Free Republic

A transgender sex worker found strangled last week near Interstate 280 in Potrero Hill was identified Thursday as a 27-year-old Nicaraguan immigrant. Ruby Ordenana, also known as Ruby Rodriguez, was last seen in the Tenderloin the day before the slaying, said Alexandra Byerly, a project coordinator for EL-LA, a local nonprofit group working with the transgender community. Ordenana was found naked and strangled after 5 a.m. on March 16 at Cesar Chavez and Indiana streets. The medical examiner's office has established her identity and is trying to locate her next of kin. But the local community is holding a vigil...

Katie Holmes Agrees Motherly Contact With Infant Is Bad Katie Holmes has been banned from speaking to her baby for a week after it is born, it has been reported. The pregnant actress has agreed not to talk to her new arrival, believed to be a girl, for at least seven days after she has entered the world, in accordance with fiancé Tom Cruise's Scientology beliefs. Katie, who is due to give birth any day, has already promised Tom she will deliver the child in complete silence, and she will also have very little contact afterwards. A source told Closer...

The human parathyroid gland, which regulates the level of calcium in the blood, probably evolved from the gills of fish, according to researchers from King's College London. Writing in the latest edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Professor Anthony Graham and Dr Masataka Okabe suggest that the gills of ancestral marine creatures, which were used to regulate calcium levels, were internalised rather than lost when land-living, four-limbed animals – the tetrapods – evolved. Many physiological processes such as muscle contraction, blood coagulation and signalling by nerve cells, require specific levels of calcium in the body. In humans,...

Sexual dysfunction affects both men and women and can potentially ruin relationships but now a new hormone may be able to help. Dr. Stephanie Ash, a gynecologist at Bay Regional Medical Center in Bay City, Mich., says that lack of labido is wreaking havoc on women and that nationally 43 percent of women suffer from a low sex drive. "Many women are distraught about it,"said Ash,"... and actually I would say at least 50 percent are reduced to tears in discussing it." However a drug on the market is working to change all that, it is nicknamed the "Barbie pill"...