Guatemala is no country for women:

As fire swept through the classroom, the pleas from the 56 girls locked inside began to fade.

Most were unconscious or worse by then, as an eerie silence replaced their panic-stricken shouts.

The police officers guarding the door — who had refused to unlock it despite the screams — waited nine minutes before stepping inside. They got water to cool down the scorching knob.

Inside, dozens of girls placed in the care of the Guatemalan state lay sprawled on the blackened floor. Forty-one of them died.

It was one of the deadliest tragedies in Guatemala since the end of its civil war decades ago, and it happened inside a group home for at-risk

The Guardian does a Trump-tease.

… Read the rest

There’s a reason he’s so fixated on Wall – the fact that he’s a racist shithead, yes, but an additional reason. Eric Lach at the New Yorker:

So why did he do [the emergency]? When a reporter pressed him on whether he would concede that he didn’t get the deal he wanted from Congress, Trump, of course, refused to concede. And, in doing so, he undercut what little concrete rationale his emergency had to begin with. “I could do the wall over a longer period of time. I didn’t need to do this. But I’d rather do it much faster,” he said. “And I don’t have to do it for the election. I’ve already done a lot of wall

The BBC has an ick when it comes to abortion.

A group of healthcare bodies have today published a letter to BBC Action Line asking that they reverse their current stance on providing links to information about abortion. The letter is co-signed by British Pregnancy Advisory Service (bpas), Brook, the Faculty of Sexual and Reproductive Healthcare, Family Planning Association (FPA), Marie Stopes UK, the Royal College of Midwives, and the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists.

The issue emerged following last week’s episode of Call the Midwife in which one of the characters died as a result of complications from an illegal “backstreet” abortion.  At the end of the programme, the BBC Action Line website was advertised for viewers

In that deranged press conference Trump said Obama told him “he was so close to starting a big war with North Korea.” He worked himself up to saying that, in stages. It’s a useful little paradigm of how he maneuvers himself into lies. Stage one, he asked Obama what the biggest threat was and Obama said “By far, North Korea.” Stage two, “And, I donwanna speak fer him…but…I believe he wouldv gone to war with North Korea.” Stage three, “I think he was ready to go to war.” Stage four, “in fact he told me he was so close to [nervous pause] starting a big war with North Korea.” He inches himself into the lie like someone inching into a … Read the rest

Interesting.

Spotted on Market Street in Manchester. One of several.

Not a brilliant angle but reads "trans kids burn terfs."

Incitement to violence? pic.twitter.com/8c1AawVxIQ

— FemaleCaravanner (@femalecaravan) February 14, 2019

Not a brilliant angle but reads “trans kids burn terfs.”

Incitement to violence?

Well let’s see what happens when we change “TERFs” to something else.

“White kids burn niggers”

“Straight men burn faggots”

“Men burn bitches”

Yes that doesn’t sound what you’d call benign, does it.

But, a voice from the back of the room calls out, trans kids are oppressed, so they’re not comparable to white kids or straight men or men in those examples. Ok, so does it sound more benign if we make the first term a … Read the rest

Guess who:

He didn’t read intelligence reports and mixed up classified material with what he had seen in newspaper clips. He seemed confused about the structure and purpose of organizations and became overwhelmed when meetings covered multiple subjects. He blamed immigrants for nearly every societal problem and uttered racist sentiments with shocking callousness.

No, not him, the other one.

This isn’t how President Trump is depicted in a new book by former deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe. Instead, it’s McCabe’s account of what it was like to work for then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

The FBI was better off when “you all only hired Irishmen,” Sessions said in one diatribe about the bureau’s workforce. “They were drunks but they could

More bad moon rising.

Senator Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, announced on Thursday that President Trump planned to declare a national emergency so he can bypass Congress and build his long-promised wall along the southwestern border.

That raised the prospect of a constitutional clash with lawmakers over who controls the federal purse.

Mr. McConnell said the president would take action after signing a bill to keep the government open but not fund his wall.

.@PressSec: President Trump will sign the government funding bill, and as he has stated before, he will also take other executive action—including a national emergency—to ensure we stop the national security and humanitarian crisis at the border.

— The White House (@WhiteHouse) February

Julie Bindel on Meghan Murphy’s lawsuit against Twitter:

‘Twitter would never have attracted the hundreds of millions of users it boasts today had Twitter let it be known that it would arbitrarily ban users who did not agree with the political and social views of its management or impose sweeping new policies banning the expression of widely-held viewpoints and perspectives on public issues,’ Murphy’s lawyers submitted.

That’s a good point. (This is why people pay lawyers.) Twitter certainly didn’t make clear from the outset that it would be doing that.

As I wrote at the time of her ban, Murphy, who, like me, is constantly de-platformed, attacked and vilified for daring to question the Orwellian madness of the

This is what you get when you set up a government of corrupt unqualified hacks: connections to people who bend their efforts to promoting epidemics.

The wife of White House communications director Bill Shine on Wednesday went on an anti-vaccine tirade while spreading conspiracy theories about an outbreak of measles in the Pacific north-west.

In a series of tweets, Darla Shine lashed out against a CNN segment detailing the outbreak, which has seen more than 50 unvaccinated people contract measles in Washington state and Oregon.

“Here we go LOL #measlesoutbreak on #CNN #Fake #Hysteria,” Darla Shine tweeted. “The entire Baby Boom population alive today had the #Measles as kids … Bring back our #ChildhoodDiseases they keep you healthy &

Farewell, Oppy.

The longest-lived robot ever sent from Earth to the surface of another planet, Opportunity snapped pictures of a strange landscape and revealed surprising glimpses into the distant past of Mars for over 14 years. But on Wednesday, NASA announced that the rover is dead.

“It is therefore that I am standing here with a deep sense of appreciation and gratitude that I declare the Opportunity mission is complete,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA’s associate administrator for science.

The rover was designed to last only three months, but proved itself to be one of the solar system’s most unexpected endurance athletes. It traveled more than the distance of a marathon when its designers only expected it to move about half

Burn.

.@jaketapper shows President Trump's hypocrisy over Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar’s anti-Semitic tweet with a little help from a "rogue" control room. pic.twitter.com/EJc2TJnmrU

— The Lead CNN (@TheLeadCNN) February 13, 2019

… Read the rest

Maggie Astor at the Times zooms in close on sexism in electoral politics.

Few Americans acknowledge they would hesitate to vote for a woman for president — but they don’t have to, according to researchers and experts on politics and women and extensive research on double standards in campaigns. Reluctance to support female candidates is apparent in the language that voters frequently use to describe men and women running for office; in the qualities that voters say they seek; and in the perceived flaws that voters say they are willing or unwilling to overlook in candidates.

And this describes all of us. The drip drip drip of background sexism does its work on all of us, no matter how … Read the rest