NAPLES (Reuters) – One of Italy’s most infamous mobsters has fathered a daughter more than two decades after being jailed for life without the right to conjugal visits.

The miracle of sorts is thanks to a legal battle that allowed Raffaele Cutolo, a former boss of the Naples-based Camorra crime organization, the right to father a child through artificial insemination.

It was a first for Italy, where mob bosses are expected to serve “hard time” once they are brought to justice.

“I’ll die in prison. My last wish is to give my wife a child,” Cutolo told newspaper La Repubblica last year.

Cutolo married his wife, appropriately named “Immacolata” or “Immaculate” in prison in 1983, but the two never consummated the marriage, according to news reports.

Tuesday, at a Naples hospital, she delivered a baby girl named Denise. Mother and daughter are healthy.

Cutolo is currently serving multiple life sentences for murder. He was married before and fathered a son, who died in a gangland shoot-out in the 1990s at the age of 25.

Immacolata, asked about her daughter’s future, said Denise would lead a life far from the Camorra.

“I want her to never even hear that word pronounced, because it is synonymous with pain for everybody,” she told La Repubblica.

BANGKOK (AFP) – A campaign is underway to chastise Myanmar’s military regime, not through dialogue or sanctions, but by flooding the country’s foreign embassies with women’s underwear, an activist said Thursday.

A pro-democracy group based in the northern Thai city of Chiang Mai is urging people all over the world to “post, deliver or fling” their undergarments to Myanmar’s international embassies.

“The Burma military regime is not only brutal but very superstitious. They believe that contact with a woman’s panties or sarong can rob them of their power,” the Lanna Action for Burma group said on its website.

The generals who rule Myanmar, previously known as Burma, provoked international outcry in September when they violently cracked down on peaceful protesters, killing at least 13 people.

Europe and the United States led the chorus of disapproval, announcing new sanctions against the regime.

Despite the outcry and a United Nations statement deploring the crackdown and urging dialogue, the junta has shown little sign of moving any closer towards democracy or freeing opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi.

Those behind the so-called “Panty Power” campaign hope that lingerie can succeed where international diplomacy has so far failed.

“We want to raise awareness first, and we want to target the Burmese government officials, letting them know we are against them abusing their power,” said Tomoko, an activist with Lanna Action for Burma.

Tomoko, who goes by one name only, said she had heard that Myanmar embassies in Thailand, Australia and the United States had been targeted by the Panty Power campaign, which began last week.

WATERFORD, Conn. – A 34-year-old woman has been charged with using the Internet to try to get revenge on an old boyfriend by breaking up his marriage. Pilar Stofega has been charged with second-degree harassment and breach of peace and released on $2,500 bond.

Waterford police say she created phony profiles of the former boyfriend’s current wife on some adult Web sites that included the wife’s home and work phone numbers and high school yearbook picture.

Stofega said she did to it “to be vindictive, knowing that the profiles would create marital problems between” the victim and her husband, according to court documents.

The plot came to life when strange men started calling a Waterford woman’s house over the summer, saying they had seen her profile on an adult Web site.

The man Stofega had dated eight years ago used his own computer to investigate and discovered someone had created a profile for his wife on several Internet sites, according to court records.

Police say the husband did more online investigating and was able to find out that the person behind the phony profiles of his wife was the woman he dated in 1999. He passed the information on to Waterford police, leading to Stofega’s arrest last week.

Waterford police got a court order to seize Stofega’s Internet records. They reviewed the account records before searching her house in late September.

Stofega was at the house when police served the warrant. Officers said she provided them with a sworn written statement in which she admitted to intentionally creating the profiles in the victim’s likeness on the adult Web sites.

Stofega is scheduled to appear in New London Superior Court on Monday. Court records did not list an attorney and her phone number was not listed.

LA PAZ (Reuters) – Prostitutes in the Bolivian city of El Alto sewed their lips together Wednesday as part of a hunger strike to demand that the mayor reopen brothels and bars ordered closed after violent protests by residents last week.

“We are fighting for the right to work and for our families’ survival,” Lily Cortez, leader of the El Alto Association of Nighttime Workers, told local television.

“Tomorrow we will bury ourselves alive if we are not immediately heard. The mayor will have his conscience to answer to if there are any grave consequences, such as the death of my comrades,” she said, surrounded by about 10 prostitutes who had sewn their lips together with thread.

Some 30 other women were shown fasting inside a medical clinic nearby.

Mayor Fanor Nava told local radio he would not reopen the brothels and bars closed after city residents fed up with underage drinking and crime stormed the red-light district in El Alto, an impoverished city just north of La Paz.

Prostitution in Bolivia is legal but pimping is outlawed.

Student activists who want the bars and brothels permanently shut down were also on a hunger strike, along with the leaders of an association representing bars, restaurants and karaoke establishments.

“It’s not only us owners and the sex workers who are affected, there are thousands of waiters, cooks, bartenders, taxi drivers and street vendors who will be without income,” said Ramiro Orellana, spokesman for the business group.

El Alto is one of the largest urban areas in Bolivia, with nearly 1 million inhabitants, mostly Aymara and Quechua Indians.

CANBERRA (Reuters) – An Australian barmaid has been fined for crushing beer cans between her bare breasts while an off-duty colleague has been fined for hanging spoons from her friend’s nipples, police said Wednesday.

Police in Western Australia said the 31-year old barmaid pleaded guilty in the local magistrate’s court to twice exposing her breasts to patrons at the Premier Hotel in Pinjarra, south of the state capital, Perth.

The woman “is alleged to have also crushed beer cans between her breasts during one of the offences,” in breach of hotel licensing laws, police from the Peel district of Western Australia said in a statement.

The barmaid and the hotel manager were both fined A$1,000 ($900), while an off-duty barmaid was fined A$500 for helping to hang spoons from the woman’s nipples, police said.

“It sends a clear message to all licensees in Peel that we will not tolerate this type of behavior in our licensed premises,” local police superintendent David Parkinson said.

CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa – A man was arrested after a government agent allegedly found him in an office building restroom lying next to an inflatable, anatomically correct doll with his pants down. Craig S. McCullough, 47, was charged Wednesday with indecent exposure, a misdemeanor.

The criminal complaint against McCullough says he was discovered in the public restroom by an agent for the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency, which is one of the federal agencies that rents space in the Hach office building.

McCullough was arrested, and Cedar Rapids police took him to the Linn County jail. His arraignment was scheduled later Friday, police spokeswoman Cristy Hamblin said.

Another agency has an outstanding warrant against McCullough, but the reason for that warrant was not immediately clear, Hamblin said. He was still in jail Friday morning and it wasn’t clear if he had an attorney.

McCullough’s criminal record includes a 2004 conviction for burglarizing Just For Me bridal boutique. Shortly after the burglary, police officers found McCullough in a nearby alley, carrying a mannequin wearing a bridal dress.

MONTGOMERY, Ala. – The bride might have been tipped off on the honeymoon: The newlyweds went to the Smoky Mountains, where they slept in separate tents. Then there was the husband’s complaint about her weight. Antoinette Walters Janda said she lost 65 pounds to be more appealing to her husband, Jiri Janda. But he still did not make love to her.

Her complaint, spelled out in court testimony, led a state appeals court Friday to annul the Jandas’ sexless marriage. The decision means the husband, a Czech citizen, could lose his permanent resident status under U.S. immigration laws and be deported.

According to the court record, Jiri Janda came to the United States in 2001 on a temporary green card. The couple married on June 5, 2005, after a courtship of a few months. The record did not say how old they were.

Antoinette Janda, who is American, filed for an annulment on Feb. 14 — Valentine’s Day — claiming that her husband had married her without ever intending to engage in marital intercourse.

Jiri Janda testified that he was truly unhappy with his wife’s weight, but he also offered other reasons for the unusual relationship, saying she was messy and her personality had changed after a hysterectomy.

He said he sought a divorce rather than an annulment because that might allow him to remain in the United States. The 5-0 decision of the Alabama Court of Civil Appeals upholds a lower court ruling siding with her.

“An unstated intent, held at the time of the marriage ceremony, to utterly refuse to engage in a sexual relationship with the other party is a fraud that alters the very essence of the marriage,” the court said.

Jiri Janda’s attorney, James Lambert, said he was disappointed by the ruling, but he and his client had not discussed whether to appeal.

“Our argument is this is not a fraud. It’s just two people in a nontraditional marriage,” Lambert said.

Antoinette Janda, who represented herself, did not have a listed phone number and could not be reached for comment.

ANCHORAGE, Alaska – A volunteer at the Eagle River Nature Center is recovering after being bitten by a brown bear sow. Alaska Department of Fish and Game officials say Sarah Wallmer was bitten on the buttocks on the Crow Pass Trail, about a mile from the nature center.

The attack happened Thursday as Wallmer was traveling to the Rapids camp yurt. She was running with her dog, about 10 minutes ahead of another volunteer.

Officials say she was making noise on the trail to announce her presence, but the blowing wind probably obscured her voice.

The bear charged her, and she dropped her dog’s leash and turned her back to the sow. The bear bit her once.

The bear roared and left, presumably to chase the dog. The dog came back about 10 minutes later with the other volunteer on a four-wheeler.

She was treated at a clinic for four puncture wounds but a release from the state agency says she otherwise “appeared to be in good spirits.”

Rangers and biologist say this was a chance encounter with the sow, who also had a cub with her, and no further action was necessary.

The nature center is about 20 miles northeast of Anchorage.

VIENNA (Reuters) – Want to get divorced but not sure how it works? Need advice on how you discover if your partner is cheating on you?

Help is at hand in Vienna where the world’s first “divorce fair” opened its doors on Saturday.

Titled “New Beginning”, the fair hopes to attract those wanting or having to separate. Untying the knot has never been so easy.

Visitors have a chance to speak to lawyers and counsellors as well as private detectives and real estate agents.

Dating agencies advise on how to find love again, travel agencies on how to spend holidays without a partner.

A paternity testing firm helps those seeking certainty about their offspring while a party organiser gives tips on how to celebrate the break-up in style.

Many visitors making their way from stall to stall already had experience of parting ways with a loved one. Silvia, 49, got divorced six years ago and is in a new relationship.

“I just wanted to get some information ahead of time, just to be prepared for the eventuality that such a terrible thing could happen again,” said Silvia, not giving her full name.

“Normally you don’t think of these things, you have butterflies, you love each other, you want to live together. But I already got burned.”

Around half of all Austrian marriages end in divorce. The rate is even higher in the capital Vienna where 66 percent of all couples opt to break up.

Organiser Anton Barz got the idea for the fair when he heard friends talk about their experiences during break-ups.

“There were so many stories and people needed to go to one place, then to another, and then somewhere else again to get all the information together, which was really painful for them,” said Barz, who used to organise wedding fairs.

“So I thought: Let’s have a divorce fair.”

MEDIATOR HELP

Besides getting one-on-one advice, visitors can listen to talks from charities on what a divorce is like for the children involved or how a mediator can help.

The two-day fair, which moves to the central Austrian city of Linz in three weeks, has touched a nerve around the globe.

“I had requests for information on how to hold a divorce fair from Germany, Switzerland, Britain, Australia and even California,” said Barz.

A disillusioned air surrounded many visitors to the Viennese fair including a 63-year-old man who is separated from his second wife.

“My wife doesn’t want get to divorced because she is hoping to get my pension,” he said, without wishing to give his name.

“My lawyer told me I am the biggest idiot ever because I got married the second time round and asked me how I could do such a thing?”

But others were not yet ready to give up on matrimony.

“I never wanted to get married in the first place — and now I have been married three times and I have four children,” said 49-year-old Gabriele Komma.

She divorced nearly a year ago “but I would get married again. After all, hope is the last thing that dies.”

LONDON (AFP) – Regular swearing at work can help boost team spirit among staff, allowing them to express better their feelings as well as develop social relationships, according to a study by researchers.

Yehuda Baruch, a professor of management at the University of East Anglia, and graduate Stuart Jenkins studied the use of profanity in the workplace and assessed its implications for managers.

They assessed that swearing would become more common as traditional taboos are broken down, but the key appeared to be knowing when such language was appropriate and when to turn to blind eye.

The pair said swearing in front of senior staff or customers should be seriously discouraged or banned, but in other circumstances it helped foster solidarity among employees and express frustration, stress or other feelings.

“Employees use swearing on a continuous basis, but not necessarily in a negative, abusive manner,” said Baruch, who works in the university’s business school in Norwich.

Banning swear words and reprimanding staff might represent strong leadership, but could remove key links between staff and impact on morale and motivation, he said.

“We hope that this study will serve not only to acknowledge the part that swearing plays in our work and our lives, but also to indicate that leaders sometimes need to ‘think differently’ and be open to intriguing ideas.

“Managers need to understand how their staff feel about swearing. The challenge is to master the ‘art’ of knowing when to turn a blind eye to communication that does not meet their own standards.”

The study, “Swearing at work and permissive leadership culture: when anti-social becomes social and incivility is acceptable”, is published in the latest issue of the Leadership and Organisational Development Journal.

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Instead of walking down the aisle of a church, a former New York couple will traipse down the aisle of a court room to settle a fight over a $48,800 (23,866 pound) diamond engagement ring.

Dean Kuehnen Jr. is suing his ex-fiance, Andria Castellano, to compel her to either return the ring or give him cash — as well as cover his legal fees and costs, according to the complaint filed in New York State Court.

Castellano has threatened to sell or destroy the 3.23-carat ring, even though the couple agreed the ring would be returned to Kuehnen if their engagement was ever broken off, the complaint says.

Both were 21 years old when they became engaged in December last year, but by September this year the wedding was off.

“The sole and exclusive consideration, motivation and reason for buying the ring was the contemplated marriage,” the complaint says.

Attempts to contact Castellano were unsuccessful.

According to the United States’ Emily Post Institute that offers etiquette and manners advice, “if an engagement is broken, the bride should immediately return the ring to her former fiance.”

“The only “but” in this case is if the ring is a family heirloom of the bride’s. She should then keep the ring,” the institute said on its Web site.

LA PAZ (AFP) – Hundreds of outraged prostitutes are ready to fight a morality campaign targeting their trade by marching nude in the streets of Bolivia’s capital, a spokeswoman said Thursday.

The threat comes after angry mob on Wednesday destroyed bars and brothels in El Alto, a suburb near La Paz.

After the violence, authorities decided to close more than a thousand houses of prostitution in El Alto.

Lily, speaking on behalf of the prostitutes, warned that prostitutes would “march nude in the streets of La Paz” and threatened to forsake checks from health authorities.

“Our businesses are burned and we are left in the street, our money is stolen and we are beaten,” Lily told local television, adding “they want to deprive us of our source of income.”

Local press reported a prostitute was beaten by the mob on Wednesday, stripped of her clothes and robbed of some 300 Bolivianos (40 dollars), her earnings for the night.

For three days, about 30 bars and more than a dozen brothels have been ransacked and furniture torched, said Ronald Perez, a security official.

Organizers of the morality campaign have demanded the mayor close several hundred illegal brothels and enforce a ban on minors visiting them. The activists have also called for ensuring the houses of prostitution operate a good distance from churches, schools and hospitals.

The police have sent in reinforcements to the turbulent area but the campaign has spread to other towns and provinces.

PHILADELPHIA (Reuters) – Philadelphia is home to the least attractive people in the United States, a survey of visitors and residents showed on Friday.

The city of more than 1.5 million people was also found to be among the least stylish, least active, least friendly and least worldly, according to the “America’s Favourite Cities” survey by Travel & Leisure magazine and CNN Headline News.

About 60,000 people responded to the online survey — at www.travelandleisure.com — which ranked 25 cities in categories including shopping, food, culture, and cityscape, said Amy Farley, senior editor at the magazine.

For unattractiveness, Philadelphia just beat out Washington DC and Dallas/Fort Worth for the bottom spot. Miami and San Diego are home to the most attractive people, the poll found.

But Farley pointed out the results don’t mean people in Philadelphia are ugly or the city is a bad place to visit.

“We were asking people to vote on attractiveness, not unattractiveness. Travel & Leisure editors believe there are a lot of attractive people in Philadelphia,” she said.

“The relative attractiveness of its residents is only a minuscule factor in evaluating a city’s merit.”

Philadelphians’ self-esteem has been undermined by national surveys showing they are among the fattest people in the United States. The American Obesity Association ranked the city in the top 10 for overweight people every year between 2000 and 2005.

And sporting pride in a city known for the fierce loyalty of its fans has been hurt by not having had a national champion in any of its four main sports since the 76ers won the National Basketball Association title in 1983.

NEW YORK (Reuters) – A life-size chocolate sculpture of a naked Jesus will finally be displayed in New York starting in late October, seven months after an outcry by Roman Catholics forced a different gallery to cancel its exhibition.

The chocolate Jesus will be joined by sculptures of several fully clothed saints, but the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights said it will not protest because, unlike before, there are no plans to put the “anatomically correct” Jesus in public view during Holy Week.

The Proposition gallery in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood will present “Chocolate Saints … Sweet Jesus,” an exhibition timed to coincide with All Saints’ Day on November 1. The show will run October 27 to November 24.

Back in March, the chocolate Jesus by artist Cosimo Cavallaro was to be exhibited in a street-level window of the Roger Smith Lab Gallery in Midtown Manhattan, giving casual passers-by a view of Jesus’s private parts.

Protests, including a call to boycott the affiliated Roger Smith Hotel, forced the gallery to scrap the showing.

“We still don’t approve but the conditions have changed,” said Kiera McCaffrey, spokeswoman for the Catholic organization.

The new exhibition will take place indoors in a neighborhood full of art galleries, she said.

Images on the Proposition gallery’s Web site (http://www.theproposition.com/wp/chocolate-saints-sweet-jesus/) show the work suspended in air, depicting Jesus as if on the cross.

A gallery statement said Cavallaro was raised as a Catholic altar boy and questioned church precepts but always held a fondness for Holy Communion.

“Remembering the mystical/transcendental quality and rushes of memory associated with the Catholic wafer received during Holy Communion, he recalls equating that ritual of ecstasy to his own experience of chocolate,” the statement said.

The flap recalled another New York clash between art and religion. In 1999, then-Mayor Rudolph Giuliani tried to withdraw a grant from the Brooklyn Museum of Art over a painting depicting the Virgin Mary as a black woman splattered with elephant dung and adorned with cut-outs from pornographic magazines.

SYDNEY (AFP) – An Australian man dressed only in his underpants survived a fall from his ninth-storey apartment when an apparent incident of high jinks went badly wrong, police said Tuesday.

The 35-year-old was attempting to build planks across to a neighbour’s flat when he lost his footing and plummeted 30 metres (100 feet) to the ground, police said.

The man crashed through an iron and timber pergola which broke his fall.

“He was skylarking around, building planks across to his neighbour’s place when it happened,” police spokesperson Ros Weatherall said. “He was very lucky.”

Residents at the apartment complex in the western Australian capital Perth said they heard a strange noise shortly after midnight.

One said he woke to find police tending to the scantily-clad man in the apartment’s courtyard.

“He was conscious, he was going ‘Well, well, where am I? What happened?’ and that was about it,” the resident told ABC radio.

“It was a horrendous fall because he actually came down nine storeys.”

The man was taken to hospital where he is in a stable condition with cuts and a suspected broken leg.

West Australian police Inspector John Gibson said he had first thought the man would have been “a goner”.

“But, yeah he survived and jolly good luck to him,” he told ABC radio.

“One would hope that if he was skylarking, he’s learnt a very big lesson from a very lucky fall.”

VIENNA (AFP) – Vienna is to host what organisers have dubbed the world’s first “divorce fair” this month, aimed at couples whose wedding dreams have turned sour and who need help in untying the knot as painlessly as possible.

At the October 27-28 event, would-be divorcees can consult, anonymously if they wish, a whole host of lawyers and mediators on their rights and obligations, and seek advice on frequently difficult questions, such as alimony and child access.

They can also consult experts on how best to organise their new post-married lives.

Nearly 50 percent of all marriages in Austria end in divorce — the figure is 66 percent in Vienna — and the two-day fair is being held under the motto: “Start your life afresh”. Organisers are hoping it will bloom into a twice-yearly event.

Up to 20 exhibitors have so far registered, not only lawyers and mediators, but also estate agents, life-crisis experts and — reflecting the messier side of divorce — private detective firms and DNA laboratories offering paternity tests.

The archdiocese of the city of Vienna will also have a stand, as will a company offering package holidays for freshly divorced people.

There will also be a series of lectures ranging from a children’s view of divorce to single-parenting.

VANCOUVER, British Columbia (Reuters) – A tiny Canadian political party that promotes sexual freedom complained in Federal Court on Monday it was discriminated against by the country’s postal service.

The Sex Party is upset that Canada Post refused to distribute a flyer during the 2006 federal election that outlined the group’s philosophy, after deeming some its contents to be pornographic.

“We are advocating for rights established for any citizen,” said Sex Party leader John Ince, who told a judge in Vancouver that the pamphlet was intended to help recruit new party members and raise donations.

The Vancouver-based party — which advocates liberalization of Canada’s prostitution laws among other issues — says its political mailing ran afoul of rules aimed at prohibiting use of the postal system to distribute mass-mailing flyers for hard-core pornography or other illegal material.

“That is not what our material is,” Ince told the court.

Ince, a former lawyer who owns an erotica shop, said the Sex Party does not oppose restrictions on mailing hard-core porn, but said postal officials have been inconsistent in applying their own rules.

Lawyers representing the post office were not expected to present their court arguments until on Tuesday, but Canada Post said it has an obligation to refuse material that could be seen by children or others who might find it offensive.

Canada Post has denied its motives were political.

The Sex Party, founded in 2005, ran three candidates in that year’s provincial election in British Columbia, and the mailing was part of its efforts to become registered as a federal political organization, Ince said.

Among the political ideas it advocated in the 2005 provincial campaign were increased sex education in schools, more designated public areas for nudists, and the party describes itself as the world’s first political party “dedicated exclusively to sex-positive issues”.

Ince said Canada Post has a government monopoly on distributing flyers to mailboxes and the low cost of mass mailings is the only way that small political parties can get their message out and gauge public support.

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Former Miss USA Tara Conner, who nearly lost her title for alcohol abuse, is joining several other beauty queens on a new MTV reality show that follows what happens to the pageant winners when their crowns come off.

The eight-part series “Pageant Place,” which debuts on Wednesday, repackages the Miss Universe, Miss USA and Miss Teen USA champions as TV roommates for the kind of behind-the-scenes spectacle that made hits from shows like “Big Brother” and “The Osbournes.”

The new series follows Miss Universe Riyo Mori from Japan, Miss USA Rachel Smith of Tennessee and two Miss Teen USA winners — Katie Blair and Hilary Cruz — as they share a high-rise apartment in New York City for one year.

Acting as their minder and “unofficial peer advisor” for the show will be none other than Conner, the 2006 Miss USA queen who was almost forced to give up her crown over revelations of her underage drinking.

Real estate mogul Donald Trump, co-owner of the Miss Universe and Miss USA pageants, publicly rebuked Conner for her behavior but let her keep her tiara when she agreed in January to enter a rehabilitation program. Conner later admitted to struggling with both alcoholism and cocaine abuse.

“Pageant Place” press materials say the four beauty queen roommates will “have a now sober Tara to guide them away from the temptations and unrelenting attention that led to her notoriety when she was Miss USA.”

And if that’s not enough, Trump himself will be “dropping by to check in and make sure they all stay on track,” according to the press release from MTV, a unit of Viacom Inc..

The show will no doubt help focus some much-needed attention of younger viewers on U.S. beauty pageantry at a time when such contests have suffered a ratings decline, prompting the Walt Disney Co.’s ABC to give up the Miss America telecast in 2005.

Earlier this year, Trump renewed his deal with rival network NBC, controlled by the General Electric Co., to carry the annual Miss Universe and Miss USA pageants for three more years.

More recently, NBC agreed to bring Trump’s corporate reality show “The Apprentice” back to prime time for a seventh edition early next year. This time, the show will feature celebrity contestants raising money for various charities.

WOODLAND, Calif. – A dentist accused of fondling the breasts of 27 female patients is trying to keep his dental license by arguing that chest massages are an appropriate procedure in certain cases. Mark Anderson’s lawyer says dental journals discuss the need to massage the pectoral muscles to treat a common jaw problem.

Police say Anderson said during recorded phone calls that he routinely massaged patients’ chests to treat temporo-mandibular joint disorder, or TMJ, which causes neck and head pain.

Attorney Robert Zaro told administrative law judge Jonathan Lew at a hearing Thursday that he should let Anderson keep his dental license while disciplinary appeals proceed. Anderson would be supervised by two assistants and would no longer do the chest rubs, Zaro said.

Zaro said Anderson, 48, of Woodland, needs to keep seeing patients so he can feed his seven children and pay for his defense.

The judge made no immediate decision.

Lew suspended Anderson’s dental license last month. He was charged with two misdemeanor counts of battery and sexual battery. Yolo County prosecutors are investigating complaints from more than two dozen women who say they also were groped in the examining chair in the last five years.

Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey Phillips gave Lew three new complaints, including one from a 31-year-old woman who said Anderson fondled her at least six times over two years.

She took to wearing tight shirts with high necklines, “and Anderson would still get in under her shirt and bra,” according to a police report.

LONDON (Reuters) – One microscopic organism has thrived despite remaining celibate for tens of millions of years thanks to a neat evolutionary trick, researchers said.

Asexual reproduction has allowed duplicate gene copies of the single-celled creatures — called bdelloid rotifers — to become different over time.

This gives the rotifers a wider pool of genes to help them adapt and survive, the researchers said in the journal Science.

“It is like having a bigger tool kit,” Alan Tunnacliffe, a molecular biologist at the University of Cambridge, said in a telephone interview. “You can do the same job but better.”

Other researchers had shown the translucent, waterborne creatures could survive for 40 million years without sexual relations.

The question, Tunnacliffe said, was how the creatures found in pools of water accomplished this feat without the gene-swapping made possible by sexual reproduction.

“Sexual reproduction is supposed to be a good thing in evolution,” he said on Thursday.

“So when you come across an organism like the bdelloid, which hasn’t engaged in sexual reproduction for tens of millions of years, you begin to question why sex is important.”

Every species of plant and animal that reproduces sexually has pairs of genes nearly identical to each other, with one of each pair coming from the mother and father.

These creatures get around that problem with the evolutionary trick that allows their genes to drift apart and evolve on their own, Tunnacliffe said, after using molecular cloning techniques.

“No sex means the genes can evolve in different directions,” he said. “It is like you have a bigger gene pool to select from for different functions in evolution.”

The theory of natural selection says sex mixes up the genes to cope with unexpected changes in a treacherous world.

Some genetic changes are good and boost survival, for example against new strains of disease, but others lead to conditions like cystic fibrosis in humans.

FRIDAY, Oct. 5 (HealthDay News) — Few men may realize it, but if they’re having problems achieving or sustaining erections, it may signal underlying heart trouble.

Erectile dysfunction, or impotence, affects more than 18 million American men, according to a recent study by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

And now a growing body of research ties erectile dysfunction to vascular diseases, such as coronary artery disease.

“Erectile dysfunction is often caused by vascular disease,” explained Dr. Ian Thompson, professor and chairman of the department of urology at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio. “A man could perceive decreased blood flow to the penis as being a less strong, a weaker erection, and that may actually be one of the first indicators of blood vessel disease.”

One recent report found men with erectile dysfunction had poorer scores on exercise tests and other measures of coronary heart disease. They also had evidence of significant coronary artery blockages.

“Our study found that among men who were sent for a stress test by their doctor, the presence of erectile dysfunction was a potent predictor — a strong risk factor — for significant underlying heart disease,” said lead researcher Dr. R. Parker Ward, an assistant professor of medicine and director of the cardiology clinic at the University of Chicago Hospitals.

“It was a stronger risk factor than some of the traditional risk factors we commonly ask questions about, things like high blood pressure and high cholesterol,” he added.

Ward’s study, published last year in the Archives of Internal Medicine, involved men who had been referred to cardiologists for nuclear stress testing, a noninvasive way to determine the severity of coronary heart disease. But even among men without heart symptoms, erectile dysfunction is a strong risk factor for future risk of heart attack, he noted.

In the same issue of the journal, Dr. Steven A. Grover and colleagues studied a group of 3,912 Canadian men, nearly half of whom reported having erectile dysfunction in the four weeks prior to visiting their family physicians. The men’s cholesterol, glucose and blood pressure measurements were taken.

“When you calculated a global cardiovascular risk, [it] was strongly associated with the probability that you had erectile dysfunction,” said Grover, a professor of medicine and epidemiology at McGill University Health Centre in Montreal. “And subsequently there have been other studies that have shown that people who have erectile dysfunction are, in fact, more likely to develop cardiovascular disease in the future.”

Thompson and his colleagues provided the first substantial evidence linking erectile dysfunction and subsequent risk for heart disease in a December 2005 report in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Yet the connection is not as well recognized among doctors and patients as cardiologists and urologists think it should be.

“A lot of men don’t have physicians,” Thompson explained. “They may not know what their blood pressure is or their lipid profiles, or they may be smokers, and they may never have been counseled to stop smoking or to reduce their weight.

“We think that if men with erectile dysfunction went to see their physicians, it may enable the interaction with the physician to discuss other coronary risk factors,” he said.

Erectile problems aren’t always vascular in nature. Sometimes the trouble is psychological or neurological and wouldn’t necessarily be associated with a higher risk of heart disease, Ward cautioned. Still, research linking erectile dysfunction (ED) and heart disease suggests that a proactive approach is the best medicine.

“We as physicians should be asking about, and men should be reporting to their physicians, symptoms of ED, so it can be considered as we work to modify their risk — treat blood pressure, cholesterol more aggressively, advise healthy lifestyle changes like exercise and healthy diet,” he said.

UNIONTOWN, Pa. – A man who stripped naked in a Fayette County convenience store for no apparent reason has been convicted of indecent exposure and criminal mischief.

A jury rejected the defense offered by 26-year-old Gregory David Moore Jr. The Uniontown man said he didn’t realize what he was doing because he had consumed a spiked drink at a party.

Moore went to the store after the party and was pre-paying for some gasoline when he undressed and told the female clerk, “I want everything.”

Police say the incident was recorded by surveillance cameras.

Moore was convicted Thursday. His sentencing is scheduled next month.

MARSEILLE, France (Reuters) – A self-professed art lover stood trial on Tuesday accused of kissing a $2-million (986,000 pound) painting while wearing red lipstick and damaging the canvas.

The deputy prosecutor in the southern French city of Avignon accused the defendant, Sam Rindy, of “savagery” for having left a lipstick smear on the work by U.S. artist Cy Twombly, and demanded the court fine her 4,500 euros (3,117 pounds).

The picture’s owner, Yvon Lambert, wants $2 million in damages and a further 33,400 euros that he says is needed to pay for the restoration work.

Rindy, an artist of Cambodian origin, has said she was “overcome with passion” when she saw the painting hanging on a gallery wall in July 2007.

“This woman is profoundly upset. She was overcome by an emotion that she could not tame,” her lawyers, Patrick Gontard Jean-Michel Ambrosino, told the court, describing the kiss as an “act of love”.

Lambert’s lawyer rejected this line of defence, saying: “In love, there need to be two consenting people.”

Rindy, who is in her 30s, told reporters earlier this year that she thought her lipstick had improved the white, untitled painting.

The court will deliver its verdict on November 16.

SPOKANE, Wash. – Police responded to a woman’s complaint on Friday that a naked man was repeatedly driving by in a van and masturbating.

The woman gave police the license plate number, and records showed the van belonged to Spokane Police Officer Sherilyn Redmon. Redmon said she left the van at a Chrysler dealership for servicing.

Police found the van back at the dealership and arrested an employee accused of taking it on a 16-mile test drive.

Police jailed Bradley S. Keegan, 49, of Idaho, for investigation of taking a motor vehicle without permission and lewd conduct.

SEOUL (AFP) – Fresh from summit diplomacy with North Korea, South Korea’s government now faces an entirely new challenge — trying to set international quality and size standards for condoms.

The five-day meeting, organised by the International Organisation for Standardisation and the Seoul government, will begin next Monday on the southern resort island of Jeju.

The commerce ministry’s standardisation agency expects 100 people from 50 nations to take part, agency spokesman Yoo Yong-Jae told AFP.

South Korean firms led by Unidus Corp account for some 30 percent of global condom sales.

“Demand has been growing for years for unified international standards on the size and quality of condoms to ensure users are protected from disease and women from pregnancy,” Unidus chief Kim Sung-Hoon told Yonhap news agency.

“The size of South Korean condoms now meets international standards, helped by an increase in the size of men’s penises here,” he was quoted as saying.

Globally, 80 major companies are capable of producing 12 billion condoms a year but annual demand is just eight billion, he said.

Citing the good quality of South Korean condoms, he said his company would lobby for the World Health Organisation and other participants to adopt Korean standards.

COEUR D’ALENE, Idaho – Security guards refused to allow a woman into a federal courthouse until she removed a bra that triggered a metal detector.

Lori Plato said she and her husband, Owen Plato, were stunned when U.S. Marshals Service employees asked her to remove her bra after the underwire supports set off the alarm.

“I asked if I could go into the bathroom because they didn’t have a privacy screen and no women security officers were available,” Plato said Wednesday. “They said, ‘No.’

“I wasn’t carrying a shank in my bra. If it’s so dangerous, why did they give it back and let me put it on?”

Patrick McDonald, the U.S. Marshal in Boise, said appropriate security protocols were followed in the Sept. 20 matter, and guards suggested she simply remove the bra in her car outside, or find a restaurant bathroom.

“She’s inflating it,” McDonald said. “All of a sudden she just took it off. It wasn’t anything we wanted to happen and it wasn’t anything we asked for her to do. She did it so fast.”

Plato, of Bonners Ferry, said she was parked on a busy street and wasn’t familiar with downtown Coeur d’Alene businesses. So her husband held up his coat to shield her from the rest of the people in the courthouse lobby while she removed her bra underneath her shirt.

Generally, McDonald said, undergarments aren’t considered a danger to security.

“I don’t think they’re considered a weapon, really, the last time I looked,” he said.

He declined to discuss other ways the federal courthouse guards could have screened Plato for weapons.

Plato wants the Marshals Service to apologize and stop forcing women to disrobe.

“It was very humiliating,” her husband, Owen Plato, said. “They could have handled it with a much more professional attitude.”

BANGKOK (Reuters Life!) – A Thai bank is pitching into the battle against HIV/AIDS and handing out condoms to customers too shy to get them at the shop.

Despite Bangkok’s reputation as one of the world’s sex industry centers, Thailand is a generally conservative country.

Kasikorn Bank launched the “Condoms for Confidence” campaign at 600 branches nationwide and said it would start giving out the sheaths, branded K-Condom and K-Excellence, later this month.

“HIV/AIDS is returning to Thailand since the government awareness campaign started 20 years ago has fizzled out,” said a bank spokesman who declined to be identified.

“We want the teenagers to be aware of the problem.”

Despite a tenfold plunge of overall new HIV/AIDS cases from 15 years ago, the health ministry has said it was concerned about the numbers of teenagers and homosexuals still being infected.

Disease Control Department chief Thawat Suntrajarn said embarrassment about buying condoms and ignorance in using them were the main causes of the new cases.

“Research papers from all sorts of agencies have a consensus that many condom users are embarrassed to buy condoms from counters,” Thawat told Reuters.

“Women who buy condoms from convenience stores always get a strange look from people, so condom handouts are a good way to avoid such embarrassment.”

New HIV/AIDS cases in Thailand, once praised by international health agencies for its aggressive campaign to tackle the epidemic, had fallen to 13,000 in 2006 from more than 100,000 a year in early 1990s, Thawat said.

But the worrying sign was that many of the new patients were teenagers and homosexual men, not heterosexual men in their 30s and prostitutes as in the past, he added.

A Health Ministry-commissioned survey last year showed 48 percent of 5,712 male high school students used condoms.

About 43 percent of 7,712 female high school students said their sex partners used condoms, it said.

Spurred by the findings, Thawat’s department is running a television advertisement encouraging people to buy condoms despite criticism from conservatives who argue it encourages teenagers to be sexually active.

“Even those bank customers who don’t need to use the condoms, they can pass them on to their families or friends,” he said.

JAKARTA (Reuters) – An Indonesian businessman’s bid to make polygamy easier was rejected by the country’s constitutional court on Wednesday.

Indonesia allows polygamy, but according to the marriage law, a man can only get court approval to take a second wife if his first wife agrees, or if she is disabled or cannot have children.

Businessman Muhammad Insa, the petitioner in the court case, argued that those conditions effectively prevent polygamy, and this has meant that many men avoid registering their second marriages. As a result, children from unregistered marriages often lose their inheritance rights and other benefits.

The court said in its ruling that the articles were not against the constitution or against the tenets of Islam, which allows multiple marriages on condition that wives are treated fairly.

“These articles … are intended to protect the basic rights of wives and prospective wives of men who engage in polygamy,” court chief Jimly Asshiddiqie said.

Insa said the decision was unfair.

“I’m not happy. With such conditions, polygamy cannot be practiced,” he told reporters, adding “I will continue my struggle with other people or groups.”

The polygamy debate in Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim country, heated up last year after a popular Islamic cleric announced that he had taken a second wife.

Abdullah Gymnastiar, a turban-clad, leather-jacketed preacher, is a household name in Indonesia because of his relaxed sermons on Islam that strike a chord with ordinary people charmed by his chatty, youthful style.

But his popularity declined after his second marriage was made public.

Though not widely practiced among ordinary Indonesians, polygamy has some prominent advocates, including restaurateur Puspo Wardoyo who has four wives, and who has been at the forefront of a campaign to promote multiple marriages.

Wardoyo’s popular chain of restaurants is renowned for its “polygamy juice,” a mixture of four tropical fruits, and “polygamy vegetables,” a four-vegetable combo.

LAPEER, Mich. – The Lapeer County sheriff wants to help two bank robbery suspects tie the knot.

“I’ll volunteer to marry them in the jail if they surrender,” Sheriff Ron Kalanquin said Monday. Kalanquin said he wanted the Lapeer couple off the streets before their cash ran out and they attempted another robbery.

A 24-year-old man and a 23-year-old woman are suspected of taking about $5,000 in the Sept. 19 robbery of a Lapeer County Bank & Trust branch in Deerfield Township, about 60 miles north of Detroit.

Detectives determined that the robbery money was used to buy wedding rings, pay back rent and pay the woman’s attorney for work done in a child custody case, The Flint Journal reported.

The couple met after the man was released from the county jail and was introduced to her by another ex-inmate, Kalanquin said.

“We believe they could still be in the area, but could also be somewhere in Michigan or beyond,” Kalanquin said. He appealed to the couple’s relatives and friends to alert police to their whereabouts.

BEIJING (Reuters) – Days after banning “sexually provocative sounds” on television, China has now stopped networks showing “saucy” adverts for push-up bras and figure-hugging underwear ahead of a major Communist Party meeting next month.

Other targets of the crackdown are “low-brow and base” commercials for sex toys and those featuring famous people or experts attesting to the efficacy of medicines, the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television said on its Web site (www.sarft.gov.cn) Friday.

“Every television advertisement management bureau and television station must strengthen their political consciousness and responsibility toward society,” Tian Jin, deputy head of the regulator, was quoted as saying.

The order is the latest in a raft of measures which have included axing reality shows featuring sex changes and plastic surgery and banning talent contests during prime-time.

The media watchdog’s edicts have reached fever pitch in recent weeks, ahead of a meeting of the 17th Party congress, a sensitive five-yearly meeting at which key national leaders are appointed and policy set for the next few years.

It earlier urged the country’s increasingly freewheeling broadcasters to forgo vulgarity and bad taste in the pursuit of ratings in favor of providing “inspiring” content for the masses imbued with “socialist” values.

“Create a positive atmosphere for public opinion,” the regulator cited state television head Zhao Huayong as telling his staff in preparation for the congress.

“Strictly adhere to propaganda requirements; do not rush to report, do not report impulsively, and make sure there are no mistakes from reports on any large events,” Zhao added.