4 dead, 53 homes destroyed in California fire

by TREVOR HUNNICUTT, Associated Press Writer

SAN BRUNO, Calif. – Fire crews flooded the ruins of burning homes with water early Friday and after a massive explosion apparently triggered by a broken gas line sent flames roaring through a neighborhood near San Francisco, killing at least four people and destroying more than 50 houses.

Thursday night's explosion was heard for miles and shot a fireball more than 1,000 feet in the air and sent frightened residents fleeing for safety and rushing to get belongings out of burning homes, witnesses said.

Utility officials said a natural gas line ruptured in the vicinity of the blast, which left a giant crater and sent flames tearing across several suburban blocks in San Bruno just after 6 p.m.

San Mateo Senior Deputy Coroner Michelle Rippy said Friday that officials at the scene confirmed at least four deaths. At least 20 others were injured, some with critical burns.

Authorities said there could be other casualties but the fire and darkness blocked them from checking.

"It's going to take us until at least until tomorrow into the afternoon to do a full search," Haag said late Thursday.

Resident Connie Bushman returned home to find her block was on fire. She said she ran into her house looking for her 80-year-old father but could not find him. A firefighter told her he had left, but she had not been able to track him down.

"I don't know where my father is, I don't know where my husband is, I don't know where to go," Bushman said.

After the initial blast, flames reached as high as 100 feet as the fire fueled itself on burning homes, leaving some in total ruins and reducing parked automobiles to burned out hulks. At least 120 homes also suffered serious damage.

The fire had spread to 10 acres and was 50 percent contained late Thursday, said Jay Allen, spokesman for the California Emergency Management Agency.

California Lieutenant Governor Abel Maldonado, acting governor while Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger was in Asia on a trade mission, declared a state of emergency in San Mateo County.

"It was like a bomb went off," Maldonado told CNN from the scene early Friday.

He said the cause of the conflagration was still unclear.

"We don't know what happened. I don't know what happened. Tomorrow morning we'll find out," he said.

Crews with search dogs will go through whole area, he said. "We'll try to find folks if there are folks in their homes."

Pacific Gas and Electric Co. said in an e-mailed statement that "if it is ultimately determined that we were responsible for the cause of the incident, we will take accountability."

But later Thursday the company's president, Christopher Johns, said he didn't know what sparked the explosion.

"I don't have any details about if there was any work going on, Johns told KTVU-TV. "That will be part of the investigation as we go forward."

The company said Friday morning a damaged section of a 30-inch steel gas pipeline had been isolated and gas flow had been stopped. About 300 customers were without gas service and about 700 without electricity at 4 a.m. Friday.

The National Transportation Safety Board said Friday that it has sent a four-member team to San Bruno to investigate the blast. The NTSB's duties include investigating pipeline accidents.

Between 150 and 200 firefighters remained at the scene through the night, according to Haag. More than 100 people were being sheltered at nearby evacuation centers, but no estimate of the number of residents missing was available, he said.

San Bruno Fire Capt. Charlie Barringer said the neighborhood was engulfed by the time firefighters arrived, even though the fire station was only a few blocks away. He said the blast took out the entire water system, forcing firefighters to pump water from more than two miles away.

Haag said firefighters initially had trouble getting close enough to the ruptured 24-inch gas line to shut it down because of the flames.

As firefighters swarmed around blazers across the neighborhood, firefighting planes roared overhead and dumped retardant onto the blazes.

Brothers Bob and Ed Pellegrini, whose homes was near the center of the explosion, told The Oakland Tribune that they thought an earthquake had struck until they looked out the window.

"It looked like hell on earth. I have never seen a ball of fire that huge," Bob Pellegrini said.

The flames quickly chased them from their home.

"The house is gone," Ed said. "I have nothing. Everything is gone. We're homeless."

Victims suffering from serious burns began arriving at San Francisco Bay area hospitals shortly after the blast. An estimate of the number of injured wasn't immediately available. Hospitals reported receiving about 20 injured patients - several of whom were in critical condition.

Jane Porcelli, 62, said she lives on a hill above where the fire was centered. She said she thought she heard a plane overhead with a struggling engine.

"And then you heard this bang. And everything shook except the floor, so we knew it wasn't an earthquake," Porcelli said. "I feel helpless that I can't do anything. I just gotta sit by and watch."

Stephanie Mullen, Associated Press news editor for photos based in San Francisco, was attending children's soccer practice with her two children and husband at Crestmoor High School when she saw the blast at 6:14 p.m.

"First, it was a low deep roar and everybody looked up, and we all knew something big was happening," she said. "Then there was a huge explosion with a ball of fire that went up behind the high school several thousand feet into the sky.

"Everybody grabbed their children and ran and put their children in their cars," Mullen said. "It was very clear something awful had happened."

Several minutes later, Mullen was near the fire scene, about a half-mile away in a middle-class neighborhood of 1960s-era homes in hills overlooking San Francisco, the bay and the airport. She said she could feel the heat of the fire on her face although she was three or four blocks away from the blaze. It appeared the fireball was big enough to have engulfed at least several homes.

"I could see families in the backyards of the homes next to where the fire was, bundling their children and trying to get them out of the backyards," she recounted.

She said people in the neighborhood were yelling, "This is awful" and "My family is down there."

Judy and Frank Serrsseque were walking down a hill away from the flames with a makeshift wagon carrying important documents, medication and three cats.

Judy Serrsseque said she heard an explosion, saw that fire was headed toward their home and knew they had to leave. As they fled, they said they saw people burned and people struggling to get their things out of burning houses.

"We got everything together, and we just got out," Judy Serrsseque. "Mostly we're wondering if we have a house to go back to."

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COMMENT: The Wave of impactors from space has already begun hitting the Earth, but the Govt/media will try to cover it up as long as they can.

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Co-chair of Obama debt panel under fire for remarks

By Jeanne Sahadi, senior writer August 25, 2010: 4:07 PM ET

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- An advocacy group is calling for the ouster of former Sen. Alan Simpson, the co-chairman of President Obama's bipartisan debt commission, who described Social Security as a "milk cow with 310 million tits!" in an email.

Ashley Carson, executive director of the Older Women's League, wrote in a blog post in April that Simpson is targeting Social Security to fix the deficit even though it "doesn't contribute" to the country's debt problem. She also accused Simpson of "disgusting ageism and sexism" in characterizing those who oppose cuts to benefits as "Gray Panthers" and "Pink Panthers."

In his email to Carson, which was sent Monday night, Simpson said he is defending Social Security, not trying to undermine it, and referred her to information showing the program's long-range shortfalls.

He went on: "I've made some plenty smart cracks about people on Social Security who milk it to the last degree. You know 'em too. It's the same with any system in America. We've reached a point now where it's like a milk cow with 310 million tits! Call when you get honest work!"

...

A coalition of groups including MoveOn.org, Social Security Works and others have pledged to "fight any effort" by the commission to cut benefits or raise the retirement age.

Such groups say that Social Security hasn't contributed to the country's fiscal woes since $2.5 trillion of surplus revenue was paid into the system over the years and borrowed by Uncle Sam.

Carson of OWL wrote that cutting defense spending should be the commission's first line of attack, and the Bush tax cuts second, when finding solutions to U.S. debt problems.

...

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COMMENT: The Conservatives are genetically unable to feel compassion. Although they can be part of human civilization, they MUST NOT be allowed to be "in charge" of ANYTHING.

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Human brain is 'unreliable and noisy'!

2010-07-01 17:20:00

The human brain, the most powerful computing device known, is also intrinsically unreliable and truly 'noisy', scientists have established. The study appears in the journal Nature. A long-standing hypothesis is that the brain's circuitry actually is reliable - and the apparently high variability is because your brain is engaged in many tasks simultaneously, which affect each other. It is this hypothesis that the researchers at University College London tested directly. The team - a collaboration between experimentalists at the Wolfson Institute for Biomedical Research and a theorist, Peter Latham, at the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit - took inspiration from the celebrated butterfly effect - from the fact that the flap of a butterfly's wings in Brazil could set off a tornado in Texas. Their idea was to introduce a small perturbation into the brain, the neural equivalent of butterfly wings, and ask what would happen to the activity in the circuit. Would the perturbation grow and have a knock-on effect, thus affecting the rest of the brain, or immediately die out? It turned out to have a huge knock-on effect. The perturbation was a single extra 'spike', or nerve impulse, introduced to a single neuron in the brain of a rat. That single extra spike caused about thirty new extra spikes in nearby neurons in the brain, most of which caused another thirty extra spikes, and so on. This may not seem like much, given that the brain produces millions of spikes every second. However, the researchers estimated that eventually, that one extra spike affected millions of neurons in the brain. Lead author Dr. Mickey London, of the Wolfson Institute for Biomedical Research, UCL, said: "This result indicates that the variability we see in the brain may actually be due to noise, and represents a fundamental feature of normal brain function." This rapid amplification of spikes means that the brain is extremely 'noisy' - much, much noisier than computers. Nevertheless, the brain can perform very complicated tasks with enormous speed and accuracy, far faster and more accurately than the most powerful computer ever built (and likely to be built in the foreseeable future). The UCL researchers suggest that for the brain to perform so well in the face of high levels of noise, it must be using a strategy called a rate code. In a rate code, neurons consider the activity of an ensemble of many neurons, and ignore the individual variability, or noise, produced by each of them. Now know we know that the brain is noisy, but we still don't know why. The UCL researchers suggest that one possibility is that it's the price the brain pays for high connectivity among neurons (each neuron connects to about 10,000 others, resulting in over 8 million kilometres of wiring in the human brain). Presumably, that high connectivity is at least in part responsible for the brain's computational power. However, as the research shows, the higher the connectivity, the noisier the brain. Therefore, while noise may not be a useful feature, it is at least a by-product of a useful feature. (ANI) --------------------------------------------------------------- COMMENT: This is why you must tune your brain to the truth and reality. ---------------------------------------------------------------

Why Has Barack Obama Refused To Accept International Help To Clean Up The Oil Spill In The Gulf Of Mexico?

As the crisis in the Gulf of Mexico enters a third month, many are now asking how in the world Barack Obama can keep refusing offers from other countries to help clean up the oil spill. The truth is that cleaning up oil spills is not rocket science. There have been massive oil spills in other areas of the world before and there are some folks that have some real expertise when it comes to cleaning them up. But Barack Obama and BP have been stumbling around as if they are trying to reinvent the wheel. So exactly what in the world is going on here? When it comes to Obama's approach to this crisis, there are really two options. Either this is one of the most extreme examples of presidential incompetence in modern American history, or Barack Obama is using this crisis for a particular purpose (such as advancing a particular agenda). In either event, Obama's actions during this crisis have been completely and totally unconscionable.

The truth is that 13 different countries have offered to help clean up the oil in the Gulf of Mexico.

Barack Obama turned all 13 of them down.

So let's get this straight....

We are dealing with the greatest environmental disaster in U.S. history by far, and yet we completely refuse any assistance?

What kind of insanity is that?

In fact, it is being reported that just three days after the Deepwater Horizon sank to the floor of the Gulf of Mexico the Dutch government contacted Barack Obama and offered to loan BP ships outfitted with special oil-skimming booms. In addition, the Dutch had a plan to quickly build sand barriers to protect the vulnerable marshlands along the Louisiana coast.

Needless to say, those plans were not implemented.

According to one Dutch newspaper, the European oil companies that offered to help said that they could have completely cleaned all of the oil from the Gulf of Mexico in just four months.

But now Obama is telling us that the crisis in the Gulf of Mexico could last for years.

So what would keep Barack Obama from accepting international offers of help?

Well, Obama is using something called "the Jones Act" as an excuse.

Howard Portnoy recently described what is going on this way....

In order to accept the offers, which have come from Belgian, Dutch, and Norwegian firms that claim to possess some of the world’s most advanced oil skimming ships, Obama would need to waive the Merchant Marine Act of 1920 (P.L. 66-261). Also known as the Jones Act, the law requires essentially that all commercial acts conducted in U.S.-controlled waters be performed by “U.S.-flag ships, constructed in the United States, owned by U.S. citizens, and crewed by U.S. citizens and U.S. permanent residents.”

So why not simply waive the act? Other presidents have under similar circumstances. George W. Bush waived the Jones Act following Hurricane Katrina, allowing foreign ships into Gulf waters to aid in the relief effort.

The truth is that the Jones Act is not a barrier to receiving assistance at all and Barack Obama knows this.

There would be absolutely no problem with waiving the Jones Act in these circumstances.

So Barack Obama has no excuse.

Either he is completely and totally incompetent or he has been trying to make this crisis worse than it should be.

You see, this is not the first catastrophic oil spill in the history of the world. There have been others, and we have learned quite a bit about cleaning up oil from those events. Anthony G. Martin recently described what happened during one particularly brutal oil spill in 1993 and 1994....

In 1993 and '94 the Saudis faced an oil spill of historic proportions in the Arabian Gulf as four leaking tankers and two oil gushers threatened to spur a catastrophic event that was 65 times worse than the Exxon-Valdez spill.

An American engineer, Nick Pozzi, was part of a task force charged with developing a solution to the looming disaster.

Pozzi had used various methods to clean up oil spills prior to this event. However, the time was short, and an effective solution was needed post-haste.

That's when Pozzi decided that the huge, empty oil tankers, sitting in the dock, could be used to simply vacuum up the oil right off of the top of the water.

The result was that 85% of the oil was recovered.

In a recent interview with Esquire, Pozzi explained that cleaning up the oil in the Gulf of Mexico should not be that complicated....

Keep in mind that what supertankers typically do is they sit in the middle of the ocean waiting for all the traders to come up with the right price. When they feel that the price is right, the tankers that are full, they take off, and they can be anywhere in the world in a few days. Right now there are probably 25 supertankers, waiting for orders, full of oil. So all they got to do is come to Texas, in the Gulf, unload the oil, and then turn around and suck up all this other stuff and pump it onto shore into on-shore storage. It's not rocket science. It's so simple.

So why won't Barack Obama and BP implement the "supertanker method"?

When asked about it they just brush it off.

Are they that incompetent?

Or is something else going on?

If this crisis had been handled properly, oil would not currently be blanketing our pristine Gulf coast beaches.

An increasing number of Gulf coast residents have become so frustrated that they have decided to take it upon themselves to stop the oil that is headed towards their homes and businesses.

But BP and the Obama administration have been running around trying to keep anyone else other than themselves from doing anything about this oil spill. In fact, Barack Obama has authorized the deployment of more than 17,000 National Guard members along the Gulf coast to be used "as needed" by state governors, and BP is being allowed to use private security contractors to keep the American people away from the oil cleanup sites.

If they used as much energy cleaning up the oil as they are in keeping the American people away from the spill they might actually be accomplishing something.

Meanwhile, CBS News is reporting that there could be as much as 1 billion barrels of oil under the damaged BP oil well in the Gulf of Mexico and that it could keep flowing for more than a decade.

Apparently BP made one of the biggest oil discoveries in history, but the problem is that oil is now coming out of there at such high pressure that we simply do not have the technology to control it.

In addition, experts have discovered a massive gas bubble which is estimated to be 15 to 20 miles across and "tens of feet high" under the floor of the Gulf of Mexico.

So what in the world is going to happen if that thing blows?

Also, there are reports of fissures and cracks appearing on the ocean floor around the damaged wellhead.

If this thing goes from a "leak" to an "eruption" it could be a catastrophe beyond anything any of us could even imagine.

So let's hope that nothing like that happens.

But there is another very serious threat that we need to keep an eye on.

Some environmentalists are now warning that North America could be facing years of toxic rain because of the highly toxic chemical dispersants that BP is using to control the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. Because it is so poisonous, the UK's Marine Management Organization has completely banned Corexit 9500, so if there was a major oil spill in the UK's North Sea, BP would not be able to use it. So BP really needs to start explaining why they are dumping so much of it into the Gulf of Mexico - especially since so much of it could end up raining down on us.

Meanwhile, Barack Obama and Joe Biden are busy playing golf and BP chief executive Tony Hayward has been busy watching his yacht race.

Well, considering the fact that Tony Hayward is set for a massive 10.8 million pound ($16 million) payout if he chooses to step down, perhaps he is not too concerned about exactly how things turn out.

As for Barack Obama, his main concern in all this seems to be advancing his climate agenda. During a recent interview, Obama directly compared the current crisis in the Gulf to 9/11, and indicated that he believed that it would fundamentally change the way that we all look at energy issues from now on. But the truth is that cleaning up the oil in the Gulf has nothing to do with the "cap and trade" carbon tax scheme that Obama is trying to foist on all of us.

What Obama needs to do is to accept all the help that is being offered, get everybody working together on cleaning up this mess, and find a way to stop all that oil from coming out of the ground.

Until he makes some progress on those things, the American people are not likely to want to hear the first thing about all of the new taxes, rules and regulations that he is so eager to impose on all of us.

The Gulf of Mexico is literally being destroyed, and already this disaster has been so horrific that the effects will be felt for decades. If Barack Obama cares one ounce about the American people he needs to start doing his job instead of playing politics with this crisis।

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COMMENT: The BP/Obama Criminal Syndicate has done EXACTLY what they had to every step of the way to make the Gulf of Mexico oil crisis the worst disaster it could possibly be. We are way past "mistake" or "accident" here.

What the vast majority are still not grokking is that, for the psychopaths, causing pain and problems for others is meaningless fun. They are not sane. They are evil.

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Lesbians and Gay Men in Zimbabwe Face Brutal “Corrective” Rape

By James Lovette-Black
NEWS JUNKIE POST

In a country long plagued by violence, corruption, and an authoritarian government, Zimbabwe’s President Mugabe is known as one of the worst anti-gay autocrats in Africa. Mugabe has repeatedly located blame for the country’s ills on lesbians and gay men, cultivating widespread bigotry and violence. His virulent homophobia has given rise to the rape of lesbian and gay male Zimbabweans, under the guise of “correcting” them into heterosexuality.

The US State Department’s 2009 Human Rights Report for Zimbabwe identified chronic, politically sanctioned anti-gay discrimination, violence, and torture at the hands of Mugabe’s minions, including rape of lesbians and gay men forced into heterosexual acts, with some raped by family members, ostensibly to “cure” them. The NGO, AIDS Free World, reported in December 2009 that the 70 women it surveyed reported being raped on average five times and possibly higher, as the women often became unconscious during the brutal sexual assaults.

Mugabe has created an atmosphere of terror through brutality and sexual assault, commonly using rape to intimidate and control anyone he deems to be undesirable or uncooperative. In a homophobic worldview such as Mugabe’s, it follows that lesbians and gay men would be seen as less than desirable and in need of a cure. Such detestable acts are clear violations of human rights as stated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:

Article 1. All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.

Article 2. Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, color, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status.

Other voices in Zimbabwe, notably the Zimbabwe Human Rights NGO Forum, have urged leaders to resist hate speech and to include protections against discrimination based on sexual orientation in the Constitution. However, Mugabe has pledged to block any effort to include gay rights.

Meanwhile, gay and lesbian Zimbabweans are finding life and identity threatened and endangered by a homophobe who uses thought police tactics to maintain power and control through the sexual abuse of lesbians, gay men, and others.

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COMMENT: Where has it been shown that rape is effective at correcting or curing homosexuality?

One of the hallmarks of the psychopath is "using the truth to lie". Here Mugabe of Zimbabwe identifies himself as a psychopath, NOT by being a "homophobe", but by using the FACT that homosexuality is an inherited disorder (for which we should be seeking a cure) as an EXCUSE to practice a campaign of terrorizing his own people.

The author of the above article has REACTED like a MACHINE, completely failing to "think with a hammer" or practice discernment.
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Shyness is all in your brain, study says

Introverted individuals may process the world a bit differently
By LiveScience Staff
April 6, 2010

The brains of shy or introverted individuals might actually process the world differently than their more extroverted counterparts, a new study suggests.

About 20 percent of people are born with a personality trait called sensory perception sensitivity that can manifest itself as the tendency to be inhibited, or even neuroticism. The trait can be seen in some children who are "slow to warm up" in a situation but eventually join in, need little punishment, cry easily, ask unusual questions or have especially deep thoughts, the study researchers say.

The new results show that these highly sensitive individuals also pay more attention to detail, and have more activity in certain regions of their brains when trying to process visual information than those who are not classified as highly sensitive.

The study was conducted by researchers at Stony Brook University in New York, and Southwest University and the Chinese Academy of Sciences, both in China. The results were published March 4 in the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience. Individuals with this highly sensitive trait prefer to take longer to make decisions, are more conscientious, need more time to themselves in order to reflect, and are more easily bored with small talk, research suggests.

Sensitive all around?
Previous work has also shown that compared with others those with a highly sensitive temperament are more bothered by noise and crowds, more affected by caffeine, and more easily startled. That is, the trait seems to confer sensitivity all around.

The researchers in the current study propose the simple sensory sensitivity to noise, pain, or caffeine is a side effect of an inborn preference to pay more attention to experiences.

They first used an established questionnaire to separate the sensitive from the non-sensitive participants. Then, the 16 participants compared a photograph of a visual scene with a preceding scene, indicating whether or not the scene had changed. Scenes differed in whether the changes were obvious or subtle, and in how quickly they were presented. Meanwhile, the researchers scanned each participant's brain with functional magnetic resonance imaging.

Sensitive persons looked at the scenes with subtle differences for a longer time than did non-sensitive persons, and showed significantly greater activation in brain areas involved in associating visual input with other input to the brain and with visual attention. These brain areas are not simply used for vision itself, but for a deeper processing of input.

The sensitivity trait is found in over 100 other species, from fruit flies and fish to canines and primates, indicating this personality type could sometimes provide an evolutionary advantage.

Biologists are beginning to agree that within one species there can be two equally successful "personalities." The sensitive type, always a minority, chooses to observe longer before acting, as if doing their exploring with their brains rather than their limbs. The other type "boldly goes where no one has gone before," the scientists say.

The sensitive individual's strategy is not so advantageous when resources are plentiful or quick, aggressive action is required. But it comes in handy when danger is present, opportunities are similar and hard to choose between, or a clever approach is needed.

© 2010 LiveScience.com. All rights reserved.

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Comment: 1.) No, "introverted" is NOT the same thing as "shy".
2.) No, "introverted" is NOT the same thing as "neurotic", but some extroverted people think the way they are is SO AWESOME that there must be something wrong with anyone who is not like them.
3.) No, "introverted" is NOT the same thing as "the preference for the behaviors that make a person acquire depth".
4.) No, "introverted" is NOT the same thing as "inner-generated intensity combining with outer-generated stimuli to become overwhelming" (aka "highly sensitive").

The people who conducted these studies and the people who wrote this article are idiots. Begin learning about the science of inherited preferences here.

P.S.
"Aggressive" = "abusive".
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Iceland Bans Strip Clubs

Iceland: the world's most feminist country

Iceland has just banned all strip clubs. Perhaps it's down to the lesbian prime minister, but this may just be the most female-friendly country on the planet

by Julie Bindel

Iceland is fast becoming a world-leader in feminism. A country with a tiny population of 320,000, it is on the brink of achieving what many considered to be impossible: closing down its sex industry.

While activists in Britain battle on in an attempt to regulate lapdance clubs – the number of which has been growing at an alarming rate during the last decade – Iceland has passed a law that will result in every strip club in the country being shut down. And forget hiring a topless waitress in an attempt to get around the bar: the law, which was passed with no votes against and only two abstentions, will make it illegal for any business to profit from the nudity of its employees.

Even more impressive: the Nordic state is the first country in the world to ban stripping and lapdancing for feminist, rather than religious, reasons. Kolbrún Halldórsdóttir, the politician who first proposed the ban, firmly told the national press on Wednesday: "It is not acceptable that women or people in general are a product to be sold." When I asked her if she thinks Iceland has become the greatest feminist country in the world, she replied: "It is certainly up there. Mainly as a result of the feminist groups putting pressure on parliamentarians. These women work 24 hours a day, seven days a week with their campaigns and it eventually filters down to all of society."

The news is a real boost to feminists around the world, showing us that when an entire country unites behind an idea anything can happen. And it is bound to give a shot in the arm to the feminist campaign in the UK against an industry that is both a cause and a consequence of gaping inequality between men and women.

According to Icelandic police, 100 foreign women travel to the country annually to work in strip clubs. It is unclear whether the women are trafficked, but feminists say it is telling that as the stripping industry has grown, the number of Icelandic women wishing to work in it has not. Supporters of the bill say that some of the clubs are a front for prostitution – and that many of the women work there because of drug abuse and poverty rather than free choice. I have visited a strip club in Reykjavik and observed the women. None of them looked happy in their work.

So how has Iceland managed it? To start with, it has a strong women's movement and a high number of female politicans. Almost half the parliamentarians are female and it was ranked fourth out of 130 countries on the international gender gap index (behind Norway, Finland and Sweden). All four of these Scandinavian countries have, to some degree, criminalised the purchase of sex (legislation that the UK will adopt on 1 April). "Once you break past the glass ceiling and have more than one third of female politicians," says Halldórsdóttir, "something changes. Feminist energy seems to permeate everything."

Johanna Sigurðardottir is Iceland's first female and the world's first openly lesbian head of state. Guðrún Jónsdóttir of Stígamót, an organisation based in Reykjavik that campaigns against sexual violence, says she has enjoyed the support of Sigurðardottir for their campaigns against rape and domestic violence: "Johanna is a great feminist in that she challenges the men in her party and refuses to let them oppress her."

Then there is the fact that feminists in Iceland appear to be entirely united in opposition to prostitution, unlike the UK where heated debates rage over whether prostitution and lapdancing are empowering or degrading to women. There is also public support: the ban on commercial sexual activity is not only supported by feminists but also much of the population. A 2007 poll found that 82% of women and 57% of men support the criminalisation of paying for sex – either in brothels or lapdance clubs – and fewer than 10% of Icelanders were opposed.

Jónsdóttir says the ban could mean the death of the sex industry. "Last year we passed a law against the purchase of sex, recently introduced an action plan on trafficking of women, and now we have shut down the strip clubs. The Nordic countries are leading the way on women's equality, recognising women as equal citizens rather than commodities for sale."

Strip club owners are, not surprisingly, furious about the new law. One gave an interview to a local newspaper in which he likened Iceland's approach to that of a country such as Saudi Arabia, where it is not permitted to see any part of a woman's body in public. "I have reached the age where I'm not sure whether I want to bother with this hassle any more," he said.

Janice Raymond, a director of Coalition Against Trafficking in Women, hopes that all sex industry profiteers feel the same way, and believes the new law will pave the way for governments in other countries to follow suit. "What a victory, not only for the Icelanders but for everyone worldwide who repudiates the sexual exploitation of women," she says.

Jónsdóttir is confident that the law will create a change in attitudes towards women. "I guess the men of Iceland will just have to get used to the idea that women are not for sale."

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COMMMENT: Q. WTF does strip clubs or topless waitresses have to do with "trafficking" in women?

A. Not one goddamn thing.

Healthy heterosexuality is NOT the goal of modern feminism.

Statements like "sexual exploitation of women" and "women are not for sale" are psychological warfare, attempting to conflate strip clubs with human trafficking. Really what's going on is that the feminists HATE heterosexuality, and therefore are incensed that any woman would do anything to please a man.

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