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,” said the source. “There is even talk that if the border remains closed, the whole country will face even tougher times.”

reported.

The North imposed a strict lockdown when it sealed its border in January last year to stop the virus spreading from neighbouring China, where it first emerged before sweeping the world. It has insisted that it has had no cases of the virus, which is widely thought to be a spurious claim.

However, trade with China, the North’s economic lifeline, has slowed to a trickle, while all international aid work faces tight restrictions.

The impact of the pandemic has “most likely exacerbated” the humanitarian situation in the North, with some 10.6 million people in need, a spokesperson for the UN Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs said.

In another admission of the North’s hardship, Kim in April told citizens to buckle down for the “worst-ever situation”. The nationwide famine that North Korea suffered in the 1990s killed hundreds of thousands of people after the fall of the Soviet Union left it without crucial support.

Meanwhile the official Rodong Sinmun gives us yet another panegyric to the wonders being achieved in the world of socialist weeding – Their Corn Fields Weeded with Might and Main:

Great successes are achieved in weeding the corn fields day after day through a hot socialist emulation among cooperative farms, their workteams and their subworkteams.

Awakened to their responsibility for the foremost sector of the nation for the defence of their socialism the officials and agricultural workers of the province and their helpers as well ceaselessly score one success after another in weeding their corn fields.

Things must be really getting desperate.

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Broadway near Herald Square, 1956

Stuyvesant Town residential development, 1956

Residential street in Sutton Place neighborhood, 1956

Park Avenue north from 58th Street, 1956

ed the funds were planned to go to the Red Cross, which aids both Israelis and Palestinians affected by violence. 

In a statement posted on the high school’s Facebook page, Ms Doward said: “I would like to put on record that I unreservedly apologise for a decision I made to consider sending the proceeds of the funds raised to the Red Cross. 

“I made this judgment call as at the time I believed there would be no bias in doing so. Subsequently, I understand that this decision has caused offence to some members of the wider community.”

The Red Cross’s Occupied Palestinian Territories and Israel Crisis Appeal provides medical and humanitarian aid and supports the work of the International Committee of the Red Cross, the Palestine Red Crescent and Magen David Adom, Israel’s medical emergency service.

Parents at the school were “indignant” when they heard donations could reach people and charitable organisations based in the Jewish state. 

Commenting on Ms Doward’s Facebook apology post, one man said: “Thank god the money is not going to the terrorist IDF, you have made the right choice and acknowledged your mistake and everyone will respect you more for standing up to the truth and realising your mistake.

“Imagine funding terrorists who kill babies, children and elderly innocent people. The IDF exactly do that.”

Another commenter, Tom Price, said: “The money was raised for Palestine so send it to Palestine.

“A nuclear superpower that subjugates and murders an indigenous people and gets away with breaking international law on a daily basis has no need for the money. Well done for doing the right thing.”

In her Facebook post, Ms Howard said she has listened to and understands the school community’s concerns, and thanked “leaders of our local Mosques, our governors and the wider community who offered support and counsel”.

Well, she's realised her mistake and apologised. Let's just draw a veil over the whole wretched business.

/p>

A lack of fertilizer, agricultural chemicals, farm materials, and work cows is reportedly to blame for the lack of weeding. 

“[Farmers] can’t plow the fields, either, because of the lack of work cows,” said the source. “There are insufficient supplies of all the materials needed for farming.” 

What to do? Well, obviously – start punishing the farmers.

Amid all of this, North Korean authorities have belatedly begun taking measures to deal with the situation. They have reportedly meted out punishments to managers of corn farms in South Pyongan Province, holding them responsible for farming-related problems. 

The source said farm managers were given “10 days in the stockade” for failing to properly manage their crops. He warned, however, that the real issue “wasn’t one that would be resolved by punishing those in charge.”

It's hard to escape the feeling that there's a serious crisis developing, what with Pyongyang's draconian response to the coronavirus, plus the sanctions – and of course the complete top-down inefficiency and corruption of the whole system, with the nuclear programme, and the personal protection of Kim Jong-un, taking precedence over everything else. Another major famine on the way this winter, or even sooner? I wouldn't be at all surprised.

h the economic productivity and the ‘stability’ of the region,” according to the SHU report.

Nearly 1,000 miles south of Yining in Karakax County stands a sprawling complex with police stations, detention facilities, factories and living quarters with every window covered with iron bars. Minders in plainclothes tailed Telegraph journalists and tried to bar them from filming.

Azamat, 44, whose name has been changed to protect his identity, was shuttled through three different detention facilities before being sent to a massive factory with about 4,000 workers, where he estimated a few hundred people were camp detainees.

Here, he was stationed at a sewing machine and forced to make handbags, clothes and gloves, and was never paid for his work. Every day, he wondered if his family was surviving without him, the main breadwinner – especially his youngest child who has diabetes and needed daily insulin injections.

“We were deprived of freedom for two years; I lost those years and I can’t have them back,” said Azamat, a construction worker with ruddy cheeks and deep laugh lines.

“I’m so angry that I wasted those two years of my life, and couldn’t see my family.”

All three – Mr Kurman, Ms Auelkhan and Azamat – were eventually released, likely due to public campaigns waged by family members in Kazakhstan.

But Chinese authorities warned all of them to stay silent, or risk harm to relatives in China.

“They threatened that if I ever talked about the camps, or what was happening in China that they would destroy my family there, find me wherever I was in the world and send me back in even worse conditions,” said Ms Auelkhan, who has since fled to the US where she is seeking asylum.

Authorities vowed to detain Azamat’s brothers in China if he ever spoke about his experience – a threat he worries about to this day.

He was surveilled so closely in detention that even now it feels like someone is watching his every move. “They could tell when you were blinking.”

We heard about Gulzira Auelkhan back in February.

Beijing is trying to rebut accusations of genocide against the Uighurs by falsifying census figures:

The official statistics indicate that between 2010 and last year, the Uighur population of Xinjiang…increased by more than a sixth to 11.6 million and that the numbers rose each year over the period.

However, critics are sceptical of the population increase because the authorities had earlier revised Uighur numbers down from previous years by hundreds of thousands. At the time, Beijing had said the revisions were normal practice but critics accused the regime of trying to cover up actual demographic declines for the Uighur people, and make the new numbers appear to represent a larger increase.

The official 2020 Uighur population of 11,624,257, as well as the official 2019 population of 11,560,000, are lower than previously reported population numbers from 2017 and 2018. However, they now show year-on-year increases after authorities reduced the 2017 and 2018 tallies by 245,000 and 178,600, respectively.

“The revisions . . . conveniently ensure that there is no reported negative Uighur population growth for any given year,” tweeted Adrian Zenz, a senior fellow in China studies at Victims of Communism, a US organisation. Zenz is known for his research on Xinjiang issues and is denounced by Beijing as a figure who spreads lies about the Communist party….

Human rights groups are also accusing China of fudging population numbers in Xinjiang by overwhelming the region with ethnic Han people who are mainly atheists. The latest census figures show the Han population in the region rose at a faster pace of nearly 25 per cent in the past decade to reach 10.9 million, or 42 per cent of the region’s total population. Most of the growth was driven by migration of Han people into Xinjiang.

By comparison, there were 5.7 million Han people in 1990 in Xinjiang, or 37.58 per cent of the region’s total population.

“That really confirms the strategy of Beijing to ‘optimise’, in their words, the population structure of Xinjiang, which involves the constriction of the Uighur population as well as increasing the size of the Han population, as well as readjusting where those population groups live,” James Leibold, a professor at Australia’s La Trobe University, told the South China Morning Post. He specialises in ethnic conflict in contemporary China.

rm on everyone else’s behalf. The challenges and successes were real, numerous, and life-changing for all: protection against discrimination in housing, employment, and immigration; the right to adopt children; the right to receive benefits in common law relationships; the right to serve your country; the eventual and important addition of sexual orientation into the Canadian Human Rights Act. The option to marry, if you so chose.

Compare this to the accomplishments of the “pride” we are meant to celebrate in 2021: the loss of single-sex segregation in women’s washrooms; the housing of male offenders with incarcerated women; the ability of men to compete in women’s sports; the erasure and harassment of women, and lesbians, as a result of “gender self-identification;” the dangers of puberty blockers and hormones for children; the tragedy of surgical procedures which are doomed to fail because they will never accomplish the desired wish; the return to harmful sex-role stereotypes; the dangers to women’s shelters as a result of accepting men into their midst. (Vancouver Rape Relief and Women’s Shelter is the only transition house in Canada maintaining a women only policy, and lost a city grant as a result.) These are just some of the accomplishments for which we are urged to feel “pride” — all month long.

I’ll admit I sound dark, even to myself. And I have wracked my brain to come up with something about these celebrations that we might cling to, and feel good about. Instead, what I see is that the LGB Alliance, the British-based advocacy group whose mission is to assert “the right of lesbians, bisexuals, and gay men to define themselves as same-sex attracted,” is being campaigned against by trans-focused charities who hope to reverse the Charity Commission’s recent decision to grant the group charitable status. Lesbian And Gay News observes that “2021 Pride month will set the stage for an extraordinary legal spectacle of large, multi-million pound trans-focused charities seeking to silence and effectively destroy a lesbian/gay/bisexual focused one.”  […]

[A] sensible case could be made that, after achieving rights and protections equal to those of our fellow citizens, the rainbow flag should have become nothing more, or less, than the symbol of a certain moment in time in which progress and human decency carried the day. Then, it might have been gracefully retired, surrendered back to the sky, so to speak, where we could gaze up, after a hard rain, and resist equating the spectacle with politics. Instead, like an indentured servant who has been bamboozled into an endless contract, the “pride’ flag has been forced to continue serving a dogmatic, ideological entity that has altered it — both philosophically and visually — to the point where what was once the sort of banner that could have complimented an ice cream shop, or a kiosk at the beach (something fun, anyway) has gone ominous, and dystopian.

It's the Stonewall story writ large: a campaigning organisation that achieved its goals, instead of quietly disbanding, morphed into something altogether darker. 

Rather, Palestine is an Islamic waqf land. The entire Islamic nation will be held to account over this issue on the Day of Judgment."

Just so we're clear…

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