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“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

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.

TL;DR:

Stephen McNamara is transphobic and David McNabb is racist.

Reform UK doubles-down on it's opposition towards Net Zero policies.

Comments include (spoilering for distressing content, just in case):

Suspended candidates included Stephen McNamara, who was selected as the candidate for Kilmarnock and Louden, and David McNabb, the party’s candidate for Mid Dunbartonshire.

A Reform UK spokesperson said: “The party has launched an immediate investigation into Mr’s McNabb and McNamara who have been suspended pending the result of that investigation.”

Linked article details public comments made by both these suspended candidates, as well as highlighting some other candidates who are not being investigated.

Reform is not investigating candidates with links to climate change denial groups, or who have made comments denying climate change. These candidates include:

• Kenneth Morton, the candidate for Angus and Perthshire Glens.
• Martyn Greene. who is Reform UK’s Scotland organiser.

A Reform UK spokesperson said: “Reform Scotland is proud to oppose the calamity that are the Net Zero policies."

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.

All parties declared more than £93m in total compared with £52m in the previous year.

The Conservatives received the most donations by far, raking in £44.5m in cash, compared with Labour’s total of £21.6m, £6m for the Liberal Democrats, £610,000 for the Green Party and £255,000 for Reform. The SNP registered only £76,000 cash donations in 2023.

My TL;DR:

The government has U-turned on its plans to phase out badger culling after campaigning from farming unions.

It is believed ministers wish to create a point of difference with the Labour party, which has said it would stop the cull, in an attempt to retain seats in rural areas.

Badger culling was first introduced in 2013 and has failed to get support of eminent scientists over more than a decade and has caused some badger populations to go locally extinct.

Furthermore. ministers plan to introduce controversial targeted culling, also known as “epidemiological culling” or “epi-culling”, whereby populations of badgers can be reduced to almost zero. A consultation launched by the government on Thursday included “chilling plans to kill 100% of badgers in bovine TB affected areas, an increase on the limit previously imposed since culling started in 2013”.

Some quotes:

Tom Langton, an ecological consultant and badger expert, argues that epi-culling is “is based on a single ‘model’ trial in Cumbria where over 1,100 badgers were shot dead between 2018 and 2022, but where a published report states no demonstrable benefit was achieved in terms of reduced TB breakdowns in cattle herds.

The government cites peer-reviewed evidence from the first 52 areas where badger culling was conducted, which shows a reduction in rates of bTB breakdowns in cattle by 56% on average after four years of culling. But independent scientists have challenged this analysis, highlighting the presence of so many different variables and the absence of any scientific control.

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.

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.

My TL;DR:

The proposed oil-drilling operation is in Biscathorpe in the Lincolnshire Wolds, an important habitat for nature and wildlife that has been officially designated an area of outstanding natural beauty (AONB).

The plans were rejected by the local council in 2021 but the oil company Egdon appealed against the decision and in November it was overturned by the government’s Planning Inspectorate, infuriating locals and environmentalists.

Now campaigners have been granted permission to seek a judicial review of the ruling in the high court.

The government has been widely criticised for pushing ahead with new oil and gas extraction in the midst of a climate emergency, with their own climate advisers, the International Energy Agency and hundreds of scientists and experts saying that no new oil and gas exploration can take place if the world is to limit global heating to 1.5C above preindustrial temperatures.

Despite this, Rishi Sunak has vowed to “max out” the UK’s oil reserves, ploughing ahead with huge new oilfields in the North Sea as well as three new onshore drilling operations in England.

Some quotes:

The area’s Tory MP, Victoria Atkins, came out against the plans in 2021, writing the proposals “represent the industrialisation of the Lincolnshire Wolds” adding that “as the UK strives to achieve net zero by 2050 … we must be cautious to ensure that we do not allow an application to go ahead that will do long-term damage to the Lincolnshire Wolds, its natural environment and our local communities”.

However, Atkins – who is now health secretary – did not respond when asked whether she was still opposed to the proposals.

The Department for Energy Security and Net Zero declined to comment on the case, instead issuing a general statement defending the UK’s decision to “max out” oil and gas in the midst of a climate crisis.

Mark Abbott, the CEO of Egdon, responded by saying it would rather not drill in an AONB “but could not control where oil is located”. He added there were extremely rigorous protection measures in place to protect the local environment.

“We’re happy to arrange for the local community to visit the site whilst we implement these important protection measures, so that they can see for themselves how seriously Egdon takes its environmental responsibilities.”

My TL;DR:

Spending on low-carbon measures for the three years from April 2020 to the end of April 2023 was about $33.3bn (£26.2bn) in total for the UK, the lowest out of the top five European economies, according to an analysis by Greenpeace of data from the International Energy Agency.

Italy topped the table for western European economies, having spent $111bn in the period. Germany spent $92.7bn, France $64.5bn and Spain about $51.3bn.

The data includes spending on electricity networks, energy efficiency, innovation on fuels and technology, low-carbon and efficient transport and low-carbon electricity.

On Wednesday, Jeremy Hunt, the chancellor of the exchequer, will deliver the last budget of this parliament, which is likely to centre on tax cuts that economists have said will mainly benefit better-off people. Hunt is expected to devote little resource to energy or green issues.

Quotes from Greenpeace UK and the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero:

Georgia Whitaker, a climate campaigner at Greenpeace UK, said the UK was losing out to international rivals in the race for the economy of the future.

“It’s clear that despite the government’s bluster, we are utterly failing on the world stage when it comes to green investment. Not only are the US and China leaving us in the dust in the race on green technology, we’re also doing terribly compared to our European neighbours,” she said.

She called instead for a green industrial strategy and infrastructure investment. “Jeremy Hunt should use the spring budget to address this embarrassing failure, but instead he’s flirting with tax cuts that disproportionately benefit the wealthiest. Meanwhile, the rest of us struggle on with the cost of living,” she said.

A Department for Energy Security and Net Zero spokesperson said: “This report fails to recognise our progress compared to European allies. We are the first major economy in the world to halve our emissions, and we have the second largest renewables capacity in Europe.

“We have a clear strategy to boost UK industry and reach net zero by 2050 – backed by £300bn in low carbon investment since 2010.”