This joke comes from 25 Jokes Only Book Nerds Will Understand, which headlines this week’s THE LIST LIST, our weekly round-up of the best bookish lists on the internet. Check out the rest here: http://wp.me/p1TMUr-eJB
Friends of Ralph Miliband’s say the Daily Mail’s version of him is grotesque.
Tariq Ali, a long-time friend of Ralph Miliband, who worked and campaigned alongside the academic from the 1970s until his death, has described the Daily Mail article attacking him as “utterly grotesque”. [Read more…]
In better news – the countries which I think of as Scandinavia plus Finland but which are properly called Nordic (I learned via this story) want to get rid of infant circumcision.
Yesterday, during a meeting in Oslo, Nordic ombudsmen for children, Nordic paediatricians, and paediatric surgeons agreed a resolution urging their national governments to work for a ban on non-therapeutic circumcision of underage boys.
The children’s ombudsmen from the five Nordic countries (Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark, and Iceland), along with the Chair of the Danish Children’s Council and the Children’s spokesperson for Greenland, passed a resolution to: “Let boys decide for themselves whether they want to be circumcised.” [Read more…]
Ed Milliband talks to the BBC about the Daily Mail’s ugly insistence that Ralph Milliband hated Britain.
Later, in an interview with reporters, Mr Miliband said it was “perfectly legitimate” for newspapers to discuss his father’s politics.
But he said: “I was appalled when I read the Daily Mail on Saturday and I saw them say he hated Britain. It’s a lie.
“I’m even more appalled that they repeated that lie today and they’ve gone further and described my father’s legacy as evil. Evil is a word reserved for particular cases and I wasn’t willing to let that stand.”
He added that there were “boundaries” that newspapers should adhere to.
“It’s not about regulation… but it is about me saying I think morality and our approach to these things matters.”
He’s not going to send in soldiers. He’s not going to throw the reporter in prison. It’s not about regulation, it’s about morality.
Everyone in the UK is up in arms over the Daily Mail and Ed Miliband. The Mail published a horrible article about Ralph Miliband, father of Ed and David (a former Labour MP). Ed M and many other people said it was horrible, the Mail refused to apologize.
The Daily Mail is under fire after it refused to apologise to Ed Miliband over an article that labelled his late father “the man who hated Britain”.
The paper prompted an angry stream of reaction on Tuesday morning when it stood by the profile published on Saturday, which said the beliefs of Ralph Miliband “should disturb everyone who loves this country”. [Read more…]
I knew that was a very rainy Saturday and a rainy windy stormy weekend but I didn’t know quite how rainy windy stormy it was. It broke records.
1.71 inches of rain Saturday, which is more than the normal amount for the whole month of September.
The center of the storm moved ashore the center of Vancouver Island (in British Columbia, Canada) early this morning* with a minimum pressure of 970 mb, deeper than any hurricane to form in the tropical Atlantic this hurricane season. On West Vancouver Island, a wind gust was clocked at 76 mph (122 km/h) Sunday night.
And there was even a tiny tornado 40 miles south of here.
*Yesterday
Nick Cohen has no time for what aboutery, for “how can you from the West talk about that instead of talking about the West,” for righteous indifference. He wrote that piece last week about the way Qatar treats immigrant labor, and got some whataboutery in response.
After publication, a couple of people contacted me to say that the Open Democracy website had published a ‘reasoned’ critique of my article.
Maybe I had got my facts wrong, I thought. I did not seem to be wide of the mark. The next day Robert Booth of the Guardian ran a tough and well-sourced piece on how Qatar’s World Cup building programme would cost 4000 lives by 2022. The International Trade Union Confederation denounced Fifa’s culpability in the scandal, and the International Labour Organisation said that Qatar was refusing to follow basic standards.
But the misnamed “Open Democracy” was more interested in making excuses for a closed and absolute monarchy than the vulgar business of ascertaining how many corpses were piling were up in morgues. [Read more…]
New information: women shouldn’t drive because driving bends their ovaries and that makes their babies come out broken.
It’s a Saudi cleric who discovered this, via research he hasn’t mentioned yet.
“If a woman drives a car, not out of pure necessity, that could have negative physiological impacts as functional and physiological medical studies show that it automatically affects the ovaries and pushes the pelvis upwards,” Sheikh Lohaidan told the news website Sabq.org. [Read more…]
Countries other than the US are puzzled by the US’s reckless destructive way of governing.
That leaders of one of the most powerful nations on earth willingly provoked a crisis that suspends public services and decreases economic growth is astonishing to many.
American policymakers “are facing the unthinkable prospect of shutting down the government as they squabble over the inconsequential accomplishment of a 10-week funding extension”, Mexico’s The News wrote in an editorial. [Read more…]