Owen said: It’s something that we’d talked about a little bit during the week we were doing the

Owen said: “It’s something that we’d talked about a little bit during the week we were doing the promotions for the album We’ve kind of been up and down over the last two weeks We’re not getting any younger If we don’t do it now, we probably never could. (This, for my money, is where the Swansea case might usefully bear scrutiny.)Awareness campaigns pointing up the dangers of “chemical coshes” such as Rohypnol spawned a whole new market in anti-tampering devices for drinkers – from lockable bottle-caps to one-way straws. The 2003 Sexual Offences Act, which effectively reversed the burden of proof in rape cases, putting the onus on the alleged attacker to show that consent had not been refused, was an important victory.Framed specifically to protect women from date rape, the Act further insisted that in cases where the woman was asleep or unconscious through drink or drugs, the onus would be on the alleged attacker to demonstrate evidence of consent. Drunk women have always been an easy mark for the sexual predator. Ogden Nash was surely not the first swain to remark that when it comes to seduction, “candy is dandy, but liquor is quicker”. The vast and vital difference between seduction and rape, however, is the issue of consent.Generations of women have fought for legal recognition that “no” means “no”.

The case for the prosecution fell apart when the 21-year-old woman admitted to the court that she had been too drunk to remember whether or not she consented to sex. The judgment, coming hard on the heels of the Amnesty International survey which found that many Britons believe that a woman who drinks too much is partly or totally responsible if she was raped, brought howls of protest, effectively asserting “a woman’s right to booze”.
Indignant young women lined up on television and in the newspapers to defend the basic human freedom to get legless, angrily pointing out that in the wake of the Swansea case, rapists are likely deliberately to “target” female binge drinkers.Which is surely true Much as candy thieves are likely to “target” babies. In the fog of outrage and confusion surrounding the case of Ryairi Dougal, the man acquitted in Swansea this week of raping a dead-drunk woman, one sharp-edged fact emerges: binge drinking puts women at risk of more than a killer hangover. Disinterested curiosity is a valuable quality for all of us, at any age: encouraging powers of observation, mental alertness and an informed scepticism. The rise in popularity of the pub quiz shows that a well-stocked and inquiring mind is still considered an admirable asset in this country.. But the sorry truth is that this is not all that George Best was famous for.

As a soccer player he flashed brilliantly through the firmament in a career that was over in just nine short years. As a drunk he was a fixture in our media for more than 30 years.. Apache Tomcat/5.5.25 – Error report HTTP Status 503 – Too many incoming HTTP requeststype Status reportmessage Too many incoming HTTP requestsdescription The requested service (Too many incoming HTTP requests) is not currently available.Apache Tomcat/5.5.25. It’s cheering news that Does Anything Eat Wasps?, a collection of readers’ questions answered over the years by New Scientist magazine, is becoming this Christmas’s surprise literary hit. The death of George Best has been a sad and protracted business, for it was drawn out not merely over the past few days but over a dozen years or more. The obituaries will talk about him as one of the greatest footballers in the history of the game.