Author: Mick Hartley

: 40px”>Families with sons and daughters serving in the military have been ordered to write letters of encouragement, Daily NK has learned.

“On March 23, the Kimchaek party committee issued an order through neighborhood offices to neighborhood watch units directing families of service members to write encouraging letters to their children in the military,” a source in North Hamgyong Province told Daily NK recently. “The order included specific instructions about what to write.”

Party officials believe the directive was issued to ease growing family concerns over their children’s safety, sparked by rumors about North Korean troops being deployed to Russia to support Moscow’s war in Ukraine.

Officials acknowledge the order came because the party has received reports that increasing numbers of families are losing sleep worrying their children may have been killed or wounded in Russia, as rumors circulate about heavy casualties among North Korean troops fighting against Ukraine….

Some party organizations have responded with threats, telling families “not to be swayed by needless rumors” and that “if it’s not from the party, it’s not true.” Others have tried to console families by telling them to wait because “good news will arrive.”

The Kimchaek party committee instructed families to write letters telling their children that parents, siblings and other relatives at home are doing well, along with positive news about construction projects in the city.

That should do the trick. 

ric-gill-statue-restoration-vtw6znfkg”>BBC puts statue by sex abuser Eric Gill back on display.

The BBC has once again unveiled a controversial statue of Prospero and Ariel created by one of the 20th century’s most influential artists who also sexually abused his own daughters.

Hardly "one of the 20th century’s most influential artists". A minor figure at best.

Maybe if it was somewhere less obvious – but this is on the front of Broadcasting House, in a big protective case, as though to say: look, this is what we're all about. A statue of a man with a naked little boy…

Genuinely surreal the top level focus given to a fictional Netflix drama vs a real and deeply harrowing set of crimes against actual non-fictional girls.

— James (@jhallwood) April 9, 2025

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I’m not the one who needs to reread her own books, muppet. A totalitarian movement infiltrates the establishment, persecutes all who oppose it, threatens rape and violence, strips rights from the vulnerable, and you decide those are the good guys and applaud like a seal. pic.twitter.com/bjgbyxZ11K

— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) April 9, 2025

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Wow.

John Mearsheimer: "There's no question a nuclear armed Iran would bring stability to the region. If Iran had a nuclear deterrent there's no way the US or Israel would be threatening to attack Iran right now. If you had a Middle-East where other states aside from Israel had a… pic.twitter.com/dqJlBKtx4O

— ☀️👀 (@zei_squirrel) April 8, 2025

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That's where you get if you think all the problems in the Middle East are down to Israel, and cover your ears when Iran repeatedly broadcasts its divinely-inspired mission to wipe the Jewish state off the face of the earth.

He's the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago, you'll be pleased to hear.

In his 2007 book The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, Mearsheimer argues that the Israel lobby wields disproportionate influence over U.S. foreign policy. His more recent work focuses on criticism of the "liberal international order" and why he believes the West is to blame for the Russo-Ukrainian War.

And a favourite of the London Review of Books, as I recall.

=”padding-left: 40px”>Prosecutors have been accused of resurrecting the offence of blasphemy through “the back door” after charging a man for burning a copy of the Quran.

Hamit Coskun, 50, has denied religiously motivated harassment after setting alight a copy of the Muslim holy text outside the Turkish consulate in Knightsbridge, central London, in February.

He is due to go on trial at Westminster magistrates’ court next month ­accused of “intent to cause against [the] religious institution of Islam, harassment, alarm or distress”, including shouting profanities about the religion.

So what? Someone shouting in the street, or burning a book, shouldn't be a criminal offence. Obviously. He's clearly being prosecuted for blasphemy.

However, on Tuesday the head of the National Secular Society wrote to senior prosecutors to call for the charges to be dropped.

Stephen Evans, the chief executive, said that there were “serious concerns about the nature of the charges” against Coskun.

Evans said that the society had received an opinion from a KC that described the charges as “plainly defective”, with a “fatal” flaw being that “the religious institution of Islam” was not a “person” under English law.

In the opinion, Akua Reindorf KC argued that treating a religious institution as a person evoked the notion of blasphemy — a common law offence that was abolished in England and Wales in 2008"….

A CPS spokesman said: “The law is clear and we will never hesitate to prosecute cases where there is hostility towards members of a racial or religious group.”

But no hostility was shown, as far as we can tell, to any member of a racial or religious group. He's being prosecuted, as they themselves (the CPS) say, for “intent to cause against [the] religious institution of Islam, harassment, alarm or distress”. So they're dissimulating. They're lying. He was protesting the religion, and they're prosecuting him for blasphemy.

From @PinkNews right across to @GBNEWS the reluctance to say ‘male’ is overwhelming. It’s a mindset.

‘But the whole point is that they’re trans!’

No, the point is that they’re men. Replace the word ‘trans’ with ‘men’ in these headlines and any argument dies on its feet. pic.twitter.com/ygCimKVF0y

— SEEN in Journalism (@JournalismSEEN) April 9, 2025

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s. It's been embraced by the liberal media, and – at least in the US – the overwhelming majority of the scientific establishment and the former ruling party, the Democrats.

Saha also invokes Lysenko:

In 1930s Russia, Trofim Lysenko asserted that all science is class-oriented in nature. His anti-Mendelian views became the official Communist Party line and classical genetics became known as "fascist science.” Over 3,000 scientists were executed, imprisoned, or exiled. The effect on agriculture and food production was devastating.

Today, censorship motivated by the mashup of ideologies sometimes referred to as the “identity synthesis” or “critical social justice” (or, colloquially, “wokeism”) is embedded within the policies of scientific journals as well as those of research funders. This politicisation of science undermines merit, restricts academic freedom, and seeks to replace liberal epistemology—rooted in objective truth, rationality, and the scientific method—with a framework that prioritises “multiple narratives” and “alternative ways of knowing.”

Censorship is antithetical to the scientific method. As J. Robert Oppenheimer once remarked, the scientist “must be free to ask any question, to doubt any assertion, to seek for any evidence, to correct any errors.” When papers on one side of a debate are censored or ignored for political reasons, the scientific record is distorted. This, in turn, enables gatekeepers to justify further suppression by presenting the science as settled. In this way, scientific censorship becomes a self-perpetuating cycle.

When academic freedom protections become contingent upon expert opinion on the quality of the contested work or the academic expertise of its author, it places orthodoxy-challenging work at risk. When universities punish researchers for pursuing “problematic” lines of inquiry, we all lose. The censorship and self-censorship of scientists damages public trust in science and harms society. As evolutionary biologist Steve-Stewart Williams put it, “Censoring science blunts our ability to understand the world. … By blunting our ability to understand the world, we also blunt our ability to make the world a better place.”

The Freedom of Speech Act was designed to protect the contrarians, the heretics, the offensive, the foolish, the Galileos. It was intended to strike a blow against scientific censorship and help to make the world a better place.

Gender ideology, remember, thrived on the mantra "no debate".

n style=”font-size: 11pt”>6./ @glaad lies about puberty blockers and tried to bully the @nytimes when it reported the risks. @emilysteel is to be applauded for exposing the vested interests that explain @glaad 's appalling behaviour. @glaad is just the latest LGBTQ+ lobby group to reveal how corrupt it is.

7./ @HRC had to fire its CEO David Alphonso after he was accused of helping Governor Andrew Cuomo to slander women he was alleged to have sexually harassed. Cuomo and @HRC deserved each other. They lied constantly. They even rewrote gay history.

8./ The @trevorproject claims to be fighting suicide when it actively promotes it. Its CEO Amit Paley pushed opioids for the Sacklers before pushing puberty blockers and a "conversion therapy" ban campaign to try to enforce them. Guess who he employed?

9./ @TrevorProject employed Sam Brinton, an S&M coach, to head up its conversion therapy campaign. He invented a cock and bull story about being bullied by his family. He's just agreed a plea deal for stealing women's luggage from airports. What a ghoul.

10./ These LGBTQ+ groups are lavishly funded. Like their UK equivalents they are also enemies of free speech and work behind the scenes to influence our politicians and companies. They have to work in the shadows because their agenda is so crazy the public would never buy it.

11./ The most immoral thing of all about @glaad , Stonewall and the other creepy gender identity lobby groups who infest our institutions is they are willing to sacrifice the wellbeing of thousands of kids just so they can live a lifestyle they never earned. Nor deserved.

le=”padding-left: 40px”>To listen to Oliver’s justification of this absurdity was to wonder if he had paid any attention these past five years. His deployment of the “Phelps gambit” – the idea of a man’s sporting advantage over a woman being roughly akin to the one Michael Phelps, the 23-time Olympic champion swimmer, enjoyed over his rivals – was especially risible. As Dr Emma Hilton, the developmental biologist, has highlighted, Phelps’s edge over his nearest pursuer in the 2004 Olympic butterfly final was 0.08 per cent. But what about the gap between his time and that of Petria Thomas, winner of the equivalent women’s event that summer? A mammoth 12.62 per cent.

And here's a thread from the organisation that Oliver specifically targeted…

She Won recently made an appearance on Last Week Tonight. John Oliver stuck to his tired recipe: dishonest sanctimony wrapped in a thick coating of self-deprecation (all the easier to swallow), this time about male athletes in women’s sports and specifically about our org. 🧵1/n:

— shewon.org (@shewon_org) April 7, 2025

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