Outrage is growing over the Verizon Foundation video that portrays abusers as "monsters" and denies the existence of abusive women or abused males: http://www.multivu.com/mnr/52044-verizon-foundation-national-domestic-hotline-video-launch-monsters

Editorialists have called the video "outrageously misandric" and having the "potential for spreading harm and hate." The pro-feminist blog Jezebel described the video as "disturbing."

Activists across the United States and Canada are going to their local Verizon store to raise awareness about the video's systematic biases. We invite you to join in this effort.

Print out copies of this flyer: http://www.saveservices.org/wp-content/uploads/Verizon-Monster-Video-flyer-FINAL.pdf. Then, pass it out to customers as they enter the store and to store employees.

Tell them the Verizon video is hateful and harmful, and needs to taken down immediately.

Sincerely,

Article here. Excerpt:

'Think most of the misogyny on MTV comes from men? Guess again, says a new study of the network’s shows, which finds women engage in a whopping 88 percent of the shows’ sexual dialogue, insult each other much more than the men, and offer themselves up in positive portrayals only when they’re talking about physical appearance and their ability to bounce back from getting ridiculed.

Television watchdog group The Parents Television Council (PTC) releases its jaw-dropping report “Reality of MTV: Gender Portrayals on Reality TV” on Wednesday, and Fox411.com got an exclusive first look at its findings.
...
Here are their bombshell findings:

-- Only 24 percent of what females said about themselves was positive across all shows combined.

-- Positive dialogue between females focused on their appearance, sense of accomplishment and emotional resilience.

Story here. Excerpt:

'In the end, the 11-woman, one-man retrial jury found the former governor guilty after nine days of deliberation. Jurors decided Blagojevich had tried to sell Obama's Senate seat and personally gained from his position of power. Each of the wire fraud convictions carry a maximum 20 years in prison.

They spared the former governor on count 17, however, saying he never shook down the Illinois Tollway. The jury didn't come to an agreement on counts 11 and 16, which dealt with the Illinois Tollway and trying to get favors for releasing funds for an elementary school.'

Article here. Excerpt:

'France's parliament is to debate abolishing prostitution through a crackdown which would criminalise payment for sex.

The National Assembly will vote on a symbolic resolution drafted by a cross-party commission which, if successful, will be followed by a bill in January.

The resolution urges abolition at a time when "prostitution seems to be becoming routine in Europe".

Some campaigners reject the bill, advocating prostitutes' rights instead.

Around 20,000 people are believed to be working as prostitutes in France.

France has been committed to abolishing the practice in principle since 1960 but the MPs behind the resolution want this stance to be "proclaimed loud and strong".

The criminalisation of clients is "the best way to see prostitution reduced in France, given that all the countries that have regulated this activity have seen an increase", the commission has argued.
...
However, France's sex workers' trade union, Strass, has called a rally outside parliament to oppose the proposed bill.

Article here. Excerpt:

'Court date for man’s £50,000 lawsuit against ‘male-blaming’ gender studies degrees at LSE

(AVfM News)A former student of the London School of Economics (LSE), who has filed a lawsuit claiming all five of its gender studies Masters degrees “exaggerate women’s issues and recommend blaming men to justify ignoring men’s issues,” will make his case at the Central London County Court, a hearing date now set for February 14th, 2012. As reported by The Evening Standard, The Guardian ...,Forbes Magazine, The West End Extra, A Voice for Men, Men’s Matters, and dozens of blogs and vlogs, Tom Martin’s case has garnered a lot of public support, his legal fund receiving £3055 in donations from ninety people in eight countries to date, but Martin says he now needs more donations, “Clerical errors by the court have caused a three month delay, so I now need a few thousand pounds more to continue devoting all my time in preparation for winning the case.”'

Article here. Excerpt:

'Solomon Metalwala’s 2-year-old son Sky disappeared while in the custody of his estranged wife Julia Biryukova a month ago. Since then, everyone’s focus has been on the search for Sky, as it should be. We speculate that Sky has been stashed with a relative in Ukraine, Biryukova’s native country, but nobody really knows. We hope that Sky is safe and that he will be reunited with his father as soon as possible.

Story here. Excerpt:

'A third-grade teacher who resigned this week after parents accused her of dressing their daughters in lingerie and photographing them at a Christmas party was arrested on Thursday.

Kimberly Crain, 47, was arrested at her home in Shawnee, Oklahoma, and will face charges of manufacture of child pornography and lewd acts with a child, said District Attorney Richard Smothermon."
...
Crain had been an elementary teacher for six years in McLoud, Oklahoma, about 30 miles east of Oklahoma City, when she allegedly invited third- and fourth-grade girls to her home last month for a Christmas party. She is accused of having the girls dress in holiday-themed bras and panties and photographing them.'

Just as troubling as the story is the reaction of many who commented on it. They express shock, since "women don't do this sort of thing". I would argue that some women have always done this sort of thing, but people were more likely to explain away their behavior, rather than see it for what it is.

Article here. I guess Hillary Clinton forgot to mention this when she was criticizing Israel for their unfair treatment of women. Excerpt:

'The United Nations' Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights has determined that Israel discriminates against divorced fathers and has called upon Israel to cancel the Tender Years Clause that grants automatic custody over children in divorce cases to their mothers. Israel is said to be the last country in the world not to have canceled the clause.

In the concluding remarks of meetings held in Geneva in November and December, the committee wrote that:

Article here. Excerpt:

'Creating a fake identity for a child is far too easy, according to a national non-profit group fighting to change Canadian and provincial laws and regulations.

The Canadian Children’s Rights Council wants mandatory paternity tests at birth so both parents are identified immediately. Such a measure would go a long way to eliminating paternal fraud and identity fraud, said Grant Wilson, the council’s president.

He has followed the story of Patricia O’Byrne, who was arrested in Victoria in connection with an Ontario parental abduction case from 1993. She had been living under the name Pamela Whelan. Her daughter, Sigourney Teresa Chisholm, was raised in Victoria and known as Thea Whelan.

The Victoria school district has a long-form birth certificate that states Theadora Gloria Whelan was born on Feb. 18, 1992, in Toronto. The space for the father’s name on the document is left blank, which is where a large part of where the problem stems from, Wilson said.

Story here. Excerpt:

'A woman who lied this summer about being raped by two men behind a bookstore at a busy shopping center pleaded no contest on Monday, Dec. 5, to a charge of initiating a false police report.

Danielle Elizabeth Hayes, 35, of Gresham must serve two years of probation, perform 150 hours of community service, pay $3,000 in restitution to the Gresham Police Department for police overtime costs associated with the investigation and continue with her mental health treatment, according to the sentence imposed by Multnomah County Circuit Court Judge Christopher Marshall.

Hayes also has 30 days to write letters of apology to the police department and to the citizens of Gresham

Her false rape report sparked fear throughout East Multnomah County in late July when she claimed that two men grabbed her in broad daylight as she was getting into her minivan next to Borders bookstore, pulled her dress over her head and raped her in the 600 block of Northwest 12th Street.'

Article here. Excerpt:

'A YOUNG mum who made two false rape allegations in 10 months was jailed yesterday.

Twisted Dorothy Russell, 20, admitted falsely accusing an ex-boyfriend of raping her - while awaiting sentence for lying to police that another man had assaulted her and threatened rape.

Yesterday, she was jailed for six months after a sheriff told her that her lies had risked the freedom of innocent men and undermined real rape victims.

After the hearing, mum-of-one Russell's despairing father said he believed his daughter committed the crimes because "she likes being the centre of attention".'

Article here. Excerpt:

'We now know that women-on-women aggression is far from rare and that women are often the initiators of male-female aggression. Surveys of U.S. households have found rates of wife-to-husband violence "remarkably similar" to those of husband-to-wife violence. And an early cross-cultural survey did not find that men were significantly more aggressive than women.

Aggression, as opposed to anger, conveys an intent to hurt or harm and can be expressed physically, verbally or by withdrawing. There is general agreement that men exhibit higher levels of physical aggression than women, but the differences are small to moderate. After a thorough review of the literature on who initiates violence in couples, Murray Straus, of the University of New Hampshire, reports: "It is painful to have to recognize the high rate of domestic assaults by women. All six major studies which have investigated this topic found that women initiate violence in a large proportion of the cases."'

Story here. Excerpt:

'A Queensland schoolgirl who claimed she fought off a would-be abductor by kicking him in the groin has withdrawn her allegations, Nine News understands.

The girl said she kicked the man in the genitals when he tried to drag her into his white Holden Commodore.
...
"Daniel Morcombe's parents came to visit her school last week so she knew what to do in that sort of situation," her mother said.

Last month Bruce and Denise Morcombe were named Queensland's Australians of the Year for their work as child protection advocates after their son Daniel, 13, was abducted on the Sunshine Coast eight years ago.'

Article here. I'm not a huge fan of Mr. Pitts, but he gets it right on this one. Excerpt:

'Another white woman has turned up missing. And, as predictably happens in such cases, television news has gone into overdrive, CNN, ABC, NBC providing breathless updates of Michelle Parker's disappearance, how she was last seen the day she appeared on "The People's Court," suing her former fiance, who is now the prime suspect in her kidnapping.

This story unfolds in the wake of similar media fixations on Laci Peterson, Elizabeth Smart, JonBenet Ramsey, Jennifer "Runaway Bride" Wilbanks, Chandra Levy, Lori Hacking, Robyn Gardner, Natalee Holloway, all of them young, female, white, pretty -- and imperiled. There is, should it need saying, a naked bias in the media's obsession with white women in danger to the exclusion of pretty much every other cohort of the American demographic.'

Article here. Excerpt:

'“My life was in danger,” McIntosh told the Daily News. “Females do murder men. . . . I displayed a lot of patience. I was in fear for my life.”

Cell phone video of the ugly smackdown at the W. Third St. franchise shows McIntosh striking the women with a 3-foot steel pole, fracturing one woman’s skull.

McIntosh was arrested on felony assault charges and tossed in a Rikers Island jail for seven weeks.

A Manhattan grand jury refused to indict him, forcing prosecutors to drop the charges and release him Friday night.'