A letter to the Times today from James Johnson, Chairman of the BMA council from 2003-07: Sir, As a former chairman of the BMA council I, like so many other members, have been horrified and saddened by the direction taken by the organisation in recent years. The latest idiocy is its peremptory rejection of the…

Creative Scotland is in dire financial straits, but the latest scandal is entirely of its own making. To get the full picture a good start would be with poet Jenny Lindsay's account of her experience at the hands of Scotland's finest literary minds – Anatomy of a Hounding – after she dared to complain about…

It was just confirmed that Hamas murdered 6 Israeli and American hostages. They were reportedly executed at short range very recently and their bodies recovered from a terror tunnel in Rafah. Among the murdered were Hersh Goldberg-Polin, Eden Yerushalmi, Carmel Gat, Almog Sarusi,… pic.twitter.com/O8O1omHiYJ — Noa Tishby (@noatishby) September 1, 2024 https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js Full text: It…

Today father-of-two "Valentina" Petrillo will compete in the Paralympics as a woman. Oliver Brown in the Telegraph: This was a dream,” says Valentina Petrillo, who today becomes a Paralympic sprinter at the age of 51, “that I had since I was a little girl.” Except this is an athlete who was never a little girl…

Unbelievable but true—Germany now has its own morality police. A Muslim man in Berlin is chasing down two women for their ‘improper hijab,’ lecturing them on how to dress ‘correctly.’ This isn’t just harassment; it’s a terrifying echo of the Hijab police we’ve battled in Iran… pic.twitter.com/VzezACtNr7 — Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) September 1, 2024…

The Labour governemnt is threatening to backtrack on the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act, brought in by the Conservatives. There's certainly an element of the by-now obligatory Tory-bashing in this, whereby everything at every opportunity is blamed on the previous government – it's been branded, ludicrously, as “the Tories’ hate speech charter” – but…

An interesting piece in the JC from Maia - a woman who emigrated to Israel from California, where she'd convinced herself that she was a man born in the wrong body. Then she had an epiphany. As told to Nicole Lampert: On October 7, when the sirens started going off in Jerusalem, I was in a…

The Robin DiAngelo plagiarism affair is the subject of Hadley Freeman's latest in today's Sunday Times – the anti-racist doyenne caught in her own trap: A few years ago, not long after the 2020 murder of George Floyd in Minnesota, I received an email from my now-former bosses in London [that would be the Guardian…

Did you know? The Italian anthem "Bella Ciao," now embraced by Iranian women fighting for freedom, has roots in Jewish folk music. The melody originally came from Eastern European Jewish traditions before evolving into a symbol of resistance and unity. pic.twitter.com/CLp3gwdqKJ — Hen Mazzig (@HenMazzig) August 31, 2024 I can't resist re-posting this, from November…

Meanwhile, in Germany: A podcast episode of Hoss and Hopf had to be deleted by court order because the moderators called a trans-identified man “a man” and used male pronouns to refer to him. The podcasters may be facing potential prison time or a fine of up to €250,000. In the controversial podcast episode, the hosts discussed…