Author: Mick Hartley

ia”>Hagia Sophia was, of course, built as a church in the 6th Century, and stayed that way for some 900 years, before the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople. As for the Al-Aqsa Mosque, it's still a functioning mosque, despite its location on Jerusalem's Temple Mount – the holiest site in Judaism. 

, because this would constitute "reverse discrimination." That's the sum total of his alleged crimes. He made a perfectly benign, wholly inoffensive, obviously true statement that at least some of the museum's featured artists would continue to be white. The petition lists no other specific grievances.

You might think that one of the most prominent art curators in the country—with 20 years of experience at SFMOMA—would be able to weather such a pathetically weak accusation of racism. But in the current cultural moment, it appears not. Garrels promptly resigned.

A grim tale from the BBC:

A woman who accessed her "vast" library of child sexual abuse images from her hospital bed has been jailed.

Julie Marshall used public wifi to look at some of her 80,000 images as she recovered from a heart attack in August 2017, Preston Crown Court heard.

The court heard police raided the 54-year-old's home in Blackpool and seized two laptops, a phone and multiple CDs.

Marshall, who admitted three counts of making indecent images of children, was sentenced to nine months in prison.

The 54-year-old, who had no previous convictions, admitted downloading images from the internet between June 2004 and April 2018 in February.

They included 677 images of the most serious nature, known as category A images.

She had also downloaded 465 category B images and 79,958 category C images.

The picture of the offender gives us more information as to what's going on here, which the text notably fails to provide…"Julie" is quite clearly a man with long hair.

More here, from when the case first came to court in February:

John Robert Marshall/Julie Marshall, a male who identifies as a trans woman, was convicted at Blackpool Magistrates’ Court in February 2020 of three counts related to the possession of more than 80,000 indecent images of children.

The offences were too serious to be sentenced in the magistrates’ court so the case was referred to Preston Crown Court…

In a gross obfuscation, the media report states throughout, and in the headline, that the offences were committed by a woman and names ‘John Robert Marshall’ as ‘Julie Marshall’s alias’….

Sexual offences such as rape and possession of CSA images are typical of male pattern offending and the inclusion of even very small numbers of sex offences committed by males within female offending statistics will hopelessly distort them.

As has been noted, if this Julie had been the victim of a crime, there's surely little doubt that her status as a trans woman would have been clearly stated in the report. But as a perpetrator? Nah. Just a woman….

urce added that dog owners gave their dogs to the government in exchange for rice and cooking oil “because they thought it would be better than selling the dogs to local restaurants at low prices.”

Daily NK has also learned that dog meat restaurants outside of Pyongyang face difficulties because all the available dogs have been bought up and the price of dog meat has skyrocketed.

The issue is compounded by the fact that there are few people who actually raise dogs for a living.

Mmm…dog stew. Lovely with wild greens.

Gordon Parks – January 1943. "Daytona Beach, Florida. Bethune-Cookman College. Girl welder in the National Youth Administration school."

[Photo: Shorpy/Gordon Parks, Office of War Information]

Check out the view from someone else's window at WindowSwap. From all over the world. [Not live…you're asked to send in a 10-minute video.]

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le=”padding-left: 40px”>"I say to my brothers who watch us from Europe, America, or elsewhere: Go to any school where there are children. Look at the way the children move, and you will notice that the Arab children are different from the children from the rest of the world. It shows! Take them on a trip, and you will see that the Arab children are different.

"This is not about castes, about racism, or about discrimination. I am talking about different genes that Allah instilled in the Arab nation, when He sent down his message.

"So Allah created us Arabs to be preachers who deliver His message to the others."

So, how's it going then, this innate Arab superiority?

lbo – the problem is more widespread than just the army. The whole of North Korea, it seems, is struggling to feed itself:

The North Korean regime has ordered people to conserve food as fears of a famine in the isolated country grow.

The regime has apparently been unable to hand out food rations in Pyongyang since April, and people are said to be starving even in the capital.

According to the summary of a lecture for the Socialist Women's Union of Korea delivered in the second quarter of this year, members "must wage a strong struggle for food conservation" and "thoroughly stamp out the waste of food by going on an eating spree in the name of various causes or gaudy ceremonial rituals that do not fit the socialist way of life."

The regime also advised Pyongyang residents to cut rice consumption by diversifying their diets to noodles, bread and pan-fried food as well as wild greens.

Wild greens? Like, um…grass?

If they're starving in the capital – the showpiece of Juche Korea under the mighty Kim dynasty – the conditions elsewhere don't bear thinking about.

status of the ancient Hagia Sophia church, which had been transformed into a mosque in 1453 and then into a museum in 1934, was made controversially last week.

It follows an increasingly religious authoritarian agenda from Ankara that has made Turkey the world’s largest jailer of journalists, seen dissidents imprisoned for “terrorism” and witnessed increasing military invasions of neighboring countries by Turkey.

The resurrection of Hagia Sophia heralds the liberation of the al-Aqsa mosque, the Turkish Presidency website says. “The resurrection of Hagia Sophia is the footsteps of the will of Muslims across the world to come… the resurrection of Hagia Sophia is the reignition of the fire of hope of Muslims and all oppressed, wrong, downtrodden and exploited.”

The speech, which was in Turkish, was translated slightly differently to Arabic and English, apparently as a way to hide part of Ankara’s full views on how it has linked Hagia Sophia to a wider agenda.

In Arabic the speech says that turning Hagia Sophia into a mosque is part of the “return of freedom to al-Aqsa,” essentially meaning Israel should be ejected from controlling Jerusalem’s Old City where al-Aqsa is located.

Turkey’s president linked the decision to reviving Islam from Bukhara in Uzbekistan to Andalusia in Spain. This terminology, linking al-Aqsa in Jerusalem to Hagia Sophia and Spain, is a kind of coded terminology for a wider religious agenda. In the Turkish translation the same reference to Spain does not appear to be included as in the Arabic. […]

Linking the major change at Hagia Sophia to Jerusalem illustrates that Ankara’s ambitions are far larger than just reasserting Islamic prayers at the historic mosque and church in Istanbul; it is part of a larger Islamic agenda for the region.

Turkey’s ruling AK Party is rooted in the Muslim Brotherhood and Turkey is a close ally of Hamas in Gaza. Hamas is also rooted in the Muslim Brotherhood. This strategy by Turkey seeks more influence across the region with like-minded groups and countries, such as Qatar and the Government of the National Accord in Libya.

Turkey is seeking to supplant Saudi Arabia and other countries in the region, such as Egypt and Jordan, as the main determiner of what is “Islamic.” This means Ankara’s leadership believes that its changes to Hagia Sophia are only one step of a larger religious militarist agenda in the Middle East.