Panda porn pays off

Scientists say a bid to encourage giant pandas to breed by showing them 'panda porn' has paid off.

They claim to have sparked a baby boom among the endangered animals by showing them DVDs of pandas mating.

"It works," Zhang Zhihe, a leading Chinese expert, told the Xinhua news agency.

Pandas are notoriously poor breeders and the 'panda porn' movies were just one of many techniques used to encourage them to breed.

In the first 10 months of this year 31 cubs were born in captivity in China and 28 survived, said Zhang.

That's an increase from 12 births in 2005 and just nine in 2000. Of this year's births, 14 came through natural breeding, while artificial insemination or a combination of the two produced the rest.

Now comes the next test - getting the trick to work outside China.

The day of reckoning will come in January, when Prasertsak Buntragulpoontawee hopes male Chuang Chuang and partner Lin Hui will mate in Thailand.

"It is the same idea as chimpanzees seeing people smoke and then copying it," says the Thai researcher.

Porn site owner barred for life

Xinhua, Taiyuan (China) | HTTabloid
November 23, 2006

China's largest pornographic website creator was sentenced to life imprisonment by the People's Court. Taiyuan Intermediate People's Court handed down the sentence to Chen Hui and ordered him to pay 100,000 yuan (about $12,500). Chen's other eight accomplices of the website were jailed for terms ranging from 13 months to ten years. The nine were convicted of profiting from pornographic dissemination.

The website contained more than nine million pornographic images and articles and it had received more than 11 million hits. Chen and his accomplices started the Qingseliuyuetian (pornographic summer) website in 2004 and opened three other porn websites, attracting more than 600,000 users.

A police source said it was difficult to know the profits made by them because most of the money was spent or saved in foreign bank accounts. The police found about 200,000 yuan ($25,000) in their Chinese bank accounts.

Commercial space on the website sold for 1,000 to 3,000 yuan (about $125 to $375) per month.

First ever lesbian hotline set to ring!

Associated Press / Hindustantimes
Shanghai, November 22, 2006

China's first helpline specifically for lesbians will begin taking calls this weekend, organizers said on Wednesday, in a sign of growing awareness of issues facing gay women in China's commercial center.

The Shanghai-based helpline will offer advice and counseling between 2 p.m. and 4 p.m. each Saturday, with about 10 female volunteers taking the calls, said Rager Shen, a volunteer with the Hong Kong-based Chi Heng Foundation that is funding the helpline.

The service will be an extension of a helpline for both gay men and lesbians that opened about six months ago but previously had only male volunteers answering questions on homosexuality.

"Lesbians would feel uncomfortable talking with men about their private issues, so we just wanted to have a try at setting up a fixed period of time exclusively for women," Shen said. Shen said the prior lack of such a helpline reflected how Chinese society largely ignored lesbians, or "lala" in modern Chinese slang, and their issues.

"Our society pays much less attention to lesbians because they are not the high-risk population for AIDS. But they do have a lot of psychological problems," Shen said.

While acceptance of homosexuality remains generally low in China, Shanghai with its relatively wealthy, cosmopolitan population, boasts an increasingly open gay community.

In what was hailed as a watershed moment for gay acceptance, a top Shanghai university this year began offering China's first class on homosexuality and gay culture, mainly because of strong demand from students.

Gays were strongly persecuted after China's 1949 communist revolution, condemned as products of decadent Western and feudal societies. Official attitudes have gradually loosened since the late 1980s, and in 2001 the China Psychiatric Association ceased listing homosexuality as a mental illness.

However, most gays remain closeted and the government has ruled-out legalizing same-sex marriages or passing legal protections such as anti-discrimination laws. Larger-scale gatherings such as gay film festivals have been banned and gay bars in some cities are subject to closure or police harassment.