Catherine Bennett on Keith Vaz and that home affairs select committee report:

The first fact mentioned in the new report on prostitution by the home affairs select committee is that “around 11% of British men aged 16–74 have paid for sex on at least one occasion”. The home affairs select committee is composed of eight men and three women. Given the men’s ages, their resources and arguably enhanced opportunities, as MPs, to conclude such transactions, maybe it is not so remarkable that at least one of the parliamentarians deciding on the future legality of prostitution may also have been a sex buyer.

It’s more surprising, really, that no one on the committee, principally its chairman, Keith Vaz, seems to

Sikh 2 Inspire are posting drivel on their Facebook page to justify their disruption of someone else’s wedding today.

Five hours ago:

Our brothers peacefully protested in the form of a sit down protest chanting vaheguru mantar at leamington spa gurdwara sahib, and are currently being arrested.

What is their crime?

No violence was committed, no one used a Sri Sahib, and no foul language was used.

More information and videos can be found on Sikh youth Birmingham page.

To clarify one key point, the Sikhs protesting were not ‘armed’ with anything other than their kirpans which a Sikh must wear always being amritdhari. This is yet again the police and press twisting facts to suit their headlines and

Today in Leamington Spa:

Armed officers were called to a Sikh temple in Leamington Spa on Sunday morning after more than 50 men, some carrying blades, entered the building to stop an interfaith marriage service.

For around eight hours, the group, described by a trustee of the Gurdwara temple as “fanatical extremists”, occupied the foyer, forcing the postponement of a wedding between a Sikh bride and a Hindu groom that had been scheduled for Sunday.

That’s nice, isn’t it? Interrupting and stopping someone else’s wedding because the couple don’t have the same religion.

Late in the afternoon the police arrested 55 men – 55 men who forcibly halted a wedding that was none of their business. Weapons were seized; … Read the rest

Peter Beinart points out in the Atlantic that Hillary Clinton is hated in a way that other recent Democratic candidates haven’t been.

According to the Public Religion Research Institute, 52 percent of white men hold a “very unfavorable” view of Clinton. That’s a whopping 20 points higher than the percentage who viewed Barack Obama very unfavorably in 2012, 32 points higher than the percentage who viewed Obama very unfavorably in 2008, and 28 points higher than the percentage who viewed John Kerry very unfavorably in 2004.

Some of that, it seems to me, could be because people don’t want yet more Clinton. But the way it’s expressed…yeah that’s just good ol’ misogyny.

At the Republican National Convention, this fervent

From A Mighty Girl:

Happy 62nd birthday to Ruby Bridges! As a six-year-old, Ruby Bridges famously became the first African American child to desegregate an all-white elementary school in the South. When the 1st grader walked to William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans on November 14, 1960 surrounded by a team of U.S. Marshals, she was met by a vicious mob shouting and throwing objects at her.

One of the federal marshals, Charles Burks, who served on her escort team, recalls Bridges’ courage in the face of such hatred: “For a little girl six years old going into a strange school with four strange deputy marshals, a place she had never been before, she showed a lot

The BHA’s Stephen Evans on the “faith” schools issue.

Theresa May confirmed today that the government plans to capitulate to the demands of religious groups by relaxing admissions rules for faith-based academies, allowing them to select all of their pupils along religious lines.

It’s hard to think of a more regressive policy than the facilitation of greater religious segregation of children and young people in our education system.

And what are we to make of the government’s warnings about schoolchildren having little or no understanding of others, when their policies seem destined to exacerbate exactly that? Only last year the schools minister Lord Nash said the government had “no plans to review the 50% limit for faith-based admissions to

The British Humanist Association:

New Government plans announced today are very serious – and we need to mobilise against them.

Theresa May’s plans entail removing the current cap on religious discrimination in English schools so that new schools can discriminate by religion in 100% of places.

This is a direct result of lobbying from the Catholic Church, whose policy has been against any requirement for Catholic pupils to mix with those of other faiths and no faith.

But the evidence is crystal clear that discrimination by religion compounds social selection and leads to segregation by class, race, and even gender in schools across the country. More discrimination of this sort serves no one’s agenda but those of religious leaders

Well I’ll be damned – the Obama admin has paused the construction of the Lake Oahe section of that North Dakota pipeline.

The Obama administration said it would not authorize construction on a critical stretch of the Dakota Access pipeline, handing a significant victory to the Indian tribe fighting the project the same day the group lost a court battle.

The administration said construction would halt until it can do more environmental assessments.

The Department of Justice, the Army and the Interior Department jointly announced that construction would pause on the pipeline near North Dakota’s Lake Oahe, a major water source on the Missouri River for the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe.

The agencies will now decide whether they need

And now Facebook has admitted it was being ridiculous.

On Friday, following widespread criticisms from news organizations and media experts across the globe, Facebook reversed its decision, saying in a statement to the Guardian: “After hearing from our community, we looked again at how our Community Standards were applied in this case. An image of a naked child would normally be presumed to violate our Community Standards, and in some countries might even qualify as child pornography. In this case, we recognize the history and global importance of this image in documenting a particular moment in time.”

The statement continued: “Because of its status as an iconic image of historical importance, the value of permitting sharing outweighs the value

Facebook v Norway, part 2.

Facebook has deleted a post by the Norwegian prime minister in an escalating row over the website’s decision to remove content featuring the Pulitzer-prize winning “napalm girl” photograph from the Vietnam war.

One doesn’t know whether to laugh or swear or question one’s grip on reality.

Erna Solberg, the Conservative prime minister, called on Facebook to “review its editing policy” after it deleted her post voicing support for a Norwegian newspaper that had fallen foul of the social media giant’s guidelines.

Solberg was one of a string of Norwegian politicians who shared the iconic image after Facebook deleted a post from Tom Egeland, a writer who had included the Nick Ut picture as one

Oh, Zuckerberg.

The Guardian headline: Mark Zuckerberg accused of abusing power after Facebook deletes ‘napalm girl’ post

Yes that sounds like Facebook. Remember the time there was that group posting photos of an allegedly gay man being burned alive, and Facebook kept telling us (and many others) it didn’t violate Facebook’s community standards? But it’s well known that photos of women nursing infants do violate those standards.

Julia Carrie Wong in San Francisco reports:

Norway’s largest newspaper has published a front-page open letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, lambasting the company’s decision to censor a historic photograph of the Vietnam war and calling on Zuckerberg to recognize and live up to his role as “the world’s most powerful editor”.

Espen

Siri Hustvedt on the subtle (I don’t think it’s all that subtle myself) misogyny of Matt Lauer’s performance in those back to back “interviews” with Clinton and Trump.

I am interested in the far more subtle variation of the misogyny illness, the one that lurks behind phrases such as “even-handed” and “fair-minded,” that low-grade fever that caused Matt Lauer to continually interrupt Hillary Clinton’s sharp, specific answers to his questions in the Commander in Chief Forum on NBC (thank god Clinton stood up and ignored him), and which also prompted him to allow Donald Trump to ramble on in incoherent sentence fragments about secret plans for defeating ISIS in thirty days, as if such nonsense were serious political discourse. Would

Via a friend on Facebook –

… Read the rest