evastenbro

I'm only here for entertainment purposes.

[Jack Grove @jgro_the]

Journalists should be able to ask professors tough questions about their research. Here's my account of why I decided to look into Professor Arday last summer https://t.co/3KuwIhpi37

[Masih Alinejad @AlinejadMasih]

To those who say "it's her choice" I used to say the same thing about my own Hijab.

I was covered head to toe. Even on the beach. Even with my male relatives. And when people challenged me, I said: this is my choice. You know why? Because the other option was burning in hell, hung by my hair for eternity. That's what they taught me since childhood.

Yes, let me repeat it for you to just understand about our version of “freedom of choice.” I grew up in an Islamist culture that gave me two options. Cover yourself and go to heaven. Or don't cover, and be hanged by your hair and burned in hell.

Like when someone puts a gun to your head and says "you can go left or right", technically, yes, that's a choice.

I picked heaven. I called it freedom. And I believed it, because that's what happens when fear is all you've ever known.

And if you think I shouldn't be telling you my story, I don't care. I really, genuinely, from the bottom of my heart, don't care. The women still living under that "choice"? I care about them.
#LetUsTalk

[evastenbro @evastenbro]

De siste dagene har vært usedvanlig varme, men én gruppe mennesker har vært mye heitere enn andre. Jeg skriver om kvinner som befinner seg midt i livet, jeg skriver om skjærsilden, og jeg gir tre gode råd til menn i sommervarmen. #menopause #menn #sommer
https://t.co/JdyysUpPjA

[Die ganze Geschichte @GanzeGeschichte]

For a long time, it was not known that Hannelore Kohl—who would later become the wife of the German chancellor—had been gang-raped by several Soviet soldiers and then thrown out of a window as a 12-year-old girl while fleeing in 1945. Because she sustained permanent and chronically painful damage to a vertebra as a result, she may not have been able to suppress the memory of the incident for even a single day. Exactly 25 years ago today, she took her own life.

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

Johanna Quaas is a 100-year-old gymnast from Germany, she started competing in gymnastics at the age of 10 in 1935.

Certified by Guinness World Records as the world's oldest active competitive gymnast.

[Geronimo Morgans @GeronimoMorgans]

Dear Norway fans… you are, without question, the finest supporters this tournament has seen.

From a nation of just over five and a half million people, you travelled across oceans, filled stadiums, painted American streets red and white and turned every single game into a festival of noise, pride and pure joy.

28 years away from the World Cup stage and you returned not with entitlement, but with energy. Not just with noise, but with meaning.

The Viking Row didn’t just inspire your players. It inspired everyone. Opponents. Neutrals. The entire watching world.

The quarter finals. You deserve every single second of it. Keep going. Keep rowing. Norway, the world is behind you. 🇳🇴

[ArtButMakeItSports @ArtButSports]

Upwards, by Wassily Kandinsky, 1929, (rotated, detail), 📸 by Lars Baron

[evastenbro @evastenbro]

@AlisonMoyet Did he say anything about your eminent tune "Imagine"? 😂

[charlesdickenspage.com @dap1955]

When I launched my Dickens website in 1997, I wanted to experience the novels spatially, as Dickens’ first readers might have. I began mapping the characters’ journeys through each story—and eventually shared them online.

[Artur Nadolny @ArturNadol7566]

SHE FILED 181 REPORTS. POLICE TOLD HER THE CHILDREN WERE NOT RELIABLE WITNESSES..

Sara Rowbotham was an @NHS sexual health coordinator in Rochdale. From 2004, she started documenting what everyone with the authority to act had decided not to see. Girls as young as 13. Groomed, trafficked, and raped by groups of men. She wrote it all down and reported it.

181 referrals to Greater Manchester Police and social services between 2004 and 2011.

The answer was always the same. The girls were not credible witnesses. Not their problem. Move along.

Nine men were eventually convicted in 2012, but only because a new chief prosecutor arrived, read the evidence Sara had spent years building, and actually did something with it. The Crown Prosecution Service had previously dropped the case entirely. Sara had been right all along.

Then the system turned on her. She was blamed.

Accused of failing to refer cases properly. The institution that had ignored 181 reports about the rape of children decided the problem was the woman who filed them.

Primetime television did what 181 referrals could not. Three Girls aired on BBC One in 2017. Maxine Peake played Sara. The public was furious. A drama series achieved what seven years of documented evidence never could.

In January 2024, a damning 173-page independent review commissioned by Mayor Andy Burnham confirmed what Sara and fellow whistleblower Maggie Oliver @MaggieOliverUK had been saying for twenty years.

They were the only people raising the alarm while GMP and Rochdale Council looked the other way. The review found 74 children who were exploited, serious failures to protect 48 of them, and 96 men still considered a current risk to children.

As of late 2025, 61 men have been convicted across multiple investigations. Combined sentences total almost 630 years.

Sara received an MBE in 2021. The officers who ignored her 181 reports got their pensions.

Two decades of raising the alarm. A BBC drama, a 173-page review, and an MBE later, the abusers were still being found.

SOURCES
@BBCNews @ITVNews @thetimes @BylineTimes

[Today In History @historigins]

The moment a rescued chimpanzee thanked Dr. Jane Goodall in a way no one expected

[Babak Taghvaee - The Crisis Watch @BabakTaghvaee1]

The Islamic regime of Iran, now run by the IRGC terrorist organization, has accelerated the execution of political prisoners. Nine female political prisoners are now set to be executed by hanging within the next few days. Their names are as follows:

Bita Hemmati
Ghazal Ghalandari
Golnaz Naraghi
Venus Hossein Nejad
Panah Movahedi
Ensieh Nejati
Mahboubeh Shabani
Diana Taher Abadi

Two of them are teenagers. They all are accused of waging war against Allah by means of protesting it's representatives on earth, the Islamic regime of Iran.

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

A parasite that has been eating people for 3,500 years is about to be wiped off the planet. It infected 3.5 million people in 1986. Last year, it infected 10. And I have not seen it make a single front page.

It is called Guinea worm. You drink contaminated water from a pond in a poor village. A year later, a worm up to three feet long starts coming out of your leg through a burning blister. There is no pill that stops it and no surgery that works. You wrap the worm around a stick and pull it out slowly, over days or weeks, inch by inch. If you rush, the worm breaks inside you and causes a fresh infection.

Guinea worm is ancient. Preserved worms have been pulled out of Egyptian mummies from around 1000 BCE. The Ebers Papyrus, an Egyptian medical scroll from 1550 BCE, describes pulling the worm out with a stick. For three and a half thousand years, that was the best humans could do.

Then in 1986, public health workers decided to kill the parasite off. They had no vaccine and no drug. What they had was cheap cloth water filters and a small army of volunteers willing to walk from village to village for decades.

The plan was simple. Give everyone who drinks from a pond a cloth filter to strain out the tiny water fleas that spread the parasite. Then send volunteers walking house to house, year after year, teaching people how to use the filters and keeping anyone with an emerging worm out of the water.

It worked. From 3.5 million cases a year to 10. Four were in Chad, four in Ethiopia, two in South Sudan. The other four countries where the worm used to be common, Angola, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, and Mali, had zero human cases for the second year in a row. The World Health Organization has already certified 200 countries as Guinea worm free. Six are left.

The last hurdle is dogs. Cameroon had 445 infected animals last year and Chad had 147, so a lot of the remaining work is on animals, not humans. Strays get leashed, and crews treat ponds to kill any remaining worms. The campaign keeps watching until the number hits zero.

When Guinea worm hits zero, it becomes the second human disease ever erased from the planet. The first was smallpox. It will also be the first parasite humans have ever wiped out, and the first disease ever ended without a single dose of medicine. Volunteers walked village to village with cloth filters for 40 years. Now a plague from the age of the pharaohs is about to be gone.

[Archaeo - Histories @archeohistories]

In 1960, a quiet woman at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration was handed a routine file. It was for a drug already sold in nearly 50 countries—a sedative called thalidomide, widely marketed as safe for pregnant women.

Most people would have signed off. Frances Oldham Kelsey didn’t.

New to the FDA, she noticed something others had overlooked—or ignored. The data was thin. Reports of nerve damage were buried. The safety claims felt… too clean. While the pharmaceutical company pushed aggressively for approval, sending repeated requests and mounting pressure, Kelsey held her ground. She asked for more studies. Then more. And more.

Behind the scenes, the pressure wasn’t subtle. Drug companies expected quick approvals. Delays meant lost profit. For a young female reviewer in a male-dominated system, saying “no” wasn’t just professional resistance—it was personal risk. She was challenging an industry that wasn’t used to being challenged, especially not by a woman.

Then the truth surfaced.

Across Europe, thousands of babies were being born with devastating deformities—missing limbs, malformed organs—traced back to thalidomide taken during pregnancy. It became one of the worst medical disasters of the 20th century.

Because Kelsey refused to approve it, the United States was largely spared.

Her skepticism saved countless lives.

In 1962, she was awarded the President’s Award for Distinguished Federal Civilian Service by John F. Kennedy—one of the highest honors a civilian could receive. But her impact didn’t stop there. Her stand forced sweeping changes in drug regulation, leading to stricter testing requirements and proof of efficacy before approval. The system became safer because she refused to bend.

She didn’t shout. She didn’t grandstand. She simply refused to compromise when it mattered most.

And that’s what made her dangerous—in the best possible way.

© Women In World History

#archaeohistories

[Jake Lundahl @LundahlHorses]

Civilization was built by people like this, and there is a stunning lack of gratitude in our culture for their work.

In this specific case, at least half of the apple varieties in Brown’s collection were considered “lost” until he personally tracked them down and saved them.

He literally went on quests where he did things like, tracking a lost variety back to a stump of a long-ago-cut-down tree near an abandoned homestead in remote Appalachia, took cuttings from the green shoots coming out of the stump, brought them back and planted them.

Absolute legend.

[Ricardo @Ric_RTP]

The journalist who took down Harvey Weinstein just spent 18 months investigating Sam Altman.

And what he found out is genuinely insane:

The people who built OpenAI went on record saying he can't be trusted with the future of humanity.

A Microsoft executive even compared him to Bernie Madoff.

This isn't just some hit piece.

It's 100+ interviews, secret memos, HR documents, Slack messages, and private notes that had never been seen before.

Here's everything you have to know about Ronan Farrow's investigation:

Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI's former chief scientist and CO-FOUNDER, compiled 70 pages of internal evidence against Altman. Slack messages. HR files. Behavioral analysis.

The word at the top of his list of Altman's "consistent patterns": lying.

He sent the documents as disappearing messages because he was "terrified" someone would find them. They became legendary in Silicon Valley. Insiders just call them "the Ilya Memos."

Dario Amodei, another co-founder who left to start Anthropic, kept his own private notes. One line: "The problem with OpenAI is Sam himself."

Paul Graham, the man who RECRUITED Altman to run Y Combinator, told colleagues Altman had been "lying to us all the time." Multiple YC partners had complained about Altman's behavior by 2018. He was effectively forced out in 2019 despite publicly claiming for YEARS that he left voluntarily.

Former board members described him as "unconstrained by truth."

And the investigation found that Altman reportedly lied to the board about obtaining safety approvals for some of ChatGPT's most controversial features.

That's the man running an $852 billion company with 900 million weekly users and a Pentagon contract.

But here's where this gets really crazy:

The New Yorker investigation dropped on Sunday.

SAME DAY, Altman publishes a 13 page policy paper proposing robot taxes, a public wealth fund, and a four-day workweek. The most ambitious social policy document in OpenAI's history.

Dropped within HOURS of the most damaging article ever written about him.

That's not coincidence.

Monday: Elon Musk files a court motion demanding Altman be REMOVED as CEO. He wants the for-profit conversion completely unwound.

Then Friday at 3:45 AM: a 20yo throws a Molotov cocktail at Altman's San Francisco mansion. It bounces off the house. Lights the gate on fire. An hour later, same guy shows up at OpenAI HQ threatening to burn the building down. Police arrest him on the spot.

Nobody was hurt.

But within hours, Altman posts a photo of his husband and 1yo child on his blog. Writes that he hopes the image "might dissuade the next person." Then blames the New Yorker article for making things "more dangerous" for him.

In 5 days, Altman went from the target of the most devastating investigation in tech history to the sympathetic father whose family was attacked.

Now anyone who criticizes him has to do it in the shadow of a firebombing.

The New Yorker spent 18 months building the case that Altman is dangerous. Altman turned it into the reason HE'S in danger.

And none of this changes what Farrow actually found:

- The co-founders don't trust him
- The former board doesn't trust him
- The chief scientist documented 70 pages of evidence and was too scared to send them through normal channels
- Paul Graham says he was lied to
- A Microsoft executive put him in the same sentence as Madoff

The trial starts in 16 days.

If Musk wins, the for-profit conversion gets unwound and Altman is removed.

If Altman wins, the man that every person who helped build OpenAI has publicly warned about gets permanent, unchecked control of the most powerful AI company on Earth.

Either way, one thing is now undeniable...

The people closest to Sam Altman are the ones screaming the loudest warnings.

And this week proved he knows exactly how to make sure nobody listens.

Peak manipulation.

[Samantha Smith @SamanthaTaghoy]

The Iranian Regime:

>killed 1 million Iranians since 1979
>murders critics of the Regime
>denies women basic rights
>bankrolls global Islamic terrorism
>allows child marriage and child rape

The UN:

>puts them in charge of human rights, women’s rights and anti-terrorism policy

[Ronan Farrow @RonanFarrow]

(🧵1/11) For the past year and a half, I've been investigating OpenAI and Sam Altman for @NewYorker. With my coauthor @andrewmarantz, I reviewed never-before-disclosed internal memos, obtained 200+ pages of documents related to a close colleague, including extensive private notes, and interviewed more than 100 people.

OpenAI was founded on the premise that A.I. could be the most dangerous invention in human history—and that its C.E.O. would need to be a person of uncommon integrity. We lay out the most detailed account yet of why Altman was ousted out by board members and executives who came to believe he lacked that integrity, and ask: were they right to allege that he couldn't be trusted?

A thread on some of of our findings:

[Masih Alinejad @AlinejadMasih]

In the middle of war, in Iran, at dawn, at the call to prayer, they took a 68-year-old architect from his cell to the gallows and executed him.

This is how they rule Iran: they cut the internet. They torture political prisoners to do false confessions. They air it on state TV. They execute them. Then they announce it on state media.

We Iranians are living in horror and it is beyond sad that international media barely talks about it. I believe this silence will embolden the regime to turn mass arrests into mass executions.

His name was Abolhassan Montazer, and he had heart and lung disease. They denied him medicine.

[Masih Alinejad @AlinejadMasih]

His mother begged the free world to help save her son’s life. No one listened.
This morning, the barbaric regime executed Vahid Bani-Amerian by hanging in Iran.

They shuts down the internet to hide its crimes, then uses that same internet to broadcast death.

Imagine waking up to state media announcing, one by one,
that the protesters are being hanged.

Vahid was tortured. Broken. Forced into a false confession on TV. And then they killed him.