Our thanks to HEqual for this good news.

Our thanks to Mike P for this piece in the Telegraph. The paper’s headline is this:

Mother, father and child survive dramatic fall onto tube tracks at Baker Street

The start of the piece:

A family of three miraculously escaped both electrocution and being hit by a train on the London Underground last night (FRI) after falling onto the tracks.

Shortly before 10.15pm a mother pushing her child in a buggy lost her bearings while reading an overhead information board, and mother child and pushchair fell onto the track at Baker Street.

The father leapt down to help his family while the couple’s other child, a toddler, looked on from the platform.

Hopefully, you’ll agree a more accurate headline would have been:

Courageous man risks his life to save the lives of his wife and child, after the latter fall onto tracks at Baket Street

Nowhere in the article is the man’s courage recognized, let alone celebrated. Imagine the media frenzy if the following had been true:

A family of three miraculously escaped both electrocution and being hit by a train on the London Underground last night (FRI) after falling onto the tracks.

Shortly before 10.15pm a father pushing his child in a buggy lost his bearings while reading an overhead information board, and father child and pushchair fell onto the track at Baker Street.

The mother leapt down to help her family while the couple’s other child, a toddler, looked on from the platform.

Hmm, we never read of stories like that, do we?

Our thanks to Sean for this:

Her Twitter account is here, her Twitter address is @SomethingTexty.

A piece by Frances Gibb, Legal Editor, in today’s Times:

Fault-based divorce is set to be scrapped as the biggest shake-up of family laws in 50 years seeks to end the “blame game” between couples.

Spouses would also lose the right to contest the breakdown of a marriage under plans being drawn up by David Gauke, the justice secretary.

The proposal fulfils a key demand of Family Matters, a campaign begun last year by The Times and the Marriage Foundation urging reform of divorce and other family laws.

At present a spouse who wants to file for divorce must either provide evidence that their partner has committed adultery, behaved unreasonably or deserted, or wait two years if both sides agree or five if they do not.

News of the consultation paper, which is being finalised, leaked amid fears in Whitehall that it could run into opposition within some quarters of the Conservative Party and the church.

A Westminster source said that “not everyone will be in favour” and added that “releasing the proposals now could be a way to test the water”. The sole legal ground for divorce would remain irretrievable breakdown but couples would no longer have to cite one of the grounds to justify it.

A time frame ensuring that the process could not take less than six months is being considered to meet critics’ concerns that reform would lead to a rush of “quickie” divorces.

Sir Paul Coleridge, chairman of the Marriage Foundation and a former family High Court judge, said: “This is a development that must be resoundingly welcomed by all of us who know the current divorce law is a fake fault system, which drives people to commit perjury on a wholesale basis if they are not prepared to wait to divorce for two years or longer.

“Now we must hope the government will expand this consultation to include the other areas of family law highlighted by the Family Matters campaign, which also cry out for review and reform.”

However, he pointed out that the move would be “scarcely shatteringly radical, given that parliament passed the law abolishing fault-based divorce in 1996 and then the government of the day failed to implement it”.

Sir James Munby, who has just stepped down as the most senior family judge in England and Wales, has said that the present system involves hypocrisy and has a “lack of intellectual honesty”.

A recent case at the Supreme Court highlighted the issue and drove the campaign for reform. Tini Owens, 68, from Worcestershire, who wanted to divorce her husband of 40 years, was told that she must stay married until 2020 after he refused to consent to the divorce. By then five years will have elapsed and they can divorce on grounds of separation without consent. She said she was devastated by the decision, which would keep her “locked” in what she had described as a “loveless and desperately unhappy marriage”.

She had cited 27 examples of what she called unreasonable behaviour but the lower courts, upheld by the Supreme Court, said that she had failed to show that the marriage had “irretrievably broken down”. The justices expressed “unease” and Baroness Hale of Richmond, the court’s president, said that the case was troubling.

There are 100,000 divorces in England and Wales every year and two thirds are granted on the basis of an allegation of adultery or unreasonable behaviour.

Divorce levels fluctuate. In 2016 the number was up by nearly 6 per cent on the previous year, a total of 106,959 divorces between couples of the opposite sex, but the long-term trend is downwards.

Lord Mackay of Clashfern, the former Conservative lord chancellor whose Family Law Act 1996 scrapping fault-based divorce was enacted but never brought into force, welcomed the news. “The present divorce ground of unreasonable behaviour requires allegations that are hardly ever challenged and often exaggerated by one spouse against the other, which tends to exacerbate the breach of relations between them. Where there are children, it also renders more difficult agreeing arrangements for them. In 1996 parliament passed an act to abolish this requirement. I would be glad that it may happen now.”

Nigel Shepherd, chairman of the 6,000-strong family lawyers group Resolution, said: “This has the potential to be a landmark moment for divorce law in England and Wales.”

Lady Hale said this year that reforming divorce law to remove fault would strengthen the institution of marriage rather than undermine it.

The Ministry of Justice declined to comment.

You can subscribe to The Times here.

An interesting piece published today by TCW.

Daily Mail caption: Jealous college student Anna Dickinson (pictured), 18, recruited two friends to help her launch a savage assault on Tyrone Baines in the dead of night after she learnt he was dating another girl

Our thanks to Steve for this. If women need men like a fish needs a bicycle, why is it that hell hath no fury like a woman scorned?

Enjoy (and the 1,200+ comments).

Our thanks to the estimable and ever-grounded Danuta for this.

Moving (audio, 11:22).

Miss Siobhan O’Dwyer, prissy angry whiny Entitlement Princess

We have a successor to the odious and equally innocent doe-eyed Charlotte Proudman, another young woman fond of passive aggression. Our thanks to James for this. Hopefully Qantas will respond to (Australian, we believe) Miss O’Dwyer’s future requests for tickets by (very robustly, in the Oz manner) telling her to piss off. Please be sure to vote on the question on the web page, “Was the university lecturer right to hit out at Qantas staff?”

Where to start? An extract:

A University of Exeter senior lecturer has slammed airline Qantas for referring to her as ‘Miss’ instead of ‘Doctor’ – saying it was an example of ‘every day sexism’.

Dr Siobhan O’Dwyer’s Tweet about the incident has been liked more than 8,500 times – and sparked a huge debate on the social network about whether Qantas staff were in the wrong.

After flying with the airline to her native Australia, Dr O’Dwyer wrote: “Hey Qantas, my name is Dr O’Dwyer. My ticket says Dr O’Dwyer. Do not look at my ticket, look at me, look back at my ticket, decide it’s a typo, and call me Miss O’Dwyer.

“I did not spend eight years at university to be called Miss.”

No, sweetheart, you spent eight years at university, but your narcissistic hysteria marks you out as a Special Snowflake, in the mould of Laura Bloody-Bates of The Everyday Whining Project. Narcissistic Personality Disorder, anyone? Another extract:

She wrote: “Copping so much flak for this tweet. This was not about my ego. [J4MB: It totally WAS, toots.] It was about highlighting one of a thousand instances of sexism that women encounter every day.

Assuming women only encounter instances of sexism during their waking hours – 16 per day, the same as evil patriarchs? – 1,000 instances “every day” equates to a little more than one per minute. Wow. No wonder there are so many angry whiny wimmin like Miss O’Dwyer around!

Miss O’Dwyer’s page on the University of Exeter website is here. Her email address is S.ODywer@exeter.ac.uk. I invite supporters to email her a link to this piece. Probably best not to include a rape threat, on this occasion. Thanks.