194 years ago, a Jewish trader from Baghdad, came to India almost as a refugee after persecution by the Ottoman empire. He eventually had 14 children and used them to build his global Empire.
David Sassoon soon became the king of Opium trade with official backing of the British empire. His family controlled more than 60% of the opium that drug addicted youth of China took at that time.
He became the Merchant Prince of Bombay!
Ironically, his competitors were also refugees from West Asia in India. The Parsis. This refugee from Iraq, and the other refugees from Iran, built the biggest drug trade of mid 19th century, from Bombay, under total protection of the British Queen.
Later his family spread into other businesses like cotton.
Here is a list of Mumbai’s landmarks built, funded, or established by David Sassoon and his family:
• David Sassoon Library & Reading Room (Kala Ghoda, Fort)
• Magen David Synagogue (Byculla)
• Jacob Sassoon High School (Byculla)
• E.E.E. Sassoon High School (Byculla)
• David Sassoon Hospital (J.J. Hospital Premises, Byculla)
• Masina Hospital (Byculla)
• Knesset Eliyahoo Synagogue (Colaba)
• Sassoon Dock (Colaba) — Mumbai’s first commercial wet dock
• The Bank of India Head Office (Fort) — contributed/built
• The David Sassoon Reformatory and Deaf School (Matunga)
• Multiple textile mills and residential mansions (such as Sans Souci on Malabar Hill and properties around Dadar / Indu Mills)Moral questions of Opium trade aside, just see the vast contribution to Bombay / Mumbai by a refugee family!
Image from #Wiki
— @KiranKS Nov 5, 2026
Category: Articles and Tweets
Category Added in a WPeMatico Campaign
President Isaac Herzog sent a warning letter last month to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other top officials, warning of a “highly explosive and dangerous reality” in the West Bank, and lamenting the ongoing “moral disgrace” of settler violence.
“A severe flare-up on the ground is liable to carry severe and far-reaching consequences, both for Israel’s security and its functioning as a sovereign state, and for Israel’s international standing, Diaspora Jewry, the Israeli economy, and more,” warned Herzog, adding that there is a “moral disgrace and the stain on us” when innocent Palestinians are harmed.
Herzog wrote the letter after a September 30 visit to the Judea and Samaria Division headquarters.
Read more on The Times of Israel.
— @TimesofIsrael Nov 5, 2026
Singer-songwriter Bob Dylan wore a black zip-up sweatshirt, hood up, when meeting with Pope Leo XIV.
Dylan also wore black leather gloves, which he looks to have removed to shake hands with the pontiff. wapo.st/4BL6s41
— @washingtonpost Nov 5, 2026
EXCLUSIVE: According to a Senior WH official, Susie Wiles and top White House aides are leaking damaging information about Secretary of War Pete Hegseth to the media.
“They intend to scapegoat Hegseth for the Republican Party’s devastating midterm defeat, in an effort to save themselves.
Susie Wiles understands that the base wants to see a high level firing, but she intends for it not to be her. This is despite Susie having handpicked the majority of the Republican Senate candidates and lying to Trump about the polling in the weeks leading up to the election.
Susie Wiles is chiefly responsible for yesterday’s catastrophic loss.”
Follow: @AFpost
— @AFpost Nov 5, 2026
Hungary releases secret police files from communist era politico.eu/article/hungary-…
— @Sandbagger_01 Nov 4, 2026
Today, #November4, 2026, #BobDylan was received in audience by Pope Leo XIV. Together with the editor of L’Osservatore Romano, I accompanied him to the Apostolic Palace. The meeting had the feel of history about it, and at every step I had the sense that anything could happen.
Speaking of peace, Leo brought up “Go Away You Bomb.” In 1963, Izzy Young, who ran the Folklore Center in Greenwich Village, was putting together a songbook against the atomic bomb; Dylan showed up the next day with the lyrics, typed. In the song, a man talks to the bomb, insults it, orders it to leave. The book never came out, and Dylan never recorded the song. In 2014, the typescript went on the block at Christie’s and found no buyer, but the lyrics were published, and so a song that was never sung made its way to a pope’s desk, in the company of Dorothy Day, Giorgio La Pira, and Stanislav Petrov, the Soviet officer who, in 1983, declined to pass on a missile alert that the computers insisted was real.
Leo is an Augustinian. In 1967, on John Wesley Harding, Dylan had dreamed of that saint. In “I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine,” the narrator watches Augustine searching for those who have already sold their souls, witnesses his martyrdom, and realizes, with horror, that he is one of the crowd that put him to death. He wakes alone, in tears. The model was the old ballad about Joe Hill, the labor organizer executed by firing squad in Utah in 1915; Dylan put the Bishop of Hippo in his place and turned a rallying cry into an unwitting confession about our tendency to silence those who bring us the truth.
Born in Chicago in 1955, Prevost grew up on the American music of those years. Jim Musselman, a classmate of his at Villanova and a Dylan devotee, recalls that the two of them talked about music a great deal, and that it was Musselman who got him to read an essay pointing to Dylan as the poetic talent of his generation.
The Pope who introduced himself from the loggia of St. Peter’s as “a son of St. Augustine” knows Dylan’s music, and Dylan was glad to meet the American Pope.
— @antoniospadaro Nov 4, 2026
Categories
RT by @mikenov: AWESOME
Pope Leo XIV has made time for several revered musicians this past year, including Patti Smith and Bad Bunny. On Wednesday, he also held a private audience with Bob Dylan.
More: rollingstone.com/music/music…
— @RollingStone Nov 4, 2026
Pope Leo XIV met with American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan in a private audience on Wednesday, November 4. The Vatican press said that during the brief meeting between the two, the Holy Father presented the singer with a rosary, while Dylan reciprocated with a copy of his book.
Leo, originally from Chicago, is a known fan and quoted a 1963 anti-nuclear protest song by Dylan, “Go Away You Bomb,” in the preface to a book released in July.
— @CBSNews Nov 4, 2026