Free Republic

Minnesota's epidemic of sexually transmitted diseases climbed to a new high in 2008 with a total of 17,650 new cases. That's 3.5 percent more than the 16,428 new cases reported in 2007, according to the Minnesota Health Department's annual report on chlamydia, gonorrhea and syphilis. The number went up despite a significant drop in gonorrhea. The vast majority of new cases were chlamydia, 14,350 in all, said Peter Carr, director of the department's STD section. The number climbed 7 percent from the previous year, the continuation of a 13-year trend of ever higher rates of infection. Chlamydia cases have more...

They probably expected a goody bag of some sorts as a going home gift after the primary school trip to Sainsbury's. But what the 42 children - not to mention their parents and teachers - did not expect was to be given a book with explicit illustrations of sexual positions. And the advice under the dozen drawings, which feature in a section about saving water by 'bathing with a friend', reads: 'Save water. Have fun. Just get out before everything becomes wrinkled.' Other inappropriate suggestions in the £5 book from Sainsbury's - whose advertising slogan is Try Something New Today...

For the past weeks, the media have been gaga over the 50th anniversary of Playboy magazine and the "Playboy philosophy," whose guru, Hugh Hefner, began to mainstream pornography and de-couple sex from a committed marital relationship. What interested me most about this latest excuse to run pictures of almost naked women on television and of the 77-year-old Hugh Hefner in his silk pajamas, surrounded by surgically enhanced women young enough to be his great-granddaughters, was the usual media complicity in promoting a one-sided and incomplete picture of the "free love" generation (which, as it turned out, was neither free nor...