Category Archives: Uncategorized

Tory MP Paul Maynard claimed over £10k in expenses for biscuits, soap and coasters

Tory MPs doing away with need for satire – they are satire on responsible democratic government – problem is that they are actually the government!

Pride's Purge

(not satire – it’s the Tories!)

Tory MP Paul Maynard has been in the news recently for labelling as extremists campaigners who want the government to assess the impact that benefit cuts are having on the sick and disabled.

Like most Tory MPs, he probably thinks benefits paid to the disabled are a waste of taxpayers’ money.

Unlike the £10,007.77 of taxpayers’ money Maynard himself claimed as expenses in just 5 months for things like soap, coasters and biscuits presumably:

MP’s biscuit claim among expenses

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Domestic Violence in Lebanon: A Law Isn’t Enough

A Separate State of Mind | A Blog by Elie Fares

Let’s call her Rachel.

Rachel is a brilliant doctor. She went to the US from a far away country, battled her way through a speciality and ended up doing a subspecialty that brought her salary to the six figures. She had what many people – not just women – around the world can only dream of: economic stability and independence, influence, power.

And yet, Rachel went to work one day with a bruise on her arm. Her secretary asked her where that bruise had come from. I bumped into a revolving door, Rachel answered. The secretary was skeptical but dismissed it because she couldn’t do otherwise. A week later, Rachel came in with a bruised eye. There was no revolving door which can cause this, so the secretary called 911 who made sure Rachel’s upcoming days were nothing short of safe, away from the monster back home who was using…

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Why I Was Arrested for Peacefully Protesting a Radical Legislative Agenda | Food & Water Watch

Denying hospice care to sick people is just wrong. Eliminating 17,500 pre-school slots for four-year-olds is just wrong. Eliminating tax credits for 64,000 military families is just wrong. The people of North Carolina deserve better. Thankfully, Moral Mondays allow us to come together and fight for what we deserve.

via Why I Was Arrested for Peacefully Protesting a Radical Legislative Agenda | Food & Water Watch.

Volunteers get a deal!

Ohio Valley Greenmarket

   GM Logo

We are in need of volunteers for Ault Park on Sunday August 4

Volunteers will help direct vendors to their assigned set-up locations, direct guests to specific areas of the Greenmarket festival, pass out information in the speakers tent, set-up chairs, maybe direct some traffic, count festival attendance with one of those cool click-counters, hand out water, answer questions you may not know the answers to, and help with clean-up.

Time slots are available in two shifts on Sunday.

  • Volunteers will receive discounted tickets to the Community Dinner (save $20/person)
  • A swag bag filled with goodies from sponsors (neat stuff!)
  • A 1-year subscription to Edible Ohio Valley ($28)
  • Lunch from Chipotle + gift cards

TOTAL VALUE OF $100+

*** Two volunteer shifts on Sunday, August 4 ***
9a-2p & 1p-6p

I want to VOLUNTEER!
Community Dinner on Saturday + Volunteer Sunday

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AP Exclusive: The CIA and a secret vacuum cleaner – Wire Politics – The Sacramento Bee

Confined to the basement of a CIA secret prison in Romania about a decade ago, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the admitted mastermind of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, asked his jailers whether he could embark on an unusual project: Would the spy agency allow Mohammed, who had earned his bachelor’s in mechanical engineering, to design a vacuum cleaner?

The agency officer in charge of the prison called CIA headquarters and a manager approved the request, a former senior CIA official told The Associated Press.

Mohammed had endured the most brutal of the CIA’s harsh interrogation methods and had confessed to a career of atrocities. But the agency had no long-term plan for him. Someday, he might prove useful. Perhaps, he’d even stand trial one day.

And for that, he’d need to be sane.

“We didn’t want them to go nuts,” the former senior CIA official said, one of several who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk about the now-shuttered CIA prisons or Mohammed’s interest in vacuums.

via AP Exclusive: The CIA and a secret vacuum cleaner – Wire Politics – The Sacramento Bee.

Turkey Has a Role in Egypt

Nervana

Originally published in  Al-Monitor

On July 9, Egypt’s Foreign Ministry summoned the Turkish ambassador over Ankara’s calls for UN intervention in Egypt, following the controversial ouster of President Mohammed Morsi. The sharp deterioration in the relationship between the two nations could not be more different than the warmth Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan received on his visit to Cairo in September 2011. The hero’s welcome Erdogan received — which came only a few months after Egypt’s revolution against former President Hosni Mubarak — stemmed mainly from his ability to present the Egyptian public with a possible third way for politics, which was distant from the traditional fight between the generals and the Islamists. Many in Egypt viewed Erdogan as the man who stood against the military, and also offered the right balance between Islam and politics.

In post-Mubarak Egypt non-Islamist Egyptians trusted neither the ruling Supreme Council of the…

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Erdogan Plays the Headscarf Card – Al-Monitor: the Pulse of the Middle East

One of the lessons of the protests is that younger Turks are far more accepting of each other’s differences. This helps explain why there were covered women who marched shoulder to shoulder with anarchists and gays. A group of uncovered women academics and journalists — myself included — recently petitioned the government to scrap any law that prevents covered women from holding elected or bureaucratic office.

 

Not that it will make a difference. Erdogan’s reluctance to allot power to covered women has less to do with politics than with a deeply engrained patriarchy that cuts across party lines. Only 79 of Turkey’s 550 lawmakers are women. More than half (45) are from the AKP. “Women are twice removed from power,” comments White, “once by their sex, and also by their piety.” And if covered women are fielded by the AKP in the 2014 local elections, she says, “They will end up in ‘the shop window’ — as the Turks say — not in any position of responsibility or power.”

via Erdogan Plays the Headscarf Card – Al-Monitor: the Pulse of the Middle East.

Learning to love – or at least like – my race photos

Fit and Feminist

By now it’s pretty much part of my racing routine. A few days after running a race, I’ll get the email directing me to my race photos, which I will then follow (even though I know what awaits me, because I am a masochist), and then I will click through my race photos with a growing sense of dismay and horror that supplants the feelings of pride and badassery that once occupied the part of my brain dedicated to feelings about that particular race.

Here, listen in my brain as my internal Anna Wintour starts in with the inevitable litany of criticism.  What am I doing with your face? Why does your face look like a big, shiny eggplant?  That top makes you look like a rectangle – never wear it again. Your thighs look like a waterbed. Your belly is bulging over your shorts. Why are your arms so…

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Some Vegetables and Fruits With a Side of Rape

Nuestra Vida, Nuestra Voz


Our vegetables and fruits come with a side of rape and sexual abuse. That’s right. Rape.

Did you know that many of the farm workers who pick our fruits and vegetables are undocumented? It isn’t enough that they’re underpaid and exploited for their labor. Many are also raped and sexually assaulted while being threatened with being fired if they say something.

It is almost as if immigrant bodies have become public property. Property for many to use and misuse as they please. From not having access to health services, being deported and exploited to being raped.

The fear of deportation and of not being able to provide for their families forces immigrants to stay silent. But not anymore.

Frontline‘s latest documentary entitled, Rape in the Fields, follows a group of women who are raped and/or assaulted at work. The documentary also highlights the rape culture that dominates our…

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