They still can't get it right – from the Telegraph:
Sharron Davies, the Olympic swimming medallist, is to be made a Conservative peer after leading a campaign to ban transgender people from women’s sport.
Not true. She hasn't campaigned against trans men – biological women – in women's sport. What she's campaigned against is transgender men in women's sport. They shouldn't be in women's sport because they're men, not because they're trans.
gone wholly unremarked by Ceferin, or indeed by Lineker.
Lineker and UEFA's Ceferin seem less interested in the truth, and more interested in polishing their modish antisemitic credentials.
Sadly, it is only performative antics that cut through in his sphere. Take Lineker’s recent comment, addressing the sharing of an anti-Semitic rat emoji that hastened his exit from the BBC, that he was “anti-the killing of children”. It read as another appeal for secular sainthood, another reminder that he was on the side of the angels. “I come from a place of complete impartiality,” he declared. If only. Sadly, the problem with his pieties is that they have been filtered through a distinct ideological prism. He is the radicalised product of social networks, seeing fit to peddle the sophomoric propaganda of Owen Jones as if it were inscribed on tablets of stone. He is interested in truth only as far as it corresponds with his preconceived version of truth.
This is why the pressure on Uefa to give more specifics about Al-Obeid feels so opportunistic. For a start, we will perhaps never know the definitive version of his death: where the PFA has said he was killed by Israel while waiting at an aid distribution point, the Israel Defence Forces have denied this…
From the vantage point of Lineker et al, Uefa’s selective testimony on Al-Obeid is cast as a damning indictment of indifference to the Palestinians’ suffering. But you cannot be taken seriously as a paragon of virtue if your application of morality is so one-sided that you fail to address an Israeli footballer’s murder, or even the massacre of Jews that precipitated this entire conflagration. That is not altruism, it is activism.
mping along under a succession of hard-men dictators, but is out of the question now as South Korea has turned itself into a cultural and economic powerhouse.
These findings were reported to North Korea’s top leadership, and Kim Jong Un — who has been personally involved in this issue since last year, ordering the strategic shift — recently called young South Koreans “foreign youth who are no longer the same people as us and who can never be on our side.”
Kim views young South Koreans’ disinterest in reunification not as a simple opinion change but as justification for North Korea to abandon ethnic unity and adopt a “two hostile nations” strategy. He called for using this disinterest as crucial evidence supporting the party’s policy to make the “hostile division” of the two Koreas permanent.
“Outdated approaches based on ethnic unity will fail,” Kim said, urging officials to “boldly burn old reunification slogans and launch new psychological warfare operations tailored to generational and cultural changes.” He specifically instructed officials “not to even use the word reunification and adopt terms that encourage psychological distance.”
Following these orders, the Institute of Enemy State Studies has dropped terms related to inter-Korean cooperation or reunification from existing propaganda materials and begun developing indoctrination content that emphasizes “cultural and genetic differences.” Researchers have even proposed the novel approach of describing young South Koreans as “biologically foreigners who mimic the Korean language but have completely different identities.”
It's typical of North Korean propaganda – obsessed with racial purity – to emphasise "genetic differences", and claim that South Koreans are now “biologically foreigners".
ght hardest for their own free-speech rights.
The Polari Prize is small potatoes in the grand scheme of things, of course. No doubt, many people reading this had never even heard of it before the controversy surrounding John Boyne. Nevertheless, the mob-like behaviour that the anti-Boyne faction has put on display supplies proof, for those looking for it, that the social-justice left really hasn’t learned anything from the last decade (including Donald Trump’s re-election, which many political analysts believe was won in significant part because of voter backlash on the transgender file).
The greatest threat to civil liberties in many parts of the world is now the populist right. But it’s harder to marshal resistance against illiberal conservatives when illiberal progressives keep showing the world why they alienated mainstream society so thoroughly in the first place. If your brand of politics is so extreme and uncompromising that even a celebrated gay author such as John Boyne is on your enemies list, who, pray tell, are you hoping to enlist as an ally?
They've won so many battles, these ideological progressives, that they seem to think they're untouchable. And indeed this forced adherence to the "correct" ideology – see also the National Library of Scotland – still works. But the the backlash is building…
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Phew.
One of the BBC’s most respected veteran journalists… pic.twitter.com/6YygkEUJaC
— Nicole Lampert (@nicolelampert) August 12, 2025
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Not forgetting that many of these Al-Jazeera journalists, like Anas al-Sharif, are – surprise surprise – fully fledged Hamas members.
le=”font-size: 11pt”>Twenty years of this misguided posture helped make October 7 possible. Hamas knew that even live-streaming its sadistic massacres would not alter the basic equation: the world would quickly focus on Israel’s reaction, invent fresh blood libels, call for “restraint” and pressure Jerusalem alone. Israelis knew that post-atrocity sympathy would be fleeting.
Fleeting? It was virtually non-existent.
And so, last month, when a ceasefire and hostage release seemed imminent, dozens of Western governments chose that fragile moment to condemn and pressure Israel while dangling recognition of Palestine – collapsing negotiations, as US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has confirmed: “The UK is like, well, if Israel doesn’t agree to a ceasefire by September, we’re going to recognise a Palestinian state. So if I’m Hamas, I say, you know what, let’s not allow there to be a ceasefire.”
Hamas themselves crowed that the European response justified October 7th.
If Western leaders truly did not foresee these entirely predictable consequences, they have no business making policy in the Middle East. If they did, the verdict is worse. Either way, 20 years on, the Gaza withdrawal anniversary stands as a monument to the cost of rewarding Palestinian terror and punishing Israeli compromise.
eft: 40px”>Now, with many of Russia's men either killed or tied up fighting – or having fled the country – South Korean intelligence officials have told the BBC that Moscow is increasingly relying on North Korean labourers.
We interviewed six North Korean workers who have fled Russia since the start of the war, along with South Korean government officials, researchers and those helping to rescue the labourers.
They detailed how the men are subjected to "abysmal" working conditions, and how the North Korean authorities are tightening their control over the workers to stop them escaping.
One of the workers, Jin, told the BBC that when he landed in Russia's Far East, he was chaperoned from the airport to a construction site by a North Korean security agent, who ordered him not to talk to anyone or look at anything.
"The outside world is our enemy," the agent told him. He was put straight to work building high-rise apartment blocks for more than 18 hours a day, he said.
All six workers we spoke to described the same punishing workdays – waking at 6am and being forced to build high-rise apartments until 2am the next morning, with just two days off a year….
"The conditions are truly abysmal," said Kang Dong-wan, a professor at South Korea's Dong-A University who has travelled to Russia multiple times to interview North Korean labourers.
"The workers are exposed to very dangerous situations. At night the lights are turned out and they work in the dark, with little safety equipment."
The escapees told us that the workers are confined to their construction sites day and night, where they are watched by agents from North Korea's state security department. They sleep in dirty, overcrowded shipping containers, infested with bugs, or on the floor of unfinished apartment blocks, with tarps pulled over the door frames to try to keep out the cold….
The labourer Jin still bristles when he remembers how the other workers would call them slaves. "You are not men, just machines that can speak," they jeered. At one point, Jin's manager told him he might not receive any money when he returned to North Korea because the state needed it instead. It was then he decided to risk his life to escape.
Grim stuff.
One of the images they use is credited to Daily NK. I wonder why the BBC don't use it as a source for North Korean news more often. Yes, Daily NK stories are unverified – and unverifiable – and it's not an official news agency, but the Beeb are happy to splash news straight from Hamas all over their front page almost every day…..
’s like we are living in the McCarthy era.”
[Polari was the old theatrical argot generally associated with the gay subculture in London, memorably brought to life in Round the Horne by Kenneth Williams and Hugh Paddick…
Horne would start off usually by mentioning that he had found an advertisement in one of a selection of risqué magazines, which he would insist he bought for innocent reasons. This would lead him, more often than not, to a business in Chelsea starting with the word "Bona" (Polari for "good"). He would enter by saying, "Hello, anybody there?", and Julian (Hugh Paddick) would answer, to a round of applause from the studio audience, "Ooh hello! I'm Julian and this is my friend Sandy!"]
Back when people had a sense of humour.]