Meanwhile Boko Haram, as always.

Suspected Islamist Boko Haram militants have ambushed a UN humanitarian aid convoy in north-eastern Nigeria which had a military escort, officials say.

The military said three civilians, including UN staff, and two soldiers were wounded in the attack.

It has prompted the UN to temporarily suspend aid deliveries in Borno state, where more than two million people have been displaced by the insurgency.

The UN says thousands of children are severely malnourished in the region.

Emphasis added. Boko Haram wants thousands of children to starve to death.

Doubtless thousands of adults are also malnourished and in danger of starving to death.

Earlier this month the UN’s children agency warned that tens of thousands of children would die if treatment did not reach them soon.

So Boko Haram’s response is to make the UN suspend aid deliveries. No more food aid for the starving people of Borno.

Nick Cohen calls the Trump-supporting Republicans – which is most of them – collaborators.

Anglo-Saxon democracies, which were never invaded in the 20th century, have produced a rich series of alternative histories of resistance. When the Nazis win the Second World War, audiences can flatter themselves that they would never have collaborated with Robert Harris’s Fatherland or Amazon’s Man in the High Castle.

No one is more prone to imagining how well they would have behaved in conflicts that they never experienced than American conservatives. The cult of Churchill in the US would embarrass even his most devoted British admirers.

Do they? That’s bizarre. I do the opposite – I always suspect I would be cowardly and selfish. I don’t dare imagine myself behaving well, because I’m not the least bit confident I would have. It’s the same with the Milgram experiment – I always imagine myself being cowed by the insistence of the guy in the lab coat and my shame at messing up his nice experiment.

Anyway – Trump is a fascist, or as close to one as we need in order to know he must not be elected president of the US.

I don’t throw the word “fascism” around, but can we at least accept that Trump follows theFührerprinzip? He has no colleagues, only followers. He is a racist. Not a closet racist, or a dog-whistle racist, but a racist so unabashed that the Klan endorses him. Above all, he has the swaggering dictator’s determination to bawl opponents into silence with screams of “loser”, “dummy”, “fraud”, “puppet,” “biased”, “disgusting”, “liar” and “kook”. As with the web trolls Trump so resembles, it is never the point and always the person. Female news presenters have to explain that they are not asking him difficult questions because they have “blood coming out of whatever” or surrender to him, as Megan Kelly of Fox News did to her shame. Latinos have to explain why they are not rapists and murderers or shut up and give up. Muslims have to explain that they are not terrorists or they lose the right to a hearing. At every stage, the argument is shifted on to the troll’s terrain of ethnic and religious loyalty tests. Except here the troll could become the world’s most powerful man.

It’s still hard to believe we’re even arguing about this. The man is a brawler, a street-fighter, that loud drunk at the bar, that out of control asshole on the bus. He’s sexist racist xenophobic and foul-tempered. There is not one good thing you can say about him.

Conservatives boasted too that they knew that the old-fashioned virtues of good character mattered as much as a man or woman’s ideology. By this reckoning, Trump’s bragging, vainglory, dark fury and towering vanity should disqualify him from the presidency regardless of his politics.

What I’m saying. He’s terrible. If he were an ardent lefty but had all those qualities I would say he’s terrible. (There certainly are ardent lefties like that, and they are terrible.)

Yet McCain and Ryan, those enemies of appeasement, have folded and endorsed Trump. Rubio, that piercing judge of his character, has decided that, after all, Trump’s finger should be on the button. Presidents Bush père et fils are bravely abstaining. Bobby Jindal, who described Trump as a “narcissist and egomaniacal madman”, wants him in the White House. Nearly all the Republican names you remember follow suit. The Dick Cheneys, Rand Pauls and Condoleezza Rices are backing Trump or refusing to commit. Confronted with a dictatorial menace in their own time and their own country they lack the courage to risk the unpopularity that Churchillian dissent would bring.

Even when Trump followed his years of promoting the interests of a dictator of a hostile foreign power by urging Vladimir Putin to hack Clinton’s emails, they held steady in their cowardice. The Republicans, the party of red-baiters and Cold Warriors, is now in the pocket of a Kremlin “useful idiot” and the best its national security conservatives can manage are embarrassed mutters.

…

My friend and comrade, the American journalist Jamie Kirchick, coined the phrase “Vichy Republicans” to describe its leaders.

They might as well be singing “Maréchal, nous voilà !”

Ari Berman on the North Carolina ruling:

This is a huge victory for voting rights—the most significant in the country since the Shelby County v. Holder decision—that will make it easier for hundreds of thousands of voters to cast a ballot this November. It comes just a week before the 51st anniversary of the VRA on August 6, and is especially welcome because there were widespread voting problems during North Carolina’s presidential primary in March that offered a disturbing preview of what to expect in the general election—students waited in three-hour lines, foreign-born US citizens were asked to spell their names to poll workers for no reason in an apparent literacy test, and elderly voters born during Jim Crow were turned away from the polls.

Most notably, the Fourth Circuit court found that GOP legislators restricted the right to vote to intentionally target African-American voters. North Carolina passed a series of reforms beginning in 2000 that benefited all voters, particularly black voters, wrote Judge Diana Motz, a Clinton appointee, in a unanimous opinion.

During the period in which North Carolina jurisdictions were covered by Section 5, African American electoral participation dramatically improved. In particular, between 2000 and 2012, when the law provided for the voting mechanisms at issue here and did not require photo ID, African American voter registration swelled by 51.1%.

African American turnout similarly surged, from 41.9% in 2000 to 71.5% in 2008 and 68.5% in 2012.

Which is a good thing, right? Well yes except that African Americans don’t tend to vote Republican. What to do, what to do.

The ruling continues:

After years of preclearance and expansion of voting access, by 2013 African American registration and turnout rates had finally reached near-parity with white registration and turnout rates. African Americans were poised to act as a major electoral force. But, on the day after the Supreme Court issued Shelby County v. Holder, 133 S. Ct. 2612 (2013), eliminating preclearance obligations, a leader of the party that newly dominated the legislature (and the party that rarely enjoyed African American support) announced an intention to enact what he characterized as an “omnibus” election law. Before enacting that law, the legislature requested data on the use, by race, of a number of voting practices. Upon receipt of the race data, the General Assembly enacted legislation that restricted voting and registration in five different ways, all of which disproportionately affected African Americans.

In response to claims that intentional racial discrimination animated its action, the State offered only meager justifications. Although the new provisions target African Americans with almost surgical precision, they constitute inapt remedies for the problems assertedly justifying them and, in fact, impose cures for problems that did not exist. Thus the asserted justifications cannot and do not conceal the State’s true motivation.

Faced with this record, we can only conclude that the North Carolina General Assembly enacted the challenged provisions of the law with discriminatory intent.

Let me just repeat one sentence, with emphasis: Before enacting that law, the legislature requested data on the use, by race, of a number of voting practices.

Oh did they. What an interesting coincidence.

Berman says this ruling may represent a trend. Good news.

Ari Berman in the Nation on William Barber’s speech at the DNC on Thursday:

Nation readers are well acquainted with Dr. Rev. William Barber II, this magazine’s civil-rights correspondent, but most Americans have never heard of him. Last night was his coming-out party, when he brought down the house with an incredible speech at the DNC just an hour before Hillary Clinton took the stage.

So I watched it. It’s a stem-winder all right.

As the leader of the North Carolina NAACP and the Moral Monday movement, Barber is leading a multi-racial and multi-issue struggle for racial and social justice that the South hasn’t seen since the 1960s. He’s been traveling the nation in recent months calling for a moral revival—similar to the “revolution of values” that Martin Luther King Jr. once preached—and he distilled that message in a barn-burning 10-minute speech last night.

It’s a faithy speech, but it’s the kind of faithy that an atheist can ally with.

DailyKos has the full transcript. Here’s the punchline:

I say to you tonight, there are some issues that are not Left versus Right, Liberal versus Conservative, they are “right versus wrong.” 

We need to embrace our deepest moral values and push for a revival of the heart of our democracy.

• When we fight to reinstate the power of the Voting Rights Act and to break interposition and the nullification of the current Congress, we in the South especially know that when we do that, we are reviving the heart of our democracy.
• When we fight for $15 and a union, and universal healthcare, and public education, and immigrant rights, and LGBTQ rights, we are reviving the heart of our democracy.
• When wedevelop tax and trade policies that no longer funnel our prosperity to the wealthy few, we are reviving the heart of our democracy. W
• When we hear the legitimate discontent of Black Lives Matter and we come together to renew justice in our criminal justice system, we are embracing our deepest moral values and reviving the heart of our democracy.
• When we love the Jewish child and the Palestinian child,  the Muslim and the Christian, and the Hindu, and the Buddhist, and those who have no faith— but they love this nation, we are reviving the heart of our democracy.

Back to Ari Berman:

I was surprised to see Barber speak at the DNC. He’s rarely endorsed candidates and been careful not to get too close to the Democratic Party, which he’s also taken on over the years. So it was great to see the Clinton campaign—known for its caution and carefulness—give a huge platform to a leader who is so bold and honest.

“In times like these, we have to make some decisions and I might not normally be here as a preacher as an individual, but when I hear Hillary’s voice and her positions, I hear and I know that she is working to embrace our deepest moral values and we should embrace her,” Barber said. “But let me be clear, let me be clear, she, nor any person can do it alone. The watchword of the democracy and the watchword of faith is we. The heart of our democracy is on the line this November and beyond.”

It is indeed great to see the Clinton campaign feature Barber. That’s the less corporate side of her, which we all need to see. Mazel tov.

An entry in the Nightmare Food Illustrations game that I just can’t not share. Via Jeffrey on Facebook:

Salmon with lemon jello.

SALMON WITH LEMON JELLO.

Not to mention the mouthwatering bowl of whole anchovies, and the side dish of sweet potato balls in raspberry jello with oysters on a bed of arugula.

Speaking of the rage and threats and violence that have become the new normal – Oregon’s governor has extra security these days, thanks to the worked-up rage of the gangsters who tried to steal Malheur.

After a series of hostile threats this year — beginning with the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge occupation and continuing after Brown called for tighter gun rules in Oregon — the governor’s security detail has quietly taken steps to increase protection levels.

Some measures remain unidentified. But others are visible.

They don’t always say where she’s going, for instance.

And while threats against Oregon governors aren’t new, Brown’s staff said it’s taking the increasingly aggressive tone of recent threats seriously enough to keep in regular contact with the FBI.

“Instead of voicing passionate opinions or dissent as part of exercising free speech, they express intent to cause her harm, ugly threats of physical violence and death,” said Kristen Grainger, Brown’s communications director. “Potentially dangerous individuals have attempted to breach security perimeters on more than one occasion.”

Grainger and others say Brown’s role in calling for an end to this winter’s armed occupation near Burns, along with her recent backing of three gun-control bills, appear to have ramped up threats.

Bullies like to bully; it’s what they do.

So you type “angry trump hitler” into Google and pop, Google knows what you mean.

Not what you want. Hot rage is not what you want in a head of state. Chronic hot rage is really not what you want in a head of state. Trump is unmistakably a horrible human being, a bully of the worst kind. His candidacy makes me ashamed to be a Yank.

Helen Pidd and Jon Boone at the Guardian have more details on the apparent murder of Samia Shahid.

Such crimes are often triggered by women defying centuries-old patriarchal codes and daring to make their own choice about who they marry, or how they live their lives. Shahid not only married a man of her choice, she also divorced her first husband, her cousin Shakeel, a man Kazam says she was pressured to marry in a lavish wedding in Pakistan in 2012.

The marriage had been arranged when she was young and it is believed Shahid was expected to apply for a visa for Shakeel so he could join her in the UK. “The nearer [the wedding] day came, the more she didn’t want to do it,” said a friend in Bradford.

She went through with the marriage but was so determined not to become pregnant that she asked a British friend in Pakistan to help her get the contraceptive pill – hard to come by in rural Pakistan.

Shahid eventually returned to the UK, where she sought a divorce via the Sharia courts and couriered the legal papers to Shakeel at his Pandori home. Her rejection of the marriage is said to have gravely insulted her family, who refused to recognise the divorce. They reported her missing to the police in November 2014 when she left the UK to live with her new partner, Kazam, in Dubai.

Her new husband, that is. They got married – willingly and happily on both sides! – in September 2014.

The family was never likely to approve. Kazam was an outsider; a member of the Syed clan rather than their own Choudhry clan and with no links to their ancestral village near the Mangla dam in Punjab.

They married at Leeds Town Hall, with a legally binding UK marriage certificate as well as a nikkah. Samia converted to Shia Islam.

Shahid had attempted to restore her relationship with the family on a return visit to Bradford in September 2015, the Guardian has learned. She was sufficiently worried that she asked a police chaperone to accompany her to a meeting with her own family.

It didn’t go well. Even with the officer present, the meeting became heated and one of her relatives received an official police harassment warning, West Yorkshire police said. “She was very smart, was Samia,” said a friend in Bradford. “That’s why she took the police officer with her. She thought they’d hurt her or take her passport off her or both.”

But she went to Pakistan anyway when they told her her father was dying. He wasn’t. Her stream of instant messages to Kazam suddenly stopped.

When he phoned her cousin, a man called Mobeen, Kazam said he was told Shahid – who he says was a healthy 28-year-old woman – had died of a heart attack. It was the first in a number of conflicting explanations of her death, including that she had fallen after an asthma attack. The local press carried a story claiming she had killed herself because she was depressed about not having had children, but the family have rejected this.

Aqeel Abbas, the investigating officer on the case, played down the likelihood of foul play, telling the Guardian on Sunday that there had been no signs of external physical injury on Shahid’s body. However, it emerged days later through an autopsy – and pictures of her body seen by this newspaper – that Shahid has visible bruising around her neck. A source involved in the investigation said they suspected Shahid was poisoned.

I’ve seen one of those pictures too. The bruise is very visible. It’s all across the front, and it stands out. There’s also a stream of blood at one corner of her mouth.

[MP Naz] Shah’s complaints dramatically raised the profile of a case that might otherwise have never gone further than the local Urdu language press in Jhelum district. The interior minister has demanded an in-depth investigation while the chief minister of Punjab has ordered a special committee of top provincial policemen to prepare a report into the affair within three days.

All because she divorced a man she never wanted to marry, and married a man she did want to marry.

Originally a comment by Steamshovelmama on An extended discussion with their homeopath.

This is one of the appealing things about most “alternative therapies”. You’re paying through the nose for the “therapist”‘s time so you get a nice comfy sit down with a cup of tea and have a long chat with someone who is basically there to listen to you talk about your problems. There’s no rush, there’s time to talk about all those neurotic little issues – which we all have but which medical doctors don’t want to hear about because theres’s nothing they can do about them. Then you go home with (or having had) the equivalent of a sugar pill which, yes, probably does do you some good because you’ve performed all the necessary steps to activate the placebo effect. You’ve been spoken to by someone you consider to be in a position of authority, you’ve sacrificed (paid a shitload of money), you’ve undergone/will carry out some ritually prescribed actions (been physically manipulated/massaged/had needles stuck in you, been given magic pills to take a set time every day etc) so it’s no wonder some people swear by them. Between the placebo effect – actually very strong – and regression to the mean (most things get better on their own in a few weeks) people do perceive they are getting an effect.

This has led to suggestions it should be offered on the NHS. Not because it does anything more than placebo but because it’s basically harmless. You see, every GP’s surgery has a small hardcore of patients who are quite well but think they’re not. They have a plethora of physical symptoms, all of which are either self-evidently neurotic or have been investigated in every way possible. They aren’t actually mentally ill as such so referral to the psych services (which are very overstretched) is just bouncing the problem elsewhere. Back in the 1940s and 50s it wasn’t uncommon for this group to be appeased by being prescribed something innocuous – a sugar pill. These days we aren’t allowed to lie to patients (and all medication can be easily looked up on line) so this small coterie of patients often ends up having their symptoms treated because the GP is left with no choice. The suggestion was to employ a homoeopathist or an acupuncturist to deal with these people’s problems. They get their sit down and chat about their issues. They get their sugar pills (or magic water), they go home happy and free up a shit-load of appointments at their GP’s surgery. The GP keeps a weather eye on them to make sure the symptoms that have been interpreted as innocuous don’t transform into something treatable. Everyone is happy – except for the folks who make the argument that the NHS should never, under any circumstances, pay for anything that doesn’t work.

I can see both sides. The problem with the current system is that, in order not to lie to this group of patients, we have to poison them, which also costs the NHS money. Overall, a local complementary therapist might well be cheaper – especially if he/she negotiates a lower rate to ensure regular NHS business. It’s not much different to the “exercise prescriptions” that GPs can give out which may include access to local authority gyms.

Ah yes, Ann Coulter exists. I’d forgotten.

You know what this convention really needed? An angry Muslim with a thick accent like Fareed Zacaria.

— Ann Coulter (@AnnCoulter) July 29, 2016

Those pesky immigrants with their foreign accents – Lafayette, Einstein, Wiesel, Rushdie – how much richer and wiser we’d be if we’d kept them all out.

Also I wonder how many languages Ann Coulter speaks fluently. My informed guess is that the number is precisely one. She’s contemptuous of Khizr Khan for speaking a second language with an accent, and apparently indifferent to the soldiers who went on being alive after Khan’s son told them to step back while he went forward to check out a vehicle…which exploded, killing him.

I guess she serves as an example, in the same way Trump does. Here’s what’s not to be: don’t be like these people.

Ok here’s some good news though.

(Mind you, it’s the kind of “good” news that’s just the undoing of some bad news, as so much of what passes for “good” news is these days. Or maybe it’s always like that.)

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit has struck down North Carolina’s horrible voter ID law.

A federal appeals court on Friday struck down North Carolina’s requirement that voters show identification before casting ballots and reinstated an additional week of early voting.

The decision by a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit was an overwhelming victory for the Justice Department and civil rights groups that argued the voting law was designed to dampen the growing political clout of African American voters, who participated in record numbers in elections in 2008 and 2012.

I’m reading Ari Berman’s Give Us the Ballot right now; it’s an excellent account of the moves to suppress all these pesky new brown voters. He says North Carolina’s was the worst of all.

“We can only conclude that the North Carolina General Assembly enacted the challenged provisions of the law with discriminatory intent,” Judge Diana Gribbon Motz wrote for the panel.

Which was the point of the Voting Rights Act – to put an end to that.

The challenge to North Carolina’s law is one of several cases throughout the country seeking to eliminate strict voting rules in place for the first time in the November presidential contest.

Opponents of the law, led by the state NAACP, asked the three-judge panel to reverse a lower-court ruling that upheld the voting rules.

In 2013, North Carolina lawmakers overhauled election law soon after the Supreme Court got rid of a requirement that certain states with a history of discrimination receive approval before changing voting rules. Legislators eliminated same-day voter registration, rolled back of a week of early voting and put an end to out-of-precinct voting.

The ruling in Shelby County v Holder was a green light for new voter suppression laws, and they tumbled out in abundance.

During oral arguments, Judges James A. Wynn Jr. and Henry F. Floyd remarked on the timing of the changes and on comments from a state senator who said lawmakers were no longer restrained by the “legal headache” of the Voting Rights Act.

Uh huh – the “legal headache” that meant legislators couldn’t impose rules that burdened non-white people disproportionately. In a set-up where non-white people are statistically poorer and thus have less easy access to things like cars and the money to pay for picture ID, it’s easy to think up ways to filter them out.

So this ruling is good news.

I’m glad I was never tempted by Jill Stein. The Washington Post reports (uncritically) her woo-based ideas:

Did she think vaccines were harmful?

“I think there’s no question that vaccines have been absolutely critical in ridding us of the scourge of many diseases — smallpox, polio, etc. So vaccines are an invaluable medication,” Stein said. “Like any medication, they also should be — what shall we say? — approved by a regulatory board that people can trust. And I think right now, that is the problem. That people do not trust a Food and Drug Administration, or even the CDC for that matter, where corporate influence and the pharmaceutical industry has a lot of influence.”

But a lot of people don’t “trust” the FDA because they’ve bought into a lot of bullshit claims about vaccines and Big Pharma.

Stein’s warning about corporate influence in the vaccine approval process is often voiced by “anti-vaxxers.” In reality, most members of the Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee work at academic or medical institutions, not drug companies. But for Stein, the fact that people saw corporate and lobbying influence running rampant meant that some skepticism was warranted.

But for reasonable people, that of course does not follow. People can “see” all kinds of nonsense, especially when they get their “information” from woo-peddlers. The fact that some people “see” something doesn’t mean the rest of us should be influenced by what they “see.” Perception can be wrong.

“Monsanto lobbyists help run the day in those agencies and are in charge of approving what food isn’t safe,” said Stein, whose platform calls for a moratorium on genetically modified organisms (GMOs).

Ok that’s it. That’s a vote for famine. No we do not need a moratorium on GMOs.

Stein went on to explain that she’d studied the value of vaccines and come out with questions.

“As a medical doctor, there was a time where I looked very closely at those issues, and not all those issues were completely resolved,” Stein said. “There were concerns among physicians about what the vaccination schedule meant, the toxic substances like mercury which used to be rampant in vaccines. There were real questions that needed to be addressed. I think some of them at least have been addressed. I don’t know if all of them have been addressed.”

So, she seems to be saying, be worried about vaccines just in case, and tell other people to be worried about them just in case, and advise people not to get their kids vaccinated just in case.

Shockingly irresponsible.

The Indian writer and activist Mahasweta Devi has died.

Devi was an outspoken proponent of equal rights.

She famously made a speech at India’s prestigious Jaipur literary festival where she said all humans had the fundamental “right to dream”.

“I would remember her as one of the most important writers in India because of the subjects she chose and remained faithful to them,” publisher Urvashi Bhutalia told the BBC.

“Her writing was a political battle for the downtrodden and she never compromised on her ideas. She was a very kind human being.”

A number of her works, including the best-selling Breast Stories, have been translated into English from Bengali, and are also studied in universities across India.

She was a friend of Taslima’s.

In Uttar Pradesh yesterday a shopkeeper murdered a Dalit couple because they owed him 15 rupees – 22 cents.

Police told the Press Trust of India news agency the incident took place in Mainpuri district early on Thursday as the couple were on their way to work.

They were stopped by Ashok Mishra, the owner of a village grocery, who demanded that the couple pay the money for three packets of biscuits that they had bought for their three children a few days ago, reports say.

The couple reportedly told him they would pay after they received their daily wages later in the evening.

“While Mishra kept shouting for the money, the couple started walking towards the fields. Mishra then ran to his house nearby and returned with an axe. He hacked Bharat repeatedly and then attacked Mamta who was trying to rescue her husband. The couple died on the spot,” Nadeem, a local villager, told The Indian Express newspaper.

I hope those three children have somewhere to go.

Trump is such a sleaze. The racism is worse, the lack of inhibition is more terrifying, but the sleaze is more shaming and disgusting.

They tripped in the dark and accidentally deleted Melania Trump’s website and biography.

The disappearance of Trump’s elaborate website comes just days after news outlets, including The Huffington Post, raised serious questions about whether she actually earned an undergraduate degree in architecture from the University of Ljubljana, which is in Trump’s native Slovenia. Her online biography claimed she had, but a book about her life published earlier this year says she left the university after one year so she could pursue a modeling career.

Well maybe it was a one-year degree. Architecture is pretty simple, isn’t it?

Embellishing Trump’s educational achievements in her online biography “was almost certainly done in consultation with Trump and his advisors, as they were desperate to give off the impression that the Slovenian model was not just beautiful, but also smart and well-educated,” according to Melania Trump: The Inside Story, an unauthorized biography of the potential first lady.

Nobody smart and well-educated would be able to stand Trump, no not even for all those billions.

Speaking of misogyny, and threats against women – Jessica Valenti has felt compelled to leave social media because of threats to her daughter age 5. Valenti is a writer, remember – social media are part of writers’ equipment now. Being forced off social media is crippling. It’s a figurative form of kneecapping.

On Twitter, popular writer Jessica Valenti wrote: “This morning I woke up to a rape and death threat directed at my 5 year old daughter. That this is part of my work life is unacceptable.”

Valenti, author of 2007’s Full Frontal Feminism and co-author of Yes Means Yes: Visions of Female Sexual Power and A World Without Rape in 2008, becomes the latest in an increasingly long line of women who have been harassed and threatened online by anonymous stalkers from SNL cast member Leslie Jones to Gamergate targets Anita Sarkeesian, Briana Wu and Zoe Quinn.

In a series of tweets, Valenti lamented the daily barrage of attacks and threats online by people who are threatened by feminism, while also slamming law enforcement for not taking online threats seriously.

She also hammered social media companies who did little to police vicious and threatening commenters.

Little or nothing. Mostly it’s nothing.

I am sick of this shit. Sick of saying over and over how scary this is, sick of being told to suck it up.

— Jessica Valenti (@JessicaValenti) July 27, 2016

It gets very, very sick-making.

Naz Shah is accusing the Pakistani authorities of trying to cover up the murder of Samia Shahid.

Pakistani police investigating the death told the Guardian on Sunday that there were “no visible injuries or signs of violence” on Shahid’s body when it was found last Wednesday in the family home in Pandori, Jhelum, 50 miles (80km) south of Islamabad.

A postmortem report released on Thursday shows that her body did in fact have a “reddish brown linear horizontal bruise measuring about 19cm extending from just below [the] right ear and around the neck”.

The Guardian has seen photographs of Shahid’s body, which appear to confirm the finding. There also appear to be two purple welts around her neck. Naz Shah, Shahid’s MP in Bradford West, has accused Pakistani authorities of a potential cover-up in light of the findings.

She said on Thursday: “I originally intervened in this case to demand that there was a proper investigation into my constituent’s death, saying it had all the hallmarks of a so-called ‘honour’ killing. Having seen the autopsy report, I think we are now also looking at a case involving a potential cover-up.”

It has to do with that huge bruise on her neck that the police did not mention to the Guardian on Sunday, and the two welts on her neck ditto.

“I have asked for the police officer and the physician who did the first postmortem to be investigated,” the MP said. “Just a few days ago they were telling us the autopsy was inconclusive and that there were no visible signs on her body and now the autopsy report shows that there were marks on her neck.”

Oh those.

Shahid’s family have said variously that she died of a heart attack or an asthma attack and insist they did not kill her.

It was a wasp sting! No, she fell down the stairs by accident. No, she choked on an apple. No, she held her breath out of spite.

The family insist Shahid was married to Shakeel, a first cousin, and police in Pakistan say they have not received any documents proving otherwise.

In fact, she divorced him in a UK sharia court in 2014 and then married Kazam at Leeds town hall in September 2014, after converting to Shia Islam, while her family is Sunni.

Friends of Shahid in the UK said the family felt so dishonoured by her behaviour that they did not acknowledge she had remarried.

A family member in Bradford was given a harassment warning by police in September 2015 when Shahid, who was living in Dubai, returned to the UK to try to patch things up with her family, West Yorkshire police said.

Two people, believed to be cousins of Shahid, were arrested in Bradford this week on suspicion of threatening Shah. Both were bailed on Wednesday night pending further investigations.

A nasty, nasty business.

Joan Smith on the resurgence of misogyny.

The murder of Jo Cox rightly caused an outpouring of emotion, from shocked disbelief to calls for more civility in public discourse. But memories are short, especially in the feverish atmosphere of a Labour leadership contest. I could hardly believe my ears when Owen Smith, in a campaign speech about equality, said he was upset that Labour did not have the power to “smash” Theresa May “back on her heels”.

…

Woman-hating has come roaring back, borne on a tide of recession, economic uncertainty and religious extremism. In this country, we have just witnessed misogyny in its “jokey” form, prompted by May’s arrival at No 10 Downing Street. “Heel, Boys” declared the Sun, showing a pair of kitten heels trampling on the heads of six of her most senior colleagues. Haven’t you got a sense of humour, love? It revived memories of an old trope of Margaret Thatcher as the Conservative party’s dominatrix, confirming that some people cannot see a woman assuming power without thinking of men being humiliated.

It’s true you know. I remember a “political” cartoon of Thatcher with guns firing out of her tits, hahaha geddit she has tits so it’s funny to pretend her tits can fire bullets hahaha.

Misogyny has deep roots. It sometimes becomes dormant – usually when the economy is doing well – but it never really goes away. It is a mistake to regard it as just another form of abuse; it is a peculiarly intimate form of hatred, rooted in relationships carried on behind closed doors but that frequently spill over into the public world. (Racists rarely marry their victims but misogynists often do.)

It needs to be met with zero tolerance, because once it starts being culturally sanctioned, there is no end to it. When a well-known woman starts receiving rape threats on Twitter, hundreds of other people join. In a more extreme example, the prohibition of rape has been abolished in areas of Iraq and Syria occupied by Isis, attracting recruits who like the idea of having coercive sex with 14-year-old girls.

What are its deep roots though? I don’t  know. I’ve been trying to figure that out my whole adult life, with not much success. I suspect it’s just itself – deep hatred is deep hatred. Women are inferior, so we hates’em.

A day after Jeremy Corbyn’s election as Labour leader, the three great offices of state in his shadow cabinet were given to men. It came as no surprise to feminists, who know that the hard left rarely pays more than lip service to a movement it regards as a distraction from the struggle against imperialism. Nor am I surprised that Labour has become a poisonous environment for women MPs. Last week 45 of them signed a letter to Corbyn, demanding that he do more to stop harassment, vilification and intimidation.

I have watched these developments with outrage – and a weary sense of deja vu. Many brave women died for freedoms that are under attack once again, all over the world. And I am as offended by people who play down outbursts of misogyny as I am by those who unashamedly revel in it.

So am I, and unfortunately it’s commonplace right now – masses of people defending outbursts of misogyny as free speech, pushback against PC, a rebuke to the excesses of “SJWs,” jokes, banter, normal give and take, high spirits, social media, the internet, whaddya gonna do. It sucks.

Oh hey gee what do you know – there’s a huge bruise on Samia Shahid’s neck. Maybe she grabbed herself by the neck when she had her “heart attack” or was it her “asthma” attack.

Police in Pakistan investigating the death of a 28-year-old British woman have confirmed a bruise was found on her neck after her death.

Samia Shahid’s husband claims she was murdered in a so-called honour killing.

There was a 7.5in (19cm)-long mark around her neck below her right ear, police said.

Meanwhile, her first husband has been granted “pre-arrest bail” and is expected to offer himself for interview, according to police.

The move means he cannot be arrested in connection with her death, for an as yet unspecified period.

Well that must be pleasant for him. Not so pleasant for her, but hey, she was just a woman.

Meanwhile in the UK, two people, including a relative of Ms Shahid, have been bailed over alleged threats made to MP Naz Shah.

The arrests were made after the Bradford West MP said she was looking into the death of Samia Shahid, 28.

West Yorkshire Police were questioning a 32-year-old woman, a relative of Ms Shahid, and a 37-year-old man.

If women would just do what they’re told, there’d be no need for all this threatening and murdering.