A social history of the Lamu city-state (1370-1885) www.africanhistoryextra.com/p/a-social-h...

Ruins of Shela, Kenya Christraud M, Smithsonian. #historyxt

“What is unfolding is what climate and forest scientists have been predicting for 30 years. That as the world gets hotter and drier, we are exposing forests to more and more risk, and the old strategies of fire suppression are simply being overwhelmed.”

New Delhi everywhere

I find this is a really odd story - why should world class biomedical research improve life expectancy in UK? What is keep life expectancy flat are a range of structural issues - not access to the latest medical treatments. 1/4 news.sky.com/story/world-...

Congrats we just made it impossible to come here for a PhD www.bostonglobe.com/2026/07/16/m...

It's not that I think they have a super-secret plan to overturn the elections and seize power, but you're watching an entire political party, from top to bottom, meme itself into convincing itself that its opponents are inherently illegitimate, and that road doesn't go anywhere good.

I am once again begging Hollywood to stop using the Greek alphabet for an Ancient World movie, if they can't afford to even throw a couple of quid at anyone with an inkling of the language. Unless they really think audiences are dying to see THS THDPSSSSPS

The most anti-legal immigrant administration ever just made it illegal for international students to transfer schools or change majors or shift any "educational objective" in their 1st year and for graduate students **at any point** ever, at all. There is no legal basis for this

We should think about these other responses because - guess what? - it's actually nearly impossible to substantially raise birth rates (and sustain them), according to a recent review of policies. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

There are policy responses that can address the consequences of low fertility that *aren't about trying to raise birth rates*! A recent @annualreviews.bsky.social came to just that conclusion. www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...

Low fertility doesn't necessarily have to result in pension burdens either - sustained investments in human capital can make smaller populations more productive and healthier, as shown in research in @readdemography.bsky.social. doi.org/10.1215/0070...

"Stop criticizing us or will keep murdering people" is just a jaw-dropping thing for a government official to say.

Yet another Kalshi offering that serves no legitimate economic purpose. It's not possible to make a rational bet on this without material non-public information. It's a market solely for fraud by both regulators and corporate insiders, and everyone connected to it in any way should go to prison.

One of the things that's so remarkable about Trump is that even after he has ascended to raking in BILLIONS in bribes and graft, he still can't resist engaging in every penny-ante grift he can think of

Racist hate crimes up 9% in a year. This is the direct result of a sustained campaign of stochastic terrorism by at least three political parties, this Labour government, and the majority of the British media.

The gaslighting in the UK is absurd. My kiddo has been fully included for years. This segregation has a start date, September 1st. It is a 180 of school policy, that they are being forced to follow by Government policy. Yet not one newspaper is mentioning this HUGE change to trans kids' lives.

Just had meeting with kiddo's school. She has been fully supported, treated with full equality & dignity for years. All of that changes from September. Full segregation & humiliation across the board. The school staff cried in the meeting. This will absolutely lead to children's deaths 1/2

The UK gov wants asylum seekers to repay £10k of their accommodation costs. We ran the numbers, gov could raise 3.5x more in tax & lower support costs by asking asylum seekers to work instead (with @helen-dempster.bsky.social & @ianmitchell1.bsky.social) cgdev.org/blog/asking-...

terrifying stuff out of the UK

NEW: A 5-year-old girl spent months in federal immigration custody here in Connecticut while her family waited for her release. Her case isn’t unique, experts and court records show. My latest w/ @jrabethomas.bsky.social at @ctinsider.bsky.social — www.ctinsider.com/news/article... #nutmegsky

I found this story genuinely shocking to report. The legislation has expanded so much that now the grounds on which citizenship can be stripped are incredibly vague and there is hardly any recourse. Anyone who the government believes MIGHT have a claim on another nationality can be denationalised.

"As far as the government is concerned, they’ve washed their hands of us. Would they do that to a white person?" For a @prospectmagazine.co.uk feature on Britain's citizenship-stripping boom, I spoke to families of people who have had citizenship revoked www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/politics/uk/...

People have studied this for decades, and the findings are pretty consistent: Immigration is unrelated or even negatively related to crime and cities w/lots of immigrants are likely safer than yours. From Robert Sampson, The Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect (2012).

This is well done, and Dems should use the inability to simply accept the validity of the 2020 election as justification to remove and bar every single one of these people from public service.

I know I'm a broken record on this, but consistently referring to it as the "welfare bill" demonstrates such a poor understanding of how important social security is as a fiscal tool to protect basic living standards and stimulate demand in the face of persistent economic shocks

After nearly two years of refusing to abide by the bare minimum of international law, the Labour-led British government confirmed this morning that it is working to implement a comprehensive ban on trade with the illegal Israeli settlement enterprise. It will cover both goods and services.

Fractal geometry and recursion in African architecture and material culture Rural castles of the Batam-mariba/Somba in Northern Ghana, Togo, and Benin www.africanhistoryextra.com/p/fractals-a...

Huge thanks to @charliearchy.bsky.social for alerting me to the USG document discussed here. You should go read his piece from yesterday, too, which I've linked to in my post and here.

I wrote about what looks very much like a formal US plan to institutionalize a global network of concentration camps.

my latest, with Mehret Berehe on sexual assault and harassment within the TDF, is live with @newhumanitarian.bsky.social. Many thanks to @pulitzercenter.org for their support.

if you made immigration law what the median voter thinks it is that would be the largest liberalization of the system in decades

From 20 deaths a day to just 2: Ebola mortality rate drop in Ituri province thanks to awareness campaigns: www.radiomoto.net/2026/07/14/e...

ICE killed another person.

“ICE’s abuses are not new, not created by Republicans alone, and not distinct from other enforcement agencies: they are tethered to otherwise normalized carceral and militarized infrastructures that will persist even without it.” @harshawalia.bsky.social:

stuff like this is why one important avenue for court reform is just nixing the shadow docket altogether and forcing these people to explain themselves to the public when they issue orders. also, making their records property of the united states and subject to publication when they leave the bench.

If this is true - big if - it is huge. Vehicles have been a site of escalation with ICE for YEARS, way before the second Trump administration

Our members know the horrific pain of being separated from their loved ones. Data from @refugeecouncil.bsky.social show that 16,000 refugees have been separated from families in the UK due to the government pausing the family reunion scheme. Cruelty by design. www.theguardian.com/world/2026/j...

How Neoliberalism Has Wielded ‘Corruption’ to Privatise Life in Africa thetricontinental.org/dossier-how-...

Officers shooting a man, running away from law enforcement, who is not a target of law enforcement, and who poses no threat to law enforcement, is murder. Federal officers do not have the power to commit summary executions because they are aggrieved.

Wow. Published in May in The Lancet. Look at those numbers of fabricated references per 10,000 articles in PubMed. The urge to publish is overcoming the urge to, I dunno, discover and learn things? #AI #medsky 🧪 www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...

the real story behind this viral photo is even more heartbreaking than the one the public created.

“Every president across party lines has poured money into ICE,” author and immigrant justice organizer @harshawalia.bsky.social tells us.

This morning in Biddeford, Maine, a 26-year-old man said goodbye to his wife and daughter and left for work. Moments later he was dead, shot in the head by ICE agents, the second man ICE has killed in six days. ICE is killing our neighbors. ICE cannot be reformed. Abolish ICE.

Zeno ain't got nothing on this. How do you solve the climate crisis? Slice emissions into parts small enough that each one "won't materially influence" anything. Jackdaw is 0.02%, so it doesn't count. Run that logic on every source and the whole crisis politely disappears.

It’s astonishing the lengths to which the right wing, anti-reparative justice lobby will go to stop the church acknowledging & atoning for its enormous complicity in one of the gravest crimes against humanity. www.theguardian.com/world/2026/j...

Amnesty International put out a report called "The Growing Threat of Anti-Rights Organizations in the UK". It included a number of "gender critical" organizations threatening trans people. JKR threatened to bankrupt them, so they retracted it. www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/mafq8...

Good analysis of why oil market hasn't completely run out - supply is down only 3.1m barrels - but that's counting inventories & reserves as supply www.theguardian.com/world/2026/j...

I cannot stress this enough: If this institution is destroyed, we will have nothing new at the international level negotiated for a generation, if ever. I don't believe the ICC is amazing, and there's a lot going on on the domestic level, but we need an ICC. A better one. #Accountability #Justice

The #ICC is not doing great. There's a lot to complain about. But this, we cannot allow. We cannot allow these hegemons and bullies to run this project into the ground because there is something worthy of protection and improvement in it. #InternationalJustice www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...