The fundraiser for the pizza family in Walkerton, Indiana is now at $749,741 and still rapidly climbing. Quite a reward for making public their religious opposition to same-sex marriage.

A more worthy fundraiser is one to send Sunil Khandbahale to MIT.

Born and raised in a rural farming village in Nashik, India to uneducated and illiterate parents who firmly believed in the power of education to unlock their children’s potential, Sunil was the first in his family to go to university and now he’s been acccepted to MIT Sloan’s fellowship program.

Sunil has spent the past 14 years overcoming many obstacles and building from nothing to what is now a free technology enabled multilingual translation platform  that is being

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Ouch. More on that drought in California:

Southeast of Lake McClure is the town of East Porterville, where waterways aren’t the only thing drying out. The town’s residents have also run out of well water, the primary source of drinking water for many of the area’s homes, according to the New York Times.

Residents haven’t had running water in months and rely on donated water tanks to bathe, wash clothes and eat, the report added. To drink, many of the city’s residents rely on bottled water, either donated or purchased on their own.

The town is largely made up of Mexican immigrants who work in the fields all day, toiling under the sun. The local high school has

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Since it came up, I’ll just share the 2012 news about how Malala’s classmates recovered from being shot on that little bus going home from school.

“Which one is Malala?” he barked. Terrified, the girls fell silent. Malala Yousafzai was their 15-year-old schoolmate, a well-known children’s rights advocate who frequently challenged the Pakistani Taliban’s stance against girls education. She was sitting to Shazia’s right. “I think we must have looked at her,” admits Shazia. “We didn’t say anything, but we must have looked, because then he shot her. He shot her in the head.” Shazia screamed when she saw Malala slump forward. The gunman turned and shot Shazia twice, just below her left collarbone, and in her left hand

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Drought in California. Jerry Brown ordered mandatory restrictions yesterday, standing on a mountaintop that should be snowy but isn’t.

The governor’s emergency order comes after a year of requests for voluntary conservation — and a record-breaking warm and dry spell culminating in the worst April snowpack in recorded history — have failed to alarm many Californians enough to cut back on water.

Do they think it will just be there anyway? Like magic?

Snow surveyors found no snow at the Phillips Station site — the first time that’s happened in 75 years of early-April measurements. In an average year, the site would have 5.5 feet of snow. Across the Sierra, electronic readings indicate the water content of the snowpack

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What a good idea. No, I mean, what a bone-achingly bad idea. Alabama wants to see children carrying hand guns.

…lawmakers have proposed an amendment to the state’s gun laws that would allow minors to acquire their very own pistols. At the moment, the law is on a bit more even keel, stipulating that “no person shall deliver a pistol to any person under the age of 18.” Lawmakers want that changed to allow minors to have pistols, but only if they get the permission of a “parent, guardian, or spouse who is 18 or older (?)”

So little George age 5 who is married to Tina age 19 will be able to pack heat as long as … Read the rest

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The attack is over, the BBC reports, and all the students are accounted for.

The number of people killed in an attack by al-Shabab Islamist militants on a university in north-eastern Kenya has risen to 147, Kenyan government officials say.

The operation to secure the Garissa University College campus was now over, with all four attackers killed, they added.

Officials said 587 students had been evacuated, 79 of whom were injured.

Nine who are critically injured have been airlifted to Nairobi for treatment.

Student Collins Wetangula said when the gunmen entered his hostel he could hear them opening doors and asking if the people inside were Muslims or Christians, the AP news agency reports.

“If you were a Christian

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Originally a comment by screechymonkey on But it’s terribly important to understand.

Who asked him? What makes him think it needs to be said? Who asked him to pronounce on which abuses of women are worse than other abuses of women?

He’s just trying to be helpful! He’s gearing up to start writing a regular advice column. It’ll be a big success:

Dear Richard Dawkins,
I’m currently unemployed, but have just received two job offers. One of them is in a predominantly Muslim country, and one of the job requirements is having my clitoris cut off. The other job is here in the U.K. and has no such requirement, but the boss is a bit handsy. I can’t decide … Read the rest

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This time it’s al-Shabab.

They’ve killed at least 15 people and taken an unknown number hostage at a university in Garissa, Kenya.

Masked gunmen from Somalia’s al-Shabaab movement claim to be holding an unknown number of Kenyan Christians hostage after a dawn raid on a university compound that left at least 15 people dead.

The attackers stormed into the university shortly after 5am in the town of Garissa, about 90 miles from the volatile border with Somalia. Kenya’s national disaster operations centre said 280 of the university’s 815 students were accounted for but did not say how many it believed to be still inside.

…

As many as 60 are wounded, according to witnesses. “We have evacuated about 30

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How sweet. Those nice people who own Memories Pizza, the O’Connor family (I said FAMILY, do you hear me? Good god-fearing Christian family, not that made up kind the fagg gay people have), are being given tons and tons of money to reward them for their courageous stand on Not Providing Pizza For Any Damn Gay Wedding. There’s a fundraiser, and the funds are just pouring in, several donations per minute. It’s $108, 630 now but going up as I type, so it will be well over that by the time you look, if you do.

Purpose: To relieve the financial loss endured by the proprietors’ stand for faith.

“Because of,” that should read, but we get the drift. … Read the rest

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There’s one Indiana pizza company that’s pleased as punch with the state’s new RFRA, and is already making firm plans to not serve gays who go in there and ask for pizzas for their wedding.

WALKERTON, Ind. -A small-town pizza shop is saying they agree with Governor Pence and the signing of the controversial Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

The O’Connor family, who owns Memories Pizza, says they have a right to believe in their religion and protect those ideals.

“If a gay couple came in and wanted us to provide pizzas for their wedding, we would have to say no,” says Crystal O’Connor of Memories Pizza.

Hmmmm. You know what? I bet the marryin’ gays of Walkerton, Indiana, wouldn’t … Read the rest

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In the Independent, Rory Fenton says something terrifying about the situation in Bangladesh.

Far from just being two random murders, these attacks are the methodical work of vigilante extremists working through a list of atheist bloggers. The list was drawn up last year when 100,000 protesters called on the government to introduce the death penalty for blasphemy. The government refused to introduce death penalty, but it did begin a crack down on the country’s free-thinking blog community. It shut down some of its most popular sites, and imprisoned bloggers accused of “offending religious feelings”. Once known as the only place where non-religious Bangladeshis could gather safely, the internet suddenly became unsafe for atheists wanting to air their views.

Working … Read the rest

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And let us not forget Thailand.

A Thai military court sentenced a businessman to 25 years in prison on Tuesday on charges of defaming the country’s monarchy in what appears to be the longest sentence handed down in recent years for the crime of lese majeste, a civil liberties lawyer said.

Yingcheep Atchanont of the Thai Lawyers for Human Rights Center said the court in Bangkok found Thiensutham Suthijitseranee guilty on five counts of lese majeste for postings he made on Facebook, and handed him a 10-year sentence for each count. It cut the total 50-year term in half because Thiensutham pleaded guilty to the charges.

Thailand’s lese majeste law is considered the harshest in the world, with those

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But hey, don’t worry about it, that was a year ago, which is like, a lifetime, pretty much, and he was only young then, and people change, and besides it’s comedy, and what’s more comedy than laughing at Jews and “fat chicks”? NPR presents the minimizations:

Updated at 4 p.m.

Comedy Central has now responded to the criticism directed at comedian Trevor Noah. In a statement cited by Politico, it said:

“Like many comedians, Trevor Noah pushes boundaries; he is provocative and spares no one, himself included. To judge him or his comedy based on a handful of jokes is unfair. Trevor is a talented comedian with a bright future at Comedy Central.”

Ah yes, he pushes … Read the rest

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Silly me, I was assuming this Trevor Noah they said was going to replace Jon Stewart was one of the regulars on his show and I just happened not to have seen him. But no – apparently they just wrote a bunch of comedians’ names down on file cards and threw them all up in the air and then stabbed one with a spike and that was the new Jon Stewart. Because guess what, it turns out he’s

• an asshole
• not funny

Now if they had sat down and carefully thought about who would be good for the host of the Daily Show, they could have found someone who was neither an asshole nor unfunny. There are people like that. … Read the rest

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Originally a comment by Kausik Datta on “Because he humiliated my Prophet.”

The situation becomes even more chilling when you consider the situation as reported in Bangla news channels.
1. These three assailants did not know Washiqur, did not know of Washiqur, and didn’t even know how he looked like, where he lived and what he had done to warrant the wrath of the fundies.

2. These three assailants didn’t even know each other. They are students of Islam, in their middle to late 20s. Of the two who have been captured, one (Zikrullah) is a student of a Madrassah in Chittagong, the main seaport in southern Bangladesh, and the other (Ariful) is a student of another Madrassah … Read the rest

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The Australian has more on Bangladesh’s way with atheist bloggers:

Of his part in the gruesome ­machete murder on Monday of a Bangladeshi blogger — the ­second in five weeks — Jikrullah, a 20-year-old madrassa student offered only this as explanation: “I stabbed him because he humiliated my Prophet”.

In a country at war with itself over whether to identify first as a nation of Bengalis or as a Muslim state, that — it seems — for many is explanation enough.

Jikrullah made an eight-hour road trip from Chittagong in ­Bangladesh’s south east corner on Sunday to join two other seminary students in the Monday attack on Washiqur Rahman…

Because Rahman “humiliated” a man who’s been dead for 14 centuries. … Read the rest

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