Category Archives: Life and style

Family planning schemes must offer options other than abortion, says US

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Campaigners urge global action on reproductive rights as US comments embolden anti-choice groups at Nairobi summit

The US will only support family planning programmes that offer alternatives to abortions, a senior policy adviser has told a conference in Nairobi.

In a statement that has emboldened anti-choice groups in the city, Valerie Huber, the US special representative for global women’s health, also told a summit on population and development that her country sought to combat gender-based violence by investing in programmes that respected the rights of women and girls, but didn’t compromise “the inherent value of every human life – born and unborn”.

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The female problem: how male bias in medical trials ruined women’s health

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Centuries of female exclusion has meant women’s diseases are often missed, misdiagnosed or remain a total mystery

From the earliest days of medicine, women have been considered inferior versions of men. In On the Generation of Animals, the Greek philosopher Aristotle characterised a female as a mutilated male, and this belief has persisted in western medical culture.

“For much of documented history, women have been excluded from medical and science knowledge production, so essentially we’ve ended up with a healthcare system, among other things in society, that has been made by men for men,” Dr Kate Young, a public health researcher at Monash University in Australia, tells me.

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No woman should be slapped for screaming as she gives birth | Ann Yates

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Respect in childbirth is a human right. As a midwife of many years’ experience, I am calling for a global effort towards more compassion in maternity care

Respectful maternity care is a universal human right due to every childbearing woman in every health system around the world. So why do women continue to endure violence, abuse and substandard care during childbirth?

As a midwife with more than 44 years of international experience, I have seen disrespect and abuse in many countries.

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Any amount of running reduces risk of early death, study finds

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Previous research suggested health benefits increased with greater volume of running

Any amount of running is good for you, according to research suggesting it is linked to a similar reduction in the risk of early death no matter how many hours you clock up a week or how fast you go.

According to the World Health Organization, about 3.2 million deaths each year are down to people not doing enough physical activity.

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The treatment of Meghan is racist. We should feel able to say so | Yomi Adegoke

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The MPs who condemned the press attacks on the Duchess of Sussex should be praised, but tiptoeing around the language only protects perpetrators

The silence surrounding the Duchess of Sussex’s treatment by the press has become a roar. More than 70 female MPs signed a letter this week in “solidarity” with Meghan after she spoke about her treatment by sections of the media. The letter outlined attempts “to cast aspersions” on her character. It also attempted to address the nature of these attacks: “We are calling out what can only be described as outdated, colonial undertones to some of these stories,” it read.

However, this treatment can be described as only one thing: racist. Not saying so explicitly is part of a growing trend – the word “racist” is now dodged with more fervour than racial slurs themselves.

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Beauty and the beam: the future of LED therapy looks bright

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It’s non-invasive and has been proven to work. But can LED therapy really be a miracle cure for everything from acne to tired skin? Rachel Cooke sees the light

If I said I knew of a sure-fire way to lastingly improve your skin and that all you would have to do to experience this seeming miracle would be to sit for 13 minutes every week beneath a gently pulsing light with your eyes closed, what would be your response? Would you whip out your credit card and rush to book yourself an appointment? Or would you silently mark me down as yet another decadent, middle-aged, straw-clutching desperado who feels bad about her complexion?

To be clear, I don’t feel bad about my neck – not yet. But perhaps I am a middle-aged desperado all the same, for how else to explain my appearance at the Light Salon, a clinic that offers the very treatment I’ve just described? The child of scientists, I’m a natural sceptic when it comes to the claims of the multi-billion-pound beauty industry. I still wash my face, just as I’ve always done, with soap and water. I would no more spend a lot of money on moisturiser, Botox or anything else in that vein than I would run down the street in my underwear. Even if I didn’t have strongly feminist feelings about facelifts, I would still find them alarming both in theory and in practice. Yet here I am, hoping that I will shortly look a little rosier: a better version of myself, if not precisely a younger looking one.

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‘I have more than 100 different food rules’: how healthy eating became an obsession

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For years I binged on diet books: paleo, keto, vegan, the 16:8. But can you have too much of a good thing?

It started during the 1999 eclipse. The year before, I had run away to Devon. Lots of bad things had happened there, but the main one was that I’d got fat. On my 27th birthday, I was 5ft 6in and weighed a hefty (as I bizarrely thought then) 9st 2lb. Worse: according to every news story I read, I was going to get an incurable disease and die. The most likely cause would be food; mad cow disease hadn’t gone away, and then there were pesticides and insecticides and growth hormones. When a friend told me he’d heard organic diets were cancer-preventing, I was in. As the skies darkened on 11 August, and birds began their evening song hours too early, I pledged that if I survived the solar eclipse, I would eat only organic food. I would stay healthy, and I would not die.

When organic food didn’t make my life perfect, I tried food combining (no protein with carbs). Then veganism. For 20 years now, I have cycled between diets and diet books, in search of the perfect hack for a good life: great health, better skin, the optimum weight and all, of course, with minimal impact on the environment. (Like so many women who dedicate their eating disorders to saving the planet, I need what I eat to be in some way an ethical choice.) I have been a vegetarian, a meat eater; I have gone paleo, keto, macrobiotic, pegan (look it up).

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Strike a contrapposto pose to look more attractive, science says

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Study finds pose makes waist-to-hip ratio seem lower on one side and looks more appealing

Dancers do it, Instagrammers do it, even the Venus de Milo does it. When it comes to striking a pose, it seems the only way is contrapposto. Now research has shed light on why the attitude is so appealing.

Experts say the pose, which involves standing with weight predominantly on one foot with a slight twist in the upper body, makes the waist-to-hip ratio appear strikingly low on one side of the body.

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Dressing Afghanistan: young designers get creative in Kabul

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In a deeply conservative society ravaged by years of war, Afghan women still want to be free to wear clothes with style

Photography by Ivan Armando Flores

There’s a steady stream of customers coming through the doors of Rahiba Rahimi’s fashion studio. The 25-year-old’s bold, intricate designs are fitted on mannequins and hung on rails around her showroom in Kabul.

Rahimi is the lead designer and co-proprietor of Laman, a clothing label she helped build in the Afghan capital five years ago.

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Experience: I’m nine years old and won an adult 10km race by mistake

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A 40-year-old woman came in second, about a minute later. She shook my hand and congratulated me

One recent Sunday morning, my mum and grandma drove me to a 5km race not far from where we live in St Cloud, Minnesota, in the US. There was a fierce thunderstorm, and when we got there I had to wait for it to pass beneath an overhang with the other runners. I started to feel a little nervous, because some of the people there looked really fast. They had proper running leggings and long, skinny legs. They were all different ages. I wasn’t wearing running clothes; just a normal T-shirt and shorts.

I’m nine years old now, but have been running competitively since I was six. I love it, because it makes me feel good. I have a lot of energy to use up and I can do it by just moving my legs. Sometimes I run for the sake of it, other times I run to win. That morning, I wanted to win.

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My land of make believe: life after The Sims

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Feeling increasingly anxious and lost, Liv Siddall found herself retreating to the comfort and security of video games – often playing for hours at a time. Here, she reveals how she finally escaped back to reality

In 2005, when I was 16, I worked in a busy local café. My job was to make tea and coffee and I churned out hot beverages at high speed, while constantly restocking my cup and saucer area. I found the work hard and boring, which was strange given that at the end of every shift I’d rush home to play Diner Dash, a video game in which you become a waitress in a busy restaurant, taking orders, serving customers, clearing away their cups and plates.

In the great pantheon of PC games, Diner Dash was not among the most realistic, but I enjoyed its simplicity and I was enthralled by the thrill that came with pleasing customers and advancing levels. How many levels were available was never made clear. The game seemed infinite. I’d play it for hours.

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#AllIsFineWithMe: Russian women fight strict beauty standards with body-positivity

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Social media trend was started by a teen to push back against unrealistic beauty standards

In a new wave of Russian feminism, thousands of women are posting selfies on social media showing their pimples, cellulite and hair loss to challenge beauty stereotypes that women’s rights activists say fuel low self-esteem and eating disorders.

The #AllIsFineWithMe trend – started by a Russian teen who has struggled with anorexia – is the latest initiative to push back against unrealistic pressures on women and girls to look perfect, often driven by airbrushed images on social media.

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What did Hillary Clinton mean it was ‘gutsy’ to stay with Bill? It’s complicated | Jean Hannah Edelstein

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How a marriage should be conducted can only be known by the key participants – and they might not even be in agreement

Hillary Clinton has a deep well to draw from when asked about the challenges she’s faced. But her admission yesterday that staying in her marriage was the “gutsiest” thing that she’s done in her personal life was remarkable. In part, remarkable because over the years she’s stayed pretty quiet when it comes to discussing being married to one of the world’s most exposed philanderers, only occasionally alluding to what must have been some very painful experiences. In part, remarkable because who doesn’t like a glimpse into what makes a well-known marriage tick?

As a central and defining arrangement that so many diverse cultures have in common, marriage is a unique (and dare I say it, strange) institution. A public-facing framework for, well, feelings. While religious bodies, governments, society and your gossipy neighbors next door have long done their best to set clear rules around what marriage is and means, how a marriage should be conducted can only really be known and understood by the key participants – and they might not even be in agreement.

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French MPs approve IVF draft law for single women and lesbians

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Bill is Emmanuel Macron’s biggest social reform since he was elected in 2017

France has taken a step towards allowing lesbian and single women to conceive children with medical help, setting the stage for a clash with the country’s religious conservatives.

To loud applause, France’s lower house of parliament approved a draft bioethics law in a move that has already sparked outrage from opponents, including some in President Emmanuel Macron’s own centrist party.

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Jenny Odell on why we need to learn to do nothing: ‘It’s a reminder that you’re alive’

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The author and artist’s keynote address on our fractured attention spans went viral. Now she has a plan for how to heal them: lose ourselves in nature

Nearly two years ago, the artist and academic Jenny Odell gave a keynote address on “how to do nothing”. In it she talked about the impact of modern life’s ceaseless demands on our time and attention, “a situation where every waking moment has become pertinent to our making a living”. And she discussed how she herself had found respite in nature.

Her talk was written for the Eyeo festival in Minneapolis – described as for the “creative technology community” and attended by the kind of blue-sky thinkers unlikely to balk at references to concepts like “observational eros”. Yet, when the 10,000-word transcript was published online, it went viral. Not only that: many people read it to the end.

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California Trip: how Dennis Stock caught the darkness beyond the hippy dream

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His iconic portraits of James Dean in a wintry New York won him fame. But it was his travels in the west coast that brought out his true genius, as he captured the cracks in the 60s counterculture

‘For many years California frightened me,” Dennis Stock wrote in the preface to California Trip, first published in 1970. “For a young man with traditional concerns for spiritual and aesthetic order, California seemed too unreal. I ran.”

Stock, a naturally sceptical New Yorker who had served in the US Navy before hustling his way into the ranks of the esteemed Magnum photo agency, had instinctively picked up on the edgy undercurrents of the late 1960s Californian hippy dream. As the idealism of that decade peaked and faded, California became what Stock called a “head lab” – fomenting various radically alternative lifestyles fuelled by eastern mysticism, experiments in communal living, and all kinds of post-LSD mind expansion.

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Chanel Miller on why she refuses to be reduced to ‘Brock Turner’s victim’

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After she was assaulted while unconscious, Miller’s life split in two. She became known as ‘Emily Doe’ – and her assailant served just three months in prison. Now she’s ready to tell the world who she really is

It has been just over three weeks since Chanel Miller allowed her name to become public and the 27-year-old is still trying to adjust. For a while, it seemed as if everyone she had ever known was going to email. “Hi! We were in bio-chem class together, how are you doing?!” she’d read. Or: “Hey, I always knew you’d write a book!” She smiles at the bleak comedy of a situation which no one, least of all Miller herself, knows quite how to handle. At some point in the emails, every sender would jettison the pleasantries and make the awkward turn towards saying: “I’m sorry.”

Around midnight on 17 January 2015, Miller was spotted by two students at Stanford University being sexually assaulted by a third student as she lay unconscious on the ground behind some bins. She was 22, a recent graduate of the University of California, Santa Barbara, working in her first job at a tech firm and living with her parents in Palo Alto. Earlier that evening she had, on a whim, agreed to accompany her younger sister to a fraternity party at Stanford University, a 10-minute drive from the house. By the early hours of the morning, Miller was in a hospital having her vagina and anus swabbed by police doctors – and 19-year-old Brock Turner was in custody.

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When my husband died, mushroom foraging helped me out of the dark

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After losing all sense of hope and home, hunting in woodland with other mushroomers got me through my grief

I was a bright-eyed 18-year-old, just one month into an international study exchange in Stavanger in Norway when I met Eiolf. I stood next to him at a party and we spent the whole night talking. It helped that he was one of the few Norwegian students I met who could actually point to my home country of Malaysia on a map. After that night I’d hang around the library hoping to cross his path. Luckily, he had the same idea.

Eiolf was knowledgeable and read a lot, but he also had a goofy sense of humour. He was very kind, too, the sort of person who children and animals gravitate towards. I had assumed that at the end of my exchange I’d go back to Malaysia, but instead I relocated to Norway to be with him; it just felt right. Norway was very different to my homeland, but I settled there and enjoyed a fulfilling career as an anthropologist, while Eiolf became an architect. We were together for 32 years, and I never lost that sense of joy in our relationship. He made me a better version of myself.

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High-octane glitz for Versace as J-Lo brings the house down

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The actor’s appearance in ‘That’ dress from 2000 had the crowd in Milan whooping

One of the lesser-known aspects of Versace’s brand mythology is its role in the inception of Google Images.

The story goes like this. In the year 2000 – as fashion scholars will recall – Jennifer Lopez wore a sheer, low-cut green Versace dress to the Grammys. “The whole world wanted to see that dress,” said Donatella Versace at a press conference in Milan on Friday. And so the world surfed the net – as we used to say – but couldn’t find the picture within the mainly text-based system. And lo, Google Images was born.

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