Toby St Hill

Journalist originally from Hadrian's Wall country, covering more contemporary events. 
#latam #environment #milecastles

[Toby St Hill @TobyStHill]

New investigation with @Global_Witness: secretly filmed videos show French giant @Veolia dumping untreated toxins in Colombia

Tests reveal severe mercury contamination in neighbouring wetlands

Locals had previously flagged concerns over birth defects
https://t.co/h8tZYD0Fds

[Illia Ponomarenko 🇺🇦 @IAPonomarenko]

No, sweetie.

Donetsk was a city of a million roses when its own Ukrainian flag flew above it.

Back then, it was also the fastest-growing and most rapidly prospering city in Ukraine -- home to what was the finest regional airport in Eastern Europe, one of the world's best football stadiums, a state-of-the-art railway terminal, and one of the cleanest, best-maintained cities in the region.

Its elites were running Kyiv, and every time I visited Donetsk as a student, riding the famous trolleybus Route No. 2 through the city, I was amazed by how many new office buildings were appearing, how much money was flowing into the city, and how many international companies were opening their doors there.

Fifteen years ago, to us kids from Donbas, Donetsk felt like the center of the universe because it had everything one could possibly dream of. It was a young city of universities and libraries, where the overwhelming majority of boys and girls from across Donbas went to study, including those from my own small hometown an hour away by bus.

Names like Liverpool or Detroit Rock City may mean nothing to you, but our Ukrainian Donetsk was a city of great rock clubs and unforgettable concerts. We traveled there to see Western bands perform.

We bought rock merchandise at the legendary Right House store near Krytyi Market. Scorpions, Rihanna, and Beyoncé performed at the famous Donbass Arena. Schoolchildren from across Donbas were bused in to watch Shakhtar Donetsk matches. The city even had a famous monument to The Beatles.

It was a city where we sang songs on guitars in its beautifully maintained parks and along the Kalmius embankment before heading out to buy the famous "green Donetsk burgers." Our older friends moved there after graduation, formed rock bands, recorded full albums, and held wedding celebrations in the squares around Donbas Arena. We traveled there to visit the legendary Radio Market in search of films, music, and books.

And then you arrived.

And you turned the wealthiest, most prosperous Ukrainian city into a piece of shit.

You deceived many of its people with sweet promises of Russian oil-fueled prosperity broadcast from television screens, but what you brought instead was war.

You transformed a thriving city into a criminal wasteland ruled by ethnic gangs from Russia, into a kingdom of Stalinist terror straight out of the 1930s, complete with torture chambers in the infamous Izolyatsia prison camp. You turned the magnificent Donetsk Airport into lifeless gray rubble, while the vast stands of Donbas Arena have spent a second decade slowly being reclaimed by weeds instead of hosting Champions League finals and Metallica concerts.

You swept away an entire generation of the city's men through your forced mobilization and threw them against Ukrainian machine guns until there were barely enough people left to keep basic municipal services running. Because of you, prosperous Donetsk became a withered desert without reliable water, because your war destroyed the canal system that carried water from the Siverskyi Donets River into Donbas. For years now, people have lived with chronic water shortages and have been reduced shitting into plastic bags forever.

You dragged Donetsk back like seventy years in time. You turned it into a depressed backwater, devoid of hope and future. Even ten years ago, tens of thousands of people, the most active, the most talented, the most entrepreneurial, fled the city and found refuge in Kyiv and elsewhere in Ukraine. Many of them still remember our Donetsk with tears in their eyes, the Donetsk that existed before the arrival of the "Russian World."

You transformed it into something that even my pro-Russian acquaintances are shocked to see when they return after years of occupation.

It was you who trampled the million roses of our Ukrainian Donetsk into shit beneath the tracks of your tanks and the boots of your death troops, turning them into a foul swamp of death and despair.

And that stain will forever remain on the conscience of fascist Russia, which brings nothing but destruction, decay, and death wherever it goes.

[🔻Bee 🪂 @evilonesobs]

People are so illiterate they don't even know what stereotypes to apply to certain books. It used to be that you accuse Ulysses fans of lying about having read it but now people have no frame of reference; they don't even know what type of book Joyce wrote.

[Joyce Carol Oates @JoyceCarolOates]

how funny is it that Joyce's Odysseus is a 38-year-old Jew (allegedly baptized Catholic at birth by his Jewish-turned-"Christian" father: but sharing no evidence of Catholicism with his 100% Catholic Dublin neighbors) living in Dublin with an attractive, slovenly-mammalian woman who never gets out of bed & is unfaithful to him with a man named Blazes Bolan? & our hero Bloom accepts being a cuckold, in fact rather seems to enjoy it as Bloom inclines toward a genteel sort of masochism.
Joyce's outrageously ironic joke of Odysseus in the 20th century: not only non-aggressive but pacifist; not only pacifist but masochist. at the end of the long day, grateful to sniff at his wife's soiled undergarments.

[Samer Ghanoor @samer3433]

Syrian President Ahmad al-Sharaa has removed his brothers from senior government posts in an effort to counter accusations of nepotism and distance his rule from the #Assad family model.

Wise move.

#Syria

[Toby St Hill @TobyStHill]

@LondonLabour dumb, stigmatising shit, I hope you're better than this and will delete

[Toby St Hill @TobyStHill]

@itsShelbee https://t.co/A9DbCxeF1P

[Toby St Hill @TobyStHill]

@hopekuki @skipper thanks to your contributions in this thread I am from now on going to eat rice with a spoon!!!

[Toby St Hill @TobyStHill]

@brianrtw @Alicoh1 This just makes me more sceptical sadly

[Toby St Hill @TobyStHill]

the actual difference between these two is that diet coke is marketed to women and coke zero is marketed to men

[keshav @kshvbgde]

I honestly do not know the difference between these two drinks, and I’m too afraid to ask at this point.

I prefer coke zero btw

[Arash Azizi آرش عزیزی @arash_tehran]

I don’t think many non-Iranians still understand the depth of the massacre this regime just committed against us… everywhere in our society, there are bereaved… in every corner….

We must bury the Islamic Republic.

[gerf (fred) @achingkneejoint]

as English speakers we have to sort out the 'had had' situation. it's frankly embarrassing to the language

[Kaveh Shahrooz کاوه شهروز @kshahrooz]

"anti-imperialist" racism is the one that believes non-white people are too stupid to identify the source of their oppression in the past ~50 years.

[Catherine Ellis @Cat_lucy1]

While oil and drugs have dominated coverage of Venezuela, it's important to look at gold mining too. Armed groups and corrupt officials have profited from operations, while ecosystems and communities suffer. I wrote this last yr about some of the impacts:
https://t.co/IsV7CI4j6i

[Thomas van Linge @ThomasVLinge]

Horrifying reports and images coming out of countless protesters being killed across Iran.

Reported death tolls range from 2000 up to 6000 people killed, but definitely all in the four digits.

[Thomas van Linge @ThomasVLinge]

Nicaragua 🇳🇮 BREAKING: the Ortega regime has released around 30 political prisoners after a tweet by @USEmbNicaragua demanding their freedom.

Among the released is Oscar Gadea Tinoco, the former mayor of Pantasma.

[Thomas van Linge @ThomasVLinge]

Venezuela 🇻🇪: president-elect Edmundo Gonzalez reports that 48 hours after the announced release of political prisoners by the regime, less then 1% of the 800 prisoners have been set free, leaving families in anguish.

[Toby St Hill @TobyStHill]

Over more than a decade, Petrocaribe provided a platform to launder an estimated $4 to $6 billion from Venezuela’s state-owned oil company, PDVSA, to Nicaragua... much of the money found its way into Sandinista political coffers
https://t.co/OX458aEKYI

[Toby St Hill @TobyStHill]

Sixty Nicaraguans arrested across the country for celebrating the fall of Maduro, in a parallel dictatorship which has also maintained power by committing crimes against humanity on its own citizens, financing its repressive apparatus with Venezuelan oil and gold money

[Carlos F Chamorro @cefeche]

Capturan a 60 nicaragüenses por celebrar la caída de Nicolás Maduro en Venezuela. Los arrestos arbitrarios ordenados por Rosario Murillo se reportan en ocho departamentos, entre ellos Managua, Matagalpa y Jinotega, según el Monitoreo Azul y Blanco https://t.co/ErO5tSTqor

[Dan Jackson @northumbriana]

The old Tyne Bridge stood for 500 years from 1270 to 1771, when it was swept away by a flood. Viewed from the east here, the Prince Bishop of Durham owned 1/3 of the bridge from the Gateshead side (note how built up that section was), and the town of Newcastle held the rest.

[Faytuks News @Faytuks]

BREAKING: A Tehran doctor told TIME on condition of anonymity that just six hospitals in the capital had recorded at least 217 protester deaths, “most by live ammunition.

https://t.co/KMlvqDcxcM