Story here. Excerpt:

'HOUSTON — In what’s becoming a familiar scenario in Texas, a man has been freed after spending years behind bars for a crime he did not commit.

David Lee Wiggins, 48, of Fort Worth was imprisoned in 1989 for rape, largely because the 14-year-old victim picked him out of photo and live lineups. His fingerprints did not match any at the crime scene. Still, he was sentenced to life in prison.

But this month DNA testing excluded Wiggins, and on Friday, State District Judge Louis Sturns in Fort Worth approved a motion overturning his conviction and freed him.

Before Wiggins is officially exonerated, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals must accept the judge's recommendation or the governor must grant a pardon.

Quite a week for Usher. Stories here and here. Excerpt:

'Usher‘s ex-wife Tameka Raymond just lost in the former couple’s bitter custody battle — TMZ has learned, a judge has awarded Usher primary custody of their two sons.

It’s a shocking development — considering both sides were trying to strip each other of custody. Tameka felt the singer was an absentee father who was too absorbed in his career to be a good dad. She also accused him of using drugs in front of the kids.

Usher argued Tameka was inattentive and irresponsible.'

Organization web site: http://CatholicsAgainstCircumcision.org/

Dear AAP Board Members:

I’m writing to you to request that you withdraw or rescind the newest 2012 AAP Circumcision Policy Statement. Below I have critiqued for you some of the serious problems with this new statement.

The Abstract states on page 585 that “health benefits are not great enough to recommend routine circumcision for all male newborns”, but this is not repeated even once in the long text on pages 758-785. Other long columns favoring circumcision are repeated over and over again, on pages 761-762, 770, 775-776, and 778. The 1999 AAP Statement was 8 pages long (pages 686-693), but this diatribe against living with a foreskin goes on for 28 pages. There is almost the feeling that AAP physicians hope that if they repeat something over and over again, eventually it might become the truth.

Article here. Excerpt:

'“I’m shaking my head because the Democratic gender gap with men as great as the gender gap with women,” Matalin said. “Greta — after the sustained war on women, that Romney is everything, from a dog abuser, to a wife cancer giver, to a felon, to a tax cheat, multimillion dollars, multi-state, multi-faceted the gender gap has remained stable, as has Obama’s with men. We’re doing fine with women. What’s driving the gender gap with Obama — excuse me, one second — is liberal women, women under 30 and post-graduate women. Romney wins every other woman, middle class moms, suburbans. Those are the women who are going to vote. The enthusiasm among younger people, in particularly post-graduate, that’s not enough to overcome the women that Romney is going to win.”

“And this war on women is ridiculous,” she continued. “Do you don’t think that Republicans who are married and have daughters and have sisters don’t care about women’s health or are going to ban contraception?”'

Story here. Excerpt:

'A discrimination and retaliation lawsuit has embroiled the upper reaches of the federal government’s immigration enforcement agency, contributing to a sense of turmoil in a bureaucracy that has been suffering major labor conflicts between senior officials and employees.

The lawsuit, filed by a top federal immigration official in New York, alleges that he was shunted out of a high-level position in the agency in favor of a less-qualified woman because he was a man.

The official, James T. Hayes Jr., also accuses the agency’s chief of staff, Suzanne Barr, of “sexually offensive behavior” that contributed to a discriminatory work environment for male employees.

Last week, Ms. Barr stepped down from her post and voluntarily left the agency on paid leave pending the outcome of an internal review of the misconduct allegations, a spokesman said.'

Your pedictably regular dose of misandry from the NY Times. You'd think that the editorial dept. was run by feminists! Wait, ... it is... anyway, here it is. Excerpt:

'That bias, however, is becoming harder to sustain, as men become less relevant to both reproduction and parenting. Women aren’t just becoming men’s equals. It’s increasingly clear that “mankind” itself is a gross misnomer: an uninterrupted, intimate and essential maternal connection defines our species.
...
With expanding reproductive choices, we can expect to see more women choose to reproduce without men entirely. Fortunately, the data for children raised by only females is encouraging. As the Princeton sociologist Sara S. McLanahan has shown, poverty is what hurts children, not the number or gender of parents.'

Article here. Excerpt:

'Non-therapeutic male circumcision is quite unclear in Tasmania and this is the reason that the Tasmanian Law Reform Institute has been asking the government to clear the doubts. It is not even known that infant male circumcision is even legal or not.

However, the institute has asked to ban circumcision among infants. It is very important that new laws should be made, which can clarify that circumcision is not allowed for baby boys. It has been noted time and again that parents and relatives make their infants to undergo make circumcision for varied purposes, which are not related to ant medical problem.
...
Professor Kate Warner, who is the director of the institute, was of the view, "It should also support measures to encourage individuals associated with these traditions to move away from loosely entrenched and particularly contentious practices”. A lot of pain is involved in the procedure, which can affect the mental growth of a person.'

Article here. Excerpt:

'THE American Civil Liberties Union has again threatened to sue the Wood County school system over same-sex classes at Van Devender Middle School.

Sarah Rogers of the ACLU demanded that school officials sign an agreement to end the classes. Dean Furner, attorney for the school board, replied.

"However, after much study and debate amongst administration, myself and the board, the board voted to not sign this agreement," Furner said.
...
The ACLU has the luxury of concentrating on manning feminist bastions. Van Devender Middle School has the much more demanding challenge of nurturing actual girls - and boys.

Outside special-interest groups should not make that job any more difficult than it is.

The ACLU's highhanded, threatening behavior is offputting in the extreme.'

Article here. Excerpt:

'The American Civil Liberties Union on Monday issued a report to the Department of Education asserting that numerous single-sex education programs in public schools are unlawful. Furthermore, the report calls for the department to rescind its regulations enabling these single-sex education programs.
...
Critics of the ACLU’s position leaped to the defense of single-sex education. Christina Hoff Sommers, Resident Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and author of “The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men,” denounced the report in an interview with the Daily Caller News Foundation.

“I think it’s seriously misguided,” said Sommers. “What the ACLU’s doing is foreclosing on possibilities for programs that will help children — especially boys — who are languishing in school … the ACLU may not like it, but boys and girls are different.”

Article here. Excerpt:

'Few topics stir up more heated debate than how women fare in the workforce. Bloomberg columnist Ramesh Ponnuru recently took on this issue, soberly detailing research that shows discrimination isn't the primary reason why men continue to out-earn women.

As Ponnuru explains, some politicians and activists continue to use the statistic that women earn just 77 per cent of what men earn, implying that this is the gap that exists between your average male and female coworkers. But in fact, once factors such as occupation choice and hours worked are taken into account, just a small fraction of that gap remains.

It's not just conservatives who reach this conclusion: Studies by the American Association of University Women and the General Accounting Office have found the same. Researchers vary on how much of a gap lingers after controlling for men and women's different choices, but there's a near consensus that a large portion of that 77-cents-on-the-dollar gap has nothing to do with workplace discrimination.'

Article here.

'David Goldberg has been the rabbi of the Bavarian city of Hof since the last 1990s. He is a mohel (ritual circumciser) who has performed approximately 3,000 circumcisions since being trained to do so. However, there is a new curve in the road: less than two months ago a German court "banned religious circumcisions" and Goldberg now faces a criminal complaint over the most recent circumcisions he performed.

Jewish leaders throughout the world have taken the news of the complaint against Goldberg with stunned disbelief. And Moseh Kantor, president of the European Jewish Congress, said: "It has been many decades since a Jew was charged for practicing Judaism openly and is reminiscent of far darker times. We hope that in Germany, of all places, the authorities would remain far more sensitive to this issue."

Link here. Excerpt:

'A Thai woman who has been accused of eating her two sons claims she hallucinated and thought they were pigs.

She allegedly butchered and cooked her sons, aged one and five, last week before police found her asleep at her Chiang Mai home with several body parts near her, the Bangkok Post reports.

When police conducted a background check after the woman's arrest, they found she had been treated for a mental illness in 2007.
...
She was charged with murder, but has been deemed mentally unfit to stand trial and was sent to a nearby hospital for treatment.'

Release here. Excerpt:

'TARRYTOWN, NY—Intact America, an organization founded in 2008 to ensure that all children are protected from permanent bodily alteration inflicted on them without their consent, is criticizing the anticipated August 27 release by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) of its new “Circumcision Policy Statement.” Based on comments to the press* made by members of the AAP’s Task Force on Circumcision, which authored the document, Intact America deplores the Statement’s focus on selective evidence supporting medical benefits of removing normal foreskins from baby boys.

Article here. Excerpt:

'Women are more at risk of severe mental illness after giving birth than at any other time in their lives.

In the worst cases it can lead to postpartum psychosis, also known as puerperal psychosis, a mental illness which affects one in 500 new mothers and can result in suicide or them killing their baby.

BBC Newsnight has spoken to people affected by this devastating but poorly understood condition, which often goes undetected because doctors and midwives can fail to recognise the symptoms.
...

"I put my hand around his tiny neck, not yet strong enough to hold up his own head, and began to squeeze. I wasn't trying to harm him. I knew I mustn't do that, but I wanted to know if I was capable of it."

Jo knew something was badly wrong, but she was too scared to seek help because she thought her children would be taken away from her.

Without treatment she became sicker and began planning how to kill both herself and her two young sons.'

Article here. Excerpt:

'Much of the blame in the demise of Olympic sports programs in the United States has been the federal government’s push of Title IX regulations that have led to “quota queens” that mandate more sports for women than men, and men are being told they cannot play sports.