More village cruelty in India.
The semi-naked body of a teenage girl who was allegedly humiliated by village elders for protesting against her father’s harassment has been found near a railway track in eastern India.
Police suspect the 15-year-old girl in West Bengal was raped and murdered.
Her family said she was made to spit on the ground and lick it up – an act considered a grave form of humiliation.
American football – maybe it’s actually not the coolest sport there is? Some heretic called Steve Almond is suggesting as much.
Every Sunday (and Monday, and some Saturdays and Thursdays) for the next five months, millions of Americans – and plenty of Brits, thanks to three regular-season games in London – will feast on a bacchanalia of gridiron pageantry.
Best-selling author Steve Almond, however, won’t be watching.
The self-professed long-time American football fan writes in the Los Angeles Times that he feels guilty about watching a sport whose participants risk traumatic brain injury. [Read more…]
A long Guardian think-piece on Martin Amis and why he gets so much attention and why so much of it is hostile yadda yadda – kind of a dopy navel-gazing three levels of meta piece, frankly, but I skimmed down to see if it ever gets to the thing that most annoys me about Martin Amis, and it does. I wonder if you can guess what that might be…
Also there’s the old question mark over his women. When I interviewed Amis about House of Meetings I asked him about the charge levelled by some reviewers that the female protagonist Zoya was a “male fantasy figure” (the same thing could be said of Nicola in London Fields and Scheherazade in The Pregnant Widow). “All that means is that she’s pretty,” he responded. “Are they suggesting that there are no pretty women? Or that novelists can’t pull? Or perhaps it means that book reviewers can’t pull?” There, again, the combat stance.
No, it’s more that Martin Amis isn’t interested unless they are pretty. [Read more…]
So that’s another no-show.
A comment by Carol on He promised to do so:
I know that DJ also didn’t appear at CSICON 2011, even though he was scheduled to present there.
Yes, he was scheduled to present there. He was scheduled to present at the Houdini Seance, along with Randi and Massimo Polidoro and Ray Hyman.
DC in Detroit did a long, detailed post covering the whole conference, and she reports that he did not appear. [Read more…]
The Chief Crown Prosecutor for the Northwest (of England), Nazir Afzal, is getting some heat for doing his job.
As the Chief Crown Prosecutor for the North West, I led the teams that brought the so-called Rochdale Grooming Gang to justice in 2012 for abusing up to 47 girls.
My work saw me go up against not only the offenders, but those who tried to intimidate me for bringing abusers before the courts. They said I had given racists a stick with which to beat minorities – I said our communities should be carrying their own sticks.
Right-wingers went after him too. [Read more…]
I saw an angry tweet by Razan Saffour @RazanSpeaks saying a journalist called Bassam Raies was killed by ISIS two weeks ago and there wasn’t a peep about it. So I looked for news and…it’s true, there’s not a peep about it, which means I can’t even tell if it’s true or not. There are a few mentions but they’re all identical and all from either Twitter or random sites that I don’t recognize.
Reporters Without Borders has nothing. The Committee to Protect Journalists has nothing. I think they would have anything if there were anything to have, so…I’m not sure this is a true story. But if it is, I would like to make a peep about it.
Of course that’s Razan Saffour’s point: there’s nothing. So maybe it’s a real story and there’s nothing in English. If so that’s pathetic and shocking.
It’s being reported that IS has beheaded the American journalist Steven Sotloff. NBC says it’s not confirmed yet, but there seems little reason to think that IS would say it had when it hadn’t. It’s not as if its members are hesitant about being brutal bastards. The text of the story (as opposed to the video) states it as fact in any case.
The Islamic militant group ISIS cut off the head of an American journalist in a video made public Tuesday — following through on a threat it made when it beheaded another American two weeks ago and vowed to keep killing unless the United States stopped airstrikes.
The journalist, Steven Joel Sotloff, was beheaded in a video made public by SITE Intel Group, which monitors jihadist organizations. The video surfaced days after Sotloff’s mother pleaded with the leader of ISIS for mercy.
I hope no more parents or other relatives do that. It’s so obvious that they don’t do mercy, and that pleading only makes it more fun for them.
The Committee to Protect Journalists said it condemned the “pure barbarism” in the strongest possible terms.
Sotloff, like Foley, “went to Syria to tell a story,” said Joel Simon, the executive director of CPJ. “They were civilians, not representatives of any government. Their murders are war crimes and those who committed them must be brought to justice swiftly.”
Must, but won’t.
The New York Times reports on Rotherham.
It starts with one victim’s account of how the grooming was done – it started with teenage boys flirting and then older men taking over and closing the doors of the trap.
The rapes started gradually, once a week, then every day: by the war memorial in Clifton Park, in an alley near the bus station, in countless taxis and, once, in an apartment where she was locked naked in a room and had to service half a dozen men lined up outside.
She obliged. How could she not? They knew where she lived. “If you don’t come back, we will rape your mother and make you watch,” they would say.
Well this is one possible reason – Maria Berglund at Skepchick Sweden.
Last year D.J, who was booked as a speaker at the European Skeptics Congress in Stockholm, simply didn’t show up. The group that organized the congress were quite surprised, since he hadn’t contacted us for a cancellation. They managed, at the last minute, to throw in another speaker to take his place.
When I got in contact with him, he sounded quite surprised and claimed that he absolutely had cancelled recently. I then asked him to let us know who he had communicated with, and he promised to do so. He didn’t, however, and when I kept asking him for it he kept telling me that he would get back to me about this when he was by his computer. He never did. [Read more…]
Sanal Edamaruku posted a photo of a chilling ad from an Indian newspaper on his Facebook page, with a comment.
Freedom of thought and expression are guaranteed as fundamental rights in Indian Constitution. Promotion of critical inquiry, scientific temper and spirit of reform are fundamental duties.
Resist all attempts to take India back to medieval times. The picture given is an advertisement by Karnataka state government in a prominent Indian newspaper.
