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John Vachon – March 1941. "Houses near Navy yard. Portsmouth, Virginia."

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

I have with them.’

Vanessa took a different view to the Scottish government about the impact of self-identification on Norwegian society. ‘Soon after the law went through, a woman was reported to the police for having asked a male to leave the women’s changing room in a gym.’ That case dragged on for over two years. The woman was eventually cleared of harassment at appeal, but only because the tribunal decided that her comments were not directed at the transwoman — who retained male genitalia — but the arrangements made by the gym.

Since 2016, transwomen with male genitalia can use women’s changing rooms in Norway simply by declaring themselves to be women. Vanessa told me that, ‘all services for women are now open to male-bodied people.’

More recent Norwegian legislation has made the situation worse. The woman at the gym faced civil action under anti-discrimination legislation. Now, Norwegian women who speak their mind when they defend their spaces risk criminal action being taken against them.

Late last year, Norway outlawed hate speech against transgender people. While trans people should all be protected from genuine hate, Vanessa explained that misogyny was still absent from the law, creating a strange imbalance where those who choose to be a woman are protected while those who are born a woman are not.

Transphobia is against the law, but good old misogyny, as ever, is not a problem. The difference, one can only assume, is that transphobia is generally directed against trans women, ie men. And we can't be having that.

Norwegian law was changed with little public awareness. Vanessa said most Norwegians knew ‘little to nothing’ about the changes.

“There was never an open public discussion about the possible downsides and upsides to the law. In that way, the many issues the law raises were never really thought through. Women’s organisations were never heard. I later learned that this was due to active silencing strategies by the FRI [a leading Norwegian LGBT group].

"The law has been a lever to change society and language everywhere in the public sector. In the school curriculum, children learn from kindergarten that it is totally normal that girls have a penis and boys have a clitoris. There is no word in Norwegian for gender so children think that they can change sex. So many academics buy into this. How can they cope with the cognitive dissonance?"

And the same old problem arises with the distortion of crime statistics:

She told me that between 2015 and 2017, the number of women reported for rape increased by over 300 per cent. But, since it is impossible to disentangle transwomen from women in the data, Norwegian women now face the indignity of being blamed for the crimes of those born men.

Scotland now looks like it'll soon be heading down that same happy primrose path.

s vision of total control. His goal is clear: to make his country great again while usurping the global leadership of the United States — and he does not hide his aims….

Xi Jinping sees himself as a saviour of his creed and a man of destiny for his country, a ruthless character driven by fierce resolve inflamed by that suffering of his youth. He is the very embodiment of that Confucian saying: “To be wronged is nothing unless you continue to remember it.”

ot; clearly shows the WPK's firm resolution and will to push forward the economic construction and provide the people with more stable and better living conditions despite the protracted emergency anti-epidemic situation.

I'm afraid I'm not sure which of these posters is being displayed here. Though I don't think it's the furnace one.

As I've said often enough before, in North Korea there's no culture outside regime propaganda.

At the Walthamstow Wetlands:

On overtaking the couple in red and blue coats I was astonished to observe that the man was in the red coat, and the woman in the blue – with short hair!

Thanks to my Stonewall diversity training, and the Mermaids' "Recognising gender dysphoria" course I completed last year, I'm familiar with the outward signs of gender issues. Of course further investigation would be needed before a definite diagnosis could be made – who does the cooking and cleaning, who does the DIY jobs, that kind of thing – but those coats seem to me as clear a sign of dysphoria as you could wish for. They're probably an unconscious cry for help.

Too late for puberty blockers, alas. These people are middle-aged, and no doubt have become used by now to the lie that they live by. But never say never! A course of hormone replacement therapy would set them on the path to more fulfilling lives, true to their inner genders. And who knows, perhaps one day they might find themselves lying side by side in the hospital, having surgically swapped sexual organs. They'd wake up post-op, and find they could scarcely control the tears of joy as they realised that at last they could live as their real selves.

Alas, I went by and said nothing – thinking to myself how often we pass by on the other side when, like the Samaritan, we should be offering our hand in friendship.

It looks like they've all drunk the Kool Aid, the World Health Organisation team that went to China to find out more about the origins of the coronavirus and came back parroting the China line.

The virus which causes Covid-19 might not have emerged in China, according to a top World Health Organisation (WHO) investigator.

It is possible the virus's leap from animals to humans could have happened outside the country,Prof John Watson said.

Prof Watson, formerly England's deputy chief medical officer, was part of the WHO team that travelled to China to investigate the origins of the pandemic.

He told BBC One's The Andrew Marr Show that the pandemic most likely started with an infection in an "animal reservoir" which was then passed on to humans through an "intermediate host".

Asked if he was sure the virus emerged in China, Prof Watson said "no".

He said: "I think that there are all sorts of reasons to do with the way it did start in the outbreak in Wuhan and the various bits of information about the way in which these viruses live in different animal reservoirs, that suggest that China is a very, very possible source for the outbreak, but by no means necessarily the place where the leap from animals to humans took place.

"And I think we need to ensure that we are looking beyond the borders of China, as well as within China."

The looking within China didn't go so well, after the Chinese refused to hand over vital information. In the case of a possible lab leak from the Wuhan Virology Institute, the extent of the team's investigation was to ask the lab people if they thought there'd been a leak and taking their word for it, on the grounds that they were the people in the best position to know.

Perhaps they'll have better luck outside China, where the authorities are likely to be more helpful.

Remember the streetlight effect? – it's not where the keys were lost, under the streetlight, but it's a lot easier to look there.

From the JC:

Conservative and Labour parliamentarians have expressed anger that Palestinian children are being indoctrinated by school textbooks that teach them hatred in classes that are funded by British taxpayers.

The MP and Conservative Friends of Israel parliamentary chair Stephen Crabb [at] an online event on Thursday: “One of the examples that I have found most shocking is a maths textbook for six-year-olds.

“A maths exercise asks children to add the numbers of martyrs in the First Intifada to the number of martyrs in the Second Intifada. And this for me really shows how deep the problem goes – this normalisation of violence present right throughout the curriculum and this insidious messaging is extremely effective at manipulating young minds.

“I believe there is a direct link between this indoctrination and the participation of Palestinian minors in acts of violence against Israelis and we should be in no doubt that Palestinian incitement makes peace harder to achieve.” 

“It was the UK government that lobbied international partners in the first instance to carry out the review into textbooks – and whilst we should give credit where it is due, the UK also then has a responsibility to ensure the review it being conducted properly.

“The UK is paying for teachers and public servants to draft and implement and to teach this material potentially in schools even named after terrorists.” 

Elementary level maths: If one martyr gets 72 black-eyed virgins in paradise, how many virgins will five martyrs get?

Advanced level maths: A martyr in paradise is presented with 72 virgins. He can manage one per hour. Assuming that any virgin, after use, returns straight back to the virgin pool with virginity restored, and that the choice of virgin each time is random, what are the chances after 24 hours that the martyr will have had congress with a different virgin every time? After 48 hours?

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Romany community encampment at Beckton Marshes

Policeman on point duty in Stratford

Street trader

Pavement kids

Watching West Ham at Upton Park 

Card game

Landlord of The Mamby Arms in Stratford gives his pet donkey a pint

Milkman
[Photos: Steve Lewis]

These photos are available as fine art prints from the Flashbak shop.

ese ungainly word games wouldn’t seem to make the real lives of trans people any better. The sole party the painful euphemisms seem palpably to benefit is the administrators who introduce them. Excited to find themselves on the ideological cutting edge, they get to feel warm and fuzzy inside.

Indeed. If you're a trans man and you read about cervix smears for women, then you're surely smart enough to know that this is a message aimed at you as a biological female. Do you really need to be affirmed in your gender choice by this convoluted "inclusive" language, at the expense of clarity and the eradication of "woman" as a category. You're the (tiny) exception to the rule, as against over 50% of the population.

As well as making the health service administrators "warm and fuzzy inside", this is a part of a campaign by organisations like Stonewall UK to keep their message at the forefront of the debate – and to keep those fees for being Stonewall-acknowledged "diversity champions" rolling right on in.

The outcome of lawyer Allison Bailey's case against Stonewall should be interesting. She claims that she was dismissed from her job because of pressure from Stonewall after she helped set up the LGB Alliance. 

11pt”>Chinese officials insisted the raw data was unavailable but the rebuff to a World Health Organisation (WHO) team has deepened concerns about Beijing’s efforts to conceal the spread of the virus in 2019….

One of the main challenges emerged after the experts learnt that more than 90 people needed hospital treatment for Covid-like symptoms in central China in the two months before the first official cases were recorded in Wuhan in December 2019.

It is widely believed that the virus must have been circulating before those known infections. But evidence of the earlier spread would embarrass Beijing.

It has portrayed China’s handing of the coronavirus as a stunning success and insisted there is no evidence that the outbreak began on Chinese soil. Instead, it has pursued an ABC — anywhere but China — strategy, claiming the virus was imported in frozen food, originated in Europe or was engineered in a US military laboratory.

So it was perhaps predictable that the WHO scientists were frustrated in their efforts to pursue evidence about hospital cases that could expose a different story. The team asked to test old waste water samples for traces of the virus — analysis of sewage for diseases is a routine check — but were told the material had been “discarded”, Dwyer said.

When they requested access to blood donations collected at the time — another standard forensic investigation protocol — they were again turned down.

And the WHO played right along, dismissing the possibility of a leak from the Wuhan Virology Lab, but suggesting that the frozen food scenario warranted further investigation.

One long-running controversy before the mission was whether there could have been an accidental leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), a laboratory that researches coronaviruses borne by bats from other parts of China.

[Peter] Daszak, the British zoologist, heads the EcoHealth Alliance charity in America and has worked with the institute for 15 years. He has dismissed the lab leak theory as “baloney”.

Peter Ben Embarek, the WHO team leader, said the mission ruled out the possibility of a laboratory leak after reassurances from scientists heading the WIV.

After visiting the facility, Embarek, a food safety expert, said “frank” discussions with institute scientists convinced them that there was no need to pursue the theory. “They’re the best ones to dismiss the claims and provide answers to all the questions,” he said.

Critics of the WHO highlighted the team’s reliance on institute chiefs — including Shi Zhengli, known as China’s “bat woman” after her virus-hunting trips to caves — to answer questions about their own facility.

So their detailed investigation of the lab leak theory involved asking the nice people at the lab what they thought. Had there been a leak? "No chance" said the nice people at the lab. "Fine", said the WHO.

Isn't that how all the best investigations proceed? You ask the accused if they did it, and if they say no, you drop the charges. After all, they're in the best position to know.

“The WHO mission was a charade,” said Richard Ebright, an American scientist and biosafety expert. “It has no credibility.”