Poor Paige Duke. What a way to find out that you were in love with a douche and a jerk.

Model and part time animal nurse Paige Duke, 24, has been fired as one of NASCAR's three 'Sprint Cup Girls' after nude pictures of her emerged on the internet.

Miss Duke, who traveled the country as one of the sport's roving reporters, was fired because the graphic shots broke mobile phone operator and sponsor Sprint's 'morality code'.

The pictures of an 18-year-old Miss Duke were taken at college and sent to an ex-boyfriend.

Speaking to Fox news, a devastated Miss Duke said: 'I did not intend for anybody to see these and now I'm exploited.

Let this be a lesson to you: If you're going to send your current boyfriend naked pictures, remember that one day he may be your ex-boyfriend. If the breakup is especially nasty and you do something big in your life, expect those pictures to come back and haunt you.

How do you keep this from happening? Well, you could not send the pictures. But if you do, follow these steps before the breakup:

1. Sneak into his phone and delete them.

2. Check his computer, iPad, iPod, Playbook, etc., for duplicates and delete them as well.

3. Delete them from your phone.

4. Marry him.

5. Get photos of him as well and play dirty.

Late yesterday afternoon, news broke in Raleigh that "two Planned Parenthood affiliates filed a federal lawsuit Thursday to invalidate part of the new state budget that cuts it off from federal or state funds for family planning."

According to the MSNBC:

The budget written by Republicans in control of the General Assembly for the first time in more than a century states that Planned Parenthood and its affiliates are forbidden from receiving any contracts or grants from the state health agency. The lawsuit filed in Greensboro's federal court by Planned Parenthood of Central North Carolina contends the group is being punished for its abortion-rights advocacy, saying that violates its free-speech protections.

The organization is barred by law from using public money to perform abortions and uses the government contracts to provide family planning or teen pregnancy prevention services, yet is being singled out because Planned Parenthood supports abortion rights, the lawsuit said. Efforts to cut off funds to Planned Parenthood affiliates in North Carolina are similar to those in Kansas and Indiana, which were also met with federal lawsuits, the group's attorneys said.

Right on! Planned Parenthood does more than provide abortions, for some women this is the only health care they can afford. Why doesn't the GOP get that?

• Photo credit: Christina Xu

A few weeks back, we told you that the federal government had expanded its consumer database to include sex toys — so you and yours can look up your favorite implements of pleasure to be sure you're not harming each other with nasty chemicals that can do everything from make you fat to cause cancer.

Well, recent news from Germany suggests that you take a gander at the database again to be on the safe side. And, we all want to be on the safe side of sex, right?

Germany's Green Party is worried about the health of their countrymen. But this time they aren't concerned about typical environmentalist causes like nuclear radiation or pesticides in food. Instead, their latest fears regard the potential health hazards of sex toys.

Now a group of 10 Green Party members of the German parliament, the Bundestag, are demanding that the government take action. They have drawn up a paper entitled "Sexual Health as a Consumer Protection Issue."

"Many dildos and other sex toys such as vibrators and anal plugs contain a high amount of phthalates, other carcinogenic plasticizers and toxic substances," the paper reads. The substances, which enter the body through mucous membranes, can lead to infertility, hormone imbalances, diabetes and obesity, the parliamentarians warn. The chemicals can also cause hormone disturbances in unborn babies, the paper reads. Phthalates and other plastic softening agents are being officially phased out of products in many developed nations.

Because dildos and other sex toys are widely used in Germany, the Greens see the issue as a problem for society as a whole. While children's toys are subject to strict regulations that allow only the smallest percentage of plasticizers, a 2006 study by the Öko-Test consumer magazine found that sex toys contain high quantities of the chemicals. Plasticizers comprised up to 58 percent of materials used in such products, the magazine wrote. More than half of the vibrators examined by Öko-Test contained so many toxic substances that they failed the test entirely, it said.

Read the entire Spiegel article, by Anna Reimann, here.

— Rhiannon Fionn-Bowman

As rumors float around about Fantasia Barrino carrying the love child of Charlotte man Antwaun Cook, who was married at the time the two began seeing each other, she'd better remember that she still lives in the state of North Carolina.

On the east side of the state, the Johnston County DA is suing her friend for alienation of affection after she found a text message.

Attorneys Susan Doyle and Christi Stem were neighbors and friends for years. Stem counseled Doyle about marital problems. She is the godmother to Doyle's children.But now Doyle - the two-term top prosecutor in Johnston County - is accusing Stem of having an affair with her husband, Michael. She filed a criminal conversation lawsuit Tuesday seeking a jury trial and at least $20,000 in damages from Stem, a private practice attorney in Smithfield specializing in family law. The move comes less than a week before Doyle is set to become president of the N.C. Conference of District Attorneys, a state agency.

The salacious 16-page court filing details a number of alleged marital infidelities and messages Stem exchanged with both Doyles.

Barrino was cleared in 2009 of stealing Cook away from his wife Paula. But, if that baby — provided that the rumors are true — was conceived before the divorce was final, I see a court date in her future.

Talk about your bipolar government. Earlier this month, women who'd been sterilized by the state of North Carolina told their horrifying stories to a committee about how painful life is not being able to give birth because lawmakers/social workers/all around assholes thought they weren't good enough.  Now, fast forward 30 years and look at the N.C.'s GOP controlled General Assembly try to infringe on reproductive rights again.

This time, lawmakers wanted to make women who were considering abortion take extra steps before going ahead with the procedure. (The bill was recently vetoed by Bev Perdue.)

The legislation also required medical personnel to present to patients an ultrasound image of the fetus along with information about possible risks.

"This bill is a dangerous intrusion into the confidential relationship that exists between women and their doctors," the Democratic governor said in a statement.

"The bill contains provisions that are the most extreme in the nation in terms of interfering with that relationship."

Barbara Holt, president of North Carolina Right to Life, said the proposed law would not be an intrusion into the doctor-patient relationship because most women who undergo abortion usually have no relationship with the doctor who performs the procedure.

"Most women who have abortions say they have never seen the doctor prior to the abortion and never see the doctor after," Holt told Reuters. "This is about women going to facilities that deal only in abortions."

Perdue said the bill is a case of legislators imposing their ideology on a woman's private consultations with her doctor.

Make up your mind, N.C. — do you want more babies or not?

North Carolina is one of a number of states with Republican majorities seeking restrictions on abortion this year.

What's interesting and sad about the abortion debate is that it's mostly men leading the charge, telling women what they should and should not do with their bodies. The decision to have an abortion isn't something that women enter into lightly.  The myth of the woman who uses abortion as birth control is outdated and wrong.

Why doesn't the government do anything about the deadbeat fathers who produce kids, then leave the state on the hook to pay for them? Here's something the General Assembly should consider: If a man has multiple children that are receiving assistance from the state, he should be subjected to a vasectomy.

I bet that will never happen.

Everyone knows the iconic scene from When Harry Met Sally where she's sitting at the table and she shows Harry how women pretend they're having an orgasm.

Well, somebody actually paid a scientist to study why women fake it.

The results are just what you would expect.

Women's fake screams of ecstasy in bed may have less to do with trying to protect the sensitive egos of their partners, and more to do with a gal's own personal insecurities and fear of intimacy, new research suggests.

Approximately 60 percent of women have faked an orgasm during intercourse or oral sex, according to Erin Cooper of Temple University, who has been studying these women to figure out why.

"This is something that we talk about happening in popular culture, in the movies and magazines," Cooper told LiveScience. "We know that this is pretty prevalent in our culture, but we don't know much about it from a scientific standpoint. That to me is a real catastrophe."

Here's the real catastrophe: Women suffer from breast cancer, cervical cancer, reproductive health problems — you know, real issues — that scientists could be studying more rather than wasting time and money on something that can be answered with a simple survey. As in, creating it with Survey Monkey and calling it a day.

Did someone really need to be paid to get these results?

Cooper surveyed 366 females ages 18 to 32 who had indicated they endorse faking orgasms, about their sexual habits, their reasons for faking it during a past relationship and their feelings about intimacy.

Many of these women said they faked it due to their own fear of intimacy; they also reported faking orgasm because they felt insecure about their sexual functioning, or because they want to get it over with.

I'm faking that I give a damn about this study.

John Edwards's fall from grace still isn't complete. You know why? Because the alleged contents of the sex tape still haven't been leaked.

Today, Edwards's criminal case was delayed until July.

Judge Carlton Tilley said he wants an agreement first on which documents will be released by prosecutors to defense lawyers and when that will happen before even thinking about scheduling a trial date.

"I encourage you to release everything," Tilley told prosecutors. "Let's get busy. Let's start turning stuff over."

Edwards accompanied his lawyers to the hearing, but apart from greeting reporters outside the building, he didn't speak or respond to questions about the case. One of his lawyers, James Cooney, also declined to comment.

Edwards pleaded not guilty this month to six felony charges related to money that went to hide Rielle Hunter, a videographer who followed his 2008 presidential campaign and later became his mistress and the mother of his child. Federal prosecutors say Edwards accepted contributions far above the legal limit in order to hide his affair, and helped in trying to cover up the payments by filing false campaign finance reports.

It's not clear exactly what the thousands of documents contain, and Edwards' lawyers said they couldn't proceed until they knew what prosecutors will be using.

So, what about the sex tape? Because honestly, that's what this is really about. But he won't have to answer those questions until the criminal charges are resolved. Boo.

About 17 percent of American adults have the herpes virus, but a rumor about the STD lead to the shooting of four people in Durham.

Brinton Marcell Millsap apparently shot three women and himself Friday night because of a rumor he had been exposed to a sexually transmitted disease."He did think that was the case, but it was a lie," said Anita D. Baker, the mother of one of the slain women, Alexandria J. Baker Pierce.

Pierce, 23, a rising senior at UNC Greensboro, made an impromptu trip to Durham on Friday to tell Millsap in person that the report that she had given him a disease was not true, Baker said. She left Greensboro in her green Honda Accord about 9 p.m. and picked up her friends, Amesha Alia Page-Smith, 24, and Adrianne Celeste Stevens, 22, both of Durham.

The seeds for the tragedy were planted on June 6,  according to one of the victim's best friends.

On June 6, Page-Smith was talking on the phone to her best friend, Adriene Williams, about the previous weekend when someone kept beeping in, Williams said.

Williams, who grew up in Durham but now lives in Tennessee, talked to Page-Smith often, she said..

The previous weekend Page-Smith, Pierce and Stevens had gone to a cookout together, Williams said. Either during or after the cookout, Pierce and Millsap had sex, Williams said.

As they spoke on the phone June 6, Page-Smith said Millsap and his friend kept calling her phone saying they had heard Pierce had herpes, Williams said.

"Brinton said if he goes to the doctor and his test results come back positive, he was going to kill A.J. (Pierce),'" Williams said, recounting her telephone conversation.

"At that time me and Amesha were just joking about it," Williams said. "And I am just like, 'It is not that serious. I mean it is not HIV.'"

It's not clear if Millsap had any reason, besides the rumor, to suspect he might have herpes. A blood test takes eight to 12 weeks (after becoming infected) and lupus can cause false positive readings, said Dr. Peter Leone, an infectious disease specialist at the UNC School of Medicine.

This tragedy highlights the importance of talking seriously about STDs before having sex and being honest about it.

• Photo credit: Jonathan Walczak from Edwards' 2008 campaign's Flickr account.

The News & Observer is reporting that former Senator, vice-presidential nominee, presidential candidate and beloved son of North Cackalacky, decided to take his campaign-finance violation criminal case to court because he didn't want to plead guilty to three misdemeanor violations, which would have meant six months in jail.

In case you've been under a rock, he's accused of using his campaign coffers to cover up his extramarital affair with Rielle Hunter — who has since moved to Charlotte — and the fact that her daughter is also his daughter.

Listen, John, I don't give a shit what you used that money for, but I am pissed that you thought, and apparently still think, you're above the law and jail time.

Enjoy your jury trial, prick. If there's any justice in this world, you and all of the other prison-avoiding rich fucks in this world — I'm looking at you Dominique Strauss-Kahn — will end up picking up trash (actual trash, not hookers) along the side of a hot Southern road only to go "home" to Bubba and his butter fingers.

I do, however, hate every bit of this for your children; they deserve better than this brand of bullshit ... and for what? So you could get laid?

Here's more from the N&O:

Just before John Edwards was indicted Friday, prosecutors made a final offer: They would accept his guilty plea to three misdemeanor campaign finance law violations in the $925,000 cover-up of his affair.

With the deal, the former Democratic vice-presidential nominee would avoid a felony conviction - and almost certainly keep the law license that had made him wealthy.

The government wanted to dictate a sentence that would result in up to six months of prison for Edwards, even with the plea to lesser charges.

Edwards and his lawyers were concerned. They wanted the ability to at least argue to a judge for alternatives, such as a halfway house, weekend releases, home arrest or some arrangement that would allow Edwards to be with his school-age children. He is a single parent after the death of his wife, Elizabeth, in December.

Read the entire article, by J. Andrew Curliss and Joseph Neff, here.

— Rhi Bowman