Islamabad, Aug.

Sydney, August 21 : A study conducted by a prominent U. S. media watchdog, known as the Parents Television Council, has revealed that adultery, teen sex and lust are hot topics on prime-time TV.

The council said that it studied over 207 hours of scripted shows on the five main American broadcast networks, and found that spoken references to non-marital sex outnumbered mentions of marital intimacy by about three to one.

The ratio was four to one for scenes that visually depict or imply sex, said the council.

The study showed once-taboo topics like partner-swapping, threesomes, strippers and prostitution were increasingly becoming common these days.

Washington, Aug 21 : Mothers who report that they or their partner spanked their child are more likely to use harsher forms of punishment than those who do not spank, say a group of researchers.

Researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill said punishments considered physically abusive included: beating, burning, kicking, hitting with an object somewhere other than the buttocks, or shaking a child less than 2 years old.

Also, increase in the frequency of spanking is associated with increased odds of abuse, and mothers who report spanking on the buttocks with an object, said Adam J. Zolotor, M. D., the study’s lead author and an assistant professor in the department of family medicine in the UNC School of Medicine.

Istanbul  - Turkey gave permission on Thursday for US Navy ships to pass through Turkish-controlled waters to bring medical supplies to Georgia.

The permission for the US vessels to pass through the Bosporus Straits connecting the Mediterranean with the Black Sea followed several days of negotiations amid Turkish reluctance in the stand-off between Russia and the US over South Ossetia.

Controversy had previously arisen over whether the US had made a formal request for passage, under the terms of a decades-old maritime treaty.

The two US Navy ships - the "Comfort" and the "Mercy" - are carrying medical aid and are to be accompanied by one coastguard vessel.

London, Aug 21 : British terrorists are just as likely to be married with children and have little religious background as they are to be fundamentalist loners, a leaked MI5 study has said.

Research from the security service found it was impossible to draw up a typical profile of a “British Terrorist” contradicting the perception that all are traditional religious fanatics or Islamic fundamentalists, The Telegraph reported.

Grakali, Georgia  - "We can get traffic moving across this in two weeks - if the Russians don't blow it up again," said Georgian railroad engineer Georgy Gurgiashvidze.

"But if they do blow it up a second time, maybe at least they'll admit they did it," he told a Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa reporter on Wednesday, as he gestured at the twisted remains of one of Georgia's most critical rail links lying in a gully next to the sluggish Kvari River.

The Kvari River railroad bridge near the central Georgian village Grakali connects the capital Tbilisi with points westward, that is, it did until the Russian army demolition experts arrived.