“In a speakout on sexual violence at Yale University, the most common theme was a new crime that has been largely ignored: when a woman stipulates a safe, or nonpenetrative, sexual encounter, but the man ejaculates into her against her will. AIDS education will not get very far until young men are taught how not to rape young women and how to eroticize trust and consent; and until young women are supported in the way they need to be redefining their desires.”

–Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth, 1991

Edward Woollard, the student who threw a fire extinguisher from the roof of Britain’s Conservative Party headquarters during raucous protests last November, was sentenced to 32 months’ imprisonment today.

Woollard, 18, was one of thousands of students and other activists who stormed the Millbank Tower building during the course of an anti-fee protest. Woollard threw the empty extinguisher from the roof of the building to the plaza below — his attorney said he aimed it at an unoccupied area, but police said they had to scurry away to avoid being hit.

The act was instantly condemned — not just by outside observers, but by protesters themselves, who immediately took up a chant of “stop throwing shit!”

In court, Woollard’s attorney described his client as “mortified … shocked, dazed, and horrified” by his action in its aftermath. Woollard turned himself in to police on November 15, after he was identified in the media, and pled guilty to the charges against him.

Woollard has been studying at a sixth form college this year, and had been hoping to be admitted to a university in the fall. He will serve at least half his sentence in an institution for youthful offenders.

Administrators and students at the University of Puerto Rico have been locked in struggle for weeks now over a planned tuition increase, with a student strike largely bringing operations to a halt before the Christmas break.

Officials have announced that they intend to re-open the university tomorrow, January 11, and student leaders have announced that they intend to resist that attempt.

Activists posted the above video on YouTube yesterday, articulating their vision for the university. They titled it “Once Uno Once” — “Eleven One Eleven” — in reference both to tomorrow’s date and to UPR’s structure: eleven campuses making up one university.

The video is in Spanish, but you can follow along with an English-language translation by clicking the Closed Caption button on the YouTube player. Here’s a transcript of that translation:

We want an autonomous self-governing university with the necessary resources and the power to decide over its destiny without political intervention from the government.

We want a university of outstanding quality, internationally recognized for its academic excellence.

We want a public university, seen as an investment and not an expense; as (a) social capital and not as a political arena of governors in power.

We want an equally accessible university for everyone: where youths of working class families can also have the opportunity of living the university experience. Where higher education can be a right and not a privilege.

We want a democratic university where administrative and academic decisions can be taken with real openness and transparency between the men and women who form the university’s community: students, workers and professors.

We want a university where solidarity and a compromise with our country prevails, where projects are in constant development to help us serve our most important responsibility: the fullest development of our society in all its knowledge dimensions.

We are many, but one.

Eleven campuses, one university of Puerto Rico.

One university for one country.

[Caption: Eleven One Eleven, 11.1.11. The strike continues. On January 11, everybody to the university!]

Who died yesterday in Tucson?

A trial-level federal judge, John Roll, on the bench for twenty years. A lawyer who gave up the much higher salaries of the private sector for the rewards of sitting behind a bench doing justice every day.

A congressional staffer, Gabe Zimmerman. Not just any congressional staffer, but a director of public outreach. The guy whose job it is to meet with constituents, wrangle local issues, set up events like the one he was attending yesterday morning.

A nine-year-old kid, Christina Taylor Green, just elected to her lets-pretend school council. A kid who jumped at the chance to tag along when a family friend announced she was going to meet her Congresswoman.

Three older people — Dorothy Murray and Dorwan Stoddard, both 76, and Phyllis Schneck, 79. We haven’t heard much about these three yet, but anyone who has spent any time around local politics could give you a guess about what they were doing there. Community events attract the elderly — folks with time to spare, opinions on issues, a sense of the importance of civic participation. Folks with a hunger to be engaged, to be involved, to listen and be heard.

These six shared something in common. They were all the kind of people who, finding themselves with some free time on a sunny Saturday morning, could think of no better way to spend it than to schlep out to a supermarket parking lot to wait on a line next to a folding table for a chance to hang out with an elected official for a few minutes.

And that’s a beautiful thing.

The comment thread from Sarah Palin’s Facebook post on yesterday’s Tucson shooting, as it looked this morning at 8:35 am:

Same thread, six minutes later:

The comments from which the above Giffords quote was taken were made on MSNBC in March 2010, and can be found in full here.

Update | I should say a bit about why I posted that quote on Palin’s site, I guess. Commenters there have gone far beyond the (reasonable) claim that Palin’s rhetoric had no direct connection to yesterday’s tragedy — they’re claiming that Palin used no violent rhetoric at all, and that the current criticism of Palin’s speech is just after-the-fact piling on. I think that’s not just false, but demonstrably false, and it seemed to me that Gabrielle Giffords’ own words, spoken almost a year ago, were the best way of showing that.

The question of what role Palin’s words and images — and those of her friends and allies — played in yesterday’s events will be debated at length in the weeks to come, and may never be satisfactorily answered. But it is a fact that Gabrielle Giffords was the target of a sustained campaign of political violence and harassment in the last year. It is a fact that she drew explicit connections between that campaign and the rhetoric of Sarah Palin. And it is a fact that she called for such reckless, inciteful speech to stop.

It’s a fact that Representative Giffords criticized Sarah Palin’s “gunsight” graphic ten months ago. And it’s a fact that Sarah Palin left that graphic up online until yesterday afternoon, when Giffords lay in critical condition in a hospital — and a federal judge, a Congressional staffer, an idealistic nine-year-old, and three other Americans lay dead.

It’s a fact.

Second Update | It’s worth noting that Palin’s people are perfectly happy to allow extremist rhetoric from the right to stand in comments at her facebook site. Take this comment, posted hours before mine and still (as of 10:48 am) up, for example:

“This guy was a Hitler worshipper, a pure socialist. If you want to blame anyone, try the left wing agenda. She was against the Obamacare and all the radical left. She was a moderate democrat. That is what made her a target of the left. I would not put it past Obama and his regime to have perpetrated this horrific action. Chicago politics at it finest.”