Article here. Excerpt:

'The U.S. Supreme Court has held that offensive touching can qualify as a “misdemeanor crime of domestic violence” that disqualifies the perpetrator from owning a gun.

The court ruled (PDF) in the case of James Alvin Castleman, who pleaded guilty to the misdemeanor offense of intentionally or knowingly causing bodily injury to the mother of his child. Though the court was unanimous in holding that Castleman’s conviction disqualified him from possessing a gun under federal law, a debate emerged over the meaning of domestic violence.

One the one side was Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who wrote the opinion for the court, and on the other was Justice Antonin Scalia, who was among three concurring justices. Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. wrote the second concurrence, joined by Justice Clarence Thomas.
...
In his concurrence, Scalia agreed that Castleman’s conviction disqualified him from owning a gun, but he took issue with Sotomayor’s “inventive, nonviolent definition” of physical force.
...
The court ignores accepted definitions of domestic violence, Scalia said, opting instead to cite expansive definitions in an amicus brief by the National Network to End Domestic Violence and publications issued by the Justice Department’s Office on Violence Against Women. As an example of the broad definition, Scalia cited amici's description of domestic violence as acts that humiliate, isolate, frighten and blame; excessive monitoring of a woman's behavior; repeated accusations of infidelity; and controlling contact with others.

Article here. Excerpt:

'With April being Child Abuse Prevention and Awareness Month, Chelsea Mayor Earl Niven has proclaimed April 20-26 as Parental Alienation Prevention Week and April 25 as Parental Alienation Awareness Day.

Niven issued the proclamation during the Chelsea City Council’s regular meeting March 18 as Kenneth Paschal, director of government affairs for the Alabama Family Rights Association, looked While addressing the council, Paschal said “alienation is the worse form of child abuse” and awareness is the first step toward change.

“Child Abuse and Prevention and Awareness Month is a time to emphasize that our children are innocent and deserve the leadership of the adults around them to ensure their health, wellness and safety,” Paschal said.

Story here. Breakthrough! For India, anyway. Wonder when the U.S. is going to have one like this? Excerpt:

'A woman has been denied alimony by a Delhi court which observed that she was capable of working as she used to do before marriage and so was not dependent upon her husband for survival.

"The couple does not have any child and therefore the woman was as independent as the man to work and maintain herself," Additional Sessions Judge (ASJ) Anuradha Shukla Bhardwaj said, dismissing the appeal of the woman, a resident of Delhi, who had challenged the order of a magisterial court which had also denied her relief on similar grounds.

The court rejected the woman's plea relying on judgements of the Delhi High Court in which it had held that when husband and wife have equal educational qualifications, both must take care of themselves.

Article here. Excerpt:

'What’s a woozle? And what role does it play in child custody decisions and custody law reform? If you remember Winnie the Pooh, he and his friends become obsessed with the idea that they are being stalked by a frightening beast they called a woozle. In fact, they are being deceived by their own footprints as they walk around in circles. In social science a woozle is a belief or a claim based on inaccurate, partial, or flawed data — data that have been repeatedly misrepresented, misinterpreted or “woozled” in ways that end up influencing public opinion, individuals’ decision making, and public policy.

The U.S. Dept. of Education has proposed that college students who engage in sex will have to follow Affirmative Consent requirements...or they will be considered rapists!

That lead to a bill in California that would mandate students give their consent on a repeated basis before and throughout the sex act...or they will be considered rapists!

A college in Ohio adopted Affirmative Consent in the 1990's prompting national ridicule. The idea was even lampooned on Saturday Night Live.

Yet...it's baaaaack: http://www.saveservices.org/camp/affirmative-consent

Ask your elected officials to Oppose the Dept. of Ed. Affirmative Consent Mandate...before everyone on campus is considered rapists!

• Capitol Switchboard: (202) 224-3121
• Find your Lawmakers: http://www.usa.gov/Contact/Elected.shtml

Thank you!

Story here. The vast majority of homeless people are men. I doubt New York would even consider doing this kind of thing if they were mostly women instead. Excerpt:

'As counties like Monroe struggle to cover the cost of legal defense for the poor, state lawmakers have been raiding tens of millions of dollars from a fund designated for that very purpose.

Over the past six years, the state's elected officials have yanked close to $50 million from a fund designated for indigent legal services.

While the "sweeps," as they are called, have not had immediate impact on a fund designated for indigent defense, those lost millions may be needed in future years as counties across New York try to provide constitutionally sound legal services for the poor. And the practice speaks to a larger issue, advocates for indigent defense services say: A continued unwillingness by state officials to confront a patchwork system of indigent legal aid.

Story here. Doesn't surprise me, or, the reason, anyway. But I am surprised that a member of the bench would behave as reported (even if he held no court appointment or elected judgeship at this particular time), since he must have known full well the only response a judge can render and keep authority in the courtroom is to find the disorderly party in contempt. But he is known for his personal mission of "promoting manhood and protecting womanhood" (See 4th paragraph of the article). This is a chivalrous idea that he apparently has taken a pledge (to whom??) to uphold, and like other modern-day (and not-so-modern-day) men who have been conned into this kind of idea, he has just paid for it. A man his age really ought to know better by now. Excerpt:

'The star of the television show “Judge Joe Brown” has been arrested and charged with five counts of contempt of court in Tennessee, court officials in Memphis said Monday.

This book entitled "The Law And Economics Of Child Support Payments" was published in 2004 and addresses the problems with the NCP-pays-CP system in the US, as well as most if not all other countries in the world that have a legal system with the power to adjudicate child custody conflicts.

It is very expensive for a book of most kinds these days, but I thought I would make people aware of its existence, as I was by a MANN reader via email. Such a book would probably make a very good addition to a library of many kinds: college, public, etc. Book description:

Article here. Excerpt:

'Put the phrase "binge drinking Britain" into Google and you will find one over-riding image in use. Young women in tiny skirts and towering heels are shown in the final stages of drunkenness, stumbling down a high street or collapsed on the ground. Nor is the search engine alone in depicting UK's alcohol culture this way. Women, young and old, are invariably used as illustrations of the problems of binge drinking today.

Last year North Yorkshire’s newly elected police commissioner Julia Mulligan said women's binge drinking was a real problem in the area, which leaves them “vulnerable to exploitation” while last month the Daily Mail asked: “Why do some of our brightest young girls want to drink themselves into oblivion?”

But what about our brightest young boys? Are they so brilliant at controlling their alcohol intake? The answer is certainly no but somehow no one seems to care if they get legless or incapable.
...
Gin Lane (1751) [link added], William Hogarth's painted depiction of London’s descent into the gin craze, when cheap alcohol flooded the market, is typical. At the centre of this image of decay a woman lets her child fall from her arms – presumably to its death - as she sits insensible and uncaring. Although Hogarth also shows men descending into debauchery and violence, it is this lost woman that forms his central motif. In the 18th century, gin became known as mother's ruin - not father’s. Segue to the modern times, and the exhibition uses a 2008 photograph - of three girls stumbling down a street, drinks in hand - that has appeared in just about every UK newspaper. Two hundred years later, attitudes have changed not a jot. But why?

Article here. Excerpt:

'The CBC’s Jian Ghomeshi is the most amiable, open-minded guy in the world, with a good sense of humour to boot. The perfect radio host. His weekly show, Q, frequently provides proof of his willingness to explore both sides of a gamut of issues in the classic liberal tradition.

Unfortunately, amongst doctrinaire feminists, amiability, intellectual curiosity and even (especially?) a sense of humour don’t cut it when their pet theories fall into Q’s crosshairs. Ghomeshi had the temerity on Monday to host a debate about the veracity of “rape culture,” between Lise Gotell, chair of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Alberta, and conservative researcher Heather Macdonald of the Manhattan Institute.

Editorial in National Post today (Equal Parenting Bill C560 is being debated for Second Reading today March 25 in Parliament). Excerpt:

'In recent days, the National Post has brought forward two sides of the current debate on Bill C-560, An Act to amend the Divorce Act (equal parenting), set for second reading in the House of Commons today.

Although the two articles, by Barbara Kay (“After a divorce, equal parenting rights should be the norm,” March 19) and Tasha Kheiriddin (“Equal shared parenting laws don’t put kids first,” March 20) appear at first glance to present diametrically opposed positions, each expresses valid concerns in regard to the importance of maintaining parent-child relationships, ensuring continuity and stability in children’s lives, and containing parental conflict. The question is whether any one legal formula can be crafted to take on board all of these concerns.

Petition here. Would they dare try to do this to homeless women? Never. Instead, there'd be a nation-wide effort to find them places to live and get them medical and psychiatric care. Excerpt:

'Private labor contractors in Japan are "recruiting" homeless men and men to work in the disaster area of the destroyed Fukushima nuclear power plant, taking advantage of their desperation to pay them less than minimum wage and with no proof that their health is being protected.

In a devil's bargain between organized crime bosses and the nation's top construction firms, laborers are exploited by these contractors as they take in state funds for the cleanup, giving them miniscule cuts for the dangerous untrained work and then subtracting more for food and lodging.

Story here. Excerpt:

'She lived in a 4,000-square foot, $1.4 million home and drove a bright green Camaro with vanity plates that read "MY SYN," but prosecutors said grandmother Erika Perdue's opulent lifestyle wasn't her darkest vice.

Perdue, who pleaded guilty to charges of trading and shipping child porn last year, was sentenced to 14 years in federal prison on Monday.

“I lost two granddaughters to this,” Perdue said in court Monday, according to the Dallas Morning News.

According to court records, the 43-year-old Dallas socialite downloaded and traded child pornography every day for 13 years while her successful lawyer husband was at work.

The Dallas Morning News reports that the activity only stopped once federal agents raided her home and arrested her in April 2012, finding more than 4,000 illicit images on her computer.

Following the raid, agents told WFAA that the images were extremely graphic, and included depictions of toddlers being raped by men and women.

Article here. Excerpt:

'I like being a woman. I have never felt even remotely bad about being a female member of the species. Chalk it up to an adolescence miraculously devoid of the unrelenting glare of women’s magazines, a fantastic relationship with my supportive parents, or being born in the good ol’ United States of America, but I’ve always known that being a girl is pretty awesome.

And the only time it even occurs to me to feel bad about my sex is when feminists start telling me I’m doing everything wrong.

The most recent feminist triumph had nothing to do with advocating for the right of women to drive in Saudi Arabia or for the right to life of unborn children killed simply for the crime of being girls or any other such problem. It was a campaign organized by high-achieving and popular women such as Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg to, um, “ban” everyone else from using the word bossy. I already listed seven of the problems with this campaign (e.g. girls don’t need over-protection, victims of unduly assertive people need a word to use to combat bad behavior, not everyone’s a leader and it’s time to stop shaming people who aren’t.)

But one major problem with the campaign is that it has taken a word that wasn’t gender specific and made it into one. So in the name of feminism, we have forever joined the term “bossy” with “girl-trait” in everyone’s minds. What are you going to do for an encore, feminism?

In response to the campaign, Elle magazine came up with an even better idea: “While We’re Banning Stuff, Let’s Ban Sorry“:
...

Link here. Excerpt:

'* Scholarship Opportunity for 4 Weeks Work
*$37,715 - $44,460 p.a. + Generous Super
* Sydney, Canberra, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth, Darwin, Hobart, Adelaide

A scholarship is offered in each state and territory every year for Australian women studying at TAFE or equivalent level, courses in electronics technology, electrical engineering, communications engineering, computer systems/shared technology or similar.

Successful applicants will receive four weeks paid work in the Technology Division of the ABC, plus a $1,000 educational book allowance.'