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te human rights activists say that some women are still being held prisoner and that kidnappings are still happening. They accuse the Syrian authorities of being unwilling or unable to stop it.

The activists say that between 50 and 60 women and girls have been taken. These numbers are small compared with the 1,600 or more civilians killed in a spasm of sectarian violence in March. Sunni militias rounded up Alawite men and boys to be shot in the streets; some – as I wrote at the time – were made to crawl to their deaths howling like dogs. But the idea that jihadis are trying to revive the practice of taking sabaya holds a special terror for Alawites. There are some credible accounts from families and in a few cases from the victims themselves.

Assad, of course, was Alawite – an offshoot of Shia Islam – so it's no surprise that, with Turkish-backed Sunnis now running Syria, revenge is in the air. And, as so often in Islam, it's usually women who suffer the most.

The bulk of the article describes the nightmare ordeal of "Samira", who was abducted off the street, gang-raped, and sold into a forced marriage. What's notable is how her captors and rapists clearly saw themselves as devout Muslims, with some sporting black headbands with the first part of the Shahada in white script: ‘There is no god but God’, while cursing her as an  ‘unveiled whore’.

The historic practice of taking female slaves was reintroduced by Isis during the brief rule of the ‘Caliphate’ in Syria a decade ago. Thousands of women and girls from the Yazidi minority were held and openly traded in slave markets. I interviewed two sisters in their teens who had been kidnapped by their father’s gardener, who enjoyed their humiliation. A woman in her forties told me she had been bought by a man too poor to own a car and who had wanted a servant. He and his wife turned her out when she got cancer. There were many such stories.

The group that now rules Syria, Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS, never took slaves. But there are almost certainly former Isis loyalists in its ranks. Occasionally a fighter in one of the militias backing the government is spotted still wearing an Isis patch….

Human-rights activists say the police often don’t want to investigate when an Alawite woman or girl disappears, or they try to blame the immediate family. In some cases, girls have posted videos saying they ran away to get married. The authorities point to these videos as evidence that no crime has been committed; the activists say the girls are being coerced. The activists say that all kinds of violence are continuing against the Alawites. One posted a video of a restaurant being attacked by bearded gunmen for selling alcohol. They fear the future in Syria is Islamist and authoritarian.

In Afghanistan, the Taliban Mark 2 returned to power promising a new, more liberal version of rule by sharia. Now they are as hardline as ever. In Syria, the international community is giving President al-Sharaa’s new government the benefit of the doubt for the time being. He was put into power by a wide coalition of armed groups. His government may be too weak to protect the Alawites; some of his men may not want to. Can’t or won’t? For the families whose wives or daughters were taken, it makes little difference which.

nal determined that the organs of marginalised detainees in China were being forcefully harvested, sometimes when the patients were still alive, to serve a transplant trade worth over $1 billion (£733 million).

While China has a voluntary organ donation scheme, Wendy Rogers, the chairman of ETAC’s advisory board, told The Telegraph that in many cases they were harvested forcefully, including from otherwise healthy prisoners against their will and who are slowly killed as their organs are removed.

Earlier this year, it was estimated that at least half a million Uyghurs were in prisons or detention centres. They have also faced decades of persecution by the Chinese government, including mass detention and forced sterilisation.

Given the history of abuse against the Uyghurs, of whom there are 10 million in Xinjiang, there is concern that the new transplant facilities will result in more forced organ harvesting among the population.

The imprisoned Uighurs, obviously, make an ideal captive source for organ harvesting. It's a huge market, and the wealthy buyers will pay more for organs from healthy donors – or rather, healthy bodies. Members of the persecuted Falun Gong religious sect, who didn't smoke or drink, used to be favoured, but the abstemious Muslim Uighurs make a fine replacement.

“The concept of informed, voluntary consent is meaningless in Xinjiang’s carceral environment,” said David Matas, an international human rights lawyer who has previously investigated organ harvesting in China.

“Given the systemic repression, any claim that donations are voluntary should be treated with the utmost scepticism.”

Even before the new facilities were announced, Xinjiang was known as a hub for organ transplants.

In the province’s capital Urumqi, its airport has green arrows on the ground – known as “Green Passage” lanes – to fast-track the transit of those transporting organs.

A real dystopian nightmare, then – but of absolutely no interest to the Gaza-obsessed protestors on the streets every day.

Jo Phoenix at UnHerd on yesterday's Sullivan Report:

There is page after page of personal testimony. It speaks of gender-critical academics being taken through shadowy, Kafkaesque complaints processes and of research ethics committees over-reaching their mandate to subvert the research of academics interested in sex and gender. It goes on to describe actual harassment and bullying….

As if detailing the bigotry faced by gender-critical academics was not enough, the report also tells us something about our universities as a whole. They have become  lawless places where adherence to a political dogma mattered more than the quest for knowledge and truth using the scientific methods of debate, discussion and critique.

For anyone who has been paying attention, the findings of the Sullivan Review should be no surprise. After all, many of us have been sounding the alarm for nearly a decade. We’ve been saying that a small but highly vocal, very disruptive group of academic activists have been using whatever tactics they can to stop any questions or critique of the (frankly) ridiculous idea that humans can change sex.

I’m reading part 2 of the Sullivan Report. Hard to pick out any examples of outstanding charlatanry highlighted, there are so many. But I think this is a particularly startling one. https://t.co/GMGPrP4y4G pic.twitter.com/C8Zt7nvPuF

— Philip Hensher (@PhilipHensher) July 2, 2025

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No "Jews Lives Matter" for Karen Diamond: she's already forgotten.  Brendan O'Neill at Spiked:

A woman has died following a savage racist attack. She was doused in a flammable liquid and set on fire by a man barking bigoted insults in her face. She later succumbed to her injuries, her precious life extinguished in a 21st-century lynching by fire. But you will not see blacked-out squares on Instagram for this victim of racist violence. The left will not march. No hashtag will trend. Few hands will be wrung in woke circles over this most hellish assault. Why? Because the victim was a Jew.

Her name was Karen Diamond. She was 82 years old. She was one of 29 people who gathered at Pearl Street Mall in Boulder, Colorado on 1 June to call for the release of the Israeli hostages. Their small, prayerful assembly was intruded on in the most sickening fashion by one Mohamed Sabry Soliman. He is suspected of having splashed the gathering with petrol before wielding a homemade flame-thrower to try to immolate them. It’s 2025 and they’re burning Jews again.

Thirteen people were injured. Karen Diamond’s injuries were too severe to survive: she died last week, as revealed in court documents filed this week. What made this act of savagery especially heinous was the age of the victims. The eight people hospitalised were aged 52 to 88. The oldest, Barbara Steinmetz, was a Holocaust survivor, having fled Nazi Europe as an infant in the 1940s. She escaped Hitler’s flames, but not the flames of the rabid ‘anti-Zionism’ raging in the West in 2025.

More from Kathleen Stock on the latest Sullivan Report:

This is Michele in 2018 – the talk speaks for itself – and absolute shame on her colleagues at London Southbank University for the way they treated her https://t.co/TsuWBnGG8g

— Kathleen Stock (@Docstockk) July 2, 2025

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It's interesting that we've had two reports in the past week or so on a couple of professions where, more than any others perhaps, you'd expect the best of our lovely liberal graduates to gravitate, keen to help spread their enlightened ideas for the benefit of the rest of us. That is, publishing last week, and academia today. Both reports have revealed the the foulest and most vicious abuse aimed at those who've refused to accept the gender ideology that's come to rule in progressive circles. Comparisons with Stalin's Russia and show trials don't seem misplaced to me. No, no one's been led out to be shot, but this is as near as it gets in modern Britain.

I made the comparison to Lysenko a few months back. It's a grim lesson in the power of ideology – and the sheer unashamed glee with which people seize the chance to bully and persecute "outsider" others when given the chance.

"Concerns were raised about him being a paedophile, and these were completely unrelated to him turning out to be a paedophile." https://t.co/rZOfpXYfZf

— Progressive Misogyny (@JustMisogyny) July 2, 2025

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yle=”font-size: 11pt”>This is not a cry for pity – it is a warning. If Hamas is allowed to keep paying its fighters and civil servants in Gaza from the comfort of Doha, then the countdown to another October 7 has already begun. The only way to truly defeat Hamas is to build a civil alternative – a government for and by the people of Gaza, firmly opposed to Hamas’s rule. In the shadow of Yahya Sinwar’s suicidal war, a growing number of us believe this tragic cycle can finally be broken.

Our grassroots movement wants a real and lasting peace with Israel, not just a ceasefire. We want the Israeli hostages to go home to their families. We want to end the corruption and repression of Hamas, just as we want freedom from Israeli control. We want jobs. We want education. We want to live.

Not if Palestine Action and all the associated Hamas fan boys have their way. 

The urgency of addressing Gaza’s aid problem relates, in turn, to the reason the GHF was established to begin with: the bitter legacy of Hamas’s theft and exploitation of humanitarian aid. Since the war began, I have been forced to purchase on the black market, at exorbitant prices, food from donor nations in boxes marked explicitly “not for sale”. Hamas bears responsibility for this tragedy: it diverted aid to fuel its war machine and feed its loyalists, such that it did not reach the people who needed it most. Hamas is desperate to regain control over aid distribution in order to maintain this unjust system which perpetuates Gazan suffering….

After the war, in a “safe zone”, we must begin to rebuild a society that believes in peace. We need a new curriculum, one that eliminates extremist ideologies. We need a new intellectual revolution before we can even begin to talk about long-term political solutions.

So that's goodbye to all those UNRWA schools, then. Goodbye to UNRWA altogether.

Well, good luck. It's not just Hamas you have to overcome, it's much of world opinion – from the UN on down.

One consequence of the recent disastrous launch of a North Korean warship: unpaid overtime:

Workers at Sinpo Shipyard have been forced to work unpaid overtime to “boost their sense of responsibility.” This follows North Korea’s failed destroyer launch at Chongjin Shipyard and the arrest of several people blamed for the disaster.

Workers are complaining that the new policy is unnecessary and hurts their ability to make a living.

According to a Daily NK source in South Hamgyong province, Sinpo Shipyard’s party committee held an internal meeting where they told workers to “boost their sense of responsibility” to prevent incidents like the failed destroyer launch. They called the accident at Chongjin Shipyard “a shame on shipyard workers everywhere.”

The shipyard’s party committee ordered mandatory overtime for all work teams and required workers to carefully document their daily activities in journals.

“Going home right after work shows you lack revolutionary spirit,” officials said, ordering party cell secretaries to report on workers’ attitudes, what time they leave, and whether they skip work without permission.

It might all make sense if the shipyard was loaded with work – but there's nothing to do.

“Sinpo Shipyard workers can’t leave on time anymore and have to stay an extra hour or two every day doing busy work, but they don’t get paid for the overtime and don’t get extra food rations,” the source said. “Officials demand that workers look busy even when there’s nothing to do, which is making everyone more frustrated.”

“We usually kill time during regular hours doing odd jobs since there’s no real work anyway, and now officials watch us to make sure we stay late,” one Sinpo Shipyard worker said. “It would be fine if there was actual work to do, but I feel awful having to pretend I’m busy just to avoid getting in trouble for leaving when there’s nothing to do.”

Workers are especially angry about the forced overtime because it directly hurts their families’ income.

“Everyone’s complaining that they need to help their wives at the market after work, but now they can’t because of the extended hours. Many people are saying workers are suffering just so the party committee can impress their bosses,” the source said.

In other words, workers who can barely survive on what their wives earn at markets—since shipyard salaries aren’t enough—are openly complaining about overtime policies designed mainly to make party officials look good.

the impact of suppressing puberty on neuropsychological function, saying: “I have never encountered the kinds of concerns that some of the reviewers expressed in response to my review of puberty blockers. It wasn’t the methods they objected to, it was the actual findings.”

The report is here. Note, this is the second part of the Sullivan Review.

And here's commentary from Sullivan herself:

In the past decade, British academics have been attacked, vilified and ostracised simply for asserting that sex is real, binary and important. They include Kathleen Stock, compelled to resign from the University of Sussex after a sustained campaign of intimidation, and Michele Moore, abandoned by London South Bank University and forced to use a kitchen annexe for an office after shining a light on abuses at the Tavistock Clinic.

In a climate where people are frightened to express their views or even to ask questions, universities have a responsibility to act as bastions of critical analysis, where reasoned debate and the pursuit of knowledge thrive. This is not only about protecting individuals but also the integrity of scientific research and scholarship.

Instead, universities have, perhaps unwittingly, institutionalised behaviours which undermine free speech and inquiry. Equality, diversity and inclusion policies and networks have been turned against groups they are supposed to protect, including women and particularly lesbians….

Sex is a fundamental category in all research concerning humans, from biology to sociology. When certain facts become unspeakable, it doesn’t just hurt individuals, it compromises the integrity of scholarship. This weakens public trust in universities, science and scholarship, and ultimately undermines our democracy. At a time when higher education faces grave financial difficulties, my recommendations provide an opportunity for vice-chancellors to cut bureaucratic bloat and promote research integrity — a win-win for the sector.

Added:

Part II of the Sullivan report is out today. It contains details of what I and many others were put through in UK Universities to make pedestrian points about human biology and its medical and social impacts on well-being and interests. The point is not the harms to us,… https://t.co/Xgaq592Nyp

— Kathleen Stock (@Docstockk) July 2, 2025

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Full text:

The point is not the harms to us, personally – I for one am very glad I ended up on the right side of history, when the wrong side was sterilising minors and chopping sexual organs out, putting sex-offending men in women's prisons, and pushing women athletes out of competition. The point is the effect of this intensely hostile environment – the research dropped, the talks not given, the lips bitten and the things not said. With Office for Student's new guidance in place, let's hope these poisonous tactics get rooted out of our research institutions, along with (eventually) the senior academics who instigated and facilitated them.