| By David Bamford BBC News Africa editor |
An West African aid group campaigning to abolish female genital mutilation has been awarded the world's biggest prize for humanitarian work. 
The Tostan organisation, based in Senegal, has been chosen for the Hilton Prize, worth $1.5m (£740,000)
The organisation uses traditional song, poetry, theatre and dance to educate people in West African villages about the dangers of genital mutilation.... Their grassroots approach has been key to dealing sensitively with an issue that involves convincing traditional communities they should move away from a long-maintained yet cruel cultural practice.
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Picking up women has been getting plenty of press these days, leading up to this week’s premiere of the VH1 reality show The Pick-Up Artist. The show follows eight “socially inept” men through an eight-week boot camp on seduction techniques, led by a self-proclaimed Lothario called “Mystery.” The headliner (whose real name is Erik Von Markovik) initially found fame after being profiled in Neil Strauss’s 2005 book The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists, and went on to co-write his own book, How to Get Beautiful Women Into Bed: The Mystery Method.
Under particular discussion is a pickup technique that Mystery advocates known as “negging” — a move that involves interjecting an insult during an initial conversation with a woman. The motivation behind the insult is, as Esquire’s A.J. Jacobs puts it, to “lower her self-esteem, thus making her more vulnerable to your advances.” While this tactic has provoked considerable ire, by all accounts from Strauss and his skirt-chasing Svengali, it seems to work.
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