News from New Zealand: the ban on Ted Dawes’s novel Into the River has been lifted.

The New Zealand Film and Literature Board has lifted the ban on Ted Dawe’s controversial teen novel Into the River.

That little word “controversial” is a bit of cautious well-poisoning. Surely the fact that it was banned was enough of a cue to readers that it was in some way “controversial.”

In a decision that was far from unanimous, the president of the board expressed the collective felt the actions of the censor were “illegal”.

Board president Don Mathieson delivered a dissenting minority report but the remainder of the board voted to allow the book to be sold without restriction, saying a

Azeen Ghorayshi, who broke the Geoff Marcy story on BuzzFeed, now reports that faculty and students at Berkeley are steaming.

The astronomy faculty at the University of California, Berkeley, released a statementlate on Monday saying that famed astronomer Geoff Marcy should no longer be a professor at the university.

…

“We urge the UC Berkeley administration to re-evaluate its response to Marcy, who has been found in violation of UC sexual harassment policy,” the 23 faculty members said in the statement. “We believe that Geoff Marcy cannot perform the functions of a faculty member.”

They’re pissed off that the university has done nothing about Marcy.

Grad students and postdocs want him to be put under restrictions.

“The University’s

Maryam has a piece replying to David Shariatmadari in the Guardian today…eleven days after she asked them for a right of reply. They heavily edited her piece, so she published the unedited version in a post. She introduces it:

On 8 October, the Acting Editor for Comment is Free wrote to say a “very light edit” had been done on my article including “a few tweaks for flow, house style, and to make the piece as accessible as possible for non-expert readers.”

Shockingly, the “light edits” included substantial changes, including the removal of references to Ali Shariatmadari and CAGE prisoners as well as all the relevant links, which would have helped “non-expert readers.”

Moreover, where I mentioned Islamism as

Ross Andersen at the Atlantic is also underwhelmed by Geoff Marcy’s notpology.

In Marcy’s account, he was just moving through the world, giving unsolicited massages to undergraduates, according to the complaints, without the slightest inkling that his actions were causing pain and distress. But in practice, Marcy had leveraged his considerable fame and power in the world of astronomy to build a nearly consequence-free bubble around himself, so that he could avail himself of pleasures that rightfully require the consent of others.

That’s one reason this story is so familiar – the way that fame and power can create that bubble.

Given that reality, Marcy’s intentions aren’t that important. The important intentions here belong to the women he victimized,

From the Guardian:

The children of a British man have called on David Cameron to intervene to save their father from being subjected to 350 lashes in Saudi Arabia. Karl Andree, 74, faces being publicly flogged as part of a punishment imposed after bottles of homemade wine were reportedly found last year in his car by Saudi police enforcing strict laws prohibiting alcohol.

The family of the oil executive, who is being held at Jeddah’s Briman prison, say he is already weak as a result of cancer and fear that the flogging will kill him.

Once again, words fail me. The guy is 74 years old and has cancer. He had some wine – and for that they want … Read the rest

Middle East Eye says it has evidence that the death toll from the Hajj disaster is much higher than the Saudis have said.

We have seen evidence suggesting that at least 2,432 people were killed on 24 September when pilgrims were crushed to death at a crossroads in Mina, inside Mecca and not far from the holy city.

Photos displayed at the Muaism Medical Emergency Centre in Mina, where people are being permitted to search for missing relatives until 30 October, appear to reveal a numbering system of those killed.

A Saudi source travelled to Mina on 30 September and spent four days visiting the centre, where he covertly took photos of what he found and sent them to Middle

Edinburgh University Student Association is holding an election. The EU Feminist Society interviewed the candidates for the Women’s Liberation Group Convenors.

We also sent this email to the candidates for Women’s Liberation Group Convenor to ask them some questions. Before you read their replies below, we’d like to remind everyone that FemSoc passed a policy stating we support sex workers’ rights, which means we back the decriminalisation of sex work and condemn all forms of whorephobia.

Two candidates have answered so far. The first to answer gets a trigger warning at the top.

Magdalen Berns

TW: whorephobia

“Whorephobia”? Really? She expresses hatred of prostitutes in her reply? No, of course  not.

3. EUSA and Femsoc both passed policies supporting sex-workers.

Michael Eisen is pissed off at Berkeley, his university.

On Friday, Azeen Ghorayshi posted a story about Geoffrey Marcy, a high-profile professor in UC Berkeley’s astronomy department. It reported on a a complaint filed by four women to Berkeley’s Office for the Prevention of Harassment and Discrimination (OPHD) that alleged that Marcy “repeatedly engaged in inappropriate physical behavior with students, including unwanted massages, kisses, and groping.”

Unusually for this type of investigation, the results of which are usually kept secret, Ghorayshi’s reporting revealed that OPHD found Marcy guilty of these charges, leading to his issuing a public apology in which he, in all too typical PR driven apology speak, acknowledges doing things that “unintentionally” was “a source of distress

So there are people who actually think it’s a serious mark against Julie Bindel that she said in an interview last month:

I mean, I would actually put [men] all in some kind of camp where they can all drive around in quad bikes, or bicycles, or white vans.

Oh come on. Really? That’s obviously not a serious statement.

Let’s look at it in context. The interview is with radfem collective, so she’s talking to fellow radical feminists – not “radical feminists”as in the hostile stereotype, but radical feminists as in feminists who think we need to get to the root of things. They asked her:

will heterosexuality survive women’s liberation?

And she replied:

It won’t, not unless men

So Ariana Huffington and the Huffington Post empire are promoting Islamism via their new website, from what the Independent says:

The refusal of Western news organisations to involve Islamist voices in the debate on the future of the Middle East is acting as a recruitment driver for Isis and al-Qaeda, one of the region’s leading media figures has claimed. The accusation that global news groups are “pushing people to become extremists” was made last week to The IoS by Wadah Khanfar, the former managing director of the Al Jazeera network.

Mr Khanfar is Arianna Huffington’s partner in the new Huffpost Arabi website, which has been embroiled in controversy since it launched eight weeks ago. Critics have denounced the site

… Read the rest

One National Review – 4chan laughingstock of the week is a “language awareness campaign” at Western University in London, Ontario. It’s a Facebook campaign, the kind with people posing next to sound bites, which frankly makes the whole idea look sillier than it has to. Not all its points are obviously absurd, but they look solemn and self-important in that format, so it’s no wonder that National Review and 4chan are pointing and laughing.

Some of its points are silly though.

Like this one:

I don’t say “White washed” because it presumes “Whiteness” as tied to a certain set of behaviors.

No, it doesn’t, any more than washing white shirts to get them clean does.

Or this one… Read the rest

A post at A Mighty Girl on Facebook:

At Leaders Vision Preparatory School in Ndalat, Kenya, one student stands out from the rest — 90-year-old Priscilla Sitienei! The nonagenarian, who attends school alongside six of her great-great-grandchildren, is believed to be the oldest primary school student in the world. Although she never had an opportunity to learn to read and write as a child, Sitienei now hopes that her example will inspire the children of her community to understand just how valuable education is.

Affectionately known as Gogo, which means “grandmother” in the local Kalenjin language, Sitienei has been a midwife for 65 years and she even delivered several of her 10 to 14-year-old classmates. When she first applied

Obama went to Roseburg, Oregon yesterday to meet with some of the people mourning the victims of the shooting there.

President Obama, visiting a city Friday where emotions are still raw from last week’s shooting massacre, was alternately berated by hundreds of demonstrators and warmly embraced by many survivors of the victims.

The president met privately for about an hour with about 40 people, including survivors of at least three of the nine dead, and made only a short public statement afterward. Many in the community have said they were angered by his pro-gun-control remarks hours after the shooting at Umpqua Community College.

Imagine the students and teacher killed at Umpqua Community College had been blown up by a bomb … Read the rest