Surprise surprise – Julian Assange and Donald Trump have things in common – and not just the predilection for sexual assault.

Julian Assange isn’t a Russia spy, but he is taking revenge on Hillary Clinton, and “if an anonymous or pseudonymous group came offering anti-Clinton leaks, they’d have found a host happy not to ask too many awkward questions,” James Ball, who worked with WikiLeaks when it made its biggest splash, in 2010, writes at BuzzFeed News.

Anti-Clinton animus isn’t the only thing driving Assange in 2016, after four years of self-imposed exile in a tiny apartment in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, Ball writes: Assange thinks himself “the equal of a world leader,” and the leak of Clinton

When beliefs about “gender” topple into full-on woo bullshit.

It’s a reply to a comment at the Huffington Post (which provides a link to the comment but not the reply, go figure):

Vanessa Sheridan ·

Director of Transgender Relations and Community Engagement at Center on Halsted

With respect, I would suggest that how the world relates to you has nothing to do with your femininity. Femininity comes from within, not from without. How others may or may not perceive you has nothing to do with your innate, invisible gender identity. That identity is self-determined (at least in an emotionally healthy person), and external forces are simply that: external and, for the most part, extraneous. Oh, it’s nice when other people

Rebecca Solnit shared a discouraging story of random misogynist aggression from Mary Diaz:

Driving through the back roads this morning I was enjoying the energy of this pack of road bikers in front of me taking up 2/3 of the lane. Until one of them yelled into my open window “You fucking stupid cunt!” I was driving slow as I passed on the left and there were at least 30 men in this group – wasn’t sure how to navigate around them so I’d slowed down as I passed. A mile or so later I pulled over when I realized his comment had left me shaking. Then there they were pulled up across the street stopping for a break…

The WHO has a new plan.

Single men and women without medical issues will be classed as “infertile” if they do not have children but want to become a parent, the World Health Organisation is to announce.

In a move which dramatically changes the definition of infertility, the WHO will declare that it should no longer be regarded as simply a medical condition.

Why not just call them unwillingly childless or similar, instead of hijacking a perfectly good word that means something different?

Because hijacking the existing word will create a new right.

The authors of the new global standards said the revised definition gave every individual “the right to reproduce”.

Oh yes? Sounds like a rapists’ charter, to … Read the rest

Don’t go thinking Canada is perfect.

The Federal Standing Committee on Finance heard from a variety of speakers about economic disparities, including gender inequality, Tuesday in Charlottetown.

The only problem? The committee didn’t have any female members present.

Because women are such a tiny minority that such a committee can’t possibly be expected to represent them?

Jenny Wright, executive director of the St. John’s Status of Women Council, posted a tweet Tuesday highlighting the irony of the fact that she was about to speak in front of an all-male government panel about income inequality for women.

https://twitter.com/JenEWright/status/788364286854729732

Nine members; nine men. Marvelous, isn’t it?

“Any standing committee like this needs to go for gender parity,” Wright told Yahoo Canada

Meghan Murphy says why she will no longer write for Rabble.ca.

This has been a long time coming for a number of reasons, but I chose to stay on in the past because I knew that if I left, never again would we see an abolitionist or radical feminist voice or analysis there, and I felt it important to ensure a feminist analysis existed in a space that claims to be a progressive and leftist one.

Recently, I felt I had no choice but to draw a line due to a decision made by a number of editors to publish, then remove (about seven hours after publication), a piece I wrote that was critical of the dehumanizing language Planned

Another Savita Halappanavar, this time in Italy.

Italian prosecutors have begun an inquiry into the death after a miscarriage of a woman of 32 who was pregnant with twins.

The family of Valentina Milluzzo said the doctor treating her refused to abort the foetuses because he was a “conscientious objector” to abortion.

The hospital involved has categorically rejected the family’s claims.

…

Milluzzo was admitted to Cannizzaro hospital in the Sicilian city of Catania on 29 September after suffering complications and going into premature labour in her 19th week of pregnancy. She had had fertility treatment at another health centre.

She was in a stable condition in hospital for more than a fortnight but on 15 October her blood

Yesterday’s treat, by way of surreal punctuation to the three nausea-inducing debates, was a “traditional” event that “traditionally” features lashings of “good-natured” jokes between rival presidential candidates. Groan. Must we? Must we have things like the White House reporters’ dinner and the Al Smith dinner and “roasts”? The whole thing is excruciating. Last night’s was of course especially excruciating. (I’ve never seen an Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner before, and I’m glad I haven’t. Not the least of the horrors of this one was the prominence of Cardinal Timothy Dolan, the guy who complained about the New York Times’s reporting on the Catholic church’s enabling of child-raping priests. Dolan protected the child-raping priests for decades.)

It was tense