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Their twins are not even two months old and the couple are rumoured to be thinking of adopting again.
The Daily Mail reported today that ‘the couple… are thought to be considering adopting a child from Namibia, where their first biological child, daughter Shiloh, was born two years ago.’ They were also looking into adopting a child from Bolivia or Paraguay.
They must have lots and lots and lots and lots of extra childcare and help.
picture credit: AP
Men. Of course, it must be men.
In my house, ’he’ is to blame for everything that goes wrong: power failure, running out of milk, dead plants, no toilet paper, phone line cut, missed appointments…
So if ‘he’ is to blame for the little f-ups in my life, ‘they’ must be to blame for the financial collapse.
In The Times of London today, Matthew Syed argues in ‘What caused the crunch? Men and Testosterone’ that ‘the reason why confidence in the banking system collapsed was too much testosterone. With more women on the trading floor, risk-taking would be a saner business’.
He says ‘…it is men who dominate the financial system that got us into this mess; it is men, by and large, whose trading inflated the profits of banks to levels that now seem like the stuff of testosterone-fuelled fantasy; and it is men who pocketed most of the bulging bonuses that even Gordon Brown reckons were a key cause of the crisis. All of which raises an important and deliciously controversial question: what would have happened if global financial institutions had been run by women?”
‘Would they have been more focused on the human consequences and less on the next pay cheque? Would they have been more empathetic and less cut-throat? Would financial districts have had a few more crèches and a few less of those godawful bars where traders hang out to brag about their latest deal? In short, would we have avoided this calamity if markets had been doused with sufficient quantities of oestrogen?’
Of course, of course, of course!
Eish, but would we really rely on a Sarah Palin to bail us out of this mess?
Such a beautiful picture of a beautiful moment between two people who quite obviously like each other. It appeared in our first edition today but was changed for an ‘economic crisis’ picture for the second edition.
So, here it is for those of you who didn’t see it in The Times today.
Barack and Michelle Obama share this moment as Democratic vice presidential candidate, Joe Biden, speaks at a rally in front of the Detroit Public Library in Detroit on Sunday.
On Huffingtonpost.com Gay and Kathlyn Hendrick write about this relationship as being a major benefit nobody is talking about. They say that Michelle and Barack Obama ‘provide a great role model of a healthy relationship, at a time when such models are sorely needed…Imagine having a president who likes his partner and values her as an equal, a president who touches his wife affectionately in public and actually listens to her when she talks! ‘
credit: AP
Whether it’s because it was just too much like socialism (as a very large number of Republicans seem to think) or because its too much like handing out cash to fat cats who’ve done nothing but mess the economy up (as a smaller number of Democratics seem to think), the bailout bill failed and Wall Street crashed. (Read continuing New York Times coverage here.)
Paul Krugman of the New York Times thinks that the US is now a banana republic with nukes.
According to The Daily Dish, McCain — sober and sensible as ever — blames Obama for his party’s failure to support their own President: ‘Just before the vote, when the outcome was still in doubt, Speaker Pelosi gave a strongly worded partisan speech and poisoned the outcome. This bill failed because Barack Obama and the Democrats put politics ahead of country.’
Sheesh…
Reading about the man, Paul Newman, this weekend, I learnt that he gave away all the proceeds from his food company, Newman’s Own. Since he launched the company in 1982, he has given away a quarter-billion dollars.
Some of the money went towards opening up The Hole in Wall Gang Camp in 1988, a summer camp experience for seriously ill children. Today there are 11 similar camps around the world. He also founded the Scott Newman Centre in 1980 which works to prevent substance abuse. His son, Scott, died of drug overdose in 1978.
Eve Ensler, playwright (The Vagina Monologues) and Founder of V-Day, the global movement to end violence against women and girls, wrote about Paul and Joanne Newman in Huffingtonpost yesterday.
She said: “They taught me that the only real happiness comes from giving. And because they lived everything they spoke, they taught me about integrity.
I can’t imagine this world without Paul Newman. But I know his generosity, his gift of confidence lives surely in many of us and if there is a way to appreciate him, it is in giving deeper and deeper.”
What a man! We will certainly miss him – and rewatch all his movies.
Picture: Paul and Joanne Newman with 2 of their daughters (AP)
This weekend I learnt that Motlanthe played soccer and marbles when he was small, and is fussy about his food. Besides these bits of information I know nothing about our new President’s personal life.
It’s so different to what is happening across the way in the US, where politicians parade their extended families for all to survey at any given opportunity.
We’ve still to see our First Lady. We don’t even know her name.
What a lovely home! This is a former house of Sarah Palin on Wasilla Lake in Wasilla, Alaska. Two months before Palin’s tenure as mayor ended in 2002, she asked city planning officials to forgive zoning violations so she could sell the house.
This is quite a story.
Initially, there was resistance to the request from neighbours and some planning officials. One neighbour Clyde Boyer Jr asked in 2002: “that the Wasilla Planning Commission apply the exact same rules in this situation that it would apply to other similar requests so that our community can see that being a public figure does not give anyone special benefits.”
But she finally got the house rezoned and sold it successfully.
picture credit: AP