As a kind of companion piece to the article I submitted yesterday about the 'model' who disfigured a young man because he was laughing at her:

Ladette binge-drinking violence soars by 300% in just seven years. Excerpt:

"Violent attacks by binge-drinking teenage girls have risen by nearly 300 per cent in seven years in a frightening wave of ‘ladette’ violence."
...
Hundreds of thousands of women have signed up to online forums where they boast about their antics and proudly post pictures showing them in various states of inebriation and undress, including kneeling over lavatories, being sick, exposing themselves or answering a call of nature in public.'

The gentler sex, eh?

Richard Smaglick of New Hampshire is asking for as much support as possible for HB139 - a bill which would establish a default presumption of shared parenting in divorce or separation cases. You can read more and sign a petition here. Please consider taking part in this simple act of activism that can help an important effort for parental equality.

... thanks to the way British 'justice' works:

Model who left student scarred for life in glassing attack is jailed for two years. Excerpt:

'A former model who smashed a glass in a student’s face, leaving him with horrific lifelong scars, has been jailed.

Drunk air stewardess Lisa Kee hit Liam Sharratt twice with the glass, dragging it down his face and wounding him in five places.

Kee, who lashed out when a flirtatious conversation turned sour, was jailed for two and a half years at Manchester Crown Court yesterday. She was dragged screaming into custody.
...

He said: ‘This was a vicious and wholly unwarranted attack and you know what you have done and you know the enormity of what you have done and the effects which will continue to be a blight on Mr Sharratt every time he looks in the mirror.’

She was ordered to serve at least half of her sentence after admitting a charge of unlawful wounding.'

Article here. Excerpt:

'The most offensive of these supposedly light-hearted monologues was one entitled “The Little Coochie Snorcher that Could.” It was given from the perspective of a sixteen year-old girl (thirteen in Ensler’s original play) who hates her “little coochie snorcher” (read: vagina) because of myriad reasons including an over protective mother, a deadbeat father and an earlier sexual assault described in far too much detail.

Then one glorious day she meets a nice twenty-four-year-old lesbian who takes the girl away from her mother, gets her drunk and sexually abuses her further. The girl, however, describes the encounter in positive terms saying of the assailant: “[she] turned my sorry-ass coochie snorcher into a kind of heaven.” The same phenomenon is seen in those suffering from the Stockholm Syndrome.

Story here.

'A THAME woman who had sex with a 14-year-old boy who contacted her over the internet to help with his learning difficulties, will not go to jail.

Catherine Armstrong, 33, had admitted three charges of sexual activity with a child and was today given a 12 month prison sentence, suspended for two years, at Oxford Crown Court.

In sentencing Armstrong, Judge Julian Hall told her that he did not think she posed a danger in the future and that female prisons did not have the facilities to help sex offenders.

"You have been given the chance to rebuild your life," he added.'

Article here. Excerpt:

'A network of refuges for male victims of domestic violence has opened in Northamptonshire.

Privately run and funded by mother and daughter team Dawn Hardie and Rachel Allen, Next Steps Housing Association provides 35 three-bedroom homes across the region with spaces for 105 men fleeing violence and their children.

Ms Hardie said the scheme is the second in the UK, and the first on this scale.

‘There is nowhere for men…and there’s no funding available, no support at all…it’s an uphill battle and we’ve funded it from our own pockets,’ she said.

The association has already received six men, two who had been victims of rape and another who had been hit in the face with a claw hammer.

‘All of them have been hospitalised, they suffer from depression and feel they have failed. They’re all high risk,’ Ms Hardie said.'

Article here. Excerpt:

'Inside a lecture hall at UNC Charlotte, professor Joe Marinello teaches criminal justice students. His passion is understanding and ending domestic violence.

"Domestic violence is a social cancer,” he said.

He said it's a disease that's slowly killing society, and for too long women have led the movement alone to try to stop it.

“Men have to come out of the shadows and admit that we are the primary perpetrators against women, children, and other men,” he said.
...
Marinello is also reaching out to teach boys and girls in middle and high schools about respect in relationships. He said he wants to plant the seeds for change that men should be protectors and not controllers.'

Story here. Excerpt:

'The all-women's unit is one of many innovations revealed Wednesday by Detroit-based Henry Ford at a preview of its new Oakland County hospital, an expansive 300-bed structure set to open March 15. The stone and brick building is attached to the existing medical center Henry Ford opened in 1975. The new hospital has a ground-floor retail area with small-town style storefronts and a look more in line with the feel of a northern Michigan lodge than a sterile medical building.

Along with its cozy resort-style look and all-private patient rooms, the hospital will have robot-assisted surgery, a one-stop care center to treat seniors with neurological illnesses, and a wellness center with day spa services and personal health coaches.

Article here. Excerpt:

'We size up men for their potential and then attempt to train and transform them into our ideal image. We pretend to be offended by their masculine presentations and open assertions regarding sex. We turn on the charm and the tears at will and are determined to make the men in our lives responsible for our life experiences and happiness. We hold the power of sex and wield it to trap them and at a moment that suits us, transform it into a tool of punishment and torture for any lack of patronization. Are those mixed messages and abuses of power conducive to the success and happiness we seek?

Editorial here. Excerpt:

Article here. Excerpt:

'They have entirely missed the point. Did you spot the age of the protagonist? Teenage, right? And she's female. And those two things qualify her as a member of the new gross-out generation. It is true that teenage boys, and the teenage boy in every man, have long had a monopoly on disgust. From the Earl of Rochester to Philip Roth, the boys have loved the shock of the “eww!” Our daughters may be made of sugar and spice, but it is not for them that the notorious apple pie scene in American Pie was made. Horrible Histories, the gross-out children's books, are marketed for boys.

Teenage girls are applauded for overtaking their male classmates on most officially gradeable targets. With their typical thoroughness, they now excel in this previously exclusively male skill too: the ability to make a joke about a wet sock, and, for an A*, laugh about it while snorting milk through the nose.'

Article here. Excerpt:

'Many parents and educators do not realize that, on average, girls are better readers than boys. In every age group, boys have been scoring lower than girls on U.S. Department of Education reading tests for more than 30 years.

The longer boys are in school, the wider the reading gender gap becomes.
...
According to NAEP, males who have made it through 12 years of school have significantly poorer reading skills than their female peers. Among white males of college-educated parents, 23 percent scored “below basic” in reading, compared to 7 percent of their female peers. Among Hispanic males of college-educated parents, 34 percent scored “below basic” in reading, compared to 19 percent of their female peers. Among black males of college-educated parents, 44 percent scored “below basic” in reading, compared to 33 percent of their female peers.'

Story here. Excerpt:

'(AP) A Louisiana woman is accused of trading two young children in her care for a pet cockatoo and $175 cash from a couple who had been trying for years to have their own child, authorities said Thursday.

Donna Greenwell, 53, a long-haul trucker with an arrest record from Pitkin, is charged with aggravated kidnapping, along with would-be adoptive parents Paul J. Romero, 46, and Brandy Lynn Romero, 27, of Evangeline Parish.
...
The transaction for the 5-year-old boy and the 4-year-old girl was negotiated by phone after Greenwell spotted a flier posted at a livestock barn selling a cockatoo for $1,500 and called the Romeros on Feb. 18, Dupre said.'

Slideshow here. See if you can spot any women in the pictures.

Article here. Excerpt:

'For the third time in 22 years, Washington state is leading the nation in family law reform. This time, the report is called the Residential Time Summary Report prepared by the state Office of the Administrator for the Courts. This is a first-in-the-nation compilation of post-divorce breakdown of parenting time for children, mothers and fathers. The numbers are collected case-by-case and county-by-county.

Amazingly, 46 percent of children of divorce, statewide, are ordered to spend a minimum of 35 percent parenting time with their biological fathers. Parenting time is broken down by large percentages, and meaningful shared parenting starts in the range of 30-35 percent. This is about 300 percent better results than anyone could have expected from the time the Parenting Act was first approved. If there ever was any doubt, Washington state is now an official shared-parenting state for families impacted by parental separation.'