Yoko Ono remembers the year she was hungry: 1945, the most shattering year in World War II for a young girl. To escape nightly bombing raids, she, her mother, and two siblings fled to the countryside outside Tokyo, where they lived among farmers and subsisted for months on rations.;
Comedy legend Bob Newhart is scheduled to appear at a conference organized by a Catholic magazine that promotes the idea that homosexuality is a disease.
The Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) entreated Newhart on Thursday to not "become the next Kirk Cameron" and appear at the "Legatus Summit" in February 2014 in Orlando, Florida, noting that other guests include former Republican presidential hopeful Rick Santorum and Catholic League president Bill Donohue, both vocal opponents of marriage equality and other LGBT community rights. Advertising for Newhart's appearance bills him as a "legendary Catholic."
GLAAD consultant Jeremy Hooper reported that the magazine, which promotes itself as "a membership organization for top-ranking Catholic business leaders," listed opposition to marriage equality as a "non-negotiable" item in a guide to voters prior to the November 2012 elections, exhorting readers to support candidates who "who promote policies in keeping with moral law."
The magazine also published an August 2013 speech by Rev. John Nienstedt, an archbishop for two churches in the Minneapolis area, blaming the state's legalization of marriage equality on the Devil.
"The source of these machinations is none other than the Father of Lies," Nienstedt wrote. "Satan knows all too well the value that the family contributes to the fabric of a good solid society, as well as the future of God's work on earth."
[Image via Bob Newhart Facebook fan page]
[h/t Billerico]
Hollywood has picked up "How to Pick Up Girls!" -- the men's paperback self-help classic from the 1970s that went on to become a sacred text of the Internet-driven "seduction community."
In a statement Friday, Los Angeles sales and distribution house The Exchange said it has optioned Eric Weber's book with the goal of producing a feature film.
Weber, a writer and director who scripted a 1978 TV movie version of his bestseller, will develop the project as an executive producer. No director has yet been selected.
"The pill, the (Rolling) Stones -- a lot was new in New York when I started interviewing women for 'How to Pick Up Girls!'" said Weber in the statement.
"Plenty has changed since then, but just as much has stayed remarkably the same. It's going to be a lot of fun showing that on screen."
Published in 1970 with more than three million copies in print, "How to Pick Up Girls!" promised shy and hapless men "the pick-up system no girl can resist" using such compelling opening lines as "Are you French?" and "Didn't I meet you in Istanbul?"
In recent years, it found a new audience among self-described "pickup artists," who swap advice on online forums known collectively as the "seduction community" and documented in the 2005 best-seller "The Game" by journalist Neil Strauss.
A concept trailer for "How to Pick Up Girls!" posted on Vimeo.com a year ago starred Weber explaining the ropes to his lovelorn twenty-something son, only to upstage him when a younger women enters the picture.
A one-time New York advertising copywriter, Weber once claimed the best pickup line of all was: "I'm writing a book on picking up and I'd like to ask you a few questions."
[Image: "Girl Seducing A Man Over White Background" via Shutterstock]
A Toronto City Hall beat reporter who covered the downfall of Mayor Rob Ford said Friday that he is suing the disgraced politician for suggesting that he is a pedophile.
Toronto Star reporter Daniel Dale made the announcement in the pages of Canada's largest newspaper.
Dale said he has served Ford with a libel notice, the first step in a lawsuit for his "malicious and defamatory insinuation... that I have some sort of predatory interest in young children -- that I am a pedophile."
The Ford remarks were made to shamed media mogul Conrad Black, who co-hosts a new current affairs show on Canadian television, and were later repeated on American radio.
Ford, who was stripped of most of his mayoral powers and duties last month after admitting smoking crack, was recalling a May 2012 confrontation with Dale, who was staking out the mayor's home for a story about him wanting to buy an adjacent city park.
"Daniel Dale is in my backyard taking pictures," Ford told Black during an interview earlier this month for Vision TV, which has also been named in the lawsuit.
"I have little kids. He's taking pictures of little kids," Ford said. "I don't want to say that word but you start thinking what this guy is all about."
Dale denied taking any pictures or standing on cinder blocks to peer into the mayor's yard, as Ford suggested.
"I was on (adjacent) public land researching a public-interest story about the mayor's unusual application to buy public land," said Dale.
But Ford has refused to apologize, saying: "I stand by my words."
Black also defended the interview, telling public broadcaster CBC that he did not believe Ford was insinuating that Dale was a pedophile.
"I don't think any of us who have young children under the age of 10 would have been particularly pleased about seeing a stranger leering out over the back fence looking at them," Black told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.
"I did not take it that Ford was saying Dale was a pedophile."
After helping websites all over the Internet make money Thursday for reporting her claim that both Santa Claus and Jesus Christ were white, Megyn Kelly’s employers decided to give her the night off.
The Fox News host missed her 9 p.m. “Kelly File” program without explanation and was replaced by guest host Martha MacCallum.
Kelly on Wednesday had discussed a Slate column urging the adoption of a penguin to replace Santa Claus, who’s usually – but not always – depicted as white in an increasingly multicultural society.
That idea didn’t sit well with Kelly, who dropped her pose as a “straight news anchor” – which she’d claimed to be just two nights earlier during an appearance on “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno.”
“For all you kids watching at home, Santa just is white,” Kelly said. “But this person is just arguing that maybe we should also have a black Santa. But Santa is what he is.”
The fictional character is usually -- but not always -- depicted as a hefty white man, although he's likely based on the 3rd Century monk St. Nicholas, who lived in present-day Turkey.
“Just because it makes you feel uncomfortable doesn’t mean it has to change, you know?” she added. “I mean, Jesus was a white man too. He was a historical figure, that’s a verifiable fact, as is Santa — I just want the kids watching to know that.”
Although historians disagree on exactly what race Jesus actually was, most agree that he probably was a Jew of Mediterranean descent.
Her claims rocketed across the Internet, and predictably provided fodder for discussion on late-night comedy shows, including "The Daily Show", "The Colbert Report" and "Conan."
Kelly will address the controversy Friday night on her program, according to a Media Bistro report.
The site also reported that Kelly missed the previous night’s program due to illness, which she mentioned during her “Tonight Show” appearance.
Watch Kelly's remarks on Santa Claus and Jesus Christ:
Updated to include Media Bistro's reporting.
Agent 007 boozed so much that in all reality he would have had the tremulous hands of a chronic alcoholic, according to an offbeat study published by the British Medical Journal.
If statistics are any guide, Bond would have died from alcohol- and tobacco-related diseases in his mid-50s, it says.
And the paper darkly questions Bond's supposed success as a womanizer.
Given the vast quantities of drink he consumed before bedding a conquest, the evidence may not have stood up, it says.
The conclusions are made by a trio of British doctors who read all 14 of the original James Bond books authored by Ian Fleming, noting when and what the character drank.
Two of the novels were excluded: "The Spy Who Loved Me," written in the first person by a waitress and thus deemed an unreliable source; and "Octopussy and The Living Daylights," a compendium of short stories that also fell short of the mark because it was not one single coherent tale.
That left 12 novels, which yielded 123.5 days for analysis.
Of these, 36 days were booze-free because Bond was incarcerated or in hospital.
This leaves 87.5 days, during which Britain's top spy glugged down a whopping 1,150 units of alcohol, or 92 units a week -- four times the recommended amount.
"James Bond's level of alcohol intake puts him at high risk of multiple alcohol-related diseases and an early death," says the tongue-in-cheek investigation.
"The level of function as displayed in the books is inconsistent with the physical, mental and indeed sexual functioning expected from someone drinking this much alcohol."
On a cruel note, it concludes: "James Bond was unlikely to be able to stir his drinks, even if he would have wanted to, because of likely alcohol-induced tremor."
Historical drama "12 Years a Slave" and crime film "American Hustle" won the most nominations for the Golden Globes announced Thursday with seven nods each.
Black and white road movie "Nebraska" came next with five nominations for the Globes, which will be handed out in Beverly Hills on January 12.
Former Pink Floyd front man Roger Waters said the comparisons between present-day Israel and Nazi Germany in the 1930s were “crushingly obvious.”
Waters, a longtime critic of Israeli treatment of Palestinians, told CounterPunch magazine on Saturday that the powerful “Israeli propaganda machine” had influenced U.S. policy in the region and shaped the mainstream media narrative.
“The Jewish lobby is extraordinary powerful here and particularly in the industry that I work in, the music industry and in rock ‘n’ roll, as they say,” Waters said.
He has called on musicians to boycott Israel for its treatment of Palestinians, which he also compared to ethnic cleansing and South African apartheid.
“So for an artist to go and play in a country that occupies other people’s land and oppresses them the way Israel does, is plain wrong,” Waters said. “They should say no. I would not have played for the Vichy government in occupied France in the Second World War, I would not have played in Berlin, either, during this time. Many people did, back in the day. There were many people that pretended that the oppression of the Jews was not going on from 1933 until 1946, so this is not a new scenario -- except that this time it’s the Palestinian people being murdered.”
Waters expressed his longtime support of the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions movement, which hopes to pressure Israel into give Palestinian refugees the right to return to lands they believe was unlawfully taken from them and occupied by Israeli forces and to give Arab-Palestinians full equality under the law.
He said the BDS movement was a legitimate form of resistance to Israeli treatment of Palestinians, and the musician blamed extremist Jewish religious figures for steering the political debate to the far right.
“The voice, for instance, of the right wing rabbinate, which is so bizarre and hard to hear that you can hardly believe that it’s real,” Waters said. “They believe some very weird stuff, you know; they believe that everybody that is not a Jew is only on earth to serve them and they believe that the indigenous people of the region that they kicked off the land in 1948 and have continued to kick off the land ever since are subhuman.”
Waters drew criticism in July for displaying a pig-shaped balloon covered with Jewish symbols, including a Star of David, during his concerts.
The Anti-Defamation League defended his use of the symbols, saying Waters had displayed similar items for years and was not expressing anti-Semitic views.
However, the ADL later reversed its stance after Waters called for the boycott, asking him why he'd singled out Israel when there are other countries, such as China, Myanmar and Russia, that have been accused of persecuting minority groups and noted that Waters had recently performed in China and Russia.
"Your single-minded obsession with trying to convince others to boycott the Jewish state, while ignoring the world’s true human rights violators, must be driven by something other than a guilty conscience," the ADL said in a statement. "Taking all this into account, one must conclude that your views on Israel are in fact colored by offensive and dangerous undercurrents of anti-Jewish sentiment."
In a public letter issued Monday, Waters urged members of the American Studies Association to endorse a proposed boycott of Israeli academic institutions to protest the country’s treatment of Palestinians, citing scientist Steven Hawking’s refusal to attend a conference there earlier this year.
The 70-year-old Waters co-founded the progressive rock band Pink Floyd in 1965 in Britain and emerged as the group's chief songwriter after its original frontman, Syd Barrett, left due to drug use and mental health issues.
Waters himself left Pink Floyd in 1985 and sued the remaining members of use of the band's name and material, settling out of court with his former bandmates and eventually reuniting with them for concerts in 2005.
Watch as Waters discusses his call to boycott Israel in this video posted online by Arc enCiel:
Time magazine named Pope Francis its person of the year on Wednesday, hailing the head of the Catholic Church as a new voice of global conscience since taking office in March.
The 76-year-old, who rose from modest beginnings and has been praised for his down-to-earth approach, is the first non-European pope in nearly 1,300 years, the first Latin American head of the Church and a leading voice for the dispossessed.
He has taken on leadership of a 1.2-billion-strong Church beset by scandal and signs of deep internal dysfunction, but there are signs his popularity is revitalizing it.
Time's runner-up was NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, who has been granted asylum in Russia and with whom Time published an exclusive interview Wednesday conducted over email.
"For pulling the papacy out of the palace and into the streets, for committing the world's largest church to confronting its deepest needs and for balancing judgment with mercy, Pope Francis is TIME's 2013 Person of the Year," said managing editor Nancy Gibbs.
She said it was rare for a new figure on the world stage to capture so much attention so quickly -- from the "young and old, faithful and cynical."
"He has placed himself at the very center of the central conversations of our time: about wealth and poverty, fairness and justice, transparency, modernity, globalization, the role of women, the nature of marriage, the temptations of power," said Gibbs.
Vatican spokesman Federico Lombardi welcomed the accolade, not because the pope sought fame but because it would give people hope.
"It is a positive sign that one of the most prestigious acknowledgments in international media should be given to someone who preaches spiritual, religious and moral values in the world and speaks effectively in favour of peace and more justice," he said.
"If this draws women and men and gives them hope, the pope is happy."
The pope last week set up a committee to fight child sex abuse in the Catholic Church and give pastoral care to victims following a recommendation from a council of cardinals he asked to advise him.
The scandals -- many of them dating back decades -- have scarred the Church worldwide and led to sharp drops in public confidence in countries such as Ireland and the United States.
Snowden, the fugitive US intelligence leaker whose disclosures of classified documents has rattled Washington, said he had acted to force reforms and to direct the NSA to focus "its tremendous power toward developing new global technical standards that enforce robust end-to-end security."
"What we recoil against is not that such surveillance can theoretically occur, but that it was done without a majority of society even being aware it was possible," he told Time.
In third place was US gay rights activist Edith Windsor in honor of her victory in June when the US Supreme Court granted same-sex married couples the same federal benefits as heterosexual couples.
In fourth place was Syrian President Bashar al-Assad for managing not only to survive but turn the tide of the civil war his way.
"The mild-mannered ophthalmologist-turned-Old-Testament-tyrant has taught his neighbors an ancient lesson: that absolute, unrelenting brutality combined with geostrategic cleverness is the most likely way to retain power in the Middle East," the magazine wrote.
In fifth place was Republican Tea Party US Senator Ted Cruz, who pushed the October shutdown of the federal government in an ideological war over President Barack Obama's medical care bill.
NBC set to begin shooting for mini-series based on Ira Levin 1967 horror novel brought to big screen by Roman Polanski
Rosemary's Baby is poised to wail demonically again – on the small screen. The US network NBC is planning a television mini-series based on Ira Levin's eponymous horror novel, published in 1967 and adapted for Roman Polanski's 1968 chiller, according to Slash Film.
The network, which has broadcast series based on Hannibal Lecter and Dracula, has set The Wire's Agnieszka Holland to direct the four-part serial.
The TV version of Rosemary's Baby is reportedly based on Levin's bestselling book, rather than Polanski's film, about a young woman facing satanic horrors in a Manhattan apartment block. The action will be transferred from New York to Paris by the screenwriters Scott Abbott (Introducing Dorothy Dandridge) and James Wong (American Horror Story).
Levin's novel centres around a young couple who move into an imposing Gothic-revival Manhattan apartment block, which they are told has a sinister history. In Polanski's paranoiac adaptation, Rosemary, played by Mia Farrow, becomes increasingly convinced that her unborn child is being targeted for ritual sacrifice by the building's eccentric tenants, who appear to have made an unholy alliance with her struggling actor husband. The reality turns out to be even more terrifying.
An earlier cinema remake of the Polanski adaptation faltered four years ago following negative reactions online. Michael Bay's much-maligned Platinum Dunes production company, which has brought poorly received reboots of A Nightmare on Elm Street, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Friday the 13th to multiplexes, had threatened to resurrect Rosemary's Baby alongside a new version of Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds.
The shoot for NBC's version of Rosemary's Baby may begin in France as early as January. There are no casting details yet.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2013
Former CBS anchor Dan Rather says Lara Logan should keep her job, but he said there was a key difference between the erroneous “60 Minutes” report on Benghazi and the report that ultimately cost his job.
“With our story, the one that led to our difficulty, no question the story was true,” Rather told CNN’s Piers Morgan on Monday. “What the complaint was, was ‘Okay, your story was true, but where you got to the truth was flawed.’ That's not the case with the Benghazi story. Unfortunately -- and there's no joy in saying it -- they were taken in by a fraud."
The veteran newsman reported shortly before the 2004 election that President George W. Bush had received preferential treatment while serving in the Texas Air National Guard during the Vietnam War era.
After questions about the report’s sourcing were raised by bloggers, CBS later admitted it couldn’t authenticate documents that Rather had relied on to source his claims and fired three news executives and a producer.
Rather stepped down as CBS News anchor and left the network in 2006. A lawsuit he filed the following year was eventually dismissed.
Logan and producer Max McClellan were suspended last month after CBS was forced to issue a retraction to their Oct. 27 “60 Minutes” report based on statements provided by a security subcontractor who claimed he’d witnessed the terrorist attack on the U.S. diplomatic compound in Libya.
The story fell apart within days, when the Washington Post reported the subcontractor, Dylan Davies, had been nowhere near the Benghazi compound during the Sept. 11, 2012, attack.
Rather said Logan had taken the fall for the network news division’s failures because, as the reporter, she’s the face of the report.
“I don’t in any way want to add to the burden (because) I know what it feels like, what it feels like to be the correspondent who is the center of the controversy, when there are people both above and below you (with) plenty of questions asked,” Rather said.
He said that Logan had clearly been fooled by her source, but he hoped that the report wouldn’t derail her journalism career.
“For whatever one thinks of what Lara Logan did or didn't do with the story, in fairness it should be put against her whole record,” Rather said. “She's still a very young correspondent, but for a young correspondent she has a distinguished record -- it should be seen in that context and that perspective.”
Watch Morgan's interview of Rather posted online by PoliticsNoww:
The White House has flatly denied a new report by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh that claims the Obama administration manipulated intelligence reports to support its case for military intervention in Syria.
Hersh, who exposed the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam War and reported American mistreatment of detainees at Iraq’s Abu Graib prison, said the Obama administration “cherry-picked intelligence” to blame Syrian President Bashar al-Assad for an Aug. 21 nerve-gas attack.
“In some instances, (President Barack Obama) omitted important intelligence, and in others he presented assumptions as facts,” Seymour reported Sunday in The London Review of Books.
“Most significant, he failed to acknowledge something known to the US intelligence community: that the Syrian army is not the only party in the country’s civil war with access to sarin, the nerve agent that a UN study concluded -- without assessing responsibility -- had been used in the rocket attack.”
Secretary of State John Kerry said the U.S. had proof that the attack was made on Assad’s orders, and Obama said in a Sept. 10 speech that the revelation had pushed him over the “red line” in considering a military strike on Syria.
A former senior intelligence official told Hersh that the Obama administration had altered the timing and sequence of some available information to give the appearance that it had been picked up and analyzed in real time, as the attack happened.
The official compared the distortion to the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident, when the Lyndon B. Johnson administration had reversed the sequence of intelligence intercepts to justify one of the early bombings in North Vietnam.
“(Military and intelligence personnel) are throwing their hands in the air and saying, ‘How can we help this guy (Obama) when he and his cronies in the White House make up the intelligence as they go along?”’ the former official said.
However, a spokesman for the director of national intelligence dismissed Hersh’s report as “simply false.”
"The intelligence clearly indicated that the Assad regime and only the Assad regime could have been responsible for the 21 August chemical weapons attack,” intelligence spokesman Shawn Turner said in a statement to The Hill. “The suggestion that there was an effort to suppress intelligence about a nonexistent alternative explanation is simply false.”
Hersh reported that the White House did not have advanced warning from the assumed source of the attack because, as shown in documents leaked by former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden, the Assad administration had recognized its vulnerability to U.S. eavesdropping and rectified it.
Documents leaked by Snowden formed the basis of a Washington Post report that revealed a secret sensor system that monitored the status of Syria’s chemical weapons arsenal, but Hersh reported that the sensors detected no movement in the months or days before the Aug. 21 attack.
The former intelligence official told Hersh that the sensors had detected movement in December 2012 that caused Obama to issue a public warning to Syria that using sarin was “totally unacceptable.
“If what the sensors saw last December was so important that the president had to call and say, “Knock it off,” why didn’t the president issue the same warning three days before the gas attack in August?” the former intelligence official said.
Hersh reported that the Obama administration buried reports that the jihadi group al-Nusra had “mastered the mechanics of creating sarin” and was capable of making bulk quantities of the deadly chemical agent, which he said undermined the case that Assad had undoubtedly been responsible for the attack.
The freelance reporter is best known recently for his work in The New Yorker, but he told The Huffington Post the publication had “little interest” in his Syria report.
A representative from The New Yorker did not respond to requests for comment.
Buzzfeed reported that The Washington Post had intended to publish the report after Hersh brought it there, but the newspaper ultimately passed on the article.
Hersh said Executive Editor Marty Baron told him by email “that the sourcing in the article did not meet the Post's standards.”
Ultimately, the Obama administration had decided not to strike in retaliation after Russia helped forge an agreement by the Assad regime to turn over its chemical weapons to the international community after the president’s plan for military intervention found little support among U.S. allies or Congress.
[Image: Seymour Hersh by Marjorie Lipan via Flickr]
US director credits Leonardo DiCaprio as source of inspiration but looks to make only a 'couple more' films
Martin Scorsese has said he expects to retire after making a "couple more" movies.
Speaking over the weekend at the Marrakech film festival, where he was acting as jury president, the Oscar-winning director also revealed he had been reinvigorated by working with Leonardo DiCaprio on their series of five films. The pair's latest collaboration, The Wolf of Wolf Street, has just been completed in time for an awards season ahead of the Oscars in March.
"I have the desire to make many films, but as of now, I'm 71 and there's only a couple more left if I get to make them," said Scorsese. He added: "I miss the time when I had the desire to experiment and try different kinds of films, I miss that time, but that's done, it's over. There is obligation as you get older, you have family. I've been very lucky in the last 10 years or so to have found projects that combine the desire [and fulfil] the obligation to my family and the financiers."
Scorsese said working with DiCaprio has been "tricky" at first because the actor was so well known for his turn in the James Cameron blockbuster Titanic. "When I did Gangs of New York and The Aviator, people kept asking me, 'Is he an actor?'" revealed the film-maker.
"I said yes. I saw What's Eating Gilbert's Grape, [and] the film he did with [Robert] de Niro, This Boy's Life before Titanic. So there's a stigma there which people still refer to.
"But we found that he regenerated my enthusiasm for making films. Mainly because, as you get older, it gets physically difficult and also the business especially – the financial issues. You're responsible for a lot of money, if you get it. It's all pressure, but can you do it? His enthusiasm and excitement really kept me going, for another five pictures now."
The Wolf of Wall Street, a three-hour black comedy about the notorious financial fraudster Jordan Belfort, was yesterday named as one of the top 10 films of the year by the American Film Institute. That announcement means the movie looks set to be nominated for the Oscar for best picture next year.
One of Scorsese's remaining films is likely to be Silence, about two New York Jesuit priests who face violence and persecution after arriving in Japan as missionaries. The film-maker said in Marrakech that the movie would dovetail with his previous work on spiritual matters, including films such as The Last Temptation of Christ, Kundun and the George Harrison documentary Living in the Material World.
"I'm just obsessed with this search for a spiritual core in life," he said. "And I'm sorry to have to talk in that way about these films, but that is what they are about. I don't know how else to discuss it other than to make a film about it."
• Robert De Niro confirms reunion with Martin Scorsese in near futureThe trailer for The Wolf of Wall Street
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