Jenni Murray, longstanding presenter of BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour, wrote a piece for yesterday’s Times (the London one) about women and trans women. We all know what happened next.

The reporting, predictably, is not accurate. It never is, is it. Maev Kennedy at the Guardian for instance led with this:

A chorus of protest – and some support – has greeted an article by the broadcaster Jenni Murray, presenter of BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour, that questioned the claims of transgender women to be considered “real women”.

That “real women” is tricksy, because in fact it’s Murray herself who put it in scare quotes, but that’s not what that sentence looks like, is it. I’ll just quote the … Read the rest

Now for the Reveal article.

The U.S. Department of Defense is investigating hundreds of Marines who used social media to solicit and share hundreds — possibly thousands — of naked photographs of female service members and veterans.

Since Jan. 30, more than two dozen women – many on active duty, including officers and enlisted service members – have been identified by their full name, rank and military duty station in photographs posted and linked to from a private Facebook page.

In one instance, a female corporal in uniform was followed at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, by a fellow Marine, who surreptitiously photographed her as she picked up her gear. Those photographs were posted on the Facebook group Marines United,

Remember Tailhook? This may be even worse.

The Marine Corps is looking into allegations that an unknown number of potential Marines, as well as current and former service members, shared naked and compromising photos of their colleagues on social media, Marine officials said Sunday.

The allegations were first reported by the War Horse and published Saturday through the website Reveal. The author, a Marine veteran and Purple Heart recipient, as well as members of his family, have received numerous death threats since the article was first published. It is unclear how many people are involved in the scandal and how many photos were posted online.

I read the War Horse/Reveal account yesterday last thing, when I didn’t have the … Read the rest

The Journal.ie publishes, via Catherine Corless, the names of the 796 children who died at the Tuam “Mother and Baby Home” i.e. prison for unmarried mothers and their babies.

Very few pictures from the home exist but thanks to the tireless work of historian Catherine Corless, we do have the names of 796 children who died there between 1925 and 1960.

The infant mortality rate at the home was double that of even other mother and baby homes around the country at the time. Young children in the Tuam home succumbed to deaths from afflictions as heartbreakingly banal as the flu and, although only in a small number of cases, ear infections.

Flu is far from always “banal,” but that’s … Read the rest

Olivia Becker at Vice reports that reproductive rights activists are resisting the right wing campaign to make women prisoners of their own pregnancies, in Republican strongholds as well as less hostile territory.

In Missouri — which has some of the harshest anti-abortion laws on the books —  Democratic lawmakers introduced a bill to recognize abortion “as an essential component of women’s healthcare” and that it “shall be made affordable and accessible throughout the state and integrated into the health care safety net.”

…

Some of these bills have already been shot down. In Virginia, Democrats introduced one of the most comprehensive pro-choice measures this year in the form of Whole Women’s Health Act, which sought to make sure that

This is heartbreaking. Ashoka Mukpo at NPR:

When James Harris rushed his wife, Salome Karwah, to a hospital at the edge of Monrovia on the night of February 19, he expected that she’d be treated as a priority case. Salome was a prominent Ebola survivor and ex-Doctors Without Borders employee who’d graced the cover of Time magazine in 2014 as one of the “Ebola Fighters” named persons of the year. And the hospital — run by an international Christian aid organization affiliated with the U.S.-based charity Samaritan’s Purse — had earned a reputation for providing care to survivors.

In fact, Salome had just been discharged from the same hospital a few hours earlier. She’d given birth to her fourth

This time it’s a Sikh man. From the Seattle Times:

Kent police are looking for a gunman who allegedly walked onto a man’s driveway and shot him, saying “go back to your own country.”

The victim, a 39-year-old Sikh man, was working on his vehicle in his driveway in Kent’s East Hill neighborhood about 8 p.m. Friday when he was approached by an unknown man, Kent police said, after talking with the victim.

An altercation followed, with the victim saying the suspect made statements to the effect of “go back to your own country.” He was shot in the arm.

The Kent police have consulted the FBI.

“We’re early on in our investigation,” Kent Police Chief Ken Thomas said

You know one thing that happens when you make undocumented immigrants afraid of the authorities? In addition to things like: they don’t go to the doctor or the dentist, they drop out of school, they don’t apply for library cards, they can’t call anyone in emergencies?

Multiple victims of domestic assault — who are living in the U.S. without proper documentation — are refusing to testify in a Denver courthouse out of fears of being deported, according to city officials.

Since President Donald Trump‘s executive order on immigration was issued on Jan. 25, at least four victims of domestic violence are unwilling to testify in court, said Denver City Attorney Kristin Bronson on Friday to ABC News affiliate KMGH.

NPR has more details on the Tuam human remains story.

Authorities in Ireland say they have excavated the human remains of an undisclosed number of young children from the site of a former home for unmarried mothers.

The home, located in the town of Tuam, was operated by the Bon Secours nuns beginning in the 1920s and was home to women and babies until the 1960s. For years, some in the region had suspected there was a mass grave on the site.

That’s a good deal clearer and more blunt than RTE was. It was a Catholic home (aka an informal prison) for unmarried mothers in 1920s-1960s Catholic Ireland. We can be sure those mothers were not treated … Read the rest