Daniel Tilles

Earliest evidence of the boomerang in Australia About 20,000 years ago: Earliest evidence of the boomerang in Australia

The National Museum of Australia: "The vast majority of boomerangs are of the non-returning variety" nma.gov.au/defining-mom...

Poland’s "insult laws" and the threat to free speech

In general - as I've long complained about (notesfrompoland.com/2018/08/21/p...) - Poland has a legal system with such wide-ranging and strict "insult laws" that it constitutes a threat free speech.

Unfortunately politicians on all sides regularly take advantage of them

Gazeta Polska's cover was awful but, as a believer in free speech and media freedom, I don't think courts should be ordering newspapers to make apologies for insulting politicians.

And I don't think politicians should be suing them to do so.

Zelensky has been in Warsaw a few times before, so why was the award given now, while Trzaskowski is standing for president?

Perhaps there's a reason I'm unaware of, and I'd be happy to be enlightened 3/3

...directly on any of Poland's presidential candidates and instead giving a general answer about why supporting Ukraine's EU and NATO accession is important

It was also odd that he granted an award to Trzaskowski for Warsaw's support for refugees now, three years after the main refugee crisis 2/3

I'm a strong supporter of Ukraine, but Zelensky shouldn't have answered this question in a way that risked making such support a partisan issue in Poland, where up until now both main parties have strongly backed Kyiv.

He could easily have answered by saying he does not want to comment...1/2

The former PiS government regularly clashed with Israel (much more than Tusk has done) and waged lawfare against domestic opponents.

That didn't seem to bother Trump then, so why should it now?

Among Poland's various aims during its EU presidency, by far the hardest will be teaching Europe to speak Polish in six months

Last December, after elections that removed PiS from power, the proportion of Poles who said they were satisfied with the functioning of democracy reached its highest ever level of 55%.

Now, after a year of Tusk's government, the figure has fallen back to the norm

This is the Polish equivalent of DEFCON 2.

The nuclear option is to get Polish grandmothers to release their strategic butter reserves

It's amazing how little attention this announcement has received.

The rhetoric of "migrant weaponisation" and the idea of ignoring asylum rights - as was promoted by parties like PiS three years ago - has now gone completely mainstream

Święczkowski: nieopublikowane orzeczenia TK są nadal ważne, a premier, który ich nie publikuje, łamie prawo.

cc BeataSzydlo @pisorgpl.bsky.social

Now that you're all leaving X, Kaczyński - who has famously had zero social media presence - has finally set up an account there

Tunisia: UN expert praises democratic progress since Revolution, says more needed for LGBT persons ​العربية | ​Français TUNIS (18 June 2021) – A UN human rights expert today acknowledged the steps taken by Tunisia since the Revolution just over 10 years ago to advance equality and non-discriminatio...

Here is the same UN office calling for more LGBT+ rights in a Muslim-majority African country www.ohchr.org/en/news/2021...