britian

Oh, the evolving humor of today's youth: Youngsters have apparently taken to freaking out their friends and classmates by pretending to be online predators! Nine cases in Cornwall were investigated where police suspected that pedophiles on social networking sites like Bebo and MSN were actually fellow classmates of kids who weren't getting along — all around age 10.

This is really par for the course in a time when we're seeing and questioning online bullying — though these cases weren't taken as far as the Megan Meier case or the Kristin Helms case, can we really be surprised that these young kids see new possibilities to tease and torture each other with the Internet?

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I can't say I really miss the pay phones in the US, but when I read that cell phone use is making the red phone booths in Britain obsolete, I got a little melancholic. I mean, the booths are not just cute places to have a conversation or have your photo taken— they're landmarks. Did you know the signature telephone box was the result of a competition in 1924 to design a kiosk that would be acceptable to the London Metropolitan Boroughs? In 1925 the winning design was reproduced 1,000 times, but by 1980 there were 73,000 of the design throughout the UK. That's a piece of geeky history right there! Here's more:

Britain has more cellphones than people, so the use of pay phones has dropped by half in the past three years, according to British Telephone. BT has removed about 30,000, or a third of all pay phones, from the streets since 2002. Of the remaining 61,700 phone booths, 12,700 are the old red kiosks made of wood or cast iron that are so identifiably British.

The old booths are being bought up for $5,000 to $10,000, depending on the make, year and condition. Apparently regular Joe and Jane Does and celebrities are placing bids for their own little booth. Talk about a vintage geek collectible!

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While the media has speculated the burst of pregnancies in young Hollywood will cause teen pregnancy to rise in the US, Britain's Office for National Statistics has released a new study that shows the number of British women becoming pregnant after turning 40 has reached a "record high."

The study found:

• There were an estimated 866,800 conceptions in Britain in 2006, compared with 841,800 the previous year.
• The rate of British women aged 40 and over becoming pregnant rose 6 percent from 11.5 per 1,000 women aged 40 to 44 in 2005 to 12.2 the following year.
• The number of women having children over the age of 40 has increased by just under 50 percent in the past decade.
• There was also an increase in older fathers, with 75,000 babies born to fathers over 40 in 2004 – one in 10 of all children born that year.

In contrast, pregnancies among teens ages 13 to 15 fell by 1.2 percent in 2006.

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