"We have a lot of people … [who have] lost their jobs, who don't have health care, even children that are in homes don't get three square meals a day. But this man sits with guards protecting him, he's receiving free medical, free meals." •  A recently freed Spanish skipper claims that Somali pirates are holding a 12-year-old Ukrainian girl hostage aboard another hijacked ship. Ricardo Black says he met both the girl and her parents. "Her mother begged me to take [her daughter] with me," he told a Spanish paper. • A New York teacher is suing the Department of Education because she claims she suffered injuries after she slipped on garbage, including condoms, that had been left on the floor. She's particularly mad about the condom bit (although there is no news about whether or not they were used): "They caused, allowed and permitted condoms to be distributed by school personnel to the students, many of which were opened during the school lunch period and thrown on the floor," she said in the suit. • Five high school freshmen were arrested in California for the sexual assault of two ninth-grade girls. Police say that the boys accosted the girls at school and groped them during a lunch break. • Forbes has compiled a list of the top earning states for women. Washington D.C. is at the top of the list, with women making an average of $866 a week, only 7.8% less than men. Also high on the list are Maryland, Connecticut, and Massachusetts. • Rusty Kanokogi, advocate for women's judo, has died at the age of 74. Kanokogi devoted the past twenty years to making women's judo an Olympic sport, an effort that was recognized by the Japanese government, who awarded her the Order of the Rising Sun last year. • The Virginia Military Institute is facing charges of sex discrimination. The Education Department first brought the complaint against the Military school in 2008, claiming that the "climate and culture" of the school was derogatory and discriminatory towards women.  • According to FBI data released today, reports of hate crimes against gays and religious groups increased sharply in 2008. The number of racially motivated hate crimes fell less than 1 percent, but there was an 11 percent increase in hate crimes against homosexuals and a 9 percent increase in crimes against religious groups. • Dr. Bernadine Healy, the former director of the National Institutes of Health, says women should ignore the new breast cancer screening guidelines that delay the start of routine mammograms until 50, because it would save money but not lives. • Senator Harry Reid says that right after the Senate's vote to begin debating health care legislation on Saturday, he got a call from Ted Kennedy's widow, Victoria Reggie Kennedy. "She believes that Ted was watching," said Reid. "I'll remember the call always. She of course was crying pretty hard. We both felt that he's watching us tonight." • Today President Obama announced "Educate to Innovate," a 10-year campaign to increase American students' achievement in math and science. It involves $260 million in corporate donations, a National Lab Day, and an annual national science fair at the White House "to show young people how cool science people can be." • A reporter for The Guardian visited an Iraqi jail to talk to women who have attempted to commit a suicide bombing. She found many have lost close male relatives, lived in isolated communities dominated by extremists, and felt choosing to be a suicide bomber made them special, even though they couldn't control much else in their lives. But, one detective investigating the women cautioned not to generalize because, "All the cases are different. Some are old; some are young; some are just criminals; some are believers. They have different reasons." • The late Sister Maria Alfonsina Danil Ghattas is one step closer to becoming a saint after thousands of worshipers gathered in Nazareth for her beatification yesterday. She helped found the Sisters of the Most Holy Rosary of Jerusalem in the 1880s, which continues to run schools for Palestinian girls in Israel, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. • Libby Longino is one of only 32 students to win a Rhodes Scholarship this year, but she won't be lonely at Oxford University: her boyfriend Henry Spelman was also selected. They are both seniors at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Longino said, "I could barely hope it would turn out this way." •

• In response to falling sales, drug company Merck & Co. is planning to push Gardasil as a back-to-school essential. • According to the first-ever large scale study of workplace power, gender, and sexual harassment, women supervisors are more likely to experience sexual harassment than women who did not hold managerial roles. "This study provides the strongest evidence to date supporting the theory that sexual harassment is less about sexual desire than about control and domination," said lead researcher Heather McLaughlin. • Although England's women's cricket team has won the World Cup and the World Twenty20, they are still less celebrated than the men's team. In order to turn things around, the English Cricket Board has hired the managing editor of Tatler to give the team a "makeover." • A man nicknamed "Prince" (real name: Allen Brown), has been accused of running a prostitution ring (which, weirdly, included both his mother and his niece). He reportedly confiscated the identification cards and cellphones of the women he had working for him, and demanded a nightly quota of $1,000. • Evelyn Coke, home care aide and advocate for fair pay, died on July 9th at the age of 74. • A recent study found that the children of Bangladeshi women who are victims of domestic violence have a higher risk of suffering from infections and diarrhea than those born to un-abused mothers. • Clinics in Australia have been cleared to prescribe RU486, the so-called "abortion pill," for pregnancies under nine weeks. Pro-choice advocates hope the increased availability of the drug will reduce the risk that women might seek out illegal drugs for abortion purposes. • In the past four decades, there has been a decline in the number of highly educated black women who chose to marry and have children. Hanna Brueckner, professor of sociology at Yale University, says that the gains women have made in higher education have "come increasingly at the cost of marriage and family." • Professor Bill Ledger from Sheffield University is urging all 30-year-old women to take a "fertility MoT test, even those who are not trying to conceive. • On Saturday, Liberia's deputy ambassador to the U.S. met with the 8-year-old rape victim from Arizona who made the news last month after her family refused to house her out of "shame." Edwin Sele said the girl cried heavily during the meeting, and asked to see her parents. • Catholic archbishop Denis Hart says he does not remember telling a woman abused by a priest to "go to hell, bitch" in 2004. "It was a number of years ago. I don't recall precisely," he said. • Depressing, but not surprising: The recession has screwed over pregnant woman, making it more difficult for them to take maternity leave. •

Guards said the segregation at the Fluvanna Correctional Center for Women was deliberate, and that the "masculine-looking women" (like Summer Triolo, pictured) were moved to a wing of the prison referred to as the "butch wing," "little boys wing," "locker room wing" or "studs wing." Guards say building manager Timothy Back came up with the segregation plan as a way of breaking up relationships between inmates. One guard remembers Back saying, "we're going to break up some of these relationships, start a boys wing, and we're going to take all these studs and put them together and see how they like looking at nothing but each other all day instead of their girlfriends."

Though material conditions on the so-called "boys wing" were not worse than on other wings, inmates there were kept away from other inmates even at mealtimes, and say they suffered harassment. Prison staff made comments like, "Here come the little boys," when they arrived at the cafeteria for meals. Warden Barbara Wheeler denies that any segregation happened, but inmates say the policy was obvious. Inmate Trina O'Neal said, "I have been gay all my life and never have I once felt as degraded, humiliated or questioned my own sexuality, the way I look, etc., until all of this happened."

Va. Women's Prison Segregated Lesbians, Others [AP]

"She told me that she was not raped or sexually assaulted in prison and that the father of her unborn child is not a Lao prison official," Jane Orobator said. Orobator has been imprisoned since August, and became pregnant in December. She has claimed that she did not have sex while in prison, yet in the same letter, she states that she was not raped. However, since Orobator's release—and her stay of execution—was contingent on her willingness to publicly deny that she was assaulted, there seems to be a strong possibility that both mother and daughter are lying to save Samantha's life. [Independent & News.com.au]

• And in other adorable animal news, the NYT City Room blog covers the story of Molly the calf, who escaped the slaughterhouse and is now living with her boyfriend on a 60-acre farm in Suffolk county. • A 32-year-old Muslim dentist living in the UK faces a charge of misconduct for refusing to treat female patients unless they donned headscarves. • Musicians are reacting in different ways to the use of music as a weapon of torture. Bands like Rage Against the Machine and Massive Attack are trying to get music banned as a form of torture, while Jonathan Mann has set the words of recently released memos on waterboarding to music. • Susan the Scientist is being billed as the next Bill Nye the Science Guy. Click here to watch one of Susan's educational videos. • A hospital in Canada is now able to offer breast cancer screening and results in the same day. • A new website named Momicillin promises mothers temporary relief from "crankiness, confusion, self-doubt, body-aches, memory loss, fatigue or general malaise due to excessive exertion or repetition during job-related activities. These activities may include, but are not limited to: binky finding, goop removing, conflict negotiating, facial contorting"... you get the idea. • According to a Washington-based nonprofit, there are 1.7 million kids in America with an incarcerated parent. This interesting article discusses the difficulties of growing up with family in prison. • Soft, decadent, luxurious four-ply toilet paper is the latest victim of the recession. • In case you still care about celebrities and their charitable causes, here is the first entry in Sienna Miller's travelogue from the Congo. • A woman from North Carolina recently returned a stolen terracotta fragment of ancient Roman ruins that her husband pocketed when they were on vacation in Italy 25 years ago. • A spokeswoman from HBO said that they would cancel "Cathouse" before letting Drew Peterson appear on the show. However, a spokesperson for the Bunny Ranch says they're still talking to Peterson. • Samantha Orobator, the pregnant Briton being held in prison in Laos on charges of drug smuggling, may return to the UK to serve her sentence if she is convicted by Laotian courts. British officials are "pleased with the prisoner transfer agreement." •

• Young women who have undergone breast reductive surgery may have been screened for cancer without their consent, according to a recent report. • Doctors hope that a new type of screening for ovarian cancer will help decrease the number of cancer-related deaths among women. • Ugh: the Caylee Anthony "tribute" dolls are back. • Mormons are up in arms about an upcoming episode of HBO show Big Love that plans to depict a sacred Mormon temple. The church has not called for a boycott, believing (rightly so) that it would only give Big Love free publicity. • According to a new study, the high incidence of child marriage in India could lead to "poor fertility outcomes" among women. • Click here to watch a video of a turtle humping a shoe. • A preacher in rural Alabama is under fire for his "sexy sermons". The sex-positive sermons received negative attention after the church sponsored billboards that read "Great sex: God's way." • A baby boy born in Russia has just undergone surgery to correct his birth defect: he was born with two penises. • A Maryland woman was seriously injured (and probably embarrassed) from an incident involving a sex toy attached to a power saw. • Fertility patients are pleased with Obama's decision to lift the ban on stem cell research, since their donated embryos can now be put to good use. However, Scientists have some doubts. • New research from the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia indicates that many doctors don't really understand the emergency contraception pill, and because of this, they don't often suggest it. • Studies performed on rats have found that children whose mothers drink alcoholic beverages while pregnant may find the taste more palatable than those born to teetotalers. • And for those of us who may be predisposed to loving the booze, there is a new website that can help monitor alcohol consumption. • More Filipinos are beginning to question the Catholic Church's teachings on birth control. "The influence of the Catholic Church has steadily weakened, just like in other countries," says Congressman Edcel Lagman. • According to a poll from 2007, 54% of Icelanders don't deny the existence of elves, and many believe that elves could be to blame for building disasters. • While women in Saudi Arabia are restricted from many activities, horse riding is not among them. • Protesters of the Miss University London pageant chained themselves to the entrance with bike locks and set off stink bombs. • The Scottish Prison Inspector has announced that many female inmates are living in "dismal and damaging conditions. • A new study shows that women expect men to do "masculine" chores, like taking out the garbage and mowing the lawn. • Film company Target Entertainment has bought the rights to a feature-length documentary titled "Monster: The Josef Fritzl Story." • Katie Couric has received a Walter Cronkite Award for Excellence for her coverage of the 2008 campaign. • A 17-year-old gunman dressed in military gear entered a high school in Germany and murdered fifteen of his classmates. Out of the fifteen, fourteen were female. • Firefighters in the UK have gotten multiple calls about this dwarf pony's stumpy legs. • Last night Congress passed a bill that will help provide cheap birth control for college women. • And if you don't like hormones, a new, cheaper, female condom has been approved for sale in the U.S. • A total of 43 people in norther Nicaragua have fallen ill with "crazy sickness." • Female Guardian writer tries boxing, realizes it's an intense workout. • Men are shelling out big bucks for hair plugs to combat society's prejudice against the bald. • Salt may be addictive, says a new study on the evolutionary reasons for human's taste for salt. • 

• A new study shows that children with contact lenses feel better about their looks than kids who wear glasses. • Horrible news: over 100,000 young women were killed in fires in India in a single year. Officials say that many of these deaths were tied to domestic abuse. • Proposition 8 is back in court. The court's decision is due within 90 days, so here's hoping that the 18,000 same-sex couples wed in California are not forced to give up their rights. • Four years after being honorably discharged, Lisa Pagan, mother of two, was recalled for duty. She reported with her children, and is now waiting to hear whether her appeal - on the grounds that she must stay in the country to take care of her kids - will be approved or not. • According to a study from the University of Warwick, modern women are ill-equipped to deal with motherhood because of their newfound geographical mobility. • New strains of drug-resistant gonorrhea have been detected in the US, UK and Australia. • The kidnapping trial of Kumari Fulbright, former beauty queen, has been pushed back until at least August. • Toward the end of the Spanish Civil War, thousands of children were kidnapped and put up for adoption. Years later, Spain is facing pressure to investigate the "lost children of the Franco regime." • The Belfast Rape Crisis Center is facing harsh criticism for its burlesque show fundraiser. Academic Fionola Meredith is among those opposing the show: "Forget post-feminism and irony - Northern Ireland remains an old-fashioned sexist's paradise where women's rights are very far down the political agenda." • More than 15,000 tapes of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker's Christian talk show, the 'PTL Club', are up for auction. • Excerpts from Josef Fritzl's psychological examination have been released, and the details are terrifying. Fritzl claims that he "actually led a completely normal family life" and that he was a "good provider." • According to UN officials, the women's prison at Badam Bagh, Afghanistan, is probably the best in the country. The "humane" prison allows children to stay with their mothers, and offers classes for the prisoners in English and computer science. • British teachers worry that forward-facing strollers may be to blame for the recent decline in the linguistic abilities of many children. • Artist Christian Faur assembles amazing portraits entirely out of whole crayons. Check them out here. • A new study has found that sexual dysfunction among women may have more to do with the brain than with the body. • The world's first pink dolphin has been discovered living in an inland lake in Louisiana. • The Japanese have invented a new weight loss tool: expensive toe rings. • Women are less likely to go into debt and work harder for financial independence than men, according to a new study. • Mariachi classes are gaining young followers, as second and third generation Latinos reconnect with music of their grandparents. 14-year-old Maureen Sanchez has been taking Mariachi classes since she was five, and has already recorded three CDs and appeared on national radio and television. • A recent survey shows that women are more religious than men. Analysts speculate that this may be caused by - what else? - motherhood. • For the first time, researchers have established a link between estrogen and fat storage, which may explain why women store fat differently than men. • The New York Times has a short, but important, documentary following an 11-year-old girl on her last day of school before the Taliban closes it down. • 

[Image via Florida Times-Union[

Amy Friedman's essay, "Kept Together by the Bars Between Us" is apparently adapted from the laugh-a-minute sounding anthology Stricken: The 5,000 Stages of Grief, so you know it's not going to end happily. But it's a pretty fascinating glimpse into the kind of relationship many of us have probably wondered about.

The author meets her husband when doing a story on the prisons of upstate New York and Ontario; he is serving a 13 year sentence for a drug-related murder. As she explains it, "The fact that we ultimately fell in love always arouses gasps of disbelief, but there wasn't much to it. We fell in love the way people do, the same way I had fallen in love with other men." Although Friedman's friends are shocked at the romance and the polarity of their existences, in fact it's made clear that he is not an "average" prisoner, and that their backgrounds are less alien than one might imagine: "He had grown up in a middle-class family; one sister was a doctor, another a businesswoman. His mother was wonderful. He was an athlete who took a wrong turn - a terrible turn."

While the strength of their commitment is clear - they marry, Friedman takes in his teenage daughters, she buys a home near the prison, she endures the indignities of prison life, and they talk daily for seven years - in some ways the relationship remains shadowy, perhaps a natural consequence of its unusual nature.

My friends Kate, Diane and Anndale and my mother and father, all of whom had visited him in prison, understood why I loved him. They knew his rich voice and infectious laugh. They spoke of how he lit up whenever he had visitors.

We don't really get a sense of the nature of their connection, their shared interests or views or any of the 'normal' currency of a relationship: but perhaps that is the point. Friedman acknowledges the obvious appeal such a romance can have to one's romantic side or ego, but reading about her total commitment to the marriage, it's impossible to dismiss it as anything less than real.

When he is paroled, after the long years of waiting, her husband abruptly tries to end the marriage. "All night long on New Year's Eve, he explained, he had lain in his cell thinking about us, about what was ahead, how he couldn't do this - saddle me with a husband who faced years of parole, who couldn't earn much money, who was a nobody, a burden." The reader is left confused - but then, one imagines the author was, too, despite having been told about the panic that can set in when prisoners face freedom. They try to make it work, but he slides into "a deep pool of depression and anger" and they don't stay together. It's a deeply troubling conclusion to what we, as readers, want to be a story of love triumphing over odds. What one comes away with, though, is not so much a feeling of sadness, although that's there, as a feeling that those seven years of tortured love were not something to have been missed. That's probably a testament to Friedman's unsentimental writing; while we may not understand the relationship much more by the essay's end, we believe it.

Kept Together by the Bars Between Us [New York Times]

"It makes it harder that they’re women," says Rhonda Cobb, a control center sergeant who always dreamed of being a corrections officer. "Because you don’t expect it from a woman. If a woman goes and butchers somebody, it makes us all look bad. As women."

According to the Times, half of the women on death row are there for killing those close to them — their partners, their children, or both. Many — the figure for all inmates at Muncy is 86% — have themselves been abused. Cobb is also an abuse victim, so she empathizes with her charges to some degree. But she can no longer read their files. "“We had a girl who had just come in – had killed her two-year-old baby," she says, "She had burnt it, starved it to death, and my son was two years old at the time. [...] With that particular inmate, it was never the same. You just don’t want to know the person’s details."

Debra Schaefer displays a similar mix of understanding and detachment:

Have I been angry enough when I think I could have killed someone? Sure. But at that moment – in a sane, sensible person – lurks the question: what’s going to happen if I do this?

Whereas these women… they dropped off the deep edge. Either they didn’t care or they didn’t think what the repercussions would be. I can’t answer for them. I wasn’t in their shoes. But no, I can’t sympathise. When you walk into that environment, you can’t cry for them. We have 1,200 inmates – that’s too many tears.

It would be too easy to say that being a female warden among women is categorically different from being a male one among men. Some men probably also feel the sense that criminals have let their gender down — and that, were it not for luck and good judgment, they might have done so too. But there is a culture at SCI Muncy that may be unique to women's prisons: a culture of conversation. The Times writes, a little crudely, that there are fewer fights at Muncy than at men's prisons, "because the female inmates can’t keep a secret. They talk, they don’t harbour malice, so incidents are prevented." And the whole piece, with the almost familial relationships between officers and inmates, the difficulties of getting too close or too angry, reminds me of a joke Sigrid Nunez tells in her novel, The Last of Her Kind:

Two women who are imprisoned in the same cell together for twenty-five years are released on the same day. Before they go their separate ways, they hang around outside the prison gate and talk for an hour.

It's reductive, and it reinforces some of the stereotypes about gabby women that ordinarily make me angry. But it does speak to the way that women are raised to live with one another, to engage in a kind of constant communication that can be as restrictive as it is reassuring — and that must make life for a warden or a prisoner all the more harrowing for the understanding that one could so easily be in the other's shoes.

The Pink Mile: Women On Death Row [Times of London]
Muncys 3 Amigos [Muncy 3 Amigos]

[New York, April 18. Image via Splash.]

When the pageant first started, over fifteen years ago, the inmates had no supplies. The winner made her dress out of plastic bags from the prison kitchen. Now the women are allowed to use hairspray, lipstick, nail polish — stuff not usually allowed in the prison. The pageant is the subject of a BBC Two special program which airs tonight. There's something poignant about incarcerated women getting to feel special — even if just for one day. But these women are criminals. And does the pageant emphasize the sexist idea that a woman is only valuable if she is pretty? Or is it worth it to have a much-needed bright spot in a drab, imprisoned Siberian existence?

Siberian Prison's Beauty Pageant [BBC]

• "As for the question of whether the surge is working, I can only state what I witnessed: U.N. staff and those of non-governmental organizations seem to feel they have the right set of circumstances to attempt to scale up their programs. And when I asked the troops if they wanted to go home as soon as possible, they said that they miss home but feel invested in Iraq." From a thoughtful opinion piece written by...Angelina Jolie? Ummmm, does this mean she's joining her estranged dad in support of McCain? (Oh, and in case you were wondering, that's her with Gen. David Petraeus and some other broad earlier this month in Baghdad, where she supposedly did all the "observing" and "interviewing" she talks about in the column. ) [Washington Post]
  
• "Anyone who says they don't enjoy the army is mad - you can spend a week hating it and the next week it could be the best thing in the world and the best job you could ever, ever wish for. It has got so much to offer." That was Prince Harry before he went to Afghanistan, where he apparently saw actual gunplay. We hear it's not rare out there! A three month tour, on the other hand... [Times Of London]
  
• "Britney Spears is basically an analogy for the world." That's Rufus Wainwright. Leave it to the gays to cling to their cynicism.[NY Mag]

• Hey speaking of, one in a hundred Americans is in prison right now. I know, it sounds low. But expensive! Many states now spend as much on corrections as higher education. [Washington Post]
  
• "I believe Sen. Obama better stay focused on his campaign with Senator Clinton, neither of whom has secured their party's nominee yet." Guess who? It's George W. Could you tell from the grammatical error? Or did you see it on CNN. He said it all stern-like, like he was making a threat. But like, what's the threat? Such an intriguing man. [The Swamp]
  
• He also maintains there's no recession. Yeah, I'm with Rufus. [AP.]
  
• I want to have his babies of the day: Jeffrey Fisher, an attorney representing fishermen suing Exxon for that oil spill thing that happened back during the Cold War who still, admirably, has his sense of humor. [Wash Post]

Scientists from Oxford University say that an increase in junk food over the past 50 years has led not to a stress-free existence but a rise in violence among inmates. A pilot study randomly distributed vitamin supplements to prisoners in England and Scotland — along with a placebo. There were a third fewer violent incidents among those given the supplements. Vitamins, shmitamins! I will cut a fool for some chocolate right about now. Maybe the problem is that they need to feed inmates more? How violent can you be if you're full of cake?

Australia Univ. Research Shows Junk Food May Lower Stress Levels [Breitbart]
Prison Study To Investigate Link Between Junk Food And Violence [The Independent]