A study claims the declining teenage pregnancy rate in the US since 1990 is down to better use of improved contraceptive, such as condoms, use rather than young people abstaining from sex. The drop was noted in the United States between 1995 and 2002 and was not due to abstinence.
The researchers, from Columbia University and the Alan Guttmacher Institute, said their study casts doubt on federal funding of programs that promote abstinence until marriage without discussing contraception options. The data write that that abstinence accounted for only 14% of the fall in teenage pregnancies over the last decade, while 86% was due to better use of contraceptives and condoms. There was a 27% drop in the teenage pregnancy rate during the decade up to 2002. The study found that in 2002 sexually active teenagers had better use of contraceptive methods, including condoms and birth control pills than in 1995.

“These data suggest that the US appears to be following patterns seen in other developed countries where increased availability and increased use of modern contraceptives have been primarily responsible for declines in teenage pregnancy rates,” the researcherss write.
“Our findings,” they conclude, “raise questions about current U.S. government policies that promote abstinence from sexual activity as the primary strategy to prevent adolescent pregnancy.” Among younger teens 15 to 17 years old, increased contraceptive use was responsible for 77 percent of the pregnancy risk decline while decreased sexual activity was responsible for 23 percent of the decline. The report cited increases in the use of both condoms and birth control pills. In addition, more young people are combining methods for extra protection, it said.

The US government has come under fire for its policy on teenage pregnancy, which includes funding education programmes which eschew promotion of contraception in favour of abstinence. Many publicly funded programs in the USA promote abstinence-only-until-marriage at the cost of education on contraception – these programs prohibit information about the advantages/benefits of condoms and contraception.
“The United States seems to be following the recent patterns in other developed countries where increased availability and use of modern contraceptives and condoms have led to remarkable declines in teen pregnancy,” said lead author John Santelli. “If most of the progress in reducing teen pregnancy rates is due to improved contraceptive use, national policy needs to catch up with those realities.”

A spokeswoman for the group Focus on the Family, a national leader in the abstinence campaign, said she could not comment on the study because the organization had not seen it. But, she said, “If sexuality education is taught in a condom-plus-abstinence format, the message is mixed and nondirective. Students are left confused as to the best health choice.”
Anne Weyman, chief executive of the Family Planning Association, said it was clear that the abstinence-only approach to sex and relationships did not work.
“Robust contraception services, comprehensive sex and relationship education and a mature attitude to young people’s sexuality are the key components in bringing down teenage pregnancy.
“If we are expecting young people to make responsible decisions about their sexual health, they need information and support to do it. Simply telling them not to have sex isn’t enough.”

Tags: Teen Pregnancy, Contraceptives

Chinese actress Zhang Yu, showed more than 20 videotapes of her having sex with famous Chinese directors and actors in return for film/TV roles, chinese media reported. Actress become famous after telling the press that she had videotapes and other evidence to prove that an important director had sex with her friend.
The name of director is Huang Jianzhong and the actress said Huang had hinted many times that he would offer her roles in his TV series if she had sex with him. The actress said she did not want, but because she want not lose an important act in TV series, she asked her friend to be her substitute. The voiceover for the first video, which lasted about two minutes and was posted on the Internet on Saturday, identified the man caught in the sex video clip as Jin Hao, media reports said.
She did say that one tape showed her having sex with Huang. She also showed letters said to be from actors like Wen Haibo promising roles in return for sex.

In 2003 Zhang Yu claimed director Huang Jianzhong has sex with her friend in return for Zhang getting a role and that she had video evidence to back up her claims. Huang and some other directors criticised Zhang for making false accusations. She responded by suing them but the case failed in court earlier this year and the directors were declared innocent.
Huang responded that he did have dinner with Zhang but he was drunk after two bottles of beer and could not remember what had happened that day – report Xinhua agency.
Zhang Yu said, she shot the sex video tape between Jin and an unidentified woman. In the clip, only the private parts were blocked with mosaic marks. Toward the end of the clip, a naked director stood up to grab the video camera while Zhang was heard saying “If you grab it, I’ll shout.” It was not clear how Zhang was able to shoot the video.

On Saturday afternoon Zhang Yu published another sex video tape showing her kissing a bald-headed man whom she identified as an actor from Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region who promised to find her a role but didn’t.
Fu Minrong, a lawyer with a Shanghai-based law firm, told Xinmin Evening News that despite Zhang’s stated whistle-blowing purpose in releasing the video tapes, it was illegal to spread such pornographic scenes online.

Zhang Yu took her campaign to the Internet by releasing two video statements, including excerpts from the tapes. She says that publishing the videos online is a response to critics who say that her accusations and the tapes are just a way for to hype herself. This online video response is of course just another way for to hype herself. And Internet companies are cashing in on the action too.
Video sharing website Yoqoo is also enjoying the fuss. Zhang videos — two of them so far — are on a Yoqoo page. Note that Yoqoo have superimposed a second Yoqoo logo over the video, just to make sure that everyone knows the original source of the video no matter where it’s reproduced.
The naked scenes in the video have the naughty bits pixellated, but it remains sordid. According to Yoqoo’s own stats, this video had been viewed almost three million times at the time of writing.

Zhang Yu also has a blog on Sina. She agreed to the sex in exchange for the parts, and in so far as I gather, she got them. She was not forced, she even pimped out one of her friends! I doubt she would be making such rackus if she became popular. In the end she is just crying sour grapes. You can’t take the moral high ground if you don’t have morals yourself.

Tags: Zhang Yu, Zhang Yu video tape, sex video tape

Iranian actress Zahra Amir Ebrahimi were investigated and faces jail after a Paris Hilton-style video tape of her having sex with her boyfriend was leaked on the internet and released on DVD. While Paris’s exploits propelled her to worldwide stardom, Zahra Amir Ebrahimi faces ruin, a public lashing and even a jail term. The downloaded video widely distributed on the black market that purports to show a young soap star making love to her boyfriend, the press reported Wednesday.
She is being investigated for a suspected breach of the country’s morality laws that prohibit sex outside marriage. Lashing is the penalty.
Her alleged partner in the video stands accused of breaking the law by distributing the material illegally and could face a year in prison. The man, whose name was not given, has fled the country. He has fled to Dubai and if caught and returned, faces three years in jail and a £6,000 fine for offending public morality, the newspaper reports.

25-year-old Ebrahimi is one of the best-known actresses in Iran, the strict Islamic country and made the 20-minute sex tape privately with her boyfriend on a camcorder at the flat they shared two years ago. The scandal sex video has shocked fans of the 25-year-old in the deeply Islamic country, where sex outside marriage is illegal. And have made a mass searches of “download zahra video” terms over the internet.
Unbeknown to her, it was posted on the internet and widely released as a DVD – angering millions in Iran. Her boyfriend, who has not been named by the authorities in Tehran, is suspected of distributing the material illegally.

The actress Zahra Amir Ebrahimi described the events as an “immoral campaign” and denounced “unjust and dishonorable accusations aimed at trampling over the honor of a woman,” according to the semi-official agency Ilna. She has also moved to reassure her fans that rumors that she has committed suicide are false. “I just want to tell my country’s people I am alive. I am thinking about the strength of Iranian women and will defend the respect of the girls and women of my nation,” she said. While she has not been officially named in Iran, her name is on everyone’s lips as her identity has become common knowledge through internet chat rooms, the newspaper reported. In the newspaper pictures she appears demure in a headscarf, which is also compulsory in Iranian state television productions, where strict Islamic rules do not even allow the slightest touching between unrelated or unmarried men and women.

According to Iran’s Islamic law, any person found guilty of encouraging prostitution, harming people’s privacy or public morality faces jail. Any sexual relationship outside marriage is also illegal. An Iranian woman was stoned to death in 2001 for appearing in a home-made pornographic movie, though authorities have since officially banned stoning. Investigators tracked her down through the number on the electricity meter in the background.
‘It (the punishment for the actress) depends on finding out whether she had a deliberate role in the case,’ a judiciary official said.
The judiciary warned families and celebrities about the risk that their private films could be obtained and put out to sale on the black market.
“Families must pay attention to their private films. If you hand in your computer or mobile phone for repair, make sure you wipe off your films,” said the deputy Tehran prosecutor Salarkia. “Families must pay more attention to people who they visit, not to reply to suspect letters and telephone calls and not to go to gatherings of strangers, as they could be trapped.”

The fate of Ebrahimi is a far cry from the experience of celebrity hotel heiress Paris Hilton and her former film-producer boyfriend Rick Salomon. Her sex video – shot five years ago when she was 21 – spread like wild fire on the internet and rocketed her to stardom in America and Britain after Salomon allegedly cashed in by leaking the tape.
Paris already has a successful career as a model and a singer and has launched a cosmetics range. The same thing can hardly be said for Zahra Amir Ebrahimi – whose fledgling career has spectacularly hit the buffers.

Tags: Zahra Amir Ebrahimi, iran, sex video

Memo to beauty pageant winners: If you want to keep your crown, don’t blab about sleeping with a judge. “Miss Great Britain” Danielle Lloyd made that mistake and now she has been stripped of her title. Miss Great Britain Danielle Lloyd was stripped of her title on Thursday after letting slip that she had been dating footballer Teddy Sheringham, who was one of the judges, for two months before she won the crown.
Danielle Lloyd, 22, won the title in February after receiving a vote from the veteran West Ham footballer striker Teddy Sheringham, who was on the judging panel. The couple are now in a relationship, which Ms Lloyd, who was crowned after she won a public telephone vote, insists began when they met at the after-show party. She had previously claimed that they had only started their romance on the night of the pageant in February.

But she was exposed after Eve magazine published an interview in which she accidently gushed about how Sheringham had surprised her with a pair of expensive shoes last Christmas while they were in bed together. She told the magazine: “I’d no idea Ted was planning to treat to me to such an expensive pressie. We were still in bed when I opened my present.
“I flung back the sheets and sprang up to try on my new shoes. Ted says he’ll never forget the sight of me prancing round the room wearing these incredible, extravagant stilettos.”
Miss Lloyd’s publicist Max Clifford has said that his client stands by her claim that she did not know Sheringham before the final.

Advance publicity for a Playboy magazine spread on Danielle Lloyd also upset the pageant. Danielle Lloyd and Cindy Margolis, another most downloaded babe on the Internet, make their nude debut together in separate pictorials in this month’s Playboy. Margolis grabs the cover and says she has finally decided to strip after years and years of being asked to bare all.
Danielle Lloyd is topless in one of the shots but covered. The other shows her in a bikini. Those two are the least revealing shots from the mag as she was paid more than £100,000 to take part in the shoot
‘Following recent claims in the press and magazines and the publicity given on the Playboy website for their next issue, we have sadly decided to strip Danielle Lloyd of her title as ‘Miss Great Britain 2006′ effective immediately,’ said a statement published on the Miss Great Britain website. They demanded their crown back since one of their rules states: “The winner will not accept or undertake any fully nude or topless assignments during her reign.”

NationalLedger reported that Danielle Lloyd writes on her website:

I have tried to have a quiet week this week – well kind of anyway until yesterday!! Here we have it – I was yesterday evening stripped of my title as Miss Great Britain because I will be appearing in the December issue of Playboy which is out on Friday 10th November in the UK.

I can’t say much about it at the moment, but I can certainly assure you that Ted and I had never met until the night of the contest of Miss GB, in fact I didn’t even know who Ted was, but I am glad I did meet Ted that night he is the best thing to have come out of all this. I am delighted and honored to be appearing in Playboy and I can’t wait to see the final copies of it when it hits the news stands. When I was sitting in the Playboy office with all the front covers from Marilyn Monroe to Sharon Stone on the wall around me I was overwhelmed and I’m so proud to be there.

I will update you with any news as It comes in!

Love Danielle xx

Tags: Danielle Lloyd, Miss Great Britain, playboy