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  • Weeding News

    From North Korea's official Rodong Sinmun – The Fields of Socialist Cooperative Farms Weeded with Great Patriotic Zeal:

    The whole country strives more mightily than ever to help its cooperative farms in their work. Meanwhile, they weed their fields with might and main.

    North Phyongan Province dynamically weeds its fields tapping out all its internal potentials.

    Kwaksan County takes the lead in weeding. Thaechon and Unjon Counties score great successes in weeding their fields. Yomju and Tongrim Counties and Jongju City are now weeding their paddies twice and their corn fields thrice. Suit is followed by many other counties one after another throughout the province.

    South Phyongan Province ceaselessly weeds its fields with all its might.

    Sukchon County gives patent daily work assignments to each of its farmers and their helpers and accurately assesses their work points so as to stimulate them to further competitive efforts. Tokchon City sees to it that its farmers stir themselves further to finish weeding their individual corn fields in charge three times at an early date as against last year.

    North Hwanghae Province registers good successes in its weeding.

    The province digs its ditches and plows its fields qualitatively to withstand a calamitous climate actively while weeding its fields with speed.

    South Hwanghae Province, a breadbasket on the West Sea of Korea, weeds its fields with great success.

    It ensures that agitprop activities are briskly conducted in its cooperative farms to spiritually encourage their members to fully exert themselves to weed their fields well and gain greater successes in it than usual. It also sees to it that a socialist emulation is carried on effectively among the subworkteams of its farms and farmers in charge of fields, that efficient small farming implements are made on their own and that a large area of its fields are weeded within unit time.

    Kangwon, North Hamgyong and South Hamgyong Provinces, Nampho City and other regions, too, weed a great area of their fields day after day.

  • Aggressively securing foreign currency through workers dispatched overseas

    had already planned out their savings based on pre-ascertained numbers tied to their respective industries.

    “Both construction workers and forestry workers will have to work every day to just barely pull together their yearly contributions,” said the source. “Because workers who can’t pay the funds have to return home, they’re trying to do any work they can. But there’s not much work they can do.”

    The rise in party contributions apparently only applies to civilian workers. In the case of soldiers, most of their wages already go to the state. 

    In 2017, the United Nations Security Council called for the repatriation of overseas North Korean workers. North Korean authorities have paid the resolution little heed and have been sending new workers overseas to earn foreign currency.

    North Korea reportedly sent a new batch of workers to Russia in April and about 200 workers to Mongolia in May.

    North Korean authorities are reportedly training another batch of workers in Pyongyang to be sent to Russia and China, as well as to Syria, Egypt, Iran, and other places in the Middle East.

    It's a sign of Pyongyang's desperate need for cash. Times are hard. Even Respected Comrade (formerly Supreme Leader) Kim Jong-un has lost weight.

  • An appeal found the tribunal had erred in law

    stament to her strength of character that she did not give up. At the appeal heard earlier this year, Forstater’s legal team argued that the original verdict implied that people would be expected to refrain from expressing genuinely held beliefs at work. Worse still, they could be compelled to express views they actively contest out of fear of losing their jobs. Legal expert Joshua Rozenberg argued ‘the tribunal’s conclusion provides state endorsement for employers to force their employees positively to endorse the dogma of gender identity theory’.

  • Encouraging antisemitism and violence against Israelis

    Well here's a surprise:

    Palestinian Authority textbooks encourage violence against Israelis and include antisemitic messages, according to an unpublished report commissioned by the European Union in 2019 and obtained by The Jerusalem Post.

    The European Commission kept the report under wraps after receiving it from the Georg Eckert Institute for International Textbook Research earlier this year. Brussels directly funds the salaries of teachers and the publishers of textbooks, which, the report indicates, encourage and glorify violence against Israelis and Jews.

  • Uighurs forcibly returned in a campaign of abductions

    ut not too much of its history. It remains something of a wonder that the same party that oversaw the death of some 40 million people in the Great Leap Forward, through its own policies, still remains in power. 

    “We must accurately understand and scientifically evaluate major events, major meetings and key figures in party history,” Xi said.

    Indeed we must.

  • Transphobia and the white saviour complex

    men go on to rape impoverished black women?

    As workplaces are increasingly captured by harmful identity politics it seems a stand is being taken against women; a war being declared against feminism.  

    While these groups pose as progressives, I hear time and again from young women both in universities and in workplaces, desperate for the type of feminism that protects women from male violence. Instead of feeling that they can debate their concerns freely, they feel shouted down or trolled on social media with such venom that most are silenced out of fear for their safety or losing their jobs. 

    "Feminism is for everyone" is one of the statements presented to Oxfam staff. But is it? As far as I am concerned, Oxfam is peddling not feminism in its training, or rather indoctrination programme, but anti-feminism. 

    All women are vulnerable to rape and other forms of male violence and feminists fight hard to ending this while also recognising the many differences between us.

    In suggesting white women are "racist" or harm black and marginalised people when they speak out about rape is nothing more than a warning for them to shut up. 

    Many of the battles we have fought as feminists appear to be up for grabs. We campaigned for, and set up, women’s refuges, rape crisis centres and other specialist services where women could feel safe from male abusers. 

    Feminists have fought tooth and nail to improve the response from the criminal justice system to rape, sexual assault, stalking and domestic abuse. All of these achievements are now under threat, as extreme trans activists and their so-called allies label women-only facilities – or us who campaign for them – as "transphobic" and "bigoted". 

  • Starmer speaks out

    The Labour leader today shares his message to LGBT+ people during Pride week:

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    "Trans people are one of the most discriminated against groups in our society. And those who pioneered LGBT rights too often find NHS and social care services are not inclusive and don't fit their needs."

    Such as the urgent need for trans men to access women's safe areas like rape crisis centres, be placed in women's prisons, and be able to play in women's sports.

    "Labour knows how muck work there is to do. We will always stand as an ally with the LGBT+ community in the fight for true equality. We're campaigning to ensure conversion therapy is banned once and for all. And we're committed to updating the GRA to introduce self declaration for trans people."

    Say the magic words "I am a woman", and – shazzam! – you are a woman. That's the Labour Party promise!

    It's just the way to get the red wall back: throw women under the bus in the name of trans rights.

    Update: Starmer's bid to win back the North: "Put men in women's sports, shelters and prisons."

  • Forest sea

    d-installations/”>forest waves:

    As the fear of a second wave of COVID-19 swept through Germany in the fall of 2020, photographer and artist Jörg Gläscher decided to channel his own worry into a project that felt similarly vast and domineering. “I was working (with the idea of) the pure power of nature, the all-destroying force, which brings one of the richest countries in the world to a completely still stand,” he tells Colossal. “A wave is a periodic oscillation or a unique disturbance the state of a system.”

    Between November 2020 and March 2021, Gläscher spent his days in a secluded location near Hamburg, where he gathered deadwood and constructed nine massive crests—the largest of which spans four meters high and nine meters wide—that overwhelm the forest floor in undulating layers of branches and twigs. Each iteration, which he photographed and then promptly destroyed in order to reuse the materials, overwhelms the existing landscape with pools of the formerly thriving matter.

    "Pools of the formerly thriving matter". Now there's a phrase.

    Glascher-2

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    [Images © Jörg Gläscher]

  • A violation of The Code of Ethics

    d Ma’am" or referring to constables by their rank is always appropriate for non-binary people. Forces should be flexible about gendered shoulder numbers in uniforms and allow two warrant cards for "gender-fluid" officers, it says.

    Both Sussex Police and Leicestershire Police, the latter of which has paid the charity £14,500 since 2014, appear on Stonewall’s index of top 100 employers.

    The Metropolitan Police – which failed to make it on to the equality league for 2020 despite paying £12,815 in fees over the past two years – noted in a feedback review that it should use Stonewall to review "all HR policies".

    Quite why police forces pay money to take advice from a campaigning trans group remains something of a mystery. Perhaps this will shake things up a bit.

  • On the wire

    "Enjoying the view", from "conceptual" photographer Romain Laurent:

    Laurent1

    Laurent previously.

    I think we can take "conceptual" here to mean that the image may not be entirely straightforward.