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Fertility experts interviewed for a September article in London’s Daily Telegraph said a growing number of women were seeking in vitro fertilization not because they were having trouble conceiving through intercourse but because the greater efficiency and superior odds offered by IVF better fit their busy schedules. (Said one clinician, “Some people are horrified by the idea that they have to have sex two to three times a week.”) And according to an Agence France-Presse article in October, an official at the fertility clinic at Erasmus Hospital in Brussels said that so many French lesbian couples had been seeking artificial insemination in Belgium–because French law denies them such treatment–the clinic would have to restrict the number of French couples (gay or straight) it could see in order to save some sperm for its Belgian patients.
In December a law took effect in the suburbs of Buenos Aires requiring all stores selling clothing for adolescent girls to stock a specific range of sizes (equivalent to U.S. sizes 6 through 16 at a minimum) or face fines of up to $170,000. According to a November Wall Street Journal article, officials blame the small clothes typically sold in the area for contributing to local rates of anorexia and bulimia, which they say are among the highest in the world. Meanwhile, doctors from the Adelaide and Meath Hospital in Dublin told a convention audience in November that more than two-thirds of their patients who were given injections in the buttocks hadn’t received the proper dosage of medicine because needles designed for this use weren’t long enough to penetrate what is now a typical amount of buttock fat.
In November Don Samuels beat Natalie Johnson Lee for a seat on the Minneapolis city council. Samuels, who is black, had ignited controversy with comments suggesting that because his ancestors had been mixed-race “house slaves” who benefited from proximity to whites, he might make a particularly good role model for the black community. One local black activist and journalist with ties to the Johnson Lee campaign (she’s also black) responded by comparing Samuels to Hitler and telling viewers of a cable-access show that “we have to kill the house niggers.” And Clark Griep, running for mayor of Broomfield, Colorado, announced in October that he and his opponent, incumbent Karen Stuart, had had an extramarital affair eight years earlier. Stuart, who denied it, was reelected.
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Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): illustration/Sahwn Belschwender.
