Article here. Try not to laugh too hard. Excerpt:

'In fact, “Believe All Women” does have an asterisk: *It’s never been feminist “boilerplate.” What we are witnessing is another instance of the right decrying what it imagines the American women’s movement to be.

Spend some mind-numbing hours tracking the origins of “Believe All Women” on social media sites and news databases — as I did — and you’ll discover how language, like a virus, can mutate overnight. All of a sudden, yesterday’s quotes suffer the insertion of some foreign DNA that makes them easy to weaponize. In this case, that foreign intrusion is a word: “all.”'

Article here. Excerpt:

'Last week, Education secretary Betsy DeVos released the new regulations for colleges to follow in Title IX cases. The old rules, decreed in the Obama administration, trampled all over concepts of fairness and due process in order to create a winning political issue for the Democrats. Many people in and out of the legal profession denounced them and early in her tenure, Secretary DeVos suspended them.

In today’s Martin Center article, I write about the ways in which the new rules restore balance in Title IX cases. The one-sided proceedings headed by a single administrator — often a zealot who was determined to nail as many of the accused as possible — are no longer approved.

Article here. Words fail me. Excerpt:

'Legendary singer David Crosby helped fellow singer Melissa Etheridge's son Beckett Cypher be conceived and now Crosby is speaking out about his death.

Etheridge on Tuesday announced the death of the 21-year-old, who was her son along with her former partner, Julie Cypher.

"Today I joined the hundreds of thousands of families who have lost loved ones to opioid addiction," Etheridge said in a tweeted statement. "My son Beckett, who was just 21, struggled to overcome his addiction and finally succumbed to it today. He will be missed by those who loved him, his family and friends."

Crosby helped Etheridge and Cypher, who split in 2000, conceive Beckett and their daughter Bailey, 23, via sperm donation and artificial insemination.

In a since deleted post, a Twitter user wrote that Crosby was just a donor and, "Like most donors, he played no other part."

"Not true," Crosby posted in response.'

Article here. Jump the paywall by Googling the first paragraph text. Excerpt:

'Boston police reported fewer calls for intimate-partner domestic violence in March and April than in the same period last year — a seemingly positive trend that nonetheless worries officials and advocates who fear victims are reluctant to report abuse while advised to stay at home due to a pandemic.

“You’re going to see underreporting because people are afraid. They’re living with their abuser," Attorney General Maura Healey said in an interview Tuesday. "It’s hard for them to make a phone call. It’s hard for them to go online even.”'

Press release here. Excerpt:

'The Coalition to End Domestic Violence is warning lawmakers of continued false claims of a “surge” and “spike” of domestic violence cases as a result of coronavirus stay-at-home policies. Such claims have been refuted by 30 police reports from 17 states around the country, which are listed below.

Calls requesting police assistance (“calls for service”) are the most reliable indicator of domestic violence trends, for three reasons:

1. Domestic violence victims or witnesses are able to make a 911 call and be connected to law enforcement officials within seconds.

2. The volume of calls is tracked by a neutral government agency, not an advocacy organization.

3. Many calls to domestic violence hotlines and shelters are requests for information about immigration, housing, or childcare (1).

Article here. Excerpt:

'Education Secretary Betsy DeVos' revised federal guidelines on how sexual assault allegations should be handled on college and K-12 campuses are the target of a federal lawsuit filed Thursday claiming that the changes would "inflict significant harm" on victims and "dramatically undermine" their civil rights.

The suit, filed on behalf of four advocacy groups for people who have been sexually assaulted, including Know Your IX and Girls for Gender Equity, is the first that seeks to block the Education Department's new provisions before they go into effect on Aug. 14.

The rules championed by DeVos effectively bolster the rights of due process for those accused of sexual assault and harassment, allowing for live hearings and cross-examinations. It's what agency officials say was lacking during the Obama administration to protect all students under Title IX, a 1972 law that prohibits gender discrimination, including sexual assault, at schools.'

Article here. Excerpt:

'A discrimination lawsuit against Colgate University led by a male former student is moving to trial in the U.S. District Court in Syracuse, New York. In 2017 an unidentified student at the university was charged with four counts of sexual misconduct. Three of the charges were dropped during a campus hearing, however, the student was found guilty on the fourth charge of non-consensual sex.

Colgate University moved to expel the male student with Interim Vice President stating in a court hearing that a “finding of responsibility for sexual assault is a significant offense and one that we believed warranted separation from the institution.”

The male student using the pseudonym “John Doe” filed a lawsuit against Colgate University on the basis of gender discrimination throughout the sexual misconduct investigation and during sanctioning.

Doe claims the campus hearing panel’s decision to expel was swayed by his gender.'

Article here. Excerpt:

'The hashtag #BelieveWomen stemmed from an era when women claiming to have been sexually assaulted were broadly dismissed. That is, if you ignore the history of white women falsely accusing black men of rape. Those women were largely believed and the accused often summarily tortured and hung by the neck from a tree.
...
Between 1881 and 1968, 3,446 black men were killed by lynching, a number drawn from the Tuskegee Institute archives. Almost a quarter of lynching victims had been accused of sexual assault, according to the Equal Justice Initiative.

A scholar, Wells didn’t ignore the reality that some rapes happened. She held, rather, that many such charges followed the discovery of consensual relationships between black men and white women – of which there were many.

Regarded as a vessel of Victorian purity, a white woman’s word was rarely doubted. That made legal proceedings unnecessary in the minds of the racist mob.

Article here. Excerpt:

'Men's blood has higher levels than women's of a key enzyme used by the new coronavirus to infect cells, the results of a big European study showed on Monday -- a finding which may help explain why men are more vulnerable to infection with COVID-19.

Angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2) is found in the heart, kidneys and other organs. In COVID-19, the respiratory disease caused by the novel coronavirus, it is thought to play a role in how the infection progresses into the lungs.

The study, published in the European Heart Journal, also found that widely-prescribed drugs called ACE inhibitors or angiotensin receptor blockers (ARBs) did not lead to higher ACE2 concentrations and should therefore not increase the COVID-19 risk for people taking them.

ACE inhibitors and ARBs are widely prescribed to patients with congestive heart failure, diabetes or kidney disease. The drugs account for billions of dollars in prescription sales worldwide.'

Article here. Excerpt:

'Federal Department of Education sex discrimination investigations have been opened on Fayette County Schools’ new all-girls elementary STEM program and four female-only STEM programs at the University of Kentucky following complaints from a Michigan professor.

Officials in the Department’s Office of Civil Rights confirmed in letters to professor Mark Perry dated Friday and April 30 that the office was investigating his complaints about the elementary school set to open in the fall and about the UK programs. Determinations have not been made on the merits of the complaints, the letters said.

Title IX is a federal law that says “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance.”'

Article here. Excerpt:

'Students who were dubiously accused of sexual assault through the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill’s kangaroo court system – even more than a decade ago – will soon have their names made public, along with the offense of which they were accused, and the punishment they received if found responsible.

Noticeably absent from the information will be the details of the allegation, which would help to explain whether the student was wrongly found responsible and to what extent UNC-CH went to find them responsible anyway.

Article here. Excerpt:

'Former vice president Joe Biden promised on Wednesday that as president he would reverse new due process protections that Education Secretary Betsy DeVos put in place to protect university students accused of sexual assault, saying they “shame and silence survivors, and take away parents’ peace of mind.”

Biden, who has recently been accused of sexual assault in 1993 by a woman who worked for him, said the new rules give colleges and universities a “green light to ignore sexual violence and strip survivors of their rights.”'

Article here. Excerpt:

'Both the Department of Education and President Donald Trump’s campaign pushed back on 2020 presidential candidate Joe Biden’s promise to reverse due process rules for campus sexual assault on Thursday.

The former vice president, who faces sexual assault allegations by his former Senate staffer Tara Reade, promised Wednesday to reverse Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos’s Title IX protections for those accused of sexual assault on college campuses. The protections are the Trump administration’s effort to “shame and silence” sexual assault victims, he added in a statement.
...
“Does Joe still stand by his presumption of guilt for the accused – or has he set a new standard for himself in the face of his own sexual assault accusations from a former staffer,” Perrine added.'

Article here. Excerpt:

'But, Joe Biden is the first major party presidential candidate to announce that he is committed to a female running mate, before actually choosing who that running mate will be. In other words, he’s the first to limit the pool of candidates to only women. “And I commit that I’ll pick a woman to be vice-president. There are a number of women who are qualified to be president tomorrow, I would pick a woman to be my vice-president,” Biden declared during the March democratic debate.

Article here. Excerpt:

'The Trump administration released new guidelines Wednesday for how universities and K-12 schools should handle complaints of sexual assault and misconduct as part of a contentious overhaul that Education Secretary Betsy DeVos launched in 2017.

Now, under reworked federal rules, alleged student perpetrators will have added protections, including the presumption that they are innocent throughout the disciplinary process and the right to be provided all evidence collected against them. Those students can also cross-examine their accusers and vice versa during live hearings, although it must be done through a lawyer or representative.

The changes, described in a more than 2,000-page document, go into effect on Aug. 14.

They come after the Education Department "heard from too many students whose careers were tarnished by administrators without any resemblance to due process," Kenneth Marcus, the agency's assistant secretary of civil rights, told reporters. "This must stop."