22 June 2026: Lilly Jones, 14, was found dead in Gwent, South Wales. A 14-year-old boy, who cannot be named for legal reasons, has been charged with her murder.
This is Ramsey. He is a mail delivery dog. Shipping is free, and while packages might not be handled with care, they are handled with enthusiasm. 14/10
BBC report and documentary, on the plight of poor Afghan fathers forced to sell their children to survive.
Except you have to read some way into the article - which is around 2,500 words long - before it becomes clear they are specifically selling their daughters into child marriage and domestic slavery.
“If I sell one daughter, I could feed the rest of my children for at least four years,” says one father.
Another father, pictured in the article, sold his five-year-old little girl. The framing is extraordinary.
Not only because the fact only female children are being sold is presented as unremarkable.
But also because the fathers making the decision are presented as the victims - rather than the girls who will actually live with the consequences of it.
The fathers’ desperation is real and tragic. But so is the reality that these girls are being treated as commodities.
Rita Moreno is one of just three people to win an Emmy for The Muppets, the other two: Bernadette Peters and Peter Sellers. The comedy timing during her performance of "Fever" while Animal attempts to railroad her is incredible. It was also done in one take
"Dat my kinda woman!"
#UPDATE | We received a report of a suspicious male on Bristol Street, Salford, at around 11:52am today.
Officers established that the individual was wearing a weighted gym vest and carrying a skipping rope at an outdoor gym.
There is no threat to the wider community.
Woman of the Day pioneering suffragist and abolitionist Matilda Joslyn Gage of Cicero, New York, died OTD 1898, aged 71. The Matilda Effect - the phenomenon in which the achievements of women scientists are claimed or stolen by their male colleagues - is named for her because she first identified it in her 1883 essay Woman as Inventor.
Matilda worked with Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton to found the National Woman Suffrage Association in 1869, and collaborated with them in writing the History of Woman Suffrage (1881–1887) and the Declaration of the Rights of Women. She published and edited the National Citizen, a paper devoted to the cause of women.
The fight against inequality was in her blood. Born into an abolitionist family, Matilda and her husband offered their home as a station on the Underground Railroad despite the risk of harsh penalties and imprisonment. She described herself as "born with a hatred of oppression” and was a staunch advocate for Native Americans, publicly criticising their treatment by the federal government.
In 1870, Matilda wrote “Woman as Inventor” promoting the work of female inventors, including Sarah Mather who invented the deep-sea telescope and Margaret Knight who invented a machine that created flat-bottomed paper bags. She pointed out that society disapproved of women inventors, thus suppressing their talents, deterring them from learning about mechanics, and patenting their inventions under the names of their husbands to evade insults and ridicule.
“In not a single State of the Union is a married woman held to possess a right to her earnings within the family; and in not one-half of them has she a right to their control in business entered upon outside of the household. Should such a woman be successful in obtaining a patent, what then! Would she be free to do as she pleased with it? Not at all. She would hold no right, title, or power over this work of her own brain.”
Widely regarded as an excellent speaker and writer, Matilda also took direct action. In 1871, she organised several women in an attempt at voting in New York. In 1872, she tried and failed to vote in the presidential elections, but she actively supported Susan B. Anthony who was arrested and tried at court for successfully casting a ballot.
When the Statue of Liberty was unveiled in 1886, she led a protest arguing that it was hypocritical to depict Liberty as a woman when real American women were denied political and social rights.
Writing about laws which allowed a man to leave his children in his will to a guardian unrelated to their mother, she said, “It is sometimes better to be a dead man than a live woman.”
Christianity especially drew her ire. “The most stupendous system of organised robbery known has been that of the Church towards woman, a robbery that has not only taken her self-respect but all rights of person; the fruits of her own industry; her opportunities of education; the exercise of her own judgment, her own conscience, her own will.”
Matilda died in 1898 at the age of 71 but it was her contention in Woman, Church and State, published in 1893, that struck a chord with me. The parallel with today is striking.
“The witch was in reality the profoundest thinker, the most advanced scientist of those ages. The persecution which for ages waged against witches, was in reality an attack upon science at the hands of the Church. As knowledge has ever been power, the Church feared its use in woman's hands, and levelled its deadliest blows at her.”
You know lads, I'm not entirely sure that a white, Scottish, community centre caretaker with a profound disability, living in one of the poorest areas of the UK, IS actually more privileged than two famous, perfectly healthy, African American
millionaire celebrities.
What Americans don't realise is that Brits only know a lot more about Tourettes than Americans precisely because of John Davidson's extraordinary courage in educating the UK about his issues since he was a child. He's done more for understanding of the condition than anyone alive