Interesting. The start of the piece:

Lawmakers from four political parties in Iceland introduced a bill in parliament that would ban the nonmedical circumcision of boys younger than 18 and impose imprisonment of up to six years on offenders.

Members of the ruling Left Green Movement, the Progressive Party, People’s Party and the Pirate Party submitted the bill to the Albingi on Tuesday, the RUV news site reported. Together, the parties account for 46 percent of the parliament’s 63 seats.

The measure cites the prohibition of female genital mutilation in 2005, arguing a similar prohibition is necessary for males. The report did not say when the bill would come to a vote.

One of the few pleasures of working as a consultant at the Conservative party’s campaign HQ, on the bank of the Thames, over 2006-8, was being only a short walking distance from Tate Britain. Once or twice a week I’d buy lunch there and stroll around some of the rooms, and I was always uplifted by the experience. Among my favourite rooms were those dedicated to masterpieces by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Many were of hauntingly beautiful women, so after ‘darts girls’ and ‘Formula 1 girls’ it was perhaps inevitable the Pre-Raphaelites would be in feminists’ sights.

The John William Waterhouse painting Hylas and the Nymphs has been removed from the walls of Manchester Art Gallery to ‘prompt conversations’. A Guardian piece on the matter is here. An extract, emphases are ours:

The painting was taken down on Friday and replaced with a notice explaining that a temporary space had been left “to prompt conversations about how we display and interpret artworks in Manchester’s public collection”. Members of the public have stuck Post-it notes around the notice giving their reaction.

Clare Gannaway, the gallery’s curator of contemporary art, said the aim of the removal was to provoke debate, not to censor. “It wasn’t about denying the existence of particular artworks.”

The work usually hangs in a room titled In Pursuit of Beauty, which contains late 19th century paintings showing lots of female flesh.

Gannaway said the title was a bad one, as it was male artists pursuing women’s bodies, and paintings that presented the female body as a passive decorative art form or a femme fatale.

“For me personally, [J4MB: Because this is all about you, toots…] there is a sense of embarrassment that we haven’t dealt with it sooner. Our attention has been elsewhere … we’ve collectively forgotten to look at this space and think about it properly. We want to do something about it now because we have forgotten about it for so long.”

Gannaway said the debates around Time’s Up and #MeToo had fed into the decision.

The removal itself is an artistic act and will feature in a solo show by the artist Sonia Boyce which opens in March. People can tweet their opinion using #MAGSoniaBoyce.

The Guardian has just published this. An extract:

Senior figures in the party – including Jeremy Corbyn and Harriet Harman – are strongly supportive of the clarification in policy. A spokeswoman for Harman, the former deputy leader of Labour, said she backed the affirmation that trans women should be able to stand for all-women shortlists without needing a gender recognition certificate. Corbyn said at the weekend: “The position of the party is that where you have self-identified as a woman, then you are treated as a woman.”

But it is understood some Labour MPs are anxious to make sure that there are some safeguards written into the policies to stop, for example, a men’s rights activist attempting to stand as a woman to test the legalities. [J4MB emphasis. The Labour party is dismissing even the possibility that trans women might be men’s rights activists. Outrageous. So having a penis and testicles, a big bushy beard, and a booming voice – basically, being Brian Blessed – won’t make you ineligible to be on a Labour all-women shortlist, but being an activist on behalf of men will? What bizarre times we live in. Why would a man vote for the Labour party today?]

Coming soon, to a Labour all-women shortlist near you:

Our thanks to James for this piece in The Guardian. Unusually, we’ve archived it, because it contains a revelation from Dany Cotton that the paper may come to regret.

The piece focuses on the fuss following her suggestion about renaming Fireman Sam as Firefighter Sam, and notes she still heads up a women’s network within the fire brigade. So we know where her priorities lie. But these paragraphs caught my eye, emphasis mine:

Speaking at a event entitled “Gender Equality: will it take another 100 years” organised by the Young Women’s Trust, Cotton revealed the sexism she has faced throughout her 30-year career at the LFB.

Asked whether she supported quotas in industries dominated by men, she warned that women promoted during quota periods could suffer because of positive discrimination. “For every single rank promotion I’ve got I have been told, every single time, that I’m going to get the job because I’m the only woman on the panel – even the job I’ve got now. Which is quite bizarre, really,” she said.

How can women who’ve been promoted during quota periods “suffer because of positive discrimination”? After “revealing the sexism she has faced throughout her 30-year career at the LFB”, Ms Cotton admits to having been informed in advance that anti-male sexism has been behind every promotion she’s had, right to the top of the LFB. And still she complains about sexism!!!

“Quite bizarre” doesn’t start to get at the truth. Bloody outrageous anti-meritocratic anti-male promotions, more like.

Most people reading this blog piece will be aware that Birmingham City FC terminated the contract to host this year’s International Conference on Men’s Issues at its home ground, St Andrew’s Stadium. Various blog pieces on this website and the conference website have explored the matter in some detail. We’re pleased to report that we’ve negotiated an out-of-court settlement with the club. Our thanks to Tony, party treasurer, for leading the negotiations, and to Ian, our legal advisor, for his support.

We’re not permitted under the terms of the settlement contract to divulge any details, but we can now finally put this matter behind us, and focus our energies on the London conference.

From left to right: Tatiana Akhmedova, gold digger, Baroness Shackleton of Belgravia, highest-paid divorce lawyer in the UK. Shackleton saved Paul McCartney a fortune in his divorce with Heather Mills, so she isn’t completely evil.

A piece by Frances Gibb (Legal Editor) on the front page of today’s Times. The 2016 award of £453 million to Tatiana Akhmedov for “equal contributions to the welfare of the family” during their 20-year-long marriage is equivalent to over £62,000 per day. To be fair, she claims to have raised their two sons without the help of a nanny, £62,000 per day seems reasonable. Nannies don’t come cheap. The piece:

A Russian billionaire ordered to hand £453 million to his former wife was named yesterday in what is thought to be Britain’s biggest divorce case.

Farkhad Akhmedov, who featured this week on the US “Putin list” of officials and oligarchs close to the Kremlin, was ordered to give Tatiana Akhmedova 41.5 per cent of his “staggering” wealth by a High Court judge in London in 2016. An order prevented the couple’s identification after Ms Akhmedova, who is in her mid-forties, expressed fears for her safety. Yesterday, however, details of the case, and the couple’s lavish lifestyle, were revealed in the Court of Appeal.

Mr Akhmedov, 62, a gas and oil tycoon who is a close friend of Roman Abramovich, the owner of Chelsea football club, married more than 20 years ago. The couple moved to London in 1993 and Ms Akhmedova brought up their two sons without a nanny, the court was told. They lived in a £39 million mansion in Surrey and had a £27.8 million holiday home.

Mr Akhmedov’s solicitor is appealing against the divorce ruling, claiming that the billionaire — who is seeking to join the appeal — was the victim of “manifestly unjust” favouritism towards his ex-wife by the British courts. She had argued that she was due almost half their £1 billion fortune because of her “equal contributions to the welfare of the family”. Ms Akhmedova says she has received almost nothing.

The previous highest divorce payout was made public in 2014 when Jamie Cooper-Hohn, estranged wife of the financier Sir Chris Hohn, was awarded £337 million. Last year Khoo Kay Peng, the boss of Laura Ashley, was ordered to pay his ex-wife, Pauline Chai, £64 million. Such awards have given London the reputation of being “the divorce capital of the world”.

No sanctions are being applied to the 200-strong Putin list, which includes Mr Akhmedov and was released by the Trump administration yesterday, but it is seen as a possible blueprint for future measures.

You can subscribe to The Times here.

Our thanks to Stu for this.