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Blog and Media Roundup - Tuesday, January 5, 2016; News Roundup
Topic Started: Jan 5 2016, 04:01 AM (256 Views)
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http://www.heraldsun.com/news/


Four days, two Durham homicides

Lauren Horsch 9 hrs ago

After a record-setting year in 2015, the Durham Police Department is back at work investigating the city’s first two homicides of the new year -- less than seven days into it.
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http://www.heraldsun.com/opinion/a-calmer-proactive-da-s-office/article_406d2c8a-b356-11e5-b507-57c4421f087c.html


A calmer, proactive DA’s office

Editorial board 6 hrs ago

As this new year gets underway, one thing for which we can be grateful is how quiet things have been lately at the Durham County District Attorney’s office.

For years, the office was rocked first by then-DA Mike Nifong’s mishandling of the Duke lacrosse case and then by Tracy Cline’s tumultuous verbal assaults on a judge, conduct which eventually got her booted from office.
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http://dailycaller.com/2016/01/04/hey-hillary-fans-whatever-happened-to-i-believe-women/

Hey, Hillary Fans: Whatever Happened To ‘I Believe Women’?

Posted By Jim Treacher On 10:36 AM 01/04/2016 In | No Comments

About a year ago, the term “rape denier” became a popular way to silence anyone who was skeptical about a claim of sexual assault. If you didn’t agree that a rape accusation alone was sufficient evidence of guilt, you were a “rape denier.”

This was especially true for men, who were told they couldn’t ask any questions about such an accusation because of their male privilege and so forth. “Proving an accusation false will only discourage rape victims from speaking out,” was the theory. Instead, we were supposed to believe women because… well, because they’re women. #IBelieveWomen. End of story.

The heyday of the “rape denier” charge was very brief, though, thanks to Mattress Girl and the UVA rape hoax and other inconvenient facts that went against the narrative. Leftists love nothing more than finding ways to silence their opponents, and when “rape denier” lost its ability to do that, it was abandoned.

Which brings us to 2016. Not only is “rape denier” out of fashion, but now the very idea of believing a woman just because she’s a woman is being repudiated by our moral, ethical, and intellectual betters on the left. That is, if believing a woman stands in the way of putting another Democrat in the White House.

Derek Hunter reports on a Hillary Clinton town hall meeting in New Hampshire yesterday:

A woman, reportedly a Republican State Representative, stood up during the question and answer session, yelling a question about Juanita Broderrick, the woman who has accused Bill Clinton of raping her in the late 1970s.

When Hillary called on someone else, the woman sat down. But, even though the woman had stopped talking, her outburst had already caught Clinton’s attention. The candidate turned her gaze toward the woman and snapped, “You are very rude, and I am not going to ever call on you.”

WATCH: @HillaryClinton shuts down heckler: “You are very rude, and I am not going to ever call on you.” https://t.co/fJns50eKv6

— ABC News Politics (@ABCPolitics) January 3, 2016

Well, Hillary certainly put that peasant in her place, didn’t she?

The heckler is a New Hampshire state representative named Katherine Prudhomme O’Brien, and yesterday she took to Facebook to explain her point of view:

This is my response to a man who wanted to know why I asked the questions as rudely as I did:

Thank you for asking what I was so concerned with. I appreciate your interest. It all started when I saw Juanita Broaddrick give an hour long interview on Dateline NBC to Lisa Myers in 1999 where she said she was raped by Bill Clinton in 1978. You can find a video of it on Youtube. I believed her so when Al Gore was running for president, I asked him if he believed her too because I was shocked that women’s groups like NOW were not demanding answers. Gore told me that he doesn’t know the story but that I should forgive Clinton anyway as if I was asking about an affair, not a crime. After Broaddrick saw that question on TV, she called me and I asked her all the questions people were throwing at me about why she may not be telling the truth. I was in a support group at the time for rape and sexual assault survivors and I know this subject better than I want to…

At any rate, it is very weird that Hillary now says on the campaign trail that women should be believed when they say they have been raped(she is correct about that, false reports are rare, it happens but it is not the norm) but told a questioner on the trail last month that she does not believe Broaddrick and Kathleen Willey(who has said that Bill Clinton sexually assaulted her by grabbing her breast when they were in the Oval Office together). Clinton told the questioner that she does not believe them because of evidence against them. I would like to know what that is…

That is what drove me to do what I did today, my concern for sexual assault survivors. If I could have brought this issue up in any polite way or if people in her campaign really did follow up with me by calling me, I would never have been so impolite. I know I was impolite but in this whole scenario, you are angry at the wrong person, save that anger for Bill Clinton for being a sexual predator or for the woman who enables him-not me.

Read the whole thing. In sum, this woman is a rape survivor who’s speaking out for someone she believes to be another rape survivor. Whatever you think of her approach, she seems to be sincere. She listened, and she believed. That’s what she’s supposed to do, right?

Every survivor of sexual assault deserves to be heard, believed, and supported. https://t.co/mkD69RHeBL — Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) November 23, 2015

Unfortunately for these women, the accused rapist went on to become President of the United States, and now his wife is running for the same office. This changes everything, of course. #IBelieveWomen has gone #OutTheWindow. The old rules mean nothing when they embarrass the Democrats.

This is a great photo. Meme away, please. https://t.co/LMCHgWQnSr

— daveweigel (@daveweigel) January 4, 2016

Bill Clinton “abused women?” No. He got parental leave law passed. He was pro-choice. He had consensual sex w/ an adult. #trumps3wives — Michael Moore (@MMFlint) January 4, 2016

“This woman stood up for Bill Clinton’s rape victims. This is where her children sleep.” https://t.co/V4j3ELHvft

— L (@OrwellForks) January 3, 2016

This woman is just a heckler. She’s to be mocked and dismissed. If that doesn’t work, dig up whatever you can find about her to discredit and silence her. She can’t be allowed to impede the ambitions of a Clinton.

It’s not victim-shaming when leftists do it.

I don’t know what happened between Bill Clinton and Juanita Broaddrick. Neither does anybody else but Bill Clinton and Juanita Broaddrick. But I do know that, once again, the rules that apply to everyone else don’t apply to the Clintons.

Just something to keep in mind the next time Hillary Clinton claims to represent victims of sexual assault. She’s got a war on women going on under her very own roof… or whichever roof Bill happens to be sleeping under on any given night.
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http://www.thecollegefix.com/post/25736/

Public university could punish neck rubs as sexual battery under new policy
Matt Lamb - University of Nebraska-Omaha •January 5, 2016

Only public announcement appears to be one tweet

East Carolina University students who are good at neck rubs could find themselves hauled before a sexual misconduct board under new rules approved by the board of trustees.

The new policy describes sexual battery as “the intentional or attempted sexual touching of another person’s clothed or unclothed body, including but not limited to the mouth, neck, buttocks, anus, genitalia, or breast, by another with any part of the body or any object in a sexual manner without their consent.”

The school described updates to nondiscrimination and Title IX policies in a press release dated Dec. 18, the same day as winter commencement.

Though it’s labeled “ECU News Services,” the release is nowhere to be found from the news portal. The school’s only apparent public communication of the changes appears to have been four days later on Twitter.

According to the release, the trustees approved the new policies Nov. 20. They took effect Friday. The school doesn’t say why it waited almost a month to announce the changes, after classes had ended.

It’s sexual battery ‘however slight’ the contact is

Moves commonly associated with flirting or even intimate friendship have been listed under a new “sexual battery” category.

The previous version, which took effect Jan. 1, 2015, said “non-consensual sexual contact … includes, but is not limited to, kissing, touching of the genitalia, anus, buttocks or breast of a person.”

The new policy describes sexual battery as “the intentional or attempted sexual touching of another person’s clothed or unclothed body, including but not limited to the mouth, neck, buttocks, anus, genitalia, or breast, by another with any part of the body or any object in a sexual manner without their consent.”

Such touching need not be drawn out: It qualifies as sexual battery “however slight” the contact is. The policy does not appear to define what makes certain touching “sexual,” endangering students who touch another person’s neck for a benign reason.

Neither the Title IX office nor university media relations had responded to requests for comment as of Monday night. Emails sent a week ago were returned with automatic vacation notices to The College Fix by the media relations team, while the Title IX office provided no response of any kind.

Few reports of forced sexual touching in national college survey

It is not clear what prompted the changes. The university’s 2015 Clery Report, which covers 2014, showed seven reported rapes and four reports of “fondling.”

sexual-battery.Morehouse_CollegeAnother school in the region, historically black Morehouse College in Atlanta, warns “college men” in a brochure that they can get “three or more years in prison” for answering any question wrong on its “sexual assault knowledge test.”

Yet even the brochure doesn’t seem to contemplate that mouth or neck touching is sexual battery. Though defined as “the touching of an intimate part of another” for “sexual arousal,” both examples of battery involve breasts.

An April article in The East Carolinian said that the university “has continuously failed to meet” the standards set by the White House “It’s On Us” campaign against sexual assault, “according to testimonies of alleged sexual assault victims and further research” into its investigative procedures.

But the article focused on complaints by accusers that they were asked about their clothing and drinking at the time of alleged attacks, not that the school dismissed sexual touching of the mouth, neck or any other body part.

The American Association of Universities asked students about “unwanted touching or kissing that could be defined as sexual battery” in its nationwide campus climate survey, whose results were released this fall.

Yet only 7 percent of those who said they were “victims of physically forced sexual touching or kissing” reported the incident.

East Carolina University has emphasized its efforts to reduce “sexual violence,” without defining it. A February press release quoted its Title IX coordinator explaining that she gets involved in incidents that seem to be police matters because students need help getting away from their alleged attackers or coping with “taunting or teasing.”
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http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/expelled-georgia-tech-student-reinstated/article/2579610

Expelled Georgia Tech student reinstated
By Ashe Schow • 1/5/16 12:10 PM

An Georgia Institute of Technology student who sued his school two weeks ago over an expulsion for sexual assault has been reinstated — but not by a judge.

The student, identified in his lawsuit as John Doe, was seeking an injunction to have his expulsion overturned when the school's Board of Regents reversed the decision and reinstated him. Because of this turn of events, lawyers for Georgia Tech have argued the request for an injunction is moot.

"At the time Plaintiff filed his complaint and his motion. [sic] his appeal to the Board of Regents seeking to overturn the decision to expel him was still pending. The Board of Regents has now heard the appeal and has made the decision to overturn the President. [sic] by reversing the finding and the sanction of expulsion and reinstating the Plaintiff," the lawyers wrote in their response to the injunction request. "As a result of this. [sic] Plaintiff's request for preliminary injunctive relief is moot."

The Board of Regents was not expected to act on the accused student's appeal for several months, which is why the lawsuit was filed and the injunction requested.

Doe was accused one year after a sexual encounter took place, and despite Georgia Tech's policy that accusations must be reported within 30 days, he was investigated and expelled. Doe alleges the encounter was consensual and that the accusation came because he rebuffed the advances of his accuser in the year between the encounter and the accusation.

The process at Georgia Tech for investigating allegations of campus sexual assault is deeply flawed. In addition to not following their own reporting rules, the school uses a single-investigator model, meaning that just one person investigates and determines culpability. This kind of model is ripe for bias, as was demonstrated in a previous lawsuit against the school.

In this case, the school's investigator, Peter Paquette, interviewed the accuser twice and provided him ample time to respond to requests. The investigator then interviewed only witnesses provided by the accuser, and didn't tape or transcribe any of them, giving Doe no way to accurately respond to the claims. Doe was given only one hour to review a 13-page, single-spaced summary of the investigation.

Unsurprisingly, the investigator determined Doe was responsible for sexually assaulting his accuser. And here's where things get messy. The investigator wrote in his summary that "both the victim and the respondent provide accounts that are reasonable to believe" and that, given the nonverbal actions of the accuser during the sexual encounter, Doe reasonably believed "he had consent."

Despite this, Paquette found Doe responsible for sexual assault. Doe appealed the decision to the Appellate Committee, which overturned Paquette's decision. The accuser's parents then filed an appeal to the school's president a day after the deadline to file (and despite Georgia Tech policy stating the accuser must be the one to file). The president overturned the appeal and upheld the initial finding of responsibility.

As if this weren't even more confusing, Doe then appealed to the school's Board of Regents, which vacated the president's decision, saying he misstated school policy and didn't review the investigative material. The Board of Regents returned the case to the Appellate Committee that initially overturned the finding of responsibility, only this time, the committee found Doe responsible after the school's president directed them to do so.

Doe again appealed to the Board of Regents, but since they weren't supposed to meet on the subject for months, he sued. But inexplicably, the Regents met much sooner than planned and reinstated Doe.

In an email to the Washington Examiner, Doe's attorney Andrew Miltenberg was pleased with the current situation, but expressed dismay at the lengths it took his client to get to this point.

"Our immediate, critical concern was that our client be able to start the semester on January 11, 2016, and enroll in the specific classes he needs to pursue his degree. We are very pleased that the Georgia Board of Regents, once again reversed Georgia Tech's decision, and has reinstated our client, effective immediately," Miltenberg wrote. "We remain extremely disappointed that it took a lawsuit and the threat of an injunction to accomplish this, especially as Georgia Tech was given numerous opportunities, by both the Georgia Board of Regents and our client to get this case right. Our client has suffered through a quixotic ordeal that has taken both an substantial emotional and financial toll on him and his family."

"Our client and his family are adamant that no one else suffer through the same painful, protracted and often Orwellian investigative and hearing process, and once we finalize the details of his reinstatement, we will address next steps in pursuing this case," Miltenberg added.
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http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/hugs-neck-rubs-could-be-sexual-battery-says-university/article/2579645

Hugs, neck rubs could be 'sexual battery,' says university
By Ashe Schow (@AsheSchow) • 1/5/16 3:49 PM

Are you a hugger? Do you sometimes give neck rubs to friends or acquaintances just out of friendliness? Well now you could be accused for sexual battery and expelled at East Carolina University.

All it takes is for one person who is scared from the sexual assault portion of orientation or who has friends with certain ideologies to ruin one's life at ECU, thanks to a new policy recently adopted for the new semester going forward.

Sexual battery has been redefined as "the intentional or attempted sexual touching of another person's clothed or unclothed body, including but not limited to the mouth, neck, buttocks, anus, genitalia, or breast, by another with any part of the body or any object in a sexual manner without their consent."

Any contact, "however slight," is considered sexual battery. Of course, it's the accuser who decides whether it is sexual battery, and with the current pressure on colleges and universities to capitulate to accusers in the name of political correctness, any friendly contact is subject to an investigation.

Matt Lamb, a graduate student at the University of Nebraska-Omaha, wrote in the College Fix that the school described the new policy in a tweet and a press release sent out the same day as winter commencement. Lamb also pointed out that the press release is nowhere to be found on the school's news website.

The policy announcement can be found on the school's homepage, where it was posted nearly a month after the new policies were approved by the school's board of trustees.

In response to a Washington Examiner inquiry, ECU's executive director of communications, Mary Schulken, said the school plans to do more in the coming weeks to inform students about the new policies.

"Now we are targeting students as they return from the holiday break with emails and plan specific student-targeted messaging through our campus wide LCD screens (the Student Affairs display system) for the first 4-6 weeks of the semester," Schulken said.

She also said the new policies would be shared through social media and that they were "evaluating additional educational outreach as well."

The new policy falls under the school's Title IX responsibilities. Title IX is a federal statute that prevents discrimination on the basis of sex, and has been used in recent years to force schools to adjudicate sex-based crimes as a pseudo-court system.

The school's 2015 Clery Report, which includes data about college crimes occurring in 2014, showed only four reports of nonconsensual "fondling" occurring at the school. The report does not include the outcomes of those reports (whether the accused was found responsible or not) or the nature of the reports, so it is unclear whether any of the "fondling" included an unsolicited neck rub.

Asked what prompted such a broad change in policy for what appears to be a nonexistent problem, Schulken said the school "continually evaluates its policies and procedures in this area to ensure compliance with state and federal regulations as well as emerging best practices."

The Examiner could find no new laws or regulations passed in North Carolina that would expand the definition of sexual battery in the way adopted by ECU; however, other schools in the state have adopted an "affirmative consent" policy when it comes to how students engage in sexual activity.

Affirmative consent — or "yes means yes" — policies dictate that students must ask for verbal permission (some policies allow nonverbal communication, but because of the ambiguity its reliance is frowned upon) at every level of sexual activity. It basically turns sex into a question-and-answer-session that doesn't apply to anyone making an accusation. Only accused students are held to the standard, and because the only way to prove one obtained such consent is through video recording, accused students are put at a significant disadvantage.

Consent is also negated if the accuser has been drinking. Most affirmative consent policies say the accuser must be "incapacitated," yet schools haven't been investigating just how intoxicated an accuser really is, relying only on their word. This makes any level of intoxication subject to an accusation. Oh, and accused student's level of intoxication doesn't matter, even if that means he also was unable to consent.

One judge in Tennessee scolded the policies, saying they unfairly shift the burden of proof onto accused students and provide no way for them to defend themselves.

Even though the policies are gender-neutral and suggest that both partners must obtain ongoing consent, no school has punished an accuser for failing to obtain consent. It is also unlikely such an instance will ever occur, given the nation-wide focus on believing accusers.

The Examiner also asked Schulken if she could foresee any negative consequences — say, students being investigated for an innocent hug or neck rub — from broadening the definition in this way. She reiterated the importance of consent.

"Each case is evaluated on the facts presented. The key aspects of the definition are the presence of consent and the sexual nature of the contact," Schulken said. "If an act of touching is not consented to, and the act was of a sexual nature, then that could constitute a battery. The purpose of this is to ensure that each act is consented to by the parties and that consent is active and mutually understood."

ECU students, take note.
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Jan 5 2016, 04:01 AM
http://www.heraldsun.com/news/


Four days, two Durham homicides

Lauren Horsch 9 hrs ago

After a record-setting year in 2015, the Durham Police Department is back at work investigating the city’s first two homicides of the new year -- less than seven days into it.
The drive by shooting happened while we were all in our office, 1 block away. And I wonder why some parents don't want their kids to come to our programs to learn math, science, and technology.
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