Olivia
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Georgina Blewett
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A comedian (Deniz Göktaş) has just been arrested in Turkey accused of insulting Islam (blasphemy).
A NATO country.
Let me repeat that just to make sure I understood.
A NATO country has just arrested a comedian for insulting Islam.
Yep... understood.
I took pictures of those black IDF soldiers at the train station in Tel Aviv because they reminded me of something I experienced years ago in Lebanon.
After my divorce, my Lebanese ex husband hired an African maid. In Lebanon, domestic workers often have barely any rights and are routinely mistreated by employers, especially because they live inside the homes and work from morning until night, usually without a single day off. When my son grew older, he once told his paternal family that even if people called them “helpers,” they were in reality treated like slaves.
When he was two years old, we were in Beirut and he wanted the maid who looked after him during visits with his father to come with us to the beach. We went to the military academy beach, and a soldier instructed my cousin where to park. Then he told us to leave the maid in the car. It was 32 degrees Celsius outside. I told him that in Europe, if I left a dog locked in a car under that heat, I would get into trouble. “Maids are not allowed,” he replied.
I asked him why he assumed she was a maid. He said it was obvious. I asked why it was obvious when we were both wearing jeans and a T shirt. “Because she is black,” he answered.
I then asked him whether the wife of the Sudanese ambassador would be allowed in. He said that if she arrived in a diplomatic car, he would let her enter. We asked him whether he understood how degrading and disgusting what he was saying was to another human being standing right there, hearing every word. His answer was simple: he did not make the rules, he just followed them.
We left the beach immediately, and after trying several places, we eventually found a beach in Jounieh that allowed black people to enter. The fact that this even had to become a search tells you everything you need to know.
The Lebanese culture I know can be deeply racist, sectarian, antisemitic, homophobic, and misogynistic, among many other problems. That said, I also know many Lebanese who are trying to improve their country and challenge those attitudes. But there is still a lot, I mean a LOT, that needs to change.
Of course Israel is not perfect. No society is. But whenever I say that Israelis and Lebanese are in some ways very similar, I also have to add that in many ways they are profoundly different.
Those two soldiers at the train station are proof of that.
#lebanon #Israel
I still sometimes cannot believe that Gaza - a faraway conflict (that currently has a ceasefire) - is dictating how some people are voting in council elections in the UK.
99.9% of these Green and Gaza Independent candidates and voters have never been to Gaza. Most barely understand the issue. Having been there and worked on it it’s undoubtedly a depressing situation all round, and a knotty geopolitical problem - as it has been for over a century. But the idea that it should be the deciding factor in how people are voting here is absurd.
These people don’t vote based on the famine in Haiti or displacement in Myanmar. So I find it very hard to escape the conclusion their Gaza obsession is down to extremely effective propaganda and/or raw sectarianism
“We’re 87!”
A Palestine activist had the temerity to ask this elderly couple to delay their journey home by twenty minutes to make way for an anti-Israel march.
Naturally, the couple were outraged.
These protesters have zero regard for anyone else. No matter your age, your plans, or your needs, you’re expected to “sacrifice” for their cause, like it or not.
Britain is fed up.
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“The Met Gala is so elitist and detached.”
No, I’m sorry, you’re not annoyed with the Met Gala because it’s elitist.
I can accept other reasons like annoyance over Jeff Bezos funding it. Fine. That’s valid.
But claiming it’s broadly elitist because celebs wear fun and interesting costumes on a red carpet is not why you’re annoyed.
You watch millionaire athletes compete against each other in stadiums and ballparks owned by billionaires who price out working class families because they want more perks for wealthy sports fans.
You voted for a fake billionaire who is obsessed with gold-plated furnishings and elective plastic surgery.
You listen to bro podcasters who are millionaires and ludicrously removed from the problems facing working class families, who then try to pit you against other working class families.
And you love all that. You can’t get enough of it.
You’re not annoyed because the Met Gala is “so elitist.”
You’re annoyed because it’s too feminine-coded and queer-coded for your taste, and the thought that, somewhere, women and queer people are having a good time gets on your nerves.
So, just say that.
Grab your fragile nutsack and have the balls to be honest about why you have no issues with conservative men enjoying themselves in wealthy settings but you draw the line at women and queer people.
These are Yaqoub Karimpour and Naser Bakrzadeh - executed this morning by Islamic regime terrorists under the cover of an internet blackout.
Innocent. Alone.
It's another horrific day.
The regime in Iran has tortured Hesam Alaadin, an ordinary father of twins, to death for owning a Starlink dish. His body was just handed to his family. Hesam was arrested in January and suffered for months.
Read that again: Tortured to death for simply being online.
Regime thugs are hunting for Starlink users door to door, because they don't want the truth about the reality in Iran to come out. The IRGC is turning the country into North Korea, a nation sized prison camp.
It can't go on like this. Iranians must have the internet restored by any means.
I am asking all tech giants to please think of a way.
They hanged him💔
The regim Executes 21-Year-Old karate athlete at dawn Thursday in Prison after Iran’s Supreme Court upheld a death sentence on charges of “enmity against God.”
His crime?
Joining nationwide protests in January 2026.
Security forces reportedly surrounded his body after the execution and buried him under heavy security, preventing any public mourning.
The United States and the international community must make clear: there can be no normalization, no meaningful engagement, while this regime continues to execute young men and women for demanding freedom.#StopExecutionsInIran
40-year-old Hossam Aladdin was tortured to death by the Islamic regime.
His "crime": using Starlink.
And the world is silent.
If you really cared about sexual violence directed at women and girls in the region then why push some ridiculous report whose sole purpose is to muddy the waters obscuring the sexual violence Hamas have done, and are doing. Instead you raise a report where events aren’t corroborated, with no accusations of rape. Where one of the top accusations is, “in the Mleihat community, Mu'arrajat East: A young woman described avoiding eye contact with her brother after a settler made an obscene hand gesture, describing the shame it carried.”
If that happened I’ll happily condemn it, but really?! That’s the sexual violence you’re using your parliamentary time to bring attention to? Not the mass rape and murder of Israelis by Hamas. Not the sexual assaults on the kidnapped Israelis by Hamas. Not the ongoing mass rape of Palestinian women and girls by Hamas.
But hey, good job holding Israel to account for an alleged hand gesture. Whilst you ignore the continuing rape carried out by Hamas.
BREAKING: The Islamic Republic is preparing to hang eight women.
Not a word from the international community or so-called human rights organizations.
After killing her, Iran’s security forces stormed the morgue, sexually abused, and sent the images to her husband as a weapon of terror.
Today in a deeply disturbing case, Ahmad Khodaei, husband of Salehe Akbari, an Iranian nurse who secretly helped wounded protester during the January uprising, has reportedly attempted suicide following months of pressure, threats, and alleged abuse by Iranian security forces.
Ahmad had sent me all the evidence the psychological torture he endured, and the details of how his wife was shot directly to my Instagram.
Today, I was shocked to learn that he has attempted suicide.
Akbari, a nurse and outdoor enthusiast, was shot dead inside her home during a raid by security agents. Ahmad was beaten, detained for 11 days, and repeatedly threatened to remain silent about what he witnessed.
Khodaei said that after killing his wife, agents later accessed her body in the morgue and committed acts of sexual abuse, sending him images in what appears to be a deliberate attempt to psychologically torture him.
The couple had been helping injured protesters seek medical care, avoiding state-run hospitals out of fear of arrest. Days later, their home was targeted.
Following his release from detention, Ahmad have faced ongoing harassment and intimidation. The sustained psychological pressure have driven him to attempt to take his own life. His current condition remains unclear.
This is what a brutal regime does when it fears its own people.
Salehe and Ahmad were a young couple in love, their lives filled with hope, their days filled with purpose. They were saving the lives the wounded. And for that, she was shot in her home.
He was detained, threatened, and psychologically broken.
The world cannot look away.
#IranMassacre
We are beyond angry this morning. Our community is being targeted, and the place where I was Bar Mitzvah’d and married is now behind a police cordon.
By allowing "hate marches" to take over London week after week, you’ve let a fever of antisemitism fester. If you actually want to protect us, stop the platitudes and address the root cause of this hatred that enables people to throw firebombs at our houses of worship. #Harrow #Antisemitism
In 1984, Ruth Coker Burks was 25 years old, visiting a friend at a hospital in Little Rock, when she noticed nurses drawing straws outside a patient's room. Someone had to go in. She didn't wait for the straws. She opened the door herself. What she found inside would define the next decade of her life. 🕯️**
Inside was a young man reduced to bones — maybe 80 pounds, dying alone, terrified. He kept whispering one word.
*"Mama."*
Ruth told the nurses to call his mother.
They laughed.
*"Honey, we've called. He's been here six weeks. Nobody's coming."*
Ruth made them give her the number. She tried one last time.
The mother's answer was cold and final: her son was sinful, already dead to her, and she would not be coming.
So Ruth went back into that room. She took his hand. She stayed.
For 13 hours, she held the hand of a dying stranger, promising him he wouldn't leave this world alone.
When he died, his family refused to claim the body.
Ruth decided she would bury him herself.
She owned plots in her family cemetery in Hot Springs — where her father and grandparents rested. The nearest funeral home willing to handle an AIDS death was 70 miles away. Ruth paid from her own pocket. A local potter gave her a chipped cookie jar for an urn.
She used posthole diggers to dig the grave herself.
She spoke kind words over the earth because no minister would come to pray over a man who died of AIDS.
Ruth thought that would be the end.
It was the beginning.
Word traveled through the quiet networks of fear and desperation across Arkansas.
*There's a woman in Hot Springs who isn't afraid. There's a woman who will sit with you. There's a woman who will make sure you're buried with dignity when your own family won't claim you.*
They started arriving. Dying young men from rural hospitals across the state, abandoned by the people who were supposed to love them most.
Over the next decade, Ruth Coker Burks cared for more than 1,000 people dying of AIDS.
She personally buried 40 of them in Files Cemetery — digging the graves herself, with her young daughter beside her carrying a small spade, holding their own funerals because no one else would speak over these graves.
Of those 1,000 people, only a handful of families didn't abandon their dying children.
Ruth called parents. Begged them to come say goodbye. To claim their child's body.
Most refused.
*"Who knew,"* she said, *"there'd come a time when parents didn't want to bury their own children?"*
But she also witnessed something else — something that stayed with her.
She watched gay men care for dying partners with a devotion that shattered every stereotype. She watched a terrified community take care of its own — and take care of her.
*"They would twirl up a drag show on Saturday night and here'd come the money. That's how we bought medicine. That's how we paid rent. If it hadn't been for the drag queens, I don't know what we would have done."*
By the mid-1990s, new treatments emerged. The crisis began to shift.
And then, like so many heroes of the AIDS crisis, Ruth Coker Burks faded from public memory.
She wrote a memoir in 2019 called *All the Young Men* because she needed people to understand what happened in Arkansas. What happened across America. What happens when fear convinces people to abandon their own children.
And what happens when one person refuses to walk past a door everyone else fears.
She didn't have medical training. She didn't have institutional backing. She didn't have money.
She had compassion. Courage. Posthole diggers. And a family cemetery.
That was enough to make sure 1,000 people didn't die believing they were worthless.
The next time someone says one person can't change anything —
Remember the red bag on the door.
Remember the 13 hours she stayed with a stranger.
Remember the 40 graves she dug with her own hands.
She walked through that door in 1984. And 1,000 lives were forever changed because of it.
Watch British tourists harass an Israeli couple in Vietnam. They sing “Boom boom Tel Aviv” and call them “rats”. They even invoke the Nazi trope of Jews being kicked out of “110 countries”. These pro-Pals are indistinguishable from Nazis now. I’m ashamed of them.
Spain’s pro-Chinese foreign is deeply disappointing and problematic . By aligning itself more closely with China—a country widely accused of committing some of the most serious human rights abuses of this century—it undermines its own credibility on human rights and democracy.
A government that chooses such partnerships cannot convincingly speak as a defender of democratic values or the rule of law.
This is Ameneh Soleimani.
A doctor.
Sentenced to death by Islamic regime terrorists for treating wounded protesters.
⚠️ Make this go viral - now.
⚠️The Islamic Republic executed a talented and brilliant individual. Vahid Baniamerian, a political prisoner who spent years in prison under torture, was a graduate in management and a compassionate teacher of children.
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.
🇵🇹 If you have ever dealt with any Portuguese business (and I have with many in my 5 years here) you know why
Portuguese in Portugal simply do not care about work, some foreigners find that refreshing, but it results in a country where you can't find anyone to do work because nobody wants to work
And when they do work, the work is generally bad, like imagine stepping into a time machine back to 1970s bad, they also can't follow the spec you agreed upon beforehand, and then when it's 60% done they disappear and ghost you
When we did home renovatiom, you hire ppl, they arrive late at 9am (you agreed 8am), they then drive away to get materials, come back 11am, do actual work for an hour, then at 12noon announce they go for lunch, come back around 2.30pm, walk around a bit, do some work, and then leave early at 4pm
It's not just construction workers, it's almost every interaction you have here with a Portuguese business, the quality is just low, the service non-existent or customer-hostile, and it's not the language, I speak fluent Portuguese, I'm respectful and friendly which is why I never ever had this amount of issues elsewhere in the world
And I know it's not just my experience, it's everyone I know here, even Portuguese complain about Portuguese!
It's not completely their fault though, the hostile tax system for both people and businesses literally gives you an incentive to never ever scale your business beyond I believe around €150,000/year, because you end up in a completely different category and tax tier that decimates you with more taxes and more bookkeeping
So every business tries to stay small, and doesn't want more customers (how many times have I walked into a Portuguese cafe or shop and the staff or owner *sighed* "not another customer")
Add decades of socialist governments that hand out free money to 50% of the country (and even the right wing parties here are socialist btw, they have to be or they don't get votes) and you don't have any incentive to work left
Why work when you don't need to work?
The majority of the young smart Portuguese people with actual ambitions understandably move elsewhere, because if there's no incentive to grow a business, there's also no jobs for them, and the whole thing becomes a vicious cycle of increasing poverty
Which is why I said Portuguese in Portugal at the beginning of this tweet, because Portuguese outside of Portugal are ambitious, want to work, want to improve their lives!
Bringing in lots of foreigners like me by the government as a way to pump money into the system, we spend a lot and it pays for the welfare, healthcare and retirements of Portuguese now, but it's not a structural solution (and we also instantly became the scapegoat for the government's decades of mismanagement)
It'd be relatively easy to fix this though if people in Portugal would put on their thinking hat:
💡 Make Portugal a great place to start and run a business, model yourself after Singapore but with extremely low taxes (maybe 5-10%) for companies/startups and make it easy for them to hire (and fire) people, the money you lose in taxes you will get back in increased economic activity over time (but it will hurt for a little bit)
Because even the foreigners who move here and start businesses get caught up in the reverse incentive spiral of Portugal:
Why even work?
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