Luring men under the pretext of EKG or ultrasound

London Times article on the not-so-creeping Talibanization of the North-West Frontier Province of Pakistan, including banning women voting. The central government keeps saying this sort of thing won’t be tolerated, and then keeps tolerating it. The article leaves out some important details, including the size and population of the province, and, while it mentions that male doctors have been banned from treating female patients, doesn’t say how many female doctors, if any, there are in the province. I know that when this was enacted two years ago, there were no women trained in ultrasound, and just one in EKGs. The worry was that the doctors would be sexually stimulated, and that women would “lure men under the pretext of ECG or ultrasound.” Hoo baby.

There’s a whole big thing going on between Poland and Belarus, which is more than just a diplomatic confrontation since there is a large ethnic Polish population in Belarus. Lukashenko is claiming that not just Poland and Lithuania but the US are actively trying to depose him.

It was on the bottom of the NYT’s front page, but got no play elsewhere: in the run-up to yesterday’s vote on the godawful energy bill, which does nothing to make automobiles more fuel efficient, the EPA delayed the release of an annual report showing that American vehicles are now less fuel-efficient than they were in the 1980s.