Author: Mick Hartley

tin Killips, a post-puberty male, won a UCI stage race for women. But boxing, the most perilous sport at the Olympics, has been left at the mercy of the IOC, the most ideologically captured body of all.

It saw no issue in sending Angela Carini into the ring to face Khelif, only for the Italian to be dismantled inside 46 seconds by punches so hard she said she feared for her life. It was not just because it disputed the IBA’s findings, but because it believed the Algerian should never have been tested at all. Its much-vaunted eligibility “framework” is rights-led rather than scientific. This means, in essence, that it is prepared to ignore anything to do with Khelif’s chromosomes. All that matters is being perceived not to discriminate….

It is worth studying the precise details of the IBA letter describing the tests carried out on the boxers. Summarising the results as “abnormal”, it declares: “Chromosome analysis reveals male karyotype.” It also includes imaging, for each athlete, of an X and a Y chromosome, highlighting that the tests were conducted at a Delhi laboratory certified by the Swiss-based International Organisation for Standardisation. But still the IOC maintains that the results are “arbitary”, not worth the paper they are written on.

The only possible conclusion is that the IOC simply does not want to listen, that it is more interested in burnishing its credentials as “inclusive” than in upholding what is fair. It is no wonder that Bach wanted to be nowhere near the boxers’ gold-medal presentations, instead delegating Khelif’s victory ceremony to Mustapha Berraf of Algeria, one of his arch-loyalists. He has, frankly, made himself foolish on this issue. He had been warned for six years that a story such as this could explode if the IOC did not draw clearer boundaries, but still he refused to react. Despite the IBA claiming that the fighters have been tested twice and that they are male, Bach insists there is no scientific means of discovering who is female.

Now, not before time, he has agreed to step aside next year, his credibility severely damaged by his handling of the controversy. It marks the dramatic culmination of a quite extraordinary episode. In the space of a single Games, the IOC has done nothing less than distort biological truth in a sport fraught with physical risk. In the eyes of many women, there could scarcely be a greater dereliction.

cheap housing — you can still buy a four-bed terrace in Middlesbrough for around £60,000 — has made it a useful dumping ground for successive governments….

But it is not all about racial identity and nationalism, or even perhaps mainly. While parts of Teesside thrive, Middlesbrough has been left behind. Its once bustling centre is close to moribund: nobody goes there any more.

It still suffers from the appalling depredations of the recession occasioned by the Conservative government in the 1980s — and by the architectural vandalism of the Labour councils at the same time. Ugly concrete flyovers to carry the A66 westward brutally bisect Middlesbrough and the giant out-of-town shopping centres have ripped the heart out of the commercial district.

The centre cannot hold because there is no longer a centre, no sense of a Middlesbrough community. Just two groups of people from different cultures. The impoverished whites who believe in a vision of our country which the British establishment now disdains and feels embarrassed about, and the Asians who cling to their own culture because in truth nobody ever tried to persuade them to adopt our own.

it. On Friday Bach made like a Labour MP circa 2019 and pretended there is no way of knowing what a woman is. He said: “If someone is presenting us with a scientifically solid system how to identify men and women … we would be more than pleased.” Well, he could push them down a ski slope and see if their uterus falls out? Or the IOC could take a swab from inside their cheeks, which is all a sex test involves.

There's now a 100% success rate for men boxing in the women's Olympics, after Lin Yu-ting followed Imane Khelif in gaining a gold medal, after another one-sided bout as he pursued his hapless opponent round the ring, punching at will:

Lin fighting for gold. Already in the lead pic.twitter.com/RS50nCPWM8

— FairPlayForWomen (@fairplaywomen) August 10, 2024

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Both men, Khelif and Yu-ting, won every round in every match on their way to gold.

le imprisoning his father for speaking out.

"The Middle East is a tragic place where true heroes are buried and forgotten.💔"

Mohammad-Mehdi Karami (22) was a member of the karate team in Iran until he was tortured and executed by the Iranian regime on 7 January 2023.

bout these issues,” says Dunning. “[Hefosa] would have been a massive change.” OfS draft guidelines made clear that Confucius Institutes would have had to obey UK non-discrimination laws on hiring. When academics are denied Chinese visas on political grounds, their institutions would have been expected to issue a public condemnation. Universities would have had to do more to ensure that foreign funding did not distort their scholarship and to protect their students from ideological surveillance.

Since going public with her story, Shipworth said she has heard from academics around the country who have been told to drop criticisms of China and turn a blind eye to evidence of cheating. Her head of department and colleagues seemed to understand neither their duties nor their obligations concerning academic freedom, she said. “They thought they were completely within their rights to do what they did to me. I know from discussion groups I’m in that censorship and self-censorship are routine across all universities now.”

If the last-gasp attempts to save Hefosa fail, who should be held responsible for its demise? If this was a game of Cluedo, the denouement would be that vice-ch­ancellors did the deed in the corridors of Westminster by wielding threats of their sector’s collapse. For many of those running the country’s universities, free speech is not merely an unnecessary frippery — it is a burden they would rather be rid of.

has reached the most explosive possible conclusion, with a biologically male boxer winning an Olympic gold medal as a female. Imane Khelif, the 25-year-old Algerian whose DNA tests have shown the male pattern of XY chromosomes, has swept all the way to the women’s welterweight title after dismantling four successive opponents in four utterly one-sided contests. The outcome of which the International Olympic Committee had for so long been warned – that an overwhelming focus on inclusion could remove fair sport for women – has finally come to pass.

It has been the starkest illustration of a failure of governance at the highest level of global sport. By allowing biological males to fight as women through pure self-ID, the IOC have caused irreparable damage to their claims of protecting the sanctity and integrity of the female category. Khelif celebrated extravagantly by dancing on the spot as the unanimous decision was announced, before being swept out of the ring on the shoulders of the Algerian support staff.

The roar was ear-splitting as the huge Algerian contingent sought to uphold Khelif’s honour. But the ramifications of these extraordinary events, you sense, might only just be beginning. This was the wholly logical outcome of the IOC neglecting to reach any plausible conclusion of the definition of a woman, allowing the lines of biology to be blurred in the most lethal sport of all. Barely believably, the crisis could become worse still, with Taiwan’s Lin Yu-Ting, a second boxer deemed ineligible for the female category by boxing chiefs, the favourite for gold on Saturday night after also being given a free pass into the Olympic Games.

Here's the image -  a man hitting a woamn as hard as he can, to cheers from the crowd and an Olympic gold medal:

[Photo: AP/Ariana Cubillos]

Manhattan ca. 1913. "Suburban concourse with ramp, Grand Central Terminal, New York Central Lines." A surreal image of spectral figures populating the Grand Central concourse, thanks to the flash-powder time exposure. It helps that the men with moustaches and hats look to be straight out of a Rene Magritte painting.

[Photo: Shorpy/Detroit Publishing Company]

Women of WRN Afghanistan stand with all women being disadvantaged by males in their sports. We are XX not XY. Men will use their strength to try to keep us down but women will always fight on @WomensRightsNet #XX#SaveWomensSport pic.twitter.com/EuHn7qLi3I

— WRN Afghanistan (@WRNAfghanistan) August 9, 2024

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The BMA is looking increasingly isolated after its call for opposition to the Cass Review has been met with a barrage of criticism from leading doctors – "simply not acceptable" – as well as Seen (Sex Equality and Equity Network), The Association of Clinical Psychologists UK (ACP-UK) and the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges.

Jo Bartosch at UnHerd:

Traditionally, unions are supposed to represent their members. But it is becoming increasingly clear that the BMA is dangerously out of step with the medical consensus. The Cass Review has sent ripples across the world, and from lawsuits in the US to a change of tack across Europe — medics are increasingly acknowledging that what is a crisis in youth mental health cannot be cured by changing bodies.

Had a world leading clinician spent four years investigating childhood diseases or treatments for anxiety, the findings would be accepted without controversy. It is because the Cass Review sought scientific evidence for ideologically rooted treatments that her work has been dismissed by transgender activists, including clinicians like Prof Banfield. It seems so-called “gender medicine” is so mired in identity politics that scrutiny or the application of basic standards is considered a threat.

There can be few things more chilling than a medic on a messianic mission, particularly when one heads an institution as august as the British Medical Association (BMA). The trans trend is finally coming to an end, and if the BMA is to stay relevant, it must move on.

40px”>Kovan's freedom is bittersweet. Upon her return, her surviving family showered her with sweets, sang and hugged her in delight and relief on having her returned to them. But her smile seemed skin-deep. Her trauma will take years to overcome, if she can conquer it at all. And she knows that. She has survived a genocide, a massacre and unthinkable brutality.

Only justice will bring her peace but so far there has been only a handful of persecutions worldwide for what Britain, and many other countries, now recognise as genocide against the Yazidis.