Standing in the way of control!

The Telegraph reports:

A Russian advertising executive who sued her boss for sexual harassment lost her case after a judge ruled that employers were obliged to make passes at female staff to ensure the survival of the human race.

The unnamed executive, a 22-year-old from St Petersburg, had been hoping to become only the third woman in Russia’s history to bring a successful sexual harassment action against a male employer.

She alleged she had been locked out of her office after she refused to have intimate relations with her 47-year-old boss.

“He always demanded that female workers signalled to him with their eyes that they desperately wanted to be laid on the boardroom table as soon as he gave the word,” she earlier told the court. “I didn’t realise at first that he wasn’t speaking metaphorically.”

The judge said he threw out the case not through lack of evidence but because the employer had acted gallantly rather than criminally.

“If we had no sexual harassment we would have no children,” the judge ruled.

Since Soviet times, sexual harassment in Russia has become an accepted part of life in the office, work place and university lecture room.

According to a recent survey, 100 per cent of female professionals said they had been subjected to sexual harassment by their bosses, 32 per cent said they had had intercourse with them at least once and another seven per cent claimed to have been raped.

Eighty per cent of those who participated in the survey said they did not believe it possible to win promotion without engaging in sexual relations with their male superiors.

Women also report that it is common to be browbeaten into sex during job interviews, while female students regularly complain that university professors trade high marks for sexual favours.

Only two women have won sexual harassment cases since the collapse of the Soviet Union, one in 1993 and the other in 1997.

Human rights activists say that Russian women remain second-class citizens and are subjected to some of the highest levels of domestic abuse in the world.

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Associated Press: Millions of people gathered to watch a total solar eclipse in China on Friday, one week before the start of the Beijing Olympics. (Aug. 1)This video contains ONLY natural sound.

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From REUTERS:

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Airbus’s A380 superjumbo touched down at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport on Friday, marking the first commercial arrival of the giant, double-decker passenger plane on U.S. soil.

The Emirates aircraft, carrying 489 passengers in varying degrees of luxury, landed smoothly and on time after a 13-1/2-hour flight from Dubai.

“Some of us were lucky, we had showers before got off the airplane,” Emirates President Tim Clark said, shortly after disembarking, losing no time in marketing the plane’s two “shower spas”, 14 first-class suites, bar and lounge.

The plane, fitted out with lie-flat beds, flat screen televisions and spacious, windowed bathrooms in first and business class, is set to return to Dubai on Friday evening.

Emirates, owned by the government of Dubai, is the second airline to put the A380 into service, following Singapore Airlines, which started A380 flights to Sydney in October.

The plane, costing $327 million at list prices, did visit New York and Los Angeles in March last year for route-testing purposes, but Friday’s flight was the first regularly scheduled arrival of an A380 in the United States

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It seems as though some fans of the Dark Knight have become….FANATICAL!

The backlash to the Dark Knight backlash isn’t exactly news — not after two weeks and almost $400 million dollars silencing even the most vehement of the film’s critics. But today we direct our attention to the more disturbing phenomenon of physical threats against some of those same critics, a few of whose lives have even been targeted by rogue fanboys with a taste for reviewer blood. We hardly believed it ourselves until an unsettling taxonomy of freaks coming after reviewers Jürgen Fauth and Keith Uhlich showcased the worst of it:

Some go no deeper than “Fag!”; some are actually amusing — “Keep your head in Little Women and Suffrage texts you pansy” — but others are downright ugly. On Rotten Tomatoes, someone felt it would be beneficial to post as many personal details about Jürgen that they could find, while another likened his crime to Joan of Arc’s:

“This guy is a terd [sic], let him rot. Lets [sic] burn him at the stake!”

The comments left for Keith are even more vile, particularly this one, which the author later claimed was written while channeling his inner Joker. Yikes. (All [sic]):

“You know, some people have been so enraged by your little opinion piece that they want you to kill yourself. Please DON’T!!! You know why, because I am going to have so much fun killing you myself! I promise, it WON’T be painless. I am going to carve a smile in your face. And then I am going to carve you stomach. And you know why? Because i just want my phone call. You’re my bitch now! I am going to track you down through your IP address and then I am going to f@#%!%* kill you!!!”

Daaammmn. Worried as we are for Mssrs. Fauth and Uhlich, really: You’ve got to see this in IMAX. Michael Caine will be campaigning for these guys’ Oscar nominations by Monday.

From: Defamer

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