After her release from police custody, she was detained in Tripoli and prevented from leaving the country or going home to Benghazi.
Category: Latest News
Welcome to our archive of news stories relevant to the project of fighting fashionable nonsense. The stories are drawn from the electronic pages of the world’s media. On this page, you’ll find links to those stories that have been featured on Butterflies and Wheels during the current year. At the bottom of the page, you’ll find links to separate archives of stories from previous years.
We’re always pleased to hear about news stories that you think should be featured on Butterflies and Wheels. Just send an email here, if you want to point one out to us.
A note about links
Inevitably links go out of date. We suggest, therefore, that you make hard-copies of the stories that particularly interest you.
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Photoshopping women out of history
A Hasidic newspaper slices the Secretary of State out of that photo in the Situation Room. Nobody here but us guys.
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Hitchens on losing his voice
One can become quite used to the specter of the eternal Footman, like some lethal old bore lurking in the hallway at the end of the evening, hoping to have a word.
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Simon Leys on Orwell in diaries and letters
“I know from experience that once I have met & spoken with anyone I shall never again be able to show any intellectual brutality towards him, even when I feel that I ought to.”
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Australia: teachers protest goddy comic
Shows a callous teacher ignoring bullying, urges prayer instead – on the website of Access Ministries, which runs 96% of RE classes in Victorian primary schools.
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BHA on Nadine Dorries’s abstinence bill
Teach girls to keep their knees together because boys will be boys.
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“An expert weighs in” on bin Laden’s afterlife
The moment martyrs die, they’re given new bodies in paradise and enjoy a blessed existence, “expert” says. -
Debating creationism, ID and Holocaust denial
Creationists and Holocaust deniers require a rejection of overwhelming scientific/historical evidence and thus rule themselves out of any serious discussion.
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Ralph Steadman on bin Laden
That’s the guy.
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Why don’t the British love their intellectuals?
John Naughton doesn’t know.
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Pseudo-historian David Barton has a good week
The New York Times treated Barton and the world of scholars who’ve devoted their lives to disciplined historical analysis as though their analyses are of equal weight.
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“Progressive” Xian group rejects LGBT ad
Sojourners said “we don’t want to take sides.” Progressive my foot.
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Apology for Spanish Inquisition executions
Thousands of “heretics” were burned at the stake after Ferdinand and Isabella set up the Inquisition to root out remnants of Islam and Judaism.
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Science hasn’t buried god so ha
A professor at Oxford’s Templeton-Green College (yes) finds lots of gaps for god to sit in.
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Cairo: Salafists attack Coptic church; ten dead
Salafist groups have become more assertive in the post-Mubarak era.
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BBC1: See You in Court
Simon Singh v the BCA. Nick Cohen, Ben Goldacre and Dara O’Briain on libel law and freedom to criticise bad ideas.
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Massimo Pigliucci on NPR on the Rapture
More bad uncritical reporting by Templeton “fellow” Barbara Bradley Hagerty.
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Jackson Lears on Sam Harris and “positivists”
Positivist reductionism, reductionist positivism, positivistic fundamentalism, fundamentalist positivism – it’s everywhere. Be afraid.
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Alternative archaeology
It is all too easy for political and religious extremists to appropriate the past and twist it to suit specific agendas.
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Rainbows are god’s way of saying “not this time”
Some people know a threat when they see one.