What we need is kittens - and babies

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Say NO to OsamaHealth

Say hello KITTEH!!!

Edited September 28, 2009 by Madame Cleo

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Osama can't stop the international currency tide that's turning!

America must brace itself for the dollar to be usurped as the world's reserve currency as US dominance wanes in the wake of the financial crisis, World Bank president Robert Zoellick warns today.

Speaking ahead of the World Bank/IMF annual meetings in Istanbul, Zoellick said that it was time for a "responsible globalisation", in which decision-making is more fairly shared between the old economic powers and fast-growing developing countries such as China and India.

Ever since the post-war Bretton Woods agreement, which cemented the dollar's ascendancy over sterling, Americans have been able to rely on borrowing cheaply from the rest of the world as governments banked on the dollar as a safe bet. But Zoellick said the greenback's status could now be under threat from the growing strength of the Chinese renminbi and the euro.

"The United States would be mistaken to take for granted the dollar's place as the world's predominant reserve currency. Looking forward, there will increasingly be other options to the dollar," Zoellick told an audience at Johns Hopkins University in Washington .

From now on, he said, confidence in the US currency - and its economy - would have to be earned. "The future for the United States will depend on whether and how it will address large deficits, recover without inflation that could undermine its credit and currency, and overhaul its financial system."

Zoellick's comments came as Beijing launched the first renminbi-denominated bond available to outside investors, as it gradually makes its currency more exchangeable on international markets.

"I expect China will inevitably be drawn outward," he said. "Over 10 to 20 years, the renminbi will evolve into a force in financial markets." Several countries, including China and Russia, have repeatedly raised what they see as the problem of excessive dollar hegemony.

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Italian conservatives tell it like it is:

The Italian prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, has repeated his reference to Barack Obama's "tan" – and this time made a wisecrack about Michelle Obama's skin colour, too.

Berlusconi told a Milan rally of conservative supporters yesterday that he was bringing greetings from the United States from "What's his name? Some tanned guy. Ah, Barack Obama!"

He added: "You won't believe it, but two of them went to the beach, because the wife is also tanned."

Last week photographs showed Michelle Obama greeting many leaders at the G20 summit in Pittsburgh summit with a kiss but stiffly holding out her arm for a handshake when she came to greet Berlusconi.

Pictures show Berlusconi gazing at Mrs Obama's gown, instead of her face, and holding his arms out as if in delight at what he sees, while the US president looks on, apparently not amused.

Berlusconi has been on the defensive over a sex scandal that erupted last spring after his wife complained that the 72-year-old prime minister was infatuated with young women and announced she was divorcing him.

Prosecutors in the southern Italian city of Bari are investigating as a suspect in a cocaine investigation a local businessman who has said he sent some 30 young women to dinners and parties at Berlusconi's Rome palazzo and Sardinian villa. The businessman told investigators he paid the women's expenses and in some cases extra money in case they had sex with the prime minister.

Berlusconi was unaware of these arrangements, the businessman said. The prime minister, who is not under investigation in the scandal, has denied ever paying for sex.

At yesterday's rally, Berlusconi also said that the cordial relationship between the US and Italy was intact. He delivered a backhanded compliment to the US president when referring to Obama's use of a teleprompter in public speeches: "He's not reckless like those of us who say what comes to mind. We all asked ourselves: 'Does he know what he's doing, or is he just someone who knows how to read well?'

"But he's all there, in a big way, and that should make us all happy and satisfied because we need the greatest democracy, the greatest country, to be in trustworthy hands," Berlusconi said.

:lol:

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This picture is hilarious

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Do you want to know why women have sex with men with tiny little feet? I am stroking a book called Why Women Have Sex. It is by Cindy Meston, a clinical psychologist, and David Buss, an evolutionary psychologist. It is a very thick, bulging book. I've never really wondered Why Women Have Sex. But after years of not asking the question, the answer is splayed before me.

Meston and Buss have interviewed 1,006 women from all over the world about their sexual motivation, and in doing so they have identified 237 different reasons why women have sex. Not 235. Not 236. But 237. And what are they? From the reams of confessions, it emerges that women have sex for physical, emotional and material reasons; to boost their self-esteem, to keep their lovers, or because they are raped or coerced. Love? That's just a song. We are among the bad apes now.

Why, I ask Meston, have people never really talked about this? Alfred Kinsey, the "father" of sexology, asked 7,985 people about their sexual histories in the 1940s and 50s; Masters and Johnson observed people having orgasms for most of the 60s. But they never asked why. Why?

"People just assumed the answer was obvious," Meston says. "To feel good. Nobody has really talked about how women can use sex for all sorts of resources." She rattles off a list and as she says it, I realise I knew it all along: "promotion, money, drugs, bartering, for revenge, to get back at a partner who has cheated on them. To make themselves feel good. To make their partners feel bad." Women, she says, "can use sex at every stage of the relationship, from luring a man into the relationship, to try and keep a man so he is fulfilled and doesn't stray. Duty. Using sex to get rid of him or to make him jealous."

"We never ever expected it to be so diverse," she says. "From the altruistic to the borderline evil." Evil? "Wanting to give someone a sexually transmitted infection," she explains. I turn to the book. I am slightly afraid of it. Who wants to have their romantic fantasies reduced to evolutional processes?

The first question asked is: what thrills women? Or, as the book puts it: "Why do the faces of Antonio Banderas and George Clooney excite so many women?"

We are, apparently, scrabbling around for what biologists call "genetic benefits" and "resource benefits". Genetic benefits are the genes that produce healthy children. Resource benefits are the things that help us protect our healthy children, which is why women sometimes like men with big houses. Jane Eyre, I think, can be read as a love letter to a big house.

"When a woman is sexually attracted to a man because he smells good, she doesn't know why she is sexually attracted to that man," says Buss. "She doesn't know that he might have a MHC gene complex complimentary to hers, or that he smells good because he has symmetrical features."

So Why Women Have Sex is partly a primer for decoding personal ads. Tall, symmetrical face, cartoonish V-shaped body? I have good genes for your brats. Affluent, GSOH – if too fond of acronyms – and kind? I have resource benefits for your brats. I knew this already; that is how Bill Clinton got sex, despite his astonishing resemblance to a moving potato. It also explains why Vladimir Putin has become a sex god and poses topless with his fishing rod.

Then I learn why women marry accountants; it's a trade-off. "Clooneyish" men tend to be unfaithful, because men have a different genetic agenda from women – they want to impregnate lots of healthy women. Meston and Buss call them "risk-taking, womanising 'bad boys'". So, women might use sex to bag a less dazzling but more faithful mate. He will have fewer genetic benefits but more resource benefits that he will make available, because he will not run away. This explains why women marry accountants. Accountants stick around – and sometimes they have tiny little feet!

And so to the main reason women have sex. The idol of "women do it for love, and men for joy" lies broken on the rug like a mutilated sex toy: it's orgasm, orgasm, orgasm. "A lot of women in our studies said they just wanted sex for the pure physical pleasure," Meston says. Meston and Buss garnish this revelation with so much amazing detail that I am distracted. I can't concentrate. Did you know that the World Health Organisation has a Women's Orgasm Committee? That "the G-spot" is named after the German physician Ernst Gräfenberg? That there are 26 definitions of orgasm?

And so, to the second most important reason why women have sex – love. "Romantic love," Meston and Buss write, "is the topic of more than 1,000 songs sold on iTunes." And, if people don't have love, terrible things can happen, in literature and life: "Cleopatra poisoned herself with a snake and Ophelia went mad and drowned." Women say they use sex to express love and to get it, and to try to keep it.

Love: an insurance policy

And what is love? Love is apparently a form of "long-term commitment insurance" that ensures your mate is less likely to leave you, should your legs fall off or your ovaries fall out. Take that, Danielle Steele – you may think you live in 2009 but your genes are still in the stone age, with only chest hair between you and a bloody death. We also get data which confirms that, due to the chemicals your brain produces – dopamine, norepinephrine and phenylethylamine – you are, when you are in love, technically what I have always suspected you to be – mad as Stalin.

And is the world mad? According to surveys, which Meston and Buss helpfully whip out from their inexhaustible box of every survey ever surveyed, 73% of Russian women are in love, and 63% of Japanese women are in love. What percentage of women in north London are in love, they know not. But not as many men are in love. Only 61% of Russian men are in love and only 41% of Japanese men are in love. Which means that 12% of Russian women and 22% of Japanese women are totally wasting their time.

And then there is sex as man-theft. "Sometimes men who are high in mate value are in relationships or many of them simply pursue a short-term sexual strategy and don't want commitment," Buss explains. "There isn't this huge pool of highly desirable men just sitting out there waiting for women." It's true. So how do we liberate desirable men from other women? We "mate poach". And how do we do that? We "compete to embody what men want" – high heels to show off our pelvises, lip-gloss to make men think about vaginas, and we see off our rivals with slander. We spread gossip – "She's easy!" – because that makes the slandered woman less inviting to men as a long-term partner. She may get short-term genetic benefits but she can sing all night for the resource benefits, like a cat sitting out in the rain. Then – then! – the gossiper mates with the man herself.

We also use sex to "mate guard". I love this phrase. It is so evocative an image – I can see a man in a cage, and a woman with a spear and a bottle of baby oil. Women regularly have sex with their mates to stop them seeking it elsewhere. Mate guarding is closely related to "a sense of duty", a popular reason for sex, best expressed by the Meston and Buss interviewee who says: "Most of the time I just lie there and make lists in my head. I grunt once in a while so he knows I'm awake, and then I tell him how great it was when it's over. We are happily married."

Women often mate guard by flaunting healthy sexual relationships. "In a very public display of presumed rivalry," Meston writes, "in 2008 singer and actress Jessica Simpson appeared with her boyfriend, Dallas Cowboys quarterback Tony Romo, wearing a shirt with the tagline Real Girls Eat Meat. Fans interpreted it as a competitive dig at Romo's previous mate, who is a vegetarian."

Meston and Buss also explain why the girls in my class at school went down like dominoes in 1990. One week we were maidens, the following week, we were not. We were, apparently, having sex to see if we liked it, so we could tell other schoolgirls that we had done it and to practise sexual techniques: "As a woman I don't want to be a dead fish," says one female. Another interviewee wanted to practise for her wedding night.

The authors lubricate this with a description of the male genitalia, again food themed. I include it because I am immature. "In Masters & Johnson's [1966] study of over 300 flaccid penises the largest was 5.5 inches long (about the size of a bratwurst sausage); the smallest non-erect ####### was 2.25 inches (about the size of a breakfast sausage)."

Ever had sex out of pity and wondered why? "Women," say Meston and Buss, "for the most part, are the ones who give soup to the sick, cookies to the elderly and . . . sex to the forlorn." "Tired, but he wanted it," says one female. Pause for more amazing detail: fat people are more likely to stay in a relationship because no one else wants them.

Women also mate to get the things they think they want – drugs, handbags, jobs, drugs. "The degree to which economics plays out in sexual motivations," Buss says, "surprised me. Not just prostitution. Sex economics plays out even in regular relationships. Women have sex so that the guy would mow the lawn or take out the garbage. You exchange sex for dinner." He quotes some students from the University of Michigan. It is an affluent university, but 9% of students said they had "initiated an attempt to trade sex for some tangible benefit".

Medicinal sex

Then there is sex to feel better. Women use sex to cure their migraines. This is explained by the release of endormorphins during sex – they are a pain reliever. Sex can even help relieve period pains. (Why are periods called periods? Please, someone tell me. Write in.)

Women also have sex because they are raped, coerced or lied to, although we have defences against deception – men will often copulate on the first date, women on the third, so they will know it is love (madness). Some use sex to tell their partner they don't want them any more – by sleeping with somebody else. Some use it to feel desirable; some to get a new car. There are very few things we will not use sex for. As Meston says, "Women can use sex at every stage of the relationship."

And there you have it – most of the reasons why women have sex, although, as Meston says, "There are probably a few more." Probably. Before I read this book I watched women eating men in ignorance. Now, when I look at them, I can hear David Attenborough talking in my head: "The larger female is closing in on her prey. The smaller female has been ostracised by her rival's machinations, and slinks away." The complex human race has been reduced in my mind to a group of little apes, running around, rutting and squeaking.

I am not sure if I feel empowered or dismayed. I thought that my lover adored me. No – it is because I have a symmetrical face. "I love you so much," he would say, if he could read his evolutionary impulses, "because you have a symmetrical face!" "Oh, how I love the smell of your compatible genes!" I would say back. "Symmetrical face!" "Compatible genes!" "Symmetrical face!" "Compatible genes!" And so we would osculate (kiss). I am really just a monkey trying to survive. I close the book.

I think I knew that.

WHY DO WOMEN HAVE SEX?????

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DAVID LOWE

THERE'S a chill in the air on the Kilwilkie estate, but it isn't the fresh autumn breeze.

A threatening gun-toting figure was recently emblazoned on the peeling walls in this warren of neglected streets in troubled Lurgan, Northern Ireland.

Beneath are the letters CIRA - Continuity IRA. This is one of three increasingly active dissident Republican groups - the Real IRA, Oglaigh na hEireann and the CIRA - opposed to the peace process and intent on plunging the province back into chaos.

When three local men were sentenced to 15 years earlier this month for plotting to kill police officers with a mortar bomb, the protests which erupted in Kilwilkie were a violent blast from the past.

For three days cars and trucks were hijacked and set alight while children as young as 13 ran wild with guns, apparently supported by hard-line anti-British elders.

Fear is growing that impressionable youngsters are being recruited by dissidents with little popular support in a desperate attempt to derail the peace process.

It's 9am and there's a rush on scratchcards and papers in Magill's shop on the Kilwilkie estate.

Locals are understandably reluctant to talk about the violence that has left the road outside scarred with potholes and scorch marks.

One friendly man, in his 60s, has lived here for nearly 40 years. He says: "It's terrible - 95 per cent of people in Kilwilkie don't support these thugs.

"They talk about being Republicans, but they're nothing of the sort. I can't believe how many youngsters were in the crowd during the riots. I'm certain drink and drugs play a role.

"Things had improved on the estate over the last few years. Burning out cars and blocking roads belong in the past.

"Most folk here want to give the peace process a go. When you see young people instead opting for violence, it makes you wonder what the future holds."

Sinead, in her 20s, grew up in Kilwilkie, but has since moved away. She says: "My mum lives here. She's a pensioner.

"She's had to put up with cars being nicked and set on fire outside. Young people are involved, which shows there's a lot of bitterness in some families. Otherwise, where would teens learn to get involved in violence?

"My sister had a baby recently but we told her not to bring him up here. She moved rather than stay where there's so much resentment to the peace process."

That Kilwilkie is no place to raise a child is clear for all to see.

Tattered Irish tricolour flags flap forlornly from every lamp post, while the streets are strewn with litter and graffiti. The playground has been vandalised with paint and most of the swings have been ripped out.

Dolores Kelly, 50, is the Social Democratic And Labour Party councillor for Upper Bann, primarily supported by moderate Catholics. She was threatened by a dissident masked gunman in Kilwilkie while canvassing for the European Elections in May.

She says: "I was approached by a group of young men in their late teens or early 20s.

"One of them wore a balaclava and was holding an air gun. He said if I didn't get off the estate I'd be shot. It was frightening and a total disgrace to the community.

"I spoke to old people in Kilwilkie who lock their doors at 4pm because they're scared of who might come knocking. Wheelie bins are often nicked and filled up with stolen heating oil.

"Residents are reluctant to call police because there's a risk of a mob forming when officers arrive."

While Lurgan has seen the worst violence in recent weeks, trouble has also flared in Londonderry and nearby Craigavon. And a massive 600lb bomb was discovered in Meigh, Co Armagh, last month fuelling fears the outlawed Oglaigh na hEireann (Warriors of Ireland) had recruited an explosives expert.

There were also concerns of a major dissident attack to coincide with the appointment last Tuesday of Matt Baggott as the new Chief Constable of the Police Service of Northern Ireland.

The force reacted by stepping up road checks and patrols in a campaign called Operation Dissent.

For Dolores and her colleagues on the Northern Ireland Assembly, longer term solutions are needed if dissidents are to be beaten. She says: "Young people are being drawn into violence in what I see as another form of child abuse.

"They're graduating from throwing stones to throwing petrol bombs to making explosive devices.

"Many of these teenagers were born after the first IRA ceasefire in 1994. More needs to be done for those in at-risk areas to make sure their hearts and minds are won for peace and not dissident Republicanism."

The MP for the area is Democratic Unionist David Simpson, who is mainly supported by the Protestant community. He has also called for the radicalisation of Catholic youths to stop.

David, 50, says: "I fear that what is going on in parts of my constituency is that young impressionable men are having their minds poisoned and filled with hatred by older men.

"Having indoctrinated these teenagers, they send them out to engage in crimes, maintaining a safe distance for themselves.

"We must protect the hard-won stability of recent years from those who would seek to destroy it and drag Ulster back into bloodshed."

One of the most shocking attacks during recent trouble involved a mum and teenage son whose horse lorry was hijacked at gunpoint.

Near the Kilwilkie estate, the two were told a bomb had been strapped to their vehicle and to drive to the local police station.

After the gang fled, the woman instead drove a short distance before calling the cops who found nothing suspicious.

The Sun heard about a near identical incident in July, which was never made public.

Although the young lorry driver involved was too scared to speak for fear of reprisals, he passed on the story through a local source.

The source said: "Someone called up posing as a customer who needed a truck.

"Outside the address in the Kilwilkie estate a gunman put a pistol to the driver's head and told him to get back in the cab.

"They claimed there was a bomb on the lorry and demanded it be driven to Lurgan police station.

"Instead the driver went to an industrial estate where no one was around. Thankfully the bomb was just a gas canister."

Back on the Kilwilkie estate, the shutters are down at Magill's and residents are drawing curtains and locking doors as dusk falls.

The new dawn in Northern Ireland is still a long way off.

SunLink

Edited September 28, 2009 by Madame Cleo

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The strange case of Roman Polanski

Olivia Cole 12:11pm

While there is probably no subject a US politician would like to discuss less than underage sex, within hours of the arrest of the director Roman Polanski, a French citizen, President Sarkozy, has called for a "rapid solution." What could be a better demonstration of the difference in French and US attitudes to their artists? In 1978, having already made the films for which he is best known (Rosemary's Baby, Macbeth and Chinatown), Polish-born Polanski fled the US after admitting having sex with a minor, Samantha Geimer. Geimer has since called for the charges against him to be dropped. In February this year, she said "Every time this case is brought to the attention of the court, great focus is made of me, my family, my mother and others. The attention is not pleasant to experience and is not worth maintaining over some irrelevant legal nicety, the continuation of the case."

You can see her point. Even the sketchiest grasp of the facts - a photo shoot for Vogue, for an issue guest edited by Polanski, and which required the 13 year-old spending hours alone with a stranger - makes you wonder, of course, at Polanski, but in a notoriously exploitative business, at the thinking of Samantha's mother too. 30 years on, it's perhaps no surprise that Geimer would prefer events not be picked over again.

While the French, who have always had a more relaxed attitude to the excesses of their artists - from being the first country to publish Joyce's Ulysses and Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, to entertaining a first lady who writes albums about the number of her ex-lovers - whip themselves into an outraged Left-bank frenzy, it's very hard to see how Polanski can possibly be helped by anyone in the US. After all this time (Polanski has a house in Gstaad) the motives this week of the Swiss authorities are a mystery.

The buck stops with the French - he's a French citizen but, however persuasive their arguments, surely the Swiss authorities wouldn't have agreed to arrest him, only to change their minds? Any intervention from an American politician, on the international stage, may look humane, but is likely to be seen as inexplicable from a domestic perspective. A messy case of underage sex and the life of fugitives - both victim and perpetrator, pursued their whole life by what happened in 1977 - has the potential to become a diplomatic row of such complexity and emotiveness that it's hard to see how Polanski stands a chance.

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