The Monthly Newds Part One 3/27/09

• Dropping the word "naked" from "naked mole rat" on a Washington state high school t-shirt was not enough, apparently, because parents are objecting on the grounds the words could be slang for female genitalia.
• Swimsuit model Joanna Krupa is not worried about being topless in a photo shoot because Pope John Paul II approved of nudity.
• Critics of Australia's proposed Internet blacklist to control child pornography say that such a filter is nothing but censorship. The proposal has sparked protests across the country. A similar outcry is happening in the UK over a new bill which could define even a comic book like "Watchmen" as being child pornography.
• Nashville is the latest city to try and control the dress codes of minorities.
• After more than 50 years of seeking young women to pose in the nude, Playboy magazine is still stirring up controversy on college campuses.
• CNN covers the "nakation".

  The economic recession is "doing us a lot of favors, maybe because there's the idea that if you've lost the shirt off your back, you should go nude," said Erich Schuttauf, executive director of the American Association for Nude Recreation.

• Posters of nude women could be banned from Scottish prison cells because prisons should not display "anything which is offensive to other people". One presumes that ax murderers and bank robbers on display behind bars don't fall under the definition of "offensive".
• In hard economic times, more and more women are turning to stripping to support their families.
• Freehikers in Switzerland are threatening to sue the canton of Appenzell if a law is passed banning nudity on the trails.

  To the authorities' argument that naked hiking should be banned because it could be detrimental to children, Kettiger responds with incredulity. "Oh, please. In this day and age, when kids have access to the Internet and where images of naked people are on every newsstand, how can they be shocked?" he asks. "Is there really a child out there who hasn't seen a naked person yet?"

• Robin Lord recounts his visit to a nude beach in the Summer of '71, and the perils of not wearing sunscreen where the sun don't usually shine.
• The Supreme Court is about to hear a case where a 13 year-old girl was stripped searched six years ago by school officials because they suspected she was in possession of some ibuprofen pills.

  In Ms. Redding’s case, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in San Francisco, ruled that school officials had violated the Fourth Amendment’s ban on unreasonable searches. Writing for the majority, Judge Kim McLane Wardlaw said, “It does not require a constitutional scholar to conclude that a nude search of a 13-year-old child is an invasion of constitutional rights.”

• Officials at a Brooklyn public library have apologized to a woman who was scolded for breastfeeding her child in the children's book section.
• Jennifer Dempsey feels more comfortable about her body since she began working as a nude artists' model.

  Instantly I became someone new to myself. The mere act of standing on that platform made me someone who was confident to let people draw her nude body. When I struck my first gesture pose, the artists heads bobbed up and down, looking frantically from my body to their sketch pad, trying to capture the pose before the timer went off.

• To be continued....