Being a journalist who investigates corruption is one of the more dangerous professions. Daphne Caruana Galizia is one who has been silenced.

The car bombing that killed investigative reporter Daphne Caruana Galizia has left Malta in shock, alarmed that organised crime and political vendettas may have spiralled out of control.

“There are crooks everywhere you look now. The situation is desperate,” she wrote in her last blog post, published shortly before her car exploded.

Caruana Galizia, 53, died near her home in Bidnija, a village in northern Malta.

She had relentlessly accused various Maltese politicians and other officials of corruption in her popular Running Commentary blog, and had been sued several times.

Now she won’t be doing that … Read the rest

The culture police strike again.

When Laura Moriarty decided she wanted to write a dystopian novel about a future America in which Muslims are forcefully corralled into detention centers, she was aware that she should tread carefully. Her protagonist is a white teenager, but one of her main characters, Sadaf, is a Muslim American immigrant from Iran, so Moriarty began by diving into Iranian books and films. Moriarty explained via email that she asked two Iranian immigrant friends to read an early draft and see if Sadaf seemed authentic to them, and whether the language and accent fit with their memories and experiences. A friend of Pakistani and American descent who is a practicing Muslim gave additional feedback. Moriarty

Trump, sniffing the air for more people to harm, has found them: welfare recipients.

President Donald Trump said Monday his administration will start to consider reforming the welfare system in the United States, saying that some people are “taking advantage of the system.”

The comment comes as the Trump administration struggles to get any sweeping legislation through Congress, despite Republicans controlling both the House and Senate. Trump failed to pass health care reform earlier this year and is currently working — without much success so far — to pass tax reform.

Trump was never trying to pass health care reform – he was trying to destroy the ACA’s attempt at providing health insurance for everyone. That’s not reform; it’s … Read the rest

Originally a comment by Bruce Gorton on Through male eyes.

The problem I think isn’t a craving for sex. Nor is it necessarily misogyny, or at least not exactly what we think of as misogyny.

A lot of it is more about what we think about being male, than what we think about the role of women. We think of being male as being the fighter, being forceful, being willing to take charge.

So with the Catholics, they can try and eliminate any hint of sexual characteristics from women, and they end up… with a massive child rape scandal that spans the entire globe. Islam tries to do the same thing, as I’m sure you’re well aware, and the net … Read the rest

This this this. It’s not just the Harvey Weinsteins, it’s not just the actual men and their actual groping and raping. It’s also the sea they swim in: it’s the content. Kate Hardie knows.

The focus is quite rightly on the horrendous sexual abuse that Weinstein is alleged to have committed. But to focus on that alone is to miss the point that the portrayal of women – of their lives, their feelings, their sexuality and their bodies – is nearly always decided upon and filtered through male eyes. Nearly every actress will tell you about scripts that included scenes of female nudity that seem to have no apparent reason for being there and that are often degrading.

Woody Allen hopes people won’t get carried away with this Harvey Weinstein thing.

Weinstein has been credited with reviving Allen’s career after Allen was accused of abusing Dylan Farrow, his daughter with actress Mia Farrow.

The allegation emerged in the early 1990s following Allen’s separation from Farrow.

The actress left Allen after discovering he was having an affair with her adopted daughter, Soon-Yi Previn.

But despite working with Weinstein on a number of films – including the Oscar-winning Mighty Aphrodite – Allen said he had never heard any of allegations of rape and sexual assault.

“No one ever came to me or told me horror stories with any real seriousness,” Allen told the BBC. “And they wouldn’t, because you are

The truck bomb in Mogadishu yesterday killed at least 230 people.

Hundreds more were wounded when a lorry packed with explosives detonated near the entrance of a hotel.

It is the deadliest terror attack in Somalia since the Islamist al-Shabab group launched its insurgency in 2007.

It is not clear who staged the bombing, but Mogadishu is a target for al-Shabab militants battling the government.

…

A BBC Somali reporter at the scene of the main blast said the Safari Hotel had collapsed, with people trapped under the rubble.

An eyewitness, local resident Muhidin Ali, told news agency AFP it was “the biggest blast I have ever witnessed, it destroyed the whole area”.

Meanwhile, the director of the Madina Hospital,

Even Ed Rogers, a Republican lobbyist who has been defending Trump in the Washington Post for months, is disgusted. Susan Glasser talked to him for a New Yorker piece.

And yet when I met Rogers, at his usual table in the back of the room at Tosca, the expensive but understated Italian restaurant across the street from his lobbying firm, where he goes to lunch almost every day, he was in no mood to defend Trump. The constant tweeting, the personal attacks on his own team, were taking a toll. “Every week!” Rogers said. “It’s surreal.” Then he paused, almost groaning when he asked, “Why does it have to be this way?”

Because Trump is what he is and … Read the rest

In Puerto Rico:

Jose Luis Rodriguez waited in line Friday to fill plastic jugs in the back of his pickup truck with water for drinking, doing the dishes and bathing.

But there is something about this water Rodriguez didn’t know: It was being pumped to him by water authorities from a federally designated hazardous-waste site, CNN learned after reviewing Superfund documents and interviewing federal and local officials.

But he has no other water source. More than 35% of Puerto Ricans still don’t have access to safe water. Without water, you die.

The water comes from a Superfund site but it’s not clear that the particular well in question is contaminated. The EPA is going to test it over the … Read the rest

Rebecca Solnit looks at the pathological absence of empathy it takes for men to exploit or destroy women in the horrifying way we see from the chopping up of Kim Wall to the reported abuse by Harvey Weinstein.

Underlying all these attacks is a lack of empathy, a will to dominate, and an entitlement to control, harm and even take the lives of others. Though there is a good argument that mental illness is not a sufficient explanation – and most mentally ill people are nonviolent – mass shooters and rapists seem to have a lack of empathy so extreme it constitutes a psychological disorder. At this point in history, it seems to be not just a defect from birth,

BuzzFeed published a story the other day on the secret life of Breitbart – specifically about its “legion of secret sympathizers in Silicon Valley, Hollywood, academia, suburbia, and everywhere in between.”

“I have said in the past that I find humor in breaking taboos and laughing at things that people tell me are forbidden to joke about,” Yiannopoulos wrote in a statement to BuzzFeed News. “But everyone who knows me also knows I’m not a racist. As someone of Jewish ancestry, I of course condemn racism in the strongest possible terms. I have stopped making jokes on these matters because I do not want any confusion on this subject. I disavow Richard Spencer and his entire sorry band of idiots.