Article here. Excerpt:

'The U.S. Air Force on Wednesday announced a series of initiatives aimed at increasing the number of female pilots and improving retention and promotion of female and minority airmen.

The initiatives include a push to give more waivers to people who don’t meet Air Force height requirements to increase the pool of officers who are eligible to become pilots. While the waiver program currently exists, many cadets aren’t reviewed to see if they are eligible, Air Force officials said.

Air Force officials estimate that over the next five years, approximately 900 female airmen could be granted waivers, allowing them to enter pilot training.
...
Ms. James said women aren’t as well represented in the pilot career field, and the service must do what it can to try to increase the pool of potential female pilots.

Article here. Excerpt:

'A new documentary calls colleges like Harvard and Notre Dame "The Hunting Ground," where rapists prey on women. A bipartisan group of senators demand new rules to "curb campus sexual assaults."

Apparently, new laws are needed because at colleges, sexual assault is "epidemic." Rape is so common that there is a "rape culture."

I hear that a lot.

It is utter exaggeration. Fortunately, AEI scholar Christina Hoff Sommers is around to reveal the truth.

"This idea of a rape culture was built on false statistics and twisted theories about toxic masculinity," she says.

No one denies that some men, especially when drunk, get violent and abusive. I saw nasty behavior when I was in college, and I assume there are places worse than Princeton. 

Sommers says, "I always make clear, rape is a very serious problem, (but) if you look at the best data ... it is not an epidemic. And we do not have a rape culture." 

Article here. Excerpt:

'Columnist George Will wrote about the “supposed campus epidemic of rape,” accusing schools of making “victimhood a coveted status that confers privileges,” while others chimed in to claim sexual violence on campus is a “false epidemic” and accused survivors of fabricating their assaults.

Rape is the most underreported crime in America, not a crime in which we see rampant false reporting or embellishment. An attack of this nature is often the most personally painful moment in a victim’s life. What’s truly harmful is not the voices of survivors coming out of the shadows — but rather disparaging rhetoric that makes reporting even more difficult. We can’t let that rhetoric distract from our work to combat these crimes.'

Article here. Excerpt:

'Justin Dillon, former federal prosecutor and now a white collar defense lawyer, knows all too well the ways campus sexual abuse investigations can go wrong.

His litany of bizarrely skewed hearings is fraught with the potential for harm and tragic outcomes.

The college student brought up on charges of giving his girlfriend an unwanted kiss, more than a year after the relationship ended; an alleged rape victim who said friends had information the accused had raped others, but then declined to identify the friends; the hearing panel, composed of a librarian, a student dance major, and a professor of romance languages, whose job was to decide whether a sexual assault had occurred.

"It feels oftentimes that every new case I get is more absurd than the last. Sometimes you get people who are not old enough to drink, but are old enough to decide whether someone is a rapist," says the Harvard-trained lawyer, based in Washington.

Podcast page here.

'In recent years we’ve seen more and more people opposing circumcision around the world, but especially in America. Collectively they have become known as ‘intactivists.’ These people are the target audience of Foregen, an organization that not only lobbies against circumcision but also, as stated on its website, “promotes genital integrity through regenerative medicine.”

Eric Clopper, a spokesperson for Foregen, tells host Gilad Halpern that his organization refrains from politics, and its sole purpose is to help circumcised men enjoy sex as they should.'

Link here. Excerpt:

'Deputy Secretary Higginbottom will present 10 extraordinary women from 10 countries with the 2015 Secretary of State’s International Women of Courage Award on March 5 at 1:00 p.m. EST. First Lady Michelle Obama will join Deputy Secretary Higginbottom and the awardees as a special guest at the afternoon ceremony at the U.S. Department of State.

Story here. Excerpt:

'Anthony Crook's photo was on the front page of a local newspaper after being made public by Essex Police - but no charges were ever brought against him.

The publicity resulted in the 37-year-old losing his job and - in his words - becoming "unemployable".

He became depressed and began drinking heavily.

Judge Deborah Taylor ruled that police breached both data protection rules and Mr Crook's right to privacy.'

Article here. Excerpt:

'There’s not much to get excited about in the new version of the Campus Accountability and Safety Act, introduced last year in the Senate, according to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education.

The group praises small improvements in the new version, like removing the word “assailants” to refer to students accused of sexual assault, and notes that at least it doesn’t codify the “more likely than not” legal standard for guilt or “affirmative consent” regime.

But it’s thin on due-process protections, doing nothing to protect students whose schools have “inadequate” or “biased” institutional policies for adjudicating assault claims.

It gives “substantial resources” only to students who make accusations, including a “confidential advisor,” which “potentially” violates regulations implementing the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act and even Department of Education guidance, FIRE says.

Article here. Excerpt:

'Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand is teaming up with the makers of a new documentary to help pass her bill combating sex attacks on college campuses.

The New York Democrat and a bipartisan group of 11 other senators are rolling out legislation to coincide with the release of “The Hunting Ground,” which opens around the country later this month.

A day before the movie’s premiere in New York and Los Angeles, Gillibrand, who appears in the film, took in a Washington screening. The director and producer attended a press conference last week where the senators outlined their bill.

Lawmakers hope to use the reaction to the documentary 'The Hunting Ground' to push universities to step up action against sex assault.
...
The film has earned positive reviews but also has been slammed for its use of disputed statistics on the prevalence of college assaults and for condemning colleges across the board for failing to help victims.

Article here. Excerpt:

'A “Confronting Campus Rape” discussion at the University of Wisconsin-Madison on Monday night delved into the rights of the accused versus the rights of the accuser, a panel discussion during which participants suggested campus rape victims are largely mistreated and dismissed.

Some in the audience even suggested that the accused should not be innocent until proven guilty, and the emotionally charged talk included suggestions by UW-Madison professor Anne McClintock that “men on campus … are at greater risk of being assaulted on campus than they are of being falsely accused of a rape” and that “this university does expel students for plagiarism, but not for rape.”

A UW-Madison student on the panel who described herself as a rape survivor said she had, however, successfully gotten the first male student ever expelled from UW-Madison for rape.

Article here. Excerpt:

'Nationally, the percentage of men ages 25 to 54 who are not working has fallen over the past year, but it isn’t back to prerecession levels and remains far above where it was for past generations. As of January, 15.6% of men in that age group weren’t working. That’s a percentage point lower than a year ago, but above the less than 13% seen in late 2007 before the recession hit and not close to the 6% seen in the early 1970s.
...
Related reading:

More Men in Prime Working Ages Don’t Have Jobs*'

*To jump the login wall, Google the first paragraph text on the linked page and click the first search result link.

Press release here. Excerpt:

'WASHINGTON / March 3, 2015 – SAVE, a national organization working to end sexual assault, is criticizing the recently released movie The Hunting Ground for presenting false statistics, offering a one-side portrayal of the problem, and failing to call for greater police involvement in campus sex cases.

Produced by CNN Films, The Hunting Ground purports to be a documentary. In fact, the movie contains numerous factual errors and omits essential perspectives. The film does not attempt to verify the accuracy or completeness of persons’ accounts.

The film makes the claim that 20% of college women are sexually assaulted, even though the U.S. Department of Justice reports a woman’s risk is under one percent each year: http://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=pbdetail&iid=5176

Story here. Excerpt:

'Bykewich said every once in a while there is a case that is so horrific, a person with any kind of empathy simply cannot fathom it.

Bykewich asked for a sentence of 23 to 25 years, saying the only mitigating factor is the guilty plea, which came late and only after the woman's husband pleaded guilty and accused her of inflicting all of the children's physical injuries.

Earlier in Monday's hearing, an Alberta Children and Youth Services social worker testified she and her colleagues "could never have prepared for such a horrendous case" of child abuse as that of child "M" and her twin sister.
...
The two-year-old girl, who can only be identified as “M” under Alberta child welfare legislation, died after being removed from life-support following a lengthy court battle between the parents and doctors.

The twins had been beaten and starved.

Article here. Excerpt:

'What would happen if someone posted an article about how a particular ethnic group was poised to destroy a city? Imagine for a moment the outcry and outrage that would flow in the blogosphere if a columnist claimed, for example, that Chinese immigrants were ruining a city’s culture or that a particular company, dominated by women, was consigning a large American city to “doom” by causing housing prices to skyrocket.

Article here. Excerpt:

'Several left-leaning news sites recently reported that Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker wants universities to stop reporting instances of sexual assault to the feds – a factually incorrect assumption that spread across the Internet like wildfire before the stories were retracted.