Rayhaneh Jabbari is sentenced to hang for killing her rapist in self defense in Iran. There is a petition to get this stopped.

Reyhaneh Jabbari is at risk of imminent execution for having killed a member of the Iranian intelligence services, Morteza Abdolali Sarbandi, a physician, who was attempting to rape her. Her execution verdict has been upheld by the Supreme Court.

Rayhaneh Jabbari is a 26 six year old woman who has been in prison for the last 7 years and is awaiting imminent execution[ by hanging].

Rayhaneh, an interior designer, was speaking on the phone about her work in a coffee shop, a conversation which was coincidentally overheard by Morteza who approached her for professional advice about renovating

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Behold, the entanglement of church and state in Ireland. The very police forces brandish bibles at their graduation ceremony. The Irish Times has the photographic record:

Photograph: Brenda Fitzsimons

That’s a truly frightening picture. These are police officers, agents of state power. They’re not supposed to work for any church.… Read the rest

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Originally a comment by Gordon Willis on How different?

The major point is that the desire to learn about the world as it is in itself is not and cannot be the same as the desire to understand god’s creation. There is a fundamental difference which the words “learn more about the world around us” conceals. The one leads to knowledge regardless of any desire for human or personal “significance”, the other has as its goal an interpretation of the world related only to personal meaning (whatever “meaning” means). There is a search for knowledge and a search for meaning, and although these seem to go together there is a point at which the ways divide. Stedman seems to be … Read the rest

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Is there a First Amendment right to bother strangers in the street? I sure as hell hope not.

By the end of June, the U.S. Supreme Court will have decided one of the most contentious topics facing abortion clinics and their patients today: at what point does a protester’s First Amendment rights interfere with a clinic patient’s right to seek medical care without nonconsensual proselytizing? That is the issue in McCullen v. Coakley, and a 35-foot buffer zone surrounding women’s reproductive healthcare facilities in Massachusetts. Mark Rienzi, on behalf of the anti-abortion activists who are challenging the state’s law, argued that being made to stand outside of a buffer zone inhibits his clients’ opportunities to speak with patients,

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Google Earth street view from a road along a fjord on Austvågøy island which is one of the Lofoten islands in Norway (way up in Norway).

Click on it to get the full effect.

… Read the rest

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Chris Stedman asks at Religion News what misconceptions people have about atheists. There are lots of them, he notes, and that’s probably because most people don’t know many atheists, or don’t realize they do.

But when people meet atheists, they have an opportunity to revise their ideas about who we are and what we believe.

In that spirit, the Yale Humanist Community is cosponsoring an “Ask an Atheist” panel with Hartford Faith & Values—Connecticut’s nonsectarian, nonprofit religion news website and an affiliate of Religion News Service—this Monday, April 7 as the kickoff event for our first ever Humanism at Yale Week.

Great idea. He gets the other panelists to give some misconceptions, then he adds one.

I

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You know the Oso landslide? The collapse of a rain-sodden slope that buried a lot of houses, vehicles, animals, and people in a small town north of Seattle two weeks ago?

It’s been reported heavily in the local media, but as a natural disaster and human tragedy, not as something that had been predicted and warned about for decades. Well guess what – it was predicted and warned about decades ago.

Rain is the fuel for landslides in wet western Washington. The tall trees of the Evergreen State help hold the ground together, not just with their roots, but also by soaking up rain before it goes deep underground. That’s why the state essentially prohibits clearing of forests in places

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The Nation takes a look at one of the more egregious scams in the scam-ridden US: for-profit colleges that flourish because of the egregious scam of our college loan “system.”

More than half of the students who enroll in for-profit colleges—many of them veterans, single mothers, and other low- and middle-income people aiming for jobs like medical technician, diesel mechanic or software coder—drop out within about four months. Many of these colleges have been caught using deceptive advertising and misleading prospective students about program costs and job placement rates. Although the for-profits promise that their programs are affordable, the real cost can be nearly double that of Harvard or Stanford. But the quality of the programs [is] often weak,

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Because we just never get tired of them, right?

Here’s another instance of rape culture to add to the ever-lengthening list: French so-called “comedian” Rémi Gaillard’s latest video, Free Sex.

In the prank, Gaillard stands a few feet away from unsuspecting women and, using the camera’s trick of perspective, makes it look like they’re having sex. He simulates sex with a woman tying her shoelace on the sidewalk, another reading on a park lawn and a third rifling through her handbag in a grocery store aisle. And he uses women smoking on a bench and eating their lunch in the sunshine to imitate oral sex.

It’s hilarious because the victims don’t know he’s there, but he’s having sex

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Ok now I know what I’ll be watching on my laptop in small increments for the next six months or so…

Norway’s public tv station NRK did a week long real-time program that was a trip on its famous Hertigruten ferry from Bergen to Kirkenes, a trip that takes six days and passes some of the most skull-crushingly beautiful scenery on the planet – possibly the most: National Geographic has called the fjords the top Thing To See in the world. I have a huge crush on the fjords, just so you know.

One of my local PBS stations ran an hour-long extract from that show last night, so now I want to see all six days, and god damn … Read the rest

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Maryam has been made a Laureate of the International Academy of Humanism, which is a CFI thing full of starry stars. AC Grayling, Taslima Nasrin, Harold Kroto, Leo Igwe, Patricia Churchland, Dan Dennett, Rebecca Goldstein, Susan Jacoby, Wendy Kaminer, Jonathan Miller, Salman Rushdie, Peter Singer, Wole Soyinka, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Keith Thomas…and lots more.

Very cool.

Here’s the whole list.… Read the rest

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Another state down.

Catholic News Agency “reports”:

The Louisiana House of Representatives has overwhelmingly approved new safety regulations requiring that abortion doctors have admitting privileges at nearby hospitals, rules which could lead most abortion clinics in the state to close.

“We are thrilled that the Louisiana House of Representatives overwhelming passed H.B. 388 to protect the health and safety of women,” Benjamin Clapper, executive director of Louisiana Right to Life, said March 31.

Ya that’s not safety regulations, you lying shits. That’s making abortion unavailable.

The bill requires that abortion doctors have admitting privileges at a hospital within 30 miles of their clinic.

In addition, it clarifies that informed consent protections also apply to abortions procured with the RU-486 pill.

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The Onion reports on a disturbing new trend:

Increasing Number Of Men Pressured To Accept Realistic Standards Of Female Beauty

The tragedy!

NEW YORK—Confronted on a regular basis with images of women who represent a diverse array of body types, a growing number of American men are reportedly feeling pressured to accept the increasingly realistic standards of female beauty now depicted in the media, social scientists confirmed this week.

“More and more, men today find themselves bombarded with un-retouched images, and with that comes the considerable mental burden of trying to reconcile what they see in these ads and magazines with their personal perceptions of beauty,” said sociologist Cliff Hillard, who studies attainable ideals of female attractiveness in the media

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So a guy rapes his 3-year-old daughter, is tried and convicted several years later, and…

…gets no jail time.

Robert Richards IV was in 2009 convicted of raping his three-year-old daughter, seven years after she, then five, told relatives that she didn’t want “my daddy touching me anymore.” In an alarming twist, the judge who sentenced the heir to the du Pont fortune let him off with no jail time, arguing that six-foot-four Richards “will not fare well” in prison.

Instead of sentencing him to prison for raping a toddler, Judge Jan Jurden ruled that Richards would benefit from treatment. Critics have since noted that such treatment is usually only offered to drug addicts or those in

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A British woman who went to visit family in Iran has been locked up for five months in Evin prison for saying things on Facebook.

Roya Saberi Negad Nobakht, from Stockport, was arrested as she stepped off a plane in the provincial city of Shiraz and accused of being a spy, husband Daryoush Taghipoor told the Manchester Evening News.

Daryoush said his 47-year-old wife has been detained at Evin, an infamous prison in Iranian capital Tehran, on suspicion of plotting to commit crimes against security and insulting Islam.

He claimed her arrest was over comments she made on an internet chat forum and to friends on Facebook about the Iranian government being too controlling and ‘too Islamic’.

Part-time chef Daryoush

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Interestingly understated headline in the Independent:

Concern as Brunei brings in system of Islamic law with punishments that include the dismemberment of limbs and stoning to death

Well yes, that would awake some concern.

The Sultan of Brunei, one of the world’s wealthiest rulers and a close ally of Britain, will this week oversee his country’s transition to a system of Islamic law with punishments that include flogging, the dismemberment of limbs and stoning to death.

I hate having close allies like that, don’t you?

The 67-year-old absolute monarch declared last year that he wanted to introduce a full sharia system in his oil-rich nation and warned critics who took to social media sites to complain that they could be

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A wonderful passage from Louise Antony’s essay in Philosophers Without Gods (a collection she edited):

As I’ve said, the reactions of grownups to my questions about religion were doubly distressing to me because of their dissonance with the principles adults were explicitly promoting in other contexts. In school, a broadly libertarian and individualistic ethos prevailed. We were always being exhorted to “think for ourselves.” In reading, we were urged to “sound out the words instead of just asking,” and in arithmetic to figure out the problems on our own. Science teachers and science books agreed heartily that curiosity is a marvelous thing, the engine of all scientific achievement. One must not take things for granted; one must always ask “why.”

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