Liberal women MPs call on Martin to protect ridings
Several female Liberal MPs are calling on Paul Martin to snuff out what they call aggressive challenges to their riding nominations if he's serious about increasing the number of women in his caucus.

Dead Men Can Become Fathers in Israel
Israeli women have been given permission to harvest a dead husband's sperm for posthumous fertility treatments without his prior consent.
The permission was granted in a directive from Attorney-General Eliyakim Rubinstein that makes Israel the only country in the world authorizing such a childbearing practice.
The directive affects married and common law wives but not parents and other relatives.

Burger King: Breast-Feeding Fine
Burger King adopted a corporate policy Friday allowing women to breast-feed their babies in restaurants, a day before a threatened “nurse-in” at the fast-food chain's facilities.

The new policy says Burger King welcomes mothers who wish to breast-feed their children.

Sex-slave underworld
South Korean women gambling on illegal passage to the United State for a new life are ending up as sex slaves in dozens of Colorado massage parlors.
They live in the same rooms in which they are forced to have sex - bare closets hidden behind the parlors' facades, according to local, state and federal officials.

BC0190 Child Abuse on a Grand Scale
That's the opinion of Richard Wexler, head of the Virginia-based National Coalition for Child Protection Reform after he read the report published by the Statewide Advocacy Council in Florida (which is, if you can believe this, affiliated with DCF.). The report said, among other things, that about 650 Florida foster children, including some that are not under the care of a pediatrician, have been given mind-altering drugs. Drugs that have not been approved by the Food and Drug Administration for use with small children.

Gallup: 72% of teens say abortion wrong
A new Gallup survey of teens finds 72 percent believe abortion is morally wrong.
"We're winning the struggle for hearts and minds," Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, told Baptist Press. "The young people are more conservative than their parents."

A Stepford for Our Times
n 1975, when the movie The Stepford Wives first came out, it was widely regarded as a chilling parable about men's fears of feminism, a tale of horror that also worked as a social satire on sexism. Sure, it struck some women's liberationists as a ham-fisted attempt to cash in on the movement. But Ira Levin, who wrote the novel on which the movie was based, seems to have been in earnest—or as earnest as he could be with a brisk little potboiler in which suburban husbands band together to replace their wives with lubricious and empty-headed robots. Levin even broadcast his good faith with a somber epigraph from Simone de Beauvoir.

Ed White revisits early feminism
In his new book, "Fanny: A Fiction," White describes such an encounter, placing his tale in the early 19th century when slavery was still legal, and the American character was in the process of crudely shaping and defining itself.
The subject, Frances Wright, was an actual person: a radical Scottish feminist who fell in love with the wide-open, pre-adolescent America, spoke out against slavery and started Nashoba, her own utopian community where she advocated atheism and abolished people's marriages as soon as they arrived.

Marriage Promoted as Cure to Social Woes
Two simple words may not only increase family income, but ensure that children have the best shot at happy, healthy lives.
"I do" can really help domestic stability, according to most, if not all, research conducted over the last decade on the effects of marriage.

The Government's War on Children
Goose Creek, S.C., recently was the scene of a horrific event spotlighting two government institutions: schools and the war on drug users.
On a quiet day early in November a squadron of policemen stormed into Stratford High School, automatic pistols and shotguns drawn. They ordered the students to the floor and forcibly placed some there themselves. Then the police searched for drugs.

Libertarians and Gay Marriage
Libertarians love to duck fights, but on gay marriage they must take a stand.
Some Americans genuinely believe that homosexuality is an immoral act that goes against God. Others either celebrate their own homosexuality or feel that those who detest homosexuality are themselves immoral, or at best utterly intolerant.

Street Sweeping
You don't want to see Denise* on your block. Nobody does. She's a homeless crack addict. And a hooker. Her erratic gait looks something like the concentrated strut of a runway model, but with end-stage Parkinson's. On the street, it's known as the "crack dance." Denise arches her spine way back, which accentuates the pipe sticking out of her bra. She's jerking around, shifting from one hip to the other, her eyes lolling back while she tries to ask you for a quarter to make a phone call. She looks like she might pass out at any moment. She's way too out of it, even, to take a sandwich from Nightworks, a nearly three-year-old outreach initiative of FROST'D (From Our Streets With Dignity), which has been providing health care, condoms, and clean needles to street prostitutes since 1986.