And speaking of those zany Russians…there’s the Holocaust-themed ice dance.

The wife of Vladimir Putin’s powerful spokesman has provoked outrage by performing a Holocaust-themed ice skating routine on Russian TV reality show.

Tatiana Navka, the wife of Dmitry Peskov, appeared on Russian reality show Ice Age and performed in the striped uniform of concentration camp victims complete with the yellow Star of David which Jewish people were forced to wear by the Nazis.

She and her ice skating partner, actor Andrei Burkovsky, smiled at the audience during the performance and appeared to mime shooting each other in one sequence.

… Read the rest

Terry Sanderson on Facebook from the Sunday Times, a story by Andrew Gilligan and Sian Griffiths:

The ringleaders of the “Trojan Horse” plot to impose conservative Islamic values on state schools in Birmingham are back in teaching, despite being banned from the classroom, an investigation by The Sunday Times has established.

Tahir Alam and Razwan Faraz are running informal classes — Faraz in a different city and under a false name.

…

An official report found Alam and Faraz were at the centre of “co-ordinated, deliberate and sustained action” to introduce an “intolerant and aggressive Islamic ethos” into schools in the city, with girls and boys separated, “un-Islamic subjects” such as evolution reduced or removed, and secular head teachers

Abigail Rockwell, granddaughter of the illustrator Norman Rockwell, points out the presence and positioning of a painting by the latter in the meeting between Obama and Donnie from Queens.

It’s the arm and torch of the Statue of Liberty.

A painting by Norman Rockwell was moved in the Oval Office for the first meeting between President Obama and Mr. Trump so it would hang over Mr. Trump’s shoulder. In the painting the torch of the Statue of Liberty is being repaired by five men, one of whom is an African-American. All of them are precariously roped to her flame.

Who moved the painting and why? It is clearly too small for that space; a larger landscape painting had hung there

It’s alarmingly warm in the Arctic this year. I suppose Donald Trump and his friends think that’s nice, the polar bears and caribou can get in some sunbathing, but everyone else realizes it could mean disaster a lot sooner than expected.

The Arctic is experiencing extraordinarily hot sea surface and air temperatures, which are stopping ice forming and could lead to record lows of sea ice at the north pole next year, according to scientists.

Danish and US researchers monitoring satellites and Arctic weather stations are surprised and alarmed by air temperatures peaking at what they say is an unheard-of 20C higher than normal for the time of year. In addition, sea temperatures averaging nearly 4C higher than usual

It’s the age of hate speech.

More than 50,000 abusive and offensive tweets were sent celebrating Labour MP Jo Cox’s murder and lauding her killer, Thomas Mair, as a “hero” or “patriot” in the month following her death, prompting calls for the government to do more to tackle hate speech online.

According to researchers on the social media site, the tweets were sent from at least 25,000 individuals and have been interpreted by hate crime campaigners as a sign of an emboldened extreme rightwing support base.

And that was before the election of Trump and his elevation of Stephen Bannon and Breitbart.

Academics examined more than 53,000 tweets sent over the month after the MP’s murder and found that

The National Network of Abortion Funds has joined the hot new trend to refuse ever to mention the set of people formerly known as “women.” This seems perverse in an organization whose issue is abortion.

From their About page:

MISSION

THE NATIONAL NETWORK OF ABORTION FUNDS BUILDS POWER WITH MEMBERS TO REMOVE FINANCIAL AND LOGISTICAL BARRIERS TO ABORTION ACCESS BY CENTERING PEOPLE WHO HAVE ABORTIONS AND ORGANIZING AT THE INTERSECTIONS OF RACIAL, ECONOMIC, AND REPRODUCTIVE JUSTICE.

VISION
WE ENVISION A WORLD WHERE EVERY REPRODUCTIVE DECISION, INCLUDING ABORTION, TAKES PLACE IN THRIVING COMMUNITIES THAT ARE SAFE, PEACEFUL, AND AFFORDABLE. WE ENVISION A WORLD WHERE ALL PEOPLE HAVE THE POWER AND RESOURCES TO CARE FOR AND AFFIRM THEIR BODIES, IDENTITIES, AND

From Atheist & Agnostic Alliance Pakistan on Facebook:

Two men, Riffat Aziz and Hameed Kamran, have recently been arrested by the Rawalakot Police in Poonch district of Azad Kashmir, and accused of spreading religious antipathy and disrupting social order by questioning Islam on social media.

Ali Camus has more:

Two men, Riffat Aziz and Hameed Kamran, have recently been arrested by the Rawalakot Police in Poonch district of Azad Kashmir, and accused of spreading religious antipathy and disrupting social order by questioning Islam on social media.

Kamran has been accused of commenting controversial stuff on social media on religion [source]. Riffat Aziz has been accused of distributing pamphlets to mosques filled with questions towards Muslims [

The IHEU posted on Facebook:

Mohamed Cheikh Ould M’kheitir is awaiting a Supreme Court ruling on whether he should be putting to death for writing a single online article – about how religion is used to justify slavery in his home country, Mauritania. The death sentence has already been upheld by the appeals court on the basis that he was an “apostate”. We are one of the few organizations campaigning on this case (we’re quoted several times in the article at the link). We’re trying to get other organizations involved and to put civil society pressure on the government. Please if you can, support our work here.

The International Business Times has the story:

Mauritania’s authorities face