Mick Hartley

The Daily NK on the business of recruiting young women to work in Chinese factories.

South Pyongan province in North Korea has begun selecting workers to be dispatched to China following orders from the Central Committee of the Workers’ Party of Korea.

A source in the province told Daily NK recently that the order, issued by the Central Committee early this month, makes clear that the Workers’ Party of Korea is directly involved in the selection process.

The order states that the main candidates for selection at seafood processing and textile factories in China are unmarried women aged 19–23.

“The province is currently taking a very methodical approach to selecting people to be dispatched overseas. The six criteria for selection are health, loyalty to the Party, consistently demonstrating a hard-working attitude, impeccable character as a woman, feminine appearance and technical knowledge,” the source said.

You’d think they were applying for diplomatic posts in the foreign service, or high-ranking teaching jobs in prestigious Chinese universities. In fact they’re going to work at the absolute worst jobs, in enclosed factories for long hours, gutting fish or making wigs. They likely won’t be allowed out – straight from the factory bench to their dorms – and most of their miserable wages will go straight to Pyongyang. It’s little better than slave labour.

As the youth league branches rush to make recommendations, the family background and ideological commitment of candidates are being carefully scrutinized as well.

Since the selection of workers for overseas assignments was ordered by the Central Committee, youth league branches are excluding women from families that might be categorized as “impure elements,” the source explained.

Once the list is finalized, candidates will undergo group physical exams through December at designated hospitals in Pyongsong and various counties.

After being placed in a pool of potential overseas workers, candidates will be admitted to “ideological study groups” for instruction in the diplomatic activities of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

“The ideological study sessions focus on teaching workers that going overseas is not merely about earning money but about embodying the will of Kim Jong Un for the world to see. Workers are given extensive loyalty training, including warnings about what will happen if they behave disloyally overseas,” the source explained.

Ayoub Khan says bans should not end with Maccabi Tel Aviv. All Israeli sports teams should be banned from competition. pic.twitter.com/R7GMNMSkd7

— PoliticsJOE (@PoliticsJOE_UK) October 23, 2025

It was never about the prospect of violence: it was always about Israel, and Jews.

Helen Joyce, perceptive as always, speaking in Australia:

Another reason we don’t see the emptiness of gender medicine is that gender clinics are doing a damn good imitation of medicine. Judith Butler famously said gender was an “imitation for which there is no original” – that it’s meaningful only because we do it over and over again. Well, the people working in gender medicine are performing the rituals of medicine: making appointments, doing consultations, coming up with diagnoses, writing prescriptions, doing blood tests, referring patients to other specialists like surgeons and endocrinologists, and making claims about outcomes and efficacy. When they interact with funding bodies, insurers and governments they talk as if what they are doing is medicine.

But the rituals are empty, in the same way that Butler claimed gender rituals are empty. The expression “gender dysphoria” functions as nothing more than a placeholder to make sentences that look similar in form to the kinds of sentences you might utter about angina, say, or multiple sclerosis, or schizophrenia, but because the expression is meaningless the sentences are meaningless.

In fact gender medicine is purely performative – which should delight queer theorists, since they love performativity. And the theme of the performance is the hyper-liberal, or hyper-individualist, claim that each person has a true self and knows that true self, and when they give expression to that true self they by definition cannot be wrong because the true self is the declaration. The purpose of gender medicine is to give an appearance of solidity to a specific sort of declaration of one’s true self — to your gender identity. What the clinics are selling is identity validation.

It may look like medicine and it may talk like medicine – but it isn’t medicine. Rather like trans women, in fact – they may look like women, and they make talk like women, but they’re not women. It’s all performative.

From the Daily NK:

As North Korea endures a severe food shortage, desperate North Koreans have been selling their blood, a practice that has surged recently after the fall harvest failed to improve the food supply.

“In Hamhung, the number of hungry families has increased sharply, so more people are selling their blood just to afford at least one meal a day,” a source in South Hamgyong province told Daily NK recently.

The source said that if one out of every 20 people used to sell their blood to cover their expenses, that number has recently increased tenfold.

“The fall harvest is typically a time when more food is available. But this year, public access to food has not improved at all,” the source said.

All this suggests that North Korea’s food crisis is severe enough to endanger people’s survival.

Kim Jong-un is in no danger, of course. The Pyongyang elite aren’t queueing up to sell blood. We can be sure that the scientists developing and building the huge rockets that feature in those regular parades are well-fed and well looked after

Another serious issue is that blood donations pose health risks for many North Koreans. Blood is collected not only at ordinary hospitals but at tuberculosis and hepatitis clinics. In most cases, the medical examination is perfunctory, if one is conducted at all.

“Good health is essential for making a quick recovery from a blood donation. But most people selling blood are on the verge of malnutrition. There’s supposed to be a six-month interval between blood donations, but some people give blood every two or three months, leading to serious health problems,” the source said.…

“Poverty-motivated blood sales are occurring not only in Hamhung but in other parts of North Korea, including Ryanggang and North Hamgyong provinces. Rumors going around about people starving to death are creating extreme anxiety.”

It’s happened before, in living memory: it can happen again.

I’m not normally a fan of these comedy animal shots – the tacky anthropomorphism – but these, I’ll admit, are pretty good. Some competition finalists from the Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards 2025, at the Times:

_{RALPH ROBINSON/NIKON COMEDY WILDLIFE AWARDS 2025}

_{GEOFF MARTIN/ NIKON COMEDY WILDLIFE AWARDS 2025}

_{MARK METH-COHN/NIKON COMEDY WILDLIFE AWARDS 2025}

_{HIKKADUWA LIYANAGE PRASANTHA VINOD/ NIKON COMEDY WILDLIFE AWARDS 2025}

_{MICHAEL STAVRAKAKIS//NIKON COMEDY WILDLIFE AWARDS 2025}

_{DIANA REBMAN/NIKON COMEDY WILDLIFE AWARDS 2025}

_{MIKE LANE/NIKON COMEDY WILDLIFE AWARDS 2025}

Mind you, I’m not sure that bird, second down, would see the funny side. Poor thing looks like it’s running for its life from that looming bird of prey.

More from City University (previously), where Jewish lecturer Michael Ben-Gad has had to face down threatening mobs:

Masked thugs allegedly threatened to behead an Israeli professor after storming his lecture at a London university.

Michael Ben-Gad, an economics lecturer at City St George’s, has faced calls to resign because he served in the Israel Defence Forces four decades ago.

But the academic at the School of Policy and Global Affairs has refused to stop teaching, vowing that “no one is going to intimidate me”.

Professor Ben-Gad said one of his lessons on Wednesday was “invaded” by activists, who branded him a “terrorist” for his mandatory service in the IDF between 1982 and 1985,

He denied the claims of terrorism, however, saying that his “only crime” is being a Jew who resided in the Middle East.

Speaking to Sky News, Professor Ben-Gad said: “I finished my lecture and it was invaded by protesters who came right up to my face and called me a war criminal and a Nazi.

“They refused to leave, they were masked. One of them made a threat about having my head chopped off.”

He added: “My main concern is for people who are far more vulnerable than I am and I mean particularly Jewish students who have been targeted all over the country.

“I feel like if I give in to these people… the university has been fantastic, they have been supportive of me from the very start.”

It’s good to hear that the university has been supportive – but if they’re so supportive, shouldn’t they be expelling these violent student thugs? At some point someone has to step up in the face of this grim and deranged hard-left-Islamist alliance. Jew harassment like this surely needs a robust response….

At the People’s Conference for Palestine in Michigan, a speaker openly calls to murder all Jews.

“Whether they are in Israel, Tel Aviv, in Washington, in Germany, in Europe. They need to be taken out. They need to be neutralized.”

pic.twitter.com/lpEIkQXGRs

— Eyal Yakoby (@EYakoby) October 22, 2025

A letter to the Home Secretary from the four survivors of the grooming gangs who’ve quit the inquiry:

Me and the other survivors have come together to speak about the main issues that lead to us resigning and we have responded to the home secretary's statment last night with conditions that would need to be met to ensure that this inquiry runs smoothly for us to consider… pic.twitter.com/l6JTzHO811

— Fiona goddard (@fionagoddarduk) October 22, 2025

From the Times:

Last night the four women who resigned from the advisory panel said they would return to the inquiry if Phillips resigned. In a letter to Shabana Mahmood, the home secretary, they set out five conditions for their return. They said Phillips’s “conduct over the last week has shown she is unfit to oversee a process that requires survivors to trust the government. Her departure would signal you are serious about accountability and changing direction”.

Goddard told Times Radio: “I think that there needs to be an apology swiftly followed by Jess Phillips’s resignation.

“I do not think a woman who can call a survivor of the grooming gangs a liar publicly to save her own skin should be in a position of protecting and safeguarding women and children.”

Good for her. Good for all four of them.

Joanna Williams in the Spectator sums it up:

Grooming gangs thrived in Britain because the abused girls were the wrong kind of victims and their Pakistani-heritage rapists were the wrong kind of perpetrators. Now, as adults, these women continue to be the wrong kind of victims, wanting to lift the lid on the wrong kind of perpetrators. Their treatment continues to shame Britain.

Some autumn colour in Kew Gardens today: