James Watson’s Nobel medal sold for a large sum yesterday. $4.1 million, to be exact, not counting the auction house’s cut.

Dr. Watson, 86, watched the auction open-mouthed from the back of the room with his wife and one of his sons as the bidding, which began at $1.5 million, rose steadily by $100,000 increments, eventually coming down to two phone bidders who pushed the price above $4 million.

He said before the sale that he wanted to give much of the proceeds to educational institutions that had nurtured him, to “support and empower scientific discovery.”

After the sale, he said: “I’m very pleased. It’s more money than I expected to give to charity.”

The sale also became symbolic of

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It’s the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ turn.

Two people who say that as children they were sexually abused by a leader in a Hillsboro Jehovah’s Witnesses congregation filed a $10.5 million lawsuit Monday – among the first in Oregon to accuse the religious organization of hiding decades of sexual abuse.

Attorneys for Velicia Alston, 39, and an unnamed man said the Jehovah’s Witnesses leadership continues to cover up sexual abuse against children by leaders. They say it is more than a decade behind other organizations, such as the Catholic Church, that have been forced to address their problems through many years of civil litigation.

Let me guess – they summoned Jehovah as a witness and he didn’t show?

“There is a

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An anti-abortion “activist” was found guilty of harassing the head of a Belfast clinic last month.

One of Ireland’s most prominent anti-abortion activists has been found guilty of harassing the head of Belfast’s Marie Stopes clinic.

A judge at the city’s magistrates court warned the Precious Life director Bernadette Smyth that she could face jail for her protests against the former Progressive Unionist party leader Dawn Purvis and the clinic.

The deputy district judge Chris Holmes said the campaign of harassment had been carried out “in a vicious and malicious fashion”.

Smyth was told she would have to pay compensation and would be barred from the area around the clinic on Great Victoria Street in Belfast.

The clinic has … Read the rest

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Tell us more about Abort67, you ask.

Wikipedia has information.

Abort67 is a pro-life protest group in the UK known for using hardline tactics such as holding protests outside of abortion clinics, counselling people going in or out of the clinics, and displaying graphic images of aborted fetuses. Such tactics are considered unusual and extreme in the UK, although they are more common in the US. Abort67 receives financial support from US anti-abortion groups,^[1] and the graphic images which they use in protests also come from the US.^[2]

1. http://www.theargus.co.uk/news/9623459.Special_report__Pro_lifers_target_Brighton_clinic/
2. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/religion/9400183/Christian-protesters-charged-by-police-over-displaying-graphic-anti-abortion-banner.html

Of course it does and of course they do. I hate my country sometimes. It feels very disgraceful to be part of it sometimes – well, … Read the rest

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Ben Quinn in the Guardian has details of Sunny’s encounter with the protesters and what happened next.

A video in which protesters picketing a London abortion clinic are challenged by a pregnant passerby has gone viral after being posted on YouTube.

The incident, involving protesters from the controversial Abort 67 group, was filmed by the commentator and pro-choice activist Sunny Hundal and had been watched nearly 2m times by Friday afternoon.

Hundal said he had been threatened with legal action by one of the protesters, who was brandishing his own camera and was accused of filming women coming and going from the clinic.

After Hundal himself confronted the protesters, who have been heavily criticised for displaying graphic imagery outside

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Sunny Hundal catches a great challenge to anti-abortion protesters outside a clinic. The video has gone viral.

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=XMy-V1TIoHI… Read the rest

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Rose Eveleth at the Atlantic reports on Twitter’s new moves to improve its practices on harassment. (Rose Eveleth herself got considerable harassment from people enraged at the objections to Matt Taylor’s shirt.)

It’s no secret that Twitter is currently playing host to an uptick in targeted harassment. The site has long provided an easy way for people to lob hostile and threatening messages into someone’s timeline, but things seem to be getting worse, not better. Gamergate targets like Zoe Quinn, Anita Sarkeesian, and Breanna Wu have all been inundated with death and rape threats that have forced them to cancel talks and flee their homes. After her father’s death, Zelda Williams—Robin Williams’s daughter—quit the social network after sustained harassment.

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James Croft writes – in a guest post at Friendly Atheist – about atheism and humanism and

1. their failure to do enough about racism
2. what some humanists have been doing about racism

He thinks they should be doing more, and that what the humanists are doing is important.

I stress our engagement because it is representative of a long tradition of Humanist passion for social justice — a tradition that is frequently overlooked even by Humanists themselves. While many of us can reel off the names of a few prominent individual activists who have been Humanists, few know that there is a history of organized social justice work that is explicitly Humanist, motivated by Humanist values and supported by Humanist

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The New Republic has abruptly disintegrated, NPR reports.

We have more news today on The New Republic, which on Thursday announced that it was cutting its publication schedule, moving its headquarters from Washington, D.C., to New York and rebranding as a digital media company – decisions that prompted the departure of editor Franklin Foer and longtime literary editor Leon Wieseltier.

The majority of the magazine’s masthead resigned today, including senior editors Julia Ioffe, Noam Scheiber, executive editors Rachel Morris and Greg Veis, and contributing editors Anne Applebaum and Jonathan Chait. (You can find the full list over at Politico.)

It has emerged that Foer resigned after discovering that TNR’s owner, Chris Hughes, had already hired Gabriel Snyder,

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The Washington Post has done a big investigation into the Rolling Stone account of a gang-rape at the University of Virginia and has found a lot of discrepancies and holes in the story.

A lawyer for the University of Virginia fraternity whose members were accused of a brutal gang rape said Friday that the organization will release a statement rebutting the claims printed in a Rolling Stone article about the incident. Several of the woman’s close friends and campus sex assault awareness advocates expressed doubt about the published account, and the magazine’s editors also apologized to readers for discrepancies in the story.

Naturally Sommers is rejoicing.

The Post continues.

Will Dana, Rolling Stone’s managing editor, also released a

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Orion took off and went 3,600 miles up and orbited twice and came back, dropping into the Pacific 600 miles off the coast of California. It sent some snaps.

The view from up there:

Here’s Earth as seen from #Orion during its flight out to a peak altitude of 3,600 miles away from the planet.

There’s also a very cool (very meta) snap of the ISS crew watching the launch.

A snap on the way back down:

… Read the rest

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The BBC reports that some UN boffins have expressed worries about this pattern we seem to be developing in the US of failing to indict cops who kill unarmed people.

“I am concerned by the grand juries’ decisions and the apparent conflicting evidence that exists relating to both incidents,” UN Special Rapporteur on minority issues, Rita Izsak, said in a statement.

A trial process would ensure the evidence is considered in detail, she said.

“The decisions leave many with legitimate concerns relating to a pattern of impunity when the victims of excessive use of force come from African-American or other minority communities.”

They do, yes. The Eric Garner case, especially, is horrifying. He wasn’t rushing at anyone, he was … Read the rest

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From A Mighty Girl:

At age 23, British secret agent Phyllis Latour Doyle parachuted into occupied Normandy in May 1944 to gather intelligence on Nazi positions in preparation for D-Day. As an agent for the British Special Operations Executive (SOE), Doyle secretly relayed 135 coded messages to the British military before France’s liberation in August. For seventy years, her contributions to the war effort have been largely unheralded but, last week, the 93-year-old was finally given her due when she was awarded France’s highest honor, the Chevalier of the Legion of Honour.

Doyle first joined the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force at age 20 in 1941 to work as a flight mechanic but SOE recruiters spotted her potential and

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My November column for The Freethinker is out.

It asks a question.

What do we do with the thought that some things are more important than others? Specifically, how do we deal with the awareness that some human problems are more urgent and pressing than others? How do we sort them, how do we rank them, how do we decide which ones we should pay most attention to?

I talk about the variety of things I discuss on my blog (hey that’s right here) and say that I don’t really know how to rank them, and don’t particularly want to.

I understand the thinking behind good-faith efforts to rank degrees of misery. There is such a thing as being spoiled,

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A long long list of Fellows of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry are urging the news media to stop referring to climate deniers as “skeptics.” Pass it on.

Public discussion of scientific topics such as global warming is confused by misuse of the term “skeptic.” The Nov 10, 2014, New York Times article “Republicans Vow to Fight EPA and Approve Keystone Pipeline” referred to Sen. James Inhofe as “a prominent skeptic of climate change.” Two days later Scott Horsley of NPR’s Morning Edition called him “one of the leading climate change deniers in Congress.” These are not equivalent statements.

As Fellows of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, we are concerned that the words “skeptic” and “denier”

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So a kid age 7 reads a book about insects with much enjoyment, then when she gets to the back cover she sees that it says the book is for boys.

Publishers? Don’t do that.

You don’t say “books for white people” do you? Don’t say “books for boys” either.

Parker Dains, seven, from Milpitas in California, wrote to Abdo Publishing after she discovered that the Biggest, Baddest Book of Bugs that she was reading was part of a series called the Biggest, Baddest Books for Boys. She told her local paperthe Milpitas Post: “It made me very unhappy. I was like, ‘What the?’ I said, ‘Dad we have to do something quickly.’”

So she wrote to

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So so so so so so funny.

[Description: two photos: one, a bunch of US-football players captioned “how America sees the 49ers”; two, the same bunch of US-football players wearing pink skirts over their uniforms captioned “How Seattle sees the 49ers”]

Contempt for the female just never gets old, does it.… Read the rest

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Oh puhleeeeeeeeeeeeeze.

I know the New York Post is a Murdoch paper but come on. NY Post columnist Bob McManus says it was Eric Garner’s fault that the cops choked him to death.

Eric Garner and Michael Brown had much in common, not the least of which was this: On the last day of their lives, they made bad decisions. Epically bad decisions.

Each broke the law — petty offenses, to be sure, but sufficient to attract the attention of the police.

And then — tragically, stupidly, fatally, inexplicably — each fought the law.

The law won, of course, as it almost always does.

What was the law that Garner was supposed to have broken? The law against selling … Read the rest

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Oh look, what a coincidence. Last April, a cop choked a guy while a bystander took pictures…and the cop was immediately fired.

Guess what the choked person isn’t. Besides dead.

Frank Phillips, a Knox County Sheriff’s officer, was fired Sunday night after a series of pictures taken by photographer John Messner were published in the Daily Mail in Britain. They showed an officer identified by the Sheriff’s Office as Phillips grabbing 21-year-old college student Jarod Dotson around the neck and squeezing him until he fell to his knees.

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A Missouri man drove his van through a crowd of protesters in St Louis last night, and then waved a gun at them.

According to the St. Louis Dispatch, activists were preparing for a “die-in” demonstration, which includes lying in the street, in Maryland Plaza at around 8 p.m. to protest the decision not to charge the officer whose illegal use of a chokehold resulted in the death of Eric Garner.

“As they did, a man driving a Town and Country minivan drove through the intersection and accelerated through the crowd,” the paper reported.

Well maybe he was late for dinner and the pesky protesters were in his way. Look at it from his point of view.

After a

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