Rooting

The only reason a real scandal doesn’t break out more often is the media do more rooting than the politicians. They generally only break out when the politician  has run one up the wrong person in the media, or their behaviour is just so appalling that even the appallingly behaved media rooters take exception.

Allegations about the Liberal Democrats’ former chief executive Lord Rennard, first aired by Channel 4 News last week, are now shaking the party to its core. Nick Clegg has already had to concede that “indirect and non-specific concerns” were made known to him five years ago, and now this newspaper has revealed an email exchange from 2010 in which five specific allegations about Lord Rennard were put to Jonny Oates, then the party’s director of electoral communications and now Nick Clegg’s chief of staff.

There’s no doubt that the Liberal Democrats are now taking very seriously claims that Lord Rennard behaved inappropriately towards women by propositioning and touching them. That’s some comfort, at least, to those who were the subject of his unwanted attentions. Because, as one woman told us anonymously on Friday, senior members of the party who witnessed Lord Rennard’s alleged sexual impropriety at the time did nothing but giggle and smirk.  Read more »

There is a new Facebook app out called Bang With Friends:

A Facebook app which seeks to pair up sexually attracted friends by allowing users to list who they’d shag has recently created controversy.

Users who download Bang With Friends can manually trawl their friends lists to identify people they’d be interesting in rooting. If the people they’ve selected, reciprocate, the app sends a notification to both people letting them know it’s on like Donkey Kong.

The software has already been downloaded by over 20,000 and has sparked a range of imitators, including LinkedIn’s Bang with Professionals.

Read more »

Breaking the no rooting rule in sport or ion politics usually gets you in big trouble…but even more trouble if you do it in Tunisia with your cousin:

A SCANDAL involving abuse of public money and gossip of adultery would be bad enough in ordinary times. Just now, though, Tunisia happens to be in the throes both of an imminent cabinet reshuffle and a budget crisis. The state of the country’s finances led some economists to suggest last week that the government would fail to pay salaries in January. Worse, the minister at the heart of the affair is not only a top figure in the Nahda Party, the long-persecuted Islamist group that helped overthrow the corrupt dictatorship of Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali two years ago and now leads the country’s ruling coalition. He is also married to the daughter of its widely revered chief, Rachid Ghannouchi.

Nothing has been proven, but Rafik Abdesselem, Tunisia’s minister of foreign affairs, is having a tough time explaining himself. His troubles started on December 26th, when a popular blogger, Olfat Riahi, published what appeared to be copies of hotel bills from last year that had been issued in the minister’s name and paid by his ministry, oddly enough by way of Tunisia’s embassy in Ethiopia. The hotel in question is one of the Tunisian capital’s fanciest, the Sheraton, a large hilltop structure that happens to be across the street from Mr Abdesselem’s office.  Read more »

An Indian village has banned women using cellphones…for “debasing the social atmosphere”…true… apparently cellphones facilitate easier elopement.

Instead of a nod and wink and a bit of how’s your father it is sly txts and off you go:

A village council in the eastern Indian state of Bihar has banned the use of mobile phones by women, saying the phones were “debasing the social atmosphere” by leading to elopements – a move that set off outraged protests from activists.

In addition to the ban, the Sunderbari village council in a Muslim-dominated area some 385 kilometers (239 miles) east of Patna, the capital of Bihar, has also imposed a fine of 10,000 rupees ($180) if a girl is caught using a mobile phone on the streets.

Married women would have to pay 2,000 rupees ($36.60).

“It always gives us a lot of embarrassment when someone asks who has eloped this time,” said Manuwar Alam, who heads a newly-formed committee tasked with enforcing the ban, referring to queries from neighbouring villages.

He said the number of elopements and extramarital love affairs had risen in the past few months, with at least six girls and women fleeing their homes.

“Even married women were deserting their husbands to elope with lovers. That was shameful for us,” Alam said. “So, we decided to tackle it firmly. Mobile phones are debasing the social atmosphere”.

Local officials have begun investigations, saying that such bans cannot be allowed in a healthy society, while women’s rights activists called it an assault on freedom that could potentially end up harming women by stripping them of one source of protection from trouble, such as unwanted advances by men.

“Girls and women are capable enough to protect themselves,” said activist Suman Lal during a debate on local television. “Technology is meant to be used, not to be banned…The order is nauseating.”

As he should… I mean who would want to be a dud root?

 Of all the grounds for divorce, “My husband won’t tie me up with cable ties and spank me when I’m bad” wins the prize for novelty.

And the prize goes to a 41-year-old British woman who filed for divorce because her husband wouldn’t act out scenes from Fifty Shades of Grey.

For those of you who’ve spent the last nine months either a) living in a convent, b) being a contestant on Big Brother or c) preoccupied with stuff that actually matters like, oh-I-don’t-know-Syria-perhaps, Fifty Shades of Grey is a bestselling series of erotic novels by EL James about a university graduate Ana Steele who agrees to become a sex slave for billionaire Christian Grey.

The aggrieved wife who played the mummy-porn card to secure her divorce is a banker who reportedly earns in excess of £400,000 a year.

Apparently she was bored with her allegedly dud-root of a husband so she did what many other women have done in similar situations. She bought some saucy underwear to try and raise her husband’s er, um, level of interest.

So far, so Dr Feelgood.

But when her husband refused to role play the creepy, moody, abusive sociopath Christian Grey, she initiated divorce proceedings citing her husband’s “boring attitude” to sex as evidence of “unreasonable behaviour”.

Her husband agreed with this assessment and didn’t contest the divorce – presumably to avoid having his libido or sexual tastes dissected and mulled over in the family division of the UK’s High Court.

It isn’t ethics or anything special…just army boys will root anything, and why not?

Along with a steady diet of books on leadership and management, the reading list at military “charm schools” that groom officers for ascending to general or admiral includes an essay, “The Bathsheba Syndrome: The Ethical Failure of Successful Leaders,” that recalls the moral failure of the Old Testament’s King David, who ordered a soldier on a mission of certain death — solely for the chance to take his wife, Bathsheba.

The not-so-subtle message: Be careful out there, and act better.

Despite the warnings, a worrisomely large number of senior officers have been investigated and even fired for poor judgment, malfeasance and sexual improprieties or sexual violence — and that is just in the last year.

Arnie is full of class:

It’s hardly going to ingratiate him with his estranged wife, but it may not surprise her: when Arnold Schwarzenegger’s scandalous affair hit the headlines, he believed that if his marriage to Maria Shriver broke down, he would find himself a “20-year-old honey”.

The admission is part of explosive revelations that detail the former California Governor’s reaction to the demise of his 25-year marriage. His relationship crumbled after Shriver learnt of his secret relationship with his housekeeper and the couple’s illegitimate child.

Newsweek reports that the Terminator star allegedly refused to attempt to work at saving the marriage, and when news of the extra-marital affair and lovechild broke, Arnie reportedly told a friend: “I have the money, the power, and the plane, and I will have the friends.”

But it is perhaps his apparent refusal to comprehend the gravity of his affair that is most alarming. “I think things will work out OK with Maria, but if they don’t, I’m getting me a 20-year-old honey”, the 65-year-old is said to have told his neighbour.

Writing for the magazine, Laurence Leamer details the star’s odd relationship with sex, describing intimacy with women as a “wilful assertion on the world”.

This is simply outrageous:

Passionate love making by Jessica Angel and Colin Mackenzie has upset their neighbours, leading the Adelaide couple to face being fined A$4000 (NZ$5134) for having sex a little too loudly.

The hefty fine is for breaching the Environmental  Protection Act of 1993, News Ltd reports.

Under South Australian law, noise is classified as a form of pollution and that includes vibration.

The couple from the Adelaide suburb of Black Forest are reportedly the first in South Australia to be charged with breaching those environmental laws.

Police patrols have visited the couple’s unit 20 times since April, News Ltd said.

Colin MacKenzie, 45, told News Ltd his arrest was excessive while Angel, 34, expressed surprise.

“We exceeded the noise pollution to the point we were arrested and taken out of our house and told we couldn’t have sex,” she said.

An Emergency Environment Protection Order was served on the couple on Sunday last week, ordering them to cease all noise for 72 hours.

But the couple were reported to have ignored that order and police were called again on Tuesday morning.

MacKenzie blamed his girlfriend for the noise.

“Our average sex goes anywhere from four, six, seven hours, basically five nights a week,” he said.

“That’s pretty much why I am asleep at six o’clock in the afternoon.

“I will probably die of a heart attack.

“She is almost killing me as it is.”

She must be a real screamer…If I was him I’d go for the heart attack, that would spectacular.

ᔥ The Telegraph

A rooting Austrian politician is in line to get nearly $32,000 in compensation after a hidden camera used for snapping wildlife photographed him doing the wild thing in a forest:

The politician, who has not been named, will get the money if a court rules the photographs violated his privacy.

Carefully concealed, placed well away from areas frequented by people and packing motion sensors the camera was designed to record the wildlife of the forest in the Austrian region of Carinthia but instead caught the politician’s physical liaison.

Legal experts said the camera contravenes Austrian laws restricting the use of surveillance cameras. Hans Zeger, president of Argen Daten, an NGO specialising in data protection, said official permission was needed to place the camera, and “at the very least is should have been marked with signs so visitors could adjust their behaviour and avoid the monitored areas.” But the Carinthia Hunting Society, the organisation which placed the camera, defended the use of the spying equipment.

“I cannot say for sure how many cameras are in operation in forests in Carinthia as they do not have to be registered to us,” said Freydis Burgstaller-Gredenegger, the society’s manager. “We have never had any problems with the cameras up until now.” She added that the cameras were generally used to record animal feeding patterns.

So far the politician’s blushes have been spared by the society decision to keep both the photographs and his name secret.

ᔥ The Local

I think I have found why Trevor Mallard chose a career in politics over banking:

A German banker and his secretary caught having sex in his 56th floor office are facing punishment – not for romping in the office but for wasting work time, Bild newspaper reported on Wednesday.

A colleague walked in on the pair as they were sprawled across the banker’s desk high up in the Helaba bank headquarters in Frankfurt.

But the punctilious co-worker was less shocked by what they were doing than the fact that neither of them had ‘clocked out’ prior to their extra-curricular activities, violating bank regulations.

As far as managers were concerned, the thrust of the affair was not that the pair were getting down and dirty on a desk – but that they were technically bonking on the bank’s time.

Luckily for Mallard, MPs (or Labour Party blondes) don’t have to complete those pesky private sector timesheets.