However, the coolness of their genitalia is brought down a notch when you find out why they are so oddly designed: the female duck's labyrinthine vagina is intended to help her escape potential rapists, and ensure that she is only impregnated by a suitor of her choosing. • Looking for the perfect gift for your multi-tasking boyfriend? Get him this two-in-one beard trimmer and cellphone! This is where I should make a joke about wanting a RAZR, but it's too easy. • Germany has refused, yet again, to return the bust of Nefertiti to Egypt. Officials claim the bust is too fragile to be moved. • A 54-year-old woman from Minnesota may be facing assault charges after she grabbed a man by his genitals hard enough to cause him to require stitches. She claims he cut himself, but he told police quite a different story. • A zoo in Illinois has raised over $20,000 by selling necklaces and ornaments made from reindeer poop. The droppings are dime-sized, dehydrated, sterilized, and covered in glitter. • Australian moms are paying up to $1000 a liter for black market breast milk. Lack of guidelines makes it difficult to regulate the breast milk trade, which has lead many mothers to pay exorbitant prices. Lactation experts are calling for national guidelines for the sale of breast milk, which would hopefully classify the liquid as a food product. •  According to Myanmar news sources, the Burmese Supreme Court has agreed to hear pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi's appeal. The court had previously turned down several requests, but some hope that this may be a sign the junta is relaxing their grip on Suu Kyi, and may even allow her to go free in time for next year's promised elections. • 300 French high school students showed up for class wearing short skirts or Bermuda shorts as part of a protest against the recently tightened dress codes. Léa Dedieu, the 17-year-old who organized the protest, said she wanted to make a philosophical point about freedom, and it wasn't intended "to draw attention to ourselves." • Every year Cadbury makes a special batch of dark chocolate exclusively for the royal family. "We've been providing chocolates to the royal family since Victorian times, but I cannot discuss the recipe," revealed a spokesperson for the company. • An Ohio mom called the cops on her own 6-year-old daughter after she found out that she had shoplifted a $3.11 package of stickers. Police picked up the girl and took her down to the station, but she was not arrested. Diane Lyons said she wanted to teach her child an early lesson about right and wrong. "I don't think I went too far," she said. •

• Law Professor Alan Young notes that witchcraft charges don't actually target witches (no shit) but those who use fake magical powers to prey on vulnerable people. • The American Library Association has announced a new prize for YA writers: the Excellence in Nonfiction for Young Adults award. A book about civil rights heroine Claudette Colvin is among the five finalists for the prize. The winner will be announced January 18th. • In 2008, women held only 15.2% of the seats on U.S. boards of directors for Fortune 500 companies. A year later, the percentage hasn't changed at all. And the same study found that women only make up 6.3% of corporate top earners. "The leadership doesn't reflect the marketplace or the talent pool," said lead researcher Ilene Lang. •  LaTanya Clemmons, sister of alleged cop-killer Maurice Clemmons, has been arrested and charged with four counts of rendering criminal assistance. LaTanya, along with five of her relatives, are being charged for their role in Maurice's escape (he eluded police for two days before he was discovered and shot by a Seattle officer). • A mother from the UK is fighting to receive donor milk for her 15-month-old son. She is currently unable to breastfeed the child due to chemotherapy, and although nurses tried giving him formula milk, it only made him sick. She was provided with donor milk for several months, but the hospital has decided that he no longer needs it. She asks that they continue giving her milk until March, when she will have finished with chemo. • Alexis Xanders was walking home from school a couple months ago when a group of kids - including one with a video camera - began to harass her and her boyfriend. The bullying escalated, and Xanders was eventually punched in the face by a member of the school's wrestling team. Fortunately, she got her hands on a copy of the tape and uploaded it to CNN iReport. Authorities are now investigating the fight, which apparently all began when Xanders said she didn't like Insane Clown Posse. • A nativity scene in front of the Old City Hall in Toronto has been altered today, after several news sources noted that the display featured a plaque from the Campaign Life Coalition - a pro-life group. City officials said the sign did not comply with their Human Rights Policy, and asked the CLC to take it down. Apparently they did so, grudgingly. • Serena Williams is in the running to be named the AP's Athlete of the Decade. Why her? Because: "With unprecedented power and underrated agility, she has transformed the way the women's game is played. Her flair for theatrics and compelling back story brought new fans to the sport, which helped the WTA Tour achieve new levels of popularity... This is an athlete who has that very, very unique combination of grit and glamour, power and grace." •

• Saudi Arabia's first female cabinet member, Noura al-Faiz, was recently quoted in a Saudi paper saying that she does not plan on appearing on TV unless she is granted permission. "I don't take my veil off and I will not appear on television unless it is allowed for us to do so," she said. • Annie Lobert, ex-sex worker and founder of the "Hookers for Jesus" organization, just married Oz Fox from the Christian heavy metal band Stryper. Congrats! • A recent government survey found that 1 in 3 Indian women have been abused by their spouses or partners. According to Reuters, even the women of the upper crust are not immune to the dangers of intimate partner violence, and rich husbands often use their wealth and influence to make divorce almost impossible. • It appears that Botox may not be such a bad thing after all: scientists say that the face-freezing drug may be useful in the fight against cancer. • Sydney Dupree, a male-to-female transsexual from Memphis, founded the Transgender Job Fair in Los Angeles in efforts to help herself and other transpeople find work in the rough economy. The fair includes 17 public and private employers willing to reach out to the trans community. • Over the weekend, NPR interviewed Sussan Tahmasebi, the leading women's rights activist in Iran, who believes that the upcoming elections "promise some sort of change" for women in Iran. Tahmasebi is the founding member of the One Million Signatures Campaign, which seeks to change gender-biased laws through gathering signatures. • Croatian nutritionist Dr Lejla Kazinic Kreho has discovered that sauerkraut is a powerful aphrodisiac — for men. The problem, naturally, comes in finding sex partners still interested after one consumers Kreho's recommended two servings a day. • A 93-year-old man wed an 89-year-old woman in Florida this weekend, stating that she'd had her eye on him for 20 years. After the ceremony, technicians used nail polish remover to remove the adhesive from her eye and returned it to her. • Sarah Palin will, indeed, be having dinner with the Republicans she's been so coy with for months, proving to herself that she can treat them poorly and still maintain their undying affection. Now, onto 2012! • Palin also renews her love with Sean Hannity, joining him on-air tonight to reprise her accusations that Obama is a Super Sekret Socialist. Now, if we'd only elected her, I mean, John McCain, the economy would be as peachy-keen as her spring suits!

The long and varied history of breastfeeding — perhaps one of the most natural and organic of processes — is, writer Jill Lepore argues, inextricably linked to social change and economic issues. Long seen as a mark of social humility, breastfeeding was, amongst the upper-classes of prior centuries, generally farmed out to a paid wet nurse. But in the 18th Century, Rousseau (himself apparently a crap father) encouraged a romanticized view of back-to-nature mothering, one backed up by Linnaueus' studies of mammalian nature. An alleged "milk shortage" in 19th Century America started a fad of feeding babies cow's milk — often with fatal consequences — and started a decline in breastfeeding. Modern science — and the new practice of giving birth in hospitals - then ushered in an era of sterility. And, as Lepore points out, "perversely, Freud’s insistence that infants experience suckling as sexual pleasure proved a boon to stork-style repression, too: mothers, eager to keep infantile incestuous desire at arm’s length, propped their babies up in high chairs and handed them bottles."

Milk-banks and early wet-nurse directories gave birth to a new formula industry. "Once milk banks replaced wet nurses, human milk came to be treated, more and more, as a medicine, something to be prescribed and researched, tested and measured in flasks and beakers." Breast-feeding was regarded as old-fashioned and unsanitary...a trend that La Leche League intended to curb when they established in 1956. Read their pamphlet: "With his small head pillowed against your breast and your milk warming his insides, your baby knows a special closeness to you, he is gaining a firm foundation in an important area of life—he is learning about love.” And, unsurprisingly, this ethic appealed to many upper-class women of the 1960s.

In more recent years, breast milk's superiority has been touted by medical professionals as a deterrant to various health and immune problems. However, American breast-feeding is at a low, something hospitals and government have been at pains to address. Measures have ranged from workplace breast-pumping stations, tax exemptions, and amendment of indecency legislation that gets in the way of public breastfeeding. (The fact that a woman was just arrested in a Connecticut bar for drinking while nursing shows there's still some issues to figure out.) A 2007 case against an airline that confiscated breast milk led to its reclassification as “liquid medication" — significant in more ways than one. This, Lepore concludes, is the age of the breast pump. And that's not a great thing.

Non-bathroom lactation rooms are such a paltry substitute for maternity leave, you might think that the craze for pumps—especially pressing them on poor women while giving tax breaks to big businesses—would be met with skepticism in some quarters. Not so. The National Organization for Women wants more pumps at work: NOW’s president, Kim Gandy, complains that “only one-third of mega-corporations provide a safe and private location for women to pump breast milk for their babies.” (When did “women’s rights” turn into “the right to work”?) The stark difference between employer-sponsored lactation programs and flesh-and-blood family life is difficult to overstate. Pumps put milk into bottles, even though many of breast-feeding’s benefits to the baby, and all of its social and emotional benefits, come not from the liquid itself but from the smiling and cuddling (stuff that people who aren’t breast-feeding can give babies, too). Breast-feeding involves cradling your baby; pumping involves cupping plastic shields on your breasts and watching your nipples squirt milk down a tube. But this truth isn’t just rarely overstated; it’s rarely stated at all...No one seems especially worried about women whose risk assessment looks like this: “Should I take three twenty-minute pumping ‘breaks’ during my workday, or use formula and get home to my baby an hour earlier?”

In Lepore's view, the current mentality is essentially another round in the breast milk carousel: the only difference is, this one's a convenient synthesis of a few views: the same sterile packaging as 1950s "science," with the benefits of alternative research — minus, of course, the romanticism. Meanwhile, the issue is as starkly class-based as ever: any "good," progressive mother knows breast milk's benefits — but breast pumps and the accompanying paraphernalia of conscientious working motherhood are shockingly expensive. Another failure of "having it all" - or progress, of a sort?

Baby Food [New Yorker]

Related: Woman Arrested For Breast Feeding At A Bar [Babble]

• A sixth-grader in Lawrence, Kansas, has successfully overturned his school's ban on hedgehogs. • A young woman in Papua New Guinea has been burned to death for her suspected involvement with sorcery. • Aruban prosecutors have announced that they are nearing the end of the Natalee Holloway case, and ask for anyone with information to come forward. • Brazilian-made diet pills may cause chest pains and other serious health risks, new study says. • A former luxury jet pilot has been accused of sexually harassing several blonde stewardesses. • In a recent interview, Janeane Garofalo talks about the odd comments she receives on the street: "People say a lot actually, 'No offense, but you look like Janeane Garofalo.' Or 'I don't mean to offend you, but you look like Janeane Garofalo.' I never really know how to respond to that: 'None taken?'" • A breast-milk bank has been set up in the UK to provide mothers who are too ill to breastfeed with fresh milk (and its beneficial antibodies) for their babies. They are currently accepting donations. • A woman who admits to hitting a child molester with a baseball bat is now facing up to eight months in prison. • A 21-year-old woman was the most recent victim of her own stupidity: after trashing her ex-boyfriend's apartment, and telling the ex that he would never be able to prove it was her, she posted pictures of the damage on MySpace. •

P.S. No animals were drugged in the making of this video.

Earlier: Dr. Ruth Personally Advises Us On Period Sex

Related: Little Britain: Meeting The Parents [YouTube]

• Yay, heart-warming story! The International Breast Milk Project ships breast milk, or liquid gold, to Africa, where nine-thousand bottles is enough to feed six babies for a year. Being that lil' Suri Cruise was weaned on a Hubbard-approved cocktail of barley water and corn syrup, we sure hope Katie didn't let her milk dry up and go to waste. [ABC News]
  
• Capitol Hill finally takes notice that postpartum depression is more than just a few tears; Congress has authorized $3 million in federal funds for research. Brooke Shields, Britney Spears, and Andrea Yates all respond, "No shit!" and "That's it?!" [ABC News]
  
• A woman dug up and stole her dead boyfriend's ashes after his family banned her from the funeral. Aww, that's kind of sweet! [CNN]

• Kim Cunningham admits to killing her brother-in-law when she found out he had repeatedly raped her 9-year old daughter. She was acquitted of murder by two juries and though some say the ruling is condoning vigilante justice, we say, "You know what? Fuck that, good for her. Where's the parade?" [ABC News]
• A burqa-wearing bandit robbed a bank in North Carolina, leaving the police scratching their heads as to whether the perp was a man or a woman. Umm, we see some pretty groomed brows in the photo so our vote is a woman... or gay drag queen. [ABC News]
• Breast cancer patients find that friends, family, and even strangers offer loads of unsolicited advice and wisdom in an effort to be supportive, most of which is totally crappy. "Pshaw, chemo is no big deal!" is not the best way to tell someone you're there for them, okay? [MSNBC]
• Shocker. State by state, the US sucks at caring for women's health, with Vermont being the best and Mississippi being the worst. As for who else failed miserably? Washington D.C., home of our nation's capital. Betcha the First Lady gets the best Pap smear in district! [MSNBC]
• Heavy sigh. A top political strategist estimates that Republican women will, in the end, vote for Hilary Clinton because they want a female president. We're not sure if that's true, we'd take Clinton over any Republican any day of the week, but why is that people don't understand voting for any woman is not a feminist statement? [AP]

• Women who smoke are more likely to go through early menopause; like, before the age of 45. [DailyMail]
  
• Eating disorders are not just for the young: There's a rise in women in their 30s, 40s, even 50s seeking treatment for diseases such as anorexia and bulimia. [USAToday]
  
• Coming soon to an airliner near you: A breast-milk "free for all"! [Salon]
  
• Placentas: Good for depression, good for hair? [Salon]
  
• The body-parts of some 3 dozen infant girls and aborted female fetuses were found in a well in India. Which is pretty much what you can expect from a society that in large part, doesn't value an entire gender. [The Guardian]

• Speaking of societies that don't value women: In Iran, husbands and fathers will be allowed into birthing rooms for the first time. Ever. [Guardian]
• A growing labor shortage in Japan is spurring employers to seek out female employees like never before. [WSJ]
• Survival rates for breast cancer are increasing to the point where some experts believe it shouldn't be labeled a 'killer' anymore. Let's not count our chickens before they're hatched, shall we? [Telegraph]

My extensive experience in making Paneer compelled me to try something different, that is, making Paneer out of my own breastmilk. Basically this is human cheese. Why would I do that? Well, basically, there are about twenty bags (each 150ml) of frozen breastmilk in the fridge, and they have passed their three months drinkability period, which means I would not be able to donate the milk like I did before... It turned out that breast milk can not curdle, because the protein content is lower, and because the protein in breast milk is more easily digested compared to cow's milk. That's why, unmodified cow's milk is unsuitable for babies. And on the other hand, adding acid to further 'digest' breastmilk protein won't curdle the milk. So, the moral of the story, YOU CANNOT MAKE CHEESE OUT OF BREASTMILK. Don't even try.

Breast Milk Cheese [Indrani via RandomGoodStuff]
Related: Save Some Womb For Dessert [Harper's Magazine, sub req'd]
Milk Money [Salon]