PHOENICIA

Whatever happened to writing your loved one a letter?

Growing numbers of young girls are sending racy images of themselves to guys through cyberspace, according to a new survey.

More than two in 10 tech-savvy teenagers admit to e-mailing or texting nude, or semi-nude photos and posting them on online.

The research shows most snaps are meant solely for the recipient, but they often get passed around among friends with one-third of teen boys and one-quarter of teen girls saying they have seen other people's raunchy shots.

"It's somewhat alarming," said Bill Albert of the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, which did the research with CosmoGirl.com

"Sending or posting sexually suggestive content, both images or messages, is much more prevalent than most people recognize."

"I think with a lot of young people, it's a time of experimentation in many areas, the problem is there's no turning back once you press send."

"This to me is like a cyber tattoo."

The online survey questioned 1,280 teens and 20-somethings about their sex-tech habits and found saucy cyber snaps is not just a trend among young girls.

One in five male teenagers said they have engaged in "sex-ting." Thirty-three percent of 20- to 26-year-olds do it as well.

The online behavior can spill into other areas of life, with nearly 25% of teens saying swapping sexy photos makes them more aggressive and forward in person. About about 33% admit it makes dating and hooking up more likely.

DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER

ATHENS — A fourth day of rioting erupted here and around Greece on Tuesday, as a 15-year-old boy killed by the police over the weekend was buried and the nation’s shaky government grappled with how to contain the worst civil unrest in decades.

While clashes between the police and students have been common in Greece for decades, the ferocity of the reaction to the boy’s death took the nation — and its crippled government — by surprise. Outrage over the death was widespread, fueled by what experts say is a growing frustration with unemployment and corruption in one of Western Europe’s consistently underperforming economies, worsened by global recession.

But it was expressed in violence in the streets by student anarchists, who had been quiet for several years but seemed revived by the crisis. Prime Minister Kostas Karamanlis, hanging on to power in Parliament by only one vote, seemed frozen, his government, once popular but now scandal-ridden, pushed a step closer to collapse.

“He’s seriously troubled” about the riots, said Nicholas Karahalios, a strategy adviser to the prime minister. “Whereas before we were dealing with a political and economic crisis, now there’s a third dimension attached to it: a security crisis which exacerbates the situation.”

Another day of demonstrations was expected in a national strike that was called for Wednesday.

On Tuesday, bands of militant youths threw gasoline bombs and smashed shop windows in downtown Athens, as rioters battled with the police here in the capital and in Salonika, Greece’s second largest city. In the port city of Patras, residents tried to protect their shops from rioters, while other rioters blocked the police station, the authorities said.

While widespread and violent, the protests on Tuesday were seen as slightly smaller than those the day before, when after dark hundreds of professed anarchists broke the windows of upscale shops, banks and five-star hotels in central Athens and burned a large Christmas tree in the plaza in front of Parliament.

At the Athens police headquarters, a spokesman said 12 police officers had been wounded in fighting with demonstrators that flared at 10 major locations around the Greek capital on Monday night. He said 87 protesters had been arrested and 176 people briefly detained because of the confrontations.

In the shattered city center on Tuesday, street-cleaning trucks tackled the mess. Mayor Nikitas Kaklamanis advised Athenians not to drive into the city center and asked them to keep their trash indoors; rioters burned 160 big garbage containers in the streets on Monday night.

On Tuesday, the opposition leader, George A. Papandreou, a Socialist, renewed his call for early elections. Yet it remained unclear whether the riots would cause the government to fall or whether the current stalemate would continue.

“What I foresee is a prolonged political crisis with no immediate results for two or three years,” said George Kirtsos, a political commentator and the publisher of City Press, an independent newspaper. “In that time, the country will be going from bad to worse.”

On Tuesday, as youths scuffled with the police outside Parliament, Prime Minister Karamanlis met with his cabinet council and opposition leaders in an effort to get their backing for security operations. But he seemed uncertain exactly how to contain the disturbances. The authorities seem to fear that cracking down on the demonstrators may lead to other unintended deaths, provoking more rioting.

Asked why the riots had not been contained, a spokesman for the national police, Panayiotis Stathis, said “violence cannot be fought with violence.”

But in a news conference, Mr. Karamanlis issued warnings somewhat stronger than his actions, saying there would be no leniency for rioters.

“No one has the right to use this tragic incident as an alibi for actions of raw violence, for actions against innocent people, their property and society as a whole, and against democracy,” Mr. Karamanlis said after an emergency meeting with President Karolos Papoulias.

On Tuesday, schools and universities were closed, and thousands of teachers and students joined generally peaceful protests through Athens.

George Dimitriou, 22, a member of the agriculture students’ union, said the teenager’s death was an opportunity to protest other issues. “Our generation is facing a tougher future than our parents,” Mr. Dimitriou said as he stood outside Athens University. “This is unheard of, because normally things get better.”

Demonstrations, even occasionally violent ones, are nothing new in Greece, which has a long history of political protest and has been relatively tolerant of the professed anarchist groups that routinely hold antigovernment demonstrations.

To many Greeks, scarred by the memories of military rule in the 1970s, the police remain a hostile remnant of the military junta.

While Greece has a comparatively high ratio of more than 45,000 police officers for 10.7 million people, in the popular imagination, they are seen as ineffective and corrupt, so many Greeks view the police as a fair target for regular demonstrations.

The 15-year-old whose death is at the heart of the disturbances, Alexandros Grigoropolos, was fatally shot on Saturday night while carousing with friends in the Athens neighborhood of Exarchia, where youths routinely battle the police. The police have said he died when officers clashed with a mob of some 30 youths.

One police officer has been charged with premeditated manslaughter in the case and another as an accomplice.

On Tuesday, thousands lined the street outside the small whitewashed chapel and the cemetery where he was buried in Paleo Faliro, a residential neighborhood where he had grown up in an upper-middle-class family. His father is a bank manager and his mother a jeweler.

Although the funeral passed peacefully, with mourners bearing wreaths of white carnations, afterward dozens of militant protesters smashed car windows and skirmished with police officers who sprayed tear gas, although no one was injured.

Earlier on Tuesday, two demonstrations by teachers, students and workers wound their way largely peacefully through downtown Athens, where some shop fronts remained shuttered after Monday night’s riots.

When some students neared the Parliament building, they shouted, “Down with the government of murderers!” and “Let it burn, let it burn, the brothel, the Parliament!” Other militant protesters scuffled with the police.

For much of his tenure, Mr. Karamanlis has been popular, even if his government is less so. He won by a wide margin in 2004 promising reform after two decades of Socialist rule. He was narrowly re-elected in 2007, when his center-right party’s lead fell to two votes in Parliament.

Yet this fall, the government has been stung by a corruption scandal in which it is accused of having sold prime Athens real estate to a monastery ahead of the 2004 Olympics in exchange for cheaper land elsewhere.

Last month, two top ministers resigned over reports of more than 250 land swaps, and lawmakers unanimously agreed to start a special investigation.

The scandals have deeply weakened the government and curbed the prime minister’s chances of reform. This week’s riots have weakened it even further.

"The New York Times"

An unusual sex survey has found that Australians who enjoy bondage and discipline are not damaged or dangerous, and might even be happier than those who practise "normal" sex.

The research showed two per cent of adult Australians regularly partake in sadomasochism and dominance and submission-type sexual role play.

And contrary to commonly-held stereotypes, they are not doing so in reaction to sexual abuse or because they are "sexually deficient" in some way, according the study of 20,000 Australians by public health researchers at the University of NSW.

"Our findings support the idea that bondage and discipline and sadomasochism (BDSM) is simply a sexual interest or subculture attractive to a minority," Associate Professor Juliet Richters and her colleagues wrote in the Journal of Sexual Medicine.

The findings showed that it was more common among gay, lesbian and bisexual people, and that participants were more likely to have been more sexually adventurous in other ways.

"However, they were no more likely to have been coerced into sexual activity and were not significantly more likely to be unhappy or anxious," said Prof Richters, author of the book Doing It Down Under.

In fact, men who take part may be happier, with results showing they score significantly lower on a scale of psychological distress than other men.

The researchers did not study why this was, but suspect it might simply be that they're more in harmony with themselves because they're into something unusual and are comfortable with that.

Prof Richters says the findings go against professional views of BDSM.

"People with these sexual interests have long been seen by medicine and the law as, at best, damaged and in need of therapy and, at worst, dangerous and in need of legal regulation," she said.

There was also an assumption, mostly among the general public, that people involved in BDSM were sexually deficient in some way, "and need particularly strong stimuli such as being beaten or tied up to become aroused".

She said she hoped the results would help change these stereotypes.

ATHENS (Reuters) - Greece welcomed back on Tuesday a marble fragment from a frieze decorating the Parthenon temple which an Austrian soldier removed during World War Two, but renewed a call for all its stolen treasures to be returned.

An inscription on the fragment, measuring 7-by-30 cm (2.8 by 12 inches), says it was taken from the Acropolis in Athens on February 16, 1943 -- in the midst of the three-year occupation of Greece by the Axis powers, led by Germany.

Martha Dahlgren inherited the piece -- broken from the frieze adorning the Parthenon's inner colonnade -- from her grandfather and decided to return it to Greece.

"Today we honor the return of an architectural part of the Acropolis ... It is a very symbolic return," Greek Culture Minister Michalis Liapis said in a statement.

Greece in recent years has stepped up its campaign to recover ancient artifacts, and especially large sections of the decorative frieze removed from the Parthenon in 1801 by Lord Elgin, the then-British ambassador to the Ottoman empire.

The Parthenon Marbles, also known as the Elgin Marbles, were bought by the British Museum in 1816 and are exhibited as a prized part of its collection in London.

The British Museum repeatedly has rejected Greek calls for the return of the 2,500-year-old frieze on the ground that its statutes would not allow it to do so.

"The request for the return of the Parthenon Marbles has exceeded the borders of our country. It has become the request and the vision of the global cultural community," Liapis said, flanked by two leading archaeologists who support the return.

The fragment was the third piece of the Parthenon Marbles to return home in recent months after the Vatican returned a small fragment on a one-year loan last month and a museum in Sicily gave back another piece in September.