… here, at Boing Boing.

For your blogger’s small role in this tale, type Righthaven into her search engine.

Well, there you go. You can’t get a better, more graphic instance of the threat to free thought in universities than that. Tunisia’s Manouba University, where the flag switch took place, is on the front lines of the university’s defense, and its women students – threatened, as usual, most severely – seem to be leading the fight (see the photograph accompanying the article to which I’ve linked). The Salafists note that university women get to wear niqabs/burqas (both face-covering clothing) in other countries:

“We demand a prayer room and access for all students wearing the niqab to classes and exams, as is allowed in the United States, Britain and Germany,” said Mohammed Bakhti, a spokesman for the Salafi students.

He is too modest. His group also demands gender segregated classrooms. And gender segregated instruction… And it’s funny… Tunisia… strong links to France, and yet he doesn’t list France. Because burqas are illegal in France. They will probably be banned this year in Italy. Canada has begun partial bans, as has Sweden. Spain looks close to a ban.

By the way, there are plenty of schools in Britain that ban the burqa. A Norwegian professor has banned the burqa in his classrooms. The beat goes on.

Righthaven, which sued your blogger (search RIGHTHAVEN on this blog), has been dying by inches for more than a year. Now a judge has killed it off entirely, having taken away all of its copyrights (Righthaven was a copyright troll) in an effort to collect on some of the outfit’s many debts.

The only question left to old UD, as this post’s headline suggests, is whether she wants to try recovering damages.

The defendants may go after the Review-Journal, the Denver Post and Righthaven’s investors — [attorney Steve] Gibson and the owner of the Review-Journal — since Righthaven itself doesn’t seem to have any assets they can go after.

Lawyers and JPs will have to ask women wearing burqas to show their faces before witnessing their signatures under tough new laws in New South Wales.

Asking a woman to show her face for a moment so you can verify her identity? This is a “tough” new law?

UD‘s buddy Carl Elliott is one of the few writers eloquent and informed and tenacious enough to worry any and all corrupt corners of the American scientific establishment – inside and outside of universities.

William Heisel, at Reporting on Health, notes that Slate magazine has pulled a recent piece Carl wrote for them because one of the people mentioned in the piece hired a lawyer to write a letter threatening a defamation suit.

Today, Slate retracted a well-researched commentary by Dr. Carl Elliott about the ethical controversy surrounding Celltex Therapeutics, a company marketing unlicensed stem cell injections, and the American Journal of Bioethics (AJOB).

Celltex recently hired the editor of AJOB, Glenn McGee, and other bioethicists have charged that McGee has been running the journal while working for Celltex. Following the criticism, McGee announced today that he has quit Celltex.

The company works in a medical and ethical gray area, harvesting adult stem cells from fat and injecting them into other parts of the body without solid evidence that the procedures work. Bioethicist Leigh Turner at the University of Minnesota has suggested that the company’s work looks exactly like something that would prompt action by the U.S. Food & Drug Administration.

Heisel’s post contains links to all of the relevant documents, articles, and letters. He points out that a libel suit, given McGee’s public profile, would be almost impossible to win; but, as this case demonstrates, the threat is sometimes enough to chill speech.

… talks about a professor at the University of Tromsø (the best Northern Lights YouTubes are from Tromsø) who has banned niqabs from his classrooms.

[The professor] quoted a parliamentary decision “that says a teacher may request to see the face of those who are taught. This is to do with covering the face, not hats or religious symbols.” [Okay, so he’s within his rights.]

The niqab covers a woman’s face apart from the eyes, and is most commonly worn in Arabian peninsula Arabic countries such as the UAE (United Arab Emirates), Oman, Yemen, and Saudi Arabia.

Whilst France introduced a ban on niqabs last year, Norway’s far-right Progress Party (FrP) has also suggested penalising women who wear these and burkas in public. [So only Norwegian reactionaries think this would be a good idea?]

Labour Party (Ap) deputy leader Helga Pedersen stated, “I’m against burkas and niqabs. We don’t want a society where people are concealed from top to toe.” [Ah. At least one Labor politician agrees.]

Professor Aarsæther’s policy has been greeted with a mixture of both conditional support and discouragement.

Senior Tromsø police station officer Morten Pettersen told Nordlys it is legal to wear niqabs in public but not during demonstrations, parades and the like. [And what of the parliamentary decision the professor cites?]

Leader of Tromsø’s Muslim community Alnor, Sandra Maryam Moe, finds it “disappointing that he [the professor] chooses to exclude someone for wearing a niqab. This is neither about a disciplinary, nor a behavioural problem.” [No – it is about a pedagogical problem. Like many people, he has serious difficulty interacting with a person whose face he can’t see.]

“I hope this is just a storm in a teacup. Norway is an open and inclusive country. One should accept the people who use the niqab here because they are so few in number, as well as let them make use of the opportunities they have in our society,” she said to NRK, doubting the lecturer’s claim that the niqab creates problems with student-teacher communication. [One of the opportunities women have in Norwegian society – as opposed to Saudi society – is that they can live a normal human life, on an equal footing with men. As a Norwegian, one should not accept the grotesque inhumanity of the burqa, even if its wearers are few in number.]

Government education officials [say] such a move is neutral and non-discriminatory, but Ole Petter Ottersen, Rector of the University of Oslo says they have no power to stop niqab-wearing students from attending lectures. [So which is it? Do professors have a right to see their students’ faces or not?]

Statement from Florida Representative Allen West:

President Obama is …very adept at promulgating deceptive language masquerading as policy, actually just insidious political gimmickry. This “tax policy” is an example as well as today’s speech on his “energy policy” shall be. Here is the bottom line, last night it took 70 dollars to fill the tank of my 2008 H3 Hummer…

Just how much more are Americans supposed to put up with?

Satan-slayer.

A community in Maryland has suspended negotiations over a sister-city agreement with Beit Shemesh following violence in the Israeli city against women by haredi Orthodox residents.

Montgomery County, which is home to a large Jewish population, was at the end of the process to ink the sister-city arrangement with the Jerusalem suburb when disturbances by haredim outside a Modern Orthodox girls’ school and other assaults on women in the area were reported internationally.

Negotiations over a sister-city relationship began in 2007, according to the Washington Post.

Gevalt. Who knew that UD‘s own Montgomery County, Maryland, was after linking arms with the most woman-phobic city this side of Kunduz!

Think of the sister-city events she’ll miss because of the suspension of negotiations: Stoning women wearing half-sleeves, forcing women to sit in the back of buses, erasing images of women from public signage, making women worship behind blind walls, AND (UD was looking forward to this most of all) spitting on eight-year-old girls as they walk to school and calling them stinking whores! Where the hell else but in UD‘s almost-sister-city can you get fun like that? Subsidized by the government?

From Andrew Sullivan:

Oklahoma legislators introduced a bill yesterday that says “the life of each human being begins at conception.” But state Sen. Constance Johnson, a Democrat, decided that the bill, SB 1433, didn’t go far enough to protect unborn children. Johnson added an amendment to the bill, posted online by The Lost Ogle, that says life actually begins at ejaculation: “However, any action in which a man ejaculates or otherwise deposits semen anywhere but in a woman’s vagina shall be interpreted and construed as an action against an unborn child.”

From Virginia:

Irked by abortion bill, Va. senator adds rectal exams for men

The state Senate this afternoon gave preliminary approval for legislation that would require pregnant women to undergo ultrasound imaging before an abortion, but not before rejecting a Democratic senator’s attempt to add what she described as “a little gender equity” to the bill. Democrat Janet Howell of Fairfax County proposed requiring men to undergo a rectal exam and a cardiac stress test before getting prescriptions for erectile dysfunction drugs such as Viagra. “This is a matter of basic fairness,” Howell said…. “It’s requiring [women] to have unnecessary medical procedures, it’s adding to the cost and it’s opening them up for emotional blackmail,” she said on the Senate floor today.

And now Mississippi:

Mississippi State Rep. Steve Holland, a Democrat, introduced a bill in the state’s lower chamber calling for the part of the Gulf of Mexico that borders his state to be renamed the “Gulf of America.” A local Latino GOP organization called on Holland to withdraw the measure. “If this bill passes the legislature and is signed into law, perhaps it is time to rename the Mississippi River,” wrote Bob Quasius, Café Con Leche’s president, in the letter. “After all, sharing a name with a state that wants to rewrite maps out of disdain for Mexicans would be a disgrace to the rest of the nation.”

Tunisians rally to hold back the Salafist tide.

Of course women were at the forefront of this protest, since they have the most to lose. Salafists have already occupied a university, demanding an end to its no-burqa policy (they were eventually made to leave).

Among them, many Muslims.

Israel’s haredim.

Longtime readers may recall UD‘s encounter two summers ago with a Las Vegas law firm or company or whatever they were (they don’t seem to exist, much, anymore).

The guy who did her was Coons.

… who came to her door two summers ago with legal papers. But life is strange.