Boris Johnson, the foreign secretary in the Conservative government, referred belittlingly to his Labour counterpart and aroused the ire of the speaker John Bercow who blasted him for his sexism.
Mano Singham
Just another Freethought Blogs site
Boris Johnson, the foreign secretary in the Conservative government, referred belittlingly to his Labour counterpart and aroused the ire of the speaker John Bercow who blasted him for his sexism.
I have been harshly critical in the past about Pakistan’s slide into religious intolerance, with its Muslim fundamentalist zealots killing and otherwise threatening non-Muslims under the cover of the state’s odious blasphemy laws. The prohibitions, discrimination, and harassment campaigns against the LGBT community in the Islamic world are also well documented. But I heard an encouraging story about a Pakistan TV station having its first transgender news anchor. Maavia Malik is a former model and her selection has not caused the kind of uproar one might have expected in a conservative Muslim country but was instead greeted with an overwhelmingly positive response.
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[UPDATE: According to this report, Australian cricket captain Steve Smith, vice-captain David Warner, and Cameron Bancroft have been ordered home immediately from South Africa by officials from Cricket Australia. Coach Darren Lehman was deemed to have no prior knowledge of the cheating plan and will remain in his position. But there will be a fuller investigation of the culture and behavior of the team and Lehmann’s role will undoubtedly be closely examined.]
The fallout from the ball tampering scandal by Australia continues with the cricket playing world expressing shock and even the Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull weighing in, saying that he and the nation were deeply disappointed and calling for the cricket authorities to take action. The intensity of the reaction is not because cricket is so pure that cheating does not happen at the highest levels but because what happened here was, to use a popular cliché, a perfect storm of events.
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TONIGHT: Trump watched 'Shark Week' with Stormy Daniels thus confronting his two biggest fears: sharks and genuine intimacy. #LSSC pic.twitter.com/zrNNwcwPXO
— The Late Show (@colbertlateshow) March 27, 2018
Siblings Lauren and David Hogg, both students at the Parkland high school where 17 students were killed, were on CNN after the rally being interviewed by Alyson Camerota. Just watch the interview and you will be impressed by how skillfully they countered Camerota’s repeated suggestions that they tone down their rhetoric against politicians and the NRA so that we can all ‘come together’ to solve the issue, the bogus ‘kumbaya’ bipartisanship rubbish that mainstream media love to promote as a means of maintaining the status quo. She was quite condescending in the way she spoke to the Hoggs, treating them as if they were naïve about political realities. They were having none of it and quickly shot down her suggestions using cogent arguments. It should perhaps be noted that Camerota used to work for Fox News before shifting over to CNN.
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I have been vaguely following the Stephanie Clifford (aka Stormy Daniels) and Donald Trump story as just one more tawdry detail about the political world. I have a TV but no cable and almost never watch any broadcast programs mainly because the constant interruptions for commercials drive me crazy. So it takes considerable prodding for me to watch a program. The much-hyped 60 Minutes interview of Clifford was on last night and I had heard so much about it being explosive that I decided to check it out. The program was due to start at 7:00pm but the preceding basketball game went into overtime so it did not get going until after 7:30, so I got to watch a huge number of commercials.
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Much attention has been focused on how the British firm Cambridge Analytica used various forms of dirty tricks to try and influence elections in various countries. The level of success achieved by them is hard to gauge since, unlike with advertisements aimed at selling products where there is a measurable outcome, electoral success is harder to gauge since we don’t know how individuals actually voted and also so many factors go into how people vote that drawing a straight line from cause to effect is hard. Pointing to the fact that winners in some close elections, like Donald Trump in the US and Uhuru Kenyatta in Kenya, were clients of CA as evidence of their effectiveness is interesting but we don’t know how many of their other clients lost.
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Today’s Doonesbury comic strip.
I would have thought that this would be impossible. But engineers never cease to amaze me at what they can do and this particular solution boggled my mind. What they did was slice the ship in two and insert a new piece to extend it, like one would insert a leaf into a dining table to accommodate more people.
Incredible.
Cricket is a game that traditionally has expected the highest ethical standards of its players and spectators, so much so that the phrase ‘not cricket’ has entered the vernacular as denoting something that, while not being technically illegal or contravening an explicit rule, is nonetheless seen as a form of gamesmanship, trying to gain an edge that was not based purely on skill or strategy or ability. But that sterling reputation has seriously deteriorated over time because of the on-field and off-field tactics adopted by players and spectators
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