36 Countries Formalize Tribunal to Prosecute Putin for Aggression Against Ukraine

36 Countries Formalize Tribunal to Prosecute Putin for Aggression Against Ukraine

Thirty-six countries, mainly from Europe, have signed up to a special tribunal to prosecute Russian President Vladimir Putin for the crime of aggression against Ukraine, headquartered in the Dutch city of The Hague. Ministers endorsed a resolution laying down the structure and functions of a management committee that will approve the annual budget, adopt internal rules, and elect judges and prosecutors.

Ukraine's Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha hailed the moment as "the point of no return" in the years-long search for accountability. "The Special Tribunal becomes a legal reality," he said. A new tribunal was necessary because the ICC can only prosecute the crime of aggression when attributed to a state party — and Russia is not one. Australia and Costa Rica joined alongside mainly European signatories; four EU members — Bulgaria, Hungary, Malta, and Slovakia — did not sign. The EU has committed €10 million. The list remains open for additional countries to join.

Gobble's Take: Thirty-six countries signed. The tribunal is now a legal reality. The list stays open.

Source: r/foodforthought

Trump's 51st State Pitch: He Wants to Annex Venezuela

Venezuela's acting President Delcy Rodríguez had a direct response Monday when asked about Donald Trump's suggestion that her country become the 51st state of the United States: "We will continue to defend our integrity, our sovereignty, our independence, our history. We are not a colony, but a free country."

Trump reportedly told Fox News correspondent John Roberts — not Chief Justice John Roberts — that he was "seriously considering a move to make Venezuela the fifty-first state." The idea follows the U.S. arrest of former President Nicolás Maduro earlier this year, which elevated Rodríguez to the interim presidency, though the article notes that Venezuela retains every functional attribute of sovereignty and no direct U.S. control exists. Trump's framing matters here: he specifically said state, not territory or possession — a legally significant distinction, since U.S. acquisitions after the Spanish-American War resulted in territories that never became states. Statehood would mean senators, House representatives, and full voting rights for Venezuela's population. The constitutional and political implications are, to put it gently, not favorable to the Trump administration's other stated priorities.

Venezuela has shown zero interest in any of this voluntarily. Which is, it turns out, the main requirement.

Gobble's Take: The only thing more complicated than annexing a country that doesn't want you is explaining to Congress what you just promised it.

Source: r/foodforthought

The "Mammy Memorial" That Almost Became Federal Law — and the Woman Who Stopped It

In 1923, the U.S. Senate voted yes on a proposal for a federal "Mammy Memorial" — a monument intended to honor Black women who nursed and raised white children. It made it to the House before activist and scholar Mary Church Terrell organized the opposition that killed it. The near-miss sits inside a much longer story about which histories America chooses to memorialize and which it buries.

The writer behind this piece opens at Lincoln Park in Washington, D.C., standing before the Freedmen's Memorial — Thomas Ball's 1876 bronze, dedicated by Frederick Douglass in a speech that, as the article notes, "quietly eviscerates the very thing it dedicates." Lincoln stands upright; at his feet kneels a half-naked Black man, modeled on Archer Alexander, the last person captured under the Fugitive Slave Act. But there was an alternate design: sculptor Harriet Hosmer submitted a multi-figure proposal that placed freed Black Americans not at Lincoln's feet but at his sides, standing, in the visual language of citizens rather than supplicants. The Western Sanitary Commission, the white-led organization that had taken over the fundraising effort, rejected Hosmer's design as too expensive. The fund itself had begun in 1865 with five dollars from Charlotte Scott, a formerly enslaved Virginia woman — who never got to choose what her money built.

Douglass, in an 1876 letter, wrote that he wanted to see "a monument representing the negro, not couchant on his knees like a four-footed animal, but erect on his feet like a man." He was still waiting. The near-passage of a federal Mammy Memorial fifty years later suggests the country was moving in the opposite direction entirely.

Gobble's Take: The most revealing thing about a society isn't what it finally built — it's what it almost built, and who had to fight to stop it.

Source: r/TrueReddit

The Civil War Ended. The Ideology Didn't.

The argument at the center of this essay is blunt: the Confederacy was never dismantled the way other defeated fascist regimes were. Germany, Japan, and Italy each faced serious, if imperfect, processes of deconstruction — their ideologies discredited, their leaders prosecuted. The Confederacy, by contrast, was reabsorbed into American political life so gently that within a decade of Appomattox, former Confederate leaders were back in power and writing their own history as tragic heroes.

The essay draws a direct line from that failure to the present. Former Confederates who had taken up arms against the United States were permitted back into positions of authority with remarkable speed. The ideology they fought for — which the Confederacy itself, as the article notes, explicitly framed around the preservation of slavery, not states' rights in the abstract — was subsequently laundered into sentimental folklore about regional identity and men with names like Beauregard. The piece invokes Nina Simone's "Mississippi Goddam" and points to contemporary examples: redistricting maps in Tennessee that the author says diluted Black voting power in Memphis, and a Supreme Court that now treats the Voting Rights Act as a relic nobody intends to enforce. The comparison to postwar Germany is pointed — imagine, the essay asks, Germany erecting statues to regional Nazi generals as "complicated figures" while insisting national unity required moving on.

The Civil War's graves filled. The ideology found other containers.

Gobble's Take: Losing a war and losing the narrative are two very different things — and the Confederacy only lost one of them.

Source: r/foodforthought

Quick Hits

• 277 dogs, one pool, one world record: A new Guinness World Record for the largest dog pool party was set with 277 canine participants — documented in photos that are exactly what you need right now. Good Good Good News
• Amazon workers are faking AI productivity: Employees are reportedly inventing pointless tasks to hit internal metrics showing AI usage — a corporate feedback loop where appearing to innovate matters more than actually doing it. r/TrueReddit

In Case You Missed It

Yesterday's top stories:

• The Strip Search That Reveals Who Transparency Laws Are Actually For
• A Woman Born in 1933 Remembers Childhood Before the Measles Vaccine
• The Internet Is Rotting Our Ability to Trust Anything — Including Real Things
• Trump Has Gone From "Unpredictable" to Something Worse