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at simply carried out its mission based on these orders, there are still questions surrounding why the unit failed to fire upon the fisheries official upon discovering him, why they did so six hours after discovering him, and why they set him on fire.

“They hesitated somewhat about killing a South Korean civilian, so they monitored him while waiting for orders from above,” the source said. “The frontline units that failed to [detect] the defector who crossed the border [and in to Kaesong] were punished, so military leaders ordered that this time [the intruder] should be shot to death.”

According to the source, setting the man’s corpse on fire was largely aimed at preventing the possible spread of COVID-19 into the country.

It's still not clear why the Supreme Leader apologised. I doubt it had anything to do with keeping on friendly terms with the South Korean government. The North regularly and enthusiastically hurls insults at the South. Partly I suppose there's the feeling that it's what proper governments should do if their troops wantonly kill a civilian from a neighbouring country. But you can't help feeling from the above that the Fat Man really had no problem with the killing, but was not unhappy to be drawing attention to the fact that someone from South Korea had actually wanted to defect to North Korea.

And it's set the cat among the pigeons, as it were, in Seoul. The ever-gullible President Moon seems to have been thrilled to receive the Supreme Commander's apology. He probably carries the letter round with him, next to his heart. The letter also served to defuse any angry response from the government, as this editorial in South Korea's Chosun Ilbo notes. Suddenly the ruling party, at one point reluctantly preparing some kind of hard response to Pyongyang's brutality, was now all smiles, talking of a friendly exchange of letters between the two leaders and referring to Kim Jong-un as an "enlightened monarch". Another easy diplomatic victory for the North.

The South Korean public, meanwhile, want to know why the government hushed up the killing for two days, apparently so Moon could deliver a pre-recorded speech to a virtual session of the UN General Assembly the previous day in which he called for a peace treaty with North Korea.

m San Francisco who authored the bill, said he doesn't expect that exception to be used very often.

“It's just a false narrative about transgender people and about transgender women in particular that they're somehow not really women and are just trying to scam their way into women's bathrooms or facilities in order to do bad things,” Wiener said. “Overwhelmingly the people who are being victimized are trans people.”

A false narrative? Well, here's an interesting case, in Ireland:

A teenager who was “born a male but identifies as a female” is facing four counts of making threats to kill or cause serious harm.

The accused, who has demonstrated a pattern of criminal and extreme physical and sexual violence towards women, is eager to be held in female custody while awaiting trial.

Gardaí, the national police service of the Republic of Ireland, says 18-year-old Barbie Kardashian made threats of violence against two individuals in July, August and September of this year. The youth was arrested on the night of Thursday, September 24, and has been remanded into custody.

At the time of his arrest, Mr Kardashian was free on bail on charges stemming from sexual assaults on two women. 

According to gardaí, the accused young man “made some statements” on the date of his latest arrest “that she did intend to do some harm to herself.” Michèle Finan, solicitor for Mr Kardashian, insists her client would be “exceptionally vulnerable in a prison setting,” and is “very anxious she be detained in a prison facility for females, as she identifies as a female.”

The solicitor requested that her client’s “certificate of gender recognition” be submitted to Limerick District Court, which is hearing the case. 

Barbie Kardashian?? His real name, apparently, is Alejandro Gentile. 

Yes, he's been to the Tavistock Clinic in London, where it was noted that he outlined his gender difficulties by rote, as it were, without emotion – as though he was reciting from something he'd learned. Nevertheless it seems he did manage to obtain that all-important gender recognition certificate.  

He's clearly a deeply troubled young man. [I mean, just look at him.] Sexual assaults on two women. Brought up in a highly dysfunctional family, and violently attacked his mother.

Not a typical case, no doubt. One would hope that if this were in California those “management or security concerns" would be invoked and the inmates of a woman's prison would be spared his unwelcome attentions. But still, it does rather cast doubt on the Californian senator's blithe assertion that it's just "a false narrative" that trans women could ever be a danger to real women.

tently shown herself to be an honourable and compassionate person, and the appalling hashtag #RIPJKRowling is just the latest example of hate speech directed against her and other women that Twitter and other platforms enable and implicitly endorse.

We are signing this letter in the hope that, if more people stand up against the targeting of women online, we might at least make it less acceptable to engage in it or profit from it.

We wish JK Rowling well and stand in solidarity with her.

Signed by 58 of the great and the good…

Ian McEwan, author; Lionel Shriver, author; Griff Rhys Jones, actor; Graham Linehan, writer; Maureen Chadwick, writer; Andrew Davies, writer; Frances Barber, actress; Craig Brown, writer; Alexander Armstrong, actor; Amanda Craig, writer; Philip Hensher, writer; Susan Hill, writer; Jane Thynne, writer; Ben Miller, actor; Simon Fanshawe, writer; James Dreyfus, actor; Frances Welch, writer; Francis Wheen, writer; Arthur Matthews, writer; Aminatta Forna, writer; Joan Smith, writer; Nick Cohen, journalist; etc. etc. with Tom Stoppard squeezing in at the bottom.

They don't actually say they agree with her that sex is real, but yes, it's something.

and they started weeping and one asked for some dust from her jacket,” Mr. Thum recalled. “This gives a sense how important this place is to people, even when they cannot visit.”

The previous closures and bans on visits to the shrines were a prelude to a more aggressive campaign by the government.

By early 2018, the Ordam shrine, isolated in the desert and almost 50 miles from the nearest town, had been leveled, eradicating one of most important sites of Uighur heritage. Satellite images from that time showed the shrine’s mosque, prayer hall and simple housing where its custodians once lived had been razed. There is no news of what happened to the huge cooking pots where pilgrims left meat, grain and vegetables that custodians of the shrine cooked into holy meals.

Satellite images of the Ordam shrine from May 2011:

and Oct 2018:

[Satellite images by Maxar Technologies]

e” src=”http://mickhartley.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/mt_imported_image_1758338927.jpg” style=”width: 550px” title=”Paul-hart-Garwick +2018.+RECLAIMED” />
Garwick, 2018

Holland Road, 2019

North Terrace, 2018

Stow Bardolph, 2018

Walpole St Andrew, 2019

Walsingham Fen, 2019

style=”padding-left: 40px”>Hopefully this new DfE guidance – a long-overdue wake-up call – will end the confusion and help teachers and pupils find some much-needed clarity. Barbie and GI Joe need to be shown the door, and they should take gender identity with them. Its definition is underpinned by sexist stereotypes: dress, speech, and mannerisms. Children must not be taught that their bodies might be wrong and in need of changing. It's a pity that this even needs to be said.

Indeed. No one is "born in the wrong body". It's a claim which never made any sense anyway – quite apart from the psychological havoc it can play with suggestible children and adolescents.

Update: more here on how Mermaids is now back-pedaling.

From the Atlantic's In Focus – "People pose for photos among a field of flowers in a lot beside high-rise apartment buildings in Goyang, west of Seoul, South Korea, on September 22."

[Photo: Ed Jones / AFP / Getty]

sponse to this crisis is deeply dysfunctional. It is not, surely, a role of government to tell us who we can hug.

We will have to learn to live with this virus. We may in fact already be quite close to collective immunity, and anyway that is where we are going to end up whatever we do. But in the meantime it is a tragedy that the witch’s brew has led to well-meaning but excessive actions by government, causing totally avoidable harm. Bold leaders often have to take difficult decisions. In this crisis boldness will require breaking the spell, and will consist in letting normal life resume, not in increasing restrictions.

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

onal training to reform the “backward thinking” of rural Tibetans and make them work harder. […]

Like China’s 12 million Uighurs in Xinjiang, the Tibetan population of seven million has long objected to Chinese rule especially after the Dalai Lama fled the country in 1959.

Mr Zenz concluded that half a million Tibetans were trained at camps and they had been set to work in construction, cleaning, mining, cooking and driving.

Beijing has quotas for the mass transfer of rural labourers within Tibet to other parts of China, according to state media reports. China’s foreign affairs ministry told Reuters: “What these people with ulterior motives are calling forced labour does not exist. We hope the international community will not be fooled by lies.”

Moving surplus rural labour into industry is a key part of China’s drive to boost the economy. In Xinjiang and Tibet, human rights groups say that the programmes emphasise ideological training. China took control of Tibet in 1950, in what Beijing calls a “peaceful liberation”. The Tibetan programme is expanding as pressure grows over similar projects in Xinjiang, some of which have been linked to mass detention centres. China insists the camps are vocational and education centres.

China's “peaceful liberation” of Tibet was of course an invasion: a colonial enterprise, basically, that seems to have gone up a gear in its ruthlessness since President Xi took office.