Joan Fontaine has died at the age of 96. I remember her most for her performance in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1940 film Rebecca, as the young bride tormented by a sense of inadequacy compared to her husband’s first wife, whose memory is jealously preserved by one of film’s classic villains, the malevolent housekeeper Mrs. Danvers, played to perfection by Judith Anderson. [Read more…]
News has emerged of a US drone strike in Yemen that killed 14 members of a wedding party and injured 22 others. The victims were traveling in a convoy and the news has understandably caused outrage in that country with the parliament voting to ban any more strikes, though the vote is not binding on the government. [Read more…]
The person who voiced the original iPhone Siri has revealed herself as Susan Bennett, although Apple won’t confirm it. But what interested me in the story was how the system was created. [Read more…]
I am not quite sure what to make of the latest developments in the infighting within the Republican party. All of a sudden, leaders such as speaker John Boehner, Paul Ryan, and senate minority leader Mitch McConnell seem to be openly challenging the Tea Party faction within the party, sometimes using almost contemptuous language. [Read more…]
A scan of 600,000 customer service calls was studied to see in which states people swore at the operators the most and also those states where people are most polite and use phrases like “please” and “thank you”. [Read more…]
Via Digital Cuttlefish I learned that a US District Court judge ruled last Thursday that the huge cross on Mount Soledad in La Jolla California has to come down.
This decision is long overdue, although the issue is still not quite settled yet. This cross is one of the longest-running church-state cases, dating back to the 1980s, involving an extraordinary level of legal and political maneuvering to the extent of the US Congress passing laws specifically designed to save this religious symbol.
Here’s a brief history of the events, with most of the information coming from the various court rulings that are linked below. [Read more…]
One of the greatest actors has died at the age of 81. At home in both dramatic roles and in wacky comedies, I wrote an appreciation of his career when he retired last year so I won’t repeat myself. Peter Bradshaw provides a much fuller appreciation of a mercurial film and stage career in which he received eight Oscar nominations but failed to win any. [Read more…]
The European parliament, defying opposition from the US and its own conservative bloc of center-right parties, has invited Edward Snowden to testify before them about the issues involved in his revelations of widespread government spying. [Read more…]
It turns out that it is not just journalists like David Miranda and Laura Poitras who are detained and questioned at length when they arrive at airports in the US and the UK. Now comes a report that even reporters from establishment media like the New York Times have suffered the same fate. [Read more…]
As a result of protests it looks like the body Universities UK, comprising the heads of British universities, has reversed its decision to allow British universities to host events in which the audiences are separated by gender if such a request is made on the basis of ‘genuinely held’ religious beliefs of the speaker.
The body that represents Britain’s universities has withdrawn guidance on the gender segregation of audiences in lectures and debates after an intervention from David Cameron.
Universities UK (UUK) said on Friday that the controversial policy which allowed the voluntary separation of men and women at events such as lectures on Islam by visiting speakers was being dropped pending a review.
The body had sought guidance from the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), which said that, while the law allows segregation by gender in premises being used for religious purposes, it was not permissible in an academic meeting or in a lecture open to the public.
…The U-turn is an embarrassment for UUK, which has attempted to fight off criticisms over the policy for several days. The body had insisted that it had sought legal advice from a senior QC, who said that gender segregation should be allowed if requested by the lecturer and students.
The protest and the resulting publicity, in which FtB’s Maryam Namazie was actively and tirelessly involved, seem to have done the trick. Ophelia Benson has also been all over this story.
What the UUK did was to withdraw the controversial ‘case study’ (see here for more) that led to their decision. So it looks like my cunning plan on how to subvert the policy by mocking it using cross-dressing will not be necessary after all, though there is no reason why it could not be adopted anywhere else someone imposes a similar separation.