Article here. Excerpt:

'SALT LAKE CITY - Take some forced family togetherness, the stress of the holidays, a little alcohol in some cases and you've got a recipe that can sometimes end up in family violence.

Police say they deal with family fights every Thanksgiving.

"It becomes an emotional time for all, and it's a stressful time in certain ways," Ogden Police Lt. Scott Conley said.

Ogden police said that on Thanksgiving, they get a lot of calls about child custody disputes between bitter parents.

"We become the mediator over some disagreement or disorderly conduct of using the child against one another," Conley told Fox 13 News.

A recent study by researchers at the University of California at Berkeley and UC San Diego documented police calls about partner violence, taking note of particular holidays. They found a 22-percent increase on Thanksgiving; a 17-percent increase on Christmas; a 32-percent spike on New Year's Eve; and a 28-percent hike on the Fourth of July, among other holidays.

Story here. Excerpt:

'Every school pupil in England is to be taught that domestic violence against women and girls is unacceptable, as part of a new government strategy.

Under the plans, from 2011 children will be taught from the age of five how to prevent violent relationships.

And next year, two helplines will be set up to deal with sexual violence and stalking and harassment.

The charity Refuge has welcomed the move but parents' groups questioned the government's interference.
...

Wanda Sykes has a theory about what happened during the Tiger Woods incident. The bottom line? Tiger Woods was most likely a victim of domestic violence after his wife found out about his infidelity. It would be funny if it wasn't true. The video is here.

Article here. Excerpt:

'In a damning report, it was claimed thousands of white British and black Caribbean boys from the poorest backgrounds were being consigned to a “lifetime of crime, drugs and prison” after being failed at school.

The report blamed the “ideological fads” of the left-wing educational establishment.
...
In its annual report, the watchdog said that a “stubborn core” of poor teaching was holding back progress at thousands of schools and warned of a persistent gap between rich and deprived pupils.
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“Effective ways of teaching children to read have been replaced by a system which completely fails those who find reading most difficult. ...

“Standards of discipline have collapsed. The curriculum has been destroyed. Competitive sports have been run down. An acceptance of failure and a lack of aspiration is found in too many schools.”

Story here.

'A WOMAN who allegedly falsely claimed she was raped at a Hampshire beauty spot has appeared in court for the first time.

Gemma Mann is charged with perverting the course of justice in relation to an alleged incident at Royal Victoria Country Park in Netley on November 14, which sparked a largescale police investigation.

Yesterday, the 24-year-old, of St Clements Way, Bishopdown, Salisbury, attended a preliminary hearing at Southampton Magistrates’ Court.

No plea was entered and Mann was released on unconditional bail until December 3, when she is due to appear at Southampton Crown Court.'

Story here. Excerpt:

'Dr David Shaw, lecturer in ethics at Glasgow University, argues that circumcising boys for no medical reason is unethical.

He wrote in the journal Clinical Ethics that any doctor who does perform circumcision without a medical reason could be guilty of negligence and in breach of the Human Rights Act as the child cannot consent to the operation and it can be argued it is not in their best interests.

Dr Shaw wrote: "Imagine a situation where two adherents of a minority religion ask their doctor to pull off their son’s thumbnails, as this is part of the religion in which they want to bring up their son.

"The pain will be transient, and the nails will grow back, but the parents claim that it is an important rite of passage. I think it is reasonable to say that the doctor would send them packing.'

Article here.

'Males are more likely to be involved in high risk activity such as unprotected sex, abuse of alcohol, multiple partners and low acceptance of condom use.

This is the reason why a greater male population is infected with HIV than women according to the National Advisor on Family Health, Dr Josaia Samuela.

Initiation rites such as scarification, group circumcision, group tattooing and homosexual activity in many Pacific Island nations pose increased risks to HIV transmission.'

Article here. Excerpt:

'Recent headlines announced a new AIDS vaccine that was said to show great promise. It was tested in Thailand and found to have a modest effect, 31 percent, on decreasing the acquisition of HIV. Within two weeks it was found that faulty statistical methods were used, and the findings are now in question.

A previous AIDS vaccine by Merck was removed from the market two years ago when it was found that not only was the drug ineffective, but in some cases it actually increased the chance of getting HIV.

Since 1989, multiple attempts have been made to develop an effective AIDS vaccine at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars. All have failed, as the virus mutated and became resistant. As these futile attempts continued, 25 million men, women and children died of AIDS, mostly in Africa, but tens of thousands in the United States.'

Story here. How could a woman pull a 200-lb man out of a car? Excerpt:

'(CNN) -- Pro golfer Tiger Woods says he bears sole responsibility for an early-morning car accident, but state police said he has canceled a Sunday interview with investigators looking into the crash.

In a statement issued Sunday afternoon on his Web site, Woods offered no details of his Friday-morning wreck outside his Windermere, Florida, home except to say he suffered cuts and bruises and was "pretty sore."

"This situation is my fault, and it's obviously embarrassing to my family and me," he said. "I'm human and I'm not perfect. I will certainly make sure this doesn't happen again."

In his statement, Woods praised his wife, Elin Nordegren, whom he said "acted courageously when she saw I was hurt and in trouble." Nordegren told police she used a golf club to break out the rear window of the vehicle, then pulled Woods from the SUV after she heard the accident from inside their home.'

Story here. Excerpt:

'Commonwealth countries are expected to make a landmark agreement on universal healthcare for almost one-third of the world's population, including free health care for women and children.

The agreement, reached at the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Trinidad and Tobago, comes after Prime Minister Gordon Brown's call at the United Nations in September for all developing countries to remove fees for healthcare, starting with services for women and children.

Britain will provide an additional £5 million for charities and non-governmental organisations to promote free health services for women and children in those Commonwealth countries where fees present the biggest barrier to treatment, on top of the £400 million that the UK already spends on improving health services in the 53-nation grouping.'

Men never get ill or injured, of course...

Article here. Excerpt:

'"Since India has not signed the Hague Convention, courts here have not really been enforcing judgments of foreign courts," said senior advocate Pinky Anand, who represented complainant V. Ravi Chandran, on whose petition the Supreme Court ordered the CBI to trace his son and former wife in India.
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"India has been used as a haven or a refuge where you could defeat the law. Moreover, dowry laws are peculiar to the Indian legal system," said Anand. "Hopefully, this judgement would pave the way for foreign judgements to be enforced in India."

The Canadian High Commission told HT that its "consular officers at the department of foreign affairs and international trade and in India were currently managing 23 child custody, child abduction and child welfare cases".'

Article here. Is it a suprise that so many young women have a bad boy complex? Excerpt:

'From a male point of view, the only redeeming feature of the Twilight books and movies is the ammunition they provide against female claims of innate moral superiority over men.

Whenever a woman criticizes a man’s lust, aggression, shallowness or any other lesser angel of his personality, the quick-witted fellow can point to the millions of women addicted to the base, insipid, bad-boy-worshiping, misogynist syrup so many female viewers of all ages knelt to this past weekend, when The Twilight Saga: New Moon raked in $147 million at the box office, setting several records.

In the spirit of speaking truth to diamond-skinned power, enjoy this list of unfortunate lessons girls learn from Twilight. (The list operates under the principle that any grownup female who embraces Twilight’s junior-high dreck temporarily sacrifices her “victim card.”)
...

Article here. Excerpt:

'The unemployment rate for men, 11.4%, based on seasonally adjusted data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, outpaces the rate for women, 8.8%. We now have the largest jobless gender gap since tracking became possible in 1948. The gap reached its previous peak, 2.5 points, in 1967 and 1978. Today's gap has exceeded that for three months. It's endured at two points or above for an unprecedented length, eight months and counting.

As of the end of October, the U.S. had lost 7.3 million jobs in this Great Recession. Men account for 5.3 million of that loss. The shift is so dramatic that women now constitute 49.9% of the work force and will soon outnumber men.

So some have come to call this downturn the "he-cession." And yet, for all its unprecedented scope and nature, the limited attention and passive response it has received are remarkable. Imagine the outcry if women amounted to roughly three in four lost jobs in this recession.'

Story here. When it first broke yesterday on TMZ.com, there was some equivocation about the details. However as of Nov. 28 at 12:08 AM, they are reporting that they have a witness that says Woods stated his injuries were caused by his wife, and that her smashing his car windows was not to assist him after the crash, but to express her anger. Story:

'Tiger Woods did not suffer facial lacerations from a car accident. They were inflicted by his wife, Elin Nordegren -- according to a conversation Woods had Friday after the accident.

Tiger has yet to be formally interviewed by the Florida Highway Patrol -- that should happen this afternoon. But we're told Tiger had a conversation Friday -- with a non-law enforcement type -- detailing what went down before his Escalade hit a fire hydrant.

We're told he said his wife had confronted him about reports that he was seeing another woman. The argument got heated and, according to our source, she scratched his face up. We're told it was then Woods beat a hasty retreat for his SUV -- but according to our source, Woods says his wife followed behind with a golf club. As Tiger drove away, she struck the vehicle several times with the club.

Story here.

'PARIS — France is to pass a law banning "psychological violence within the couple" and study the idea of tagging violent partners to prevent them stalking their victims, the government said Wednesday.

Prime Minister Francois Fillon announced the measures in a speech to mark the United Nations' tenth International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, promising legislation in the first half of nest year.

"It's an important step forward: the creation of this offence will allow us to deal with the most insidious situations, situations that leave no visible scars, but which leave their victims torn up inside," he said.

"And we are going to experiment with electronic surveillance measures on the Spanish model to monitor the effectiveness of restraining orders against a violent spouse," he added.

Spanish judges now have the power to force convicted a wife-beater to wear a watch-sized electronic bracelet that triggers an alarm if he gets too close to his former victim and gives her a chance to call the police.