In the News

Here is some stuff in the news today...

[Content Note: Terrorism; death; abduction; misogyny] Today, a teenage girl with a bomb strapped to her blew up a crowded bus station in Damaturu, Nigeria, killing at least 15 people and wounding more than 50 others. "No one claimed responsibility for the bombing in Potiskum but the main suspect is likely to be group Boko Haram... Witness Musa Ayuba, who was knocked over by the force of the blast, said the girl arrived at the Tashan Dan Borno bus station in a rickshaw and was trying to board a bus when she detonated the bomb." This is "the second such attack there this week. ...On Sunday, a girl with explosives strapped to her killed five people and wounded dozens outside a market in Potiskum." Both girls are being commonly being called "suicide bombers," which suggests consensual participation in the terrorist acts. But: "The use of female suicide bombers has become a common tactic of Boko Haram since last year as the group expanded territory and became stronger and more deadly." Also since they abducted hundreds of girls? I strongly suspect and fear and grieve that these girls are not willing volunteers in these missions.

[CN: Sexual harassment] Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has stepped down from his position, effective immediately, after a female colleague alleged that he sexually harassed her. "Last week, a 29-year-old researcher accused the 74-year-old Pachauri of making physical advances and sending lewd text messages and e-mails, according to a copy of the complaint and her lawyer." And get this shit: "It's 'understandable' that Pachauri resigned while he faces 'allegations against him in India. The allegations are unrelated to his post as chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,' Bob Ward, policy director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics, said by e-mail." Oh. They're unrelated. So it doesn't matter if the chair of an international science organization sexually harasses his colleagues, as long as he doesn't do it on that particular job? Cool.

[CN: Police brutality; torture] Spencer Ackerman continues his reporting on the "Chicago police practices that echo the much-criticized detention abuses of the US war on terrorism": "The Chicago police department operates an off-the-books interrogation compound, rendering Americans unable to be found by family or attorneys while locked inside what lawyers say is the domestic equivalent of a CIA black site."

[CN: Misogynoir; racism; body policing] On the Oscar edition of Fashion Police, a show that should immediately be put into a cannon and fired directly into the sun, Giuliana Rancic made [video may autoplay] shitty, implicitly racist comments about Zendaya's locced hair. And Zendaya had plenty to say about that. Right on. (If you can't view/read the image, Bedhead has a transcript here.)

[CN: Anti-immigrant sentiment] After US District Judge Andrew Hanen "temporarily blocked" President Obama's executive action on immigration, the Justice Department vowed to appeal, and, yesterday, the Justice Department asked Judge Hanen to lift the temporary hold.

Meanwhile, a related showdown in Congress threatens to suspend funding for the Department of Homeland Security, because Republicans are not budging, even though Obama's above-referenced executive action which was the ostensible reason for their petulance has been put on hold. The editors of the Washington Post write: "Why not treat the policy issue as moot, which it is for the time being, and keep funds flowing? The answer, it seems, is that the fervor of Republican partisanship, especially in the House, is immune to logic beyond an insistence on victory at any cost—the cost in this case being the imminent shutdown of a critical chunk of the federal government." Yup.

[CN: Classism] Austin, Texas, is the most economically segregated city in America, based on research that combines "measures of segregation by income with ones tied to educational level and to the type of job a person has, and created an index of overall economic segregation in hundreds of U.S. metro areas." The researchers found: "People with higher educational credentials tend to cluster, especially in densely populated metro areas, and members of the 'creative class' tend to self-segregate into concentrated neighborhoods while people who work in service industries aren't able to do the same and end up scattered. Residential segregation is therefore driven primarily by the choices that wealthier, higher-earning people make about where it would be cool to live." Of course. Call it hipster segregation.

I guess it's only called "lying" when one of the hoi polloi does it: "Veterans Affairs Secretary Robert McDonald apologized today for mistakenly saying in a videotaped exchange with a homeless man that he had served in the special forces, though his service was entirely with the 82nd Airborne Division. 'Secretary McDonald has apologized for the misstatement and noted that he never intended to misrepresent his military service,' a White House officials told ABC News."

[CN: Animal endangerment] And finally! Tiny sweaters for tiny penguins! Which is the most adorable thing humans have ever had to do for animals because we are terrible and destroying their environment.