Sex uncovered: A beginner’s guide

I’ve gone no further than kissing. I don’t feel the need to do what others are doing.

I’m 16, and I’m in no rush to lose my virginity. I’ve had sexual experiences before, but the thought of oral sex repulses me, and I don’t plan on doing that at all!

I’m 14 and still a virgin. I’ve been with quite a few lads but haven’t had a proper relationship yet. I’ve done things with four lads and I regret it all. After we’d done stuff they moved on.

It may seem like everyone’s having sex all over the place, but look around and remember it’s not necessarily true.

I was 13 when I lost my virginity and I hadn’t done anything up until then. Now I wish I had waited; I’m 17 and would rather be a virgin. Because I have had sex with a few people, I’m seen as ‘easy’, so wait – you’ll get more respect.

I’m 13 and all my friends are ‘poking’ each other. Is it OK to do that? And what is dry sex?

I’m 16, and I plan to wait for as long as it takes me to know I’m in love before I have sex – even if I’m 80. It’s better to wait than to lose your virginity before you’re ready.

It is a good thing to wait, but if you think you’ve got Mr Right go for it. I lost my virginity to my boyfriend when I was 13.

Oh my God, I feel a little bit dorky about it but I know that I’m not a prude. I’m scared about my first time because I won’t know what to do.

Imagine:John Lennon

Imagine there’s no heaven
It’s easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today…

Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace…

You may say I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you’ll join us
And the world will be as one

Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world…

You may say I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you’ll join us
And the world will live as one
–John Lennon

Strains Between McCain and Palin Aides Go Public

Now that the defeated team of Sen. John McCain and Gov. Sarah Palin have gone their separate ways, the knives are out and Palin is the one who is getting filleted.

Revelations from anonymous critics from within the McCain-Palin campaign suggest a number of complaints about the Alaskan governor:

Fox News reports that Palin didn’t know Africa was a continent and did not know the member nations of the North American Free Trade Agreement — the United States, Mexico and Canada — when she was picked for vice president.

The New York Times reports that McCain aides were outraged when Palin staffers scheduled her to speak with French President Nicholas Sarkozy, a conversation that turned out to be a radio station prank.

Newsweek reports that Palin spent far more than the previously reported $150,000 on clothes for herself and her family.

Several publications say she irked the McCain campaign by asking to make her own concession speech on election night.

The tension is likely to continue or get worse. Lawyers for the Republican National Committee are heading to Alaska to try to account for all the money that was spent on clothing, jewelry and luggage, according to The New York Times.

Reports of agitation between the two camps bubbled up in the final weeks of the campaign as Barack Obama began pulling away and the GOP duo was unable to regain the momentum.

But those reports are no longer in the rumor stage as McCain loyalists are now blasting away at the Alaska governor, who was a favorite of the Republican right during the campaign, but was cited in numerous polls as a reason why many Americans wouldn’t vote for the Arizona Republican.

Perhaps the most dangerous allegation for Palin are reports in The New York Times and Newsweek that when she was urged by McCain adviser Nicole Wallace to buy three suits for the Republican convention and three suits for the campaign trail, she went on the now-infamous shopping spree at swank stores like Saks Fifth Avenue and Neiman Marcus.

A Republican donor who agreed to foot a majority of the expenses was stunned when he received the bill, Newsweek reported. Both the Times and Newsweek report that the budget for the clothing was expected to be between $20,000 and $25,000. Instead, the amount reported by the Republican National Committee was $150,000.

That wasn’t the whole tab, however, according to Newsweek. The magazine claims that Palin leaned on some low-level staffers to put thousands of dollars of additional purchases on their credit cards. The national committee and McCain became aware of the extra expenditures, including clothes for husband Todd Palin, when the staffers sought reimbursement, Newsweek reported.

There is one comment in particular from a McCain aide that guaranteed to heighten friction between the two camps. The angry aide described the Palin family shopping spree to Newsweek as “Wasilla hillbillies looting Neiman Marcus from coast to coast.”

It’s unclear how much McCain knew about the clothing debacle. Reports suggest that he was kept out of the loop for fear that he would not approve.

Both Newsweek and The New York Times say McCain and Palin had little contact with each other.

“I think it was a difficult relationship,” one top McCain official confided to The New York Times. But a high level McCain adviser told ABC News that the two had a good working relationship.

“He likes her,” this senior McCain adviser said last week. “He’s had no problem with her. He’s very appreciative of what she’s done.”

The adviser said McCain and Palin talked at least once a day. He also said McCain frequently joked about how large Palin’s crowds were compared to his.

However, press accounts today suggest that Palin rubbed many of the McCain aides the wrong way. On election night when it was clear that McCain would be giving a concession speech instead of an acceptance speech, Palin approached McCain with a speech in hand hoping to make her own concession speech, according to published reports.

Vice presidential candidates traditionally leave the spotlight to the top of the ticket on election night and McCain aides made it clear to Palin that she would be a spectator that night, not a speaker, The New York Times reported.

And when McCain and Palin split up in Arizona Wednesday, the personal differences were stark.

McCain drove himself home in a Toyota sport utility vehicle. Palin’s departure was a grander event. She left with an entourage of 18 family members and friends and a Secret Service detail, heading to the airport in a motorcade stretching more than a dozen vehicles, flanked by a dozen more cops on motorcycles.

McCain aides had numerous complaints about Palin. She was unwilling or unable to find the time and energy to prep for her disastrous interview with Couric. And when she did study, she astonished her handlers by her unsophisticated views.

She didn’t know Africa was a continent, according to Newsweek. Fox News revealed that during her cramming, she couldn’t name the three countries that belong to the North American Free Trade Agreement: the United States, Canada and Mexico.

Questions followed Palin home to Alaska. She was asked about some of the accusations from anonymous sources when she landed there late Wednesday.

Asked about the Fox report that she did not know the NAFTA members or that Africa was a continent, Palin said, “If they’re an unnamed source, that says it all. I won’t comment on anyone’s gossip based on anonymous sources. That’s kind of a small of a bitter type of person who anonymously would charge that I didn’t know an answer to a question. So until I know who’s talking about it, I won’t have a comment on a false allegation.”

When pressed on what went wrong with the campaign, she said, “I certainly am not one to ever waste time looking backwards.”

She defended herself against the notion that she is to blame for the failure of the McCain-Palin ticket.

“I don’t think anybody should give Sarah Palin that much credit, that I would trump an economic, woeful time in this nation that occurred about two months ago, that my presence on the ticket would trump the economic crisis that America found itself in a couple of months ago and attribute John McCain’s loss to me,” Palin told reporters in Arizona Wednesday.

“Now, having said that, if I cost John McCain even one vote, I’m sorry about that because John McCain I believe is the American hero. I had believed that it was his time. … He being so full of courage and wisdom and experience, that valor he just embodies, I believe he would’ve been the best pick, but that is not the Americans’ choice at this time.”

She also rejected the characterization that she was a “diva” on the campaign trail, as one anonymous McCain adviser told CNN.

“If only people, y’know, come on up and travel with us to Alaska and see this ‘diva’ lifestyle that I supposedly live or would demand, because it’s just false,” she said.

Asked about her national political ambitions, she said, “I have not given it any thought in the context of making any kind of decisions at all, so no, just happy to be back here.”

In one of her favorite coffee shops in Wasilla Tuesday morning, Palin summed it up this way: “Forever, I’m going to be Sarah from Alaska.”

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Tendulkar gives India solid start

Sachin Tendulkar became the first man to 40 Test centuries as his 109 took India to a solid 311-5 against Australia on day one in Nagpur.

With the tourists needing to win the final Test to avoid a rare series defeat, they lost their third toss in a row, and India’s batsmen cashed in.

Tendulkar, dropped on 85 and 96, and VVS Laxman (64) put on 146 after Virender Sehwag’s rapid 66.

Australia’s debutant off-spinner Jason Krejza coped well, taking 3-138.

The 25-year-old from Sydney, who moved from New South Wales to Tasmania after being starved of opportunities, found plenty of turn at times. And despite his poor economy rate, few of his overs contained bad deliveries.

Krejza’s introduction came at the expense of reliable seamer Stuart Clark, and he justified his Baggy Green by spinning the ball appreciably at times as he took his first two wickets before lunch.

He should have had a third wicket when Tendulkar was unforgivably missed by Mitchell Johnson at mid-off, but battled on to remove Laxman.

Tendulkar’s innings was the major feature of the day. The 35-year-old played as well as he ever has between lunch and tea, but a combination of fatigue – and nerves as he reached three figures – made him a less potent force in the final session.

With him out of the way, Australia know they have not yet been batted out of the match.

he terrific new Vidarbha Cricket Association Stadium in Jamtha became the 99th venue to host a Test, but once again the attendance was poor.

The fans who stayed away missed a particularly fascinating morning session, in which Sehwag and his debutant parter Murali Vijay put on 98 for the first wicket inside 18 overs.

Vijay, only playing because of the one-match ban imposed on Gautam Gambhir, was hoping to make a big impression.

A spare batting place will be available for the series against England in December following Sourav Ganguly’s imminent retirement and Vijay – a 24-year-old right-hander from Chennai whose impressive form has also seen him named in the one-day squad – looked pretty handy.

A cover-drive off Brett Lee – which followed three early Sehwag boundaries – was an early highlight, and he also drove Krejza sweetly down the ground for four.

But he was eventually surprised by a short-pitched ball from Shane Watson, which he could only edge to wicketkeeper Brad Haddin.

With Vijay out for 33, it was Rahul Dravid’s turn to come to the crease. But it has been a tough 18 months for “The Wall” in Test cricket and he meekly tapped a Krejza off-break straight to short leg to complete a two-ball duck.

Sehwag played some wonderful shots in his 69-ball innings – driving his first two balls from Krejza for four and six – but always seemed to be living by the seat of his pants.

Not content to drop a gear in the run-up to lunch, he tried to cut a Krejza delivery that was too close to his body, and spinning in. The ball crashed into the stumps off a bottom edge and Australia went into lunch on a positive note, with the scoreboard reading 122-3.

Laxman, in his 100th Test, and Tendulkar, both men holding outstanding long-term statistics against Australia, were in no mood to allow the tourists back into the match.

Boundaries off Laxman’s bat were rare as, in his 100th Test match, he favoured a minimum-risk policy of hitting ones and twos where available.

Tendulkar played Krejza with plenty of positive intent, however, and moved to 47 with a fine pushed drive past mid-on for four off Lee.

At tea, India had motored along smoothly to 202-3 with Tendular 62 and Laxman 34.

Tendulkar’s century moved into view as he played one of the shots of the day, a drive through the covers off Watson played at the top of the ball’s bounce.

That took him to 71 and he had added only three more when Krejza missed a fantastic chance to run him out, rushing his throw from the covers after a badly misjudged call from Tendulkar.

Fifteen runs short of his ton, Tendulkar hoisted Krejza to mid-off, but his attempted lofted drive went wrong. Johnson was in position to accept the chance but the ball burst through his fingers and onto the turf.

Laxman was the next man out, however, when – like Sehwag – he tried to cut a Krejza ball that was turning too much. His edge was trapped between Haddin’s thighs, and Ganguly emerged for what could be his final Test innings.

Tendulkar still felt the need to play one big shot to reach his landmark and another chance off Krejza spiralled high over mid-off. This time, Lee was the fielder but it was a much tougher chance as he had to turn and run towards the boundary before trying to sight the ball.

The spilt catch gave Tendulkar a third life, and he finally did reach three figures with a cut shot off Krejza, his 12th boundary of the innings.

Ganguly (27 not out) was the main aggressor in the closing stages of the day, as Tendulkar began to focus on ensuring he would still be there on Friday.

But the tactic did not work, as the exhausted-looking 35-year-old wandered in front of a straight ball – the 188th he had faced – and was out lbw to Johnson.

Australia’s lamentable over-rate – they managed just 87 overs in the day despite taking the extra half hour and using 41 overs of spin – was a disappointing aspect.

Bangladesh former PM returns home

Former Bangladesh PM Sheikh Hasina has returned home to lead her party in the general elections due next month.

She spent nearly four months in the US receiving medical treatment.

Thousands of Awami League party supporters welcomed Ms Hasina after she landed at the international airport in the capital, Dhaka.

There are a number of extortion and corruption cases pending against her in Bangladeshi courts and Sheikh Hasina faces possible arrest on her return.

She was detained last year after the army-backed interim government assumed power, but was released from prison in June to go abroad for medical treatment.

The Awami League leader had pledged to lead the party’s campaign in the elections scheduled for 18 December.

Ms Hasina told the BBC Bengali service said she was willing to forge an alliance with other pro-democratic forces – including former president Hossein Mohammad Ershad’s Jatiya Party – for the sake of democracy and welfare of the people.

“But elections must be held on schedule. The country is suffocating,” Ms Hasina said.

The former prime minister’s comments came as police in Dhaka said they could not find evidence against her in an alleged extortion case.

Stripping the Spy Down to His Manners:007

IT took two years of high-level negotiations to arrange a meeting with Daniel Craig. In an era when MI6 — the agency that employs his best-known character, James Bond — blithely advertises for agents on the Internet, Mr. Craig may well be the world’s most elusive pretend spy.

The long wait allowed plenty of time for disturbing rumors to marinate. For instance: He is surly and defensive, a reporter-averse utterer of combative monosyllables. Or this, from two women working on his publicity: He has more sexual magnetism than anyone we have ever met.

Perhaps nothing short of Mr. Craig’s materializing in his snug powder-blue bathing trunks from “Casino Royale” and offering to shake the martinis himself could have realistically lived up to all that anticipation.

But there he was in normal jeans, his arm in a sling from recent shoulder surgery. He was wearing a thick cardigan that, truth be told, walked a sensitive line between doofusy and stylish. He was, of course, unfairly attractive anyway, in his craggy, lived-in, blue-eyed way, but not so much as to render anyone speechless or unable to operate a notebook.

He was polite to a fault. He stood up when his publicist’s assistant brought in a cup of tea. He apologized several times for being five minutes late. He acted as if he were not sitting in a soulless conference room, which he was, and as if he had all day to chat about Bond and other interesting topics, which he didn’t. (He had an hour.)

Unlike many movie stars who come to believe the myth of their superiority, Mr. Craig, 40, tends to mock his own celebrity. Now that he is too famous to go to the movies without being recognized, he said, he might be forced to install a screening room at home. Not. “I could stick it next to the indoor swimming pool,” he said sarcastically.

Passing beneath two celebratory posters of himself as James Bond in his publicist’s office here, he grimaced and muttered, “That’s my Dorian Gray portrait.” Asked whether he saw himself as a natural leading man, he said, “Fat chance.” And then, “There’s not a skin-care product in the world that would have made that happen for me.”

When he was cast as Bond, filling the position most recently vacated by Pierce Brosnan, Mr. Craig did not seem like an obvious choice. He was an actor’s actor known for his intensity of focus and his wide range of challenging, counterintuitive roles. He has played, among other things, a sharp-lapeled pornography baron from Manchester in the BBC mini-series “Our Friends in the North”; a college professor pursued by a male stalker in “Enduring Love”; a builder sleeping with his girlfriend’s sexagenarian mother in “The Mother”; a drug-dealing businessman in “Layer Cake”; a killer full of murderous rage and heartbreaking tenderness in “Infamous”; and the poet Ted Hughes in “Sylvia.”

“Everybody said, ‘Oh, aren’t you afraid you’ll be typecast?’ ” he recalled of taking the Bond role. “And I said, ‘Of course I am,’ but if it has to be this — well, that’s not too bad.”

Traditionalists were appalled. The British tabloids, whose writers possibly had not seen Mr. Craig in his other films, sniped that he was too short, too blond, too actory, too potentially Lazenbyesque; they spread the rumor that he didn’t know how to drive a stick shift, let alone one attached to an Aston Martin.

But from the first scene in “Casino Royale” (2006), in which Bond brutally kills a man with his bare hands and then coolly shoots and kills his own corrupt boss, Mr. Craig proved to be a rare combination of plausibility, physicality and charisma. He got rave reviews, and not just from Bond’s traditional fan base.

(Full disclosure: Mr. Craig’s mix of emotional vulnerability and cocky insouciance discomfited to an alarming degree many a journalistic associate. One saw “Casino Royale” five times in two months. Another received an e-mail message from a flustered pal: “What are we going to do? About Daniel Craig, I mean.” Efforts to find a way for interested outside parties to pose as a reporter’s assistant during the interview or to dress as plants and hide on the windowsill proved unsuccessful.)

The latest movie, “Quantum of Solace,” which opens Nov. 14, is full of the usual Bondian big guns, big explosions, big-busted women and big, improbable, high-testosterone stunts, many of them performed by Mr. Craig. While he bulked up for “Casino” — he wanted to “look as if he could kill people just by looking at them,” his personal trainer, a former Royal Navy commando, said recently — in this film he focused on building up his stamina, going for lean and mean over brawn.

(Mr. Craig was recently quoted in The Times of London as saying, “I am not an athlete, although I have always enjoyed keeping fit between bouts of minor alcoholism.”)

Mr. Craig said that he had been determined to ensure that the story made logical and emotional sense. “Quantum” begins moments after “Casino” ends, with Bond, wielding an enormous firearm, on the island where he has just shot one of the men responsible for the death of Vesper Lynd, the treacherous love of his life.

“They’re two separate movies, but if you were to punish yourself by watching them back to back, you’d see a through line,” Mr. Craig said. He particularly wanted Bond to have to contend with the emotional repercussions of Vesper’s death.

“It was very important that we deal with that,” he said. “I just felt that you can’t have a character fall in love so madly as they did in the last movie and not finish it off, understand it, get some closure. That’s why the movie is called ‘Quantum of Solace’ — that’s exactly what he’s looking for.”

He added: “By the end of ‘Solace,’ there’s a conclusion that I’m hoping will set us up, if all goes well, for a third movie. And we can set it someplace warm and quiet.” (He was kidding, he said, about the “quiet” part.)

Last fall he and the director of “Quantum of Solace,” Marc Forster, set out to fill in the gaps in the script, left incomplete because of the Hollywood writers’ strike. Mr. Forster said he was struck by how much Mr. Craig wanted to get the story right and ensure that his interpretation of Bond was “not just a cliché, but a character that people can connect to.”

He added: “He’s very shy and slightly modest and humble, and he doesn’t like to be the center of attention. It’s more like, ‘Let’s make good movies and tell a good story and do a good job.’ ”

Along with “Quantum,” Mr. Craig is appearing this fall in “Defiance” (set to open Dec. 31), based on the true story of the Bielskis, a trio of freedom-fighting Jewish brothers in World War II. Defying the Nazis (and the odds), they set up an unlikely community of tough, armed refugees in the punishing Belarussian forest. Mr. Craig plays Tuvia, their complicated leader — sometimes hot-headed, sometimes coolly rational; now seeking revenge, now preaching restraint.

The shoot was tough. The actors had to speak Russian in a number of scenes; they also had to live more or less in the woods, in sometimes extreme frigid conditions, for three months. Most of the cast came down with some sort of bronchial flu, Mr. Craig said, “but when we started drinking more, it seemed to get better.”

The director of “Defiance,” Edward Zwick, said it was interesting to watch Mr. Craig take on the role, with all its ambivalence and inner conflict, in tandem with playing the self-assured Bond.

“You see very clearly his ambition as an actor; he refuses to be just one thing,” Mr. Zwick said in a telephone interview. “What you have to understand about Daniel is that he is a working actor who considers himself that. He began in the theater and did all sorts of ensemble work, and in some ways this was a territory in which he’s more comfortable than in being the star who’s out in front of the movie.”

Mr. Craig grew up in Liverpool and spent much of his spare time watching movies, sometimes by himself, in a small cinema down the street from his house. He left home as a teenager to seek his fortune as an actor in London. He worked with the National Youth Theater, went to drama school and began being cast as romantic leads, a designation he brushes aside.

With each part, he explained, “I said to myself: ‘Romantic lead — what is he? Is he an alcoholic? What’s his deal? What’s his problem?’ For me, that has always been the way. That’s what I did for Bond and what I try and do with everything.”

He is determined to continue pursuing extra-Bond roles.

“I’ve been so fortunate to land this amazing role in a huge franchise,” he said. “It’s set me up in a really good way for life, and that’s wonderful. But I love acting, and I genuinely think it’s an important part of what life is about. I get a kick out of it, and I’m not good at sitting around.”

Mr. Craig, who has a teenage daughter from an early marriage, genuinely seems more interested in talking about other topics — the books of Philip Pullman; the exciting-to-him proposition of Barack Obama being elected president; movies he likes — than he does in talking about himself.

But he mentioned his longtime American girlfriend, Satsuki Mitchell, with whom he lives in Los Angeles and London. He wears a silver necklace inscribed with a quotation “about taking your heart wherever you go,” he said when asked, sounding suddenly shy.

Recently, he said, the two drove up the American West Coast, through to the Pacific Northwest. They ducked into a small-town movie theater to see the Guillermo del Toro movie “Hellboy II: The Golden Army.”

Someone approached Mr. Craig.

“Has anyone ever told you you look like Daniel Craig?” the man asked.

“No,” Mr. Craig answered, and walked on.

Antelope’s sex signal in the knee

Scientists from the Zoological Society of London and the University of Copenhagen recorded the sounds of eland bulls in Kenya, Africa.

Reporting in the journal BMC Biology, the researchers say that the depth of the sound correlates to body size.

The tactic signals the bulls’ fighting potential, establishing mating rights.

The sound is thought to be made as a tendon in the animals’ legs slips over one of the leg bones, and can be heard from hundreds of metres away.

“The tendon in this case behaves like a string being plucked, and the frequency of the sound from a string correlates negatively with both its length and diameter,” said Jakob Bro-Jorgensen.

That means that the sound signals how large – and thus how fighting fit – the antelopes are. The antelope can thus establish mating rights among each other while avoiding actual fights.

The unusual approach adds to the list of signals that are known in the animals to provide an indication of their status.

A fold of skin under their throats called the dewlap indicates age, and the darkness of their hair indicates levels of aggression.

Why John McCain lost?

Candidate John McCain seemed to have it all.

Few in America did not know about his decades of service, his breath-taking heroism as a war hero in Vietnam, his foreign policy expertise and his ability to reach across the Congressional aisle.

Mr McCain’s opponent was largely untested, inexperienced and, initially at least, unknown; his race only added to his challenge.

If there is such a thing as a perfect political storm though, John McCain found himself caught in the middle of it. In a leaky boat. With limited fuel.

Financial squeeze

From the start, his biggest problem was finding the money to compete with Barack Obama’s $650m (£403m) campaign juggernaut. By accepting federal funding (which Mr Obama declined) he capped his general election campaign spending at $85m (£53m).

Of course much more than that was spent by the Republican National Committee and other pro-McCain groups, but Mr McCain could never seriously challenge Mr Obama’s ability to dominate the TV airwaves – even in states that were traditionally Republican.

Worse, Mr Obama had the money to force him to compete in states he should have been able to rely on, which reduced the amount of money Mr McCain had for states he needed to target.

His other big problem was in trying to separate himself from one of the most unpopular presidents in American history and a Congress which had been Republican for six of the past eight years.

As a mostly loyal Republican, his record was one of support for President George W Bush, which Barack Obama never let him forget.

Mr McCain insisted that he would be a very different president, without explicitly rejecting George Bush’s presidency. Instead he tried to position himself as a maverick who had gone his own way in the past.

But conservative Republicans knew all too well that “maverick” also meant going against them on issues such as immigration and campaign finance reform.

The right-wing, evangelical Republicans who had got Mr Bush elected were unhappy about Mr McCain from the start. That forced him into selecting a vice-presidential candidate who would reassure them.

Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska was a huge gamble from the start.

Mr McCain had said that the only thing he would look for in his vice-president was the ability to be president. Given that he would have been the oldest first-term president in history, that seemed particularly relevant.

Palin problems

But choosing someone with no national experience and no foreign experience as his running mate raised questions about his judgement and undermined his main argument against Mr Obama.

In the few interviews she gave, it was clear that she had not grasped foreign policy issues to the same extent as anyone she was running against. But there were other problems too.

She was the subject of an ethics probe in Alaska which eventually ruled that she had abused her power. Then came questions about her official expenses and her claims to have tried to end wasteful federal construction projects.

Her “hockey mom” persona was undermined by a revelation that the campaign had spent $150,000 on clothes and accessories for her.

As the weeks went on, her poll ratings fell heavily. She may have helped shore up the Republican base but she made it far more difficult for Mr McCain to broaden his appeal – especially with her forceful views on abortion and the environment.

She also helped drive away some in her own party. Mr Bush’s former Secretary of State Colin Powell cited her as one of the reasons he had decided to endorse Mr Obama; he decried what he saw as an increasing “narrowness” of the party.

He also condemned the negative attacks on Mr Obama coming from the McCain campaign as having gone too far.

Hopes dashed

This was another aspect of the McCain strategy that seemed to backfire. Although Mr McCain ran only 10% more purely negative adverts than his rival, according to media monitoring groups, they were more deeply personal attacks – accusing Mr Obama of having a close relationship with a “domestic terrorist”, for example.

Such ads created a backlash from independent voters, according to the polls, and Mr McCain was forced to change his tone.

In fact, he could never quite find a narrative that worked. He went from being war hero, to the voice of experience, to maverick, to tax-cutter, but he never found a way to lift himself in the polls.

His team hoped the three presidential debates would finally reveal their candidate to be best qualified for the job. But in the “town hall” setting Mr McCain favoured, he wandered around the stage and forgot that what may work in a real town hall doesn’t necessarily work with a TV audience.

In other debates he tried confronting Mr Obama, but was never able to shake the younger man’s almost unnatural cool. At times, Mr McCain seemed to be trying to keep a simmering rage under control, which brought more negative coverage.

When the credit crisis erupted and the economy stalled, it seemed a damning indictment of an era of Republican deregulation and “trickle-down” economics.

Mr McCain’s past quotes about the fundamentals of the economy being strong came back to haunt him. His tax plan – which seemed to favour the wealthy – rang hollow with people facing foreclosure and job losses.

His abrupt suspension of his campaign to return to Washington and “fix the problem” seemed erratic and was ultimately ineffectual.

In the end, he projected an image as a man from America’s past, who had been through much and served his country well.

But in a disgruntled nation, deeply disenchanted with Republicanism, he couldn’t match the appeal of his younger opponent and his message of change.

Victim drives sleeping rapist to police station

A New Zealand rape victim drove her rapist to a police station when he fell asleep in his car after assaulting the woman, local media reported on Wednesday.

Vipul Sharma, 22, was found guilty of abduction and two charges of rape by the Auckland District Court Tuesday, court officials told Reuters Wednesday.

The New Zealand newspaper said Sharma met the woman at an Auckland bar in 2006 and later drove her first to a park where he raped her in the back seat of his car.

After the attack Sharma allowed the woman to drive and fell asleep in the passenger seat, so the woman drove him to Auckland Central police station where he was arrested, said the newspaper.

“She showed a lot of bravery and common sense. I have nothing but respect for what she has endured,” police detective Simon Welsh told the newspaper.