21 of the Chibok girls kidnapped into sex slavery by Boko Haram have been freed.

In an emotional ceremony in the capital Abuja, one of the girls said they had survived for 40 days without food and narrowly escaped death at least once.

It is unclear how the release was negotiated, but an official says talks are under way to free some more girls.

Of the 276 students kidnapped in April 2014, 197 are still missing.

197, two and a half years into their enslavement.

Many of the kidnapped students were Christian but had been forcibly converted to Islam during captivity.

Another girl said: “We never imagined that we would see this day but, with the help of God,

Ecuador has cut off Julian Assange’s internet. The poor guy. He’s had to hide out in Ecuador’s London embassy since June 2012 on account of how he didn’t feel like answering to a rape charge.

“We have activated the appropriate contingency plans,” added the Twitter message on Monday. People close to WikiLeaks say that Assange himself is the principal operator of the website’s Twitter feed.

Over the last two weeks, Democratic Party officials and U.S. government agencies have accused the Russian government, including the country’s “senior-most officials,” of pursuing a campaign of cyber attacks against Democratic Party organizations ahead of the Nov. 8 U.S. presidential election.

WikiLeaks has been one of the most prominent internet outlets to post and

The facts of the retrial and acquittal of Ched Evans don’t make it any easier to understand how it happened.

The appeal court judgment – which was made before the retrial, but can only now be reported – allowed new evidence from two witnesses who gave testimony about the complainant’s sexual preferences and the language she used during sex. It led to her being questioned in detail in open court about intimate details of her sex life.

Evans, who has played for Wales and Sheffield United and was a member of the Manchester City youth setup, spent two and a half years in prison after being convicted in 2012 of raping the young woman following a drunken night out

The Independent on the Ched Evans retrial.

A former solicitor general has condemned the way the Ched Evans rape trial was conducted.

Vera Baird told the BBC details of the woman’s sexual past should not have been heard in court and the case could discourage people who are sexually assaulted from reporting it to police.

The 27-year-old footballer was cleared on Friday of raping a woman in a hotel room in 2011, only after her sexual history was scrutinised before a jury. Evans was initially found guilty of the rape in 2012.

And you think that might deter women from reporting rape? Just a little?

While he was in prison, Evans’ family and friends offered £50,000 for information that

Rebecca Solnit again.

So Trump’s position is “I boast about sexually assaulting women, but when women confirm that is true, they are liars, because I was just lying all those times, and you must believe I am telling the truth, because whatever is convenient for me to say in this very moment weighs much more than what they say with witnesses, confirmation, etc., just as I weigh much more than the people I assault.”

I wrote about Bill Cosby and Donald Trump and the way women’s credibility is assaulted if they speak up about being assaulted, before the revelations about their crimes, because it’s the same old same old nearly every woman knows:
The story of Cassandra, the woman

The Great Barrier Reef is not dead, yet. It’s in trouble but not dead. So far.

Perhaps you have read its obituary by writer Rowan Jacobsen on the website Outside Online.

No, but I saw some headlines, probably inspired by that, so I hit the googles.

“For those of us in the business of studying and understanding what coral resilience means, the article very much misses the mark,” said Kim Cobb, a professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences. “It’s not too late for the Great Barrier Reef, and people who think that have a really profound misconception about what we know and don’t know about coral resilience.”

Cobb spoke to the LA

In news of the Dakota Access Pipeline, and freedom of protest, and freedom of the press –

This Monday afternoon, as the sun hits its peak over Mandan, North Dakota, the award-winning journalist, and host of Democracy Now!, Amy Goodman will walk into the Morton County–Mandan Combined Law Enforcement and Corrections Center and turn herself in to the local authorities. Her crime: good, unflinching journalism.

Goodman had the audacity to commit this journalism on September 3, when she was in North Dakota covering what she calls “the standoff at Standing Rock”: the months-long protests by thousands of Native Americans against the Dakota Access Pipeline. The $3.8 billion oil pipeline is slated to carry barrel after barrel of Bakken

Remember what I said about seeing women as the same kind of thing as a hamburger when you’re hungry? Dave Holmes at Esquire has the same thought.

Twenty years ago he saw a woman get sexually assaulted on the subway. She was on her way to work at the Fashion Cafe, wearing its uniform of tight T shirt with the logo and a miniskirt.

Here’s where my memory snaps into high-definition: The train approached the Rockefeller Center stop, and she moved toward the exit. A man, seated in the spot nearest the doors, looked her up and down. And then, as the doors opened, he got underneath her skirt and grabbed a handful of her.

It was not a pat,

Clementine Ford tells us about a thing that happened.

[E]arlier this week, a woman posted a lengthy diatribe to Facebook calling out a man who had engaged in threatening behaviour on public transport. The woman described him harassing three fellow female passengers, pressing into their personal space and insisting they give him high fives. After intervening, she took a photograph of the man and shared it alongside her Facebook post. It was quickly reposted by numerous people, including myself.

Shortly afterwards, unqualified rebuttals started appearing claiming this man had an intellectual disability. This was soon framed as him being autistic, with numerous people (who were not there) deciding this meant his behaviour was harmless and it was the nasty

Obama points out that Republicans don’t get points for disavowing Trump at this late date, after enabling him and all his horrors for months.

They know better, a lot of these folks who ran, and they didn’t say anything, so they don’t get credit for, at the very last minute, when finally they guy that they nominated and they endorsed and they support is caught on tape saying things that no decent person would even think, much less say, much less brag about, much less brag about or joke about, much less act on, you can’t wait until that finally happens and then say, ‘Oh, that’s too much! That’s enough!’ and think that somehow you are showing any kind of