Pink News is overjoyed.

Awards season is well and truly here, and with it often comes the premise of historical firsts. This year, Karla Sofia Gascón has made history as the first out trans performer to be nominated at the 2025 Screen Actors Guild Awards in a solo category.

The Spanish actress has been nominated at the SAG Awards for Best Female Actor in a Leading Role for her work in Emilia Pérez, making her the first out trans performer to be nominated in a solo category, as per Out Magazine.

In other words, a man has won [been nominated for] an award for best female actor.

As if women don’t have enough trouble getting work and attention and awards in the movie business, now men are stealing actual best woman prizes.

And Pink News is reporting it as a good thing.

The world’s first humorless comedy festival. Should be a real blast.

Allllllll genders.

The national police leader on child protection and abuse investigations has urged officers not to be “distracted” by media coverage of grooming gangs, emphasising it is one element of a wider threat.

Becky Riggs, an assistant chief constable, said analysis of child sex crimes reported to police made it clear that “group-based offending occurs in various forms, in diverse settings, and across different ethnicities”.

She urged a “balanced approach to addressing the threat in all its forms”, adding that “children are at risk from perpetrators of all races, ethnicities and genders”.

Excuse me?

Perps of “all genders” go after children? Really? Women sexually abuse children just as much as men do?

There is nothing in the article that backs up her claim.

The report, based on 2023 data, stated that there were 4,228 reported group-based crimes out of a total 115,489 child sexual exploitation and abuse crimes. Of the group-based offences, more than a quarter were familial, 9 per cent were institutional and 17 per cent were in a child sexual exploitation setting involving an imbalance of power. Nearly 40 per cent of offending did not fit a category and 9 per cent was unknown. More than 80 per cent of suspects were white, 7 per cent were Asian, 4 per cent were black and 8 per cent mixed or other.

See? “Gender” not mentioned. Did she throw it in by accident because it’s formulaic? If you mention races and ethnicities you have to mention genders too?

Not all that liberal…

The Liberal Democrats have been ordered to pay £14,000 to a former parliamentary candidate who says she was driven out of the party and barred from standing as an MP over her gender-critical views.

Natalie Bird was removed as a prospective parliamentary candidate for Wakefield after she wore a top bearing the slogan “Woman: Adult Human Female” to a party meeting.

It’s like removing people as prospective parliamentary candidates for wearing tops that say “Rain is wet” or “Fire burns” or “Lions are not frogs” or “Jumping off a tall building is dangerous” or an infinite number of other obvious factual assertions.

Ms Bird had been critical of the party’s policies online but Judge Jane Evans-Gordon said “there was no evidence Ms Bird’s views ever crossed the line and became transphobic or abusive”.

What line? Who installed the line? By what right? On what grounds? Why is there any kind of “line” at all when it comes to saying what a woman is??

And why aren’t people sniffing out misogynistic abuse? What about all the people who clearly detest women and hold us in contempt and say so every chance they get? Why is that just business as usual while there is hypervigilance about some imaginary “line” demarking transphobic and not transphobic?

Ms Bird wore the T-shirt bearing the words “Woman: Adult Human Female” in the days after she was nominated as the Lib Dem candidate for Wakefield in December 2018.

Soon afterwards she received a letter suspending her membership and notifying her there would be a formal disciplinary hearing against her for breaching the party’s code of conduct.

So very “liberal”.

It’s not the future any more. Big chunks of Los Angeles are on fire.

Firefighters in Los Angeles are battling a number of blazes in city suburbs, as tens of thousands of residents are forced to flee.

The rapidly changing situation is compounded by Santa Ana winds and extremely dry conditions. Currently authorities say there is no possibility of bringing the fires under control.

The Palisades fire, which is closest to the coast and also the largest, has ripped through picturesque suburbs which are home to many Hollywood stars. More than 1,000 buildings have already been destroyed.

Picturesque and very very very expensive.

LA has always been a mistake. It’s in a desert, and it’s way too big for a desert.

Four major fires are currently being tackled.

The Palisades fire was first reported at 10:30 (18:30 GMT) on Tuesday, and grew in just 20 minutes from a blaze of 20 acres to more than 200 acres, then more than tenfold in a matter of a few more hours. At least 30,000 people have so far been ordered to leave their homes.

The Eaton fire grew to cover 1,000 acres within the first six hours of breaking out. It started in Altadena in the hills above Pasadena at around 18:30 local time on Tuesday.

The Hurst fire is located just north of San Fernando. It began burning on Tuesday at around 22:10 local time, growing to 500 acres, according to local officials. It has triggered evacuation orders in neighbouring Santa Clarita.

The latest of the four fires is the Woodley fire, currently 75 acres in size. It broke out at approximately 06:15 local time on Wednesday.

It’s terrifying – pow pow pow pow, in less than one day.

“Sophie Molly” tries his hand at argument.

Once again, a festival capitulates to the demands of transphobes. By hosting not one but two notable TERFs. The festival in question is the Oxford Literary Festival.

It’s not clear what the demands are. Did the terfs demand that the Oxford Lit Fest host them? Or did the Oxford Lit Fest simply invite a couple of feminists?

By far, the worst of them is Helen Joyce. Her book Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality can only be described as anti-trans propaganda. This book and its author should not be featured at a mainstream literary festival.

But even if it’s true that the book can only be described as anti-trans-[ideology], how is that a reason it should not be discussed at a mainstream literary festival? Trans ideology is a very new and very wobbly set of beliefs and demands, and it just is not self-evident that we must not dispute its claims. “Sophie Molly” doesn’t make his case, he just rants.

Joyce argues that gender should be understood strictly as biological sex and dismisses the concept of self-identified gender. This undermines the identities of transgender people and invalidates their lived experiences. 

There it is: that’s as close as he gets to arguing. He doesn’t say why “gender” shouldn’t be understood as biological sex, or why the “identities” and “lived experiences” of transgender people should matter more than, say, women’s rights. He just takes it all for granted, without noticing that he’s doing so.

The book over-fixates on trans women having access to female spaces.

Easy for a man to say. “Shut up, bitch, you don’t get to have somewhere to go to be safe from me.” Very persuasive, much empathetic.

Joyce wants to shackle us all into two neat little boxes based solely on our genitals and reproductive organs. So rigid! So limiting!

Redundant! Urgent redundancy alert! You can shackle or you can push into neat little boxes, but it’s just silly to try to do both.

Throughout the book, she is critical of gender-affirming medical treatments, especially for minors, viewing them as harmful and potentially irreversible. This once again makes out that being trans is wrong. It tells the reader that trans people should not be trusted to have agency over their bodies. All of this strips trans people of their bodily autonomy. These are not the words of kindness and compassion. These are the words of someone who just can’t accept that trans people exist. 

This poor guy. He hasn’t got a single thought of his own – all he has is these ultra-stale bromides. Ooh ooh “agency” – that’ll fetch’em. Along with “bodily autonomy” it’s a surefire conversation-ender, no matter how many billion times we’ve heard it before.

Sad case.

No, sir, you can’t sue people for getting it wrong.

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, an organization most recognized for its work bolstering conservatives on the nation’s campuses, announced on Tuesday it would represent the pollster J. Ann Selzer, at no charge, against Donald J. Trump’s lawsuit accusing her of consumer fraud for a poll that predicted he would lose Iowa. “Punishing someone for their political prediction is about as unconstitutional as it gets,” said Bob Corn-Revere, the group’s chief counsel. “This is America. No one should be afraid to predict the outcome of an election.”

Trump accusing someone else of consumer fraud is hilarious. Remember Trump University? All those gilded tchotchkes in his gift shoppees? His hair? His makeup? His shoes?

Yet again the respectable mainstream news media pretend Trump may be just messing with us.

President-elect Donald Trump on Tuesday suggested he would consider using military force to gain control of the Panama Canal and Greenland, and “economic force” to acquire Canada.

During a free-wheeling news conference at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, Trump was asked by a reporter if he could assure the public that he would not use military coercion against Panama or Greenland, a goal he has floated in recent weeks. “No, I can’t assure you on either of those two, but I can say this, we need them for economic security,” Trump said. He said later that he would not use military force against Canada, only “economic force.”

You can call that suggesting or you can call it threatening. It looks a lot more like threatening to me.

Anschluss time.

Trump on Tuesday refused to rule out invading Greenland or Panama when asked if the U.S. could use military force to acquire the Arctic island or the Central American canal.

Asked if he would rule out economic or military coercion to gain control of Greenland and the Panama Canal, Trump said, “I’m not gonna commit to that. No. It might be that you’ll have to do something.”

“I can’t assure you — you’re talking about Panama and Greenland — no, I can’t assure you on either of those two,” Trump said in response to the question at a press conference. “But I can say this: We need them for economic security.”

And what we need we help ourselves to.

“We need Greenland for national security purposes,” he said Tuesday. “People really don’t even know if Denmark has any legal right to it, but if they do they should give it up because we need it for national security.”

And I need Trump to be in prison for national security, so hurry up on that.

The fix is in.

District Judge Aileen Cannon on Tuesday blocked the release of special counsel Jack Smith’s final report on his investigations into President-elect Donald Trump.

It was so lucky for Trump that he got to appoint the drastically underqualified Cannon while he was drastically underqualified president.

In the filings, Walt Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira asked Cannon to block the release of the special counsel report, which is expected in the coming days before Trump is sworn in as president for the second time. The two men, who both worked for Trump and have pleaded not guilty to obstruction-related crimes, argued that Smith does not have the authority to release the report because Cannon previously deemed his appointment as special counsel unlawful. (The 11th Circuit is currently considering DOJ’s appeal of that ruling as well).

Cannon was appointed by Trump during his first term in office.

And is drastically underqualified and wholly in the can for Trump.

The fast-moving dispute comes less than two weeks before Trump’s inauguration, at which point his Justice Department – to be led largely by appointees drawn from his criminal defense team in the case before Cannon – will take over the handling of the investigation.

And if that’s not dirty I don’t know what “dirty” is.

Erm.

Remember that guy who hacked a bunch of people with an axe in a 7-11 because a lesbian refused to hook up with him?

He’s out of prison.

Axe attacker Evie Amati laughed as she was released from jail, eight years to the day after the horrific attempted murders of customers at a Sydney 7-Eleven outlet. 

Amati, a trans woman, smashed an axe into the head of one man at an Enmore service station on January 6, 2017 before attacking a female customer and another man. 

But at 9.30am on Monday, Amati, 32, walked out of the Bolwara Transitional Centre at Emu Plains women’s prison smiling, sporting a new look and a ghoulish jail tattoo. She emerged into daylight grinning broadly, and had so many boxes and bags of possessions that a large trolley was needed to transport them all.

Amati, wearing jeans, Vans skater shoes and a sleeveless maroon top, was swiftly escorted from custody to a waiting female friend’s car before being whisked away. With shiny pink polished nails, full make-up and bleached blonde hair with a thick black streak, Amati had the word ‘DEAD’ inked in big blue letters on the knuckles of the left hand. Other disturbing arm tattoos included a skeleton dressed in a suit, and a zombie eating a can of Campbell’s labelled ‘Brain Soup’. 

A real comedian.

Maryam remembers.

Ten years ago today.

Dominic Green at The Free Press has the details.

The grooming and serial rape of thousands of English girls by men of mostly Pakistani Muslim background over several decades is the biggest peacetime crime in the history of modern Europe. It went on for many years. It is still going on. And there has been no justice for the vast majority of the victims.

That’s a very large claim. Is it really Europe’s biggest peacetime crime? Bigger than what Anders Breivik did for instance? Bigger than the July 7 bombings in London? These things are hard to measure.

British governments, both Conservative and Labour, hoped that they had buried the story after a few symbolic prosecutions in the 2010s. And it looked like they had succeeded—until Elon Musk read some of the court papers and tweeted his disgust and bafflement on X over the new year.

Britain now stands shamed before the world. The public’s suppressed wrath is bubbling to the surface in petitions, calls for a public inquiry, and demands for accountability.

The scandal is already reshaping British politics. It’s not just about the heinous nature of the crimes. It’s that every level of the British system is implicated in the cover-up.

Social workers were intimidated into silence. Local police ignored, excused, and even abetted pedophile rapists across dozens of cities. Senior police and Home Office officials deliberately avoided action in the name of maintaining what they called “community relations.” Local councilors and Members of Parliament rejected pleas for help from the parents of raped children. Charities, NGOs, and Labour MPs accused those who discussed the scandal of racism and Islamophobia.

Which are, of course, two very different categories. We’re allowed to hate religions. Islam is peculiarly hateful in many ways. It’s revoltingly hostile to women. We’re allowed to say that, and it’s imperative that we remain allowed to say that.

The media mostly ignored or downplayed the biggest story of their lifetimes. Zealous in their incuriosity, much of Britain’s media elite remained barnacled to the bubble of Westminster politics and its self-serving priorities.

They did this to defend a failed model of multiculturalism, and to avoid asking hard questions about failures of immigration policy and assimilation. They did this because they were afraid of being called racist or Islamophobic. They did this because Britain’s traditional class snobbery had fused with the new snobbery of political correctness.

Class snobbery as in “the girls are slags so they don’t matter.”

All of which is why no one knows precisely how many thousands of young girls were raped in how many towns across Britain since the 1970s.

What we do know is that the epicenter was the postindustrial mill towns of England’s north and Midlands, where immigrants from Pakistan and Bangladesh settled in the 1960s. White locals say the grooming and rapes began soon after. In Rotherham, the rundown Yorkshire city where the scandal first broke, local police and councilors were notified about systematic grooming and sex abuse by 2001. The first convictions did not occur until 2010, when five men of Pakistani background were jailed for multiple offenses against girls as young as 12 years of age.

…

Several girls were murdered. In Manchester in 2003, Victoria Agoglia was repeatedly drugged and raped before being given a fatal dose of heroin at the age of 15. In Blackpool that same year, 14-year-old Charlene Downes disappeared—her body was never found.

In Telford, Azhar Ali Mehmood groomed Lucy Lowe from the age of 12 and impregnated her at 14. He burned her alive in her own home with her mother, her disabled sister, and her unborn second child, also fathered by Mehmood. Mehmood was jailed for life in 2001 for murder—not sex crimes.

In the age of “Say Her Name,” no one important thought it worth saying the names of these girls. The girls, their rapists told them, were “white slags,” worthless and expendable. Apart from a few whistleblowers, most of them women, and courageous journalists such as Julie Bindel, Andrew Norfolk, Douglas Murray, and Charlie Peters, the media showed no interest.

And the result is Elon Musk is showing interest, which is almost as bad as Donald Trump showing interest would be.

Well clearly this business of Musk and the grooming gangs is going to run and run, so let’s remind ourselves of the background.

The row between Mr Musk and Starmer centres around a series of high-profile cases where groups of men – mainly of Pakistani descent – were convicted of sexually abusing and raping predominantly young white girls around the UK.

In 2012 The Times newspaper investigated Rotherham grooming gangs, which led to a major inquiry. At least 1,400 children were subjected to appalling sexual exploitation in Rotherham between 1997 and 2013, according to a 2014 report written by Prof Alexis Jay. The report made headlines in the UK and around the world and led to major debates in Parliament.

Similar scandals also occurred in other towns, including Oldham, Oxford, Rochdale and Telford, leading to a national inquiry into child sexual abuse, which was also led by Prof Jay.

How did Oxford get in there along with three northern industrial cities?

The CPS was criticised for a decision not to proceed with a prosecution in Rochdale on the basis that it viewed the main victim as “unreliable” following an investigation between August 2008 and August 2009. That decision was overturned later by Nazir Afzal in 2011 after [he was] appointed by Starmer as the CPS chief prosecutor for north-west England.

Speaking to BBC Verify, Mr Afzal said that the view of prosecutors not to proceed to trial at the time was “if the police aren’t happy that she will give credible evidence then we’re not happy either”. He went on to say that he had reviewed and reversed the decision as “I believed what she [the victim] was saying”.

That’s always an issue in prosecution, as far as I know – there’s always worry about how a witness will come across to a jury, worry about how a victim will come across, worry about which way to jump. It’s not easy. We on the outside can think “They just should have [etc]” but we don’t know.

The elephant in the room is the question of whether the police and prosecutors erred on the side of doing nothing because the accused men were Pakistani, aka [whispers] Muslim. Would it be “Islamophobic” to prosecute them? Would it be controversial? Would it look like whities bullying brown people? Would it look like bullying [gasp] a community? I have no idea whether or how much that influenced decision making, but some people clearly suspect it did.

On a related note, Elon Musk is absolutely the wrong person to be re-lighting this fire.

Trudeau has resigned.

Trudeau, the latest incumbent to be driven out amid rising voter dissatisfaction worldwide, said it had become clear to him that he cannot “be the leader during the next elections due to internal battles.” He planned to stay on as prime minister until a new leader of the Liberal Party is chosen.

…

The political upheaval comes at a difficult moment for Canada internationally. U.S. President-elect Donald Trump has threatened to impose 25% tariffs on all Canadian goods if the government does not stem what Trump calls a flow of migrants and drugs in the U.S. — even though far fewer of them cross into the U.S. from Canada than from Mexico, which Trump has also threatened.

Canada is a major exporter of oil and natural gas to the U.S., which also relies on its northern neighbor for steel, aluminum and automobiles.

After Trudeau’s announcement, Trump, who for weeks has referred to Canada as the 51st state, did so again and incorrectly claimed on social media that the prime minister resigned because Canada relies on subsidies from the U.S. to stay afloat.

…

Trudeau had been planning to run for a fourth term despite his party’s displeasure. Prime ministers in Canada can stay in office as long as their government or party has the confidence of a majority in the House of Commons, but no Canadian prime minister in more than a century has won four straight terms.

It seems that Labour made a slight error. It’s tricky finding an ordinary news story on it, because of the taboo on slang words for the female genitalia. Yet again social meeja has to substitute.

What was that about grooming again?

Politico on Macron on Musk:

Emmanuel Macron took a not-so-thinly veiled swipe at Elon Musk on Monday, accusing him of meddling in European politics and backing what the French president called a “reactionary movement” across the world.

While Macron did not name the controversial tech billionaire in his annual speech to French ambassadors gathered in Paris, the description was unmistakable.

“Ten years ago, who could have imagined it if we had been told that the owner of one of the largest social networks in the world would support a new international reactionary movement and intervene directly in elections, including in Germany,” Macron said in a wide-ranging foreign policy speech at the Elysée Palace.

Macron’s comments, however, did not go as far as those of Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre, who said Monday he found it “worrying” that Musk, “a man with enormous access to social media” would be so “directly involved” in the politics of other nations.

Musk is facing mainstream political backlash in Europe after wading into domestic politics in Germany and the United Kingdom. He came out in support of the far-right Alternative for Germany ahead of a snap legislative election in the country next month, which the government in Berlin and various political leaders argued amounted to election interference. Musk has also sparred with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and, in a surprising move, urged Nigel Farage to stand aside as leader of the right-wing Reform UK party.

There have been meddling grandiose right-wing media moguls before – William Randolph Hearst for one, Rupert Murdoch for another. They did a lot of damage.

The problem grows and grows.

When the German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, was asked in an interview about the barrage of insults being directed at him and other German leaders by Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, his reply was: “Don’t feed the troll.”

Speaking to the German weekly Stern, Scholz described the criticisms as nothing new. “You have to stay cool,” he said in the interview. “As Social Democrats, we have long been used to the fact that there are rich media entrepreneurs who do not appreciate social democratic politics – and do not hide their opinions.”

He said he would make no efforts to engage with Musk, who has endorsed the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) in next month’s federal elections and will host a live discussion on his social media platform X with its candidate for chancellor, Alice Weidel. “I don’t believe in courting Mr Musk’s favour. I’m happy to leave that to others,” he said. “The rule is: don’t feed the troll.”

Meanwhile the troll is munching on all of us.

Since taking the reins of X, Musk has increasingly used the social media platform’s global reach to push his own political views. After spending a quarter of a billion dollars to help secure Donald Trump’s return to the White House, Musk has used his influence to back far-right and anti-establishment parties across the continent, while attacking some of its most prominent centre-left leaders.

…

In recent days Musk has waded into UK politics, calling on King Charles to step in and dissolve parliament as he criticised the government over child grooming cases

Unelected strongman calls to unelected strongman to stamp out democracy. Good plan.

Musk sez: Declare war on the UK, or no?

Elon Musk has questioned whether the United States should “liberate the people of Britain from their tyrannical government” after hitting out [raging] at top U.K. lawmakers.

…

Musk accused the U.K. Safeguarding Minister Jess Phillips of being a “rape genocide apologist” on Friday, before publishing a series of posts calling for Prime Minister Keir Starmer to be ousted and face jail time over how child grooming gangs and other criminals who targeted children have been prosecuted.

His criticisms of the U.K. government over the weekend culminated in a poll, where he posed the concept of “liberating the people of Britain” to the platform’s users.

He’s not even a little bit funny.