From the Daily NK: A North Korean university in Wonsan, Kangwon province, held a mandatory ideological lecture on Feb. 1 instructing faculty and students to view South Korea as an enemy state, ahead of the upcoming Ninth Party Congress. The Kangwon provincial party committee ordered the lectures at the end of January, directing institutions to prioritize sessions on “hostile relations with South Korea” and the supposed triumph of Pyongyang’s strategy against…

In Iranian culture the 40th day after a death is a solemn threshold. Families & friends gather at graves in a ritual of grief, both private and communal. As in the 2nd video, they continue to chant slogans: “your canons, tanks, and machine guns no longer have an effect, tell my mother that she no…

An insider’s account of Tehran’s killing nights. A man who says he was deployed during Tehran’s January crackdown describes watching protesters shot and helping load bodies into refrigerated trucks, including a little girl whose earrings had been taken before her body was thrown inside. Kazem, a 40-year-old Tehran resident, says he was present as part…

A useful summation of where we are, from Akua Reindorf in the Times: The Supreme Court typically addresses cases of general public importance that contain the knottiest unresolved points of legal analysis. It is a measure of just how messy things had become in 2024 that the court agreed to answer a question about which…

More on Jolyon Maugham and his denial of defeat, here from Jo Bartosch at The Critic: There is a whiff of the swivel-eyed 9/11 truther in Maugham’s telling — that official accounts cannot be taken at face value, that powerful forces are aligned against The Righteous, that GLP has privileged information about the way things…

Never ones to let an opportunity pass to spread the most deranged nonsense, a fanatical antisemite here, along with the familiar blood libel, seizes on the Epstein scandal to inject more poison into the world: Swedish-Algerian journalist Yahya Abu Zakariya spread blood libel in a February 4, 2026 interview with Roula Nasr on YouTube. He…

Lucky Bridget Phillipson. As well as that Good Law Project letter, she’s also getting this. This is in response to a UK Supreme Court ruling that the term “woman” refers to a human of the female sex, and that access to single-sex spaces must be based on “biological sex” instead of a person’s subjective “gender…