posted April 10, 2009 01:31 PM            

I busted up laughing after reading this!

WARSAW (Reuters) – A Polish politician has criticised his local zoo for acquiring a "gay" elephant named Ninio who prefers male companions and will probably not procreate, local media reported on Friday.

"We didn't pay 37 million zlotys (7.6 million pounds) for the largest elephant house in Europe to have a gay elephant live there," Michal Grzes, a conservative councillor in the city of Poznan in western Poland, was quoted as saying.

"We were supposed to have a herd, but as Ninio prefers male friends over females how will he produce offspring?" said Grzes, who is from the right-wing opposition Law and Justice party.

The head of the Poznan zoo said 10-year-old Ninio may be too young to decide whether he prefers males or females as elephants only reach sexual maturity at 14.

posted April 10, 2009 09:37 PM            

source: toi

PARIS: Selective abortion in favour of males has left China with 32 million more boys than girls, creating an imbalance that will endure for decades, an investigation released on Friday warned.

The probe provides ammunition for those experts who predict China’s obsession with a male heir will sow a bitter fruit as men facing a life of bachelorhood fight for a bride.

“Although some imaginative and extreme solutions have been suggested, nothing can be done now to prevent this imminent generation of excess men,” says the paper, published online by the British Medical Journal (BMJ).
In most countries, males slightly outnumber females — between 103 and 107 male births for every 100 female births. But in China and other Asian countries, the sex ratio has widened sharply as the traditional preference for boys is reinforced by the availability of cheap ultrasound diagnostics and abortion.

This has enabled Chinese couples to use pregnancy termination to prevent a female birth, a practice that is officially condemned as well as illegal.

In China, an additional factor has been the “one-child” policy. Parents who have a second child are liable to pay a fine and contribute disproportionately towards the child’s education. But in some provinces, a second child is permitted if the first is a girl or if parents are experiencing “hardship.”

In the paper, Zhejiang university professors Wei Xing Zhu and Li Lu and Therese Hesketh of University College London found that in 2005 alone, China had more than 1.1 million excess male births.