Egypt plans to make not believing in god a crime.

The Egyptian parliament’s committee on religion has announced plans to make disbelief in God a crime. Under the current law against “contempt of religions” atheists can be prosecuted for expressing their disbelief in public but the committee’s proposal would go further and criminalise disbelief itself.

I wonder how they plan to detect that crime, or collect evidence for it, or present the evidence in court.

They don’t really, I suppose, it’s just a fist under the nose. But there’s nothing quite like people trying to tell you what to believe to bring out the defiance in most of us.… Read the rest

Ah the British sense of humor.

Oh Elf, we know it’s nippy outside but not that kind of nippy! #ElfBehavingBad pic.twitter.com/kYMNruqLda

— Poundland (@Poundland) December 11, 2017

Rub-a-dub-dub, three in a tub. A night of 'selfies and chill.' #ElfBehavingBad pic.twitter.com/C5FrrUMdJF

— Poundland (@Poundland) December 12, 2017

That’s one way to scratch that itch. That’s not Santa’s toothbrush is it?! pic.twitter.com/bzgX3LFEDA

— Poundland (@Poundland) December 13, 2017

Don't tell Rudolph I've found a new piece of ass pic.twitter.com/UA4Ye2jh3R

— Poundland (@Poundland) December 16, 2017

First come, first served pic.twitter.com/JstSqtWOTh

— Poundland (@Poundland) December 19, 2017

Spot the difference… pic.twitter.com/hWV83m4EYE

— Poundland (@Poundland) December 21, 2017

Noel Coward eat your heart out.… Read the rest

Porn script or sexual assault?

That’s the question two filmmakers recently asked a group of men for a new video project titled “Be Frank.” Created by Dutch natives Damayanti Dipayana and Camilla Borel-Rinkes, “Be Frank” is a seven-minute film featuring men discussing the recent #MeToo movement and the role men can play in combating sexual violence.

…

In the above “Be Frank” clip, Dipayana and Borel-Rinkes asked men to read different storylines and then guess whether the situation was from a pornography script or a #MeToo story. The #MeToo campaign, originally created by activist Tarana Burke, has recently sparked a cultural reckoning with how we deal with sexual violence around the world.

Although it’s revealed at the

Also in the Guardian, and not particularly significant but kind of amusing…why Carter Page had such a hard time defending his PhD thesis.

In emails seen by the Guardian, Page compares his decade-long struggle to get a postgraduate qualification to the ordeal suffered by Mikhail Khodorkovsy – the Russian oligarch sent to a Siberian prison by Vladimir Putin.

In one unhappy note to his examiners, he writes: “Your actions to date have been far more destructive than anything I have personally experienced in my 39 years on this planet.” The fate of Khodorkovsky, he adds, represents “the closest analogy in recent history to my trials”.

Well at least we can see he had a scholarly sense of proportion … Read the rest

Yet more shame and degradation on the world stage, this time involving the shiny new US ambassador to the Netherlands.

Trump’s new choice for ambassador, Pete Hoekstra, who was only sworn in by the vice president, Mike Pence, on 11 December, was being interviewed for current affairs programme Nieuwsuur by reporter Wouter Zwart.

Zwart says: “You mentioned in a debate that there are no-go zones in the Netherlands, and that cars and politicians are being set on fire in the Netherlands.”

Hoekstra replies: “I didn’t say that. This is actually an incorrect statement. We would call it fake news.”

Hoekstra is then shown clips of him saying: “The Islamic movement has now gotten to a point where they have

These are the people who are ruling over us.

https://www.instagram.com/p/Bc0wnvLDR3u/

“Some good friends decided that while my birthday is not for 2 weeks that they would get me an early 40th birthday cake,” Trump Jr. explained on Instagram, beside a photo of himself gripping the cookie with both hands and what appears to be a grimace of pain.

Cruz stands next to him.

Newsweek wrote the senator “appeared unmoved by the cookie,” though Bill Kristol saw a “sickly smile” on his face — as though he had some foreboding of the storm to come.

The sickly smile on Ted Cruz's face suggests he knows that even many of his hard core supporters are going to think this a bit

There’s a pattern.

On a summer afternoon in Southern California nine years ago, a commuter train blew through a stop signal and ran head-on into an oncoming freight train, killing 25 people.

After investigators determined that the crash could have been prevented by automatic-braking technology, Congress ordered all passenger railroads to install new systems by 2016. Since then, Congress has extended that deadline and trains have kept speeding into preventable disasters, including the Amtrak derailment that killed three people in Western Washington on Monday.

In Amtrak’s case, this is a recurring nightmare. The crash this week was eerily reminiscent of one just two years ago in Philadelphia, where an Amtrak train barreled into a sweeping curve at 106

Last week in El Salvador:

An El Salvador court has rejected the appeal of a woman sentenced to 30 years in prison over what she says was a stillbirth.

Teodora del Carmen Vásquez, 37, said she was working in 2007 when she began to experience intense pain, then bleeding. She called for help before fainting. As she came round, police officers surrounded her and accused her of murdering her baby by inducing an abortion of her nearly full-term baby.

She was convicted of aggravated murder in 2008.

The non-profit Center for Reproductive Rights, which has been campaigning for the release of dozens of other women convicted of murder in El Salvador for obstetric emergencies, said the decision

Sweden too.

Cissi Wallin was inspired by the explosion of the Harvey Weinstein racket to name a name.

Ms. Wallin had filed a police report in 2011, a few years after she was sexually assaulted, only to see it dismissed within weeks. Now she decided to do something different: She put the name of a well-known columnist for Sweden’s largest left-wing tabloid newspaper on her Instagram page, alongside a statement saying he had drugged and violently raped her in Stockholm more than a decade ago.

Soon more people came forward about the man. I was a co-author of an investigation into his behavior.

And suddenly, just as in the United States, stories of other national figures in the

Via Actual Feminist News:

Stop the Harassment and Threats
Against Radical Feminists

Ad in the December 2017 Issue of The Progressive

[Note from the editors: Below find the text of an ad that appears in the December issue of The Progressive. In our view the issue raised warrants a conversation on the revolutionary left. We are therefore reproducing the ad here as our way of helping to facilitate that discussion.]

As socialists and progressives we are committed to building a united movement of the left rich in our diversity capable of creating a just, democratic, and egalitarian society freed from all forms of oppression and discrimination. To build such a movement for fundamental change will require an atmosphere of

For years, decades, workplace sexual harassment goes unreported and unprevented, then one big perp is outed and the dam breaks – so naturally the next step is the move to say repair that dam right now. Spiked came up with several women prepared to say this has gone much too far – not the routine harassment but the reporting of the routine harassment.

Lionel Shriver is one.

In the complicated dance of courtship, someone has to make a move, and the way one conventionally discovers if one’s attraction is returned is to brave some gentle physical contact and perhaps accept rebuff.

Actually it’s not. There are many other “moves” in that complicated dance; physical contact is not the first … Read the rest