Story here. Excerpt:

'(CBS) The city that will soon outlaw toys in McDonald’s Happy Meals could have a measure banning circumcision on next November’s ballot, reports CBS San Francisco.

“It’s genital mutilation,” said Lloyd Schofield, the author of a San Francisco ballot measure that would make it a “misdemeanor to circumcise, excise, cut or mutilate the…genitals” of a person under 18.

Baby boys in San Francisco may be relieved but not everybody agrees with a proposed ban.

“I just had him circumcised 3 weeks ago,” said Heather Wisnicky of Sacramento, mother of Tyler, a 6-week-old baby boy. “It’s a health issue. It’s cleaner,” she said.

Scientists with the Centers for Disease Control are still studying whether circumcisions are healthier, and have promised recommendations to the public. Meanwhile, according to the New York Times, a CDC researcher reported a sharp drop in the number of American parents choosing circumcision in hospitals - from 56 percent in 2006 to less than 33 percent last year.'

Link here. Excerpt:

'How To Write About Circumcision
A guide for bloggers and journalists
...
Circumcision is really, really trivial, so it doesn't really matter what you write. Flippancy is essential. Make sure you use the word "snip" at least once, and any wordplay, such as "snip the tip" is guaranteed to cause hilarity. Because circumcision is so trivial, anyone who opposes it may be ridiculed.
...
Mention the African HIV-circumcision trials and imply they prove that circumcising developed-world babies will reduce their chance of getting HIV by "up to 60%" (or 70% or 80%, whatever you're happy with)
...

By all means interview couples who decided to circumcise their sons. You can safely attribute any frivolous reasons you happen to support to them. Bathroom splatter, zipper injury, teasing by friends, all belong here.
...
By all means interview doctors who make their living from circumcision. Their motives are purely altruistic, as they will tell you themselves.'

Story here. Excerpt:

'HOUSTON (AP) — A woman who tied her husband to the bed, stabbed him 193 times and buried his body in the backyard is lying when she claims she did so after years of abuse, prosecutors told jurors Monday during her sentencing hearing.

Susan Wright, 34, is being re-sentenced for the 2003 murder of her 34-year-old husband, Jeffrey. She was initially sentenced to 25 years in prison, but the Texas Court of Appeals last year tossed the sentence, agreeing with Wright that her trial lawyers were deficient because they failed to present testimony from witnesses that would have bolstered the abuse claims.

During her opening statement Monday, Harris County prosecutor Connie Spence told jurors Wright lied about being physically abused by her husband to try to justify the killing.

Blog entry here. Excerpt:

'After three years of legal battles, Ohio father Benjamin Wyrembek has finally been reunited with the little son who was wrongfully taken from him. In Ohio high court right to unite father, son (Toledo Blade, 10/24/10), Fathers and Families Board Member Robert Franklin, Esq. recently explained:

This month, the Ohio Supreme Court finally cleared the way for Benjamin Wyrembek of Swanton to be united with his biological son, who will turn three years old this week. That should have happened long before now.

But for almost three years, attorneys for an adoptive couple in Indiana who have raised the child since birth have kept the case tied up in court, separating father and son.

News story here. Excerpt:

'OTTAWA - Marriage should be promoted as a way to civilize men and cut down on social ills such as crime, substance abuse and homelessness according to an Ottawa think-tank.

An Institute of Marriage and Family Canada paper cites marriage as helping men become more nurturing, improving their health outcomes and even making men better workers.

The paper quotes Ottawa Senators general manager Bryan Murray as saying marriage improves the games of his players.

“You’re more committed. You have something to go home to,” Murray told a reporter in October. “I think these guys start to realize that there are other people depending on what they do with their lives.”

Status of Men, authored by the institute's research manager Andrea Mrozek, looks at what role the decline of marriage may play in the lagging results educators and sociologists are seeing in boys.'

Report here. Excerpt:

'The Irvine Unified School District is the latest target of the feminist assault on any institutions not dictating exact equality in athletics. The National Women’s Law Center, wielding Title IX, has filed complaints against the school district for allegedly discriminating against girls in federally funded sports programs.

Evidently, there is a roughly 10% sports participation gap between boys and girls in the district, and, what’s worse, it has even grown in recent years.

Although feminists would probably never admit it, girls simply aren’t as interested in sports as boys. If they were, one might think they would have actually invented some competitive sports over the years, but I can’t think of one single competitive sport created by women. '

Link to artilce here. Excerpt:

'A woman drew a 23-year prison sentence on Wednesday for killing her alcoholic boyfriend by lacing a jug of margarita cocktails with antifreeze at her apartment.

"It's not as if you were captive in this house," Judge William Kocher said in imposing a near-maximum penalty on Cynthia Galens, who maintained that victim Thomas Stack was emotionally and physically abusive.

"It's just senseless what you did."
...
Galens was charged with murder in January, three months after Stack, a 48-year-old Air Force veteran, died from complications of ethylene glycol poisoning.
...
Based on his history of alcoholism, bipolar disorder and depression, state police deemed his death an accident or possibly a suicide.'

Article here. The interview article with the German Family Minister can be viewed here, and the follow up article here. Excerpt:

"Germany's leading feminist campaigner and its minister for families, pensioners and women have locked horns over the role of feminism in relationships and the workplace, unsparingly attacking each other's views in a row that has escalated into a nationwide debate.

Alice Schwarzer, considered the country's foremost women's rights campaigner, labelled Kristina Schröder "hopeless" and "incompetent" after Schröder said she thought some of her views were wrong.

Full story here. Excerpt:

"Tomorrow [was Nov. 10] the Supreme Court will consider whether American fathers have the same rights as American mothers to ensure that their children are citizens at birth. Under the 14th Amendment, "all persons born in the United States are ... citizens of the United States." But the status of children born to American parents beyond U.S. borders is less certain. In the case Flores-Villar v. United States, the Justice Department is defending the constitutionality of a law that treats some of these children differently depending on whether their mother or their father is a citizen."

Article here. Excerpt:

'"They throw guys in jail for non-support all the time, and when they do, the guys serve the whole 30, 60 or 90-day sentence (the term keeps lengthening), even though cocaine dealers routinely get out of jail after serving half their time.”

Ontario’s Family Responsibility Office, which is responsible for ensuring that custodial parents don’t get stiffed for child support payments by the non-custodial parent, has a lot of power.

Starting Dec. 1, someone (read “father”) in arrears on their support payments can have their car impounded. That’s about the stupidest punishment for non-payment one can imagine, since most people need their cars in order to work. As Lloyd Gorling, a father’s rights activist put it, “How are you going to make support payments if you can’t get to work? If you can’t make support payments, does the government really think you’re going to be taking a taxi every day to work?”'

Story here. Excerpt:

'The radical feminist tendency to reject relationships between men and women was not a solution for inequality, she said.

“I believe that early feminism at least partially overlooked that partnership and children bring happiness,” she told the magazine.

The minister also rejected the idea of quotas to improve women’s standing in the workplace, calling it a “political capitulation.” She blamed some women’s own choices for the fact that they earned less than men.

“The truth is this: Many women prefer to study German philology and humanities, while men study electric engineering – and that has consequences when it comes to wages. We can’t forbid companies from paying electric engineers more than a philologist.”

Schröder told Der Spiegel that a new part of her policy would be providing more support to boys, who are falling behind girls in schools. Government policies have neglected boys and men, she said.'

From A Voice for Men, here. Excerpt:

'The lives of most boys and men are now more unfulfilling than ever before in postmodern America. It is situation the beginnings of which arguably can be traced back to the post-World War II generation of men. That is an important history to be told. In general, misandry—typically dressed down in the media in the tatters of bad jokes—has by now produced two generations of males born since 1975 who feel less than welcome at home, in the workplace, and especially at school.

Blog entry here. Hard to know where Sarah Palin is at vis-a-vis feminism today. I do know she is reported as having said misandrist things, more often in rooms filled with female supporters, but not as much in mixed-sex gatherings. Makes no difference to me if she is just "playing to the audience," if that is the excuse you want to make for her, since in either case, it still isn't right. (If a person wants to "play to the audience" and if that audience happens to be a bunch of Nazis, is something the speaker says that is patently racist forgivable for the "playing to the audience" reason?) Nonetheless, following is the excerpt:

'Furthermore, we discovered that during the last national conference of NOW, which took part in Indiana from June 19-21, 2009, the "pro-Palin feminists" gained the majority - reportedly with a very slim margin of only eight votes!
...

Article here. For those new to the case, read some about it on Wikipedia here. She has consistently claimed she was a battered woman and that she didn't mean to kill her husband. The Dateline site story has comments, one from user shatteredmen which follows in part, with minor edits:

'Mary said the shot gun went off "accidentally". Did the phone get unplugged accidentally? Did the reservations for her get away get made accidentally too? Did she accidentally write 17 THOUSAND dollars of hot checks for which she and Matt were to meet the authorities at the bank the day he was shot to talk about paying it back? (The last I knew, writing checks for money you knew you did not have was a crime but she got away with that too.) What would YOU do if you accidentally shot someone? Would you watch them bleed to death or would you call 911? Also, there was NO EVIDENCE of abuse and I contend there is a good chance Matt did not even know about the high heels that were used to prove his abuse. He is no longer here to defend himself as she trashes his name more and more.

Story here. Remember this particular case? Here is how it ends... for now. I have a feeling it won't, though. Excerpt:

'Two Vancouver police officers who faced an allegation of abuse of authority have been cleared by Delta police investigating the incident.

The accusation was made after the officers went to the wrong entrance of a home when investigating a domestic-violence call around 2:15 a.m. on Jan 21.

A woman called 911 to report that her husband was drunk and had assaulted her.

When plainclothes officers arrived at the address provided, they believed Yao Wei Wu, 44, was their suspect and used force to arrest him, resulting in injuries to Wu’s face, legs and back.

On Feb. 1, Delta police began to investigate what happened.

A report prepared by a senior Delta police investigator found that, although Wu had seen the officers’ badges and knew they were police, he resisted arrest, prompting the officers to pull him to the ground, where he hit his face. He was also punched in the shoulder a number of times.'