shedding post-baby flab

One day she is seen sporting a baby bump and just a few weeks later she walks down the red carpet with a super slim figure. There is no one like the Hollywood celeb mum. Here are some of their secrets to shedding their post-baby flab

• Pop singer Aguilera also managed to lose the pregnancy weight quickly after giving birth to son Max Liron in 2008. She made her first appearance after having her baby at the Best Buy store in West Hollywood. She used to do 40-minute intervals of cardio on the treadmill or elliptical, along with strength training with bicep curls, chest presses, push-ups and lunges.

• The Fantastic Four star said she ate "a lot of soul food" and did some cardio exercises after giving birth to daughter Honor Marie in June 2008. Alba, married to Cash Warren, looked stunning as she posed for OK! magazine with six-week-old Honor Marie. She said at the time: "I do cardio on my own. I'm doing it slow. Now I'm starting to eat more healthy. Because after working out, having fried chicken and mashed potatoes is a little counteractive."

• The Latina singer, who gave birth to twins Max and Emme in February 2008, is said to have built a new gym in her house during her pregnancy and began intense workouts with her trainer as soon as her doctor gave her the go-ahead. Lopez was pictured looking fit while strolling hand in hand with husband Marc Anthony outside Radio City Music Hall in New York City just a month after delivery.

• Jolie was back to her svelte self just a few months after giving birth to twins Knox Leon and Vivienne Marcheline with partner Brad Pitt in July 2008. She flaunted her post-baby figure on the red carpet at the New York premiere of her movie The Changeling. Although the actress refused to share her secret, it was said she took occasional Pilates classes and ate lots of fruits and vegetables. Moreover, breastfeeding and snacking on popcorn also helped Jolie get back into shape.

• Known for her role as Mystique in the X-Men movies, Romijn says being in shape is the demand of the industry. She gave birth to twin daughters Dolly Rebecca Rose and Charlie Tamara Tulip in December 2008. She looked fit in pictures taken while she was taking a walk in California just a month after becoming a mother. She credits losing her post-baby flab to breastfeeding. "The pressure to lose weight definitely comes from the business. I think within the first three weeks, I took off like 35 pounds [14.5 kilogrammes] without doing anything!"

• The socialite, who is engaged to rocker Joel Madden, dropped her baby weight in just 17 days after giving birth to son Sparrow James Midnight Madden in September 2009. She also has a daughter, Harlow Winter Kate Madden. To shed extra pounds, Richie abstained from alcohol and carbs. She showed off her post-baby body in a hip-hugging black dress at their manager's party.

• Ben Affleck's actress wife looked fit just a couple of months after giving birth to her second child, Seraphina Rose Elizabeth Affleck, in January 2009. She made a rare post-baby appearance while taking her elder daughter, Violet, to school. Garner worked out briefly three to five times a week with two-minute intervals of running and exercises such as lunges and bicep curls.

• The Up in the Air actress, who looks stunning in the film, says she needed the money so badly that she started filming for the movie only two weeks after welcoming son Fynn. "I could never reclaim these first precious moments of maternity, but I needed to pay my mortgage. It wasn't an option. I had to do the role," Farmiga was quoted as saying.

• The supermodel, who is married to Tom Brady, gave birth to son Benjamin in December 2009. The Brazilian beauty, who gained 14 kilos during her pregnancy, is set to show off her post-baby figure on the cover of the April issue of Vogue. She is such a fitness freak that she was kung-fu kicking and doing yoga two weeks before she went into labour. "I did kung-fu up until two weeks before Benjamin was born and yoga three days a week," Bundchen said.

eye love you

The focus is only on eyes. Every painting in Shirin Aliabadi's latest work features pencil-on-paper drawings of eyes. The eyes are accentuated with bright eye shadows and decorated with glitter, diamantes and elaborate designs of flowers, birds, butterflies and other motifs from Iranian poetry and art.

Aliabadi has presented the artworks as doodles drawn by a schoolgirl in her notebook while daydreaming in class about life, love and her uncertain future.

The series is playfully titled Eye Love You and the theme is further echoed in the titles of the drawings such as Eye dream of you, Eye miss you, Eye want to be a star and Eye want to matter.

The drawings and their captions appear light-hearted and whimsical. But these eyes are the windows on the soul of a troubled people. The drawings and their titles convey the thoughts and emotions of a restless generation and make a strong statement about contemporary society in Tehran. Aliabadi graduated in art history and archaeology from the University of Paris and now lives in Tehran.

The artist, whose preferred medium is photography, is interested in exploring the cracks created within monolithic oppressive societies such as today's Iran by the emergence of small subcultures such as the growing number of young Iranian women who fanatically ape Western ideas of beauty and "cool" behaviour.

Her previous work includes Girls in Cars, a series of snapshots of Iranian girls in party make-up and clothes, stuck in Tehran's notorious traffic; and Miss Hybrid — a series of studio shots of hip young Iranian girls sporting coloured contact lenses, platinum blonde hair and vibrant chadors, posing with telephones and other props.

Eye Love You is Aliabadi's first international solo exhibition. And once again, through the heavily made-up eyes, she has highlighted the idea of aestheticism accepted in today's Iran and the extent to which young women are willing to go to conform and be aesthetically acceptable. The eyes in her drawings may seem over the top but they are actually replicas of the make-up you see on fashionable brides and bridesmaids in today's Tehran.

"While working on the Miss Hybrid project, I visited many beauty salons and shops selling beauty products and that is how I became familiar with the new trends in our country. I was amazed to see the phenomenal scale of weddings in Tehran and realised just how big the wedding business is here and how important make-up, especially eye make-up, is. No matter how fancy your car is, how rich your husband is, how perfect your (cosmetically designed) nose is, how blonde your hair is and how lavish your bridal gown is — if your eyes and make-up are not hot, you are just not happening," says Aliabadi.

As an artist and social commentator, Aliabadi was keen to explore this social phen-omenon and hence decided to work on this series. But after meeting some popular eye make-up artists, she soon realised that photography would not work here.

"The great thing about photography is that you do not have to create an illusion as in painting or drawing. You just point your camera and press a shutter and you capture reality, which is always stranger than fiction. But I found that many of the make-up artists do not put their designs on paper but directly on to the skin. So this time, my idea was in someone's head and I could not photograph that. I had to find that someone to draw what they were thinking. So I collaborated with the designers and we produced some drawings.

"As I looked at these drawings, they reminded me of the little scribbles and sketches we all did in our notebooks, while dreaming in a boring class at school. The drawings looked like psychological profiles of young girls and that is where the idea to present this series as sketches in a schoolgirl's notebook came from," she says.

The series is supported by a poem that includes the titles of the paintings. With lines such as "Eye want to be famous. Eye want a hybrid car. Eye want everything. Eye want to forget you. Eye want to be happy. Eye want to fly. Eye want to be free. Eye want to matter. Eye want to give. Eye am a teardrop. Eye am the ocean. Eye am a burning candle", the poem seems to be simply a young girl's dreams and fears written in her diary.

But like the eyes, these sentences too have a deeper significance. The flamboyant eyes portray the way in which modern Iranian women rebel against the confines of their conservative society by adopting Western codes of beauty.

And disguised as random thoughts scribbled by a naïve youngster, the titles and poem convey the suppressed desires, insecurities, confusion, frustration, angst and hopes of young Iranians.

mother at 9

Chinese girl, 9, becomes one of world's youngest mothers after giving birth to a baby boy

A nine-year-old Chinese schoolgirl has become one of the world's youngest mothers after giving birth to a healthy boy.

The unnamed girl was brought to a hospital in Changchun, which lies in the north-east of the country, when she was eight and a half months pregnant.

Two days later, she gave birth to the 6lb boy by Caesarean section, a Chinese newspaper has reported.

The child comes from the nearby town of Songyuan. Her family refused to discuss the pregnancy, but confirmed they had reported it to the police.

Last night police were reportedly trying to establish who the father is.

In the province, sex with a child under the age of 14 brings an automatic rape conviction and a lengthy jail sentence.

A legal expert told the paper that women under the age of 14 do not have sexual rights - 'so any argument of being consensual as a defence is completely untenable,' he said.

He added: 'Anyone who had sexual relations with a girl under 14 means they have committed rape and is to be punished severely.'

A hospital in China's largest city, Shanghai, recently said that about 30 per cent of abortions were on school-aged girls.

The youngest reported mother in the world - and the most bizarre of all young pregnancy cases - is five-year-old Lina Medina of Peru, who gave birth to a 6lb son named Gerardo in a Caesarean operation in 1939.

Lina Medina, accompanied by her 11-month-old-son Gerardo, and Dr Lozada who helped with the birth. The picture was taken in 1939 in a hospital in Lima, Peru's capital

Her father was arrested on suspicion of sexual abuse but was later released because of lack of evidence.

In 1957 another Peruvian girl, aged nine, gave birth to a girl weighing just over 6lb and, curiously, it was in 2006 that yet another Peruvian girl, aged eight, gave birth to a 4lb 4oz girl.

Several other girls aged nine, from Thailand, Singapore, Rwanda and Brazil, have also given birth.

Mothers aged as young as 10 and 11 have also become an increasing occurrence.

The youngest mother in Britain is believed to have been 11 when she got pregnant and 12 years old when she gave birth.

GIRLS REACHING PUBERTY AT EVER YOUNGER AGES

Menstruation usually starts at the age of 12 but it is not uncommon for it start earlier. In the western world children are reaching puberty at younger and younger ages - some girls at the age of seven. Many blame rising obesity rates because, generally, girls who achieve menstruation earlier in life tend to have greater body mass index and a higher ratio of fat compared to those who begin menstruation later. University of Bristol research has suggested one girl in six reaches puberty before the age of eight - 18 months earlier than their mothers. Periods are a sign that a girl is now releasing fertile eggs which makes her able to conceive

child bride

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.

While it was not immediately known why Fawziya's parents married her off, the reasons vary. Sometimes, financially-strapped parents offer up their daughters for hefty dowries.

Marriage means the girls are no longer a financial or moral burden to their parents. And often, parents will extract a promise from the husband to wait until the girl is older to consummate the marriage.

Children's organization UNICEF issued a statement Monday saying: "Child marriages violate the rights of children in the most deplorable way. The younger the girl is when she becomes pregnant, the greater the health risks for her and her baby.

"Girls who give birth before the age of 15 are five times more likely to die in childbirth than women in their 20s. Child marriage denies girls of their childhood, deprives them of an education and robs them of their innocence."

"More must be done to address the underlying causes in order to prevent tragic deaths like those of 12-year-old Fawziya and her baby," the statement added.

The issue of Yemeni child brides came to the forefront in 2008 with 10-year-old Nujood Ali.

She was pulled out of school and married to a man who beat and raped her within weeks of the ceremony.

To escape, Nujood hailed a taxi -- the first time in her life -- to get across town to the central courthouse where she sat on a bench and demanded to see a judge.

After a well-publicized trial, she was granted a divorce.

The Yemeni parliament tried in February to pass a law, setting the minimum marriage age at 17. But the measure has not reached the president because many parliamentarians argued it violates sharia, or Islamic law, which does not stipulate a minimum age.

tiny voices

JIBLA, Yemen — One morning last month, Arwa Abdu Muhammad Ali walked out of her husband’s house here and ran to a local hospital, where she complained that he had been beating and sexually abusing her for eight months.

Nujood’s father, Ali Muhammad al-Ahdal, who has 16 children, said that, with no husband, Nujood could have been abducted.

That alone would be surprising in Yemen, a deeply conservative Arab society where family disputes tend to be solved privately. What made it even more unusual was that Arwa was 9 years old.

Within days, Arwa — a tiny, delicate-featured girl — had become a celebrity in Yemen, where child marriage is common but has rarely been exposed in public. She was the second child bride to come forward in less than a month; in April, a 10-year-old named Nujood Ali had gone by herself to a courthouse to demand a divorce, generating a landmark legal case.

Together, the two girls’ stories have helped spur a movement to put an end to child marriage, which is increasingly seen as a crucial part of the cycle of poverty in Yemen and other third world countries. Pulled out of school and forced to have children before their bodies are ready, many rural Yemeni women end up illiterate and with serious health problems. Their babies are often stunted, too.

The average age of marriage in Yemen’s rural areas is 12 to 13, a recent study by Sana University researchers found. The country, at the southern corner of the Arabian Peninsula, has one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the world.

“This is the first shout,” said Shada Nasser, a human rights lawyer who met Nujood, the 10-year-old, after she arrived at the courthouse to demand a divorce. Ms. Nasser decided instantly to take her case. “All other early marriage cases have been dealt with by tribal sheiks, and the girl never had any choice.”

But despite a rising tide of outrage, the fight against the practice is not easy. Hard-line Islamic conservatives, whose influence has grown enormously in the past two decades, defend it, pointing to the Prophet Muhammad’s marriage to a 9-year-old. Child marriage is deeply rooted in local custom here, and even enshrined in an old tribal expression: “Give me a girl of 8, and I can give you a guarantee” for a good marriage.

“Voices are rising in society against this phenomenon and its catastrophes,” said Shawki al-Qadhi, an imam and opposition member in Parliament who has tried unsuccessfully to muster support for a legal ban on child marriage in Yemen in the past. “But despite rejections of it by many people and some religious scholars, it continues.”

The issue first arose because of Nujood, a bright-eyed girl barely four feet tall. Her ordeal began in February, when her father took her from Sana, the Yemeni capital, to his home village for the wedding. She was given almost no warning.

“I was very frightened and worried,” Nujood recalled, speaking in a soft, childlike voice as she sat cross-legged on the floor in her family’s bare three-room home in a slum not far from Sana’s airport. “I wanted to go home.”

As she told her story, Nujood gradually gained confidence, smiling shyly as if she were struggling to hold back laughter. Later, she removed her veil, revealing her shoulder-length brown hair.

The trouble started on the first night, when her 30-year-old husband, Faez Ali Thamer, took off her clothes as soon as the light was out. She ran crying from the room, but he caught her, brought her back and forced himself on her. Later, he beat her as well.

“I hated life with him,” she said, staring at the ground in front of her. The wedding came so quickly that no one bothered to tell her how women become pregnant, or what a wife’s role is, she added.

Her father, Ali Muhammad al-Ahdal, said he had agreed to the marriage because two of Nujood’s older sisters had been kidnapped and forcibly married, with one of them ending up in jail. Mr. Ahdal said he had feared the same thing would happen to Nujood, and early marriage had seemed a better alternative.

A gaunt, broken-looking man, Mr. Ahdal once worked as a street sweeper. Now he and his family beg for a living. He has 16 children by two women.

because of sex cream

Couple get suspended jail term for sex cream theft in Dubai

25-year-old marketing manager and his 24-year-old wife were given the suspended jail term by the Dubai Court of First Instance earlier this month after they convinced the court of their forgetfulness

Dubai: An Indian couple in their early 20s caught stealing sex enhancement cream among other items from a hypermarket have been given a three-year suspended prison sentence.

The 25-year-old marketing manager and his 24-year-old wife were given the suspended jail term by the Dubai Court of First Instance earlier this month after they convinced the court of their forgetfulness.

Presiding Judge Hamad Abdul Latif Abdul Jawad convicted the couple of stealing the items but handed them the suspended prison term after they obtained a waiver from the hypermarket.

Prosecutors charged the pair with stealing two packs of sex enhancement creams, some electronics, four knives and perfume.

According to the charge sheet a security guard saw them on camera attempting to steal the items.

The marketing manager defended himself in court, saying: "We forgot to pay for the items. However, we obtained a waiver from the hypermarket and submitted it to the prosecution."

The guard told the investigating prosecutor the goods were worth around Dh1,100.

a father kills his daughter

Riyadh: A Saudi man working with the Commission for Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice recently killed his daughter for converting to Christianity.

According to sources close to the victim, the religious police member had cut the tongue of the girl and burned her to death following a heated debate on religion.

The death of the girl sent shockwaves and websites where the victim used to write with various nick names have allocated special space to mourn her, while some others closed temporarily in protest.

According to the Saudi Al Ukhdoud news website, the victim wrote an article on the blog of which she was a member under the nickname “Rania'' a few days before her murder.

She wrote that her life became an ordeal after her family members grew suspicious about her after a religious discussion with them.

She said that her brother found some Christian articles written by her as well as a cross sign on her computer screen. Since then he started to insult her and blamed the internet for pushing her to change her religion.

The “Free Copts'' website published a message which it received from a friend of the victim, revealing that the killer is in police custody and that he is being investigated for an honour related crime.

Saudi religious scholars have frequently warned against the dangers of Christian internet websites and satellite TV channels which attract Muslim youngsters to change their religion.

They decreed that watching these channels or browsing these websites which call for conversion to Christianity by various means is against the teachings of Islam.

same-name couple to wed after FB meeting

This October, Kelly Hildebrandt will vow to share her life with a man who already shares her name.

This is no joke. Kelly Katrina Hildebrandt, 20, and Kelly Carl Hildebrandt, 24, expect just over 100 guests at a ceremony at the Lighthouse Point Yacht & Racquet Club in South Florida, where they will become husband and wife.

"He is just everything that I've ever looked for," she said in an interview. "There's always been certain qualities that a guy has to have. And he has all the ones I could think of — and more."

Their modern romance was a match made in cyberspace. She was curious and bored one night last year, so she plugged her name into the popular social networking Web site Facebook just to see if anyone shared it.

At the time, Kelly Hildebrandt, of Lubbock, Texas, was the only match.

So she sent him a message.

"She said 'Hi. We had the same name. Thought it was cool,'" Kelly Carl Hildebrandt said. "I thought she was pretty cute."

But there were also concerns.

"I thought, man, we've got to be related or something," he said.

For the next three months the two exchanged e-mails. Before he knew it, occasional phone calls turned into daily chats, sometimes lasting hours. He visited her in Florida after a few months and "fell head over heels."

"I thought it was fun," he said of that first online encounter. "I had no idea that it would lead to this."

Months after Kelly Hildebrandt sent her first e-mail, she found a diamond engagement ring hidden in treasure box on a beach in December.

"I totally think that it's all God's timing," Kelly Katrina Hildebrandt said. "He planned it out just perfect."

She's a student at a local community college. He works in financial services. They plan to make their home in South Florida.

It hasn't been all smooth sailing. A trip on a cruise ship almost got canceled when the travel agent deleted one ticket from the system, thinking someone had plugged in the same information twice.

There was also some uncertainty about how to phrase their wedding invitations, so they decided to include their middle names. But any confusion likely won't carry on past the husband and wife. Kelly Katrina Hildebrandt said there are no plans to pass along the name to future children.

"No," she said. "We're definitely not going to name our kids Kelly."

valentine card

Earlier this month, as Mike Trogdon was going about his routine as director of operations for postal services at Duke University, he ran across something rather startling: a letter from Salem, Va., postmarked Feb. 12, 1934. He told Yahoo! News that his first thought was "Where in the world could this have been for all these years?"
The letter — which bore a 2-cent stamp and a 1-cent stamp — was addressed to a "Miss Margaret Davey c/o Duke Hospital, Duke University."
Trogdon checked the university’s records for any mention of that name in the employee database. When that came up empty, he decided to open the envelope. Inside he found a Valentine's Day card adorned with numerous hearts and a giraffe.
The message read: "In the race for my affection, you win by a long neck, so be my valentine!!"
At the bottom of the card was a signature: "Joyce."

Trogdon contacted the school's alumni department to see if anyone named Margaret Davey had attended Duke in 1934, and indeed she had.

Davey had graduated from the Duke School of Nursing in 1935, went on to enjoy a long career as a registered nurse in Virginia and Florida, and married a World War II veteran. Together they raised a son and daughter.

But sadly, the dig for information about Margaret Davey revealed something rather unfortunate: She died in January of this year at the age of 96 — just two months before her Depression-era valentine caught Trogdon’s eye.

Still, Trogdon was determined to get the word out. He contacted Leanora Minai, the school's director of communications and editor of its employee newsletter. She tracked down a few of Davey's surviving family members, including her son, and they set about trying to crack the other mystery of the card: Who had sent it? Eventually, they established that in 1934, Margaret Davey had a 6-year-old niece named Joyce living in Salem. Joyce — now Joyce Galbraith Colony — turns 82 in April and lives in Charlottesville, Va.

"My mother wrote both the envelope and the 'Joyce' signature inside," Joyce Galbraith Colony told Minai in a piece for Duke Today. Colony's mother, Florence, was Davey's older sister. "She was my favorite aunt."

One mystery will probably remain unsolved, though: just where the card has been hiding these past 76 years. Trogdon’s best guess is that it fell behind a mail counter, where a vigilant postal worker finally retrieved it.

But that doesn’t account for another recent revelation: A second envelope addressed to Margaret Davey at Duke University has also recently surfaced at the U.S. Postal Service’s Processing and Distribution Center in Raleigh, N.C. — and it, too, was signed by someone named Joyce. The missive was postmarked in Salem on Jan. 15, 1935 — nearly a year after Joyce had sent off her valentine. Postal officials sent this wayward letter to Margaret Davey's other niece, and included an explanatory note.

"We believe it may have been left in a mailbag and overlooked by our personnel who emptied the contents," the note read. "Occasionally, an envelope may stick to the seam inside a bag."

The missing-mail saga is already causing a stir around the Duke campus — even as the student body is obsessed with how far the school’s famed Blue Devils basketball squad will go in this year’s NCAA tournament. Davey no doubt would have enjoyed hearing her name crop up amid all the hoops mania, Minai suggests.

"Margaret was an avid Duke basketball fan," Minai told Yahoo! News, proudly noting that she kept "a poster of the team, signed by Coach K, above her bed in the nursing home."