Article here. Excerpt:

'Judged against the standard of the U.S. Senate, maybe Sonia Sotomayor has a point. "A wise Latina" certainly came across smarter than most of those white men on the Judiciary Committee.
...
This was par for the course. Patrick Leahy of the Boutique of Vermont seemed confused most of the week, garbling his questions and misquoting Mzz Sotomayor. Reprising her famous remark that "Latinas" are inherently smarter than white folks -- "I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experience would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life" -- the senator told her that she had "said, quote, you 'would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experience would reach wise decisions.' " Not remotely accurate, but no one could blame the nominee if she felt no need to correct him. Several aides, always hovering over their senator to show him how to take a cell phone call, find the men's room or the way back to the office, winced.'

Story here. Excerpt:

'DELTA COUNTY -- A Gladstone woman could face prison time for allegedly making a false rape and kidnapping report to police back in February of 2008.

Wednesday, 27-year-old Amanda Miller-Tryan pleaded guilty to two counts of attempted false report of a felony, which is a two year felony. Four other false report charges were dismissed with the plea agreement.

Miller-Tryan said she and her husband concocted the story about a fake sexual assault and kidnapping after they had a physical altercation, and she felt she needed hospital attention.'

Article here. Excerpt:

'NEW YORK (Reuters) - Men and women handle their personal finances much differently, research shows, with men more likely to keep a close eye on their spending and investments and to pay their bills on time.

The gender gap emerged in the results of financial planning questionnaires filled out by some 3,500 U.S. workers nationwide for Financial Finesse Inc., an employee benefits company.

The data showed two-thirds of men but just one-third of women said they regularly pay their credit card balances in full, said Liz Davidson, chief executive of the company based in Manhattan Beach, California.'

Article here. Excerpt:

'Woman’s organizations immediately denounced this as “Macho Stimulus” and about 600 feminist economists and 1000 feminist historians managed to press the president to scrap his “sexist bailout”. The anti-stimulus feminist action group called WEAVE – Women’s Equality Adds Value to the Economy was a huge success. They managed to get the Obama administration to completely rewrite his stimulus along gender-correct lines with 42% of new jobs going to women. Yet since women had only held 20% of the jobs lost in recession the stimulus as it passed through Congress on February 17 skews the creation of new jobs heavily towards women. And its working: Labor Department’s latest June data revealed a 2.5 percentage-point gender gab for women over men.'

Article here. Excerpt:

'The problem is that phthalates suppress male hormones and sometimes mimic female hormones. As I’ve written before, chemicals called endocrine disruptors are believed to explain the proliferation of “intersex fish” — male fish that produce eggs — as well as sexual deformities in animals and humans. Phthalates (pronounced THAL-ates) are among the most common endocrine disruptors, and among the most difficult to avoid. They’re even in tap water, and levels soar in certain plastic water bottles.

They probably are not harmful to us adults, but it is another story for children. In girls, some research suggests that phthalates may cause early onset puberty. Most vulnerable of all, it seems, are male fetuses in the first trimester of pregnancy, just as they are differentiating their sex. At that stage, scholars believe, phthalates may “feminize” these boys.

Video report here. Caption:

'Prosecutors allege it was a "calculated seduction." A math teacher is accused of having sex with a teen student.'

A very nice change I am seeing here: A year ago, there would have been a lot of sympathetic pseudo-questioning of the defense position by the reporter. We didn't see that in this clip at all. In fact, he was very direct with the matter at hand and pointed out how the "She didn't know he was under 18" defense wouldn't fly if the sexes were reversed. Progress!

Story here. Excerpt:

'SARGODA, Pakistan (CNN) -- Mohammed Iqbal said he has been told by his landlord to pay up on debts and is left with a choice facing others in this impoverished corner of Pakistan: Sell your children or a kidney.

For the 50-year-old Iqbal, there is only one option. Despite a law passed in late 2007 banning transplants for money, he has decided to sell his kidney and has already been for pre-operation tests. The sale will net him between $1,100 and $1,600.

"What's incredible here is the law that bans the operation he's going to go through came into place in 2007," said CNN's Nic Robertson. "He's still able to go to a doctor, the doctors given him advice, that's what he has to do under law... He's going to make money out of it 100,000-150,000 rupees, and that is absolutely illegal. Yet, in just a few days, he's expecting to sell his kidney."

Story here. Excerpt:

'Frank Hatley has languished in a South Georgia jail for more than a year.

The reason? He failed to reimburse the state for all the public assistance his “son” received over the past two decades.

The problem? Hatley is not the biological father -- and a special assistant state attorney general and a judge knew it but jailed Hatley anyway.

“I feel bad for the man,” Cook County Sheriff Johnny Daughtrey said Tuesday. “Put yourself in that man’s shoes: If it wasn’t your child, would you want to be paying child support for him?”

Daughtrey said he hopes a hearing Wednesday will resolve the matter. Hatley has been held at the county jail in Adel since June 25, 2008, costing the county an estimated $35 to $40 a day.

Even after learning he was not the father, Hatley paid thousands of dollars the state said he owed for support. After losing his job and becoming homeless, he still made payments out of his unemployment benefits.'

Article here. Excerpt:

'Published online in the Journal of Adolescent Health (subscription required), the study comes from a survey of about 2,000 students who sought treatment at health clinics at five universities in Wisconsin, Seattle and Vancouver in 2006-7. Similar rates of young men and women -- 17 percent and 16 percent, respectively -- reported experiencing violence within the previous six months. While men were more likely to report physical abuse, women reported a high rate of emotional abuse, which was defined as acts like "repeated ridicule, threatening statements, destroying belongings and unreasonable jealousy" and considered separate from physical violence.'

Article here. Excerpt:

'Sotomayor apparently told Republican Senators in private meetings that those words were "inadvertent" and "inartful," -- implying that her statement was an accident. President Obama himself tried to explain this statement as just a one-time utterance that she would have worded differently if she had the chance to do it all over again.

But after these private meetings with Senators it was revealed that Sotomayor had used the equivalent phrases during at least seven different speeches over a period of a decade. It is one thing for Obama to explain this as an accidental, single occurrence; it is something quite different for Sotomayor, especially now that we know that she repeatedly made such statements.'

Article here. Excerpt:

'LYNN Rosenthal, a veteran of the battered women’s advocacy movement, was named to the new post of White House counsel on violence against women on June 26. On the same day, a conference opened in Los Angeles disputing the basic tenets of the movement Rosenthal represents - such as the view that domestic violence is overwhelmingly a male crime against women rooted in patriarchal power. Speakers argued for new policies based on a fuller understanding of the problem. Is there a way to bridge the gaps between these competeing paradigms?

Challenges to feminist orthodoxy on domestic violence are often seen as anti-feminist backlash from angry men. But this conference, “From Ideology to Inclusion 2009: New Directions in Domestic Violence Research and Intervention’’ (sponsored by the California Alliance for Families and Children), could not be so easily dismissed. The speakers included scholars, social workers, and counselors; about half were women.'

Article here. Excerpt:

'The good news is that Congress has already made a commitment to do something about this. The bad news is that it hasn't put its money where its mouth is. While having previously recommended $175 million for emergency shelter in the Family Violence Prevention and Services Act, Congress budgeted only $127.7 million for these services last year. Likewise, the much-lauded Violence Against Women Act (VAWA -- a flagship piece of legislation for Vice President Biden when he was a senator) has never been fully funded.

This could dramatically change on Friday. The House Appropriations Committee is set to decide how much money to provide for a number of critical domestic violence services, including emergency shelter. Members would do well to remember Michelle, and the millions of American women like her who are forced to flee violent relationships. They should remember the duty of protection the government owes them and the pledge of assistance it has made. And they should be aware of the repercussions if that pledge is not kept. '

Story here. Excerpt:

'Police recently concluded that former Baltimore Ravens star Steve McNair was shot dead in his sleep by girlfriend Sahel Kazemi in a murder-suicide. Yet while there are more than 10,000 media entries on Google News for "Steve McNair," only a few of them mention the phrase "domestic violence."

Article here. Excerpt:

Story here. Excerpt:

'Women athletes have far more opportunities than men to earn scholarships and to participate in many college sports, according to a study by an organization which advocates Title IX reform.

The College Sports Council largely limited its analysis to 19 sports in which both men and women compete, such as basketball, volleyball and tennis. The study released Wednesday determined male high-school athletes in those gender-symmetric sports face longer odds and fewer total opportunities to land college scholarships.

"We are trying to shine the light on a problem that exists where football frequently clouds the issue," CSC chairman Eric Pearson said. "We're not trying to tear down the women's numbers. We just want it to be even and fair. We support both men and women playing sports. We want more sports. We want more athletes to play, both men and women, and the NCAA's rules make that difficult."'