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al” style=”padding-left: 40px”>PS According to AstraZeneca, the EU claim that it pays less than the UK for each vaccine dose, and that is why the company is ‘working harder for the UK than for the EU’, is ‘completely incorrect’. The company reportedly offers the same price to all buyers, wherever they are in the world, subject to small adjustments due to local costs.

The latest high-level defection:

A senior North Korean diplomat and member of one of the country’s most powerful families has defected to South Korea in the latest sign of discontent among the ruling elite.

Ryu Hyun-woo was the acting ambassador to Kuwait when he travelled with his family to South Korea in September 2019, the Maeil Business Newspaper reported. The South Korean spy agency has declined to comment but, according to the newspaper, Mr Ryu was motivated by the needs of his family. “I decided to defect because I wanted to offer my children a better future,” it quoted him as saying.

He is the latest in a trickle of senior officials to flee North Korea, although there are no obvious signs that the defections are undermining the authority of the supreme leader, Kim Jong-un.

Mr Ryu joined the foreign ministry after studying Arabic at Pyongyang University of Foreign Studies and served in Syria.

His wife, who attended the highly regarded Kim Il-sung University, is the daughter of Chon Il-chun, a schoolmate of the late Kim Jong-il, father and predecessor of Kim Jong-un. Mr Ryu is a former head of “Bureau 39”, a shadowy government department accused by the US government of raising funds for the regime through illegal activities such as manufacturing counterfeit currency and drugs.

Mr Ryu became the acting ambassador to Kuwait when the ambassador was expelled after sanctions were imposed on North Korea in 2017. His presence in Seoul has been kept a secret, partly to escape the attention of North Korean assassination squads. But South Korea also hides elite refugees to prevent embarrassing Mr Kim, with whom it is trying to re-establish diplomatic talks.

Trying to re-establish diplomatic talks – with absolutely no progress nor hint of progress on that particular delusionary path. And imagine the dismal state of South Korean politics, where "to prevent embarrassing Mr Kim" is actually a matter of concern.

Some high-level defectors, like Thae Yong-ho, the North Korean deputy ambassador to the UK who defected in 2016, have made clear their ideological motives for defecting. Thae has become a dedicated campaigner against the evils of the North Korean regime, giving numerous talks on the subject and writing regular columns for the Daily NK.

Ryu's reasons for defection may not be quite so high-minded, according to South Korea's Chosun Ilbo:

Ryu reportedly decided to defect because he was worried about repercussions after embassy staff lost portraits of regime founder Kim Il-sung and his son Kim Jong-il while cleaning the embassy. "Ryu contemplated suicide but instead drove his car to the South Korean Embassy for the sake of his daughter who was in middle school," a diplomatic source said.

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s of 52 per cent of the population. Gender identity is not a fringe issue, it is an ideological hydra that threatens to undermine everything from language to our most basic human rights.

American culture being what it is, the implications of the executive order on sport have received more media coverage than the plight of women in refuges, prisons and those needing medical attention. The Guardian’s headline read: ‘Joe Biden’s gender discrimination order offers hope for young trans athletes’, cheering on the right of second-rate male athletes to obliterate the achievements of first-rate women.

With more males identifying as the opposite sex, actual women and girls are being pushed off podia and are losing out. To combat this, last year 17 different US statehouses passed bills to ensure that athletes’ participation in sport was in accordance with their sex recorded at birth. Montana was the most recent state to consider doing so. In opposition, state representative Robert Farris-Olsen said that passing the bill would violate the right to privacy enshrined in the state constitution and could mean Montana would lose federal education funding, which amounted to $484million in the last fiscal year. It seems that, thanks to President Biden, few states will be able to afford women’s sport let alone any other women-only services.

Trump was an odious character and was clearly no friend to women. But at least his sexist ‘locker-room talk’ was firmly in the men’s. Self-righteous orthodox left-wingers in the UK have been gushing in their praise of Biden, not because of who he is but rather because of who he isn’t. It seems that to them, women’s rights are a fair trade for a new, less obviously obnoxious president. One wonders if the women in mixed-sex hospital wards, prisons and refuges agree.

Here's a video of a women's hurdles event. One competitor seems to be a lot better than the others. I wonder why.

Channel 4 news had a piece on the Tavistock clinic yesterday in the wake of the Keira Bell decision – you can see the whole thing here – which includes an interview with consultant psychiatrist Dr David Bell.

Dr Bell, you may recall, voiced his concerns about the Tavistock back in 2018, saying that the service they provided was not fit for purpose, and urging them to suspend all experimental hormone treatment for supposedly gender dysphoric children until there was better evidence of the outcomes. As a result of voicing his concerns he faces disciplinary action by the clinic.

The Glinner Update helpfully provides some highlights of what the doctor had to say:

“The main concerns were issues to do with lack of proper lack of consent. Many of the people who spoke to me did not think that children were able to consent to the treatment, then there were concerns of children being inappropriately pushed through to transition, where they had a lot of complex problems. As a result, children have been very seriously damaged.”

“The puberty blockers have been stopped because there is no evidence base for them at all. And the judicial review revealed that there was no follow up of patients, no data and remarkably little knowledge of what happens to these children. By putting them on that pathway it rather becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. The children have been diagnosed now as their main problem being gender, the other problems are left aside, and this results in my view, in many children having inappropriate medical treatment.”

So the judgment is really important because it acts to protect children, 35 to 40% of these children are on the autistic spectrum, a large number of them have experienced a major trauma, a large number have very serious family problems, and a particularly large number of young girls could be helped to become non gender conforming lesbian women.

So the re positioning of these girls as only having a gender problem, it acts to prevent them developing in a normal way, and being able to develop their own non-conforming gender identity and their own sexuality.

This is a form of conversion therapy for young people who are gay or lesbian.

“…this is a very highly politicized area and leaders of the movement who have a very powerful ideological commitment, have managed to capture policy. Both medically, professionally, in the media, and in government, with no evidence base. It's a highly politicized movement, which has had these consequences. So all I am saying and many people are saying is that they need to wait. There needs to be a thoughtful engagement with them, as opposed to motoring them through to treatment pathways, which have irreversible consequences for their bodies. So we're talking about not doing harm to children.”

“What they were doing was making it clear that people like me who spoke out will be come under the scrutiny in this very negative way, and be exposed to the possibility of disciplinary hearings”

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Makes you appreciate the benefits of a camera, mind. Imagine those old Dutch masters hauling their canvases out there into the freezing cold, sitting for hours, trying to squeeze the paint with frozen fingers – did they even have gloves in those days? – while all the people kept moving round. Just start on a skater, look up again, and the bastard's twenty yards further off facing the other direction. Nightmare. They suffered for their art alright, those hardy souls.

ation, to sign up to an “investment agreement” with China — despite calls from Biden’s people to hold off (not just because of what was happening in Xinjiang but also in Hong Kong). Germany’s big manufacturing companies see profits from China as vital to their prospects.

See yesterday's post on Volkswagen in Xinjiang for more on why China is so important for VW – and for Germany.

So right from the start there are clear policy differences between the US and Germany, and hence between the US and the EU. As Lawson concludes:

Boris Johnson’s Brexity government in London is not going to be Biden’s bête noire in the western alliance. It is Berlin and Brussels whose decisions are likely to infuriate Joe B. And he does have one thing in common with Donald Trump: a short fuse.

Not to mention the issue of military spending, where the US has long provided cover for a Germany that's been unprepared to finance its own defence – while Germany develops a lucrative trading arrangement with America's number one enemy.

_paragraph–size-medium–spacing-normal”>Volkswagen have a history with forced labour, of course. The company was founded by the Nazis in 1937 and used slave labour including concentration camp prisoners in its factories during WW2. The Führer himself was an early fan of the Beetle:

[Getty images]

Their decision to continue operations in Xinjiang has clearly been determined less on moral considerations or, god forbid, shame about their history, than on the fact that VW is responsible for some 20% of all vehicle sales in China. They've got too much to lose to think about displeasing the Chinese authorities. 

Perhaps we consumers could help out here in our own small way, as Maass suggests:

But in the end, it is us as consumers who will influence the fate of the millions of people in Xinjiang. For many in the West it has become normal to boycott products that violate animal rights or destroy our environment. It is time that we apply the same standards to slave labour and gross human rights violations when we are about to buy a product labelled ‘Made in China’.

, in particular the testing of historic human samples stored by hospitals to determine where and when the virus really started spreading.

Those scientists who argue that the possibility of an accident at the Wuhan Institute of Virology should also be included as part of any investigation are curious about this apparent silence.

"I find it very unlikely that such investigations would not have already occurred," Alina Chan, a molecular biologist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, told me.

"It's a serious risk to resume life as usual without knowing where a dangerous human pathogen came from."

Instead of publishing its own evidence though, China appears to be taking an anywhere-but-Wuhan approach, with state media cheerleading the idea that the virus may have arrived in Wuhan on frozen food imports or talking cryptically of "multiple origins".

At a recent daily press briefing, I asked China's Foreign Ministry spokesperson, Hua Chunying, why such narratives were being promoted in the absence of real scientific evidence.

"Your question reveals your prejudice against China," she replied. "Reports have emerged from Australia, Italy and many other countries that the coronavirus was found in multiple places in the autumn of 2019."

"Aren't these all facts?" she asked.

Well, what are "facts" nowadays? Don't we live in a post-truth world?

Besides, won't the World Health Organisation visit sort it all out and give us the answers?

Dr Daniel Lucey, a physician and infectious disease professor at the Georgetown Medical Centre in Washington, suggests the stage is being set for a foregone conclusion.

"In my view, if you line up side-by-side the WHO's terms of reference with the Shi Zhengli Science article," he told me, "then it is clear that the overarching strategic narrative is that the origin of the virus is outside of China."

Hmm. Maybe not.

In Wuhan's giant exhibition hall, the city's place in history is again called into question by one of the concluding sign boards which says Covid-19 broke out "in multiple places around the world".

For China, this city's past is now propaganda and the truth, like the virus, is being brought under tight control.

he final of the 55-meter dash over transgender athlete Andraya Yearwood, far left, at a 2019 indoor track meet at Hillhouse High School in New Haven, Connecticut. Photograph: Pat Eaton-Robb/AP

That's the future in American women's sport, captured in one image. Men claiming to be women powering ahead while the actual women struggle along behind.

But that's fine. The feelings of trans women, their "growth as a person", count far more than the ability of those bleeders, labourers, ovary-havers, birthing parents or whatever they're called to be able to enjoy sport fairly and competitively.