On June 16, police were called to an unlikely scene: an end-of-the-year class party at the William P. Tatem Elementary School in Collingswood. A third grader had made a comment about the brownies being served to the class. After another student exclaimed that the remark was "racist," the school called the Collingswood Police Department, according to the mother of the boy who made the comment.

The police officer spoke to the student, who is 9, said the boy's mother, Stacy dos Santos, and local authorities.

Dos Santos said that the school overreacted and that her son made a comment about snacks, not skin color.

"He said they were talking about brownies. . . . Who exactly did he offend?" dos Santos said.

The boy's father was contacted by Collingswood police later in the day. Police said the incident had been referred to the New Jersey Division of Child Protection and Permanency. The student stayed home for his last day of third grade.

More at http://www.philly.com/philly/education/20160629_Why_police_were_called_to_a_South_Jersey_third_grade_class_party.html

Wow. I'd probably be doing life for all the dumb things I did during grades 1-7 if I attended school today. Smoking in the boy's room, a fight after school, skipping a class here and there....

A disabled woman was beaten bloody by federal agents during an airport security screening while on her way to undergo treatment for a brain tumor. Hannah Cohen set off the metal detector at a security checkpoint at the Memphis International Airport, and she was led away for additional screening, reported WREG-TV.

“They wanted to do further scanning, (but) she was reluctant — she didn’t understand what they were about to do,” said her mother, Shirley Cohen.

Cohen said she tried to tell agents with the Transportation Security Administration that her 19-year-old daughter is partially deaf, blind in one eye, paralyzed and easily confused — but she said police kept her away from the security agents.

The confused and terrified young woman tried to run away, her mother said, and agents violently took her to the ground.

“She’s trying to get away from them, but in the next instant, one of them had her down on the ground and hit her head on the floor,” Cohen said. “There was blood everywhere.”

More at http://www.rawstory.com/2016/07/disabled-woman-beaten-bloody-by-tsa-agents-after-becoming-confused-and-afraid-at-security-checkpoint/

The sort of mindset exhibited by both the police and the TSA here is frightening at best. There needs to be more action taken to turn down institutionalized violence by "public servants" several notches.

A Texas jury has just acquitted a 30-year-old man who shot and killed a woman he met on Craigslist after she refused to have sex with him.

The man in question, Ezekiel Gilbert, has been cleared of murder after the Texas court determined that his actions were “justified after he shot an escort when she took his money but refused to have sex with him,” according to the Daily Mail.

Lenora Frago was shot in the neck by Gilbert on Christmas Eve 2009. As a result, the 23-year-old was paralyzed and died several months later.

The acquittal came from a Bexar County Texas court which determined that Mr Gilbert, who was facing a life sentence, should not be convicted of murder “because he was trying to retrieve stolen property.”

/snip

http://countercurrentnews.com/2016/06/texas-court-just-acquited-man-woman/

Amazing what gun related laws in some states can cause.

Felt this might be appropriate to GD in light of the Orlando tragedy and the reprehensible reactions of some evangelical pastors toward the LGBTQ community.

http://bipartisanreport.com/2016/06/19/before-european-christians-forced-gender-roles-native-americans-acknowledged-5-genders/

It wasn’t until Europeans took over North America that natives adopted the ideas of gender roles. For Native Americans, there was no set of rules that men and women had to abide by in order to be considered a “normal” member of their tribe.

In fact, people who had both female and male characteristics were viewed as gifted by nature, and therefore, able to see both sides of everything. According to Indian Country Today, all native communities acknowledged the following gender roles: “Female, male, Two Spirit female, Two Spirit male and Transgendered.”

“Each tribe has their own specific term, but there was a need for a universal term that the general population could understand. The Navajo refer to Two Spirits as Nádleehí (one who is transformed), among the Lakota is Winkté (indicative of a male who has a compulsion to behave as a female), Niizh Manidoowag (two spirit) in Ojibwe, Hemaneh (half man, half woman) in Cheyenne, to name a few. As the purpose of “Two Spirit” is to be used as a universal term in the English language, it is not always translatable with the same meaning in Native languages. For example, in the Iroquois Cherokee language, there is no way to translate the term, but the Cherokee do have gender variance terms for ‘women who feel like men’ and vice versa.”

The “Two Spirit” culture of Native Americans was one of the first things that Europeans worked to destroy and cover up. According to Brits like George Catlin, the Two Spirit tradition had to be eradicated before it could go into history books. Catlin said the tradition:

/snip

thinking birth control will take away your penis.