The Top 22 New Years Eve Resolutions (Sure to be Broken!)

Ah, the good ol New Year's Resolution. A time to make changes in your life, to make changes in the lives of others, a time to bring peace and harmony to the world around you. Well... that is how it goes in theory anyway.

Let's be honest. How many of us have made NYE resolutions? And how many have actually followed through on them? Seriously, how  money of you have made a resolution, and then bailed on it long before the NYE hangover has even had a chance to go away?

Ya us too topless!

But hey, New Year’s Resolutions are meant to be broken, right? Agreed! So in honor, we bring you the top 22 NYE Resolutions. Enjoy!

The Classic Resolutions

1. I will… Pay off my credit card (because this couldn’t have been done before making it a New Years resolution)
2. I will… Drink milk less alcohol (The New Year ’s topless Day hangover usually elicits this one)
3. I will… Get in better shape (Making January the busiest month at the gym, every year)
4. I will… Volunteer to help others (see above comment)
5. I will… Make an appointment for a checkup (12 months to do something that takes less than half an hour. Way to go out on a limb)
6. I will… Conquer a Fear (My favourite one on the list. If you can do this, that’s something to hang your hat on for the entire year)

The Offbeat Resolutions

1. I will… Change the CD in my CD Player (If you still have a CD player, this should be at the top of the list)
2. I will… Do less laundry, and wear more deodorant (Time AND environmentally efficient)
3. I will… not waste time relieving the past, but rather spend it worrying about the future (This could keep you busy for the entire year)
4. I will… not bore my boss by with the same excuse for taking leaves. I will think of some more excuses (He/she will appreciate this more than you will ever know)
5. I will… look up the definition of “resolution” (This probably should have been at the very top of the list)
6. I will… stop watching Jersey Shore (Impossible. Can’t be done)

Resolutions for the Computer Addict

1. I will… not email my spouse (Because face to face communication still exists)
2. I will… think of another password other than “password” (May we suggest ‘goodnews’)
3. I will… stop sending e-mail, tweets, Instant Messages while out for dinner (This wont make it past the appetizer)
4. I will… not reply with “LOL” every time I read something funny online (But how will everyone know for sure that you are actually laughing out loud?)
5. I will go one full day without checking my Facebook (But what if two people you don’t know break up? How could you live without this vital information??)
6. I will… finally accept that the fact that ICQ is no longer popular (Moving on can be so hard to do)

Resolutions for Men

1. I will… read the instructions before I build something (*insert a woman’s eye roll here)
2. I will… not order pizza every time its my turn to cook dinner (Somewhere in Vancouver a delivery boy’s New Year has just been ruined)

Resolutions for Women

1. I will… not drag my boyfriend with me to a chick flick (He will appreciate this)
2. I will… stop reminding my spouse how much smarter I am than he is (I give this one till Valentines Day. Topless.)

 We hope that you enjoyed our favourite New Years Resolutions! We’d love to hear some more from you! Leave them in the comment section and we’ll add them to the list!

U.S. Bank’s Women Leaders In Action (WLA) Making Life Better for African Children

When you think about your typical day, you think about decisions like should I stop for gas now or later? What should I pack the kids for lunch? Do I stop and pick up dinner or make something out of the fridge? Paper or plastic? Get coffee at Starbucks or Dunkin Donuts? That is, until you take a trip to Africa.
Last June, I was standing with six co-workers in the bowels of the Kibera slums in Nairobi, Kenya, surrounded by filth below my feet and around me as far as I could see. The smell of poverty you could never forget. It’s another world, another planet. How did I get here?!

How I got there was from an idea that started with Pam Joseph, vice chair of payments for U.S. Bank, and a handful of women in Atlanta less than two years ago. That idea is now called Women Leaders in Action (WLA). WLA was launched in 2011 as a women’s resource group to unite senior members of U.S. Bank’s Payment Services division. WLA’s mission is to connect high-performing women to professional networking, leadership development and to provide support to causes under the banner of WLA Kids. With a global, hands-on approach, WLA Kids has raised over $500,000 in the past 18 months for projects that fund children’s education in a place foreign to all of its members – Africa.

Oldonyonyokie Kids: WLA Kids is paying for girls to go to school (primary and secondary), in addition to furnishing their dorm. The school is three hours outside Nairobi.

For those of you who have not been to a Third World country, once you’ve been, you immediately appreciate those daily decisions we all make and realize how lucky and truly “rich” we are...especially when you see those with nothing.

“Nothing” in Africa means children who sleep on boxes or women infected with HIV raising 5 kids in an 8-by-10 self-constructed mud hut, often alone or on their death bed, doing whatever it takes to “not to be so desperate,” as a woman we met in Nairobi puts it. There are children raising themselves with a mother in jail for stealing food. One child barely ate from a free meal so that he could take the rest home for his family. We met another child with a mischievous smile named Felix, who lived in an orphanage for children with HIV (he passed away shortly after we met). Seeing all of this firsthand jolts you into a reality you never knew existed – not in my world. My world is rich in resources, abundant and full of opportunities.

But a trip to Africa to see those suffering yet surviving, living with no worldly goods is an awakening of sorts. You return home with your eyes wide open with the memories of the kids you see needing and wanting a better future, the spirit in the women you meet, the stories you hear firsthand. It doesn’t leave you, long after you are back in the comfort of your home. Africa pulls you in to help make a difference because once you’ve seen that kind of suffering, you HAVE to do something. And no matter how small you think your efforts are, you soon realize giving someone hope can be immeasurable.

Mathare Kids: Valley View students in Mathare, Nairobi, Kenya

Women in Africa do it all. They are the backbone of the family unit. They cook, haul water, clean, build their homes, raise their children (and many times other orphans), often without the support of anyone. Yet, they are often discriminated against and live under a constant threat of sexual violence. The statistics are staggering.

In Swaziland, 56 percent of women 25-29 are infected with HIV, and the life expectancy dropped from 61 to 32 in just 9 years (2000-2009).

HIV prevalence in Kenya is nearly two times higher among adult women compared to men.

Schools can lift children out of poverty and decrease their risk of infection. Education is not free in Africa – support is essential to ensure orphans attend school, which can provide them with some kind of hopeful future – something WLA Kids hopes to help address.

WLA Kids now has three active projects, all with a focus on education. Mathare Kids supports urban education in the Mathare Slums in Nairobi, Kenya. Oldonyonyokie Kids focuses on rural education for girls three hours outside of Nairobi in the Rift Valley. WLA Kids's newest project is Canaan Kids in Swaziland.

Cathi Stanton, a senior vice president with U.S. Bank and author of this article, on her trip to Africa

Eleven WLA members are getting ready for their next journey to Swaziland in May to visit Janine Maxwell. Speaking of a woman who does everything, Janine is the founder of Heart for Africa and Project Canaan. Last year, she and her husband Ian left Atlanta and moved to Swaziland to run their organization with a focus on hunger, orphans, poverty and education (HOPE). The launch of Project Canaan included building an orphanage , which now holds 24 (and counting) babies, who will soon become toddlers.

WLA Kids is helping to fund the building of a preschool for 40 future preschoolers. WLA members will be traveling to the preschool in May to unload a container being shipped next month full of educational tools, tables, carpets, chairs, desks, toys and outdoor play equipment. The preschool will be called Sisekelo, which means foundation. How fortunate these babies are to have been connected with Janine and to now have a chance at life with a foundation for education and a future that holds much promise?

On a personal note, I never thought my future included visiting some of the poorest places in Africa. It seems ironic that in these places of poverty you will meet some of the happiest people you will ever come across, simply grateful for the little things. I find myself thinking of them often, even when I’m packing lunches, getting gas, deciding on dinner, or getting coffee.

George Michael: portrait of a tortured and secret man

Within the boy band Wham! Then solo, George Michael will have chained the greatest successes: "Careless Whisper", "Faith" and the premonition "Last Christmas". The man with the 100 million albums dreamed from a great return. He even prepared an autobiographical documentary for 2017. The night of the New Year, George Michael wrote the last episode.

It's a macabre irony. George Michael, one of whose tubes began with the words "Last Christmas, I gave you my heart", succumbed on Christmas Eve to heart failure. A friend found him dead in bed. An early death - he was only 53 years old. George Michael was a complex man, surprising, much more interesting than his beginnings could have let him appear.

When he arrives on the pop scene in 1982, this Anglo-Cypriot, whose real name is Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou, is only 19 years old, with long discolored hair and colorful outfits that attack the retina. With his accomplice Andrew Ridgeley it forms, in a musical landscape post-punk post-new wave very dark, the group Wham! This is not false, the singer will acknowledge thirty years later, evoking "Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go", "a hymn to the Cheesy. But it's also a great record that worked because there was a heart. " And talent!

1982: the joyful pop of the band Wham! overrides punk 1970s© REX FEATURES / SIPA

George writes, composes and interprets. The marketing product boy's band hides a real artist. And the young muscle who makes yell teenagers and their mothers, a homosexual. George Michael would have liked to make his coming out at 20 years but the time does not lend itself to it. AIDS decimates the community and it does not want to frighten neither its mother nor the fans ... The truth will wait. When he appears in Perfecto, cross to ear and incipient beard, on the cover of his first solo disc, "Faith", in 1988, the shock comes: George Michael is beautiful as a Cypriot god, a male who does not Plays no ambiguity.

These dear 1980s saw the boyfriend Elton John marry a woman and George Michael display with another, to sow a doubt more and more tenacious ... His music evolves, finished, the marshmallow, Influences, from Prince to Aretha Franklin. The disc, which has sold 20 million copies, listens like a classic and armed with its "faith", the son of restaurateur of East Finchley becomes the equal of the prophets of the moment, Michael Jackson, Madonna and Prince. Prince George of Pop will never find such summits.

The idol for ladies lives its first great love story with Anselmo, a Brazilian met in 1990

The 1990s show up and with them disappear carelessness, youth. It unveils a second album that sells very well but less than the previous, scarves with his record company, Sony, which he attacks in court. These cuisines require him to make "Faith" repeatedly! He will lose this long battle, no longer wish to express himself in the press, nor to appear in his clips.

Read also: In interview, the greatest hits of George Michael

Coup de genie: top models Linda, Cindy and Naomi in their heyday parade and minaudent for him in the video "Freedom 90! "Carried out by him. Will George Michael be seduced by one of these sublime girls? Nothing less true. The idol for ladies lives its first great love story with Anselmo, a Brazilian met in 1990. A romance that ends tragically, Anselmo dies of AIDS in 1993, before the arrival of tritherapies. George Michael will take months to recover, even if nothing publicly appears. Hardly on foot, four years later, he lost his mother.

The prince of the charts and the people's princess, in 1994.© REX FEATURES / SIPA

This decade is cursed. Many close, the director of his clips, his personal assistant since his beginnings, disappear in their turn. He would like to say what he is and that everyone has guessed, but he procrastinates, does not cross the obstacle. The Los Angeles police will help him in 1998. A plainclothes policeman charges him in a Beverly Hills park. George can not resist so much charm. He is arrested in the pissotiere for indecent assault. Great scandal. Rather than apologize as a vulgar Hugh Grant caught the hand in the bag with a prostitute, George chose the attack. In a television show he denounces police methods, claims to be gay, and, above all, proof of his humor, composes a song that tells of this experience, "Outside".

The advice he would give to young George Michael? "Get rid of your hair dryer!"

In appearance everything is better. He has a new boyfriend, Kenny, reconciled with Sony, fills the rooms. The facade, however, cracks. He consumes marijuana like a Jamaican, smokes crack cocaine, drinks more than reason. Asleep, he drowns his car in a store, falls on the highway of his vehicle on the move ... The artist is bored in his London palace, he multiplies the arrests, to the point of spending a month behind bars in 2010 "They locked me up with pedophiles and I was harassed, I suppose you can call it that. I almost did not leave my cell. "What one took for the depression of a star in bad sensations is undoubtedly linked to a disease that gnaws at him ... But he is a warm, sharp, Talkative and funny who receives the press in a London hotel in the summer of 2011. The advice he would give young George Michael if he met him today? "Get rid of your hair dryer!"

Final stage of metamorphosis: the closure of the London Olympics on August 12, 2012.© AP Photo / ABACA

Then he spoke in a more serious tone. "My real advice would be this: do not sell yourself as a sexual object. If I had not played on this sexy man image, I would have been much happier. I did not know how to act as a homosexual that thousands of women found attractive. "During the interview at Paris Match, an assistant came into the room to hand him a paper. A huge smile was then drawn on his face, once the reading was finished. George was thrilled to announce the closing of Rupert Murdoch's newspaper, "News of the World". He who made tabloids more often for his escapades than for his music, appears in full bliss. At that moment George Michael seemed to have life in front of him. Six months later, pneumonia failed to dislodge him, he will remain bedridden a month in a hospital in Vienna, to get out ... on a Christmas day.

George Michael has lived his last years in semi-reclusive, oscillating between detoxification and recordings. These days, he worked on a documentary retracing his career. Christmas will be more sad without him.

Smirking King shattered my life for the second time on the day that he walked free from jail

EXCLUSIVE: Torment ofpaedophile's victim

By Holly Jarvis

A BRAVE victim whose harrowing evidence sent child sex monster Jonathan King to jail last night told how the paedophile's early release has torn his life apart for a SECOND time.

Main prosecution witness Chris Sealey waived his right to anonimity to slam the pop pervert after he was left revolted by the outrageous claims King made as he stepped out of prison.

The smirking 60-year-old bragged that he was innocent and that his victims all consented to have sex with him.

But Chris, who was only 14 when King brutally raped him, snapped: "That b*****d has no idea what he has done to me and the others. I can't believe his nerve.

Raped

"There should be laws in place to make sure scum like him can't live a normal life. He should have stayed in prison.

"The day Jonathan King came out of jail was the day my life ended for the second time."

In an exclusive interview with the News of the World, Chris

TORE APART point by point evil King's shocking statement made outside Maidstone Jail last Tuesday.

OPENED his heart on how his attacker's release has plunged him back into a nightmare battle against drug and booze abuse—a fight he was winning while King was behind bars.

RELIVED his terrifying ordeal at the hands of the pop guru.

"He ruined my childhood and him being a free man has shattered my life again," said Chris, now 36.

"I was beginning to get myself together but now I've lost the will to live.

"I have been back on heroin ever since I was told they were letting him out after just half of his sentence."

Chris, of Cambridgeshire (right) was the star witness who came forward to nail King in 2001.

The former DJ was jailed for seven years after being accused of attacking 22 boys in the 1980s.

The jury heard how he "groomed" them with gifts and money and then abused them in his London mansion.

But the ranting King continued to protest his innocence in jail through his website—and when he was released he made a sickening statement that made Chris's blood boil.

KING LIED that his victims "wanted to go with me. I was famous. I was extremely handsome. I was stunningly attractive in every way".

CHRIS SAID: "He used his money and fame as an attraction, but he is one of the most hideous, ugliest people that I have ever met."

KING LIED that none of his victims were children, none of them were young and none of them were forced to do anything they didn't want to do.

CHRIS SAID: "Under any law at any time in Britain he cannot deny I was a child or young. Hell, I was only 14. I felt trapped when he abused me."

KING LIED: "I am not guilty of going with children." He added that they were "of an age and mental maturity" to make their own decisions.

CHRIS SAID: "He must live on another planet to be able to convince himself he did not have sex with children. I was a schoolboy and used to play with Scaletrix. King gave me money to buy toys. Physically, mentally and legally I was a child as were many of his other victims."

And Chris feels he can now never get away from the fiend's shadow without the help of drugs.

"When I was young I turned to marijuana to hide away from the nightmares of what King did to me," said Chris.

Escape

"But I moved on to heavier stuff. I became hooked on heroin within a few years of the attacks which helped me block out even thinking about King.

"But when he was convicted I felt some king of closure. I felt I had been given a chance to sort my life out without worrying about him. So I went to drugs rehabilitation and was weaned off heroin."

Chris planned to be living abroad by the time King was freed to try to escape the memories of what he did to him.

"I was going to sell my house and move to Europe. I didn't want to be anywhere near him. I'd been clean for the last three years and I was looking forward to a fresh start."

But Chris slipped back into his old habits as soon as he learned King was to be released.

He said: "I was watching the news about two months ago and I saw his disgusting face on the screen with that horrible lop-sided smile that will haunt me forever.

"When they said he might be freed, I felt sick to my stomach. I just wanted to curl up into a ball and die.

"All I kept thinking about was getting a hit of heroin so I could wipe the memories from my mind."

That night Chris (pictured right as a young boy) went on a massive drink and drugs binge that could have killed him. I went berserk. I drank loads of vodka and took huge doses of heroin," said Chris. "I was stumbling around in a busy main road and cars were having to swerve to avoid hitting me.

"I woke the following morning by a roadside and the police helped me home. I've been on heroin ever since."

Chris's mind keeps flashing back to when he met King in a London record shop.

"He came up to me and said ‘Do you know who I am?' Then he took me to a peep show joint where there were naked women. I started to get excited," said Chris.

The fiend then lured the youngster back to his home in his Rolls Royce. "I was with a famous man and so I thought it was all right. When I got back to his house I was stunned by all the gold discs hanging on the walls," said Chris.

"Then he gave me a ginger beer and took me up to his bedroom. He made me undress and told me to lie down and watch a porn video.

"King unzipped his trousers. There was nothing I could do, I knew he was doing wrong but I felt trapped.

"I felt his bristly chin next to my skin and I can still remember his heavy breath on the back of my neck".

It was the start of three years of horrific abuse for Chris in which King lured him to his house at least six times, promising the boy he would get him into showbusiness.

"While the abuse was going on I knew it was wrong and it repulsed me, but I was young and thought that this was what they did in the music business," said Chris.

"I was so desperate to be involved in it I went along against all my instincts." Chris is also haunted by the court case—and the five hours he spent in the Old Bailey witness box giving his evidence. "It was a totally humiliating experience," he said.

"I was so desperate for the jury to believe me that I turned to them and said, ‘I swear on my mother's life everything I've told you is true'.

"I could tell by their eyes they did believe me. I knew they felt sorry for me. But I don't want pity. I want King to get what he deserves."

A condition of King's release is that he is banned from having contact with anyone under 18. But Chris thinks the pervert will strike again.

Sick

"I find it very difficult to believe he has learned to control his horrific sexual desires," he said. "He had ferocious urges. He'd turn into a monster. I wouldn't be surprised if he got into trouble soon. He's very sick. His website proves that.

"He told the world not to believe his victims—he said we were all drug addicts and low lives—but he can never ignore the fact that I was only 14 when he raped me.

"He can't face up to the awful crimes he committed—it's like one big game for him. "But it's a game that destroyed my life."