Katniss is a 16-year-old girl living with her mother and younger sister in the poorest district of Panem, the remains of what used be the United States. Long ago the districts waged war on the Capitol and were defeated. As part of the surrender terms, each district agreed to send one boy and one girl to appear in an annual televised event called, “The Hunger Games.” The terrain, rules, and level of audience participation may change but one thing is constant: kill or be killed. When her sister is chosen by lottery, Katniss steps up to go in her place.By definition, The Hunger Games is a much more violent series of books than the Harry Potter books. There are deaths in both, but in The Hunger Games it becomes almost routine. Also, the fact that Katniss is 16 years old when the books begin makes the possibility of sex (or at the very least romance) a very real possibility.
Big box retail giant Wal-Mart has added transgender protections to its employee non-discrimination policy.The protections include gender identity and gender expression said Phillip Keene, a company spokesperson.Unless the Employment Non-Discrimination Act passes Congress and is signed by the President , this is probably the largest expansion of job protections that will happen in the Congressional term.
Keene did not confirm when the new policy went into effect, only that the change was made "several weeks ago."
News of the new policy has not been widely publicized.
Sexual orientation protections are already a part of the company's "Discrimination and Harassment Prevention Policy."
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| Bernice Donald has been confirmed by the U.S. Senate to be the first Black woman on the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals |
More than 70 percent of Obama's confirmed judicial nominees during his first two years were "non-traditional," or nominees who were not white males. That far exceeds the percentages in the two-term administrations of Bill Clinton (48.1 percent) and George W. Bush (32.9 percent), according to Sheldon Goldman, author of the authoritative book "Picking Federal Judges."Read that last line again. For the first 140 years (of the 220 years they have been in existence) the federal courts had zero racial or gender diversity. And I'm pretty sure that's just the way Republicans would prefer it to be!
[...]Of the 98 Obama nominees confirmed to date, the administration says 21 percent are African-American, 11 percent are Hispanic, 7 percent are Asian-American and almost half – 47 percent – are women. By comparison, of the 322 judges confirmed during George W. Bush's presidency, 18 percent were minorities and 22 percent were female. Of the 372 judges confirmed during Clinton's terms, 25 percent were minorities and 29 percent were women. In these figures, some judges fit into more than one category.Last week, the Senate confirmed the first African-American woman to sit on the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati, Bernice Donald. Earlier, she was the first African-American woman elected as a judge in Tennessee, the first appointed as federal bankruptcy judge in the nation and first confirmed as a U.S. district judge in Tennessee.Obama also has doubled the number of Asian-Americans sitting on the federal bench, including adding Denny Chin to the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York as the only active Asian federal appeals court judge. There currently are 14 Asian-American federal judges on the 810-judge roster.
[...]
For more than 140 years, there were no females or minorities among the nation's federal judges.
AB 887 protects all Californians. No matter your skin color, your age, where you come from or whether you're gay, straight, or transgender, we are all protected by the same rights," Atkins said.
"We share equal protection in employment, housing, and education. This bill ensures that no one is left out."AB 887 seeks to strengthen employment, housing, and other civil rights protections for all Californians, particularly those who face discrimination based on gender identity and expression.
While California anti-discrimination laws already define "gender" to include a person's gender identity and gender expression, AB 887 explicitly enumerates gender identity and expression as protected categories in a number of state codes to provide clarity to those who are victims of unlawful discrimination as well as for business owners, employers and other entities required to comply with the anti-discrimination protections.I presume Governor Jerry Brown will happily sign the bill into law soon.
