Article here. Excerpt:

'The "race" for the next Federal Reserve chair has, in a way, turned into a test of the White House's openness to women. It's the second time that's happened this year. Though Obama won the women's vote, and Democrats campaigned against a Republican "war on women," by January the president was facing criticism his cabinet was getting too white and too male. A widely-circulated photo showed the Oval Office packed with 10 male advisers, with only the leg of a single female aide visible. For the last few weeks, the same kind of controversy has been brewing over who will be the next Fed chair.

Among people who talk about these things, the field's been narrowed down to two candidates: former Treasury Secretary and National Economic Council chairman Larry Summers and current Fed vice chairwoman Janet Yellen. Yellen would be the first woman to lead the Fed, if President Obama decides to pick her. A lot of people think he should.

Article here. Excerpt:

'A veteran meteorologists has filed a discrimination lawsuit against KABC-TV, alleging the Los Angeles TV station did not consider him for a position because it wanted to hire a young, attractive woman for the job.

According to a lawsuit Kyle Hunter filed Wednesday, Aug. 14, in Los Angeles Superior Court, Hunter applied for the job of weekend meteorologist in June 2011, but was never interviewed for the job. He alleges "multiple qualified persons age 40 and over" applied for the position, but they were also not interviewed.

The suit describes Hunter as a meteorologist with 25 years of experience, with both a bachelor's and master's degree in meteorology, and a third bachelor's degree in political science with an emphasis on earth and space sciences from UCLA. It says he worked as a broadcaster in Los Angeles and San Diego.'

Story here. All it took was an op-ed in the NYT, and bingo, the relocation was stopped. Yet male prisoners relocated routinely away from convenient travel distances for family members are... just not that important. Excerpt:

'The author of the prison memoir "Orange Is the New Black" is relieved that federal prison officials have halted plans to move 1,000 female inmates from Connecticut to a prison far from their families in Alabama, but questions the "rationale" for wanting to send the women far from their homes in the first place.
...
Kerman wrote a New York Times op-ed earlier this week criticizing the Board of Prisons plans to transfer the female prisoners incarcerated at the Danbury facility to Alabama.

Article here. Excerpt:

'A four-year-old boy in South Africa has died after being circumcised in a medical centre his father has described as a "slaughterhouse".

Gugulethu Mokalapa was taken off life support a week after the procedure. He was declared brain dead by two surgeons in a hospital in Germiston, east of Johannesburg.

The boy's father Reggie Mokalapa, 39, was told by doctors at the Medicross Germiston that the circumcision would take less than two hours, reports South Africa's Independent Online.
...
Five days after the circumcision, tests showed Gugulethu's brain was not responding and he was declared brain dead the following day. A second doctor confirmed his condition a week after the procedure.

The family then decided to take him off life support. Mokalapa said: "We are always advised to circumcise our children young, and we did this so that he'd be okay in future. Unfortunately, we took him to a slaughterhouse.'

Story here.

'It didn’t take the Rexburg Police Department long to find that a 20-year-old woman’s rape complaint was actually a consensual encounter.

An investigation revealed that the woman had consensual sex, but had an attack of conscience and told roommates it was rape.

She contacted the Rexburg Police Department, which then investigated the claim. After interviews of the woman and roommates, it was revealed that she wasn’t truthful to the roommates, said Capt. Randy Lewis.

Lewis said this is not an uncommon occurrence in Rexburg.

“We run into that all the time,” he said.

The woman won’t face any charges for making any false claims, and police consider the matter closed.'

Article here. Excerpt:

'The recent debate about sexual assault in the military also reflects the notion that there is something fundamentally diseased about the institution itself. The New York Times has editorialized on "the military's entrenched culture of sexual violence." Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D., N.Y.) demands that the country replace the military chain of command with civilian legal processes in cases of sexual harassment and assault because the military is inadequate to deal with crimes of "dominance and violence and power." Ms. Gillibrand has been joined in her legislative effort by two leading libertarian Senate Republicans, Rand Paul and Ted Cruz.

Article here. Excerpt:

'An Army officer writing in a prestigious journal says the services should not overemphasize physical strength when deciding whether a woman qualifies for direct ground combat.

Col. Ellen Haring, on the staff of the U.S. Army War College, says commanders need to downplay obstacle courses and judge a service member’s ability to stay calm and think quickly.
...
“Perhaps it is time to take a hard look at what really makes a competent combat soldier and not rely on traditional notions of masculine brawn that celebrate strength over other qualities,” Col. Haring says in the current issue of Armed Forces Journal.

She cites World War II hero Audie Murphy and North Vietnamese insurgents as examples of small people who came up big on the battlefield.
...
Col. Haring, who had sued the Pentagon over its old exclusion policy, said that Murphy perhaps could not have passed the Marine Corps’ infantry officer qualification course.'

Article here. Even when women do get sent to prison, the call rises for "special considerations". Has the thought even occurred to her that the thing she's complaining about affects male prisoners routinely and meh, no one seems to care much? My guess is no. Don't do the crime if you can't do the time. Excerpt:

'Because I know the prison so well, I was disturbed to learn that it was quietly planning to relocate most of its inmates.

Starting this month, the federal Bureau of Prisons will transfer the more than 1,000 women incarcerated in the main facility at Danbury to other prisons across the country to convert it to a men’s prison (the small satellite camp immediately adjacent, where I served my time, will still incarcerate approximately 210 women). The bureau says the plan will ease overcrowding in its men’s prisons.

September's just two weeks away, and it's Prostate Cancer Awareness Month, at least here in the US. The ACS's page on it is here. Will employers put up signs in lobbies and hallways like they do for Breast Cancer Awareness Month/Week/etc.? Excerpt:

'There is no better time than September, during Prostate Cancer Awareness Month, for men to talk with their health care providers about this disease so that they can make informed decisions about maintaining their prostate health. Although prostate cancer is the second leading cause of cancer death among men, when detected early it also boasts some of the highest survival rates.

This year approximately 217,730 men will learn they have prostate cancer and more than 32,050 men will die from the disease. African-American men are disproportionately affected by prostate cancer, having higher rates of prostate cancer diagnosis and death than men of all other racial or ethnic groups in the United States. Almost one third of prostate cancer cases are found in men during their prime years at work.

I almost fell out of my chair when I saw this item. OK, for literally DECADES we've heard about there being "too many males" (as if there's some kind of natural maximum for genderal headcount in a population) in China due to "selective abortion" but far worse, infanticide based on the baby's sex. 100% agreed, no one ought to be killing infants, period, for any reason that isn't nearly incomprehensible. In any case, now China's got a "problem" with "leftover women". And why? Read the story. I'll finish by simply suggesting to one Miss Lucy Wang quoted at the end of the article that indeed, there *is* something wrong with her-- and a lot of other people in China, too, men and women both, and it's this: You're looking at "love" feminine-hypergamously, as far too many women (and men) do.

Story here. Excerpt:

'After working 34 years as a court clerk in Kansas City, Sharon Snyder was fired in June for giving Robert Nelson a public document that showed him how to properly seek DNA tests, a move that eventually led to his release from prison three decades after being wrongfully convicted of rape.

Despite being punished for helping Nelson, Snyder told MSNBC's "All In With Chris Hayes" on Wednesday she would do it all over again.

"Oh yes, I would do it again," Snyder said in her first national television interview with Nelson. "I am so happy that he got exonerated on this charge, and felt that would happen or he wouldn't have filed that motion to start out with."'

Article here. The NYT once again runs an article on the declining population of someplace and talks almost exclusively in terms of decisions about reproduction that women are making and why. They don't even mention the other half of the human race necessary to procreate and what decisions they may be making about having babies-- and why. As long as the 600-pound gorilla gets ignored, it'll just stay there, keeping the babies away. Excerpt:

Article here. Excerpt:

'A comment piece on this website this week about a so-called "Crisis of manhood" unintentionly highlighted the paradox of so many women: they say they want men to be more communicative and emotional - yet their dating history shows they're morbidly attracted to men who are neither, otherwise all the men they've loved wouldn't "have trouble sharing their feelings".*

This strikes me as one of the great contradictions of modern sexual dynamics - men are increasingly altering their "traditional" masculine behaviour to suit the tastes of women, who publicly claim to want blokes who are sensitive and thoughtful, yet are privately repelled (or become disenchanted) by the soul-searching and vulnerability this manifests.

Men are just as prone to this cognitive dissonance, pronouncing their desire for articulate, intelligent, strong, independent women and then sleeping with gals whose appearance or youth trumps all other concerns.

Article here. Excerpt:

'An Orlando woman was charged with attempted murder after police said she shot her boyfriend of ten years in the leg during a domestic disturbance early Wednesday, officials said.

Tara Michelle Lloyd, 35, told police her boyfriend had attacked her but police officers determined she was the aggressor in the conflict, according to an arrest affidavit.

Lloyd met police in the driveway of her home at 13 North Hillside Avenue about 3:07 a.m., saying she put the gun, a Taurus .38 caliber revolver, in the kitchen drawer after shooting the 42-year-old male victim, the report said.

When she called 911, dispatchers heard Lloyd say the shooting "was on purpose" and overheard the victim's voice on the call saying, "I can't believe you shot me."

Officers observed "no visible marks" on Lloyd or her clothing and she did not appear disheveled as if there had been a physical altercation, the report said.'

Article here. Excerpt:

'Most states include gender in the list of protected class categories, which makes the fact that the bluest of the blue states is so out of line on something as basic as women’s equal protection of the laws seem especially odd. Similarly perplexing is the silence of groups that should be making noise. Where is the National Organization for Women, and anti-violence groups like Jane Doe? Isn’t it their job to speak out when government officials devalue women’s lives by refusing to redress gender-based violence fairly?
...
It’s time for Patrick, Coakley, the district attorneys and all the police chiefs to come together and demand that the Legislature add gender to Massachusetts’ hate crimes statute. With gender as a category, women’s lives will be better protected and cops and prosecutors will have access to more funding, which means law enforcement efforts will be more effective.'