There’s a woman in South Dakota, Annette Bosworth, who is hoping to be a Republican candidate for the Senate. She has a campaign page on Facebook. On it she posted this attractive item:

Subtle, the comparison to animals, isn’t it.

The post shows 61,789 shares at the moment. There are a lot of hostile comments, so many of those shares must be of the “do you believe this bullshit?” variety.… Read the rest

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I get facetious in the afternoon…

… Read the rest

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Alexis Okeowo at the New Yorker blog on the kidnapped schoolgirls in Borno, Nigeria.

“I thought it was the end of my life,” Deborah Sanya told me by phone on Monday from Chibok, a tiny town of farmers in northeastern Nigeria. “There were many, many of them.” Boko Haram, an Islamist terrorist group, kidnapped Sanya and at least two hundred of her classmates from a girls’ secondary school in Chibok more than two weeks ago. Sanya, along with two friends, escaped. So did forty others. The rest have vanished, and their families have not heard any word of them since.

Sanya is eighteen years old and was taking her final exams before graduation. Many of the schools in towns

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Another one it would be good to sign.

Tell Iraq: Don’t Legalize Forced Child Marriage

Any minute now, the Iraqi Council of Representatives will vote to legalize forced child marriage.

The specifics of the legislation (part of the Jaafari Personal Status Law) are terrifying:

• There will no longer be a minimum age to legally marry (it’s currently 18) but the law provides policies for divorcing a 9-year-old;
• A girl’s father would legally be able to accept a marriage proposal; and
• The girl would be legally prohibited from resisting her husband’s advances and leaving the home without his permission. It’s a recipe for a life in domestic and sexual slavery.

Currently, Iraq has one of the most progressive policies on women’s

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The Irish Times reports:

The Sinn Féin president Gerry Adams has been arrested in connection with the 1972 abduction, murder and disappearance of Jean McConville.

Detectives from the PSNI’s serious crime branch are questioning Mr Adams at Antrim station about the murder of the widowed mother of 10 children.

Mr Adams remained in police custody overnight following his arrest yesterday.

The BBC gives some background.

Mrs McConville, one of Northern Ireland’s Disappeared, was kidnapped in front of her children after being wrongly accused of being an informer.

The claim that she was an informer was dismissed after an official investigation by the Northern Ireland Police Ombudsman.

The widow was held at one or more houses before being

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In more tooth-grinding news from Pakistan, a mosque in a suburb of Islamabad has been named after the guy who murdered Salmaan Taseer.

Taseer was shot and killed by Mumtaz Qadri, a member of his own security detail, at the Kohsar Market in Sector F-6 on January 4, 2011. The shooter Qadri has become a divisive figure in Pakistani society. He is hailed as a ‘hero’ by some and denounced as a cold blooded murderer by others. Clerics from the Barelvi school of thought are among those proclaiming Qadri’s ‘heroism’.

Perhaps this is why a mosque in the suburbs of the very city Taseer was killed in, has been named after Mumtaz Hussain Qadri. The mosque is constructed on

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