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q6sqk5v”>here's a letter in today's Times from former judge Peter Ross:

I read with dismay the suggestion that the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) was not to examine the “grooming” cases that occurred in Oxford and other cities (“Child abuse inquiry ‘scared of racist tag’ ”, News, Oct 24).

I tried the last three cases at Oxford crown court. All defendants and those in Rotherham and Rochdale were of similar ethnic and religious backgrounds. Neither I nor my colleagues made reference to this when sentencing. My working life within the criminal justice system and 16 years as a circuit judge did not qualify me to conclude how such depraved and destructive criminality occurred. The IICSA, though, has such expertise available to it.

The IICSA’s approach is fundamentally flawed: akin to seeking to identify why fatal accidents occur on one stretch of road by examination of roads where no such accidents occurred. Thames Valley police and Oxfordshire social services learnt lessons: the excellent “Kingfisher team” was set up to investigate current cases involving vulnerable children. Their work would be aided immeasurably by qualified analysis of these cases. The IICSA is uniquely equipped to do this, representing a once in a lifetime opportunity; otherwise many further victims will be exposed to such offending and communities unfairly labelled.

For the IICSA to turn a blind eye to these cases is an avoidance of responsibility.

That's putting it mildly. 

Ross retired recently, citing the emotional toll of trying a series of horrifying child grooming gang cases in Oxford as a major contributory factor:

"I decided I had had enough, because of their sheer size and because one listens not just to the accounts of what happened, awful though they are, but you also see the terrible consequences upon the lives of the young women who have been the victims.

"Their lives are destroyed and that's quite distressing to observe at close quarters."

He added: "I challenge anyone to be left untouched by some of the horrifying stories you listen to."

ll over a million in "re-education camps", women being sterilised, mass rape as Han Chinese men move in to Uighur households….

And what have Erdogan and Imran Khan said about this extraordinary state of affairs? Nothing. It's not a problem. This despite the fact that Turkey shares its ethnic heritage with the people of Xinjiang, formerly East Turkestan, and Pakistan shares a border.

Cartoons of the Prophet – outrage. The destruction of a whole Muslim people – nothing. The hypocrisy is breath-taking.

Another Fifties behemoth from the Ford archive – "1957 Mercury Commuter at Hialeah Park racetrack, Miami." The rear vent wing in this 1956 photo of a prototype station wagon apparently never made it to production.

[Photo: Shorpy/Ford Motor Co. media archive]

tumours have "epigenetic mechanisms". This helps them adapt to different environments by switching certain genes on or off.

So there you have it. Belgian cemeteries can be weird places.

ciate the help for peace from anyone in America."

Nicely dodged. Which is not to say that Trump doesn't have a point.

Being the Beeb though, reporting on Israel and Trump, this must of course be a cynical move:

The move is seen as a foreign policy victory for Mr Trump ahead of the 3 November election. BBC correspondents say the timing of the announcement is no coincidence.

Mr Trump's pro-Israel policies are seen by his advisers as appealing to Christian evangelical voters, a key part of his voter base.

After all, who but the most rabid Christian evangelical would see this as a positive development?

More, from the JC:

But there are questions over whether Sudan’s transitional government has the authority to strike such a deal. The country remains without a parliament and elections are due in 2022.

Any deal with Israel has been a matter of vehement debate within Sudan’s transitional government, with its military wing, headed by Abdel Fattah Abdelrahman al-Burhan, in favour, but Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok opposed.

The deal with Sudan would include aid and investment from Israel, particularly in technology and agriculture, along with further debt relief. 

It comes as Sudan and its transitional government face civil stife and economic chaos. 

Thousands have protested in the country’s capital Khartoum and other regions in recent days over the dire economic conditions.

Reports in Israel have also suggested a normalisation deal with Saudi Arabia is on the cards.

Mossad director Yossi Cohen claimed: "They seem to be waiting for the US election, to give a 'gift' to the president-elect."

Oman is also said to be moving towards agreeing a deal with Israel.

From Spanish street artist Manolo Mesa:

To complete a recent tableau in Oviedo, Spain, for Parees Fest, Mesa explored the history of an abandoned pottery factory in San Claudio. Event organizers gathered tableware from local residents, a collection that informed the shapes and exterior motifs of his work. “I was able to see all the evolution of this earthenware in the houses of Oviedo. I found postwar pieces, which were inherited and preserved with great affection by collectors. We saw (the) tableware of a lifetime from the middle of the century".

On Instagram.

g.

Maggie Oliver, a former Greater Manchester police officer who exposed the alleged cover-up of sex-grooming crimes in the region, accused the inquiry of being “too frightened to open the hornet’s nest”.

Sammy Woodhouse, a Rotherham victim, claimed that those running the statutory inquiry, which began in 2015 and has cost £143 million so far, “have not placed survivors at the forefront” and are “selective in what they decide to look at”. She added: “If you are going to get to the root of gang-related child sexual exploitation you need to go right to the heart of it. They are trying to bury what happened in places like Rotherham and Rochdale because they’re scared of being called racist.” […]

Since 2011, groups have been prosecuted for sex-grooming in towns including Rochdale, Rotherham, Oxford, Telford, Burnley, High Wycombe, Leicester, Dewsbury, Peterborough, Halifax and Newcastle upon Tyne.

The IICSA held two weeks of public hearings for its “organised networks” investigation from late September, and a final day for closing submissions is due to take place on Thursday. It decided to hear no evidence from survivors or those with expert knowledge of the crime pattern.

The inquiry chose instead to select six areas of England and Wales: St Helens, Tower Hamlets in east London, Swansea, Durham, Bristol and Warwickshire “because they represent a range of sizes, demographics and institutional practices”. None of the six has witnessed a major prosecution of a south Asian sex-grooming gang. In all six areas, according to the 2011 national census, the proportion of the population that is of Pakistani origin is lower than the national average.

Henrietta Hill, QC, lead counsel to the inquiry, told the hearing on its opening day that the inquiry “carefully considered the extent to which, if at all, it should focus on areas such as Rochdale, Rotherham and Oxford, all of which have attracted public attention”.

The IICSA decided, she explained, that it was “more appropriate” to focus instead on “different areas, not least because it was intended that this was a forward-looking investigation building on analysis that’s already been done”.

The two weeks of oral evidence was dominated by the questioning of institutional representatives from the six areas about their safeguarding practices in relation to child exploitation by organised networks.

In areas, note, carefully chosen because they have no record of child exploitation by organised networks. So that was easy.

And since when were enquiries into past crimes meant to be forward-looking? The IICSA's remit was to investigate how the country's institutions handled their duty of care to protect children from sexual abuse: not how they will handle it. 

Once again the young victims of organised grooming gangs are being betrayed by the authorities.

Starlings at Gretna, Scotland:

[Photo: Jeff J Mitchell / Getty]

crumbles that will be a tragedy of its own making.’

In the face of this challenge to its monopoly of the cause of LGB rights, Stonewall has doubled down, issuing increasingly hyperbolic statements about the barriers faced by non-binary and trans people in the face of a hostile political landscape. It is hard not to pity new Stonewall CEO Nancy Kelley. She is charged with steering the UK’s largest LGBT charity through lawsuits with no clear sense of direction. And it is all thanks to Stonewall’s dramatic shift in focus over the past few years. One wonders how Stonewall can set any course right now given it has deemed the traditional definition of homosexual as same-sex attracted as trans-exclusionary.

But the tide is turning. Liz Truss, minister for women and equalities, has said that the Government will not amend the Gender Recognition Act 2004 to allow people to change their legal gender without the approval of doctors and officials, ie no "self-ID". And the trans-activist charity Mermaids will no longer be advising schools.

Bartosch's conclusion:

In The Temper of Our Time (1967), social and moral philosopher Eric Hoffer wrote: ‘What starts out here as a mass movement ends up as a racket, a cult, or a corporation.’ It is an observation that fits the decline of Stonewall. Three decades ago, it represented a vital, relevant movement, battling a hostile establishment from the margins. Today Stonewall is the hostile establishment. Embedded across the UK’s institutions, it has been using its power, in the name of trans rights, to silence the very lesbian, gay and bisexual people who once were its supporters.

Stonewall’s is a cautionary tale – it shows how even the most worthy of causes can be corrupted in the quest for power and influence.