This story illustrates another legal barbarity (see below), but also that some sanity has finally prevailed. Here a baby born on June 30 was technically left stateless because his parents were unmarried. From July 1, however, the father’s status as a parent is recognised.

Under Section 9 of the Nationality Immigration and Asylum Act 2002, which came into force this month, children born to unmarried parents can take their nationality from their father.
Mr Poole said: “You don’t have to get permission to be in any EU country any more, but all the old laws to do with your child’s nationality still applied until now.
“Fathers had no status or rights unless they were husbands too, so it’s good they have changed the law, but they should take consideration of people like Leo who have already been caught out. It’s outrageous.”

The next step must surely be to make this retrospective. I know some people affected by this, and they might be forced at some stage, against their principles, to marry, which is ludicrous. There surely must be the possibility of a human rights case in this.

In Pakistan, women previously denied bail are being allowed it after a small legal change by President Musharraf. Not much, but any small advance in changing repressive laws should be appaluded.

Seventy women awaiting trials on charges such as murder and adultery have been released on bail from jails in eastern Pakistan after President Pervez Musharraf amended a law to give them the right to bail – a right previously denied to women in Pakistan.
Mr Musharraf amended the controversial Hudood Ordinance last Friday to allow women awaiting trial on charges of adultery and other crimes to qualify for bail. The women were freed in the past two days from jails in various cities in the eastern Punjab province, provincial prisons chief Sarfaraz Mufti said.

No explanation is given as to why women specifically should be denied bail, but one can guess. Whereas I recall celebrated cases of rape and murder of women by men in Pakistan where the men have been walking around free.

No such signs of civilisation in the US, however, where a mother who was obviously acutely mentally ill is for the second time on trial for murder for killing her five children. The first jury convicted her of capital murder but that was overturned on a technicality.

Her lawyers say she suffered from severe postpartum psychosis and did not know it was wrong to kill seven-year-old Noah, five-year-old John, three-year-old Paul, two-year-old Luke and six-month-old Mary.
Prosecutors say Yates knew her actions were wrong because she waited until her husband left for work to drown the children in the tub and then made an emergency phone call, and later told a detective that she was a bad mother and wanted to be punished….
Saeed acknowledged that if someone is psychotic, discontinuing an anti-psychotic medicine could make the person’s condition worse.

… and no this isn’t the start of a women and bicycles joke. But, once you slog past the super-models in bikinis, included on distinctly thin grounds, and the women inexplicably dressed in evening wear and with makeup slathered on like concrete (so Daily Mail!) there is actually a proper, interesting story in today’s Observer Woman magazine.

All that stuff about how all boys being reared by their mothers turn into hoodie-wearning hooligans … seems it is wrong. Instead, a researcher has found that many families are better off without the dad.

Peggy Drexler, an assistant professor of psychology at Cornell University and a former gender scholar at Stanford University, has published Raising Boys Without Men: How Maverick Moms are Creating the Next Generation of Exceptional Men (Rodale Books). In a unique study she followed more than 60 fatherless families over 10 years. As time went by she practically became another member of the family in these households. She picked up boys from school, dropped them off at sports clubs, spent weekends and holidays talking in depth to both them and their mothers. All the while taking notes and taping conversations. What she discovered stunned her and has divided public opinion. It goes to the heart of the very idea of the apple-pie American family: is it necessary for a son to have a dad?

Since the book was published she has criss-crossed the country, talking about her research in the nation’s bookshops, lecture theatres, radio stations and television studios. She’s been short-listed for publishing awards and approached by HBO to make a documentary based on the families she met. Her findings contradict many judges, social scientists, religious groups and pundits. But what she discovered was that a boy’s morality and masculinity can be cultivated without a live-in father.

Indeed, she goes even further. In her view, traditional families have much to learn from these households: that boys from fatherless homes can fare better than boys raised in nuclear families.

It was the WAGS (wives and girlfriends) wot lost England the World Cup – oddly enough, didn’t see one of them on the field.

McLaren, who succeeds Sven-Goran Eriksson as England manager, feels that the WAGs’ conspicuous high spending in designer stores and raucous partying in the bars of Baden-Baden, England’s World Cup base, did not help the teams’ performance in the World Cup. England went out on penalties to Portugal in the quarter-final.

And it is not mother who knows best, but a “top fertility doctor” (unsurprisingly male), who says that women over a certain (unspecified) age should not be given fertility treatment: “Abdalla believes the practice should be halted because elderly mothers may not live long enough to see their children grow up.”

So presumably he also believes in compulsory vasectomies for males over the same age (in fact a few years younger, no doubt, since men on average die younger than women)?

If a 38-year-old single mother from South Africa can do this, it is our duty to try to ensure that Tesco is kept to its word:

Ms Baartman took on the might of the UK retailing world when she highlighted the plight of farm workers at Tesco’s annual shareholders’ meeting in London.
In front of more than 500 onlookers the fruit packer, who is paid 46 rand (£3.49) per day, made an impassioned plea to one of the best-paid executives in the City, Tesco’s chief executive Sir Terry Leahy. Her wages just scrape the legal minimum set by the South African government earlier this year, but are less than a man would earn for the same work.
Ms Baartman confessed she was risking her job by speaking out. She works on a farm in the western Cape that supplies Tesco with fruit during the country’s four-month growing season.
…
David Reid, Tesco’s chairman, said the supermarket’s ethical trading team had visited South Africa but had found no proof to back up the allegations made because both ActionAid and Women on Farms, a South African pressure group, will not name and shame the farms concerned. He promised to “personally guarantee” to protect Ms Baartman from any backlash from her employer if it managed to “expose any bad practice”.