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ing a question during equality training, for saying that men are not lesbians or for asking for female-only lavatories to be maintained. The EHRC is failing in its duty to uphold the Equality Act when stating scientific facts and defending the law on sex discrimination have become a risk to people’s livelihoods.

That the EHRC itself is a member of the Stonewall Diversity Champions scheme is shocking. By signing up, it is pledging to uphold “Stonewall law” — that everyone must accept “trans women are women; trans men are men” — rather than the laws made by parliament.

The country’s equality body should not outsource its responsibilities to a lobby group. We call on the EHRC to leave the Stonewall Diversity Champions scheme, and for an inquiry into the role of Stonewall and the transgender lobby in public life.

It would be difficult to overstate the role that Stonewall UK has played in the spread of the pseudoscience of gender ideology. It's just astonishing that they've got away with it for so long, and so many seemingly intelligent people have signed up in the foolish belief that this is some kind of progressive movement.

livery.org/roger-ballen-twins/”>1993 picture of South African twins Dresie and Casie. It's a dramatic, unforgiving portrait which borders on the edge of exploitation. They look, frankly, like inbred freaks – a fact only emphasised by the way they're dressed, the spittle on their chins, and the stained shirt of Casie.

Ballen now has a new book (actually an expanded reissue), Outland, which continues in the same vein, with a selection of photos of a (mainly) white cast of characters from the bottom fringes of South African society. The difference now, perhaps, is that there's more of a feeling that his subjects are involved themselves in the deliberate grotesquerie. So the feeling of exploitation, while never absent, is at least at the edge rather then centre stage. 

This time the characters almost disappear, in favour of Ballen's increasingly strange misanthropic visions.

t disagreement with the party line — let alone having relatives abroad — brings terrifying retribution. Intrusive, random and ubiquitous repression combines high-tech surveillance with hooded abduction, interrogation, beatings and humiliation. Three million people in East Turkestan have been consigned to a network of 1,200 camps, including slave-labour facilities in faraway parts of China. Those outside this latter-day gulag live in constant fear and humiliation. […]

China’s repression in East Turkestan combines North Korean levels of compliance, racism reminiscent of Nazi Germany and Kafkaesque vindictiveness. To survive the self-criticism sessions you have to invent shortcomings. But these can then be used against you. Sexual abuse is endemic, even outside the camps. Indigenous women are allocated at random to Chinese men for eight days a month. Sauytbay escapes that by paying a bribe. Greed corrodes even the most ruthless system.

Corruption was also her way out. The camp authorities send Sauytbay home, abruptly. Almost immediately she receives warning that she is due to be arrested and returned as an inmate. She bribes her way to the free-trade zone on the Kazakh frontier, and crawls under a border checkpoint while the guard is distracted. It could be true. If she actually used an underground escape route for fugitives, she is wise not to write about it.

While Kazakhstan is an autocracy, heavily beholden to its giant neighbour, people there enjoy enough political freedom to kick up a public fuss when the authorities try to extradite her. After lengthy legal battles, she and her family get political asylum in Sweden and enjoy international acclaim. But her torments continue. Her health is ruined. Menacing phone calls tell her to shut up. The authorities send her sister and mother to the camps to underline their point. “It’s my fault,” she writes. No it’s not.

uled out. But when Avril Haines, President Biden’s director of National Intelligence, said the same thing, she too was largely ignored. This is not to argue that editors should have endorsed the lab escape scenario, merely that they should have explored the possibility fully and fairly.

People round the world who have been pretty much confined to their homes for the last year might like a better answer than their media are giving them. Perhaps one will emerge in time. After all, the more months pass without the natural emergence theory gaining a shred of supporting evidence, the less plausible it may seem. Perhaps the international community of virologists will come to be seen as a false and self-interested guide. The common sense perception that a pandemic breaking out in Wuhan might have something to do with a Wuhan lab cooking up novel viruses of maximal danger in unsafe conditions could eventually displace the ideological insistence that whatever Trump said can’t be true.

It's the most powerful case I've yet read for the lab leak.

rom the north" in south Korea recently scattered leaflets against the DPRK again, an intolerable provocation against it.

We have already seriously warned the south Korean authorities of consequences their wrong act of giving silent approval to the human wastes' wild moves will bring to the north-south relations.

However, the south Korean authorities again did not stop the reckless acts of the "defectors from the north", winking at them.

Displeasure can not be hidden over such sordid acts.

We regard the maneuvers committed by the human wastes in the south as a serious provocation against our state and will look into corresponding action.

Whatever decision we make and whatever actions we take, the responsibility for the consequences thereof will entirely rest with the south Korean authorities who stopped short of holding proper control of the dirty human scum.

Sending leaflets and USB sticks may be a bit on the crude side, but there's not much alternative given the draconian bans in place in the North against any South Korean culture, and the brutal punishments meted out to those who've been "contaminated" by the contact. Clearly the prospect of the spread of South Korea's vibrant culture – K-pop, TV, films – is something that Pyongyang is terrified of, with good reason in a society where there's no culture beyond worship of the Kim dynasty. How sad that the South is helping them out.

At the National Trust's Ashridge Estate, in the Chilterns:

From the 1988 concert Roy Orbison and Friends: A Black and White Night:

[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8Jz3VW7rYk&w=550&h=309]

The friends include Bruce Springsteen, Elvis Costello, kd lang…

He was getting on – he died in December 1988 – but the voice is still there.

John Vachon, August 1941. "Residential section. Hibbing, Minnesota."

[Photo: Shorpy/John Vachon for the Farm Security Administration]

Dylan, that other Hibbing modernist, is just three months old.

ay, the West seeks to ideologically subvert Muslim cultures through ideologies such as feminism.”

You shouldn’t require any familiarity with the irrational excesses associated with the social sciences and humanities departments of certain third-rate universities to notice something a bit off about these claims. But if you find yourself agreeing with this sort of thing, you might want to check your head. The passages quoted above come directly from “Feminism as Colonial Tool,” an editorial published only last week in Voice of Jihad, the English-language propaganda organ of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, otherwise known as the Taliban.

It’s clever, in the same way the effort mounted by proxies of the Chinese Communist Party to subvert and weaponize the recent and urgently necessary “Stop Asian Hate” mobilizations in western countries — a mischief rarely noticed outside the community of Uyghur human rights activists and pro-democracy diaspora Hongkongers — is also quite clever.

Real Afghanis, meanwhile, are not buying:

Afghan women aren’t taking their cues from any “colonialist saviour” in wanting to maintain what few gains they’ve made in law, education, social status and employment since the brutally misogynistic Taliban satrapy of Pakistan’s intelligence establishment was overthrown in 2001. And that desire for basic human freedom runs across Afghan society.

In its 15 years of intensive public-opinion polling in Afghanistan, the Asia Foundation has consistently found that Afghans overwhelmingly support the rights of women to work outside the home, vote, run for political office and so on. Now that the United States is determined to pull its troops out of the country by September, a crushing anxiety has set in among Afghans. Nobody wants peace more than Afghans do, but still, a series of Asia Foundation polls conducted since last September show that between 82 and 85 per cent of respondents say it’s “very important” that women’s rights be protected in any so-called peace deal with the Taliban.

Whatever the Voice of Jihad claims about what Afghans want, “troops out” has never been a top concern among ordinary Afghans, at least not since the days of the bloody Soviet occupation in the 1980s. In the Asia Foundation’s last 15 years of barometer readings, popular Afghan support for anti-government forces like the Taliban has rarely broken the double-digit barrier.

The thing about “woke” politics is that anyone can play the game.

sive of trans women) in our centre on Tuesdays 4pm – 7pm, Wednesdays 12.30pm – 4pm and Fridays 9am – 12.30pm. 

In other words, they don't offer women only spaces. At – let's remind ourselves – a rape crisis centre.