Since the Gulf victory in 1991, a series of largely unnoticed policy changes have opened new opportunities for women to fight alongside, and even to lead, front-line troops. The Navy and Air Force, with some fanfare, allowed women into the cockpits of fighters and bombers. But less well known is how vastly the Army has expanded the role of women in ground-combat operations. Today, women command combat military police companies, fly Apache helicopters, work as tactical intelligence analysts, and even serve in certain artillery units--jobs that would have been unthinkable for them a decade ago. In any war in Iraq, these changes could put thousands of women in the midst of battle, far more than at any time in American history. This new role for female U.S. troops is the product of three different forces. One is congressional pressure to integrate the military by gender as it previously had been integrated by race. Another is the ongoing enlistment shortage; the military remains reluctant to admit women yet is unable to recruit enough competent men to staff an all-volunteer Army. But the most important reason has been pressure from women within the Army who need combat experience to advance their careers, nearly all of them in the officer corps. And yet this experiment has been conducted largely below the threshold of public awareness.

Wow! More than two-thirds of Australian women reached orgasm the last time they had sex. This finding, from the newly released "Australian Study of Health and Relationships", suggests that the "hit rate" for women has improved immensely over the past 30 years. We've come a long way, baby, to quote the famous Virginia Slim cigarette ad ... Or have we? Whether sex actually is better for women isn't easy to sort out, because this new survey is the country's first representative national study to delve into these matters. But the limited Australian sex surveys dating back three decades show a distinctly less cheerful picture.

Recently I listened to a hard-pressed working mother bemoan the lack of time. "But," she sniffed resentfully, "I have to work." I looked about me. We were sitting in an air-conditioned, 300-square-metre, multi-bedroom ranch house with several bathrooms. Among the vehicles in the multi-car garage was a four-wheel-drive worth $50,000. To sustain that lifestyle she did indeed "have" to work. By any definition, however, economic necessity was elsewhere. Food on the table and a roof over one's head are real needs. But it is not "necessity" to own a large house, luxury vehicles, or, for that matter, to wash in quite so many places.The distorting effect of our capitulation to a consumer arms race without end is the theme of Clive Hamilton's radical and provocative new book Growth Fetish. Hamilton, head of The Australia Institute, is the sharp-eyed local representative of a critique first developed by US economists Juliet Schor (The Overspent American) and Robert Frank (Luxury Fever) ... Feminism, Hamilton argues, has been partly hijacked by such logic. Passing up the deeper exploration of what liberation means, we have settled instead for the "equality" of the rat race, depicting those outside it as talentless parasites.

Nicholas H. Wolfinger, assistant professor of family and consumer studies at the University of Utah, has studied the effects of divorce on children for more than three decades.

The most recent research suggests children with divorced parents are one-and-a-half times more likely to divorce as compared to children with an intact family.

The good news is that rate is decreasing. In 1973, children with divorced parents were three times more likely to divorce.

As anyone familiar with this issue knows, the divorce rate for the adult children of divorce has not declined. It has increased significantly. In the early 1970s, about 35 percent of ever-married adult children of divorce were themselves divorced. By the early 1990s, the number had increased to 45 percent. Yet during this same period, the divorce rate for everyone else increased even more. In the early 1970s, about 18 percent of ever-married adults raised in intact homes had themselves divorced. Twenty years later, the number had jumped to 35 percent.

The study..., which was conducted by Nicholas Wolfinger of the University of Utah, does show that the gap separating the two groups has narrowed. But this development has nothing to do with declining divorce rates. On the contrary, the convergence cited in Wolfinger�s study is entirely the result of a remarkable increase in divorce-proneness in recent decades of U.S. adults who were raised in intact families. This is good news?

Actually, it�s terrible news - not only because divorce has increased, but also because the convergence described by Wolfinger suggests that, in a high-divorce society, everyone�s marriage is made weaker.

The increased commitment and caution Johnson has toward dating is a result of not wanting to go through what she saw her parents go through.

This is the most common and heartfelt sentiment among students of divorce. They don't want to expose their children to the kind of pain they experienced and are motivated to work even harder. As a result, Berger vows, "there's no backing out."