In The Consult this morning, we linked to an article about a Jamaican dance craze called daggering. According to this article, doctors in Jamaica attribute daggering to a threefold increase in broken penises. As a result, government officials have banned any media promoting the dance, which simulates rough sex. Apparently, those who try to dagger in the bedroom--the same moves minus the "simulation"--are getting hurt.

Take a look at the example of daggering, shown here in a Mr. Vegas video. It's totally SFW, which prompts the question...

...is this really the root of an island-wide epidemic?

Rebecca Shabad investigaes and finds out more than you want to know, after the jump. 

Take some time today to visit Andrew Sullivan's blog over at the Atlantic, where one of the most capital-F fascinating discussions in recent blog history (which is pretty much all of blog history) is taking place.

After the murder of Kansas physician George Tiller, Sullivan—the deeply Catholic, economically-conservative pundit—did a great job of  covering the political and sociological implications of the crime. But he also started posting first-person accounts of late-term abortion experiences, including some women who chose not to terminate and some who were under Tiller's care. (Tiller provided third-term abortions, one of only three doctors in the country to do so.) An excerpt:

The walls of the clinic reception and waiting room are literally covered with letters from patients thanking him. Some were heartbreaking - obviously young and/or poorly educated people thanking Dr. Tiller for being there when they had no other options, explaining their family, church etc. had abandoned them.

I remember my wife, foggy with sedation after the final procedure, being helped from the exam table. He had her sit up and put her arms around his neck, and then he lifted her into a wheelchair. "You give good hugs" she whispered. He paused just for a moment. "You're just fine," he told her.

After that, more families began providing their stories about the tough choices they had to make regarding a terminating a late pregnancy, all of which are, to paraphrase Sullivan's labels on these posts, "so personal," honest, and heartbreaking. (A round-up of the stories are here, though more have since been published)

That alone would constitute some highly-recommended reading. But the conversation hasn't stopped there. It has expanded to include the point of view of former abortion protesters, the arguments for and against abortion limits, and the debate over what role men should play in shaping abortion policies—basically, it's a smart, reasoned, respectful discussion about abortion, something which is sorely needed but exceedingly rare. (Today, as the discussion has expanded into some more general pro-life vs pro-choice arguments, some of the nuance is lost, and one can see signs of the familiar divisions and rhetoric.)

Throughout it all, Sullivan has been as transparent and honest with his readers as they have been with him, and as the posts continue, one can watch his personal beliefs regarding abortion evolve right there on screen. On Monday night, he said, "I still cannot in good conscience support these [late-term] abortions." By Wednesday morning, he was admitting that:

I am beginning to believe that these abortions, given their excruciating moral and personal choices, may be the most defensible in context of all abortions. And yet they seem to be taking life in a more viscerally distressing way. I need time to think and rethink these things. I would not have without reading these extraordinary accounts.

In order to keep another doctor from ever being murdered for his work treating women in need, in order to move towards that elusive "possibility of common ground" that President Obama called for in regards to abortion, we need more thinking and rethinking, more sharing of extraordinary accounts, and more discourse. Sullivan's work on this has been a very, very good start.

RELATED: On NEWSWEEK.com, writer Amanda Robb adds another powerful, personal voice to this discussion. Her uncle, Dr. Bart Slepian, a Buffalo obstratrician, was murdered by an anti-abortion terrorist in 1998, and the death of Dr. Tiller has brought back painful memories. Read her story here.

Last month, NEWSWEEK's Jessica Bennett's wrote a heartbreaking story about the Catsouras family, who are fighting to scrub the internet of gristly accident-scene photos taken moments after their daughter Nikki's death. Now, another tale of private, post-mortem photos posted online has made the news.

CBSNews reports that a New York City emergency medical technician was charged today with official misconduct for posting to his Facebook page crime-scene photos of a murder victim. Mark Musarella  was charged for taking a cell-phone photo of Caroline Wimmer, 30, who was strangled in her Staten Island home, then uploading those photos to the social-networking site. Unlike the highway patrol police* responsible for leaking the photos of Nikki Catsouras, who say they purposefully e-mailed the photos to a small group of friends and family members as a cautionary tale about the dangers of speeding, Musarella's attorney insists that the photos were posted accidentally. (Nothing has yet been reported about why Musarella snapped a private pic of the victim in the first place).

Sadly, social networking sites may have also played a role in Wimmer's death; her mother tells CBS that rumors on MySpace precipitated her death. Calvin Lawson, 28 has been charged with her murder.

With almost every cell phone acting as both a camera and a personal computer, stories like these may become all too common. Let's hope that both the law and the training procedures for emergency personnel catches up to the technology before more families suffer. One small upside to stories like these: they give evidence to how the worst in some people can bring out the best in others. After the article about the Catsouras photos ran in NEWSWEEK, readers responded with a groundswell of support and action, doing what they can to ensure that Nikki is remembered as she lived.

*correction amended: these men were originally identified as EMTs in this post.

Out of respect for both the Catsourus and Wimmer families, we're going to close the comments to this post.

This just in: NEWSWEEK has learned that in the one-month period allotted by the National Institute of Health, the NIH received 49,015 comments in response to its draft guidelines for human stem cell research. Between April and May, remarks poured in from all over the country and from a wide variety of interested parties: stem cell scientists, religious organizations and the general public.

There has been something of a collective mood swing among stem cell scientists this year. Researchers were ebullient when President Obama lifted Bush-era restrictions on federal funding for embryonic stem cell research in March. But many were hugely disappointed when the NIH’s draft guidelines came out a month later. Two major concerns: first, the government has proposed very specific standards for the informed consent process—i.e. what couples need to know before they agree to donate their frozen embryos to research. Many of the lines developed from human embryos over the last decade would not meet these stringent new standards, and research using those cells would therefore be ineligible for government money. The International Society for Stem Cell Research (ISSCR) submitted a letter saying that researchers shouldn’t have to start from scratch. “It is critical that a mechanism be developed to ensure that the past ten years of scientific progress with these lines not be lost to federally-funded research,” the ISSCR wrote. The guidelines also rule out somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT) or so-called therapeutic cloning. Scientists want to use SCNT to create cell lines that have genetic conditions built in, which they say would allow them to study diseases as they develop and ideally create more targeted ways to treat them.

Religious groups had their own take. The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops argued in their letter that other stem cell research, including adult stem cells and newer induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS cells), show great promise, and that destroying human embryos is morally flawed

The NIH will be reviewing the comments over the next few weeks and expects to release its final guidelines no later than July 7. Fireworks expected one way or the other. Stay tuned.