Poor Mojo's Newswire

Last week we reported Israel supporters were pressuring the Newseum to drop two Palestinian journalists, Mahmoud al-Kumi and Hussam Salama, from its yearly event honoring reporters killed in the line of duty. Al-Kumi and Salama worked for Al-Aqsa television and were killed in the Israeli assault on Gaza last November. Although the Newseum originally defended their inclusion, this morning the Washington, DC-based museum dedicated to the news industry announced that al-Kumi and Salama would in fact not be a part of today's ceremony.

Shortly after he first heard about the policy under consideration at an April meeting of Kutztown’s Administrative Council, the president of the faculty union, Dr. Paul Quinn, began receiving anonymous death threats. Faculty first learned of these threats at a May 9th meeting of the union’s Representative Council and the Morning Call reported on the threats this past Friday. I spoke with Quinn over the weekend about what happened. Quinn, a physics professor, said after his classes on Thursday, May 2, he walked into his office to find that someone slipped a folded note under his office door. “At first, I didn’t think anything of it,” he said. “I opened the note and it said, ‘Drop the gun issue or else.’” Quinn said that after he read the note he immediately made several calls, including one to the Executive Director of Kutztown’s Human Resources department. She told Quinn to go to the police immediately. “I alerted my Chair and my Chair said yes, go.” Quinn and a union representative met with Kutztown University’s Director of Police Services and Acting Chief of Police, John Dillon shortly afterwards. “The only time I could get there was around two o’clock,” Quinn explained. “I had an office hour from 1:30 to 3:00. So, I normally would have been in my office. I went at two o’clock to deliver that note to Public Safety. When I got back an hour and a half later, there was a second note under the door. The second note said, ‘What scares you more, guns or death?’” “What this means,” Quinn said, “is that someone was watching.” “What’s weird is that I have not taken a position on this new policy,” Quinn said.

A prominent barrister specialising in reproductive rights has called for the age of consent to be lowered to 13. Barbara Hewson told online magazine Spiked that the move was necessary in the wake of the Jimmy Savile scandal to end the "persecution of old men". She also said that complainants should no longer receive anonymity. The NSPCC called her views "outdated and simply ill-informed" and said to hear them "from a highly experienced barrister simply beggars belief". Her remarks come after a number of high-profile arrests over allegations of historical sexual offences in the wake of the Jimmy Savile scandal.

RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — Sgt. 1st Class Naida Hosan is not a Muslim — she’s a Catholic. But her name sounded Islamic to fellow U.S. soldiers in Iraq, and they would taunt her, calling her “Sgt. Hussein” and asking what God she prayed to. So before deploying to Afghanistan last year for her second war tour, she legally changed her name — to Nadia Christian Nova. This did not solve her problems. Instead, matters escalated. Nova complained to her superiors about constant anti-Muslim slurs and jokes. She says they responded with a series of reprisals intended to drive her out of the Army, leading her to consider suicide. “My complaints fell on deaf ears every time,” said Nova, 41, a member of the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division based at Fort Bragg, N.C. “Any time I would say something about it I was treated like I didn’t know what I was talking about or that I’m an idiot or that I was a Muslim sympathizer. It was just a very lonely feeling.”