How a cash-strapped teacher beat credit crunch by living on £1 a day for a YEAR after drunken bet - "Frugal Kath ate at free buffets, shopped at church jumble sales and scrounged left-overs from grocery stores and restaurants. She picked fruit from bushes and trees and collected a staggering £117 in loose change dropped in the street - a third of her annual budget. Amazingly, Kath even managed a free holiday, by hitch-hiking to France... She has even found true love, meeting her boyfriend of 18 months while on a volunteering holiday on an organic farm."

Heartbroken Italian man holds round-the-clock vigil outside convent for girlfriend-turned-nun - "When Patrizia refused to see him he put up a banner on the convent walls reading: 'I didn't want to take you away, just talk to you, because I love you'. The nuns immediately took the banner down but Daniel has said he will do 'whatever it takes' to get her back - his efforts are supported by local villagers."

Tattoo on Man, Sold to Collector, Debuts at Shanghai Art Fair - "A Swiss man with a tattoo of the Virgin Mary on his back, which was sold to a German art collector, will go on show for the first time next week at Shanghai's SHContemporary fair, said Wim Delvoye, the Belgian artist who created the work... Delvoye is no stranger to controversy. His 2001 ``Euterpe'' resembles from a distance a cathedral window pane composed of tinted glass. The 2-meter work is actually a collage of 36 X-ray pictures, each the photograph of a Delvoye friend having sexual intercourse after being painted in radio-contrast barium sulfate. His 2001 Cloaca machine replicated the human digestive system, producing rinds of feces that sold for 3,000 euros each in vacuum-packed bags. His plan to exhibit eight live pigs, each tattooed with the Walt Disney Co.'s characters and the Louis Vuitton motif, was rejected by SHContemporary's organizer."

London | Brothel industry is 'spreading' - "Brothels in the city offer sex for as little as £15, and some are charging £10 extra for unprotected intercourse, the Poppy Project in Southwark found... The average age of the women was 21. Several places offered "very, very young girls" but did not admit to having underage girls available."

Critics hit out at sex law plan - "The English Collective of Prostitutes attacked Ms Harman's support for the Swedish system and urged her to look at New Zealand's system of legalising brothels instead. Spokeswoman Cari Mitchell said the Swedish system of criminalising men who buy sex had forced prostitution further underground and "made women more vulnerable to violence". Similarly, Sarah Walker, also from the group, said the deaths of five prostitutes killed in Ipswich last December was largely due to young women being forced underground... "Evidence from Sweden in making prostitution illegal has shown that it doesn't help in reducing human trafficking. It, in fact, increases violence against women and makes the practice of prostitution far more risky for all involved." "Outlawing prostitution completely will mean that men will be far less likely to come forward to help with prosecutions for fear of criminalisation themselves.""
The Swedish law was probably thanks to their wonderful Feminist politicians, ignorant of the lessons of Prohibition. The further to the Left you go, the closer to the Right you become.

A Brave New World - "Just as a reminder, here's what Korean women used to look like – and these are "stewardesses," the cream of the crop of any age, so one can't say I'm unfairly comparing these apples and oranges... Don't these ladies from the 60's and 70's look different? Let's go way, way back and much higher up the beauty food chain, to Miss Korea contestants from 1957... Korea before probably anyone but really, really elite could afford to go under the knife... what you should notice is that Korean women just plain looked different than the people you see coming out in similar entertainment venues today... but Koreans on television and on the streets are actually starting to look like a different race of people. What Korea is really pioneering is an entire new aesthetic, a mixture of European beauty standards and surgical interpretations of them on Korean faces. Seriously. I'm not being facetious (hehe) here. When I came in 1994 and watched Korean TV, I could tell people apart, and they looked more, well...umm...Korean. Now, it's literally like a new race of people I see both on screens and in the streets."

Feminism and Freedom - "Pick up a women's studies textbook, visit a college women's center, or look at the websites of leading feminist organizations, and you will likely find the same fixation on intimate anatomy combined with left-wing politics and a poisonous antipathy to men... Contemporary feminism routinely depicts American society as a dangerous patriarchy in which women are under siege... It therefore presents itself as a movement of "liberation," defying the patriarchal oppressor and offering women everywhere the opportunity to make contact with their "real selves."... In a 1975 exchange in the Saturday Review, the feminist pioneer Betty Friedan and the French philosopher and women's rights advocate Simone de Beauvoir discussed the "problem" of stay-at-home mothers. Friedan told Beauvoir that she believed women should have the choice to stay home to raise their children if that is what they wished to do. Beauvoir candidly disagreed: 'No, we don't believe that any woman should have this choice. No woman should be authorized to stay at home to raise her children. Society should be totally different. Women should not have that choice, precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one.' In Beauvoir, we see how starkly the ideology of liberation has come to oppose actual, practical liberty--even "choice.""

Music tastes link to personality - "We have always suspected a link between music taste and personality. This is the first time that we've been able to look at it in real detail. No-one has ever done this on this scale before."

Islam 'recognizes homosexuality' - "Homosexuals and homosexuality are natural and created by God, thus permissible within Islam, a discussion concluded here Thursday. Moderate Muslim scholars said there were no reasons to reject homosexuals under Islam, and that the condemnation of homosexuals and homosexuality by mainstream ulema and many other Muslims was based on narrow-minded interpretations of Islamic teachings."
UHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH............

Pink Browser - "Sometimes living the life on the web seems to be so male-dominating! Do you know that most of the web browsers are made by MEN and only for MEN? There by sending the needs of women out for the backburner. That’s why they seem to be so boring and hectic especially if you are a woman. THANKS GOD – For here's a new browser touching the feminine side of women. Are you ready to be swept by THE PINK REVOLUTION? Here comes PINK BROWSER that will add excitement and thrill in to your day to day browsing activities. This browser is designed keeping in mind the softer nature of women. After installing this browser and using it for few days you will acknowledge the shift in yourself, as your day to day browsing will become easier and joyful."
UHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH............

Church obsessed with gays - Tutu - ""God is weeping" to see such a focus on sexuality and the Church is "quite rightly" seen by many as irrelevant on the issue of poverty, he said... He said he sometimes felt ashamed of his fellow Anglicans as they focussed obsessively on trying to resolve their disagreement about homosexuality while 30,000 people died each day because of poverty."
"Death to the Infidels!" has always gone down better than "Love Thy Neighbor"

How Rat Meat Becomes a Rarity - "A Reuters article notes that the price of rat meat in Cambodia has quadrupled, even as the overall inflation rate is “only” 37 percent... The rise in price has raised the return to rat catching — so more kids are entering the labor market for rat catchers and are offering rat meat to the market."
I KNEW THEY ATE RAT MEAT IN CAMBODIA!!!

Sexologists Can Infer A Woman's History of Orgasms By The Way She Walks - "The results showed that the appropriately trained sexologists were able to correctly infer vaginal orgasm through watching the way the women walked over 80 percent of the time. Further analysis revealed that the sum of stride length and vertebral rotation was greater for the vaginally orgasmic women. "This could reflect the free, unblocked energetic flow from the legs through the pelvis to the spine," the authors note."

What Happens to Religion When It Is Biologized? - "Cognitivist Justin Barrett identifies as an evangelical Christian and has been an organizer for the youth ministry Young Life. “Why wouldn’t God,” he speculates in an interview, “design us in such a way as to find belief in divinity quite natural?” His book Why Would Anyone Believe in God?, a summary of cognitivist research, spends its concluding chapters suggesting that these theories make a naturalist case against atheism: “Belief in God comes naturally. Disbelief requires human intervention.”... The consequences of biologizing are much more complex and difficult to predict than most scientists have been willing to admit. The assumption that a scientific description of religiosity will inevitably counteract it rests on a model of static identity that has been amply refuted by modern experience."
I love how contrary evidence is taken as affirmative. Doubtless he'd magically invoke "The Fall" for homosexuality, avarice, lust and other forms of "sin"