The BBC reports that some UN boffins have expressed worries about this pattern we seem to be developing in the US of failing to indict cops who kill unarmed people.
“I am concerned by the grand juries’ decisions and the apparent conflicting evidence that exists relating to both incidents,” UN Special Rapporteur on minority issues, Rita Izsak, said in a statement. [Read more…]
At age 23, British secret agent Phyllis Latour Doyle parachuted into occupied Normandy in May 1944 to gather intelligence on Nazi positions in preparation for D-Day. As an agent for the British Special Operations Executive (SOE), Doyle secretly relayed 135 coded messages to the British military before France’s liberation in August. For seventy years, her contributions to the war effort have been largely unheralded but, last week, the 93-year-old was finally given her due when she was awarded France’s highest honor, the Chevalier of the Legion of Honour. [Read more…]
My November column for The Freethinker is out.
It asks a question.
What do we do with the thought that some things are more important than others? Specifically, how do we deal with the awareness that some human problems are more urgent and pressing than others? How do we sort them, how do we rank them, how do we decide which ones we should pay most attention to?
A long long list of Fellows of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry are urging the news media to stop referring to climate deniers as “skeptics.” Pass it on.
Public discussion of scientific topics such as global warming is confused by misuse of the term “skeptic.” The Nov 10, 2014, New York Times article “Republicans Vow to Fight EPA and Approve Keystone Pipeline” referred to Sen. James Inhofe as “a prominent skeptic of climate change.” Two days later Scott Horsley of NPR’s Morning Edition called him “one of the leading climate change deniers in Congress.” These are not equivalent statements.
As Fellows of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, we are concerned that the words “skeptic” and “denier” have been conflated by the popular media. [Read more…]
So a kid age 7 reads a book about insects with much enjoyment, then when she gets to the back cover she sees that it says the book is for boys.
Publishers? Don’t do that.
You don’t say “books for white people” do you? Don’t say “books for boys” either. [Read more…]
So so so so so so funny.
[Description: two photos: one, a bunch of US-football players captioned “how America sees the 49ers”; two, the same bunch of US-football players wearing pink skirts over their uniforms captioned “How Seattle sees the 49ers”]
Contempt for the female just never gets old, does it.
Oh puhleeeeeeeeeeeeeze.
I know the New York Post is a Murdoch paper but come on. NY Post columnist Bob McManus says it was Eric Garner’s fault that the cops choked him to death.
Eric Garner and Michael Brown had much in common, not the least of which was this: On the last day of their lives, they made bad decisions. Epically bad decisions. [Read more…]
Oh look, what a coincidence. Last April, a cop choked a guy while a bystander took pictures…and the cop was immediately fired.
Guess what the choked person isn’t. Besides dead.
Frank Phillips, a Knox County Sheriff’s officer, was fired Sunday night after a series of pictures taken by photographer John Messner were published in the Daily Mail in Britain. They showed an officer identified by the Sheriff’s Office as Phillips grabbing 21-year-old college student Jarod Dotson around the neck and squeezing him until he fell to his knees. [Read more…]
A Missouri man drove his van through a crowd of protesters in St Louis last night, and then waved a gun at them.
According to the St. Louis Dispatch, activists were preparing for a “die-in” demonstration, which includes lying in the street, in Maryland Plaza at around 8 p.m. to protest the decision not to charge the officer whose illegal use of a chokehold resulted in the death of Eric Garner.
“As they did, a man driving a Town and Country minivan drove through the intersection and accelerated through the crowd,” the paper reported.
Surprisingly (to me at least), a high-up in the Southern Baptist Convention has gone off on racism, Sarah Posner reports.
After the failure yesterday of a grand jury to indict the New York police officer who was videotaped choking Eric Garner to death, Russell Moore, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, launched into a denunciation of racism in the church on the ERLC’s program “Questions and Ethics.”
Saying he was “shocked and grieved” by the news, Moore added:
Romans 13 says that the sword of justice is to be wielded against evildoers. [Read more…]