Jho

“People are saying that I’ve betrayed them somehow, but the truth is, I’ve always been consistent,” explained Rowling in an interview to promote the TV reboot due in 2026.

“For example, if you read the Harry Potter books closely, you’ll see that Dumbledore actually hated trans people.

“For example, in Goblet of Fire, he says, ‘You fail to recognize that it matters not what someone is born, but what they grow to be’. That’s clearly Dumbledore indicating he thinks people should stay the gender they were born with, no matter what.

Original article title: Courtier demanded assurance king could not be prosecuted under new Welsh law

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A Buckingham Palace official phoned the Welsh government to secure the assurance under an archaic custom that requires UK parliaments to obtain the consent of the monarch to draft bills before they can be implemented.

According to Buckingham Palace, the royal household rang the Welsh government to ensure that “as a matter of legal correctness” the monarch could not be prosecuted under the act.

The monarchy has been given personal immunity from swathes of British law, ranging from animal welfare to workers’ rights.

More than 30 laws stipulate, for example, that police are barred from entering the privately owned Balmoral and Sandringham estates without the king’s permission to investigate possible crimes, including wildlife offences and environmental pollution. No other private landowner in the country is given such legal immunity.

A Welsh government spokesperson said: “The immunity of the monarch from prosecution is a long-established principle.” They declined to comment further.

OP details various first-hand accounts of disabled children across the UK who have been edited in their school photos. This is not a new phenomenon as one of the accounts is from the 1970s.

Some quotes from the article:

Behind the erasure of disabled children lies the frightening belief that they don’t belong in ‘perfect’ pictures – or public spaces.

If that feels somewhat chilling, it is because it should. Few of us – even at a time when someone, somewhere will always find a way to excuse bigotry – cannot understand the connotations of wanting to pretend disabled children don’t exist.

Children have had their disability aids removed by photographers. Other children have been altered with editing software or banned from their class photos entirely.

That is the thing with true ugliness. It does not come in the shape of a wheelchair, a cleft lip, white cane or scars. It sits in prejudice, digging and clawing its way into our culture until one day the nice man who is taking your child’s school photo asks her to hide her hearing aids. That this prejudice will follow these children into adulthood is perhaps the bleakest part. If only society had the desire to edit that out.

With the government voting overwhelmingly in favour of allowing liquid human shit to pour into our rivers and into the sea, the government’s dream of creating a barrier of excrement between England’s Brexit sunlit uplands and those horrible foreigners who might harbour dreams of reaching them, draws ever closer to becoming a reality.

Unveiling the new definition, Mr Gove told the BBC, “The definition is very clear. It includes the promotion or advancement of violence, hatred or intolerance.”

“You might say that making blatantly racist comments and calling for an MP to be shot would be the very definition of hatred and intolerance, but before that can be established, there has to be a rigorous process and due diligence to establish whether the person making those alleged comments is A) a Tory supporter or B) has given us £10M. And I think in this case, the answer is quite clear. Case closed.”

My TL;DR:

Lucy Moore, a UK academic, has completed a project creating a Wikipedia page for a woman in every country in the world and is calling for more women to contribute to the world’s largest encyclopedia.

She has now written biographies of 532 women since 2019, when she first became a Wikipedia editor, including scientists, monarchs, activists, writers and women whose faces are well known but their stories are not.

She tended to focus on women who share her interests, she said, such as poets, activists and coin specialists, known as numismatists, which is her own field.

But it has not been easy. She said one of the issues was that Wikipedia required three reliable sources for each biography and, while there may have been a lot written on social media about some of the women, they may not have appeared in newspapers, especially in countries where women’s achievements are not taken seriously.

Run as a non-profit, open-source encyclopedia that is free to use, Wikipedia can be edited by anyone but only a fifth of its 124,000 regularly active editors are women.

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Some of the women recognised by Moore:

• Julia Chinn (c. 1790 – July 1833) was an American plantation manager and enslaved woman of mixed race, who was the common-law wife of the ninth vice-president of the United States, Richard Mentor Johnson.
• Sharbat Gula (born c. 1972) is an Afghan woman who became internationally recognised as the 12-year-old subject in Afghan Girl, a 1984 portrait taken by American photojournalist Steve McCurry that was later published on the cover of National Geographic.
• Jeanne Gapiya-Niyonzima (born 12 July 1963, in Bujumbura) is a human rights activist from Burundi. She is the chair and founder of the National Association for Support for HIV-Positive People with Aids (ANSS) and was the first person from the country to publicly admit they had HIV.
• Ólafía Einarsdóttir (28 July 1924 – 19 December 2017) was an Icelandic archaeologist and historian, becoming the first Icelander to complete a degree in archaeology. She taught at the University of Copenhagen and published many works about Icelandic sagas and Viking history.
• Gloria Meneses (1910 – 1996) was a Uruguayan performer and activist who lived openly from 1950 until her death as travesti – a term used in Latin America to designate people who were assigned male at birth and develop a feminine gender identity.

Edit: I would recommend checking out the original article just for the sake of seeing the pictures of what hock burn looks like on packaged chicken you would buy from the supermarket.

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My TL;DR:

"Hock burn" is caused by ammonia from excrement. A sign of poorer welfare on farms, it can be seen on a third of birds in some supermarkets.

Hock burn is often associated with a high-stocking density of birds and is a result of prolonged contact to moist, dirty litter. It shows up on packaged and prepared meat as brown ulcers on the back of the leg.

Chicken with hock burn markings are still safe to eat. But the amount of hock burn within a poultry flock is an industry-accepted indicator of wider welfare standards on farms.

Red Tractor, the UK's biggest farm and food assurance scheme, sets a target rate for hock burn of no more than 15% of a flock.

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Hock burn statistics from various supermarkets:

The BBC requested animal welfare data from 10 leading UK food sellers: Tesco, Sainsbury's, Asda, Morrisons, Aldi, Co-op, Lidl, Waitrose, Iceland and Ocado.

Five of the companies - Asda, Morrisons, Lidl, Iceland and Ocado - failed to provide specific figures.

• Co-op, which is supplied with an estimated 30 million chickens a year, recorded hock burn in 36.7% of its poultry.
• Aldi's most recent annual figures revealed it had found hock burn in 33.5% of its chickens.
• Company animal welfare reports reveal Tesco recorded a 26.3% rate in its chickens in 2022/23.
• Sainsbury's found hock burn in one in five (25%) of its chickens.
• Waitrose had the lowest recorded annual figure of 2.7%.
• Lidl was one of the stores that did not provide data to the BBC. Volunteers found 74% of the chickens they checked had hock burn.

My TL;DR:

The UK’s net zero economy grew by 9% in 2023, a report has revealed, in stark contrast to the 0.1% growth seen in the economy overall. This includes renewable energy, building energy efficiency, electric vehicles, carbon capture technology and green finance.

Thousands of new green companies were founded in 2023 and overall the sector was responsible for the production of £74bn in goods and services and 765,000 jobs.

Hotspots of net zero businesses and the well-paid jobs they provide occur across the country, rather than being concentrated in London and the south-east. It also highlighted strong net zero activity in some of the most deprived areas (including Hartlepool, Nottingham, Redcar and Cleveland) and in marginal constituencies that will be focal battlegrounds in the coming general election (including High Peak, Cheadle, Derby North, and Lancaster and Wyre).

Achieving net zero emissions by 2050 is vital to limiting the damage from the climate crisis. Doing so would not only bring an economic boost but also cut energy costs for households and businesses and ensure energy security by ending the UK’s reliance on volatile fossil fuel markets.

Nevertheless, the report pointed out that strong future growth from green businesses was being put at risk by government policy reversals, lack of investment and competition from the EU and US.

As an upfront disclaimer, it's not all good news. Programmes like this are unlikely to become common in the near future due to large costs. It costs £1,355 each week for an elderly person to stay in these care homes. The cost of the nursery is £59 a day per child. This is not something that is accessible for most British folk.

Nonetheless, reading this article was a heartwarming experience and certainly gives insight into a solution which can enrich the lives of the elderly, young children, their families, and care home workers. I really hope to see programmes like this become more accessible and commonplace in the future.

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My TL;DR:

Belong Chester claims to be the first older people’s “care setting” in the UK to include a fully integrated children’s research nursery, where children and residents come together every day.

Alan and his wife, Diana, both 82, often invite the children to their apartment to see their budgie, Joey. Diana is living with Alzheimer’s, but has “always loved children”, says Alan. “If she’s not having a good day I bring her down to the nursery and it’s as if someone has turned her switch back on. It’s that powerful.”

The change in some of the older residents is remarkable “We call it unfurling. We see it in some of our older people. When they arrive, they are a bit closed down. Then the children arrive and you can actually see their whole body unfurl.”

Interacting with the children is “incredibly important” for the men, thinks Dorothy Hulford, 87, a former university administrator who moved in with her 95-year-old husband, Frank, last year: “That generation weren’t involved with their children, back then, because they were at work. I see how much they enjoy being with the nursery children now.”

Many of the nursery parents think their children have become more caring by mixing with older people.

“Some of them use a wheelchair, some have limited speech or communication, and I think it has made Jacob more empathic,” one mother says, “I’m six months pregnant and I’ve been really ill, and when Jacob has seen me be unwell, he checks on me. I don’t know if that’s normal for a three-year-old, but Belong is definitely teaching the children they have to be a little bit careful around their grandfriends. One of them had a fall and was bruised and Jacob was asking how she was.”

Another mother says her daughter, Charlotte, aged three, has learned a lot from her grandfriends at nursery. “Charlotte’s language, compared to her peers from our antenatal group, is head and shoulders above. She uses words in the right context and talks in full sentences.”

My sibling has been working on this project for the last 18 months and it fully launched yesterday. It has now made the news! I'm immensely proud of them, their work will surely save many lives.

Anyone aged over 18 who has at least one Jewish grandparent is eligible for testing. If you meet this criteria you can order a test here: https://jewishbrca.org/

Article TL;DR:

The tests check for faulty BRCA genes. People with Jewish ancestry are far more likely to have inherited faulty BRCA genes than the general population. There is a 50% chance of someone who has a faulty BRCA gene passing it on to any children.

Those born with impaired BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes have a greater risk of developing breast, ovarian, prostate or pancreatic cancer.

The NHS England screening programme is part of a drive to detect cancer early. Tests can be ordered online and completed at home, by taking a sample of saliva and sending it off to a laboratory.