On this day, 22 July 1987, Palestinian artist Naji al Ali was shot by an unidentified person in London. He was struck by a bullet below his right eye and fell into a coma that lasted 37 days, until he died on 29 August 1987.Naji al Ali is considered one of the most prominent Palestinian and Arab cartoonists and one of the most important artists who used political art as a tool to raise awareness of the Palestinian cause. His drawings were known for their sharp criticism and boldness, leaving behind a vast legacy of more than 40,000 cartoons addressing Palestinian displacement, corruption, and social injustice.Naji al Ali created the character “Handala” in 1969 in Kuwait. “Handala will always remain ten years old, because at that age he left Palestine, and when Handala returns to Palestine, he will still be ten years old.” After 1973, Handala turned his back to the world and clasped his hands behind him, rejecting external solutions and compromises, becoming al Ali’s signature and a global symbol of Palestinian steadfastness.3.4K44
July 20/21/22, 2026 - Students and workers across India are fighting back against police after a brutal crackdown on student protests.
Tens of thousands of youth and workers marched on New Delhi demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Modi and Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan. The protests erupted over the repeated systematic leaks of the country's NEET medical examination answers, leading to the examination results being annulled, a huge blow especially for poor students who can't afford to retake the exam. Riot police brutally assaulted the protesting students, tear gassing, arresting and beating students with lathis.
The protesters decry endemic state corruption and contempt for young people, and have formed their own Cockroach Janta Party, named after a senior judge referred to students as "cockroaches". [video]/[video]
STOP SCROLLING FOR A MOMENT. TONIGHT, I THOUGHT I WAS GOING TO LOSE MY WIFE. Tonight, I watched my wife's condition get worse, and my heart nearly stopped. I have never felt so helpless, because I knew she desperately needed treatment and I had no way to provide it. The doctor examined her and prescribed urgent injections and medication that she must start taking as soon as possible. The cost is around €800, and every day of delay makes our fear bigger. I am begging you as a husband who has nothing left except hope in kind strangers. Please help me get my wife the treatment she needs. Your donation today could make the difference between more suffering and a chance for her to recover. Please donate now GoFundMe.
This lot of bollocks around Islamophobia underlying the Uygur genocide hoax is so clumsily set.
The largest mosque anywhere across China is the Id Kah («عيد گاه» in conventional Uygur grammar) mosque, a 15th century temple with infrastructural renovations ordered by the Chinese Communist Party, located in Kashgar, Xinjiang. The last ordained imām who oversaw it, member of the National People's Congress and with the Chinese Communist Party's approval, was an ethnic Uygur named Jüme Tahir. He was murdered by local Ua77abīs in July 2014, as he was heading out from Fajr duties. The then Party's Secretary of Xinjiang co-presided over the imām's funeral and instructed attendees (and why would a Communist do this, if Communism is supposed to be islamophobic?) to observe a moment in silence to honour him.
The Chinese Communist Party then closed the mosque for Islamic services two years later, out of fear that Ua77abī armed violence would endanger more lives of people attending their rites duly.
I should've looked into it sooner than I did years ago.
For a concise debunking of the hoax check out Atrocity Fabrication And Its Consequences’ tenth chapter which is on Xinjiang.
Or for something more in depth look at Barry Sautman’s very recent book Telling Tall Tales: “Uyghur Genocide” as a Political Stratagem. Which you can download for free from Brill.
Sautman has written about Xinjiang, Tibet, and minorities in China for more than twenty years at this point. I encountered his work before while reading Ferrana’s book Why The World Needs China where he’s used as a source a fair bit in the 8th and 9th chapters. One of the most notable things was his data revealing that rather than being an internal colony Xinjiang received very generous subsidies and credit from the central government despite various loss making ventures. Wealth was flowing into the region from the richer eastern regions. Not out.
my fiancé is very ill and while we fight doctors and surgery centers for procedures that can help, caretaking is my full-time job. if you’d like to support us we have a throne wishlist and my partner has a ko-fi.
reblogging because pip’s been having constant nausea recently and there’s only so much Zofran you can safely take so we want to try the FDA approved anti-nausea bracelet 😭
for the record im not technially 100% anti-AI, in the sense that its a broad category of tech being lumped under one umbrella term so it feels over-zealous to say i hate all of it all the time forever. but i also think trying to discuss what it actually IS good for is difficult right now when i cant take one step without something trying to convince me to use chatgpt to summarize my life and speed up my hobbies and turn my friends into chatbots and optimize my life into oblivion. i am certain there is nuance to the topic but can we stop cramming the square peg into the round hole before you start trying to sell me on the legitimate benefits of the square peg. please.
here's my super-quick, easy-to-digest summary that i use when i can't spend more than like 15 seconds on it but need someone to know the basic distinctions:
generative AI - bad evil AI. chatbots, LLMs, image generators, etc. this the one that steals shit.
analytical AI - helpful medical AI. this the one that helps detect cancer early.
game "AI" - fake AI. 100% human created and dictated. this the one that determines game mob behavior n stuff.
losing the battle with my own self-control so will briefly comment and say that categorizing certain types of ai as straightforwardly good and other types as "bad evil," even for the sake of summary, doesn't really hold water. just to give two counterexamples to the distinctions drawn above, large language models ("evil") are being used by human rights groups to parse huge datasets about police abuse while analytical ai ("helpful") is also the kind of ai that animates facial recognition software and the increasingly ubiquitous searchable license plate databases that police are using to stalk people. the goodness or badness of a given ai tool has less to do with its type and more to do with things like scale and scope, transparency, ownership, and contextual application.
the US is currently looting Iraq. seeing Chevron, Space X, and other US corporations pick up $60 billion worth of contracts in the country, we have to remember that the US has controlled Iraq's access to it's own oil revenue since the 2003 US led invasion. revenues that it will cut off if Iraq doesn't play ball
Following the invasion of Iraq, the US occupation of the country became a reality after the collapse of Saddam’s government. Faced with a fait accompli, the UN Security Council had to accept the new status quo.
According to International Humanitarian Law, occupation forces – in this case, the US and UK – become responsible for the well-being of the populations they occupy. So, UNSC Resolution 1483 was issued on 22 May 2003 to establish the US-led Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) as Iraq’s administrator and create the Development Fund for Iraq (DFI) to manage Iraqi oil revenues.
Note that Resolution 1483 did not mention the US Federal Reserve as the depositary of Iraqi funds, nor did it assign a location for the DFI headquarters or account. In fact, the resolution specifically states directed that the DFI should “be held by the Central Bank of Iraq.” It was the CPA, led by Paul Bremer, that decided unilaterally to house the account at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
This decision allowed the US government to maintain tight control over Iraq’s oil revenues. From that point until today, the Iraqi Ministry of Finance has had to submit requests for funds to the US Treasury, which then approves or denies these requests based on its own criteria.
This monthly transfer of US dollars – which are literally flown into Baghdad in pallets of hard cash – determines Iraq and its 40-million-population’s ability to pay for basic needs like salaries, food, and medicine.
Whenever Washington feels that Iraq is not compliant with US regional goals, these fund transfers can be delayed or reduced. In January 2020, for instance, after the Iraqi Parliament voted to expel US troops following the assassination of Iranian Quds Force General Qasem Soleimani and Iraqi Popular Mobilization Units (PMU) Deputy Commander Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the Trump administration threatened to freeze Iraq’s access to its oil revenues.
Today, Iraq’s financial situation remains dire. Despite having oil revenues piling up in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York – estimated today at around $120 billion – Iraq is burdened with a growing debt that matches this amount.
source
part of the new contracts is the restoring of an Iraq-Syria oil pipeline to bypass Hormuz
critically stagnant spotlight campaigns for today (7/22.) [NO DONATIONS IN TWO DAYS, PLEASE DON'T IGNORE!!]
all campaigns are vetted by the organizers of gaza funds. this site has been vouched for by palestinian bloggers. for full transparency, a list of campaigns is available to view on their site. additionally, if you look at my list of individual campaigns, you will see that i personally trust these campaigns and have donated to them many times.
yasmin's family: 15 days since last donation
yahia hawajry: 15 days since last donation
ghazi mekawi: 14 days since last donation
hassan abdullah: 14 days since last donation
ahmed atallah: 9 days since last donation
campaigns in danger of becoming critically stagnant:
ibrahim abu raida: 6 days since last donation
ghada and abdulrahman: 4 days since last donation
rania alneder: 4 days since last donation
individual posts for these campaigns are generally ignored, which is why i've moved to using this pinned post instead. it simply takes me too long to queue up a bunch of posts people will just scroll past. please don’t ignore this, you have the opportunity to throw someone a lifeline and do some real good. even if you don’t have any money, a reblog is free and can help get more eyes on these campaigns. none of them are on tumblr, to my knowledge. nobody sees these campaigns unless people reblog posts about them or make their own posts.
thank you in advance for your consideration.
tags for reach under the cut (you can always let me know if you'd rather not be on this list, or if you want to be tagged in future posts!)
This lot of bollocks around Islamophobia underlying the Uygur genocide hoax is so clumsily set.
The largest mosque anywhere across China is the Id Kah («عيد گاه» in conventional Uygur grammar) mosque, a 15th century temple with infrastructural renovations ordered by the Chinese Communist Party, located in Kashgar, Xinjiang. The last ordained imām who oversaw it, member of the National People's Congress and with the Chinese Communist Party's approval, was an ethnic Uygur named Jüme Tahir. He was murdered by local Ua77abīs in July 2014, as he was heading out from Fajr duties. The then Party's Secretary of Xinjiang co-presided over the imām's funeral and instructed attendees (and why would a Communist do this, if Communism is supposed to be islamophobic?) to observe a moment in silence to honour him.
The Chinese Communist Party then closed the mosque for Islamic services two years later, out of fear that Ua77abī armed violence would endanger more lives of people attending their rites duly.
I should've looked into it sooner than I did years ago.
