and still they can't find their own arse with a map any longer.
NHS Scotland spends ‘farcical’ £360,000 on actors to train medics The budget for actors to role-play patients would be better spent on frontline services, says Scottish Labour
NHS Scotland has been attacked for spending hundreds of thousands of pounds on a “farcical” use of professional actors to play fake patients to help train medics. About £360,000 has been set aside to pay actors and role-players to impersonate people with illnesses and medical conditions to help doctors and nurses hone their skills.
The spending is against the background of a cash-stretched NHS in Scotland. At the end of last year, Stephen Boyle, the auditor-general, warned that the finances of NHS Scotland were “unsustainable”. Earlier this month, Audit Scotland, Scotland’s spending watchdog, warned of “unprecedented” financial challenges at NHS Ayrshire & Arran, while NHS Grampian must redesign its health and social care system to balance the books.
nostr:nprofile1qyt8wumn8ghj7un9d3shjtnyd968gmewwp6kytcqyzzt97lrml84re2h8m2pjuhaqjgseg4e6akfdz6gnuf6wygxxhpg6mqf3wm
Re the other week's convo. Typical bougie faux Left behaviour, she had it in spades!
https://unherd.com/2025/11/jessica-mitford-faux-progressive-troublemaker/
On the other, stealing seems to have been her favourite form of economic redistribution, and not only from the rich. She took food from cafes, pilfered toiletries and household goods from kindly hosts and benefactors, and at one point snatched “a mattress from a nearby cabin” so she could get a comfortable night camping in a tent. And she didn’t mind exploiting others’ labour either. During the war, she was employed as a typist at the Office of Price Administration, but couldn’t type, so — as she herself described it in her own memoir — she would wander into the typing pool and pretend to be a boss: “I want nine copies of this by noon, please, and be sure that it’s correctly proof-read.” Later, newly arrived in San Francisco with an inconvenient baby in tow, Decca persuaded her working-class landlady to babysit “and to charge her less than half the going rate”. It’s not so clear, then, that Decca’s life functions as idealised woke inspo, for oblivious entitlement is never far enough away, even when she is poor. And she’s unlikely to win any posthumous awards for gentle parenting either. Going on honeymoon with her second husband, and faced with the problem of what to do with her two-year-old, the couple took a bus trip, “passing Constancia and her suitcase out the window to a family to whom they’d been given a letter of introduction”. And when her little boy had an inconvenient fever on the day of a house move, Decca simply deposited him at the hospital and rushed off, leaving the nurses “furious”.
nostr:nprofile1qyt8wumn8ghj7un9d3shjtnyd968gmewwp6kytcqyzzt97lrml84re2h8m2pjuhaqjgseg4e6akfdz6gnuf6wygxxhpg6mqf3wm
Re the other week's convo
Typical bougie faux Left behaviour, she had it in spades!
https://unherd.com/2025/11/jessica-mitford-faux-progressive-troublemaker/
On the other, stealing seems to have been her favourite form of economic redistribution, and not only from the rich. She took food from cafes, pilfered toiletries and household goods from kindly hosts and benefactors, and at one point snatched “a mattress from a nearby cabin” so she could get a comfortable night camping in a tent. And she didn’t mind exploiting others’ labour either. During the war, she was employed as a typist at the Office of Price Administration, but couldn’t type, so — as she herself described it in her own memoir — she would wander into the typing pool and pretend to be a boss: “I want nine copies of this by noon, please, and be sure that it’s correctly proof-read.” Later, newly arrived in San Francisco with an inconvenient baby in tow, Decca persuaded her working-class landlady to babysit “and to charge her less than half the going rate”.
It’s not so clear, then, that Decca’s life functions as idealised woke inspo, for oblivious entitlement is never far enough away, even when she is poor. And she’s unlikely to win any posthumous awards for gentle parenting either. Going on honeymoon with her second husband, and faced with the problem of what to do with her two-year-old, the couple took a bus trip, “passing Constancia and her suitcase out the window to a family to whom they’d been given a letter of introduction”. And when her little boy had an inconvenient fever on the day of a house move, Decca simply deposited him at the hospital and rushed off, leaving the nurses “furious”.
https://unherd.com/2025/11/can-britain-escape-its-housing-trap/
For most of the 20th century, private renting was a very different beast. Rent controls were introduced into the market in 1915, after landlords in Glasgow attempted to hike rates by 25% and, with most of the men fighting in war, the city’s women went on rent strike. This led to emergency war-time rental protections, which survived in some form until the Eighties. Moreover, private tenants had access to long-term security of tenure. Back then, landlords saw themselves as part of a particular community. Old-school businesses and occasionally paternalistic organisations became involved: the Sutton family, former dockers who had been investing in property since the 19th century, dominated the area of East London I grew up in. But others were sharks, who did their best to operate outside the legal structures. Associated with organised crime, they sought the most vulnerable tenants, often new immigrants. Peter Rachman, who owned more than 100 properties in West London, gained such a strong reputation for bullying and intimidating tenants that “Rachmanism” now describes this form of semi-legal landlord exploitation. Conditions in these homes were a living disaster: whole families in single rooms, outside toilets, rat infestations.
But by the Seventies, all types of private landlords were dying out. Property prices were low enough that many working families could afford to buy — and decades of major building programmes meant those who couldn’t were still able to get a council house. Indeed, even Right-wing commentators at the time believed the decline of private landlords was “quite irreversible” and that within a generation they would be “as extinct as the dinosaur”. Instead, we took a different path. In 1976, the UK got itself into financial trouble and had to go to the International Monetary Fund for a bailout. The terms of the loan demanded brutal spending cuts: and specifically targeted expenditure on new council housing. The IMF wanted the state out and the private sector in.
This was followed, three years later, by the arrival of Margaret Thatcher as prime minister. A leader who enthusiastically embraced the IMF’s philosophy, she cut spending on new council housing almost to nil, and introduced the Right to Buy policy, which saw millions of homes in the existing stock rapidly sold off. In 1988, Thatcher liberalised the rental market, axing rental control and introducing short-term tenancies with “no-fault” evictions. The idea was that private landlords would replace the state: people who couldn’t afford to buy would no longer get council housing. Instead, they would rent privately and claim housing benefit to meet the higher costs. As one of Thatcher’s housing ministers, George Young, said in 1991: “If people cannot afford to pay that market rent, housing benefit will take the strain.”
A housing strategy for the country would mean plotting a way out of this cycle of doom, and imagining a future where we no longer treat housing as a route to quick profits and instead as essential social infrastructure which we cannot do without.
https://unherd.com/2025/11/can-britain-escape-its-housing-trap/
For most of the 20th century, private renting was a very different beast. Rent controls were introduced into the market in 1915, after landlords in Glasgow attempted to hike rates by 25% and, with most of the men fighting in war, the city’s women went on rent strike. This led to emergency war-time rental protections, which survived in some form until the Eighties. Moreover, private tenants had access to long-term security of tenure. Back then, landlords saw themselves as part of a particular community. Old-school businesses and occasionally paternalistic organisations became involved: the Sutton family, former dockers who had been investing in property since the 19th century, dominated the area of East London I grew up in. But others were sharks, who did their best to operate outside the legal structures. Associated with organised crime, they sought the most vulnerable tenants, often new immigrants. Peter Rachman, who owned more than 100 properties in West London, gained such a strong reputation for bullying and intimidating tenants that “Rachmanism” now describes this form of semi-legal landlord exploitation. Conditions in these homes were a living disaster: whole families in single rooms, outside toilets, rat infestations.
But by the Seventies, all types of private landlords were dying out. Property prices were low enough that many working families could afford to buy — and decades of major building programmes meant those who couldn’t were still able to get a council house. Indeed, even Right-wing commentators at the time believed the decline of private landlords was “quite irreversible” and that within a generation they would be “as extinct as the dinosaur”. Instead, we took a different path. In 1976, the UK got itself into financial trouble and had to go to the International Monetary Fund for a bailout. The terms of the loan demanded brutal spending cuts: and specifically targeted expenditure on new council housing. The IMF wanted the state out and the private sector in.
This was followed, three years later, by the arrival of Margaret Thatcher as prime minister. A leader who enthusiastically embraced the IMF’s philosophy, she cut spending on new council housing almost to nil, and introduced the Right to Buy policy, which saw millions of homes in the existing stock rapidly sold off. In 1988, Thatcher liberalised the rental market, axing rental control and introducing short-term tenancies with “no-fault” evictions. The idea was that private landlords would replace the state: people who couldn’t afford to buy would no longer get council housing. Instead, they would rent privately and claim housing benefit to meet the higher costs. As one of Thatcher’s housing ministers, George Young, said in 1991: “If people cannot afford to pay that market rent, housing benefit will take the strain.”
A housing strategy for the country would mean plotting a way out of this cycle of doom, and imagining a future where we no longer treat housing as a route to quick profits and instead as essential social infrastructure which we cannot do without.
https://unherd.com/2025/11/can-britain-escape-its-housing-trap/
For most of the 20th century, private renting was a very different beast. Rent controls were introduced into the market in 1915, after landlords in Glasgow attempted to hike rates by 25% and, with most of the men fighting in war, the city’s women went on rent strike. This led to emergency war-time rental protections, which survived in some form until the Eighties. Moreover, private tenants had access to long-term security of tenure. Back then, landlords saw themselves as part of a particular community. Old-school businesses and occasionally paternalistic organisations became involved: the Sutton family, former dockers who had been investing in property since the 19th century, dominated the area of East London I grew up in. But others were sharks, who did their best to operate outside the legal structures. Associated with organised crime, they sought the most vulnerable tenants, often new immigrants. Peter Rachman, who owned more than 100 properties in West London, gained such a strong reputation for bullying and intimidating tenants that “Rachmanism” now describes this form of semi-legal landlord exploitation. Conditions in these homes were a living disaster: whole families in single rooms, outside toilets, rat infestations.
But by the Seventies, all types of private landlords were dying out. Property prices were low enough that many working families could afford to buy — and decades of major building programmes meant those who couldn’t were still able to get a council house. Indeed, even Right-wing commentators at the time believed the decline of private landlords was “quite irreversible” and that within a generation they would be “as extinct as the dinosaur”. Instead, we took a different path. In 1976, the UK got itself into financial trouble and had to go to the International Monetary Fund for a bailout. The terms of the loan demanded brutal spending cuts: and specifically targeted expenditure on new council housing. The IMF wanted the state out and the private sector in.
This was followed, three years later, by the arrival of Margaret Thatcher as prime minister. A leader who enthusiastically embraced the IMF’s philosophy, she cut spending on new council housing almost to nil, and introduced the Right to Buy policy, which saw millions of homes in the existing stock rapidly sold off. In 1988, Thatcher liberalised the rental market, axing rental control and introducing short-term tenancies with “no-fault” evictions. The idea was that private landlords would replace the state: people who couldn’t afford to buy would no longer get council housing. Instead, they would rent privately and claim housing benefit to meet the higher costs. As one of Thatcher’s housing ministers, George Young, said in 1991: “If people cannot afford to pay that market rent, housing benefit will take the strain.”
A housing strategy for the country would mean plotting a way out of this cycle of doom, and imagining a future where we no longer treat housing as a route to quick profits and instead as essential social infrastructure which we cannot do without.
https://unherd.com/2025/11/the-cruelty-of-tiktok-truthers/
There are material rewards for influencers in the true crime ecosystem: attention, clout, money (if they monetise their channel). That helps to explain the supply, but not the demand. Why should anyone want to believe dreadful and unlikely things about people like Duncan or the McCanns, when they have already suffered the worst thing imaginable? The answer is, precisely, because they have suffered the worst thing imaginable. To accept that Kate McCann or Debbie Duncan are just like any other mothers would be to accept that what happened to them could happen to anyone. Which it could. In the real world, a young man can die of one idiotic choice, and a small girl can be lost because her parents were ever so briefly inattentive. In the real world, there is no way to be “good enough” to prevent such horrors: they happen regardless of how virtuous you are. Believing in conspiracist explanations is a literal-minded way of asserting the “just-world fallacy”. It is nicer to tell ourselves that such events can only befall the wicked, and once the wickedness of the bereaved has been assumed, any depraved acts can be attributed to them. Conspiracy-world is a more moral place than the real world, governed by the same reassuringly strict rules of action-and-consequence as a snakes-and-ladders board.
Conspiracy-world is also a more interesting place than the real world. Accidents and abusers are quotidian and grubby. A killer mother, though? That’s a thrilling proposition, a giddily exciting inversion of the expected order where a woman’s function is to love and nurture. The need to hate these mothers of the missing is so profound that the cycle seems irresistible. Regrettably, Duncan is learning, as the McCanns learned before her, that the truth will always be overpowered by the seduction force of a mystery.
Good God :blob_dizzy_face:
😂 :blob_cat_giggle:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c39749px2zyo
People around the world have been able to catch a glimpse of the Beaver supermoon as it rose on Wednesday.
The largest, brightest Moon of the year has been shining in all its glory in the areas lucky enough to have a clear sky.
Wednesday's supermoon is bigger and brighter than earlier supermoons this year due to the fact that it is the closest full Moon to Earth.
This happens because the Moon does not orbit the Earth in a perfect circle - its axis of orbit more closely resembles an oval.
THREE migrants have been charged after a woman was allegedly dragged on to a beach and raped in a popular UK seaside town.
Cops rushed to the lower esplanade in Brighton, East Sussex, at 5am on October 5 after a 33-year-old woman reported she was attacked. It is believed she had been at a nightclub in the city before the “terrifying” incident.
An investigation was immediately launched with detectives arresting and charging three men in connection with the alleged rape.
Egyptians Karin Al-Danasurt, 20, and Ibrahim Alshafe, 35, and Abdulla Ahmadi, 25, from Iran, were charged on Thursday with the trio remanded in custody.
Al-Danasurt and Alshafe – who were charged with two counts of rape each – live in the same taxpayer-funded asylum seeker hotel in West Sussex.
Oh FFS! 🤦
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/czxwvr57424o
The facelift is moving into new territory.
A quick search on socials and my feed is inundated with posts from people in their late 20s, 30s, discussing different types of facelift - the mini, the ponytail, the deep plane.
Gone are the days when facelifts were reserved for the ageing wealthy - now an increasing number of younger people are opting to go under the knife.
Some happily share pictures of their face before, after and the very bruised bit in between - their often very painful recovery.
It's no longer a procedure that's spoken about in secret, celebrities like Kris Jenner, Catt Sadler and Marc Jacobs have spoken openly about their treatment. Many more are rumoured to have had one.
The facelift is often seen as the last resort, the most major of cosmetic surgeries.
Are people becoming so insecure in an often fake online world that they will pay thousands of pounds for the operation?
Or have we had so many non-surgical treatments, such as Botox and fillers, that having our skin peeled from our cheekbones and our facial tissues and fat rearranged feels like a logical - and longer lasting - next step?
Absolutely.
Maddening. Did you get seen?
In late July, a self-described “eyewitness” finally emerged—a former US Army green beret named Anthony Aguilar, who had been dismissed as a security contractor for the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. News organisations (including the BBC and PBS), websites, and numerous podcasts carried interviews with Aguilar in which he was described as a “whistleblower” and permitted to allege “barbaric” tactics and “war crimes” on the part of US security contractors and the Israel Defence Forces (IDF). Nobody seemed to mind that the accompanying footage from Aguilar’s body camera showed not a single killing. Aguilar’s most heart-rending story—in which he claimed to have been kissed by a grateful Palestinian boy whose killing he then witnessed—was later found to have been fabricated in every detail. The boy was never shot and remains alive. At the time of writing—four days after Aguilar’s claims had been fully discredited in early September—neither the BBC nor PBS had amended their earlier coverage.
As consumers of this kind of evidence-free “content,” ordinary citizens can be divided into roughly four categories, depending on the topic at hand. Some of us accept unverified information out of naked bias. In the case of the Gaza food-aid story, millions of our fellow citizens in the West require no evidence to embrace the familiar and uncomplicated fable of Israeli (or Jewish) evil. Indeed, facts or even nuances are highly inconvenient for these consumers, who then must take the trouble to cancel or wilfully ignore the purveyors of such evidence.
Others of us respond with what might be called “learned ignorance.” This fast-growing group has simply never been taught how to distinguish between fact and fiction, let alone fact and claim. On the contrary. Their education includes fewer and fewer examples of objective inquiry, the scientific method, and the principle of innocence until proven guilty, but many classroom hours of propaganda and critical theorising that condemns the disfavoured without a hearing. In today’s post-truth information environment, the learned ignorant are society’s babes in the woods.
A third group of us go along to get along. We conform—or appear to conform—via our social-media “likes,” our cocktail-party commiserations, our bumper stickers, or simply our silence. This is how we avoid the professional or social consequences of perceived dissent from the prevailing narratives of powerful in-groups. It is one thing to set your drunken uncle straight at a family dinner, but it is quite another to question the chosen dogma of your CEO, your pastor, your university dean, or a vaunted international organisation on the issue of the moment.
⚠️SOUTHAMPTON: Joseph Fisher, 25, caught with 1000s of CSA images - incl. 1YO babies, has walked free.
Court heard he was isolated during the pandemic. Judge Peters said Fisher "corrupted" himself by viewing.
A computer game also found included 1000s of CSA. 30 'rehab' days
⚠️OXFORD: Daniel Kalinowski, 32, caught with 1500+ CSA images of children as young as 3, has walked free.
Court heard that he "had a difficult upbringing" & that he'd now relocated to Nottingham & "had a job making parts for aeroplanes"
Judge Khan ordered 200 hrs unpaid work
Remarkable, innit.
🙄
The UK’s ambassador to the US, Peter Mandelson, has said more “very embarrassing” details of his friendship with the paedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein will come out, as he said he had never seen any “wrongdoing”.
His admission comes after US lawmakers released Epstein’s 50th “birthday book”, in which Mandelson called him “my best pal”, in a handwritten note.
In his first public comments since the revelation, Lord Mandelson said he “never sought, nor did [Epstein] offer” any introductions to women in the same way as he had done for others, “perhaps it’s because I’m a gay man”.
The Labour peer sought to defend himself in his first public appearance since the revelations, as he told the Harry Cole Saves the West podcast that Epstein was a “charismatic criminal liar”, adding that he deeply regretted continuing their association “far longer than I should have”.
She sometimes leaves comments on Unherd articles.
https://unherd.com/2025/09/the-mutiny-of-middle-englands-mums/
The costly burglar alarms, gated compounds, and private security patrols that compensate for eroded public trust and safety in effect transform an intangible common good into a luxury for the rich. This makes the loss of an existing atmosphere of safety a far graver threat to those of modest means — not to mention one that, for reasons that should be obvious, lands especially heavily on women. So we shouldn’t be surprised if women are beginning to protest, especially as the side-effects of recent, rapid immigration extend palpably beyond big cities into provincial Britain, while the ongoing small boats crisis brings matters to a head. Of course some population turnover is normal, and plenty of newcomers just want to fit in; in the ordinary course of things, such individuals tend to be absorbed in short order. But this is not always the case, and becomes more noticeable as the volume increases.
As things stand, my own small town feels tranquil and familiar enough that primary-age children of both sexes play outdoors unaccompanied. But Reform’s swelling membership stands as testament to the radicalisation of Middle England, which is happening in no small part as mothers in similar towns up and down the country fear, or as in Epping simply experience, the rapid erosion of their treasured safety and familiarity. Some women might deride this as “bigoted”, especially if sufficiently rich or inured to big-city social norms to be puzzled by such distress. But far more are motivated not by ideology so much as looking after their own. And these women are on the warpath. The same outlet reports sympathetically on this group’s loss of felt safety, recently quoting Carly, 38, on the asylum hotel opened near her tiny Somerset village: “I don’t go out running any more because some of the men hang around in groups and they used to shout things out when I ran past them,” she said. “I found it very intimidating.” Why, such women might be forgiven for asking, should we give up our freedom to exercise outdoors alone? What, indeed, gives the Home Office the right to take away our teenage daughters’ confidence-building freedom to go out un-chaperoned? Accordingly, women now feature front and centre in asylum protests. And those in towns that still feel safe think: “This could be me next”. As they face this prospect, Middle England’s middle-aged mums are growing increasingly militant.
https://unherd.com/2025/09/the-mutiny-of-middle-englands-mums/
The costly burglar alarms, gated compounds, and private security patrols that compensate for eroded public trust and safety in effect transform an intangible common good into a luxury for the rich. This makes the loss of an existing atmosphere of safety a far graver threat to those of modest means — not to mention one that, for reasons that should be obvious, lands especially heavily on women. So we shouldn’t be surprised if women are beginning to protest, especially as the side-effects of recent, rapid immigration extend palpably beyond big cities into provincial Britain, while the ongoing small boats crisis brings matters to a head. Of course some population turnover is normal, and plenty of newcomers just want to fit in; in the ordinary course of things, such individuals tend to be absorbed in short order. But this is not always the case, and becomes more noticeable as the volume increases.
As things stand, my own small town feels tranquil and familiar enough that primary-age children of both sexes play outdoors unaccompanied. But Reform’s swelling membership stands as testament to the radicalisation of Middle England, which is happening in no small part as mothers in similar towns up and down the country fear, or as in Epping simply experience, the rapid erosion of their treasured safety and familiarity. Some women might deride this as “bigoted”, especially if sufficiently rich or inured to big-city social norms to be puzzled by such distress. But far more are motivated not by ideology so much as looking after their own. And these women are on the warpath. The same outlet reports sympathetically on this group’s loss of felt safety, recently quoting Carly, 38, on the asylum hotel opened near her tiny Somerset village: “I don’t go out running any more because some of the men hang around in groups and they used to shout things out when I ran past them,” she said. “I found it very intimidating.” Why, such women might be forgiven for asking, should we give up our freedom to exercise outdoors alone? What, indeed, gives the Home Office the right to take away our teenage daughters’ confidence-building freedom to go out un-chaperoned? Accordingly, women now feature front and centre in asylum protests. And those in towns that still feel safe think: “This could be me next”. As they face this prospect, Middle England’s middle-aged mums are growing increasingly militant.
Fuck me, that is infuriating, there is too much of this kind of shit going on, and when the person says oi, it was you, not me, they more or less gaslight you from then on in over it. Appalling so it is.
Senior politicians have called for Boris Johnson’s £115,000 taxpayer-funded annual allowance to be suspended after revelations in the Guardian suggested the former prime minister may have used his private office to profit from contacts he gained in office.
The government ethics watchdog, which monitors the activities of former ministers and senior civil servants, has also opened an investigation into Johnson’s newly revealed contacts and income since leaving office.
Johnson’s engagements, revealed in a major data leak from his private office, include lobbying senior Saudi officials for a firm he co-chairs and meeting with Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, after which he received more than £200,000 from a hedge fund.
The disclosures shine a spotlight on how Johnson appears to have used his private office since resigning as prime minister and the scheme that allows former UK prime ministers to claim government money to pay for expenses “arising from their special position in public life”.
The Labour peer Margaret Hodge, a former chair of the public accounts committee, who has been a longtime transparency activist, called for a full investigation.
Hodge said the Guardian’s investigation suggested that “Boris Johnson is prepared to break the ethical standards of behaviour we all sign up to as public servants”.
She said Johnson appeared to have acted “with complete impunity”, ignoring the rules that all government ministers were expected to uphold when they left office.
Tut tut, Julie, writing for the "Right Wing press" again, are we, an ok for me but not for thee situation 🙄 She's absolutely bloody right, but she's also absolutely bloody hypocritical.
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/36624503/sharia-courts-starmer-two-tier-justice/
PM Keir Starmer says it is wrong to suggest there is two-tier justice in the UK – with some groups treated differently because of who they are. His Attorney General, Lord Hermer, went even further, saying such claims were “disgusting”. What I have found out about Sharia law in the UK shows how dangerously wrong they are. The horrific murder, forced marriage and coercive control of women and girls by family members is still referred to in the UK as “honour crime”. New research shows that there were 2,755 “honour”-based offences recorded here in the last year. Of these, 111 concerned FGM, or female genital mutilation, while 201 related to forced marriage. But my research has shown FGM may well be being carried out behind closed doors in private clinics on London’s Harley Street.
The law against it was introduced 40 years ago yet, so far, there have only ever been TWO prosecutions. Last month, the Home Office announced it will introduce a legal definition of “honour”-based abuse as part of the Government’s pledge to halve violence against women. Yet how will they do this when it would appear that Sharia courts — also known as “councils” — are rife in the UK? The creeping acceptance of Sharia law in the UK has serious ramifications. It signals that all women’s rights are under threat, because to support Sharia (as many liberal and left-wing people in the UK appear to do) is to be against equality. In December 2024, several months after Labour came to power, it was claimed in a major national newspaper investigation that the UK has become the “Western capital” for Sharia courts, which issue religious rulings on marriage and family life. The probe found that an app used by Muslims in England and Wales to create Islamic wills has a drop-down menu for men to select how many wives they have (up to four).
Sharia courts first appeared in Britain in the 1980s and also sanction “pleasure marriages”, which allow a man and woman to “marry” for as little as 30 minutes, so that the man can have sex outside of marriage, including in brothels. Women and girls living within Muslim communities in the UK are particularly vulnerable to domestic violence. Forced and early marriage, polygamy and draconian attitudes towards the role of women in the home result in such wives having little or no power — and men doing exactly as they wish.
I wish they would keep away from things like this though, whoever it is and regardless of whatever they are complaining about.
https://thecritic.co.uk/on-rotherham-and-the-reality-of-two-tier-policing/
Sammy Woodhouse was the original whistleblower of the notorious grooming gangs in Rotherham. She was a victim of Ash Hussain, who raped and groomed her for most of her teenage years. She said: I’d be seen by police on a daily basis with him. They would pull him over, ask how he was, he never had any tax or insurance, they didn’t care. They didn’t suggest that a 14 and a 24 year old was wrong. I lied to protect him too and I was the one who got the criminal record when they found us in bed once and charged me for having a baton in my bag. Imagine, her abuser caught in bed with an underage girl, and they don’t charge him — but they charge her! This week, it was reported that some police officers also abused children who were victims of these grooming gangs. One victim says she was raped from the age of 12 by a serving police officer in a marked car. He threatened to hand her back to the gang if she did not comply. PC Hassan Ali is named as one of the perpetrators. He died in 2015 following a car crash. He is alleged to have also been involved in supplying drugs. Later, Sammy says Ash’s family got involved. They wanted to take her eldest son (conceived by rape) because: They wanted to convert him to Islam. They wanted my son to have an arranged marriage. My son was excited he was going to marry his cousin and be a daddy. They told him I was a white slag.
I have written before that we can’t neglect the connection between grooming gangs and elements of Islam, with its theological justification of sexual abuse of non-Muslim girls. Justice has finally caught up with this abusive Muslim family. It took a while. Meanwhile, also last week it emerged that police in Rotherham took time out from dealing with actual crimes to arrest a Christian street preacher for asking a question of a member of the public about what the Qur’an says.
The articles in question, they run around by themselves and probably bite too. My late cousin's MIL, in her 90s, is still churning them out weekly.
https://www.scottishislandgifts.com/product/harris-wool-boban-socks/
🚩
https://x.com/realMaalouf/status/1949964659575914993
Is it normal for a primary school teacher in America to dress like this?
My God, society is so fucked and it happened so quickly 😬
https://x.com/ThePosieParker/status/1949520283578036407
Muslim man tries his hardest (in front of police) to justify child rape, complete with reams of victim blaming, and bonus apparent confusion at why all rapists should go to prison. Earlier today at Speakers' Corner, Hyde Park.
#LetWomenSpeak #FreeYourFaces
✂️ 🍆 🤬
https://x.com/realMaalouf/status/1949857450946945471
Islamist preacher says he is very angry that British women wear makeup and perfume, and do not cover themselves in Islamic clothing. What would you tell him?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c206mp28exvo
A church pastor who sexually assaulted a female churchgoer under the pretence of "removing demons" from her body has been jailed for 10 years.
Walter Masocha, 61, groped the married woman at his home in Stirling, claiming he was a "gift from god".
The University of Stirling professor also attempted to rape another woman during a campaign of abuse from 2006 to 2012.
Masocha denied the attacks during the trial at the High Court in Livingston, but judge Susan Craig described his offending as "appalling".
She imposed a non-harassment orders banning him from approaching or contacting his two victims.
Masocha founded his own church in Scotland in 2007 soon after moving from Zimbabwe.
Reviewing the case, developmental biologist Emma Hilton noted on X that the toddler girl was “just about ready for a training bra. Normal for a 10-to-12-year-old.” She also noted that the toddler’s “uterus development was approaching Tanner stage 4. That’s period territory.” From the case study, it appears that the girl’s condition was reversed when the exposure to her father’s medication stopped.
“The hormone therapy of the father was changed from a gel to a transdermal patch, and the girl experienced regression of breast development, normalization of growth velocity, pelvic ultrasound and GnRH stimulation test,” reads the case study. Hilton, again posting to X, said that it may not be so simple: “And another note: his daughter’s precocious puberty ‘receded’ after exposure to estrogen was stopped. The assumption is that all is now ‘reset.’- I’d advocate caution there,” she wrote.
In another post, she told an X user that she is unsure if the girl will go on to experience a “normal” or “second” puberty, or if she will remain taller for her age. “I’m not sure there can be answer to that. It’s possibly unprecedented,” posted Hilton.
In a shocking incident, a 15-year-old girl was set on fire by some unidentified persons in Odisha’s Puri district on Saturday. The victim, a plus-two student, is undergoing treatment at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), Bhubaneswar, after suffering 70 per cent burn injuries. The harrowing incident reportedly took place at 9 am at Bayabar village under Balanda police station in Nimapada block, some 1.5 kilometres from the girl's home. Three young men on motorcycles stopped the girl as she was going to her friend's house. The accused forcefully took the girl to the banks of Bhargavi River, sprinkled an inflammable substance on her body, and set her on fire, PTI reported, quoting a police officer.
On seeing the flames, local people quickly arrived at the spot, but not before the culprits managed to flee. They doused the fire and took the girl to the Pipili government hospital, from where she was shifted to AIIMS Bhubaneswar. According to police, the girl suffered burn injuries on her back, abdomen and other parts.
A women's rights group is planning to sue the corporation who run Hampstead Heath Ladies' Pond for £50,000 because they allow transgender bathers in. Sex Matters, who advertise themselves as a 'human-rights charity', are gearing up to take legal action against the City of London Corporation over their stance that transgender women can use the ponds in north of the city. It has been the view of the corporation that anyone who identifies as a woman can swim in the Ladies' Pond under its formal guidance since 2019.
But critics in the women's rights group say this goes against the Supreme Court ruling, which earlier this year ruled that the legal definition of a woman should be based on their sex at birth under the Equality Act. After the ruling, the organisation said that its policy of trans women using the pond would 'remain in place' as it looked to gather legal advice, prompting the threat of courtroom action from the women's rights group.
The City of London Corporation has said that it did not need to comply with the requirement for single-sex spaces in the Equality Act, arguing: 'The Ladies' Pond is not a single sex facility … precisely because trans women are permitted to access the swimming facilities.' Chief Executive of Sex Matters, Maya Forstater, told The Times they were 'amazed' that the corporation held this view, saying it was 'nothing more than linguistic trickery'. She added: 'The corporation claims that, because it chooses to define "women" and "men" according not to biological sex but to who wants to be referred to as "she" or "he", the Supreme Court judgment doesn't apply.
The BBC should not have called Khalid Masood, the Westminster terrorist who killed five people, an “Islamic extremist”, because Islam means peace. News outlets are wrong to describe terror groups, including Hamas, Boko Haram and Islamic State, as “Islamist”. Indeed, the very term Islamism is “redundant” and should no longer be used by the press.
The headscarf for women is “normative” and a Muslim writer “misrepresent[ed] Muslim behaviour and belief” when she said there was “no basis in Islam for the niqab”, the full-face veil. The late Andrew Norfolk, of this newspaper, who did more than anyone to expose the grooming scandal, “scapegoated” Muslims.
Welcome to the Centre for Media Monitoring (CfMM), a little-scrutinised activist group seeking to skew the national conversation. CfMM is, or has recently been, part of the Muslim Council of Britain, with which successive governments have had a policy of non-engagement for its hardline views. But that has not stopped it from being listened to, welcomed or even employed at influential levels of the media. The CfMM claims to have been “feeding into the BBC’s terminology guidebook” and to have facilitated a focus group on the BBC’s behalf. It says it was “instrumental” in guidance by the press self-regulator, Ipso.
https://twitter-thread.com/t/1936422842305835365
🧵THIS IS TENI 🚩
Trans Equality Network Ireland is set to receive considerable funding via RTE's Late Late Toy Show.
This thread will highlight a few of what has always been the primary staff of TENI - straight men, mostly middle-aged ex husbands and fathers, who've choosen to dedicate their lives to the full-time indulgence of a sexual fetish. Women in Ireland have been keeping a close eye on these men. Every one of them have threatened us with violence if we refuse to comply with their demands. Please feel free to add information re each man so we can show the world what we and our children are expected to endure. 2/ Let's start with TENI's Adrian "Aoife" Martin, ex husband, father of two.
Here we have Mr. Martin throwing his menacing weight around in the women's toilets. Classy. Who wouldn't want to fund this behaviour via a family Christmas programme featuring children's toys @RTÉ ?