The New Year holiday break is over. Today is my first day back at work. A new decade has begun and I’m still alive. I can’t stop thinking about myself as a teenager in the 1990s, a naive young man who thought of the turn of the millennium as a future abstract. Now the future is old and I didn’t die at thirty.

“A famous giant yule goat that usually gets burned down by arsonists well before Christmas has survived its third consecutive holiday season for the first time in its 53-year history,” The Local reports.

“An attack on the Iranian general had been unthinkable until recent activities put him in the US’s sights,” Martin Chulov of the Guardian writes.

But maybe it was about time, considering:

“He was behind hundreds of American deaths in Iraq and waves of militia attacks against Israel,” the New York Times writes.

Trump tweets:

These Media Posts will serve as notification to the United States Congress that should Iran strike any U.S. person or target, the United States will quickly & fully strike back, & perhaps in a disproportionate manner. Such legal notice is not required, but is given nevertheless!

“Two airbases housing US troops in Iraq have been hit by more than a dozen ballistic missiles,” BBC News reports.

The ball is now in Trump’s court.

“President Trump backed away from further military confrontation with Iran on Wednesday after a barrage of missiles fired at American troops killed no one and Tehran indicated that would be the end of its retaliation for the killing of a top general,” Peter Baker of the New York Times reports.

“The breakup of the [British] union certainly won’t be easy but it may be one of the few good things to come out of Brexit—not just for Scotland and Ireland but also, and perhaps especially, for England,” David Edgerton of the New York Times writes.

“Tehran acknowledges it accidentally shot down a Ukrainian passenger plane that had 176 people on board,” Al Jazeera reports.

“Elizabeth Warren has said Bernie Sanders told her during a private meeting that he did not believe a woman could beat Donald Trump in 2020,” Lauren Gambino of the Guardian reports.

How could anyone be surprised by a 78-year-old politician making sexist comments? That’ what grumpy old men do.

Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet has made a list.

I don’t like the new normal.

“Taylor Swift’s bratty, libidinous Bombalurina is better—stomping around in high heels, shimmying her furry breasts and purring ‘Macavity the mystery cat’ with a faux-British accent,” Simran Hans of the Guardian writes in her review of the film Cats. “Swift is the only cast member who seems to be having fun, perhaps because she only appears in the film for approximately 10 minutes.”

The man put the fat in fatwa.

This is so immoral that I’m at a loss of words. The Sweden Democarats, a party founded in the 1980s by Nazis—among them an SS veteran—will take part in the official Holocaust remembrance service.

Stefan Löfven writes in Ynetnews:

This event is called the Malmö International Forum on Holocaust Remembrance and Combating Anti-Semitism. The choice of Malmö as the venue is important: Jews who fled across the Öresund strait and were saved from the concentration camps in the final stages of the war came to Malmö. But the situation concerning anti-Semitism in Malmö today is serious. We do not close our eyes to this fact. It is something we are tackling with determination.

“Gender norms compound the trauma for men who are victims of rape and sexual abuse,” Owen Jones writes in the Guardian.

He’s right. Male rape is a much bigger problem than most people realise.

“Palestinians demonstrated in the Gaza Strip on Thursday to protest the visit of world leaders to Jerusalem to attend the World Holocaust Forum,” the Jerusalem Post reports. “During the demonstration, which took place outside the offices of the United Nations in Gaza City, the protesters said that the world leaders ‘chose the wrong site’ to celebrate the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp in German-occupied Poland.”

שבת שלום

Today it’s exactly 75 years ago the concentration camps at Auschwitz were liberated.

Sarah Boseley of the Guardian reports that Germany has confirmed a first human coronavirus transmission in Europe.