News from Morocco:

Women in Morocco have reacted in horror after a programme on state television demonstrated how they could use makeup to cover up evidence of domestic violence.

The segment in the daily programme Sabahiyat, on Channel 2M, showed a smiling makeup artist demonstrating how to mask marks of beating, on a woman with her face made up to appear swollen and covered with fake black and blue bruises.

“We hope these beauty tips will help you carry on with your daily life”, the host said at the end of the segment, broadcast on 23 November – two days before the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women.

Have the clip:

https://twitter.com/CurioGorilla/status/802496936393711616

Lipstick on … Read the rest

And speaking of those zany Russians…there’s the Holocaust-themed ice dance.

The wife of Vladimir Putin’s powerful spokesman has provoked outrage by performing a Holocaust-themed ice skating routine on Russian TV reality show.

Tatiana Navka, the wife of Dmitry Peskov, appeared on Russian reality show Ice Age and performed in the striped uniform of concentration camp victims complete with the yellow Star of David which Jewish people were forced to wear by the Nazis.

She and her ice skating partner, actor Andrei Burkovsky, smiled at the audience during the performance and appeared to mime shooting each other in one sequence.

… Read the rest

Terry Sanderson on Facebook from the Sunday Times, a story by Andrew Gilligan and Sian Griffiths:

The ringleaders of the “Trojan Horse” plot to impose conservative Islamic values on state schools in Birmingham are back in teaching, despite being banned from the classroom, an investigation by The Sunday Times has established.

Tahir Alam and Razwan Faraz are running informal classes — Faraz in a different city and under a false name.

…

An official report found Alam and Faraz were at the centre of “co-ordinated, deliberate and sustained action” to introduce an “intolerant and aggressive Islamic ethos” into schools in the city, with girls and boys separated, “un-Islamic subjects” such as evolution reduced or removed, and secular head teachers

Abigail Rockwell, granddaughter of the illustrator Norman Rockwell, points out the presence and positioning of a painting by the latter in the meeting between Obama and Donnie from Queens.

It’s the arm and torch of the Statue of Liberty.

A painting by Norman Rockwell was moved in the Oval Office for the first meeting between President Obama and Mr. Trump so it would hang over Mr. Trump’s shoulder. In the painting the torch of the Statue of Liberty is being repaired by five men, one of whom is an African-American. All of them are precariously roped to her flame.

Who moved the painting and why? It is clearly too small for that space; a larger landscape painting had hung there

It’s alarmingly warm in the Arctic this year. I suppose Donald Trump and his friends think that’s nice, the polar bears and caribou can get in some sunbathing, but everyone else realizes it could mean disaster a lot sooner than expected.

The Arctic is experiencing extraordinarily hot sea surface and air temperatures, which are stopping ice forming and could lead to record lows of sea ice at the north pole next year, according to scientists.

Danish and US researchers monitoring satellites and Arctic weather stations are surprised and alarmed by air temperatures peaking at what they say is an unheard-of 20C higher than normal for the time of year. In addition, sea temperatures averaging nearly 4C higher than usual

It’s the age of hate speech.

More than 50,000 abusive and offensive tweets were sent celebrating Labour MP Jo Cox’s murder and lauding her killer, Thomas Mair, as a “hero” or “patriot” in the month following her death, prompting calls for the government to do more to tackle hate speech online.

According to researchers on the social media site, the tweets were sent from at least 25,000 individuals and have been interpreted by hate crime campaigners as a sign of an emboldened extreme rightwing support base.

And that was before the election of Trump and his elevation of Stephen Bannon and Breitbart.

Academics examined more than 53,000 tweets sent over the month after the MP’s murder and found that