Article here. Excerpt:

'Piedmont resident Lisa Braver Moss is collaborating with Rebecca Wald of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, on a book called "Celebrating Brit Shalom," to be published in the spring.

Brit shalom, which means "covenant of peace" in Hebrew, is a naming ceremony for newborn Jewish boys that does not involve circumcision as in the traditional bris milah (covenant of circumcision).

The book offers families who don't want to circumcise their infant sons the choice of three original brit shalom ceremonies that include prayers, readings, new music -- and the cutting of only a pomegranate, a fruit that symbolizes wisdom and righteousness in Judaism.'

Article here. Excerpt:

'A group of 20 attorneys from across the country with experience handling sexual assault cases sent a letter on Thursday to the co-sponsors of the Senate’s campus sexual assault bill.

The attorneys, who have all represented students accused of sexual assault who are now suing their universities for lack of due process, wrote that while sexual assault needs to be addressed, rights of the accused need to be preserved.

“We are concerned that the complexity of the problem and the momentum to find a solution to the manner in which colleges handle these matters will overwhelm any effort to ensure fair treatment to and protect the rights of the accused — particularly with respect to due process, impartiality and the collection of evidence,” the attorneys wrote.

They cited the Campus Accountability and Safety Act, noting the legislation uses the word “victim” or “victims” 34 times but “accused” only once.

Story here. Excerpt:

'A woman who was acquitted of murder after killing her ex-husband more than 20 years ago in South Florida is now facing charges of trying to kill her adult son — with the same gun.

Prosecutors in Las Vegas want a jury there to learn about the trial Linda Cooney won in 1993, when she was accused in the Feb. 7, 1992 shooting death of prominent Palm Beach County tax attorney James Cooney.

The testimony of Kevin Cooney, 11 at the time of the trial, was key to his mother's acquittal, according to Peter Magrino, the prosecutor who tried the case. James and Linda Cooney had divorced four years earlier, and she claimed she acted in self-defense when she shot him.

When Linda Cooney shot her ex-husband in 1992, Kevin Cooney told police he saw his fatally wounded father lying on the floor after he'd been shot. His hands were empty, he said. But during the trial, he told lawyers his father may have had something in his hands after all.

Article here. Excerpt:

'It’ll take more than an act of Congress to get more women into tech, former Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and former Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm agreed Thursday.

Changes may have to come from companies — or from women themselves, they said during a POLITICO Women Rule event in San Francisco.
...
Congress could require the industry and tech investors to disclose more data about how many women they hire, Napolitano suggested.
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Napolitano, who is now president of the University of California system, suggested she would consider moves to encourage transparency in the tech industry. She pledged at the event to inquire as to whether the University of California could demand that investment firms receiving money from the school system disclose their employment figures.'

Article here. Excerpt:

'The 'Undue Importance' Of SAT Scores Is Keeping Women Out Of Elite Colleges

Female college applicants' scores on the SAT could be keeping them out of some of the most elite colleges in the country, according to a new study.

According to the study, "the evidence best supports a conclusion that women's lower average standardized test scores, combined with the importance attributed to those scores in admissions decisions, creates de facto preferences for men that drive women's under-enrollment in these institutions."'

Article here. Excerpt:

'If there is a singular conversation starter about gender and money it is this:

Who pays on the first date?

As women make huge huge gains in family medical leave and gaining seats on corporate boards and in Congress, dating expectations barely budge. The status quo is that men pay on first dates. Last week NerdWallet released the results of a survey that found 77 percent of straight people believe men should pay on first dates — a sentiment held by 82 percent of men and 72 percent of women. I am one of those women. I have no financial reason not to pay for my own $29 grilled farm-raised salmon on a first outing with a man. But I really, really prefer if he cooly assumes the bill and slips the server his Visa.

It’s not about snagging a rich husband or a free meal.

Story here. Excerpt:

'Two months after Sao Paolo’s city authorities approved a bill enforcing women-only carriages on the city’s metro network, a transport minister has said that similar measures may be needed in the UK.

Claire Perry, speaking at the Conservative party conference in Birmingham yesterday, said she is “absolutely determined” to cut the number sexual offences on public transport, and that women-only carriages could be a way to prevent “groping and low-level violence”.
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Segregated carriages currently operate in India, Russia, Indonesia and Japan, where transport police have seen a drop in incidents since they were introduced. SheTaxi, a woman-only taxi company, also launched in New York this month.
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Perry said she’s also considered other “wacky ideas”, like banning repeat offenders from public transport permanently in a “three strikes” system. For all the practical barriers, that might be less wacky than removing women from mixed carriages for their own safety.'

Article here. Excerpt:

'Opening this fall in Old City, The Hive is a coworking space that follows in the footsteps of Indie Hall and Seed Philly (among others — plenty of us are getting sick of the crumby couch). This time around, however, it’s girls-only: billing itself as a “chic coworking space for the self-made female entrepreneur to learn, network and thrive,” this gorgeous 900-square-foot office is strictly for “queen bees.”

Article here. Excerpt:

'Gov. Jerry Brown, D-Calif., has signed into law the state’s controversial “yes means yes” sexual consent bill for disciplinary procedures at public colleges, which defines consent narrowly and leaves accused students without due process rights.

California’s bill, S.B.967, is the first in the nation to define consent as an “affirmative, conscious, and voluntary agreement,” but also codify into law that a “lack of protest or resistance does not mean consent, nor does silence mean consent.”

Non-verbal consent, such as a nod, is acceptable under the law, but because the law’s text requires consent to be “ongoing throughout a sexual activity and can be revoked at any time,” the likelihood that a university could determine signals were misinterpreted is high.

Link here. Excerpt:

'As part of the U.S. Department of State’s TechWomen exchange program, companies in the San Francisco Bay area and Silicon Valley will host 78 women from the Middle East and Africa from September 30 - November 5. The TechWomen program supports the United States’ global commitment to provide women the access and opportunities needed to advance their careers, pursue their dreams, and build a network of mentors in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM).

This year’s participants – from Algeria, Cameroon, Egypt, Jordan, Kenya, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Nigeria, the Palestinian Territories, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Tunisia, Yemen, and Zimbabwe – will work side-by-side with American counterparts at 40 leading companies. They will attend professional networking events and workshops hosted by partners in one of the following tracks: hardware, Internet, science, software, telecommunications, and for the first time this year green technology, as women who work in that field look for global solutions to environmental challenges.

Article here. Excerpt:

'Watson works with the HeForShe initiative, which encourages men to stand up for women’s equality—but the actress also brought an important point into the spotlight: Men are plagued by gender stereotypes too. Will her highly praised speech spur a change in Hollywood? Or will the industry continue to tear males down by portraying them as lovable idiots who ought to be banned from the domestic sphere?

“Men are often portrayed as dingdongs and women mainly as the tough counterpart with a bad attitude and that strange magic ‘problem solver’ gene,” said Nadia Atwal, a talent manager and film producer. “Women have to wake up and start switching on that ‘equality’ we supposedly score so high at.”

Article here. Excerpt:

'In fact, it would be nice to see a male student refuse to take part on the grounds that he is being discriminated against on the grounds of his gender.

And that's wrong. Or maybe it's only wrong when it's used against a woman.

The logic which drives this forced indoctrination is one which starts from the secret belief that all men are potential rapists, even the 'good' ones. It's a little piece of 1970s feminism that's as offensive as it is shrill and stupid.
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Ultimately, this is all down to identity politics and the belief that men are simply naked apes who can't be trusted to resist their 'biology' when it comes to understanding that rape is a bad thing.
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This intellectual black hole owes far more to the ideological laziness of the women behind the mandatory course than any desire to see the average campus become a safer place.

Article here. Excerpt:

'California’s enacting on Sunday of the “yes means yes" law is a victory for some feminist activists but an ill-conceived detour for feminism.
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Like the antiporn laws, “yes means yes” is a bad romance between feminism and the state for two reasons: pleasure and danger. The statute equates good sex with a legalistic definition of consent rather than with the pleasures had by the parties involved. It also expands notions of criminality at a time when the criminal-justice system is regularly committing horrific acts of race- and class-biased violence.
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"Yes means yes” is another case of politics making strange bedfellows. Feminists work hard to show that the state is both racist and sexist, and yet some feminists imagine that very same state making the world a safer place for them. That’s like dating the wrong partner and wistfully hoping, against all evidence, that he or she will change.'

Article here. Excerpt:

California Gov. Jerry Brown affixed his signature to SB 967—the "Yes Means Yes" affirmative consent bill—which will require colleges to police their students' sex lives.

Some congrats are in order, I suppose? To collectivist feminists, doomsayers of the "rape is an ever-worsening epidemic" variety, and other puritans: Your so-called progressivism has restored Victorian Era prudishness to its former place as a guiding moral compass. Well done, liberals.

Article here. Excerpt:

'CASA’s faith in self-interested campus judiciaries stands in stark contrast to recent efforts to address sexual assault in the military. In that context, Gillibrand and McCaskill argued that only impartial civil courts could secure justice.

And CASA’s most dangerous component provides OCR with a distorting incentive to wield its enforcement power against colleges and universities. CASA would empower OCR to impose fines equal to 1 percent of an institution’s entire operating budget for each Title IX “violation or failure” it found—and to keep the money for itself. This could be crippling. Last summer, for example, OCR found the University of Montana had committed 40 Title IX violations—a staggering potential loss of $160 million under CASA. Finding a single violation at Penn State could net OCR more than $45 million; finding 40 at Harvard could net 

Allowing OCR to self-fund by fining institutions for violations will only accelerate the rush to judgment in campus hearings, pushing campus administrators even further towards abandoning due process altogether. Already, college attorneys have admitted that pressure from OCR has prompted unjust outcomes. The National Center for Higher Education Risk Management acknowledged in a recent open letter that in “a lot” of cases, administrators are finding accused students guilty “in spite of the evidence—or the lack thereof—because they think they are supposed to, and that doing so is what OCR wants.” It’s no wonder that more than 20 students have recently filed suit against their institutions, alleging unfair campus hearings.
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