Binge-drinking is on the rise amongst young girls, and clearly draconian health warnings and parental punishment isn't doing the trick. So, plan B: and at Worcestershire's Malvern St James School for Girls, that means after-hours wine-tasting sessions for 16-and-ups. Says teacher Rachel Huntley, according to the Independent,

We want to introduce the girls and their friends to good wines and their complexity, and educate them to develop an interest in the making of the wines rather than them seeing wine as something that you knock back in the summer holidays without thinking...As an all-girls' school, we have recognised that our children are under enormous pressure to conform to a drinking culture which has huge adverse health and social effects,

The girls in the class learn about bouquet, color and palate, and try the wines with foods (cooked in another class) from similar regions. Some of them include students from a local boys' school. Says Huntley, "Far better to enjoy a candlelit dinner with boys in the form of a quiz night blind wine-tasting than rely on the awful discos which are the standard diet in many schools."

When I wrote a British friend, I immediately got the response, "unlikely to challenge time-honored tradition of cider in park. But good idea."

Wine-Tasting Club Is The Toast Of Top Independent Girls' School [Independent]

Pittman is being held without bail. The women were all African-American and believed to be prostitutes. Police are still investigating the murders of the other four women and three missing women who fit the profile. • The persistent rumors that Chelsea Clinton was getting married in August on Martha's Vineyard obviously weren't true, as it's September and she's not married. The rumors got so bad that at one point the Clintons offered a $1,000 bet to any journalist's source that there would be no wedding. Hillary Clinton's reps issued a statement saying that they were, "sick of this insane environment where nobody bothers to heed the denials of the actual individuals involved and where facts and truth are a distant afterthought... So, if we're all going to be stuck together in this endless unfounded rumor loop through at least 8/29, let's at least make it interesting." There were no takers. • The wife of Yukio Hatoyama, who is expected to be voted Japan's next prime minister later this month, claimed in a book published last year that she rode a UFO to Venus 20 years ago. "While my body was asleep, I think my soul rode on a triangular-shaped UFO and went to Venus," said Miyuki Hatoyama. "It was a very beautiful place and it was really green." • Six women have been awarded the $25,000 Jaffe award for emerging women authors including poets Vievee Fancis, Janice Harrington and Heidy Steidlymayer; fiction writers Lori Ostlund and Helen Philips; and nonfiction writer Krista Bremer. • French doctor Pierre Foldes has developed a simple reconstructive procedure for victims of female genital mutilation that removes the painful tissue and reconstructs the clitoris by cutting ligaments to expose the root. "The results are getting better and better," he said . "Seventy two to 75 percent [of patients] are back to normal sexuality after 18 months." He has operated on more than 3,000 women in his hospital in France and is developing a program that would follow up with the women for months, giving them psychological treatment as well. • Though many teen sections in newspapers have been cut for economic reasons, the Yakima Herald-Republic's "Unleashed" section will return this fall due to an agreement with the local school district in Washington State to provide $11,500 to pay a part-time coordinator and student contributors. • Christina Aguilera, Christina Applegate, Maria Bello, Anne Hathaway, January Jones, Sherry Lansing, Sigourney Weaver, and Laura Ziskin will be honored at Variety's Power of Women luncheon on September 24 for the contributions they have made to charitable causes. • A study of nearly 30,000 people in the former Soviet Union found that binge-drinkers, and particularly women, who consumed four or five pints of beer or a bottle of wine in one day were more likely to have a "beer belly" than those who drank the same amount in a week. • The publishers of the New International Version Bible will release a revised edition that will "undo the damage" of an earlier version that tried to be more inclusive by substituting words like "he," "father," and "son" with more gender-neutral terms. Many didn't like the version, which came out in 2005. Wayne Grudem, a Biblical scholar at Phoenix Seminary in Scottsdale, Arizona, says, "I'm delighted to see they have realized the TNIV was simply never going to be accepted by the Christian public who value accuracy in translating the word of God... I'm thankful for their honesty." • To promote the Ultimate Pole Dancing Competition, there are mobile pole-dancing units bicycling around Manhattan today. • On Sunday 71-year-old Dawn Fraser, who won swimming gold medals in three Olympics, fought off and helped capture a man who tried to rob her in her home near Brisbane, Australia. "This guy came out of the gate and grabbed me and I grabbed him by the ear and I kicked him in the groin," she said. "So he had to let me go. He threatened my life and I got really annoyed about that and just grabbed him by the ear and the hair." A male friend made him lie on his stomach until the police came. • Are men really more likely to brag online? MIT researcher Philip Greenspun theorizes that men are more likely than women to participate in behaviors associated with high social status but little practical return, such as bickering over details on Wikipedia or commanding raids in World of Warcraft. • We're not sure if the front page of this newspaper is a "fail" just because it runs a photo of a woman pole dancing under the phrase "Boob bitten, woman busted," or because it also labels pole dancing "fun for the whole family."

The mind-wandering study asked participants to read from Tolstoy's War and Peace and press a key every time they caught themselves thinking about something else. Participants who drank during the study got distracted twice as much as their sober counterparts, but didn't notice it any more often, which will come as no shock to anyone who has ever tried to, say, talk to a philosophy major at a keg party.

While all British minds are doing a bit more booze-induced wandering these days, women showed the biggest increase — 15% now binge once a week, compared to 7% in the mid-90s. Interestingly, the biggest jump in consumption came for women over 65, whose weekly average drinking nearly doubled. Researchers from Oxford Brookes University say women may be drinking more because of advertising, because they have more money, or because — at least in Northern Ireland — they no longer have to worry as much about getting blown up at the bar.

However, another reason may be changes to Britain's incredibly confusing standards for measuring alcohol. According to the Guardian, "Binge drinking is defined as consuming on at least one day a week more than twice the safe limit recommended by the government, which is three to four units of alcohol for a man and two to three units for a woman." The definition of a "unit" changed in 2006, to reflect stronger wine and beer, so now a 175 ml glass of wine is worth two units, while two 125 ml glasses are worth three. The math on this makes no sense even when you're sober. Perhaps if the British government wants to reduce drinking, rather than increasing alcohol taxes, they should make their alcohol guidelines easier to follow than War and Peace.

Alcohol Drinkers Not Only Zone Out — But Also Are Unaware That They Do [ScienceDaily]
Female binge drink rates 'double' [BBC News]
Binge drinking Britain: surge in women consuming harmful amounts of alcohol [Guardian]
More British women drinking to excess [Reuters]

Of course, just off the top of our heads we can think of more than a few exceptions to this study, but according to those Yalies, there are physical manifestations of this male emotional avoidance. "Men had greater blood pressure response to stress, but did not report greater sadness and anxiety, may reflect that they are more likely to try to distract themselves from their physiological arousal, possibly through the use of alcohol," Chaplin tells Science Daily. So the next time your best dude wants to drown his sorrows in booze, perhaps you should get him to talk it out...though you'll probably just end up doing Jaeger bombs with him anyway.

Men Are More Likely Than Women To Crave Alcohol When They Feel Negative Emotions [Science Daily]

And anyway, more stringent controls on drinkers isn't getting at the root of the problem. The problem is a culture of alcohol consumption. Williams posits:

The factors motivating drunkenness, or rather militating against a mature, long-term attitude to consumption and wellbeing, are vast and global and complicated. You could blame the 60s for destroying a shared understanding of morality, or the 80s for creating the financial disparities that make society functionally meaningless to people anywhere near the bottom.

Binge drinking doesn't even cause destructive behavior in all cultures, the New York Times noted yesterday. In a 1969 book called Drunken Comportment, social scientists Craig MacAndrew and Robert B. Edgerton wrote about drunkenness across the world, and according to the Times, they found " the Yuruna Indians in the Xingu region of Brazil would become exceptionally reserved when rendered sideways by large helpings of moonshine...In a Japanese island village, Takashima, people knew a drinking occasion had gone completely off the dials if villagers began to sing or, wilder still, to dance. Aggression, sexual or otherwise, was unheard of during these sessions."

More recently, social scientists in New Zealand studied the effects of drinking in teenage girls. The researchers observed two different cliques at a high school, according to the Times, and while both groups associated boozing with wild behavior, "one group considered being uninhibited to include making out, and the other considered it to include far more." In other worlds? If you're out flashing Joe Francis, it's probably the booze and the influence of your whorey friends in equal measures.

So what's the takeaway? A bottle of wine probably won't hurt you. A bottle of wine smashed over your head by a soccer hooligan will.

Sorry, I Binge Responsibly [Guardian]
When People Drink Themselves Silly, and Why [New York Times]

Doctors Blame Unwanted Pregnancies And STDs On Booze [Daily Mail]
Teenage Risks, And How to Avoid Them [NY Times]

Related: Girls 'Sell Themselves For beer' [News.com.au]

CNN ruddy-cheeked-blusterer in chief Lou Dobbs has found a new victim of the War on the Middle Class being waged by Indian call center employees, H1-B engineers and Bill Gates.....

YOUR DAUGHTERS. According to a special report, The War Within on Lou Dobbs Tonight, teenage daughters of hard working, middle-class Americans are DRINKING TO GET DRUNK, in greater numbers than ever, no doubt to escape from the pressures of their own economic irrelevance. While we love the brief cameo by cute sorority girl-gone-memoirist, Smashed author Koren Zailckas, we think Lou would be well-served to consider the sparkling career of, for instance, Lauren "L.C." Conrad, who, despite having virtually no apparent knowledge bases or skill sets that would supposedly equip a girl for the so-called "Flat" new global talent marketplace — and despite being an avid consumer of alcohol — yesterday announced she was starting her own clothing line!

And then, of course, there's Koren — and us, both with our own drunken girlhoods behind us, or, in the case of us, sort of next to our laptop. Koren's lack of global competitiveness may have condemned her to a life in the Old Economy business of writing books on paper, but we are totally Web 2.0. And we bet only, like, 10,000 girls in Hyberabad could do this job better than us....

The War Within [CNN]