Pittman is being held without bail. The women were all African-American and believed to be prostitutes. Police are still investigating the murders of the other four women and three missing women who fit the profile. • The persistent rumors that Chelsea Clinton was getting married in August on Martha's Vineyard obviously weren't true, as it's September and she's not married. The rumors got so bad that at one point the Clintons offered a $1,000 bet to any journalist's source that there would be no wedding. Hillary Clinton's reps issued a statement saying that they were, "sick of this insane environment where nobody bothers to heed the denials of the actual individuals involved and where facts and truth are a distant afterthought... So, if we're all going to be stuck together in this endless unfounded rumor loop through at least 8/29, let's at least make it interesting." There were no takers. • The wife of Yukio Hatoyama, who is expected to be voted Japan's next prime minister later this month, claimed in a book published last year that she rode a UFO to Venus 20 years ago. "While my body was asleep, I think my soul rode on a triangular-shaped UFO and went to Venus," said Miyuki Hatoyama. "It was a very beautiful place and it was really green." • Six women have been awarded the $25,000 Jaffe award for emerging women authors including poets Vievee Fancis, Janice Harrington and Heidy Steidlymayer; fiction writers Lori Ostlund and Helen Philips; and nonfiction writer Krista Bremer. • French doctor Pierre Foldes has developed a simple reconstructive procedure for victims of female genital mutilation that removes the painful tissue and reconstructs the clitoris by cutting ligaments to expose the root. "The results are getting better and better," he said . "Seventy two to 75 percent [of patients] are back to normal sexuality after 18 months." He has operated on more than 3,000 women in his hospital in France and is developing a program that would follow up with the women for months, giving them psychological treatment as well. • Though many teen sections in newspapers have been cut for economic reasons, the Yakima Herald-Republic's "Unleashed" section will return this fall due to an agreement with the local school district in Washington State to provide $11,500 to pay a part-time coordinator and student contributors. • Christina Aguilera, Christina Applegate, Maria Bello, Anne Hathaway, January Jones, Sherry Lansing, Sigourney Weaver, and Laura Ziskin will be honored at Variety's Power of Women luncheon on September 24 for the contributions they have made to charitable causes. • A study of nearly 30,000 people in the former Soviet Union found that binge-drinkers, and particularly women, who consumed four or five pints of beer or a bottle of wine in one day were more likely to have a "beer belly" than those who drank the same amount in a week. • The publishers of the New International Version Bible will release a revised edition that will "undo the damage" of an earlier version that tried to be more inclusive by substituting words like "he," "father," and "son" with more gender-neutral terms. Many didn't like the version, which came out in 2005. Wayne Grudem, a Biblical scholar at Phoenix Seminary in Scottsdale, Arizona, says, "I'm delighted to see they have realized the TNIV was simply never going to be accepted by the Christian public who value accuracy in translating the word of God... I'm thankful for their honesty." • To promote the Ultimate Pole Dancing Competition, there are mobile pole-dancing units bicycling around Manhattan today. • On Sunday 71-year-old Dawn Fraser, who won swimming gold medals in three Olympics, fought off and helped capture a man who tried to rob her in her home near Brisbane, Australia. "This guy came out of the gate and grabbed me and I grabbed him by the ear and I kicked him in the groin," she said. "So he had to let me go. He threatened my life and I got really annoyed about that and just grabbed him by the ear and the hair." A male friend made him lie on his stomach until the police came. • Are men really more likely to brag online? MIT researcher Philip Greenspun theorizes that men are more likely than women to participate in behaviors associated with high social status but little practical return, such as bickering over details on Wikipedia or commanding raids in World of Warcraft. • We're not sure if the front page of this newspaper is a "fail" just because it runs a photo of a woman pole dancing under the phrase "Boob bitten, woman busted," or because it also labels pole dancing "fun for the whole family."

[London, April 14. Image via WENN]

Not only do reporters get into the business because they are generally willing to forego good money in order to do some service to the world — srsly! — a newsroom is ideally one of the most meritocratic workplaces possible. It's all about the bylines, baby! So I consulted my career history for clues.

The first newspaper I worked at was my college rag, the Daily Pennsylvanian. The "glass ceiling" there was the "crime" beat, and I think there was some uncertainty among the editors as to whether I'd have the same rapport with the cops as their manly English-majoring Radiohead-listening selves; needless to say, when I got the job I had much better rapport. Because cops are often sexist! And they say much stupider shit to women. Most real newspapers have women on their police beat for this reason!

Ummmm, next I worked for the Philadelphia Daily News. They loved ambitious girls there because they could boss them around and get them to do hard-hitting pieces such as the Playmate of the Year stories. No one there struck me as particularly sexist or racist until, for some reason, the boss who liked me (a dude) went on vacation and no one would give me assignments and a veteran lady reporter told me it was because they were all sexists. Determined to overcome adversity, I spent months digging around for scoops and learning everything I could about the city's total lack of funding for drug treatment. I even found out the new police chief had a junkie for a daughter! Which no one else knew at the time. The editor — I think he hailed from the Trentonian, the last American paper to still run pictures of naked ladies — did not want to run anything I found out about. He did not seem to "trust" me. Did he not trust me because I was 20 years old? Or because I was a 20-year-old girl? I think the latter, because who doesn't encourage an ambitious dude? He could turn out to be the next Bob Woodward, after all! The third newspaper I worked at was the Washington Times which did not seem like a sexist place mostly because what self-respecting woman would want to work there? The only place to eat that was remotely nearby was Checker's. I was a terrible Washington Times employee. I actually faked appendicitis to get out of work, for which I was paid $8 an hour.

The next places I worked — Asiaweek, Time and the Wall Street Journal — were all highbrow, and that's a totally different scene. The only type of sexism I encountered at those places was the sort of "oh you are poorly organized and bad with deadlines and quaintly obsessive and unafraid of saying "fuck" to your sources and your desk is a mess because you are a self-destructive female" psychoanalysis sort that you get when editors feel a Nikki Finke vibe coming off you. (Seriously, my desk was nothing compared to some male reporters with actually important beats, but whatev.) And I can't really argue: I was a self-destructive female — still am! But I don't think I'd be so bad if I hadn't been a reporter.

See, when you're a reporter you have to get information from people. You can do that by expecting them to understand the media's role in the world and hoping they respect your work sufficiently to tell you shit, or you can do that by making them like you. (Or feel sorry for you; same diff.) I mean, inevitably you mix up those things, but it varies by beat and it varies by reporter. And at the end of the day, the person you wind up actually being is some weird result of those choices, applied to different jobs. You become a reflection of your relationship with the people you befriend and manipulate into giving you information, with a side order of how badly you desire to please readers.

Weirder still, you become so attuned to the prejudices and the faults of people you interview that you find yourself parodying them with eerie precision in your off-hours. It starts out as a joke — "wetback!" "Feminazi bonerkiller squad!" — and is seeps into your identity. My most sexist boss ever, a veteran sports reporter and Philadelphia boy's-club fellater who came after all this, is still positive it's all a joke. And to him, it was! But this self-destructive crazy female couldn't take it anymore. Thank god for teh blogz! I don't have to interact with the sexist, bigoted, provincial people who hold power over stuff ever again! Just you fucking dykes.