1. In the Indonesian province of Lampung, three transwomen were reportedly hosed down by authorities on Friday evening. Officers from the Public Order Agency (Satpol PP) of Pesisir Barat Regency apprehended the three waria (an Indonesian portmanteau combining the local words for female and male) at a local tourism spot. Then they were hosed down using water from a fire truck. The Satpol PP officers were saying it was a form of "mandi wajib" which is an Islamic bathing ritual required to cleanse one off of Junub, the state of ritual impurity after sexual intercourse or seminal discharge. There have been no reports of charges being pressed against the officers over the incident.
2. The right-wing conspiracy theorist, Liz Crokin, has a message for everyone before Election Day saying that if you vote for Democrats, you are obviously supporting the rape, murder, and torture of children. She also said before that Satanic pedophiles were going to kill us all.
3. In Florida, April Dawn Thomason, a woman who ran over and killed a pedestrian, then said it happened at least partly because she was distracted while talking to God. She was sentenced to 32 years in federal prison. She killed a woman in 2015 and blamed a combination of drug withdrawal and God. On Monday, she received her three-decade-long prison sentence.
4. In Jamaluddin Wali area of Sadiqabad, Pakistan, two girls were first abducted and raped by an influential landlord and when the victims returned home, their uncle killed them to "restore honour". The police have lodged the case of the incident whereas three person have been arrested. The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan reported an average of 650 honour killings over the past decade but likely to be much higher as most of the cases go unreported.
5. Amal Hussain, an emaciated 7-year-old whose portrait of her lying on a hospital bed in northern Yemen got published in The New York Times, had died at a ragged refugee camp four miles from the hospital. She died on Thursday. Her mother, Mariam Ali, wept during a phone interview and said she is worried for her other children. She was discharged from the hospital in Aslam last week, still sick, as the doctors needed to make room for new patients.
6. Less than two weeks after singer Sinéad O’Connor announced that she had become Muslim, she tweeted this:
“I’m terribly sorry. What I’m about to say is something so racist I never thought my soul could ever feel it. But truly I never wanna spend time with white people again (if that’s what non-muslims are called). Not for one moment, for any reason. They are disgusting.”
7. Kenneth Mayle, a self-described "non-theistic Satanist" has been battling for more than a year to consider his case to get "In God We Trust" off the money. He represents himself and argues that the phrase on money is a way for the government to force a belief in God upon him. Last year, the U.S. District Court tossed out his complaint and he appealed the decision but the U.S. Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the earlier decision against him. Mayle is now asking the Supreme Court to look at his case.
8. Yeshiva Oholei Torah, a pro-vaccine Orthodox Jewish school in New York, is being forced to defend its decision not to grant admission to an unvaccinated child, even amid an ongoing measles outbreak. Parents Shalom and Esther Laine submitted a request for a "religious exemption," and the school denied it. The court rejected the request for a preliminary injunction but the case is not over. A judge has to determine whether schools have the right to deny admission to unvaccinated kids.
9. The Kentucky county clerk who denied gay couples their legal marriage licenses in 2015 because Jesus told her not to do her job, Kim Davis, lost her election. The gay man who couldn't get a marriage license, David Ermold, was one of her potential opponents but Ermold lost the primary to Elwood Caudill, the man who just beat her in the Election. Ironically, he is also the same person who lost the Democratic primary to Davis in 2014 by those 23 votes.
10. A huge Facebook page for atheists, We F*cking Love Atheism, got shut down. The page was unpublished and the administrators were not even told which post violated Facebook's terms and conditions. The admins identified as LJ and Kat, started a Change.org petition to reverse the decision. The page is now back: https://bit.ly/2JQPYOd
