Athlete has bad headaches, goes to “therapist” who decides that sticking a needle in her chest will fix her headaches. Lung collapses, athlete’s life is trashed. This is called “traditional Chinese medicine.”
The therapist accidentally pierced Ms. Ribble-Orr’s left lung during acupuncture treatment that was later deemed unnecessary and ill-advised, causing the organ to collapse and leaving it permanently damaged. [Read more…]
Katha Pollitt reports on a horror story from Saudi Arabia.
After proceedings that stretched out over nearly a year and violated many legal norms, Wajeha Al-Huwaider, the prominent Saudi Human rights activist and co-organizer of protests against the ban on women drivers, has been sentenced to ten months in prison, along with her colleague Fawzia Al-Oyouni. (I interviewed Al-Huwaider here.) After they serve their terms, both will be banned from travel for two years.
What did they do? They tried to help a Canadian woman whose Saudi husband is holding her hostage.
They were accused of kidnapping and trying to help Nathalie Morin, a Canadian woman married to a Saudi, flee the country in June 2011. Morin, who has said her husband locks her in the house and is abusive, has been trying for eight years to leave Saudi Arabia with her three children. [Read more…]
Yesterday the Wisconsin Supreme Court upheld the conviction of a couple for homicide – or, as NBC News put it, the conviction of a “deeply religious Wisconsin couple who prayed over their dying daughter rather than seek medical help.” Not fanatically religious or irrationally religious or stupidly and dangerously religious but “deeply” religious. Let’s give them extra deference and admiration for the profundity of their unreasonable magical thinking even as we report that their “deep” religion caused them to let their daughter die of an easily treatable condition.
Kara Neumann, 11, of Weston, Wis., died March 23, 2008 — Easter Sunday — of complications of untreated juvenile onset diabetes.
According to the case records, Kara had been showing symptoms of exhaustion and dehydration for more than a week, but her parents, Dale and Leilani Neumann, refused to take her to a pediatrician, and decided to respond to her illness with prayer, not medicine. [Read more…]
Well great. Which is least worst, military rule or Islamist theocracy?
Couldn’t Egypt manage a third possibility?
Egypt’s military has moved against the leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood a day after deposing President Mohammed Morsi.
Mr Morsi is in detention, as well as senior figures in the Islamist group of which he is a member. Hundreds more are being sought.
The top judge of Egypt’s constitutional court, Adly Mahmud Mansour, has been sworn in as interim leader.
Let’s hope they can figure it out soon.
So there’s this comedy writer Kurt Metzger, who’s on the staff at Comedy Central’s Inside Amy Schumer. You know the next line already.
Lindy West and Sady Doyle, two outspoken critics of rape humor in comedy, are accusing Metzger of an online harassment campaign that started more than a month ago. Doyle is taking the evidence straight to Amy Schumer and Comedy Central.
Are they sure it’s harassment? Couldn’t it just be…you know…comedy? [Read more…]
Oh by the way did I mention that I’m back? I am, I’m back. It was a looooooooong trip. Jane and Michael picked me up at 11:15 yesterday (Tuesday) morning and I got home at 7:30 the next morning Dublin time. That’s 20 hours. Lordy.
I had a bit of good luck though, that made it a little shorter than it might have been. I looked on the board at JFK to find my gate and saw that there was an earlier flight in half an hour. Ooh, could I get them to put me on that one? Could I get there in time? [Read more…]
Anne Ferris TD, Vice Chair of the Oireachtas Committee for Justice, Defence and Equality, has a scorching article on the Magdalene laundries. If you read it it will make you feel angry.
In 1955 Halliday Sutherland was doing research for a book on Ireland and managed to visit a Magdalene laundry in Galway.
The day before he visited the laundry in Galway, Dr Sutherland visited the Mother and Baby home in Tuam. He noted that the accepted practice was that unmarried mothers in the Tuam home ‘agreed’ to provide a year of unpaid domestic service to the nuns, and that in addition to this servitude, the home received State support, via Galway County Council, to the tune of £1 per child or mother per week. [Read more…]
The Irish abortion bill passed, 138 to 24.
It’s very limited though. Don’t go getting any ideas about a general right to decide about your own life.
Mr Kenny issued a stern defence of the legislation in his own speech to the Dáil, saying it was not possible to remove the suicide clause. He also rejected demands for a time limit to be applied to when a termination can take place.
“To those who fear that this Bill is the first step towards a liberal abortion regime in Ireland, I say clearly that this extremely restrictive Bill is the only proposal that will be brought forward by this Government on this issue,” he said.
What about those who fear that this bill is a great deal too restrictive?
The videos are flooding in now!
Rebecca Goldstein’s amazing talk at Women in Secularism 2 is one.
It starts with a bang.
I probably agonized over this talk more than any other talk in my entire career.
…
The source of my agony is this: do I, for the first time in my life, publicly address the gender issue. My MO has always been to try to behave as if my being a female doesn’t matter insofar as my professional life is concerned.
Wouldn’t it be nice if we could do that? The trouble is, other people don’t try to behave as if our being female doesn’t matter as far as our work is concerned.