SEATTLE, WA -- The new retro logo at Starbucks is stirring controversy.
The logo shows a mermaid with partially-covered breasts.
A christian group based in San Diego called The Resistance says the logo looks like a naked woman with her legs spread like a prostitute.
The Resistance is calling for a national boycott of Starbucks.
Starbucks says the logo is appropriate. It'll be around for a few weeks.
The logo is based on a 16th century Norse woodcut of a two-tailed mermaid.
[Source: First Coast News]
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Starbucks Logo Under Fire: Shows Partially Covered Breasts
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American Gladiators Crush (aka Gina Carano) vs Kaitlin Young in 3 weeks
When it comes to training for a fight the mixed martial artist Gina Carano normally likes to train for a full two-months to get match fit for a MMA fight. Carano will have to work extra hard if she has any hope of winning the fight against Kaitlin Young, when the fight is televised on CBS’s Elite XC on May 31. Carano who is better known to us as Crush from the popular show American Gladiators has realized that when you are a top fighter you need to have a career to fall back on, so what better way to do this than to become an American Gladiator.
Gina Carano is one of the most known female MMA fighters, which she has earned the hard way by fighting her way to the top. As a fighter she was not the toughest or biggest to start with, but with doing some hard training she has managed to beef herself up and working harder on perfecting her jiu-jitsu to become a better all round fighter. Carano was already used to media attention before becoming a MMA fighter and a Gladiator as her father was Dallas Cowboys quarterback Glenn Carano. As she is Crush it is going to be hard for the fighter to get out of that persona, so that she can get match fit for the fight with Kaitlin Young.
Gina has said that she did jump at the chance for this May 31 fight, but only having three weeks to train could end up being costly. It is so strange that Carano has received this much media attention as she has taken part in only five pro fights, just shows what appearing on a TV show like Gladiators can do for your image.
[Source: InEntertainment]
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[Source: CNN.com]
Hyperthymestic Syndrome: Man's rare ability may unlock secret of memory
By David S. Martin
CNN
CNN
LA CROSSE, Wisconsin (CNN) -- Give Brad Williams a date, and he can usually tell you not only what he was doing but what world events happened that day. He can do this for almost every day of his life.
Brad Williams has hyperthymestic syndrome, experts say, and remembers what he did on allmost every day of his life.
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Williams is one of only three people in the world identified with this off-the-charts autobiographical memory, according to researchers at the University of California-Irvine who gave the condition its name: hyperthymestic syndrome, from the Greek words for excessive (hyper) and remembering (thymesis).
Unlike most people whose memories fade with time, much of Williams' life is etched indelibly in his mind.
"It's just there," said Williams, 51, who reports the news for a family of radio stations in La Crosse, Wisconsin.
The California researchers are studying Williams and the two others with hyperthymestic syndrome, a man in Ohio and woman in California, hoping to gain new insights into how a superior memory works.
The goal of the study is to find a way to help people with failing memory.
Williams didn't realize how exceptional his memory was until his brother Eric told him about an article published two years ago in the journal Neurocase, describing a woman referred to by the initials, A.J.
"My brother in California saw this and said, 'She sounds like you. Why don't we talk to the folks at Irvine?'" Williams said.
At Irvine, researchers quizzed Williams, as they have the two other hyperthymestics, about a series of dates, asking for the corresponding event, and vice-versa.
"The speed with which they do this is part of why I find this so amazing because it seems to indicate there's no -- or not much -- intentional calculation going on. It's boom, boom, boom, there's the answer," said Larry Cahill, a fellow at the university's Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory. "Remember, these are questions they had no idea what we're going to ask them."
Now researchers are using an MRI to create three-dimensional pictures of the hyperthymestic brain. They want to see whether any brain structures differ in size, compared with the average brain.
Cahill and his colleagues are still going over the results but it appears some structures in the prefrontal cortex are substantially larger in hyperthymestics. The prefrontal cortex sits at the front of the brain and has been associated with complex thinking, not learning or memory.
Cahill said he hoped others with this extraordinary ability will come forward.
"I hope that we can identify as many of these people as possible because the more we identify and the more we study the greater the likelihood that we are going to really figure out fundamental new things about brains and memory that we would have never figured out without them," Cahill said.
Flipping through a family photo album with him it was astonishing how much Williams recalled, going back decades.
Asked about one black and white picture taken in the Badlands of South Dakota, he remembered exactly when it was taken: Tuesday, July 28, 1964, the same day as a trip to Mount Rushmore. He also remembered that the temperature reached 100 degrees and that they tried to keep Funny Face drinks cool in a Thermos in the back of the car.
Cahill said Williams and the other hyperthymestics don't do any better than average on standard memory tests, nor are they savants, a condition where one extraordinary mental ability is accompanied by deficits in other areas.
In this age of instant information, what can you do with phenomenal recall?
"I don't really know. I've thought about it for years," said Williams, the 1969 Wisconsin Spelling Bee champion. Williams appeared on "Jeopardy!" but finished second.
For now, Williams said he is content knowing research into his memory might help others. "That would be the ultimate goal."[Source: CNN.com]
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Juicy Campus: College Gossip Crackdown: Chelsea Gorman Speaks Out
There it was, for the whole world to see, "Chelsea Gorman Deserved It," a topic posted on Vanderbilt University's JuicyCampus.com page.
After surviving a traumatic experience last year, Chelsea Gorman, 20, was shocked to find defamatory comments about her ordeal posted on juicycampus.com.
(ABC News)Underneath that heading, someone had anonymously written, "what could she expect walking around there alone. everyone thinks she's so sweet but she got what she deserved. wish i had been the homeless guy that f***** her. [sic]"
It was a dagger to the heart of a young girl still recovering from the worst moment in her life. Her secret was so painful that only a few friends even knew about it, yet there it was tattooed on the Web for the world -- and almost worse, her entire campus -- to read, talk about, look into and spread.
Watch the story Friday on "20/20" at 10 p.m. ET
In the spring during her freshman year, Chelsea Gorman, a pretty and soft-spoken girl from Indiana, was walking back to campus after grabbing a cup of coffee around 9 p.m. on a fairly well-lit street in Nashville, Tenn.
Vanderbilt has warned its students that Nashville can be dangerous, but a quick walk to get a cup of coffee was something Gorman had done many times. Yet as she returned to campus, something unusual happened.
"A man came up and asked me for some money," she said. "I gave him the change that I had, and then he started screaming at me that that wasn't all that I had."
Suddenly the man turned violent. She says the rest is mostly a blur but in an instant her life was shattered.
"He grabbed me, and I don't remember very clearly what happened after that, but he raped me," Gorman said.
[Source: ABC News]
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Titans QB Vince Young goes WILD in Texas Gay Bar
What in the hell is Titans QB Vince Young doing running around swappin' sweat with (hopefully only) half-naked "ballers" in what appears to be a gay bar in Texas?
We ain't here to judge what Vince Young, the 24-year-old Tennessee Titans quarterback, does during the offseason.
It's his free time, who wouldn't be getting a little twisted at that age. But we're darn sure going to make fun of this pic anyway!
What in the hell is he doing running around swappin' sweat with (hopefully) half-naked "ballers" in Texas . Gotta give him props though, he's downing that bottle of Patron like it's Gatorade.
A spokerperson for the Titans had "no comment". And why should they, how the hell do you explain this? Remind me to avoid any Texas frat parties.
If Vince Young is sober, do you think the Titans can win the Super Bowl?
[Source: theonlinewire.com]
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Woman Indicted in MySpace Suicide Case
LOS ANGELES — In a highly unusual use of a federal law generally employed in computer fraud cases, a federal grand jury here on Thursday indicted a Missouri woman accused of using a phony online identity to trick and taunt a 13-year-old girl, who committed suicide in response to the cyberbaiting.
The woman, Lori Drew, was charged with one count of conspiracy and three counts of accessing a computer without authorization and via interstate commerce to obtain information to inflict emotional distress. Each count carries a maximum penalty of five years in prison.
Ms. Drew lives in O’Fallon, Mo., where, according to the indictment, she created a MySpace account under the name Josh Evans in 2006. Prosecutors said she used the social networking account to contact a young girl named in the indictment as M.T.M. with sexually charged messages from “Josh.” The girl, who has been identified by her mother as Megan Meier, was a former friend of Ms. Drew’s daughter.
After a few weeks of chatting, “Josh Evans” began to send Megan nasty messages, via the MySpace account, ending with one that suggested “the world would be a better place” without her. Megan, believing she had been rejected by “Josh,” committed suicide in her home.
Missouri law enforcement officials said they had not found enough evidence to bring charges in the case, and Ms. Drew, who was 48 when Megan died, has repeatedly denied creating the account.
But because MySpace, a unit of Fox Interactive Media, is based in Beverly Hills, Calif., and its server is here, federal prosecutors decided to wield a federal statute that is generally used to prosecute fraud that occurs across state lines.
The statute applies in the case, the indictment says, because by violating the user agreement of MySpace, which prohibits phony accounts, Ms. Drew was seeking information “to further a tortuous act, namely, intentional infliction of emotional distress.”
“To my knowledge it is the first case of its kind in the nation,” said Thomas P. O’Brien a United States attorney in California. “But when an adult violates terms on a MySpace account to gain information that creates this type of reaction, it caused this office to take a really hard look.”
Calls to Megan’s parents, Tina and Ron Meier, were not returned Thursday. Mr. Meier told The St. Louis Post-Dispatch: “It’s a good day. It’s an awesome feeling.”
Ms. Drew’s lawyer, H. Dean Steward, said: “I am deeply disappointed. We thought when the St. Louis prosecutors took a look at the case and decided not to bring charges that was the end of it. I don’t think the statute they used fits the facts in the indictments.”
Ms. Drew is scheduled to be arraigned in Los Angeles in June.
Experts were skeptical that the charges would withstand close legal scrutiny.
“It is an extremely aggressive indictment,” said Rebecca Lonergan, a law professor at the University of Southern California and a former federal prosecutor. “I have never in 18 years as a prosecutor seen the statute used that way. Cybercrimes is a relatively new area, but I am not sure this statute technically covers the essence of the harm.”
Officials at MySpace said in a written statement, “MySpace does not tolerate cyberbullying and is cooperating fully with the U.S. attorney in this matter.”
Various state and local governments have passed or introduced laws that prohibit cyberbullying, often through requirements that school districts have cyberbullying policies.
“I have concerns about the term ‘cyberbullying’ being applied to this situation,” said Nancy Willard, executive director of the Center for Safe and Responsible Internet Use. “Cyberbullying usually occurs between peers. It is not this kind of action.”
Ms. Willard, who is also a former lawyer, said she also had doubts about the prosecutor’s tactics. “I, like everyone else, would like to see Lori Drew see her comeuppance,” she said, “but I have some concerns. I don’t think the statute was written to apply to this case.”
[Source: New York Times]
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Target: Michelle Obama
The other day I received an e-mail from a 77-year-old female reader who wondered the following:
David, What is your concept of Michelle Obama's statement about the first time being proud of America? To me, it seems like she has a dislike of America.
This sentiment is currently being manufactured for political gain by the Tennessee Republican Party, who has apparently decided that Michelle Obama is the next Reverend Wright. You see, they've put together a catchy little "ad" that replays the would-be First Lady's sound-bite remark over and over again, interspersed with average white Americans (and one Hispanic!) reciting long-winded statements on what makes them proud of America.
Of course, what rankles so many, and what the GOP is attempting to make political hay over, is the qualifier "first time in my adult life." Here's Michelle Obama's clarification:
Look. I know this may come as a shock to some of you, but there are many people in this country whose emotional palate is not entirely composed of the colors black and white. Yes, Michelle Obama's statement--a three second blip replayed ad nauseam--was a political slip of sorts. In tandem with such other manufactured controversies as flag pins and strange sounding names, it might even be enough to tip the balance for some voters away from Obama.
As Barack Obama has often said in this campaign, nuance doesn't play well in politics. You hit your points over and over again, reduce complex issues into bumper sticker slogans. You bash and bash and bash again. But here's the funny thing: that's precisely why the Michelle Obama ad (like the Reverend Wright ads used in Mississippi) will ultimately fail. This ham-fisted attack is too transparent, too repetitive. Moreover, it is, once again, a bunch of Southern whites (and one Hispanic!) beating up on a black woman. The message that these two black people aren't patriotic enough to be trusted with the White House will indeed play to those bigots who already believe as much. But more people will see it for what it is.
Even if you think that Michelle Obama was caught in a moment of candor for her initial remark--that she hadn't ever been proud of America in her adult life until this year--so what? She is proud now, maybe she was proud as teenager, or a toddler. Maybe she went through a bitter phase while delving into America's shameful history of race relations when she wrote her college thesis. The question we should be asking ourselves is, what did her feelings for the country inspire her to do? Did she go postal? Burn any flags? Give whitey the finger? No. No. And no.
What was the context of her remark, anyway? That she was proud at how many new people were getting involved in politics. Oh, the horror! Is there a racial subtext to her comment. Absolutely. As Tom Hanks put, we are poised to elect a person to our nation's highest office who, at one time in our country's history, was only considered three-fifths of a human being. Make no mistake, that is a first.
The GOP should be very wary of attempting to score political points off of Michelle Obama. Who is on the other side of that equation, after all? Cindy "I-will-never-release-my-tax-returns" McCain, the multi-millionaire heiress to a beer-distributor fortune. Do we really want to reduce our potential first ladies into political symbols?
[Source: AOL]
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[Source: Radio Online]
Kidd Chris Fired - CBS Ousts WYSP Morning Host Kidd Chris, PD Cook
Active Rock WYSP-FM/Philadelphia morning host Kidd Chris (pictured) and PD John Cook are out after a guest on Kidd's morning show on March 21, Lady Gash, performed a racist song that then aired several times later that day and again on March 24. The song, entitled "Schwoogies," was sung to the tune of Blondie's "Call Me." Listeners also recorded the song and posted it on YouTube and several other sites.
In a statement, CBS spokeswoman Karen Mateo said, "We found the song to be highly offensive and completely inappropriate for broadcast on our airwaves. When senior management of the station learned that it had been played, they took immediate steps to prevent it from ever appearing on the station again."
She continued, "At the same time, we launched an extensive internal investigation into the situation including a thorough review of the editorial controls and systems we have in place to prevent this type of content from airing. We instituted additional educational training for the station, and have taken appropriate disciplinary action, including termination of the individuals involved."
Kidd Chris moved from afternoons to mornings (6-10am) in November replacing the syndicated Opie & Anthony. Previously, Chris spent more that two years in afternoons.
Cook, a 22-year veteran programmer, was appointed PD of WYSP and sister WPHT-AM (Big Talker 1210) last July. Before that Cook served as OM for KPLX-FM (99.5 The Wolf) and Classic Rock KDBN-FM/Dallas, where he was also PD of KPLX. Before joining Dallas duo in March, 2005, he was OM of CBS Radio's two outlets in San Antonio. (05-16-08)
[Source: Radio Online]
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Peak Oil - Oil Production Has Peaked As Demand Soars
In 1998, oil cost $10 per barrel and experts said the price would return to $5 per barrel, but it never happened. Many people believed we had huge oil fields that would never run dry, and that new fields would meet our growing demands. Ten years later, the evidence is beginning to align to tell a much different story -- one that we are just beginning to read.
I serve as a member of the Minnesota House of Representatives Energy Committee. This year our committee held hearings on "peak oil."
Peak oil is the point where world oil companies produce a maximum output of oil, after which they will never be able to sustainably produce that same amount of oil again. Some people believe we have already reached that point, and many others believe we will reach that point in five to 10 years.
What does that mean for residents in district 30B? If China and India continue to purchase vehicles at the rate they are now, they will be consuming much greater amounts of oil at a time when world oil supply is either at its peak or beginning to decline. This is simple economics; a shortage in supply and increase in demand will lead to higher prices.
Consider these facts: According to Matthew R. Simmons, author of "Twilight in the Desert -- The Risk of Peak Oil," and one of the testifiers before our Energy Committee, oil accounts for 95 percent of our transportation energy and is increasingly being used to make consumer goods. In 1995, the world demanded 70 million barrels per day (mbd), and today we demand 88 mbd. World crude production was at about 69 mbd in 2003, 74 mbd in 2005, and is currently at about 73 mbd.
Did you know that the U.S. reached peak oil in 1970? Indonesia once exported oil and now imports it. Cantarell, the world's second-largest oil field in Mexico, peaked in May of 2005 and its production has since declined by 41 percent. Prudhoe Bay peaked around 1988 and produces less than one-third of its peak production. Several other oil fields have peaked and are declining.
Skeptics point to new discoveries to solve our supply shortage issue. There were 134 fields discovered in the 1940's, 743 in the 1970's, 510 in the 1990's, and so far 65 in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Production from those fields closely correlates with the number of fields discovered.
Oil companies are drilling in deeper waters and extracting oil from Canadian tar sands, which is very inefficient. Saudi Arabian production has been relatively constant, with a recent small decline. Hedge fund trading wasn't responsible for past price increases. High prices haven't squelched demand, yet.
Prices continued to climb after the first Iraq War, and technology hasn't had a great impact on consumption in automobiles. Mr. Simmons clearly proves the skeptics wrong.
If you are still skeptical, maybe this will change your mind... in an email sent to Shell Oil employees in January of 2008, Shell Oil's CEO, Jeron van der Veer stated that the company estimates that after 2015, supplies of easy-to-access oil will not keep up with demand.
Peak oil is real. If we're not seeing it now, we will be soon. People continue to ask me if I can do something about gas prices -- then they chuckle because they think it is too large of an issue to tackle. Well, the state is responding.
We passed a peak oil resolution to draw attention to this emerging issue; we funded research for hydrogen and algae being used to create biodiesel; we established renewable energy goals for transportation fuels and we held many discussions about biomass and renewable energy fuel potential.
We're trying to move forward on rail and transit initiatives and are asking tough questions of refiners, auto manufacturers and others involved in transportation to encourage them to be the catalyst for change.
If we continue to rely upon oil as our main source of transportation fuel, our economy will suffer. We have the ability to overcome the economic challenges of the near future by being leaders in finding ways to create alternative fuel sources and reduce consumption.
Mr. Simmons is a Harvard Business School Graduate and former energy investment banker of nearly 40 years. When I asked why he shared this information, he replied that during his career he began seeing indisputable evidence related to peaking oil supplies, and researching the issue became a passion. He said that he now feels a responsibility to share this information and to give something back to society.
[Source: Post Bulletin]
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Gayego Preakness Odds: Could Change Quickly With Behindthebar Out
Gayego was listed with 10 to 1 Preakness odds heading into Saturday's race but all that could change now that his nearest competitor, Behindthebar, has been removed from the race.
Behindthebar was listed with the next shortest odds after heavily favored Big Brown. He was taken out of the race due to a bruise in his left front foot, trainer Todd Pletcher said.
Gayego's odds to win the 2008 Preakness were likely to be shortened further over the course of Friday afternoon, therefore Gambling911.com was urging its readers to bet on Gayego immediately (see odds here) in order to lock him in at the 10 to 1 odds. It was conceivable that as soon as this article headed to press, Gayego's Preakness odds could be shortened.
Gayego is the only Derby horse besides heavily favored Big Brown racing in the 2008 Preakness Stakes. He was among the more talked about horses before finishing 17th out of 20th in the Kentucky Derby.
He won the Arkansas Derby and had never finished lower than second in five trips.
This horse never had a chance to run until late," Gayego's trainer, Paulo Lobo, said of Gayego's Derby run. "The first half-mile for him was a bad, bad race. It took him out of it early."
Lobo said the final decision was a team effort between him and the colt's owners, Cubanacan Stables. They met Saturday morning and Lobo told the owners he'd like to see how Gayego galloped Sunday and Monday before committing to the second leg of the Triple Crown. On Tuesday morning, Lobo made it official - Gayego would join Big Brown as the only two runners from the Derby's full field of 20 to run in the Preakness.
"He's eating everything since he came back from Churchill," Lobo said. "He's pulling my rider in the morning. He's strong, happy. We decided to give him a chance."
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[Source: By Don Shapiro, Gambling911.com]
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Dennis Rodman Charged With Domestic Violence in LA | Gina Peterson
LOS ANGELES (AP) — Prosecutors say they have charged former NBA star Dennis Rodman with domestic violence for allegedly hitting his girlfriend at a hotel last month.
Los Angeles City Attorney spokesman Nick Velasquez says Rodman was charged Wednesday with spousal battery, brandishing a deadly weapon, and one count of dissuading a witness. The charges were misdemeanors.
The 46-year-old was arrested at a hotel April 30 after Gina Peterson called hotel security. Police say she suffered injuries to her arm.
Rodman spokesman Darren Prince says Rodman had had too much to drink when he got into an altercation with Peterson. Prince says the couple are still dating.
"We look forward to a successful resolution of this misdemeanor matter," said Rodman's attorney, Paul Meyer.
Attempts to find a phone listing for Peterson were not successful.
[Source: Associated Press]
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Ellen DeGeneres, de Rossi plan to marry, AP is told
LOS ANGELES (AP) — Ellen DeGeneres is putting the California Supreme Court ruling in favor of gay marriage into action — she and Portia de Rossi plan to wed, DeGeneres announced during a taping of her talk show.
DeGeneres was taping the episode of "The Ellen DeGeneres Show" on Thursday, the day the state's high court struck down California laws against gay marriage, and it was to air Friday, a person close to the production said.
The person, who was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly, spoke to The Associated Press on the condition of anonymity.
Citing the court's ruling, DeGeneres said she and girlfriend de Rossi ("Ally McBeal," "Nip/Tuck") would be getting married.
De Rossi, 35, who was in the studio, and DeGeneres, 50, were applauded by audience members, the person close to the production said.
Calls and e-mails late Thursday to DeGeneres' publicist were not immediately returned.
The court ruling means same-sex couples could tie the knot in as little as a month. However, religious and social conservatives are seeking to put a constitutional amendment on the ballot in November that would undo the Supreme Court ruling and ban gay marriage.
DeGeneres has boldly used TV before to make a stand for gay rights.
In 1997, she brought her character on the ABC sitcom "Ellen" out of the closet, making the show the first on prime-time network TV to have an openly gay lead. The move drew cheers from gay civil rights organizations but was condemned by some religious groups.
A month before, DeGeneres had proclaimed from the cover of Time magazine that she was a lesbian.
DeGeneres and the glamorous de Rossi have been a familiar couple at Hollywood events, including the Academy Awards. Previously, DeGeneres had a high-profile relationship with actress Anne Heche.
In a 2005 interview with Allure magazine, the comedian said she hoped she and de Rossi are "together the rest of our lives."
"I never would have thought my life would have turned out this way," DeGeneres told the magazine. "To have money. Or to have a gorgeous girlfriend. I just feel so lucky with everything in my life right now."
[Source: By LYNN ELBER, Associated Press]
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Amy Ryan - TV Tonight: One-Hour Finale of The Office, "Goodbye, Toby"
Awww, tear! As much as I think The Office hasn't been quite as glorious this season as it has in the past, I'm still going to miss it when it's gone. I'm also just itching to see tonight's one-hour finale because what if something big happens (like a you-know-what from Jim)?!
Tonight already promises a sad farewell (the title of the episode is "Goodbye, Toby") and a special guest star (the Oscar-nominated Amy Ryan of Gone Baby Gone, pictured). The episode description is this: "It's Toby's goodbye party at Dunder Mifflin and Michael demands a huge celebration that matches the joy in his heart. Angela, sick of Michael's unreasonable last minute demands, refuses, and Michael turns to Phyllis to take over the party planning committee.
Meanwhile, Dwight and Meredith haze the new HR woman, Holly (Amy Ryan)." One of the promos claims there will be "surprises right down to the very last second." Aaah! Cheesy as it may sound, I've already got butterflies in my stomach. What about you? What are your hopes and dreams for tonight's Season Four finale? To see a preview and discuss, read more.
Photo courtesy of NBC
[Source: buzzsugar.com]
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CSI Season Finale
On CSI (CTV, CBS), Warrick (Gary Dourdan) doubts himself when he is accused of murdering a famous Las Vegas gangster.
0
Anna Nicole Smith's mother sues TMZ and Howard K. Stern
Anna Nicole Smith's mother Virgie Arthur is suing TMZ and Howard K. Stern for "tarnishing her image."
This crazy old hoot thought she was a good mama until TMZ and plenty of other bloggers ran her name through the mud. As Anna Nicole told it, Virgie was a hateful old hag who couldn't even stand herself.
Arthur thinks that TMZ.com was working with Howard K. Stern to prevent her from getting custody of Anna Nicole's daughter Dannielynn.
"Their goal was simple and straightforward," the lawsuit filed in Texas State Court reads, "to ‘destroy’ anyone that was opposed to Howard K. Stern or his interest."
TMZ ran a story titled: "Virgie has son with step-brother." In their quasi-investigative piece, TMZ unveils that Virgie Arthur had a son with her step brother and a poll showed that most readers found it "creepy."
Anna Nicole's mama hasn't exactly denied the story's truth, but Virgie still wants financial compensation as an apology.
[Source: gaysocialites.com]
0
John Phillip Law, 70; actor played blind angel in 'Barbarella' Dies
Columbia Pictures
John Phillip Law and Caroline Munro in 1974's "The Golden Voyage of Sinbad."
John Phillip Law, a tall, blond actor who cut a striking figure as the blind angel opposite Jane Fonda in 1968's "Barbarella" and in other film roles, has died. He was 70.
Law died Tuesday at his Los Angeles home, his former wife, Shawn Ryan, said. The cause of death was not announced.
Born in Los Angeles on Sept. 7, 1937, to L.A. County Sheriff's Deputy John Law and actress Phyllis Sallee, Law decided to become an actor after taking drama classes at the University of Hawaii.
He moved to New York in the early 1960s, studied with Elia Kazan at the Lincoln Center Repertory Theater and landed bit parts on Broadway. He went to Europe and found work in a handful of Italian films, where he caught the attention of Norman Jewison. The director cast Law as Alexei Kolchin, a young Soviet submariner who wins the heart of a teenage baby-sitter in "The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming," his 1966 Cold War comedy set in New England.
Law's next break came in Roger Vadim's science fiction fantasy starring Fonda, who was then married to the director.
Equipped with oversize, feathery wings, Law's bronzed angel, Pygar, shields Fonda's gun-toting, go-go-boot-wearing heroine in her intergalactic adventures.
After gaining notice for his roles in "Hurry Sundown" (1967), "The Sergeant" (1968) opposite Rod Steiger, and "The Red Baron" (1970), Law starred as the ruthless Robin Stone in "The Love Machine," a 1971 version of Jacqueline Susann's pulp novel. The movie flopped.
Law, who mastered Italian and Spanish in his European travels, worked steadily in Hollywood and abroad, appearing in such action-adventure movies as "The Golden Voyage of Sinbad" (1974), "The Cassandra Crossing" (1977) and "Tarzan the Ape Man" (1981), among others. He also had a stint playing Jim Grainger on the daytime television drama "The Young and the Restless."
At the beginning of his career in the '60s, Law lived in a 1924 Los Feliz mansion with his brother, Tom, who had been the road manager for Peter, Paul and Mary.
The brothers rented rooms to up-and-coming singers and artists, including Bob Dylan, Andy Warhol and Tiny Tim, turning the home into a vibrant salon of emerging pop-culture icons. Life at the Castle, as it was known, was documented in “Flashing on the Sixties,” a 1987 collection of photos and text by Tom's former wife, Lisa Law.
Besides his brother, Law is survived by a daughter, Dawn, and a grandson.
Services will be private.
[Los Angeles Times]
Law died Tuesday at his Los Angeles home, his former wife, Shawn Ryan, said. The cause of death was not announced.
He moved to New York in the early 1960s, studied with Elia Kazan at the Lincoln Center Repertory Theater and landed bit parts on Broadway. He went to Europe and found work in a handful of Italian films, where he caught the attention of Norman Jewison. The director cast Law as Alexei Kolchin, a young Soviet submariner who wins the heart of a teenage baby-sitter in "The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming," his 1966 Cold War comedy set in New England.
Law's next break came in Roger Vadim's science fiction fantasy starring Fonda, who was then married to the director.
Equipped with oversize, feathery wings, Law's bronzed angel, Pygar, shields Fonda's gun-toting, go-go-boot-wearing heroine in her intergalactic adventures.
After gaining notice for his roles in "Hurry Sundown" (1967), "The Sergeant" (1968) opposite Rod Steiger, and "The Red Baron" (1970), Law starred as the ruthless Robin Stone in "The Love Machine," a 1971 version of Jacqueline Susann's pulp novel. The movie flopped.
Law, who mastered Italian and Spanish in his European travels, worked steadily in Hollywood and abroad, appearing in such action-adventure movies as "The Golden Voyage of Sinbad" (1974), "The Cassandra Crossing" (1977) and "Tarzan the Ape Man" (1981), among others. He also had a stint playing Jim Grainger on the daytime television drama "The Young and the Restless."
At the beginning of his career in the '60s, Law lived in a 1924 Los Feliz mansion with his brother, Tom, who had been the road manager for Peter, Paul and Mary.
The brothers rented rooms to up-and-coming singers and artists, including Bob Dylan, Andy Warhol and Tiny Tim, turning the home into a vibrant salon of emerging pop-culture icons. Life at the Castle, as it was known, was documented in “Flashing on the Sixties,” a 1987 collection of photos and text by Tom's former wife, Lisa Law.
Besides his brother, Law is survived by a daughter, Dawn, and a grandson.
Services will be private.
[Los Angeles Times]
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Trimble Copernicus II GPS Receiver
Trimble has rolled out its Copernicus II GPS receiver that ought to see action in many a miniaturized gizmo in the near future. After all, it shares roughly the same measurements as the average thumbnail, being a surface-mount, high sensitivity module. Some of the major advancements found in the Copernicus II receiver include the ability of signal tracking for applications functioning despite being in poor signal environments and a high-sensitivity stationary timing mode for time synchronization. Thanks to its higher sensitivity, performance and faster startup times, the Copernicus II GPS module allows system integrators to add Global Positioning System (GPS) capability to a mobile device with minimal impact on its size or battery life without breaking the bank, and these savings will also be passed down to consumers which is always a good thing considering the global credit crunch at this point in time.
The Copernicus II GPS module is a complete, ready-to-go receiver that provides position, velocity and time data. The receiver features Trimble patented software technology that provides faster startup times and even higher performance in foliage and urban canyon environments. Compatible with active or passive antennas, the Copernicus II GPS receiver can be used in portable handheld, battery-powered applications such as Bluetooth appliances, sport accessories, personal navigators or cameras, computer and communication peripherals as well as vehicle tracking, navigation, and security products.
The Copernicus II GPS receiver will come with version 3.0 firmware, allowing it to generate position fixes with high accuracy in extremely challenging environments and under poor signal conditions, even down to -160dBm. This GPS receiver won’t consume much power at all, where a typical session takes just 120 milliwatts at full power with continuous tracking. Trimble is expected to release the Copernicus II GPS receiver sometime in the third quarter of this year.
[Source: Coolest Gadgets]
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Mariah Carey Ex Mark Sudack “Heartbroken” Over Marriage
According to reports, Mariah Carey’s ex-boyfriend Mark Sudack is “heartbroken” over her sudden marriage to Nick Cannon. Carey and Sudack dated for four years and split earlier this year.
“Everyone is scared to call him because no one knows what to say,” a friend close to Sudack says. “He never thought she would go off and marry someone else. He’s heartbroken and shocked.”
Carey and Cannon were unexpectedly married in a private ceremony earlier this month.
[Source: TransWorldNews]
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Lori Drew Indicted Over Megan Meier Suicide
The Megan Meier story was such a sad one. A poor 13 year old girl committed suicide following taunts online. While Megan thought she was chatting with a 16 year old boy, she was in fact chatting with Lori Drew. Drew used the persona of Josh Evans to first befriend the young teen, and then increasingly became hostile in the exchanges.
Lori Drew of suburban St. Louis was indicted today on one count of conspiracy and three counts of accessing protected computers without authorization to obtain information to inflict emotional distress on the girl.
Megan hung herself in her bedroom closet in October 2006, the fact that Lori Drew was the cause became public knowledge months ago. About the only surprise in this indictment is the length of time it has taken to bring it about.
Obviously indicting Lori Drew will not bring the little girl back, but this must be of some comfort to Megan’s family that justice will finally be served.
The conspiracy count carries a maximum penalty of five years in federal prison, as does each count of accessing protected computers. While it is unlikely that Lori Drew will receive the maximum sentence, but it would seem more than likely that she will be spending some time behind bars.
[Source: BY Simon Barrett, Blogger News Network]
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Progivil, Viagra for the Mind
Johann Hari documents his experience with Progivil, a drug originally intended to help narcoleptics, that has been found to enhance mental acuity and IQ.
It was, they said, Viagra for the brain. It was originally designed for narcoleptics in the seventies, but clinical trials had stumbled across something odd: if you give it to non-narcoleptics, they just become smarter. Their memory and concentration improves considerably, and so does their IQ.
It’s not an amphetamine or stimulant, the article explained: it doesn’t make you high, or wired. It seems to work by restricting the parts of your brain that make you sluggish or sleepy. No significant negative effects have been discovered. Now students are using it in the run-up to exams as a “smart drug” – a steroid for the mind.
[Source: ClusterFlock]
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Dolly Parton vs. Howard Stern
Country legend Dolly Parton isn't flattered by a recent Howard Stern parody, in which the satellite radio host mashed up Parton quotes to make it sound as if the singer were spewing offensive and racist remarks. In a post on her official website, Parton is quoted as saying she has "never been so shocked, hurt and humiliated" in her life, and even hints and at potentially suing the shock jock.
Parton was the victim of one of Stern's "audiobook" bits, in which celebrity quotes are pieced together to form chopped-up, raunchy sentences. In the past, Stern has remixed quotes from the likes of William Shatner and Oprah.
In the bit with Parton, which originally aired last week, Stern and his cohorts cut up Parton quotes in an attempt to make it sound as if the artist were saying a host of sexually explicit and racist remarks. Said Parton on her site: "In a blue million years, I would never have such vulgar things come out of my mouth. They have done editing or some sort of trickery to make this horrible, horrible thing. Please accept my apology for them and certainly know I had nothing to do with this. If there was ever going to be a lawsuit, it's going to be over this. Just wanted you to know that I am completely devastated by this."
While the explicit content of the Stern bit prevents me from linking to it, has Parton's response to the bit simply brought more publicity to Stern, or did the overtly racist content of the sketch warrant a response from the artist?
[Source: LA Times]
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California Supreme Court Overturns Gay Marriage Ban
In a 4-3 ruling, the justices rule that state marriage laws are unconstitutional.
By Maura Dolan, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
SAN FRANCISCO -- The California Supreme Court ruled today that same-sex couples should be permitted to marry, rejecting state marriage laws as discriminatory.
The state high court's 4-3 ruling was unlikely to end the debate over gay matrimony in California. A group has circulated petitions for a November ballot initiative that would amend the state Constitution to block same-sex marriage, while the Legislature has twice passed bills to authorize gay marriage. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed both.
The long-awaited court decision stemmed from San Francisco's highly publicized same-sex weddings, which in 2004 helped spur a conservative backlash in a presidential election year and a national dialogue over gay rights.
Several states have since passed constitutional amendments banning gay marriage. Today, 27 states have such amendments.
The reaction to today's ruling outside the courthouse in San Francisco was one of jubilation as couples, once denied marriage, hugged, kissed, shouted and shook their fists at the sky. Holding up a sign that says, "Life feels different when you're married," Helen Pontac said she was beyond words.
"Oh, wow," she said. "It felt so good when we got married in San Francisco. This feels better."
She hugged her partner Shelly Bailes. "The best day of my life was when I met Helen," Bailes said. "This was as good as that."
Both women said they have been together for 34 years. Added Bailes, "This feels good for us. But I can't imagine what it means for all those young couples with their entire lives ahead of them."
Pontac shook her fist at the sky. "We got a bottle of champagne on ice."
A few feet away, Kate Kendell, executive director of National Center for Lesbian Rights, was mobbed by reporters and well-wishers.
"As of today, the right to marry is now guaranteed to anyone," she said. "All I know is that we won."
At his home in Toluca Lake, Jim Smith a parent and part of a same-sex relationship, also rejoiced. "I'm ecstatic," said Smith, 40, chief technology officer for an online advertising agency. "I think this is the beginning of the end of ostracism, bullying, and all the things that used to make people feel less human than others."
Opponents of same-sex-marriage had a much different reaction.
Ron Prentice, executive director of the Sacramento and Riverside-based California Family Council, said the group was "not surprised by the ruling, though extremely disappointed."
He said the group expects "that with the November ballot we will have the opportunity for the people of California to once again define marriage as only between a man and a woman and this time place it into California's constitution which would strengthen it and keep it out of the hands of the courts."
"We have not been able to count on the legislature or the courts of California to adhere to the will of the people," Prentice said. "This is yet another example why the people need to go to the polls in November to defend the historic and natural definition of marriage."
After a month of jubilant same-sex weddings here, the California Supreme Court intervened and ordered the city to stop issuing licenses to gay couples. The court later invalidated the documents and declined to address the constitutionality of a state ban on same-sex marriage until lower courts acted first.
Today’s ruling by the Republican-dominated court affects more than 100,000 same-sex couples in the state, about a quarter of whom have children, according to U.S. census figures. It came after high courts in New York, Washington and New Jersey refused to extend marriage rights to gay couples. Before today, only Massachusetts' top court has ruled in favor of permitting gays to wed.
Gay rights lawyers won an early victory in the dispute when a San Francisco trial judge decided in 2005 that gays should be permitted to wed. An appeals court later overturned that decision on a 2-1 vote, ruling that only the Legislature or the voters could change California's traditional definition of marriage.
Lawyers in favor of same-sex marriage argued that the law discriminated on the basis of both gender and sexual orientation.
Opponents countered that the ban was gender-neutral, barring both women and men from marrying members of their own sex. They also argued that people could be treated differently because of their sexual orientation if there was a rational basis for it.
In 2000, 61% of California voters approved Proposition 22, which said that "only marriage between a man and a woman is valid and recognized in California."
Since the ballot measure, California has passed one of the strongest domestic partnership laws in the country, giving registered same-sex couples most of the rights of married people.
The plan by San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, City Atty. Dennis Herrera and gay rights lawyers to challenge state marriage laws by wedding same-sex couples was carefully considered.
City officials chose the first couples to wed, hoping their long unions and sympathetic stories would put a face on same-sex marriage that courts would find difficult to reject. The city also decided to begin the weddings on a day when courts were closed to deprive opponents of quick legal intervention.
One of the first couples to wed, the lead plaintiffs in San Francisco's lawsuit challenging marriage laws, has since separated and is no longer part of the case.
The long parade of weddings fours years ago -- at City Hall and across the street from the California Supreme Court -- provided a dramatic backdrop for the gay rights debate.
Young gay fathers with babies strapped to their chests, lesbian couples with children and elderly gay couples who had been together for decades celebrated their unions while passersby honked their horns and friends threw rice and popped champagne corks. Protesters also showed up, carrying signs and denouncing the newlyweds.
Before today's ruling, gay rights lawyers predicted a victory in the California Supreme Court would help them defeat the proposed constitutional amendment against same-sex marriage, which the lawyers expect to qualify for the November ballot. A loss in the court would have helped the backers of the measure, they said.
The California Supreme Court has six Republican appointees and one Democrat. Scholars have described the court under the leadership of Chief Justice Ronald M. George as cautious and moderately conservative.
[Source: LA Times]
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Swiss 'Fusion Man' Flies Over the Alps With Jet-Propelled Wings
Years ago, aviation enthusiast and inventor Yves Rossy dreamed of soaring through the sky like a bird.
In 2006 that dream took flight.
Known as Switzerland’s "Fusion Man," Rossy in November 2006 became the first man in the world to fly with wings and four jet engines strapped to his body; on Wednesday he displayed that talent to the world.
The inaugural flight lasted six minutes in Bex, Switzerland, and included an emergency parachute programmed to automatically open if he were to black out, NBC11 reported at the time.
"The idea is to have fun, not to kill yourself," Rossy said in the story.
In Internet videos, Rossy wears a white helmet with the words "Jet-Man" on the front, dives out of a plane, fires up his wings and propels through the atmosphere, leaving a trail of special-effects white smoke in his wake.
• Click here to view YouTube video of Rossy in flight Part 1 | Part 2.
These days the former Swiss air force fighter pilot can be seen making figure eights over the Swiss Alps during his days off from work as an Airbus pilot for Swiss International Air Lines.
On Wednesday the 48-year-old daredevil made his first public flight with his self-made flying contraption in front of the world press after five years of training and many more years of dreaming.
"This flight was absolutely excellent," the extreme sports enthusiast said after touching down on an airfield near the eastern shore of Lake Geneva.
Half an hour earlier Rossy had stepped out of the Swiss-built Pilatus Porter aircraft at 7,500 feet, unfolded the rigid 8-foot wings strapped to his back and dropped.
Passing from free fall to a gentle glide, Rossy then triggered four jet turbines and accelerated to 186 miles an hour as a crowd on the mountaintop below gasped — then cheered.
His mother, who was among the spectators, told journalists she felt no fear. "He knows what he's doing," Paule Rossy said.
Steering only with his body, Rossy dived, turned and soared again, flying what appeared to be effortless loops from one side of the Rhone valley to the other. At times he rose 2,600 feet before descending again.
"It's like a second skin," he later told reporters. "If I turn to the left, I fly left. If I nudge to the right, I go right."
Rossy then performed a stunt he had never before tried.
After one last wave to the crowd, the rocket man tipped his wings, flipped onto his back and leveled out again, executing a perfect 360-degree roll that even a bird would find impossible.
"That was to impress the girls," he later admitted.
Wednesday's five-minute flight nearly never happened. Rossy said his engineers worked until the last minute to fix one of the four kerosene-fueled engines that power his flight.
He said he is ready now for a bigger challenge: crossing the English Channel later this year.
The stunt, which will be shown on live television, will test his flying machine to the limit. Rossy said he plans to practice the 22-mile trip by flying between two hot-air balloons.
"I still haven't used the full potential," he said.
Rossy told The Associated Press that one day he also hopes to fly through the Grand Canyon.
To do this, he will have to fit his wings with bigger, more powerful jets to allow for greater maneuvering. The German-built model aircraft engines he uses already provide 200 pounds of thrust — enough to allow Rossy and his 120-pound flying suit to climb through the air.
"Physically, it's absolutely no stress," Rossy said. "It's like being on a motorbike."
But on this ride, even the slightest movement can cause problems. Rossy said he has to focus hard on relaxing in the air, because "if you put tension on your body, you start to swing around."
Should things go wrong — and Rossy says they have done more times than not — there's always a yellow handle to jettison the wings and unfold the parachute.
"I've had many 'whoops' moments," he said. "My safety is altitude."
Rossy — whose sponsors have dubbed him "Fusion Man" — says his form of human flight will remain the reserve of very few for now. The price and effort involved are simply too enormous, he says.
So far Rossy and sponsors have poured more than 200,000 Swiss francs, or $190,000, and countless hours of labor into building the device. He would not estimate how much his device would cost should it ever be brought to market.
But, he believes similar jet-powered wings one day will be more widely available to experienced parachutists ready for the ultimate flying experience.
That is, if they don't mind missing out on the breathtaking panorama above the Swiss Alps.
"I am so concentrated, I don't really enjoy the view," Rossy said.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
[Source: FOX News]
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Dunkin Donuts | FREE Iced Coffee Day
Get one FREE 16oz Iced Coffee today from 10AM - 10PM. Limit one per person per visit.
Click here for participating locations.
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[Source: Think Fashion]
Fantasia Steals American Idol Spotlight - Syesha Mercado Sent Home
Even with former idol winner Fantasia Barrino’s performance, last night’s episode of American Idol was not a good night for the fairer sex - namely, Syesha Mercado.
For the viewers out there who actually care about the results and the contestants themselves, Syesha, the last remaining female contestant, was axed on Wednesday night’s elimination show in what some (big surprise) are calling a major fix.
In the Tuesday show featuring three performances by each remaining contestant, judge Randy Jackson gave Syesha supposed accolades, but it's said that he also inadvertently revealed his bias toward her with a few well-chosen words.
“I’m so happy you are peaking at the right time in this competition,” Jackson said. That’s why you’re standing there at No. 3.”
Did you catch it? No. 3, not Top 3. That word fart apparently indicates that Jackson had already given Syesha the gong in his own mind and wanted to influence the vote.
Excuse us for not putting on our tinfoil conspiracy hats just yet. Randy's little gaffe hardly compares to Paula’s blatant judging screw-up. To be fair, we can probably blame whatever it is Paula chugs in her Coke glass for her on-air fumbles, but yo, dawg – it sounds like Randy just had a brain cramp.
But Who Cares About the Results? Fantasia's Gettin' Her Freak On!
Moving on, for those of you who don’t give a low note about the mediocre current Idol talents, let’s discuss Fantasia’s guest appearance and her brilliant performance of her new single “Bore Me”.( And by brilliant we sort of mean, “Oh my God, what the f*** just happened?”)
Good, bad, we’re not sure what that performance was – and judging from the stunned lapse in his perma-sneer, neither was Simon Cowell. Even hardcore Idol forum fans didn’t know what to make of newly neon-haired Fantasia’s on-air freakfest. Fan reports include everything from "I loved it...it was FUN and CRAAAAZZZY! I was up dancing!" to "What was all the screaming about?...She's lost it."
Check out the performance below, and let us know what you think! Fun and fab or total fail?
[Source: Think Fashion]
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David Cook vs David Archuleta in American Idol Final, Syesha Mercado Goes Home
...and that leaves two. Yes, David Archuleta and David Cook battle each other for the American Idol crown. Syesha Mercado goes home. Sure we'll see her surface somewhere again. She has amazing vocals and is really good.
[Image Source: American Idol]
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Miley Cyrus Already Hanging With D-List Skanks
Beleaguered 'Hannah Montana' star seen out with Kim Kardashian
By TheImproper.com
Troubled Miley Cyrus (pictured second from left) hung out with one of her biggest fans last weekend at KIIS-FM’s 10th annual Wango Tango music festival in Los Angeles: none other than reality star Kim Kardashian (far left).
Wango Tango, a daylong outdoor concert, was held this year at the Verizon Wireless Amphitheater. Tween fans of Miley and the Jonas Brothers turned the outdoor hootenany into a screamfest. American Idol host Ryan Seacrest, who also hosts the KIIS-FM morning show, was there to emcee the event.
Kim Kardashian, 27, who's famous for having a big *ss and a sex tape, wrote about hanging with 15-year-old Miley on her blog Monday (see below). With semi-nude Vanity Fair photos under her belt, will it be long before Miley's sex tape hits the Internet? Kardashian's tape came out only a couple of years after she started hanging with ex-BFF Paris Hilton (who also got famous overnight when her sex tape came out). You know what they say: Birds of a feather....
May 12, 2008
[By Kim Kardashian]
Ryan Seacrest asked the Kardashian clan to join him at the music festival Wango Tango. So we went with him this weekend and ran into a lot of super performers backstage!
Our [reality] show just got rated No. 1 show on the E! Network. I'm so thrilled!!!
We honestly had such a blast! Kendall and Kylie [Kim's youngest sisters] were most excited to see the Jonas Brothers and [sister] Khloe and I were most excited to see Miley Cyrus!
[Source: TheImproper.com]
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American Idol - Top Two Finalists Revealed Today
Today at 8:00pm CST, the top two finalists will be revealed. Who will they be? Find out here on Breaking Buzz shortly...
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Chicago Lifts Two-Year Ban on Foie Gras
CHICAGO (Reuters) - Gourmets in Chicago can order foie gras again after the city council on Wednesday repealed a two-year restaurant ban on a delicacy that critics say is produced at cruel expense to geese and ducks.
The aldermen voted 37-6 to drop the ban on restaurants serving foie gras, an ordinance that had passed with a single dissenting vote in April 2006.
The city had issued a few warnings to restaurants for flouting the ban and one defiant eatery was fined.
Mayor Richard Daley had called the ban the "silliest ordinance" the city council ever passed and said it made Chicago "the laughingstock of the nation."
Animal rights groups decry foie gras as a product of inhumane treatment as it is made by force-feeding geese and ducks through a steel pipe put down their throats, expanding their livers to 10 times normal size.
In 2004, California passed a law that will end the production and sale of foie gras in the state in 2012. Similar laws have been proposed in a few other states.
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals criticized Chicago's move to overturn the ban.
"This is industry's dirty political maneuvering at its worst," the group said in a statement.
"Today, that compassionate decision was reversed in a secretive, rushed bow to special interests that benefit from the cruel treatment of animals. It goes against what the vast majority of Chicagoans believe in."
Some restaurant owners, whose association lobbied for the ban's repeal, worried that other items such as lobster, veal and even eggs could be barred from their menus.
"I thought it was us sticking our nose in something we probably shouldn't have even been in," Alderman Dick Mell told the Chicago Sun-Times newspaper, adding that veal calves and chickens also suffer in confinement.
"There's some cruelty out there, folks."
[Source: REUTERS]
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Ex-Calvin Klein Model Heather Stohler Dies in Fire
A former model who appeared in several Calvin Klein ads with model Kate Moss has died in a fire in her Indiana apartment. She was 29.
Heather Stohler landed on the cover of several fashion magazines throughout the US and Europe during her career. Her highest profile gig was in a series of ads for Calvin Klein, and her face graced the cover of Italian Vogue nine times.
Firefighters responded to calls that a fire had broken out at the apartment Stohler shared with her boyfriend in Vincennes, In. Sunday morning. According to reports, by the time they had arrived, three-fourths of the apartment was charred beyond salvage.
Stohler and her boyfriend, 26-year-old Daniel Risley, were taken to nearby Good Samaritan Hospital. Reports say Stohler died of smoke inhalation shortly thereafter. Risley died the following morning.
A friend of Stohler said she had moved back to Indiana from Florida after leaving the modeling industry.
[Source: GayWired.com]
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Edwards to Endorse Obama
Christopher Cooper and Amy Chozick report on the presidential race.
Democrat John Edwards is expected to formally endorse Barack Obama, fresh signs of the party establishment embracing the likely nominee.
Campaign spokeswoman Jen Psaki said Edwards will join Obama at his Grand Rapids, Mich., rally where he will announce his endorsement.
Edwards, who dropped out of the race for the Democratic nomination in late January, placed second in the Iowa caucuses and was a favorite among some in the party’s liberal wing, particularly union members.
In West Virginia last night, where he appeared on the ballot and Sen. Hillary Clinton won in stunning fashion, Edwards garnered 7% of the vote — a surprise for a candidate who dropped out of the race before “Super Tuesday” voting Feb. 5.
Edwards could give a boost to Obama’s candidacy by attracting the exact sort of voter that has been Clinton’s strength — white, working-class voters from rust-belt states who are drawn to a populist political philosophy.
Obama has struggled for such support. Clinton, behind Obama in the delegate count and popular vote, has remained in the race and argues that her greater appeal to blue-collar workers makes her more electable against Republican John McCain in November.
Edwards previously declined to back either candidate, both of whom courted his endorsement and promised to advocate for antipoverty issues he has long championed. More recently, he hinted that he might take sides soon, and strongly indicated that woud be for Sen. Obama.
People close to Edwards have said that he sees deep flaws in both Clinton and Obama. He thinks Obama lacks the fire to wage war against special interests in Washington, and objects that Clinton takes money from lobbyists and is part of the inside-the-beltway aristocracy, which he considers to be the problem with American politics.
[Source: Washington Wire]
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HTC Touch Diamond Phone Posed To Finally Top iPhone
Boston (dbTechno) - The Apple iPhone still stands above the rest of the pack when it comes to touch-screen phones. The iPhone set the bar extremely high, making it near impossible for anyone to beat it, until now. HTC has introduced the Touch Diamond phone, which will be powered by Windows Mobile 6.1, to try and overthrow the iPhone.
In London, HTC revealed the Touch Diamond phone. The Touch Diamond featured a reworked TouchFlo 3D interface which gives users an easier way to get into their messages, contacts, etc.
The screen looks quite impressive from pictures released.
It is a 2.8-inch 680×480 VGA touch-screen, as well as touch-sensitive controls below the screen.
It runs off of Windows Mobile 6.1 and also supports Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 2.0, GPA, as well as HSDPA support.
The Touch Diamond will also be getting a customized mobile Web browser which allows you to zoom in and pan sites with one hand. When you turn the device, the page will turn as well, sound familiar?
Other extras include 192MB RAM, 256MB flash memory 4GB internal storage, and a 3.2-megapixel camera.
It will ship in Europe in June, followed by Asia and the Middle East shortly after.
North America will be getting their own version of the phone in the second half of 2008.
[Source: dbtechno]
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[Source: By Risemoon, RightCelebrity Images Source: FHM, EasyDoesItUniversity]
Svetlana Shusterman: Real World HOT!
Meet Svetlana Shusterman, Real World Key West’s hottest housemate and FHM magazine cover-girl. See her hot photos, biography and video here.
She is making a name for herself in a variety of reality television programs mostly with the MTV network.
Svetlana Shusterman Biography
She was born on December 1st 1985 in the Ukraine Russia which makes this hot housemate only 22 years old. She is a medical student at Temple University which means that she has brains as well as hot brawn.
Svetlana Shusterman burst on to our television screens as a reality TV star in 2006 where she played a bodacious housemate in Real World: Key West. Her 21st birthday party was televised on My Super Sweet Sixteen in 2007. She was also be part of the Real World: Road Rules: Freshmeat II cast in 2008.
Shusterman currently resides in Richboro, Pennsylvania. She has a boyfriend and describes her self as a “Russian Jew.” She is 5′5″ tall while her measurements include 34DD and and her weight is unknown.
About her breast rumors, she says “my boobs here are real (see video proof later). They are real. I would never put fake boobs in me.”
See more pictures below.
[Source: By Risemoon, RightCelebrity Images Source: FHM, EasyDoesItUniversity]
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One of the suspects in the prostution ring that led to the fall of New York Governor Eliot Spitzer has pleaded guilty.
Temeka Rachelle Lewis (pictured above in her 1997 yearbook photo) admitted that she booked hookers for the Emperor's Club who "traveled from state to state for the purpose of prostitution," in a read statement.
Court papers say the FBI secretly recorded conversations between Temeka and Spitzer about a Feb. 13th order for a prostitue named "Kristen." The former governor is identified in the court papers as Client No. 9
Lewis will be sentenced on August 6th and could get up to 25 years in prison.
Three other suspects are expected to also plead guilty. Gov. Spitzer will likely not face any charges.
Spitzer, who as state attorney general championed anti-prostitution legislation and cracked down on financial crimes, resigned as governor in March after The New York Times reported he was a client of the Emperors Club.
[Source: Socialite Report]
Temeka Rachelle Lewis Pleads Guilty in Spitzer Prostitution Ring
One of the suspects in the prostution ring that led to the fall of New York Governor Eliot Spitzer has pleaded guilty.
Temeka Rachelle Lewis (pictured above in her 1997 yearbook photo) admitted that she booked hookers for the Emperor's Club who "traveled from state to state for the purpose of prostitution," in a read statement.
Court papers say the FBI secretly recorded conversations between Temeka and Spitzer about a Feb. 13th order for a prostitue named "Kristen." The former governor is identified in the court papers as Client No. 9
Lewis will be sentenced on August 6th and could get up to 25 years in prison.
Three other suspects are expected to also plead guilty. Gov. Spitzer will likely not face any charges.
Spitzer, who as state attorney general championed anti-prostitution legislation and cracked down on financial crimes, resigned as governor in March after The New York Times reported he was a client of the Emperors Club.
[Source: Socialite Report]
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Angelina Jolie Confirms She Is Having Twins
Angelina Jolie confirmed that she and Brad Pitt are having twins!
According to Access Hollywood, in an interview that took place in Cannes on Wednesday with the “Today” show’s Natalie Morales, ” Angelina confirmed the baby news.
The twins will be the couple’s fifth and sixth children joining Maddox,Pax, Zahara and Shiloh. Angelina confirmed the news in a side-by-side interview with Jack Black.
[Source: Celebglitz]
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Liveblog: NASA Announcement of "Success of Long Galactic Hunt"
Scientists using a combination of radio and x-rays have found the most recent supernova remnant observed in our galaxy, located about 26,000 light years from here. It's the youngest, most energetic supernova we know and could shed light on just exactly how the stardust we're made of -- heavier elements and all-- gets created. The finding also lends some support to astronomers calculations that there should be about three supernovae in our galaxy per century, although they still need to find dozens more similar supernova remnants to confirm their suspicions.
Liveblog:
NASA scientists at the Chandra X-ray Observatory are holding a teleconference this morning to announce "the discovery of an object in our Galaxy astronomers have been hunting for more than 50 years."
The press release announcing the teleconference generated considerable speculation, despite the efforts of some astronomers, so we're going to bring you live coverage of the announcement starting at 10 AM PST/1 PM Eastern.
We think it'll be interesting, but if it isn't, you'll be the first to know the news is boring.
There's a stream of the audio available, but I'll be on the phone, so if you've got any burning questions you want asked, Tweet @alexismadrigal, AIM: gatobarb, or post a comment.
I'll be updating the post as the conference happens, so remember to hit the old refresh button.
9:57 AM: Headset on. Excellent classical music on the hold line. (Vivaldi, maybe?)
10:03: NASA press release goes live, spoiling the fun. Scientists using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory have discovered the Milky Way's most recent supernova, which exploded a mere 140 years ago, a few years after the Civil War.
It's not exactly the discovery of extraterrestrials our readers were hoping for, but it's a significant finding.
10:05: Still on hold. But news: Previously, the latest known supernova occurred in 1680, right around the time Newton published his Principia. A discovery like this was long sought-after and lends support to astronomers rough estimate that three supernovae should explode in our galaxy each century. Scientists calculated the rough age of the supernova by tracking the expansion of its remains from 1985 until new observations were made last year. The remains, as you can see in the picture, had expanded 16 percent.
10:08: Call starts. Two discoverers will be on the line: Stephen Reynolds of NC State and David Green, University of Cambridge. Also, a 3rd party commentator: Bob Kirshner. Reynolds says, "The discovery addresses a lack of recent supernova in our galaxy."
10:16: Reynolds continuing: Supernova located approximately 26,000 light years away from here. Shockwave moving 5% of the speed of light, the fastest ever observed. This supernova exhibits special kind of x-ray activity, one of only 4 supernovae with these x-rays, which are incredibly high-energy, far beyond anything that even the Large Hadron Collider will create.
10:18: Supernovae are incredibly energetic and often visible across the universe, but this one, known as G1.9+0.3, was obscured by the cosmic dust near the center of the galaxy. The scientists said the dust made the explosion a trillion times fainter in optical light than an unobscured explosion.
Green said that this is a very interesting remnant. It's the youngest and smallest and has the highest expansion speed and highest electron energy. "We're confident it will contnue to find interesting information about supernova, supernovae remnants."
10:25: Kirshner gets on the line to provide context, says interesting things: Why are we interested in this? Self-interest. Supernovae make the chemical elements through real alchemy. The calcium in our bones and iron in our blood came from supernovae that exploded. So we're all star dust and it seems reasonable to want to know how elements get formed when stars explode," he said.
Unlike older supernova remnants: "For young objects like this one, you're getting to see the rock that made the splash, not the wave that's going out into the pond."
"This is a stellar death and the corpse is still warm," he concluded.
10:30: Young sounding guy gets on the Q&A line and asks, ""Does this discovery have the potential to get the moon crickets shipped off Earth?" WTF? say the scientists in nicer, longer words. Anyone know what that was about?
10:36: Commenter answers: "'Moon Crickets' and 'Swoogies' (ED: which the questioner also said) are racial slurs." Yikes: how'd that guy get the dial-in number?) The scientists are discussing the difficulty of finding supernovae in the galactic haystack. Also, added more NASA pictures after the jump.
10:40: After a brief discussion of other younger remnants, Kirshner says: "It's great to have this album of baby pictures for exploding stars, but there might be more than one kind... We know there are different types of explosions. Some are from massive stars and some are thermonuclear explosions in low-mass stars."
10:42: Another weird moment at the end of the call: a man started yelling, "Hello? I want to talk to you. Let's talk about you guys..." and then I think he might have made a reference to the female genitalia.
That's when NASA shut down the teleconference. For a moment, though, the researchers appeared to think they were off-the-air. Green said, "Aside from the couple of loonies, I think that went quite well."
The research will appear in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
Don't forget to take a peak at the pictures after the jump. The Bad Astronomy blog also has excellent commentary on the discovery.
Other NASA photos: first of the supernova's position in the Milky Way, the second of other known historical supernovae. 
[Source: Wired]
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Former Center Whitley dead at 39 | Curtis Whitley
FORT STOCKTON, Texas (AP) — Former NFL center Curtis Whitley, who played for three teams in the 1990s and had a history of substance use, was found dead in his trailer home in West Texas.
The Pecos County sheriff said Wednesday that the 39-year-old Whitley was found Sunday night in Fort Stockton, about 220 miles east of El Paso.
Sheriff Cliff Harris said Whitley was found face down in the bathroom by friends who went to check on him after they had not heard from him. Harris said there was no signs of foul play, but the death remains under investigation.
Whitley played for San Diego, Carolina and Oakland from 1992-97 and had two suspensions for violating the league's drug policy.
Whitley's body has been sent to El Paso for an autopsy.
A fifth-round draft pick out of Clemson in 1992, Whitley spent six tumultuous years in the NFL.
He played three seasons for San Diego, but was released in 1994 after an arrest for investigation of drunken driving, then re-signed after a 26-day star at the Betty Ford Center.
The Carolina Panthers chose him in the 1995 expansion draft. He spent two seasons in Carolina and started each game in 1995.
He was suspended four games in 1996 for what officials said was an alcohol-related violation of the drug policy, then released by the Panthers before training camp the next season.
Whitley spent 1997 with the Raiders, appearing in 15 games with one start. He was suspended for the entire 1998 season for violating the drug policy and never played in the NFL again.
Whitley admitted snorting crystal methamphetamine while with the Panthers in a book chronicling Carolina's 1996 season called "Year of the Cat." He said in the book his four-game suspension in Carolina was for drug use, not alcohol abuse as the team had said.
He also revealed in the 1997 book that he had used crystal methamphetamine often since 1992.
[Source: Associated Press]
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USHL Entry Draft today
The Green Bay Gamblers have the first pick in the United States Hockey League (USHL) entry draft.
It'll be the first job responsibilities for new coach and general manager Jon Cooper. Cooper was hired to the position on Monday.
The Gamblers are drafting first after finishing last season with a 13-41-6 overall record.
[Source: WRN.com]
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Moshe Kai Cavalin | 10-Year-Old Scholar Takes Calif. College By Storm
DOWNEY, Calif. (AP) — With the end of another school year approaching, college sophomore Moshe Kai Cavalin is cramming for final exams in classes such as advanced mathematics, foreign languages and music.
But Cavalin is only 10 years old. And at 4-foot-7, his shoes don't quite touch the floor as he puts down a schoolbook and swivels around in his chair to greet a visitor.
"I'm studying statistics," says the alternately precocious and shy Cavalin, his textbook lying open on the living room desk of his parents' apartment in this quiet suburb east of Los Angeles.
Within a year, if he keeps up his grades and completes the rest of his requirements, he hopes to transfer from his two-year program at East Los Angeles College to a prestigious four-year school and study astrophysics.
One of his primary interests is "wormholes," a hypothetical scientific phenomenon connected to Albert Einstein's theory of relativity. It has been theorized that if such holes do exist in space, they could — in tandem with black holes — allow for the kind of space-age time travel seen in science fiction.
"Just like black holes, they suck in particulate objects, and also like black holes, they also travel at escape velocity, which is, the speed to get out of there is faster than the speed of light," Cavalin says. "I'd like to prove that wormholes are really there and prove all the theories are correct."
First, he has statistics homework to finish. Later, he'll work with his mother, Shu Chen Chien, to brush up on his Mandarin for his Chinese class. Then it's over to the piano to prepare for his recital in music class.
His father, Yosef Cavalin, frets about the piano-playing, noting that his only child recently broke his arm pursuing another passion, martial arts. He has won several trophies for his age group.
"Finals are coming and everything and he cannot play with both hands. He'll just try to play with the right hand," he says. "I don't know how his grade's going to be in piano. It worries me a bit."
If past success is any indication, his son will find a way to compensate. Cavalin, who enrolled in college more than a year ago, has maintained an A-plus average in such subjects as algebra, history, astronomy and physical education.
College officials couldn't immediately say whether he is the youngest student in the school's 63-year history. Among child prodigies, Michael Kearney, now 24, is often cited as the world's youngest college graduate, having earned a bachelor's degree in anthropology from the University of South Alabama at age 10.
Cavalin's professors can't recall having a younger student in their classes.
"He is the youngest college student I've ever taught and one of the hardest working," says Daniel Judge, his statistics professor. "He's actually a pleasure to have in class. He's a well- adjusted, nice little boy."
Cavalin was an 8-year-old freshman when he enrolled in Guajao Liao's intermediate algebra class in 2006. By the end of the term, Liao recalls, he was tutoring some of his 19- and 20-year-old classmates.
"I told his parents that his ability was much higher than that level, that he should take a higher-level course," Liao says. "But his parents didn't want to push him."
Cavalin's parents avoid calling their son a genius. They say he's just an average kid who enjoys studying as much as he likes playing soccer, watching Jackie Chan movies, and collecting toy cars and baseball caps with tiger emblems on them. He was born during the Year of the Tiger in the Chinese zodiac.
Cavalin has a general idea what his IQ is, but doesn't like to discuss it. He says other students can achieve his success if they study hard and stay focused on their work.
His parents say they never planned to enroll their son in college at age 8, and sought to put him in a private elementary school when he was 6.
"They didn't want to accept me because I knew more than the teacher there and they said I looked too bored," the youngster recalls.
His parents home-schooled him instead, but after two years decided college was the best place for him. East L.A. officials agreed to accept him if he enrolled initially in just two classes, math and physical education. After he earned A-pluses in both, he was allowed to expand his studies.
"He sees things very simply," says Judge, his statistics teacher. "Most students think that things should be harder than they are and they put these mental blocks in front of them and they make things harder than they should be. In the case of Moshe, he sees right through the complications. ... It's not really mystical in any way, but at the same time it's amazing."
[Source: By JOHN ROGERS, Associated Press]
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Zipingpu Dam | China Says Troops Rush To Plug Dangerous Cracks In Dam
HANWANG, China (AP) — Thousands of Chinese soldiers rushed on Wednesday to repair a dam badly cracked by the country's massive earthquake, while rescuers arrived for the first time in the epicenter of the disaster.
China's top economic planning body said that the quake had damaged 391 mostly small dams. It left "extremely dangerous" cracks in the Zipingpu Dam upriver from the earthquake-hit city of Dujiangyan and some 2,000 soldiers were sent to repair the damage, the official Xinhua News Agency said.
Xinhua said Dujiangyan would be "swamped" if major problems emerged at the dam.
He Biao, the director of the Aba Disaster Relief headquarters in northern Sichuan province, said there were also concerns over dams closer to the epicenter.
"Currently, the most dangerous problems are several reservoirs near Wenchuan," he said, according to a transcript on the CCTV Web site.
"There are already serious problems with the Tulong Reservoir on the Min River. It may collapse. If that happens, it would affect several power plants below and be extremely dangerous," he said.
Rescuers who hiked in to the epicenter scoured flattened mountain villages for thousands of missing and buried victims, and the death toll of nearly 15,000 appeared likely to soar far higher.
Help also began to arrive helicopter in some of the hardest-to-reach areas, where some victims trapped for more than two days under collapsed buildings were still being pulled out alive. But the enormous scale of the devastation meant that resources were stretched thin, and makeshift aid stations and refugee centers were springing up over the disaster area the size of Belgium.
Leveled hospitals forced doctors and nurses to treat survivors in the street. Helicopters dropped food and medicine to isolated towns. Mourners burned money before rows of bodies, believing their lost relatives could use it in the afterlife.
Xinhua quoted government officials as saying rescuers who hiked Wednesday into the city of Yingxiu in Wenchuan county — the epicenter of the quake — found only 2,300 survivors in the town of about 10,000, with another 1,000 badly hurt.
The official death toll rose Wednesday to 14,866, Xinhua said, but it was not immediately clear if that number included the 7,700 reported dead in Yingxiu. In Sichuan province alone, another 25,788 people were buried and 1,405 were missing, provincial vice governor Li Chengyun said, according to Xinhua.
Twelve Americans were found safe near the epicenter of the quake.
A spokeswoman for the World Wildlife Fund said the 12 members of the wildlife group were reached by satellite phone earlier in the day. The team was near the world's most famous panda preserve in Wolong, whose pandas were reported safe Tuesday.
Unlike previous natural disasters in China, official media have reported prominently on the quake and state TV canceled regular programming to run 24-hour coverage.
Scenes of destruction and death have been shown, along with prominent focus on Premier Wen Jiabao, who rushed Monday to Sichuan to oversee the rescue work. He has been shown crawling into collapsed buildings to urge survivors to hang on with impassioned pleas, and seen reassuring children who had lost parents.
Wen was there when one 3-year-old girl trapped for more than 40 hours under the bodies of her parents was pulled to safety Wednesday in Beichuan region, Xinhua said.
Rescuers found Song Xinyi on Tuesday morning, but were unable to pull her out right away due to fears the debris above her would collapse. She was fed and shielded from the rain until rescuers extricated her from the rubble.
Elsewhere, a 34-year-old woman who was eight months pregnant was rescued after spending 50 hours under debris in Dujiangyan.
"It's a miracle brought about by us all working together," said Sun Guoli, fire chief of the nearby provincial capital Chengdu, who supervised the rescue.
The show of official empathy was aimed at reassuring the public about the government's response and also showing the world the country is ready to host the Beijing Olympics in August. Wednesday's leg of the Olympic torch relay in the southeastern city of Ruijin began with a minute of silence.
President Hu Jintao presided over an emergency meeting of the Communist Party's highest body Wednesday, the second such meeting since the quake happened. Hu, also secretary-general of the party, urged the military, police and others to rush to the disaster area to help.
"The Communist Party Central Committee has not forgotten this place," Wen said after flying by helicopter to Wenchuan, adding that some 50 injured people had been airlifted from the area.
Relief efforts were aided in their third day by the clearing of storms that had prevented flights over some of the worst-hit towns. Military helicopters seen flying north over Dujiangyan, and Xinhua said some had airdropped food, drinking water and medicine to Yingxiu.
East of the epicenter in the town of Hanwang, the smell of incense hung over a crowd of sobbing relatives who walked among some 60 bodies wrapped in plastic, some covered with tributes of branches or flowers.
Nearby, rescuers carried more bodies out of a makeshift morgue at the Dongqi sports arena. People from the town and surrounding areas packed into blue tents provided by relief officials. A Western-style clock tower in the town center had stopped at 2:27 — the time the quake hit.
The Mianzhu No. 3 Hospital was obliterated, and the seven-story main Hanwang Hospital collapsed. Surviving medical staff set up a triage center in the driveway of a tire factory, but could only provide basic care.
"The first day hundreds of kids died when a school collapsed. The rest who came in had serious injuries. There was so little we could do for them," said Zhao Xiaoli, a nurse at Hanwang Hospital.
Emergency vehicle sirens sounded every few minutes. An ambulance drove in, delivering a man pulled from the rubble and covered in dust.
"There will be a lot more people. So many still haven't been found," said Zhao.
Disorienting episodes added to the struggle for survival in much of the disaster zone. The Mianyang city government ordered its 700,000 residents to evacuate all buildings between 4 p.m. and 6 p.m. because an aftershock was predicted.
In Chengdu, water to some parts of the city was cut for repairs, touching off a rumor that the supply was contaminated. People began hoarding water and water pressure citywide dropped before a senior official went on TV to deny anything was wrong.
Associated Press writers Christopher Bodeen and Bill Foreman in Dujiangyan contributed to this report.
[Source: By AUDRA ANG, Associated Press]
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Dagmar Midcap
Dagmar Midcap anchors the weather, weeknights at 4, 6, and 11pm.
Dagmar joined CBS 46 in June 2006 as the “Better Mornings” weather and traffic anchor. She not only brought early risers their daily forecast and commute, but hosted the weekly segments “Critter Corner” and “Better Wheels.” Her passion for animals and love of cars was a sure fit for the segments themes, and the viewers love her! She continues to provide these segments for “Better Mornings.”
When she’s not in front of the camera or tucked behind the microphone in an audio studio, she volunteers for domestic and wildlife animal rescue organizations as well as caring for her ever-growing personal zoo. She hopes to own a small farm in the very near future to be used as a shelter for all creatures great and small.
Dagmar has partnered with Pennzoil Canada and Wal-Mart as the celebrity representative in a nation-wide fund-raising effort for the Children’s Miracle Network. In her spare time, Dagmar enjoys motorcycles and joy-riding. She was even a host on a successful national automotive program, “Driving Television” as well as a celebrity advocate for Harley-Davidson, Canada.
Dagmar hails from Vancouver, Canada. While pursuing dreams of becoming a National Hockey League play-by-play announcer, she began her career with broadcast journalism training at BCIT (British Columbia Institute of Technology). That following year she was offered a full time position in Cleveland, Ohio. Her popularity soared as the host of a weekly current affairs program and her career took off as she played host to several highly regarded national broadcasts. Dagmar then returned to Vancouver to re-join family and begin her new role as the traffic and weather reporter on VTV's “Breakfast,” soon making the move to Global’s BCTV “Morning Show.”
Dagmar has an impressive list of movie and television credits too. She has been cast in feature films including “Catwoman” with Halle Berry and “Baby Geniuses 2.” Her television credits include “Stargate SG: 1,” “Dead Zone,” “Twilight Zone” and recurring roles on the popular series “Smallville” as well as “Dark Angel” starring Jessica Alba. Dagmar’s most recent appearances have been in the television series “Medium” and “Numb3rs,” and up and coming features films like “Shooter” with Mark Walhberg and “Case 39” with Rene Zellweger.
Send Dagmar an e-mail at dagmar.midcap@cbs46.com
[Source: CBS46.com]
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[Source: Associated Press]
House of Yahweh - Texas Authorities Investigate More Polygamy Charges
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In this aerial photo from Feb. 12, 2008, shows the House of Yahweh compound. The complex is located in a rural area between Clyde, and Eula, Texas, in Callahan County, about 170 miles west of Dallas. The group's leader, Yisrayl Hawkins, is now charged with performing polygamous weddings and forcing children as young as 11 to work at his 44-acre compound. (AP Photo/Abilene Reporter-News/Nellie Doneva) | ||
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Texas authorities investigate more polygamy charges
CLYDE, Texas (AP) — Behind guarded, ornate gates at the end of a rural road, a self-proclaimed prophet warns his followers about the end of time and rails against a dangerous and unclean world outside their West Texas compound.
The women are covered in long skirts and long-sleeve shirts. Many of the children have different mothers and share the same father.
But this isn't the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints' ranch, which authorities raided last month in Eldorado after receiving reports that underage girls were being forced to marry much older men.
This is the House of Yahweh: a different, even darker sect that the state has been investigating for years. Authorities in February charged the group's 73-year-old leader with performing polygamous weddings and forcing about 40 children — some as young as 11 — to work jobs at his 44-acre compound.
"If a bunch of adults want to get together and follow some con man and throw their lives away, that's their right in this country," said Callahan County District Attorney Shane Deel. "But to me, when you do that to children and they don't have a chance, that's where the biggest concern is."
If convicted on the most serious charges, Yisrayl Hawkins faces up to 20 years in prison.
Another sect leader, Yedidiyah Hawkins, goes to court this summer on charges of sexually abusing a teenager, bigamy and welfare fraud.
Questions have also been raised about at least two deaths within the sect.
A 7-year-old died in 2003 after her mother and another member performed home surgery on her infected leg. Both women were convicted of injury to a child.
And in 2006, a woman bled to death after giving birth because she was prevented from going to the hospital, according to a wrongful-death lawsuit filed by her husband.
Although members deny they practice polygamy, former members say Yisrayl Hawkins has at least two dozen wives — and state records show he fathered two babies last year with women ages 19 and 22.
Yisrayl Hawkins, who has pleaded not guilty in his criminal case, told The Associated Press that he and his church are misunderstood and persecuted because of their religious beliefs.
"We have nothing to hide," said the bearded, white-haired Hawkins, who declined to address specific allegations against him and his sect.
The House of Yahweh compound, about 120 miles northeast of the FLDS ranch, has wind generators, a cafeteria, a food-processing plant and dozens of tractor-trailer rigs holding canned goods. It also has a few stores carrying homemade toiletries and clothing.
Unlike the FLDS members who stay on the 1,700-acre ranch, most House of Yahweh followers live in mobile homes surrounding the sect's compound, which is occupied only by a few caretakers. Other members own homes nearby or live in trailer parks owned by Hawkins in Abilene.
"Anyone can come here and can leave at any time," Hawkins said.
After the April 3 raid on the FLDS ranch, Child Protective Services took more than 460 children into custody.
Child-welfare officials said they cannot comment on possible investigations of House of Yahweh members unless youngsters have been removed. Only one such case has occurred: Four children living in Yedidiyah Hawkins' home are now in foster care.
Yisrayl Hawkins was born Buffalo Bill Hawkins but legally changed his name. He founded the House of Yahweh in 1980 — three years after the former Abilene police officer was fired for having beer in his patrol car. The group moved to rural Clyde several years later so they would have room to celebrate weeklong Old Testament feasts.
Hawkins began preaching polygamy in the early 1990s, saying women had to accept it or leave and forfeit heaven, several former members said.
"It's definitely a cult that follows mind-control techniques," said Miryam Martin, a House of Yahweh member from 1986 to 2000. "So many people's lives have been destroyed by what's been going on over there."
But Tanah Hawkins, a member for 20 years, said its Scripture-based beliefs offer something missing in mainstream churches. She blames disgruntled former members for the criminal investigations.
"When people leave the House of Yahweh, they go out and feed the rumors and add more lies," she said. "But I actually pray for them."
The sect claims to have hundreds of members scattered worldwide. One group in Kenya gained international attention in 2006 by building nuclear fallout shelters, believing Hawkins' apocalyptic prophecy.
Former members describe Hawkins as a zealot whose teachings are a blend of Old Testament directives on diet and cleanliness, New Testament beliefs in Jesus, and Hawkins' own prophecies rooted in the Book of Revelation.
Hundreds of his followers have legally changed their last names to Hawkins — including Yedidiyah and Tanah. Many have taken biblical first names that — like their leader's — include the letter "y."
Some former members also say Hawkins' followers tithe nearly a third of their incomes to the church. Many purchase the church's organically grown food, herbal drinks and dairy products, believing similar items available elsewhere are "unclean."
Public records show Yisrayl Hawkins owns at least $2.1 million in land, housing and mobile homes.
Nowhere is his influence more apparent than in the sect's 1,200-seat warehouse-like sanctuary, where a dozen poster-size pictures of Hawkins adorn the front wall.
Worshippers must first remove their shoes, and feet and hands are then sprayed with disinfectant before they come in. Men and women are seated on separate sides of an 8-foot wall dividing the sanctuary. Women wear long clothing and veils for modesty, and everyone wears gloves for cleanliness.
Some authorities fear Hawkins will lead his group to a tragic end like David Koresh, who the government said urged his Branch Davidian followers to set their compound on fire and kill themselves in 1993, when federal authorities tried to end a 51-day siege. Survivors blame the deaths on federal agents.
Concerned about a similar confrontation, police did not arrest Hawkins until nearly three months after obtaining the warrant — when they spotted him driving through town.
Bail was initially set at $10 million, partly because of a perceived threat in a sermon.
"I'm not asking much out of you — I'm just asking that you be willing to die rather than leave this house," Hawkins told his congregation in November.
A judge later relented, and Hawkins was released on $100,000 bond after testifying that his security guards are unarmed and suicide is counter to the church's teachings.
[Source: Associated Press]
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Nancy Kerrigan Welcomes Third Child
Olympic skater Nancy Kerrigan and husband Jerry Solomon welcomed their third child – and first daughter – Wednesday morning at Winchester Hospital in Winchester, Mass., the couple tell PEOPLE.
The baby, who has yet to be named, weighed 6 lbs., 12 oz., and was delivered by Caesarean.
Kerrigan, 38, and Solomon, 53, are also parents of sons Matthew, 11, and Brian, 3.
"They're very excited," Kerrigan told PEOPLE. "Matthew wanted a girl and Brian wanted a boy, and the two would occasionally argue about it, but they're both looking forward to having a new sibling."
"All went well. Everyone is fine," says the dad, who's been told "there is nothing like the relationship between a dad and a daughter. So it should be fun."
Once home, the new arrival will move into a navy blue nursery, one of four bedrooms in the family's Lynnfield, Mass., home.
Kerrigan, who announced her pregnancy in January, gained only 25 lbs. with this baby, a pound less than she gained with Brian and two pounds more than she put on with Matthew.
As for what to call the little girl, "I think that is the hardest job, to pick a name for somebody," says Kerrigan. "We are not very good at that."
One suggestion: "Brian thinks Pooper would be good."
[Source: People]
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Obama T - Shirt Sparks Protests At Georgia Restaurant
A t-shirt for sale at a Marietta, Ga., restaurant is causing quite a stir among those who believe it is racially offensive.
The shirt bears an image of a monkey eating a banana and urges voters to support Barack Obama in 2008.
[Source: MyFox Gulf Coast]
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McDonalds Free Chicken Sandwich
McDonalds Wants To Feed You Fried Chicken For Breakfast
It's morning in America and McDonald's is pretty sure you want to eat fried chicken on a biscuit. The Chicago Tribune is reporting that McDonald's has seen so much cash from their chicken menu items that they're adding some to the breakfast menu. Get ready to sink your teeth into the Southern Style Chicken Biscuit and the Southern Style Chicken Sandwhich. Chicken sandwich experts (or whatever) accuse McDonald's of copying Chic-Fil-A which apparently has been offering a chicken breakfast biscuit since 1986.
From the Chicago Tribune:
McDonald's Southern-style items are simple affairs. The sandwich, which has a suggested retail price of $2.89, comes on plain steamed bun, with butter and two pickles its sole condiments. The biscuit, which goes for $1.89, comes adorned only with butter.
Both arrived in stores nationwide within the past two weeks, and a national ad campaign began last week. On Thursday, customers who buy any medium or large drink at McDonald's 14,000 U.S. restaurants can receive a free Southern-style sandwich or breakfast biscuit.
In the South, chicken for breakfast has long been popular, as have simple-but-hearty fried chicken sandwiches like Chick-fil-A's, said West of Stifel Nicolaus. "People in the South love this stuff. The wild card is, will this do as well in the North, in Chicago or Michigan?"
McDonald's says it has extensively tested its Southern-style items in the North, as well as the South, and that both went over well. For those who think chicken for breakfast might sound bizarre, McDonald's Thoma pointed to the McGriddle.
Launched in 2003, the McGriddle—eggs and/or meat sandwiched between two pancakes—was seen by some as bizarre, he said. But it became a big hit and a staple of McDonald's breakfast menu.
"People are venturing outside of their comfort zones," Thoma said.
What say you, Northerners? Are you going to eat a chicken biscuit for breakfast?
[Source: The Consumerist]
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'Bachelor' Winner Shayne Poses For Girls Gone Wild Magazine
Shayne Lamas, who got a marriage proposal from Matt Grant on the season finale of The Bachelor, is the newest cover girl for Girls Gone Wild magazine!
Shayne, who is an aspiring actress and the daughter of actor Lorenzo Lamas, posed for the Girls Gone Wild photo shoot after competing on The Bachelor. One photo in her six-page spread shows her lying on a bed wearing only a veil and holding a bouquet.
We wonder what Matt thinks about this! These photos might add to the talk that Shayne only did The Bachelor to get her name out there. "[She] is just looking to jump start her acting career," one reader commented today. Is this reader right? What do you think of Shayne's 'Wild' magazine spread?
[Source: by Latoya West, About.com]
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Remy Ma Gets Eight Years
Remy Ma will be spending more than just her honeymoon in the clink.
The PunishHER rapper was sentenced to eight years in prison today for shooting a female acquaintance outside an NYC nightclub, a spokeswoman for the Manhattan District Attorney's Office confirmed to E! News.
The 26-year-old Ma, whose real name is Remy Smith, burst into tears after learning her fate.
In March, a jury convicted her on four counts, including assault, weapons possession and attempted coercion, for shooting Makeda Barnes-Joseph in the gut last July in a dispute over $3,000. She faced more than 25 years behind bars.
After State Supreme Court Justice Rena Uviller handed down the punishment, Ma's fiancé, fellow hip-hopster Papoose, sparked a melee as he screamed invective at the victim, who took the stand earlier asking for a harsh sentence.
"Get the f--k off me. F--k y'all. F--k jail," the performer yelled as the hearing ended and bailiffs escorted him out of the Manhattan court. "I don't care. Lock me up. Lock me up. Take me to jail. Arrest me. It's all about money."
Papoose was caught by Rikers Island corrections officers last week allegedly trying to smuggle his betrothed a handcuff key as the two were about to tie the knot in a jailhouse wedding. He wasn't charged, but the nuptials were nixed.
Ma's lawyer, Ivan Fisher, told E! News Remy was heartbroken over the judge's decision.
"She's in a highly emotional state. She's very concerned about her 7-year-old son," the legal eagle said.
Asserting Ma's innocence, Fisher announced he'll appeal the sentence, especially since under state guidelines she's not eligible for parole.
"There is a 15 percent good-time reduction. There may be a halfway house kind of release no more than a year before the sentence would be up, and if that's the case, she might have to do a little under six [years]," he added. "The best-case scenario, however, is that we win that appeal."
The attorney also denied Papoose's key was meant to unlock handcuffs and said the couple still plan on swapping vows.
Before getting the bad news, Ma addressed the judge and pleaded for mercy, claiming last summer's shooting was purely accidental.
"Throughout this unfortunate case, I was advised from my attorney to stay silent, but now I want you all to see me for me and what I've gone through," the entertainer said. "Reporters and newspapers have called me a 'hard-core rapper,' a 'hip-hop harlot'—Remy Ma is just a music-industry name. A facade. I'm not a thug. I'm not a hard-core anything. I have feelings. I'm Remy Smith—No, I'm Remy Mackie. I'm a wife, mother, daughter and big sister."
Uviller, however, wasn't buying, citing Ma's history of violence.
"This is a pattern. The previous times haven't been as severe," the judge said. "Smith doesn’t take responsibility for her actions. Her letter to the court and her statement today showed no remorse. She even painted herself as the victim."
No word yet where she'll do the time.
[Source: E! Online]
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Lily And Marshall Sell Their Stuff
How I Met Your Mother - Everything Must Go
Future Ted talks about the time in the spring of 2008 when he started getting slapped by women who were interested in him and he finally pursued the woman who was telling women bad things about him - and he realized it was Abby.
Lily and Ted are discussing how she yelled at a child and when Marshall comes in he says that their floor fixing estimate is going to be higher than anticipated and so he has set up a site to sell off her stuff. She says that a better site would be http://guyforceshiswifetodressinagarbagebagforthenextthreeyears.com/ which as you can see is a real site - and she notices this as well.
Barney asks Abby why she is doing so much to ruin his dating life and they compare the bad things that happened to them and they find that Ted is a common enemy, so to speak. Soon they are in bed.
Robyn and Ted talk about things that they own to sell and the red cowboy boots that Ted owns are brought up. Lily says that she doesn't want to sell her clothing. Marshall says he doesn't know what else he can do while they wait for him to find a job. She says they can sell her paintings and we are reminded about why sometimes you can get something right a thousand times and then mess it up on time one thousand and one - Marshall says he doesn't think they can sell the paintings for the right amount.
The right amount turns out to be $1500 and Lily says she can sell them in a week. Ted comes out in the boots and says that he is, in fact, pulling them off. Lily starts by showing one painting to a gallery and it did not sell. The next day they take it to a coffee shop but nobody notices it. Ted and Robyn talk about it loudly.
Barney and Abby lay in bed naked and talk about Ted. Barney says they need to show Ted how horrible he is in a relationship and Abby says she has an idea.
Mat Besser makes an awesome appearance as a tube sock salesman who needs the money for heroin. Just as she was ready to give up a couple comes up and buys it from her. Soon at the bar, Lily says that she sold the painting to a GCWK - gay couple without kids.
Barney and Abby come in with matching sweaters and talk about how they are in love. Abby keeps messing it up humorously. Barney then proposes to Abby - somehow to teach Ted a lesson.
Lily calls the man that bought the painting and it turns out that he bought it just for the frame and Barney says he wants to buy champagne for the whole bar but then tells the bartender to just use ginger ale.
Lily says that her dream of being an artist disappeared and now had to sell her clothing. Marshall and Ted come in and say that they went to the GCWK apartment to ask about the painting but Ted first wants approval for his boots. They are told the painting was in the trash but it wasn't there. It turns out that it went to a vet who finds that the painting calms animals down. It speaks to animals on a primal level yet it bums out birds. He sold four more paintings for five hundred dollars each and says they should reinvest the money in a web site to sell her paintings to vets.
Barney goes to get his tie back from Abby and she is still talking about the wedding and so he tells her that Ted wants her again because their plan worked. Oh, and lilyandmarshallselltheirstuff.com works but it will probably be slow for a few days while everyone and their mother goes there to bid on stuff to benefit the Children's Hospital of Los Angeles.
-- Gordon Davidescu
[Source: TV Fodder]
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Hannah Storm Will Join ESPN in August
NEW YORK (AP) — ESPN will add Hannah Storm to its "SportsCenter" lineup in August when it will supplant nine hours of taped programming in favor of live sports news.
Storm, most recently on CBS' "The Early Show," will co-anchor the middle three hours of ESPN's new daytime news block.
"I loved being in news — it made me a better journalist — but I've always had a passion for sports," Storm told The Associated Press on Monday.
Storm worked at NBC Sports for 10 years before joining CBS News in 2002, and had sports jobs at CNN and in local markets before that.
She will co-anchor "SportsCenter" each weekday from 9 a.m. to noon. It premieres Aug. 11.
ESPN airs a live "SportsCenter" at 2 a.m. Eastern each day. That one-hour show is repeated six times between 6 a.m. and noon with only occasional updates for breaking news.
With three more hours of taped programming following that, ESPN essentially doesn't begin live programming each day until 3 p.m. Eastern.
That no longer reflects the fast-moving nature of sports news, said Norby Williamson, the network's executive vice president of production.
"You look at Fox News and CNN, it's inconceivable that they would be on tape for that amount of time," he said. "The sports world is evolving in that direction. Things are happening all the time."
ESPN was doing OK in the ratings during the reruns. But constantly repeated versions of the same "SportsCenter" don't exactly keep viewers tuned in for a long time, and advertisers take note of programs that can keep an audience.
The new nine hours of "SportsCenter" will be divided into three parts. The first, from 6 to 9 a.m., will be chiefly devoted to highlights from the events the night before. Some new touches will be mixed in, like referring to how sports radio is reacting to a particular event that morning, Williamson said.
Storm's shift will take in more dayside news and the third shift, between noon and 3 p.m., will be more devoted to that day's news or previewing upcoming events, he said.
Williamson would not name any of the other anchors for the nine hours of "SportsCenter." Storm will be the only hire from outside ESPN, he said.
[Source: Associated Press]
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"The Bachelor" Matt Grant Proposed to Shayne Dahl Lamas
Matt Grant proposed to Shayne Dahl Lamas on the season finale of "The Bachelor: London Calling" on Monday night.
Lamas accepted Grant's 2.85-carat Tacori platinum diamond as he knelt on bended knee for her hand in marriage.
Lamas, the 22-year-old actress from Los Angeles and daughter of actor Lorenzo Lamas, told People Magazine that she is not too young to get married but is not rushing to the altar, either.
Lamas, who has appeared on General Hospital from 2003-06, is also the granddaughter of late Argentine actor Fernando Lamas and the U.S.-born actress of Norwegian descent, Arlene Dahl, both of which are the parents of her father Lorenzo.
Matt and Shayne became the season's final couple soon after Matt sent Chelsea Wanstrath home.
For more Entertainment News, please go to http://www.transworldnews.com/NewsList.aspx?cat=2&wcat=6
[Source: TransWorldNews]
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Complete List of Nominees for the 2008 Tony Awards
A complete list of nominations for the 62nd annual Tony Awards:
Play (and playwrights): "August: Osage County" (Tracy Letts), "Rock 'n' Roll" (Tom Stoppard), "The Seafarer" (Conor McPherson), "The 39 Steps" (Patrick Barlow).
Musical: "Cry-Baby," "In the Heights," "Passing Strange," "Xanadu."
Book-Musical: "Cry-Baby" (Mark O'Donnell and Thomas Meehan), "In the Heights" (Quiara Alegria Hudes), "Passing Strange" (Stew), "Xanadu" (Douglas Carter Beane).
Original Score (music and/or lyrics): "Cry-Baby" (Music & Lyrics: David Javerbaum and Adam Schlesinger), "In the Heights" (Music & Lyrics: Lin-Manuel Miranda), "The Little Mermaid" (Music: Alan Menken, Lyrics: Howard Ashman and Glenn Slater), "Passing Strange" (Music: Stew and Heidi Rodewald, Lyrics: Stew).
Revival-Play: "Boeing-Boeing," "The Homecoming," "Les Liaisons Dangereuses," "Macbeth."
Revival-Musical: "Grease," "Gypsy," "South Pacific," "Sunday in the Park With George."
Actor-Play: Ben Daniels, "Les Liaisons Dangereuses"; Laurence Fishburne, "Thurgood"; Mark Rylance, "Boeing-Boeing"; Rufus Sewell, "Rock 'n' Roll"; Patrick Stewart, "Macbeth."
Actress-Play: Eve Best, "The Homecoming"; Deanna Dunagan, "August: Osage County"; Kate Fleetwood, "Macbeth"; S. Epatha Merkerson, "Come Back, Little Sheba"; Amy Morton, "August: Osage County."
Actor-Musical: Daniel Evans, "Sunday in the Park With George"; Lin-Manuel Miranda, "In the Heights"; Stew, "Passing Strange"; Paulo Szot, "South Pacific"; Tom Wopat, "A Catered Affair."
Actress-Musical: Kerry Butler, "Xanadu"; Patti LuPone, "Gypsy"; Kelli O'Hara, "South Pacific"; Faith Prince, "A Catered Affair"; Jenna Russell, "Sunday in the Park With George."
Featured Actor-Play: Bobby Cannavale, "Mauritius"; Raul Esparza, "The Homecoming"; Conleth Hill, "The Seafarer"; Jim Norton, "The Seafarer"; David Pittu, "Is He Dead?"
Featured Actress-Play: Sinead Cusack, "Rock 'n' Roll"; Mary McCormack, "Boeing-Boeing"; Laurie Metcalf, "November"; Martha Plimpton, "Top Girls"; Rondi Reed, "August: Osage County."
Featured Actor-Musical: Daniel Breaker, "Passing Strange"; Danny Burstein, "South Pacific"; Robin De Jesus, "In the Heights"; Christopher Fitzgerald, "Young Frankenstein"; Boyd Gaines, "Gypsy."
Featured Actress-Musical: Laura Benanti, "Gypsy"; de'Adre Aziza, "Passing Strange"; Andrea Martin, "Young Frankenstein"; Olga Merediz, "In the Heights"; Loretta Ables Sayre, "South Pacific."
Direction-Play: Maria Aitken, "The 39 Steps"; Conor McPherson, "The Seafarer"; Anna D. Shapiro, "August: Osage County"; Matthew Warchus, "Boeing-Boeing."
Direction-Musical: Sam Buntrock, "Sunday in the Park With George"; Thomas Kail, "In the Heights"; Arthur Laurents, "Gypsy"; Bartlett Sher, "South Pacific."
Choreography: Rob Ashford, "Cry-Baby"; Andy Blankenbuehler, "In the Heights"; Christopher Gattelli, "South Pacific"; Dan Knechtges, "Xanadu."
Orchestrations: Jason Carr, "Sunday in the Park With George"; Alex Lacamoire and Bill Sherman, "In the Heights"; Stew and Heidi Rodewald; "Passing Strange"; Jonathan Tunick, "A Catered Affair."
Scenic Design-Play: Peter McKintosh, "The 39 Steps"; Scott Pask, "Les Liaisons Dangereuses"; Todd Rosenthal, "August: Osage County"; Anthony Ward, "Macbeth."
Scenic Design-Musical: David Farley and Timothy Bird & The Knifedge Creative Network, "Sunday in the Park With George"; Anna Louizos, "In the Heights"; Robin Wagner, "Young Frankenstein"; Michael Yeargen, "South Pacific."
Costume Design-Play: Gregory Gale, "Cyrano de Bergerac"; Rob Howell, "Boeing-Boeing"; Katrina Lindsay, "Les Liaisons Dangereuses"; Peter McKintosh, "The 39 Steps."
Costume Design-Musical: David Farley, "Sunday in the Park With George"; Martin Pakledinaz, "Gypsy"; Paul Tazewell, "In the Heights"; Catherine Zuber, "South Pacific."
Lighting Design-Play: Kevin Adams, "The 39 Steps"; Howard Harrison, "Macbeth"; Donald Holder, "Les Liaisons Dangereuses"; Ann G. Wrightson, "August: Osage County."
Lighting Design-Musical: Ken Billington, "Sunday in the Park With George"; Howell Binkley, "In the Heights"; Donald Holder, "South Pacific," Natasha Katz, "The Little Mermaid."
Sound Design-Play: Simon Baker, "Boeing-Boeing"; Adam Cork, "Macbeth"; Ian Dickson, "Rock 'n' Roll"; Mic Pool, "The 39 Steps."
Sound Design-Musical: Acme Sound Partners, "In the Heights"; Sebastian Frost, "Sunday in the Park With George"; Scott Lehrer, "South Pacific"; Dan Moses Schreier, "Gypsy."
___
Also announced:
Regional Theater Tony Award: Chicago Shakespeare Theater
Special Tony Award: Robert Russell Bennett
Lifetime Achievement Award: Stephen Sondheim
[Source: Associated Press]
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NYC News Anchor Sue Simmons Apologizes for Using F-Word On-Air
NEW YORK — Veteran news anchor Sue Simmons says she's "truly sorry" for blurting out a curse word on live television.
WNBC-TV's Sue Simmons dropped the bomb when the wrong footage was aired as she did a teaser for the 11 p.m. newscast on Monday.
The screen went momentarily blank following the gaffe.
Later, during the newscast, Simmons apologized for using "a word that many people find offensive. It was a mistake I made and I'm truly sorry."
Click here to watch
[Source: Fox News]
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Def Jam Diet: Do You Know What It Is?
An internet buzz abounds about the so-called (and seemingly mythical) Def Jam Diet. The New York Post's Page Six reports that when Beyonce gains weight, she turns to the Def Jam Diet. Regarding her pregnancy:
"She has gained a lot of pregnancy weight," a source said. "When she gains weight, she normally does the Def Jam detox, but not now."
Live Daily holds another mention of this elusive Def Jam Diet:
Music's A-listers were on hand to celebrate L.A. Reid's 50th birthday at Nobu 57 in New York City, July 11th.
There was Jay-Z, looking so slim some started whispering about a "Def Jam Diet." One partier noted, "L.A. has lost a lot of weight. So has Jay, Jay's girlfriend Beyoncé, Mariah Carey, Reid's p.r. woman Laura Swanson and Def Jam publicist Jana Fleischman. It's amazing. It's like a whole new skinny company."
So -- does anyone out there actually know what the Def Jam Diet is? There was talk about Beyonce favoring the Master Cleanse Diet -- perhaps Def Jam Diet is just a hip-hop version of that? We're as lost as you are -- so if you've got the inside scoop, share the secrets of this oh-so-elusive and exclusive diet in the comments below!
[Source: Huffington Post]
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"In The Heights" Leads Broadway's Tony Nominations
NEW YORK (Reuters) - "In the Heights," an original musical written by a university student about life in a working-class New York neighborhood, led the nominations for Broadway's top theater honors, the Tony Awards, on Tuesday.
Among the 13 nominations for "In The Heights" were best musical, best original score, best performance by a featured actor in a musical for Lin-Manuel Miranda, who also wrote the musical, and best direction of a musical for Thomas Kail.
Miranda wrote the musical, set in Manhattan's largely Hispanic Washington Heights neighborhood, while in his second year at Wesleyan University and after graduating he and Kail reworked it for a larger audience. It first played in Connecticut before moving to an off-Broadway theater and then making its Broadway debut on March 9 this year.
"Rodgers and Hammerstein's South Pacific" picked up 11 nominations, followed by "Sunday in the Park with George" with nine. Both received a nod for best revival of a musical, along with "Grease," the only nomination for that musical, and "Gypsy," which had seven nominations.
After an award-winning run in London's West End, "Macbeth," starring Patrick Stewart, moved across the Atlantic this year to pick up six nominations, including best revival of a play, best performance by a leading actor for Stewart, and best performance by a leading actress for Kate Fleetwood.
"It's so deeply satisfying to find that the production has been recognized across the creative board," Stewart told Reuters. "Macbeth does not have too glowing a history with Tony voters."
Also up for best revival of a play is "Boeing-Boeing," which grabbed six nominations; "Les Liasons Dangereuses," which had five; and "The Homecoming" with three nominations.
Pulitzer Prize-winning play "August: Osage County" received seven nominations, including best play, for which it is competing against Tom Stoppard's "Rock 'n' Roll" and "The Seafarer" -- each with four nominations -- and "The 39 Steps," which ended up with six nominations.
Passing Strange," a tale of a young American's travels from black, middle-class America to Amsterdam and Berlin that was written by a performance artist known as Stew, pulled in seven nominations, including best musical.
Also nominated for best musical were "Xanadu" and "Cry-Baby," which both received a total of four nominations, and "In The Heights."
The complete list of Tony Award nominations can be found at www.tonyawards.com. The awards will be presented June 15.
(Editing by Bill Trott)
[Source: By Michelle Nichols, Thomson Reuters]
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NFL Power Rankings have the Champion at No.6
The ESPN has pulled out the first NFL Power Rankings since the end of the season and a long list of questions have popped up. The most important - how good are the guys at the ESPN when it's time to predict the NFL Power Rankings? You can see the full list of the NFL Power Rankings by clicking here, but for most of the football fans, it's a shocker that the 2008 Super Bowl winner the New York Giants made it only to No.6 on the list, considering there were little changes in the team so far. The reason for the low ranking of the Giants - "Teams other than the Patriots aren't supposed to repeat as Super Bowl champions" - no respect for the Giants whatsoever. And to add insult to injury, the NFL Power Rankings have the Cowboys at No.4, which means that the Super Bowl winner, a.k.a. The Champion, failed to even be the best in its division, the NFC East.
But to be fair, the odds makers bank little on the New York Giants this season, as well. At the online sportsbook BodogSports, the Giants are sitting on the long 16/1 odds to win the next Big Game, while the Patriots are once again the favorite football team with odds 10/3. The NFL Power Rankings published by the ESPN indeed follow the odds reported on the next Super Bowl winner - the Indianapolis Colts are at 15/2, the Cowboys and the Chargers follow with 8/1 each and the Jacksonville Jaguars hold odds of 12/1 to win the next Championship.
[Source: OGPaper]
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UPDATE: Suge Knight Assaulted And Hospitalized
According to TMZ.com, who obtained pictures of the incident, Marion "Suge" Knight, controversial founder of Death Row Records was assaulted last night in Shag Nightclub in Los Angeles last night. Knight was seen by witnesses arguing with a man, reportedly screaming "I want my money!" According to the reports, Suge and his entourage began assaulting the man, when Suge was struck in the face by the other party, and knocked out. The pictures on the website, show Knight, covered in blood, being escorted from the club, en route to the hospital. Just as the case with the night of Tupac Shakur's murder and the shooting several years at Kanye West's MTV Awards party shooting, Knight did not cooperate with police. UPDATE: An anonymous witness contacted HipHopDX, claiming to have been in Club Shag Saturday evening. According to the report, Suge Knight was not assaulted by the initial man he was arguing with. Although the witness confirmed that Knight screamed "I want my money," before allegedly attacking a man with his entourage inside the club, the publicized incident was independent. According to the reports, a third party was video-taping the beating with a cell phone. Knight witnessed this, and attacked the video-taper. The Death Row Records founder put the man in a headlock and took his phone inside the club. Following the incident, the victim reportedly left the club, went to a vehicle, and opened the trunk. The man removed an unidentifiable object, and as Suge Knight stood outside the club, struck him in the back of the head. The attack left "a large gash" on the back of Knight's head, prompting the blood seen in the pictures provided by TMZ. The hit to the back of the head left Suge Knight unconscious on the sidewalk for a period of about 10 minutes. The attacker reportedly fled the scene. While on the sidewalk, a female in Knight's entourage reportedly vacated the scene to get a car. Upon pulling in front of the club, the woman wrecked into several vehicles. This incident added to frenzy, that eventually led Knight to a Los Angeles hospital. When asked by members of press about the incident, Knight has opted not to file a police report, stating that he would deal with the incident internally. [Source: HipHopDX]
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HP, EDS confirm 'advanced discussions' over possible combination
SAN FRANCISCO (Thomson Financial) - Hewlett-Packard Co. and Electronic Data Systems Corp. after Monday's closing bell separately confirmed they're in 'advanced discussions' regarding a possible business combination. Both companies said there could be no assurance that an agreement would be reached or that a transaction will be consummated. H-P and EDS said they don't plan to comment further until an agreement is reached or discussions are terminated. Earlier Monday, the Wall Street Journal reported that H-P was in advanced talks regarding an acquisition of EDS for $12 billion to $13 billion. While terms of the deal were not clear, the Journal report said, an announcement was expected as early as Tuesday. Shares of EDS rose 28% to $24.13 before being halted late in the trading session. Shares of H-P fell 4.7% to $46.83 before they were halted. [Source: Forbes]
1
[Source: China View]
1840 in Austria pose for nude picture
 |
| Over 1,800 men and women posed nude for a U.S. photographer in Austria's Ernst Happel stadium on Sunday. (Photo: Agencies) |
BEIJING, May 12 (Xinhuanet) -- Over 1,800 men and women posed nude for a U.S. photographer in Austria's Ernst Happel stadium on Sunday.
Spencer Tunick, notorious for his works featuring hundreds of naked people at unusual venues, requested his 1,840 participants to wear no sunglasses, no smiling, and no underwear.
The participants were not paid, but were promised to receive signed pictures of the photo-shoot.
The stadium will host seven of the Euro 2008 soccer championship matches being staged by Austria and Switzerland, including the June 29 final.
New York-born Tunick described Sunday's shooting on his website as combining "the spirit of sports, the grand sweeping waves of stadium architecture and the abstract relation of the human form to modern structures."
The number of participants still fell short of the symbolic "at least 2,008" Tunick had hoped to get, ahead of the Euro 2008 tournament.
Tunick had created several installations of large-scale nude projects from Mexico City to the Netherlands, Barcelona and Newcastle.[Source: China View]
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Barack Obama Wants To Be President of These 57 United States
Ah, Oregon. The beautiful Northwest. Rain. Trees. Clouds. Rain. Friendly territory for Sen. Barack Obama, the leading contender for the Democratic Party's long-disputed presidential nomination.
So there he was in Beaverton today at the start of a two-Illinois Senator and leading Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama speaking to a friendly crowd againday swing through Oregon, virtually ignoring his remaining Democratic opponent, what's-her-name from New York, as part of his new strategy to act like the actual nominee while she flails around way behind in numbers.
Naturally, this being the Northwest where everything is not ruined quite yet, his staff had Obama visit an eco-friendly company, Vernier Software & Technology, that makes products for science teachers. He could get education in there too, see?
In his prepared remarks Obama was ready to start blasting Arizona Sen. John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, to show the Illinois Democrat is moving on to the general election campaign.
But first the freshman senator had to go through all the....
...obligatory delighted to see you, delighted to be here part of stump speeches that also require that you actually know where you are.
Obama pulled that off O.K. But then he drifted away from the text a tad, as rookies are wont to do sometimes, forgetting how exhausting this primary process is and should be. And trusting in their instincts, their very tired instincts.
"It is wonderful to be back in Oregon," Obama said. "Over the last 15 months, we’ve traveled to every corner of the United States. I’ve now been in 57 states? I think one left to go. Alaska and Hawaii, I was not allowed to go to even though I really wanted to visit, but my staff would not justify it."
The Times' conscientious Robin Abcarian thought she heard something different there. She checked her tape recorder. It had captured what he had actually said -- 57 states now. A new Louisiana Purchase that's gone unannounced so far? Was he channeling his inner John Kerry-Heinz 57 personality?
(UPDATE: At a later stop Obama was talking with reporters and expressed concern he'd also mis-stated the number of potential cyclone victims in Burma. He said, ""I hope I said 100,000 people the first time instead of 100 million. I understand I said there were 57 states today. It's a sign that my numeracy is getting a little, uh." At that point, an aide cut him off and ushered journalists out. Before he could mis-speak again?)
Oh, and as far as Hawaii voters are concerned, they're probably delighted to learn that Obama's campaign staff doesn't think that tiny state can justify an appearance by his eminence, even though he did a lot of growing up there. Or maybe because he was there.
Let's see what they do with that in the Honolulu media, which the Republicans have probably already notifed.
Maybe it's Obama's age. He's getting up there in his forties, you know.
(ANOTHER UPDATE: Because of a new development in this situation another item on this subject has been posted here.)
--Andrew Malcolm
Photo Credit: AP / Joe Raymond
[Source: LA Times]
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[Source: by Dan Farber, CNET News]
Google Brings Friend Connect To The Masses
As expected, Google has unveiled a preview of Friend Connect, a way to add social features to a Web site without programming. 
David Glazer, director of engineering at Google, described Friend Connect, whose site is inaccessible Monday morning, as plumbing for the rest of the Web.
"The Web is getting better by getting more social. We've baked social features into the infrastructure of the Web, and it is not tied to any particular site," Glazer said. "Users can interact with any of their friends anywhere they go on Web, and with any app."
I asked Glazer if Friend Connect is a response to Facebook Connect and MySpace.com's Data Availability. "People will speculate a lot in that direction. We didn't create this code in the three days (since Facebook and MySpace made their announcements)."
Unlike Facebook and MySpace, Google lacks a dominant, centralized social-networking hub. Friend Connect works the edges of the Internet, applying an open and distributed approach, and bringing a social dimension to the 99-plus percent of sites that aren't socially enabled.
Guacamole is a sample site created by Google for demonstrating Friend Connect features.
(Credit: Google)"The distributed model has worked well for the Web. That is what the Web does--many points of light loosely coupled and massively distributed, allowing users to connect to pages of information," Glazer told me. "Now it is working to connect people to other people."
Friend Connect-compliant sites will be able to view, invite, and interact with newfound friends, or with existing friends, from established social-networking sites, including Facebook, Google Talk, Hi5, Orkut, and Plaxo via secure authorization application-programming interfaces.
Currently only a few sample sites, including Google's Guacamole site, are available to end users. "We are looking to get feedback from Web site owners about what kinds of sites and apps they want," Glazer said. Ingrid Michaelson, an independent musician, integrates iLike's OpenSocial application with Friend Connect to connect friends without having to leave the site.
David Glazer, director of engineering, Google
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News.com)John McCrea, vice president of marketing at Plaxo, said Google's Friend Connect is "flipping the model" from walled gardens (such as Facebook) to a more open social Web:
Alas, the devil is in the details, and we haven't seen any details (yet) from Facebook--just a Friday blog post signaling intent. It might be great, and we hope it is, but it's not clear what the actual substance will be.Instead of widgetizing apps and bolting them on to some corporation's proprietary social graph, why not widgetize the social graph and socially enable any Web site or Web page?
That's a big, bold vision that Plaxo is 100 percent aligned with. As to Facebook and MySpace, it is certainly great to read the rhetoric they are now putting forth. The meme of data portability, open social Web, and bill of rights for users of the social Web has certainly caught on!
With regard to MySpace, the rhetoric is over-the-top goodness, including a declaration of the end of the era of walled gardens. Alas, the details, as they currently exist, for their "Data Availability" effort fall far short of the vision many of us share for users having ownership of their data, control over who can see it, and freedom to take it with them, wherever they go across the social Web.
In the MySpace "Data Availability" model, the user can take their data for a walk anytime they want or to any place they want, but the data remains on a tether. There is no notion of copy, move, or sync. Participating sites must agree to have MySpace serve the data live in their page. That's a half-step wrapped in a beautiful flag of openness.
Friend Connect provides a set of wizards for adding social features to Web sites without programming.
(Credit: Google)"Friend Connect provides wizardlike pages. Webmasters just fill in the information, select social apps, copy code, paste, and save. No coding is required. It passes the 'easy' test, and it does something useful," Glazer said. It provides features such as user registration, invitations, member galleries, message posting, and reviews, as well as OpenSocial applications.
At the core of Friend Connect are three emerging social standards--OpenID, oAuth, and OpenSocial.
"Today is the right time to connect all emerging standards to give users the ability to go anywhere on Web and interact with any set of friends on any application," Glazer said.
Google's Social Graph API is not part of the Friend Connect preview, Glazer said. "The Social Graph API is part of the same conversation, but we didn't need to connect those two dots."
Friend Connect applies existing and emerging standards to provide plumbing for the social Web.
(Credit: Google)Glazer emphasized that Google is focused on keeping users in control of their information. "The Webmaster has no business knowing who my friends are, but I can choose to link my login to my Facebook account and invite friends," he said. "It's up to each site to publish APIs, with appropriate terms of use," Glazer told me. "I would expect as Friend Connect matures in the market, we will see more people connecting to it and more standard interfaces to turn on and register for it. It's not fully standard now.
Friend Connect covers many of the use cases for the social Web, but a single, standard "friend" API is still lacking.
"There are a few good candidates, such as the OpenSocial RESTful APIs, which are at a rough consensus stage but not running code," Glazer said. "We don't know enough to call a winner, but there will be a standard."
[Source: by Dan Farber, CNET News]
0
Postage Rates Go Up Today
Before you pop that letter in the mail today, keep in mind you might need to add postage.
The rate for sending a first class letter weighing an ounce or less went up by a penny to 42 cents at 12:01 a.m.
So-called “Forever stamps” purchased from May 12 forward also go up to the new rate, but those bought prior to the increase at 41 cents will be good.
The U.S. Postal Service says it had sold six billion Forever stamps in the year since they were first offered in April 2007. In the weeks just prior to today’s rate increase, Forever stamps were being sold at the rate of 30 million per day, the postal service says.
Look for another rate hike in a year under a new law that allows postage rate increases annually at no more than the rate of inflation.
[Source: Central Valley Business Times]
0
Sexy Parvati Shallow Wins 'Survivor Micronesia'
It was a season with more backstabs, blindsides, evacuations and eliminations than ever before as Survivor Micronesia paired ten fans of the show against ten returning favorites. In the end, after 39 days and 20 castoffs, sexy flirt Parvati Shallow became the soul survivor of perhaps the most entertaining season of the hit reality show yet.
After 16 seasons of the CBS reality series, it seemed as though everything had already been done, but the producers decided to bring back some of the most beloved and infamous players of previous seasons to go head to head against die hard fans who vowed to spoil their game.
Early on, Shallow, who was a returning player from Survivor Cook Islands, joined forces with Panama alum Cerie Fields and last season's Amanda Kimmel to create a dominant force in the game. The three women used their brains and their skills of persuasion to pull off some of the most impossible strategic moves ever by eliminating the powerhouse men from the competition.
After blind-siding former ally Ozzy Lusth, the three women, along with new recruit Natalie Bolton, went on a backstabbing spree, sending man after man to the jury box.
Fields, the lovable mother of three who provided most of the comedy of season, orchestrated the demise of her fellow teammates, but after losing an unexpected final immunity to Kimmel, she was voted out, leaving only Kimmel and Shallow in the final two.
While Kimmel played a strong physical game, Shallow used her womanly charms to beguile both the men and the women of the show and wound up earning the most votes at the final tribal council.
Next season of Survivor will return to Africa and 18 new castaways will once again try to outwit, outlast and outplay each other for a chance at a million dollar prize.
[Source: By Dylan Vox, gaywired.com | Image Source: ColdLeftOvers]
0
CHONGQING, China - Powerful quake kills thousands
CHONGQING, China (AFP) — A huge earthquake rocked southwest China on Monday, killing nearly 8,700 people and flattening schools, homes and factories in a powerful tremor felt across a swathe of southeast Asia.
The quake, with a magnitude of 7.8, struck close to densely populated areas of Sichuan province in what Premier Wen Jiabao called a "major disaster."
China's state-run Xinhua news agency reported 8,533 confirmed dead in that province alone, but there were fears the toll will rise far higher with scores killed in neighbouring regions and reports of hundreds buried under debris.
Buildings swayed in Beijing and Shanghai, while the quake was felt in Hong Kong, Vietnam and in the Thai capital Bangkok, 1,800 kilometres (1,200 miles) from the epicentre.
"I heard the vents ruffling and then started to feel the building shake and a couple of bits of the ceiling fell," Richard Morgan-Sanjurjo, a 30-year-old business consultant in Chengdu, provincial capital of Sichuan, told AFP.
"I ran so fast. I thought the building was going to come down on my head," he said.
Xinhua cited disaster relief officials as saying 3,000 to 5,000 people were estimated to have died in one district of Sichuan, Beichuan County, where 80 percent of buildings had collapsed.
"Facing disaster, the most important thing is calm, confidence, courage and strong leadership," Wen told China's CCTV television on a plane to Chengdu to oversee rescue operations.
Worryingly, there was still no news from Wenchuan County, the mountainous region at the epicentre, more than nine hours after the disaster struck.
All lines of communication were cut with the county, which has a population of 112,000 and is home to the Wolong Nature Reserve, China's leading research and breeding base for endangered giant pandas.
"We are doing everything we can but the roads are blanketed with rocks and boulders," Xinhua quoted Li Chongxi, a Communist Party official, as saying.
US President George W. Bush expressed his condolences and said the United States "stands ready to help," and Japan said it was ready to provide as much relief aid as possible.
The quake damaged two chemical plants in Shifeng, burying several hundred people and forcing the evacuation of more than 6,000 nearby, Xinhua said.
It earlier reported up to 900 students buried under a collapsed high school in Dujiangyan, northwest of Chengdu. Rescuers recovered at least 50 bodies as frantic parents looked on.
A local official in the Dujiangyan said "rows of houses" had crumbled, while two primary schools were demolished in the sprawling metropolis of Chongqing.
President Hu Jintao urged an "all-out" effort to rescue victims. Troops were ordered to help with the disaster relief work.
All trains to and from Chengdu were stopped, the city's airport was closed and planes diverted for engineers to assess the runways, and mobile phone and Internet communications were disrupted.
An Olympic spokesman said none of the 31 venues for the Beijing Olympics in the capital and other host cities had been damaged.
The quake's epicentre was about 93 kilometres from Chengdu, a city of more than 12 million people, and 260 kilometres from Chongqing and its 30 million. It struck shortly before 2.30 pm (0630 GMT) at a depth of just 10 kilometres, the US Geological Survey said.
Xinhua quoted an official saying the landmark Three Gorges Dam in Sichuan province had not been affected.
However, buildings shook in Beijing and Shanghai, residents reported, with many people evacuating tower blocks and rushing onto the street.
The quake was felt in the Taiwanese capital Taipei, where buildings swayed for half a minute, and in the southern Chinese territory of Hong Kong.
In Hanoi, residents said some high buildings shook for around five minutes but there were no reports of damage.
One of the biggest quakes ever recorded was in China in 1976, which killed 242,000 people.
That quake, centred in the northern city of Tangshan, lasted for 15 seconds and flattened 90 percent of buildings. The death toll, out of a population of one million, made it one of the world's deadliest in the 20th century.
[Source: AFP]
1
Bkindy.com | Burger King Mashes Indiana Jones
Burger King mashed up with Indiana Jones to create a BKindy.com website. Yes, it's got the soundtrack too. Check it out.
0
Ex-Googler Tip: Build Start-ups In Packs of Three | Ooyala
Three: It's the magic number.
Googlers have long had a geeky obsession with numbers. The name Google, after all, is a play on the mathematical term "googol"; one of the company's office buildings is named "Pi"; and founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin set the search giant's public offering price at $2,718,281,828, the product of the natural logarithm "e" and $1 billion.
So it seems only fitting that ex-Googlers--of which there are many these days--are setting a new trend when it comes to starting their own companies. The equation? It takes at least three former Googleheads to start a start-up. It's like forming a triangle of Google juju.
The latest upstart to be formed in this mold is Mechanical Zoo, a social search application company started by Nathan Stoll, former product manager of Google News. Stoll is joined by Max Ventilla, a former Google business development executive, and Fritz Schneider, who worked on application security at the search company for more than five years. Like many other fresh companies from Google exes, Mechanical Zoo is still in stealth mode, but it plans to launch a beta product next month.
It takes a cue from Cuill, a stealth start-up based in Palo Alto, Calif. Cuill was founded by Anna Patterson and Russell Power, former technical leads of Google's large index search engine, TeraGoogle. Its Google threesome is completed by Louis Monier, who technically is better known for being the founding CTO of one of the Web's first search engines, AltaVista. Monier was a high-profile hire at Google, but he worked there only briefly on search design.
(Cuill recently raised $25 million from Madrone Capital Partners, among others.)
Then there's Ooyala, a Mountain View, Calif., video delivery software company. It was started by Sean Knapp, Belsasar Lepe, and Bismarck Lepe, former Googlers who worked products like Google's search and advertising services. It has raised $10 million.
There's also the much-publicized FriendFeed, a social Web application created by Bret Taylor and Jim Norris, two engineers who worked on Google Maps. Going one beyond the threefold, former Googlers Paul Buchheit and Sanjeev Singh also helped start the company.
The apple doesn't fall far from the tree. Many of the companies started by former Google employees are developing services around some kind of Web search, whether they are complementary to Google's many products (read: they could be Google acquisition targets) or they are outright future competitors.
Cuill, for example, plans to take Google head-on with "a new kind of search." In contrast, companies like FriendFeed and Mechanical Zoo are building complementary services to Google's, rather than trying to out-Google the search giant. Mechanical Zoo, for example, is developing a social-search application that would help people find suggestions for movies or restaurants among their circle of friends or acquaintances.
Triangulating a new service that Google hasn't thought of yet, or simply hasn't devoted the resources to yet, seems to be another common theme of many of these start-ups. "It's stupid to try to outdo Google. I can do more good outside Google than inside by doing something complementary," said Max Ventilla, CEO of Mechanical Zoo.
Advice to Google: watch for engineers and product managers hanging out in the lunch room in packs of three.
[Source: by Stefanie Olsen, CNET News]
0
Powerful Quake Kills Thousands in Southwest China | Chongqing
CHONGQING, China (AFP) — A huge earthquake rocked southwest China on Monday, killing nearly 8,700 people and flattening schools, homes and factories in a powerful tremor felt across a swathe of southeast Asia.
The quake, with a magnitude of 7.8, struck close to densely populated areas of Sichuan province in what Premier Wen Jiabao called a "major disaster."
China's state-run Xinhua news agency reported 8,533 confirmed dead in that province alone, but there were fears the toll will rise far higher with scores killed in neighbouring regions and reports of hundreds buried under debris.
Buildings swayed in Beijing and Shanghai, while the quake was felt in Hong Kong, Vietnam and in the Thai capital Bangkok, 1,800 kilometres (1,200 miles) from the epicentre.
"I heard the vents ruffling and then started to feel the building shake and a couple of bits of the ceiling fell," Richard Morgan-Sanjurjo, a 30-year-old business consultant in Chengdu, provincial capital of Sichuan, told AFP.
"I ran so fast. I thought the building was going to come down on my head," he said.
Xinhua cited disaster relief officials as saying 3,000 to 5,000 people were estimated to have died in one district of Sichuan, Beichuan County, where 80 percent of buildings had collapsed.
"Facing disaster, the most important thing is calm, confidence, courage and strong leadership," Wen told China's CCTV television on a plane to Chengdu to oversee rescue operations.
Worryingly, there was still no news from Wenchuan County, the mountainous region at the epicentre, more than nine hours after the disaster struck.
All lines of communication were cut with the county, which has a population of 112,000 and is home to the Wolong Nature Reserve, China's leading research and breeding base for endangered giant pandas.
"We are doing everything we can but the roads are blanketed with rocks and boulders," Xinhua quoted Li Chongxi, a Communist Party official, as saying.
US President George W. Bush expressed his condolences and said the United States "stands ready to help," and Japan said it was ready to provide as much relief aid as possible.
The quake damaged two chemical plants in Shifeng, burying several hundred people and forcing the evacuation of more than 6,000 nearby, Xinhua said.
It earlier reported up to 900 students buried under a collapsed high school in Dujiangyan, northwest of Chengdu. Rescuers recovered at least 50 bodies as frantic parents looked on.
A local official in the Dujiangyan said "rows of houses" had crumbled, while two primary schools were demolished in the sprawling metropolis of Chongqing.
President Hu Jintao urged an "all-out" effort to rescue victims. Troops were ordered to help with the disaster relief work.
All trains to and from Chengdu were stopped, the city's airport was closed and planes diverted for engineers to assess the runways, and mobile phone and Internet communications were disrupted.
An Olympic spokesman said none of the 31 venues for the Beijing Olympics in the capital and other host cities had been damaged.
The quake's epicentre was about 93 kilometres from Chengdu, a city of more than 12 million people, and 260 kilometres from Chongqing and its 30 million. It struck shortly before 2.30 pm (0630 GMT) at a depth of just 10 kilometres, the US Geological Survey said.
Xinhua quoted an official saying the landmark Three Gorges Dam in Sichuan province had not been affected.
However, buildings shook in Beijing and Shanghai, residents reported, with many people evacuating tower blocks and rushing onto the street.
The quake was felt in the Taiwanese capital Taipei, where buildings swayed for half a minute, and in the southern Chinese territory of Hong Kong.
In Hanoi, residents said some high buildings shook for around five minutes but there were no reports of damage.
One of the biggest quakes ever recorded was in China in 1976, which killed 242,000 people.
That quake, centred in the northern city of Tangshan, lasted for 15 seconds and flattened 90 percent of buildings. The death toll, out of a population of one million, made it one of the world's deadliest in the 20th century.
[Source: AFP]
0
Bob Barr to Run for President As a Libertarian
WASHINGTON -- Bob Barr, a former congressman from Georgia and a former Republican, today announced his candidacy for president as a Libertarian who would rein in federal spending and foreign wars.
"The government has run amok fiscally," he said at a press conference. Saying that during the first quarter of this year the private sector was losing millions of jobs while the federal government was "hiring with enthusiasm," Barr added, "As the American people see their standard of living falling, the standard of government keeps going up."
Expected to win the nomination of the Libertarian Party when it holds its convention in Denver over the Memorial Day weekend, Barr, 59, criticized Republican John McCain, the presumptive GOP nominee, for not being a true conservative.
"There's not a great deal of substance there in terms of a commitment to cutting the size of government," Barr said He said no one who had authored the McCain-Feingold campaign reforms that cap individual donations could call himself a conservative, "at least with a straight face."
Barr also lashed Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton for saying that if Iran threatens Israel's existence, the United States should "obliterate Iran." Calling the New York senator's statement "tremendously dire," Barr called the possibility of Iran possessing nuclear weapons "remote" and said he has seen "no evidence that indicates that is an imminent likelihood."
Saying both the Republican and Democratic Parties have "bought into a system of running a charity called the United States of America," Barr blasted programs that use public funds to educate the children of illegal immigrants and maintain foreign military bases "that have no more efficacy in the 21st century."
"The federal government needs to get away from the notion that simply because we have all this money in the Treasury -- or we can borrow more money -- that we can provide all these services," he said. "That is not responsible government."
Political commentators debated the impact of Barr's entry, with some arguing that, like Ralph Nader in 2000, who pulled votes away from Democrat Al Gore, Barr could pull enough votes away from Republican McCain in 2008 to give the Democrats the election.
Barr confirmed that he was asked by McCain supporters not to run for fear he would pull votes from the GOP, but he defended his decision by saying that "American voters deserve better than simply the lesser of two evils."
Arguing that in recent election cycles, the losing candidates "blame somebody else," Barr said, "At the end of the day if I do succeed, it is not my intent to blame Sen. McCain or Sen. (Barack) Obama. I hope they would return the favor." If McCain loses to Obama, the Illinois senator, Barr said, it will be because his message or his candidacy doesn't resonate. "Each of us has the future in our own hands," he said, adding that his voters "are not likely to fall in the category of being enthusiastic about voting for John McCain, if such exists."
But Christopher Barron, a Republican political consultant, thinks it is equally plausible that Barr could hurt Obama.
"I think Bob Barr's candidacy could impact the race -- but I don't know at this point which candidate he is likely to help or hurt," he said. "If Barr's candidacy is fueled by the same people who supported Ron Paul -- college students, antiwar advocates and hard-core libertarians -- then I think it is unlikely to hurt Sen. McCain in any significant way because these are not the type of voters McCain is reaching out to. I could actually envision a scenario under which Barr's candidacy actually helps McCain by siphoning off some of the enthusiasm among college voters and antiwar advocates for Obama."
And Jennifer Duffy of the Cook Political Report noted that Barr's effectiveness could turn on gathering enough voter petitions to get on the ballot in key swing states. "I think he is only a threat if he gets on the ballot in a decent number of battleground states," she said.
One day before the West Virginia primary, Obama forecast a Clinton victory in the state - and Democratic unity in the fall. In a state with a high population of military veterans, Obama focused a speech in Charleston on health care for veterans.
"I'm honored that some of you will support me and I understand that many more here in West Virginia will probably support Sen. Clinton," he said. "But when it's over, what will unify us as Democrats - what must unify us as Americans - is an unyielding commitment to the men and women who've served this nation."
Pledging "zero tolerance" for situations in which homeless veterans are sleeping on the streets, Obama promised to build "a 21st century VA" as president.
"It means no more red tape . . . no more shortfalls . . . no more delays . . . no more means-testing," he said.
Endorsing legislation by Sen. Jim Webb (D-Va.) to expand the GI Bill for veterans, Obama criticized McCain for opposing the bill and said, "At a time when the skyrocketing cost of tuition is pricing thousands of Americans out of a college education, we should be doing everything we can to give the men and women who have risked their lives for this country the chance to pursue the American dream."
In Clear Fork, W. Va,. meanwhile, Clinton focused on the economy.
She argued that during her husband's administration in the 1990s, 22.7 million new jobs were created, "and they were good jobs." Saying that the U.S. economy is "on the brink of a recession," Clinton noted that under the Bush administration, "the typical family" has lost $1,000 in earnings even as gasoline and grocery costs escalate.
"I believe that when you're a leader you should lead on behalf of the people you represent, not on behalf of a few," she said, pledging universal healthcare, an end to the Bush administration's No Child Left Behind law and direct federal lending for college loans.
Behind in the count of pledged delegates and superdelegates, Clinton was banking on a strong showing in West Virginia to boost her popular vote totals against Obama.
"Even when times are tough and it looks like the deck is stacked against you, Americans are resilient," she said in a comment that may have reflected her own aspirations. "One of the jobs of the next president is to get Americans to believe again."
McCain was in Portland, Ore., today and planned to give a speech this afternoon on global warming. His prepared remarks lash Bush for failing to sign the Kyoto global warming accords.
"I will not shirk the mantle of leadership that the United States bears," McCain says. "I will not permit eight long years to pass without serious action on serious challenges. I will not accept the same dead-end of failed diplomacy that claimed Kyoto. The United States will lead and will lead with a different approach -- an approach that speaks to the interests and obligations of every nation."
Oregon is considered a swing state in November. McCain's appearance there comes just days after Obama and Clinton stumped in the state.
[Source: LA Times]
0
Bob Barr to Run For President as a Libertarian
Win McNamee / Getty Images
Bob Barr, 59, a former Republican congressman from Georgia, criticized Republican John McCain, the presumptive GOP nominee, for not being a true conservative.
The former GOP congressman from Georgia accuses the government of irresponsible spending. He says McCain can't call himself a true conservative. Clinton and Obama campaign in West Virginia.
WASHINGTON -- Bob Barr, a former congressman from Georgia and a former Republican, today announced his candidacy for president as a Libertarian who would rein in federal spending and foreign wars.
"The government has run amok fiscally," he said at a press conference. Saying that during the first quarter of this year the private sector was losing millions of jobs while the federal government was "hiring with enthusiasm," Barr added, "As the American people see their standard of living falling, the standard of government keeps going up."
Expected to win the nomination of the Libertarian Party when it holds its convention in Denver over the Memorial Day weekend, Barr, 59, criticized Republican John McCain, the presumptive GOP nominee, for not being a true conservative.
"There's not a great deal of substance there in terms of a commitment to cutting the size of government," Barr said He said no one who had authored the McCain-Feingold campaign reforms that cap individual donations could call himself a conservative, "at least with a straight face."
Barr also lashed Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton for saying that if Iran threatens Israel's existence, the United States should "obliterate Iran." Calling the New York senator's statement "tremendously dire," Barr called the possibility of Iran possessing nuclear weapons "remote" and said he has seen "no evidence that indicates that is an imminent likelihood."
Saying both the Republican and Democratic Parties have "bought into a system of running a charity called the United States of America," Barr blasted programs that use public funds to educate the children of illegal immigrants and maintain foreign military bases "that have no more efficacy in the 21st century."
"The federal government needs to get away from the notion that simply because we have all this money in the Treasury -- or we can borrow more money -- that we can provide all these services," he said. "That is not responsible government."
Political commentators debated the impact of Barr's entry, with some arguing that, like Ralph Nader in 2000, who pulled votes away from Democrat Al Gore, Barr could pull enough votes away from Republican McCain in 2008 to give the Democrats the election.
Barr confirmed that he was asked by McCain supporters not to run for fear he would pull votes from the GOP, but he defended his decision by saying that "American voters deserve better than simply the lesser of two evils."
Arguing that in recent election cycles, the losing candidates "blame somebody else," Barr said, "At the end of the day if I do succeed, it is not my intent to blame Sen. McCain or Sen. (Barack) Obama. I hope they would return the favor." If McCain loses to Obama, the Illinois senator, Barr said, it will be because his message or his candidacy doesn't resonate. "Each of us has the future in our own hands," he said, adding that his voters "are not likely to fall in the category of being enthusiastic about voting for John McCain, if such exists."
But Christopher Barron, a Republican political consultant, thinks it is equally plausible that Barr could hurt Obama.
"I think Bob Barr's candidacy could impact the race -- but I don't know at this point which candidate he is likely to help or hurt," he said. "If Barr's candidacy is fueled by the same people who supported Ron Paul -- college students, antiwar advocates and hard-core libertarians -- then I think it is unlikely to hurt Sen. McCain in any significant way because these are not the type of voters McCain is reaching out to. I could actually envision a scenario under which Barr's candidacy actually helps McCain by siphoning off some of the enthusiasm among college voters and antiwar advocates for Obama."
And Jennifer Duffy of the Cook Political Report noted that Barr's effectiveness could turn on gathering enough voter petitions to get on the ballot in key swing states. "I think he is only a threat if he gets on the ballot in a decent number of battleground states," she said.
One day before the West Virginia primary, Obama forecast a Clinton victory in the state - and Democratic unity in the fall. In a state with a high population of military veterans, Obama focused a speech in Charleston on health care for veterans.
"I'm honored that some of you will support me and I understand that many more here in West Virginia will probably support Sen. Clinton," he said. "But when it's over, what will unify us as Democrats - what must unify us as Americans - is an unyielding commitment to the men and women who've served this nation."
Pledging "zero tolerance" for situations in which homeless veterans are sleeping on the streets, Obama promised to build "a 21st century VA" as president.
"It means no more red tape . . . no more shortfalls . . . no more delays . . . no more means-testing," he said.
Endorsing legislation by Sen. Jim Webb (D-Va.) to expand the GI Bill for veterans, Obama criticized McCain for opposing the bill and said, "At a time when the skyrocketing cost of tuition is pricing thousands of Americans out of a college education, we should be doing everything we can to give the men and women who have risked their lives for this country the chance to pursue the American dream."
In Clear Fork, W. Va,. meanwhile, Clinton focused on the economy.
She argued that during her husband's administration in the 1990s, 22.7 million new jobs were created, "and they were good jobs." Saying that the U.S. economy is "on the brink of a recession," Clinton noted that under the Bush administration, "the typical family" has lost $1,000 in earnings even as gasoline and grocery costs escalate.
"I believe that when you're a leader you should lead on behalf of the people you represent, not on behalf of a few," she said, pledging universal healthcare, an end to the Bush administration's No Child Left Behind law and direct federal lending for college loans.
Behind in the count of pledged delegates and superdelegates, Clinton was banking on a strong showing in West Virginia to boost her popular vote totals against Obama.
"Even when times are tough and it looks like the deck is stacked against you, Americans are resilient," she said in a comment that may have reflected her own aspirations. "One of the jobs of the next president is to get Americans to believe again."
McCain was in Portland, Ore., today and planned to give a speech this afternoon on global warming. His prepared remarks lash Bush for failing to sign the Kyoto global warming accords.
"I will not shirk the mantle of leadership that the United States bears," McCain says. "I will not permit eight long years to pass without serious action on serious challenges. I will not accept the same dead-end of failed diplomacy that claimed Kyoto. The United States will lead and will lead with a different approach -- an approach that speaks to the interests and obligations of every nation."
Oregon is considered a swing state in November. McCain's appearance there comes just days after Obama and Clinton stumped in the state.
[Source: Los Angeles Times]
"The government has run amok fiscally," he said at a press conference. Saying that during the first quarter of this year the private sector was losing millions of jobs while the federal government was "hiring with enthusiasm," Barr added, "As the American people see their standard of living falling, the standard of government keeps going up."
Expected to win the nomination of the Libertarian Party when it holds its convention in Denver over the Memorial Day weekend, Barr, 59, criticized Republican John McCain, the presumptive GOP nominee, for not being a true conservative.
"There's not a great deal of substance there in terms of a commitment to cutting the size of government," Barr said He said no one who had authored the McCain-Feingold campaign reforms that cap individual donations could call himself a conservative, "at least with a straight face."
Barr also lashed Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton for saying that if Iran threatens Israel's existence, the United States should "obliterate Iran." Calling the New York senator's statement "tremendously dire," Barr called the possibility of Iran possessing nuclear weapons "remote" and said he has seen "no evidence that indicates that is an imminent likelihood."
Saying both the Republican and Democratic Parties have "bought into a system of running a charity called the United States of America," Barr blasted programs that use public funds to educate the children of illegal immigrants and maintain foreign military bases "that have no more efficacy in the 21st century."
"The federal government needs to get away from the notion that simply because we have all this money in the Treasury -- or we can borrow more money -- that we can provide all these services," he said. "That is not responsible government."
Political commentators debated the impact of Barr's entry, with some arguing that, like Ralph Nader in 2000, who pulled votes away from Democrat Al Gore, Barr could pull enough votes away from Republican McCain in 2008 to give the Democrats the election.
Barr confirmed that he was asked by McCain supporters not to run for fear he would pull votes from the GOP, but he defended his decision by saying that "American voters deserve better than simply the lesser of two evils."
Arguing that in recent election cycles, the losing candidates "blame somebody else," Barr said, "At the end of the day if I do succeed, it is not my intent to blame Sen. McCain or Sen. (Barack) Obama. I hope they would return the favor." If McCain loses to Obama, the Illinois senator, Barr said, it will be because his message or his candidacy doesn't resonate. "Each of us has the future in our own hands," he said, adding that his voters "are not likely to fall in the category of being enthusiastic about voting for John McCain, if such exists."
But Christopher Barron, a Republican political consultant, thinks it is equally plausible that Barr could hurt Obama.
"I think Bob Barr's candidacy could impact the race -- but I don't know at this point which candidate he is likely to help or hurt," he said. "If Barr's candidacy is fueled by the same people who supported Ron Paul -- college students, antiwar advocates and hard-core libertarians -- then I think it is unlikely to hurt Sen. McCain in any significant way because these are not the type of voters McCain is reaching out to. I could actually envision a scenario under which Barr's candidacy actually helps McCain by siphoning off some of the enthusiasm among college voters and antiwar advocates for Obama."
And Jennifer Duffy of the Cook Political Report noted that Barr's effectiveness could turn on gathering enough voter petitions to get on the ballot in key swing states. "I think he is only a threat if he gets on the ballot in a decent number of battleground states," she said.
One day before the West Virginia primary, Obama forecast a Clinton victory in the state - and Democratic unity in the fall. In a state with a high population of military veterans, Obama focused a speech in Charleston on health care for veterans.
"I'm honored that some of you will support me and I understand that many more here in West Virginia will probably support Sen. Clinton," he said. "But when it's over, what will unify us as Democrats - what must unify us as Americans - is an unyielding commitment to the men and women who've served this nation."
Pledging "zero tolerance" for situations in which homeless veterans are sleeping on the streets, Obama promised to build "a 21st century VA" as president.
"It means no more red tape . . . no more shortfalls . . . no more delays . . . no more means-testing," he said.
Endorsing legislation by Sen. Jim Webb (D-Va.) to expand the GI Bill for veterans, Obama criticized McCain for opposing the bill and said, "At a time when the skyrocketing cost of tuition is pricing thousands of Americans out of a college education, we should be doing everything we can to give the men and women who have risked their lives for this country the chance to pursue the American dream."
In Clear Fork, W. Va,. meanwhile, Clinton focused on the economy.
She argued that during her husband's administration in the 1990s, 22.7 million new jobs were created, "and they were good jobs." Saying that the U.S. economy is "on the brink of a recession," Clinton noted that under the Bush administration, "the typical family" has lost $1,000 in earnings even as gasoline and grocery costs escalate.
"I believe that when you're a leader you should lead on behalf of the people you represent, not on behalf of a few," she said, pledging universal healthcare, an end to the Bush administration's No Child Left Behind law and direct federal lending for college loans.
Behind in the count of pledged delegates and superdelegates, Clinton was banking on a strong showing in West Virginia to boost her popular vote totals against Obama.
"Even when times are tough and it looks like the deck is stacked against you, Americans are resilient," she said in a comment that may have reflected her own aspirations. "One of the jobs of the next president is to get Americans to believe again."
McCain was in Portland, Ore., today and planned to give a speech this afternoon on global warming. His prepared remarks lash Bush for failing to sign the Kyoto global warming accords.
"I will not shirk the mantle of leadership that the United States bears," McCain says. "I will not permit eight long years to pass without serious action on serious challenges. I will not accept the same dead-end of failed diplomacy that claimed Kyoto. The United States will lead and will lead with a different approach -- an approach that speaks to the interests and obligations of every nation."
Oregon is considered a swing state in November. McCain's appearance there comes just days after Obama and Clinton stumped in the state.
[Source: Los Angeles Times]
0
Houston teen Marche Taylor kicked out for Skimpy Prom Dress
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Instead of a night of dancing and hanging out with friends, the Madison High School senior ended in a confrontation with school officials and her being escorted out in handcuffs.
All because school officials said her dress was inappropriate for the school prom.
This is not the first time either school officials or parents have been outraged over the prom attire available to teens.
Tell us what you think. Do you believe teens should be able to wear what they want to prom, or do schools have the right to enforce dressing standards?
[Source: WTOL.com]
0
Powerset Launches Piggybackipedia: Wikipedia Search Engine
Who won Survivor last night? Powerset doesn't know.
Okay - maybe that's an unfair question for Powerset since the aptly-named Parvati Shallow only won Survivor Micronesia last night. It might be easier to ask "Who is Parvati? The answer: in Sanskrit, "parvati" means "Mountain's daughter" one of the names for Shiva's wife, the Universal Mother.
So what is Powerset? That's a much more intelligent question to ask.
Powerset is the much-hyped beta natural language search engine metaphor-challenged mainstream media call the Google Killer. That means you can type questions in a search box the way you normally ask them. (Think Ask Jeeves 1.5)
That doesn't mean natural language search or Powerset can kill Google, or even commit assault and battery on Google.
Powerset launched with a smart concept: better search results than Wikipedia's own search box. So the play is a "non-Google Custom Search Engine" for Wikipedia. Let's see about what Powerset can can do..
"What is Powerset?" we asked. Powerset separates results by combining the primary keyword (Powerset) with related verbs and nouns from Web pages and Wikipedia. Here's the answer we weren't looking for from Powerset itself.
Factz from Wikipedia: we found the following about Powerset Powerset opened : community and Powerlabs.Results for Powerset opened community
Powerset (company) In a form of beta testing, Powerset opened an online community called Powerlabs on September 17, 2007.
Results for Powerset opened Powerlabs
Powerset (company) In a form of beta testing, Powerset opened an online community called Powerlabs on September 17, 2007.
Results for Powerset displayed advertise
Powerset (company) (Powerset is not currently selling or displaying any advertising.)
Results for Powerset searched language
Powerlabs Let's roll, is a prerelease of Powerset's general natural language search.
Wikipedia Articles: results 1 - 10 of 78
1. Powerset (company)
Powerset is a company based in San Francisco, California that is developing a natural language search engine for the Internet.
2. Power set
In mathematics, given a set S, the power set (or powerset) of S, written , P(S), or 2S, is the set of all subsets of S. In axiomatic set theory (as developed e.g. in the ZFC axioms), the existence of the power set of any set is postulated by the axiom of power set.6. Powerlabs
Powerset Applications Currently, Powerset has released two applications: Powermouse and a beta of its search engine.
Only when you click on the expand snippet (powermouse) miniviewer button, do you find the answer you're looking for (sort of):
Powerset (company)Powerset is a company based in San Francisco, California that is developing a natural language search engine for the Internet.
The company's stated desire is to build a search engine to compete with Google and Yahoo which would act on a user's questions, as opposed to keywords. For instance, a user who wanted to find out which U.S. state has the highest income tax would enter "Which state has the highest income tax?" at Powerset, as opposed to "state income tax" at Google. The advantage to the user, aside from using questions similar to what one person would ask another verbally, is that a natural language search engine would, depending on its underlying programming, return a result that is more relevant to what the user seeks
Powerset is limited by the poorly-written Wikipedia entry. The comparison to Google doesn't work. If someone's searching for the state with the highest state income tax, they'll type in "highest state income tax." No one would type in "state income tax" in Google if they'd type "Which state has the highest income tax?" in Powerset.
At this stage in beta, Powerset can be considered a search engine survivor.
But unless the technology yields better results -- and fast -- people will think of Parvati and Powerset as "shallow" contestants.
[Source: Search Engine Watch]
0
BlackBerry 9000 officially revealed as BlackBerry Bold
A review on the 9000/Bold surfaced last week and now RIM has come forward with an official announcement of the BlackBerry Bold. The bold features tri-band HSDPA, integrated GPS, Wi-Fi, 128MB Flash, 1GB on-board storage, a microSD memory card slot, and a 480×320 color LCD, just to name a few features.
It sounds like a great device and is expected to be available in the summer from RIM. No word on price yet, but you can bet it’ll be priced competitively given all of the other gadgets hitting around that time.
I’m impressed with how much memory is integrated, too. Not only does it sport 1GB of storage, but it also has an externally acessible microSD slot. Nice touch, RIM! I’ve been playing with the Curve on Sprint’s network and I’ve been noticing a number of applications that will only save on a storage card. With 1GB of integrated storage, this problem would have been a non-issue out of the box.
[Source: www.geek.com]
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Jenna Bush Wed By Obama Backer Kirbyjon Caldwell
The New York Times notes:
On Saturday afternoon, the Hager family hosted wedding guests at a barbecue in Salado. The wedding, which began at 7:30 p.m., took place on the Bush ranch, before a white limestone altar erected next to a man-made lake. The Rev. Kirbyjon Caldwell of Windsor Village United Methodist Church in Houston officiated at the ceremony. Mr. Caldwell, a longtime religious adviser to Mr. Bush, has endorsed Senator Barack Obama.
Here's the AP write-up of Caldwell's endorsement:
Houston minister Kirbyjon Caldwell endorses Obama
HOUSTON - An influential Houston minister who has long been a spiritual adviser to President George W. Bush says he will endorse Barack Obama's bid for the presidency.
The Rev. Kirbyjon Caldwell, senior pastor of Windsor Village United Methodist Church, said Saturday that he's backing the Illinois senator because of Obama's "character, confidence and courage."
Obama, a Democrat, is electable and "would do a wonderful job to bring people together to pursue a common vision we all have," said Caldwell, who said his support is personal and not connected to his role as pastor of the 14,000-member church.
However, Caldwell told his congregation that Obama may pay a visit to his church.
Caldwell, whose relationship with the president began when Bush was governor of Texas, introduced Bush at the 2000 Republican National Convention and gave the benediction at both of his inaugurations.
Caldwell said he called Bush to inform him of his decision to support Obama and that the president was "OK" with it, adding that the minister's presidential choice would not affect their relationship.
[Source: The Huffington Post]
1
Tornadoes Leave At Least 22 Dead
PICHER, Oklahoma (CNN) -- Residents in three Midwestern states spent Mother's Day sifting through the wreckage of their homes, trying to recover from powerful storms that killed at least 22 people.
The storm system killed at least 21 people in the Midwest and then continued into the South on Sunday, killing one in Georgia and destroying a small town.
Sherri Mills was in the small Oklahoma town of Picher trying to find family pictures among wreckage that was a friend's home. Mills said her friend was elsewhere when the tornado struck.
"Thank God she wasn't here," said Mills, standing in front of the piles of brick and wood. "[She] lost everything. This was a two-story big brick home."
Another man in Picher said he was home with his family when the storm hit. He was blown around inside the home, and was lucky to be alive, he said.
"We got down on the floor and huddled up together, and we weren't in there 30 seconds when it hit the house," the man told CNN. "We ended up right there under that door. At least, I was under the door, my wife, two granddaughters, and my daughter was all there, just bunched up against each other."
President Bush pledged federal support. "Mother's Day is a sad day for those who lost their lives in Oklahoma, Missouri and Georgia because of the tornadoes," he told reporters in Waco, Texas.
"We send our prayers for those who lost their lives. The federal government will be moving hard to help," he added.
Bush said he would be in touch with the governors of the affected states. He did not specify what support the federal government would give.
Lisa Janak with the Georgia Emergency Management Agency said one person people was killed in Dublin, just south of Macon.
And the nearby town of Kite, with about 200 residents, was destroyed, she said. "The report I am getting is the whole town is gone," Janak said. "I have worked in emergency management for eight years, and I never received a report like that before."
Authorities fear there may be additional casualties in Missouri, said Susie Stonner, a spokeswoman with the State Emergency Management Agency in Jefferson City.
"It's dark, and it was over a wide area. Some of the houses have been completely destroyed," she said.
A twister touched down in the northeastern corner of Oklahoma shortly before 6 p.m. and killed seven people in Ottawa County, according to emergency officials. And a 20-mile area in Picher was destroyed, said Michelann Ooten, a spokeswoman for the Oklahoma Department of Emergency Management.
Another 150 were injured and an unknown number of people were missing.
Ooten said the town enlisted the help of firefighters from surrounding areas, who went house-to-house in a 20-block area, sifting through the rubble and searching for survivors.
"It looks like a war zone," she said. "Some homes have fallen in, some homes have lost roofs, and some are now just slabs."
Freelance journalist Mike Priest went to a heavy-hit neighborhood in Picher on Sunday, surveying an area where almost all the houses were were obliterated. Video Watch Priest film flattened houses »
All the residents had left, abandoning their cars, clothes and even their pets, Priest said.
"As you can see, some people's pets have been left behind, and they are fighting over some food," Priest told CNN as he shot footage of the neighborhood. "Just total devastation.
"Houses wiped all the way down to the foundation. You can see what used to be a house in the driveway. The storm was incredibly, incredibly strong right through here."
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By early Sunday morning, emergency management agencies in the two states reported deaths in the following areas: Seven in Ottawa County, Oklahoma; 12 in Newton County, Missouri; one in a small community just east of Carthage in Jasper County, Missouri; and one in an area of Purdy in Barry County, Missouri.
Oklahoma Gov. Brad Henry and Missouri Gov. Matt Blunt are scheduled to visit the area Sunday.
[Source: CNN]
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Gospel Singer Dottie Rambo Dies In Tour Bus Wreck In Mo.
MOUNT VERNON, Mo. -- Joyce "Dottie" Rambo, an influential gospel singer and songwriter, died early Sunday when her tour bus ran off the highway and struck an embankment. She was 74.
Seven other people on the bus were injured in the wreck about two miles east of Mount Vernon on Interstate 44, the Missouri Highway Patrol said. They were hospitalized in Springfield with moderate to severe injuries, according to the patrol.
It was unclear whether the crash was related to the severe storms and tornadoes that hit the region on Saturday. Storms also swept through the area later in the night, according to the National Weather Service.
Rambo, of Nashville, Tenn., was on her way to a Mother's Day performance in Texas, according to her Web site.
"She was a giant in the gospel music industry," said Beckie Simmons, Rambo's agent. "Dolly Parton recorded some of her songs."
Rambo was inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame last year and the Kentucky Music Hall of Fame in 2006.
Rambo has had more than 2,500 published songs, including gospel classics such as "He Looked Beyond My Fault and Saw My Need" and the 1982 Gospel Music Association Song of the Year, "We Shall Behold Him."
[Source: Washington Post]
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Jenna Bush Wedding Pics: Photos From Ceremony With Henry Hager Released Sunday
Jenna Bush is now married young woman. The daughter of President George W. Bush had a lovely wedding ceremony on Saturday in Texas and the bride is now officially Mrs. Henry Hager. So where are the wedding pics? Reports claim that the bride will release some of the celebrity wedding photos on Sunday but it is still not clear exactly how many photos the First Family will release.
Jenna Bush was determined to keep her ceremony private and only for her family and friends. She skipped what could have been a huge ceremony at the White House for a family affair in Texas. There have been all kinds of requests for the pictures from what has been described as a low key wedding ceremony and though the requests are being treated liked celebrity photos, but this isn’t a Mariah Carey and Nick Cannon moment.
***
The Bush wedding has a bit of an edge on the paparazzi type treatment that might have been present as they have that whole Secret Service detail working for them and all of the invited friends and family were able to celebrate with Jenna and Henry without concerns for private photographers trying to sneak a photo or two and send them off to the tabloids.
The couple is rumored to be ready to head for their honeymoon in Europe but even that is being kept very quiet. Congrats to the young couple and check back for the photos, we will link to them as soon as they are available.
Update: Pics are here. Some of the wedding photos have been released! One of the photos is at the link and there are more linked as well. 
[Source: By Jo Anne Way, National Ledger | Images Source: FOX News]
Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders - Dying Man's Last Wish
DALLAS --
A terminally ill North Texas man recently received his dying wish to meet the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders, NBC 5 reported.Mark Harris, Jr., a 26-year-old cancer patient, was all smiles as the cheerleaders greeted him.Vistacare, the hospice organization caring for Harris, helped grant his wish. The organization said his prognosis is day-to-day, NBC 5 reported.
"It hurts a lot, but at first, you just let it go because I know that God is with me, I'm not worried," Harris said. His family has known for months about the prognosis. "Some days are funny, some days are a lot of fun and laughter, some days are very sad, some are very heart wrenching," his father, Mark Harris Sr., said.The day his wish was granted was one of the good days as he was finally able to meet the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders. He also met the Dallas Maverick Dancers on the same day. Harris said as he continues to cherish each moment with his family he has one last wish. "My wish is that I can just go to heaven and look down and see my family succeed," Harris said.
[Source: NBC5i.com]
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Jenna Bush's Wedding is Low-Key Affair at Ranch
Jenna Bush's wedding is low-key affair at ranch
By DEB RIECHMANN – 1 hour ago
CRAWFORD, Texas (AP) — Jenna Bush couldn't see herself getting married at the White House surrounded by antique furniture and oil portraits of presidents. She and Henry Hager said "I do" Saturday at President Bush's ranch in Crawford where the corn is thigh-high, roads are named Cattle Drive and the Texas flag is painted on the rooftops of barns.
The president and the bride picked "You Are So Beautiful" for their father-daughter dance, according to band leader Tyrone Smith of Nashville, Tenn. Smith and his 10-piece party band, The Tyrone Smith Revue, was asked to do "Lovin' in My Baby's Eyes" by Taj Mahal for the newlyweds' first dance. Smith, who promised the couple a "get down" party, talked to The Associated Press earlier in the week on condition that the information not be released before the wedding.
Smith, who witnessed the wedding ceremony, said afterward the groom was dressed in a dark blue suit with powder-blue tie and the bride wore a "very simple and elegant" white dress, but did not wear a veil.
Smith said Jenna Bush's paternal grandparents, President George H.W. Bush and Barbara Bush, spoke during the wedding, though he could not hear their comments.
Away from the glare of television cameras that have beamed other first family weddings into American living rooms, Jenna's outdoor wedding at the ranch reflected her family's penchant for privacy and her preference for the casual over grandiose.
Even without the prying eyes of strangers, Jenna's marriage to her longtime boyfriend Henry Hager made presidential history. It will be remembered as an upbeat moment of Bush's two-term presidency beset by terrorism, war and the nation's current limp economy.
"This is a joyous occasion for our family, as we celebrate the happy life ahead of her and her husband, Henry," Bush said in his Saturday radio address. "It's also a special time for Laura who this Mother's Day weekend will watch a young woman we raised together walk down the aisle."
Jenna, 26, is the 22nd child of a president to get married while their father was in the Oval Office. Their ceremonies have ranged from Tricia Nixon's extravagant wedding broadcast live from the Rose Garden in 1971 to the 1992 Camp David wedding of Jenna's aunt, Dorothy Koch. That one was kept so secret that the press didn't find out about it until it was over.
"All of them are different. This one really reflects the personality of both Jenna and the George W. Bush family," said Doug Wead, a former aide to President George H.W. Bush and author of a book on presidents' kin.
"If they'd have gone on TV, the wedding would have been shown all over the world and Jenna Bush would have been an international celebrity — and she would have been a target. They're preparing the transition to private life and they're not particularly interested in seeing Jenna Bush become a huge celebrity."
The media was not invited, but Jenna's wedding will be closely scrutinized — down to the matte beading and embroidery on her white Oscar de la Renta gown.
"The wedding details will be reported on for generations, influencing both present-day and future brides-to-be," says Millie Martin Bratten, editor-in-chief of BRIDES magazine and student of first family weddings.
Jenna's twin sister, Barbara, was maid of honor and 14 other women were in her "house party." Barbara Bush wore a long, moonstone blue dress with a low-cut back. The women in the "house party" were clad in seven different styles of knee-length dresses in seven different colors that match the palette of Texas wildflowers — blues, greens, lavenders and pinky reds.
The best man was the groom's brother, John "Jack" Hager. Also part of the "house party" were 14 ushers, who walked with the 14 women down the aisle to their seats, but did not participate in the ceremony.
More than 200 family and friends converged here for the nuptials on the 1,600-acre ranch where a tent was erected for the post-ceremony dinner and dancing.
The ceremony began about a half hour or so before sunset. The couple stood at a cross, made of beige colored Texas limestone, that was erected near the ranch's man-made lake. The cross and altar, made of the same stone used to construct the Bush's ranch house, will be a landmark at the ranch for years to come. The Rev. Kirbyjon Caldwell of Windsor Village United Methodist Church in Houston officiated.
Festivities began Friday with a bridal lunch, rehearsal dinner and post-rehearsal dinner celebration in Salado, a tiny tourist village, which used to be a stagecoach stop. Jenna, her sister and the first lady were in Salado, more than an hour's drive south of Crawford, all day Friday and the president arrived in the evening by motorcade.
The rehearsal dinner for about 100 people was hosted by the parents of the groom, who turned 30 on Friday. Hager's father, John Hager, is the chairman of the Virginia Republican Party and is former lieutenant governor of Virginia and former U.S. assistant secretary of education.
The rehearsal dinner crowd, including the president, then walked down a street in Salado with the Belton High School Marching Band from Belton, Texas, to a "Texas-sized celebration" at another establishment. All the wedding guests were invited to this event. They were entertained by the five-member Duke Merrick Band from Charlottesville, Va., which performed classic Texas songs and original pieces by Merrick, a relative of the Hager family.
The groom's family also hosted a barbecue lunch Saturday in Salado ahead of the wedding.
Henry Hager met Jenna during her father's 2004 re-election campaign. He graduated from Wake Forest University and worked as an aide to Bush's former top political adviser Karl Rove. He is set to receive a master's degree in business administration later this month from the University of Virginia's Darden School of Business.
Between February 2005 and January 2006, he was an economic policy aide in the office of Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez and regularly briefed the secretary on economic data. "He was widely regarded as a super star," said Ann Marie Hauser, press secretary at Commerce.
After the wedding, the couple is rumored to be honeymooning in Europe, although the White House would not comment. After that, they plan to live in a two-bedroom, two-bath town house on the south side of Baltimore. She plans to return to teaching and he will work for Constellation Energy, a power supplier based in Maryland.
This was a big doing for Crawford, home to about 700 central Texans. They likely will not get a glimpse of the bride and groom, but the couple's photo is plastered across coffee mugs, mouse pads, key rings and other Western White House trinkets for sale at a few stores along the main drag.
A rusty, metal sculpture of an angel, a gift to Crawford after Bush's re-election, is adorned with a veil and a bouquet of white flowers for the occasion. The sign at the Coffee Station in Crawford, where Jenna orders fried jalapenos, says "Congrats Jenna and Henry." The Peace House, home away from home for anti-war protesters when they're in Crawford, set up a red sign that says "Peace to the Newlyweds."
The Peace House group decided against protesting on the wedding day, but about a dozen members of an anti-gay group out of Topeka, Kan., demonstrated on a road leading to the ranch.
Dick and Kathy Karmy drove 70 miles from their home in Cleburne, Texas, to visit Crawford on wedding day. "I have a girlfriend in Washington state and she said `You've got to go and get me a mug,'" Kathy Karmy said.
Mary Wood of San Antonio, about a three-hour-minute drive from Crawford, stopped at a table the Crawford Chamber of Commerce and Waco Convention and Visitors Bureau set up outside a bank to welcome visitors to town. Since so many people wanted to know how to drive to Bush's Prairie Chapel Ranch, they offered a homemade map, even though the ranch property is barricaded far from the entrance.
"I almost came during the week, but then I said it would mean more to be here on the wedding day," said Wood, who had a camera hanging from her neck so she could take a photo of the "Prairie Chapel Road" sign. "It's just a big kick to say I was here."
[Source: Associated Press]
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