The BBC’s Paul Wood also reports on the terrible fate of Yezidi women.
Yezidis say there are still 3,500 Yezidi women and girls enslaved by IS. Three thousand five hundred. A few have escaped, and some of those told their stories to Paul Wood.
Hannan is 18 and wants to be a nurse, a future almost snatched away by IS.
Hannan says the jihadists blocked Sinjar’s roads with their pick-up trucks. She was turned back to town, where women and girls were separated from everyone else. [Read more…]
MediaMatters tells us that Rush Limbaugh has been ranting about the idea of Idris Elba playing James Bond.
Limbaugh on Idris Elba: “James Bond was white and Scottish, period.”
Huh. Jesus was Mediterranean and Palestinian, too; I wonder if Rush Limbaugh ranted when Mel Gibson played the part.
Anyway…if I had any interest in James Bond I think I’d rather watch the guy on the left playing him than the shouty fella.
It’s not just IS. Lejla Kurić reminds me that Karadžić said much the same thing at his trial. I’d forgotten that if I ever knew it.
Former leader Radovan Karadzic has said the Serb cause in the Bosnian war was “just and holy” as he began his defence at his genocide trial at The Hague.
Marcus Tanner at the Guardian expanded on the point. [Read more…]
Don’t let’s forget about the Yezidi women. Islamic State has enslaved hundreds or perhaps thousands of them for the purpose of rape, Amnesty International reports.
What AI doesn’t report, at least in the press release, is the fact that IS treats this as officially okie dokie according to Islam. IS gives itself permission and indeed approval to treat women and girls this way because they consider it endorsed by their religion. [Read more…]
Originally part of a comment by kagekiri on “A predictable outcome of divisive anti-cop rhetoric.”
Stop and frisk just harasses the vast, vast majority of people stopped (according to the NYPD, 9 out of 10 are innocent), as they aren’t committing crimes, and the vast majority of people stopped are black people. In areas that are 24% black or latino, they make up 75% of stops, and given only 11% of stops are ones where police actually have a suspect they’re looking for, that means 89% are just “random” (read: racist as fuck), so it’s not even mostly explained by having more black and latino suspects they’re looking for. It’s just plainly racist and authoritarian, and not even particularly effective for it: it doesn’t catch many illegal guns, gun murder rates haven’t gone down, and you’re fucking over innocent black people who get harassed disproportionately. [Read more…]
Should promoters of homeopathy be able to claim that homeopathic “vaccinations” are effective? Nope, not in my view. It’s the equivalent of advertising Cyanide Candy on cartoons shows aimed at children.
A court in Australia has accepted a version of that view.
The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission has convinced a court that a company that offers homeopathic remedies was “misleading and deceptive” when it tried to argue that said remedies provide a viable alternative to the pertussis vaccine. [Read more…]
Life for Canadian dentistry students who are careless enough to be women can be quite unpleasant, it appears.
“It was hell,” said the resident, CBC News is calling “Sarah”. We have agreed to protect her identity because she fears retaliation and damage to her professional career.
Over the course of her final year in residency she says she and other female peers were targets of misogynistic jokes, comments and text messages made by a fellow male resident. [Read more…]
Anthony Zurcher reports on the opportunistic “blame the protests” rhetoric over the murders of the two New York cops.
At the centre of the storm is New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, who has been heralded as a populist torch-bearer since his election in November 2013.
The mayor had previously expressed solidarity with protesters who had taken to the streets after a police officer was not indicted for the death of Eric Garner.
And he had publicly wondered if his biracial son was safe from police – rhetoric some are now arguing helped to create an environment that encourages violence against police.
Originally a comment by Bruce Gorton on “A predictable outcome of divisive anti-cop rhetoric.”
On the same day on which this story broke, I read another in which a cop attacked someone who was asleep in a hospital.
The cop arrested his victim for assault, it was probably only that hospital waiting rooms have cameras that resulted in the cop being found out.
Last week meanwhile I subbed a story about a cop who was suspended, for not tear-gassing a suicidal university student he had just talked down when his fellow officers felt the need to forcibly restrain the said student for no apparent reason. [Read more…]
Oh and by the way – it’s completely unimportant, but then again it perhaps led to things that were important, so it might be worth mentioning – the first person Ismaaiyl Brinsley shot was his ex-girlfriend, Shaneka Thompson. He shot her in the stomach.
Nancy Leong at Slate says this is a pattern.
We live in a country where shooting your ex-girlfriend is at most local news. [Read more…]