Kidnapping and torture of Rico Martinez Nagel
Topic: Children and Family
Source: The Truth Barrier
Lindsey Nagel gave birth to a healthy baby boy on December 19. He was supposed to come home a few days later. He is still not home. He remains in the hospital, in state custody, covered in tubes. So battered and destroyed by force fed ARV drugs, the family has begun to wonder if Rico will make it. (28/02/13)

Backpack thief turns out to be teacher
Topic: Children and Family
Source: Yahoo News Canada
A California high school student was shocked at what she found when she decided to play detective and stop a string of thefts from backpacks during gym class. Justine Betti said she decided to hide in a locker to see if she could catch the thief in action. She didn’t expect the alleged culprit to be her gym teacher. After all of the students left the locker room, the teacher stayed behind, rummaged through backpacks and took money, Betti said. (26/02/13)

Farrakhan, White people fear becoming U.S. minority
Topic: Political Correctness
Source: Detroit Free Press
Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan says white people are promoting birth control for black women because they fear becoming a minority in the United States. Farrakhan spoke Saturday at Fountain Street Church in Grand Rapids, invited by the Grand Rapids Community College Black Student Union. He says white Americans will lose their majority by 2050 and says they've introduced birth control to black women "because they don't want no more black babies." (03/03/13)

Teacher duct taped students face as punishment?
Topic: Children and Family
Source: FOX News
A suburban Chicago school board member has filed a lawsuit accusing a teacher in her district of duct taping her 11-year-old son's face after telling him to stop talking in class. The lawsuit filed this week in U.S. District Court by Princess Dempsey on behalf of her son says the Lindrop School teacher put an index card on the boy's mouth, then wrapped duct tape around his head. Dempsey's attorney, Standish Willis, confirmed that Dempsey is on Lindrop's school board. The Broadview woman also has run unsuccessful races for Illinois state representative. The suit names the teacher and Lindrop School District 92 as defendants. It seeks more than $100,000 in damages, saying the boy has suffered anxiety attacks and nightmares since the Feb. 27, 2012, incident. (03/03/13)

Defenders rally around free speech victim
Topic: Political Correctness
Source: FOX News
A group of free-speech advocates is rallying behind an Indiana inmate serving two years for his online rants against a judge who took away his child-custody rights during a divorce case. There’s no disputing that Daniel Brewington’s words were strong and angry -- found in hundreds of emails over the course of the related, two-year divorce case. But the group is asking the state’s highest court to decide whether they indeed amounted to criminal behavior. Brewington was convicted in 2011 of perjury, intimidating a judge and attempting to obstruct justice -- with the attorney general’s office successfully arguing that his threat was to expose the judge to “hatred, contempt, disgrace or ridicule." (03/03/12)

House passes VAWA after GOP version defeated
Topic: Gender Discrimination
Source: CNN
An expanded Violence Against Women Act won bipartisan approval on Thursday from the U.S. House after Republicans failed to pass their own proposal due to a party split on an issue important to women and minority groups. The measure now goes to President Barack Obama, who said in a statement that it was "an important step towards making sure no one in America is forced to live in fear." Thursday's votes reflected an emerging political reality in the GOP-led House, with a minority of Republicans joining Democrats to pass legislation that has broad public support, including from increasingly influential demographics such as Hispanic Americans. (27/02/13)

Kid, 7, suspended for Pop Tart shape
Topic: Political Correctness
Source: FOX Baltimore
Children at Park Elementary School went home with a letter today explaining there was a disruption in school. Seven year old Josh Welch, and his father, say the disruption lead to a two day suspension for the second grader in Brooklyn Park. Academics are hard for Josh, who suffers from ADHD, but he excels in art class. It is Josh’s own creativity that may have gotten him into trouble. At Park Elementary school, Josh was enjoying his breakfast pastry when he decided to try and shape it into a mountain. Josh said, “It was already a rectangle and I just kept on biting it and biting it and tore off the top and it kinda looked like a gun but it wasn’t.” (02/03/13)

L.A.s novel way to oust perverts
Topic: Children and Family
Source: L.A. Times
Los Angeles has started building a city park that will be smaller than some backyards, only one-fifth of an acre in size. No matter, explains the LA Times. The point isn't to celebrate the great outdoors, it's to force 33 registered sex offenders out of an apartment building in the Harbor Gateway neighborhood. They'll have to move by the time the park is finished this summer because state law prevents such convicts from living within 2,000 feet of a park or school. Two other city "pocket parks" are in the works, for exactly the same reason, even though critics say they infringe on the rights of convicts and will force them into even more condensed pockets of the city.

Louisiana man sues clinic, says ex stole sperm
Topic: Children and Family
Source: ABC News
A Louisiana man is suing a fertility clinic and an ex-girlfriend after the sperm bank handed over two vials of his sperm in a "paper lunch sack" to the woman who then conceived a child without his permission, his lawyer said. Lawyer Cade Bernsen accuses Toby Devall of having "bluffed her way into getting the sperm" and created a baby without ex-boyfriend Layne Hardin's consent "purposefully out of vindictiveness and to punish him for breaking up with her." Hardin also alleges that the sperm bank and an affiliated fertility clinic had an "utter lack of safeguards and protections," according to his lawyer. Now Hardin could be asked to pay child support for the 2-year-old boy, despite never authorizing the use of his sperm or having met the child. (28/02/13)

Judge orders man to tell women he is a deadbeat
Topic: Men's Movement
Source: Lawyers.com
A Wisconsin man is going to have a tough time picking up women, unless he can woo them in three minutes or less. A judge has ordered that as a condition of his probation, John Butler, 28, must tell women within three minutes of meeting them that he is a felon who owes child support. Butler pled no contest for failure to pay support and was given two years probation for the felony. As we learned recently, Wisconsin had state Supreme Court precedent giving a green light to ban people on probation from having kids unless they can show that they can support them financially. Judge Eugene Harrington went a step further, imposing the no-procreating order on Butler but also taking measures to ensure he never has an opportunity to do more impregnating.

GOPs uncomfortable debate over gay marriage
Topic: Gay/Lesbian Issues
Source: National Journal
As Republicans rebound from the 2012 election and plot their future, an uncomfortable debate over gay rights is taking place. Some party leaders are promoting a more inclusive approach to help the GOP modernize its image and reach across the generational divide. Polls show a narrow majority of Americans--and an overwhelming number of young people--think same-sex couples should have the right to marry. “The marketplace of ideas will render us irrelevant, and soon, if we are not honest about our time and place in history,” wrote former Republican presidential candidate Jon Huntsman last week in declaring his support for gay marriage. (25/02/13)

Chicago proposes sex ed for kindergarteners
Topic: Children and Family
Source: ABC22
Chicago public schools students get their sex education in the fifth grade as most do in the U.S., but CPS wants to change that, so the instruction begins at age 5. Parents who are uncomfortable with the new policy will be able to opt out. (26/02/13)

I was supposed to report rape to my rapist
Topic: Violence Against Women
Source: New York Times
Soon after Virginia Messick reported to basic training at Lackland Air Force Base in March 2011, her training instructor, Staff Sgt. Luis Walker, started giving her special treatment. One day, while she was in his office using his computer—a rule violation that he allowed—he started groping her. Though he promised it would never happen again after she told him to stop, it wasn't long before he ordered her to deliver towels to an empty trainee dorm floor—and raped her, Messick says. After saying it had been fun and they should do it again, he threw her clothes at her and ordered her into the shower, Messick tells the New York Times. She is the first victim of the Lackland sex assault scandal to come forward with her story. (27/02/13)

Mexico arrests its most powerful woman
Topic: Violence Against Women
Source: Newser
She's known as Mexico's most powerful woman, and she's currently sitting in prison. Elba Esther Gordillo was arrested on corruption charges last night after landing near Mexico City in a private plane, reports the AP. It's things like private planes that appear to be the problem: The 68-year-old heads the country's 1.5 million-member teachers' union, which the BBC describes as Latin America's most powerful union, and prosecutors accuse her of embezzling more than $150 million from its funds to fund a lavish lifestyle of planes, $17,000 of plastic surgery, and designer clothing.

Alimony reform bills propose relief from lifelong payments
Topic: Men's Movement
Source: Crestview Bulletin
The days of a Florida ex-spouse potentially paying alimony even after death may end if reform bills working their way through the Legislature make it to the governor's desk. "What we are talking about is trying to put fairness into the law," John Fromularo, Northwest Florida representative of Florida Alimony Reform, said while speaking to the Crestview Area Chamber of Commerce Government Issues Committee. Alimony types include "bridge the gap," which helps the ex-spouse during a transition from being married to single; durational, from two years to the marriage's length; rehabilitative, paid until an ex-spouse is self-supporting; and permanent, Fromularo said. House bill 231, co-sponsored by area Rep. Matt Gaetz, and Senate bill 718 would reform five areas, as follows... (25/02/13)

Menendez blames right wingers for scandals
Topic: Porn, Prostitution, and Sexual Freedom
Source: Daily Caller
At a Black History Month event held at a Trenton, N.J. church on Sunday, Democratic Senator Bob Menendez blamed conservatives for his ethics scandals, framing them as a racial attack on him because of his Hispanic heritage. “I have felt the sting of discrimination,” he told approximately 300 worshipers, according to the Bergen Record. ”It has never been easy.” “Now we face anonymous, faceless, nameless individuals from right-wing sources seeking to destroy a lifetime of work,” Menendez said at Shiloh Baptist Church. “And their smears are false. I have worked too hard and too long in the vineyards, too long with my hands, for the harvest to be soured.” [Ed: Shades of Hillary's defense of Bill v. the Monica claims.] (24/02/13)

Creationism, Ayn Rand and gun control
Topic: Ayn Rand, Objectivism
Source: Salon
4. Read Ayn Rand or stay in high school The chairman of the education committee in Idaho’s Senate introduced a bill earlier this month that would make students read — and pass a test — on “Atlas Shrugged” as a requirement for a high school diploma. Then he backed away from the bill, saying he was just trying to make a point. (24/02/13)

Obamas lopsided education policy
Topic: Children and Family
Source: Reason
President Obama has repeatedly promised to use an “evidence-based approach” for social policy—and when it comes to education, he has been true to his word: He has systematically promoted programs such as universal pre-school with little evidence of success and panned ones such as school vouchers with lots. In his recent State of the Union address, the president—not for the first time—hectored Congress to “make high-quality preschool available to every single child in America.” “Study after study shows that the sooner a child begins learning, the better he or she does down the road,” he insisted. Actually, “study after study” has shown the exact opposite—that publicly funded preschool programs make no lasting difference in a child’s life. (28/02/13)

Crony capitalism vs. American food
Topic: Political Correctness
Source: Reason
Author: Baylen Linnken
On Thursday this week I took part in a great panel discussion on crony capitalism in food and agriculture at the American Enterprise Institute. Crony capitalism in this area, to me, means that a food business’s success is often wrongly contingent upon the business maintaining a close relationship with legislators and regulators. (02/03/13)

With Leveson and libel, reforms are not enough
Topic: Political Correctness
Source: Spiked
Author: Mick Hume
Libel reform campaigners in the UK are worrying that the House of Lords’ attempt to sneak through a ‘Leveson law’ on press regulation could scupper their treasured Defamation Bill. If so, it could be an opportunity to restart the public debate on both issues with a more forthright defence of freedom of expression and a free press. Time to put every page of the Leveson report and every clause of Britain’s libel laws in the dustbin of history where they belong. The Lords are certainly playing low politics with high principles. Infuriated by Tory prime minister David Cameron having the nerve to reject Lord Justice Leveson’s proposal for a law to back the new press regulator, their lordships have been plotting revenge. (28/02/13)