Joan retweeted
Madgwick wants to be famous
Make him famous - then donate to the RNLI to screw the odious little man in to the ground
Joan retweeted
The person solely responsible for the forced temporary closure of the @RNLI station in Portsmouth is the stochastic terrorist who incited the targeting of staff.
Now is the time to proscribe his Patriotic Platform movement and duly charge @RealDannyTommo under terrorism law.
Joan retweeted
Dans une ruelle poussiéreuse de Kaboul, une jeune fille de 15 ans marche à pas pressés, le regard baissé vers le sol. Dans son sac à main, elle a soigneusement caché un morceau de tissu et du fil à coudre. Si la police des mœurs des Talibans l'arrête au détour d'une rue, elle répétera la leçon apprise par cœur : elle se rend simplement à un cours de couture. Ce jour-là, alors que la peur lui noue l'estomac à chaque bruit de moteur, personne ne sait encore que cette adolescente dissimule en réalité des cahiers de chimie et de calcul avancé sous son coupon de tissu.
Cinq ans après le retour des Talibans au pouvoir en Afghanistan, plus de 2,5 millions de jeunes filles se sont vues brutalement interdire l'accès aux écoles et aux universités.
Du jour au lendemain, leurs rêves d'avenir ont été effacés par des lois étouffantes.
Mais dans l'ombre de la capitale, au fond d'un sous-sol éclairé par une simple ampoule nue, la résistance s'est organisée.
C'est là que se trouve une école clandestine.
Chaque matin, des dizaines d'adolescentes âgées de 14 à 16 ans risquent l'arrestation, la prison ou pire encore, simplement pour s'asseoir sur un tapis et ouvrir un livre de sciences. Elles n'apportent avec elles qu'un stylo et un cahier pour ne pas éveiller les soupçons.
Là où le régime veut les condamner au silence et à l'obscurité, ces jeunes filles choisissent la connaissance.
Récemment, lorsque des journalistes ont obtenu un accès exceptionnel à ce refuge secret, les élèves leur ont confié un trésor inestimable : 21 lettres manuscrites adressées au reste du monde.
Ce qui déchire le cœur en lisant ces mots, c'est la simplicité désarmante de leurs souhaits.
Elles n'aspirent pas à la gloire ou à la richesse.
Elles écrivent pour demander le droit d'apprendre.
Elles écrivent pour choisir leur propre métier.
Elles écrivent pour marcher dans la rue sans trembler de peur.
Elles ont perdu leurs droits les plus fondamentaux.
Elles ont perdu la liberté de leur jeunesse.
Elles risquent leur vie à chaque pas vers ce sous-sol.
Mais elles refusent de laisser éteindre la flamme de leur esprit.
Ces adolescentes afghanes nous rappellent avec une force incroyable que l'éducation n'est pas un privilège ordinaire, mais le combat le plus puissant pour la liberté et la dignité humaine.
L'ignorance est une prison, mais le savoir reste la plus invincible des révolutions.
Si le courage extraordinaire de ces jeunes filles vous touche, partagez leur histoire pour faire résonner leurs voix à travers le monde. On ne doit jamais oublier celles qui se battent dans l'ombre pour avoir le droit d'apprendre.
Joan retweeted
Hazel is a Jersey on a dairy farm run by a man called Roy, and yesterday she spent 24 hours being exploited, in a shed with the gate open, by a machine she queues for.
4.10am. Hazel forces her way into the milking robot for the first of what will be four visits, because the daily cruelty of dairy farming is something Hazel would like more of, and would like it now. Nobody is in the shed. Roy is asleep. The cow has walked the length of a straw yard in the dark, on her own, to be milked, and the machine has read her collar and let her in, and if it had not she would have stood there roaring at it, as she has before.
4.16am. The machine has taken her milk, measured it, checked it for the electrical signature of an udder going wrong, and let her out. Milking hurts, the internet says. Hazel is in the queue again by nine.
5.30am. Hazel lies down in straw to her hocks. The shed has 80 cows in it and one gate, and the gate has been open all night, as it is every night, and every cow in the building has chosen to be in the building, which is the part the documentary forgot to film.
7.00am. Roy comes in. He does not pump anything into anybody. Growth hormone for milk has been illegal in this country for 26 years, and the only cow on the place with anything in her is the one with red tape round her leg at the back of the shed, who is ill, and whose milk is going into a bucket, and whose bucket is the most expensive object on the farm, because if a cupful of it reaches the tanker the whole load goes down the drain and Roy pays for every farm's milk on the run.
9.00am. Hazel goes in again. The machine measures her again. Every litre of milk that leaves this farm is tested for antibiotic before it leaves the lorry and again at the dairy, and tested for the white blood cells that every mammal's milk carries, which the internet calls pus and which the law calls a number, and above the number the milk cannot be sold at all. Hazel's number is fine. Hazel's number is on a sheet in Roy's office, three times a week, with her name on it.
11.00am. Hazel eats. The feed is grass, silage and a scoop at the robot, and the scoop is the reason she goes four times and not three. The internet says she is forced to produce. Hazel is producing because a Jersey cow's whole design is to turn grass into cream, and she would do it in a field with nobody watching, and she has, and Roy has the wet knees to prove it.
1.00pm. A visitor at the gate asks Roy whether the cows ever go outside. Roy says they came in last night from outside and will go back out after milking, and the visitor looks at the open gate for a while and does not ask anything else.
2.15pm. Hazel is at the robot. Nobody put her there.
6.00pm. The tanker comes. The driver draws a sample before a drop goes on, because a cow's worth of antibiotic in 20,000 litres empties the lot, and every dairy farmer in the country treats a poorly cow like she is radioactive for exactly that reason. Hazel's milk goes on. Hazel's milk has gone on every day of her life.
9.40pm. Fourth visit. The robot lets her in, as it has all day, because she asked.
Roy went to bed. The gate stayed open. Eighty cows stayed in, and the one who wants milking most in the whole of England was first in the queue at ten past four this morning, again, shouldering past the cruelty to get to the front of it.
Joan retweeted
I'm deeply grateful for the opportunities London has given me and my family.
From a council estate to City Hall, I’ve been supported and helped throughout my journey. It’s an honour to join the House of Lords.
My focus is, and will always be, to ensure every Londoner has the chance to reach their full potential.
bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c674…
Joan retweeted
Then return to your wife @TiceRichard and tell your girlfriend to return to her husband @IsabelOakeshott and tell @Nigel_Farage to return to the mother of his children, and @LeeAndersonMP_ Fucking hypocrites!
Joan retweeted
After 33 years of public service, one of my constituents has now waited more than six months for the pension he is owed.
He has exhausted the interest-free loans available to him, faced selling his car and been unable to support his daughter through university as planned - all while undergoing cancer treatment.
He still has not received his pension. That is unacceptable, and I raised his case in Parliament. 👇️
Garcia: So, to be clear, we have a president that is $2 billion richer just from this last year. We have a son whose wedding is being paid for by rich Russians and oligarchs that have connections to Putin. We have Jared Kushner, who got $2 billion for his investment firm from the Saudis while also doing diplomacy in the Middle East.
We have the Kushners who are trying to buy private islands and selling all sorts of merchandise that’s being promoted, oftentimes through government resources. We also have, of course, this insane amount of stock trading that the president himself is doing to enrich himself and his family.
And, of course, the sons sitting on boards of private companies that are then getting contracts from the federal government. The amount of corruption is unprecedented. And not only are they lining their pockets, they’re stealing the wealth of hardworking Americans, they’re stealing the hard-earned labor and wealth of working-class people, and then funneling that money to themselves and to the rich donors and large corporations and CEOs across this country.
As they get richer, costs go up for the American people. And we know that Republicans in the House and in the Senate are complicit by not calling out this corruption.
Joan retweeted
Activist: "Farmers pump their cows full of antibiotics. It's in every glass of milk."
Dairy farmer: "Do you know what happens if it is?"
Activist: "People drink it."
Dairy farmer: "The tanker gets tested at the gate. One cow's worth of antibiotic in 20,000 litres and the whole load goes down the drain. Every farm on the run that morning gets their milk tipped, and the farm that did it pays for all of it."
Activist: "So you're saying it never happens."
Dairy farmer: "I'm saying a treated cow on this farm gets red tape round her leg, goes to the back of the parlour, and her milk goes in a bucket for 6 days. I treat her like she's radioactive, because financially she is."
Activist: "You still use them."
Dairy farmer: "On a cow that's ill. Same as you. The vet writes it up, the date goes on the wall, and the wall's checked. Use on this farm is about half what it was 10 years ago, and that's every dairy I know."
Activist: "Routine use in feed, then."
Dairy farmer: "Illegal for years. Growth promoters went 20 years ago. You're describing a chicken shed in a country I don't farm in."
Activist: "You can't prove it's not in the milk."
Dairy farmer: "I can prove it 3 times a week, because they test it 3 times a week and send me the sheet. When did you last get a sheet on your oat drink?"
Activist: "That's different."
Dairy farmer: "It is. Nobody tests it. Mine's the most inspected liquid in your kitchen and it's the one you're scared of."
Joan retweeted
Hey @BBCNews -
Can you please actually do your job and report how everyone, including Reform, were told in March the law would be retroactive.
Heres the wording:
“The cap will therefore apply retrospectively, so it will include all donations from overseas electors received from today and all regulated transactions entered into from today.”
Hansard, 25th Mar 2026
Tice says government wants to 'retrospectively change rules' after Reform's £72m in donations bbc.in/4AcSSpd
Joan retweeted
The fundraising - as at 11 pm UK Time on 13 September - stands at £20,104. The RNLI team are over the moon. This is who we are.
Toys R Us was profitable. Private equity bought it anyway, and 33,000 people lost their jobs with nothing.
In 2005, Bain Capital, KKR, and Vornado Realty Trust bought Toys R Us in a leveraged buyout for $6.6 billion.
Here's the part that gets skipped: the company itself was making money. It wasn't failing. It wasn't asking to be saved.
But in a leveraged buyout, the firms don't pay with their own money. They borrow against the company they're buying, and the debt becomes the company's problem, not theirs.
Toys R Us went from having almost no debt to carrying over $5 billion in loans it never asked for and never benefited from.
Every year after that, a huge share of the company's profit went straight to interest payments instead of stores, inventory, or staff. The stores got run down. Amazon and Walmart kept eating market share. Toys R Us couldn't invest its way out because there was nothing left after the debt.
In 2017 it filed for bankruptcy. In 2018 it liquidated completely.
33,000 employees lost their jobs. Store closures. No severance for most of them.
Giovanna De La Rosa worked there for years. She testified before Congress on November 19, 2019, describing what it meant to lose her income with nothing after decades of loyalty to a company that had been profitable the entire time she worked there.
The firms that bought it walked away having collected management fees for over a decade, regardless of outcome.
Here's the sentence that explains the entire model: the buyers cannot lose. The debt belongs to the company. The fees get collected either way.
They didn't buy a business to grow it.
They bought a business to extract from it, and left 33,000 people holding what was left.
Joan retweeted
There are absolutely NO circumstances in which a woman deserves to be raped or sexually assaulted.
A woman could be walking down the street naked - & she STILL wouldn’t ‘deserve’ it.
Clothes don’t cause rape - rapist do.
Joan retweeted
For people concerned about this particular work, please note it’s London’s Trafalgar Square “Fourth Plinth”, a temporary project. Sculptures by living artists are placed on it for 18 months. Google it & see. The idea is to make people think a bit & look at art in new ways. Enjoy!
Joan retweeted
Thank you everyone for sending this to a million views🙏
UK media must start calling out Farage’s bull****
Nigel Farage and Reform UK want to
- leave the European Convention on Human Rights which protects our right to protest, our right to privacy, our right to fair trials and so much more
- repeal the Equality Act - a key piece of legislation that prevents against discrimination in Britain
- Strip back workers rights
- Lift restrictions on exploitative zero-hours contracts and Legalize "fire and rehire" tactics
- repeal the Renters’ Rights Act which abolishes “no fault evictions” that allow landlords to remove tenants without giving a reason and introduces new duties over health hazards
and to sell all this to the country Farage offers nothing in return but grievance and division. PLEASE DON’T FALL FOR IT.
That anyone could be supporting Farage and Reform with these policies must surely be a damning indictment of UK media in failing to explain all this to the public
Joan retweeted
WHO SILENCED DR DAVID KELLY
Most people scrolling past this have never heard the name Dr David Kelly. They should.
He was one of the world's leading weapons inspectors, a quiet Ministry of Defence scientist who spent years checking Iraq's chemical and biological arsenal for the United Nations. Nobody understood that file better than he did.
In 2003 Tony Blair's (@InstituteGC) government published a dossier claiming Saddam Hussein could deploy chemical weapons within 45 minutes. That one line helped justify sending Britain to war, a war that ended up killing hundreds of thousands of people.
Kelly knew the intelligence behind that claim had been stretched. He said so privately, off the record, to BBC (@BBCNews) journalist Andrew Gilligan (@mragilligan). Nothing more than a conversation.
Somebody in government made sure his name reached the press anyway. Within days a respected scientist with decades of service was dragged in front of 2 parliamentary committees and questioned like a suspect on live television. His wife later said he came home a broken man.
On 17 July 2003 he left his house in Oxfordshire for a walk. He was 59. He never came home. His body was found the next morning in nearby woodland, a knife beside him and a shallow cut to his wrist.
Now here is where the story stops making sense.
Instead of letting the standard coroner's inquest run its course, Tony Blair's government suspended it before it properly began and replaced it with a private inquiry led by a judge the government appointed, Lord Hutton.
It was never resumed.
To this day Dr David Kelly is the only person in England and Wales in living memory to die in unexplained circumstances without a full coroner's inquest ever taking place.
Hutton concluded suicide within months. Officially, that was that.
Unofficially, a group of senior doctors reviewed the medical evidence and said the conclusion was unsafe. In letters to The Times (@thetimes) and The Guardian (@guardian) they explained that the artery involved is so small that cutting it rarely causes fatal blood loss in a healthy person, that the painkiller level found in his body was well under a lethal dose, and that the amount of blood at the scene was too small to account for the death recorded.
In 2011 those doctors formally asked the government to finally allow a proper inquest. Attorney General Dominic Grieve (@dominicgrieve_) reviewed it and refused. Hutton's inquiry was declared sufficient. The matter was closed, again, by the people who opened it.
Think about what actually happened here. A civil servant quietly raised concerns about the most consequential political deception in modern British history. He was exposed, humiliated and found dead days later, and the same government that needed answers made sure a proper, independent investigation never happened.
Tony Blair went on to become a Middle East peace envoy. He was later knighted.
Dr David Kelly got a rushed private inquiry, a sealed post mortem report kept from public view for years, and a grave that campaigners are still fighting over more than 2 decades on.
Nobody has ever been held accountable. Not for the dossier, not for the leak, not for what happened next.
This story deserves to be told every single year, not forgotten. If you think that too, share it.
Sources @BBCNews @guardian @thetimes @PrivateEyeNews
Joan retweeted
Dandelions are one of the last flowers standing in the fall. Spray one with roundup and you're spraying every bumblebee queen that visits, just as she's preparing to hibernate.
The flower doesn't die on contact. It takes days, and it keeps getting visited the entire time. Bumblebee queens are feeding hard right now, building the fat reserves that have to carry them through months underground with no colony and no food. Every queen that doesn't fatten up is a colony that doesn't start next spring.
Research from Finland found glyphosate-exposed bumblebees lost the ability to tell flowers apart by color, and lost their sensitivity to the ultraviolet patterns bees use to find nectar.
Late solitary bees, hoverflies, and butterflies are working the same flowers too.
If the dandelions genuinely bother you, dig them out. A weeding fork gets the taproot.
Or leave them. The first hard frost takes care of it.
Joan retweeted
In April 2009, dozens of cedar waxwings were found dead in a single yard in Thomas County, Georgia. Their stomachs were packed with one thing: small, red berries.
The birds had hemorrhaged into their lungs, tracheas, hearts and brains. It was cyanide poisoning.
A decade later the curator of the UNC Chapel Hill Herbarium found dead waxwings on campus, in sight of a large nandina planting. That's what finally prompted somebody to test the berries.
Nandina, sold as heavenly bamboo, is from China and Japan, it's invasive across the Southeast, and it's still sold at garden centers.
Most birds can detoxify small amounts of cyanide. Eat one or two nandina berries and you'll be sick for a day. Cedar waxwings don't eat one or two. They gorge on them. A flock strips a bush in minutes.
And the ripe berries release cyanide slowly as they digest. There's no warning, no bad taste, nothing that says stop. By the time it's hitting, the bird has a crop full of them.
Worse, nandina berries hang on all winter, when almost nothing else is fruiting. It's most attractive exactly when the birds have the fewest options.
If you have one, cut the berry clusters off before they ripen. That solves the problem this year.
Then dig it out. Get under the root crown and pry it up, or it comes back. Alternatively, a cut stump with a dab of herbicide will usually kill it for good.
Replace it with winterberry holly, American holly, or eastern red cedar. Red berries all winter, and waxwings are supposed to eat those.
Joan retweeted
It's time for my occasional reminder that balloons don't fly up to grandma up in heaven. They go up about five miles, burst, and fall back down.
What lands is a translucent scrap of latex with a ribbon attached, floating on water, stuck on land, looking almost exactly like a jellyfish. Sea turtles, seabirds and fish eat them.
Balloons are the deadliest piece of plastic a seabird can ingest, something like 32 times more likely to kill than a hard fragment, because soft latex folds and blocks the gut instead of passing through.
The ribbon stays intact for years, and it wraps around necks, wings and flippers long after the balloon itself is gone.
The biodegradable balloons don't fix the problem. University of Tasmania researchers buried latex balloons in industrial compost, the fastest breakdown environment that exists, and dug them up 16 weeks later fully intact.
Louisiana made intentional releases a finable offense this year. Most of Europe has banned them.
If you want to mark something: plant a tree, light a candle, blow bubbles, ring a bell. Whatever you're releasing it for, it isn't going where you want it to go.
