As requested…and I’ve been thinking I would do more of it anyway, because I like it too, and they’re public domain.

I’ve had a big poster of this one on my bathroom wall for years. Monet, Apple Trees in Bloom.

… Read the rest

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The BBC talked to the Norwegian woman punished for being raped in Dubai. She is Marte Deborah Dalelv.

Ms Dalelv says she had been on a night out with colleagues on 6 March when the rape took place.

She reported it to the police, who proceeded to confiscate her passport and seize her money. She was charged four days later on three counts, including having sex outside marriage.

That certainly strikes an outsider as a very odd criminal justice system – one that grabs the passport and money of a foreign woman who reports being raped.

Her alleged attacker, she said, received a 13-month sentence for extra-marital
sex and alcohol consumption.

No no no, try to focus. The issue isn’t … Read the rest

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When I signed this petition my signature was number 24, and it needs a LOT more than that. So please both sign it and publicize it on social media.

63-year old Josephine Komeh is a courageous fighter against FGM/Cutting in Sierra Leone who opposed it in the most practical way – by refusing to cut girls and young women herself. She was severely tortured because she had defied the traditional authorities that maintain this brutal practice.

Josephine sought asylum in Britain, where the Government condemns FGM, but the Home Office plans to deport her on 24th July. She will face further torture back in Sierra Leone unless she agrees to cut. There is no-one there to protect her: her husband

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A Norwegian woman went to Dubai on a business trip. It didn’t go well.

She was raped.

Thinking that the police would help her, she reported the rape to them… and  ended up in jail, her passport stripped from her. She spent three days there  before she was allowed to use a phone to call her family. They, in turn, called  the Foreign Ministry and the Norwegian Consulate, who were able to get the woman released into their custody. They took her to the local Norwegian Seaman’s Center, where she stayed for 6 months until her sentencing.

If that’s not enough to outrage you, her sentence will be: she will be spending 16 months in jail. Alone, in a

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A blazer of trails.

When Ms. Thomas took a job as a radio writer for United Press in 1943 (15 years before it merged with the International News Service to become U.P.I.), most female journalists wrote about social events and homemaking. The journalists who covered war, crime and politics, and congratulated one another over drinks at the press club were typically men.

Covering war, crime and politics was mostly a guy thing.

She worked her way into full-time reporting and by the mid-1950s was covering federal agencies. She covered John F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign in 1960, and when he won she became the first woman assigned to the White House full time by a news service.

Ms. Thomas was also

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An end of the day amusement. Don’t be drinking anything when you watch this.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6W2NNCUilo

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And speaking of don’t do that, Bruce Gorton did a column about geek sexism yesterday.

When it comes to sexism geeks have a serious problem just talking about it.

We have such a huge problem talking about it that the fact that women gamers are talking about it is seen as censorship. Think about how twisted the logic has to be, that so many arguments amount to some guy telling women to shut up – for the sake of free speech.

And gaming isn’t the only place where this happens. The atheist community was rocked by women in atheism calling for an end to sexual harassment at conventions not that long ago.

Atheist activism currently focuses heavily around breaking the

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SpokesGay has joined the More Than Men blog and done a debut post. It’s titled Gays, Don’t Do That (see what he did there?) and it says really, don’t.

Now. Let’s get right to the pissing-off-of-gay-doodz. Mainly white gay doodz. Before you wrap your peaches in freezer paper, though, understand this: All the things I list below I’ve been guilty of. Every one of us ambles about in an oblivion bubble about something(s). It’s part of the human condition. Doucheitude doesn’t have to be a terminal disease, but managing it requires acknowledging the illness.

And hoo-boy, is there a problem. These past two to three years have been a horrific. . . enlightenment. . . about the pervasive,

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The Texas Taliban continues its war on women, Amanda Marcotte reports. Fetal heartbeat this time. Got a heart beat? Abortion forbidden! Slut leaves the fetus there long enough to develop a pulse, she’s stuck with it, the slut.

Like the lush at the bar who can’t stop himself from ordering one more round, some Texas Republicans don’t know when it’s time to give it up for the night. Drunk off the win of passing a bill into law that will shut down most abortion clinics in the state and ban abortions after 20 weeks, three Republican state legislators introduced yet another anti-abortion bill Thursday.

This one, which is even less likely to get far in the lower courts than

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Alex Gabriel reports on Creationism and fundamentalism in Keswick.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5w0DzQEBIjE

Alex transcribed much of it. AM=audience member; P=preacher.

AM #10: No no no no no, I’m asking, d’you not think you are scared – you are scared?

P: I’m telling you what I think. I think that atheism is a crutch for people who are scared of Judgement Day, and they… they cling to the… the… the ridiculous lie of evolution in order to silence their conscience that tells them they are guilty before God, and that they know that they’re accountable because they’ve lied, stolen, looked at porn on the internet, when they’ve slept around, sinned outside of marriage. All sex outside of marriage of one man, one

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Turkey is now going to have halal blood.

Wut?

I don’t know. That’s what they say.

A recent Turkish Red Crescent initiate is set to be turned into a factory-supported production process, making medicine out of Turkish people’s blood in order to rule out any risk of non-Islamic dietary impact, according to the organization’s head, Ahmet Lütfi Akar.

Akar told daily Hurriyet that the move could both eliminate dependence on drugs imports, as well as providing Muslim Turks with assurances that their medicine complies with their religious codes.

Uh huh. Because if it’s Turkish blood, it’s clean, and if it’s kaffir blood, it’s dirty. That’s always a great way to think about people.

“For instance, if we are buying

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Via Taslima – a study shows that chimps and orangs can have episodic memories after three years.

It has been well established in humans that sensory cues like songs and smells can help transport our minds back to the past.

The team, led by Gema Martin-Ordas of Aarhus University, Denmark, used the same principle. They found that cues – keeping the experimental set up the same – triggered the apes’ memories.

They observed that 90% of the apes who experienced the event three years earlier found the tool in the correct location almost instantly.

“Our data, and other emerging evidence, keep challenging the idea of non-human animals being stuck in time,” said Dr Martin-Ordas.

“We show not only that chimpanzees

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For dessert at the end of the day – another painting that’s not in a stove. Flowering Orchard, from the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.

I’ve been there once, years ago. That’s one museum that really impresses on you the difference between the real thing and pictures in books. The real paintings practically vibrate on the walls. It’s a wonderful, overwhelming experience.

… Read the rest

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Atheist Ireland has made a submission to the Irish Constitutional Convention, looking to get blasphemy out of the Irish Constitution.

3. Why the Irish blasphemy law in particular is harmful

…

(ii) The preamble to our Constitution states that all authority of the State comes from, and all actions of the State must be referred to the Most Holy Trinity. It also humbly acknowledges all of the obligations of the people of the State to Our Lord Jesus Christ.

That’s just a bonkers thing to have in a constitution. Just nuts. That’s not the kind of thing it’s reasonable to expect an entire population to agree to or submit to! You can’t demand agreement on something that’s not decided by … Read the rest

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Mohammed Hanif warmly thanks Adnan Shaheed for his generous letter to Malala Yousafzai.

Thanks for owning up that your comrades tried to kill her by shooting her in the head. Many of your well-wishers in Pakistan had been claiming the Taliban wouldn’t attack a minor girl. They were of the opinion that Malala had shot herself in order to become a celebrity and get a UK visa. Women, as we know, will go to any lengths to get what they want. So thanks for saying that a 14-year-old girl was the Taliban’s foe.

Then he moves on to theology.

Like you, there are others who are still not sure whether it was “Islamically correct or wrong”, or whether she deserved

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A new Dan Cardamon.

How can you tell what a woman wants at any particular moment, I mean, come on.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Efcqo1r4NCw

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One article from the Asian Human Rights Commission leads to another, like this one from July 3 about the murder of one woman who was a women’s rights activist, followed by the murder of her sister who was trying to pursue the murder case.

Dear friends,

The Asian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) has received updated information regarding the murder of Ms. Shamim Akhter (50), who worked for the Social Welfare organization in Tando Jam, Sindh province. She was brutally chopped to death by her husband Mr. Sajid Mahmood and Police Constable Usman Lodhi on 4 June 2013 (For further information, please see our recent urgent appeal: AHRC-UAC-092-2013).

Now, we have learned that Shamim’s younger sister, Ms. Tasleem Akhter, who

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Via Małgorzata – in Pakistan, a young woman stoned to death for having a mobile phone.

Arifa, a mother of two, has been stoned to death on the orders of Panchayat (a tribal court) for possessing a cell phone. She was executed on 11 July in the district of Dera Ghazi Khan in Punjab province. The victim was stoned to death by her uncle and relatives on the orders of Panchayat after she was found to have a mobile phone.

There’s something wrong here.

I know that’s an understatement, but it’s also the problem. There’s something wrong. There’s something wrong when on the one hand there’s a trivial matter like possession of a mobile phone (on which it would in … Read the rest

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