The death of Judge Sheila Abdus-Salaam is desperately sad news.

She called her chambers on Tuesday to say she wasn’t coming in. The next day she was found in the Hudson, with no signs of trauma.

The unexpected death was shocking and saddening and even set off some suspicions among Judge Abdus-Salaam’s friends and colleagues, many of whom said she had given no indication that anyone — including herself — would want to do her harm.

In the hours after her body was found, the police said they were treating her death as a suicide. The judge, 65, had recently told friends and a doctor that she was suffering from stress. And tragedy had followed her closely: On Easter

God the BBC can be infuriating. In its reporting on the murder by torture of Mashal Khan for instance.

A university student in Pakistan accused of blasphemy against Islam has been killed by a mob of fellow students on campus, police say.

Many students have been arrested after the brutal attack in the northern city of Mardan, and the campus has been closed.

Reports suggest that two young men were accused of posting offensive content on Facebook. One survived with injuries.

It’s not for the BBC to call the content of Khan’s posts “offensive.” It’s not for the BBC to agree with the idea that skepticism or mockery of religion is “offensive” – especially not hours after someone was violently … Read the rest

Ari Berman in The Nation:

My grandmother Sylvia moved from Brooklyn to Iowa when she was 89 years old. It was a culture shock, to say the least. When my mom took her to vote, she complained of the candidates, “There isn’t anybody who’s Jewish!”

I thought of my grandmother, who passed away in 2005 at 99, when the Iowa Legislature passed a strict voter-ID law today. She didn’t have a driver’s license because she never drove (she’d frequently walk two miles from her apartment to the grocery store). Her passport expired long ago. She never had a US birth certificate because she was born in Poland and fled the Holocaust. She used her Medicare card as identification.

Meanwhile, in Afghanistan…

The US military has dropped the biggest non-nuclear bomb ever used in combat on an Islamic State group tunnel complex in Afghanistan, the Pentagon says.

The GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast Bomb (MOAB), known as “the mother of all bombs”, was first tested in 2003, but had not been used before.

The Pentagon said it was dropped from a US aircraft in Nangarhar province.

The news came hours after the Pentagon admitted an air strike in Syria mistakenly killed 18 rebels.

…

The 21,600lb (9,800kg) bomb was dropped in Achin district on Thursday evening local time, the Pentagon said. It is more than 9m (30 feet) in length.

“We targeted a system of tunnels and caves

Terry Gross did an interview about for-profit colleges a couple of weeks ago that I kept meaning to blog if only Trump would shut up for one second. Her guest was Tressie McMillan Cottom, who has written a book about them called Lower Ed.

She worked as an enrollment officer for two for-profits at opposite ends of the spectrum – a cosmetology career school and a large college that offered associate’s, bachelor’s and graduate degrees. She left after fearing that instead of helping the students she recruited to improve their financial future, she was leaving them with large student loan debt they’d never earn enough to repay.

When she left the for-profit college sector, she returned to college, completed her

I saw this tweet from Elizabeth Warren

In the choice between students & student loan companies, Betsy DeVos made clear she stands with companies that cheat & squeeze borrowers.

— Elizabeth Warren (@SenWarren) April 12, 2017

so I went to the Google to find news coverage. The Times has an editorial.

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is inexplicably backing away from rules that are meant to prevent federal student loan borrowers from being fleeced by companies the government pays to collect the loans and to guide people through the repayment process.

On Tuesday, she withdrew a sound Obama administration policy that required the Education Department to take into account the past conduct of loan servicing companies before awarding them lucrative

Eric Alterman in The Nation on “thought leaders” via a new book by Daniel Drezner. He says Drezner doesn’t pay enough attention to “the power of money to corrupt and control literally everything with which it comes into contact—most particularly intellectual culture.”

Drezner by no means ignores the issue. Early on, he makes a crucial distinction between old-fashioned “public intellectuals” and the now-trendy “thought leaders.” The latter model is one that sells itself less to an identifiable “public”—something that has become increasingly difficult to define in a society continually segmenting itself according to ever-more-narrow criteria—than to plutocratic patrons…

Today, our most famous purveyors of ideas sell themselves to the wealthy much like the courtiers of the Middle Ages.

How ludicrous it is that what Adam Frank says needs to be said:

The attack on expertise was given its most visceral form by British politician Michael Gove during the Brexit campaign last year when he famously claimed, “people in this country have had enough of experts.” The same kinds of issues, however, are also at stake here in the U.S. in our discussions about “alternative facts,” “fake news” and “denial” of various kinds. That issue can be put as a simple question: When does one opinion count more than another?

By definition, an expert is someone whose learning and experience lets them understand a subject deeper than you or I do (assuming we’re not an expert in

National Geographic reports on the work of photographer Poulomi Basu.

“As I grew up, I realized how customs and traditions are used as forces to bring women to subservience and control them,” and this includes the use of color, she says.

With her series, “A Ritual of Exile,” Basu studies red as related to the blood of menstruation. Her long-term goal is to help end the entrenched Hindu practice of Chaupadi, which pushes menstruating women into isolation and into a normalized cycle of violence perpetuated by custom, tradition, and religion.

It’s interesting how often “custom, tradition, and religion” are all about subordinating women and girls. It’s interesting what a central goal that is.

Photographed in neighboring Nepal, the

Jeez, you turn your attention away for a few hours and look what happens.

Spicer happens.

In criticizing Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s alleged use of chemical weapons, White House press secretary Sean Spicer said Tuesday that even Adolf Hitler did not sink to that level of warfare, despite Hitler’s use of gas chambers to kill millions of Jews.

When given the chance to clarify his comment — uttered during Passover, the most celebrated Jewish holiday in the United States — Spicer then said Hitler took Jews “into the Holocaust center” but that Hitler “was not using the gas on his own people in the same way that Assad is doing.”

So I guess he doesn’t know that Zyklon B … Read the rest

A demonstration against Orban in Budapest on Sunday:

… Read the rest