Story here. Excerpt:

'Jeff Goldblum had his son circumcised, but didn't hold a bris — the ceremonial Jewish circumcision ritual — he told Conan O'Brien, when Conan asked. Instead, he and his wife and their pediatrician, a former New York Met, sang "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" during the procedure. Goldblum asked Conan and sidekick Andy Richter if they had circumcised their sons, and Richter took the bait.

Richter did not have his son circumcised, and that's only the tip of the personal iceberg he shared. O'Brien stayed out of the debate, only jumping in occasionally to let everyone know how uncomfortable he was with the turn of the conversation. "With my son, as I told the doctor, I said, 'He was born perfect — why change him?'" Richter said, to appreciative murmurs from the audience. "So, what I'm saying is, you've mutilated your child," he added, good-naturedly ribbing Goldblum. Goldblum said that Ricther was probably right, and Conan took the opportunity to wrap up the debate. ...'

Article here. Excerpt:

'Circumcision is supposed to be a rite of passage, but a new study by World Vision has confirmed the fears of many that some boys are subjected to abusive and bullying practices.

The charity's study, In the Name of Culture: Forced Initiation in Orange Farm South Africa, which was carried out in Orange Farm, south of Johannesburg, found that boys who do not go, or do not complete initiation, are picked on and excluded.

"For example, fellow students will take away their chairs and won’t allow them to use the school bathrooms unless they pay a fee," World Vision said a statement.

Paula Barnard, national director of World Vision SA, said society is not acting cohesively or fast enough to deal with illegal initiation schools.'

Article here. Excerpt:

'Yale is reporting not only on cases brought forward since Jan. 1, but also providing updates on past cases.

In one example, one of the school’s Title IX coordinators “brought a formal complaint alleging that a [Yale College] student engaged in sexual touching without consent.” Upon further review, the school “did not find sufficient evidence to support the allegation,” but continued to maintain no-contact restrictions on the cleared student.

On other occasions, accused students did not even get a hearing, receiving punishments directly from Title IX officers.

On one occasion, a student accused another of inappropriate sexual touching but decided to not go forward with the case. Without any adjudication of the allegation’s merits, the Title IX coordinator “counseled the one identified respondent on appropriate conduct and referred the respondent for training on sexual consent.”'

Article here. Excerpt:

'At the University of Minnesota, yes now officially means yes.

The U’s revised “affirmative consent” policy on student sexual relations will roll out next week, in time for freshmen to begin arriving on campus for Welcome Week Sept. 2-7.
...
Critics of affirmative consent say it places an unfair burden on the accused. The policy has been implemented at schools across the country during the past year. But this summer, courts in Tennessee, California and Virginia have criticized it in cases where students accused of sexual assault didn’t receive due process.

“What the court said is that you cannot require someone to prove that consent was manifested, particularly in a typical date-rape situation where there is no other evidence and where it often comes down to he-said, she-said,” said John Banzhaf, a law professor at George Washington University.'

Story here. Excerpt:

'A Maryland politician was busted on charges of indecent exposure and trespassing at her ex-husband’s house, court documents show.

Delegate Ariana Kelly flipped out when she dropped off the couple’s kids in Bethesda and realized her former spouse’s fiancee was home,the Washington Post reported.

The 38-year-old state lawmaker rang the doorbell over and over during the June 27 encounter, and then pulled out her breasts, according to the complaint.

The Montgomery Democrat stood “with one breast in each hand (shaking) them up and down,” according to the documents obtained by the Washington Post.

Kelly’s ex-husband, Barak Sanford, recorded the bizarre episode on his cell phone and called police, authorities said.'

Article here. Excerpt:

'The psychological and forensic profile of men who murder their intimate partners varies from murderers who kill people they don’t know, a study published online Friday in the Journal of Forensic Sciences suggests.

The study, conducted by scientists at Northwestern University, involved more than 1,500 hours of interviews with 153 male and female murderers charged with and/or convicted of first-degree murder in Illinois, Missouri, Indiana, Colorado and Arizona.

“You learn a lot about them in that amount of time,” lead author Robert Hanlon, director of the forensic psychology research lab at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, said in a news release. “I saw the same patterns and trends over and over again.”

Article here. Excerpt:

Press release here. Excerpt:

'In four recent cases, judges have overturned sexual assault findings by campus disciplinary committees. In each case, the judges ruled the college proceedings lacked necessary due process protections. As the new academic year begins, these judicial decisions highlight the need for renewed focus on fairness in college sex assault cases, SAVE says.

In the most recent case, federal judge Norman Moon ruled that Washington and Lee University created a climate of gender discrimination that served to “railroad” students who are wrongly accused of sexual assault. The judge concluded the university’s bare-bones adjudication process “plausibly support a Title IX claim” by the plaintiff. See Doe v. Washington & Lee Univ.: https://d28htnjz2elwuj.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/06171146/Opinion-on-MTD.pdf

In a landmark case, Judge Carol McCoy ruled that the affirmative consent standard used by the University of Tennessee-Chattanooga was unfair because the rule “erroneously shifted the burden of proof” to the defendant, robbing the student of his due process rights. McCoy noted that “requiring the accused to affirmatively provide consent… is flawed and untenable if due process is to be afforded to the accused.”https://kcjohnson.files.wordpress.com/2013/08/memorandum-mock.pdf

In mid-August, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Robert H. O’Brien barred the University of Southern California from expelling Bryce Dixon, a football player who was expelled on an allegation of sexual assault. The judge found that that the university’s sexual assault adjudication process was fundamentally unfair to accused students: http://reason.com/blog/2015/08/13/judge-stops-usc-from-expelling-football

Article here. Excerpt:

'But the initiative signals something more worrisome than just Columbia’s distorted priorities, according to this refusenik. “People like me might be losing the right simply to be silent, to be left alone,” he writes. “For the first time I, along with anyone else remotely willing to dissent, am not even being allowed to stay quiet and keep my opinions to myself. The initiative implies that agreement with the ideology—indeed, with a university-mandated code of sexual ethics—is actually required for attendance at this institution.”

Article here. Excerpt:

'Is that what you mean when you say in the book that "every American boy is at risk of growing up to become a rapist"?

"When I say that, I mean that American boys are all growing up in the same rape culture, so they're growing up with this incredible sense of entitlement to women's bodies. Boys are taught that sex is their right – it's on demand, basically – and that girls will resist, and their job is to overcome that resistance. Instead of teaching them about respecting girls as fellow human beings, they're taught that girls are sexual organs.

A culture that devalues girls and women gives social cover to people who want to rape. You don't know which boy is going to be the one who says, "I'm going to go for it." (And it almost always is a boy. There are cases of women raping both other women and men, but men are predominantly the perpetrators, regardless of the gender of the victim.)

Link here. Readers interested in making a submission (comment) can do so until 30 October 2015. Excerpt:

Article here. Excerpt:

'Former Queensland premier Anna Bligh kicked off the topic by answering a viewer's question about whether she would advise young women to pursue a career in politics.

She said women needed to persist longer to be selected as leading figures in politics.

"We need the best and brightest. And to get the best and brightest, we need just as many young women to put their hands up as young men, to stay in the political parties long enough to get preselected and go through those sorts of jobs," she said.

Ms Bligh said despite the brutality of being a woman in Australian public life, she would not discourage young females to make this as their career choice.
...
Former federal independent MP Tony Windsor went one step further in saying women made better politicians than men, praising Julia Gillard for her role as the first Australian female prime minister.

"I think women — I'm generalising here — but I think women tend to make better politicians than the men," he said.'

Article here. Excerpt:

'SCOTTISH Liberal Democrat leader Willie Rennie is to seek to change his party’s rules to allow women-only shortlists for parliamentary selections.

Mr Rennie said he had “lost patience” with the current system and would take steps to address the gender imbalance within his party at its spring conference.

The party was criticised after its only female MSP, Alison McInnes, lost out to former MSP Mike Rumbles at the top of the party’s north-east Scotland regional list for next year’s Holyrood election.

Similar proposals have been rejected by the party in the past but Mr Rennie said the time was right for a “fresh start”.

He has pledged to lead a working group to look at measures to increase representation of Liberal Democrat women in Holyrood, Westminster and Brussels.'

Article here. Excerpt:

'She had posted a satirical cartoon on Facebook to protest proposed legislation to restrict birth control and women’s rights. Farghadani has since been found guilty of “spreading propaganda” and “insulting members of parliament through paintings.” She has been sentenced to 12 years in prison.

Farghadani is one of millions of women whose basic rights are being ruthlessly violated. In countries like Iran, Yemen, Egypt, and Cambodia, women are struggling for freedoms most women in the West take for granted.

But American feminists are relatively silent about these injustices — especially feminists on campus. During the 1980s, there were massive demonstrations on American college campuses against racial apartheid in South Africa. There is no remotely comparable movement on today’s campuses against the gender apartheid prevalent in large parts of the world. Why not?

Article here. Excerpt:

'It has been nearly a year since Democratic California Gov. Jerry Brown signed into law the first-in-the-nation "yes-means-yes" policy on sexual consent. Since that time we've seen more schools adopt the policy, more lawsuits from students and more rulings from judges determining the merits of campus kangaroo courts.

One recent ruling, limited in scope but broad in its potential ramifications, addressed the yes-means-yes policies head-on. Judge Carol McCoy addressed two of the biggest concerns shared by opponents of yes-means-yes — the burden of proof being shifted onto the accused, and the nearly impossible task of proving such consent was obtained.

McCoy overturned a University of Tennessee-Chattanooga ruling that a student accused of sexual assault failed to prove he did obtain consent. Of course, such proof could not be obtained, as there are very few ways — and even fewer legal ways — to provide such proof.