Queens teacher who had sex with 14-year-old student gets 6 months jail

A former Queens teacher was sentenced to six months in jail on Monday for sleeping with a 14-year-old student.

Daniel Reilly, 36, was also sentenced to ten years of probation, and has to register as a sex offender for being sexually active with the girl, who was one of his English students at IS 237.

Sex drive: Zurich launches drive-in prostitution plan

A series of wooden sheds have been constructed in Zurich, Switzerland as part of an initiative to regulate prostitution.

They look like garages or shelters but are being called by the locals ‘drive-in sex boxes’.

The idea is that men wanting to pay for sex can drive into one of the sheds having picked up a prostitute from an approved area.

Project director Michael Herzig said the boxes should improve security for sex workers.

“We’ve had a problem here which has been getting worse over the last few years, especially regarding Roma women, some of whom were being forced into prostitution. This was a degrading situation which we really had to stop.”

It is hoped the sex boxes will persuade prostitutes to sell their services away from residential areas, in a safe environment – the sheds are all equipped with alarms.

“This solution has several advantages: the support service for the women is better because we are directly here on site. The infrastructure is better. The women can come to us and use the shower and the toilets. We can talk to them without other people listening and the area is closed and observable,” said Ursula Kocher, of the Flora Dora centre for women:

The million euro project was approved by voters in Zurich last year in a referendum. The site is only open to drivers of cars and will operate from early evening until 5am each day.

San Diego mayor in sex harassment settlement talks

SAN DIEGO — Settlement talks in the sexual harassment lawsuit against Mayor Bob Filner are underway as petitions circulate to recall the former congressman who has been besieged by allegations from more than a dozen women.

Attorney Gloria Allred announced Monday evening that she and her client, Irene McCormack Jackson, spent the day in mediation at a downtown office building, where Filner was spotted by a TV crew entering earlier in the day.

Allred wouldn't say whether Filner's resignation was discussed nor whether the mayor was present. She said the mediator, former federal judge J. Lawrence Irving, asked that no one make comments while talks continued.

Filner is facing a recall effort prompted by the cascade of sexual harassment allegations that also led the entire City Council and many leading Democrats to call for him to step down, including U.S. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer.

Filner has vowed to remain the leader of the nation's eighth-largest city and said he would return to work Monday after completing an intensive two-week therapy program. His lawyers said he also spent one week in outpatient counseling.

Before going into therapy, Filner vowed when he returned that his "focus will be on making sure that I am doing right by the city in terms of being the best mayor I can be."

But he wasn't seen Monday at City Hall, where a few dozen Filner supporters rallied outside, engaging in heated arguments with opponents.

"The mayor coming back to City Hall is the wrong message," Councilman Kevin Faulconer said Monday. "There is no way that he is able to move any type of agenda forward."

Faulconer said the mayor needs to "quit dragging the city of San Diego through this. He needs to resign. He needs to go get the help that he clearly and desperately needs."

Faulconer was later seen entering the building where Filner was spotted by KFMB-TV in San Diego. The councilman referred questions to the city attorney's office, which declined to comment.

Allred said she and her client would not be returning Tuesday.

Steve Erie, a political science professor at the University of California, San Diego, said Filner's resignation must be part of the settlement discussions. Filner would benefit from waiting it out, Erie said, since his pension would spike after serving a year, which would be in December. He also may be trying to shed financial responsibility for the lawsuit.

"As long as he doesn't resign, he has leverage," Erie said. "So stay tuned."

McCormack was the first to go public with harassment allegations. Since then, his accusers have included a university dean to a retired Navy rear admiral. Some contend he cornered, groped and forcibly kissed them.

Filner, 70, served 10 terms in Congress before being elected mayor in November. The feisty liberal has long had a reputation for berating employees and has been dogged by rumors of inappropriate behavior toward women. But nothing in his past approaches what has surfaced in the past six weeks.

Questions also have risen over his spending and a trip to Paris. At least four agencies are investigating Filner: the city attorney's office, the state attorney general's office, the Sheriff's Department and the U.S. attorney.

City Council President Todd Gloria said the city's daily operations have been running fine without Filner but the city needs a leader to set policy.

"Those of us who have called on the mayor to resign know he is not being effective at this time," Gloria said.

Filner's spokeswoman Lena Lewis and lawyer James Payne did not respond to calls.

If Filner should resign, Gloria would step in as acting mayor.

The recall petition drive started Sunday. Organizers must collect 101,597 signatures of registered San Diego voters by Sept. 26. If the petition has fewer than that, the recall campaign will have 30 more days to circulate a supplemental petition to gather additional valid signatures.

If enough signatures are validated by the city clerk, the petition will be presented to the City Council, which must schedule an election within 60 to 90 days.

America's First Sex Manual Has Some 'Interesting' Thoughts On Virginity, Same-Sex Marriage And Female Pleasure

On the internet, there are seemingly endless resources for information about sex -- for better and for worse. But where did Americans get their sex education way, way back in the day? It turns out they read Aristotle's Complete Master-Piece, In Three Parts; Displaying the Secrets of Nature in the Generation of Man, a sex manual published in Boston in 1766.

via Internet Archive

This "sexy" book was originally published in England in 1684 and then reprinted in the United States 82 years later. A copy of the guide, which Open Culture reports was written by William Salmon (not, in fact, Aristotle), a self-proclaimed English "Professor of Physk," was put up for auction in January of this year after a 200-year-long ban in England.

According to Open Source, the book was one of the most widely circulated publications regarding sex and reproduction in North America at the time, but it certainly lacked scientific basis for many of its claims. For instance, Edinburgh auction house Lyon & Turnbull's book specialist, Cathy Marsden, told HuffPost UK in April that the book warned readers that if a woman became pregnant out of wedlock, she might give birth to an infant covered in hair or Siamese twins.

via Internet Archive

The manual's stance on topics like virginity and marriage also reflects the Puritanical era in which it was written. According to Booktryst, Aristotle's Complete Master-Piececontends that virginity is, "the boast and pride of the fair sex," that marriage is meant to be between a man and a woman, and that any sex outside of this context fills "the world with confusion and debauchery, has brought diseases on the body, consumptions on estates, and eternal ruin to the soul, if not repented of."

Interestingly, some parts of the book are shockingly progressive. Marsden told Open Culture:

Sex and the H.I.V. Morning-After Pill

I RECENTLY had a serious H.I.V. scare after an episode of unprotected sex. The next day, at Whitman-Walker, a clinic in Washington that specializes in treating gay patients, I began a monthlong regimen of the drug Truvada, a form of post-exposure prophylaxis, or PEP. It has to be taken within 72 hours after potential contact with the virus that causes AIDS. The price tag would normally be $1,200, but I was able to get a subsidy the manufacturer gives to low-income earners.

“You can only get this deal once,” my doctor warned.

“Jeez, I hope so,” I said. “I mean, it’s not like there are PEP regulars, right?”

She sighed. “Oh, there are.”

More than 30 years since AIDS emerged, and two decades since antiretroviral drugs transformed that epidemic into a chronic but manageable disease, conversations about H.I.V. remain awkward, especially for gay men.

When were you last tested? Did you test only for antibodies, or was it a full polymerase chain reaction test? What have you done sexually since you last tested negative?

It can be tough to rekindle any bedroom passion after such questions come up.

Two recent developments could make these conversations less awkward, or even render them moot. But they also raise troubling questions about promiscuity and responsibility that are reminiscent of debates from the 1980s.

The first development was the approval, last summer, by the Food and Drug Administration of an over-the-counter rapid-response at-home H.I.V. test kit. The test, called OraQuick and available nationwide since October, gives results 20 minutes after a cheek swab. The second is the increasing availability of PEP and of pre-exposure prophylaxis, or PrEP.

PEP — the medication I am taking — has been called the H.I.V. morning-after pill, and PrEP, to follow the analogy, is akin to birth control. A study in the British medical journal The Lancet this month found that drug-injecting addicts who took PrEP were half as likely to become infected with H.I.V. as those who did not; other studies have shown that the drug reduces transmission of the virus from mother to child, and transmission among both gay men and heterosexuals.

The at-home OraQuick tests, at $20 a pop, are a bigger phenomenon than drugs like Truvada, which can be used as either a pre-exposure or a post-exposure prophylaxis, and can cost more than $10,000 a year.

A study by Columbia University researchers, published last year in the journal AIDS and Behavior, found that the at-home tests could be effective if widely used. It gave at-home testing kits to 27 gay men who reported having routine unprotected sex. Over three months, the 27 men had a collective total of 140 sexual partners; 124 of them were asked to submit to testing before sex, and 101 agreed. Of the 101, 10 tested positive (six learned of their H.I.V. status that way). None of the men had sex with a partner after learning that the partner tested positive.

The at-home test, OraQuick, also is not a sure thing. It tests only for antibodies, which sometimes don’t emerge for months after infection. So the newly infected, who are 8 to 10 times more likely to be infectious, can still test as negative.

As for the pre- and post-exposure pills, cost is not the only barrier. Of 403 H.I.V.-negative gay men surveyed in a different study by Columbia researchers, only half said they would take PrEP on a regular basis. A 22-year-old art director on the Lower East Side told me of a recent scare he had after he took home a handsome but sometimes homeless man he met at a bar. Very drunk, they had unprotected sex. The next morning the art director panicked, but eschewed the post-exposure pills, he told me, because “I’m pretty health-conscious and careful about what I put in my body, especially medicine.” (Weeks later, he did a regular H.I.V. test, which came up negative.)

Dan Savage, the nationally syndicated sex columnist who coined the concept of “monogamish” relationships, expressed similar worry, fearing that clinicians do not understand the psychology of the population they’re trying to help. “The guys these sensible health care folks are trying to reach are not sensible,” he told me. “They are self-identified idiots who can only be saved by a vaccine.” Right now, in the final weekend of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Pride Month, it is a good moment to reflect on these issues. In the nearly two decades since “Rent” and “Angels in America,” a generation has grown up in a world where AIDS did not equal death. That has led to a complacency that helps explain a troubling increase in new H.I.V. infections among young men who have sex with men.

I fear that, for all their potential benefits, at-home tests and the new pre- and post-exposure H.I.V. medications might give some gay men an exaggerated sense of safety, and encourage the promiscuity that Larry Kramer, the playwright and activist, has spent so many years railing against.

When a gay crowd gathered Wednesday on Christopher Street, where the modern gay liberation movement was born in 1969, to celebrate the Supreme Court’s rulings on same-sex marriage, there was much cheering and talk about progress. But I wondered what the crowd did with the rest of their night.