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Nobody has lived at 610 North Buchanan Boulevard in Durham, North Carolina since March 2006, when police began investigating charges that members of the Duke University lacrosse team had raped a woman there.
Three years later, the criminal charges against the players have long since been dropped, but the house remains padlocked and vacant. Duke owns the building, and wants to tear it down, but lawyers for members of the team are insisting that it be preserved as evidence in a possible lawsuit.
The Duke Chronicle, the university’s student newspaper, has the story.
A high school student in Virginia’s Fairfax County has received a two-week suspension and a threat of expulsion … for taking her birth control pill at lunch.
Oakton High School considers bringing prescription drugs to school one of the most serious violations a student can commit — it brings a harsher punishment than use of heroin or LSD, and the same penalty as possession of a handgun on school property.
The student’s mother was aware of, and supportive of, her decision to go on the pill. Birth control pills are most effective if taken at the same time every day, and the student began taking them at lunch over the summer. Neither the student nor her mother was aware that the punishment for continuing to do so in the fall could be so severe.
The student faced a hearing before school officials on Thursday, and has yet to hear whether she will be expelled.
Thanks to Amplify Your Voice for the heads-up on this story.
August 5 update: Stephen Colbert ran a segment on the incident on Monday night’s Colbert Report.
Feminists are sounding alarms online about the return to cyberspace of a male blogger who sexually assaulted a fellow college student in early 2007.
Kyle Payne, a self-described male feminist and anti-pornography activist, was an undergraduate at Iowa’s Buena Vista University, working as a resident advisor in BVU’s dorms, when he undressed and videotaped an unconscious, intoxicated student under his care.
Months after the assault, while his crime was still unknown, Payne began blogging on pornography, sexual violence, and other issues from a pro-feminist perspective. He continued to do so, without acknowledging his wrongdoing, even after he was arrested for, and pled guilty to, the assault. It was not until he was on the brink of incarceration that publicity forced him to admit his crime on his blog.
Both the fact of Payne’s crime and the manner in which he chose to discuss it generated tremendous outrage among feminist bloggers, and that outrage was revived and intensified last month when Payne, released from a six-month jail term, began blogging again.
Payne’s earliest post-incarceration posts made no mention of his crime or his punishment, although they did include reprints of pro-feminist essays he had written before the scandal broke — including several relating specifically to campus rape prevention. In response to subsequent criticism, he added a disclaimer referring to the sexual assault to his earlier pro-feminist and anti-rape posts, though no mention of his crime appears on the front page of his blog or in his new posts. (He discloses it at the very end of his “Blogger Bio” page, in a one-sentence statement that refers to the assault as a “non-violent sexual offense.”)
For a sampling of response to Payne’s return to blogging, see Renegade Evolution, Natalia Antonova, and Hugo Schwyzer.
Students at the University of Minnesota Duluth staged a protest and counter-concert when rapper Soulja Boy performed on campus on Friday night. UMD student Arielle Schnur said Soulja Boy’s songs “degrade half the student body as sex objects and the other half as sexual assault perpetrators.”
Protest organizers sat down with the director of the UMD student center to plot strategy for a protest that would raise awareness without disrupting the event. In an effort to ensure an orderly demonstration, organizers required participants to attend an informational session on protest rules before the gig.
The demonstrators’ counter-concert, held at the same time as the Soulja Boy show, was free and featured a lineup of local bands.
The protest was given a boost on Friday afternoon when Soulja Boy mentioned it on his Twitter feed.
Iowa’s supreme court has unanimously granted legal recognition to same-sex marriages!
More cool details:
- The ruling will take effect on April 24, three weeks from today.
- Two of the justices behind the unanimous opinion were appointed by Republicans.
- The decision is based on the Iowa state constitution, so it cannot be appealed to any other court.
- It appears that the earliest the decision could be overturned by constitutional amendment is November 2012.
- Such an amendment would require approval by the Iowa state legislature prior to a popular referendum.
The majority leaders of both houses of the state legislature can be expected to oppose any effort to overturn the decision by constitutional amendment — they released a joint statement today hailing the ruling as an example of “Iowa common sense and Iowa common decency.”
It’s been a long, long time coming, but I know … a change is gonna come.
studentactivism.net 
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