Lawmakers in Warsaw on Friday approved a European convention against domestic violence following a stormy parliamentary debate, in which many said the convention threatened traditional family structures. The lawmakers voted 254-175 with eight abstentions to empower President Bronislaw Komorowski to sign into law the 2011 Council of Europe’s convention on combating violence against women and domestic violence.

HONG KONG — A Hong Kong woman convicted of beating and threatening her Indonesian maid was sentenced to six years in prison on Friday, in a case that focused attention on the treatment of domestic servants here.
Law Wan-tung, 44, was found guilty earlier this month of assaulting Erwiana Sulistyaningsih, 24, who cleaned her house and lived in a closet in her apartment for eight months. During the trial, Ms. Erwiana recounted the various ways she said Ms. Law abused her, including shoving a vacuum cleaner tube into her mouth, fracturing two of her teeth with a blow to the face, putting her on a diet of bread and rice and forcing her to urinate into a plastic bag or bucket to avoid dirtying the toilet.

HONG KONG — She claimed that her employer kicked her and beat her with a vacuum cleaner pipe. She said that she was given only one bottle of water a day to minimize toilet breaks, was forced to sleep on the floor and became emaciated for lack of food.
On Tuesday, a court here agreed, vindicating Erwiana Sulistyaningsih, a domestic servant from Indonesia, by finding her former employer, Law Wan-tung, guilty of 18 charges. They included inflicting “grievous bodily harm,” assault and failure to pay wages. Ms. Law, 44, now awaits sentencing at the end of this month. She faces up to seven years’ imprisonment.
Ms. Erwiana’s trial was closely watched in Hong Kong, where more than 300,000 domestic servants, mostly from Indonesia and the Philippines, work for expatriates and native residents.

(TNO) Cựu ca sĩ nổi tiếng Gary Glitter đang phải đối mặt với nguy cơ sống những năm tháng cuối đời trong tù khi bị tuyên phạt 16 năm vì xâm hại tình dục nữ sinh, tờ Guardian đưa tin ngày 27.2.

SEX Classification as male or female or, rarely, intersex (not exclusively male or female). Sex is usually assigned based on external anatomy but is determined by characteristics like chromosomes, hormones and reproductive organs.
GENDER Roles, behaviors and activities that a given society considers appropriate for males or females. “Sex” and “gender” are often mistakenly used interchangeably.

Silicon Valley elites like to think they’re miles ahead of the rest of the world. But when it comes to openness toward women, they are as behind as everyone else.

Harvard University has adopted a ban on professors’ having sexual or romantic relationships with undergraduate students, joining a small but growing number of universities prohibiting such relationships. The move comes as the Obama administration investigates the handling of accusations of sexual assault at dozens of colleges, including Harvard.

Clougherty and Lonsdale had been dating over the previous couple of weeks, while he was her assigned mentor for an undergraduate course at Stanford called Technology Entrepreneurship, Engineering 145. The limited-enrollment class offered a combination of academics, business skills and access to Silicon Valley that has made Stanford the most-sought-after university in the country, with the most competitive undergraduate admissions and among the highest donations. More than any other school, Stanford is the gateway to the tech world, and computer science is the most popular major. Each year, new young multimillionaires are minted, some just months after graduation.

OTTAWA — The Supreme Court of Canada on Friday struck down laws banning physician-assisted suicide for patients with “grievous and irremediable” medical conditions.
“The prohibition on physician-assisted dying infringes the right to life, liberty and security of the person in a manner that is not in accordance with the principles of fundamental justice,” the court wrote, adding that an absolute ban was not needed to ensure that vulnerable people are not coerced “to commit suicide at a time of weakness.”

Teach for America, the education powerhouse that has sent thousands of handpicked college graduates to teach in some of the nation’s most troubled schools, is suddenly having recruitment problems.
For the second year in a row, applicants for the elite program have dropped, breaking a 15-year growth trend. Applications are down by about 10 percent from a year earlier on college campuses around the country as of the end of last month.