The BBC is still reporting on the kidnapped schoolgirls in Nigeria. Their reporter there, Will Ross, says the government is saying 99 girls are missing but parents are saying it’s 150 to 200.

The attack on the school in Chibok, a remote part of Borno state, happened late on Monday with gunmen reportedly storming the school, stealing food supplies and ordering the students onto lorries.

On Wednesday, the military said most of the abducted students had been freed “as troops pursuing the terrorists close in on the den of those believed to have carried out the attack”.

But Mr Olukolade said it was based on a report “filed in from the field indicating that a major breakthrough had been

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Richard Attias at the Huffington Post points out the lack of coverage of the kidnapping of more than 100 schoolgirls in Borno, Nigeria.

The Western media has made barely a mention of this story and appears resigned to ignore this abduction, which is an act of terror and unprecedented barbarism against these students whose only crime was to go to school.

That’s actually not true. It may be true of US media, but it’s not true of for instance the BBC World Service – it was the top story on Wednesday and it got a lot of minutes. He probably had no idea how much coverage there was in French, German, Swedish, Spanish etc etc media. Be careful  not … Read the rest

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For refreshment after that – the new xkcd.

… Read the rest

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NSFW

Two more, for the total of three, at the Art Show and Silent Auction at the American Atheists’ Convention in Salt Lake City.

I’m told this one is hanging just below one of Neil DeGrasse Tyson.

This one is sculptural; the hand is part of it.

… Read the rest

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NSFW

So the American Atheists Convention is going on this weekend – Easter weekend, you know. Tom Flynn has the glory of giving the Easter sermon.

There’s an art show and auction. I loved the one last year. I kept wandering back to it to gaze some more.

But this year…There’s one guy who has a bunch of portraits of The Godmen of Atheism, and along with them – some naked women. The Godmen are all fully dressed, and the women, not so much.

Like this one:

See the oh so witty caption? “What glass ceiling?” Hahaharight, because naked woman among all the Godmen in suits – yeah that’s busting the glass ceiling all right. And the Women’s Rights barcode? … Read the rest

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Boko Haram has kidnapped more than 100 schoolgirls from the town of Chibok in Borno State.

The government closed all schools in Borno three weeks ago because of frequent attacks in which hundreds of students have been killed in the past year. The girls who were kidnapped had been recalled so they could write their final exams.

The extremists have been using abducted students as cooks, sex slaves and porters.

Boko Haram has been on a rampage this week, blamed for four attacks in three days that started with an explosion at a busy bus station during the Monday morning rush hour in Abuja, the capital, which killed at least 75 people.

Two attacks in northeastern villages killed 20 people

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From the Guardian:

Few writers have produced novels that are acknowledged as masterpieces not only in their own countries but all around the world. Fewer still can be said to have written books that have changed the whole course of literature in their language. But the Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez, who has died at the age of 87 after suffering from Alzheimer’s disease achieved just that, especially thanks to his novel One Hundred Years of Solitude.

Since its publication in 1967, more than 25m copies of the book have been sold in Spanish and other languages. For at least a generation the book firmly stamped Latin American literature as the domain of “magical realism”.

Born in the

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Another message to men – specifically geek guys – about sexual harassment.

That women are harassed online is not news. That women in comics and the broader fandom cultures are harassed online is not news. That these women are routinely transmitted anonymous messages describing graphic sexual violence perpetrated upon them for transgressions as grave as not liking a thing… that is actually news to me, and it’s probably news to a lot of you guys reading this.

But it’s not news to a lot of women I know, and to women whose work you’ve read here and around the Web.

Nope, it’s not.

The Internet is a boon to humanity. It is also terrible. That is its special nature.

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This business of rape being something that’s done to the man who owns the woman who is raped…I watched some of the 1959 movie Anatomy of a Murder the other day, and was struck by something the defense lawyer-protagonist (Jimmy Stewart) said. One character said of another, “He was a nice guy.” Jimmy Stewart responded, “Yeah, a nice guy, except for his habit of raping other men’s wives.”… Read the rest

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The horror…

A woman in India sought to enact revenge on her daughter’s rapist, so she got four men, including her own husband, to gang rape the wife of the accused man.

According to reports, the revenge rape, which happened in Barabanki, Uttar Pradesh, India on Sunday, left the accused rapist’s wife struggling for life on the side of a road.

The mother of the teenage girl that was originally raped allegedly called on three men and her husband to rape the wife of her daughter’s rapist in retaliation for the crime. The four men wound up abducting the woman, taking her to an area near a police station in a neighboring village, and gang raped her.

Later on, the

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Another piece of annoying waffle about Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Brandeis, this one in The New Republic. Isaac Chotiner muddles it from the beginning:

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the outspoken (this is almost a euphemism) Somali-Dutch opponent of Islam, was recently offered an honorary degree by Brandeis University. The school, which apparently only recently became acquainted with some of her comments about the Islamic faith, decided to revoke the offer of the honorary degree and instead invite her to campus for a dialogue.

No. It wasn’t “we want to switch the honorary degree to a dialogue.” Brandeis revoked the award (it wasn’t an offer at that point, because Hirsi Ali had accepted), period. It also said she was welcome to come … Read the rest

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This could happen to anyone.

On March 14, 2013, a 63-year-old atheist writer named Aleksandr Kharlamov was arrested in his hometown of Ridder in the east region of Kazakhstan and tried under the country’s Criminal Code Article 164 on charges of “inciting religious hatred” for articles he wrote criticizing religion. According to Forum 18 News Service based in Oslo, Norway, Kharlamov’s sentence included a month of enforced psychiatric detention and five months in prison. During that time Kharlamov lost 44 pounds.

An atheist writer. I’m an atheist writer. I’m trying to imagine being arrested and imprisoned for that.

[T]he American Humanist Association connected with Kharlamov and supported his legal efforts with a $2,000 donation as part of its increased work

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North Dakota went a little too far, a judge has ruled.

A federal judge has struck down a North Dakota law banning abortions if a fetal heartbeat can be detected, calling the law “invalid and unconstitutional.”

The law, passed by lawmakers in the state just over a year ago, bans abortions as early as six weeks into pregnancy and is considered the most restrictive in the country.

Another loss for the “it’s not your body any more, IT’S THE BABY’S” crowd.

U.S. District Judge Daniel Hovland, who is based in Bismarck, cited the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision by the U.S. Supreme Court, saying “no state may deprive a woman of the choice to terminate her pregnancy at

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It’s not just Oklahoma. Florida passed a bill last year barring local governments from enacting mandatory paid sick time laws. The Orlando Sentinel reported on June 14:

Florida Gov. Rick Scottdidn’t waste much time in signing a bill Friday that would block local governments from enacting mandatory paid sick time measures, such as the one pending in Orange County.

The Republican governor sided with Walt Disney World, Darden Restaurants, the Florida Chamber of Commerce and a broad array of powerful business interests who argued the ban was needed to avoid a patchwork of local employment rules for companies.

That’s code for “to avoid having to pay for workers’ sick leave.”

“Protecting small businesses and jobs from

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Originally a comment by DrMcCoy on When openness is taken as an absolute.

as few as 1.5% of open source programmers are women [...] chauvinism, assumptions of inferiority, and outrageous examples of impropriety (including sexual harassment at conferences where programmers gather) to a lack of women mentors and role models

A shame. really. :/

This is why I’m glad at least GNOME’s Outreach Program for Women exists. There should be more programs like that, though.

But the outcry on reddit and Phoronix when it was announced that the GNOME Foundation had a temporary cash flow problem. People yelling that the GNOME Foundation was wasting their money on that “useless” program and how they’re using donations to push their political … Read the rest

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Michael Nugent and a priest, Gearoid O Donchu, on RTE’s Liveline with Joe Duffy talking about whether priests should report child rapists whose rapes they learn of via the confessional. Michael starts briskly with

It’s one of these things where the Catholic church thinks their own internal rules trump the law of the land.

They go on to discuss a hypothetical in which X tells a priest in the confessional that X has poisoned the communion wine. The priests says shocking things, and Michael says how shocking they are and what this shows about the way religion corrupts morality.

It’s great stuff!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X7WpMpMY11Q… Read the rest

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