It’s bad news for insomniacs, you know, Craig Ferguson’s divorce from The Late Late Show. I’ve never watched any of the other – the normal – late shows, but if I had an attack of the wide-awakes then Craig Ferguson was just the ticket.

Slate says some of why (although much of my why is somewhat different):

Still, this is bad news for fans of late night television. It’s even bad news for haters of late night television: Ferguson was an irreverent genius, a consistent and consistently surprising comic who took the genre’s tiresome format and threw it out the window. He had no in-house band. He had no in-house announcer. His co-host was a robot. His monologues eschewed

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The University of East London’s Islamic Society is attempting the “you are victimizing us” ploy, after UEL canceled a gender-segregated Isoc event in mid-April, according to the Newham Recorder.

The University of East London’s Isoc claimed the segregation, which would have meant separate seating for men and women, was advertised by mistake due to a printing error by an external company.

However, it defended the policy on its Twitter feed with the hashtag “SegregationIsNotHate”, and said the hastily re-arranged April 17 dinner went ahead in a North London mosque with segregated seating.

An Isoc spokesman said: “We are very disappointed that the university did a U-turn less than 24 hours prior to the event.

“They listened to external right-wing groups

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The Chief Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, Roy Moore – a guy you would expect to know something about the Constitution, given his job – says the First Amendment protects only Christians.

Speaking at the Pastor for Life Luncheon, which was sponsored by Pro-Life Mississippi, Chief Justice Roy Moore of the Alabama Supreme Court declared that the First Amendment only applies to Christians because “Buddha didn’t create us, Mohammed didn’t create us, it was the God of the Holy Scriptures” who created us.

“They didn’t bring the Koran over on the pilgrim ship,” he continued. “Let’s get real, let’s go back and learn our history. Let’s stop playing games.”

Games? What games would those be? The First Amendment says … Read the rest

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Oh good grief, a conspiracy theorist about the Nigerian kidnapped schoolgirls. Yes really. He says he’s getting flags (by which he seems to mean warnings) from “those familiar with events inside Nigeria.” Oooooooooooh that sounds important – until you look at it and realize it doesn’t. He says (this is in a Facebook group) “some” compare it to the Kony 2012 campaign. Oh yes, I totally see that, except that that was a movie and this is a whole bunch of news reports, including from people who are actually there, like the BBC’s correspondent and CNN’s reporter and the local history teacher whose article I blogged about a few hours ago.

I asked some questions, like who are these people … Read the rest

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Morocco is considered fairly liberal compared to most of its neighbors, but what liberality there is may be more formal than real.

There’s that 2004 revision of the family code that raised the legal age of marriage from 15 to 18. The trouble is it allowed for “exceptions” where a judge could rule that young Miss 15 was actually old enough – and guess what. Lots of judges are ruling just that.

A 2014 World Bank report entitled “Ten Years After Morocco’s Family Code Reforms: Are Gender Gaps Closing?” indicates that of the 44,134 underage marriage petitions in 2010, 99 percent involved underage girls and 92 percent of said requests received judicial approval.

As the World Bank report succinctly states:

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

There’s a vocal #BringBackOurGirls protest outside the Nigerian Mission at the UN right now.

Via braden@detroitred9… Read the rest

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Texas Freedom Network points and laughs at David Barton’s views on why the Constitution forgot to say that women could vote. He says it’s because the family is one, not many.

And you have to remember back then, husband and wife, I mean the two were considered one. That is the biblical precept. That is the way they looked at them in the civil community. That is a family that is voting and so the head of the family is traditionally considered to be the husband and even biblically still continues to be so …

See? It makes perfect sense. The family is one, and that one is the husband. Everybody else doesn’t count (until the male children grow up … Read the rest

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The movie IJTIHAD: Feminism and Reform is available on Vimeo.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

I’ve started with Part 2 because it has my friend Tehmina Kazi in it.… Read the rest

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There’s a woman in South Dakota, Annette Bosworth, who is hoping to be a Republican candidate for the Senate. She has a campaign page on Facebook. On it she posted this attractive item:

Subtle, the comparison to animals, isn’t it.

The post shows 61,789 shares at the moment. There are a lot of hostile comments, so many of those shares must be of the “do you believe this bullshit?” variety.… Read the rest

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I get facetious in the afternoon…

… Read the rest

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Alexis Okeowo at the New Yorker blog on the kidnapped schoolgirls in Borno, Nigeria.

“I thought it was the end of my life,” Deborah Sanya told me by phone on Monday from Chibok, a tiny town of farmers in northeastern Nigeria. “There were many, many of them.” Boko Haram, an Islamist terrorist group, kidnapped Sanya and at least two hundred of her classmates from a girls’ secondary school in Chibok more than two weeks ago. Sanya, along with two friends, escaped. So did forty others. The rest have vanished, and their families have not heard any word of them since.

Sanya is eighteen years old and was taking her final exams before graduation. Many of the schools in towns

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Another one it would be good to sign.

Tell Iraq: Don’t Legalize Forced Child Marriage

Any minute now, the Iraqi Council of Representatives will vote to legalize forced child marriage.

The specifics of the legislation (part of the Jaafari Personal Status Law) are terrifying:

• There will no longer be a minimum age to legally marry (it’s currently 18) but the law provides policies for divorcing a 9-year-old;
• A girl’s father would legally be able to accept a marriage proposal; and
• The girl would be legally prohibited from resisting her husband’s advances and leaving the home without his permission. It’s a recipe for a life in domestic and sexual slavery.

Currently, Iraq has one of the most progressive policies on women’s

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The Irish Times reports:

The Sinn Féin president Gerry Adams has been arrested in connection with the 1972 abduction, murder and disappearance of Jean McConville.

Detectives from the PSNI’s serious crime branch are questioning Mr Adams at Antrim station about the murder of the widowed mother of 10 children.

Mr Adams remained in police custody overnight following his arrest yesterday.

The BBC gives some background.

Mrs McConville, one of Northern Ireland’s Disappeared, was kidnapped in front of her children after being wrongly accused of being an informer.

The claim that she was an informer was dismissed after an official investigation by the Northern Ireland Police Ombudsman.

The widow was held at one or more houses before being

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In more tooth-grinding news from Pakistan, a mosque in a suburb of Islamabad has been named after the guy who murdered Salmaan Taseer.

Taseer was shot and killed by Mumtaz Qadri, a member of his own security detail, at the Kohsar Market in Sector F-6 on January 4, 2011. The shooter Qadri has become a divisive figure in Pakistani society. He is hailed as a ‘hero’ by some and denounced as a cold blooded murderer by others. Clerics from the Barelvi school of thought are among those proclaiming Qadri’s ‘heroism’.

Perhaps this is why a mosque in the suburbs of the very city Taseer was killed in, has been named after Mumtaz Hussain Qadri. The mosque is constructed on

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