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(Reuters) - The U.S. Air Force on Wednesday kicked off a drive to attract and retain more women and minorities, including a push to increase the number of female officers and pilots. Air Force Secretary Deborah James announced nine measures that she said were critical to ensuring the Air Force's success, such as a web-based mentoring system, longer deferrals for deployments after pregnancy, and a 30-percent target for the percentage of females in the officer applicant pool, up from 25 percent.

The leader of the Muslim group who defended ISIS executioner Mohammed Emwazi has sparked further outrage after he refused to condemn the stoning women. Asim Qureshi, the director of Cage, was last night quizzed about extremist positions advocated by Muslim scholars - including female genital mutilation, domestic violence and stoning as a punishment for adultery. But Mr Qureshi, appearing on the BBC's This Week programme, failed to speak out against the practices - while also defending the right of Muslims to wage jihad. It comes after he defended the London-raised fanatic Emwazi - unmasked as the infamous fanatic 'Jihadi John'...

Smith & Wesson reported solid earnings. Why? It’s down to a normalizing market — and a rise in women’s sport shooting. The horror that follows a mass shooting event does not last long in the public memory. And that’s good news for the firearms industry. Smith & Wesson, one of the three biggest U.S. gunmakers (along with Sturm, Ruger & Co. and privately held Freedom Group, which owns Remington), beat analyst expectations this week with its third-quarter earnings. Quarterly revenue of $130.6 million was down nearly 11% from the third quarter of last year, but that still topped predictions. Across...

At her first public event since voters learned that she used personal email to handle sensitive government business for four years, former secretary of state Hillary Clinton avoided any suggestion or shadow of the scandal, instead delivering a dress rehearsal campaign speech to an audience of pro-choice advocates. As for her long-deferred announcement about the 2016 presidential race, Clinton did no more than repeat old quips about the difficult question of whether to run for president, at one point asking: “I suppose it’s fair to say: don’t you someday want to see a woman president?”

Where to begin to expose the over-the-top dishonesty of abortion advocate Dr. David Grimes’ piece on abortion and breast cancer posted on Feb. 26 in the Huffington Post Blog (“Abortion and Breast Cancer: How Abortion Foes Got it Wrong“)? Not surprisingly Grimes begins by announcing dismissively that the abortion-breast cancer connection (ABC link) “was debunked long ago.” In truth, it is the denial that has been repeatedly debunked. Ironically, one of the key studies Grimes relies on as “a landmark prospective study of women in Denmark” to “prove” the ABC link is a myth is actually the largest and most...

WOMEN are moody. By evolutionary design, we are hard-wired to be sensitive to our environments, empathic to our children’s needs and intuitive of our partners’ intentions. This is basic to our survival and that of our offspring. Some research suggests that women are often better at articulating their feelings than men because as the female brain develops, more capacity is reserved for language, memory, hearing and observing emotions in others. These are observations rooted in biology, not intended to mesh with any kind of pro- or anti-feminist ideology. But they do have social implications. Women’s emotionality is a sign of...

It’s that time of year and Americans are honoring some of our favorite presidents. How about honoring our female presidents this time around? Oh, I forgot. There aren’t any. Frankly, I find America’s two-centuries-and-counting streak of all-male presidents astounding. You’d think it was against the law to elect a woman. (It probably would have been if the founding fathers had even thought it could happen — it’s not like they let them vote or anything.) And it’s not that women haven’t tried. Most people don’t know about the first woman to run for our highest office. Victoria Woodhull gave it...

Is anyone else tired of seeing women who are a mess with tattoos?

The Navy SEAL who killed Osama bin Laden says there is a welcome mat out for women SEALs if they can meet the grueling physical and mental standards that exist today. Former Chief Petty Officer Robert O’Neill, whose handpicked SEAL Team Six unit raided bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan, answered “absolutely” when asked whether women can meet the demands of sea, undersea, ground and airborne warriors. Asked by The Washington Times how he knows, Mr. O’Neill said, “I’ve met women that I think can beat me up. I’m not joking. Here in the states. There are some tough women out...

Four out of five women admit they don't shower every day, and a third say they can go for three days without washing their body. The personal hygiene of Britain's fairer sex - or the lack thereof - has been laid bare in a survey of 2,021 women aged 18 to 50 for skincare range Flint + Flint. It also found that almost two thirds can't be bothered removing make-up before they go to bed, and one in eight own up to not brushing their teeth before they sleep.

Police are appealing for help to find three schoolgirls who have gone missing and are thought to have travelled to Turkey with the intention of crossing the border into Syria. They are Shamima Begum, 15, who could be using the name Acklina Begum, and 16-year-old Kadiza Sultana. The third girl, 15, is not being named at the request of her family, Scotland Yard said. Police fear the girls, all pupils at the Bethnal Green Academy, in east London, might be heading to join terror group Isil - Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, also known as Islamic State. They...

California Clothing Mavens Hit The Road For New Hunting Series They’ve come a long ways, metaphorically at least, from designing outdoor fashion clothes for women out of a home garage in northern California. Jen Adams and Norissa Harman had a vision that spawned a successful company, Girls With Guns Clothing. But while the gals remain small-town at heart, choosing to continue their work out of Red Bluff, a quiet hamlet of 14,000 off Interstate 5, 130 miles north of Sacramento, even for these ambitious entrepreneurs, traveling across a continent, an ocean and hunting the wild lands of Africa in...

On the happily few occasions when callers to my radio show make a particularly foolish comment, I ask them what graduate school they attended. When they ask why I assume they attended graduate school, I respond, "Only someone who went to graduate school would say something that foolish." Because it is never my intention to humiliate a caller, I always hasten to explain that my comment is not directed at the caller; it is directed at our universities. Moreover, I mean it literally. In order to say certain things that are so obviously foolish, one has to be taught them....

The National Shooting Games Establishment (NSSF) as of late discharged a thorough report details regarding women and guns. The report, “Women Gun Owners: Purchasing, Perceptions and Participation,” speaks to a study of more than 1,000 women, which investigates almost every part of weapon proprietorship. In spite of the fact that we hear an incredible arrangement about the quantity of women who have as of late procured their first gun, the majority of those reviewed, 42.1 percent, have claimed a weapon for no less than 10 years. About 33% of the women reviewed, however, are a piece of the female gun...

Yoga pants are under attack. Lately, they have been a hot topic on Facebook, blogs and other corners of the web. Some say they are too tight. Others complain that we, as a society, have lost all sense of modesty. The question has been posed: Should women wear yoga pants in public? For one state legislator in Montana, the struggle against yoga pants is real. No. Seriously. From the Billings Gazette:

It may have been touted as the steamiest thing in Hollywood - but movie critics rounded on Fifty Shades of Grey for being too light on the sex. In a barrage of reviews published on Tuesday night, most of those who sat down with the raunchy adaptation ahead of its 13 February release date lamented its 'run-of-the-mill' lovemaking. One critic pointed out that sex only makes up 15 minutes of the two-hour runtime. Another pointed out that there are no visible genitals, no orgasms - and not that much nudity.

The United States can be quite an incoherent place at times. Here are a few examples. Diversity Sometime in the 1990s the growing contradictions of affirmative action in a multiracial society became problematic. Ethnic ancestry was often neither easily identifiable nor readily commensurate with class status, and so gave way to a more popular term: “diversity.”

Conservative media were in an uproar last week over the President’s remarks at the National Prayer Breakfast. He said that we see “faith being twisted and distorted … sometimes used as a weapon” and “lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ." Nearly everyone took the statement to mean “Catholic pot, don’t call the Muslim kettle black.” And they were quick to point out that the “terrible deeds in the name of Christ” were...

Fans of Fifty Shades Of Grey, you've been warned: leave those whips and riding crops at home on your way to the movies next week. AMC, Regal Entertainment and Cinemark have banned movie goers from bringing naughty props to the cinema in anticipation of the hotly awaited world premiere of Fifty Shades Of Grey. The film adaptation of EL James' steamy best-selling erotic romance starring Jamie Dornan as Christian Grey and Dakota Johnson as Anastasia Steele hits the big screen on Valentine’s Day, February 14.

More Than 500,000 In U.S. Could Be At Risk Of Female Genital Excision Preliminary data shows that up to 507,000 women and girls in the United States were at risk of female genital excision in 2013. By ALEXANDRA ZAVIS A new study finds that nearly 507,000 women and girls in the U.S. could be at risk of female genital excision There is anecdotal evidence of U.S. girls being sent to their parents' home countries for 'vacation cutting' Nearly 507,000 women and girls in the United States could be at risk of female genital excision, including 57,000 in California, a new...