Los Angeles Times: Several female priests are facing excommunication from the Catholic Church. The U.S. Conference of Bishops' executive director of the secretariat of doctrinal and pastoral practices, the Rev. Thomas Weinandy, has offered this totally airtight rationale: "A woman cannot possibly be ordained a priest. It can't be done. It won't stick, no matter how hard you try. Doing things like performing last rites or saying Mass will automatically excommunicate these women because they are impersonating clergymen." (See also the recent Salon feature.)
Glamour: Check out Lynn Harris' witty and moving examination of the celebrity baby craze and its effect on infertile women.
Pink News: This week, Soccer Tasmania welcomed 47-year-old postoperative transsexual Martine Delaney to play in its women's league. (Some had suggested she was too good to play with the girls.) We love a happy ending.
San Francisco Chronicle: An S.F. neuropsychiatrist has written a book on the differences between the male and female brain, which seem to involve transportation: "Women have an eight-lane superhighway for processing emotion, while men have a small country road," she writes. Men "have O'Hare Airport as a hub for processing thoughts about sex, where women have the airfield nearby that lands small and private planes." The Chron then asked area residents to weigh in on the biggest difference between the sexes, which proved pretty entertaining.
Associated Press: The Bloomington, Ill., police officer accused of the repeated rape of several local women pleaded not guilty today.
BBC: Toronto is set to host the 16th International AIDS Conference this weekend; 24,000 scientists, researchers, health workers, advocates and policy makers will converge on the city and, we hope, do more than just pay lip service to the pandemic. To get the ball rolling, the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation just donated$500 million to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. Less positively, the Bush administration has apparently limited the number of government scientists attending the conference. In a journalists' workshop earlier today, BroadReach Healthcare chairman Dr. Ernest Darkoh put HIV/AIDS in the context of this week's big antiterror news, reminding everyone that the disease kills 8,500 people per day. "This is equivalent to 17 jumbo jets crashing every day," Darkoh said.
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