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erate underground, even beneath civilian areas. Israel has proudly destroyed many of these tunnels, dealing Hamas a psychological and practical blow.

Iran is the biggest provider of weapons to Islamic Jihad and Hamas. They provide both ready to use weapons which are smuggled in, as well as funds and technical knowledge….

As well as taking out weapons stores and manufacturing sites, Israel has taken out numerous developers and engineers key to Hamas’ capability. By their most conservative estimates, they have killed over 75 enemy combatants. They have also eliminated rocket launchers (often stationed in civilian areas) and underground tunnel systems, particularly in Shejaiya and Beit Hanoun.

Israel’s famous ‘Iron Dome’ missile defence system has succeeded with over 90 per cent of its interceptions, saving lives every single day. Without it, the situation would have been far worse for Israel. And for the first time, Iron Dome has been used to intercept kamikaze unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) sent from Gaza. Israeli military sources say this is the first time in the world that a UAV has been taken down by a missile defence system.

There is no ceasefire in sight, and while hundreds of rockets continue to be launched, Israel says it won’t even discuss the end of its action. The IDF reports it has so far struck more than 672 military targets and has significantly degraded Hamas and Islamic Jihad’s ability to produce new rockets by attacking their Research and Development and production facilities. Hamas will not be able to replace what they are firing now for several years to come, increasing the chance of stability and calm in the future.

Stability and calm of a sort….until the next intifada.

His post that "tipped the scale," according to Staddon, was titled "Hmm… Binary view of sex false? What is the evidence? Is there a Z chromosome?" Staddon told Newsweek he created the post on April 15.

It could hardly be more clear: Staddon was saying that there are only two sexes – a basic biological fact. It's absurd, of course, for him to be censured for stating the obvious, if indeed that was the reason for his removal from the APA forum. But no wonder the debate's in such a mess if this is the standard of reporting…

yle=”padding-left: 40px”>Scores of academics, many claiming to be from the Russell Group of leading universities, shared their anonymised experiences on GC Academia. One part-time lecturer at Edinburgh said a sense of intellectual freedom had been supplanted by a culture of fear.

The lecturer wrote: “It is as though academic colleagues believe there are some trans/trans ally students who are monstrous toddlers, ready to throw a strop if they should hear anything that invalidates their ‘true self’ and report the offending tutor. The effect is that the extreme version of gender identity theory has to be taught as though it’s an unchallengeable orthodoxy.”

And in Dundee:

A law student who said that women have vaginas and are not as physically strong as men is being investigated by her university.

Disciplinary action is being taken against Lisa Keogh, 29, over “offensive” and “discriminatory” comments that she made during lectures at Abertay University, Dundee.

The mature student was reported by younger classmates after she said women were born with female genitals and that “the difference in physical strength of men versus women is a fact”. The complaints have prompted a formal investigation into her conduct.

Keogh, a final-year student, fears that any sanction could end her dream of becoming a human rights lawyer. Her case is being backed by Joanna Cherry QC, the SNP MP for Edinburgh South West and deputy chairwoman of the Lords and Commons joint committee on human rights, who described the situation as farcical.

Keogh was astonished to receive an email accusing her of transphobic and offensive comments during seminars on gender feminism and the law. “I thought it was a joke,” she said. “I thought there was no way that the university would pursue me for utilising my legal right to freedom of speech.”

Joanna Cherry was herself removed from the SNP's frontbench team at Westminster back in February despite being generally acknowledged to be the party's strongest parliamentary performer. She's a gender-critical feminist, you see…

h cellphone alerts, and hitting targets with rooftop warning blasts in advance of missile attacks.

But innocent people still end up getting killed, and it’s a “win-win” for Hamas when that happens. Hiding rocket-launch sites in civilian infrastructure inhibits military decision-makers’ efforts to target Hamas firepower, and civilian casualties serve as “asymmetrical” propaganda victories. Each Hamas rocket is a double war crime: launched at random human targets, from behind human shields.

Identifying the practice of committing acts of terror from behind human shields and adding that war crime to the roster of obscenities that demand international sanctions might not go very far in restraining gangsters like Ismail Haniyeh. But at least it would clarify something about the nature of the Israeli-Palestinian misery, and its ultimate causes.

And where are these missiles coming from? Who's supplying Hamas? Tehran, of course.

Theories of accidental release from a lab . . . remain viable,” they wrote.

The idea of a laboratory escape has polarised the community. A WHO investigation concluded it was “extremely unlikely”, arguing it was far more possible that it came naturally as “zoonotic spillover” from animals.

In February of last year, a group of scientists also backed this view. “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that Covid-19 does not have a natural origin,” they wrote in a letter to The Lancet.

Virologists said yesterday that there was a “toxic” atmosphere around the subject, and that few who argued for the possibility of laboratory origins were willing to speak openly.

The 18 scientists of the latest letter include Marc Lipsitch, the Harvard epidemiologist, and Ravindra Gupta, the Cambridge geneticist who has played a key role in the UK’s response to variants. David Relman, the Stanford microbiologist who organised the letter, said it was in part a plea for more people to stand up.

“Many of us who signed this letter feel the same way, which is that we simply just don’t have enough information. Anyone who asserts a strong opinion one way or another can’t really be basing it on a whole lot of good data, because we just don’t have any,” he said.

He added that he was not surprised that the topic had become so fraught. “The fact is that this pandemic has caused so much pain, people feel angry, and they need to direct it at something,” he said.

“It’s sad that scientists have also joined this mode of engagement and seem to have forgotten why we are all in science.”

It was crucial for scientists across countries to find ways to investigate the origins of the pandemic with an open mind, he said, as many hypotheses remain credible.

The Wuhan Institute of Virology was conducting pre-pandemic research into coronaviruses, often in lower-biosecurity laboratories. “We know that laboratory accidents happen far more often than anyone would like to admit,” he said. “And that includes the very best labs, including those here in the United States.”

That Lancet letter from February last year, condemning the lab leak hypothesis as a "conspiracy theory", was signed by virologists like Peter Daszak who had professional links to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, so it was hardly the opinion of disinterested scientists. Daszak was also, of course, a major player in the whitewash WHO report. And, as Nicholas Wade argued last week, those concerned to play down any talk of a lab leak include not only the Chinese authorities, but also those virologists unhappy to have too much light shed on the playing with fire involved in their irresponsible "gain-of-function" research.

The Every Brothers, Don and Phil, with their harmony as perfect as ever, after barely speaking to each other for ten years. From their reunion concert at the Royal Albert Hall in 1983:

[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZYpa7u28WU&w=550&h=309]

yle=”font-size: 11pt”>The largest declines have been in counties where Uyghurs and other indigenous communities are concentrated. Across counties that are majority-indigenous the birth-rate fell, on average, by 43.7 percent in a single year between 2017 and 2018. The birth-rate in counties with a 90 percent or greater indigenous population declined by 56.5 percent, on average, in that same year.
 
In 2017, the Chinese government’s approach to birth control among minority nationalities shifted from “reward and encourage” towards a more coercive and intrusive policing of reproduction processes. Hefty fines, disciplinary punishment, extrajudicial internment, or the threat of internment were introduced for any “illegal births.” Family-planning officials in Xinjiang were told to carry out “early detection and early disposal of pregnant women found in violation of policy.”
 
While the Chinese government argues it has adopted a uniform family-planning policy in Xinjiang, the county-level natality data suggests these policies are disproportionately affecting areas with a large indigenous population, meaning their application is discriminatory and applied with the intent of reducing the birth-rate of Uyghurs and other religious and ethnic minorities. This policy also stands in stark contrast to the loosening of birth control restrictions elsewhere in China.
 
Policy implementation documents from Xinjiang explicitly set birth-rate targets that are among the lowest in the world, and the birth-rate has declined from a rate similar to those in neighbouring countries such as Mongolia or Kazakhstan to only slightly higher than that of Japan, where the low birth-rate is seen as a “national crisis.” 
 
The sharp drop in birth-rates in Xinjiang (a region with a population of nearly 25 million) is proportionally the most extreme over a two-year period globally since 1950. Despite notable contextual differences, this decline in birth-rate is more than double the rate of decline in Cambodia at the height of the Khmer Rouge genocide (1975-79)….

adding-left: 40px”>Ju had found himself in a similar situation when he reportedly began to wonder, “How will I live if I go back [to North Korea] without having earned a single US dollar?” 

His pent-up feelings of betrayal by his country finally motivated him to visit the United Nations (UN) headquarters in Russia to find a way to escape to South Korea in January 2017. Ju was 27 years old at the time.

After five months, agents from Russia’s intelligence service arrived at the UN refugee camp where Ju resided and claimed that they needed to take him into police custody. The agents stated that the North Korean Central Prosecutor’s Office had notified them that Ju is a criminal and faced charges including rape of a minor and attempted murder.

“This is a common tactic used by the North Korean authorities to catch people who try to escape,” Kim told Daily NK.

Ju, locked inside a jail cell at a Saint Petersburg police station, realized the seemingly inescapable reality that he would be sent back to North Korea and killed. He reportedly burst into tears and begged for mercy from the Russian police officers. 

“I will die if I get sent back to North Korea,” he reportedly sobbed. “Please don’t let me die. I have never killed anyone. I will be killed as a traitor if I go back.”

The Russians, possibly wary of receiving bad press related to human rights, reportedly conducted a careful check of the North Korean documents detailing Ju’s alleged crimes. 

They found that the supposed “murder” occurred while Ju was in Russia, making it impossible for him to have committed it. The Russian authorities declared Ju innocent, released him from jail, and transferred him back into the UN refugee camp after over forty days in captivity.

After it became apparent that the Russians would not send him back to North Korea, Ju began indulging in his dreams of going to South Korea. Then, on a spring day in 2018, Ju received a meeting request from the Saint Petersburg branch of Russia’s intelligence service. He went out with his lawyer from the refugee camp to attend the meeting.

Then, the unimaginable happened. Kidnappers hired by the North Korean authorities, who had never given up on their resolve to capture Ju, kidnapped him while he was heading to the bathroom. 

Ju was 28 years old when he was forcibly repatriated to North Korea. After a year of pining for freedom, he was dragged away back to his country. 

“Ju was the longest-serving group leader among soldiers working on construction projects with the Seventh General Bureau, so he would have known about the flow of party funds and interpersonal connections inside and out,” a high-ranking source in North Korea told Daily NK. “When the authorities found out that Ju intended to escape to South Korea, they gave orders to bring him back dead or alive.

“Ju’s case was neither investigated nor did he ever receive a trial,” the source further said, adding, “I understand that he was executed by the Ministry of State Security in the ‘name of the revolution’ after four months of imprisonment.”

The press continue to report violent and sex-based crimes committed by trans women as though they're committed by women, referring to the perpetrators as "she" and "her". This makes a nonsense of sex-based reporting, and of the statistics relating to these crimes – which are overwhelmingly committed by men. At the Glinner Update they're organising a petition to get IPSO, the independent press regulator, to change its guidelines on transgender reporting:

We can no longer trust the press to report on something as basic as the sex of violent criminals and sex offenders. 

Over the past few years there have been innumerable news stories which demonstrate the appalling lies told in crime reporting when suspects and perpetrators claim to ‘identify as a woman’.

Rapists, murderers, paedophiles and voyeurs are being described as women, and even ‘female’, if that’s how they identify, with their true sex concealed from the public.

Read on for details of actual cases. Or see Fair Play for Women's history of their engagement with IPSO.

And sign the petition.

Andreas Feininger for Life magazine, New York, July 1944. "Under the Third Avenue IRT elevated train line, looking north at East 58th Street."

[Photo: Shorpy/Andreas Feininger for Life magazine]