Mir Sabbir reports from Dhaka:

Nusrat Jahan Rafi was doused with kerosene and set on fire at her school in Bangladesh. Less than two weeks earlier, she had filed a sexual harassment complaint against her headmaster.

Her courage in speaking out against sexual assault, her death five days after being set alight and everything that happened in-between has gripped Bangladesh and brought attention to the vulnerability of sexual harassment victims in this conservative South Asian country.

The vulnerability of female people in general.

“Conservative” isn’t really the right word for setting a woman on fire because she reported sexual abuse. (I’m going out on a limb here and surmising that “harassment” also doesn’t quite cover what the headmaster did.) … Read the rest

On a different part of the planet:

One of four women who was recently subjected to a brutal public lashing by armed Taliban fighters in Afghanistan has spoken about her experience, amid an increase of violent punishments given to those violating its strict interpretation of religious law.

Aziza, who like many other Afghan women only uses one name, was rounded up by the Taliban’s shadow police for being out of her house without her husband and not being fully veiled. She was beaten so badly she lost consciousness.

Not punishments and not any kind of police, just a group of criminal men committing extreme violence against a woman.

Aziza said she was arrested by armed Taliban fighters after they

Eugene Scott at the Post points out that Trump tweeted about Notre Dame twice but had said nothing about the three Louisiana black churches that burned down.

On Tuesday, state authorities charged Holden Matthews, a 21-year-old white man and the son of the local police deputy, with hate crimes in the Louisiana church attacks. He was earlier charged with arson.

Of course, the churches in Louisiana are significantly younger than Notre Dame. But they also have a rich history and played a significant role in St. Landry Parish’s black community. At least one hosts a cemetery containing graves of black people enslaved in Louisiana.

“My church has a lot of history,” the Rev. Gerald Toussaint of Mount Pleasant Baptist Church,

Spare a thought for the flying trans people.

Flying while transgender — a term that increasingly includes not just those who are male or female but also those who identify as both or neither, like me — is undeniably improving.

So transgender means being the sex opposite the one “assigned at birth” and being neither sex and being both sexes. So it’s entirely incoherent. Could its real meaning be just “more special than you”?

Anyway, at least the flying part is improving. Because? Airlines no longer give pink drinks to women and blue drinks to men? But they’ve never done that. It’s hard to see what difference it could make.

Last month, United Airlines expanded its gender options:

https://twitter.com/AliceStrudel/status/1118419181781815301… Read the rest

Well that’s us told:

Nonbinary Femmes Must Be Included in the Feminist Movement.

“Must” on whose orders? There is no such “must.”

But besides that, what the hell is a nonbinary femme supposed to be? I think I’ve asked that before, possibly to the point of tedium, but nobody seems to be able to explain. It’s having it both ways, if you ask me.

At any rate it’s clearly nothing to do with women, dreary old humdrum commonplace neither trans nor nonbinary women. They’re too boring to bear, so feminism needs to be livened up by being ordered to include men who identify or present or perform or pirouette or show off “as” women.

Our author Tre’vell [sic] … Read the rest

Katie Herzog notes a commonality in mourning cultural destruction:

As I watched Notre Dame burn yesterday, I was reminded of the fire at the National Museum of Brazil last year and the destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan by the Taliban in 2001. You didn’t have to be a Brazilian or a Buddhist to care about those losses, and you don’t have to be a Catholic or a Parisian to care about Notre Dame now.

I’ve blogged about both of those, and a lot more – the shrines in Timbuktu, the statues in Palmyra, the mosques in Gujarat.

Art works aren’t people, but art works matter to people, so it’s not devaluing people to give a damn when examples … Read the rest

https://twitter.com/DoctorChristian/status/1118168023406395394

The replies are even funnier.

Damn!
I thought it was real too.
At least this Cockenoserous is real. pic.twitter.com/7WRfEgiMpw

— Nige (@nigelrudd) April 16, 2019

https://twitter.com/nigelrudd/status/1118256741748285440… Read the rest

Dahlia Lithwick points out many things Trump has done in full public view that amount to the various kinds of wrongdoing Mueller’s team investigated.

There’s the alleged telling an official to close the southern border and promising a pardon in advance, there’s the lying about Wikileaks, there’s the spreading filth.

Last week, as professor David Rothkopf ably summarized here, Attorney General William Barr testified that he was able to be the arbiter of whether the president obstructed justice, which is actually not the case. He also reversed a long-standing Department of Justice policy to defend statutes because the president told him to. The treasury secretary has refused to abide by a law that on its face demands that

What may have happened:

A heritage fire safety expert has said his heart sinks and he fears for the worst every time he sees scaffolding on a historic building.

Stewart Kidd said all construction sites were inherently dangerous places, but the danger was so much higher in a heritage building.

“We’re talking about timber, we’re talking about very dry buildings because they are old, we’re talking about nooks and crannies, we’re talking about voids and ducts where fire can spread unseen and pop out a long way from where it started.”

He said data from Scotland suggested that about 8-12% of fires in heritage buildings occured when contractors were present.

“What we know is that any kind of hot

Cue Trump screaming.

House Democrats issued subpoenas Monday for records from Deutsche Bank and other financial institutions, seeking information regarding President Trump’s business ventures as several congressional panels took steps to intensify their scrutiny of the president’s personal accounts and corporate dealings.

The subpoenas, first reported by the New York Times, were issued by the House Intelligence and Financial Services committees, which have been leading the Democrats’ probe of Trump’s finances. Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), chairwoman of the Financial Services Committee, said in a statement Monday that Trump’s “potential use of the U.S. financial system for illicit purposes is a very serious concern.”

This was reportedly one of Trump’s red lines for Mueller—Trump was so angry over reports that

And the courage awards go to…

Highly decorated track athletes Andraya Yearwood of Cromwell High School and Terry Miller of Bloomfield High School have been selected co-recipients of the 2019 Bob Casey Courage Award by the Connecticut Sports Writers’ Alliance.

And why are they “highly decorated”? Because they have male bodies but race against girls and so they win all the races. I’m not at all sure I consider that “courage”…

Both juniors, Yearwood and Miller are transgender athletes in girls track who have won individual Connecticut state track championships in multiple sprint events. Miller, who previously attended Hartford’s Bulkeley High School, recently won New England indoor track championships in the 55 and 300 meters.

Yes, of course they … Read the rest

One for the “least worrying worry ever” file: some Trump people who talked to Mueller are in a sweat that Trump might get mad at them. Waa waa; we’re in a sweat that Trump might kill us all.

Of particular concern is how Trump — and his allies — will react if it appears to be clear precisely what specific officials shared with Mueller, these people said.

“They got asked questions and told the truth and now they’re worried the wrath will follow,” one former White House official said.

Some of those who spoke with Mueller’s team, such as former White House counsel Don McGahn, witnessed Trump’s actions up close and were privy to key moments in the obstruction

In other news – Trump does another disgusting thing.

For the first time in years, the United Nations’ committee on racism will not contain anyone from the U.S.

According to a report from POLITICO on Saturday, the White House blocked the renomination of human rights lawyer Gay McDougall, who had served on the committee since 2015. The White House has not announced why it failed to renominate McDougall, or why it opted not to nominate anyone else to the 18-member commission. POLITICO reported that State Department officials had already informed McDougall that she would be renominated before the White House abruptly nixed the move.

NOPE. No American on any stinkin’ international commission on racism on his watch. America was … Read the rest