In an interview that makes her sound extremely likable and charmingly humble, Sotomayor tells C-Span about the bizarre experience of waiting around for Obama to call. She says that her family had boarded planes to Washington before she got the final answer from Obama. She had been told Obama would be making the call that day, but at 5:00 p.m. Obama still hadn't called. Her family was anxious, so she told them to go on ahead.

Sick of waiting, Sotomayor called up the White House and asked, "Well you're getting my family to Washington, have any of you given any thought about how I'm going to get there? And:

"And they stopped and said, 'Oh I guess we should figure that out, shouldn't we?' Literally, that was the response. What I was told was that the president had gotten distracted with some important other business that was going on at the time, and that he would call me at about 8 p.m. but that I should go home and pack to come to Washington, and that they would prefer that I didn't take a plane."

The Washington Post notes that the other business Obama was busy with his Memorial Day appearences and North Korea's decision to detonate a nuclear device, so we suppose he has a good excuse. But in a strange way, the rest of the story sounds kind of like a particularly nerve-wracking first date. Sotomayor recalls holding her hand over her chest, "trying to calm my beating heart, literally," right before she got the call. And once she did? She admits to breaking down in tears: "And I said to him — I caught my breath and started to cry and said, 'Thank you, Mr. President.' That was what the moment was like." We can only imagine.

Sotomayor Describes Day Of Supreme Court Selection For C-Span [Washington Post]

Alex Hart has an IQ of 47, and is classified as mentally retarded. He can neither read nor write. Unable towork, he lived with his parents, did odd jobs and was, they say, courteous and gentle.

On the eve of his arrest, he was excited about a fair coming to town and asked a neighbor if he could mow her lawn to make a few dollars. She found him in the back shed fondling her 6-year-old stepson. When the police arrived, they read Hart his rights, and he confessed to what he'd done. As they transported him to jail, he asked repeatedly whether he'd get paid for mowing the lawn.

The sentence, which, as the Dallas News reports, is harsher than those typically meted out to repeat child molestors and rapists, has raised the larger question of how the state prosecutes the profoundly disabled.

The question is whether Hart was capable of understanding right from wrong; the court said yes, his parents say no. Many blame Hart's court-appointed lawyer for the severity of the sentence. Hart may not have understood his Miranda rights, and confessed to all five counts without an attorney present. Once appointed, the lawyer, assuming his client would get probation, apparently neither called witnesses on Hart's condition nor hired a liaison to help Hart understand what was going on. He also didn't challenge the finding that Hart was competent to stand trial, which his parents claim came after a cursory inspection. As a result, both judge and jury "say they would have preferred not to send Hart to prison," but they were presented with no option - no mental health facility or group home for disabled offenders. (Some jurors are saying the judge ignored their requests for alternatives, and that they were appalled that he chose to stack the sentences.) The District Attorney, however, stands by his decision to prosecute Hart on all counts, saying, "I hope people will remember he committed a violent sexual crime against a little boy."

Hart is currently in Texas' "Mentally Retarded Offender Program." He will appeal later this year; in the meantime, his father says the one upside is that his son has no idea of the severity of his situation. I use "upside" loosely, as the story is a tragedy. If Alex Hart is going to harm children, however unknowingly, he must obviously be kept away from them. One can only hope the child will sustain as little emotional damage as possible and receive counseling. But it's hard not to agree with the law professor quoted in the article who calls the sentence "not helpful to society or the offender."

Fairness Of 100-Year Prison Sentence For Mentally Disabled Offender Questioned [Dallas News]

• Michael Jackson has settled on a costume for his upcoming tour: an ensemble made entirely from Swarovski crystals. His wardrobe uses 300,000 of the sparklers. Of course, this is the man who once wore a gold-plated jacket. [WWD]

• Meanwhile at Glastonbury, the band Florence and the Machine had its outfits designed specially by Topshop. [Telegraph]
• Anna Wintour is said to have instructed Vogue petty officers to create sockpuppet accounts on Facebook to monitor fan page comments about The September Issue. [P6]
• Bucking the trend of British fashion designers returning to London Fashion Week for its anniversary, Giles Deacon has announced he'll show his Spring 2010 collection in Paris. [WWD]
• Eva Green read what you wrote about her on the Internet, but unlike Anna, she just doesn't care! "I want to wear something that I wouldn't wear every day, I like to be a bit eccentric and I know lots of people say 'Oh my god blah' but I don't care, I want to have my style, I like to try something new," said the actress, who also pines for Topshop when she's in France. [Mirror]
• 50 Cent unveiled his new fragrance, Power, at a private party in New York. While unspecific about its target audience ("Everyone human...breathing...") he did manage to shove a journalist out of his path. The way she writes it, she didn't seem to mind. Power indeed. [The Cut]
• This week sees the official previews of two dark, "intellectual" fashion ranges, heavy on the strange shapes and deconstruction, and costing around $300-$600. One is by Juicy Couture ("There is...one pair of very expensive leather leggings", but we knew that already). The other is by Comme des Garçons. Odd! [Racked] [Racked]
• Council of Fashion Designers of America menswear award winner Band of Outsiders' Scott Sternberg (who tied for the award with Calvin Klein's Italo Zucchelli) was good enough to answer some of W magazine's questions. To "Waverly Inn or Monkey Bar?" he sagely responded: "No." Asked, "Jon or Kate?" Sternberg said: "Who?" Also, Paris Hilton better not ever ask to borrow his clothes. We like him even more now. [W]
• Christy Turlington, who bagged the spring campaign, too, is coming back this fall as the face of Bally. Mario Sorrenti shot the ads. A number of fashion houses have made the choice to stick with their spring casting choices for fall. Versace re-shot Gisele in virtually the same position and dress as before, and Louis Vuitton re-hired Madonna. [WWD]
• Bar Refaeli is now the new face of Garnier Fructis. [SassyBella]
• Speaking of, L'Oréal has been found guilty of racial discrimination in French court. To market its Fructis shampoo in supermarkets, the beauty giant hired a sales staff — and was caught giving instructions in writing to a temp agency to employ only white women aged 18-22 who wear a French size 38-42. L'Oréal and the temp agency, Adecco, each have to pay fines and damages of €60,000. [Times of London]
• Models of color did not fare well at Milan menswear week. Even reliably diverse clients, like DSquared2 (which last year used an all-black cast) had virtually no faces of color on their runways. Check out these pictures to see the practically all-white casts for yourself. [FashionBombDaily]
• An Australian retail chain called Diva has ripped off a wide variety of jewelry by indie designers. [ShanaLogic]
• Let me say this again: Male modeling is just like modeling for women. Only even more poorly paid. (This article quotes 500 Euros to several thousand Euros as a typical rate for men who work the shows in Europe — and says that it's lower than what women models get. Why do reporters never keep in mind who they're asking? In this case, it's a pair of twins who started out by booking campaigns for Dolce & Gabbana. Nothing about their experience of the industry is average.) [Telegraph]
• Project Runway's Leanne Marshall wrote on her personal blog that she was unhappy with a business opportunity gone sour — but one which it was too late to pull the plug on. Discontent with retail partner Bluefly is the only logical conclusion. [Racked]
• Ex-model and PR whiz Carlos Souza has returned to the house of Valentino to try and repair its damaged reputation. Since Valentino's departure, the brand has suffered through the embarrassing ousting of the talented successor Alessandra Facchinetti, and lackluster collections designed since then by two of Valentino's former assistants. [FWD]
• Vena Cava now has a blog. [Viva Vena Cava]
• Philippe Starck has launched a new clothing line, which he describes as "non-photogenic." It's made of waterproof cashmere and designed to last a long time, which is still enough to prick our interest. [UnBeige]
• Dress Barn announced plans to buy Tween Brands Inc., which operates the Limited Too and Justice. [WSJ]
• Nike, which cut 5% of its global workforce, some 1,750 jobs in May, saw sales for the fourth quarter decline to $341.4 million, from $490.5 million the year before. Orders for the next few month are also down 12%. [AP]
• Troubled Jones Apparel Group is betting on the Asian market. It just bought a 15% stake in the Hong Kong-based retail distribution group GRI, upping its total stake in the company to 25%. [WWD]
• H&M's sales are up by 6.4% in the quarter just ended. Revenue climbed 23%. [WSJ]
• Uniqlo is talking about buying the Gap. [Independent]
• The company that owns Lacoste has chosen the former head of the European supermarket chain Carrefour to lead the brand. [WWD]

• A new study has found that exposure to family violence, even at a young age, can cause poor health among older African-American women. • Brittany Mayes, one of the five teens involved in the video-taped assault of a 16-year-old friend and fellow cheerleader, has been sentenced to a year of probation. • Click here to read an interesting interview with writer/filmmaker/actress/artist/musician Miranda July in which she discusses Gossip Girl, her new movie, New York hotels and internet gossip. • Forgetful? Fan of Memento? Buy a To-Do Tattoo Kit. • Chicago's Cook County sheriff's department is suing Craigslist for the many, many sex ads listed in its "casual encounters" section. • An Australian company is selling paper made out of wombat poop for the extremely environmentally conscious/cute-loving among us. • Baby bottle companies have agreed to stop using BPA, a potentially harmful chemical, in their plastic bottles. • 65-year-old Val Renfro was shopping when a man shoved her, grabbed her purse and ran. She grabbed her phone out of her bra, where she always keeps it, dialed 911, and chased down her thief with her car. • What a nightmare: Jean Driscoll, 72, has been burping uncontrollably for two years, and doctors still do not know what is wrong with her. • 70% of male drug addicts admit to taking drugs in order to increase sexual pleasure, the most popular choice being, somewhat surprisingly, cocaine (58%). Only 37% of drug-addicted women report using for this purpose. • A new study shows that older adults are better at controlling their emotions than young adults. Yet another reason to respect your elders. • Prostitute-rating website, The Erotic Review, has severed its ties with founder David Elms because of recent drug charges. • A Tehran court has ruled in favor of blinding the man who attacked Ameneh Bahrami with acid in 2004. Bahrami was left blind in both eyes, but the court ruled that, since her attacker is male and thus his eyes are worth more, he will only be blinded in one. • Using the model of a "pendulum of pain," counselor Steven Stosny explains to CNN why some women are unable to leave their abusers. • Get ready to get stabby: a defense lawyer in a Bahrain gang rape trial has argued that the three men who committed the crime should be acquitted because they only did it for "fun." • A 40-year-old British woman bit off her boyfriend's tongue during a drunken kiss because she was upset she was not pregnant. • Census data shows that minority children may become the majority by 2023. • A recent study found that watching violent cartoons may cause children to act out aggressively against their peers. • Amnesty International has issued a warning about gender-specific violence against women in Iraq. • Sad news: Anne-Marie Rogers, campaigner for breast cancer drug accessibility, has passed away. • In response to recent claims of mishandling rape cases, the University of Portland has changed its handbook with regards to rape victims and underage drinking. • Bed, Bath, and Beyond is sponsoring a contest for female (and only female) inventors to develop new products that will retail in stores. • Ohio has been named the "manliest" state in the country, based on stereotypical criteria such as the popularity of sports teams, tools, hardware, and the frequency of monster truck rallies. •

"My views as a victim, my feelings as a victim, or my desires as a victim were never considered or even inquired into by the district attorney prior to the filing. It is clear to me that because the district attorney's office has been accused of wrongdoing, it has recited the lurid details of the case to distract attention from the wrongful conduct of the district attorney's office as well as the judge who was then assigned to the case." She adds: "I have survived, indeed prevailed, against whatever harm Mr. Polanski may have caused me as a child," and says she believes Polanski fled the country "because the judicial system did not work." This story notes:

Now a wife and mother of three children, Geimer said that the insistence by prosecutors and the court that Polanski must appear in person to seek dismissal "is a joke, a cruel joke being played on me."

Victim In Polanski Case Urges Dismissal [AP]

As reported earlier, street harassment is insanely prevalent in Egypt. 83% percent of Egyptian women say they have been harassed, but less than 3 percent ever report it, according to a Reuters poll. In fact, the only reason Gomaa's crime was reported is that Noha jumped on the hood of her attacker's car, dragged him to a police station herself, and demanded that the crime be reported even as onlookers tried to help him escape.

Though nearly half of the Egyptian women polled earlier this year said they are sexually harassed on a daily basis, which the Reuters poll defined as men touching or ogling women, shouting sexually explicit remarks, and exposing their genitals, the problem is almost never addressed by the authorities or the mainstream media in Egypt. Noha's case is extremely unusual only in that she insisted on prosecuting Gomaa and chose to speak publicly about the incident.

In a translated interview with the Egyptian paper The Seventh Day, Noha describes the incident, saying that Gomaa stuck his arm out of his van and grabbed her breast, pulled her toward the car violently. She pushed him away and fell to the ground and he tried to drive off, but was forced to stop as a car pulled in front of him. Noha ran down the street and stood on the car's hood. "I was overcome by a feeling of strength and was prepared to be run over by his car, but not to let him get away with it," she said.

Noha called to people on the busy street to help, but they told her to let him go and asked if she was crazy. One woman told Noha, who was wearing loose clothing but not a hijab, "First, look at what you're wearing." Noha and a friend managed to get Gomaa to the nearby police station but she says the police assistant refused to investigate at first, then told her there were no cars to transport Gomaa to the central police station. Noha had to drive her attacker and a police officer to the main station in her own car.

Noha's experience demonstrates two reasons why so few cases of sexual harassment are reported in Egypt. The "blame the victim" mentality is so deeply ingrained in Egyptian society that 53 percent of Egyptian men polled by Reuters said women brought the abuse on themselves by dressing indecently and even many women agreed. Though wearing a hijab is thought to prevent harassment, 72 percent of the 83 percent of Egyptian women who were harassed said they were veiled when the abuse occurred.

It is also extremely unlikely that authorities will do anything if the crimes are reported, since there isn't even a specific Egyptian law criminalizing sexual harassment. There have been two recent cases of mob-style sexual attacks on female Egyptian pedestrians, one earlier this month and another at the same time in 2006, and witnesses say that police officers just watched as the women were violently groped and their clothing was torn off.

Egyptian women's rights groups are praising the judge in Noha's case for handing down a harsh sentence that they hope will set an example. The Egyptian Center for Women's Rights said in a press release that the decision, "will restore confidence in the legal system’s ability to defend women subjected to such crimes in every step of the process - from filing police reports, to investigation, to sentencing. [It] sends a message to all segments of Egyptian society that sexual harassment is a crime and will not be tolerated."

Khairy Ramadan, a columnist in the Egyptian newspaper Almasry-Alyoum, praised the ruling as well, saying enforcement is at the root of the problem. "Sexual harassment happens everywhere in the world. The difference is that they enforce the law abroad, whereas we just did it now for the first time," he writes. "Does this [ruling] mean society has changed? Until we find the answer, Noha must be praised for what she did and we all must support and protect her."

Egyptian sexual harasser jailed [BBC]
Harassment = Jail Time! [Muslimah Media Watch]

She told a judge she was a drug addict who had taken Xanax, Ecstasy, OxyContin, heroin, coke and LSD, to which the judge replied, "If all that is true, you should be dead," a statement that becomes immeasurably more accurate without its preambulatory clause. She also: skipped out on a Denny's bill — Denny's! thank the deities for poetic justice — and stabbed her boyfriend with a pocket knife and keyed his car...Oh, I don't know, maybe she's just a worthless drug addict. Anyway now she's finally going away, to juvi, and apparently also "crying," and definitely also sporting a fresh set of highlights. Who knows, maybe she will become even more famous in prison. The Mumia Abu-Jamal of our Generation. Then I can die.

Some videos:

Paris Hilton Of Palm Beach Has A Problem [NPR]

Girl Scout Cookie Thief Sentenced [Fox 29]

"You Should Be Dead" [Palm Beach Post]

The Part Where She Skips Out On A Denny's Tab [CBS 12]

Videogum Weighs In [Videogum]

"I Don't Know, Doesn't Everybody Like Money? [Fox 29]

"If Ian MacKaye Were Here, He Would Grab That Frappuccino Out Of Her Hand And Smash It Over Her Head And Say, 'Chill Out'" [Metatribes]

• Jennifer Aniston just says no to that more rotund Vince Vaughn and picks herself up a male model named Paul Sculfor (who we show you almost-nudie, to the left) to date instead. [People.com]
  
• A new development in stem cell research allows for cells to be removed without the destruction of human embryos. We assume Republicans will still find some reason to be against it. [ABC News]
  
• We don't know about you, but we sure won't be sleeping soundly tonight knowing that The Rubber Band Bandit's been freed! [ABC News]
  
• Our suspicions are confirmed: Only a man would think to put a woman in sequined hot pants. [ELLE.com]

• The Price Is Right's Bob Barker will announce the Showcase Showdown no more. [USA Today]
• But don't worry, Alec Trebek still digs doing Jeopardy. [Yahoo]
• Researchers in England have found new ways to identify the most common serious diseases through DNA analyses. Our hypochondriac hearts just did a little dance in our chests. [BBC]
• Now that's our kind of justice! A former judge was rigging divorce proceedings in exchange for boxes of Cubans. [CNN]
• This Iraqi gallery owner has a better peace strategy than any other we've heard proposed yet. [NYT]
• We really don't want to see Tony Blair naked, even if it is part of an art piece protesting the war in Iraq. [Yahoo]
• A day in the life of a house cat... through the eyes of a house cat. [Boing Boing]
• 11 U.S. casualties identified today. [DoD]