Article here. Excerpt:

'(CNN) -- Donna LeBlanc gave her husband, a former restaurant manager, the stark ultimatum: become a pizza delivery man or their family "wouldn't make it."

The Lafayette, Louisiana, family of six was struggling with $45,000 of mounting medical debt from Donna LeBlanc's unexpected case of pneumonia and tonsillitis a year earlier. The family savings account had dwindled to $100.

"It's embarrassing for my husband to take a job he is overqualified for, and I know he feels ashamed at times," says Donna LeBlanc, a 35-year-old mother with four children. "But this is what we have to do and we're going to make the best out of it."

She watched her husband, Rob LeBlanc, 35, load Domino's pizza boxes into their family car and deliver orders until near dawn for $10 an hour.'

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Ed. comment: Let's see a similar story where a man tells his wife to deliver pizzas or else they won't make it as a family get touted all over the press without editorial criticism.

Article here. Excerpt:

'Economist and former U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich worries about too much of the Obama stimulus going to white males in the construction sector.

“If there aren’t enough skilled professionals to do the jobs involving new technologies, the stimulus will just increase the wages of the professionals who already have the right skills rather than generate many new jobs in these fields. And if construction jobs go mainly to white males who already dominate the construction trades, many people who need jobs the most -- women, minorities, and the poor and long-term unemployed -- will be shut out,” Reich said on his economic blog.'

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Article here. Excerpt:

"As endangered species go, this one is especially alarming: so rare has the male primary school teacher become that one in ten schools has none at all, while across the country they account for barely 15 per cent of those who teach under-11s.
...
Is it that these days, men are scared of teaching young children because they are scared of false allegations of child abuse.

And if you want to know who is largely responsible for creating an atmosphere in which such a fear is all too horribly realistic, look no further than the twittering bunch of over-protective, over-excitable mothers clustered around our school gates.

These are the people who have bought, wholesale, into the myth of the sexually predatory bogeyman on every corner; the people who have, in a single generation, swept us from the sensible 'don't take sweets from strangers' to the absurd 'all men are paedophiles'."

Story here. Excerpt:

'A husband was conned for 17 years by his wife into bringing up her lover's child as his own, a court heard yesterday.

Mark Webb only found out the truth from DNA tests conducted after the girl turned 18, it is alleged. He has tried to sue his ex-wife Lydia Chapman for deceiving him over the paternity of her daughter.

In the first 'paternity fraud' case to reach the Appeal Court, Mr Webb claimed his former wife and her alleged lover conceived the girl at a hotel in 1985.'

This is an important test-case in the UK. The outcome will set a precendent for other cases.

Article here. Excerpt:

"The 40-year-old alcoholic, from Co Roscommon, is the first woman in the history of the Irish state to be convicted of incest.

She admitted to being the worst mother in the world after putting her youngsters - who were aged between six and 15 at the time - through a harrowing catalogue of neglect, including forcing her 13-year-old son to have sex with her.

At Roscommon Circuit Court, Judge Miriam Reynolds said she would have given the unnamed woman a life sentence had she been a man but was restricted by the terms of a legal act carrying a maximum sentence of seven years for incest cases involving women."

Story here. Utterly unbelievable. And, OF COURSE, she gets no jail time. Words fail me. Excerpt:

'A young mother allowed her three-year-old son to smoke, a court heard yesterday.

The boy was apparently familiar with cigarettes and knew how to use a lighter and inhale.

He was allowed to smoke in his bedroom and around the house, and was only stopped when a family friend used her mobile phone to film him and alerted social workers.'

Her CHILDREN's sake... She has more than one. Maybe the others are alcoholics and drug addicts?

Article here. Excerpt:

'In the last eleven years (1996 - 2007) 156000 husbands have been claimed by rampant domestic violence against them. In a shocking revelation of suicide statistics for the year 2007 reveals that almost double the number of married men have committed suicide in comparison to married women as the report attached here corroborates. It states that in the year 2007 57,593 married men committed suicide in comparison to 30,064 married women whereas the same figures for the years 2006 are 55,452 and 29,869 and for 2005 are 52,483 and 28,188.

While there has been a lot of hue and cry for domestic violence against women with various studies being sponsored for studying the same with tax payers’ money 82% of which comes from men, but sadly enough no study has ever been done in India for studying the prevalence, effects and trends of domestic violence against men or the statistics about it.

How many years has it been and still, boys can't have long hair without judicial intervention? Even so, the reason has to be something like religion. How about just plain self-expression? Story here. Excerpt:

'Five-year-old Adriel Arocha doesn’t have to stuff his hair into his shirt collar. And he doesn’t have to meet privately with a teacher, away from his classmates, for flouting the school’s policy on hair length.

On Tuesday, a federal judge ruled that the Needville Independent School District’s policy violated state law and the U.S. Constitution by punishing the American Indian kindergartner for religious beliefs that require him to wear his hair long.

Story here. Excerpt:

'ALBERT LEA, Minn. – Allegations that two young assistants groped, spanked and spat on several nursing home residents suffering from dementia have shaken members of this southern Minnesota community, including the lead prosecutor in the case.

Brianna Marie Broitzman and Ashton Michelle Larson, both 19, appeared in court Wednesday to face multiple charges over the alleged abuse at Good Samaritan Society. The young women did not enter pleas, and both were released on bail.

"I think that they are very serious charges," Freeborn County Attorney Craig Nelson said after the hearing. "We're dealing with people who are vulnerable adults. People who are clearly ... in need of our care and our concern and our monitoring. They depend on us for everything."

Nelson added: "I, as a member of this community, certainly can feel it in my bones."'

Story here. Excerpt:

"New Delhi: Men's rights activists want domestic violence laws to be gender-neutral. Armed with statistics of high suicide rates among men, their wish list includes a ministry for men's welfare, a national commission for men and a review of the antidowry law, which they claim is grossly misused.

"Men are suffering from 'legal terrorism' at the hands of some women. If you can have a ministry for animal welfare, why not one for the welfare of men'' asks Swarup Sarkar, coordinator, Save Family Foundation, Delhi.

Story here. Excerpt:

'NEW DELHI: India reported 122,637 suicides last year — an average of 336 every day — with more men ending their lives than women, the latest report of the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) has revealed.

Although suicide was a nationwide phenomenon, five states — Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, West Bengal, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka — registered consistently higher number of suicidal deaths during the last few years. Overall, 2007 recorded an increase of 3.8% over the previous year's figure of 118,112.

Read the story here. Do you think a woman would have been left to die on the streets like this? Mostly not. But the status of men is lower than even animals. Excerpt:

'KOLKATA: It's known as a city with a heart caring, nourishing and reaching out to the helpless and destitutes. This premise was put to test over the weekend, and sadly, Kolkata failed.

Article here. Excerpt:

'Infidelity produces faster sperms, say researchers

Toronto: Female behaviour determines the quality and quantity of sperm of her mating partner, says a new Canadian study.

If she is promiscuous, she can trigger changes in the quality and quantity of sperm of a male as he has to compete with other males to impregnate her.

Only if he can produce better, larger and faster sperm than others does he stand a chance of impregnating her, says the study on fish by McMaster University at Hamilton near here.

The study says the idea that sperm would evolve to become more competitive when males compete for fertilisation seems obvious, but there has been little proof of this till date.'

Article here. Published in April 2008 but relevant to the kind of rationale being used. Harkin is appealing to the Labor Theory of Value which in essence says work's value is commensurate with how much effort is put into it rather than whether or not the product thereof is in demand. Based on that thinking if one were to dig a sand-pit in the middle of a desert, one should be paid the same as if he were to excavate by request a similarly-sized hole in downtown Manhattan where a building is to be put. Excerpt:

Read it here. Replace "women" in the url with "men" and you get a 404 error. No big surprise there. Excerpt: