Juan Gris and porn star banned from prom top Google searches

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Afghans: US paid $50,000 per shooting spree death

Afghan villagers pray over the grave of one of the 16 victims killed in a shooting rampage in the Panjwai district of Kandahar province south of Kabul, Afghanistan, Saturday, March 24, 2012. Mohammad Wazir has trouble even drinking water now, because it reminds him of the last time he saw his 7-year-old daughter. He had asked his wife for a drink but his daughter insisted on fetching it. Now his daughter Masooma is dead, killed along with 10 other members of his family in a shooting rampage attributed to a U.S. soldier. The soldier faces the death penalty but Wazir and his neighbors say they feel irreparably broken. (AP Photo/Allauddin Khan)

Afghan villagers pray over the grave of one of the 16 victims killed in a shooting rampage in the Panjwai district of Kandahar province south of Kabul, Afghanistan, Saturday, March 24, 2012. Mohammad Wazir has trouble even drinking water now, because it reminds him of the last time he saw his 7-year-old daughter. He had asked his wife for a drink but his daughter insisted on fetching it. Now his daughter Masooma is dead, killed along with 10 other members of his family in a shooting rampage attributed to a U.S. soldier. The soldier faces the death penalty but Wazir and his neighbors say they feel irreparably broken. (AP Photo/Allauddin Khan)

An Afghan boy prays over the grave of one of the sixteen victims killed in a shooting rampage in the Panjwai district of Kandahar province south of Kabul, Afghanistan, Saturday, March 24, 2012. Mohammad Wazir has trouble even drinking water now, because it reminds him of the last time he saw his seven-year-old daughter. He had asked his wife for a drink but his daughter insisted on fetching it. Now his daughter Masooma is dead, killed along with 10 other members of his family in a shooting rampage attributed to a U.S. soldier. The soldier faces the death penalty but Wazir and his neighbors say they feel irreparably broken. (AP Photo/Allauddin Khan)

FILE - In this Sunday, March 11, 2012 file photo, Afghan security forces stand guard outside a home where witnesses say Afghans were killed by a U.S. soldier in Panjwai, Kandahar province south of Kabul, Afghanistan. U.S. Army Staff Sgt. Robert Bales was charged on Friday, March 23, 2012 with 17 counts of premeditated murder, a capital offense that could lead to the death penalty in the massacre of Afghan civilians, the U.S. military said. (AP Photo/Allauddin Khan, File)

(AP) ? The United States has paid $50,000 in compensation for each Afghan killed and $11,000 for each person wounded in the shooting spree allegedly committed by a U.S. soldier in southern Afghanistan, an Afghan official and a community elder said Sunday.

The sums, much larger than typical payments made by the U.S. to families of civilians killed in military operations in Afghanistan, come as the U.S. tries to mend relations following the killing rampage that has threatened to undermine the international effort here.

Army Staff Sgt. Robert Bales is accused of sneaking off his base on March 11, then creeping into houses in two nearby villages and opening fire on families as they slept.

U.S. investigators believe the gunman returned to his base after the first attack and later slipped away to kill again, American officials have said. Bales has been charged with 17 counts of premeditated murder and other crimes and could face the death penalty if convicted.

That would seem to support the U.S. government's assertion ? contested by some Afghans ? that the shooter acted alone, since the killings would have been perpetrated over a longer period of time than assumed when Bales was detained outside his base in Kandahar province's Panjwai district.

But it also raises new questions about how the suspect could have carried out the pre-dawn attacks without drawing attention from any Americans on the base.

The families of the dead, who received the money Saturday at the governor's office, were told that the money came from U.S. President Barack Obama, said Kandahar provincial council member Agha Lalai. He and community elder Jan Agha confirmed the payout amounts.

Survivors previously had received smaller compensation payments from Afghan officials ? $2,000 for each death and $1,000 for each person wounded.

Two U.S. officials confirmed that compensation had been paid but declined to discuss exact amounts, saying only that it reflected the devastating nature of the incident. The officials spoke anonymously because of the sensitive nature of the subject.

A spokesman for NATO and U.S. forces, Lt. Col. Jimmie Cummings, said only that coalition members often make compensation payments, but they are usually kept private.

"As the settlement of claims is in most cases a sensitive topic for those who have suffered loss, it is usually a matter of agreement that the terms of the settlement remain confidential," Cummings said.

However, civilian death compensations are occasionally made public. In 2010, U.S. troops in Helmand province said they paid $1,500-$2,000 for a death and $600-$1,500 for a serious injury.

The provided compensation figures would mean that at least $866,000 was paid out in all. Afghan officials and villagers have counted 16 dead ? 12 in the village of Balandi and four in neighboring Alkozai ? and six wounded. The U.S. military has charged Bales with 17 murders without explaining the discrepancy.

The 38-year-old soldier, who is from Lake Tapps, Washington, is accused of using his 9mm pistol and M-4 rifle, which was outfitted with a grenade launcher, to kill four men, four women, two boys and seven girls, then burning some of the bodies. The ages of the children were not disclosed in the charge sheet.

Bales is being held in a military prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. The mandatory minimum sentence if he is convicted is life imprisonment with the chance of parole. He could also receive the death penalty.

Families of the dead declined to comment on any payments by U.S. officials on Sunday, but some said previously that they were more concerned about seeing the perpetrator punished than money.

Kandahar is the birthplace of the Taliban and remains a dangerous area despite several offensives.

In the latest violence, a bomb struck a joint NATO-Afghan foot patrol in Kandahar's Arghandab district late Saturday, killing nine Afghans and one international service member, according to Shah Mohammad, the district administrator.

Arghandab is a farming region just outside Kandahar city that has long provided refuge for Taliban insurgents. It was one of a number of communities around Kandahar city that were targeted in a 2010 sweep to oust the insurgency from the area.

The Afghan dead included one soldier, three police officers, four members of the Afghan "local police" ? a government-sponsored militia force ? and one translator, Mohammad said.

NATO reported earlier Sunday that one of its service members was killed in a bomb attack in southern Afghanistan on Saturday but did not provide additional details. It was not clear if this referred to the same incident, as NATO usually waits for individual coalition nations to confirm the details of deaths of their troops.

____

Associated Press writer Robert Burns contributed to this report from Washington

____

Vogt reported from Kabul, and can be followed on Twitter at http://twitter.com/heidivogt

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/3d281c11a96b4ad082fe88aa0db04305/Article_2012-03-25-AS-Afghanistan/id-378c8a3ef9e44deaa3d263fa8c4188d8

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Executive Speech Coach - Business Presentations: Superior ...

The next public seminar of "How to Deliver Superior Presentations is March 28, 2012, by the Toronto Airport. Hurry to reserve your spot at http://www.PresentationSeminars.com ?

If you have questions, call George Torok at 905-335-1997

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Executive Speech Coach, Business presentation tips from George Torok, the Speech Coach for Executives
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Source: http://executivespeechcoach.blogspot.com/2012/03/superior-presentations-participant.html

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Attacking Paul Ryan, But Not the National Debt

Attacking Paul Ryan, But Not the National Debt


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The White House and Democrats have been attacking Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), Chairman of the House Budget Committee, for having the audacity to put forth budget plans, something the Democrats in the Senate have failed to pass for well over a thousand days at this point.

The first words out of Rep. Steve Israel?s mouth, a Democrat from New York, were the pathetic blather about ?billionaires.? Most Americans aren?t billionaires or even millionaires and are more concerned about the rising costs of gasoline, food, and everything else than whether the rich pay more?taxes. In point of fact, the rich pay the vast bulk of the?income taxes?and some forty percent of workers pay none at all. If you?earn?more than $250,000 a year, Democrats think you?re rich.

Never mind that most of us are trying to live within our own budget, the Democrats have resisted passing any kind of a budget to address a looming fiscal crisis of their making. That was why voters in 2010 returned control of the House, where all appropriations are authorized, to Republicans. If they had done the same for the Senate, we might actually have had some budgets, but Harry Reid, the Senate Majority Leader, has ensured that every effort to address the fiscal mess fails.

The White House and the Senate, despite the Simpson-Bowles Commission, despite the so-called ?super committee?, and despite the plans put forth by Ryan, have utterly failed to do anything but spend, spend, and spend. To do so, they must borrow, borrow, and borrow.

In February, the Congressional Budget?Office?(CBO) reported that annual spending over the Obama era had climbed to a projected $3.6 trillion this fiscal year from $2.98 trillion in fiscal 2008; more than 20%. It added up to an increase of about $5 trillion in just four years. This year will mark the highest deficit?the difference between government revenues and government spending?since 1946!

Robotically and moronically, the Democrats keep calling for higher?taxes?and even the CBO has concluded that the 2012 tax hike (ending the Bush?tax cuts) on capital gains,?dividends, estates and small businesses would impede?economic?growth, reducing it 1% the next year and raising the specter of unemployment rising from 8.5% to 9.1%?increasing the jobless to 750,000.

As The?Wall Street?Journal put it, ?the CBO?s facts plainly show that Mr. Obama has the worst fiscal record of any President in modern times. No one else is even close.?

In addition to the tired rhetoric about billionaires and millionaires, the Democrats are also lying about Ryan?s plan as it relates to Medicare, claiming it wants to deprive older Americans of its benefits, but as Ryan points out, ?Our budget?s Medicare reforms make no changes for those in or near?retirement.? Without reform, Medicare will go broke as will Social Security.

Ryan?s plan ?spurs?economic?growth with bold tax reform?eliminating complexity for individuals and families and boosting competitiveness for American job creators. Led by House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp, our budget consolidates the current six?income tax brackets?into just two brackets of 10% and 25%?, the latter for corporations in order to permit them to be more competitive with nations that tax their corporations at a far lower rate than ours?, currently near the highest in the world.

?We reject calls to raise?taxes,? says Ryan, preferring to close tax loopholes.

In brief, the Ryan budget would produce savings in federal spending of $5.3 trillion over ten years and reduce the deficit by $3.3 trillion. It proposes a 10% reduction of the federal work force over three years through attrition and it offers reforms toMedicaid, among others to pull the nation back from the brink of catastrophic collapse and default.

You don?t have to be a mathematical genius to know what is wrong with the way Obama and his Democrat trolls are running the government, despite Republican efforts to apply the brakes. They have increased spending to $3.8 trillion despite the fact that the government only takes in about $2.1 in revenue.

In just one term, Obama is on pace to borrow $6.2 trillion. The debt rises by $4.2 billion every day, $175 million per hour, nearly $3 million per minute.

Without a Republican in the White House and Republican control of both the House and Senate, the United States of America?you and I?are headed off a cliff. All the lies Obama tells between now and November 6, 2012 will not change that.

?

?

Guest columns do not necessarily reflect the views of Accuracy in Media or its staff.


Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/AccuracyInMedia/~3/c6yZg2f69f8/

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New Light Rail Line Approved In Toronto Over Mayor's Objections in the Continuing War On The Car


TTC/Public Domain

Toronto resident and urban theorist Richard Florida wonders in a tweet: "Has anyone recently quantified the effect of bad/ incompetent leadership on the competitiveness and status of a large global city?" He then finds one, that concludes "good mayoral decisions have a marginally positive effect on econ growth but poor decisions have a significantly negative effect"

We have a good test case going on in Toronto right now, where the Mayor, Rob Ford, is seeing all of his allies in the center and on the right fall away because of his stubbornness and intransigence. Mayor Ford hates streetcars and above-grade transit because it gets in the way of cars. In the debate on the future of transit held yesterday in Toronto, he had only one thing to say:

?The people of this city have spoken loud and clear, they want subways folks, they want subways, subways, subways,? Ford told councillors.

?People hate this St. Clair, they hate these streetcars, you can call them what you want, people want subways folks, subways, subways. They don?t want these damn streetcars clogging up our city!?

?That?s what they don?t want!?

Now I happen to live near the #stclairdisaster, as the hashtag goes, a running joke about the "problems" on St. Clair since the new dedicated streetcar right of way was installed. Tweets like: "One of the hidden dangers of the #StClairDisaster are all the parks, filed with kids when the weather turns nice. Someone save us!"

What we get instead is a mayor and his brother badmouthing the whole neighbourhood, saying things like : "We don't want to St. Clair-ize the whole city." - they should be so lucky; new restaurants and upscale stores are going in everywhere, there are condos being built all over the place, property values within walking distance of the St. Clair line have skyrocketed.

Fortunately, cooler heads prevailed and voted instead for Light Rapid Transit system that runs on the surface, meaning that they can afford to build much more, with more stops. Instead of a couple of subway stops to nowhere, there is now the possibility of building a real network.


West Annex News/CC BY 2.0

John Lorinc watched the drama unfold and writes:

The Great Subway Battle of 2012? was Mayor Rob Ford?s to lose, and he lost it with such single-mindedness and determination that this episode may well go down in Toronto history as the textbook example of political self-immolation. Future generations of urban government students and ambitious party operatives will sift through the sorry details for shards of insight on how to avoid IEDs and devastating missteps. Indeed, a new phrase ? ?they really Forded that issue? ? should enter our lexicon.

Rob Ford doesn't love transit and subways; if he did, he would have agreed to tax changes and compromises to pay for them. He just hates transit period, anything that gets in the way of his van or his brother's Navigator. The only thing he hates more than streetcars are cyclists and bike lanes.

Perhaps the tide has turned. Now that Toronto is once again getting a network of modern light rail transit, perhaps we will get a few bike lanes too.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/treehuggersite/~3/ch5boyMgG-w/new-light-rail-line-approved-toronto-over-mayors-objections-continuing-war-car.html

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Johnny Depp Boning Ashley Olsen? (Photos)

Johnny Depp Boning Ashley Olsen? (Photos)

Johnny Depp, who is rumored to have split from his longtime girlfriend Vanessa Paradis, is reportedly hooking up with an Olsen twin! In Touch magazine [...]

Johnny Depp Boning Ashley Olsen? (Photos) Stupid Celebrities Gossip Stupid Celebrities Gossip News


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Space Opera Creator George Walton Lucas, Jr. | Modern Digital Art ...

George Walton Lucas, Jr. (born May 14, 1944) is an American film producer, screenwriter, director, and entrepreneur. He is the founder, chairman and chief executive of Lucasfilm. He is best known as the creator of the space opera franchise Star Wars and the archaeologist-adventurer character Indiana Jones. Lucas is one of the American film industry?s most financially successful directors/producers, with an estimated net worth of $3.2 billion as of 2011.

Early life and education

George Lucas was born in Modesto, California, the son of Dorothy Ellinore (n?e Bomberger) and George Walton Lucas, Sr. (1913?1991), who owned a stationery store.

Lucas grew up in the Central Valley town of Modesto and his early passion for cars and motor racing would eventually serve as inspiration for his USC student film 1:42.08, as well as his Oscar-nominated low-budget phenomenon, American Graffiti. Long before Lucas became obsessed with film making, he wanted to be a race-car driver, and he spent most of his high school years racing on the underground circuit at fairgrounds and hanging out at garages. However, a near-fatal accident in his souped-up Autobianchi Bianchina on June 12, 1962, just days before his high school graduation, quickly changed his mind. Instead of racing, he attended Modesto Junior College and later got accepted into a junior college to study anthropology. While taking liberal arts courses, he developed a passion for cinematography and camera tricks. George Lucas graduated from USC in California.

As a child, Lucas never learned to swim, which became a source of embarrassment and frustration as he became older. Lucas has expressed in several interviews that his inability to swim was ?the passion that drove me to succeed in filmmaking? [It] gave me the chip on my shoulder that I think was critical to my later success?

During this time, an experimental filmmaker named Bruce Baillie tacked up a bedsheet in his backyard in 1960 to screen the work of underground, avant-garde 16?mm filmmakers like Jordan Belson, Stan Brakhage and Bruce Conner. For the next few years, Baillie?s series, dubbed Canyon Cinema, toured local coffeehouses. These events became a magnet for the teenage Lucas and his boyhood friend John Plummer. The 19-year-olds began slipping away to San Francisco to hang out in jazz clubs and find news of Canyon Cinema screenings in flyers at the City Lights bookstore. Already a promising photographer, Lucas became infatuated with these abstract films.

?That?s when he [George] really started exploring? Plummer recalled. ?We went to a theater on Union Street that shows art films, we drove up to San Francisco State for a film festival, and there was an old beatnik coffeehouse in Cow Hollow with shorts that were really out there.? It was a season of awakening for Lucas, who had been an uninterested slacker in high school. At an autocross track, Lucas met his first mentor in the film industry?? famed cinematographer Haskell Wexler, a fellow aficionado of sleek racing machines. Wexler was impressed by the way the shy teenager handled a camera, cradling it low on his hips to get better angles. ?George had a very good eye, and he thought visually,? Wexler recalls.

Lucas then transferred to the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts. USC was one of the earliest universities to have a school devoted to motion picture film. During the years at USC, George Lucas shared a dorm room with Randal Kleiser. Along with classmates such as Walter Murch, Hal Barwood and John Milius, they became a clique of film students known as The Dirty Dozen. He also became very good friends with fellow acclaimed student filmmaker and future Indiana Jones collaborator, Steven Spielberg. Lucas was deeply influenced by the Filmic Expression course taught at the school by filmmaker Lester Novros which concentrated on the non-narrative elements of Film Form like color, light, movement, space, and time. Another huge inspiration was the Serbian montagist (and dean of the USC Film Department) Slavko Vorkapich, a film theoretician comparable in historical importance to Sergei Eisenstein, who moved to Hollywood to make stunning montage sequences for studio features at MGM, RKO, and Paramount. Vorkapich taught the autonomous nature of the cinematic art form, emphasizing the unique dynamic quality of movement and kinetic energy inherent in motion pictures.

Lucas saw many inspiring films in class, particularly the visual films coming out of the National Film Board of Canada like Arthur Lipsett?s 21-87, the French-Canadian cameraman Jean-Claude Labrecque?s cin?ma v?rit? 60 Cycles, the work of Norman McLaren, and the documentaries of Claude Jutra. Lucas fell madly in love with pure cinema and quickly became prolific at making 16?mm nonstory noncharacter visual tone poems and cin?ma v?rit? with such titles as Look at Life, Herbie, 1:42.08, The Emperor, Anyone Lived in a Pretty (how) Town, Filmmaker, and 6-18-67. He was passionate and interested in camerawork and editing, defining himself as a filmmaker as opposed to being a director, and he loved making abstract visual films that create emotions purely through cinema.

After graduating with a bachelor of fine arts in film in 1967, he tried joining the United States Air Force as an officer, but he was immediately turned down because of his numerous speeding tickets. He was later drafted by the Army for military service in Vietnam, but he was exempt from the draft after medical tests showed he had diabetes, the disease that killed his paternal grandfather.

In 1967, Lucas re-enrolled as a USC graduate student in film production. Working as a teaching instructor for a class of U.S. Navy students who were being taught documentary cinematography, Lucas directed the short film Electronic Labyrinth: THX 1138 4EB, which won first prize at the 1967?68 National Student Film Festival, and was later adapted into his first full-length feature film, THX 1138. Lucas was awarded a student scholarship by Warner Brothers to observe and work on the making of a film of his choosing. The film he chose was Finian?s Rainbow (1968) which was being directed by Francis Ford Coppola, who at the time was revered among film school students of the time as a cinema graduate who had ?made it? in Hollywood. In 1969, George Lucas was one of the camera operators on the classic Rolling Stones concert film Gimme Shelter.

Film career

George Lucas is a filmmaker, with a film career dominated by writing and production. Aside from the nine short films he made in the 1960s, he also directed six major features. His work from 1971 and 1977 as a writer-director, which established him as a major figure in Hollywood, consists of just three films: THX 1138, American Graffiti, and Star Wars. There was a 22-year hiatus between the original Star Wars film and his only other feature-film directing credits, the three Star Wars prequels.

Lucas acted as a writer and executive producer on another successful Hollywood film franchise, the Indiana Jones series. In addition, he established his own effects company, Industrial Light and Magic (ILM), to make the original Star Wars film. The company is now one of the most successful in the industry.

Lucas co-founded the studio American Zoetrope with Coppola?whom he met during his internship at Warner Brothers?hoping to create a liberating environment for filmmakers to direct outside the perceived oppressive control of the Hollywood studio system. His first full-length feature film produced by the studio, THX 1138, was not a success. Lucas then created his own company, Lucasfilm, Ltd., and directed American Graffiti (1973). His new-found wealth and reputation enabled him to develop a story set in space. Even so, he encountered difficulties getting Star Wars made. It was only because Alan Ladd, Jr., at Fox Studios liked American Graffiti that he forced through a production and distribution deal for the film, which ended up restoring Fox to financial stability after a number of flops.

Star Wars quickly became the highest-grossing film of all-time, displaced five years later by Spielberg?s E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. During the filming of Star Wars, Lucas waived his up-front fee as director and negotiated to own the licensing rights (for novelizations, T-shirts, toys, etc.)?rights which the studio thought were nearly worthless. This decision earned him hundreds of millions of dollars, as he was able to directly profit from all the licensed games, toys, and collectibles created for the franchise. This accumulated capital enabled him to finance the sequel himself.

Over the two decades after the first Star Wars film, Lucas worked extensively as a writer and/or producer, including the many Star Wars spinoffs made for film, TV, and other media. He acted as executive producer for the next two Star Wars films, assigning the direction of The Empire Strikes Back to Irvin Kershner and Return of the Jedi to Richard Marquand, while receiving a story credit on the former and sharing a screenwriting credit with Lawrence Kasdan on the latter. Lucas also acted as executive producer and story writer on all four of the Indiana Jones films, which he convinced his colleague and good friend, Steven Spielberg, to direct. Other notable projects as a producer or executive producer in this period include Kurosawa?s Kagemusha (1980), Lawrence Kasdan?s Body Heat (1981), Jim Henson?s Labyrinth (1986), Godfrey Reggio?s Powaqqatsi (1986) and the animated film The Land Before Time (1988). There were also some less successful projects, however, including More American Graffiti (1979), the ill-fated Howard the Duck (1986), which was arguably the biggest flop of his career; Willow (1988, which Lucas also wrote); and Coppola?s Tucker: The Man and His Dream (1988). Between 1992 and 1996, Lucas served as executive producer for the television spinoff The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles. In 1997, for the 20th anniversary of Star Wars, Lucas went back to his trilogy to enhance and add certain scenes using newly available digital technology. These new versions were released in theaters as the Star Wars Trilogy: Special Edition. For DVD releases in 2004, this series has received further revisions to make them congruent with the prequel trilogy. Besides the additions to the Star Wars franchise, Lucas released Special Edition director?s cuts of THX 1138 and American Graffiti containing a number of CGI revisions.

The animation studio Pixar was founded as the Graphics Group, one third of the Computer Division of Lucasfilm. Pixar?s early computer graphics research resulted in groundbreaking effects in films such as Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khanand Young Sherlock Holmes, and the group was purchased in 1986 by Steve Jobs shortly after he left Apple after a power struggle at Apple Computer. Jobs paid U.S. $5 million to Lucas and put U.S. $5 million as capital into the company. The sale reflected Lucas? desire to stop the cash flow losses from his 7-year research projects associated with new entertainment technology tools, as well as his company?s new focus on creating entertainment products rather than tools. A contributing factor was cash-flow difficulties following Lucas? 1983 divorce concurrent with the sudden dropoff in revenues from Star Wars licenses following the release of Return of the Jedi.

The sound-equipped system, THX Ltd, was founded by Lucas and Tomlinson Holman. The company was formerly owned by Lucasfilm, and contains equipment for stereo, digital, and theatrical sound for films, and music. Skywalker Sound and Industrial Light & Magic, the sound and visual effects subdivisions of Lucasfilm, respectively, have become among the most respected firms in their fields. Lucasfilm Games, later renamed LucasArts, is well respected in the gaming industry.

In 1994, Lucas began work on the screenplay for the prequel Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace, which would be the first film he had directed in over two decades. The Phantom Menace was released in 1999, beginning a new trilogy of Star Wars films. Lucas also directed Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones and Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith which were released in 2002 and 2005, respectively. Numerous critics considered these films inferior to the previously released Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi.

In 2008, he reteamed with Spielberg for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

Lucas currently serves as executive producer for Star Wars: The Clone Wars, an animated television series on Cartoon Network, which was preceded by a feature film of the same name. He is also working on a so-far untitled Star Wars live-action series.

For the film Red Tails (2012), Lucas serves as story-writer and executive producer. He also took over direction of reshoots while director Anthony Hemingway worked on other projects. Lucas is working on his first musical, an untitled CGI project being produced at Skywalker Ranch. Kevin Munroe is directing and David Berenbaum wrote the screenplay.

Semi-retirement

?I?m moving away from the business,?from the company, from all this kind of stuff.?

?George Lucas on his future career plans

In January 2012, Lucas announced his retirement from producing large-scale blockbuster films and instead re-focusing his career on smaller, independently budgeted features. He did not specify whether or not this would affect his involvement with a fifth installment of the Indiana Jones series.

Awards

In 1991, The George Lucas Educational Foundation was founded as a nonprofit operating foundation to celebrate and encourage innovation in schools. The Foundation?s content is available under the brand Edutopia, in an award-winning web site and via documentary films. Lucas, through his foundation, was one of the leading proponents of the E-rate program in the universal service fund, which was enacted as part of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. On June 24, 2008, Lucas testified before the United States House of Representatives subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet as the head of his Foundation to advocate for a free wireless broadband educational network.

The American Film Institute awarded Lucas its Life Achievement Award on June 9, 2005. This was shortly after the release of Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, about which he joked stating that, since he views the entire Star Wars series as one film, he could actually receive the award now that he had finally ?gone back and finished the movie.?

On June 5, 2005, Lucas was named among the 100 ?Greatest Americans? by the Discovery Channel.

Lucas was nominated for four Academy Awards: Best Directing and Writing for American Graffiti, and Best Directing and Writing for Star Wars. He received the Academy?s Irving G. Thalberg Award in 1991. He appeared at the 79th Academy Awards ceremony in 2007 with Steven Spielberg and Francis Ford Coppola to present the Best Director award to their friend Martin Scorsese. During the speech, Spielberg and Coppola talked about the joy of winning an Oscar, making fun of Lucas, who has not won a competitive Oscar.

In 2005, Lucas gave US$1 million to help build the Martin Luther King, Jr. National Memorial on the National Mall in Washington D.C. to commemorate American civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr.

On June 17, 2006, the Science Fiction Hall of Fame inducted George Lucas and three others.

On September 19, 2006, USC announced that George Lucas had donated $175?180 million to his alma mater to expand the film school. It is the largest single donation to USC and the largest gift to a film school anywhere. Previous donations led to the already existing George Lucas Instructional Building and Marcia Lucas Post-Production building.

On January 1, 2007 George Lucas served as the Grand Marshal for the 2007 Tournament of Roses Parade, and made the coin toss at the 2007 Rose Bowl.

On August 25, 2009, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and Maria Shriver announced that Lucas would be one of 13 California Hall of Fame inductees in The California Museum?s yearlong exhibit. The induction ceremony was on December 1, 2009 in Sacramento, California.

On September 6, 2009, Lucas was in Venice to present to the Pixar team the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement during the 2009 Biennale Venice Film Festival.

Personal life

In 1969, Lucas married film editor Marcia Lou Griffin, who went on to win an Academy Award for her editing work on the original Star Wars film. George and Marcia adopted a daughter, Amanda, in 1981, and divorced in 1983. Lucas has since adopted two more children: Katie, born in 1988, and Jett, born in 1993. All three of his children have appeared in the three Star Wars prequels, as has Lucas himself. Lucas had been in a long relationship with and engaged to singer Linda Ronstadt. He has been dating Mellody Hobson, president of Ariel Investments, since 2006 and she has accompanied him to several events including the 79th Academy Awards ceremony in February 2007, an American Film Institute event in October 2007, the 2008 Cannes Film Festival held in May, and the 2010 Golden Globes.

Lucas was born and raised in a strong Methodist family. The religious and mythical themes in Star Wars were inspired by Lucas? interest in the writings of mythologist Joseph Campbell, and he would eventually come to identify strongly with the Eastern religious philosophies he studied and incorporated into his films, which were a major inspiration for ?the Force.? Lucas eventually came to state that his religion was ?Buddhist Methodist?. Lucas resides in Marin County.

Lucas has said that he is a fan of Seth MacFarlane?s hit TV show Family Guy. MacFarlane has said that Lucasfilm was extremely helpful when the Family Guy crew wanted to parody their works.

Lucas has pledged to give half of his fortune to charity as part of an effort called The Giving Pledge led by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett to persuade America?s richest individuals to donate their financial wealth to charities.

?

Santhosh Koneru

Santhosh Koneru is a freelance graphic designer based in India. He recently completed his college courses majoring in 2D Animation, and has decided to continue on to Film Production. His weapon of choice: Photoshop.

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Source: http://zillionarts.com/george-walton-lucas-jr/

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Mali soldiers claim to have seized power

Renegade Mali soldiers on Thursday claimed they had seized power from an "incompetent regime," announcing on television they had suspended the constitution and dissolved state institutions.

The putschists, calling themselves the National Committee for the Establishment of Democracy, said they had acted due to government's "inability" to handle a Tuareg-led insurrection in the north of the country.

A group of a few dozen soldiers appeared on state television at about 0445 GMT after a few false starts battling to get audio equipment working and hours of music videos playing after seizing the broadcaster in Bamako.

The group's spokesman, identified on-screen as Lieutenant Amadou Konare said the takeover was a result of a "lack of adequate material to defend the nation" as well as government's inability to combat terrorism.

Claiming to represent the nation's defence forces, Konare said the junta "solemnly commits to restore power to a democratically-elected president as soon as national unity and territorial integrity are re-established."

The leader of the junta was revealed to be one Captain Amadou Sanogo, who appeared briefly to announce the imposition of a national curfew, without specifying the time.

The appearance on television came shortly after the mutinous soldiers seized the presidential palace and arrested several ministers, including Foreign Minister Soumeylou Boubeye Maiga and Interior Minister Kafouhouna Kone.

"We are in control of the presidential palace," one of the rebels told AFP on condition of anonymity.

Meanwhile an independent source said President Amadou Toumani Toure, earlier holed up in the palace as shots were traded outside, had managed to leave the premises.

What began as a mutiny over the government's response to the rekindled Tuareg rebellion in the north on Wednesday afternoon turned into a full-blown coup as soldiers seized control of the government broadcaster and attacked the presidential palace.

Witnesses reported heavy gunfire and the use of tracer bullets, while one noted flames coming from the southern side of the presidential palace, perched on a hill overlooking Bamako.

Calls for calm poured in from abroad as the United Nations, France and United States expressed alarm at the events unfolding in the landlocked west African nation.

Elite paratroopers known as the "Red Berets" had attempted to defend the presidency, but the renegade soldiers claimed the upper hand.

The coup comes just a month before Toure was due to step down ahead of April elections after serving two presidential terms. He was not a candidate.

The president is himself a former soldier who led the ouster of president-for-life Moussa Traore in 1991 before handing power to civilians. He later won an election in 2002 and was re-elected in 2007.

Under his leadership Mali -- which has battled successive Tuareg rebellions since independence and more recently Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) activities -- has since been hailed as a growing democratic success in the region.

The Tuareg, many of whom fled drought and discontent under a southern government to work and fight for Moamer Kadhafi in Libya, returned heavily armed and battle-experienced after that country's conflict last year.

In mid-January they launched a fresh rebellion for independence of what they call Azawad, their stomping ground which makes up the vast desert northern triangle of the bow-tie shaped nation.

Anger has grown in recent weeks over the government's handling of the conflict in which the Tuareg attacks have caused up to 200,000 people to flee.

While no official death toll is available, many soldiers are believed to have died in the fighting or taken prisoner.

Wednesday's turmoil erupted when efforts by Defence Minister Sadio Gassama to ease tensions at a military barracks outside the capital turned sour and soldiers fired shots into the air as they demanded proper weapons with which to face the rebels.

"We want ammunition to go and fight the Tuareg rebels. Enough is enough," a corporal at the Kati camp told AFP.

Soldiers took to the capital, firing shots wildly into the air and sending people running in all directions as panic grew.

There were immediate international calls for a peaceful resolution to the crisis.

"We believe that grievances should be addressed through dialogue, not through violence," State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said, urging US citizens to stay indoors. The UN Security Council also appealed for calm.

"Members of the council expressed concern about the reports of military disturbances in Mali. They appealed for calm from all stakeholders and respect for the constitutional order," said Britain's UN ambassador Mark Lyall Grant, the council president for March.

Anger has been simmering in Mali over the government's stance and in February violent protests broke out as the wives and families of those fighting the rebels took to the streets.

Ill-equipped against the heavily armed Tuareg, in some cases soldiers abandoned their barracks in smaller towns as they withdrew to defend larger targets in the vast, desert zone.

A nomadic community of some 1.5 million people, Tuareg of various tribes are scattered between Algeria, Burkina Faso, Libya, Niger and Mali.

Mali and Niger experienced uprisings as the Tuareg fought for recognition of their identity and an independent state in the 1960s, 1990s and early 2000, with a resurgence between 2006 and 2009.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/mali-soldiers-seized-power-053020137.html

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Anticipation Builds Over ?The Hunger Games? as the Film?s Pre-Sale Tops the Charts and Surpasses Even the ?Twilight" Saga?s Numbers with Record-Breaking Pre-Sales

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Source: http://news.yahoo.com/anticipation-builds-over-hunger-games-film-pre-sale-072624886.html

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Simone Farrow, Ed Hardy Bikini Model, Arrested For Heading International Drug Ring


Simone Farrow, an international swimsuit model accused of being the mastermind of a worldwide drug ring run out of a Hollywood apartment, has been arrested.

Farrow got popped in her native Australia after skipping bail last month.

Once the face of the Ed Hardy bikinis, Simone used up to 19 different aliases to ship methamphetamine around the world by FedEx and even the U.S. postal service.

Simone Farrow Picture

According to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency and Australian police, the 37-year-old denied the charges and claims that she was in hiding after running for her life.

"The only reason I've done this is because someone was trying to murder me," she told Australia's Sunday Telegraph in response to the drug ring allegations.

"I've been in relationships with numerous underworld figures or whatever you want to call them and I feel that maybe they feel threatened by my situation."

Simone Farrow was first arrested in 2009 after flying to Australia as the DEA was raiding her Sunset Blvd. apartment, allegedly seizing drugs and documents.

After having a friend post her $150,000 bond in February, Farrow skipped bail. Police in Australia finally caught up with her last week at a Queensland hotel.

Under the stage name Simone Starr, Farrow was a bikini model, pin-up girl and even a Penthouse "pet," making FHM's Sexiest Women In The World list three times.

Farrow was also promoting herself as a singer/songwriter, and on her website, as a would-be reality show star ... hey, why leave any opportunity on the table?

Authorities say behind that high-fashion facade, Farrow was leading a double life trafficking high-grade crystal meth, hiding them in shipments of bath salts.

"It's not uncommon in the modeling and entertainment industry," former special agent Brad Garrett, who is not involved directly in the case, told ABC News.

"If your skill set doesn't take you any place else, where's it going to take you? A quick buck would be distributing methamphetamine. It tells me that she was not that sophisticated, and she may have been desperate for money."

Investigators are saying that Simone Farrow was the brains behind the "ongoing criminal enterprise," which they purport involved at least seven people.

One of the members of the alleged drug syndicate committed suicide in a Hollywood motel after being contacted by officials, the Sunday Telegraph reported.

Source: http://www.thehollywoodgossip.com/2012/03/simone-farrow-ed-hardy-bikini-model-arrested-for-heading-interna/

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