Two Pennsylvania juvenile court judges are being prosecuted for corruption in a shocking scandal involving corruption, abuse of law, and what amounts to government-sponsored child abuse. Since December 2002, they allegedly sentenced children who were denied legal representation and fair trials to detention in private jails from which the judges received kickbacks.
The “Elkins Task Force” has been set up to help correct problems in the family law courts in California.
The next Elkins Family Law Task Force meeting is on Tuesday, February 24, 2009, from 11:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. This meeting will be at the following location:
Department of Water & Power
111 N. Hope Street, Lower Level
Los Angeles, California 90012
(Click here for more coverage of preventing canker sores.)
We’ve previously reported that taking supplementary lysine can significantly reduce the frequency and severity of canker sores, medically referred to as recurrent aphthous stomatitis (RAS). Up to 25% of the general population suffers from these oral lesions, and they can be extremely painful, take weeks to heal, and occur many times per year. So it would be really nice to have some options to help alleviate problems with canker stores.
Happily, vitamin B12 has been found to be yet another option for preventing canker sores. A recent study was published in the January 2009 issue of the The Journal of the American Board of Family Medicine that covered a small double-blind placebo-controlled trail following 58 patients suffering from RAS for a period of 6 months. 31 participants received 1000mcg (1mg) of vitamin B12 via sublingual lozenges (mouth-dissolving tablets used under the tongue), and 27 participants received placebos.
In recent years, multiple studies have shown there is a link between vitamin D deficiency and contracting multiple sclerosis (MS). MS is an autoimmune disorder that results in the body attacking the myelin sheath that protects nerve cells. Worldwide, more than 2.5 million people have MS.
We ran across this story in the Winter 2008 issue of USAA Magazine on page 7. For those of you who don’t know, USAA is an insurance and financial services company that specializes in serving active and retired military members and their current and former dependents.
The story goes that USAA member DaLonna Rimsky wanted a way to keep her kids thinking about their father who was overseas working in the Air Force. She came up with the idea of custom coloring books that are created using family photographs turned into coloring book line drawings. An example using one of her family photos is below.
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It’s possible to “catch the fat” as one cause of obesity is a contagious human virus. While viral-induced obesity is not the only way people become obese, it is apparently a widespread and significant cause.
The human virus Ad-36, a member of the adenovirus family, spreads via airborne means and infects the lungs first, much like the common cold virus. Then it spreads to the rest of the body. It has symptoms similar to the cold, such as sore throats. Worse, it apparently forces fat cells to multiply throughout the body, leading to an estimated 3 months of weight gain before the body mounts an effective defense to the virus.
The USA PATRIOT Act has yielded a new class of terrorists — disruptive airline passengers. Since the passage of that law after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, more than 200 airline passengers have been convicted of felony terrorism by such dangerous means as yelling or swearing at airline employees and swatting disobedient children. While it was previously in theory possible to prosecute some of these acts as violent behaviors on airlines, the USA PATRIOT Act has made it vastly easier and the climate it has created has encouraged prosecutions of even disruptive behaviors that do not appear to be threatening to safety.
Minnesota is considering passing legislation to make shared physical custody of children between both parents a presumption of the court. Under the current law, the courts presume that parents will share legal custody. But physical custody is up for grabs. Detractors of the current law believe that it sets up families for bitter custody disputes and frequently results in fathers and children being short-changed of time with each other.
(Click here for more coverage of domestic violence.)
What is domestic violence? Many people think of it as purely physical in which one person beats up another. Many people think that only men commit domestic violence and women are always the victims.
Neither of these perceptions is accurate. Domestic violence involves more than just physical abuse. It includes verbal and emotional abuse which may have no physical component. Studies show that women commit domestic violence at rates similar to men. Further, they do this not only against men, but even in lesbian relationships in which no men are involved.
Our view is that all domestic violence is bad, no matter who commits it. Domestic violence will continue to be a problem especially if violent behaviors are written off because they are not physical or because women are committing them. Much of the literature and popular beliefs about domestic violence contribute to victimization of children, men, and even women by abusive women due to inaccurate biases that falsely classify women as not possibly being perpetrators of domestic violence. (See Women commit more than 70% of single-partner DV for a Harvard Medical School study which amply shows this.) Further, as modern research shows that partner violence tends to beget partner violence, the women abusing their partners makes it far more likely they will be co-abused in return.
When reading about domestic violence, you must realize that much of the literature and research in this field was done with the assumption that men are abusers and women are victims. Recent research has shown that this is not accurate, that anybody can be a victim and anybody an abuser. Some writings in the domestic violence field are gender-neutral and use well-designed studies to make their conclusions. For whatever reasons, some do not. Some claim it is because of sexist bias, others because of feminist propaganda. Whatever the reason, after you strip away the gender bias from the sources that haven’t caught up to the inaccuracy of the male abuser / female victim model popularized by early work in domestic violence in the 1970s despite much evidence to the contrary, there is still value to what these sources have to say.
For example, Professor Straus of the University of New Hampshire was one of the early researchers in domestic violence in the 1970s. He researched battered women and assumed that men were the abusers. However, over his 35 years of research, he has come to realize that abusers can be of either gender and that his earlier viewpoints were gender-biased. (See Female Violence Against Males.)
The bottom line is that all domestic violence is bad, regardless of who commits it.
Parental alienation is the systematic denigration committed by an alienating parent against a target parent in order to influence their children to dislike and mistreat the target parent. It typically also involves blocking of access to the target parent, often in violation of court orders regarding custody, exchanges, and visitation.
J. Michael Bone, Ph.D. is an eminent authority on parental alienation. [See Wikipedia: Parental Alienation] Dr. Bone’s website offers pre-recorded teleseminars on how targeted parents can overcome Parental Alienation. Available titles include:
Winning Courtroom Strategies with Parental Alienation: How to Avoid the (4) Most Common Mistakes!
Presented by: J. Michael Bone, Ph.D.
Family Court: What Works, What Doesn’t and Why
Presented by: J. Michael Bone, Ph.D.
Dr. Bone has also written a number of journal articles on parental alienation. One of these is available for electronic purchase and download here: Parental alienation syndrome: how to detect it and what to do about it.: An article from: Florida Bar Journal
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