Article here. Excerpt:

'LITCHFIELD - — In advance of its premiere on HBO, a new documentary about teen suicide will be shown July 25 at Bantam Cinema in Litchfield, with the directors in attendance.

"Boy Interrupted" is about Evan Scott Perry, who committed suicide at his home in New York City in 2005, at the age of 15, after a lifetime of battling bipolar disorder. His parents took years' worth of home-movie footage and edited together a chronicle of their troubled boy's life, which included treatment at Wellspring, a facility in Bethlehem.

Sheila Nevins, HBO executive producer, and Dana and Hart Perry will attend, as will representatives from Wellspring.'

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'A new organization based in the Lower Hudson Valley is hoping to influence the debate about infant circumcision, as the nation's most influential public health agency prepares to make recommendations on the procedure amid new evidence that it could help protect men from sexually transmitted diseases, including the HIV virus.

The group, Intact America [link added], is headed by Upper Nyack resident Georganne Chapin, who also leads the Tarrytown-based Hudson Health Plans, which provides health insurance to people on Medicaid.

The organization, backed by an anti-circumcision Texas millionaire, is circulating an online petition that it hopes will convince the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention not to recommend routine infant male circumcision as a matter of public health policy.

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'The Center for Abuse and Rape Emergencies, Inc. said even though there were two false reports in two days, it's rare for people to make up these kinds of stories.

Mary Baer, Director of Sexual Assault Services said, "Only two percent of rape reports are false, and that is about the same number of false reports of any other crime."

Mary Baer also said false reporting not only wastes time and money, but it could also keep real victims from coming forward - fearing no one will believe them.

"False reports just feed into the myth that women lie about rape, and it's not true," Baer said.'

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'A woman convicted last week of making a false claim of rape against two Minneapolis police officers filed a lawsuit Monday alleging a cover-up and seeking damages in excess of $50,000.

Lawyer Jill Clark filed the complaint on behalf of Trisha Farkarlun against the city, Police Chief Tim Dolan and several police officers, including the two she alleged participated in the rape and those who investigated it. The suit was filed in Hennepin County District Court.
...
Last Tuesday, Clark successfully sought a delay in sentencing one day after Farkarlun, 23, was convicted of making a false report of police misconduct, a gross misdemeanor. She could be sentenced to up to one year and fined $3,000. Judge Tanya Bransford scheduled a hearing for 2 p.m. Thursday for sentencing and post-trial motions for acquittal, a new trial and juror misconduct.'

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'PISCATAWAY — The engineering class going on this summer on the third floor of the Allison Road classroom building on the Busch campus does not look like any other engineering class at Rutgers University.

In fact, it may not look like any other engineering class anywhere.

That is because everyone in the class is an adolescent girl.

This is not an actual college engineering class. The students are still in high school.

They are participating in a summerlong program called The Academy at Rutgers for Girls in Engineering and Technology, or TARGET, designed to introduce girls as early as the sixth grade to engineering.'

Article here. Excerpt:

'There is a growing fathers’ rights movement in the United States and especially Ohio where fathers are treated very unfairly. A little known fact about child support is that the county is allotted large sums of money for each case that is enforced. The money trickles down through the system via the County Commissioner’s Office. The court merely rubber stamps the child support recommendation and nine out of ten times the father has no say in the matter. There seems to be no incentive to grant visitation to unwed fathers and no incentive to enforce visitation rights or lower support when needed. Speaking to many politicians around the State was very disappointing since almost none of them want to touch the issue. One response was that there was legislation looming but the last election year killed it. The details were not explained.'

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'Kristin Ruggiero of East Kingston went to the media last year seeking help with an ongoing domestic violence case against her ex-husband.

Ruggiero told a television reporter she was so terrified of her ex-husband she couldn't sleep at night.

In an interview with the Exeter News-Letter, Ruggiero said he was posing as other people over the phone in an attempt to find out where she lived.

Now police allege that before she began her media campaign Ruggiero, 33, attempted to set up her ex-husband by sending a series of threatening text messages to herself from a cell phone she had falsely registered under his name.
According to the affidavit, police tracked where and when the phone was used. They discovered a call made in California was six-tenths of a mile from where Kristin Ruggiero was staying at the time.
...
Another call, placed from Nashville, Tenn., lined up with the date and time Kristin Ruggiero had flown into the city, the affidavit states.

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'In what police describe as one of the most gruesome crimes against a child in recent memory, an infant boy was stabbed, decapitated and mutilated early Sunday.

His 33-year-old mother claimed responsibility, police said.

Otty Sanchez told police that she was “hearing voices” and that the devil made her kill Scott Wesley Buchholtz Sanchez, to whom she gave birth on June 30, San Antonio police spokesman Joe Rios said.

Sanchez used a steak knife to repeatedly stab the nearly 4-week-old baby, then decapitate and mutilate him, Rios said. A police source said the baby was skinned and gutted.

Sanchez then used the knife to stab herself in the chest and abdomen, police said.

Sanchez was detained and taken to University Hospital, where she remained in stable condition Sunday night. She was charged by proxy late Sunday with capital murder, which is punishable by the death penalty. Bond was set at $1 million.'

Very nice to see this. Article here. Excerpt:

'Ours is a world where female friendships are celebrated by Oprah and the Traveling Pants and bestsellers like "The Girls From Ames." ... But friendships between straight men and women wind up mangled by clichéd claptrap like "The Ugly Truth." Men are only interested in spreading their seed! Women are uptight prisses! And the only thing to do, of course, is to fall hopelessly in love.

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'Ebony S. Mack was found not guilty Friday of killing a mother of four in a street-corner slaying that helped launch Rochester's Zero Tolerance anti-crime initiative.

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'BROOKSVILLE - Fenol Francois has mixed feelings about the woman who tried to have him killed.

In court on Thursday, he pledged his love for his wife, then placed her on the same level as Osama Bin Laden.

He pleaded with Circuit Judge Jack Springstead to give Jacqucia Francois a hefty prison sentence.

"If you only give her four years, she will come after me again," Fenol Francois said in the thick Caribbean accent of his native Haiti.

At the prompting of Assistant State Attorney Rob Lewis, Fenol Francois described life after his wife was arrested on suspicion of conspiracy to commit first-degree murder.'

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'Reported sex offenses by women increased tenfold from the '80s to the '90s, yet their prison time remains but a fraction of what men receive. A Kansas State professor found that, on average, male teachers faced up to 20 years in prison for sex abuse, while female teachers were handed probation, house arrest or a maximum of three years of jail time.

That's because the public—and judges—still can't imagine women as sexually aggressive.

"The speculation is that people are less likely to see the woman as a predator," says Vanderbilt law and psychology professor Chris Slobogin. "Also, there is perhaps the sexist assumption that boys who tend to be the victims of women aren't really victims, but in fact consented to the act and enjoyed it."'

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'The Crown recommended eight to nine months in prison Monday for a 30-year-old female high school teacher from Burnaby, B.C., who admitted to having sex with a 17-year-old male student.

The relationship began with flirtatious emails and text messages and developed into highly sexualized phone calls from the teacher and, eventually, sex in her classroom after school one Friday. It was the student's first time having sex.

The student's face turned red in B.C. provincial court in Vancouver on Monday as the act was described and the Crown revealed it was the teacher herself who told other male students they "did it" and called his performance disappointing. It was the other male students who told authorities.'

Article here. Excerpt:

Article here. Excerpt:

'First-grader Cyrus Mends parks himself on an exercise ball and tackles a Sudoku puzzle to help hone his math skills. He calls his teacher "Mr. Mealey" and his classmates by Mr., too. And he's a proud member of "Mealey's Men," made up of three teams that compete to demonstrate the best behavior and the best academic performance.

Tom Mealey's classroom at Carver Elementary School in Maplewood is a bit different from other elementary classrooms. The most obvious distinction? There are no girls.

Mealey is one of many educators tackling what some call a silent epidemic. By almost every achievement measure, boys in Minnesota and across the nation are falling behind their female peers.

Boys' reading and writing test scores continue to lag behind girls', while girls have caught up to boys in math. Check out the names of the top graduates at your local high school — chances are an overwhelming majority are girls. Girls are more likely than boys to get a high school diploma in four years, and they outnumber guys 3 to 2 on Minnesota's college campuses.