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While the Supreme Leader struts his stuff on the international stage, life is getting harder for ordinary North Koreans away from the cities. From the Daily NK:

Despite North Korea’s promises of an “agricultural revolution” announced at a key party meeting in late 2021, the country’s rural areas remain mired in poverty with inadequate food supplies and substandard living conditions—a reality that state media coverage of new housing construction and happy rural families systematically misrepresents.

“Many city residents believed the country was changing based on the new homes and bright lights in the countryside that they see every day on television or in the newspapers. But when they actually come to the countryside, they’re astonished by the awful reality of life there,” a source in South Pyongan province told Daily NK recently.

Many rural residents live in ramshackle homes that barely qualify as shelter, while their children walk around barefoot. The gap between propaganda and reality often astonishes urban visitors.

“There are still many people in the countryside with unpowered homes that leak in the rain and creak in the wind. These are people who know little about what is happening inside North Korea, let alone overseas. What sort of ambition could these adults, or even children, have for their lives?” the source said.

Photographs obtained by Daily NK show people in rural areas walking barefoot on dirt roads and children eating plain noodles with salt water in dimly lit homes that rely only on natural light. The images document the backward conditions in North Korea’s countryside, with no sign of children who have “nothing to envy in the world”—as state propaganda claims—or the happy families featured in government housing stories.

Meanwhile:

Some vendors at North Korean marketplaces are struggling to make a living, sometimes going days without a single sale. Business has collapsed due to soaring prices and empty wallets.

“Vendors at Hamhung marketplaces have been feeling the pinch lately. Several have quit after failing to sell anything for days,” a source in South Hamgyong province told Daily NK recently.

“Vendors selling hand-wrapped cigarettes are nervously considering new lines of work. The working-class people who typically buy these cigarettes are so broke they’ve stopped smoking entirely. Some vendors barely see any customers during a full day at their stalls,” the source said….

A similar situation exists in Hyesan, Ryanggang province.

“Market vendors nowadays all look like they’ve been to a funeral"…

From the Telegraph:

The slogan “trans women are women” is scientifically false and harms the rights of women, Richard Dawkins has said.

Gosh. Men are not women, says leading scientist. Putting on a wig and a dress and some lippy and changing your name to Daphne doesn't mean you actually are a woman. 

Not criticising Dawkins here, who's been a solid voice of reason against the trans madness – just the fact that this point needs making, and is actually newsworthy. Scientist says earth is round and revolves round the sun…

In a new book, the evolutionary biologist warns that scientific truth must prevail over “personal feelings” and argues that academic institutions must defend facts above emotion.

In The War on Science, Dawkins joins several scientists and philosophers contending that academic freedom and truth in universities was being stifled by diversity, equity and inclusion policies that promoted falsehoods under the banner of social justice.

“I draw the line at the belligerent slogan ‘trans women are women’ because it is scientifically false,” he said. “When taken literally, it can infringe the rights of other people, especially women.

“It logically entails the right to enter women’s sporting events, women’s changing rooms, women’s prisons and so on.

“So powerful has this postmodern counter-factualism become, that newspapers refer to ‘her penis’ as a matter of unremarked routine.”

Dawkins told The Telegraph that the trans-activist community had become “astonishingly vicious”, hounding people out of their jobs and calling for women who disagreed with them to be decapitated and physically assaulted.

He warned that even senior publishers were bullied by junior colleagues into censoring their authors who did not accept that men can become biological women.

“Both politics and personal feelings don’t impinge scientific truths and that needs to be clearly understood. I feel very strongly about the subversion of scientific truth,” he said.

“I think part of what’s happened is the move of academia towards postmodernism, which is pernicious, and probably does account for the current vogue for the nonsense lie that sex is a spectrum.

“There’s this post-modern hubris which presumptuously and falsely dismisses science as a social construct. The human conceit here is the idea that personal feelings can change reality.

“I have been told by publishers that they are under strong pressure from junior members of staff to censor books for this kind of reason, and the astonishing viciousness of the trans lobby, they are very dogmatic and hectoring.

“JK Rowling can look after herself, but you look at the way they hounded Kathleen Stock out of Sussex University, and it’s always women who suffer.”

For years – well, decades – postmodernism had largely kept itself confined within academic circles, gradually rotting away "soft" subjects like English and History. More recently it's turned its aim to science – how could it not? Now gender ideology is perhaps its first real-world manifestation. Welcome aboard.

“We love all people, no matter where they come from… but Israelis are not welcome.”

A restaurant in Fürth, Germany 🇩🇪, announced that it will no longer admit Israelis “to protest not with a racist character.”

“Dear customers,

We love all people, no matter where they come… pic.twitter.com/IQlAlILjWf

— Hen Mazzig (@HenMazzig) September 25, 2025

Full text:

“Dear customers,

We love all people, no matter where they come from. We believe that the children of this world should never be harmed under any circumstances. We have decided to protest not with a political or racist character.

Israelis are not welcome in this establishment.

Of course, they will be welcome again as soon as they decide to open their eyes, ears, and hearts.”

‘I’m not racist but I will ban an entire people from my restaurant’ has the same taste as ‘I’m not antisemitic, I have Jewish friends.’

Let’s call this what it is: open antisemitism dressed up as moral superiority.

Previously.

In this video, Moussa Kadri repeatedly slashes a knife at a man for burning a Koran. Today, he has been spared jail time.

In the sentencing remarks, the Judge said: "I note however that you are now 59 years old and someone of hitherto exemplary character… You are a loved… pic.twitter.com/pRnJcUXkTi

— Connie Shaw (@_ConnieShaw) September 23, 2025

Full text:

In the sentencing remarks, the Judge said: "I note however that you are now 59 years old and someone of hitherto exemplary character… You are a loved husband and father. A hard worker and someone who, those who have written on your behalf cannot praise highly enough. You are relied upon as a carer and much respected in your work with charity.”

The man he slashes a knife at is Hamit Coskun, who was burning a Koran in protest. For this, Hamit was originally charged by the CPS with intent to cause "harassment, alarm or distress" against "the religious institution of Islam". This charge was dropped, and changed to a Public Order Offence: disorderly behaviour within the hearing or sight of a person likely to be caused harassment, alarm or distress.

Part of the prosecution’s evidence that Hamit had caused someone harassment, alarm or distress was that Moussa Kadri attacked him with a knife.

Hamit was convicted and ordered to pay a fine of £240. He is also now living in hiding due to credible threats to his life. Moussa Kadri, the man who tries to stab him in this video, is walking free.

The suggestion that Kadri's attack showed that Hamit "had caused someone harassment, alarm or distress" is like saying that a woman's rape showed that she'd caused someone, her rapist, an uncontrollable sexual urge. It was her fault. Lovely to see how Islamic thinking is penetrating our legal system.

From the BBC report:

Lord Young of Acton, general secretary of the Free Speech Union, said after the sentencing that it "sends a green light to any Muslim who wants to enforce an Islamic blasphemy by taking the law into their own hands.

"The court is effectively saying that if you attack a blasphemer with a knife, he will be convicted of causing you harassment, alarm or distress and you won't have to spend a day behind bars."

It's worse in New Zealand. Anna Slatz at Reduxx:

A Māori women’s rights advocate in New Zealand is facing prison time after being reported to police by a trans-identified male for her social media posts. Rex Landy, a member of Mana Wāhine Kōrero, was arrested in December of 2024 after being targeted by a trans activist who took issue with her online commentary.

The source of the complaints against Landy is a fantasy author named Daniel Johnston, a man who identifies as “female” and refers to himself by the name “Caitlin Spice.” Speaking to Reduxx, Landy explains that she first became aware of Johnston in 2019 after she discovered that he had participated in having Broadsheet, a women’s issues magazine, suspended on Facebook.

“All they had done was post some quotes of his where he said things like ‘I am a legal female’ and boasted about being able to use the women’s washrooms,” Landy says. “They had to fight to get their account back.”

Broadsheet had warned their readers about Johnston, noting that he “delights in taunting feminists who are defending women’s rights.”

Landy says that Johnston’s rhetoric, specifically that about using women’s intimate spaces, was triggering for her as a survivor of sexual abuse.

“That’s when I realized he could be in any toilet in Wellington, where I go, from time to time. And I got upset.” Landy explains that she later discovered Johnston had been targeting multiple women critical of gender ideology in New Zealand for insult and harassment.

While it is unclear when Johnston began to “identify” as a woman, he first started attracting attention on social media for making graphic posts about his vaginoplasty and use of women’s restrooms. On his now-deleted X (then Twitter), Johnston would frequently make comments about his post-surgical fluid leakage, dilation, and use of women’s menstrual products.

Lovely bloke. See the article for a more graphic account of his "vaginal leakage", of which he's inordinately proud.

It gets worse.

While in court last week, Landy was told the prosecution was not willing to entertain diversion or discharge without conviction because of her beliefs.

“They said I was not eligible because I was in the ‘grip of an ideology’ and was ‘unlikely to change my mind,'” Landy explains, rejecting the premise that a belief in biological sex is ideological. “So this is an exercise in them trying to get me to change my mind.”

She is next expected to appear in court on December 16, and faces three months in jail or a $50,000 fine. Her current bail conditions include a ban on directly or indirectly contacting Johnston.

The by-now familiar story of a bullying trans activist who malevolently accuses gender-critical women of harassment – with the full backing of the authorities.

There's some irony here. New Zealand is obsessed with its Maori heritage, to the extent that Matauranga, the Maori way of knowledge, has been elevated to the extent that it's now taught as of equal value to science – an issue that Jerry Coyne has taken up, here for instance, or here. There could hardly be a better (worse) example of western ideology gone wrong than gender woo, yet in this case the Maori wisdom (ie common sense), as shown by this woman Rex Landy, is overruled by the authorities.

A belief in biological sex, as affirmed both by science and by a Maori woman and her traditional knowledge, must bow before the greater power of gender ideology.

Helen Joyce at The Critic recounts her experience of being secretly logged as a criminal by the police at the behest of trans activists, who are seen as members of a "protected group". It's the same mechanism, and reputedly the same trans activist (Lynsay Watson), which resulted in the ludicrous arrest of Graham Linehan at Heathrow.

Her conclusion:

Trans lobby groups such as Stonewall have partnered with almost every force in the country and despite not being the law, gender self-identification is firmly embedded in police practice. Officers have been trained that calling a man a man, if he says he’s a woman, is “anti-transgender hate”. When the culprit is someone like me who believes that to the contrary, it’s essential in order to protect women’s rights, claims of “significant harm” are believed and repeat offences are not guaranteed.

The reason Watson was taken seriously and I wasn’t is because he insists men who say they’re women are women and I say the truth, which is that they’re not. The disparity is by design: a feature of the law, not a bug.

This can’t be fixed by abolishing non-crime hate incidents and applying “common sense”. It requires radical change in the culture of policing. No more partnerships with lobby groups, no more flags and badges, no more marking Pride Month, Transgender Day of Remembrance and the rest of the identitarian calendar. On trans issues it will take a deradicalisation programme, with officers retrained to understand that self-ID is not the law and factual statements about the two sexes aren’t hateful.

More fundamentally, “protected groups” have got to go. They’re unnecessary, and there’s no evidence they’re effective. There’s no need for them, either: offences against women and children are policed not by giving them special group status but by creating dedicated strategies and specialist teams.

Above all, creating special categories of people who can instruct the police to credulously record their claims about others offends against two fundamental principles: that we are all innocent until proven guilty, and equal before the law.

Well then. President Prabowo Subianto at the UN General Assembly.

Shalom, انشاالله, President of Indonesia 🇮🇩, the country with the largest Muslim population in the world: “We will have peace only when we recognize, respect, and guarantee the security of Israel ” @grok pic.twitter.com/dETefafzft

— Justice (@pastsmartlink) September 23, 2025

The idea that something exists if enough people believe in it. Dave Rich on Palestinian statehood:

The recognition of Palestinian statehood by the UK and other western governments is less an acknowledgement of reality, and more an expression of faith. The official statements announcing recognition do not even try to pretend that Palestine meets the criteria for statehood as set out in international law, because it obviously doesn’t (this is a separate question from whether Palestinians as a people have the right to statehood). Not for Palestine, the need to fulfil the laborious challenge that every other state that has come into being in the modern era has had to meet.

Instead, it is as if these governments hope that they can imagine Palestine into being simply by saying it is so. It is statehood through the Tinkerbell Effect – the idea that something exists if enough people believe in it.

The problem is that the two state solution has been on offer for years – and has been rejected for years, by the Palestinians. Has anything changed? The problem if anything has got worse, as the international community has implicitly – and often explicitly – supported the Palestinians in their fantasy of being refugees whose destiny it is to eventually return to their stolen land. In the meantime the Palestinian claim has been subsumed into an Islamist holy war, driven by Iran, where the sacred land of the Al-Aqsa mosque can never be home to the evil Zionists.

Those are the barriers.

Added:

The single biggest peace move the international community could make for the Middle East would be to get rid of the concept of Palestinian “right of return” and disband UNWRA.

— Andrew Fox (@Mr_Andrew_Fox) September 23, 2025

Meanwhile, in Bristol:

A council has become embroiled in a transgender row after insisting that women should be called “people with ovaries”.

Bristol city council has been accused of offending women with “virtue-signalling madness” after claiming that legally defining sex as biological “misgenders trans people” and could lead to discrimination.

Officials also argued that the term “maternity” should be scrapped and replaced with “paternity” to avoid offending trans people, despite the latter meaning “the fact of being a father”.

They also demanded support for biological men who wanted to “chest-feed” babies, despite questions about whether the practice is harmful.

Oh ffs. Of course it's harmful. A tiny baby forced to drink some chemically-induced gunge to satisfy a man's fetish…

And if women are “people with ovaries”, why aren't men “people with testicles”? Somehow it never works that way.

Bristol city council, whose Green Party leader Tony Dyer has criticised the Supreme Court ruling, raised a number of objections, including urging the EHRC to drop gendered language when referring to pregnancy, maternity and breastfeeding.

It wrote that “not all pregnant individuals would use the pronouns ‘she/her’” so it could lead to “emotional and psychological distress” for “trans men, non-binary, gender diverse or intersex individuals”.

“We strongly advise the use of more inclusive language such as using ‘they/them’ to refer to all individuals, or include other identities to reflect the diversity of individuals who access maternity or paternity services,” officials said.

“This could include ‘people with ovaries’ or the term ‘people who use paternity services’. We also recognise that individuals may not identify with the word maternity and prefer paternity as it is gender neutral.

Eh? Does he even know what paternity means? The man's an idiot.

The consultation response, signed off by Mr Dyer and his deputy, also took issue with a new definition of sexual orientation, which states that a lesbian woman or a gay man is someone attracted to someone of the same sex.

The council complained that this means that two biological men in a relationship would be “wrongly” categorised as gay.

“The revised wording of this section introduces confusion by defining sexual orientation only in relation to biological sex, rather than the affirmed gender of a partner,” Bristol council wrote.

“For instance, under this framing, a heterosexual man in a relationship with a trans woman could be wrongly categorised as gay, solely because of his partner’s sex assigned at birth.

“This erases the affirmed gender of trans people and mischaracterises the orientation of their partners. Sexual orientation is about patterns of attraction, including attraction to people of a particular gender – not just anatomy or birth sex.”

They've really drunk the KoolAid, this lot.

Barrister Sarah Phillimore in the Telegraph:

Baroness Harman’s independent review of bullying, harassment and sexual harassment at the Bar, published earlier this month, sent ripples across the barrister community for its potential to lead to censorship and the repression of free speech.

Sadly, these likely encroachments do not surprise me.

Speech should only be a criminal or regulatory matter if a very high bar of offence is crossed. Certainly I don’t think I’ve ever crossed it. Yet, in our culture now, mere disagreement is seen as violence, and not having a prevailing view about issues such as sexuality or transgenderism is seen inherently to be bigoted.

I know this from personal experience. In 2020 I was investigated for 18 months by the Bar Standards Board (BSB) after an unknown person reported a collection of my past social media tweets that they deemed to be offensive, to the police.

Twelve pages were recorded by Wiltshire Police as transphobic and religiously aggravated “non-crime hate incidents”.

While ultimately the police and the BSB’s investigation came to nothing, it was distressing, irritating, time-consuming and utterly absurd.

See here for more details. She's also a particular target of Jolyon Maugham's risible Good Law Project, accused of misgendering and deadnaming a trans woman (here). The horror.

The thing that really worries me from Lady Harman’s new report is recommendation number 24, which reads: “Regulatory enforcement action must be taken against online bullying and harassment,” particularly if it’s motivated by misogyny or racism.

But who is deciding an unknown individual’s motivations for a tweet? Somebody who is upset enough to get the whole apparatus of either the criminal law or a regulatory offence moving? It’s very dangerous.

I’m confident I understand the law around freedom of expression inside out. I understand the requirements for a registered professional and about proportionality, but that, I think, is what we are losing. The fetters some people wish to put on speech, simply because said speech makes them feel unhappy, is grossly disproportionate….

Last year’s proposal to make it a duty for barristers to promote equality, diversity and inclusion was a clear example of what I’m afraid of. Ultimately, it did not succeed, and I am glad of that, because these proposals don’t really mean diversity. They mean one political view. Transgress against that view and you will be punished.

For the last decade, the message across public sector organisations is that there is only one thing we’re allowed to believe – and that we must always promote love and inclusion. While that may be a noble aim, it has had disastrous effects on the cohesion of society and alienates vast groups of people. For example, you’re not allowed to discuss immigration because then you’re a racist, and you’re not allowed to discuss gender identity because then you’re a transphobe.

There’s only a handful of us at the Bar who’ve been willing to speak out. I know many colleagues who keep their heads down because they’ve got young children and big mortgages….

Frankly, I have no compassion for people who are offended by opinions. If they’re upset by what I say, unless it is genuinely insulting, I do not care. I think they are contemptible.

And as for the Bar Standards Board, I don’t think my opinions or those of any other barrister should be any concern of theirs.