Joy Watford

There are 30,000 humanitarian reasons for Rodrigo Duterte to stay in prison.

""Frankly, we have imported antisemitism with the big numbers of migrants we have within the last 10 years." German Chancellor Friedrich Merz blamed the rise in antisemitism on migrants, calling it a "terrible challenge" for the country."

If you stop thinking that Germany's response to anything Israel is about Holocaust guilt and instead about rewriting German history, you'd understand German politics better. 🧵

I feel like Google's NotebookLM has been designed to annoy the hell out of me. I tested it with some bits of fiction I wrote, and it kept getting details wrong. The audio overview 'hosts' kept saying 'mischievious.' It was like listening to two pretentious idiots talking.

Mahmoud Darwish's poem: I Am from There I am from there and I have memories. Like any other Man I was born. I have a mother, A house with several windows, friends and brothers. I have a prison cell’s cold window, a wave Snatched by seagulls, my own view, an extra blade Of grass, a moon at word’s end, a life-supply Of birds, and an olive tree that cannot die. I walked and crossed the land before the crossing Of swords made a banquet-table of a body. I come from there, and I return the sky To its mother when it cries for her, and cry For a cloud on its return To recognise me. I have learned All words befitting of blood’s court to break The rule; I have learned all the words to take The lexicon apart for one noun’s sake, The compound I must make: Homeland.

'I Am from There' by Mahmoud Darwish. 77 years on, the Nakba continues.

‘Incredible platform for future’: Starmer hails UK-US trade deal – UK politics live Trump says he is ‘thrilled’ with deal and claims it will be ‘so good’ for both countries

'Technology partnership.' This is going to be a rotten deal.

Screenshot of an article title from Esquire.com, stating ‘Esquire’s 25 Favorite Stationary Items of 2025’

Stationary? STATIONARY?

Really, Esquire? You don’t employ copy editors now?

Drawing for the sake of drawing. I missed doing this.

Human Made by HINOKODO An icon pack made by humans

Here's an icon pack to show a product doesn't contain any AI content.

hinokodo.itch.io/human-made

You know you're getting old when you manage to capture the right skin tone for a test portrait but immediately forget which colours you mixed. 😔

While investigating Nike’s claims about sustainability, I started collecting paystubs from its suppliers. It’s been almost 27 years since Phil Knight acknowledged that Nike products had become synonymous with “slave wages.” I wanted to know what people in Asia earned producing Nike apparel. (thread)

Oh Alina, I finally listened to it and am broken over it. 'The Greatest Bastard' hit me hardest.🥹

Oh wow, I've completely forgotten him. Must revisit his music.

Please can you feature Zahid Rafiq?

A pink background with a speech bubble that reads: The Politics of Categories

Categories used by the state to sort people into boxes are never neutral.

Some thoughts on the UK Supreme Court case ruling and the wider anti-trans campaign to narrow sex and gender categories in policy, data and law.

📝 kevinguyan.com/2025/04/16/t...

Screenshot of the results from The Atlantic's LibGen search tool, confirming that Ghassan Kanafani's books are among those that Meta stole to train its AI

Imagine the audacity to remove references to Kanafani on their platforms whilst stealing the contents of his books for AI training.

Leaked Data Reveals Massive Israeli Campaign to Remove Pro-Palestine Posts on Facebook and Instagram A sweeping crackdown on posts on Instagram and Facebook that are critical of Israel—or even vaguely supportive of Palestinians—was directly orchestrated by the government of Israel, according to inter...

'[Meta’s Director of Public Policy for Israel and the Jewish Diaspora Jordana] Cutler actively instructed employees of the company to search for and review content mentioning Ghassan Kanafani, an Arab novelist considered to be a pioneer of Palestinian literature.'

How the US seeks to influence UK law under the guise of free speech A Russian linked anti-abortion & anti-LGBT+ network, Musk, Thiel & FSU

It's alarming how deeply US right-wing organisations have penetrated the UK. We might laugh off Trump and his antics, but our country is in real danger of falling under chaotic authoritarianism if these organisations get their way.
counterdisinformationproject.substack.com/p/how-the-us...

Gigil, alamak among new words in Oxford English Dictionary The Oxford English Dictionary has added new untranslatable words from South East Asia.

Welcome to the Oxford English Dictionary, 'gigil'!

www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Dear god.

In practical terms, siding with the strong against the weak is easy, but morally, it is far more difficult for others.

Revisiting old Those We Lost portraits and reposting them as videos while I’m working on new ones. Impossible to document all 30,000 lives lost, but it’s important to remember that each life mattered and each death tore a hole in the fabric of our collective humanity.
#Duterte
#PhilippineDrugWar

Ofcom, stop GB News broadcasting hate *CW: Homophobia, hate speech GB News is no stranger to spouting hatred and toxic lies. They take pride in it, and pretend the rules don’t matter. But they do. And they must be enforced. On 22 January,...

On 22 January, GB News presenter Josh Howie repeated a homophobic slur linking the LGBTQ+ community to paedophilia. This is offensive, wrong and unlawful. Join me and @GoodLawProject to file a complaint to Ofcom :point_down: action.goodlawproject.org/ofcom-stop-g...

Part of a bookshelf with the following poetry books on it: Nox by Anne Carson, Ghost of by Diana Khoi Nguyen, Toxicon and Arachne and Death Styles by Joyelle McSweeney, Ruby for Grief by Michael Burkard, Grief's Alphabet by Carrie Etter and The Man with Night Sweats by Thom Gunn

Why yes, my current poetry reads follow a specific theme.

#BookSky
#poetry

I only saw it on that other platform this morning. He passed away on the 30th of January. I'm disappointed in the dearth of online tributes, to be honest.

I've been so out of the loop on Philippine news that I've only just found out about Edcel Lagman's passing. He was a real servant of the people with a rare combination of courage and progressive ideas. Rest in power, sir.

It has been 1000 days since Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh was killed by Israeli forces while covering an Israeli raid in the occupied West Bank city of Jenin on May 11, 2022.

Despite efforts for justice, no one has been held accountable aje.io/56v4aj

Screenshot of highlighted text from the introduction to Míklos Szentkuthy's Marginalia on Casanova, which reads: 'As archivist buffoon, Szentkuthy feeds the extravagant theater with his rigorous bulimia of a thousand networks of burgeoning stories, palimpsests in abysses and apocryphal pitfalls. Appropriating countless masks, pacing the epochs, this emotional athlete has no other aim than to break time until it stills the whirlwind of history into one continuous present.'

I'm starting to read Szentkuthy's 'Marginalia on Casanova' and finding myself baffled by parts of the introduction from Zéno Bianu. 'Rigorous bulimia of a thousand burgeoning stories' is a bit much for me. 😩

#BookSky

Cover of Alan Lightman's novel Einstein's Dreams

Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers.

Day 13

#BookSky
#Books
#BookChallenge
#20daybookchallenge

Cover of John Berger’s Ways of Seeing

Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers.

Day 12

#BookSky
#Books
#BookChallenge
#20daybookchallenge

Cover of Gabriel García Márquez's Love in the Time of Cholera

Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers.

Day 11

#BookSky
#Books
#BookChallenge
#20daybookchallenge