In terms of appearance slimmer women look attractive and healthier than their overweight counterparts.

Researchers at the University of Manchester in Britain and Australia’s Monash University asked students to go over the CVs and photos of job applicants what they thought were 12 various women.

It was actually six women with their photos taken before and after weight loss surgery.

The students were asked to rate the job applicants on their leadership potential, whether they would be likely to choose them for a job and what sort of initial remuneration they would offer.

They were also asked to rank them in terms of how successful they thought they would be.

The findings, published in the International Journal of Obesity, show that the overweight applicants were overall rated far lower than those their slimmer rivals.

The students awarded them lower wages and looked forward that they would be far less successful within the company.

Lead researcher Kerry O’Brien, from Monash University, said the prejudices were in part a reflection of how people felt about themselves.

‘Our findings show that there is a clear need to address obesity discrimination, particularly against females who tend to bear the brunt of anti-fat prejudice,’ said O’Brien.

The treatment is being piloted by psychiatrists at HMP Whatton, Nottingham, a specialist category C prison which holds male sex offenders.

Around one hundred child sex offenders or pedophiles have undergone chemical castration under a government program to reduce the likelihood of being a recidivist.

Evidence from Scandinavia suggests chemical castration can cut the rates of being a recidivist from 40 per cent to 5 per cent.

Guidance on the medication says it should be used for those with compulsive or impulsive urges to offend, those who have difficulties in controlling sexual arousal, intrusive sexual fantasies or urges, sadism or other “dangerous” tendencies such as necrophilia.

But it stresses: “It is anticipated only small numbers of sex offenders will benefit from these treatments.”

“Apart from lengthy jail sentences, the only other way to deal with most of these people is through chemical castration,” according to Psychologist Dr. Ludwig Lowenstein.

“The idea of giving sexual offenders a pill to destroy their ability to have intercourse always provokes fierce objections on the grounds of civil liberties.

But a child’s right to protection is far more morally important than the freedoms of pedophiles.”

A Ministry of Justice spokesman said: “We support the use of pharmaceutical interventions for high risk sex offenders given the evidence that it can be useful in reducing risk for some perpetrators.”

This study shows how stress can be a vicious circle, adversely affecting the way employees perform at work, which can lead to even more workplace stress.

The mental and physical well-being of employees were at risk if they came to work still stressed from the day before, according to Professor Wayne Hochwarter, author of the study.

The main ingredient to taking the pain out of a stressful day at work is a supportive partner at home, a new study has confirmed.

It may not seem like a breakthrough but the study, from Florida State University, is the first to quantify the effects that a sympathetic partner can do at home and at work.

Prof. Hochwarter found that highly stressed employees had a 25 per cent higher level of concentration levels if they had a harmonious home life.

Employees with strong home support were 25 per cent less likely to suffer from after-work fatigue.

They were also 33 per cent more likely to have positive relationships with colleagues, and a 20 per cent higher level of job satisfaction.

Having an awareness of a partner’s daily work demands, such as deadlines, a lack of adequate resources and bad bosses, could ensure that couples always communicated, and a partner could see when their loved one was underplaying or exaggerating a problem.

The ability to bring a partner back to the middle, building them up when they feel down in the dumps, or talking them down when they are overly agitated, also played a crucial role.

It was not advisable, however, to compete with each other in terms of who had the worse day, or keep tabs on who had been more supportive of whom.

Professor Hochwarter said: ‘When stress enters any relationship, it has the potential to either bind people together or break them apart. Successful couples almost always kept a steady supply of support resources on reserve to be tapped on particularly demanding days.’

In its report, it says that one in four of the world’s children have stunted growth, meaning their body and brain have failed to develop properly due to malnutrition.

Malnutrition contributes to the deaths of 2.6 million children each year, according to the report.

One parent in six said their children were abandoning school to help out by working for food.

A third of parents surveyed said their children complained about not having enough to eat.
Rising food prices could undo work to reduce child malnutrition, the charity organization warns.

The charity found that many families in the world’s poorest countries could not afford meat, milk or vegetables.

The survey covered families in India, Bangladesh, Peru, Pakistan and Nigeria. The survey was carried out in these five countries, where half the world’s malnourished children live, according to the international polling agency Globescan.

The charity organization said that a year of record food prices had worsened child malnutrition and could hit progress reducing child deaths.

“The world has made dramatic progress in reducing child deaths, down from 12 to 7.6 million, but this momentum will stall if we fail to tackle malnutrition,” said Save the Children chief executive Justin Forsyth.

Forsyth wants a global ‘hunger summit’ to address the problem of malnutrition.

Assumpta Ndumi, a nutritionist who works with Save the Children in Kenya, told the BBC’s Network Africa program that successive droughts are causing a downward spiral there:

“When another drought comes and livelihood assets are destroyed it becomes worse for families to be able to feed their children.

“Milk is very important for families in north-eastern Kenya, so when livestock is lost they basically have no access to a protein source.

“We need to address the hidden hunger because it’s killing silently.”

Food prices rose sharply in the first half of last year, according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), after severe weather in some of the world’s biggest food exporting countries in 2010 damaged supplies.

Their fears of emotional, financial, social and legal reprisals of divorce, according to a study.

Committed couples aren’t marrying because they fear divorce, though many other reasons for and against marriage abound in young adults from different social classes.

In the study, researchers from Cornell and the University of Central Oklahoma performed in-depth interviews with 122 people who lived with their partner in or around Columbus, Ohio, between July 2004 and June 2006.

The respondents were organized into two groups: middle-class or working-class, based on their education and annual income.

They were asked open-ended questions on several topics as a part of a larger study, and about their thoughts and plans for marriage.

Researchers found that lower-income women, were concerned about being trapped in marriage and having no way out if things went wrong. They also tended to view marriage as ‘just a piece of paper.’

Working-class women had strong doubts about marriage and fear that it might be hard to exit if things went awry.

They also had fears of extra responsibilities and the costs of exiting the relationship make them more fearful of marriage.

The middle-class women viewed living together as a natural stepping stone to tying the knot. But the social, legal, emotional and economic consequences of divorce were a big worry for the 67 percent of respondents.

Social pressures and thoughts of deeper commitment may promote wedding vows in middle-class young adults.

A study from the Pew Research Center indicates that over half of adult Americans are currently married, the lowest rate in decades.

The findings could help premarital counselors devise lessons that ease fears of divorce and address the specific concerns of various socioeconomic classes, the researchers said.

The study was published in the December issue of the journal Family Relations.

A report from an independent commission said Catholic officials had failed to tackle the widespread abuse at schools, seminaries and orphanages.

The commission, which began work in August 2010, It studied 1,800 complaints of abuse at Catholic institutions, identifying 800 alleged perpetrators, just over 100 of whom are still alive.

It also conducted a broader survey of more than 34,000 people, to gain a more comprehensive picture of the scale and nature of abuse suffered by Dutch minors.

The report estimates that 10,000-20,000 minors were abused in the care of Catholic institutions between 1945 and 1981, when the number of Church-run homes dropped. In the years between 1981 and 2011, several more thousands suffered at the hands of priests and others working for the Church.

Most of the cases involved mild to moderate abuse, such as touching, but the report estimated there were ‘several thousand’ instances of rape.

Abuse by Catholic priests, laymen and laywomen was systematically covered up by the church to protect its reputation, the commission said, adding that the church was guilty of ‘inadequate supervision’ and ‘inadequate action’.

The findings appear to paint a picture of wider abuse in the Netherlands even than in Ireland, in a scandal that has rocked the Catholic Church in Europe and the United States and forced Pope Benedict xvi to apologize to victims of sexual abuse by priests.

The investigation was commissioned by the Conference of Bishops and the Dutch Religious Conference in 2010 after cases surfaced involving pedophile priests in the Netherlands, Belgium, Ireland, Germany, Australia, Canada and the United States.

But a new, international study at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has cast doubt on the idea that the differences are biological at all.

The study used data from schools in 86 countries, it’s the first major study to include so many non-Western societies, and concluded that differences in mathematical ability were due to unequal societies, not unequal biology.

The differences in performance seemed to be caused by social factors, i.e., each society’s attitude to women.

This is not a matter of biology. We found that boys, as well as girls, tend to do better in maths when raised in countries where females have better equality,’ said the researchers.

‘We found that boys as well as girls tend to do better in maths when raised in countries where females have better equality, and that’s new and important,’ said Jonathan Kane, a professor of mathematical and computer sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater.

According to researchers, none of their findings suggest that an innate biological difference between the sexes is the primary reason for a gender gap in math performance at any level.

Rather, these major international studies strongly suggest that the maths gender gap, where it occurs, is due to cultural factors that differ among countries and that these factors can be changed.

‘The girls living in some Middle Eastern countries, such as Bahrain and Oman, had, in fact, not scored very well, but their boys had scored even worse, a result found to be unrelated to either Muslim culture or schooling in single-gender classrooms,’ says Kane.

He suggests that Bahraini boys may have low average math scores because some attend religious schools whose curricula include little mathematics.

Also, some low-performing girls drop out of school, making the tested sample unrepresentative of the whole population.

‘For these reasons, we believe it is much more reasonable to attribute differences in maths performance primarily to country, specific social factors,’ Kane says.

To measure the status of females relative to males within each country, the authors relied on a gender-gap index, which compares the genders in terms of income, education, health and political participation.

Relating these indices to math scores, they concluded that math achievement at the low, average and high end for both boys and girls tends to be higher in countries where gender equity is better.

The study, by sociologist Brian Powell and colleagues at Indiana University, asked 815 ‘nationally representative’ Americans to explain their views on name change choices.

Not only is it becoming more popular to ditch maiden names nowadays, but half of Americans support the idea of women being legally required to do so.

Results published by Gender and Society journal in April, highlight that Americans are more traditional than others supposedly.

Two thirds of respondents said that taking a husband’s name after marriage is ‘best’ and 50 per cent said that they would support a law requiring women to take their husband’s name.

And while 50 per cent of respondents said they’d be fine with a man taking a wife’s name, their attitudes towards the idea belied their opinion.

Maintaining personal and individual identity was cited as a reason for the 30 per cent who said that keeping a maiden name is best, while convenience, tradition and children were drivers for taking a husband’s name.

In terms of religious belief, the most likely to change their names were Catholics, followed by Protestant and then Jewish women.

In the study, it was also noted that women with higher educational levels and high powered jobs who were most likely to keep their maiden names.

And seventy percent of American recruiters report that they have rejected job candidates because of information online, he said.

Marc S. Rotenberg, president of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, based in Washington D.C., said that employers were entitled to gather information to make a determination about job related expertise, but he expressed concern that “employers should not be judging what people in their private lives do away from the workplace.”

Companies have long used criminal background checks, credit reports and even searches on search engines and career affiliations online to probe the previous lives of prospective employees. Now, some companies are requiring job candidates to also pass a social media background check.

“We are not detectives,” said Max Drucker, chief executive of the company, which is based in Santa Barbara, California. “All we assemble is what is publicly available on the internet today.”

A start up, Social Intelligence scrapes the Internet for everything prospective employees have said or done online in the past seven years.

Then it assembles a dossier with examples of professionals honors and charitable work, along with negative information that meets specific criteria: online evidence of racist remarks; references to drugs; sexually explicit photos, text messages videos; flagrant displays of weapons or bombs and identifiable violent activity.

And what information has led to job offers being withdrawn or not made? Mr. Drucker said that one candidate was found using an advertising site to look for OxyContin, a narcotic pain reliever. A woman posing naked in photos she put up on an image sharing site didn’t get the job offer she was seeking at the hospital.

Reports removing references to a person’s religion, race, marital status, disability and other information protected under federal employment laws, which companies are not supposed to ask about during interviews.

Also, job candidates must first consent to the background check, and they are notified of any adverse information found.

Less than a third of the data surfaced by Mr. Drucker’s firm comes from such major platforms of social network. He said much of the negative information about job candidates comes from searches that find comments on blogs and posts on smaller social sites.

Mr. Drucker said his goal was to conduct screenings that would help companies meet their obligation to have consistent hiring practices while protecting the privacy of job candidates.

Police recently announced that they had rescued 89 babies from child traffickers, and the deputy director of the Public Security Ministry assailed what he called the practice of “buying and selling children in this country.”

China’s state controlled media ignored or suppressed news about government sanctioned kidnappings in Longhui and other regions until this May, when Caixin, an intrepid Chinese magazine, prompted an official inquiry.

Yuan Xinquan was caught by surprise one morning in 2005. Then a new father at the age of 19, he was holding his 52 day old daughter at a bus stop when a half dozen men sprang from a government van and demanded his marriage certificate.

He did not have one, he and his daughter’s mother were below the legal age for marriage. Nor did he have 6,000 renminbi, then about US$ 745 dollars, to pay the fine he said they demanded. He was left with a plastic bag holding her baby clothes and some powdered formula.

“They are pirates,” he said. Nearly six years later, he still hopes to relay a message to his daughter, “Please come home as soon as possible.”

But parents in Longhui say that in their case, it was the local government officials who treated babies as a source of revenue, routinely imposing fines of US$ 1,000 dollars or more, five times as much as an average local family’s yearly income. If parents could not pay, the babies were illegally taken from their families often put up for adoption by foreigners.

At least 16 children were seized by family planning officials between 1999 and late 2006 in Longhui County, a rural area in Hunan province parents and other residents said.

The practice came to an end in 2006, parents said, only after an 8 month old boy fell from the second floor balcony of a local family planning office as officials tried to pluck him from his mother’s arms.

Reports that local government officials stole children, beat parents and forcibly sterilized mothers, sowed terror in Longhui County for years are well known. Critics say the powers handed to local officials under family planning regulations remain excessive and prone for abuse and exploitation.

But rather than helping trace and recover seized children, parents say, the authorities are punishing those who speak out.

Lillan Zhang, the director of China Adoption With Love, based in Boston, said the agency had found adoptive parents in 2006 for six Chinese children for adoption from the government run Shaoyang orphanage.

The Chinese authorities certified in each case that the child was eligible for adoption, she said. Foreign parents who adopt must donate about US$ 5,400 dollars to the orphanage.

The scandal also has raised some questions on moral grounds and legal issues regarding foreigners adopting Chinese children who were falsely and deliberately depicted as orphaned by unscrupulous government officials.