Banning Toys, Jailing Editors & Other News You Might've Missed

It's Friday, and I know what you're thinking: if only the weekend never had to come, there's so much more work I can do! Alas. But dry your eyes and consider this: with all that free time, you can now check out all the criminal justice news that ran elsewhere this week on Change.org:

-- For better or worse -- okay, for worse -- the McDonald's Happy Meal is an iconic, high fat symbol of childhood (obesity). Or, well, it was. As Brie Cadman reports on the Health blog, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors has moved to make the Happy Meal a little less happy by banning the pairing of toys and junk food.

-- Newspaper ad revenues are in steep decline. Now, as Amanda Kloer reports on the Human Trafficking blog, editors in Britain will have to look even harder for cash in light of a new police policy that will hold them personally responsible if their paper publishes any ads for sex-related work. Prostitution in the U.K. has since been eliminated.

-- So, in light of that election we just had, having second thoughts on that whole "representative democracy" thing? As Colin Asher on the Gay Rights blog notes, it's not always all it's cracked up to be, particularly when it results in pro-equality judges being ousted by homophobic demagogues.

-- Bahrain, a small island nation in the Persian Gulf, is a close U.S. ally. It's an authoritarian state that tortures and jails human rights activists and opposition figures. On the Human Rights blog, Benjamin Joffe-Walt speaks with a leading Bahraini activist about his government's crackdown on dissent.

-- Steve Li's immigrant parents never told him that he was actually in the country illegally. But now the 20-year-old college student faces deportation back to Peru, a country he hardly knows, and as Alex Dibranco reports on the Immigrant Rights blog, he's currently being held away from his parents in an Arizona detention facility.

-- When Mel Distel found a noose hanging from the front of the gay rights organization she works at in Southern California, she picked up the phone and called police. But Brandon Miller reports on the Gay Rights blog that when the cops showed up, they protected and served by basically just telling her to toughen up.

Anything I miss? Stories you think we should be covering? Text messages from Brett Favre you'd like to share? Leave a comment below.

Photo Credit: Toban Black