Being a journalist who investigates corruption is one of the more dangerous professions. Daphne Caruana Galizia is one who has been silenced.

The car bombing that killed investigative reporter Daphne Caruana Galizia has left Malta in shock, alarmed that organised crime and political vendettas may have spiralled out of control.

“There are crooks everywhere you look now. The situation is desperate,” she wrote in her last blog post, published shortly before her car exploded.

Caruana Galizia, 53, died near her home in Bidnija, a village in northern Malta.

She had relentlessly accused various Maltese politicians and other officials of corruption in her popular Running Commentary blog, and had been sued several times.

Now she won’t be doing that any more.

She was seen as one of Malta’s most influential writers, commented Herman Grech, Times of Malta online editor.

About 3,000 people honoured her in a candle-lit vigil in Sliema, near the capital Valletta, the night after she died.

The night after she was killed.

In his condemnation of the murder a German Green MEP, Sven Giegold, said“such incidents bring to mind Putin’s Russia, not the European Union”.

Her son Matthew, himself an investigative reporter, castigated the police on Facebook, accusing the authorities of negligence for failing to prevent the “assassination”.

He called Malta “a mafia state” where “a culture of impunity has been allowed to flourish by the government”.

He described rushing to the scene and finding “my mother’s body parts all around me”.

Yet he’s not silent.

The culture police strike again.

When Laura Moriarty decided she wanted to write a dystopian novel about a future America in which Muslims are forcefully corralled into detention centers, she was aware that she should tread carefully. Her protagonist is a white teenager, but one of her main characters, Sadaf, is a Muslim American immigrant from Iran, so Moriarty began by diving into Iranian books and films. Moriarty explained via email that she asked two Iranian immigrant friends to read an early draft and see if Sadaf seemed authentic to them, and whether the language and accent fit with their memories and experiences. A friend of Pakistani and American descent who is a practicing Muslim gave additional feedback. Moriarty asked a senior colleague at the University of Kansas, Giselle Anatol, who writes about Young Adult fiction and has been critical of racist narratives in literature, to read the book with a particular eye toward avoiding another narrative about a “white savior.” And after American Heart was purchased by Harper, the publisher provided several formal “sensitivity reads,” in which a member of a minority group is charged with spotting potentially problematic depictions in a manuscript.

We can tell what’s coming. There’s a But.

None of this, as it turns out, was enough to protect American Heart from becoming the subject of the latest skirmish in the increasingly contentious battle over representation and diversity in the world of YA literature. American Heart won’t be published until January, but it has already attracted the ire of the fierce group of online YA readers that journalist Kat Rosenfield has referred to as “culture cops.”

And that was before the starred review.

The backlash escalated last week, when Kirkus Reviews gave American Heart a coveted “starred review,” which influences purchases by bookstores and libraries. Kirkus’ anonymous reviewer called the book “by turns terrifying, suspenseful, thought-provoking, and touching,” and praised its “frighteningly believable setting of fear and violent nativism gone awry.” The book’s critics were not pleased with the commendation. “Kirkus Reviews of books reinforce white supremacy,” author and activist Justina Ireland, who had posted a critical review of the book on Medium, wrote on Twitter. “I’m sick to my stomach over this, and I’m so sorry Muslim folks have to contend with one more reminder that their humanity is negotiable.”

Their humanity is negotiable? Because a non-Muslim wrote a story with a non-Muslim protagonist and a Muslim major character? That’s making humanity negotiable?

Kirkus, apparently, was listening. Over the weekend, the publication took down the brief review and replaced it with a remarkable three-paragraph statement from editor in chief Claiborne Smith. He pointed out that the original reviewer was a woman, a Muslim, and an expert in children’s and YA literature—the kind of profile that would privilege her opinion of the book in many circles. Nonetheless, “while we believe our reviewer’s opinion is worthy and valid, some of the wording fell short of meeting our standards for clarity and sensitivity, and we failed to make the thoughtful edits our readers deserve,” Smith wrote.

The whipping will be very gently administered.

Trump, sniffing the air for more people to harm, has found them: welfare recipients.

President Donald Trump said Monday his administration will start to consider reforming the welfare system in the United States, saying that some people are “taking advantage of the system.”

The comment comes as the Trump administration struggles to get any sweeping legislation through Congress, despite Republicans controlling both the House and Senate. Trump failed to pass health care reform earlier this year and is currently working — without much success so far — to pass tax reform.

Trump was never trying to pass health care reform – he was trying to destroy the ACA’s attempt at providing health insurance for everyone. That’s not reform; it’s nihilism. Trump wants poor people and middling people (not poor but far from rich) to be unable to get health insurance, because it’s too expensive.

“People are taking advantage of the system and then other people aren’t receiving what they really need to live and we think it is very unfair to them,” said Trump, flanked by Defense Secretary James Mattis and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson during a Cabinet meeting. “Because some people are really taking advantage of our system from that standpoint.”

Nah. He doesn’t care about those other people who “aren’t receiving what they really need to live” – he just wants to take it away.

“We are going to be looking very, very strongly, therefore, at welfare reform,” Trump added.

How do you look at something “strongly”? Let alone “very, very strongly”? His vocabulary is so exiguous that he has to fall back on that idiot repetition.

Welfare reform was not something Trump emphasized on the campaign trail, but his first budget proposal — unveiled earlier this year — proposed sweeping cuts to food stamps and welfare programs by restricting those who are eligible for such programs.

See? He just wants more people to go without. It makes him happy. I bet he thinks about it while he’s eating his two scoops of ice cream (and his guests are eating their one).

Originally a comment by Bruce Gorton on Through male eyes.

The problem I think isn’t a craving for sex. Nor is it necessarily misogyny, or at least not exactly what we think of as misogyny.

A lot of it is more about what we think about being male, than what we think about the role of women. We think of being male as being the fighter, being forceful, being willing to take charge.

So with the Catholics, they can try and eliminate any hint of sexual characteristics from women, and they end up… with a massive child rape scandal that spans the entire globe. Islam tries to do the same thing, as I’m sure you’re well aware, and the net result is… more of the same stuff.

The problem isn’t the sexual desire, it isn’t about women’s bodies, it is about what we as men have going on in our heads. It is that stuff we consider being a “real man”.

Sometimes you need those traits of being a fighter, being forceful, being willing to take charge, they aren’t inherently bad things, except what we’re taught to think of as winning is somebody else losing, and that means those traits are prized in a way where consent is not only devalued, it is seen as a negative.

If everyone wins, is it victory or is it a participation award?

President Jacob Zuma, a while back, argued in Parliament that because the ANC won the most votes, the ANC has more rights than everyone else. His view of democracy was as a means of winning those rights.

Is it any surprise that Jacob Zuma, the ANC and the country as a whole, have less than great histories regarding respecting consent? When your concept of political victory is you have more rights than everyone else, that, not anything really to do with women per se, is a problem.

What is our language around sex? Conquest. Conquest is a form of taking power that is not achieved through mutual consent. Leadership becomes dominance, and dominance is desirable because you don’t have to think about what other people want. “When you’re a star, they let you get away with it.”

When you’re a successful movie producer, when you’re a TV icon, when you’re a president, when you’re in charge and you’re a winner, you get more rights. It isn’t simply about how men view women, it is what happens when the way we’re taught to see everything gets applied to women.

But of course all of this is IMO, and maybe I’m crazy. I hope so, because actually solving the problem I’ve set forward is much harder than identifying it.

This this this. It’s not just the Harvey Weinsteins, it’s not just the actual men and their actual groping and raping. It’s also the sea they swim in: it’s the content. Kate Hardie knows.

The focus is quite rightly on the horrendous sexual abuse that Weinstein is alleged to have committed. But to focus on that alone is to miss the point that the portrayal of women – of their lives, their feelings, their sexuality and their bodies – is nearly always decided upon and filtered through male eyes. Nearly every actress will tell you about scripts that included scenes of female nudity that seem to have no apparent reason for being there and that are often degrading.

And quite a few women in the audience for such scripts will tell you the same thing.

You only have to turn on most police dramas to find the obligatory image of a battered, naked – but beautiful – young female corpse. (Apart from the ones written by Sally Wainwright: will someone please put Sally Wainwright in charge of everything for a while?) You don’t have to be talking about consent and abuse to be mortified by many female roles.

Second that. I love Sally Wainwright. In case you’re thinking “who?” – Scott and Bailey. Women have all the big parts, and they’re real women.

I am 49, so I do not get asked to be naked any more. (That is another thing the male-dominated industry is not keen on – women over 40 having any kind of satisfactory sex life or, indeed, bodies.) But when I was 17, I had become so used to being required to appear naked that I asked for a no-nudity clause to be written into a contract. I was fired by the male director because, despite there being no nudity in his script, he felt the clause curbed his creativity should he, on a whim, decide he needed me to remove my clothes. (This director, fittingly was given his break by Weinstein.)

Besides which, why is a woman even in the movie if she doesn’t take her clothes off? It’s not as if women ever do anything.

We proceeded to read the scripts; the room was full of women – a casting director and assistant director included. A male producer was reading out the stage directions, his voice hardly faltering in tone as he read out: “He rips open her shirt and we see her tits.”

When we finished, it was announced that anyone who wasn’t an executive producer, producer, writer, director or the director of photography had to leave so that those left behind could make important decisions. I watched as the room emptied of women.

While the men stayed in the room to decide when the women had to take their clothes off for the camera.

Woody Allen hopes people won’t get carried away with this Harvey Weinstein thing.

Weinstein has been credited with reviving Allen’s career after Allen was accused of abusing Dylan Farrow, his daughter with actress Mia Farrow.

The allegation emerged in the early 1990s following Allen’s separation from Farrow.

The actress left Allen after discovering he was having an affair with her adopted daughter, Soon-Yi Previn.

But despite working with Weinstein on a number of films – including the Oscar-winning Mighty Aphrodite – Allen said he had never heard any of allegations of rape and sexual assault.

“No one ever came to me or told me horror stories with any real seriousness,” Allen told the BBC. “And they wouldn’t, because you are not interested in it. You are interested in making your movie.”

No, they wouldn’t because you’re the wrong guy to tell, because you’re such a skeeve. You cheated on your partner with her daughter.

Allen said he hoped the revelations, which emerged after an investigation by the New York Times, would lead to “some amelioration”, but said: “You also don’t want it to lead to a witch hunt atmosphere, a Salem atmosphere, where every guy in an office who winks at a woman is suddenly having to call a lawyer to defend himself. That’s not right either.”

Yeah. Gotta make sure guys in offices are still totally free to skeeve on women. That’s what women are there for, after all.

The truck bomb in Mogadishu yesterday killed at least 230 people.

Hundreds more were wounded when a lorry packed with explosives detonated near the entrance of a hotel.

It is the deadliest terror attack in Somalia since the Islamist al-Shabab group launched its insurgency in 2007.

It is not clear who staged the bombing, but Mogadishu is a target for al-Shabab militants battling the government.

…

A BBC Somali reporter at the scene of the main blast said the Safari Hotel had collapsed, with people trapped under the rubble.

An eyewitness, local resident Muhidin Ali, told news agency AFP it was “the biggest blast I have ever witnessed, it destroyed the whole area”.

Meanwhile, the director of the Madina Hospital, Mohamed Yusuf Hassan, said he was shocked by the scale of the attack.

“Seventy-two wounded people were admitted to the hospital and 25 of them are in very serious condition. Others lost their hands and legs at the scene.”

Ad maiorem dei gloriam.

Even Ed Rogers, a Republican lobbyist who has been defending Trump in the Washington Post for months, is disgusted. Susan Glasser talked to him for a New Yorker piece.

And yet when I met Rogers, at his usual table in the back of the room at Tosca, the expensive but understated Italian restaurant across the street from his lobbying firm, where he goes to lunch almost every day, he was in no mood to defend Trump. The constant tweeting, the personal attacks on his own team, were taking a toll. “Every week!” Rogers said. “It’s surreal.” Then he paused, almost groaning when he asked, “Why does it have to be this way?”

Because Trump is what he is and not something else. He is what he is and what he has always obviously been – there wasn’t a better wiser more adult human being under the stuffed bladder of Public Trump. Under bloviating pinch-pointing fishmouth Donald Trump is just more of the same. He’s all exterior.

The weekend war of words between Corker and Trump had left Rogers, like many lobbyists in town, thinking not so much of the actual world war that Corker warned about (though he’s worried about that, too) but about the fate of Trump’s proposed tax-reform plan.

Good ol’ Republicans. “Yeah nuclear war would be a hassle but the real agony is losing the tax cuts for millionaires.”

Until now, Rogers and many other Washington Republicans have placed their hopes in the idea that sober-minded types like the new chief of staff, John Kelly, will somehow find a way to check Trump’s worst impulses, as was clear from a story he recounted. Rogers said that he remembered attending a session once with Steve Bannon, who was the President’s top White House strategist at the time, and who has returned to his previous roles as chairman of the conservative news site Breitbart and scourge of the Party establishment. Bannon had said, as Rogers remembered it, “ ‘There’s a bunch of people who think they have to protect the country from Trump.’ He said it in a belittling way.” At this, Rogers shook his head again and told me, “Well, it’s not heretical to say such a thing and think such a thing.”

Says the lobbyist who had been supporting him until just recently. If you know Trump has worst impulses that need to be checked, and those worst impulses are much worse than the normal routine worst impulses of presidents, then why did you ever support him in the first place? Weasel.

They all hate him, but they won’t all say it in public. That’s cool: it’s only the welfare of the 300-something million people in the US and also pretty much everyone else on the planet, apart from Putin and the odd oligarch.

As a Republican veteran of Capitol Hill explained to me, “The taxonomy of Washington Republicans is not a bright line of Never Trump versus pro-Trump.” There is, instead, “a continuum of people who are to varying degrees either outright supportive of the President or comfortable with the fact that getting things done requires working with the Administration to outright disgust and opposition.” As I have found, and with the exception of a small handful of officials who came to town with Trump, the private comments of even the most publicly pro-Trump Republicans often differ little from their more outspoken colleagues.

They know he’s shit but they won’t do anything about it. Impressive.

In Puerto Rico:

Jose Luis Rodriguez waited in line Friday to fill plastic jugs in the back of his pickup truck with water for drinking, doing the dishes and bathing.

But there is something about this water Rodriguez didn’t know: It was being pumped to him by water authorities from a federally designated hazardous-waste site, CNN learned after reviewing Superfund documents and interviewing federal and local officials.

But he has no other water source. More than 35% of Puerto Ricans still don’t have access to safe water. Without water, you die.

The water comes from a Superfund site but it’s not clear that the particular well in question is contaminated. The EPA is going to test it over the weekend.

Autoridad de Acueductos y Alcantarillados, the water authority, was unaware that this well site was part of the Superfund program until CNN provided maps showing that this was the case, according to Luis Melendez, sub-director for environmental compliance at the utility.

Melendez maintained the water is fit for public consumption. The well was opened on an emergency basis and is not part of the regular drinking water supply, he said.

In 2015, this well in Dorado, which is located near a shopping center, was found by the EPA to be safely within federal standards for PCE and chloroform, two industrial chemicals.

Let’s hope it still is, and let’s hope the EPA’s standards are good enough.

We have to hope Trump’s people haven’t been weakening the standards.

Rebecca Solnit looks at the pathological absence of empathy it takes for men to exploit or destroy women in the horrifying way we see from the chopping up of Kim Wall to the reported abuse by Harvey Weinstein.

Underlying all these attacks is a lack of empathy, a will to dominate, and an entitlement to control, harm and even take the lives of others. Though there is a good argument that mental illness is not a sufficient explanation – and most mentally ill people are nonviolent – mass shooters and rapists seem to have a lack of empathy so extreme it constitutes a psychological disorder. At this point in history, it seems to be not just a defect from birth, but a characteristic many men are instilled with by the culture around them. It seems to be the precondition for causing horrific suffering and taking pleasure in it as a sign of one’s own power and superiority, in regarding others as worthless, as yours to harm or eliminate.

Or perhaps it’s an extreme version of masculinity that has always been with us in a culture that gives men more power and privilege than women; perhaps these acts are the result of taking that to its logical conclusion. There must be terrible loneliness in that failure to perceive or value the humanity of others, the failure of empathy and imagination, to consider oneself the only person who matters. Caring about others, empathising, loving them, liberates each of us; these bereft figures seem to be prisoners of their selfishness before they are punishers of others.

Loneliness and beyond – emptiness, meaninglessness, nothingness. Can you imagine considering yourself the only person who matters (and who has ever mattered)? You don’t have to be gregarious or an extrovert to find that idea a horror. There would be no meaning in books, in stories, in dramas, in art, in history – there would be little meaning in anything.

(Do I suddenly for the first time feel sympathy for Donald Trump? No.)

Much has also been written to explain why the mass shootings are not terrorism (except when the shooter is, as he is rarely, Muslim), but perhaps terrorism can be imagined as a cultural as well as political phenomenon, a desire to instil fear, assert dominance, devalue the rights and freedoms of others, assert the power of the violent and of violence. There is an ideology behind it, even if not an overtly political ideology, of self-aggrandisement, cruelty, the embrace of violence, and hate.

I would call that not so much an ideology as…what, an urge, a preference, a permanent mood? A great many people like that kind of thing but it’s not by itself an ideology.

It’s the authoritarianism of violence that seems too often overlooked, the acts that are the opposite of the democratic ideal that all people are created equal, with certain inalienable rights. There is no greater authoritarianism than that of someone who violates the will, the body, the wellbeing, or takes the life of another.

Yes. That’s why I keep repeating the word “authoritarian” (and the word “dictator”) when I talk about Trump. It’s important – more so than whatever passes for the ideology that attempts to justify it. He doesn’t really believe most of the bullshit he talks; he just likes to boss and destroy.

That powerlessness of others seems to be desired and relished in these cases. It’s time to talk about the fact that many men seem erotically excited by their ability to punish, humiliate, inflict pain on women – the subject of a lot of porn. When you jerk off while cornering an unwilling woman, you’re presumably excited by her powerlessness and misery or repulsion. Another of Weinstein’s victims told the New Yorker, “The fear turns him on.” Fox News founder and CEO Roger Ailestook pleasure, according to his victims, in degrading the employees he sexually exploited and harassed.

But that stuff gets called “sex-positive” and feminists who criticize it get called the other thing.

We’ve also recently had a host of obituaries for Hugh Hefner. Some included the arguments that Hefner and his magazine were harmless or liberating. But they insisted that women were for men to use if they met a narrow definition of attractiveness, and to mock or ignore if they were not. While often portrayed as part of the sexual revolution, the magazine and Hefner were instead part of the counter-revolution, figuring out how to perpetuate women’s subordination and men’s power in a changing era.

The young women who lived in – and sometimes described feeling trapped in – the Playboy mansion were there to please the old goat at the centre of it and his friends, and not the other way around.

His male friends. Men are people, women are things for people to have sex with. Sex isn’t mutual, it’s For Him and By or In or On her. He is Man, she is thing.

Negative empathy is a bad thing.