King’s College Cambridge, if I’m not mistaken.

Public Facebook post.… Read the rest

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Terrible news via a public Facebook post by Ensaf Haider.

Important-Urgent: We received information that last Friday ‪#‎RaifBadawi‬ was subjected to a third medical examination to see if he was fit for a second session of lashing!

This surprising/unsettling examination came despite the conclusion of a previous medical check that was done two days earlier which recommended the stopping of any future flogging. #RaifBadawi

Strangely, the doctor conducting the examination wanted to sign the paper and approve the flogging, but due to discussions that took place and the previous medical report, he finally agreed to postpone the flogging for a further medical examination!

As a result, the intentions of the Saudi authorities are not clear and there is a possibility

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Mike Huckabee wants to set us all straight about where laws come from. They don’t come from Hoboken. They don’t come from Walmart. They don’t come from Microsoft nor yet from Apple. They come from god, gee oh dee god.

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee (R) said during an appearance Thursday on a Christian television show that he’s thinking about running for President to help the nation know where laws come from: God.

“We cannot survive as a republic if we do not become, once again, a God-centered nation that understands that our laws do not come from man, they come from God,” he said on the show “Life Today.”

Izzat right?

Then what went so wrong during … Read the rest

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To the surprise of no one, it turns out that men who have “traditional” marriages, in which their wives take on all the domestic duties, have more time to devote to their jobs and thus rise higher up the ladder than men who share the domestic duties. Is this true also in STEM fields? Why yes, yes it is. The Washington Post explained last September.

For years, people have been puzzling over why there are so few women in science, technology, engineering and math, and why the university professors who teach the subjects are predominantly men. Is it genetics? Preference? Caregiving responsibilities? An unwelcoming environment?

Turns out, according to a new study released Thursday on men in academic

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A Swedish tv reporter, Petter Ljunggren, did an investigative report on anti-Semitism in Malmo.

Ljunggren wanted to know what it feels like as a Jew in Malmo, so he put on a kippah and Star of David, and went out to walk the streets.

He was followed by an undercover reporter who filmed everything.

Along the town’s main road, Ljunggren was immediately confronted. One man told him he should leave if he was wearing that ‘Jewish shit’.

Another shouted at him that he’s a Jew-devil. People shouted at ‘dirty Jewish pig’ and “Jewish pigs, we’ll kill you’. In the neighborhoods of Lindängen and Rosengård, he was harassed so much, he considered just leaving.

So that’s horrifying.… Read the rest

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Enough of this exotic foreign far away bullshit, let’s look at some humdrum local bullshit. Let’s look at Cindy Jacobs and Bobby Jindal.

“A living prophet that has a direct line to God” was one of the dubious public figures that joined Bobby Jindal at a prayer rally this weekend.

Televangelist Cindy Jacobs, who claims to possess the ability to raise people back from the dead, joined the Republican governor of Louisiana for an event called “The Response,” which many speculated to be the kickoff to his presidential campaign. It was held Saturday at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, despite protests from students and faculty.

If Cindy Jacobs can raise people from the dead, can she show us? … Read the rest

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For a spot of whimsy – a house full of built-in ramps and bridges and portholes for cats.

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=okOVxfuSYPk… Read the rest

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Reuters reports that Nigeria’s military finally managed to pull its socks up and stop Boko Haram from devouring yet another spot on the map, which is a good thing since this spot on the map has two million people in it. It’s a Chicago.

Other places weren’t so fortunate.

Nigeria’s military repelled multiple attacks by suspected Boko Haram militants on Borno state capital Maiduguri in the northeast, security sources said on Sunday, but the insurgents captured another Borno town.

The assault on Maiduguri, with a population of around two million, began just after midnight. Sources at two hospitals said at least eight people had died and 27, mostly civilians, had been injured. A second attempt to take the city’s airport

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Sure enough: Massimo knows how to do it. Compare his first paragraph:

Much has been written about the terrorist attack on the satirical paper Charlie Hebdo, which took place on 7 January 2015. Some of the commentary has been insightful, some full of pious platitudes about defense of free speech by sources with not exactly a stellar record in that department, and some of it has ranged from the woefully uninformed to the downright awful. It is, therefore, with some recalcitrance that I write these lines, particularly because I’m coming to the issue from what I feel is an increasingly rare point of view: that of a moderate liberal atheist.

No puffing out, no pointless baroque … Read the rest

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The academic journal Science, Religion & Culture has a special issue on Islam, Culture and the Charlie Hebdo affair. The first article I’ve opened is Free Speech is Free for Whom? by Hussein Rashid, an adjunct prof at Hofstra. I…don’t like it. It’s written in a form of academese that I’m very allergic to – the kind that wraps its points in such a cloud of pseudo-technical verbiage that…well that two things:

1. people like me can’t stand to read it
2. the unwary are fooled into thinking it’s profound

He’s saying less than he appears to be saying, in other words, and in doing so he makes it hard to pin down what he is saying because of the sheer … Read the rest

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Amnesty has a new report on violence against women in Egypt. Melissa Jeltsen at the Huffington Post reports on the report.

The damning report, released by Amnesty International, urged the government to present a comprehensive strategy to combat violence against women before the upcoming parliamentary election.

“Recent measures to protect women taken have been largely symbolic,” Hassiba Hadj Sahraoui, Deputy Director of the Middle East and North Africa Programme at Amnesty International, said in a press release. “The authorities must prove that these are more than cosmetic changes by making sustained efforts to implement changes and challenge deeply entrenched attitudes prevalent in Egyptian society.”

In June 2014, Egypt criminalized sexual harassment for the first time. Women’s rights

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An Egyptian doctor has been found guilty of killing a girl by cutting up her genitals, the BBC reports.

Opponents of FGM were dismayed when Raslan Fadl was acquitted in November of charges relating to the death of 13-year-old Suhair al-Bataa.

But after an appeal, a court in the Nile Delta city of Mansoura sentenced him to more than two years in prison.

The campaign group Equality Now called the ruling a “monumental victory”.

Although FGM was banned in Egypt six years ago, it remains widespread.

That’s a different system from the one in the US. Here an acquittal can’t be appealed: that’s double jeopardy and it’s a no-no.

Fadl was sentenced to two years in prison for manslaughter

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So there’s this hospital in Clermont-Ferrand with a mural of what looks like a gang-rape…

A fresco depicting four superheroes committing what has been interpreted as a gang rape is currently the subject of a huge scandal in France. The mural—which is painted on the wall of a hospital in Clermont-Ferrand—depicts Wonder Woman having anal sex with Batman while Superman comes in her mouth. Supergirl is there, fisting, and the Flash is getting a handjob. It’s causing its fair share of controversy in a country still dealing with the emotional fallout of the Charlie Hebdo attacks.

The outrage kicked off on Saturday, when the Facebook page Les médecins ne sont pas des pigeons (“Doctors aren’t dupes”) published a photo of

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In Australia some awards were handed out.

Rosie Batty has been named Australian of the Year for her campaign against family violence in an award ceremony that saw four women take the nation’s top Australia Day honours for the first time in history.

Ms Batty rose above her personal tragedy and the great loss of her 11-year-old-son, Luke, who was murdered by his father on a cricket oval in February last year.

Her story jolted Australia into recognising that family violence could happen to anyone and she has given voice to many thousands of victims of domestic violence who had until then remained unheard.

She now champions efforts to fight domestic violence, making many media and public speaking appearances

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Meanwhile, in London – a baffling plan is afoot.

The UK Ministry of Justice (MoJ) is hoping to profit from selling its expertise to the prison service in Saudi Arabia, a country notorious for public beheadings, floggings, amputations and courts that regularly violate human rights.

A new commercial arm of the justice ministry, staffed by civil servants, has bid for a £5.9m contract in Saudi Arabia. Just Solutions international (JSi) will also soon start setting up a probation service in Macedonia, and is in the running to build a prison in Oman.

???????????

How can any branch of the UK government have anything whatever to do with the prison service in Saud-family Arabia of all things? What next? A … Read the rest

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Bad. Now Boko Haram is attacking Maiduguri, which is not a village but a city.

Fighters from the Islamist militant group Boko Haram have launched an attack on the key city of Maiduguri in north-eastern Nigeria.

Fierce fighting was reported on the outskirts. The military is carrying out air strikes, and a curfew is in place.

Maiduguri is home to tens of thousands of people who have fled Boko Haram attacks and was visited on Saturday by President Goodluck Jonathan.

Another Boko Haram attack was reported in Monguno, north of Maiduguri.

Bad bad bad news.

The attack appeared to have begun in the Njimtilo district on the edge of the city.

Nigerian military spokesman Chris Olukolade tweeted that a

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Seth Shulman, editorial director of the Union of Concerned Scientists, reviews Michael Shermer’s new book at the Washington Post. Remember, the subtitle of that book is “How Science and Reason Lead Humanity Toward Truth, Justice, and Freedom.”

If you read carefully, I think you can detect that he doesn’t think much of it but wants to be polite or encouraging. It’s possible that I’m just reading that in, but…that’s the sense I get.

‘The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,” the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. told a crowd of protesters in Montgomery, Ala., in March 1965. King’s use of that quote stands as one of history’s more inspiring pieces of oratory, acknowledging

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Ishaan Tharoor at the Washington Post has the story of Abdullah’s daughters, but he makes clear that he’s reporting reports as opposed to an investigation. He says there are some doubts as to how confined the daughters are. Maybe they’re only a little bit held against their will.

Abdullah’s reforms, writes one commentator, have “all the substance of a Potemkin village, a flimsy structure to impress foreign opinion.”

Closer to home, moreover, there are a few women related to the late monarch who may object to the praise being heaped upon him. Abdullah, like other Saudi royals, had numerous wives — at least seven, and perhaps as many as 30. He had at least 15 daughters.

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