Genitals

As her hearing before a high-level immigration board approaches, a young woman who fled her native Togo because of the threat of forced genital mutilation seems likely to gain sympathetic treatment in a plea for political asylum here. Fauziya Kasinga, 19, will present her case to the U.S. Board of Immigration Appeals on Thursday. Her attorneys will ask the board to grant her the asylum refused last year by a lower court or at least remand her case for a fuller hearing before the same judge.

The federal Board of Immigration Appeals will conduct a hearing next month into the case of Fauziya Kasinga, a young women from Togo who is seeking asylum in the United States on grounds she has been threatened with genital mutilation in her African nation. The hearing had been set for Wednesday. Karen Musalo of American University, who is representing Kasinga, has argued that the United Nations considers this tribal ritual a human rights violation.

SINCE the dawn of its days as a medical specialty, plastic surgery has been marching inexorably down women's bodies, straightening, slimming, tucking as it goes, restoring the appearance of youth to features sagging with age and smoothing those marked by eccentricity. Plastic surgery's southward expansion has now entered territory long thought sacred.

A federal magistrate denied bail Tuesday for a self-described "body modification artist" accused of offering to perform illegal circumcisions on two young girls during an FBI undercover investigation. In reaching her decision, Judge Carla Woehrle cited a prosecutor's disclosure that Todd Cameron Bertrang, 41, of Canyon Country might be charged with additional crimes of possessing child pornography and being an ex-felon in possession of a gun.

In the first ruling of its kind in Kenya, a court has fined 20 parents for forcing their daughters to undergo genital excisions, a newspaper in Nairobi, the capital, reported. The parents pleaded guilty to assault charges. The parents were each fined about $25--Kenya's average monthly wage--or, if they failed to pay, two months in jail, the newspaper said. Female genital excision, legal in Kenya, is common practice in some of the nation's many tribes.

Scientists at the Australian research organization CSIRO have developed a new instrument that they say revolutionizes classification of insects by inflating their genitalia. The vesica everter, more commonly known as a phalloblaster, uses a stream of pressurized alcohol to dehydrate and harden the genitalia, which then remain inflated like a balloon.

Even in the sexually permissive '70s, the afflicted often kept quiet. Having genital herpes, after all, was akin to being a social leper. Then along came HIV, which can lead to AIDS, making herpes pale in comparison and pushing it out of our collective consciousness. But the herpes epidemic, far from being over, is getting worse. Today, roughly one in five Americans over age 12--or about 45 million people--is thought to have genital herpes, although most are unaware they have it.