• The Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission in Australia is working on creating an official "intersex" gender for people who don't define themselves as "female" or "male." • A new study has found that women who suffer from severe stress six months before they conceive can increase the risk of having a premature baby. • Three egg donor agencies in Illinois are offering the nation's first guarantee for would-be parents that they can receive a discount if their egg donor changes her mind. • A Massachusetts man is appealing a $100 ticket he got while driving in the breakdown lane as he was taking his in-labor wife to the hospital. • Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Toni Morrison and Seamus Heaney supported the new Aura Estrad Prize which is given to young female writers who live in America or Mexico and write in Spanish. • A recent study of United States Latinas shows that those with more European ancestry have an increased risk of breast cancer. • Lillian Allen, a 100-year-old African American woman and community activist, is excited for Obama's inauguration, where her grandson who serves in the Secret Service will protect the new President. • A "morbidly obese" dog named Jiffy survived being frozen to the sidewalk overnight in Wisconsin thanks to his layers of chub. Jiffy's owner was arrested on Thursday on suspicion of animal neglect. • Glasvegas's tiny female drummer Caroline McKay was voted the 10th Coolest Person in Rock by NME magazine. • SANS offers cheap, printable patterns for crafty men and women who want to make or alter their own clothes. • A 19-year-old lass from Florida was arrested on misdemeanor assault and battery charges on Sunday when she popped off on a store employee for calling her the c-word. •

[Image via Mantra Films, Inc.]

• Scientists around the world are working on new male contraceptive techniques one of which involves a remote-controlled sperm valve that can turn off sperm flow at the push of a button. • From today until October 10 a carnival will be held in Nigeria where "bachelor catchers" parade a bachelor around a village in a noose in order to encourage young men to marry. • The Guatemalan government has announced a five-month program to provide some 15,000 lay midwives proper training to avoid preventable childbirth deaths. • A new study from England says that women who are undergoing fertility treatments can increase their chances of having children if they undergo acupuncture during the embryo transfer as part of their regular fertility treatment. • The annulling of a French marriage in 2006 based on the fact that the wife lied about her virginity is currently being appealed because the court decided that a woman's virginity was an "essential quality" and therefore grounds for annulment. • Historians and economists believe that "witch-hunts" tend to occur when times get tough as evidenced by Western history and current persecution of "witches" around the world. • The Japanese Defense Ministry decided today to lift gender restrictions aboard destroyers for female members of the Maritime Self-Defense Force. • An English woman kept a baby hare alive by storing the little fluffball in her bra to keep it warm and feeding the hare baby formula with a syringe. • A pair of cloistered nuns in Spain are the country's newest celebrity chefs with a hybrid reality show and cooking show called Taste of Heaven. • A new rapid test for HPV, careHPV, may be able to help stop cervical cancer for some women in rural villages worldwide. • The Indian government's decision to review the Anti-Dowry Act has been criticized by women's organizations who want the Act to be strengthened instead of dissolved or relaxed. • Okay, so we have been entranced for the past hour by this cute video of a kitty playing "red light, green light" with a camera. Whatevs, it's cute! •

[Photo via Getty.]

• MTV promotes "green" campaigns like Switch, but when it comes to the actual production of their shows, the network is very unfriendly towards the environment. • Researchers have found that 90 minutes sitting on a heated car seat can lead to an increased scrotal temperature in men, which may hurt a man's sperm quality. • A Kentucky Court of Appeals has ruled against lesbian couples adopting children as though they are stepparents. • A new website that provides syphilis information to gay men — as well as a referral letter for syphilis testing and a 1-week wait for the tested men to retrieve their results online — shows promise in promoting testing among gay men. • Rachel Bird and Gideon Codding of California refused to complete marriage forms in their state because they wanted to be referred to as "bride" and "groom" on the forms and not by the new gender-neutral terms. • A new study claims that only 3% of Australians have cheated on their loved ones last year, but researchers claim the results would be "radically different" if they measured cheating over a longer time period. • Betty Constable, Princeton's first women's squash coach and a squash pioneer in the United States, died on September 9 at the age of 83. • A British woman has sworn off having children after she recently gave birth to a baby weighing 13 pounds, 4 ounces (the weight of a 6 month old) and had given birth to three previous children who weighed more than 10 pounds at birth. • A new study has found that estrogen creams do not help reduce wrinkles on areas of skin that experience sun exposure (i.e., the face, hands, and neck). • The federal government is considering making Gardasil vaccination mandatory for female immigrants who are seeking U.S. citizenship. • Meanwhile, the FDA has updated the label for Gardasil, saying the vaccine protects against cancers of the vagina and vulva. • Margaret Hoelzer, a U.S. swimmer who won 3 medals at the Beijing Olympics, opens up about being sexually abused by a friend's father when she was 5 years old. •

[Image via JSoul.]

Entertainment Weekly:

What divine inspiration moved Kimberly Rivers Roberts, an aspiring rap artist and toweringly self-possessed woman from New Orleans' Ninth Ward, to grab her Hi8 camcorder and document the onslaught of Hurricane Katrina as it smashed up her neighborhood? And what grace brought Roberts to the attention of Tia Lessin and Carl Deal, filmmakers who, like so many others, went to Louisiana after the levees broke? Whatever the cosmic luck, the result, Trouble the Water, is essential, unique viewing: a stunning experience of the hurricane and its aftermath, rooted in immediate personal response and emotions that encapsulate the full national catastrophe.

Newsday:

Shot predominantly from the attic of their rapidly submerging house during the worst of the storm, Roberts' visual record gives us a palpable sense of impending doom. But it's only after the Robertses - in the company of filmmakers Tia Lessin and Carl Deal - return to their battered city their crime-ridden neighborhood that the true, sustained and still-unresolved damage of Katrina becomes so terribly clear.

Salon:

If possible, Roberts' movie-within-a-movie is even more amazing than it sounds. She captures a tale of courage, heroism and tragedy more thrilling than any Hollywood spectacle; one neighbor, a man Roberts and her husband, Scott, hadn't even liked before the hurricane, risks his life to save them, swimming back and forth across the street using a punching bag as a flotation device. Roberts barely knew how to turn the camera on when the storm started, and her footage is highly uneven. But you can feel her taking ownership of the situation as the catastrophe worsens, doing her own TV-news-style voice- over and alternating between establishing shots and close-ups.

The Los Angeles Times:

Kim Roberts' footage, shot with a video camera she'd bought on the street for $20 only the week before, gives a rare from-the-ground-up look at what it's like to be flooded out of your house. We watch in hypnotized horror as the waters rise so high they almost obliterate the corner stop sign, forcing the Roberts and their extended family to take precarious refuge in their attic.

Startling as that footage is, however, it takes up only about 15 minutes of "Trouble the Water." The documentary's best asset is not what Kim shot, but the woman herself.

With her buoyant, naturally dramatic personality (she ended up giving birth to a daughter in Utah just days before the Sundance award ceremony), bold, nervy Kim has the kind of intensely charismatic spirit documentary directors dream about. With her as our guide, "Trouble the Water" looks at the reality of New Orleans from the inside.

New York Daily News:

Using mostly amateur video shot by an aspiring rap artist and her husband in the lead-up to Hurricane Katrina and in the weeks after, this gripping, sometimes unstructured doc shows the devastation New Orleans residents suffered in the swirl of the storm.

Filmmakers Tia Lessin and Carl Deal utilize the footage Kim and Scott Roberts had taken throughout the disaster, showing how residents suffered, survived and came together to help when official assistance let them down. Kim especially emerges as a real voice of America, one that refuses to keep quiet about the horrors she saw.

New York Post:

As "Trouble the Water" points out, most of New Orleans' black residents have yet to return to a city that turned its back on them. When Kimberly sings, she gives voice to their pain.

The A.V. Club:

Trouble The Water is infuriating in its depiction of helpless Americans getting left behind, and uplifting in the way it shows the Roberts putting their lives together, but it's also frustrating, because it lacks some focus. It starts off being about the footage Kim shot, but she didn't shoot a lot, and anyone coming to Trouble The Water looking for an insider's take on the storm and its immediate aftermath will be disappointed to find that the bulk of the film takes place post-emergency. Even more bothersome is how Lessin and Deal keep steering away from the most persistently unsettling part of the Hurricane Katrina story, having to do with the multiple ways the rights of American citizens were taken away, by the suspicious and the well-meaning alike. Given that the filmmakers' original idea for their project stalled out due to lack of access, it's disappointing that they didn't explore that angle more. Even the generally upbeat Roberts and their friends note the promises and lies that have been exposed by their predicament. "Freedom exists," one of their neighbors says. "There's just… limitations on the freedom."

Village Voice:

The first and most gripping half of Trouble the Water, directed by Carl Deal and Tia Lessin, is essentially a first-person disaster movie—history captured in the visual grammar of Cloverfield. Driven just to get it down ("I'll be able to tell the story"), Kimberly aims her palm-sized camera at her backyard, at the neighbor passed out on his porch, at the kids laughing off the storm warnings in the street. A dog whimpers, an Army truck creeps by, the sky fades to gray, a drizzle begins. Those cunning directors who've turned shaky-cam mock-vérité into a horror-movie cliché waste a lot of effort planting such "stray" details; they don't have the thing that gives Kimberly's footage its eerie force—genuine uncertainty about what's going to happen.

New York Magazine:

As someone of bounteous hope but little (formal) faith, I found Kimberly’s religious ejaculations a bit trying. She and her husband trek north to a relative’s house in which there’s no water, and when a man shows up to turn it on, she exclaims, “When you trust in God, he sends miracles your way!” Five minutes later, the man returns, now ordered to shut the water off, and this time God goes pointedly unmentioned. But I admit that my perspective is that of a privileged New Yorker who has never had to summon comparable spiritual resources. Whatever sparked and has sustained Kimberly’s resolve is indeed a kind of miracle. The rap that she performs for the camera, “Amazing,” is just that, an explicit (and profane) account of her sordid past capped with an irresistibly upbeat refrain—a potential smash. That faith brings her and her husband back to New Orleans despite continued government neglect—even as New Orleans pours its resources into luring tourists back to the French Quarter. In one scene, Kimberly and fellow refugees line up for FEMA assistance at some kind of ranch, where a sign overhead points to Gate B—CATTLE ENTRANCE. You can’t make this stuff up. You can, however, capture it on film for all time. Trouble the Water is ineradicably moving.

Rolling Stone:

Kimberly's star power comes from the music she writes and sings, music that was almost lost in the storm. The moment in the aftermath when she finds it and raps about her feelings will knock you off your feet. At the Sundance Film Festival in January, when the film premiered, that moment got audiences standing and cheering. Never mind Katrina, Kimberly Roberts is the real force of nature. Despite the political incompetence that continues to devastate New Orleans, Kimberly and Scott went home with only positive vibes. The repair needed in their city has gotten Scott a job in construction. And Kimberly's music has attracted producers. No wonder, a glory abides in this woman's voice. "Inspiring" is an overused word in the movie business. But it fits here. Lessin and Deal have made Trouble the Water a spellbinder you do not want to miss.

'Trouble The Water' opened on August 22nd in selected theaters in Los Angeles and New York.

Earlier: Hurrican Katrina, Three Years Later: A New Memoir And An Approaching Storm [Jezebel]