Democrats did a sit-in for gun control, so Republicans turned the cameras off.

Led by civil rights [giant] Rep. John Lewis (D-GA), Democratic members of Congress literally sat on the House floor on Monday to demand action on gun control. Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) responded by ordering the cameras off and abruptly ending the session.

“We have lost hundreds of thousands of innocent people to gun violence,” Lewis said on the House floor during Wednesday’s morning session. Dozens of Democratic members of Congress stood beside him, before they all took a seat on the floor.

Was this Monday or Wednesday? Today, apparently, so I guess the “Monday” in the first paragraph is a typo.

Anyway – there is John Lewis, who is a hero of mine.

On Monday, after Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) led a 15-hour filibuster, the Senate rejected four gun control measures that would have expanded background checks to all gun sales and made it more difficult for people on the terror watch list to purchase firearms. The Republican-led House is also unlikely to pass gun reform after the Orlando shooting — a fact that Lewis noted on Wednesday.

“We have turned deaf ears to the blood of the innocent and the concern of our nation,” Lewis said. “We are blind to a crisis. Mr. Speaker, where is the heart of this body? Where is our soul?”

“Give us a vote!” he demanded, echoing rhetoric he used to demand the passage of the Voting Rights Act decades ago. “Let us have a vote.”

Republicans are so bizarre.

Bridgette Dunlap says the reporting on that story about the Texas court that acquitted a guy of murder because he was defending his property was bad sloppy reporting.

A misreading of the verdict in a strange and upsetting Texas case has gone viral, since Gawker claimed: “Texas Says It’s OK to Shoot an Escort If She Won’t Have Sex With You.” Texas law does not say that, and the jury didn’t say that either. Pushing the idea that an “Insane Texas Law Made it Legal for a Man to Kill a Prostitute” is irresponsible; it misinforms the public and sends a terrible message to violent misogynists.

It is not in dispute that the defendant, Ezekiel Gilbert, paid the victim, Lenora Frago, $150 for 30 minutes of escort services advertised on Craigslist. After Frago refused to have sex with him, the defendant shot her. Frago was paralyzed and the defendant was charged with aggravated assault.  When she died seven months later Gilbert was indicted for murder instead.

The defense attorneys did argue that Gilbert was justified in shooting Frago because she had stolen from him and Texas law permits the use of deadly force to defend one’s property at night. That law is horrible and the defense is horrible, but that doesn’t mean it’s why the jury acquitted Gilbert.

The much more plausible reason for the verdict is that the jury believed the defendant’s claim that he didn’t intend to shoot the victim. Per Texas’ homicide statute, the prosecution needed to prove that Gilbert “intentionally or knowingly” killed Frago or intended to cause her “serious bodily injury.” The defense argued that Gilbert lacked the requisite intent for murder because when he shot at the car as Frago and the owner of the escort service drove away, he was aiming for the tire.

And he hit the tire, but a tiny piece of it hit Frago. (But she died, so doesn’t that make it murder? Morally, maybe. In Texas law, no. In the law of many states and countries, no – the law does distinguish based on intent.)

Unless someone has interviewed a juror or can read minds, they cannot claim the jury agreed the killing was justified. And the juries do not “cite” laws. They find facts and decide “guilty” or “not guilty.” And it isn’t accurate to call Frago a “prostitute.” Witnesses for the prosecution testified she was an escort who never agreed to have sex. Rather than siding with the killer’s characterization, writers should at least say “alleged.”

One would expect the jury to find that shooting at a car with an AK-47 is at least “reckless,” in which case he could have been convicted of manslaughter. But the prosecution didn’t charge him with manslaughter, only murder. Manslaughter is a “lesser included offense” of murder and the judge is entitled to instruct the jury if the evidence supports that charge, but it appears she did not. The jury can’t convict on a charge that isn’t before them.

I think Texas’s defense of property law is abhorrent and my gut reaction was that it was a reprehensible defense. This reaction suggests, that you should think twice before hiring me as your defense attorney, sadly. As Professor Michael W. Martin of Fordham Law’s Federal Litigation Clinic reminded me: “If the law allows the defense, the lawyer must use it, if it is viable, unless there is a good strategic reason not to. Otherwise, it is ineffective assistance of counsel. If the lawyer feels like he is ethically barred from using a legal, viable defense, he should ask to be relieved.”

H/t Nick Little, George Felis

A Texas jury finds a man not guilty of murder for shooting a woman who refused to have sex with him.

A Texas jury has just acquitted a 30-year-old man who shot and killed a woman he met on Craigslist after she refused to have sex with him.

The man in question, Ezekiel Gilbert, has been cleared of murder after the Texas court determined that his actions were “justified after he shot an escort when she took his money but refused to have sex with him,” according to the Daily Mail.

Lenora Frago was shot in the neck by Gilbert on Christmas Eve 2009. As a result, the 23-year-old was paralyzed and died several months later.

The acquittal came from a Bexar County Texas court which determined that Mr Gilbert, who was facing a life sentence, should not be convicted of murder “because he was trying to retrieve stolen property.”

The defense argued that “the shooting was not intended to kill Miss Frago and his actions were justified because he believed sex was included as part of the fee.”

Apparently in Texas you’re allowed to kill people if you believe they stole something from you, including access to their own body.

Christopher Perkins, the young woman’s manager, explained to the court that while Frago was an escort, the $150 fee in no way guaranteed sex.

He explained that “Lenora normally would do lap dances and hanging out. That was her thing. Her regular customers were all quiet, reserved guys and she would hang out.”

…

Gilbert hugged his defense attorneys and thanked God, his lawyers, and the jury for being able to “see what wasn’t the truth,” as he claimed he was “just trying to retrieve” his stolen property… Frago’s body.

Yeah good old god. God always protects the johns.

Heyyyyyy – Rome has a woman mayor for the first time ever. Take that, Vatican!

In a landslide, to boot.

Thirty-seven-year-old Rome city council member Virginia Raggi has been elected as the city’s first female mayor. Raggi is an attorney and a member of the antiestablishment Five Star Movement (M5S). As of Monday morning, she’d captured 67 percent of the vote, according to the Italian Interior Ministry.

Raggi campaigned against corruption and failing public services, soundly beating her Democratic Party (PD) opponent Roberto Giachetti, who was backed by Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, also of the PD.

In Turin, another female candidate took the mayorship as well. Another M5S member, 31-year-old Chiara Appendino tallied more than half the vote against PD rival and incumbent, Piero Fassino.

Urrà!

Lauren Wolfe on Facebook:

I’ve just confirmed that the arrest warrant for the suspected ringleader of the rapes of at least 50 little girls in Kavumu, DRC, was issued suddenly last night. He was arrested in the early morning hours along with 67 men under his command. These horrifying attacks have been going on for three years and this all happened hours after I revealed what I knew the government was sitting on.

I’m just going to just say that I’m tearing up right now. In my wildest dreams I don’t think I dared to imagine such an outcome. But if you need any reassurance that journalism isn’t dead: This is it.

In a comment she adds:

This has been a massive collective effort of people I can’t name here.

Her article was published at the Guardian yesterday.

A five-year-old sat shyly in her metal hospital bed as her mother described what had brought her to Panzi hospital in the city of Bukavu, in the far east of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. A couple of beds down lay a tiny six-year-old girl, and further along sat a speck of a three-year-old in a fuchsia hoodie. This smallest girl had been brought in the previous night and had a painful fistula from gang rape.

A THREE-YEAR-OLD.

In each case, what had been done to the girls is remarkably similar. Each was abducted at night from a wooden shack in their impoverished village, called Kavumu, about an hour-and-a-half drive from the hospital over the mudscape that is DRC in the rainy season. Each was then gang-raped and left in a nearby government-owned field overgrown with stalks of corn, sorghum and dried-out cassava; the area is used as a kind of subsistence farm by former rebel soldiers. A walk through the meadow is a tour of one spot after another in which little girls have been found bleeding and unable to move in the dead of night.

It’s been going on for three years – girls grabbed out of their homes in the middle of the night while their families sleep on.

Parents assert that they’ve been drugged by a kind of “magic powder” sprinkled over their houses during the attacks. Men in groups of two, three or four have raped as many as 50 children, aged 18 months to 11 years old. At least two have died from their injuries. These girls are extremely young and malnourished, and therefore smaller than normal. Their injuries have been so extensive that one of the experienced doctors at Panzi, a hospital famous for treating the legions of women raped in DRC, told me that they had made her faint.

This is not your average “war rape”. These are terrifying, targeted, individual attacks against the country’s smallest children being perpetrated by what appears to be a powerful man and his minions, who believe – as do local Mai-Mai militia fighters – that the virgin blood of girls will fortify them for battle. The Guardian cannot name the man for legal reasons.

But that man has now been arrested.

For many months the government has considered this man to be its main suspect – and even knows the names of men believed to be working under him. Yet it still has not moved to arrest him.

Since I left Kavumu in January, four more girls have been abducted and raped – one as recently as 3 June – according to sources close to the cases. I have spent the months attempting to understand the delays in arresting this man and his underlings, to no avail. I’ve been told everything from “The local prosecutor is too busy” to “Paperwork is still being transferred between offices.” Rumours that arrest warrants have been issued turn into rumours that they haven’t.

There’s also a suspect in the matter of the sleeping powder.

What is happening in Kavumu is a clear manifestation of a government unable or unwilling to confront its country’s rape crisis. For years the president, Joseph Kabila, was seemingly indifferent to the fact that there was even a problem. In 2009, however, he declared a “zero tolerance” policy on sexual violence. He appointed a special representative on sexual violence, Jeanine Mabunda, in 2014. Yet in all this time little has changed, either in terms of impunity for rape or in regard to helping victims.

For example, to this day not a single court-ordered reparation has been paid to a single rape survivor in the country. When DRC finally paid out $155,000 owed to 29 women who were raped in a town called Songo Mboyo in 2003, the money was given to the wrong women in a pathetic case of fraud. At the same time, Mabunda’s office has spent tens of thousands of dollars (if not hundreds of thousands) employing fancy American PR firms to speak on her behalf.

And in a remarkable demonstration of skewed priorities, while the government has declared that there isn’t enough money to pay reparations, in February Kabila gave $2.16m worth of Toyota Land Cruisers to Congo’s national football team.

If only the rape victims could play football.

From the Daily Beast:

Sheikh Farrokh Bahram Sekaleshfar, a Shia cleric of Iranian descent, sits opposite a reporter from the Australian TV network ABC. He is about to be kicked out of the country over his views, but he insists he played no role in the June 12 Orlando massacre.

Sekaleshfar’s name appeared in the news this week after a U.S.-born Afghan-American, Omar Mateen, shot dead 49 people and injured 53 others at Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida.

Sekaleshfar is on record saying that “death is the sentence” for homosexuals and that executing them is an act of “compassion,” since earthly punishment will gain them leniency in the afterlife. He has spoken on the subject at least twice in the U.S., once in 2013 at the University of Michigan, and again in April at the Husseini Islamic Center north of Orlando.

Boko Haram again.

Boko Haram fighters have killed at least 18 people at a funeral in northeast Nigeria, residents and a police official have said.

The attackers shot at mourners and set houses on fire after arriving on motorbikes in the village of Kuda near Madagali town in Adamawa state on Thursday evening, witnesses said.

At least ten more were injured, according to a witness.

Resident Moses Kwagh told the Reuters news agency that people waited until three hours after the attack and then counted 18 women’s bodies. Some women were still missing, he said.

“When we said that Boko Haram is still in this place, some people sit in Abuja and claim that there is no more Boko Haram – but see what has happened,” Kwagh said.

Ramadan mubarak, eh.

I wonder what horrors lurk under the story of Lee Kaplan and the 12 girls removed from his house a couple of days ago.

The girls were found without birth certificates and other public records have not yet been located, according to authorities. Lee Kaplan, 51, faces a number of charges including statutory sexual assault and aggravated indecent assault for allegedly fathering two of the children with the oldest girl found, now 18.

When authorities raided Kaplan’s Feasterville home on Friday after receiving a tip, the children were found hiding in the basement and in a chicken coop, among other places, according to Lower Southampton Director of Public Safety Robert Hoopes.

The oldest is 18 and two or more of the others may be hers along with her rapist’s.

A couple is also charged in the case. Daniel Stoltzfus is charged with conspiracy of statutory sexual assault and children endangerment. His wife, Savilla Stoltzfus, is charged with endangering the welfare of a child.

The Stolftzfus’ allegedly told police they gave the oldest girl, who they said was their daughter, to Kaplan several years ago in exchange for financial help.

Isn’t that also enslavement? You’re not allowed to “give” people away in exchange for money. That’s called slavery, and it’s not permitted.

Savilla Stoltzfus allegedly said that all of the children were her offspring, Hoopes told CBS News on Monday.

“She was in the house, and she said that, but we don’t really know,” Hoopes said. “There’s no documentation.”

Well they certainly sound like nice people, giving all their daughters to that Lee Kaplan fella.

Hoopes said the children found in Kaplan’s home were outfitted in traditional Amish attire, and as a result, were brought to homes in nearby Lancaster County, which has a large Amish community.

Of course they were. Amish, “prairie,” burqa – it’s all the same shit.

Margaret Atwood has won the 2016 PEN-Pinter prize.

Margaret Atwood has said that she is humbled to win an award from PEN celebrating her political activism, describing herself as “a stand-in for the thousands of people around the world who speak and act against [human rights] abuses”.

The PEN Pinter prize was set up seven years ago in memory of the Nobel prize-winning playwright Harold Pinter, and is given to a writer of outstanding literary merit who, in the words of Pinter himself on winning the Nobel, casts an “unflinching, unswerving” gaze upon the world and shows a “fierce intellectual determination … to define the real truth of our lives and our societies”.

The Booker prize-winning Canadian author was picked by a judging panel chaired by Maureen Freely, who said: “In a profession dominated by careerists who are content to tend to their own gardens, Margaret Atwood is the shining exception.

“She does not just stand up for her principles: in novel after novel, she has put them to the test. What she does as a campaigner has only served to deepen her work as a writer of fiction. She is an inspiration to us all,” said Freely.

And the best part is she gets to name a co-winner. Now that would be a pleasing opportunity.

Atwood will now choose a co-winner of the prize, the 2016 International Writer of Courage, who will be revealed at an event at the British Library in October. The winner, said PEN, would be an international writer “who is active in defence of freedom of expression, often at great risk to their own safety and liberty”, with previous recipients including Gomorrah author Roberto Saviano, Mexican journalist Lydia Cacho and the imprisoned Saudi blogger Raif Badawi.

So many to choose from.

In other news, Catherine Deveny is back on Facebook.

From Cross River State, Nigeria:

Two children age, 10 and 7, were this morning, rescued from being murdered by some members of Divine Zion of God Church Ikot Abasi Effiom district of Akpabuyo LGA.

Led by one Prophet David Effiom Zion and some members of their family, the children were accused by their cousin of being witches and allegedly snatching her baby in a dream.

The stigma that confronted the children since they were branded witches took on a new dimension when the children were taken to the forest, tied to a tree, battered and assaulted with a machete by some members of the family, leaving them with cuts and bruises all over their bodies.

This happened on the heels of the screening of the movie ‘The Fake Prophet’ in Ikot Offiong Ambai community in Akpabuyo Local Government Area (LGA) by Basic Rights Counsel Initiative (BRCI), a child’s rights organization based in Calabar.

Respite came the way of the children when an uncle who arrived from town demanded the release of the children with threats of calling the police and on learning of BRCI’s visit, took the children to the venue where the movie highlighting issues of child abuse and witchcraft branding was being screened.

Ten and seven years old.

Speaking also, Theresa Okpa who is the Executive Director of Mediatrix Development Foundation (MDF), the NGO of the Wife of the Governor of Cross River State, Dr. Linda Ayade said issues of child witch branding is abuse of the rights of children and assured that the Mediatrix Foundation is partnering with organizations like BRCI to address issues relating to the abuse of children’s rights.

I hope they succeed.

The children were given medical attention and allowed to stay with the uncle who rescued them.

H/t James Ibor.

Guest post by Maureen Brian, originally a reply to a question about whether Brexit is binding or not.

The majority in Parliament is certainly for remaining though the whole process seems to have unhinged one or two minds so that it’s difficult to say who would vote which way after the referendum! Some may see it as morally binding: others will not and that’s whichever way the result goes.

All the legislation supposedly “imposed by Brussels” operates through laws passed by Westminster. That includes the treaties at various stages of the EU’s development. In many cases passing that legislation repealed earlier UK legislation so that we can’t just roll them all into a ball and repeal the lot. That would leave us with no laws on things like food safety, exhaust emissions, motorway signage and about a million other things. They would have to be done one by one and given a very small majority already, fractious Tory party and in all probability vast amounts of emotion and pique it could take twenty years! No-one but me seems to have thought of this. It’s not come up in the debates or press coverage.

Then there’s the question of whether Cameron, if still in post, should have preliminary discussions with the other 27 states before he pulls the plug – invokes Section 50 which then gives us two years to get out, nowhere near long enough!

If Parliament should decide to over-ride the referendum result, as it could, then an entirely different set of shenanigans will be triggered, possibly with parties splitting, one or more general elections with unworkable results and a completely impotent government for however long that takes. Not that it’s very competent now.

If you ask me what’s going to happen then sorry but I haven’t the faintest idea. I may get a hint on Thursday night as I’m a Counting Agent at the count in Halifax i.e one of the Labour Party’s official observers. Results will be counted for Calderdale MBC then fed to the regional collation place, then announced. It could be mid-day Friday when we have the full result.

The Leave people seem to be splitting – great criticism of a UKIP poster which was just too close to a well-known and easily found for comparison Nazi propaganda film. Other Leave leaders really do not like it! Then Boris is proposing even more immigration “as long as we control it” plus an amnesty for illegal migrants already here for some time. That will not go down well with many supposedly on the same team. Watch this space.

Ew, a woman. Deutsche Welle:

Social media users flooded German public broadcaster ZDF’s sites after Friday’s Italy-Sweden match, not to voice complaints about the game, but to bemoan the broadcaster’s female commentator.

Claudia Neumann, a reporter for German public broadcaster ZDF, became the first female play-by-play announcer for this year’s men’s European Championships in France.

But her role as the match’s main commentator enraged numerous soccer fans. Many of whom posted complaints about her “annoying voice” while others said women have no place doing sports commentary for men’s soccer. One Twitter user wrote: “Women shouldn’t commentate men’s soccer. It doesn’t fit. Annoying. Period.”

So true. And people who don’t commit murder shouldn’t report on murders, and people not in government shouldn’t report on government, and atheists shouldn’t report on religion, and…you see where this goes? Here’s the thing: journalism is journalism, it’s about reporting on stuff using the skills of the profession. Journalists report on subjects they don’t have personal experience of all the time. It often is useful to have lawyers reporting on legal issues, scientists reporting on science, and so on, but it’s not mandatory, and spectator sports are spectator sports, so they’re pretty open to generalists.

Her Euro 2016 debut was the June 11 match between Wales and Slovakia. Following that first game, users insulted and attacked her with misogynistic slogans about “the place of women” and even rape threats.

Despite expecting some criticism following the games, the head of ZDF’s sports department said he couldn’t believe the “harsh formulation” of comments that appeared on ZDF social media sites.

“I’m shocked,” said Dieter Gruschwitz on Saturday to sports news agency SID, calling some of the social media comments “asocial critique.”

In a post on the broadcaster’s Facebook site, ZDF editors said numerous “offensive” comments had been deleted.

Yeah well – there are a lot of men who will seize any pretext to talk shit to and at a woman. Any pretext at all.

H/t Stewart

News from Lahore:

Relatives slit the throat of a young mother who was pregnant with her second child after she married against their will near Lahore, officials said Friday, the latest in a spate of so-called “honour killings”.

Muqaddas Bibi, 22, married Taufiq Ahmed three years ago in defiance of her family, who considered a marriage for love — rather than an arranged marriage — shameful, police investigator Mohammad Arshad told AFP.

Bibi’s ties with her family were severed after the marriage, Arshad said, but her mother and brother allegedly approached her at a clinic where she was having a check-up on Thursday and convinced her to come home, saying they accepted her decision.

Local police station chief Gohar Abbas said that when Bibi reached her parents’ house, her father, brother and mother cut her throat with a knife and she died on the spot.

Her mother, and her father, and her brother – three people who should love her.

What’s the point of marrying and having children if you’re not going to love your children enough to recoil in horror at the very idea of killing them? What’s the point of families at all if there’s no love involved? What’s the point of making it a rule that marriage should not involve love? A rule that in fact making marriage depend on love is a reason for killing your own daughter? The whole thing is so sick and anti-human it makes one despair.

Hundreds of women are murdered by their relatives in conservative Muslim Pakistan each year on the pretext of defending what is seen as family honour.

Last week sixteen year-old Zeenat Bibi was killed in Lahore by her mother for marrying a man of her own choice in a case that sparked condemnation throughout the country.

It was swiftly followed by another killing, of a couple in Lahore who married without their family’s consent.

On Sunday a young girl was killed by her brother for insisting on marrying the man of her choice in the city of Sialkot, also in Punjab.

Parents shouldn’t think of their children as like toasters or printers, that are things which are expected to do a job on command, and that get thrown out if they fail at that one duty. That shouldn’t be what having children is about. If you’re not going to love them don’t have them; skip that whole thing.

Clementine Ford on Facebook:

Catherine Deveny has just been given a 30 day ban for posting this status. Something like this is removed while posts celebrating violence against women are just a laugh m8.

Maybe if Dev had made a horrible joke about rape or beating women, it would have been considered okay by the ‘community standards’.

Facebook Community Standards are a sour joke.