Article here. Excerpt:

'Camille Paglia observed: “As I drove across the Verrazano Bridge, I thought, ‘Men built this.’ As I looked towards the New York skyline, I thought, ‘Men built that.’ If women were in charge of culture, we would still be living in caves. Well-decorated caves, but caves.” That story may be apocryphal, but correct. Men continue to create civilization. All cultures, without exception, were built by Patriarchy.

Article here. Excerpt:

'(WOMENSENEWS)--I suppose it's a good thing Judge Sonya Sotomayor's confirmation hearings have been a little boring and uneventful. I keep waiting for the scandalous hidden love affair to emerge, but nothing. No affair, unpaid taxes or skeletons to derail her confirmation.

Hats off to the team that vetted her nomination.

What has become a sticking point, though, are Sotomayor's comments in the past when she had the nerve to refer to herself as wise.
...
How dare she? Everyone knows white men set the bar when it comes to making fair and impartial decisions. They never allow their background or experience to influence their judgment.
...
It was obvious from the majority opinion that none of them had been in the position of having their work devalued because of their gender.'

Article here. Excerpt:

'It's no secret that men have been hit hard by the recession. From November 2007 to November 2008, the U.S. economy lost over 2 million jobs – 82 percent of those losses were male jobs and only 18 percent female jobs. The reason is because men are concentrated in the sectors devastated by the downturn: manufacturing and construction.

This employment gap prompted University of Michigan economist Mark Perry to dub the downturn a "man-cession in the lipstick economy."

So in his Inaugural address, Barack Obama glowingly promised, "We will build the roads and bridges, the electric grids and digital lines that feed our commerce and bind us together."
...
As soon as Obama released his stimulus proposal, the National Organization for Women and other feminist groups swung into action. They knew the head of Obama's Council of Economic Advisers, Lawrence Summers, would be a push-over following the putsch at Harvard University.'

Article here. Excerpt:

'WASHINGTON, July 16 (Reuters) - U.S. teens are getting sex education, but most are not learning about birth control from their parents, new government data showed on Thursday.

And rates of infection with sexually transmitted diseases reflect this -- the annual rate of AIDS diagnoses for boys aged 15 to 19 years has nearly doubled in the past 10 years, and rates of syphilis are also up.

The numbers show that U.S. youth need better sex education, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said.

The new administration of President Barack Obama has been dropping some of the more controversial policies of the former Bush government, including an emphasis on abstinence-only education.'

Story here.

'CARROLLTON, Ga. — Carrollton police found a baby sitter accused of feeding a 9-month-old boy wine, causing his blood-alcohol level to exceed four times the legal limit for an adult.

Carrollton police Sgt. Tony Johnson says authorities have found 40-year-old Tammy Demice Truitt of Carrollton. She was being sought on charges of first-degree cruelty to children and reckless conduct.

Police say Truitt was called to watch the baby and four other children ages 3 to 9 earlier this week when their mother had to leave town to care for a sick relative who has since died.

Doctors said the baby's blood-alcohol content of .33 was considered a life-threatening condition.

Johnson said the baby was released from the hospital on Wednesday and is doing fine.'

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.'