More personnel turnover:

The Trump administration official in charge of diplomatic protocol plans to resign and isn’t going to Japan for this week’s Group of 20 meetings, where he would have played a sensitive behind-the-scenes role, according to people familiar with the matter.

Trump has a protocol boffin?? Who knew? He doesn’t seem to have been doing much of a job…

Sean Lawler, a State Department official whose title is chief of protocol, is departing amid a possible inspector general’s probe into accusations of intimidating staff and carrying a whip in the office, according to one of the people.

Ah. So Trump has a protocol boffin who carries a whip in the office. Makes sense.

The protocol chief assists

More finger-pointing hissing venomous garbage from Pink News:

The Harry Potter author JK Rowling has been heavily criticised for following the “self-professed transphobe” YouTuber Magdalen Berns on Twitter.

Berns has uploaded numerous anti-trans videos to YouTube with titles including, “There is no such thing as a lesbian with a penis,” “Gender is NOT a social construct,” and “Non binary bullshit.”

Berns has also called for people to stop using the term TERF (trans exclusionary radical feminist), saying it is an attack on free speech.

Berns is a hero. You regular readers here got to know about her well before her videos made her famous. I wrote about her back in October 2015 when she was running in an Edinburgh … Read the rest

But have you done the RESEARCH? Where is your RESEARCH?

More on TERFs and white supremacy: https://t.co/Sv0zPbZgR2

— Dr. Dorothy Kim (@dorothyk98) June 24, 2019

That’s how you do RESEARCH. You read an article in Jezebel and a thread on Twitter. That’s RESEARCH.

She’s a bizarre character, Dr. Dorothy Kim. She has an…impoverished vocabulary, to put it politely, and she’s free with the epithets. She’s also an academic, in the English department at Brandeis.

As you just commited violent misgendering in your tweet, exactly what is your point. Like the litany of other TERFs you are anti-trans and support violent conspiracy theories. So why do you even want to hold onto “feminism” b/c you are not.

— Dr. Dorothy Kim

Obvious but worth reminding us:

A UN expert has warned of a possible “climate apartheid”, where the rich pay to escape from hunger, “while the rest of the world is left to suffer”.

It seems more inevitable than possible. Remember the hours-long queues for water in Chennai? It’s clear how money would make a difference in that scenario. Money pays people to stand in the queue for you, money pays for bottled water, money can get you out of Chennai altogether.

A key warning was that the world’s poor are likely to be hardest hit by rising temperatures – and the potential food shortages and conflict that could accompany such a change.

Developing nations are expected to suffer at

“Well why didn’t you say so?”

Border Patrol and the Trump administration are shocked, shocked, to hear of the horrific conditions at the Clint Facility. They had no idea. They have moved 300 children to the nearest Trump hotel.

Not really. They’ve been taken to a tent facility. In Texas. So that will be a huge improvement.

Almost 300 migrant children have been removed from a border patrol facility in Texas after media reports of lawyers describing “appalling” and potentially dangerous conditions, Department of Homeland Security officials told NBC News.

…

The children have been taken to a tent detention camp also in El Paso, Texas, where they will remain under the custody of Border Patrol until they can

Originally a comment by iknklast on Nouvelle intrusion en maillot couvrant à Grenoble.

I remember when I was in school, and we were required to wear dresses. Those dresses were to have hems no more than 6 inches from the floor. We were in Maine and could not wear pants in the winter, though we could wear longer dresses.

I was not allowed to wear pants to school until 7th grade, and our school didn’t allow girls to wear anything but matching pantsuits until I was a sophomore in high school.

Needless to say, I come down on the side of maximum freedom to choose what you wear. I don’t have to approve of it; that isn’t my place. … Read the rest

Trump’s bros are there for him.

The New York Post’s former top editor, a supporter of President Trump and an old lieutenant of Rupert Murdoch who returned to the conservative tabloid as an adviser in early 2019, ordered the removal of a story about writer Jean Carroll’s sexual assault allegations against President Trump, two people familiar with the matter told CNN Business.

The Post’s story about Carroll’s sexual assault allegations was mysteriously scrubbed from the tabloid’s website on Friday afternoon. The link to the story, which had been written by reporter Joe Tacopino, directed readers to a dead or 404 page.

A wire story by the Associated Press which had been published on the Post’s website was also removed.

Trump denies raping Jean Carroll, saying "she’s not my type.” @Jordanfabian @esaagar https://t.co/NAmxNhCs4m

— Peter Baker (@peterbakernyt) June 24, 2019

He really said this. Really. https://t.co/oQovRtmR8m

— David Corn (@DavidCornDC) June 24, 2019

Not the first time, either.… Read the rest

Now who knew there was a need for this?

https://twitter.com/charlmarx89/status/1142799457282605058

The price is the same, so the pwitty pink dogshit bags cost more.… Read the rest

There’s this brilliant French tv series about life under the Occupation, Un village Français. The station that ran it a few years ago fills in the gaps between the end of one show and the start of the next (gaps because they all start on the hour) with whatever fits, and sometimes that is a one of a set of interviews with witnesses that accompanied the French series. They ran one such clip last night, and the subject was…

…the separations of children from their parents that happened during the deportations To The East.

It was only about 5 minutes worth, but it was very affecting nonetheless. The separations were almost all final. The interviews are elderly people describing … Read the rest

A “burkini” protest in Grenoble:

Muslim women in France are disobeying the rules at a local swimming pool by wearing burkinis.

In a protest inspired by US civil rights pioneer Rosa Parks, they bathed in suits covering their entire bodies – apart from the face, hands and feet – in the city of Grenoble on Sunday.

The Jean Bron swimming pool is among many in France that ban burkinis.

Leave Rosa Parks out of it. It’s not the same thing. Banning a garment is not the same as banning people.

After changing into burkinis, the Muslim members of the group were told by lifeguards that their swimsuits were not allowed.

Despite this, they entered the pool and bathed for

Trans girls are girls.
No one is hurt when trans people live authentically.
Not in the restroom.
Not in the locker room.
Not on the court, field or track.

We stand in solidarity with all trans people. pic.twitter.com/HcpuOmT3BJ

— ACLU of Connecticut (@acluct) June 20, 2019

I hope the ACLU of Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New York, Minnesota, Oklahoma, Colorado, California et al. knows better than that.… Read the rest

This is somewhat puzzling.

A THREAD Today I’m delivering LGBT+ workshops to over 100 year 7s at a school in East London as part of my new @LondonFire Equalities Job. Before we started we were told 8 parents had contacted the school to pull their kids out specifically of my session “Cos of Birmingham” 1/6 pic.twitter.com/CvDusThBDD

— Abby Crawford (@Abby_Crawford_) June 20, 2019

I don’t get it. Why is the London fire department, or Fire Service as it’s called over there, giving LGBT+ workshops? Why is the Fire Service doing that any more than grocers or bus drivers or bankers or plumbers would?

Lots of people asked about that.

I'm very concerned about anyone giving lessons to children and would

Isaac Chotiner at the New Yorker reports that this week lawyers interviewed a lot of children being held in nightmare border prisons, in order to monitor compliance with Flores.

The conditions the lawyers found were shocking: flu and lice outbreaks were going untreated, and children were filthy, sleeping on cold floors, and taking care of each other because of the lack of attention from guards. Some of them had been in the facility for weeks.

That sounds…so…familiar.

It sounds, for instance, like the conditions at the work camp part of Auschwitz, where Margo and Anne Frank died of typhus. But this isn’t the Nazis. This is us. This is our government doing exactly, yes exactly, what the … Read the rest

Oregon’s one of those funny states with a reputation for granola hats and peace-loving recycle bins, but the reality is that it has a big share of right-wing god-n-guns types. Apparently they have seized the state legislature.

Oregon’s statehouse shut down for safety concerns on Saturday. But the threats weren’t coming from anonymous trolls or foreign fighters—they were coming from the state’s Republican senators, who have teamed up with right-wing militias to threaten violence over a climate change bill.

Eleven of Oregon’s Senate Republicans fled the state this week to avoid a vote on a bill that would cap greenhouse emissions. The group, believed to be hiding in Idaho, left the state senate with too few lawmakers to hold

The shunning is well under way.

Sarah Honeychurch, a fellow in the Adam Smith Business School at Glasgow University, was among more than 30 academics who signed the letter in last week’s Sunday Times. It registered “disquiet” over a programme run by the charity Stonewall in which “anti-scientific claims are presented . . . as objective fact”.

The guidance includes instructing academics on using gender neutral pronouns such as “zie” and “ey”, as well as insisting that “one in 100 are born with an intersex trait” and that trans women should be allowed to use female changing rooms.

…

Last week Honeychurch, an editor of the journal Hybrid Pedagogy, received a formal email from Chris Friend, the managing editor,