It’s been a bad week for refugees trying to get to Europe.

In Austria, 71 people — including four children, the youngest just a year old — suffocated after being locked in the back of a truck, authorities said Friday. It remained unclear why the migrants, at least some of whom were believed to have been fleeing the war in Syria, were left to die. Hungarian authorities arrested four suspected smugglers, but a police official in Austria acknowledged they were likely low-level operatives and said the ringleaders remained at large.

Meanwhile, some 2,000 miles away, at least 80 people drowned overnight Thursday when a boat, unprepared for the rigors of a trans-Mediterranean voyage, capsized soon after it departed from

It’s not just IS destroying ancient heritage sites.

One such site in Yemen was obliterated in early June, reportedly by the Saudis.

A protected 2,500-year-old cultural heritage site in Yemen’s capital, Sana, was obliterated in an explosion early Friday, and witnesses and news reports said the cause was a missile or bomb from a Saudi warplane. The Saudi military denied responsibility.

The top antiquities-safeguarding official at the United Nations angrily condemned the destruction of ancient multistory homes, towers and gardens, which also killed an unspecified number of residents in Al Qasimi, a neighborhood in Sana’s Old City area.

…

Photographs from the scene and witness accounts posted on social media said the attack destroyed at least five houses

A horror out of a village in India. Amnesty International UK broke the story, and I tried to read their account first but it has drawn so much attention that the site wouldn’t load so I got the Independent’s version.

Two sisters who have been told they will be repeatedly gang-raped as a “punishment” for the crimes committed by their brother have pleaded with the Supreme Court to be protected.

The pair fled their village after an all-male council “ruled” that they should be raped, have their faces blackened and then be paraded naked because the brother eloped with a married woman from a higher caste.

They forgot the scare-quotes on “crimes committed.” Under reasonable laws and human rights … Read the rest

From a public post by Mary Scully on Facebook:

The Women’s Strike for Equality on August 26, 1970 in NYC was the first protest of the women’s liberation movement, now called the second wave of feminism. It was called on the day which marked the 50th anniversary of the 19th Amendment to the US Bill of Rights giving women the right to vote. The demands of the march were: Equal pay for equal work; Free 24-hour childcare; & Free abortion on demand, No forced sterilization. There had been many abortion actions for a few years but this was the first protest that proclaimed all of our demands.

There have been for a long while serious attacks on the women’s

The Brennan Center for Justice at the NYU law school has a resource page on the Voting Rights Act.

The Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965 to ensure state and local governments do not pass laws or policies that deny American citizens the equal right to vote based on race. As the leading democracy of the world, the U.S. should work to keep voting free, fair, and accessible. That’s why the Voting Rights Act is so important. It makes sure every citizen, regardless of their race, has an equal opportunity to have a say and participate in our great democracy.

On June 25, 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned a key provision of the Voting Rights Act, removing

We know humans tend to see faces everywhere, and that Jesus-loving humans see Jesus faces everywhere, but some are so tenuous they bend the mind a little.

Like this one. It takes a lot of good will to see a face at all, and if you do consent to see it as a face…it looks like a very grumpy scowling face of someone advanced in years, which isn’t the usual idea of Jesus. (Also of course there are no actual images of Jesus taken from the life, so nobody knows what actual Jesus actually looked like. Maybe he looked like Yasser Arafat.)

It’s nice of the guy in the blue check shirt to hold up a little image of Jesus … Read the rest

The IHEU has an Amsterdam Declaration that is a statement of the fundamental principles of modern Humanism. The first one was in 1952, and it was updated in 2002. They tweeted about it, so I had a look.

Humanism is the outcome of a long tradition of free thought that has inspired many of the world’s great thinkers and creative artists and gave rise to science itself.

The fundamentals of modern Humanism are as follows:

1. Humanism is ethical. It affirms the worth, dignity and autonomy of the individual and the right of every human being to the greatest possible freedom compatible with the rights of others. Humanists have a duty of care to all of humanity including

Waiting for a bus. A truck went by – a St Pauli Beer truck. There was a slogan on the side, under the logo of the “St Pauli girl” and her armful of beers.

You never forget your first girl.

Hmmm.… Read the rest

The ACLU tweeted a graphic:

 … Read the rest

Steven Shapin reviews the second installment of Richard Dawkins’s memoirs in the Guardian.

I get a sense that he’s not wholly admiring.

The enemies Dawkins has made are, in the main, the enemies he anticipated. As an atheist, he is a vigorous critic of the creationists, their religious fellow-travellers, the postmodernists, relativists and assorted “enemies of reason”. And as a participant in the scientific cage-fighting that is modern evolutionary theory, Dawkins has one of the sharpest tongues in modern culture.

Yes, but also as a participant in various other kinds of cage-fighting, especially the kind conducted via Twitter. In that avocation he’s made some enemies he didn’t anticipate, such as fellow atheists, scientists, humanists and the like who think he … Read the rest

A teenager gets space in the Washington Post to explain why he refused to read Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home because it has drawings of naked laydeez.

Brian Grasso is a freshman.

As a Christian, I knew that my beliefs and identity would be challenged at a progressive university like Duke.

My first challenge came well before I arrived on campus, when I learned that all first years were assigned “Fun Home,” a graphic novel by Alison Bechdel. The book includes cartoon drawings of a woman masturbating and multiple women engaging in oral sex.

After researching the book’s content and reading a portion of it, I chose to opt out of the assignment. My choice had nothing to do with