Inside Climate News on the depth of the disaster in Puerto Rico:

“It is very bad down there right now,” said Sven Rodenbeck, chief science officer for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s 2017 hurricane response. “For the vast majority of the island, there is no power. They have had flooding, and the health care system—many of the clinics and hospitals are closed. A lot of the drinking water systems are not operational, along with the waste water systems.”

Carmen Yulín Cruz, the mayor of San Juan, the capital of Puerto Rico, gave a blunt assessment of the situation.

“People are dying,” Cruz told CBS news on Tuesday. “This is the reality that we live in, the

Sunday we read a piece by Gaby Hinsliff about the disproportionate rage directed at BBC reporter Laura Kuenssberg.

Yesterday I read this in the Guardian from last July: Yvette Cooper ‘sick to death of vitriol’ directed at Laura Kuenssberg.

The Labour MP Yvette Cooper has launched a staunch defence of the BBC political editor, Laura Kuenssberg, as she called on Labour to be a “broad-based party” and its supporters to stop engaging in “vitriolic abuse” online.

Cooper defended Kuenssberg, regularly under fire for perceived political bias, as she set out a potential strategy to put Jeremy Corbyn in Downing Street and attacked the US president, Donald Trump.

She said Trump’s approach to politics and social media was “normalising

Of course.

Louise Brealey tweets a Guardian article about the misogyny aimed at women who say or do things.

Missed this from @suzanne_moore on the grim misogyny trying to silence women in UK politics. https://t.co/EaufI27lIS

— Louise Brealey (@louisebrealey) September 25, 2017

Then she makes an observation about misogyny in history.

Men have been trying to shut us up since 2350 BC: punishment for a woman speaking out of turn was having her teeth smashed by a burnt brick.

— Louise Brealey (@louisebrealey) September 25, 2017

So of course a man dives in to say you’re calling us evil. Brealey says no she’s not, she’s saying men have silenced women throughout history.

https://twitter.com/mlbfan190/status/912412531653840896

Isn't you announcing that an article written

The NSS points out that several schools in the UK are requiring girls to wear religious dress as part of their school uniform.

Girls in dozens of schools in England are forced to wear hijabs, according to National Secular Society research published in the Sunday Times today.

The NSS examined uniform policies on the websites of registered Islamic schools in England and found that girls potentially as young as four are instructed to wear the hijab as part of the official uniform policy.

Out of 142 Islamic schools that accept girls, 59 have uniform policies on their website that suggest a headscarf or another form of hijab is compulsory. This includes eight state-funded schools and 27 primary schools ­– three

Philip Bump at the Post also notices Donald’s slightly out of proportion obsession with The Flag while Puerto Rico runs out of oxygen and everything else.

Since last Friday, he’s tweeted about anti-police violence protests at NFL games some two dozen times — far more than he’s tweeted about North Korea or about health-care revision or about the special election in Alabama. It has consumed him. Four tweets on Saturday. Seven on Sunday. Eight on Monday. Four before 9 a.m. on Tuesday.

It’s astonishing to behold – that someone in his position can be that petty and childish, and proud of it.

After the contrast between his eager tweets about the NFL and apathy about Puerto Rico was raised by

CNN on the current situation in Puerto Rico:

Nearly a week after Hurricane Maria slammed Puerto Rico, the US commonwealth looks something like this: Most are without power and phone service, with little hope of having it restored soon. Food and medicine are dwindling, especially for those isolated by impassable roads. And rescuers still are finding and removing desperate people from their demolished communities.

It is, in short, a humanitarian crisis, San Juan’s mayor told CNN on Tuesday.

You put all those together – roads impassable, power out, communications down, food and medicine running out – and you can’t help but have a humanitarian disaster. Emergency services are finding dialysis patients near death, people running out of oxygen.

Residents

Let’s start with something funny for a change.

Kate Smurthwaite did a tv chat thing this morning along with “Celebrity Big Brother star” Kim Woodburn where they discussed whether or not it’s annoying to be called “darling” in shops.

It wouldn’t be all that funny/interesting perhaps were it not for the fact that Kate reports that Kim Woodburn pitched a fit at her in the corridor afterwards.

I’m not even joking. Kim Woodburn (from How Clean Is Your House who I was just on This Morning with) completely flipped out at me in the corridor as we left the studio. Got right in my face. Called me “crazy”, “a nutter” and all sorts of other not-very-PC terms. I was like

Gaby Hinsliff on the abuse aimed at BBC reporter Laura Kuenssberg.

SNOWFLAKE. Pathetic. Fake news. “Not exactly Kate Adie in a war zone.”

And that’s just a flavour of the way some people on social media greeted the news that the BBC’s political editor has been assigned a bodyguard to protect her at Labour party conference: by blaming the victim, not those who threaten violence against her. She’s making it up for attention! She was asking for it, what with her wilful refusal to report the news in a manner more to people’s liking! She should have known it was provocative even to set foot there!

Evidently many Labour supporters will be as horrified as any other sane

I’m sure this will work out well.

North Korea’s foreign minister has accused US President Donald Trump of declaring war on his country.

Ri Yong-ho told reporters in New York that North Korea reserved the right to shoot down US bombers.

This applied even when they were not in North Korean airspace, the minister added.

This is not the first time that North Korea has used the phrase “a declaration of war” in relation to the United States.

But Mr Ri’s comments are a response to the US president’s tweet that Mr Ri and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un would not “be around much longer” if they continued their rhetoric.

Trump needs to be removed from office because he’s … Read the rest

Recently a student at Edinburgh, Robbie Travers, made a lot of headlines over his claim that EU was investigating him for mocking ISIS. I saw several friends of mine pressing him on this claim on Facebook, and I saw him blowing smoke rather than answering.

Now Nick Cohen has found out what really happened.

On 12 May, Robbie Travers sent Esme Allman, a fellow student at Edinburgh University, a Facebook message.

“Hey Esme, just to let you know multiple news agencies have been delivered [sic] your comments on calling black men trash. You might want to think about saying that in future, some have been linked it [sic] to neo-Nazism.”

The ill-crafted words were at best half-truths and at

David Remnick is lucidly disgusted at Trump’s racist demagoguery.

In the midst of an eighty-minute speech intended to heighten the reëlection prospects of Senator Luther Johnson Strange III, Trump turned his attention to N.F.L. players, including the former 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick, and asked a mainly white crowd if “people like yourselves” agreed with his anger at “those people,” players who take a knee during the national anthem to protest racism.

“Wouldn’t you love to see one of these N.F.L. owners, when somebody disrespects our flag, to say, ‘Get that son of a bitch off the field right now, out, he’s fired!’ ” Trump continued. “You know, some owner is going to do that. He’s gonna say, ‘That guy

The AfD has done better than expected in the German election.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has been re-elected for a fourth term in federal elections, exit polls suggest.

Her conservative CDU/CSU alliance has won 32.5% of the vote, remaining the largest party in Germany’s parliament, according to the ARD poll.

Its coalition partner, the social democratic SPD, has gained 20%.

Meanwhile, the AfD, a right-wing nationalist, anti-Islam party, was on track to win 13.5%, emerging as Germany’s third-strongest party.

…

AfD’s performance, better than what opinion polls had forecast, means that the right-wing party will have a seat at the Bundestag for the first time.

The party’s leader, Frauke Petry, said on Twitter (in German) that Germany has experienced an

Another one of those customs we’re so used to we forget to ask why they’re customs – why is it the custom to sing “the national anthem” at sporting events? It’s not a universal custom, so why is it ours?

Oh well that’s easy – because we’re vainglorious and boastful and we love violence, basically.

Back in 2011 ESPN reminded us the US “national anthem” is a war song, taunting the enemy (flag still there, nyah nyah).

That’s why, in a country that loudly lauds actions on the battlefield and the playing field, “The Star-Spangled Banner” and American athletics have a nearly indissoluble marriage. Hatched during one war, institutionalized during another, this song has become so entrenched in our sports