Newsround

It’s kind of slow season over here in the news department and if it’s not: Wolves run rampage in the Alps, followed by images of the concerned faces of many lopsided farmers and corpses of fluffy sheep then it’s scenes of utter destruction as more rivers break their banks in the UK. So these articles caught my eye:

Flirting and Fornication tells of the runaway success of the online dating site Meetic. Did you know for instance that it was French? I didn’t. Did you also know that:

In France alone, 5 million people spend precious hours chatting every day, flirting, meeting and fornicating with perfect strangers.

No, moi non plus, but what I was more interested in was that last year their profits rose by 70% to £18m, kind of makes you wish that you had thought of it first hey? On the down side this 25 year old Parisian had this to say (just imagine the accent):

"I have no more time to waste trying to charm girls in cafes ... the process is too long and too arduous.. With Meetic ... I often score on the first date. Not long ago, when I was a teenager, girls kept me salivating for weeks. Forget it."

Do you think someone should tell him he’s going to end up a 35 year old single man?

Sex discrimination rife and equality will take generations, says axed commission, is pretty much what it says it’s about.
20% of MPs are women and it will take 195 years to close the gap.
40% of women have less pension than men and it will take 45 years to close that gap.
38% of women earn less in full time jobs than men and that gap will take 25 years to close.
17% of women earn less in part time jobs and it will take 20 years to close the gap.
The Equal Opportunities Commission goes on to say:

‘...we are living with the consequences of an unfinished social revolution. We are still faced with many workplaces, institutions and services designed for an age when women stayed at home. In other areas of modern life, inequality underpins life and death issues. For example, every month seven women are killed by their partner or ex-partner.’

If that is too depressing for you then my suggestion is that you stock up on your winter woollies and move to Finland. When I was studying a few years ago I read an article about high achieving women there. Throughout their lives they had grown up with a sense of egalitarianism and that all their achievements were valued. It was these two things which differentiated them from their other western counterparts. Also as a link to the next article, Finland is one of the cleanest countries (if not the cleanest) regarding carbon emissions.

Ethical shopping is just another way of showing how rich you are is an interesting look at man’s obsession with shopping. But as Monibot says: No political challenge can be met by shopping. The rest of the article is quite interesting too, I didn’t know that you could get recycled biros for a start. His website also seems to be full of interesting little gems too.

Lastly this review caught my eye:

The Simpsons movie gives you everything you could possibly want, and maybe it's a victim of its own gargantuan accomplishment. Eighty-five minutes is not long enough to do justice to 17 years of comedy genius. It's still great stuff.

Peter Bradshaw gushes. I think he wants us to go see it.