Buried lede: Meta sends all your nudes to Kenya where humans annotate it and feed it to AI

A man lost his sister to suicide and wanted to help other people not make that choice. He asked random strangers around the world to write “Reasons to Stay” letters. Thousands did. And now his website saves lives. Also always good for a pick-me-up. This is lovely. reasonstostay.co.uk

“the system integrates facial recognition and biometric data provided by Chinese tech giant Huawei with a software application developed by Russia.”

Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez on Iran: “Remember that one can be against a hateful regime, as is the case with the Iranian regime, as is the whole of Spanish society, and at the same time be against an unjustified, dangerous military intervention outside of international law.”

A govt legal summary; always fascinating & rare “solely focussed on ending the threat of air and missile attacks against regional allies unlawfully attacked by Iran and who have not been involved in hostilities from the outset” V telling (but one ‘s’ pls in focused. Not the important thing I know)

I, uh, do not think HM Gov has the capacity for this

I agree. But, of course most of the settlement changes can be amended via a statement of changes to the immigration rules without parliamentary debate (changes haven't been debated since 2008). MPs already ceded a significant proportion of their oversight here to the executive.

The strikes on Iran are blatantly illegal. I explained in June why the strikes on Iran's nuclear facilities were unlawful under US and international law. Everything I wrote then is true today, but this is a far larger assault with far graver consequences. www.nytimes.com/2025/06/23/o...

Also, there’s no way the Home Office has the resources to hugely multiply its asylum workload by reassessing each claim every 30 months. The delays will be colossal, adding to everyone’s stress and frustration

A further attack on the Refugee Convention and the internationally agreed refugee status by this xenophobia-driven Labour government, shifting it to something more like temporary protection and denying refugees the relief of stability they need and likely compounding the trauma individuals face

In fact, the extract from the Home Secretary's comments suggests that her rationale is wholly dishonest - the settlement changes concern people who are here legally, not illegally

This is a good read. I'm also thinking about how almost all disability organizations, including ones for Tourette's, have very white leadership, which means many fail to approach situations like this with intersectional nuance. www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/politic...

A reminder of what some of these asylum policies are: - giving refugees only 2.5 years of leave, meaning the Home Office has to review their status every 30 months - quadrupling the time to settlement from 5 years to 20 years - no automatic way to be reunited with close family members

When faced with a shockingly exploitative new employment contract that would’ve forced them to sign away their IP, their likeness rights, and their power of attorney, Jupiter Jetson and her coworkers at Sheri’s fought back—fast. They organized a union in SIX DAYS. www.thenation.com/article/econ...

#HongKong has set a chilling precedent. A court has convicted the father of US-based activist Anna Kwok — the first time a family member has been punished for an overseas activist’s peaceful advocacy. This is collective punishment. This is #TransnationalRrepression www.hrw.org/news/2026/02...

Few things from the latest immigration stats, published this morning. www.gov.uk/government/s... First, the number of asylum claims has fallen a bit. It’s still high though.

Why do I have to pretend that I'm going to print something in order to save it as a PDF. Why do I have to engage in a little ruse.

European politicians pull away from (rhetoric of) migrant integration, towards the Arab Gulf model: low-paid work by insecure “temporary” migrants. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Because of the National driver register, since their licenses are suspended, trans folks cannot move to another state and get a new license until they remove the suspension on their existing Kansas license. They can't even escape this by moving to another state.

Hackers Expose The Massive Surveillance Stack Hiding Inside Your “Age Verification” Check We've been saying this for years now, and we're going to keep saying it until the message finally sinks in: mandatory age verification creates massive, centralized honeypots of sensitive biometric data that…

To summarize what seems to be the story of BAFTA: They knew John Davidson has Tourettes and hurls out slurs, sat him near the back of the room and chose to seat him near a hot mic. According to him he was told any slurs would be edited out and that he was unaware that his ticks could be heard /1

Nurul Amin Shah Alam, a Rohingya refugee in the US who didn’t speak English & was nearly blind, was tasered & beaten by the police, detained for a year, & then dropped off by Border Patrol on a street in the middle of winter without informing his family or lawyer. He was found dead a few days later

The pileup of blatantly unlawful conduct by the government in this case is astonishing, as is the fact that the Supreme Court allowed the govt to go forward with this program in a shadow docket ruling

ICE took their papers—and won’t give them back

A new study published earlier this month in Geophysical Research Letters reveals how the tips of tree leaves burn with ghostly, ultraviolet sparks. These phenomena, known as coronas, had never been seen in nature—until now. 🌿 spklr.io/6042DI2EC 📸: William Brune

For the first time since @projectsaltbox.bsky.social launched their DHS warehouse acquisition tracker, the number of canceled sales is higher than any of the other warehouse-related figures. We've reached a tipping point, folks. lookerstudio.google.com/reporting/b0...

Destitute survivors of south-east Asia’s cyberscam farms an ‘international crisis’

Why the measles outbreak is about NHS funding (and, I would add, workers' rights) rather than anti-vaxxers

New UN human rights report on the lived experiences of victims of trafficking in persons, slavery & other serious human rights violations & abuses taking place in South-East Asia in the context of extensive criminal operations set up to perpetrate cyber-enabled fraud: www.ohchr.org/en/stories/2...

Absolutely insane story about a middle-aged woman from Hertfordshire who got arrested, shackled, and detained by ICE and held in a prison for eight weeks.... while on holiday... with a valid tourist visa... as she tried to leave the country.

Ahead of a panel on why folks should boycott FIFA World Cup, I did some quick data analysis: - Of 42 qualifying countries, migration from 14 is restricted. - Of the 9 from Africa, 7 are restricted & 2 fully banned (Côte d'Ivoire & Senegal). Why anyone would participate in this is beyond me.

Labour sucks so bad This is a disaster

“…no government which gave a good goddamn about the immigration issue would pass anything which looked like this. It is a dog’s dinner of half-conceived policy, Reform rhetoric, mean-spirited sentiment, and profound intellectual muddle.”

skull of a HELL HERON , the newly discovered unicorn spinosaurus, next to a pet lizard. source: kaijutegu on tumblr

📢BIG NEWS: Sea-Watch 5 detention order dropped! Today, the court of Catania decided to suspend the 15-day detention order and the related fine. Soon, we will be back in the Mediterranean and ready to support people on the move!

"An Associated Press reporter was beaten by the police and detained along with three other journalists on Tuesday in Cameroon while reporting on a secretive Trump administration program to deport migrants to the Central African country, according to two of the people detained." (gift link)

"Understanding how the criminal legal system and immigration enforcement have been braided together is essential. So is understanding the central but often overlooked role of sheriffs’ departments and the political economy of rural areas as bulwarks of the carceral and deportation state"

This isn't a shocker. If you look at many sectors with high vacancy rates at the moment, such as the care sector, you can easily see that reducing migration won't lead to more Brits working, and that's before factoring in that migrants create jobs by being here. www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026...

“I don’t want to be in this place I want to go to my school.” - 7 year old imprisoned by ICE for 70 days in a concentration camp in Texas. Today, after @propublica.org published this story, the camp was raided to confiscate letters from the children. www.propublica.org/article/ice-...

We spoke to 68 migrant parents raising 134 children about the Government’s proposed “earned settlement” model. 👇They told us the plans would push families into government-imposed poverty and make it harder to keep their children safe, housed and secure.

Thanks so much to @bordercrim.bsky.social for hosting this blog. One of the core findings of my book was around how models which were intended to support legal practitioners in helping their clients to show that they are, for example, a gay man were actually often working as a reason for refusal.

NEW: For the last few years, calls to reform the seasonal worker visa have gone largely ignored Now, the government has even rejected several recommendations from its own independent immigration advisers... Story link in the replies ⬇️ @mellino.bsky.social

Since a handful of hate filled people protested outside RNLI HQ yesterday because they're angry that crews don't discriminate in their rescues and work to save all lives at sea you might want to show your support with a one off or regular donation. rnli.org/pages/ig/new...

Labour will cut overseas aid spending by about 27% in 2026-27 compared with 2024-25, while the US reductions are expected to be 23% lower in 2026 than in 2024. UK cuts highest in OECD. Child mortality ROSE by 200,000 in 2025.

douglas adams was our most accurate futurist

I think it's wrong to describe the World Service as "soft power". It's actually "info power". And these days that's a very hard form of power indeed.

NEW: Hundreds of judges around the country have ruled more than 4,400 times since October that President Donald Trump’s administration is detaining immigrants unlawfully, a Reuters review of court records found. The government keeps doing it nonetheless. www.reuters.com/legal/govern...

Remigration by stealth? The government’s settlement proposals will mean 10 or 15 years extra to settle - but are they designed to make people leave? The reforms combine with other policy changes to mean many people here would have no route to stay in/beyond 2030 ukandeu.ac.uk/remigration-...