Mon: How do You Feel About Losing 1/3rd of Your Net Worth?

England Picks a Fight With Scotland

The UK government has decided to block a controversial Scottish bill designed to make it easier for people to change their legal gender.

UK ministers say it would conflict with equality laws which apply across Great Britain.

It is the first use of a Section 35 order, which can block Scottish laws.

Scotland's First Minister Nicola Sturgeon called the move a "full-frontal attack" on the Scottish Parliament and vowed to oppose it.

The Slave Market in India

Twenty-nine-year-old Nazima Begum* sits cross-legged on the floor of her dark room, the windows covered with tarpaulin. On her lap is her youngest son, five-month-old Taufiq*, who plays with his mother’s face as she talks. Occasionally, she stops to plant a kiss on his head.

Nazima lives in this single room in Srinagar with Taufiq and her two older children, aged seven and 10. Her husband died from heart disease four months ago and although there is sadness in her voice, she says she tries to appear strong for her children.

Hers was neither a love marriage nor an arranged one. Nazima was kidnapped from her home state of West Bengal and transported 1,600km (1,000 miles) to Kashmir, where she was forced to marry a man 20 years her senior who had paid her traffickers $250 for a bride.

With his death, Nazima has been left to support her children alone as she contemplates an uncertain future.

‘We were all terrified’
The daughter of an agricultural labourer who had three other children, Nazima grew up in poverty.

So when, in the summer of 2012, a friend from Nazima’s village told her she’d heard that an NGO was looking to offer women and girls from poor backgrounds jobs in West Bengal’s capital, Kolkata, she decided to take the six-hour train journey to the city.

It was a sweltering afternoon when she arrived at her destination – a large glass building. There were a few men and many women – some her age, others older – she recalls.

One of the men served her tea. All these years later, she still remembers how it smelled of cardamom. And how, soon after drinking it, she found she could no longer talk. Unable to protest, she was led by two men to a car that was waiting outside.

There had been no NGO, no jobs for poor women and girls, no route out of the crippling poverty that had defined Nazima’s life – only traffickers waiting to exploit her.

She was driven to a railway station, where four men waited with four other women. On the train, the women were not allowed to make eye contact with each other, use the bathroom or eat.

“The men looked scary,” Nazima says. “I did not understand what was happening.”

A photo of a woman holding a baby in her lap.
Nazima was trafficked from her home state of West Bengal to Kashmir in 2012 [Rifat Fareed/Al Jazeera]
After 20 hours on the train, they reached Delhi. But their journey wasn’t over. The women were put on another train for the 13-hour journey to Jammu, a city in the south of Indian-administered Kashmir.

There, the traffickers handed them over to two Kashmiri men.

“We were all terrified,” she says. “We could not do anything as we were frightened that we might be harmed.”

Hungry and tired, the women were put in a cab and driven through treacherous mountain passes and along unpaved roads in the dark.

“In Jammu, I felt in a completely strange place, the language was completely different,” she says. “It looked like a different world.”

It was 6am when they finally reached Pattan, a picturesque village surrounded by apple orchards and paddy fields, in north Kashmir’s Baramulla district, 274km (170 miles) from Jammu.

They were taken to the home of one of the traffickers, where they were made to change out of the clothes they had by now been wearing for days.

Nazima says the new outfits they were told to wear “were not very nice”.

“It seemed they were not even new,” she adds.

As they changed, the women were able to talk to each other for the first time. But they didn’t have long. They would soon be taken one by one and handed over to the men they were to marry.

When Nazima’s turn came, she cried. But she says nobody cared.

“There was an old man who kept a hand on my head and I was introduced to my husband,” she says. “I was not able to understand what they were saying. There was an overwhelming fear in me.”

Then the old man announced that she was married.

Abdul Rashid Hanjura is a Kashmir-based lawyer and activist who has worked on human trafficking cases for the past 20 years. He tells Al Jazeera that there is “a full-fledged business for the brokers involved in bride trafficking” in the region. The brokers are the middlemen who connect Kashmiri men looking for a bride with the women trafficked from other parts of the country.

“This happens because of poverty,” he explains. “Many poor men are not able to afford marriage in Kashmir because we have many expensive rituals in which an average marriage costs more than $1,000.”

Trafficked brides – many of whom are underage – can cost as little as $80, he says. Sometimes, they are sold to the agents by their families.

“I saw one case where the agents paid just $35 [to a family],” he adds.

Hanjura believes there are thousands of trafficked brides in Kashmir, with cases dating back to the early 1990s, but says that without proper data the true number is impossible to know.

This Feel-Good Story is Really a Feel-Bad Story

An 82-year-old Walmart cashier is getting to retire after TikTok users raised more than $100,000 to make that possible.

Butch Marion, the 82-year-old in question, is not the first elderly Walmart employee to be able to retire thanks to TikTok donations. It’s a whole damn trend. Carmen Kelly, another 82-year-old who had $50 in her bank account when a Walmart customer asked her why an elderly woman with a cane was working as a greeter, came before him as a recipient of $120,000 in fundraising. Nola Carpenter, 81, retired after a fundraising campaign that brought in more than $180,000. Marion, who spent 10 years in the Navy, was excited that the recent GoFundMe a TikToker set up for him would allow him to “go to Florida and see my kids,” and “enjoy my last 10 or 12 years I’ve got.”



Then there are the campaigns to pay off school lunch debt. An 8-year-old boy sells keychains to pay off the lunch debt for his school, and yeah, that child is praiseworthy—but we should be talking about the existence of school lunch debt. The concept of school lunch debt, which is on the rise after Congress let free school lunch for all lapse.

And of course it’s lovely that the handful of workers who benefit from these viral campaigns get to retire, or have reliable transportation to their jobs. But celebrating those isolated events misses the point that 82-year-olds shouldn’t be on their feet eight hours a day working at Walmart because it’s their only financial option. People shouldn’t be walking more than 10 miles to then work all day and walk back home because they can’t afford a car and there’s no reliable public transit.

These are signs of a broken system and reminders of how many people are not getting that successful crowdfunding campaign, not joyous occasions to be celebrated.

We see these signs everywhere, if we’re paying attention. In the very words “school lunch debt.” In the modest things that families celebrated being able to provide for their children during the six months of expanded child tax credit payments, things like special help for an autistic child or a puppy to comfort a newly orphaned one. Food was the top use of those checks, followed by utility payments.

Our seniors should be able to retire with dignity. Our workers should have access to reliable public transit or the money to live within actual walking distance of their jobs or buy a reliable car. Our children should be fed. The moments when these things happen shouldn’t be headlines and hashtags.

This Woman Is So Stupid She Seems to Think All Chinese People Are MAGAs.

Last Wednesday, 56-year-old Billie R Davis stabbed an 18-year-old Indiana University student out of the blue as she was getting off the bus in Bloomington, Indiana. The attack caused the student to rush to hospital for treatment.

A review of bus video surveillance shows that (name withheld by the Bloomingtonian) and Billie Davis were not together and had no prior confrontations or negative interactions. The video shows Davis removing and unfolding the knife immediately prior to (victim’s name) exiting the bus. Billie appears to turn for a better position while clutching the knife. Davis then stabs and/or attempts to stab (victim) in on top of her head approximately seven times. Davis then folds the knife, puts it back in her pocket, and returns to her seat position on the bus. Davis doesn’t appear to acknowledge (victim) after stabbing her or have any other contact. Davis then exits the bus and was later located, arrested by Bloomington Police Officers.

Davis tried to justify attacking the Asian-American girl with a folding knife; she stated, “It would be one less person to blow up our country.” Davis was truly angered by the presence of Chinese people.

Aren't MAGAs Today's Terrorists?