• A new study claims that eating extra amounts of choline, a chemical found in eggs, while pregnant can lead to an increased risk of developing breast cancer in offspring. • Nielsen Online says that the number of employees visiting porn sites while working has increased 23% over the past year. • A new study reports that young gymnasts are suffering new types of injuries to their hands, wrists and arms .• Women who have undergone breast augmentation and are being treated for early-stage breast cancer may have more treatment success with brachytherapy, a partial-breast radiation treatment.• Inducing labor before the 40 week gestational age has become more common in the U.S. • The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is taking the estate of Beverly Rogers to court over the estate's planned auctioning of Mary Pickford's 1930 Oscar for best actress. • Honor killings have increased by 70% in the southern Iraqi city of Basra where women can be murdered for "honor killings" by hired hitmen for as little as $100. • Amnesty International is asking the Haitian government to do more to stop the widespread rape of girls in the country's slums.• A BBC reporter's 12-year-old daughter gets the Somali pirates on the Sirius Star to talk. • Canadian researchers say that gay men who feel undesirable are more likely to engage in risky sexual behavior and develop psychological problems. • A recent survey claims that British men and women beat out the people of Italy, Germany, France and the US as the most sexually liberal. • We may have just missed the beginning of Advent, but surely this condom Advent Calendar will keep us up-to-date. • An Italian book that reveals unpublished excerpts of Amanda Knox's diary says that sex was a "predominant aspect of her life" and influenced her relationships with men and women. • A new study claims that individuals who wash their hands before making judgments tend to make less strict rulings. • More and more men are beginning to take primary care of their elderly and ill parents. • Meanwhile, the Gender-Based Violence Forum estimates that 60% of Sri Lankan women have experienced domestic violence.• An art critic for the BBC's Antiques Roadshow received criticism when he referred to a woman in a portrait as having "Shropshire ankle" (or fat ankles). • Are you ready for a relationship boot camp? • A Texan man claims that God told him to ram into a woman's vehicle on a highway while going 100 mph on Friday because she "wasn't driving right" and needed to be "taken off the road." The two only suffered minor injuries. •

So anyway, a lot of these donors appear to be dudes, so I'd like to give a shout out to dudes, since women's rights are human rights and it was a dude who broke this story and even if it's just you guys using your boyfriends' PayPal accounts that's still more comingling of funds than dudes in this town are generally apt to abide:

John Wignall, Andrew McNamara, Francis Mitchell, Polka Dots and Motherboards, david wilson, Robert Wynne, Gabriel Mikhael, A W Johnston, Amy Muhlberg, Eric Young, Sheep to Shawl, TS Robinson, Melissa Martin, Matthew Fredrickson, Amanda Jonsson, Jen Myers Design, Agust Elfar Johannsson, Jennifer Brunet, David Nevel, John Wignall, Fred Bremmer, Mattison Narramore, Steven Theiss, Susan Vdovichenko, Anna-Marie Carey, C Micah Pilkington, morgan gillespie, Maria Raviele, Alison Holton, alexandra dumont, Nanna Freeman, Joshua Warner, Steven Theiss, Skepchicks, Intl., Maria Walters, Staci Sontag, Susan Vdovichenko, Teri Hebert, Kelly Bray, Greg Rowan, nolto216, Diana Wadke, Amy Forbes, Sara E Royster, C Micah Pilkington, Alexandra Golaski, Tina Lawrence, Minerva Alvarez, Kristina Meshelski, Aja Hicks, Stacy Baertson, Maria Raviele, James Wylie, Brienne Callahan, Jane Hansen, Sarah Walsh, Alison Holton.

We'll keep you updated as the women (hopefully) manage to start migrating.

Love Has To Be Calculated In Iraq Today: They Think Women Are Machines

Welcome To Basra, Where Beating Your Daughter To Death Gets You High-Fived By Cops

Mom Who Fled Her Honor Killing Husband In Basra Shot Down On The Street; How You Can Help

For The Woman Of Iraq, The War Is Just Beginning [Independent]

And basically, we got some emails and contact information, and an offer from a Guardian staffer to let us use their bank account since the women's NGO in question lacks its own, so if you would like to help, email us and we'll pass on the info. Because while stunningly horrific, the case is not exactly rare. Four years ago George Packer wrote a New Yorker piece that sorta-prophesied the current rash of honor killings under the rationale that Iraqi citizens, who were much more religiously puritanical than we'd given them credit for before the war, would react to the lawlessness and moral corruption unleashed by the invasion by killing prostitutes, in a warped sort of Fixing Broken Hymens theory of criminology. Here's a relevant passage:

An entire subspecialty of forensic medicine in Iraq deals with virginity, Shaker said. In any criminal case involving a woman, it’s the most important piece of information. “It rules our life,” he added. The surprising thing about these details of his profession is their ordinariness. In the West, Iraqis developed a reputation for cosmopolitan modernity that is now decades out of date. In order to win the support of Iraq’s clerics, Saddam obliged people to adopt a harsh form of traditional Islam. In private matters of religion, family, and the treatment of women, the vast majority of Iraqis are far more conservative than most outsiders understand.
In March, 2003, a week before the start of the war, a sixteen-year-old girl whom the Baathist police had found wandering disoriented through the streets was brought to the Medico-Legal Institute. Upon examining her, Shaker found that her virginity had been recently and violently taken. The girl, named Raghda, was beautiful, with pale skin and large, dark eyes, and she was so miserable she could hardly speak. Raghda seemed nothing like the teen-age prostitutes Shaker examined, and he gently persuaded her to tell him what had happened.
Raghda had gone to audition as a television announcer at the studio owned by Uday Hussein, Saddam’s psychopathic older son. Along with the six other finalists, she was taken to a room where Uday — crippled from a 1996 assassination attempt—was seated in a chair, holding a pistol in his lap. He ordered the girls to undress and walk in a circle around his chair. When one girl begged to be excused, Uday shot her dead. After that, the other girls, including Raghda, did as they were told. In the following days, Uday (who was committing some of his last crimes in power, while an invasion force gathered along Iraq’s southern border) raped the girls, then threw them out on the street, drugged, with a wad of cash, which was how Raghda was found by the police. When she told them her story, they gave her a beating and then took her to the Medico-Legal Institute.
“If you want to help me,” Raghda told the doctor, “go tell my parents their daughter was found dead.”
On March 18th, two days before the war started, Shaker completed Raghda’s paperwork. “Notice that there is the appearance of complete hymen rupture from the top to the base,” he wrote. “In conclusion, the hymen membrane was ruptured longer than two weeks ago; I cannot say how long. End of report.” Raghda was returned to the police; Shaker never learned her fate.
…
I assumed that this forward-thinking man of science—with a flat-top haircut and clean-shaven jaw—wanted a relatively secular, liberal Iraq. I kept waiting for him to catch my eye in the middle of one of his clinical descriptions and shake his head over the backwardness of a society obsessed with virginity and prostitution. It never happened

Before the war, it was the other way around; Shaker used to perform five or six virginity exams a day. Shaker is a Shiite Muslim, and he was appalled by this inversion of the normal order. In his view, a fragile moral relationship existed between the two sections of the Medico-Legal Institute—as if the social control of virginity offered a defense against the anarchy that led to murder. He noted that in Iran, an Islamist theocracy, prostitutes were publicly whipped. He thought the same practice should be instituted in Iraq—where the sex trade, he claimed, had reached epidemic proportions in the lawlessness of the occupation. “It’s strict, it’s horrible, but it has good results,” he said of Islamic law. “Prostitution now is normal here.” He blamed the Americans for the moral laxity in Baghdad, and especially L. Paul Bremer, the administrator of the Coalition Provisional Authority, for threatening, in February, to veto any interim constitution that declared Islam to be the principal basis of federal law. “When they give everybody their rights, it’s causing bad things in society—it’s corrupting us,” Shaker said. “If Islam is the main source of law, none of these things would happen.”

Mother Who Defied The Killers Is Gunned Down [Guardian]
Caught In The Crossfire [New Yorker]

The wife has left Mr. Abdel-Qader and gone into hiding; he's been relieved of his duties but won't be charged with any crimes:

Abdel-Qader, 46, a government employee, was initially arrested but released after two hours. Astonishingly, he said, police congratulated him on what he had done. 'They are men and know what honour is,' he said...'I don't have a daughter now, and I prefer to say that I never had one. That girl humiliated me in front of my family and friends. Speaking with a foreign solider, she lost what is the most precious thing for any woman. 'People from western countries might be shocked, but our girls are not like their daughters that can sleep with any man they want and sometimes even get pregnant without marrying. Our girls should respect their religion, their family and their bodies.

'I have only two boys from now on. That girl was a mistake in my life. I know God is blessing me for what I did,' he said, his voice swelling with pride. 'My sons are by my side, and they were men enough to help me finish the life of someone who just brought shame to ours.'

"My Daughter Deserved To Die For Falling In Love" [Guardian]
Related: How Moqtada Al-Sadr Won Basra

MOE: Okay dammit, I can't find that John McCain clip. I'm refusing to take meds today because I've got all this work to do later, and I'm all over the place. On one side of me this woman on Fox News is saying we're not in recession, that the media and a vast Hugo Chavez-led left-wing conspiracy has formulated this whole con to get people to hate business and the free market, and I seriously want to reach into the TV and strangle her. Also, bitch is so young she looks like Enron collapsed before her first Purity Ball. Also, and this is shallow, but the hair: needs a blow out. Who are you, Southern-accented apologist for the plutocracy? Maybe you should spend a little time reading business news before you go on airing your conspiracy theories!!!
MOE: But anyway John McCain went on Letterman and made some funny cracks (and some nine-times-warmed-over ones but no one seems to be clipping those) and meanwhile Barack Obama has been bro-ing down with the sports talk radio guys on Philadelphia's WIP.
MEGAN: Do you mean this clip? The thing I hate about candidates on late night talk shows is that I don't really need to know that they can be "funny" anymore. They're just sort of not.
MOE:

After Obama spoke about former Sixers legend Julius Erving - Dr. J - being a boyhood idol, Cataldi asked whether Obama would rather be the president or Dr. J.
"The Doctor," said Obama. "I think any kid growing up, if you got a chance to throw down the ball from the free throw line, that's better than just about anything."

The victim must experience intense pain or suffering of the kind that is equivalent to the pain that would be associated with serious physical injury so severe that death, organ failure or permanent damage resulting in a loss of significant body functions will likely result

Perhaps you can feel it in the strange way that the war is beginning to feel increasingly like a distant, historical event in two very different films. In Ellen Spiro's "Body of War" (co-produced and co-directed by Phil Donahue), video of the October 2002 congressional debate on the Iraq war resolution has that familiar-but-foreign quality of things now slipping into the near past. Politicians hector each other, with faces less wrinkled, hair less gray than they have today. Names that were once so familiar you felt like they were family (what happened to Phil Gramm?) are slipping into the realms of amnesia. The urgency of the threat of weapons of mass destruction — announced by the president and parroted by the Congress — feels odd, too, not just because no WMDs were found but because the very foundations of the war have shifted so many times over the past half-decade.

Women! I think we can all agree we are guilty enough already! That's why, in lieu of the usual evening Jezebel news roundup, we're presenting you with ten things NOT to worry your head over. Read, and go back to feeling bad about carbs!

• The "Recession": Bull markets are the new black! [Washington Post]
  
• The rising cost of food. I think we all know one place the nation's poor people could use a little "cutting back." [WSJ]
  
• Betraying your feminist principles by marrying rich and staying in the union not a day longer than you'll need to live happily ever after on the alimony. Here's to gender parity: men are doing it these days, too! [WSJ]
  
• Haiti This little dirt-eating nation just got a visit from our very stunning Secretary Of State. Oh Condi, won't you reconsider your stance on joining Republican presidential ticket? It could so use a splash of color. [Wonkette]
  
• The ever-nastier tenor of this presidential campaign. At least one national pageant queen refuses to join the fray. Here's to you, Rachel Smith, for knowing that it sometimes is wisest to be seen and not heard. [Wonkette]

• "Meditating" on your next shopping spree! Now you can worry about whether your puppy's chakras are balanced correctly. [Washington Post]
• Not totally understanding what all the fuss is about "Basra" right now. John McCain doesn't either — and he masterminded the troop surge! [Think Progress]
• The social burden of all those reckless people who signed mortgages they couldn't afford and now think they can just declare bankruptcy. It won't be quite as painless for the ignorant freeloaders it was in the past. [New Yorker]
• That Elizabeth Edwards would be hypothetically left out of John McCain's health plan. Well Jeez, if anyone can afford it, she can. [Think Progress]
• All the nastiness directed at Sarah Jessica Parker lately. She has a really great metabolism. [People]