Clinton Seeks ‘Amnesty’ For 2 Held By North Korea
7/11/09
NY Times: Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Friday that the United States was now seeking “amnesty” for two American journalists imprisoned in North Korea, a remark that suggests that the Obama administration was admitting the women’s culpability in a bid to secure their freedom.

Alabama Family Physician Picked As Surgeon General
7/13/09
AP via USA Today: President Obama has chosen a well-known Alabama family physician, Dr. Regina Benjamin, to be the next surgeon general, the Associated Press reports.

Hopes And Fears Over Suu Kyi Trial
7/11/09
BBC: The trial of Burma’s pro-democracy leader on charges of breaking the terms of her house arrest has been proceeding in fits and starts at a court inside Rangoon’s Insein prison, but a verdict is expected soon.

Slagging Sotomayor
7/13/09
Salon: As Sotomayor’s confirmation hearing begins today, Women’s Media Center offers a compilation video that looks at some of those low points up to this point, from good ol’ Rush Limbaugh calling her a “racist” to that horrible editorial cartoon in The Oklahoman that strung her up like a pinata.

A Sponsorship Scandal At The Post
7/12/09
Washington Post: The Washington Post’s ill-fated plan to sell sponsorships of off-the-record “salons” was an ethical lapse of monumental proportions.

Hate Speech Against Malia Obama On Conservative Blogs Reported By Hate Speech Planting Journalist
7/12/09
Gawker: Conservative blog Free Republic fired hate speech off at Malia Obama, letting their commenters go to town. But the journalist who reported this as news isn’t innocent, either.

Hearings: What To Watch For
7/13/09
NY Times: With the confirmation hearings for Judge Sonia Sotomayor before the Senate Judiciary Committee beginning at 10 a.m. today, several New York Times correspondents are offering up previews of what we may expect as the week unfolds.

Palin’s Long March To A Short-Notice Resignation
7/12/09
NY Times: In late March, a senior official from the Republican Governors Association headed for Alaska on a secret mission. Sarah Palin was beset by such political and personal turmoil that some powerful supporters determined an intervention was needed to pull her governorship, and her national future, back from the brink.

Giving Life, Wearing Shackles And Chains
7/12/09
NY Times: At least once a week, somewhere in one of New York’s prisons or jails, a pregnant women goes into labor. Nearly all of them are behind bars for drug offenses. Even so, they are often as severely restrained in the final hours of pregnancy as the most nimble and dangerous of criminals. While their bodies heave toward childbirth, they become walking, clanking jail cells.

A Homespun Safety Net
7/11/09
NY Times: If nothing else, the recession is serving as a stress test for the American safety net. How prepared have we been for sudden and violent economic dislocations of the kind that leave millions homeless and jobless?

What The Sisters Are Up To
7/12/09
NY Times: Across 30 years, the modern version of the Sisters of St. Joseph has been revolutionizing the treatment of imprisoned women in New York. Now it is the bewildered community of American nuns that is the subject of two sweeping Vatican investigations. The question is whether the sisters are “living in fidelity” to the religious life — a question being put to nuns in no other nation.

L.A. Teenager Who Flew Single-Engine Plane Across The Country Lands In Compton
7/12/09
LA Times: A 15-year-old Los Angeles girl who navigated a single-engine Cessna through thunderstorms in Texas and took in breathtaking aerial views of Arizona’s sunsets landed her plane to cheering crowds at Compton Woodley Airport on Saturday. She is believed to be the youngest African American female pilot to fly solo across the country.

Civil Rights Group Divided Over Gay Marriage
7/11/09
NY Times: The Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the 50-year-old civil rights organization founded by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and others, is seeking to remove the president of its Los Angeles chapter in response to his support of same-sex marriage in California.

Meet Miss Right: The Rise Of The New Tory Woman
7/12/09
Guardian, UK: Four years ago David Cameron promised to address the ’scandalous under-representation’ of women in his party. Geraldine Bedell asks how much progress has been made.

Sudan Women ‘Lashed For Trousers’
7/13/09
BBC: A group of Sudanese women has been flogged as a punishment for dressing “indecently”, according to a local journalist who was arrested with them.

Women Short-Changed In Top Positions
7/13/09
ABC News, Australia: While women may be making their way up the corporate ladder, women managers earn about 25 per cent less than their male counterparts do. Study author Ian Watson from Macquarie University says there is an obvious answer; men continue to be paid more than women for the same work, earning on average about $22,000 a year more.

Labour Women Attack ‘Laddish’ PM
7/12/09
BBC: Senior female Labour MPs have hit out at Gordon Brown for a government style that they say excludes women.

Women In Bahrain To Lobby For Equal Nationality Rights
7/13/09
Media Line: Bahrain’s Supreme Council for Women (SCW) announced the launch of a major campaign for equal nationality rights, along with several other Bahraini women’s advocacy organizations.

Teva Gets FDA Approval For New Version Of Plan B
7/13/09
AP via Forbes: Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd. said Monday the Food and Drug Administration approved the company’s one-pill version of the emergency contraceptive Plan B.

Trans-Atlantic Whirlwind Juggles Dozens Of Shows
7/12/09
NY Times: Sonia Friedman, who has won the last two Tony Awards for best play revival (for “Boeing-Boeing” in 2008 and “The Norman Conquests” last month), is well known in the theater here and on Broadway for having a dizzying number of projects going at once, the recession be damned.

Unscripted Upheaval, Starring Herself
7/11/09
NY Times: “What I Thought I Knew,” a new memoir by Alice Eve Cohen, a playwright and solo theater artist, works on several levels. In essence, it documents Ms. Cohen’s medical travails. Told at age 30 that she was infertile, she became pregnant at 44 but her pregnancy was misdiagnosed by doctors as everything from menopause to a possible cancerous tumor. Finally an emergency CAT scan revealed that she was six months pregnant. In the ensuing days, various disastrous outcomes were forecast for her baby if she went ahead with the pregnancy.

Women Lose Bid To Ski Jump At Olympics
7/10/09
NPR: Women won’t ski jump in the Winter Olympics in Vancouver next year. A justice at the British Columbia Supreme Court has ruled that failing to hold a ski jumping competition for women constitutes discrimination — but there’s nothing Canadian courts can do about it.

Ji Wins Open On Final Hole
7/13/09
Washington Post: Eun Hee Ji’s fists extended into the air and she leapt into her caddie’s arms, celebrating a 20-foot birdie putt on the 18th green to win the U.S. Women’s Open and entrench her name in golf history.

Holdsclaw Is Back In The W.N.B.A., With A Purpose
7/11/09
NY Times: Chamique Holdsclaw was once an A-list sports celebrity, a big shot with a big shot. The high-scoring Holdsclaw passed the first-name-only recognition test.

LPGA Commissioner Carolyn Bivens Was Undone By Unflinching Commitment To Her Vision For The Tour
7/10/09
Sports Illustrated via Golf.com: The Carolyn Bivens era is over. All that’s left now is to tidy up the details. What should have been a celebration of the first round of the U.S. Women’s Open instead turned into a daylong spectacle of rumors and prognostications, with various golf Web sites dueling to be the first to trumpet Bivens’s ouster.