Story here.

'A West Virginia teenager has been sentenced to 30 years in prison for her role in her friend's death.

Seventeen-year-old Rachel Shoaf apologized before being sentenced Wednesday in Monongalia County Circuit Court. She pleaded guilty last May to second-degree murder in the July 2012 death of 16-year-old Skylar Neese.

Media outlets report that Judge Russell Clawges ordered Shoaf to serve her sentence in a state prison. She'll remain in a juvenile facility until her 18th birthday.

Co-defendant Shelia Eddy* was sentenced Jan. 24 to life in prison with the possibility of parole for first-degree murder.

Neese was lured from her home, stabbed to death and her body left in the woods. Prosecutors never divulged a motive. Shoaf told police the girls no longer wanted to be friends with Neese.'

Story here. Hey, welcome to the club. Male convicts not only get mandatory life sentences/death sentences for less (sometimes, a lot less, depending on the country) but people regularly state that they hope such men "rot to death," are raped/murdered while in jail, etc. So a mandatory life sentence handed out without further comment for a sadistic serial-murdering sociopath qualifies, IMO, as better treatment than is typical. Men so sentenced for similar (or lesser) acts are often also denounced by the judge at sentencing with all manner of more-polite ways to render the phrase "mass-murdering subhuman scumbag". And well-deserved. Just also well-deserved for female ones, too. Excerpt:

'Joanne Dennehy has become the first woman ordered to die behind bars by a judge, who told the murderer of three men she was "a cruel, calculating, selfish and manipulative serial killer".

Article here. Excerpt:

'How to prevent crime? 'Rein in the greenhouse gas emissions that are causing global warming in the first place.'

Controversial new research predicts that over the coming century, rising temperatures will result in more violent crime...'Police have long operated with the understanding that 'the summer is more dangerous than the winter,' explains Roman. 'To the extent that climate change causes people to be out and interacting more, there will be more crime.'

Like we mentioned last week, things are getting a little crazy when it comes to rape prevention.

From female students being afraid the statue of a man in underwear might come to life and sexually assault them, to a college administrator suggesting we hang every student who is accused of rape, just because he's been accused. Okay, I may have exaggerated about the hanging.

We want to stop rape hysteria because we don't think it's helping one bit. In fact, it's making it more difficult to promote evidence-based solutions. One way to end the hysteria is with facts. So here you go:

FACT: Each year, similar percentages of men and women (Men: 5.3%; Women: 5.6%) experience sexual violence other than rape.

That shows me that sexual assault is not a "gender crime."

FACT: The number of rapes of females has fallen dramatically in the United States, from 402,000 in 1995 to 143,300 in 2010.

Story here. A woman gets into an argument with her daughter and slaps her. The police show up and immediately confront the woman's husband, and somehow it leads to him dead on the ground. Imagine if the sexes had been totally reversed: Man gets into argument with son and slaps him. Police show up and confront the man's wife, and she is dead on the ground a few minutes later. That'd be weird, but this? How weird does it feel? If your intellectual reaction is that it's outrageous but emotionally it's... well, meh... then that's the degree to which you've been conditioned to accept male disposability and anti-male injustice. And tell me, we still live in a "patriarchy"? Excerpt:

'It was supposed to be a fun family outing to the movies, but Nair Rodriguez's 19-year-old daughter got under her skin. They fought, she said, and she slapped her daughter.

Article here. Excerpt:

'"Intimate partner violence is the leading cause of death for African-American women aged 15-45." – Attorney General Eric Holder, Oct. 19, 2009

A.G. Holder’s statement turned out to be wrong. So wrong, in fact that the Washington Post’s Fact-Checker said the claim qualified for his notorious Four-Pinocchio rating: http://wapo.st/19Gxb1x

Holder’s faux pas illustrates how even high government officials can be fooled by zealous advocates who dole out incredulous factoids.
These factoids are numerous, pervasive, and made by design:

Numerous

Have you noticed all the jaw-dropping abuse claims are out there?

Article here. Excerpt:

Article here. Excerpt:

'Growing gender enrolment [sic] gaps at universities and poor male test scores in reading and writing have a lot of commentators saying boys are being left behind in schools and workplaces increasingly shaped for women to succeed.

These concerns are nothing new according to University of Windsor education professor Christopher Greig. His recently published book, Ontario Boys: Masculinity and the Idea of Boyhood in Postwar Ontario, 1945—1960, argues that concerns about boyhood identity have been big issues in the past.
...
“Any time you have significant economic and societal changes you see gender roles can become threatened and you see that now also,” Greig said. “Today men continue to see women take on roles (men) used to dominate and succeed in fields they were not around in before, especially at universities.”
...
Greig says he hopes his book will help readers look at the bigger picture of how gender roles play a role in performance by boys at school and elsewhere.

Article here. Excerpt:

'Two weeks ago I wrote an article about the brilliant new film “The Mask You Live In,” a documentary about the pressures boys face growing up.

After my article was published, a reader wrote in with some thought-provoking points. Here is an excerpt from their email: “How about we allow boys to be boys and not emasculate them? By nature, they are rough and tumble, loud, and sometimes will push boundaries. Unfortunately, they receive labels like behavior disorder, ADD, ADHD and so on because most teachers are women and feel intimidated by their actions.”

Story here. Excerpt:

'Today, from the East Room of the White House, President Obama will launch a new effort aimed at empowering boys and young men of color, a segment of our society which too often faces disproportionate challenges and obstacles to success. These obstacles are found in our schools, our communities, our criminal justice system, our families, and even in the minds of our young people themselves. The president is committed to build a broad coalition of backers to help break down barriers, clear pathways to opportunity, and reverse troubling trends which show too many of our boys and young men of color slipping through the cracks in our society.

Link here. Excerpt:

'A 13-year-old girl has filmed two women racially and physically abusing a male passenger on a Gold Coast bus.

The mobile phone vision, filmed by a girl only known as Rebecca, shows the women hurling abuse at the man before assaulting a fellow passenger.

The teenager filming can be heard frantically pleading with someone on the bus to stop the women as the man tries to retaliate.

Ms Little also defended the bus driver for not stepping in to break up the feud.

"The girls also attacked the driver. Then they were standing right next to him while they were arguing with the Aboriginal man, Paul, so the driver couldn't get out of his seat," she said.

Ms Little said the video fails to show the moment the man continued to "hit" the two women even as they were getting off the bus.

"That was when the other passenger jumped up and just pushed them off," she said.

Article here. Excerpt:

'The Supreme Court of Utah ruled Tuesday that a district court judge should not have dismissed a biological father's challenge to the Utah Adoption Act.

Christopher Carlton, of Pennsylvania, filed the suit in his quest to find his daughter, now 3 years old, after the baby's mother told Carlton the child was a boy and had died shortly after birth, according to court documents.

The mother, Shalonda Brown, later revealed she had put the baby up for adoption, and Carlton tracked the case to the Adoption Center of Choice in Orem.

In early 2011, Carlton began challenging the constitutionality of the Utah Adoption Act, which prevents him from contesting the adoption because he hadn't acceptably established parental rights.

Article here. Excerpt:

'For years family lawyers have known it to be true: men get a raw deal when they divorce in this country. And by this country, I mean England and Wales rather than the UK as a whole. Scotland has a very different approach to money in divorce and women rarely get the joint lives order (aka ‘meal ticket for life’) that we still see here.

And the prejudice against men is not confined to finance. More important, perhaps, is the way in which there is still no level playing field when it comes to deciding whether children should have their primary homes with their mothers or fathers.

Announcement here. Excerpt:

'Plenty of poetry and song have been dedicated to a woman's heart, but a little science is needed, too, because her heart is also at the center of the number one cause of death for women.

According to the American Heart and Stroke Association, heart disease, disease, stroke, and other cardiovascular diseases (CVD) are the No. 1 cause of death in American women, claiming over 400,000 lives each year, or nearly one death each minute.

In 2009, one in 30 female deaths was from breast cancer, but one in three was from cardiovascular disease.

Article here. Excerpt:

'Only a small fraction of Army women say they'd like to move into one of the newly opening combat jobs, but those few who do say they want a job that takes them right into the heart of battle, according to preliminary results from a survey of the service's nearly 170,000 women.

That survey and others across the Army, publicly disclosed for the first time to The Associated Press, also revealed that soldiers of both genders are nervous about women entering combat jobs but say they are determined to do it fairly. Men are worried about losing their jobs to women; women are worried they will be seen as getting jobs because of their gender and not their qualifications. Both are emphatic that the Army must not lower standards to accommodate women.