Today it’s Bamako’s turn.

Malian special forces have entered the Radisson Blu Hotel in Mali’s capital, Bamako, to end a siege by gunmen. The hotel says 138 people remain inside.

The gunmen stormed the US-owned hotel, which is popular with foreign businesses and airline crews, shooting and shouting “God is great!” in Arabic.

Malian officials said 30 hostages have been freed. State TV earlier put the figure at 80.

Three people have been shot dead and two soldiers wounded, officials say.

…

Air France says 12 of its crew have been successfully freed in the rescue operation; Turkish Airlines says five of its crew are out, but two remain in the hotel.

Twenty Indian nationals are in part of

Germaine Greer gave that lecture at Cardiff. Nobody melted or imploded or spontaneously combusted or turned into a pillar of salt.

Uniformed police officers stood guard outside the lecture theatre and security officials guarded the doors inside, but in the end only about a dozen people turned up to protest peacefully. Greer told the audience that campaigners had been “trying to frighten me off”, but added: “Here I am.”

She did not mention the issue during her lecture, entitled Women & Power: the Lessons of the 20th Century, but during questions was asked about the controversy. Greer said: “They [trans people] are not my issue. It should be perfectly clear why not. I think 51% of the world’s population

Harvard Crimson reports a very bad thing:

Law School students and faculty members who walked into Wasserstein Hall on Thursday morning found that pieces of black tape had been placed over the faces of portraits of black professors that hang on walls inside the building. The tape has since been removed.

The incident prompted outrage from Law School affiliates, including second-year Law School student Michele D. Hall, who posted photographs of the vandalized portraits in a post on the website Blavity. “This morning at Harvard Law School we woke up to a hate crime,” she wrote.

Law Professor Ronald S Sullivan tweeted about it:

Ronald S. Sullivan ‏@ProfRonSullivan 7h
This is my portrait at the Harvard Law School.

The National Archives have photos from Manzanar.

Click to embiggen.

To see more go to the archive and search for Manzanar then select “images.”… Read the rest

Another church horror, this one in a suburb of Melbourne.

From the 1970s to the late 1990s, a string of priests abused children in the Australian outer eastern Melbourne suburb of Doveton.

Father Thomas O’Keeffe was a violent offender who tortured some of his altar boys in his time in charge of the Holy Family Parish in the 1970s, Ms Last said.

The article doesn’t use the word “Catholic” until more than halfway through, and then only twice. These are Catholic priests, protected by the Vatican.

Father Peter Searson liked to walk around the Holy Family Primary School playground carrying a revolver and dressed in army fatigues.

…

Broken Rites also believes the independent commissioner for the archdiocese’s

The Manzanar Committee puts out a statement written by Gann Matsuda.

(Manzanar is the name of one of the horrible “camps” in which Japanese-Americans were interned – aka imprisoned – after Pearl Harbor.)

On November 18, the Manzanar Committee repudiated statements by David Bowers, Mayor, Roanoke, Virginia, in which he used the unjust incarceration of over 110,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry as justification for his demand that Syrian refugees be denied asylum in the Roanoke area.

In an official statement, Bowers said, “I’m reminded that President Franklin D. Roosevelt felt compelled to sequester Japanese foreign nationals after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and it appears that the threat of harm to America from ISIS now is just as real

Jeremy Duns has an extended exposé of the risible Twitter personality Mo Ansar. One section of it is illuminating about what may be something a lot of people are doing on Twitter (which would explain people who seem to spend hours every day doing it).

Ansar’s main base of operations is Twitter, where his persona often appears charming and reasonable. It is a Potemkin persona, designed to impress bookers from TV and radio shows as well as to curry favour with media figures. It’s a method he has honed over several years, and it goes like this: he sees something in the news that he feels he can use to lever himself into the media, usually something related to

Barry Duke at The Freethinker tells us:

Iain Lee has lost his job as a presenter for BBC Three Counties radio after calling an anti-gay Christian group representative ‘a bigot’ during a debate on homophobia.

Lee made the comments to Libby Powell, a lawyer for the Christian Legal Centre, who was appearing on breakfast show to defend homophobic Pentecostal preacher Barry Trayhorn who had read out verses from the Bible condemning homosexuality during a service at a prison.

The presenter described the passages, and Libby’s belief in them, as “homophobic” and “bigoted” during a heated debate.

He asked her “Do you support bigotry?” and, when Libby defended her stance, said:

You’ve chosen not to question it, because you’re a

Update: The SOAS SU Twitter account says it’s not true, and they’ll investigate tomorrow to find out where the story came from.

SOAS Students’ Union ‏@soassu 40 minutes ago
There was no vote to no-platform @monaeltahawy, we are not sure where this story came from.

Ophelia Benson ‏@OpheliaBenson 23 minutes ago
@soassu @monaeltahawy Nor a vote that she not be allowed to give a talk, but a panel instead?

SOAS Students’ Union ‏@soassu 18 minutes ago
@OpheliaBenson @monaeltahawy no, no vote.

Will investigate further tomorrow where this story came from to see what has happened.

So, good.

Original post:

In the You have got to be kidding department –

Mona Eltahawy tweets that the SOAS Student Union has

Originally a comment by SA Wells on Changing the subject again.

It’s taken me some time to decode that too, but I think I get it. The claim is that any recognition that genitals are relevant to gender is bad and wrong; because in order for the claim that “trans women are women full stop” to be true, all women would have to be women for the same reason, viz. an internal sense of gender identification. This of course flies in the face of the observable reality, which is that almost all women (or men) or regarded as women (or men) because they were born with female (or male) bodies and were told that that makes them girls/women (or … Read the rest

Amy Poehler has a thing I didn’t know about, called Smart Girls. As part of that, she has this highly appealing video in which two women – who say they are each other’s fiancées – explain about female bodies, starting with menstruation. I wish I could be besties with both of them. Cameron Esposito and Rhea Butcher, they’re called.

Good, right? Great idea?

Most commenters on the Facebook post about it think so, but there’s an exception.

Hey Amy Poehler’s Smart Girls. I think you are doing a great job empowering cisgender girls–but that’s about where it stops. All kids with vaginas, breasts, or any of the parts that you refer to as “the female bod,” deserve to

George Ongere has a guest post at CFI about Ron Lindsay’s visit to CFI-Kenya. (I was looking forward to seeing George Ongere at the CFI conference last June, but he couldn’t get a visa. Many disappointed people there.)

On November 10 and 11, 2015, CFI President and CEO Ron Lindsay visited CFI–Kenya. Ron’s visit during this time was very important because he was coming to officially launch the Humanist Orphans Center, which is a project of CFI–Kenya, located in the rural of Kisumu County. While launching the center, Ron stressed the importance of education to the growing generation and explained the commitment of the Center for Inquiry to supporting vulnerable children living in disadvantaged areas to make them realize their