stays.
“The Taliban are still the same as 21 years ago,” he said. “I have lost faith in Afghanistan… there is no more life here.”
Or there soon won't be. Unlike Simentov, the women of Afghanistan will have nowhere to go once the Taliban are in power – except out of school, back to the kitchen, and the full burka if their menfolk decide they can ever leave the house.
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Maurice Richards
[Photos © Bryan Adams]
These portraits were taken between 2011 and 2017. Though they're now back on the streets selling Big Issue after the lockdown, most of the vendors I see now are middle-aged women from Eastern Europe – Romania in particular.
Two sides of the class divide, Florida 1939, from Marion Post Wolcott:
April 1939. "Miami Beach, Florida. Home in a wealthy residential section."
January 1939. "Migratory laborers' camp. Single-room cabin costs $2.50, double room $4 per week. Water hauled, 55 cents for 55-gallon tank. Toilet for about 150 people. Near Belle Glade, Florida."
[Photos: Shorpy/Marion Post Wolcott for the Farm Security Administration]
Further evidence of the paranoia that's gripped Pyongyang over Covid-19:
Amid North Korea’s hardline attempts to prevent COVID-19 from spreading in the country, Daily NK has learned that a Chinese national was recently shot to death by North Korea’s border patrol and a group of Chinese fishermen died when North Korean authorities failed to rescue them while their ship sank.
These two incidents are examples of the excessive responses spawning from the country’s disproportionate levels of vigilance focused on preventing the spread of COVID-19.
A source in China told Daily NK yesterday that a “Chinese national tried to cross a shallow part of the Yalu River near Changbai, Jilin Province, in late March,” but that “he was shot to death [by North Korean border guards] while trying to deliver goods [to someone on the North Korean side].”
The source said that the border guards first fired warning shots in the sky, but then “fired directly on the man when he continued his attempt to cross the river.” […]
The source also told Daily NK about a recent incident involving a Chinese fishing boat that was engaging in illegal fishing near Haeju, South Hwanghae Province.
“The Chinese fishing boat tried to flee after a North Korean patrol boat went from firing warning shots with rubber bullets to live fire,” the source said. “While trying to flee, the boat hit a submerged rock and sunk.”
According to the source, the ship had a total of seven sailors and all of them died in the sinking. “The North Korean patrol boat didn’t even try to save them,” he added.
As part of their “emergency quarantine guidelines,” North Korean authorities have completely “locked down” all air, sea and land routes in and out of the country while strongly prohibiting any outsiders from crossing the nation’s borders. These guidelines may have been what stopped the patrol boat from rescuing the Chinese sailors.
Or it could be that North Korea just places a low value on human life generally.
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[Photos © Luke Agbaimoni]
hat various Israeli policies “fail[] any reasonable test of balancing Israel’s security concerns against [] human right[s].” But, somehow, the report asserts this conclusion without ever addressing any of the actual security threats to Israeli civilians.
In other words, not only does the report pretend that Palestinian terrorism does not exist. It ignores related security threats, such as spying by Palestinians on behalf of foreign terrorist organizations like Hezbollah.
The report doesn’t suffice with whitewashing Palestinian terrorism and related crimes. HRW actually distorts international law to the point where it became a basis for a Palestinian legal right to join and be active in terrorist organizations.
More from the Elder of Ziyon:
Throughout the report, HRW asserts that Israel's laws that give preference to Jews – as one would expect in the world's only Jewish state, especially when most of its neighbors are irredeemably antisemitic – are not pro-Jewish laws, but anti-Palestinian laws. This is absurd, because no non-Jew can receive automatic citizenship. The entire basis of the report is that Israel is discriminating against Palestinians and it simply does not allow that it is moral for Jews to have and maintain their own state where they can be safe from persecution.
This law creates a reality where a Jewish citizen of any other country who has never been to Israel can move there and automatically gain citizenship, while a Palestinian expelled from his home and languishing for more than 70 years in a refugee camp in a nearby country, cannot. And every single Arab country has laws banning Palestinians from becoming citizens – laws that were on the books since the 1950s, ostentibly to "support" Palestinians. Unlike Israel's laws that give preference to Jews becoming citizens and that do not discriminate against Palestinians specifically, the laws in all Arab League states say that all Arabs can become citizens except Palestinians. For over 70 years, they have been languishing in the countries they were born in and have not had a path to citizenship.
If Israel's laws giving positive preference to Jews (similar to laws in Spain, Italy, Poland and many other nations) is "apartheid" and "racial discrimination," then most certainly every Arab country whose laws specifically discriminate against Palestinians is guilty of the same.
But HRW never says that. Isn't that interesting? The epithet "apartheid" only applies to the Jewish state. Isn't that a super interesting coincidence?
And let's not even start on the matter of the wholesale expulsion of Jews from Arab countries. Israel has a 20% population of Arab Muslims, given full rights. The surrounding Muslim states now have a Jewish population hovering somewhere around 0%. HRW will not, we can be quite sure, be producing any equivalent reports on the situation and treatment of the Jews in Iraq, or Egypt, or Libya, or Yemen…because there aren't any.
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Ceiling at Tash Hauli Palace, Khiva, Uzbekistan
Ashgabat, capital of Turkmenistan
The Badshahi Mosque in Lahore, Pakistan
Iran: Persepolis, 1st century capital of the world
Iran's Lut Desert
At the top of a Zoroastrian Tower of Silence near Yazd in southern Iran
[Photos: Christopher Wilton-Steer]
The exhibition's sponsored by the Aga Khan Foundation, and avoids any politics. Photos of Kashgar in Xinjiang, for instance, talk of the "strikingly diverse population", with no mention of the Uighur genocide. But perhaps that's to be expected.
Elsewhere in Granary Square: parrots.
edly not following these legal procedures.
“The street vendors and rickshaw drivers are the ones with the most difficult lives,” the source said. “If you tell people to blindly report to a workplace where they get zero rations or money, what are they supposed to eat? The authorities are just sending people to their death.”
“Ministry of Social Security officers and labor disciplinary unit officers are hell-bent on putting people in forced labor camps,” the source added. “Life in the camps is tough, but the bigger problem is that [even after they are released, the vendors] will have no way to make money in the future.”
ved in their preferred gender for two years. Since then only about 5,000 people have received a gender recognition certificate, but the “best estimate” of the trans population in the UK now, according to Stonewall, is “about 600,000”. And it isn’t just adults. From 2009 to 2019 the number of boys seeking help from the NHS Gender Identity Development Service for children went up by 1,460 per cent and the number of girls by 5,337 per cent. In 2018 the youngest patient was three.
Many of the children have been prescribed “puberty blockers”, drugs licensed for prostate cancer and endometriosis, Stock explains, but not for children with gender dysphoria, and most of those have gone on to take cross-sex hormone treatment. But as children set out to make permanent changes to their bodies, trans adults increasingly don’t. Trans activist organisations have lobbied against the medical diagnosis of gender dysphoria and for a system of “self-ID”. Pick your gender. No need to pander to stereotypes and change your body. Get over it.
Material Girls shows how far we have rushed to do just that. Politicians of all the big parties, celebrities, charity leaders, business leaders, doctors and many of our national institutions have signed up to the new reality. So have public health bodies, which have swapped words like “women”, “girls” and “vagina” for “menstruators”, “cervix-havers” and “front hole”. As the period tracker app Clue explained in 2016, “using the word ‘female’ or ‘female-bodied’ is offensive to some”. Sex, it seems, is so last century. It is, says Stonewall, “a person’s innate sense of their own gender” that makes them a man or woman. It is, in other words, Stock says, “an inner feeling”. We have, she explains, changed our language, and some of our laws and institutions, on the basis of a new theory called “gender identity”. The trouble is, says Stock, the theory doesn’t stack up.
Indeed it doesn't, with Judith Butler and her post-modernist nonsense — no surprise – fingered as chief progenitor.
She starts her inquisition with a survey of the philosophical ideas that have led to this point, from Simone de Beauvoir’s statement that “one is not born, but rather becomes a woman” to Anne Fausto-Sterling’s view that biological sex is “a continuum” (a view that may have contributed to Facebook’s present offer of 71 gender options) and Judith Butler’s view, developed from poststructural philosophy, that it’s language that creates biological reality and not the other way round. This ingenious theory is the heart and soul of the new world view. Unfortunately it presents all kinds of complications when it comes to healthcare, work, data collection, the criminal justice system, conflicting rights of different groups of vulnerable people, policy and sport….
The trans activists have, she explains, hit the bedroom too. A trans woman with an unchanged male body may now “self-identify” as a lesbian. She (to use her preferred pronoun, which Stock politely does throughout) may want to have sex with lesbians. But lesbians, Stock tells us, are sexually attracted to adults with a female body. Campaigners call this the “cotton ceiling” and run workshops on how to overcome it.
What this all amounts to, Stock concludes, is “an immersive fiction”. And it isn’t optional. Male and female bodies have different body strengths, different sexual characteristics and are vulnerable to different diseases, but to point out these differences is to break a taboo. “In my opinion,” she says, “immersion in a fiction about sex change is being coercively required of people.” It’s one thing to choose to do that out of a kind of courtesy, she says, but quite another to “indicate that these things are literally true”.
I wonder if – and how – the Guardian will review.
where it is geopolitically – a country ruled by an Islamist party that already deals closely with Russia and China and has moved a long long way from the supposed NATO-supporting Western ally that wanted to join the EU – there's no longer much reason to placate Ankara with this absurd pretence about the Armenian Genocide.. What's the point?
Whether the Biden administration finally standing up to Ankara will lead it to work with authoritarians more is a question Ankara has to weigh against its own claims of wanting “reconciliation” with countries it has attacked in the last few years. There is no evidence that denying the genocide helped keep Ankara more liberal, tolerant, democratic and open minded and more close to the West.
Mind you, Israel has yet to follow suit – though with undeniably greater reason to be cautious about angering Erdogan. Though there is pressure from a number of Israeli politicians for that to change.