The (staid, mainstream, conformist) New York Times has less hostile coverage of Charlie Hebdo than the putative “lefty” Guardian.

A special issue of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo went on sale in France on Wednesday, amid a week of official commemorations and other events paying tribute to the 17 people who were killed one year ago in attacks last January at the newspaper’s office and other locations in the Paris area.

The commemorations have been accompanied by a flurry of book releases and new documentaries on the subject, as well as a resurgence of questions about whether French intelligence and police services failed to adequately assess security threats against the newspaper, which had been under police protection.

The newspaper has

The New York Times story on the Köln (Cologne) mess is deeply depressing.

The tensions simmering beneath Germany’s willingness to take in one million migrants blew into the open on Tuesday after reports that scores of young women in Cologne had been groped and robbed on New Year’s Eve by gangs of men described by the authorities as having “a North African or Arabic” appearance.

The German authorities expressed outrage at the attacks and called them unprecedented in scale and nature, saying hundreds of young men appeared to have participated.

It was not clear that any of the men involved were recent arrivals to Germany over the last year from conflicts in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, North Africa and elsewhere. But

CFI has filed an amicus brief in Whole Woman’s Health v. Cole, the Texas abortion restrictions case.

Steven Pinker, Eugenie Scott, Lawrence Krauss, Richard Dawkins, and more than 40 other eminent scientists and public intellectuals are backing the Center for Inquiry in a brief to the Supreme Court criticizing the state of Texas’s onerous restrictions on abortion providers. CFI’s brief argues that the alleged expert, scientific testimony used to justify the restrictions is flawed pseudoscience and the Court cannot constitutionally rely on it.

In Whole Woman’s Health v. Cole, plaintiffs argue that restrictions on abortion providers passed in Texas in 2013 impose an undue burden on women’s constitutionally protected right to end a pregnancy. Since only a few

Oh great, now street harassment of women is being organized.

The mayor of Cologne has summoned police for crisis talks after about 80 women reported sexual assaults and muggings by men on New Year’s Eve.

The scale of the attacks on women at the city’s central railway station has shocked Germany. About 1,000 drunk and aggressive young men were involved.

At least one woman was raped.

What is particularly disturbing is that the attacks appear to have been organised. Around 1,000 young men arrived in large groups, seemingly with the specific intention of carrying out attacks on women.

Police in Hamburg are now reporting similar incidents on New Year’s Eve in the party area of St Pauli. One politician

From the Sydney Morning Herald:

Cricketer Chris Gayle, already facing a barrage of criticism over inappropriate remarks to a female television reporter, allegedly indecently exposed himself to a woman during a Sydney training session at last year’s World Cup.

The Australian woman, who was working around the West Indies team in Sydney, has detailed the incident to Fairfax Media. In the course of her work she entered the team dressing room to get a sandwich as she hadn’t eaten all day, thinking the players were on the field training.

Instead, she found Gayle in the room with one other player. Gayle was wrapped in a towel, which she says he pulled down to partially expose his genitals to her

Brace yourself. This one is really horrifying.

Jodhpur: In a shocking incident, a lower caste Dalit student of a government school was beaten up by his teacher till he started vomiting for touching plates being reserved for the upper caste.

According to media reports, the episode happened on October 1, a day before Gandhi Jayanti in Government Higher Secondary School in Osian town of Jodhpur, when a seven-year-old picked up a green coloured plate (reserved for the upper caste) where mid-day meal was being served.

“I picked up a plate reserved for upper caste students mistakenly and started having the rice on it. When the teacher saw this, he started hitting me badly on my head. I started vomiting,”

Talking Points Memo addresses this whole “why did the Feds let Cliven Bundy get away with it?” question.

The situation presents a complicated challenge for authorities seeking to end the standoff peacefully but armed militia members itching for a confrontation. But some observers caution that once it is settled — however it is ultimately resolved — those involved must face consequences, unlike Bundy himself, who was never sanctioned for his armed showdown with the government and still owes some $1 million in disputed public grazing fees that triggered the initial incident.

“These folks are militant extremists and they need to be treated as such,” Jessica Goad — advocacy director at the Center for Western Priorities, a conservation group which

Katie Glover writes in the Independent that men mustn’t be allowed to wear “women’s clothes” because that’s a “danger for trans women.”

She starts with the fact that 17-year-old Jaden Smith, son of American actor Will Smith, is going to be “the face of” Louis Vuitton clothes, specifically, women’s clothes.

Jaden seems to be up for this gender-neutral, equal clothing rights thing which allows men to wear women’s clothes without any fear of ridicule.  But there is another, more important issue afoot.

There’s a reason why men wear men’s clothes and women wear women’s clothes, and why they are generally so different.  OK, I know women have been wearing trousers for decades but they’re usually a femme version of the

Yes, people in other countries are startled to learn we have no federally mandated paid maternity leave. I just heard from a startled person on Twitter. Employers are free to provide it, but they’re also free not to.

NPR did a piece on the subject last July.

If you’ve been paying attention to the political news in the past couple of years, you know that the U.S. stands virtually alone in not mandating paid leave of any type for its workers.

It’s because we love freedom. We love the freedom of employers not to provide it, and we love the freedom of workers to be screwed over.

President Obama likewise brought new attention to paid leave this year as

Gulalai Ismail:

I had a wonderful start of the year, got to spend 1st of this year with amazing Hadiqa Bashir; a young activist from Swat who is fighting against child marriages in Swat, and she is just 14 years herself. She is very committed to the cause, and is an inspiration.

We in the US so easily lose sight of how awful we look to the rest of the world.

The UN gave three human rights experts from that rest of the world plane tickets to the US so that they could check out how women fare here. They were appalled.

A delegation of human rights experts from Poland, the United Kingdom and Costa Rica spent 10 days this month touring the United States so they can prepare a report on the nation’s overall treatment of women. The three women, who lead a United Nations working group on discrimination against women, visited Alabama, Texas and Oregon to evaluate a wide range of U.S. policies and attitudes, as well as school,

Ok so the Bundy men are Mormons. They think “God” is telling them to grab public land and threaten anyone who comes to evict them.

As roughly 20 militants continue to occupy a federal wildlife refuge in southeastern Oregon, observers are left scratching their heads. Why would an out-of-state rancher lead a self-styled militia in defending federal land far from home?

Because God told him to, Ammon Bundy said in a YouTube video posted Friday.

Oh yes? I wonder why God didn’t remind them to take plenty of food.

Bundy is a son of Cliven Bundy, a Nevada rancher known for his stand-off with the federal government over cattle grazing.

That is, Cliven Bundy, a Nevada rancher known for … Read the rest

Still the strangely placating, gentle, tactful note when law enforcement talks about the armed men occupying an isolated federal building in rural Oregon.

The FBI has taken charge of the law enforcement response to an armed occupation of a federal wildlife refuge in Oregon, saying that it will work with local and state authorities to seek “a peaceful resolution to the situation.”

“The situation” – aka the violent takeover of a government building by armed men. I say “violent” because the men are armed, which is unmistakably a threat of violence.

The occupation of a remote federal wildlife refuge followed a peaceful march and rally held over the weekend to support two local ranchers convicted of arson.

It wasn’t peaceful. … Read the rest

This guy Spencer Sunshine researches white supremacist groups and he has some tips for understanding the fascist uprising in Oregon.

One, it’s a land grab.

Despite the talk about supporting the Hammond family in Burns, Oregon, the takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge headquarters is actually part of a long-standing campaign by radical right-wingers to dismantle federal land ownership in the West. Some elected officials are working through mainstream channels to get lands transferred to state or county governments, or to allow them equal say over their use. But the Malheur takeover seems to be an attempt to spread a tactic of armed federal land takeovers. These armed groups are part of the “Patriot movement”—the successor to

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NYT pieces on secular Bangladesh bloggers censored in Pakistan

Pic 1: Pak edition
Pic 2: original
via @salmanmasood