Friday Extra

By Christine Cupaiuolo — October 13, 2006

Is feminism more appealing to the masses when served with apple pie? Check out “Cooking With Feminists,” Stephen Colbert‘s delicious segment with Gloria Steinem and Jane Fonda, who appeared during Colbert’s “Salute to the American Lady.”

Novelist Kiran Desai is, at age 35, the youngest woman to win Britain’s best-known literary award, the Man Booker Prize. She was honored this week for her second book, “The Inheritance of Loss.” “Ms. Desai’s mother, Anita Desai, has been a Booker finalist three times, but has not won. They are the first mother-daughter team of nominees in the prize’s 37-year history,” reports The New York Times.

There’s another Washington sex scandal — but this one involves abstinence, medical misinformation and millions of dollars in misspent funds.

“Diary of a Sex Slave,”, the San Francisco Chronicle’s four-part series on sex trafficking is more than just a news series; it’s a full multimedia report, with podcasts, slideshows and photos. Discover how the series was researched and reported, and when you’re done reading, share your opinion of the series.

“Bringing in the Bystander” is the hallmark of a new research center at the University of New Hampshire that focuses on preventing sexual violence on university campuses. The multidisciplinary center received funding from the U.S. Department of Justice; evaluation of the Bystander Intervention Program was funded by the National Institute of Justice.

Paws for a Cause — Chicago march raises awareness of the link between animal cruelty and domestic violence.

Not all terrorists make the news. Crash your car into a women’s health clinic and see if the media notices. In an op-ed published in Newsday, Jennifer Pozner writes:

On Sept. 11, 2006, the fifth anniversary of the terror attacks that devastated our nation, a man crashed his car into a building in Davenport, Iowa, hoping to blow it up and kill himself in the fire. […]

Had the criminal, David McMenemy, been Arab or Muslim, this would have been headline news for weeks. But since his target was the Edgerton Women’s Health Center, rather than, say, a bank or a police station, media have not called this terrorism – even after three decades of extreme violence by anti-abortion fanatics, mostly fundamentalist Christians who believe they’re fighting a holy war.

Since 1977, casualties from this war include seven murders, 17 attempted murders, three kidnappings, 152 assaults, 305 completed or attempted bombings and arsons, 375 invasions, 482 stalking incidents, 380 death threats, 618 bomb threats, 100 acid attacks, and 1,254 acts of vandalism, according to the National Abortion Federation.

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