Last week in El Salvador:

An El Salvador court has rejected the appeal of a woman sentenced to 30 years in prison over what she says was a stillbirth.

Teodora del Carmen Vásquez, 37, said she was working in 2007 when she began to experience intense pain, then bleeding. She called for help before fainting. As she came round, police officers surrounded her and accused her of murdering her baby by inducing an abortion of her nearly full-term baby.

She was convicted of aggravated murder in 2008.

The non-profit Center for Reproductive Rights, which has been campaigning for the release of dozens of other women convicted of murder in El Salvador for obstetric emergencies, said the decision

Sweden too.

Cissi Wallin was inspired by the explosion of the Harvey Weinstein racket to name a name.

Ms. Wallin had filed a police report in 2011, a few years after she was sexually assaulted, only to see it dismissed within weeks. Now she decided to do something different: She put the name of a well-known columnist for Sweden’s largest left-wing tabloid newspaper on her Instagram page, alongside a statement saying he had drugged and violently raped her in Stockholm more than a decade ago.

Soon more people came forward about the man. I was a co-author of an investigation into his behavior.

And suddenly, just as in the United States, stories of other national figures in the

Via Actual Feminist News:

Stop the Harassment and Threats
Against Radical Feminists

Ad in the December 2017 Issue of The Progressive

[Note from the editors: Below find the text of an ad that appears in the December issue of The Progressive. In our view the issue raised warrants a conversation on the revolutionary left. We are therefore reproducing the ad here as our way of helping to facilitate that discussion.]

As socialists and progressives we are committed to building a united movement of the left rich in our diversity capable of creating a just, democratic, and egalitarian society freed from all forms of oppression and discrimination. To build such a movement for fundamental change will require an atmosphere of

For years, decades, workplace sexual harassment goes unreported and unprevented, then one big perp is outed and the dam breaks – so naturally the next step is the move to say repair that dam right now. Spiked came up with several women prepared to say this has gone much too far – not the routine harassment but the reporting of the routine harassment.

Lionel Shriver is one.

In the complicated dance of courtship, someone has to make a move, and the way one conventionally discovers if one’s attraction is returned is to brave some gentle physical contact and perhaps accept rebuff.

Actually it’s not. There are many other “moves” in that complicated dance; physical contact is not the first … Read the rest

Rebecca Solnit:

Oh look, it’s hate on women for not stopping men from doing horrible things to women, again? Street poster blaming Merle Streep for raper-dude, though she has said she didn’t know and made a strong statement for victims, against him (in comments below). Possibly connected to the Pentagon Papers movie she’s starring in, and the poster is by right-wing artist Sabo, who Mike Cernovich (Mr. Pizzagate if you’re not familiar with him) is urging people to donate to. The gist of these kind of attacks is so fundamentalist: men are women’s responsibility, not their own.

Sure, blame Meryl Streep for Harvey Weinstein; that makes all the sense in the world.

Solnit quotes herself from a couple of … Read the rest

In case you need a moment of happy in your twitter feed pic.twitter.com/QKUo2OLXov

— Lisa Abeyta (@LisaAbeyta) December 17, 2017

… Read the rest

Trump is doing another Shove the Diplomats Out of the Way move. He says he won’t let a single one of them sit next to him at lunch if they don’t do what he tells them.

Donald Trump has threatened to withhold “billions” of dollars of US aid from countries which vote in favour of a United Nations resolution rejecting the US president’s recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.

His comments came after the US ambassador to the UN, Nikki Haley, wrote to about 180 of 193 member states warning that she will be “taking names” of countries that vote for a general assembly resolution on Thursday critical of the announcement which overturned decades of US

Paul Krugman last week on Republican contempt for people who work for a living:

As usual, Republicans seek to afflict the afflicted and comfort the comfortable, but they don’t treat all Americans with a given income the same. Instead, their bill — on which we don’t have full details, but whose shape is clear — hugely privileges owners, whether of businesses or of financial assets, over those who simply work for a living.

And this privileging of nonwage income isn’t an accident. Modern Republicans exalt “job creators,” that is, people who own businesses directly or indirectly via their stockholdings. Meanwhile, they show implicit contempt for mere employees.

Because mere employees are losers.

Cutting corporate taxes is hugely unpopular

It’s not only that the tax bill is designed to make the rich richer and everyone else poorer – it’s also that they passed it without even reading it. They voted yes without knowing what they were saying yes to. Wouldn’t you think Knowing What They Are Saying Yes To would be right at the very heart of their job, which is after all to legislate? Isn’t it a pretty gross dereliction of duty for legislators to sign legislation sight unseen? Isn’t that an obvious occasion to shout hoarsely YOU HAD ONE JOB?

It’s discomfortingly similar to driving a train without bothering to slow down for curves.

In its great haste, the “world’s greatest deliberative body” held no hearings

Cornel West decided it would be a good idea to pick a fight with Ta-Nehisi Coates for not being…well, enough like Cornel West.

It started on Sunday, when Mr. West published an article in The Guardian calling Mr. Coates “the neoliberal face of the black freedom struggle,” and accusing him of “fetishizing white supremacy” while ignoring “Wall Street greed, U.S. imperial crimes or black elite indifference to poverty.”

It’s a pretty crappy article, frankly. There’s no argument, just a lot of assertion:

Coates rightly highlights the vicious legacy of white supremacy – past and present. He sees it everywhere and ever reminds us of its plundering effects. Unfortunately, he hardly keeps track of our fightback, and never connects this

This got on a lot of people’s nerves today:

ATTENTION CISGENDER PEOPLE.

Can you imagine what it's like leaving your home in constant fear of assault, harassment and ridicule? This is what trans people experience every day of their lives. Help our trans siblings. Read this thread and share, please. https://t.co/LDixnSrhLJ

— Ryan John Butcher (@ryanjohnbutcher) December 18, 2017

Ryan John Butcher

ATTENTION CISGENDER PEOPLE.

Can you imagine what it’s like leaving your home in constant fear of assault, harassment and ridicule? This is what trans people experience every day of their lives. Help our trans siblings. Read this thread and share, please.

Says clueless dude to “CISGENDER PEOPLE” which of course includes women, who don’t need to “imagine” what … Read the rest

Robert Reich, former Secretary of Labor:

The House just passed the disgraceful Trump-Republican tax bill, enacting large and permanent tax cuts for corporations (that is, the richest 1 percent who own 40 percent of all shares of stock), and temporary cuts for individuals (the lion’s share going to the richest 1 tenth of 1 percent). The Senate is expected to approve it tonight or tomorrow, and Trump will sign it into law before Christmas.

A decade from now, according the nonpartisan analysts, the top 1% will have received 83% of the gains from this tax cut, and the richest 0.1% will get 60% of the gains. But 13 million Americans will have lost health coverage, the national debt

Representative Adam Schiff, Democrat of California:

I just voted NO on the Republican tax plan. Here’s why:

Since their failure to repeal the Affordable Care Act, President Trump and Republicans in Congress have desperately sought a legislative accomplishment — a “win” to show voters that with control of both the House and Senate and the Presidency, they could get something done.

Today, in the headlong pursuit of something, anything that they could point to as a legislative success, they passed a massive tax cut for the wealthy that they would like to portray as “tax reform.” But this “win” comes as a terrible loss for the country. It is, in fact, a gift to GOP wealthy sponsors and

So there was this train derailment not far from here yesterday, that dumped train cars all over the main north-south freeway for the West coast; it killed three passengers. The train was going 80 miles an hour as it went into a curve, where the speed limit was 30.

The revelation that a passenger train was speeding 50 miles per hour over the speed limit at the time of a fatal crash near Tacoma, Wash., has once again focused attention on Amtrak’s safety culture, the role of human error in rail accidents, and the need for technology that automatically slows trains that are going too fast.

Late Monday night, National Transportation Safety Board officials said that the train, bound from

Interesting. A couple of weeks ago Paul Ryan was saying ooh we need to cut the deficit, need to reduce all this spending on health care.

House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) said Wednesday that congressional Republicans will aim next year to reduce spending on both federal health care and anti-poverty programs, citing the need to reduce America’s deficit.

“We’re going to have to get back next year at entitlement reform, which is how you tackle the debt and the deficit,” Ryan said during an appearance on Ross Kaminsky’s talk radio show. “… Frankly, it’s the health care entitlements that are the big drivers of our debt, so we spend more time on the health care entitlements —

Matt Damon is still busy telling us all how to talk about the problem of men preying on women in the workplace. He thinks we should talk more about the men in Hollywood who aren’t sexual predators. He also thinks he knows who they are and that they’re the vast majority.

Damon says not all the men in Hollywood are despicable.

“We’re in this watershed moment, and it’s great, but I think one thing that’s not being talked about is there are a whole s—load of guys — the preponderance of men I’ve worked with — who don’t do this kind of thing and whose lives aren’t going to be affected,” Damon told Business Insider while promoting his new

A headline:

27% of California adolescents say they are viewed as gender nonconforming, study finds

Hmm. How good are adolescents at sussing out what other people think of them? Adults aren’t all that good at it, even with experience and learning; I don’t think it’s the kind of thing adolescents are better at.

“The data show that more than one in four California youth express their gender in ways that go against the dominant stereotypes,” said lead author Bianca D.M. Wilson, the Rabbi Barbara Zacky Senior Scholar of Public Policy at the Williams Institute.

But that’s a different claim. The claim in the headline is twice-meta – it’s a claim about 1 )what people say 2)other people think. It’s not … Read the rest