-A new law in Rhode Island will require all middle schools and high schools in the state to teach students about dating violence - what it looks like and how to prevent it - in health classes. Texas is the only other state requiring its teachers to educate their students about this ugly, pervasive side to human relationships.
-California's ballot this November will include Proposition 4, a new law that will require doctors to acquire parental or guardian consent before performing abortions on minors. Though the measure has failed twice in the past, supporters think they've got the votes this year to pass it.
-South Dakota's 2006 abortion ban is back.
-feministing wants to know "what's up with Family Guy's rape jokes?"
Other news:
-Creative Loafing, the company that recently bought out and gutted the Chicago Reader, has filed for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy. Since purchasing Chicago's notable weekly, Creative Loafing cut the Reader's staff significantly, including reporters like John Conroy - the top journalist in Chicago devoted to investigating Mayor Daley's role in the John Burgher police-torture scandals of the 80s.
-Gawker has some beef with The New Yorker's recent profile of new-media baroness, Arianna Huffington.
-Nilanjana S. Roy, a columnist for Business Standard, refutes the curious statements by Horace Engdahl, Permanent Secretary for The Swedish Academy, that "The US was 'too isolated, too insular.' Its writers didn’t translate well, didn’t participate in the “big dialogue of literature”, and besides, Europe was still the centre of the literary world." According to Roy, for these reasons, Engdahl seemed to be implying, the Academy would not be selecting an American for the Nobel Prize in Literature this year. I've been awaiting news of this award going to Philip Roth since The Human Stain in 2000 (and really he should have received it after his masterpiece Sabbath's Theater debuted in 1995), so I'm hoping Engdahl is just bloviating here.
-Prediction: Chicago baseball miserably closes out the season tonight.
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