Praise for Gandhi assassin caps acrimonious Indian election campaign

Faux-Hindu nationalist fascists!

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PM admonishes candidates who lauded Mahatma Gandhi killer as a ‘patriot’

Campaigning in the most acrimonious election in recent Indian history has ended with an admonishment by the prime minister, Narendra Modi, of some of his hardline candidates for praising Mahatma Gandhi’s assassin.

A six-week campaign dominated by national security issues and increasingly brazen rhetoric came to a head this week after a candidate for Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) in Madhya Pradesh state said she believed Gandhi’s killer, Nathuram Godse, was “a patriot”. She later apologised. Three other BJP members also weighed in on Gandhi’s murder.

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Trump scam got family to pay $400,000 for a literal hole in the ground

CNN’s Erin Burnett this week has blown the lid off a scam involving President Donald Trump that saw a California family fork over $400,000 for what they thought would be a luxury condo at a Trump resort — but that turned out to be a literal hole in the ground.

In her report, Burnett talked with a woman named Sandra Sapol, who in 2006 bought a condo at what was supposed to be a new Trump-branded property called the Trump Ocean Resort Baja Mexico.

Sapol said that a woman selling condos at the resort met with her and showed her brochures of what the resort would look like — and they came complete with an endorsement from Trump himself that guaranteed people would have “the time of their lives” at his new resort.

“Whatever Donald Trump touches turns fantastically gold,” Sapol said in explaining her reason for buying the condo.

But the resort was never built and Sapol lost all the money she invested. On the site of where the hotel was supposed to be constructed is a giant hole in the ground — and nothing more.

“There’s my hole!” Sapol said while choking back tears. “That’s what I bought, my hole!”

Burnett went on to explain how the people selling the condos were using Trump’s brand under a licensing deal under which they misled buyers into believing they were buying property directly from Trump himself.

“In the brochure, it says, ‘Developed by one of the most respected names in real estate, Donald J. Trump,’” Burnett explained. “In fact, here’s a letter from the developer and Donald Trump’s name is at the bottom!”

“This looks deliberately misleading because the president’s signature… is right on the bottom of the letter!” commented CNN host Jim Sciutto.

Are we inadvertently feeding the anti-abortion monster?

Content note: this post discusses abortion, forced pregnancy and rape

As the USA slides ever-closer into fascism, states are functionally outlawing abortion. There’s resistance, thank goodness, it’s not passing by unremarked. But as with every time abortion bans rear their ugly head, many of us find ourselves falling into a trap: we begin to say “but what if someone is forced to carry an unviable pregnancy?” “But what if a woman was raped?” “But what if being pregnant causes enormous health problems?”

I’ve fallen into this trap myself, too many times.

We never say “But what if someone decided they just don’t want a kid?”

And why would we? There’s nothing emotive about someone who finds themselves knocked up and doesn’t want to spend nine months with swollen ankles only to find themselves saddled with stress incontinence, stretch marks and a screaming brat. A lot of people resent that figure. That person is a bitch. We don’t raise the example of a non-binary person or a man whose dysphoria is exacerbated by pregnancy: that shit’s too complicated. So we favour the ones who sound innocent. It feels comfier making the argument.

A lot of it is internalised patriarchal bullshit, because we’re all carrying it around with us, and we find ourselves projecting it onto those vile womb-botherers, trying to come up with examples that maybe, just maybe, they’ll relate to.

We are all missing the point entirely when we bring up our most emotive, most innocent examples to try to explain why the unforgivable things that are happening are dangerous and terrible. Our point should not be that some good people will be harmed. The only reason anyone should need to give to access an abortion is “I do not want this embryo or foetus inside me.”

It’s not an argument about whether a young rape survivor deserves to be harmed. It’s an argument about basic bodily autonomy. Should you be forced to be a meaty incubator just because you have the internal gubbins to function that way? Of course not. Some people think we should, and they’re scary as fuck, and you know what? We can’t reason with them, no matter how emotive our examples may be, because at their core, most of them believe we’re skin draped around a reproductive tract.

Perhaps some can be swayed, and that’s even scarier. Imagine, for a moment, that you hit the mark. The governor of Georgia blinks in shock and says “Shit, of course abortion should be legal if someone’s been raped!” How would that be enforced? If you can think of a not-completely-horrifying way that a rape survivor could access abortion while stopping everyone else from accessing it, you deserve a Hugo for your incredible eye for fantasy. It would require so much invasive and traumatic testing – and considering how invasive and traumatic a criminal investigation of rape is anyway, and with so little chance of a successful prosecution, functionally all you’ve gained is some additional invasion and trauma.

This is the risk we run when we begin throwing around some situations where it feels most like an exception should be made. We can’t means-test bodily autonomy, and we mustn’t.

More than five years ago, I wrote this manifesto for the demands we must be making, taking the proactive fight to the disgusting creeps who think our uteruses are their business. We need to do this. We need to look at that Overton window and chuck a fucking brick through it. We need to insist on abortion access centred around bodily autonomy: if you don’t want that embryo or foetus inside you, you must have the right to end that pregnancy safely and legally.

As well as this, we need to support those who need support to access a safe, legal abortion if they’re banned from it. In the UK, consider supporting the Abortion Support Network, who help people from Northern Ireland, the Isle of Man, Malta and Gibraltar travel to access legal abortion. Yes, a reminder that one of the countries in the UK actually has harsher abortion law than Georgia or Alabama’s. If you’re aware of groups providing support in other countries, please leave a comment.

We all need to fight this together, and we all need to support each other. Let’s not cede ground just to try to win an argument.

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These Tiny Teeth Suggest Neanderthals Evolved Earlier Than We Thought

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Deep within the Atapuerca Mountains of northern Spain, a cave called the “Pit of Bones” became the final resting place for some very tiny ancient teeth. The teeth aren’t just tiny—they’re unusually small, almost shrunken in comparison with the Neanderthal skulls they came from. According to Aida Gómez-Robles, who works at University College London as an anthropologist, this strange size discrepancy could suggest that Neanderthals and modern humans split off far earlier than previously thought. She published her findings on May 15, 2019, in Science Advances.

To be fair, scientists have never been able to agree precisely when we diverged from Neanderthals. Previous DNA estimates suggest the two groups split around 400,000 years ago, according to the study. But these tiny teeth don’t fit squarely into that timeline. Though they date back 430,000 years, they look eerily similar to the teeth of Neanderthals that lived much later, with features distinct from those of Homo sapiens.

According to Gómez-Robles’s past research, hominid teeth evolve at a relatively standard rate and tend to become smaller over time. The teeth of the last known common ancestor of Neanderthals and modern humans were larger and more primitive, according to the study. So in order for Neanderthals to develop teeth as small and distinctively shaped as those found in the Pit of Bones, they would have needed to split from Homo sapiens much earlier than previously thought. As Gómez-Robles told Science, “there wasn’t enough time for Neanderthal teeth to change at the rate [teeth] do in other parts of the human family tree”

To test this theory, Gómez-Robles calculated the rate at which the teeth found in the Pit of Bones would have needed to evolve after Neanderthals split from their common ancestor with Homo sapiens, according to Science. According to these models, Neanderthals would have needed to split from Homo sapiens somewhere between 800,000 and 1.2 million years ago.

Not everyone’s convinced. The paleoanthropologist Rick Potts, who directs the Smithsonian’s Human Origins Program, believes researchers shouldn’t jump to conclusions that all dental rates of evolution would be this standard, according to a story in Smithsonian Magazine. Gómez-Robles says it is possible that the teeth simply evolved at an unusually rapid rate due to the genetic bottleneck effect seen in remote, isolated populations. But she believes this rapid evolution would have resulted in other physical changes beyond the teeth, as she told Smithsonian.

The “Pit of Bones,” or Sima de los Huesos, has been an enormously significant treasure trove for scientists studying the remains of early humans. It’s also a chillingly accurate name. The depression extends more than 46 feet below the surface, topped with layers upon layers of bones from cave bears. But under the bear bones, the pit holds one of the largest collection of human fossils found anywhere in the world, National Geographic reports. Archaeologists have unearthed over 6,500 human bones from the cave, including several nearly intact human skulls—a real needle in the haystack as far as 300,000-year-old human remains go. One of Sima de los Huesos’s most remarkable skulls opened up a 430,000-year-old murder mystery, bearing two fractures on its forehead that came from “multiple blows” from someone with “an intention to kill,” the BBC reports.

If Gómez-Robles is right, she may have filled in a crucial blank in the timeline of humanity’s family tree. Her research would rule out any possible shared ancestral species between Homo sapiens and Neanderthals that evolved 800,000 years ago. If she’s wrong, at least she’s now intimately familiar with some very old, very tiny teeth.

This Town Didn’t Want to Be a Radioactive Waste Dump. The Government Is Giving Them No Choice.

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PIKETON, OHIO—David and Pam Mills have grown tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, and okra on their secluded Appalachian property for about 18 years now. This will be the first year the retired couple doesn’t. They just can’t trust their soil anymore. Not with what’s being built barely a five-minute walk away.

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Rise of the far-right in Spain: The suspicious victory of far-right group Vox in a tiny town in Ávila | In English | EL PAÍS

Could a change in the law and the nuns who run a residence for women with learning disabilities have seen to it for the party to get most votes in Gotarrendura?

Source: Rise of the far-right in Spain: The suspicious victory of far-right group Vox in a tiny town in Ávila | In English | EL PAÍS