It looks as if Thailand is not going to hand Rahaf Alqunun over to her father after all.

Rahaf Mohammed Alqunun, 18, will be taken to a safe location in Bangkok, a hotel where U.N. staff members will interview her and process her status determination in coming days. She originally was set to be deported back to Kuwait, where her family was waiting for her.

…

Thai authorities had detained her at an airport hotel in Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi Airport since Saturday night and had initially planned to send her back to Kuwait on a flight departing at 11:15 a.m. local time Monday. Alqunun, however, barricaded herself in her room and demanded to meet with the U.N. refu­gee agency, missing the

Foreign Minister Chrystia @caFreeland, please intervene to help @Rahaf84427714; save her life. She’s a Saudi woman who renounced Islam & tried to escape her family & Saudi Arabia, but was arrested in Thailand at the behest of Riyadh. Please #SaveRahaf. We Canadians r not cowards.

— Tarek Fatah (@TarekFatah) January 6, 2019

https://twitter.com/miss9afi/status/1082032113069756418

#Thailand authorities should immediately halt planned deportation of Rahaf Mohammed al-Qunun, a #Saudi woman who says she is fleeing domestic abuse & fears for her safety if forcibly returned to Saudi Arabia, Human Rights Watch @hrw said today. https://t.co/C2iyZ6XJ3f #SaveRahaf

— Mona Eltahawy (@monaeltahawy) January 6, 2019

https://twitter.com/JenDegtjarewsky/status/1082054336383860736

#Saudi woman asylum-seeker Rahaf has stated that the forced flight info is @KuwaitAirways 412. It is

Oh, how thoughtful.

Women in Saudi Arabia divorced by their husbands will now be sent a text message to inform them of their new status.

The move is designed to stop the practice of men ending marriages without telling their wives.

That nice Saudi Ministry of Justice tweeted it.

https://twitter.com/MojKsa_EN/status/1081894180908134400

So nice for her, as she’s walking around in her abaya (which she wouldn’t be, because women aren’t supposed to be walking around on their own) she gets a text telling her she’s divorced. I’m glad it’s such a nice blue-sky day.

The message will include the divorce certificate number and the name of the relevant court where the women can pick up the documentation.
Women can also inquire

Feminist – a *woman* who fights for the political, economic and social liberation of *women.*

When 'UN Women' will not even name themselves as advocates for women things are fucked. https://t.co/CoQEhhlHQi

— Dr. Jane Clare Jones (@janeclarejones) January 6, 2019

https://twitter.com/tommykinda/status/1081984250054889473

Nope, that’s exactly what it is. “Feminism isn’t about the liberation of women, it’s about the liberation of people.” That is All Lives Matter in a different outfit. But, you know, it’s only women, so it doesn’t matter.

Like, why on earth would you participate in that? Is being nice so important that you’d happily just blink out of existence? I fucking love all the women who firmly answer ‘no’ to that question.

— Graham Linehan (@Glinner)

We haven’t seen enough starvation lately, let’s have more of that.

The partial government shutdown glided into its third week Saturday with no end in sight. If the government is not reopened before February, millions of Americans who receive benefits from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) — the nation’s food stamp program — could have their assistance disrupted.

But they can just make an adjustment. Trump said so.

According to the nonpartisan Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, 42 million Americans received SNAP benefits in 2017. More than 68 percent of participants were in families with children, and more than 44 percent were in working families.

Other programs are in even more immediate danger than SNAP. The

Human Rights Watch:

(Bangkok) – Thailand authorities should immediately halt the planned deportation of a Saudi woman who says she is fleeing domestic abuse and fears for her safety if forcibly returned to Saudi Arabia, Human Rights Watch said today. The authorities should also allow her unrestricted access to make a refugee claim with the Bangkok office of the United Nations refugee agency (UNHCR) and should respect UNHCR’s decision under the agency’s protection mandate.

Rahaf Mohammed al-Qunun, 18, told Human Rights Watch that she arrived at Suvarnabhumi Airport in Bangkok on the evening of January 5, 2019, en route from Kuwait to Australia, but was met by a representative of the Saudi embassy who seized her passport to

Judith Shulevitz at the Times points out that publishers are starting to add morality clauses to their contracts.

This past year, regular contributors to Condé Nast magazines started spotting a new paragraph in their yearly contracts. It’s a doozy. If, in the company’s “sole judgment,” the clause states, the writer “becomes the subject of public disrepute, contempt, complaints or scandals,” Condé Nast can terminate the agreement. In other words, a writer need not have done anything wrong; she need only become scandalous. In the age of the Twitter mob, that could mean simply writing or saying something that offends some group of strident tweeters.

Here’s one problem with that: not all strident tweeters are reasonable. We wouldn’t want Adrian Harrop … Read the rest

Oh come on now.

Feminist = a person who believes in & stands up for the political, economic, and social equality of human beings. pic.twitter.com/5MMwk1bMyM

— UN Women (@UN_Women) January 5, 2019

I don’t see color!

ALL lives matter!

Affirmative action is unfair to white men!

Feminism is about ALL PEOPLE!

Shouldn’t UN Women change its name now? I mean, why women? Why not people? Why is UN Women being so exclusionary in its very own name?… Read the rest

Trump displays his profound understanding of how life is for people who are not rich.

Trump says he can relate to those affected by the government shutdown, telling reporters, "I'm sure that the people that are on the receiving end will make adjustment. They always do." pic.twitter.com/ChRTFL4NDU

— Steven Portnoy (@stevenportnoy) January 6, 2019

It’s totally fine to have your salary suddenly cut off, all you have to do is make an adjustment. It’s easy. Student loans? Rent? Mortgage payment? Childcare? Debt for that stay in the hospital? Food? Car payment? Relatives you help support? Don’t worry about any of that, all you have to do is adjust it. There’s a little dial somewhere, just give it a small twist … Read the rest

Oh hey, Trump and the Trumplings didn’t realize that the government shutdown would actually do harm, and now they’re scrambling to figure out how they’re supposed to be doing their jobs.

Food stamps for 38 million low-income Americans would face severe reductions and more than $140 billion in tax refunds are at risk of being frozen or delayed if the government shutdown stretches into February, widespread disruptions that threaten to hurt the economy.

The Trump administration, which had not anticipated a long-term shutdown, recognized only this week the breadth of the potential impact, several senior administration officials said. The officials said they were focused now on understanding the scope of the consequences and determining whether there is anything they

Here again – trans people can absolutely say what it’s like to have gender dysphoria, but no one else can. Trans people and trans people only know what gender dysphoria is and what gender nonconformity is and that they are different and exactly how they are different.

Let's be absolutely clear, cis women claiming they had "gender dysphoria" as kids because they were tomboys are lying. They are deliberately conflating gender nonconformity with gender dysphoria, not because they believe it, but because it is useful to muddy the waters.

— Casey Explosion (@CaseyExplosion) January 5, 2019

Let’s be absolutely clear, cis women claiming they had “gender dysphoria” as kids because they were tomboys are lying. They are deliberately conflating

Okay now I just don’t know what to believe.

Adrian Harrop tells a woman what her experience is.

https://twitter.com/DrAdrianHarrop/status/1081360068879241222

But we are always told it’s Forbidden to deny anyone’s Lived Experience. That’s a big no-no. Subjective experience trumps mere physical facts, we are told over and over and over. So why do the rules suddenly change when it’s someone who doesn’t claim to be trans or to be literally the other sex?

Also, what in fact is the difference? How can we tell when the difference is present when all it seems to be is “but more so”? Gender nonconformity is totally different from gender dysphoria because gender dysphoria is like gender nonconformity but waaaaaay more so. Oh? So, how … Read the rest

I read the opening of a piece by Elizabeth Goitein at the Atlantic on Trump and emergency powers the other day, and found it so alarming I stopped reading. Now it appears we’re being dragged over that threshold…which could be game over. It was for Germany, and it could be for us.

Trump has long signaled his disdain for the concepts of limited presidential power and democratic rule. During his 2016 campaign, he praised murderous dictators. He declared that his opponent, Hillary Clinton, would be in jail if he were president, goading crowds into frenzied chants of “Lock her up.” He hinted that he might not accept an electoral loss. As democracies around the world slide into autocracy, and nationalism

The airport pat-down patrol has been calling in sick.

Hundreds of Transportation Security Administration officers, who are required to work without paychecks through the partial government shutdown, have called out from work this week from at least four major airports, according to two senior agency officials and three TSA employee union officials.

Did you miss it? I’ll repeat.

Hundreds of Transportation Security Administration officers, who are required to work without paychecks through the partial government shutdown

Who are required to work for no pay. That’s what we call “slavery,” and it’s not allowed.

“This problem of call outs is really going to explode over the next week or two when employees miss their first paycheck,” a union official at