The Blog of Record

Their names are Ty Ziegel and Renee Kline.

The reason why the divorce rate is down: no one can afford to keep the house?

A recession is a bad time to get divorced — especially if your home has sunk in value along with the rest of the housing market.

Last year, the divorce rate in the U.S. fell 4% after rising 7% in 2007, according to a report released recently by the National Marriage Project. Although the news might cheer family advocates, it suggests something else to project director W. Bradford Wilcox: that couples with depreciated home values might be waiting to split until the market rebounds.

They look like a bunch of happy folks.

Goel Ratzon, 60, is alleged to have kept the women and children as slaves in squalid apartments around Tel Aviv, and suspected of fathering children with some of his own daughters. How did he manage to get so many women? He picked Orthodox Jews and told them he was the messiah.

‘The situation is urgent! We have a woman ovulating this morning. Can you be here in a half hour?’

With so many people carrying his genes, studying them could answer some questions about genes and health. Problem is, the doctors weren’t keeping track of the births, so the donor, Kirk Maxey of Northville, Mich., is now concerned that his offspring could start dating one another.

Source.

Her 19-year-old husband is facing six years in prison for having sex with a minor. Judging by her photo, though, he may be telling the truth when he says he thought she was 15.

The story read like a sensation until it became clear that these people were Gypsies. From what I know about Eastern European Gypsies, it’s nothing out of the ordinary for them. The girl’s grandmother says that much:

‘It’s normal for our girls to have babies young. It’s our tradition. But I didn’t want it for my Kordeza – I felt she was too young.’

 The girl obviously had a different opinion, as it appears from the report that she pursued the man deliberately.

In his happier days before the colostomy bag, the Cuban tyrant sired at least ten children by a half-dozen women, but nobody knows how many exactly, or who are the mothers of some of the known ones. In 1956 alone, three different women had his babies.

Apparently, he never cared to groom one of his sons to succeed him as dictator, and now his little brother is reportedly arranging for his own son to carry on the communist dynasty.

At least she was not 6, like Muhammad’s favourite wife:

A 12-year-old Yemeni girl, who was forced into marriage, died during a painful childbirth that also killed her baby, a children’s rights group said Monday.

Fawziya Ammodi struggled for three days in labor, before dying of severe bleeding at a hospital on Friday, said the Seyaj Organization for the Protection of Children.

“Although the cause of her death was lack of medical care, the real case was the lack of education in Yemen and the fact that child marriages keep happening,” said Seyaj President Ahmed al-Qureshi.

Born into an impoverished family in Hodeidah, Fawziya was forced to drop out of school and married off to a 24-year-old man last year, al-Qureshi said.

Child brides are commonplace in Yemen, especially in the Red Sea Coast where tribal customs hold sway. Hodeidah is the fourth largest city in Yemen and an important port.

More than half of all young Yemeni girls are married off before the age of 18 — many times to older men, some with more than one wife, a study by Sanaa University found.

But of course it’s not for us, Western imperialists who are to blame for all problems in the world, to criticise their beautiful culture.

But not because the Chinese government has suddenly accepted that people should be free to have as many children as they want. It’s simply that after 30 years of effectively forbidding its people from having more than one child, China has woken up to the looming demographic crisis and shortage of workers. So they are now actively encouraging couples to have two children, trying the new policy in Shanghai for now.

A study of polygamous marriages in Rwanda demonstrates that wealthier mothers tend to have more sons while poorer women produce more daughters:

Scientists have unearthed a fascinating link between the financial status of a woman and the proportion of boys and girls she can expect to have.

The discovery adds to the increasing evidence that the sex of a baby isn’t just a matter of chance but is influenced by lifestyle and environment.

According to evolutionary theory, when conditions are good, and babies are likely to be healthy, a mother’s best chance of passing on her genes to another generation is to have boys.

Fit, healthy boys will see off rivals and can potentially father hundreds of children, ensuring the survival of the family line.

But if a mother is unfit or malnourished, a baby boy is a poor investment.

A weak, sickly male is unlikely to beat off competition from other males and may not become a father or even survive.

In these circumstances it makes more evolutionary sense to have a girl who does not face competition to become pregnant to continue the family line.

Well, after it was shown that women have more orgasms with wealthy men, nothing about womenfolk surprises me anymore.

“The Shelf Life of a Trophy Wife”: you can read, or just go straight to the gallery. Jackie Kennedy Onassis is No. 10.

A man from Knoxville, TN, with a 14-page criminal record and minimum-wage job has 21 kids with 11 different women. No, he’s not a Mormon. Meet Desmond Hatchett:

The Obama administration’s gift to American families - a marriage tax:

Obama’s proposed tax increases create a massive financial penalty for married couples, by subjecting them to much higher income taxes than if they had chosen to live together without getting married. (Unmarried people voted decisively for Obama. But as the Associated Press notes, “married people tend to favor” Republicans like McCain).

Under the tax increases contained in Obama’s recent budget proposals, a married couple making $232,000 a year would be in a higher tax bracket than many unmarried couples making $370,000 a year. Simply by getting married, a man and woman making $170,000 each would be pushed up from their current level of 28 percent to 36 percent. But an unmarried couple making $340,000 a year ($170,000 each) would be taxed at 28 percent. And a married couple making $380,000 would be taxed at 39.6 percent — not counting certain adjustments that bring the rate to 40.7 percent. (That’s just the federal standard rate. You have to add to that state income taxes (up to 10.3 percent), and federal self-employment taxes, which many small business owners pay — which could result in marginal rates of well over 60 percent).

Obama’s proposals impose tax increases on any single person making over $190,650. Worse, they increase taxes on all married couples making over $231,300 — even if each spouse only makes half of that, or $115,650, far less than the $190,650 that drives up the rate for singles.

If married folks vote Republican, then it’s entirely logical that Obama wants fewer of them by 2012.

A feminist Marxist scholar’s research in Colombia leads her to an un-Marxist conclusion: after evangelical conversion, husbands in a society dominated by a macho value system cut down on the drinking, gambling and wife abuse, making life better for their wives and even transforming traditional gender relations.

Two stories in the post and another eighty-something in the comments.

I like this one:

I’m pretty sure it was the night that I said to him, “Come on, can we please have sex, I think I’m really fertile!” We laugh because it really wasn’t romantic, but hey, it worked!

(Via Daniel Smith.)

Saudi Arabia: A girl’s puberty is a precondition for divorce - but not for marriage.

Of course they won’t annul the marriage – their prophet married a 6-year-old girl, and they can’t make him look bad.

Austria, Britain, Italy – and now Colombia:

A central Colombian farm worker has been accused of raping his daughter for decades and fathering eight children with her.

The daughter, 35-year-old Alba Nidia, told CNN that her biological father has sexually abused her since she was about 5, shortly after her mother’s death, resulting in 14 pregnancies. Eight children — five girls and three boys — survived.

Actually, Britain has two - don’t forget the Muslims.

Italy has discovered its own Josef Fritzl clone who raped his daughter for 25 years and taught his son to rape his sister and his own four daughters (Britain has one of these, too). The article says that as the eldest daughter, the girl was reserved for the father according to a family rule. The family had moved to Turin from a place called Apulia in southern Italy, and I just hope this family rule is not based on some kind of a local tradition that’s common over there. Southern Italy is a rather patriarchal place.

Claimed to be extremely accurate:

A British mathematician has devised a formula to predict whether loved-up couples are bound to spend their lives together or end their marriages in divorce.

Oxford University professor James Murray said his formula successfully predicted whether a couple would divorce 94 percent of the time, in a study of 700 newly-married couples.

“Some couples might as well get divorced right away,” said Murray, who was to present his findings to the Royal Society in London on Thursday, after receiving one of its oldest awards.

As part of the research Murray and his team filmed the newlyweds discussing contentious issues such as money or sex for 15 minutes, and graded each statement made during their respective turns of speech.

Statements with humour or affection were given positive scores, while those with defensiveness or anger were given negative ones. The resulting scores were used to identify whether the relationship was likely to stand the test of time.

The couples were then contacted over one to two year intervals over a period of 12 years, with Murray’s formula correctly predicting the divorce rate with an accuracy of 94 percent.