Moms Don’t Need Fun Job Perks. They Need Child Care.

From Bloomberg authored by Kara Alaimo:

“Want to work for a company like Facebook Inc., Apple Inc. or Google? You’re hardly alone. Many tech companies offer their employees nearly every perk imaginable, from free meals and booze to on-site doctor and dentist appointments, gyms and haircuts to massages and fitness classes. Everything, that is, except the service that would help moms most: on-site child care.

“Sure, you can bring your dog to work, but you are (mostly) on your own with your baby,” Bloomberg Technology anchor Emily Chang notes in her book “Brotopia: Breaking Up the Boys’ Club of Silicon Valley.” “That’s because Silicon Valley companies have largely been created in the image of their mostly young, mostly male, mostly childless founders.” Their food-, entertainment- and service-filled campuses enable and even encourage staffers to spend most of their waking hours at work, which works well for people like the young singles who helped create many tech companies — but not for parents.

Yet Chang writes that many Silicon Valley firms offer other generous perks to help new moms and dads, such as paying for fertility services, generous family leave and the “pregnancy parking” found at Facebook. That’s what makes their lack of child-care options so glaring. Not only would offering on-site day care help parents, but it would also help tech companies recruit and retain top talent and improve productivity.”

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35 Employees Committed Suicide. Will Their Bosses Go to Jail?

From The New York Times authored by Adam Nossiter:

“In their blue blazers and tight haircuts, the aging men look uncomfortable in the courtroom dock. And for good reason: they are accused of harassing employees so relentlessly that workers ended up killing themselves.

The men — all former top executives at France’s giant telecom company — wanted to downsize the business by thousands of workers a decade ago. But they couldn’t fire most of them. The workers were state employees — employees for life — and therefore protected.

So the executives resolved to make life so unbearable that the workers would leave, prosecutors say. Instead, at least 35 employees — workers’ advocates say nearly double that number — committed suicide, feeling trapped, betrayed and despairing of ever finding new work in France’s immobile labor market.

Today the former top executives of France Télécom — once the national phone company, and now one of the nation’s biggest private enterprises, Orange — are on trial for “moral harassment.” It is the first time that French bosses, caught in the vise of France’s strict labor protections, have been prosecuted for systemic harassment that led to worker deaths.”

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Want to See My Genes? Get a Warrant

From The New York Times authored by Elizabeth Joh:

“Someone broke into a church in Centerville, Utah, last November and attacked the organist who was practicing there. In March, after a conventional investigation came up empty, a police detective turned to forensic consultants at Parabon NanoLabs. Using the publicly accessible website GEDmatch, the consultants found a likely distant genetic relative of the suspect, whose blood sample had been found near the church’s broken window.

Someone related to the person on GEDmatch did indeed live in Centerville: a 17-year-old high school student. Alerted by the police, a school resource officer watched the student during lunch at the school cafeteria and collected the milk carton and juice boxhe’d thrown in the garbage. The DNA on the trash was a match for the crime scene evidence. This appears to be the first time that this technique was used for an assault investigation.

The technique is known as genetic genealogy. It isn’t simply a matter of finding an identical genetic match between someone in a database and evidence from a crime scene. Instead, a DNA profile may offer an initial clue — that a distant cousin is related to a suspect, for instance — and then an examination of birth records, family trees and newspaper clips can identify a small number of people for further investigation.”

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‘How Much Is a Little Girl Worth?’: The Painful Financial Fallout of the Larry Nassar Case

From Fortune authored by Mary Pilon:

“On Jan. 24, 2018, Rachael Denhollander walked into a Michigan courtroom to speak about the sexual abuse she suffered as a child from Larry Nassar. She was the last in an extraordinary procession of nearly 150 women to offer an impact statement at the sentencing hearing of the longtime USA Gymnastics and Michigan State University doctor.

Standing at a podium facing Nassar as her words were beamed out worldwide, Denhollander, a former gymnast—and now herself an attorney, an advocate for child safety, and a 34-year-old mother of four—concluded her statement with a question:

“How much is a little girl worth?”

For decades, Nassar’s work as a doctor treating athletes at Michigan State University (MSU) and for USA Gymnastics helped give him unfettered access to girls and young women that he serially sexually abused. Since Denhollander became the first survivor to publicly accuse the doctor of abuse, in September 2016, an estimated 500 women have come forward saying that they, too, were abused by Nassar. Some experts on the case think that number could eventually pass 1,000. In July 2017, Nassar pleaded guilty to child pornography charges, and months later, he pleaded guilty to multiple counts of sexual assault of minors. He will likely spend the rest of his life behind bars. In May 2018, MSU agreed to pay a $500 million settlement to victims who had sued the university, among the largest sums ever paid in relation to sex-abuse claims.

As a consequence of that financial victory, Denhollander’s question has taken on a painfully literal meaning.”

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Fearing her husband, she gave his guns to police. They jailed her for theft.

From The Washington Post authored by Katie Mettler:

“It had been a day since Courtney Taylor Irby’s husband had been arrested and accused of running her off the road, and now she was testifying that she feared for her safety.

Speaking at his June 15 bond hearing by telephone, Irby — who goes by her middle name Taylor — told a judge in Polk County, Fla., that she believed her estranged husband, 35-year-old Joseph Irby, was dangerous. The two had been separated since December, and she had filed for divorce in January, the same month the court granted her a temporary restraining order.

Now he was facing a domestic violence charge, over which Taylor Irby had been granted another temporary restraining order.

The judge released Joseph Irby on $10,000 bail — with the pretrial condition that he not use, possess or carry any weapons or ammunition.

Taylor Irby would later tell police that this is when she decided to take matters into her own hands, because she was afraid.”

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The Term ‘Domestic Violence’ Is a Failure

From The Atlantic authored by Rachel Louise Snyder:

“I met a woman once whose husband threw golf balls in front of her face as she drove down the highway, in an effort to both terrify her and establish his dominance and fearlessness. Then there was the teenager who told me how her father used to sit at the kitchen table and spin his pistol around as a reminder of his power and authority; he kept his loaded guns hanging on the wall like art. In researching my new book, No Visible Bruises, I met a woman whose husband had brought home a rattlesnake and kept it in a cage, threatening her with its presence to ensure her compliance.

The English language has a name for this kind of viciousness, a catchall phrase for this particular brand of human meanness: domestic violence.

But as a term, domestic violence is wholly inadequate, failing to capture the nightmare that people experience. For other kinds of terrible events, English has terms, dark and foreboding, that vividly communicate the situations they describe. Genocide, for example. Crimes against humanity. Holocaust. They are all abstractions—fundamentally just a bunch of phonemes cobbled together—that nevertheless conjure startling images. As I type these words, pictures form in my mind: starvation, disease, torture. They are a kind of shorthand for the worst that humans inflict on one another.

Domestic violence does little of this. It doesn’t convey the psychological terror of knowing that a snake could be slipped into bed while you’re sleeping, or the emotional betrayal of having a loaded gun toyed with as a threat from someone who has complete control over your life. At its worst, domestic violence suggests complicity in one’s victimhood. One chooses one’s partner, after all.”

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Smithsonian Museum Considers Collecting Drawings Made By Detained Migrant Children

From NPR authored by Sahsa Ingber:

“The Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History may add drawings made by formerly detained migrant children to its famous collection.

The drawings depict time spent in the custody of U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Some of the children’s images appeared to show stick figures with frowns and people on floors under blankets.

They made headlines last week, after the American Academy of Pediatrics toured CBP facilities at the U.S. southern border and released the images to media outlets.

Three children between 10 and 11 years old who had been separated from their parents made the drawings in a Texas facility overseen by the Roman Catholic Church after being released from CBP custody, according to CNN.

A spokesperson for the National Museum of American History, Laura Duff, told NPR that the museum is in the early stages of planning.

In an emailed statement, the museum said a curator had contacted the American Academy of Pediatrics and CNN on July 4 to ask about the drawings “as part of an exploratory process.”

It went on to explain why the museum was considering acquiring the drawings. “The museum has a long commitment to telling the complex and complicated history of the United States and to documenting that history as it unfolds, such as it did following 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina, and as it does with political campaigns,” the statement read.”

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Why Dame Products Is Suing NYC’s MTA Over a Vibrator Campaign

From W authored by Marissa G. Muller:

“Any trip on the New York City subway is often full of things you don’t want to see. But the MTA is apparently drawing a line at one: ads for Dame Products, the trendy vibrator company. The company is now using their social media presence to point this out, as its founders Alex Fine and Janet Lieberman believe that sexism is the reason why their ads were rejected by the MTA.

Even though erectile dysfunction, birth control and breast augmentation ads are rampant on the subway, Dame Products’ ads were rejected by the MTA after the city’s transit organization allegedly courted them into advertising on the subway. Now, there is a lawsuit pending from Dame Products against the MTA. In the lawsuit, the company alleges that “the MTA has approved numerous advertisements for hims, a company that sells medication to treat erectile dysfunction… The MTA did so despite the fact that hims’ phallic imagery is far more overt and explicit.” But the company’s ads, which depicted their rather innocuous-looking devices with captions like “You come first” and “toys, for sex” were rejected.”

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Gigi Hadid Wants To Change Copyright Law And She Has A Point

From Above the Law authored by Joe Patrice:

“The Verge has a write-up on model Gigi Hadid’s current legal battles with the dismissive headline, “Gigi Hadid wants to rewrite copyright law around her Instagram account.” And while that’s technically accurate, it’s not really fair to the underlying argument Hadid and her lawyers —- led by John Quinn of Kaplan Hecker & Fink LLP —- are making, which is that America’s intellectual property laws were woefully unsuited to the modern world, and something needs to change fast.

This is a legal regime that supercharges patent and copyright trolls and while every legal observer bemoans the trolling culture, few are willing to stand up and demand concrete legal changes to fix it. Apparently, we need to rely on Gigi Hadid to handle that for us which — no offense to Gigi — should really embarrass every academic, jurist, and legislator.

At issue is an Instagram photo Hadid posted of herself. One would think that posting pictures of yourself is entirely fair game (or fair use as the case may be) because this is basically the language of all online communication these days. But because Hadid is a celebrity instead of your cousin, she got a shakedown request from an agency demanding payment for infringing the copyright, claiming — without much evidence — that it’s now the owner of the copyright of the paparazzo who took the picture.”

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What Makes a Leader?

From The New York Times authored by Jessica Bennett:

“’You’re too accessible.’

That’s what Susan Zirinsky, the new head of CBS News, was told early in her career — because she was seemingly everywhere at once.

It was during that era that she agreed to meet with a young woman named Hannah Yang, who was on the verge of quitting what she had thought would be her dream job — working for Charlie Rose. She was troubled by the workplace environment and had decided to leave, but was convinced her career in journalism would be over.

Ms. Yang had only briefly met Ms. Zirinsky, then executive producer at “48 Hours,” but decided to ask for a meeting. She expected Ms. Zirinsky to say no. Instead, Ms. Zirinsky ended up giving her the most valuable advice of her career: to pursue the business side of media.

Eighteen years later, Ms. Zirinsky — known to many as “Z” — is president of CBS News, brought in to run the news division following a massive company crisis over sexual misconduct that included the firing of the company’s chief executive, Les Moonves, and Mr. Rose. She is the first woman to hold that job. Ms. Yang is a business executive at The New York Times, who said she now makes a point of making herself accessible, too.”

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