The BBC:

Security forces have ended a gun and bomb attack on a university in north-west Pakistan in which 19 people were killed and 17 injured.

Four suspected attackers also died in a battle that lasted nearly three hours at Bacha Khan University in Charsadda.

One Pakistani Taliban commander said the group had carried out the assault, but its main spokesman denied this.

Someone should claim it. If people don’t know who did it, how can they submit to the demands?

One student told television reporters he was in class when he heard gunshots: “We saw three terrorists shouting, ‘God is great!’ and rushing towards the stairs of our department.

“One student jumped out of the classroom through the

…what??

Pink News:

A proposal to add mothers’ names to marriage certificates has been rejected for excluding gay couples.

The proposal had intended to include mothers’ names on marriage certificates, in a bid to “reflect modern Britain”.

The certificates currently only ask for the name of each spouse’s father. The new proposals are intended to include mothers on equal footing to fathers.

However the Home Office has rejected the plans, saying it could not agree to them as assuming that couples have opposite-sex parents is exclusionary.

So…it’s fine to name only fathers, but it’s impermissible to mention mothers. Well what if the parents are a lesbian couple?

Then you put the father’s name, just as it is now. Everybody … Read the rest

Damn it to hell.

Leila Alaoui, a French-Moroccan photographer whose hauntingly beautiful photographs explored themes of migration, cultural identity and displacement, died on Monday night from injuries sustained during a terrorist attack in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. She was 33.

The French culture minister, Fleur Pellerin, confirmed her death on Twitter.

Ms. Alaoui, whose work has been displayed around the world, was described as one of the most promising photographers of her generation by Jean-Luc Monterosso, director of the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris.

God-lovers who hate humans destroy as many good people and things as they can reach.

The North African affiliate of Al Qaeda has claimed responsibility forthe rampage, which killed at

Many startling figures and percentages here – Christopher Ketcham in The New Republic a year ago on the way cattle ranching is sucking the west dry.

Food production consumes more fresh water than any other activity in the United States. “Within agriculture in the West, the thirstiest commodity is the cow,” says George Wuerthner, an ecologist at the Foundation for Deep Ecology, who has studied the livestock industry. Humans drink about a gallon of water a day; cows, upwards of 23 gallons. The alfalfa, hay, and pasturage raised to feed livestock in California account for approximately half of the water used in the state, with alfalfa representing the highest-acreage crop…90 percent of Nevada’s cropland is dedicated to raising hay.

An Oregon citizen writes a letter to the Oregonian rebuking its recent headline on the illegal seizure of Malheur.

The Oregonian’s A1 headline on Sunday, Jan. 17, “Effort to free federal lands,” is inaccurate and irresponsible. The article that follows it is a mere mouthpiece for the scofflaws illegally occupying public buildings and land, repeating their lies and distortions of history and law.

Ammon Bundy and his bullyboys aren’t trying to free federal lands, but to hold them hostage. I can’t go to the Malheur refuge now, though as a citizen of the United States, I own it and have the freedom of it. That’s what public land is: land that belongs to the public — me, you, every law-abiding

Carole Cadwalladr has a scathing review of The Revenant (as did all three of the guests on Saturday Review yesterday). It sounds absolutely rebarbative.

It’s a tale of “revenge, retribution and primal violence”, according to theGuardian’s Peter Bradshaw, “as thrilling and painful as a sheet of ice held to the skin”. This is praise, by the way. It’s “unthinkingly, aggressively masculine,” saysGQ. That’s praise too.

The film is based on a true story of the American frontier from 1823 and I’ll summarise the plot for you: man seeks revenge, man gets revenge. That’s it, basically, for two and a half hours, though there is a brief reprieve when you get to

The armed but white thieves trespassing at Malheur National Wildlife Refuge are begging to be arrested and evicted, and law enforcement is still standing around daydreaming.

The militiamen occupying a wildlife refuge in eastern Oregon have adopted increasingly bold and risky tactics in their protest against the federal government, raising questions about how long law enforcement officials can allow the standoff to continue.

Why do law enforcement officials want to allow the standoff to continue? Why are they asking how long they can keep doing that, instead of not doing that? If those people were not white, we know damn well they wouldn’t be sipping their 10th cup of coffee instead of arresting the thieving gun-having criminals.

Now entering

Oyyy, it’s not just Germany. It’s Sweden too.

Sweden’s prime minister has condemned a “double betrayal” of women after allegations that police covered up sexual harassment by recent immigrants at a music festival in Stockholm. Meanwhile, reports have emerged of attacks on women in Malmö on New Year’s Eve.

Groups of refugees molested concertgoers at We Are Stockholm, Europe’s largest youth festival, in the summer of 2014, according to internal police memos obtained by Dagens Nyheter, a daily newspaper.

“These are so-called refugee youths, specifically from Afghanistan. Several of the gang were arrested for sexual molestation,” one police memo said.

But the official police report on the festival didn’t mention the assaults or harassment. No one was prosecuted.… Read the rest

Here’s how to combat hatred – call people cunts. No hatred there, no indeed.

This is Donald.

Donald has made a career out of hating other people.

Donald is a hoofwanking bunglecunt.

Don’t be like Donald.

Oh the envy. Iceland Magazine reports that ZERO Icelanders age 25 or younger believe God made the world. ZERO.

Iceland seems to be on its way to becoming an even more secular nation, according to a new poll. Less than half of Icelanders claim they are religious and more than 40% of young Icelanders identify as atheist. Remarkably the poll failed to find young Icelanders who accept the creation story of the Bible. 93.9% of Icelanders younger than 25 believed the world was created in the big bang, 6.1% either had no opinion or thought it had come into existence through some other means and 0.0% believed it had been created by God.

0.000000000000000%… Read the rest

This happened a couple of days ago: an activist trans man and a feminist woman on Channel 4 News.

The video.

Activist Jack Monroe clashed with a feminist academic during a fiery TV debate on trans issues on Thursday, calling the belief that trans women aren’t women “bang out of order”.

Monroe sat alongside Julia Long, a lecturer in sociology and long-time feminist, on Channel 4 News, after the publication of the first report by the Women and Equalities Committee in Parliament.

It wasn’t “fiery.” There was evident irritation, but no flames. In the next paragraph the Huffington Post said the report “sparked the fury of Dr Long,” which also isn’t true. Neither of them displayed “fury”; it’s … Read the rest

Originally a comment by tiggerthewing on It’s been a long day.

Honestly, talk about privilege – if the worst thing happening in your life is someone calling you female-bodied on Facebook, you have less to worry about than 99% (at least) of humanity.

One of the ludicrous things that I’ve in read comments by people in the so-called ‘trans activism’ group is the objection to calling a woman a ‘vagina-haver’ on the grounds that trans women don’t all have vaginas, and suggest ‘female bodied’ as being inclusive; followed by others saying that ‘female-bodied’ is ‘transphobic’ and we should say ‘uterus-havers’.

If the in-group can’t agree on terminology, why the hell are they coming here and ranting at the rest … Read the rest

Here we have a highly technical explanation of how gender abolition is colonization, by Lola Phoenix.

When mentioning that I don’t identify as a woman, I end up in a lot of debates with people who believe in abolishing gender. Recently, I’ve comprised an explanation of why arguing for the abolition of gender is a form of colonisation.

I think LP means “composed,” not “comprised,” but anyway.

You probably have heard of the philosophy that gender is a social construct. What that means is that, while there may be biological and bodily markers of what we refer to as “gender” (or “sex” as it is just as much a social construction as “gender”), the concept of gender is something