Well today is looking gruesome – Erdoğan is busy purging judges as “plotters” by way of making himself even more of a dictator, IS says Lahouaiej-Bouhlel was one of theirs, and Pakistan’s Kim Kardashian has been murdered by her brother for being Pakistan’s Kim Kardashian.

Pakistani social media celebrity Qandeel Baloch has been killed by her brother in an apparent ‘honour killing’ in the province of Punjab, police say.

Ms Baloch, 26, recently caused controversy by posting controversial pictures of herself on social media, including one alongside a Muslim cleric.

She caused controversy by being controversial. Got it.

This is, of course, the BBC yet again reporting violence from the point of view of the perpetrators, which I wish they would learn to stop doing. They did it with Salman Rushdie, with the Motoons, with Lars Vilks, with Charlie Hebdo, and now they’re doing it with Qandeel Baloch. She didn’t “cause controversy”; some people chose to consider her pictures of herself “controversial.”

Ms Baloch’s parents told The Express Tribune that she was strangled to death on Friday night following an argument with her brother.

They said her body was not discovered until Saturday morning. Her parents have been taken into custody, the Tribune reported.

Ms Baloch had gone to Punjab from Karachi because of the threat to her security, police say.

Maybe she thought she would be safer with her family? Poignant, isn’t it.

“[Her] brothers had asked her to quit modelling,” family sources quoted by the Tribune said.

Sources quoted by the newspaper said that Wasim was upset about her uploading controversial pictures online and had threatened her about it.

There again – the BBC has to help Wasim work up indignation at her, by saying yet again that her pictures are “controversial.” Listen, in Pakistan it’s “controversial” for a woman to walk around with a naked head; that doesn’t mean the rest of us have to see it that way.

Jill McGivering adds some analysis.

Qandeel Baloch used social media to find fame and the reactions there showed the feelings she inspired, from admiration to disgust.

Some called her death “good news” and even praised her suspected killer. Others said it was wrong to condone her murder, even if she was flawed. Some showed outright support.

Qandeel Baloch has been dubbed Pakistan’s Kim Kardashian. There are comparisons: the provocative selfies, the pursuit of celebrity, the controversial rise to notoriety.

Blamey blamey blamey, again. There’s no need for the BBC to label her selfies “provocative” or her status “notoriety.” She’s already dead – I don’t see why the Beeb needs to throw mud at her.

But in Pakistan, women, especially poor ones, still lack basic rights, from schooling to choosing a husband and violence against them is rife. The country struggles with sexuality and especially with “immodest” women.

The fact that many of Qandeel’s videos went viral suggests a titillating fascination with confident female sexuality – along with fear of its power and of her assertion of independence. However she lived her life, tweeted one, it was her life.

It was her life, but the BBC will pin pejorative labels on it after she’s been murdered, all the same.

More from the BBC:

An army group in Turkey says it has taken over the country, with soldiers at strategic points in Istanbul and jets flying low in the capital, Ankara.

A statement read on TV said a “peace council” now ran the country and there was a curfew and martial law.

Erdogan is saying no it hasn’t, this is just some hotheads. He told the people to resist and that he’d be there to help as soon as possible.

PM Binali Yildirim had earlier denounced an “illegal action” by a military “group”, stressing it was not a coup. He said that the government remained in charge.

The military group’s statement on national broadcaster TRT, read by an announcer, said that democratic and secular rule of law had been eroded by the current government. There would be new constitution, it said.

This isn’t the first time secularism has been defended (or imposed, depending on your point of view) by the military.

One European Union source told Reuters that the military action “looks like a relatively well-orchestrated coup by a substantial body of the military, not just a few colonels”.

Visiting Moscow, US Secretary of State John Kerry said he hoped for peace and “continuity” in Turkey.

“Continuity” could mean a lot of things.

And now for something completely different – a military coup in Turkey. The BBC is live updating.

Summary

1. A Turkish military statement read out on television says it has taken over power
2. The prime minister says security forces have been called in to deal with the situation
3. Military jets and helicopters are seen flying over the capital, Ankara
4. Military vehicles are said to be blocking bridges in Istanbul and gunfire is heard
5. Turkey soldiers launch ‘illegal action’

Then a frightening reminder:

New British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson ‘very concerned’

https://twitter.com/BorisJohnson/status/754071415612116992

Not reassuring.

Military coups are not legitimate, but neither is theocracy.

The New York Times:

The toll of an attack on a Bastille Day fireworks celebration in the southern French city of Nice rose on Friday to 84 dead and 202 injured, as the government identified the assailant as a 31-year-old native of Tunisia, extended a national state of emergency and absorbed the shock of a third major terrorist attack in 19 months.

…

Starting around 10:45 p.m. Thursday, the attacker mowed down scores of victims in Nice with a rented 19-ton refrigerated truck before engaging in a gunfight with three police officers, who pursued him down a storied seaside promenade before finally killing him.

The Paris prosecutor, François Molins, identified the man as Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, who was born on Jan. 3, 1985, and raised in Msaken, a town in northeastern Tunisia.

No organized group has said “We did it!” They do say they did it when they did it, because they’re proud of doing it. The fact that they haven’t said that is a strong hint that they didn’t do it.

Mr. Bouhlel had a history of petty crime, including theft, going back to 2010, and he received a six-month suspended sentence in March for assaulting a driver during an altercation in January.

“However, he is completely unknown by intelligence services, both at the national and local levels,” Mr. Molins said. “He has never been in any database or been flagged for radicalization.”

Maybe he wasn’t “radicalized.” Maybe he just wanted to kill a bunch of people, for the sheer glorious fun of it. Maybe he wanted to live out a fantasy. Mowing people down with a big truck is one fantasy a person can have, and maybe Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel simply wanted to do that – maybe there was no more ideology to it than that, nothing but a love of violence and not enough compassion to inhibit him from pursuing his love.

“There are many children, young children who had come to watch fireworks with their family, to have joy, to share happiness, delight, amazement, and who were struck, struck to death, merely to satisfy the cruelty of an individual — and maybe of a group,” Mr. Hollande said, flanked by Mr. Valls and Health Minister Marisol Touraine, after meeting with victims and medical workers at the Pasteur Hospital in Nice.

Maybe that was the only point. People were out having fun, including children, enjoying a fireworks display just as we did here in the US 11 days ago – maybe Bouhlel’s only goal was to fuck that up.

He’s been given plenty of role models lately though, role models who did have an ideology. It’s the hot new thing, picking out a place where people are crowded together – an airport, a bar, a football ground, a music theater, a busy street – and killing as many of those people as possible.

Pick your role models carefully.

Again.

A lorry has struck a crowd after Bastille Day celebrations in the southern French city of Nice, killing at least 70 people, officials are quoted as saying by local media.

It happened on the famous Promenade des Anglais after a firework display. The driver was “neutralised”, and guns and grenades were found inside the lorry.

One image on Twitter showed about a dozen people lying on the street.

The BBC’s live page now says AFP says the death toll is 75.

Terrorism expert Claude Moniquet say it is “pretty clear” the incident in Nice was a terror attack. He says the idea was “clearly” to wait until the end of the Euro 2016 football tournament to launch the attack.

He says there has been no official confirmation of guns or grenades being found in the truck, but if those reports prove to be true, it would indicate a “more elaborate” and “more professional” plot.

Again again again.

Unbelievable. Teresa May has killed the climate change department.

The decision to abolish the Department for Energy and Climate Change has been variously condemned as “plain stupid”, “deeply worrying” and “terrible” by politicians, campaigners and experts.

One of Theresa May’s first acts as Prime Minister was to move responsibility for climate change to a new Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy.

Only on Monday, Government advisers had warned of the need to take urgent action to prepare the UK for floods, droughts, heatwaves and food shortages caused by climate change.

Climate change is largely a product of business and energy and industry, and action on climate change tends to be antagonistic to many branches of business and energy and industry, so folding it into a Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy is giving the hens a nice new dormitory inside a fox’s den.

To put it another way, Business shouldn’t be in charge of climate change.

Former Labour leader Ed Miliband tweeted: “DECC abolition just plain stupid. Climate not even mentioned in new department title. Matters because departments shape priorities, shape outcomes.”

…

Craig Bennett, chief executive of Friends of the Earth, pointed out that a major report into the effects of climate change on Britain had made clear that it was already happening.

“This is shocking news. Less than a day into the job and it appears that the new Prime Minister has already downgraded action to tackle climate change, one of the biggest threats we face,” he said.

“This week the Government’s own advisors warned of ever growing risks to our businesses, homes and food if we don’t do more to cut fossil fuel pollution.”

But it’s only businesses, homes and food. No big deal.

So Ginsburg took it back.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg of the Supreme Court on Thursday expressed regret for her recent remarks about the candidacy of Donald J. Trump, saying they were “ill-advised.”

…

“On reflection, my recent remarks in response to press inquiries were ill-advised and I regret making them,” Justice Ginsburg said in a statement on Thursday. “Judges should avoid commenting on a candidate for public office. In the future I will be more circumspect.”

In general, they should. But a potential Hitler isn’t “in general.” Hitler didn’t run on a platform of killing all the Jews, after all. German voters didn’t know that was what they were voting for. He was just an ordinary anti-Semite and right-winger when he ran, albeit one with a history of violence and a prison record. It’s not safe to assume that Trump won’t really be the racist bully he seems to be if he gets elected. It’s not safe to assume he’ll be sobered by the responsibility if that happens. So I’m not convinced RBG was wrong to deviate from the usual custom for judges.

Few legal experts had expected Justice Ginsburg to offer the apology that Mr. Trump demanded. Justices typically remain largely out of the public eye and are insulated from political pressures and news media coverage that can compel action.

But the torrent of criticism, especially from supporters and allies of Justice Ginsburg, appears to have pierced that protection.

Former Justice Antonin Scalia, who died this year, was often the target of demands for apologies for his acerbic comments from the bench or in speeches. They generally did not materialize, though the justice did apologize to reporters in 2004 after a deputy federal marshal ordered them to destroy recordings of a half-hour speech by Justice Scalia at a Mississippi high school.

At least RBG didn’t say she would be more circumspect “going forward.”

Can’t anyone put a stop to this?

“Parents hold their child down – three of them holding them down – and give this stuff as an enema,” says Emma Dalmayne. “Many feed it to their children. They even put it into their babies’ bottles.”

Dalmayne, a stay-at-home mother and autism campaigner from London, is describing Miracle Mineral Solution (MMS), a “supplement” being sold online to parents as a “cure” for their autistic children. But MMS is essentially bleach. It is 28% sodium chlorite, and when used as instructed, generates chlorine dioxide – a potent bleach that’s used to strip textiles and for industrial water treatment.

It’s been around for years, people have been campaigning against it for years, but it’s still being marketed. People are still advertising bleach as a cure for autism – bleach to be ingested, not bleach to disinfect the garbage bin.

It is highly dangerous to ingest. Taken directly, MMS can cause severe nausea, vomiting and diarrhoea, damage to the gut and red blood cells, respiratory problems, and can be fatal. “MMS can cause serious damage to health and in some cases even death,” says a spokeswoman for the Food Standards Agency (FSA). “Anyone who has bought these products is advised to throw them away.”

It’s poison. Poison poison poison. It will kill you. It’s stuff you keep in a locked cupboard if you have young children. Yet people are marketing it as something to ingest.

Kerri Rivera, a prominent proponent of MMS and author of Healing the Symptoms Known as Autism, says: “Almost all of the people with autism have high levels of pathogens; virus, bacteria, parasites and heavy metals. Chlorine dioxide kills pathogens and helps the body to detoxify itself. It is considered safe at doses we use for weight.” She adds: “There are over 225 people who no longer have autism after using it.”

Weapons-grade quackery, and lethal to living beings.

Dalmayne has discovered a Facebook group for parents of autistic children – many from the UK – that’s centred on these “cures”. With the tagline “Solving the puzzle one drop at a time”, the more than 9,000 members of the group discuss using chlorine dioxide, often posting photos of their children with skin rashes and bleeding – “bragging” that it’s a sign it’s working or asking for help when they’re afraid.

“People post, ‘my child can’t walk because she’s/he’s doubled up in pain’ or ‘their urine’s pink’,” Dalmayne says. “One had three seizures in a day. But they’re always told by the other members, ‘That’s normal. That’s the autism leaving them.’” The people being given the “solution”, who are discussed in the group, range from vulnerable adults to children as young as 10 months, Dalmayne tells me. “It’s like they’re going to war with their own children,” she says.

That’s so terrifying.

Although the FSA’s food crime unit is working with councils and government departments to combat the promotion and sale of MMS, Dalmayne says the law needs to be changed. While it is unlawful to sell a product such as MMS that is injurious to health, “you can say, ‘this is a cure for autism’ – and right now there’s nothing we can do about it”, she says. She is campaigning with Change.org for the government to introduce legislation to ban the marketing of products to the public based on the false claim it will cure autism, as is already the case with alleged remedies for cancer.

I just signed that petition.

I guess we’re all living in a surrealistic comedy show based on a competition between the UK and the US on who can put more absurdly unqualified and dangerous people in minor jobs like head of state or head of foreign affairs.

Or to put it another way, I go out for a couple of hours and come back to find that Boris Johnson is Foreign Secretary. Boris Johnson! Is Foreign Secretary!

Mr Johnson said he was “very humbled” to be appointed foreign secretary.

He said Mrs May had made a “wonderful speech” earlier, saying there was a “massive opportunity in this country to make a great success of our new relationship with Europe and with the world”.

But Lib Dem leader Tim Farron predicted Mr Johnson would “spend more time apologising to nations he’s offended” than working as foreign secretary.

Slate has a partial list of the offendings.

• In 2003, Johnson described U.S. President George W. Bush as “a cross-eyed Texan warmonger, unelected, inarticulate, who [epitomizes] the arrogance of American foreign policy” in an unsigned editorial in the Spectator.
• In a 2005 Telegraph column, he wrote “…compared with the old British Empire, and the new American imperium, Chinese cultural influence is virtually nil, and unlikely to increase….Chinese culture seems to stay firmly in China. Indeed, high Chinese culture and art are almost all imitative of western forms…. The number of Chinese Nobel prizes won on home turf is zero, though there are of course legions of bright Chinese trying to escape to Stanford and Caltech.”
• In a 2006 column, also for the Telegraph, Johnson wrote “For 10 years we in the Tory Party have become used to Papua New Guinea-style orgies of cannibalism and chief-killing.” After backtracking furiously, he said he would “add Papua New Guinea to my global itinerary of apology.”

Naturally it makes sense to appoint someone who has a global itinerary of apology to the job of Foreign Secretary.

• In an op-ed published in April, he claimed President Obama removed a bust of Winston Churchill from the Oval Office upon assuming the presidency in 2009 because “it was a symbol of the part-Kenyan president’s ancestral dislike of the British empire—of which Churchill had been such a fervent defender,” comments several leading British members of Parliament (rightly) condemned as racist.

He’s been rude about both Clinton and Trump.

Interesting times.

The National: the newspaper that supports an independent Scotland:

Tomorrow's front page @ScotNational The De Vil is in the detail pic.twitter.com/3CB5Me8FT8

— The National (@ScotNational) July 13, 2016

Nicholas Confessore at the NY Times on Trump as the racism candidate.

The chant erupts in a college auditorium in Washington, as admirers of a conservative internet personality shout down a black protester. It echoes around the gym of a central Iowa high school, as white students taunt the Hispanic fans and players of a rival team. It is hollered by a lone motorcyclist, as he tears out of a Kansas gas station after an argument with a Hispanic man and his Muslim friend.

The chant is just one word – Trump.

In countless collisions of color and creed, Donald J. Trump’s name evokes an easily understood message of racial hostility. Defying modern conventions of political civility and language, Mr. Trump has breached the boundaries that have long constrained Americans’ public discussion of race.

And that’s why he’s so terrifying. This isn’t some joke or stunt or tv show or publicity move. It may be any or all of those in Trump’s mind, who knows, but that is no guarantee that he wouldn’t act on his message of racial hostility if he were elected. Racist chanting doesn’t stop with racist chanting.

Mr. Trump has attacked Mexicans as criminals. He has called for a ban on Muslim immigrants. He has wondered aloud why the United States is not “letting people in from Europe.”

His rallies vibrate with grievances that might otherwise be expressed in private: about “political correctness,” about the ranch house down the street overcrowded with day laborers, and about who is really to blame for thedeath of a black teenager in Ferguson, Mo.

In cries of “All lives matter.”

“I think what we really find troubling is the mainstreaming of these really offensive ideas,” said Jonathan Greenblatt, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League, which tracks hate groups. “It’s allowed some of the worst ideas into the public conversation in ways we haven’t seen anything like in recent memory.”

And not merely “offensive.” People can get over being offended, but the ideas are dangerous as well as “offensive,” and it’s the dangerous part that makes Trump terrifying.

Some are elated by the turn. In making the explicit assertion of white identity and grievance more widespread, Mr. Trump has galvanized the otherwise marginal world of avowed white nationalists and self-described “race realists.” They hail him as a fellow traveler who has driven millions of white Americans toward an intuitive embrace of their ideals: that race should matter as much to white people as it does to everyone else. He has freed Americans, those activists say, to say what they really believe.

Yeah. And that’s a bad thing.

This was last week, but I missed it – Neil deGrasse Tyson, Twitter, a hashtag – #Rationalia.

Oh god. The word all by itself is enough to kick the nausea-mechanism into life. Rationalia: the land where all the self-admiring dudebros wander up and down congratulating each other on their towering Rationality.

Tyson tweeted him a tweet, a tweet tweeted he it, on June 29.

Earth needs a virtual country: #Rationalia, with a one-line Constitution: All policy shall be based on the weight of evidence

— Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) June 29, 2016

Earth needs a virtual country: #Rationalia, with a one-line Constitution: All policy shall be based on the weight of evidence

Dude. No. What are you thinking?

Well, we know what he’s thinking. He’s thinking what Sam Harris was thinking when he wrote his awful book on morality. He’s thinking what the self-admiring dudebros always are thinking when they tell everyone else to go away and learn how to think. He’s thinking “reason” is all there is to it.

He’s thinking a one-line Constitution is a possible and a desirable thing, and that evidence is the only relevant factor in how people should treat each other. Did you notice the one word in there that overturns that whole idea? It’s the word “should.” What evidence can determine what we should do? Not influence or shape, but determine? “Should” according to what?

A single ten word sentence is not enough for a Constitution. That ten word sentence is not enough for a Constitution or for basic life advice. I can think of better single sentences for the purpose without breaking a sweat. “First, do no harm” is a contender, and that’s only four words. “Be good to each other” is one more word. “Don’t be evil” is a mere three. All of them are more to the purpose than Tyson’s absurdity.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights has 30 articles. Most of the articles have numbered items, and most of the rest are several sentences. Actual Constitutions are longer than that, and that’s not just because humanities types like to ramble on while Rational Men of Science know how to cut to the chase.

Some people posed for photos.

Reason is good. Following the evidence is good. Thinking carefully is good. But they are not enough.

More on the looming problem of antibiotic resistance.

The golden age of antibiotics appears to be coming to an end, its demise hastened by a combination of medical, social and economic factors. For decades, these drugs made it easy for doctors to treat infections and injuries. Now, common ailments are regaining the power to kill.

Harvard University infectious disease epidemiologist William P. Hanage cautions that “we will not be flying back into the dark ages” overnight. Hospitals are improving their infection control, and public health experts are getting better at tracking new threats. But in a race against nature, he said, the humans are losing ground.

That’s a clumsy use of the word “cautions.” One doesn’t “caution” people that things aren’t all that terrible. He clarifies rather than cautions.

Until very recently, few made the connection between antibiotic use in individual cases and the emergence of antibiotic resistance, said Dr. Susan Bleasdale, an infection-control expert at the University of Illinois in Chicago. Patients with earaches, sinus pressure and sore throats demanded antibiotics, and physicians tended to oblige.

The results have been deadly. Each year, more than 2 million people in the U.S. are infected with a bacterium that has become resistant to one or more antibiotic medication designed to kill it, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. At least 23,000 people die as a direct result of antibiotic-resistant infections, and many more die from other conditions that were complicated by an antibiotic-resistant infection, the agency says.

But it’s getting worse rather than better.

A survey released in June by the Infectious Diseases Society of America found that only 30% of Americans believe that antibiotic resistance is a significant problem for public health.

Which is probably why so many Americans still demand antibiotics for colds, and some doctors still give them.

The problem goes beyond treating infections. As bacterial resistance grows, Lesho said, “we’re all at risk of losing our access” to medical miracles we’ve come to take for granted: elective surgeries, joint replacements, organ transplants, cancer chemotherapies. These treatments give bacteria an opportunity to hitch a ride on a catheter or an unwashed hand and invade an already vulnerable patient.

We grew up taking powerful medical technologies for granted. It won’t be pleasant watching them weaken and fade away.

ExMuslim flashdance at Kings Cross.

The Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain:

On July 5, 2016 a number of ex-Muslims from Bangladesh, Britain, Iran, Kuwait, Morocco, Pakistan and Syria converged on Kings Cross for a flash “dance” in support of freethinkers and “apostates” across the globe. On their faces and chests, they had written of “Ex-Muslim”, “Kafir”, “Atheist”, “Migrant”, “Refugee”, and “Apostate”.
They danced to Shaggy’s “I Need Your Love”** in support of all those who are isolated, intimidated, harassed, and even killed for leaving Islam or thinking freely.
They also danced in memory of Adel Al-Jaf, a young Iraqi dancer, who was killed the day before in a mass suicide bombing in Iraq with over 200 others. He had to dance in secret; they danced for him and all those who cannot dance, think, live and love in public.
Dancers include: Aftab Ahmed, Hana Chelache, Imad Iddine Habib, Mahdi Khalidi, Maryam Namazie, Rayhana Sultan, and Zee Jay.
Dance was organised by the Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain.
Filming: Poone Ravi
WE DON’T OWN COPYRIGHT TO THIS SONG.
NO COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT INTENDED.
Soundtrack: Shaggy’s I need your love
Artists: Shaggy Feat Mohombi , Faydee and Costi
Music : I NEED YOUR LOVE ( itunes)
With Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain (CEMB)
ExMuslimBecause
Imad Iddine Habib
Zee Jay
Maryam Namazie
Hana Chelache
Aftab Ahmed
El Mahdi Khalidi
Rayhana Sultan

Trump is angry (or is pretending to be angry) at Ruth Bader Ginsburg because she has said harsh things about him in public. Supreme Court justices aren’t supposed to take sides in political campaigns.

“I think it’s highly inappropriate that a United States Supreme Court judge gets involved in a political campaign, frankly,” Trump told the Times by phone. “I think it’s a disgrace to the court and I think she should apologize to the court. I couldn’t believe it when I saw it.”

Ginsburg in recent days has ramped up her criticisms of Trump’s campaign. She has said he’s a “faker” who should release his tax returns, that she “can’t imagine” a Trump presidency, and that “everything” would be up for grabs with him occupying the White House. Ginsburg’s comments are unique in that a Supreme Court justice typically doesn’t comment on presidential candidates during election season.

I don’t know. I can see why the Supes don’t usually get involved, and why it’s better that they don’t…but Trump is a special case. He’s special because he has no relevant experience or education, and because he’s a reckless pugnacious loose cannon. He’s not a real “presidential candidate” in the normal sense of the phrase. He’s a noisily self-promoting tv personality and “tycoon” – he’s a joke rather than a serious candidate. He’s also a vocal, aggressive racist. He’s not so much a candidate as an emergency. The rules change for emergencies.

The Bookbinder twins are in the Washington Post.

It was nearing 6 p.m. one Sunday last month when Jeremy and Eliana Bookbinder heard about an injured hawk on a hiking trail not far from the camp where they were working.

The 20-year-old twins from Prince George’s were at Camp Marriott, a Boy Scout camp in the Goshen Scout Reservation, about 20 miles from Lexington, Va.

Some hikers had told a camp staff member that they had found an injured hawk, and the information had been passed along to the twins.

You know the story from Eliana’s write-up. Eliana found the bird – a juvenile bald eagle – and found that it was in bad shape.

It was “very, very still and quiet,” she said, and it was “covered in flies.”

Bookbinder called her boss, Matt Anderson, and told him about the eagle. She also texted him a photo of the bird. But from the other end of the line came an order: She was not to call the wildlife rehabilitation center, nor was she to transport it to a wildlife veterinarian.

“I pointed out that this was a massive violation of the Scout law,” Bookbinder said. “Part of the Scout law is to be thoughtful and to be kind, and this was neither.

“I have never been so angry that I cried,” she said. “At that point I just thought okay, I’m just going to do it anyway.”

She called Jeremy for backup.

She also called the emergency after-hours phone number of the Wildlife Center of Virginia. She was told that if she could safely capture the eagle, she should do so and bring it to the center, located about 45 miles away.

That’s the part that makes the firing impossible to understand. She called the correct experts, and the correct experts told her to bring the eagle in if she could do it safely. I don’t know why that isn’t all there was to it.

At the Wildlife Center, the two handed over the eagle and filled out paperwork, and staff at the center started assessing the bird’s condition.

It was about 11 p.m. by the time the Bookbinders arrived back at camp. They were called to Anderson’s office. According to Eliana Bookbinder, Anderson berated them for having done a “terrible” thing and said that their actions had “endangered the reputation of the Boy Scouts.”

Next morning they were fired.

The people in charge act as if they’re running the Pentagon or something, and refuse to explain.

Contacted by The Washington Post for comment, Barbash deferred to his chief spokesman, Aaron Chusid.

“We have no comment at this time as it is our policy not to comment on employment matters,” Chusid wrote in an email. “At Goshen Scout Reservation, our first priority is always to promote the health and safety of our campers while adhering to Scouting’s values as stated in the Scout Oath and Law.”

Blah blah blah; question not answered.

The Srebrenica massacre was 21 years ago today.

The United Nations had declared Srebrenica a safe haven for civilians, but that didn’t prevent Serb soldiers from attacking the town they besieged for years. As they advanced on July 11, 1995, most of the town’s Muslim population rushed to the nearby UN compound hoping that the Dutch peacekeepers would protect them.

But the outnumbered and outgunned, peacekeepers watched helplessly as Muslim men and boys were separated for execution, while the women and girls were sent to Bosnian government-held territory. Nearly 15,000 residents tried to flee through the woods, but were hunted down and also killed.

The victims were buried in mass graves, which were dug up shortly after the war by the perpetrators and relocated in order to hide the crime. During the process, the half-decomposed remains were ripped apart by bulldozers. Body parts are still being found in more than 100 mass graves, put together and identified through DNA analysis.

21 years ago. Not more than 70, like the Holocaust, but just 21.

Peter Popham looked back a couple of months ago.

In late-1991 I spent a few days under bombardment in Croatia reporting on the civil war for The Independent, then moved on to Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital, to see if something similar was brewing there.

The locals were expansive, charming, bibulous and comprehensively reassuring. “What? Serbians, Bosniaks and Croatians turning on each other and killing each other?” The idea was laughable, I was told. This was a modern, sophisticated town full of mixed couples and families, where the bloody borders dividing Catholic, Orthodox and Muslim which had scarred the Balkans for centuries had been swallowed up and forgotten in happy modernity: first Tito, then European liberalism, had buried the region’s ugly history.

Yet within months the siege of Sarajevo was under way.

It can happen any time. It can happen anywhere and any time – no country or set of people is immune. It’s dreadful to admit that, and to be aware of it…but it’s dangerous not to.

Bosnian Serbians could not have picked up their guns and trained them on their Muslim and Croatian neighbours without believing they were doing something right and necessary.

The man who provided that belief, Radovan Karadzic, is now beginning the 40-year sentence handed down this week in The Hague. Charismatic, theatrical, a poet with something of the prophet and much of the charlatan about him, Karadzic was the right man in the right place, infusing his Serbian brethren with an intoxicating belief in their high racial destiny, involving a millennial conflict with the Muslims who, under the banner of the Ottomans, had inflicted that never-to-be-forgotten defeat at the Battle of Kosovo Polje in 1389.

…

We make a mistake if we see Karadzic as a unique monster. Figures like him are springing up and prospering right across the world, wherever the old state structures nourished by the post-war order totter. The viciousness of the historic divisions in the southern Balkans lent a fire-and-brimstone quality to the Karadzic rhetoric, just as the medieval touchstone of fundamental Islam justifies the barbarities promulgated by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi of Isis. France’s Marie le Pen, Hungary’s Viktor Orban and Matteo Salvini of Italy’s Lega Nord each know how to apply the flame of rhetoric to the blue touchpaper of atavism. Each is as different as the clans to which they appeal, but all appeal to blood and soil. Civilisation as we know it was an awakening from such nightmares. These people lead us back into the dark.

Nigel Farage, Donald Trump.

Yarl’s Wood is cutting costs. We know what that means…

Staff are being replaced by “self-service kiosks” at the troubled Yarl’s Wood immigration detention centre as the main way of driving through a £42m cut in the costs of a new Home Office contract to run the centre, it has been disclosed.

A report by the National Audit Office (NAO) published on Thursday also reveals that some women have refused to go on “humiliating” hospital visits after a tougher Home Office policy made it more likely they would be handcuffed on outside visits.

Handcuffs – as if immigration were a violent crime.

Let’s take a look back.

A former senior Serco official who worked inside the Yarl’s Wood immigration detention centre has alleged that an anti-immigration culture was “endemic” among staff, and that vulnerable women have been deported without their mental health being properly assessed.

The claims came after the Observer revealed last week that the private outsourcing giant is to be investigated by MPs when it was forced to disclose a secret internal report revealing evidence that it failed to properly investigate a claim of repeated sexual assaults by one of its staff against a female resident.

The whistleblower also claimed that another alleged case of sexual assault by a Serco member of staff occurred in August 2012, involving a particularly vulnerable detainee with profound psychological issues. It is understood she has since been deported.

The claims come from the first senior employee to have broken rank since the immigration detention centre – which is so tightly guarded that the Home Office recently banned the United Nations from entry – opened in 2001.

The whistleblower claims Yarl’s Wood is not fit for purpose and that he detected a culture of disbelief towards female detainees, claims which are rejected by Serco.

He said: “Officers would say openly: ‘They need to go back, they need to leave the country, they’re only coming here to use NHS resources.’ A common phrase was: ‘They’re only putting it on to block their removal.’ I’ve actually heard [senior staff] say: ‘These people are putting it on.’ It was endemic … even the senior management structures were saying this, it was a mindset.”

Oh well – now it’s all kiosks, so problem solved.