All you really need to know to understand this story is that “estuprador” means rapist, “corta” means cut, “pênis” means penis (fancy that), and “polícia” means police. Oh, and it helps to know that the “estuprador’s” victim wielded the knife.
“Quando ele tentou violentá-la, a mulher cortou seu pênis com uma faca. Ela depois colocou o membro em um recipiente de plástico e o levou para a delegacia de polícia de Jhalakathi como prova do crime”, indicou à AFP o chefe de polícia local, Abul Khaer.
I guess it helps to know that Bangladesh is 89.5% Muslim. We’ll have to wait to see if turnabout is considered fair play in that part of the world.
I remembered reading this from The Village Voice in 2008 while I was reading this in The Weekly Standard from last week about David Mamet’s conversion of the left to the right, liberal to conservative. The first article, an essay actually, by Mamet himself, had the better title: “Why I Am No Longer a ‘Brain-Dead’ Liberal.” The second is the story of what’s happened since.
Read both. Maybe–if you find yourself on the left bank–you’ll be persuaded to convert too. After all, his family looks happy.
The Economist gets the thumbs up for the best line of the week. In an editorial titled “Damned,” the magazine laments the possible loss of DSK’s ideas because of his fall from grace. “They are more important [than him,” the editorial says. And why? Well among other things, he stood to become the first Socialist Party candidate to win the presidency of France since François Mitterrand ate Ortolan Bunting.
That’s important because DSK apparently knows something his party doesn’t (bolding mine):
The danger now, as Socialist alternatives line up, is that the party sloughs off its modernising aspirations and reverts to type. Unlike parties of the left in Britain or Germany, France’s Socialists have yet to digest the sour reality that wealth needs to be created before it can be distributed. Their draft manifesto includes a jaw-dropping pledge to reverse France’s minimum retirement age, which has only just been raised from 60 years to 62. The Socialists’ reflex is to tell the French that they need to be “protected” and “sheltered”. However, the French cannot for ever defy the laws of economics and protect themselves with costly benefits that only pile up huge public debts for future generations. France’s tragedy is that Mr Strauss-Kahn, who understood that, misunderstood so much else.
Elder Jeffrey R. Holland, a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles was in the Middle East recently to, among other things, organize the Abu Dhabi Stake and the Bahrain District out of the Manama Bahrain Stake.
Latter-day Saints in the area has tripled, from 900 when the first stake was formed 28 years ago to 2,700 today, a division was needed. The original Arabian Peninsula Stake was organized by Elder Boyd K. Packer, now President of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles.
Why didn’t I know there was a stake in the middle of the Middle East? I mean, do you know were Abu Dhabi is? Again, courtesy of the CIA:
When I say middle of the Middle East, I mean right in the middle:
Walter Russell Mead says it was Palestine and that all the bruhah about his Israel/Middle East speech is overblown or downright wrong. I agree. He writes:
On substantive grounds, it is hard to see what Obama’s critics have in mind. The US position is and has always been that the 1967 borders are the starting point for negotiations. UN Security Council Resolution 242, the basis for all negotiations on this question since it was passed in 1967, makes that very plain — although that resolution does not demand an Israeli withdrawal from all of the territory it conquered in the war. President Bush never deviated from this position; neither has President Obama. Israeli prime ministers including Likud prime ministers like Ehud Olmert have accepted this for years. This is standard diplospeak boilerplate. It is a non-statement, a platitude, even a bromide.
His post comes with a nifty little map of the controversy, courtesy of the CIA:
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