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| WOMEN TODAY |
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Dr. Judith Steinberg, an internist in Shelburne, Vt., cherishes her privacy. Fond of taking solo rides along nearby Burlington's lake-hugging bicycle path, the wife of former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean is — by her own account — a private person who has not made a public speech in nearly 20 years and has never given a radio or television interview.
And Steinberg says she has no intention of changing that behavior just because her husband is running for president.
 NYTimes
New York Pursues Old Cases of Rape Based Just on DNA
New York City officials said yesterday that they planned to systematically review biological evidence from hundreds of unsolved sex crimes, with the goal of indicting the unidentified attckers based on their DNA profiles before the 10-year statute of limitations runs out.
The first roughly
600 cases for which evidence will be reviewed concern attacks in 1994, nine years ago. If the indictments are completed before the prosecution clock runs out, law enforcement officials say they believe the person with that DNA can be arrested and prosecuted any time in the future.
The annual State of Our Nation's Youth survey by the Horatio Alger Association shows that spending time with family tops a long list of things students would like to do more often. Family time beats hanging out with friends, listening to music, surfing the Web, doing homework and watching TV.
Christian Science Monitor
Are war toys more acceptable now?
As the parent of a 6-year-old boy, I have avoided buying toy guns and military-themed action figures such as G.I. Joe. Both made me uncomfortable, as a mom who had absorbed the message that little boys who play with war toys can become more aggressive.
One might expect to find these bastions of gender enlightenment in, say, Massachusetts (rated "best for women" last year by one women's group) or Minnesota (home of the nation's first pay-equity law for state government workers).
Instead, they're nestled in rural places few people have visited. And they're led by a small, no-stoplight county called, of all things, King, and located in a patch of north Texas where men still wrangle cattle and NOW refers to time rather than the National Organization for Women.
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WOMEN
INTERNATIONAL |
BBC News
Ban urged on 'sexist' insurance
The European social affairs commissioner Anna Diamantopoulou has told the BBC that women are being punished when they buy insurance because of biological differences to men.
The commissioner, who is championing plans for a new directive on sex discrimination, says insurers should not take account of pregnancy or longer life expectancy when setting premiums.
Conservative critics said that allowing women to seek divorce without their husbands' consent was breaking up families.
"If it was up to me, women would be at home raising their children," said deputy Mahmoud Kharbasheh, quoted by the Jordan Times. He led calls for the law to be thrown out.
King Abdullah II had backed the law and Prime Minister Ali Abu Ragheb defended it in parliament, saying "we are all interested in giving people their due rights".
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| THINKING
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Christian Science Monitor
An ancient find, a modern quest - beauty in a jar
By Marilyn Gardner
In an age when cosmetics represent a $20 billion-plus industry in the United States, there is something oddly appealing about this find. It serves as a reminder that the business of beauty goes back thousands of years. Vanity is hardly a modern invention. The Roman poet Ovid wrote about beauty regimens, including toners and herbal mixes. And Cleopatra of Egypt took honey and milk baths to maintain a youthful appearance.
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| WOMEN'S HEALTH |
USAToday
Commuters drive stress into the workplace
Stressful cimutes spill over to the job: The more hassled drivers feel by their morning commute, the more verbally abusive they are to co-workers and the more they try to sabotage productive efforts, suggest several studies to be released this weekend.
"The most stressed commuters backbite, make cutting remarks, purposely don't return phone calls and do all kinds of passive-aggressive things that interfere with work," says Dwight Hennessy of State University of New York College-Buffalo, who based his findings on a survey of 130 people. "We're not saying they're lunatics, but they sure can throw a wrench into thngs at work."
Washington Post
Despite Downside, Some Women Resume Hormone Use
Like millions of other women, Donna Packard quit taking hormones after hearing that they increased her risk for heart attacks and breast cancer. But three miserable months later, Packard was back on them.
"Within a week, I was having hot flashes during the day and waking up four or five times a night," said Packard, 56, of Ivy, Va. "I was cross, and unpleasant, and disagreeable and irritable. I kept saying, 'It's going to get better. It's going to get better.' But it didn't. Finally, I just said, 'I'm not living the rest of my life this way.' "
NYTimes
First year of Hormone Treatment Is Found to Raise Risk of Heart Attack
Hormone therapy nearly doubles a woman's risk of having a heart attack during her first year of treatment, according to a new report, lending more weight to the idea that its use should be limited to healthy middle-age women seeking temporary relief from the symptoms of menopause.
For these women, researchers said, the risk of heart attack is so low that doubling it does not put them in appreciable danger.
But the findings added to the growing evidence of the risks of estrogen and progestin supplements. And they appeared to have quashed the hope of many physicians that they might be able to sift through the tide of bad news to find some subsets of women for whom hormone replacement might offer heart benefits.
BBC News
The dawn of gender-specific drugs
Some medicines that are safe for men are known to be lethal for some women.
But until recently, many medicines were not tested in women.
Now that they are, more differences between the ways men and women respond to drugs are being discovered all the time.
USAToday
Frantic search is on for memory-loss cures
Worried baby boomers can take heart in new evidence that mental stimulation may help stave off Alzheimer's disease, though there still is no cure. A looming crisis of widespread dementia as boomers age has thrown memory researchers into fast-forward, yielding an explosion of discoveries about prevention and some clues that could lead to cures.
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DESIGN STUDIO |
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NESTLED behind tall bamboo groves two blocks from traffic-clogged Santa Monica Boulevard lies one of the 20th century's architectural treasures, the radically Modernist home that the architect Rudolf M. Schindler built for himself more than 80 years ago.
The Schindler House, revered by designers, draws 10,000 visitors a year. Now, however, it has been caught up in an extraordinary architectural debate as a developer prepares to build a condominium next door.
Metropolis
Relax. Don't Do It
Frank Gehry's voice was low--his words unspooling at a lope, his pauses deliberate and long--but there was a little smile in and around his eyes as he spoke. He knew he was being naughty, and, droit du seigneur, he didn't care. He was in front of a full auditorium three levels deep under the architecture school at Columbia University, giving the second keynote (Rem Koolhaas had delivered the first a month earlier) to kick off a giant conference with a presumptuous name--"The State of Architecture at the Beginning of the 21st Century"--and epochal aims: to record the cultural moment on the occasion of the departure of the school's long-serving dean, Bernard Tschumi. The lights were on, and the slides were waiting; Gehry had preempted his default stump speech to preach abstinence in the bawdy house of form, temperance to the theory-drunk, patience at a school where the professional model is the shooting star: streak, flash, burn out.
USA Today
Gay taste? Here's straight talk
Is it true, as some people believe, that gay men have better taste than their straight brothers?
Is it true that a gay man can stroll through a flea market, find the one and only good thing -- a valuable antique, even -- take it home, clean it up and put it out for all the world to admire?
Queer Eye for the Straight Guy (tonight, 10ET/PT) has been the summer's biggest surprise hit, albeit by Bravo's smaller standards. Still, its 2.8 million viewers last week set a ratings recored for Bravo, leaping from a high of 1.7 million the week before. Seven episodes are being added to the original 12.
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STYLE.COM
Vogue and W online
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NYTimes
Fashion and Art Embrace, in Not Passionately
September is the month when fashion magazines like W load up on clothes. So the portfolio, conceived by Dennis Freedman, W's creative director, is an attempt to break out of the commercial rut that mainstream magazines have dug for themselves. It is also a throwback to an era when art directors like the late Alexander Liberman of Vogue and Alexey Brodovitch of Harper's Bazaar commissioned work from artists, largely in the belief that they were there to sell ideas rather than mere clothes.
Mr. Freedman's main motive, though, was to tap into the interchange between art and fashion, something
that the first Florence Biennale, in 1996, explored in deatail -- through installations by teams of artists and designers like Damien Hirst and Miuccia Prada -- but that magazines, he says, have generally paid lip service to.
Rose Portillo's grandfather left a tiny Texas border hamlet that grew up around a Native American pueblo, became a scenic painter at Paramount, and by the sweat of his brow, bought the Silver Lake Spanish deco she calls home. That was 50 years ago.
There's no telling what her grandfather would make of the place now.
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AMERICAN
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Chistian Science Monitor
Global scourge: synthetic drugs
The dime-a-dozen storage unit in San Gabriel, Calif., yielded a big find: Law-enforcement officials on Sunday uncovered 70 pounds of Asian methamphetamine, carrying a street value of $3 million.
The largest US seizure of the pure and potent Asian variety of the stimulant, it was also the latest evidence of the global rise of powerful synthetic illegal drugs.
USAToday
'Moving West is no longer the norm
The exodus of millions of people from California and New York in the late 1990s may signal the end of the nation's traditional settlement patterns from East to West.
A series of reports released by the Census Bureau today shows that most of the people who moved out of New York are going to suburbs in New Jersey and Connecticut or to retirement havens and fast-growing job centers in the Southeast. Most of the people leaving California are going to other Western states such as Nevade, Arizona, Oregon, Washington and Colorado.
Washington Post
'Survivor' Meets Sitcom in Calif.
So far, more than 200 Californians have picked up filing papers for a candidacy in the recall. Elections officials statewide are trembling as they await Saturday's deadline to enter the race. The ballot, they fear, may be a mosh pit.
The looming election also is producing a multitude of political stunts and hijinks. In Silicon Valley, a former software engineer is trying to entice 1,000 people to enter the race this week in the hope that such a flood of candidates would overload the ballot and stop the election.
NYTimes
Hispanics in U.S. Report Optimism
A new survey of the nation's Hispanics finds they are far more optimistic about life in the United States and their children's prospects than are non-Latinos, despite the fact that many are much poorer and many do not intend to gain the full benefits of citizenship.
The New York Times/CBS poll found that nearly 70 percent of foreign-born Hispanics say they identify more with the United States than with their country of origin., Still, many continue to send money tof amily members even though they rarely visit their home countries.
Christian Science Monitor
Firebrands of 'ecoterrorism' set sights on urban sprawl
Environmental activism's darker side is turning from wild nature to the urban jungle. Among its targets: posh housing developments, car dealerships hawking sport utility vehicles, and military-recruiting stations.
The latest attack came last weekend when a large condominium project under construction in an upscale San Diego neighborhood burned to the ground. A banner stretched across the charred site read: "If you build it - we will burn it. The E.L.F.s are mad." In e-mails to regional newspapers, the Environmental Liberation Front (ELF) claimed responsibility for the conflagration that also damaged nearby homes.
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PBS
FRONTLINE
serious tv journalism
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Economist
Chasing the dream
EVERYBODY loves a fat pay rise. Yet over the past half-century, as developed economies have got much richer, people do not seem to have become happier. Surveys suggest that, on average, people in America, Europe and Japan are no more pleased with their lot than in the 1950s. This is curious, because at any given time richer people say they are happier than poorer people do. For instance, 37% of the richest quarter of Americans claim to be “very happy”, compared with only 16% of the poorest quarter. That might lead you to expect that, as a country grows richer and incomes rise, rich and poor alike would become happier. However, they have not. Here lies a paradox: an individual who becomes richer becomes happier; but when society as a whole grows richer, nobody seems any more content.
Christian Science Monitor
Is Sin In?
When Pope Gregory I refined the list of seven deadly sins toward the end of the 6th century, he never guessed that one day they'd become ice cream flavors.
But 1,400 years later, people can lick gluttony off a stick while they ponder that particular sin and its infamous brethren - anger, pride, envy, sloth, lust, and greed.
MSNBC
Gay rights loom large on U.S. agenda
A sudden convergence of events has pushed the issue of the place of gays and lesbians in American society to the top of the political agenda. The Episcopal Church’s election of a New Hampshire cleric as the denomination’s first openly gay bishop comes on the heels of a far-reaching Supreme Court gay rights decision and the rise of Democratic presidential contender Howard Dean, who signed the nation’s first civil unions bill to give gays and lesbians the same rights as heterosexual married couples.
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LATimes
Film Wholesaler Charged With Obscenity
Federal prosecutors said today they have charged a North Hollywood wholesaler of adult films with violating federal obscenity laws as the government steps up a campaign against the major distributors of adult entetainment.
The U.S. Justice Department said that its 10-count indictment against Extreme Associates and its owners is part of a renewed enforcement of federal obscenity laws after more than a decade in which they were rarely imposed. Several more prosecutions of "major purveyors and producers of adult obscenity" are expected in the coming months, the government said in a statement
The federal indictment handed down by a federal grand jury in Pittsburgh charges Extreme Associates and its owners with illegally distributing such allegedly obscene films as "Extreme Teen #24" and "Forced Entry - Directors Cut," which depicts the rapes and murders of several women. Prosecutors said the company was the subject of a "Frontline" documentary that aired on PBS in February.
Ladies Home Journal/Harvard Women's Health Watch
Female Sexual Dysfunction
While it's perceived as an issue affecting men, sexual dysfunction is more common in women, and there's no "magic pill" at this time.
Researchers have been gathering information on our sexual behavior for half a century. By now, there is quite a lot of data on what we do but little indication of the amount of satisfaction we get from doing it. For many years, studies on sexual dysfunction concentrated on men, and the results indicated that about 30% of American males experience it to some degree. One of the first major studies to include both genders suggests that an even greater proportion of women -- 43% -- have sex lives that are less than ideal.
The death of the director John Schlesinger was a reminder that the adult-rated studio film also seems to have died. But it perished long ago.
Schlesinger's "Midnight Cowboy" of 1969 became the only X-rated film to win an Academy Award for best picture. (And Schlesinger won for best director.) Four years later Bernardo Bertolucci was the last director to be nominated for an X-rated film, "Last Tango in Paris," which also got Marlon Brando a best-actor nomination.
Both films were made by directors betting their hearts to bring their art to the screen and delivering material that didn't sink to the sordid, superficial level of sex movies on Cinemax at 4 a.m. And both were released by a major studio, the filmmaker-friendly United Artists.
NYTimes
Double Lives on the Down Low
Rejecting a gay culture they perceive as white and effeminate, many black men have settled on a new identity, with its own vocabulary and customs and its own name: Down Low. There have always been men -- black and white -- who have had secret sexual lives with men. But the creation of an organized, underground subculture largely made up of black men who otherwise live straight lives is a phenomenon of the last decade. Many of the men at Flex tonight --0 and many of the black men I met these past months in Cleveland, Atlanta, Florida, New York and Boston -- are on the Down Low, or on the DL, as they more often call it. Most date or marry women and engage sexually with men they meet only in anonymous settings like bathhouses and parks or through the Internet. Many of these men are young and from the inner city, where they live in a hyper masculine "thug" culture. Other DL men form romantic relationships with men and may even be peripheral articipants in mainstream gay culture, all unknown to their colleagues and families. Most DL men identify themselves not as gay or bisexual but first and foremost as black. To them, as to many blacks, that equates to being inherently masculine.
Chicago Sun-Times
Men born to fool around, researcher says
Men are just born to be wild.
They want more sexual partners than women do. And they want to jump into the sack quicker than women do. It doesn't matter whether the men are married, single, straight, gay or bisexual.
It's in the genes, man.
Those are essentially the findings of a Downstate researcher who has just published a study based on surveys of 16,288 people. He studied men and women from 52 countries on six continents and 13 islands. And everywhere it was the same:
Oakland Tribune
Study: Active lifestyle delays onset of sexual dysfunction
A new study finds men suffer more from sexual dysfunction as they age, but that such problems can be delayed among those who lead an active, healthy lifestyle.
Researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health assessed the sexual function of 31,742 men ages 53 to 90. Thirty-three percent of participants reported experiencing erectile dysfunction, the inability to have and maintain an erection sufficient for intercourse, in the previous three months.
But men who reported they were physically active, defined as running three hours or more a week or playing singles tennis five hours a week, reported a 30 percent lower risk of erectile dysfunction compared to men in the study who reported little or no physical activity.
Have you seen the ad? It's just one example of hundreds of commercials for herbal male enhancement pills hitting the airwaves these days, "What did he get? A boost in confidence, more self esteem and a very happy Mrs. at home."
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