'Being raped by a gang is normal – it's about craving to be accepted'

How sad is that! 'Being raped by a gang is normal'. This is a really awful indictment of the way today's young black women think and feel. To prostitute yourself just to feel accepted by a bunch of thugs must surely be the bottom rung of an already low ladder. How can otherwise normal healthy women think that acceptance by men who will only abuse them and dominate them sexually is what is the best thing they can hope for. It beggars belief. 

I've just been reading that a female former gang member (pic above) has exposed the growing levels of sexual violence against young women who join them, saying that many are willing to risk being raped in return for the status of membership.

Isha Nembhard, who was part of an 80-strong gang in Peckham, south London, said some girls readily accepted that they would be sexually abused when associating with male gangs. The 20-year-old said that the problem had reached a point where being raped was becoming "normalised" among many young women. "Girls who are getting treated very badly know what they are getting into. They sleep with a boy and the boy asks if she will sleep with all his friends.

"It's about low self-esteem and a craving for attention. Even if they know it's wrong, they will do anything to get acceptance," she said. "A lot of girls are sort of prostituting themselves to have sexual relationships within a gang and get treated in a bad way. For example, she might know about what happens to girls in the gang but still sleeps with all of them just for the status."

Nembhard, who was a teenage drug dealer, said that even those who are abused and called "pieces of shit" by gang members maintained sexual relationships with them because they felt "that they couldn't do better".

What hope then is there for these women if they already think, at such a young age, that this is the best they can do? For me, it's right up there with the common feeling of shame that many Asian women feel when they are raped and think that somehow they were responsible for their rape and general victimisation! Often Pakistani and Indian women are not only shunned by their peers in their communities, but are also made to feel that they are the perpetrators of the crime not the rapist! The world is really messed up! So much for 50 years of Feminism as it's clear that many women still feel completely at the beck and call of men and their sexual whims.

Read more: http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2012/feb/18/being-raped-by-gang-normal

Goats have accents which they pick up from their peers

Where do they get these stories from? You've heard of the North-South divide where there are clear regional differences in things like food, economics, general habits, and accents. This divide tends to translate to a generally harder voicing of consonants and vowels in the mother tongue and can be heard in countries as diverse as Italy, Thailand, the UK and China.

It's surprising then that this also appears to happen among the animal population, well goats anyway and we've always assumed that one goat sounds much like another. But we'd be wrong, claim researchers – because while their vocabulary may be limited, the animals bleat in different accents.They discovered pygmy goats had a distinct bleat according to the herd they lived in, developing a similar sound to their peers as they grew up.

 

The researchers, from Queen Mary, University of London, now believe regional accents among mammals are much more widespread than previously thought.They followed four separate herds of baby pygmy goats, recording them with a hidden microphone over several weeks.

At first, the baby goats stayed with their mothers and siblings and copied their sounds. But as they grew older and formed social groups with their peers – known as ‘creches’ – their voices became more uniform.

You can try to teach them to speak properly... A pygmy goat mother with her three-day-old kid. The young pick up new accents when they start to mix with peers.

This suggests the noises they make can change with their social environment rather than being solely determined by genes, as previously thought.

Dr Elodie Briefer and Dr Alan McElligott recorded the noises made by the goats – all farm-bred in Nottinghamshire – at around a week old and again at around five weeks.

They analysed the sounds they made and discovered each herd had its own ‘accent’. They believe the differences between herds born further apart would be even greater. Dr McElligott said: ‘Goats have a very limited vocal repertoire, they only have a couple of types of call. ‘But yet we found these variations, which suggests they may be a lot more intelligent than we thought. The findings were published in the journal Animal Behaviour.

So now you know: when you see two goats in a field bleating together, like us, they may not be understanding each other because of regional differences!

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2101591/Youve-got-kidding-Remarkable-research-shows-goats-accents-pick-peers.html?ITO=1490

Doctors' radical plan to tackle organ shortage

Now this really is something to get the tongues wagging! In the latest medical news, it's being suggested that in future, patients could be kept alive to become donors, and hearts retrieved from newborn babies if controversial BMA proposals are accepted. This is certainly a radical move and somewhat dystopian.

 

(Photograph: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images)

 

Patients could be kept alive solely so they can become organ donors, hearts could be retrieved from newborn babies for the first time, and body parts could be taken from high-risk donors as part of an urgent medical and ethical revolution to ease Britain's chronic shortage of organs, doctors' leaders say .

Hearts could also be taken from recently deceased patients and restarted in those needing a cardiac transplant, under controversial proposals from the British Medical Association intended to stop up to 1,000 people a year dying because of the country's chronic shortage of organs.

A new BMA report on ways to increase the supply of organs, which it has shown to the Guardian, has revived the intense ethical debate about how far doctors should go to help save the lives of the growing number of patients with organ failure.

While this idea is no doubt well meaning, we have to wonder where it is all leading. It could be that if we say it's permissible to harvest healthy organs from people clinically dead or on the verge of death, that we are reducing the idea of quality of life in favour of quantity. And whatever happened to "dying with dignity"? I don't see much dignity if people are close to popping their clogs and there's a que of people waiting to take over use of their body parts!

Maybe it's only a short time before we go to the equivalent of Sainsburys or TESCOs and order our own kidney replacement or heart transplant. Oh what a terror-ridden world we live in!

Read more: http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2012/feb/13/doctors-radical-plan-organ-shortage

Malaysian Girl Speaks Indonesian After Freak Accident

How does that happen? You go to bed one night having spoken the same mother tongue since birth, then suddenly you wake up and not only are you speaking other languages fluently, but you can no longer speak your own language. Ok, in most cases there's an accident involved, typically a blow to the head which causes mild concussion, but nevertheless, it's still baffling, neigh astonishing that someone can have such a radical linguistic changes in their life!

I just read about a Malaysian teenager can now speak Indonesian and three other languages after being hit by a truck last month and suffering a head injury. Noraini Ismail, 17 now speaks Bahasa Indonesia, Mandarin, Japanese and Korean, even though she’s never learned any of the languages, the New Straits Times reported.

“I am baffled by my sudden ability to speak these languages, but I hope I can retain the ability and develop my language skills,” Noraini told the Malaysian paper in a mixture of Chinese and Indonesian.

Noraini will be in the hospital until Feb. 12, and suffers from frequent headaches. Noraini’s mother Mansena Daud, however, said her daughter could only speak her new found languages from dawn to 6 p.m.

“The language changes every day, and we will only know what language she will speak for the rest of the day after she has performed her subuh prayer in the morning,” Mansena told the paper. She said she had to gesticulate and use crude sign language with her daughter to try and communicate.

It truly shows the power of the human mind and the untapped abilities that we all have latent inside us just waiting for a chance to show themselves.

Read more: http://www.thejakartaglobe.com/seasia/malaysian-girl-speaks-indonesian-after-freak-accident-report/496843

Male spiders break off sex organ to boost paternity

Ouch! That's gotta hurt! I know males will go to great lengths to get a shag but that is just one step too far for me!! 

Apparently, some male spiders voluntarily "castrate" themselves during sex in order to increase their chances of fathering offspring, a new study shows. The males break off the entire sex organ while it is still in the female, allowing it to keep injecting sperm long after they have scuttled away. A quick getaway is understandable; the females often eat their male mates.

 

The red box shows a broken male organ lodged in the female spider

Writing in Biology Letters journal, a team now says castration increases the amount of sperm transferred. This boosts the chances of paternity from this pairing, explaining a behaviour had been a puzzle to biologists because, on the face of things, it renders the spiders sterile.

Breaking off the tip of the palp during sex is fairly common in spiders. It is thought to function as a "plug" to stop other males from later mating with the same female, and potentially fathering offspring with her instead. It also makes sense in light of the female propensity for cannibalising males after sex.

But full emasculation was not considered necessary for making an effective plug.

So scientists had come up with other theories to explain the behaviour, known as the "eunuch phenomenon". These have included the so-called better fighter hypothesis; eunuchs are more aggressive and agile compared with males sporting intact organs. Arms race

But Daiqin Li, from the National University of Singapore, and colleagues decided to test whether castration resulted in continued sperm transfer to females of the Nephilengys malabarensis species. They dissected the spiders and counted sperm from the reproductive parts under a microscope.Their results show that sperm transfer from the broken palp continued after sexual intercourse had been terminated. The longer the broken spider organ was left lodged in the female before its removal, the more sperm were transferred.

They also discovered that while the percentage of organ breakages initiated by the female spider and those initiated by the male spider did not differ greatly, those initiated by the female generally resulted in a shorter intercourse time and fewer sperm transferred.

This reduces the male spider's reproductive potential.

So now you know what you need to do if you want to father lots of offspring!

Read more: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-16816344