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The terms “male” and “female” are so last year. At least to the New Jersey Board of Education, or NJSBE, which just voted to approve its “equity” policy and dump all gender-specific phrases in favor of the term “all students.” The vote passed six to five, with board members agreeing Wednesday to several language changes, the New Jersey Spotlight News reported. The board is required to vote on its equity code every seven years, according to the outlet.

Boston's Fenway Park, home of the Red Sox and one of the oldest baseball parks in the country, will become the first carbon neutral Major League Baseball facility, the team said on Wednesday. The Red Sox, in partnership with climate finance company Aspiration, will use a portion of ticket proceeds to purchase carbon offsets. Fans will not pay a surcharge, the team said.

France has banned schools from using 'gender neutral' spellings, saying they are a threat to the French language. The country's education ministry issued the ruling last week after a push to include full stops in the middle of written words - dubbed 'midpoints' - which allow both male and female forms to be represented simultaneously. But the Academie Francaise, which is responsible for guarding the French language, said the move is 'harmful to the practice and understanding of [French.]'

Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz said Saturday she will remain neutral in the presidential race despite Democratic presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders’s endorsement of her primary opponent.

GOP presidential front-runner Donald Trump on Wednesday refused to pick sides in the conflict between Israel and Palestine. "You know, I don’t want to get into it," he told hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski during a MSNBC town hall in Charleston, S.C.

Swiss army chief Andre Blattmann warned, in a Swiss newspaper article on Sunday, the risks of social unrest in Europe are soaring. Recalling the experience of 1939/1945, Blattman fears the increasing aggression in public discourse is an explosively hazardous situation, and advises the Swiss people to arm themselves and warns that the basis for Swiss prosperity is "being called into question."

Target plans to close 13 stores nationwide, most in the Midwest where the store has its roots. The Minneapolis, Minnesota-based retailer says a decision to close a store usually follows several years of decreasing profitability. The retail giant plans to close the stores on January 30, 2016. The 13 are among Target's nearly 1,800 stores in the U.S.

Staff and students in the University of Tennessee Office for Diversity and Inclusion want people to think beyond the "he/she" pronouns and are encouraging use of gender-neutral pronouns such as "xe," "xym" and "xyr." Their suggestion hasn't quite caught on -- and some state legislators aren't impressed. Not everyone in society identifies on a strict male-or-female basis, according to diversity office staff, so they are asking people to be aware some may identify themselves with a name and gender that's not strictly male or female. It is not UT's policy. "We should not assume someone's gender by their appearance, nor...

Target to customers: Our toy aisle is now gender-neutral Target is ditching boys' and girls' labels on toys after the store says customers were raising concerns about unnecessary gender-based signs. In an statement posted to their website on Friday, Target announced they were moving away from gendered signs in stores. "Over the past year, guests have raised important questions about a handful of signs in our stores that offer suggestions based on gender," the posting read. Molly Snyder, a spokeswoman for Target, told NBC News the ways that people shop are continually evolving and changing. "We tried to look at...

Last year’s most popular baby names were Benjamin and Emma, but this year the top boy and girl names could actually be the same. 2015 is looking like the year of the gender-neutral baby names, according to a midyear report by BabyCenter.com. Currently, names like Amari, Karter, Phoenix, Quinn and Reese have been making the largest leaps in popularity. “As usual, baby names are reflecting a larger cultural shift,” says BabyCenter’s Global Editor in Chief Linda Murray. “Millennials are an open-minded and accepting group, and they don’t want their children to feel pressured to conform to stereotypes that might be...

Well, it appears that TRADOC is now well into the process of attempting to destroy the greatest armed force that the world has ever known. Training and Doctrine Command has launched “two major efforts in support of this full integration of women soldiers.” TRADOC has started a scientific review working with U.S. Army Medical Command, U.S. Army Research Institute for Environmental Medicine and Army Research Institute to assist in the development of gender-neutral physical standards for all Areas of Concentration for commissioned officers and military occupational specialties for enlisted soldiers.In addition, the “TRADOC Analysis Center is examining the institutional and cultural...

No, JK, JK. Everyone's manhood and womanhood and non-binaryhood is still intact, no matter what the conservative gender-apocalypse-mongers are sure to do with this story. You can still be whatever gender you want to be, and embody whatever stereotypes you want—from swaggering alpha douche to limp lily on the fainting couch. But the ever-progressive nation of Sweden has introduced a new gender-neutral pronoun—hen (neither the masculine han nor the feminine hon)—into its official National Encyclopedia. It's a heartening step in broadening the concept of gender and giving institutional validation to those for whom gender is more complicated than the stiff...

I have a confession to make - I've been a bit of a hypocrite on one issue. I like to rib my lefty pals for their inability to offer any realistic, constructive solutions to the problems that they want to solve. There is no energy source we can use that won't have a leftist opposing its construction, and none of them are willing to offer any kind of realistic policy for satisfying our energy needs. On the federal budget, they love to call for raising taxes that nobody will pay to balance the budget, while oblivious to the fact that...

Yesterday Bryan Preston covered Barack Obama’s remarks on the Falkland Islands at the Summit of the Americas in Colombia. When asked about Argentina’s claim to the British-ruled islands, Obama said the U.S. would continue to observe a “neutral” stance, adding that “this is not something that we typically intervene in.” Taking a leaf out of the Sean Penn guide to diplomacy, he also attempted to refer to the Islands by their Argentinian name, Las Malvinas. Obama’s response attracted little interest here in Britain, and while the Smartest President Ever mistakenly called the islands the Maldives, I didn’t find Obama’s intention...

First there was “Pop” in Sweden, then “Storm” in Canada. Now out of Britain comes Sasha, a boy, we hear, who is being raised by his parents in a “sex-neutral” fashion. And this isn’t just your modernistic grandmother’s neutrality, where she didn’t want to push toy guns and trucks on her son. Sasha’s parents, Beck Laxton and “partner,” as he’s described, Kieran Cooper, are going the full feminist monty. On Sasha’s birth announcement, there was no indication of sex; and for years Laxton wouldn’t use the pronoun “he” when referring to him on her blog, but instead just indentified him...

It's one sentence. And it has thrown Minnesota's largest school district into the national debate on gay rights. "Anoka-Hennepin staff, in the course of their professional duties, shall remain neutral on matters regarding sexual orientation including but not limited to student led discussions." Controversy over that line within Anoka-Hennepin schools' Sexual Orientation Curriculum Policy has hung over the suburban district for more than two years. The policy itself is the only known one like it in Minnesota. Parents of students who are gay, bisexual or transgender, or perceived to be, say the directive leaves their children vulnerable to bullies. Teachers...

Ed. Note: this is the first instalment of a detailed critique of a major New Scientist anti-creationist diatribe. This one deals with a substantial section in the article, which tries to downplay the Nazi reliance on Darwinian theories, and instead tries to smear Christianity as a cause of the Holocaust...

What is Cheat Offsetting? When you cheat on your partner you add to the heartbreak, pain and jealousy in the atmosphere. Cheatneutral offsets your cheating by funding someone else to be faithful and NOT cheat. This neutralises the pain and unhappy emotion and leaves you with a clear conscience. Can I offset all my cheating? First you should look at ways of reducing your cheating. Once you've done this you can use Cheatneutral to offset the remaining, unavoidable cheating

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger today put to rest months of speculation that he would shake up presidential politics by endorsing one of the candidates. Standing alongside Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York City - himself a potential presidential candidate - at a Los Angeles news conference where the two men spoke of the need for more federal funds for road projects and other infrastructure, the governor said he will not be getting involved in the race. "It doesn't help me any, it doesn't help the state of California to endorse anybody," Schwarzenegger said. "I will not endorse anybody."

Entropy: A measure of the disorder or randomness in a system. The second law of thermodynamics states that entropy of a closed system always increases over time. This means that energy is being transformed by the mechanics of the universe into uniformly-distributed heat energy. What this means is that even a chemically neutral process will increase entropy. There is no way around entropy… no matter how green or chemically neutral mankind intends to become. Quote 1: Is it better to be feared than loved, if you cannot be both? --- Niccolo Machiavelli Quote 2: War is an extension of politics...