Booooooooo. Wrong. Bad move. Go back and start over. Lose a turn.

“Continuity” for Saudi Arabia means more fanatical religiosity governing everything, more theocratic meddling, more sadistic punishments for the utterance of liberal thoughts, more frenzied efforts to conceal the existence of women, more criminally bad treatment of foreign workers, more crawling before “god” and stamping on perceived inferiors.

Within hours of acceding to the throne of the oil-rich kingdom, King Salman, 78, vowed to maintain the same policies as his predecessors.

“We will continue adhering to the correct policies which Saudi Arabia has followed since its establishment,” he said in a speech broadcast on state television.

The new king’s profile was updated on his official Twitter account, where

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

You know that measles outbreak that started at Disneyland? Pediatricians say yo, that’s a hint that people should be vaccinated.

The leading U.S. pediatrician group on Friday urged parents, schools and communities to vaccinate children against measles in the face of an outbreak that began at Disneyland in California in December and has spread to more than 50 people.

The American Academy of Pediatrics said all children should get the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine between the ages of 12 and 15 months old and again between 4 and 6 years old.

No, this is not like people who make Fords saying all people should buy Fords. It’s different from that.

“A family vacation to an amusement park –

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International Business Times has an exciting story dated a few hours ago…but sadly it seems to be based on a misreading of a Facebook post, so not so exciting after all. Ludovica Laccino reports that a Saudi official has said Raif won’t be flogged any more.

Saudi Arabian activist blogger Raif Badawi, sentenced to 1,000 lashes and 10 years in prison for advocating free speech, may not have to serve the full decade in prison.

Badawi family’s spokesperson, Dr Elham Manea, who is also an associate professor specialising in the Middle East at University of Zurich, said on Facebook that the news was delivered by a Saudi ambassador in Germany.

She wrote: “Saudi ambassador in Germany informed

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Ziauddin Sardar says Islam has a history full of freethinkers.

“This has nothing to do with Islam,” say the imams. “These callous and fanatic murders have nothing to do with us,” say the mullahs. “Islam means peace,” say the worshippers. These disclaimers, and variations on them, have been repeated countless times by Muslim commentators since the Charlie Hebdo killings. They are designed to distance people from guilt by association with those who kill and maim in the name of Islam.

But what about the sentence recently handed down to the (mildly) liberal blogger Raif Badawi in the Islamic state of Saudi Arabia? Ten years in jail, a massive fine, 1,000 lashes over 20 weeks (currently suspended because the first

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The king of Saudi Fascist Arabia has died and his half-brother has replaced him. The New York Times gives some background.

Abdullah’s reign was a constant effort to balance desert traditions with the demands of the modern world, making him appear at times to be shifting from one to the other.

When popular movements and insurgencies overthrew or threatened long-established Arab rulers from Tunisia to Yemen in 2011, he reacted swiftly.

On his return from three months of treatment for a herniated disk and a blood clot in New York and Morocco, his government spent $130 billion to build 500,000 units of low-income housing, to bolster the salaries of government employees and to ensure the loyalty of religious organizations.

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

However, one piece of better news – though I can’t really call it good news, given the eight years wasted…

A pardon granted by El Salvador’s Parliamentary Assembly to a young woman imprisoned after suffering a miscarriage is a triumph of justice and gives hope to the other 15 women languishing in jail on similar charges, said Amnesty International.

In 2007 “Guadalupe” received a 30 year jail sentence after authorities wrongly suspected she had terminated her pregnancy. She was only 18 years old.

Now she’s 25 or 26. She lost eight years because she had a miscarriage.

El Salvador has one of the most draconian abortion laws in the world, criminalizing abortion on all grounds, even when a woman or

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

Michael Shermer is on the book tour for his new book explaining morality.

Morality? Shermer?

Yes. Bemusing, isn’t it.

Known for his analytic approach to the complex plight of humanity, New York Times bestselling author Michael Shermer (Skeptic Magazine) brings his characteristic insight to the nuanced relationship between science and morality in his latest book, The Moral Arc. From paying ransom to Somali pirates and the dilemmas of being a Nazi, to an analysis of the Bible’s basic principles, Shermer unpacks the philosophies behind some of today’s greatest moral questions. He’ll explain how beginning with The Age of Reason and the Enlightenment, scientific ways of thinking have made society more moral and in turn, created a freer,

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

Now have some revolting kakk from the International Union for Islamic Scholars.

(That’s not “scholars” as normally understood, of course. It means not people who have read and understood many books, but people who have read and memorized one book.)

IUMS calls for the Islamic nation to continue in the legal peaceful demonstrating to defend the great messenger, and calls for the West to protect Muslim communities from attacks.

Defend him from what? He’s dead. It’s too late to defend him because he has no life to defend any more.

IUMS had received with deep sorr[ow], the insistence of some of the re-deployment of graphics or movies that offend the Prophet of mercy, the Great Prophet Muhammad – peace

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

The doctors have again said Raif should not be whipped tomorrow, Amnesty reports.

The planned flogging of Raif Badawi is likely to be suspended this Friday after a medical committee assessed that he should not undergo a second round of lashes on health grounds. The committee, comprised of around eight doctors, carried out a series of tests on Raif Badawi at the King Fahd Hospital in Jeddah yesterday and recommended that the flogging should not be carried out.

Nothing surprising about the assessment – deep cuts caused by repeated blows of a stick would of course not heal completely in two weeks.

“Instead of continuing to torment Raif Badawi by dragging out his ordeal with repeated assessments the authorities

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

CFI Canada is holding weekly protests at the Saudi embassy in Ottawa in conjunction with Amnesty International  Canada.

CFI Canada calls its volunteers and supporters to join or lend support to weekly 30-minute demonstrations at the Saudi embassy in Ottawa (201 Sussex Drive).  Amnesty International  Canada  is leading this initiative on Thursday January 15, 2015  at 4:00 pm.  Raif Badawi is expected to receive lashes every Friday for a total of twenty weeks.    For further information, contact the CFIC office at ned@cficanada.ca.

That’s from last week but theobromine tells us there is one today:

Note to anyone in or near Ottawa, Canada: Atheist and Humanist groups (CFI-Canada and Humanist Canada) are joining the weekly protests sponsored by Amnesty international –

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

Watch Shazia Mirza speak up for the value of humor and Nabila Ramdani speak up for…other things.

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

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Another item from Maajid on Twitter:

Maajid Nawaz @MaajidNawaz · 13 hours ago
Adam Lowisz on my Facebook page applied Kübler-Ross ‘5 stages of grief’ onto outdated Muslim “community leader” types

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More from that Washington Post article about the overlooking of female scholars of the Middle East when events are being organized. I ran out of time before.)

The problem isn’t going to fix itself, even though women are the majority at some graduate schools of international affairs now.

The paucity of women’s voices in public discussion comes not just from thoughtless conveners, but also from long-standing problems in the professional “pipeline” that carries individuals to the top levels of the field. Inequities in hiring and promotion often reflect, and help perpetuate, the unconscious bias of a male-dominated field.

Women are systematically cited less than their male peers, for example. Even when women are active scholars, as they are in

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

Are.you.kidding.

Last year, six leading Washington think tanks presented more than 150 events on the Middle East that included not a single woman speaker. Fewer than one-quarter of all the speakers at the 232 events at those think tanks recorded in our newly compiled data-set were women. How is it possible that in 2014, not a single woman could be found to speak at 65 percent of these influential and high-profile D.C. events?

They all figure it’s more of a guy thing?

Pretty much.

Such questions are increasingly common in other fields, including the natural sciences. In our experience, organizers of all-male events reply to challenges with one of two answers: “I didn’t even notice there weren’t any women!”

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