And we thought the Brock Turner sentence was shocking…In Germany the victim would have been found guilty.

A 29-year-old German model was, according to her own account, drugged and raped by two men who filmed the ordeal and then posted it online. The woman pressed charges. But a judge gave the men a light fine for the incident while ordering the alleged victim to pay the equivalent of $27,000.

The judge — whose name was not disclosed — offered a nuanced argument for the surprise ruling. During the act, the alleged victim, the judge ruled, had said “No!” to the filming but not to sex. Therefore, the model’s claim of rape, the court decided, was false, fining her

Prepare to be horrified.

Deutsche Welle again, this time reporting that the police in Kano State, Nigeria are running around all over the place enforcing Ramadan. State police are running around forcing citizens to go without water and food from sunrise to sunset, because religion.

The religious police in Kano State have been cracking down on Muslims who fail to fast during the holy month of Ramadan. As DW’s Nasir Zango reports, the suspects could be caned in public if found guilty.

Caned in public for drinking water for example.

How do the police even know which people are Muslims and which aren’t? And how is it any of their business in the first place?

The Kano State Police,

So having read that interview with Rae Story I followed the link to her blog and fell deeply in love with the first thing I saw, 4 reasons she dislikes Everyday Feminism.

Number 1 is the lazy writing, such as having numbers one through four or seven or ten for everything instead of just doing joined-up writing like a grown up.

Second is the ridiculous content, always sniffing for novelty and never about anything that matters.

Third is the pig-ignorance.

4. And worst of all, the comic strips. Often about things such as “5 Things You Got Wrong About Narcissistic Personality Disorder”.  Just stop it. We are not 12 and we are not stupid. Clearly we have understood perfectly

At Feminist Current, Rae Story talks to Francine Sporenda about neoliberalism and the middle-classing of prostitution.

Rae Story worked in prostitution for a decade, primarily in the UK but also in other countries such as Australia and New Zealand. She exited prostitution last year and has subsequently written critically on the contemporary, libertarian push for full decriminalization and the concomitant project of sex industry sanitization and legitimization. Find more of her work at In Permanent Opposition. Rae tweets @raycstory.

Was it a choice? Sporenda asks. Yes, in a way, but the way addiction and abusive relationships can start out with a choice.

FS: Feminist challenges to the system of prostitution are often met with a response that claims

Deutsche Welle reports that Turkey’s representative for Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has been arrested on charges of disseminating “terrorist propaganda.” Layers of irony there.

Reporters Without Borders’ Erol Onderoglu was charged Monday, along with journalist Ahmet Nesin and prominent academic Sebnem Korur Fincanci, for supporting an embattled pro-Kurdish newspaper, reports said.

…

RSF said the three were sent to pre-trial detention after they guest-edited pro-Kurdish newspaper “Ozgur Gundem” and campaigned against efforts to censor it. It was unclear how long they would be detained or when they would face trial.

Onderoglu has represented RSF in Turkey since 1996, while Nesin is a well-known writer and journalist, and Fincanci heads the Human Rights Foundation of Turkey.

“Ozgur Gundem” has for years

Tragic news from Pakistan:

One of Pakistan’s most famous singers, Amjad Sabri, has been shot dead in the southern city of Karachi.

Two gunmen fired on his car in the busy Liaqatabad area, police said. Sabri died on his way to hospital.

A faction of the Pakistani Taliban has told the BBC it carried out the attack.

Sabri was a leading exponent of Sufi devotional music, known as Qawwali. Sufism, a tolerant, mystical practice of Islam, has millions of followers in Pakistan but is opposed by extremists.

Of course. They don’t want tolerance and mysticism, they want rules and punishments and hatred. They don’t want music and devotion, they want submission and obedience enforced by punishment.

The BBC’s Islamabad … Read the rest

More of Bill Donohue’s attacks on people who dare to call the Catholic church to account.

June 7 – Margaret Markey should resign.

Bill Donohue comments on today’s lead story in the Daily News:

The Daily News is back at it again slamming the Catholic Church. But this time they really did themselves in: They floated a front-page story by a notorious anti-Catholic bigot accusing a local bishop of bribery.

Assemblywoman Margaret Markey—the number-one enemy of Catholics in New York—has accused Brooklyn Bishop Nicholas DiMarzio of offering her a $5,000 bribe. He allegedly tried to get her to drop her support for a bill that would lift the statute of limitations on offenses involving the sexual abuse of

The Daily News – not normally one of my favorite news outlets – reported on Bill Donohue’s stomach-turning gloat.

Markey’s bill would have extended the timeframe in which a victim could bring a case by five years, opened a six-month window to revive old cases, and treated public and private institutions the same when it comes to child sex abuse cases.

The 2016 session ended 5 a.m. Saturday without a vote.

…

The ferocity of his statements, particularly his contention that advocates were out to “rape” the Church shocked sex abuse survivors and even had the group representing Timothy Cardinal Dolan and the state’s Catholic bishops distancing itself from Donohue.

Which says something, given how terrible Timothy Dolan has … Read the rest

A press release from Bill Donohue aka “The Catholic League” (which is really just Bill Donohue) on Monday –

First of all the image:

That’s the first thing you see, before you start reading the “press release.”

Now for the words:

Bill Donohue comments on a New York abuse bill that failed:

The bill was sold as justice for the victims of sexual abuse, when, in fact, it was a sham: the proposed legislation that failed to make it to the floor of the New York State legislature in the wee hours of Saturday (the session that began on Friday ended at 5:00 a.m. the next day), was a vindictive bill pushed by lawyers and activists out to rape the

In the House today:

… Read the rest

Representative John Lewis on Twitter

:

https://twitter.com/repjohnlewis/status/745643704531173376

From Newtown to Charleston… how long will it take for Congress to act? #NOMORESILENCE #goodtrouble pic.twitter.com/uH4G5HCQc5

— John Lewis (@repjohnlewis) June 22, 2016

We must hold the floor until we get a vote. The time to act is now. #holdthefloor #goodtrouble

We have turned deaf ears to the blood of the innocent & the concern of our nation. We will use nonviolence to fight gun violence & inaction.

Act today for the victims of gun violence. Act today for their families. Act today for our nation who cries out for action.#holdthefloor

Democrats did a sit-in for gun control, so Republicans turned the cameras off.

Led by civil rights [giant] Rep. John Lewis (D-GA), Democratic members of Congress literally sat on the House floor on Monday to demand action on gun control. Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) responded by ordering the cameras off and abruptly ending the session.

“We have lost hundreds of thousands of innocent people to gun violence,” Lewis said on the House floor during Wednesday’s morning session. Dozens of Democratic members of Congress stood beside him, before they all took a seat on the floor.

Was this Monday or Wednesday? Today, apparently, so I guess the “Monday” in the first paragraph is a typo.

Anyway – there is John … Read the rest

Bridgette Dunlap says the reporting on that story about the Texas court that acquitted a guy of murder because he was defending his property was bad sloppy reporting.

A misreading of the verdict in a strange and upsetting Texas case has gone viral, since Gawker claimed: “Texas Says It’s OK to Shoot an Escort If She Won’t Have Sex With You.” Texas law does not say that, and the jury didn’t say that either. Pushing the idea that an “Insane Texas Law Made it Legal for a Man to Kill a Prostitute” is irresponsible; it misinforms the public and sends a terrible message to violent misogynists.

It is not in dispute that the defendant, Ezekiel Gilbert,

A Texas jury finds a man not guilty of murder for shooting a woman who refused to have sex with him.

A Texas jury has just acquitted a 30-year-old man who shot and killed a woman he met on Craigslist after she refused to have sex with him.

The man in question, Ezekiel Gilbert, has been cleared of murder after the Texas court determined that his actions were “justified after he shot an escort when she took his money but refused to have sex with him,” according to the Daily Mail.

Lenora Frago was shot in the neck by Gilbert on Christmas Eve 2009. As a result, the 23-year-old was paralyzed and died several months later.

The acquittal came from

Heyyyyyy – Rome has a woman mayor for the first time ever. Take that, Vatican!

In a landslide, to boot.

Thirty-seven-year-old Rome city council member Virginia Raggi has been elected as the city’s first female mayor. Raggi is an attorney and a member of the antiestablishment Five Star Movement (M5S). As of Monday morning, she’d captured 67 percent of the vote, according to the Italian Interior Ministry.

Raggi campaigned against corruption and failing public services, soundly beating her Democratic Party (PD) opponent Roberto Giachetti, who was backed by Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, also of the PD.

In Turin, another female candidate took the mayorship as well. Another M5S member, 31-year-old Chiara Appendino tallied more than half the vote

Lauren Wolfe on Facebook:

I’ve just confirmed that the arrest warrant for the suspected ringleader of the rapes of at least 50 little girls in Kavumu, DRC, was issued suddenly last night. He was arrested in the early morning hours along with 67 men under his command. These horrifying attacks have been going on for three years and this all happened hours after I revealed what I knew the government was sitting on.

I’m just going to just say that I’m tearing up right now. In my wildest dreams I don’t think I dared to imagine such an outcome. But if you need any reassurance that journalism isn’t dead: This is it.

In a comment she adds:

This has

From the Daily Beast:

Sheikh Farrokh Bahram Sekaleshfar, a Shia cleric of Iranian descent, sits opposite a reporter from the Australian TV network ABC. He is about to be kicked out of the country over his views, but he insists he played no role in the June 12 Orlando massacre.

Sekaleshfar’s name appeared in the news this week after a U.S.-born Afghan-American, Omar Mateen, shot dead 49 people and injured 53 others at Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida.

Sekaleshfar is on record saying that “death is the sentence” for homosexuals and that executing them is an act of “compassion,” since earthly punishment will gain them leniency in the afterlife. He has spoken on the subject at least

Boko Haram again.

Boko Haram fighters have killed at least 18 people at a funeral in northeast Nigeria, residents and a police official have said.

The attackers shot at mourners and set houses on fire after arriving on motorbikes in the village of Kuda near Madagali town in Adamawa state on Thursday evening, witnesses said.

At least ten more were injured, according to a witness.

Resident Moses Kwagh told the Reuters news agency that people waited until three hours after the attack and then counted 18 women’s bodies. Some women were still missing, he said.

“When we said that Boko Haram is still in this place, some people sit in Abuja and claim that there is no more Boko