[Vienna, September 22. Image via Getty]

An Austrian woman walks on an empty main road called ''Burg Ring '' shortly after it was closed for eight hours to participate in Europe's Car Free day in the heart of Vienna on September 22, 2009.The closure of the street caused traffic chaos in several parts of Vienna.AFP PHOTO/Joe KLAMAR (Photo credit should read JOE KLAMAR/AFP/Getty Images)

[Bregenz, Austria; June 17. Image via Getty]

BREGENZ, AUSTRIA - JUNE 17: A woman stretches prior to performing a stunt in front of a gigantic foot of the Statue of Liberty during a rehearsal for AIDA at the sea stage on June 17, 2009 in Bregenz, Austria. The premiere of Giuseppe Verdi's opera takes place on July 22, 2009. (Photo by Miguel Villagran/Getty Images)

[Venice, June 4. Image via Getty]

A visitor looks ata mixed media installation, 'Rain theorem', by Russian artist Alexei Kallima on show on June 4, 2009 at the Russian pavilion of the Art Biennale in Venice. The 53rd International Art Exhibition, titled Making Worlds // Fare Mondi // Bantin Duniyan // Weltenmachen // Construire des Mondes // Fazer Mundos�, directed by Daniel Birnbaumwill presents works of some 90 artists from 77 countries and will be open to the public from June 7 to November 22 in the Giardini and the Arsenale exhibition venues, as well as in various other locations around the city. AFP PHOTO / ALBERTO PIZZOLI (Photo credit should read ALBERTO PIZZOLI/AFP/Getty Images)

• According to The Independent, Fritzl once again entered court holding a blue folder in front of his face, and held it up for 10 minutes until cameramen were ordered to leave the courtroom.
• Prosecutor Christians Burkheiser told the jury the ceiling of Fritzl's cellar was only five feet from the ground and that the cellar itself had no heat, no shower, no warm water, and hardly any ventilation for the first nine years Elisabeth was imprisoned there. Burkheiser said:
  

  He kept his daughter in a room that measured only 11sq meters for nine years. That is just about the size of the jury box you are sitting in .... In the summer it was blisteringly hot. In the winter it was freezing cold. Nobody can really imagine what went on down there.

• Burkheiser said that during the first few years of her imprisonment, Frtizl never spoke to his daughter, he just randomly entered the room and raped her. "He would turn down the lights, rape her and then turn the lights back up," she said. After the children were born, Fritzl raped her repeatedly in front of them. Elisabeth was kept in the cellar in complete darkness and without electricity for periods of up to 10 days.
• Fritzl told Elisabeth that he had installed three locking doors and electronically operated light barriers which would flood the cellar with gas if she tried to escape.
• A few weeks before Elisabeth was due to give birth to their first child, Fritzl gave her a dirty mattress, a filthy blanket, and an old book about childbirth.
• The Guardian reports that Burkheiser told the jury she didn't feel the full impact of the cellar prison until she visited it herself. She said:
  

  I've seen the cellar dungeon twice. It has a morbid atmosphere, which starts with having to crawl in on your hands and knees through the 83cm entranceway. And it's sinister. It's really bad. It's incredibly damp, a damp that creeps into you after just a few minutes.

  She continued:
  

  "But do you know what the worst thing was? The uncertainty: when will he return, when will he turn on the electricity, when will he go again, what will happen if he doesn't return?"

  She said Elisabeth's life in the cellar could be encapsulated in the sentence: "Light out. Rape. Light on. Mould. Rape. In front of the children. The uncertainty. Birth. Death. Rape."

• Fritzl's defense attorney, Rudolf Mayer, shocked the court by claiming that Fritzl was a caring family man, according to The Mirror. Mayer said:
  

  A man who put so much effort into keeping two families cannot be called a monster. If I only want a daughter as a sex slave, I don't let her bring children into the world. You'd let them starve.

  He continued:
  

  "This is a man who had wanted to have two families. If he had not wanted children he could have used contraceptives.

  "If he didn't care about children he could have disposed of them. He had the power. But he slept in the cellar with his children and spent time with them over Christmas. He cared for his second family.

  "When his oldest daughter was ill, what would a monster do? What would a killer do?

  "What this man did was take her to hospital. He could have killed her and everyone else."

  "He could have claimed that he was mentally unstable and tried to escape these proceedings. But he did not do so. He's not trying to say he was mentally ill."

• The Guardian reports that Elisabeth's 11 hours of videotaped testimony is so harrowing it's being played for the four-woman, four-man jury in small portions and other jurors are standing by in case the eight main jurors decide they can't cope.
• According to the Daily Mail, Elisabeth agreed to testify on the condition that she would never have to see her father again.
• Elisabeth said Fritzl would come in the cellar with boxes of pornographic videotapes and make her reenact scenes in them. She says she suffered serious internal injuries from oversized sex toys he used on her.
• The defense presented information about Fritzl's childhood. As the Daily Mail reports:
  

  Fritzl said: "I did not have a good relationship with my mother. She tried to stop me having any friends. But I had one she didn't know about and that friend bitterly let me down. So I decided that I would not have any friends after that."

  "I had a very difficult childhood. My mother didn't want me. She was 42 when she had me. She simply didn't want a child and she treated me correspondingly. I was beaten."

  He told the jury that, at the age of 12, he had made it clear to his mother that he would not tolerate being beaten any longer and would defend himself.

  'From that point on, I was Satan personified for her,' he said.

• Fritzl's wife Rosemarie now lives alone and has begun divorce proceedings.
• The rest of the trial will be conducted in secret until a verdict scheduled for Friday. The judge's decision has angered the Austrian public. One Austrian lawyer is quoted as saying: "I thought secret trials ended with Stalin, but obviously I was wrong."

  'Herr Fritzl, Can You Just Answer One Thing – Why?' [The Independent]
  'Light out. Rape. Light On. Rape. In Front Of The Children. Birth. Death. Rape' [The Guardian]
  Josef Fritzl Trial: Lawyer Insists Dungeon Fiend Was A Caring Family Man [The Mirror]
  Josef Fritzl Trial Judge Clears Court For Daughter's Evidence [The Guardian]
  Elisabeth Fritzl Tells The World How Her Father Forced Her To Re-Enact Porn Films With Him In The Cellar Dungeon [Daily Mail]

  Earlier: Austrian Abuser Admits To Rape But Denies Murder On First Day In Court

Today, Mr. Fritzl's first day in court, the abuser held up a blue folder to hide his face and spoke only to confirm his name. He pleaded "partially" guilty to rape because he doesn't agree with how the charge is worded, and fully guilty of depriving his children of their liberty, reports Reuters. He pled innocent to charges that he enslaved his daughter Elisabeth since the age of 18 and to murdering their infant son in 1996. Prosecutors say he is guilty of murder by negligence for not taking their son to the hospital when he developed breathing problems. Fritzl is accused of burning the three day old baby's body in the furnace.

In her opening statement, prosecutor Christiane Burkheiser said, "Josef Fritzl treated his daughter as his property, he made her completely dependent," according to the BBC. She added that Fritzl, "showed no sign of regret or any consciousness of wrongdoing."

Fritzl's daughter Elisabeth, now 42, and her six surviving children, are now living in a secret location with new identities and will not testify in person. The Times of London reports that 11 hours of Elisabeth's videotaped testimony will be shown to the eight jurors in the coming days. According to excerpts, Elisabeth says that she was initially chained to an iron pole behind her bed and couldn't get to the bathroom in the cramped windowless dungeon Fritzl built under the family's home. He is accused of raping his daughter on average three times a week since imprisoning her in the basement.

Of the six surviving children she gave birth to while underground, three were kept underground their entire lives, and three were taken upstairs and raised by Fritzl and his wife. According to CNN, Fritzl explained his daughter's disappearance in 1984 by saying she ran away from home and forcing her to write letters to back up his story. The then said she left three of her children on his doorstep throughout the years. His wife Rosemarie supposedly didn't know what was going on in her basement.

Police discovered the dungeon last April when 19-year-old Kerstin, one of the children in the cellar, got sick and Elisabeth persuaded her father to take her to the hospital. Elisabeth now lives with her youngest child, 6, and is in contact with her other children. The two older children from the basement, who are 19 and 20, are still receiving therapy. They never left the basement or saw sunlight and as a result have a stoop, restricted spatial awareness, rotting teeth and gums, skin problems, weak immunity and difficulty communicating.

Officials at St. Pölten prison where Fritzl is being held say he on suicide watch, according to The Guardian. "He's under constant watch. We're aware of the possibility he might self-harm," said Günther Mörwald, head of the prison. A verdict is expected on Thursday or Friday and Fritzl faces life in prison if convicted.

Austrian Admists Rape But Not Murder [Reuters]
Fritzl Admits Rape, Denies Murder [BBC]
Josef Fritzl To Tell Court He Was Good Father To Dungeon Family [The Times of London]
Austrian To Plead Guilty To Rape And Incest, Lawyer Says [CNN]
Josef Fritzl Cellar Trial Begins In Austria [The Guardian]

Here's the unbridled enthusiasm I was talking about! Sure, Vogue always shoots models on jumping in front of greyish-beige background. But are they ever this adorable? No. They are not.

I swear to the almighty Aphrodite, this girl is selling me those pants. I would look horrifying in white wide-legged pants, like the Sta-Puft Marshmallow Man's girlfriend, and yet, I want them! Because she makes them look fun!

Let's not mention body mass index or the fact that their legs are the width of arms in some other magazine. Let's focus on the glittery jewelry and their contagious smiles!

The shoes! Can we talk about the shoes? And the way they go with the shorts? And the tone-on-tone laces? Oh, and for those of you who watch Model.Live, the one on the left is Austria.

Sigh. When my sister gets "dressed up," she wears tux pants and a ribbed tank. On some women, it just works. And I love this. I love the shoes! And the $450 necklace that modeling can buy you but blogging cannot. I'm almost ready to sweep last month's corn row debacle under the rug where it belongs.


Teen Vogue [Official Site]
Earlier: Teen Vogue: Be A "Gender Bender" With A Blazer & Cornrows

• Josef Fritzl, the Austrian man who imprisoned and raped his daughter for 24 years in his basement, has been declared clinically sane, according to an Austrian psychiatric report to be presented when he comes to trial sometime next year. • Honor Blackman, the actress who played Pussy Galore in the film Goldfinger, says that her Bond girl was "no bimbo" but a "career woman" who fell in love with Bond. • Are you prone to shedding tears on your pillow? Now there's a pillow that is specially designed for bedtime-weepers. • Two Icelandic women have been put in charge of two nationalized banks that helped push Iceland's economy to the edge of bankruptcy. • A 24-year-old Australian woman who hid in her lover's house 10 years ago for 5 years and led her family to believe she was dead has recently married the man who helped hide her. • A new exercise program is being developed by researchers to reduce knee injury in the anterior cruciate ligament in women, which often sidelines female athletes. • A Florida grand jury issued a sealed murder indictment today in the murder of missing 3-year-old Caylee Anthony. • A 68-year-old former cross-country champion ran after and caught a 15-year-old boy who stole her handbag in England. • Some young Muslim women in Turkey are rebelling against against the secular Turkish state, which forces them to drop out of college if they wear headscarves. • Actress Maggie Quigley (or Maggie Q) describes the stereotypes in Hollywood about Asians and the difficulty she has in Hollywood due to her biracial background. • The California Association of Clerks and Election Officials wants to delay the change on marriage licenses from "Party A" and "Party B" to a "bride" and "groom" which is supposed to go into effect on November 17 since the clerks are currently overloaded with Election paperwork. •

But it's not just photographers looking to profit off of the Fritzl family's misery. A hospital worker allegedly snapped some pictures of Elisabeth and her children and tried to sell them for upwards of 200,000 euros. Two out of three of Elisabeth's children who were kept in the cellar with her — Stefan, 18, and Felix, 6, — along with the three raised above-ground, Alexander 12, Monika 14 and Lisa 15, are all at the hospital with their mother. Elisabeth's oldest daughter, Kerstin, who was raised in the cellar, is still in a coma, but sources say she is on the mend.

Elisabeth is planning to be interviewed for her television debut by reporter Christoph Feurstein, the same guy who interviewed Natascha Kampusch, the other young Austrian woman who was locked in a cellar for several years. Elisabeth is expected to discuss the child she had who died and was subsequently thrown in the furnace by her father. "It might not be good for the psychological healing process but Elisabeth's heart pumps nothing but pure venom for him," a source tells the Daily Mail. It's vaguely ironic that the Mail, a rag that publishes tabloid pictures of Lisa Marie Presley merely to poke fun at the pregnant star "piling on the pounds," would be the paper to suggest that the media's gone too far in the Fritzl case. But at least someone's pointing it out.

Elisabeth Fritzl Is To Talk About The 24 Years She Was Imprisoned In Her Father's Dungeon On Austrian TV [Daily Mail]
Exclusive: Kerstin Fritzl Winning Fight [Sunday Mirror]

Austrian Man Locked His Daughter In The Basement For 24 Years
Who Is Josef Fritzl?

[ Image via INFDaily].

Another issue raised by the Guardian (and our own commenters) is how Fritzl's wife, Rosemarie, did not know what was going on right under her nose. Franz Pölzer, head of the criminal investigation of Fritzl, says"It defies logical thinking that a woman who has had seven children with her husband would make it possible for him to have another relationship with his daughter and have another seven children."

For now, the focus is on psychologically rehabilitating Elisabeth and her six children. "It could take between five and eight years," to restore any sort of normalcy to their lives, according to Mas Friedrich, the psychiatrist who looked after Natasha Kampusch — the other woman famously kept in an Austrian cellar. Trying to determine the motivations of a complete psychotic like Fritzl, however, could take an eternity

Josef Fritzl: The Unanswered Questions [Guardian]
Austria: Natasha Kampusch Says Fritzl Children Should Stay In Cellar [Times of London]

Earlier: Austrian Man Locked His Daughter In The Basement For 24 Years

This crime, perpetrated in the town of Amstetten, 93 miles outside of Vienna, was only discovered because Elisabeth's 19-year-old daughter, Kerstin, became so seriously ill that she had to go to the hospital. A DNA test done on Kersten showed that Josef was her biological father, and that set off an investigation that uncovered Josef's "house of horrors," as many papers are calling it. One of the more bizarre aspects of the gruesome tale is that Josef's wife, Elisabeth's mother Rosemarie, reportedly didn't know about what was going on in her cellar, and thought the three children that she and Josef were raising above ground were left on their doorstep by the still-"missing" Elisabeth.

The case is somewhat of a national embarrassment for Austria, as in 2006, it was discovered that a woman named Natascha Kampusch had been held in a cellar for 8 years by an abductor, Wolfgang Priklopil, who had kidnapped her when she was 10 years old. Austrian newspaper Der Standard said in an op-ed about the crimes, "The entire nation must ask itself just what is fundamentally going wrong."

All six of the children — three boys and three girls — who were raised in the Fritzl's household are now in the care of authorities. There was a seventh child, who was the twin of another one of the children, but it died shortly after birth and was thrown into an incinerator by Josef. Police spokesman Franz Polzer told the BBC, "[The children] are being cared for individually - those between 12 and 16 years of age who grew up with their grandparents, and two boys who, when they came out yesterday with their mother, saw the daylight for the first time in their lives."

Austrian 'Hid Daughter In Cellar' [BBC]
Austrian Detectives Study Cellar [BBC]
Austrian Admits 24-year Abuse Of Daughter In Cellar [Reuters]
'House of Horrors' Father Confesses [CNN]