The Daily Newds 5/7/09

• 10 French women staged a topfree protest at a Paris swimming pool because women's bodies are considered more sexual than men's and that they are under greater pressure to live up to standards of beauty.
• Nudity is now legal on the beaches of the Kapiti District of New Zealand, as long as it causes no offense.
• An Everglades park ranger is being reassigned to Cape Cod for the summer and intends to enforce the law against nude sunbathing as part of his duties.
• A Dayton Ohio woman posted a nude photo of herself on Craiglist and was arrested for soliciting. In South Carolina, state Attorney General Henry McMaster has given Craiglist 10 days to "remove illegal content" or face prosecution. Personal ads have been around as long as I can remember, but these new government attacks on Craiglist are something new, showing an increased level of intervention into the private lives of citizens.
• This news video about the Running Bare 5k race manages to touch upon just about every cliche and misconception about nudism.
• Actor Shia LaBeouf says his mother and her friends "would be naked around the house" when he was a kid for "goddess-group time, where it’s literally a bunch of naked women tracing auras around one another’s bodies with incense and then sitting together and humming for prolonged periods of time".
• Georgia PTA leaders will ask state lawmakers and school boards to add a class about crime and punishment to the curriculum of middle and high schools because many "things that a kid may have been dealt with harshly by his coach or principal for engaging in, now [school officials] are just picking up the phone and calling the police and the kid is getting arrested." More and more parents and teachers are abdicating their responsibilities to the government. "1984" and Big Brotherism is just coming a little later than predicted by Orwell.
• Steven's Point Brewery's Nude Beach Summer Wheat ale will not be sold in Michigan because the implied nudity on the label has been deemed "detrimental to the health, safety or welfare of the general public" by the Liquor Control Commission. Who are these people?
• At the age of 70, artist Brian Dunlop has painted his first nude. His muse is classical pianist Janine Carstein.

  "It's a secret wish. I've always wanted to paint the naked female form. I told her I'd really like to see her body." Her reply? "She didn't flinch."

• Burlesque dancer Tanya Cheex picked up her penchant for undressing from classic Hollywood films and 50s pin-up magazines.

  Cheex pinpoints the resurgence of burlesque in the '90s as a kind of backlash against the overload of explicit pornography available online. "As the World Wide Web phenomena really took off and the Internet was more accessible to everybody, porn was more accessible," Cheex says. "Everywhere you looked, anything you wanted to see, or you didn't want to see, was available. The burlesque revival was almost like a return to innocence."

• An Alaska man was celebrating turning 21 by taking a hike in his birthday suit. Police say the man was unable to give a good reason for being nude. I was unaware that "having a good reason" was a requirement for being nude.
• When Japanese megastar Tsuyoshi Kusanagi was arrested for running nude in a Tokyo park, the initial backlash was severe, but the tide of public opinion seems to be turning.

  His misfortunes have generated brisk sales of a T shirt with his most famous recent words emblazoned on them, "What's wrong with being naked?" In further good news, the police have decided not to press charges against him.