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s around your waist and you're looking at yourself in the mirror and you're just like, 'There I am'. And I'm not having the moment where I'm panicked," he said during the Apple TV interview.

Page's Instagram post has already received over two million likes and a wave of supportive celebrity comments praising his new appearance.

"Dude I see why you crushed me on that workout!" actor Justin Cornwell commented. "Hot" added singer Miley Cyrus, alongside a heart emoji.

The Vampire Diaries' Nina Dobrev said: "You look amazing… and most of all happy." Julianne Moore, who starred with Page in the film Freeheld, wrote: "Happy summer" accompanied by a flame emoji.

Winfrey, meanwhile, shared her support by reposting the image on the Oprah Daily Instagram account.

"This is what happiness looks like!" she wrote. "Looks like Elliot will be shining brighter than the sun this summer."

Yep, this is what happiness looks like: a woman posing with her scar tissue where her breasts used to be. Fabulous! An inspiration for young girls everywhere to make their dreams come true under the surgeon's knife with a double mastectomy.

A heroine for our times, is Elliot: as well as that saccharine Oprah interview, she featured on the cover of Time back in March – "Actor Elliot Page and the fight for trans equality".

As a Stonewall Diversity Champion, does the Beeb feel pressured to make a big deal of celebrating this kind of body mutilation – or would they do it anyway?

an video content for between USD 5 USD and USD 12 each. According to the source, the Ministry of State Security is searching for those who purchased the videos from Lee. The authorities arrested approximately twenty other merchants involved in the case and are currently conducting preliminary examinations for each of them.

“Nowadays, if you are caught watching a South Korean video, you receive a sentence of either life in prison or death, so nobody knows who will be executed next,” the source said. “You can receive a seven-year sentence just for not reporting someone [who watched or distributed South Korean media]. The entire population is shaking with fear.”

tyle=”font-size: 11pt”>That people like to vote and have their votes counted is a dangerous truth for most of the world's governments.  For Putin's regime in neighboring Russia, in particular, the spectacle of a neighboring country that wanted clean elections seemed like a terrible threat.  During the protests, the Belarusian state media was penetrated by Russian specialists, who helped provide slick and false narratives of what was happening.  The protests were eventually slowed by pure violence of the Belarusian regime, supported by Russia….

This incident is an outrage and will be punished.  European and international authorities should consider the possibility of Russian involvement.  Russia does not seem to be upset that Belarus has arrested one of its citizens in a bizarre, unprecedented and highly unlawful way, which suggests prior knowledge.  A complicated abduction operation such as this one would be more likely to succeed with the help of Russian intelligence.  It seems unlikely that the Belarusian regime, now very dependent upon Russia, would have committed such a spectacular international crime without Russian approval. 

It is worth asking whether the whole initiative was a Russian idea.  NEXTA's coverage of Belarus was a problem for the Putin regime, which fears clean elections, protest, reporting — and above all reporting about protests for clean elections.  Another Russian interest is not hard to see: when the EU predictably sanctions Belarus for this infamy, then Minsk will have no choice but to move even further towards Moscow.  The only way to defeat that logic is to consider whether Russia is co-responsible, and punish Russia if so.

Protasevich could now face the death penalty in Belarus.  The state terrorism organized to silence one person reminds us just how important reporters are.  Without the words and the images they provide us, we have no chance of getting to the truth about oligarchy, war, and elections, or about any issue that really matters.  They may use technology skillfully, as Protasevich does, but no technology can replace them.  There are far too few of them, and  each one is precious.  We should support them everywhere, abroad and at home.

1905. "St. Paul and Mississippi River from under High Bridge."

[Photo: Shorpy/Detroit Photographic Company]

Demolished in 1985:

The current bridge replaced a 2,770-foot (840 m) iron Warren deck truss bridge constructed in 1889. In 1904 the original bridge was partially destroyed by a tornado or severe storm and the southernmost five spans had to be rebuilt. With modest alterations it served for nearly a century, but in 1977 an inspection found irreparable structural deficiencies. The Minnesota Department of Transportation enacted a weight restriction on the bridge until it was closed in 1984 and demolished in 1985. The ornamental ironwork on the replacement was built using iron from the old bridge.

The current wave of antisemitic violence in Europe and the US may be supported by the usual hard-left crowd, but the actual young men on the street are composed mostly, as Ben Cohen notes, of members of the various Arab and wider Muslim communities:

The mutation of antisemitism that the latest fighting between Israel and Hamas has given us a glimpse of hasn’t been seen in almost a century. It is one of the most disturbing forms that Jew-hatred takes: semi-organized mobs of mainly young men deliberately targeting individual Jews or Jewish-owned businesses with verbal abuse and physical violence. We associate such images with the Nazis most of all, but there are slightly more recent instances of such antisemitic violence. Throughout the Arab world in the late 1940s and ’50s, Jews were subjected to pogroms and other atrocities as a prelude to their mass expulsion and expropriation by these countries.

History is full of horrible ironies, and this is one of them. The mobs we have witnessed attacking Jews in cities on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean are overwhelmingly composed of members of the various Arab and wider Muslim communities. In European demonstrations, for example, Turkish and Algerian flags can be spotted alongside Palestinian ones. The same impulse that drove the eventual expulsion of nearly 800,000 Jews from the Arab world is now coming back to haunt us in the very countries where we sought our freedom.

The impulse that I am referring to is failure. In the Arab countries during the first decade of Israel’s existence, persecution of local Jews was one feat that could be accomplished, and indeed relished, amid the humiliating battlefield defeats inflicted by the nascent Israel Defense Forces on the Arab armies. The legacy of that domestic campaign of antisemitism has traveled with us to different continents and vastly different political contexts. What remains the same is the conviction that Arabs are being disempowered, robbed, and murdered by Jewish conspiracies, and that ordinary Arabs are therefore justified in taking their anger out on ordinary Jews in response.

A world view which the kind of attitudes exposed by MEMRI, for instance, play such a major role in fostering.

Imam Salim Ammar Mohamed, from California, points out that the motivation for the “criminal activity” of the Israelis is their “distorted” religious texts. Jews use their religious books to justify their racist ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, and their harassment and injustice towards them. It's not only the Old Testament that includes such statements, but the New Testament also includes “outrageous orders for killing”. And we all know how much the Jews follow the New Testament. In Islam, happily, there are no such teachings.

Whilst here, in another MEMRI TV clip, Egyptian Islamic Scholar Hazem Shouman says that Allah promised the total destruction of the Jews. According to the Koran, the Jews will be defeated twice, as during the time of the Prophet Muhammad in Khaybar. He explains that “the face of the Jews will be disfigured from what the Muslims will do to them.”

He clearly didn't get the memo.

itor.

It’s discouraging that the federal district court has decided that these experiences — these lost opportunities — simply don’t matter.

You're a woman, Chelsea dear. Of course your experiences don't matter. Your role is to step aside with a sweet smile and let the men do the winning.

lling on the EHRC to quit the scheme. 

Sex Matters campaigns for clarity about sex in law and policy. It argues that membership of the Stonewall Scheme conflicts with public service independence, and in particular with the EHRC’s mandate to protect everybody’s rights. 

Perhaps this will encourage other institutions to question why on earth they should be paying money to a campaigning trans organisation that hands out dodgy advice.

Organisations that join the scheme pay Stonewall an annual fee and allow it to vet their internal policies, such as those about who can use toilets and changing facilities, and what language to use when talking about men and women. Scheme members are encouraged to promote “gender self-identification”, to train all staff to be “allies”, and to take steps such as encouraging people to announce their pronouns in meetings, and to wear rainbow lanyards….

The news of EHRC leaving the Stonewall scheme comes in the same week as Essex University released the “Reindorf Review” investigation into the no-platforming of two feminist academics. 

Barrister Akua Reindorf found that the university had adopted policies which reflect “the law as Stonewall would prefer it to be, rather than the law as it is”, and created a “culture of fear”. A spokeswoman from Stonewall defended their policies as being “based on guidance provided by the Equality and Human Rights Commission“.

Well that link's now been broken. The two organisations are no longer fighting the same battle.

aving to bother about the safety of Gaza’s population, let alone its welfare.

The asymmetry in the conflict isn't so much between the sophistication of Israel's armoury set against the crude Palestinian weapons  – Hamas after all are getting their rockets from Iran – but in the differing attitudes to civilian casualties. For Hamas, every dead civilian is a win whether in Israel or in Gaza.

Update: see also Efraim Karsh in the Spectator:

Do Hamas’s supporters in the West know what this organisation really stands for? The reality is that Hamas is no liberation movement in search of a Palestinian nation. Instead, it seeks the destruction of Israel and the establishment of an Islamic empire on its ruins. How do we know? Because senior Hamas leader Mahmoud al-Zahar has said so:

“Islamic and traditional views reject the notion of establishing an independent Palestinian state… In the past, there was no independent Palestinian state… This is a holy land. It is not the property of the Palestinians or the Arabs. This land is the property of all Muslims in all parts of the world… [Hence] our main goal is to establish a great Islamic state, be it pan-Arabic or pan-Islamic."

Understanding this makes it clear that the most recent bout of fighting — in which thousands of rockets have been fired and dozens killed — has little to do with freeing Palestinians from Israeli domination. It is inspired instead by the idea of freeing the Holy Land from Israel….

thern England in an era when what I was, was pretty much illegal. It wasn't easy for me to accept who or what I was/am. I am very grateful for all those who helped in the fight for normalising and bringing about the acceptance of homosexuality over the decades and I'm sure at some point this included Stonewall. However, everything about Stonewall and what it stands for in 2021 is not something I can support. I question their methods and their motivation. I have also (as have most gay and lesbian people I know) long been frustrated by the association of gay and lesbian men and women with trans people. We are not the same. We are happy in the bodies we are in. We just happen to like people of the same sex. LGB is about sexuality. Trans is about gender.

In fact trans ideology now, as pushed by organisations like Stonewall, is clearly homophobic.

The reason for the current focus on Stonewall is the debacle at Essex University, where two women professors had their talks cancelled and were subject to the familiar trans abuse as TERFs and transphobes. An independent review found the university culpable for its failure to protect the women, and pointed the finger at Stonewall for its malign influence.

Sian Griffiths in the Times:

Last week Jo Phoenix received a phone call from the vice-chancellor at Essex University who wanted to personally apologise to her for an attack on her freedom of speech.

Anthony Forster then picked up the phone to Rosa Freedman, one of the UK’s leading human rights lawyers, and said sorry again.

Both Phoenix, professor of criminology at the Open University, and Freedman, professor of law at Reading University, had been invited to give talks at Essex. But both had had their talks cancelled after they were accused of transphobia.

Freedman, who was reinvited to speak after she complained, also faced attempts to block her from getting a job at Essex and was accused by another academic of being a Holocaust denier.

Shoddy reporting there. She wasn't accused of being a Holocaust denier. A university member posted a tweet comparing her views on gender identity to Holocaust denial. There is a difference.

Both academics are speaking out to highlight what has been described as a “culture of fear” at Essex and to demand that the university donate at least £100,000 to a women’s charity and discipline or sack the students and staff involved in their abuse.

In a joint statement they say: “We feel very sad. It took 18 months to investigate what happened to us, which included a violent threat against one of us and the other being called a Holocaust denier. We welcome the apology . . . but we also want to see . . . the students and staff responsible disciplined. We also, because of the damage to our reputations and the stress caused, want the university to make a six- figure donation to a women’s charity. The culture of fear on campus at Essex . . . is very real. People are afraid to speak out.”

The university's apology though, it has to be said, is somewhat compromised by their refusal to part ways with Stonewall and its ridiculous Diversity Champions scheme.