The FBI has released partial transcripts of Omar Mateen’s conversations with police while he was shooting up Pulse in Orlando.

As we’ve previously reported, Mateen threatened to use explosives, including a car bomb and a suicide vest. Investigators say they didn’t find those items in or outside the club. In the calls, Mateen also identified himself as”an Islamic soldier” who pledged allegiance to a terrorist group, FBI Assistant Special Agent in Charge Ron Hopper said Monday.

Throughout the calls, Hopper says, Mateen spoke in a “chilling, calm and deliberate manner.”

That’s how “Islamic soldiers” work. They’re chill.

A key name is missing from the official text, that of ISIS, the terrorist group to which Mateen reportedly pledged allegiance in

National Public Radio thinks Mariella Mosthof’s piece telling white straight “cis” people not to write about Orlando is so good that it needs to be highlighted on NPR.

Really, NPR?

In an essay for Bustle, Mariella Mosthof reflects on how this type of violence can end up affirming straight anxieties over queerness. She says parents can reject their queer children “from a place of their own fear, or their own desire for you to be safe,” and the conviction that “the easiest way for you to be safe is for you to be ‘normal.'”

But she said a lot more than that, and at the beginning of the piece, and what she said there was frankly ugly and … Read the rest

Oh gee, a new piece on Orlando that rivals Mariella Mosthof’s for terribleness.

When I read about Orlando, I was surrounded by straight people. Well meaning straight people, yes, allies, yes, but straight people all the same.

I was surrounded by straight people because I was at my house with my husband and my daughter. I spend a lot of time around straight people (thats what I get for marrying a cishet man), but I noticed it more today than I have any other morning. When I heard the news, I started counting down the time until I could be around queer people.

No doubt the apparent distaste for and disapproval of her own husband and daughter are meant … Read the rest

Another turn of the screw.

The Orlando gunman’s wife has told federal agents she tried to talk her husband out of carrying out the attack, NBC News has learned.

Omar Mateen’s wife, Noor Zahi Salman, told the FBI she was with him when he bought ammunition and a holster, several officials familiar with the case said. She told the FBI that she once drove him to the gay nightclub, Pulse, because he wanted to scope it out.

Oh. Oh really. So she knew he was planning it but she didn’t tell anyone who could have stopped him. Well thanks a lot.

I’m seeing people say maybe she was abused, maybe she was too afraid to tell anyone. Maybe so … Read the rest

Peak something – peak doing social justice wrong is perhaps the best description of it. Mariella Mosthof at Bustle says nearly everyone should say nothing at all about Orlando.

The title alone is terrible:

Dear White, Hetero, Cis People: Please Don’t Co-Opt This Tragedy

Excuse me? Co-opt?? It’s not co-opting to express grief and outrage, and it’s not some ideal opposite of co-opting to ignore terrible things that happen to other people. If only people who are neither white nor straight nor “cis” can talk about Orlando, few people would even know it had happened.

Then the first sentence is even worse:

If you are a cisgender, heterosexual, white person, please do not write about the largest mass shooting

Peter Tatchell on Facebook:

London vigil for Orlando victims 7pm tonight. Join us (details below). LGBT venues (and others) must step up security. Orlando is the tip of an iceberg of global anti-LGBT violence. Don’t demonise all Muslims. Best memorial to victims: US should ban semi-automatic weapons, repeal legal discrimination against LGBT people and require all schools to educate pupils against all hate, including against homophobia, biphobia and transphobia. Appalling Sky TV interview.

Gay and human rights campaigner, Peter Tatchell, will join tonight’s London vigil in commemoration and solidarity with the victims of the Orlando massacre. It commences at 7pm in the heart of the gay village, Old Compton Street, Soho, W1.

Commenting on the mass killings, Mr Tatchell,

Reuters reports that Mateen made his 911 call announcing his allegiance to the caliph during the attack, not before it as we were hearing yesterday.

The caliphate of course returned the favor.

Islamic State reiterated on Monday a claim of responsibility. “One of the Caliphate’s soldiers in America carried out a security invasion where he was able to enter a crusader gathering at a nightclub for homosexuals in Orlando,” the group said in a broadcast on its Albayan Radio.

Uh huh, it’s all very official – it was a legitimate, in fact the only legitimate state carrying out a “security invasion” – because what, the partiers at Pulse were a dangerous threat to Islamic State? Of course they were – … Read the rest

The New York Times tells us a little about one of the Orlando victims on its live update page.

Eric Ivan Ortiz-Rivera, 36, was nicknamed Shaki and had been married to his husband for about a year, said his cousin, Orlando Gonzalez, 26.

Mr. Ortiz-Rivera lived in downtown Orlando, with his husband, and worked at a Party City and a Sunglasses Hut, Mr. Gonzalez said.

He had other passions: “He was very artistic,” Mr. Gonzalez said. “He was all about interior design. He actually knew how to cut hair and stuff. He was the one that everyone in the family” went to for design advice, Mr. Gonzalez said.

And, Mr. Gonzalez said, his cousin was “a goofball” who liked to

So this is horrifying.

The United West investigative team uncovered a story so disturbing Field Sutton of Channel 9 news in Orlando, FL broke the story on their newscast.

The Husseini Islamic Center, 5211 Hester Ave, Sanford, FL 32773, invited Sheikh Farrokh Sekaleshfar to speak at their Mosque. Dr. Sekaleshfar says the killing of homosexuals is the compassionate thing to do.

In a 2013 speech Sheikh Sekaleshfar said this regarding gays, “Death is the sentence. We know there’s nothing to be embarrassed about this, death is the sentence…We have to have that compassion for people, with homosexuals, it’s the same, out of compassion, let’s get rid of them now.”

The story is dated April 6. Two months ago.

… Read the rest

Oh guess what. It turns out Omar Mateen wasn’t a nice quiet loving peaceful citizen even before he murdered over 50 people at Orlando’s largest gay bar and injured over 50 more; no, it turns out he was a violent abuser of – you’ll never guess – women.

The ex-wife of the 29-year-old man suspected of killing 50 people in a Orlando nightclub early Sunday said that he was violent and mentally unstable and beat her repeatedly while they were married.

The ex-wife said she met Omar Mateen online about eight years ago and decided to move to Florida and marry him.

At first, the marriage was normal, she said, but then he became abusive.

“He was not a

The BBC is live updating the news from Orlando.

These are the main points from the second press briefing by officials in Orlando:

• 50 people killed, up from 20, making the Pulse nightclub attack the worst mass shooting in recent US history
• New death toll came after investigators were able to gain better access to the building – they had to ensure it was clear of devices
• 53 people were injured, many critically

Officials are saying the death toll will go up.

NBC news say they have spoken to the father of the suspected gunman by phone.

The man said: “We are saying we are apologising for the whole incident. We weren’t aware of any action he is taking.

So what does the lieutenant governor of Texas do? He composes a “reap what you sow” tweet and shares it with the sinful world.

At precisely 7 a.m. Sunday Dan Patrick tweeted a photo with the words of Galatians 6:7. The verse reads, “Do not be deceived: God cannot be mocked. A man reaps what he sows.”

That’s so horrific in so many ways. One, he’s a high official in a state government – the largest state in the country in fact, with a population of 27 million. Two, he’s saying the victims had it coming. Three, he’s citing “God.” Four, he’s more than hinting that the reason the victims had it coming is because God hates fags. Five, it’s … Read the rest

Our Paris November 2015: 50 people killed in a mass shooting at a gay nightclub in Orlando.

Fifty people were killed inside Pulse, a gay nightclub, Orlando Police Chief John Mina and other officials said Sunday morning, just hours after a shooter opened fire in the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history.

At least 53 more people were injured, Mina said. Police have shot and killed the gunman, he told reporters.

The shooter had an assault weapon.

Before Sunday, the deadliest shootings in U.S. history were at Virginia Tech in 2007 and Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012, with 32 and 27 killed.

The three worst, in less than a decade. People think they’re in a movie, and the … Read the rest