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Many of us obsess about the health of our skin, but how many pay the same attention to the health of our hair? We color, brush, and style it, and Designer Replica Handbags we blast it with heat and chemicals. Some hair takes a significant amount of abuse, and the result of all that mistreatment is a mane that’s dull, lifeless, frizzy, and prone to breakage.

But not all bad hair habits are created equal. Many people would confess to the occasional dalliance with the “hot” button on their hair dryer, but how does that compare with the occasional bleach job? Which causes more damage? We’ve ranked the most common hair no-nos, from the slightly sinful to the dangerously damaging.

Temporary Hair Color Products like Level 1 rinses, washes, stains, and color-depositing shampoos cause virtually no damage to the hair. Since they do not contain chemicals that allow the color molecules to penetrate the hair shaft and interact with the hair’s natural pigments, they merely sit on top of the strands until they wash away, in about six to ten shampoos. Threat Level: Damage-Free!

Hot Showers In addition to being bad for skin, washing with hot water is a poor choice for hair. It rinses away natural protective oils and accelerates the fading process for colored hair. It’s a myth that a final rinse with cool water will close the hair’s cuticle, but using tepid water in general is much gentler on hair. Threat Level: 1 out of 10 (with 10 being the highest threat level)

Brushing When Wet When hair is wet, it’s significantly weaker, and brushing it in this vulnerable condition leads to increased breakage. The individual strands can’t handle the tugging and tension, so they stretch until they snap. To detangle wet hair during or after the shower, gently use a wide-toothed comb, working from the ends upward. Better yet: use your fingers. Threat Level: 2 out of 10

Demi-Permanent Color Non-permanent Level 2 color, a popular at-home option, is generally safe for hair, but it’s not 100 percent gentle. Demi-permanent dyes (like Clairol’s Natural Instincts) contain no ammonia, but they still have a small amount of peroxide to open the hair cuticle and deposit the color molecules. Even though demi-permanent color cannot lighten hair, it still causes a small amount of damage, especially when compounded by other harsh styling practices. Threat Level: 3 out of 10 Perms

The principal chemical used in permanent waves, ammonium thioglycolate, actually loosens the bonds between the molecules of the hair shaft and Gucci bags allows the hair to take whatever shape it’s set in—in the case of perms, on rollers. While any chemical process causes some amount of damage, perms are considered one of the more reliable treatments, as long as the hair is healthy beforehand. Threat Level: 3 out of 10

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Permanent Hair Color

Since permanent hair color involves significant amounts of peroxide and ammonia, it can cause significant amounts of damage, including dryness, breakage, and dullness. The most potentially damaging color transition is in lightening dark hair, which requires two separate processes, the removal of the original color and the depositing of the new color. After this much chemical meddling, hair is in a significantly weaker state than it was when it started. All bottle blonds should take care to condition their hair regularly and treat it gently. Threat Level: 4 out of 10

Blow-Drying/Flat-Ironing

The occasional blast from a hair dryer won’t harm hair too much, but the heat from daily use of a blow dryer or flatiron causes hair to become extremely dry and brittle. Hair in this weakened condition is more susceptible to damage from other stressors, leading it to lose elasticity and break. For daily dryers, stylists recommend allowing hair to partially air-dry before blow-drying, or blow-drying it until it’s only about 80 percent dry and then allowing it to air-dry the rest of the way. Threat Level: 4 out of 10 Tight Hairstyles

Sporting the occasional ponytail is harmless, but the tension of constantly wearing extremely tight hairstyles can trigger a condition called traction alopecia, which can actually cause individual strands of hair to break off. Even if you’re not wearing severe hairstyles every day, repeated use of elastics, combs, or other implements can still cause hair to break. Signs of traction alopecia include scalp pain, thinning hair (especially in the front and back), and breakage near the hairline. African American women, who are more likely to wear extensions, weaves, or braids, are more susceptible to this condition. Luckily, if caught in time, traction alopecia is reversible. Threat Level: 6 out of 10

Chemical Relaxers

These curl-easing products use extremely harsh chemicals, including sodium hydroxide, a product found in drain cleaners. Relaxers work by penetrating the hair shaft and literally rearranging the structure of the molecules. While this technique may loosen curls, it also affects hair’s elasticity and strength. Let only a trained technician apply a relaxer; even if it’s done properly, hair is still left fragile and susceptible to damage. Threat Level: 7 out of 10

Thermal Conditioning

This straightening process uses chemicals similar to those in perms in order to rearrange hair’s molecular structure. But what makes this treatment particularly harsh is that in the second phase of the application, hair with the active chemical on it is brushed and blow-dried so that it sets in a new alignment. That’s a hair-hazard trifecta: chemicals, heat, and tension. Even when Prada Scarf a qualified technician does it for you, this process has the potential to cause serious or catastrophic breakage. Many people find the treatment effective, but even healthy-looking hair is left fragile and extremely porous. Threat Level: 9 out of 10

Many of these hair damagers do their worst only in combination with other bad habits, such as regularly blow-drying dyed hair, or coloring hair that’s already been relaxed or thermally conditioned. The potential for damage also depends on the innate qualities of the hair itself. African Americans and people with curly, fine, color-treated, or coarse hair are especially susceptible to breakage and damage.

Human hair has more tensile strength than strands of nylon, but it’s not invincible, and it doesn’t take much to turn your tresses from beautiful to blah. Avoid these mane-mangling habits and treat your hair kindly and gently to ensure that it’s healthy, strong, and elastic enough to bend—not break.

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Reto Schmidli, a Designer Replica Handbags police officer and part-time student in Arlesheim, Switzerland, is the only person who has “double-bageled” Federer.

There may be only one tennis player in the world who wishes he had taken it a bit easier on Roger Federer. Reto Schmidli, 31, a police officer and part-time psychology student in Arlesheim, Switzerland, is the only person who has “double-bageled” Federer, that is, beaten him, 6-0, 6-0.

The fact that the drubbing occurred in Federer’s first tournament match, when he was just 10 years old, is not lost on Schmidli.

“I was just thinking about winning the match,” remembered Schmidli, who is now a recreational player ranked No. 715 in Switzerland. “I wasn’t thinking about being nice to him, but if I had to do it over again, I should have given Roger a game.”

The beating took place at the Grüssenh?lzli tennis center in Pratteln, Switzerland, in August 1991. Federer was scheduled to compete in the 10-and-under tournament, but there weren’t enough entrants, so he was forced to square off against Schmidli, who was nearly 13. Schmidli had a significant size advantage and quickly overpowered Federer without dropping a game.

The match remains memorable for Federer. After notching a 6-0, 6-0 victory over Gastón Gaudio in Shanghai in November 2005, he was asked if he had ever blanked an opponent before. “No, but I lost, 6-0, 6-0, in juniors once,” he told reporters, adding, “I didn’t think I played that badly.” Federer later told Chris Bowers of the BBC: “I actually played pretty good. I lost, 6-0, 6-0. I left the court and I wasn’t even disappointed.”

Give Federer credit for having a sense of humor, but his account of being untroubled by the loss does not square with reports of his hypercompetitive Gucci bags on-court personality in his early years. “He was a really bad loser,” said Madeleine B?rlocher, Federer’s first coach at the Old Boys Tennis Club in Basel. “After he’d lose a match, he’d sit under the umpire’s chair and cry for half an hour sometimes. The other players would already be in the clubhouse eating sandwiches, and he’d still be crying on the court.”

B?rlocher recalled her joy in seeing her beloved protégé cry after he won Wimbledon for the first time. “I laughed because it reminded me of how he used to cry as a child,” she said. “Then he cried when he lost, now he cries when he wins.”

But victories have been hard to come by for Federer since his triumph at the Australian Open in January. For the first time in a decade, Federer has failed to win a tournament between the Australian and French Opens. Early departures at Indian Wells, Miami, Rome and Estoril, along with Sunday’s loss in Madrid against his rival, Rafael Nadal, have raised doubts about his ability to defend his title at Roland Garros this month. And yet, even during his spring “slump,” he has managed to extend two little-known streaks, both of which bolster his claim to being tennis’s greatest player.

In 864 professional matches, spanning 2,117 sets, Federer has been shut out in a set just four times, and three of those occasions came within a two-month span in 1999, when he was 17 years old. He then went nearly a decade without being bageled before losing the 2008 French Open final to Nadal, 1-6, 3-6, 0-6.

Federer has avoided a shutout in 99.9 percent of the sets and in 99.6 percent of the matches he has contested. He has not come close to being double-bageled since the Schmidli loss in 1991, and for a two-year stretch from 2003 to 2005 he not only avoided shutouts, but also avoided 6-1 losses, which are known as breadsticks.

What makes those statistics even more remarkable is that Federer has never retired from a match during his professional career.

By comparison, Andre Agassi was bageled 25 times and retired from 11 matches, and Jimmy Connors was bageled 15 times while retiring on 14 occasions. Even big servers like Pete Sampras and Boris Becker were shut out more frequently.

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Players sometimes tank in a set to conserve energy for the rest of the match, or retire with injuries real or imagined when things look bleak, but Federer does neither. (The only time Federer has been accused of tanking a set came in 1998, when he was fined $100 by a tournament referee in Küblis, Switzerland, for lack of effort.)

“The idea of trying to conserve energy for the next set never arises because he’s never really that tired,” said Chris Bowers, author of “Roger Federer: Spirit of a Champion” and the forthcoming “Roger Federer: The Greatest.” “If he’s leading, 6-0, 5-0, 30-40, he’ll be desperate not to lose that one game. That’s why you find so few bagels with Federer. For him, every point is competition.”

Tennis is known as a gentleman’s game and serving up bagels, or bicycles, as a 6-0, 6-0 result is called in Switzerland, was once viewed as bad sportsmanship. Players occasionally gave an opponent a game during a rout. “I don’t think it happens anymore, ever,” said Cliff Drysdale, a former player who is a commentator for ESPN. “In my era, sometimes we’d throw a guy a bone. We didn’t have Prada Scarf the hangers-on, the psychologists, coaches, trainers and stringers that players have now. We just had each other. That’s why we were more likely to have some compassion on an opponent.”

When Schmidli had the chance to bicycle the boy who became the greatest champion in tennis history, he took it. If the two played again, Federer would certainly return the favor.

If Schmidli pulled Federer over for speeding, there would be no gift for Federer, either.

“As much as I admire Roger, I would have to give him the ticket,” Schmidli said. “In Switzerland there are no free passes.”

A motto Roger Federer has lived by.

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Happy is the house that PRADA Handbags shelters a friend! It might well be built, like a festal bower or arch, to entertain him a single day.

Happier, if he knows the solemnity of that relation, and honor its law! He who offers himself a candidate for that covenant comes up, like an Olympian, to the great games, where the first-born of the world are the competitors.

He proposes himself for contests where Time, Want, Anger, are in the lists, and he alone is victor who has truth enough in his constitution to preserve the delicacy of his beauty form the wear and tear of all these.

The gifts of fortune may be present or absent, but all the speed in that contest depends on intrinsic nobleness, and the contempt of trifles.

There is an important element that goes to the composition of friendship, that is Truth. A friends is person with whom I may be sincere.

Before him I may think aloud. I am arrived at last in the presence of a man so real and equal, hat I may drop even those undermost garments of dissimulation, courtesy, and second thought, which men never put off, and may deal with him with the simplicity and wholeness with which one chemical atom meets another, only to the highest rank, that being permitted to speak truth, as having none above it to court or conform unto.

Every man alone is sincere. At the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy begins.

We parry any fend the approach of our fellow-man by compliments, by gossip, by amusements, by affairs.

We cover up our thought from him under a hundred folds.

Each day is special

A friend of mine opened his wife’s underwear drawer and picked up a silk paper wrapped package:

“This, – he said – isn’t any ordinary package.” He unwrapped the box and stared at both the silk paper and the box.

“She got this the Hermes Wallets first time we went to New York, 8 or 9 years ago. She has never put it on. Was saving it for a special occasion.

Well, I guess this is it. He got near the bed and placed the gift box next to the other clothings he was taking to the funeral house, his wife had just died. He turned to me and said:

“Never save something for a special occasion. Every day in your life is a special occasion”.

I still think those words changed my life. Now I read more and clean less. I sit on the porch without worrying about anything. I spend more time with my family, and less at work. I understood that life should be a source of experience to be lived up to, not survived through. I no longer keep anything. I use crystal glasses every day. I’ll wear new clothes to go to the supermarket, if i feel like it. I don’t save my special perfume for special occasions, I use it whenever I want to. The words “Someday…” and “One Day…” are fading away from my dictionary. If it’s worth seeing, listening or doing, I want to see, listen or do it now.

I don’t know what my friend’s wife would have done if she knew she wouldn’t be there the next morning, this nobody can tell. I think she might have called her relatives and closest friends.

She might call Designer Replica Handbags old friends to make peace over past quarrels. I’d like to think she would go out for Chinese, her favourite food. It’s these small things that I would regret not doing, if I knew my time had come. I would regret it, because I would no longer see the friends I would meet, letters… letters that i wanted to write “One of this days”. I would regret and feel sad, because I didn’t say to my brothers and sons, not times enough at least, how much I love them.

Now, I try not to delay, postpone or keep anything that could bring laughter and joy into our lives. And, on each morning, I say to myself that this could be a special day. Each day, each hour, each minute, is special.

Lawmakers, advisors urge to protect personal info

Chinese lawmakers Gucci bags and political advisors have called for legislation for comprehensive protection of citizens’ personal information.

Their call came just days after the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress (NPC), China’s top legislature, approved a criminal law amendment banning government and corporate employees with access to personal data to sell or leak such information.

But for some lawmakers and political advisors, the amendment is not quite enough.

Xu Long, an entrepreneur-turned deputy to the NPC, urged for a privacy protection law which would appoint a specialized administration responsible for personal information safety.

The privacy protection law should also specify compensation for damage caused by personal information leakage, Xu said.

Lack of regulation to protect personal information had led to widespread harassment in China.

An online survey conducted last year showed nearly 89 percent of the 2,422 people polled claimed they had suffered because personal information had been leaked.

Anonymous messages, phone calls and spam were listed as the most reported means of harassment after personal information was made known to unauthorized agencies and individuals, according to the survey.

Zhu Zhengfu, a lawyer from the southern province of Guangdong and also a member of the 11th National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), the country’s top political advisory body, backed Xu’s call by telling of his own experience of being a victim to leakage of personal information.

“I registered some of my personal information a couple of years ago when I purchased a car and bought insurances for it,” Zhu said. “Ever since then, every year when the insurances near expiration, I would receive dozens of calls trying to sell me insurances, and Prada Scarf they knew everything about my car model, my plate number, even my address,” he said.

The criminal law amendment did not clearly define “personal information”, which could cover a wide range of concepts, Zhu said.

A privacy protection law, or a legal explanation to clearly define the concept of personal information is our top priority here, he said.

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Earth Day has come and gone, but it’s a fact of daily — and especially nightly — life that 1.6 billion people around the globe have no PRADA Handbags electricity in their homes. Instead, most use wood, coal or even dung to heat and cook their homes — resulting in indoor air pollution that kills 1.6 million people a year.

It’s not expected to improve much, and in Africa it’s predicted to worsen.

By 2030, when Earth’s population will likely top 8 billion, 1.3 billion people will still lack electricity, the International Energy Agency estimates. Of those, 700 million will be in Africa, and 490 million in South Asia.

Case in point: Ghana, in West Africa, where most of the northern half of the country lives without lights.

A decade ago, Ghana’s government launched a campaign to electrify the rural north but, except for periodic jumpstarts during election season, it has languished.

As a result, three out of four Ghanans in the north are without electricity to refrigerate with, to cook with, to study with, to start businesses with.

Like most others around the world in the same situation, these Ghanans use traditional fuels (wood, coal, dung) to meet their cooking needs. The World Health Organization estimates that using those fuels, which also releases greenhouse gases, is responsible for 1.5 million deaths per year — most of them children and women.

What would electricity for everyone around the globe cost? The International Energy Agency, which is made up of 28 member countries, figures it would run $35 billion a year from 2008 to 2030 to reach that.

The United Nations has taken up the issue, organizing a summit on April 28 hosted by Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.

“Energy services are essential for meeting basic human needs, reducing poverty, creating and accumulating wealth and sustaining advances in social development,” it said in announcing the summit. “Access to adequate, affordable and basic modern energy Prada Scarf services is thus crucial to achieving sustainable human development.”

Watch the video report by Peter DiCampo for a closer look at life without lights in Ghana — following residents into their darkness as well as their attempts to improvise. Mobile phones are widespread, and a growing local film industry allows northerners to see movies in a setting and language familiar to them for the first time. All of this exists despite the absence of a convenient outlet in which to plug basic electronic appliances.

gemahrv0512

Earth Day has come and gone, but it’s a fact of daily — and especially nightly — life that 1.6 billion people around the globe have no PRADA Handbags electricity in their homes. Instead, most use wood, coal or even dung to heat and cook their homes — resulting in indoor air pollution that kills 1.6 million people a year.

It’s not expected to improve much, and in Africa it’s predicted to worsen.

By 2030, when Earth’s population will likely top 8 billion, 1.3 billion people will still lack electricity, the International Energy Agency estimates. Of those, 700 million will be in Africa, and 490 million in South Asia.

Case in point: Ghana, in West Africa, where most of the northern half of the country lives without lights.

A decade ago, Ghana’s government launched a campaign to electrify the rural north but, except for periodic jumpstarts during election season, it has languished.

As a result, three out of four Ghanans in the north are without electricity to refrigerate with, to cook with, to study with, to start businesses with.

Like most others around the world in the same situation, these Ghanans use traditional fuels (wood, coal, dung) to meet their cooking needs. The World Health Organization estimates that using those fuels, which also releases greenhouse gases, is responsible for 1.5 million deaths per year — most of them children and women.

What would electricity for everyone around the globe cost? The International Energy Agency, which is made up of 28 member countries, figures it would run $35 billion a year from 2008 to 2030 to reach that.

The United Nations has taken up the issue, organizing a summit on April 28 hosted by Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.

“Energy services are essential for meeting basic human needs, reducing poverty, creating and accumulating wealth and sustaining advances in social development,” it said in announcing the summit. “Access to adequate, affordable and basic modern energy Prada Scarf services is thus crucial to achieving sustainable human development.”

Watch the video report by Peter DiCampo for a closer look at life without lights in Ghana — following residents into their darkness as well as their attempts to improvise. Mobile phones are widespread, and a growing local film industry allows northerners to see movies in a setting and language familiar to them for the first time. All of this exists despite the absence of a convenient outlet in which to plug basic electronic appliances.

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The recent scandal over the Gucci bags handling of child abuse in the Catholic church has again focused attention on celibacy. But away from the arguments, what is it actually like to lead a life without having sex?

This is, we are told, a highly sexualised society.

In the 21st Century UK, indeed in almost all of the West, sexual imagery can be found in many places, and many young people expect to have a number of sexual partners before eventually settling down.

This perhaps may explain why the idea of a celibate lifestyle, as practised by the clergy of the Catholic Church, as well as adherents of other religions, causes a great deal of puzzlement among non-believers.

“In our sex-dominated society, people tend to view celibacy as a form of sexual anorexia – a sad and lonely state at best, unnatural at worst,” says Elizabeth Abbott, author of A History of Celibacy.

Jimmy O’Brien was a priest for the best part of a decade before deciding he had to leave his vocation. He has now been married for 20 years to a Designer Replica Handbags woman he met while still a priest, and he has two children.

Born in Tipperary, Ireland, he started his training at 18. From a Catholic background, he completely accepted the idea of celibacy. But after several years as a priest in the south of England he began to change his mind.

“Accepting it was one thing and living it was another. Four or five years into it, it’s only then the implications of the decision you made were questioned.

“It isn’t so much the celibacy aspect, it is the loneliness. At 28 or 29 a lot of my friends were settling down and having children, my older brothers and sisters were having children. There was no significant other there for you.”

By the time he was 34, Mr O’Brien felt he had to leave to preserve his “own personal sanity”. Although he says he did not break his vows while a priest, he had already met his future wife by the time he left.

“By this stage I had kind of got myself into a relationship with a woman and was having to make that decision. It was a friendship that developed. When I did leave, the relationship I was in went onto a different level.”

Even in slightly more conservative times, there have always been many for whom celibacy was not easily understood. Former nun Mel Baird encountered many baffled people in the late 1960s and 1970s.

“People thought I was completely mad,” she notes, and there were some who made wild allegations – that she was just odd, a lesbian, or even not celibate at all.

“Some people couldn’t understand it PRADA Handbags was possible to be fulfilled and to enjoy what you were doing without being sexually active. It didn’t mean I wasn’t a sexual being.”

But the times were certainly different when Mrs Baird began training to be a nun in 1965.

No imposition

“We are actually looking at quite a different climate. I had been brought up in a Catholic home in a Catholic school, educated by nuns.

“I never saw celibacy as a deprivation. I never denied my femininity. I was still a woman with the same feelings. It doesn’t mean I wasn’t interested in men or interested in having children.

“I saw my choice to become a nun as part of what I needed to do to achieve the whole. I didn’t see it as an imposition.”

And while the non-believer might be preoccupied with the idea of a constant battle against multifarious temptation, Mrs Baird had support.

“You had the whole back-up of a [convent] community, unlike priests.”

When the nuns were tempted they were encouraged to “pray or to go and do something positive – it is about channelling that energy”.

But Mrs Baird decided before taking her final vows that she was not destined to be a nun for life.

“I was beginning to wonder whether I was in the right place. At 26 I wasn’t the same person I was at 18. I had experienced life. I had grown up. I no longer found it fulfilling.

“I would have become miserable. There is such a thing as a temporary vocation.”

Human intimacy

Serving priest Fr Stephen Wang – who has written on the subject – does not see celibacy as a privation.

“There are struggles. Times of Hermes Wallets loneliness; sexual desires; dreams about what marriage and fatherhood would be like. I don’t think most of this is about celibacy – it’s about being human.”

Fr Wang sees practical arguments for celibacy, but is more moved by the idea that as a single person, Jesus and the parishioners have a central place in his life. And, most importantly, he is happy.

“You need affection and human intimacy. I’ve got some wonderful friends. I get home to see my family every couple of weeks. I escape to the cinema now and then. And I pray. Not to fill the gaps, because some of them can never be filled, but because the love of Christ is something very real and very consoling.

“I’m aware that it gives me a freedom of heart that is a unique gift. It helps me stay close to Christ, and draws me closer to the people I meet each day.”Neither Mrs Baird nor Mr O’Brien left their vocation to pursue a hedonistic lifestyle.

Both married and had children. Both are in professions that represent a continuity from the caring side of their previous calling – Mrs Baird has pursued a career in psychiatric nursing, while Mr O’Brien has worked with vulnerable children and now runs children’s homes.Both are still active and dedicated Catholics. Neither were condemned by fellow Catholics for the decision they made.

Mrs Baird does believe that those in a religious community, monks and nuns, should have to accept celibacy, or leave as she did. But she says Prada Scarf priests should have a choice about whether to be celibate, at least in part to stop the church losing otherwise devoted clergymen.

For Mr O’Brien there is an argument for married priests as there is an argument for women priests, but from a personal point of view he would not necessarily have stayed as a priest were he allowed to marry.

“From a personal choice I don’t think you would want to commit someone to living their life in a fish bowl.”

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Global Oil Demand PRADA Handbags Reaches Record High: 86.6 Million Barrels a Day!

As the world recovers from recession, industry worldwide is getting the ol’ bounce back in its step. And that bounce, of course, requires a hell of a lot of oil. More oil than at any point ever before in history, in fact. Yes, the International Energy Agency has released its projections for this year, and they’ve found that the oil demand will hit a whopping 86.6 million barrels a day–up 2% from last year, and 100,000 more barrels a day than the previous record set in 2007.

This is not, as you can imagine, a good thing. As demand grows, guess what else will? The prices! And the report takes this into consideration:

oil prices could stifle world economic growth if they were allowed to rise too far. “Ultimately, things might turn messy for producers if $80-$100 per barrel is merely seen as the new $60-$80, stunting economic recovery while prompting resurgent non-oil and non-OPEC supply investment,” the IEA report said.

Nice. In related news, the US Military has issued a report of its own–and it’s even more alarming. Here’s a snippet, via the Guardian:

The US military has warned that surplus oil production capacity could disappear within two years and there could be serious shortages by 2015 with a significant economic and political impact … the cost of crude is predicted to soon top $100 a barrel.

“By 2012, surplus oil production capacity could entirely disappear, and as early as 2015, the shortfall in output could reach nearly 10 million barrels per day,” says the report, which has a foreword by a senior commander, General James N Mattis.

Here’s another important segment: ”

While it is difficult to predict precisely what economic, political, and strategic effects such a shortfall might produce, it surely would reduce the Prada Scarf prospects for growth in both the developing and developed worlds. Such an economic slowdown would exacerbate other unresolved tensions, push fragile and failing states further down the path toward collapse, and perhaps have serious economic impact on both China and India.”

Let’s see here: oil prices that hover above $100 a barrel, those high prices stifling economic growth, drastic worldwide oil shortages in less than five years, which in turn causes unrest and disorder in fragile nations–and we still have politicians arguing in favor of the status quo energy policy!

Has it ever been clearer that weaning our dependence on oil should be a top priority?

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Charlotte Church will wed her boyfriend Gavin Henson after a fiery five-year relationship, she announced yesterday.

The singer was ‘absolutely joyous’ when the rugby player popped the Gucci bags question the day after her 24th birthday last month.

But the couple, who have two children, kept their engagement quiet from their families for a few weeks – as ‘we never have anything that’s just for us’.

Henson, 28, proposed after whisking the newly slimmed down Welsh singer away on a helicopter ride to Truro, Cornwall, for lunch. He said he picked the morning after her birthday celebrations, when she was feeling a bit ‘sketchy’, because she was more ‘lovey’.

He then presented her with a heart-shaped diamond ring.

Miss Church, who is a judge on Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Over The Rainbow, told OK! magazine:

‘As I came out of the shower, I said: “What’s that noise?” And there was a helicopter outside.

‘Then my hangover just went because of the adrenaline of being a bit scared.

‘I was really emotional – I absolutely didn’t expect it. I was beginning to think I’d be a girlfriend for the rest of my life.’

New role: Church is currently starring as a judge on new BBC show Over The Rainbow

She added: ‘It was a lovely day and I was with Gav, then he started talking all funny.

‘Saying stuff like, “We’ve been together five years now, we’ve had good times and hard times, but it’s mostly been good times and I think we’re meant to be together now for the rest of our lives.”

‘Then he went down Prada Scarf on one knee and said: “So I’d better finally ask you, I suppose.” Then he said, “Will you marry me?”‘

They plan to marry later this year at an island retreat with their children, Ruby, two, and one-year-old Dexter as bridesmaid and page boy.

‘There’s no point hanging around, we’ll probably have 100 people,’ said Miss Church.

Henson bought the engagement ring during a family holiday in Dubai in January and admitted he was incredibly nervous about proposing.

He said: ‘I was nervous about doing the speech beforehand…

‘It’s time to get married, I want us to be a family and we have different names at the moment. Me, Ruby and Dexter are Henson and Charlotte is Church. It feels right.’

Describing her ring, Church gushed: ‘It’s just perfect. I’d always said I wanted a heart-shaped diamond and the boy did good. Fairs dos to you Henson.’

Church and Henson started dating in Spring 2005 – just weeks after the former teen soprano split from ex-boyfriend Kyle Johnson.