Story here. Excerpt:

'A Smyrna woman has been charged with murder after police say she admitted lacing her husband's steroid injections with antifreeze.

State police say 44-year-old Jamie Baker was arrested on Thursday and charged with first-degree murder in the death of her husband, 42-year-old James Baker.

James Baker died in September. An autopsy revealed he had a chemical found in antifreeze in his system, and his death was ruled homicide by poisoning.
...
Police searched the home again on Thursday, and police say Jamie Baker told officers that she had used a hypodermic syringe to extract antifreeze from a bottle and then injected it into her husband's bottles of steroids.'

Story here. Excerpt:

'A federal judge has ruled that a series of claims by a student-athlete against his school will go to trial after he was branded a rapist during a campus hearing even though a local prosecutor who investigated said the case should be dropped.

A ruling from U.S. District Judge Arthur Spiegel rejected the request by Xavier University to toss the entire case. It ordered a trial on claims by Dezmine Wells regarding breach of contract, intentional infliction of emotional distress, libel through injury to his personal reputation, his profession reputation and with malice, negligence and discrimination.

The school released only a statement on the dispute.

“We’re pleased that the court dismissed a number of the claims at this point,” the university said. “The court’s decision was based solely on the facts as alleged by Mr. Wells and his lawyers in their amended complaint, as is required by court rules at this early stage in the litigation. After the actual facts are disclosed to the court, we are confident that the result will vindicate Xavier.”

Catherine Sevcenko, an attorney, commented on the website of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education that Wells was expelled for sexual assault “in spite of the local prosecutor’s public statements that the evidence did not support the accuser’s allegations.”
...
WND has reported several times on the federal campaign to have campus disciplinary boards determine guilt based on a preponderance of the evidence, which is far lower that the “beyond a reasonable doubt” in America’s criminal justice system.
...

Article here. Excerpt:

'How does classifying most consensual sex as rape help rape victims?

As a lawyer who has handled rape and sexual harassment cases, I can’t imagine how. But this radical result is what some want to happen in California.

In endorsing a bill in the California legislature that would require “affirmative consent” before sex can occur on campus, the editorial boards of the Sacramento and Fresno Bee and the Daily Californian advocated that sex be treated as “sexual assault” unless the participants discuss it “out loud” before sex, and “demonstrate they obtained verbal ‘affirmative consent’ before engaging in sexual activity.”

Press release here. Excerpt:

'WASHINGTON / March 11, 2014 – Editorial writers are criticizing Senate Bill 967 for removing due process protections and encouraging false allegations. Stop Abusive and Violent Environments, a victim advocacy group, says the bill’s broad definitions would serve to dissipate scarce resources and make it harder for victims to be believed.

SB 967 would require students contemplating any form of “sexual activity” to express their prior consent through “clear, unambiguous actions.” SB 967 also encourages partners to reaffirm consent on a continuing basis throughout the sex act.

Article here. Excerpt:

'With a tidal wave of shared parenting legislation sweeping the nation, New York has a golden opportunity to dramatically improve the outcomes of millions of children in the state by passing shared parenting legislation. Senate Bills 949 and 5316 would establish “a presumption of shared parenting of minor children in matrimonial proceedings.” The Bills are now in the Children and Families committee, and they need your help now to move to a floor vote.

Story here. Reported by the NY Times, no less! Excerpt:

'The most important sexual assault prosecution in the military came apart on Monday. But cracks had appeared two months earlier in the same North Carolina military courtroom.

During a Jan. 7 pretrial hearing, the sole witness to accuse Brig. Gen. Jeffrey A. Sinclair of forced sex — charges that could imprison him for life — took the stand at Fort Bragg to explain how she had only recently found an old iPhone that contained evidence of their three-year affair.

What might have seemed an innocuous discovery was, to General Sinclair’s civilian lawyers, a major opportunity: The witness, a 34-year-old captain, had kept text and other communications with General Sinclair on her computer and on another cellphone, some of which bolstered their contention that the relationship was consensual. They suspected this newly discovered phone contained similar messages.

As the lead defense lawyer, Richard L. Scheff, a former federal prosecutor, questioned the captain, she told a precise, detailed and unequivocal story about when and where she found the phone, and what she did with it.
Photo

But according to a forensic expert hired by the defense, her story was not true — the phone had been charged and restarted two weeks earlier than she had claimed. The military’s own experts reached a similar conclusion later.
...
This week, Colonel Pohl stopped the court-martial, sent the jury home and offered General Sinclair another chance to try to hammer out a plea agreement, presumably on lesser charges. The military, in its pursuit of General Sinclair, seemed overly concerned about politics and its public image, he suggested.

Article here. Excerpt:

'Female TSA officers are in such high demand to conduct pat-downs that they get pigeonholed as checkpoint workers and miss out on chances for other experience that would earn them promotions, a top member of Congress said Tuesday.

Female officers are required to pat down women travelers and also are preferred for pat-downs for children, which means that they end up conducting more than half of the pat-downs, even though they are just a third of the TSA workforce, said Rep. Nita Lowey, the top Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee.

“The result is that female TSOs are not getting the experience at other stations to be considered for promotion,” Ms. Lowey told Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson.

Mr. Johnson said the conundrum was news to him, but said he didn’t doubt it was possible.

Article here. Excerpt:

'A New Jersey court decision makes it clear, it may take two to tango but not to give birth.

“It’s well established under federal and state law that there is a privacy right when a woman’s in labor.”

Rutgers professor and family law expert Sally Goldfarb says a Passaic County judge made the right call last November in his decision, which was published this week, when he sided with pregnant woman that her ex-fiancee had no legal right to be in the delivery room.

“What this man was seeking to do was really interfere with the woman’s ability to exercise her own choices about giving birth in privacy and that to me falls outside of the rights that a father is legitimately entitled to.”

In the decision, believed to be the first of its kind, the father was also told he didn’t have a right to know when the baby was born.

Jeff Golden of Fathers & Children’s Equality says, “It’s a sad day for fathers, and for father’s and men’s rights.”

Article here. Excerpt:

'Ignoring the trolls – it’s not just good advice online. It’s indispensable in real life too. You see, this should have been a slam dunk. Instead, we have a tale in which radical anti-choice protesters wind up being depicted in the media as good guys.

It begins with a group with the ridiculously named Survivors of the Abortion Holocaust, a Christian group that claims that “Any person born after January 22, 1973 is a survivor of the American abortion holocaust.” On the other side is Dr. Mireille Miller-Young, a feminist studies professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara, whose research “explores race, gender and sexuality in visual culture and sex industries in the United States.” It’s a story in which the self-described holocaust survivors – who do not attend the school — reportedly did not notify the university that they were coming to the campus to stage a demonstration in a “designated as a free-speech zone,” which would have provided some measure of warning to the students. In an editorial in the Daily Nexus last week, student Delyla Mayers coherently argued against the group’s confrontational use of “overwhelmingly bloody and gory pictures,” and failure to “give students the right to choose to partake in such events, stripping individuals from their choice to practice self-care in topics as deep as abortion.” And it’s a narrative in which the African-American feminist professor now winds up cast in the role of bully.

It's ironic that the so-called gender wage gap is greatest in wealthier places like Beverly Hills and much less in poor places such as Indian reservations.

Women earn $.64 on the dollar compared to men in Beverly Hills. For the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, it's $.90. So men earning more than women says nothing of how the money is spent or who benefits from it.

An even more extreme case is Buffalo County, SD, which has the lowest per capita income in the U.S. Women there earn $1.05 to the dollar compared to men. This county is made up mostly the Crow Creek Indian Reservation, and is largely a matriarchy. Many houses lack kitchens and indoor plumbing.

In contrast, Rancho Santa Fe is a wealthy enclave in San Diego County. Women there earn $.58 to the dollar for men. Rancho Santa Fe has the second highest per capita income in the U.S. and the typical house costs over $2 million. The women living there can hardly be described as suffering from the so-called wage gap.

So, high gender wage gap here vs. women earning more here.

Where are women better off? And where are they more likely to be a victim of violence? Where are children - or men for that matter - better off?

Link here. Excerpt:

'The Freemasons Foundation Centre for Men's Health (FFCMH) was established with the vision to enable men to live longer, healthier and happier lives. The FFCMH's mission is to pursue innovative research programs, significantly improve health services, deliver evidence-based training programs, and disseminate the latest health information and education resources.

The FFCMH is seeking an Early Career Post-Doctoral Research Fellow with a PhD in a relevant field that has application in the setting of men's health. Research Experience with a men's health focus is desirable but not essential. You must be highly motivated and have a track record of presentations and publications that demonstrate research capabilities and have a commitment to research excellence.
...
Closing date: Friday 28 March 2014'

Article here. Excerpt:

'Red-faced and rendered speechless, I hurried away. Minutes later, I became enraged by what had just happened. I’d basically been accused of being some kind of sweet-bag-rattling nonce, drooling through the fence with a blacked out van parked round the corner. It seemingly hadn't occured to any of those observers that I did simply want to see my own son; their instinct was to view me as a sex offender.

I don't think this is an isolated incident either. Many dads I know think twice before using family changing rooms or viewing areas at swimming pools, before going to play groups, or even, like me, before waving to their own child through the school fence.

One local swimming pool backs onto its reception area, and if anyone (any men, no doubt) are seen “behaving inappropriately”, i.e. looking at children (their own or anyone else's), the receptionist presses a button which immediately blacks out the glass.

"Sorry son, I didn't see you do your first ever backstroke width because the pool staff suspected I might be another Gary Glitter."

A dad friend of mine told me recently that he was asked by a mum to stop taking photos of his son in a playground, because her daughter was on the next swing. She told him she felt it “wasn’t appropriate”.

He, like me, was consumed by an unfounded shame, as if the default position is "guilty until proven innocent".

The unsavoury truth is that these days we cannot escape paedophilia – or, more to the point, the fear of paedophilia. The wall-to-wall media coverage of child abuse scandals ensures that this fear-fuelled fire never goes out.
...

Story here. The only reason why this boy is dead is because the daughter lied to her father by claiming she didn't know him. Excerpt:

'The Houston father who police say fatally shot a 17-year-old boy who was inside his daughter’s bedroom early Thursday morning will likely not be charged, an area prosecutor told MyFoxHouston.com.
...
The investigation into the shooting is ongoing, and a grand jury will ultimately decide if charges are appropriate. But so far it appears the father, who was only identified as a 55-year-old in reports, was awaken by one of his other children at about 2:20 a.m. He was told someone was in his 16-year-old daughter's bedroom and he grabbed his gun.

He reportedly found the teen in bed with his daughter and confronted him. His daughter apparently told him she did not know the boy.

Article here. Excerpt:

'After days of discussing, researching, arguing, reading and thinking about Sheryl Sandberg’s 'Ban Bossy' campaign I have to admit, I’m exhausted. And confused, because the one question that keeps popping into my head is: what about the boys?

Oh no. I'm not actually going to defend men here, am I? After all, men are responsible for building a society that is inherently biased against women. They set that glass ceiling in place. Most men don’t even bother to join conversations about gender equality. They don’t need our help, or our sympathy.
...
Despite these numbers, a nagging worry persists in my mind, especially as I see campaigns like Sandberg's. The privilege once associated with being born male seems to be dissipating. Manufacturing jobs have moved abroad. Traditional blue-collar jobs are disappearing. The days of men forgoing college and still earning a comfortable living for their families are over.
...
What do men (and boys) have?

Not much. No support groups, no Dads Night Out. No church, synagogue, mosque, country club or community institution like the ones that once provided men with some sort of a social life. No whiling away the hours on Facebook. Heck, we barely let our fellas watch a Sunday football game or enjoy a round of golf. Being a guy today seems lonely, difficult and confusing.

Perhaps I shouldn’t care that men are being displaced. Perhaps it’s good for them to know what it feels like to be the underdog. Or the forgotten. But where, I wonder, will that ultimately lead us? To more boys on Adderall? To more isolated, unhappy young men on the news after another mass shooting? As I see the many obstacles males are facing, my greatest concern is that girls and women rising will lead, almost by default, to boys and men flailing.

Article here. Excerpt:

'Should a father be allowed in the delivery room for the birth of his child, over the mother's objections? A New Jersey judge said no last November, in a ruling that was released in writing earlier this week. "Any interest a father has before the child's birth is subordinate to the mother's interest," Judge Sohail Mohammed wrote. That has to be the right call. At the same time, I can understand why fathers' rights groups see the ruling as discrimination: It privileges motherhood over fatherhood.
....
The same logic of biology convinced me that a New York judge was wrong last year when she barred Sara McKenna, a former Marine and firefighter, from moving from California to New York, because she wanted to go to Columbia University, when she was seven months pregnant. The father of McKenna's child was the Olympic skier Bode Miller, and he tried to block her from moving across the country by asserting his paternal rights before his child was born. An appeals court quickly reversed that order. Again, fathers just cannot have rights over fetuses that interfere with a woman's freedom of choice and movement in this way. Once the child is born, the law can accord equal rights to fathers and mothers. Before birth, it just cannot.