Well today is looking gruesome – Erdoğan is busy purging judges as “plotters” by way of making himself even more of a dictator, IS says Lahouaiej-Bouhlel was one of theirs, and Pakistan’s Kim Kardashian has been murdered by her brother for being Pakistan’s Kim Kardashian.

Pakistani social media celebrity Qandeel Baloch has been killed by her brother in an apparent ‘honour killing’ in the province of Punjab, police say.

Ms Baloch, 26, recently caused controversy by posting controversial pictures of herself on social media, including one alongside a Muslim cleric.

She caused controversy by being controversial. Got it.

This is, of course, the BBC yet again reporting violence from the point of view of the perpetrators, which I wish they … Read the rest

More from the BBC:

An army group in Turkey says it has taken over the country, with soldiers at strategic points in Istanbul and jets flying low in the capital, Ankara.

A statement read on TV said a “peace council” now ran the country and there was a curfew and martial law.

Erdogan is saying no it hasn’t, this is just some hotheads. He told the people to resist and that he’d be there to help as soon as possible.

PM Binali Yildirim had earlier denounced an “illegal action” by a military “group”, stressing it was not a coup. He said that the government remained in charge.

The military group’s statement on national broadcaster TRT, read by an announcer,

And now for something completely different – a military coup in Turkey. The BBC is live updating.

Summary

1. A Turkish military statement read out on television says it has taken over power
2. The prime minister says security forces have been called in to deal with the situation
3. Military jets and helicopters are seen flying over the capital, Ankara
4. Military vehicles are said to be blocking bridges in Istanbul and gunfire is heard
5. Turkey soldiers launch ‘illegal action’

Then a frightening reminder:

New British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson ‘very concerned’

https://twitter.com/BorisJohnson/status/754071415612116992

Not reassuring.

Military coups are not legitimate, but neither is theocracy.… Read the rest

The New York Times:

The toll of an attack on a Bastille Day fireworks celebration in the southern French city of Nice rose on Friday to 84 dead and 202 injured, as the government identified the assailant as a 31-year-old native of Tunisia, extended a national state of emergency and absorbed the shock of a third major terrorist attack in 19 months.

…

Starting around 10:45 p.m. Thursday, the attacker mowed down scores of victims in Nice with a rented 19-ton refrigerated truck before engaging in a gunfight with three police officers, who pursued him down a storied seaside promenade before finally killing him.

The Paris prosecutor, François Molins, identified the man as Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, who was

Again.

A lorry has struck a crowd after Bastille Day celebrations in the southern French city of Nice, killing at least 70 people, officials are quoted as saying by local media.

It happened on the famous Promenade des Anglais after a firework display. The driver was “neutralised”, and guns and grenades were found inside the lorry.

One image on Twitter showed about a dozen people lying on the street.

The BBC’s live page now says AFP says the death toll is 75.

Terrorism expert Claude Moniquet say it is “pretty clear” the incident in Nice was a terror attack. He says the idea was “clearly” to wait until the end of the Euro 2016 football tournament to launch the attack.

Unbelievable. Teresa May has killed the climate change department.

The decision to abolish the Department for Energy and Climate Change has been variously condemned as “plain stupid”, “deeply worrying” and “terrible” by politicians, campaigners and experts.

One of Theresa May’s first acts as Prime Minister was to move responsibility for climate change to a new Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy.

Only on Monday, Government advisers had warned of the need to take urgent action to prepare the UK for floods, droughts, heatwaves and food shortages caused by climate change.

Climate change is largely a product of business and energy and industry, and action on climate change tends to be antagonistic to many branches of business and energy … Read the rest

So Ginsburg took it back.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg of the Supreme Court on Thursday expressed regret for her recent remarks about the candidacy of Donald J. Trump, saying they were “ill-advised.”

…

“On reflection, my recent remarks in response to press inquiries were ill-advised and I regret making them,” Justice Ginsburg said in a statement on Thursday. “Judges should avoid commenting on a candidate for public office. In the future I will be more circumspect.”

In general, they should. But a potential Hitler isn’t “in general.” Hitler didn’t run on a platform of killing all the Jews, after all. German voters didn’t know that was what they were voting for. He was just an ordinary anti-Semite and … Read the rest

Can’t anyone put a stop to this?

“Parents hold their child down – three of them holding them down – and give this stuff as an enema,” says Emma Dalmayne. “Many feed it to their children. They even put it into their babies’ bottles.”

Dalmayne, a stay-at-home mother and autism campaigner from London, is describing Miracle Mineral Solution (MMS), a “supplement” being sold online to parents as a “cure” for their autistic children. But MMS is essentially bleach. It is 28% sodium chlorite, and when used as instructed, generates chlorine dioxide – a potent bleach that’s used to strip textiles and for industrial water treatment.

It’s been around for years, people have been campaigning against it for years, but it’s … Read the rest

I guess we’re all living in a surrealistic comedy show based on a competition between the UK and the US on who can put more absurdly unqualified and dangerous people in minor jobs like head of state or head of foreign affairs.

Or to put it another way, I go out for a couple of hours and come back to find that Boris Johnson is Foreign Secretary. Boris Johnson! Is Foreign Secretary!

Mr Johnson said he was “very humbled” to be appointed foreign secretary.

He said Mrs May had made a “wonderful speech” earlier, saying there was a “massive opportunity in this country to make a great success of our new relationship with Europe and with the world”.

But

The National: the newspaper that supports an independent Scotland:

Tomorrow's front page @ScotNational The De Vil is in the detail pic.twitter.com/3CB5Me8FT8

— The National (@ScotNational) July 13, 2016

… Read the rest

Nicholas Confessore at the NY Times on Trump as the racism candidate.

The chant erupts in a college auditorium in Washington, as admirers of a conservative internet personality shout down a black protester. It echoes around the gym of a central Iowa high school, as white students taunt the Hispanic fans and players of a rival team. It is hollered by a lone motorcyclist, as he tears out of a Kansas gas station after an argument with a Hispanic man and his Muslim friend.

The chant is just one word – Trump.

In countless collisions of color and creed, Donald J. Trump’s name evokes an easily understood message of racial hostility. Defying modern conventions of political civility and

This was last week, but I missed it – Neil deGrasse Tyson, Twitter, a hashtag – #Rationalia.

Oh god. The word all by itself is enough to kick the nausea-mechanism into life. Rationalia: the land where all the self-admiring dudebros wander up and down congratulating each other on their towering Rationality.

Tyson tweeted him a tweet, a tweet tweeted he it, on June 29.

Earth needs a virtual country: #Rationalia, with a one-line Constitution: All policy shall be based on the weight of evidence

— Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) June 29, 2016

Earth needs a virtual country: #Rationalia, with a one-line Constitution: All policy shall be based on the weight of evidence

Dude. No. What … Read the rest

More on the looming problem of antibiotic resistance.

The golden age of antibiotics appears to be coming to an end, its demise hastened by a combination of medical, social and economic factors. For decades, these drugs made it easy for doctors to treat infections and injuries. Now, common ailments are regaining the power to kill.

Harvard University infectious disease epidemiologist William P. Hanage cautions that “we will not be flying back into the dark ages” overnight. Hospitals are improving their infection control, and public health experts are getting better at tracking new threats. But in a race against nature, he said, the humans are losing ground.

That’s a clumsy use of the word “cautions.” One doesn’t “caution” people that … Read the rest

ExMuslim flashdance at Kings Cross.

The Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain:

On July 5, 2016 a number of ex-Muslims from Bangladesh, Britain, Iran, Kuwait, Morocco, Pakistan and Syria converged on Kings Cross for a flash “dance” in support of freethinkers and “apostates” across the globe. On their faces and chests, they had written of “Ex-Muslim”, “Kafir”, “Atheist”, “Migrant”, “Refugee”, and “Apostate”.
They danced to Shaggy’s “I Need Your Love”** in support of all those who are isolated, intimidated, harassed, and even killed for leaving Islam or thinking freely.
They also danced in memory of Adel Al-Jaf, a young Iraqi dancer, who was killed the day before in a mass suicide bombing in Iraq with over 200 others. He

Trump is angry (or is pretending to be angry) at Ruth Bader Ginsburg because she has said harsh things about him in public. Supreme Court justices aren’t supposed to take sides in political campaigns.

“I think it’s highly inappropriate that a United States Supreme Court judge gets involved in a political campaign, frankly,” Trump told the Times by phone. “I think it’s a disgrace to the court and I think she should apologize to the court. I couldn’t believe it when I saw it.”

Ginsburg in recent days has ramped up her criticisms of Trump’s campaign. She has said he’s a “faker” who should release his tax returns, that she “can’t imagine” a Trump presidency,

The Bookbinder twins are in the Washington Post.

It was nearing 6 p.m. one Sunday last month when Jeremy and Eliana Bookbinder heard about an injured hawk on a hiking trail not far from the camp where they were working.

The 20-year-old twins from Prince George’s were at Camp Marriott, a Boy Scout camp in the Goshen Scout Reservation, about 20 miles from Lexington, Va.

Some hikers had told a camp staff member that they had found an injured hawk, and the information had been passed along to the twins.

You know the story from Eliana’s write-up. Eliana found the bird – a juvenile bald eagle – and found that it was in bad shape.

It was “very,

The Srebrenica massacre was 21 years ago today.

The United Nations had declared Srebrenica a safe haven for civilians, but that didn’t prevent Serb soldiers from attacking the town they besieged for years. As they advanced on July 11, 1995, most of the town’s Muslim population rushed to the nearby UN compound hoping that the Dutch peacekeepers would protect them.

But the outnumbered and outgunned, peacekeepers watched helplessly as Muslim men and boys were separated for execution, while the women and girls were sent to Bosnian government-held territory. Nearly 15,000 residents tried to flee through the woods, but were hunted down and also killed.

The victims were buried in mass graves, which were dug up shortly after the war 

Yarl’s Wood is cutting costs. We know what that means…

Staff are being replaced by “self-service kiosks” at the troubled Yarl’s Wood immigration detention centre as the main way of driving through a £42m cut in the costs of a new Home Office contract to run the centre, it has been disclosed.

A report by the National Audit Office (NAO) published on Thursday also reveals that some women have refused to go on “humiliating” hospital visits after a tougher Home Office policy made it more likely they would be handcuffed on outside visits.

Handcuffs – as if immigration were a violent crime.

Let’s take a look back.

A former senior Serco official who worked inside the Yarl’s Wood