The BBC on Rahaf al-Qunun’s escape to Canada:

The UN’s refugee agency has said it considers her to be a legitimate refugee.

Refugee status is normally granted by governments, but the UNHCR can grant it where states are “unable or unwilling to do so”, according to its website.

Thai immigration officials told Reuters that Canada had “granted her asylum”, however Canadian officials told the BBC they currently have “nothing to confirm” on the issue.

I didn’t know the UNHCR can grant refugee status on its own; that’s useful.

The BBC talked to another Saudi woman.

Rahaf is an inspiration. But she’s not the first one who did this and definitely not the last one.

What we are going through is awful. We think about this every day because us women here do not know what it feels like to go out. We don’t know what freedom tastes like.

Dad keeps my passport with him all the time, we go to hotels and he puts it next to him when he sleeps.

Unfortunately it’s not a revolution. Every girl that is tweeting about this, it’s either that she has already escaped or she’s using a fake account like me. Some people tweeted me or DMed me to tell me to use my real account, for me to be brave.

We do not want the guardianship any more. I want to go out of the house and drink coffee from Starbucks. I don’t have to take my whole family. This is just way too harsh on us.

Living this life is exhausting.

Don’t let anyone tell you MBS is “reforming” anything.

Meanwhile in Burma:

A court in Myanmar has rejected an appeal by two Reuters reporters jailed for breaking a state secrets act.

Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo were sentenced to seven years in September in a case condemned around the world.

They exposed the summary execution of 10 Muslim Rohingyas by the security forces during the military’s anti-Rohingya operation in 2017.

State murder shouldn’t be protected by state secrets acts.

When arrested the two were investigating a mass execution of Rohingyas, hundreds of thousands of whom have been forced to flee destruction and persecution in the northern Rakhine province of Myanmar (also called Burma).

UN investigators have called for top Myanmar generals to be investigated for genocide, and criticised the country’s de facto leader Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi for failing to stop the attacks.

The massacre the reporters were investigating is the only one the Burmese government has admitted. Myanmar’s military – which says its operations targeted militant or insurgent threats – had until then insisted its soldiers carried out no unlawful killings.

Reuters editor-in-chief Stephen J Adler called the court’s rejection “yet another injustice” against the pair.

“Reporting is not a crime, and until Myanmar rights this terrible wrong, the press in Myanmar is not free,” he said in a statement.

I don’t suppose the Trump administration will apply any pressure.

White nationalists marching in Princeton:

A white supremacist group — the New Jersey European Heritage Association — plans to host a march in Princeton Saturday, a move that local officials say they don’t condone, but can’t stop.

Now look here – that’s my hometown, and that’s no good. (It’s also quite surprising, because Princeton is frankly very up itself…but then come to think of it that’s probably why they chose it. “Take that, you exurban preppy elleetist snobs.”)

The Princeton Police Department was notified that flyers were posted around town advertising the march, which is happening in Palmer Square. The department will have a strong presence in the area Saturday, Chief Nick Sutter said.

“We want everybody to be able to demonstrate peacefully and (get) their voices heard,” Sutter said. “We don’t want any provocations or altercations to take place.”

Sutter also encouraged any groups or people who may be planning counter-protests to register with the police department so they can obtain a permit and police can ensure everyone has a space.

Fight fiercely Harvard, fight fight fight
Impress them with your prowess, do.

In November, a group held an “It’s OK to be white” march on Nassau Street. Similar racist and anti-Semitic posters have also been found hanging at Princeton University.

The Princeton I grew up in was so genteel about its racism.

Good news:

#BREAKING: Saudi teen who fled family will leave Thailand for Canada on Friday night – Thai immigration chief (Reuters) https://t.co/Zuz42w27ne

— Natasha Fatah (@NatashaFatah) January 11, 2019

The AP has more:

Thailand’s immigration police chief says a Saudi woman who fled alleged abuse by her family will leave Bangkok for Canada.

Police Chief Surachate Hakparn says the 18-year-old woman, Rahaf Mohammed Alqunun, is leaving on a flight late Friday evening. He gave no other details.

He earlier said that several countries including Canada and Australia were in talks with the U.N. refugee agency on accepting Alqunun.

Well done Canada.

This doesn’t mean she has refugee status now, but it’s a step in a good direction.

Hmmmm.

AP FACT CHECK: Democrats put the blame for the shutdown on Trump. But it takes two to tango. Trump's demand for $5.7 billion for his border wall is one reason for the budget impasse. The Democrats refusal to approve the money is another. https://t.co/9IWnqUgl2d

— AP Politics (@AP_Politics) January 9, 2019

The rapist’s demand for the woman to spread her legs is one reason for the rape. The woman’s refusal to comply is another.

Justin E. H. Smith on the higher bullshit:

Derrida means nothing without his Parisian institutional setting, but once that setting comes into focus, he continues to mean nothing, though now in a different way: he means nothing, individually, because the tricks he was encouraged to perform that so dazzled the crowds at Johns Hopkins and Irvine were taught to many others just like him, who would all of course insist on their own uniqueness, would claim they were always outsiders to the true French intellectual elite, but only because you cannot enter the tightest nucleus of this elite if you do not claim to be an outsider to it, all the while, all of them, yielding up only minor variations on the same recipes.

The logic of this performance of outsiderness is the same as in many genres of popular music, where the whole delicate game is to appear to maintain your street cred as a bad boy who disdains the major record labels and the award shows, all the while clamouring for such distinctions.

I like that because it describes so much of what passes for lefty politics right now, especially the union of ferocious policing and punishment with proud displays of awesome rad woke specialness.

Better for some, then, to go far away, where the rules of the game are not so transparent, where you’ve got no Bourdieu hounding you and exposing your every move as really nothing more than the species-specific behaviour of Homo academicus francogallicus. Like top chefs who travel far to ply their trade, Derrida found that the crowds at his distant destinations could not make any distinction between what was inspired in his words, and what was inherited, what was the product of a singular mind, and what the generic template of an earlier acculturation. The most conventional dishes will get French chefs raving reviews if they go and open a restaurant, perhaps calling it ‘Ooh-La-La’, in a strip mall in Orange County (an example drawn from my true memory of a suburban California childhood). That is the whole secret of Derrida’s decades-long mystification of the Anglophone world.

It helps a lot that Americans are so far away and so very provincial. It apparently never occurred to the smitten-by-Derrida even to ask how his colleagues saw him, let alone to suspect that he was nowhere near as groundbreaking as his Anglophone reputation made him seem.

It is, moreover, nothing short of the highest species of farce that the likes of Ronell were permitted for so long to use university offices as their deconstructionist romper rooms, to develop their tiny cults of personality and have their imagined French romances, only because administrators, unable to understand what the lit professors were talking about, assumed that it was just very difficult and profound philosophy, and saw that whatever it was all about was economically useful for the cultivation of institutional prestige.

While it lasted.

The BBC tells us:

Victims of forced marriages overseas will no longer have to take out loans to pay for their return to the UK.

It emerged last week in an investigation by The Times that those unable to cover flights, food and shelter were made to take out an emergency loan.

Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt said the policy was changing as victims “may have endured particular suffering”.

Existing loans will be written off and the women’s passports returned.

The Foreign Office is going to try to get the money back from the people who arranged the forced marriage, which seems only fair.

Deutsche Welle reports that the Trump administration has downgraded the diplomatic status of the EU delegation to the US.

The unannounced move by the US State Department, which has not previously been reported, downgraded the EU delegation’s diplomatic status in Washington from member state to international organization.

“We don’t exactly know when they did it, because they conveniently forgot to notify us,” an EU official who is familiar with the matter told DW in an interview.

“I can confirm that this has not been well received in Brussels,” the person said, adding that the issue and an official EU response was still being discussed.

Welllll who needs Europe when we can have Russia, Turkey, Saudi Arabia? Europe is for what Trump calls elleetissts.

A Washington-based diplomat of an EU member state also confirmed the downgrade and denounced the move.

“This is clearly not simply a protocol issue, but this is something that has a very obvious political motive,” the person said. The diplomat added that the negative view of the EU mission downgrade was shared by the majority of member states.

After discovering the downgrade, EU diplomats in Washington reached out to the State Department, which is responsible for diplomatic affairs, for clarification. “They have told us that they forgot to notify us and that this is a decision they have taken because that is apparently what the chief of protocol thinks is the proper thing to do,” the person said.

Meaning, it’s what the Trumpies told them to do.

The diplomatic downgrade of the EU’s mission in Washington appears to be in line with what is widely being perceived as an anti-EU stance by the Trump administration.

Trump was an avid supporter of Britain’s exit from the European Union during his presidential campaign, and as president has repeatedly lashed out at the European Union on issues such as trade and defense.

Europe isn’t authoritarian enough for Trump’s tastes.

Russell Berman in the Atlantic:

Eric Young is the president of the union that represents the approximately 30,000 employees of the Federal Bureau of Prisons who are working during the government shutdown.

Young’s members, scattered at 122 facilities located in largely rural areas across the country, aren’t being paid and don’t know when their next paycheck will come. Like the leaders of virtually every federal-employee union during the past three weeks, he has condemned the shutdown and its toll on innocent workers as “unconscionable.”

“My personal opinion,” Young told me over the phone from his office in Arkansas, “is that it constitutes involuntary servitude.”

Neither Young nor any of his partners in union leadership, however, will urge their members to do the one thing that would seem most natural for employees facing the same treatment in the private sector: If they don’t pay you, stay home.

“We can’t call or advocate for a strike,” Young said.

Why? Because of the highly regressive Taft-Hartley act of 1947, which made it illegal for federal employees to go on strike. As far as I know it’s also illegal to force people to work for no pay, but heads the bosses win, tails the workers lose.

The current shutdown is a partial one affecting roughly 800,000 federal employees. Roughly half of them are on furlough, while the other half, whose jobs are considered essential to public health and safety, must report to work even though Congress has not appropriated the funds to pay them. This category includes the Secret Service agents who protect the president and his family, the Transportation Security Agents, pilots, and air-traffic controllers who keep the aviation system running, the corrections officers who staff federal prisons, and, yes, the Border Patrol agents who guard the southern divide with Mexico along which Trump wants to build a wall.

If they don’t show up, “they’d be considered absent without leave,” said Jacque Simon, the policy director for the American Federation of Government Employees, by far the largest union representing federal employees. “When they’re told to come to work, they are required to come to work.” An awol designation could lead to disciplinary action, including termination. For longtime government employees, that could put in jeopardy a federal pension they’ve spent a career accruing, union leaders said.

Trump doesn’t care. He said last weekend that they will “make an adjustment,” which is meaningless, but he doesn’t care. He’s not having to do without, and neither is Princess Ivanka, and that’s all he cares about.

Meanwhile this vehicle we’re trapped in is racing toward the cliff.

President Trump slammed his hand on a table and stormed out of a White House meeting with congressional leaders on Wednesday after Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California said she would not fund a wall along the southern border, dramatically escalating the confrontation over the government shutdown.

Stunned Democrats emerged from the White House meeting declaring that Mr. Trump had thrown a “temper tantrum.” The president’s allies accused Democrats of refusing to negotiate. Then he tweeted that the meeting was “a total waste of time.”

As opposed to rage-tweeting, and withdrawing emergency aid to victims of wildfires, and watching Fox News for 8 hours a day? Those are valuable uses of time are they?

Moderate Republicans who entered the room confident that senators were coalescing around the idea that the government should be reopened while the border security debate continues left disappointed, convinced that for now, the party would follow Mr. Trump perilously further into a shutdown with an uncertain end.

A handful of them, including Cory Gardner of Colorado, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Susan Collins of Maine and James Lankford of Oklahoma, pressed Mr. Trump on the mounting impact on federal workers and related industries in their states. His response was consistent.

Of course it was, because he’s a selfish stubborn piece of crap who doesn’t care how much misery and desperation he is causing as long as he gets his own way.

But, in much better news –

Incredible news for Saudi teen @rahaf84427714.

The UN says she should be granted asylum in Australia as a refugee.
This the power of a Twitter campaign and the bravery of one young woman.#SaveRahaf #رهف_محمد_القنون pic.twitter.com/2x06dFYrRe

— Natasha Fatah (@NatashaFatah) January 9, 2019

https://twitter.com/rahaf84427714/status/1082961242979938304

Kudos to the Government of Australia !!! @Liam_Cochrane @australian @SkyNewsAust @westaustralian @PravitR #RahafMohamed #RahafMohammedalQunun #RahafMohammed #Rahaf #Saudi #SaudiWomen @veen_th @JeromeTaylor @RichardBarrow @leunigcartoons pic.twitter.com/JbisWws7GE

— stephff cartoonist (@stephffart) January 9, 2019

Make America demonic again.

Photographer: Al Drago/Bloomberg