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Entries tagged with 'News'
Posted Aug. 29, 2007,
Perez Hilton Stands by His "Castro Is Dead" Story
By David Hershkovits
Recently gossipist Perez Hilton reported that Fidel Castro was dead. With his millions of readers, the word spread as everyone anticipated confirmation from Washington, Cuba or the media that this was indeed the case. Alas, not only hasn't the news been confirmed but Castro has penned an editorial for a Cuban newspaper about the unbeatable prospects of a potential Clinton-Obama ticket.
When I asked Perez about this he responded: "I stand by my story 100 percent. I can guarantee you will not see him out and about walking the streets of Havana before the Cuban government officially announces his death. However long it takes them, a week, a month or a year. But between now and then, he won't be seen in public because he's dead. I have this from government sources. I feel confident that I'm right. He hasn’t been seen in public in a year and he won't be. He allegedly continues to write these essays and I wouldn’t be surprised if a video pops up in the future but that video could have been shot whenever."
Posted Aug. 9, 2007,
Hello Kitty - Cute and Unusual Punishment!
By Ann Magnuson
Love this story in the New York Times about naughty Thai police being punished by wearing Hello Kitty armbands! Always nice to start out the day with a LOL guffaw. Thanks Gray Lady! You might want to add a Hello Kitty insignia to your stuffy ole masthead as well!
From The New York Times:
No matter how many ribbons for valor a Thai officer may wear, if he parks in the wrong place, or shows up late for work, or is seen dropping a bit of litter on the sidewalk, he can be ordered to wear the insignia.“Simple warnings no longer work,” said Pongpat Chayaphan, acting chief of the Crime Suppression Division in Bangkok, who instituted the new humiliation this week.
Posted Jun. 8, 2007,
OMG TGIF
By Shanon Kelley
PAW PAW, Mich. - A man was taken on a wild ride when his wheelchair became lodged in the grille of a semitrailer and was accidentally pushed down a highway for four miles at about 50 mph, authorities said.
The 21-year-old man, whose name was not released, was unharmed but was taken to a hospital as a precaution. He had been secured to his wheelchair by a seat belt.
“The man spilled his soda pop, but he wasn’t upset,” said Sgt. Kathy Morton of the Michigan State Police.
About 4 p.m. Wednesday, a caller told police dispatchers, “You are not going to believe this: There is a semi truck pushing a guy in a wheelchair on Red Arrow Highway,” state police said in a release.
(Thanks, Hot Lisp, for pointing this out to us!)
Posted Jun. 8, 2007,
Paris Hilton's Bad Hair Day
By David Hershkovits
Oh, the ups and downs of being a media plaything. Watching the Paris Hilton story play out gives me the willies. If nothing else this girl will not go away. Every time we seem ready to consign her to the dustbin of history, she manages to come back stronger than ever. What begins as a minor infraction that gets most people a slap on the wrist ends up a major media story covered around the world. As the London Times reports:
News channels abandoned all coverage of the G8 summit, before reluctantly tearing themselves away from the live coverage of Hilton’s front door to report, briefly, that America’s top general had resigned. And now back to the “breaking news” on Paris Hilton, where an excited TV reporter was pointing out the expensive homes of nearby celebrities such as Rod Stewart and Britney Spears, adding: “Some of the houses date back to the 1920s!
Since you asked... I think it's reprehensible that the justice system lets itself be manipulated this way. Maybe they made a mistake in releasing her at first, but it was done. Is it fair to then bring her back to jail? I think not.
Posted May. 1, 2007,
Joint Chinese/Russian Military Excercise (plus The Simpsons) for MAY DAY!
By Ann Magnuson
YIKES! Happy May Day? No wonder NASA wants to keep those commies off the moon! But wait a minute, are the Russians even commies anymore? And with everyone scrambling to get their business into China, what does that make them? Or us? One thing is for sure, if these two superpowers team up we're all having Kung Pow Stroganoff for din-din. But what are the folks on YouTube saying?
Posted Apr. 23, 2007,
Eight Items or Less: Kate Moss, Pete Doherty and Ryan McGinley Get Down
By Carol Lee
1. Who would be in your dream threesome? According to the rumor mill, heartthrob photographer Ryan McGinley just shot Kate Moss and BF Pete Doherty nude for the upcoming issue of W.
2. Art stars of today Elizabeth Peyton, Tony Just, Maurizio Cattalan, Dan Colen, Cecily Brown and Clarissa Dalrymple all came out for the Turner Prize winner Brit Jim Lambie's opening at Anton Kern Gallery last Thursday.
3. Fergie's lady humps were caught in high-waisted body-squeezing jeans by Judi Rosen of downtown boutique The Good, The Bad and The Ugly as reported by the fashion bible In Touch.
4. Vogue's Alexandra Kotur has a tough job of deciding who makes Style.com's Ten Best Dressed List each week. Look who made the cut last week!
1) Kirsten Dunst
2) Chloe Sevigny
3) Miuccia Prada
4) Coco Rocha
5) Doo-Ri Chung
6) Lisa Airan
7) Hilary Rhoda
8) Camilla Belle
9) Lauren DuPont
10) Demi Moore
5. Name Change: On a more, delicate note... Over this weekend, when rendering the Virginia Tech shooter's name, The New York Times decided to go by Seung-Hui Cho, rather than the easternized-style Cho Seung-Hui, which has been the official name used by the media world-wide since the release of his identity. There have been many whispers on the Internet among sensitive Korean-Americans about this uncouth placement of his surname.
Posted Apr. 19, 2007,
Terrorist Cho Seung-Hui's Multimedia Manifesto
By David Hershkovits
A madman has struck and left a trail that tells one of the most frightening stories that we've heard in a long time. It's a story that we don't want to hear which is why Cho Seung-Hui, America's home-grown suicide bomber, chose this way of telling it. Devoid of any meaningful social contact on the campus of Virginia Tech or elsewhere, he became a cypher of a world without love. Like the terrorist Muslim suicide bombers of the Middle East, he leaves a multimedia manifesto of words, photos (the one of above, of bullets, is by Cho) and videos as a final testament. He speaks of the "martyrs," uses the name "A Ishmael," rails against "hedonism" and makes reference to 911, Osama, Kim Jung II, Hummer and Bush. Though what he says can scare your pants off, the student who couldn't connect with anyone communicates beautifully with the camera. We know all this about Cho because he took the time to shoot, edit and Express Mail it all to NBC. (MSNBC has done an incredible job covering this and has been releasing pages and visuals from the manifesto.)
Cho's Multimedia Manifesto leaves behind a treasure trove of material for experts to rummage over in the coming years as they try -- with 20/20 hindsight -- to understand what motivated this young man to do such a horrible act. I expect that anyone as proficient with multimedia tools as Cho, and as talented an artist, will have many more writings, drawings and videos stashed away in his hard drive.
On the day of the shooting I was on the phone with Jon Savage, the British author of Teenage, a monumental book of cultural history that traces the creation of youth culture. When I mentioned the events at Virginia Tech to him he said, “Remember, your country and my country are at war in Iraq. When you’re at war it hits people in a weird way, especially young people. When the top guy is waging war and acting like a big bully, it’s going to make a difference. Kids pick up on this. But they don’t have the wherewithal of adults who learn how to handle it.” Given Cho's multimedia handiwork and the numerous allusions to the Middle East in his video, Savage's comments -- made before anything was known about the killer -- seem more prescient than ever.
Posted Apr. 18, 2007,
To Be a Korean-American After the Virginia Tech Nightmare
By Carol Lee
By yesterday morning the whole world knew the guy behind the beyond-tragic shootings at Virginia Tech. Every headline read that the killer was "a 23-year-old student from South Korea." And then it was cemented forever that he was a loner. While it is legally correct that Cho Seung-Hui was a Korean native, a resident alien in the U.S. and a South Korean immigrant (all descriptions used by the media), many of the articles made it out as though he had just come off the boat last week -- when in fact he was a mere 8-year-old when his family emigrated to the U.S. None of these facts excuse the monstrosity of his murderous act -- though beyond his green card status, he was a seriously disturbed social-outcast.
I feel like the media is not owning up to the fact that he was more or less a common law American. They're emphasizing his foreignness in order to further demonize a murderer who is already dead. And for what purpose? To perpetuate a racial backlash and deepen the remorse and paranoia that already exist among the Korean-American community? (nytimes.com has been flooded with comments by Koreans all over the world expressing apologies and regrets.)
Like so many, I've been freaked out, haunted and saddened by the nightmare at Virginia Tech. I've been following the news closely since the moment I first heard it on jetBlue en route from North Carolina (it's a weird thing to hear the biggest breaking news while on an airplane -- it had never happened to me before.) Later that night back in New York, my obsession with following the news grew even more when I found out that the suspect was an Asian male. After hitting many global news sites, I came across this unsettling photo (above) in the UK's Daily Mail of an Asian man on the VT campus being handcuffed. I was confused because I had thought that the gunman had killed himself after the rampage. I hope nothing happened to this guy. I see him and I see the faces of my own friends, cousins and brother. And I hope that we don't lose sight of the real issues at hand here.
Posted Apr. 17, 2007,
Red Square Nebula -- The Death of a Star
By Ann Magnuson
What you see here is a dying star. Called the "Red Square," this particular nebula displays a unique symmetry that is dazzling astronomers and layfolk alike! Thanks to infrared cameras at two different observatories, this composite image can now replace your old screen saver. And provide a rather effective mandala for meditation as well.
According to New Scientist Space, the reasons for this memorable exit are unclear. "Towards the end of their lives," the site reads, "many low-mass stars, like the Sun, slough off their outer layers to produce striking 'planetary' nebulae. But the hot star at the heart of the Red Square nebula, called MWC 922, appears to be relatively massive, suggesting another process formed its signature shape."
And according to National Geographic's website, "few other such nebula have been detected -- among them the Red Rectangle Nebula in the constellation Monoceros -- but what causes the phenomena has been poorly understood. Scientists say the new image shows the Red Square to be a bipolar nebula, with stellar winds blowing cone-shaped jets away from its hot central star. "
If only some of the bipolar central stars currently blowing hot stellar wind out here in Hollywood could burn out so spectacularly!
Posted Apr. 10, 2007,
Don Imus, Are You Serious?
By Rebecca Carroll
Don Imus calls Rutgers University basketball team “nappy-headed hos” and gets a two-week suspension off the air… yeah, that’ll fix it.
See, here’s where we are with the issue of race in America—we’ve created and insist on perpetuating a culture whereupon white neo-liberals set the tone with this kind of “I’m cool with race and if you’re not that’s not my problem, because I’m cool with it” attitude. Nobody is actually talking about anything—it’s like, the antebellum North: Slavery is over, let’s move on, get a job and pull yourself together, black people. So when folks like Michael Richards and Don Imus (albeit total dumb-asses the both of them) spew some egregious, racial epithet in a public forum, all hell breaks loose—like nobody else in the country is thinking the same exact things they said. And then the morning shows bring in the usual suspects (Al Sharpton would be out of a job if this were to change) to talk about how these comments are going to set us back another million years, and how we’re still struggling with our sense of self as a race (we, meaning black folks; I’m black). And the hideous loser who made the comment then launches a celebrated “apology tour.” And in some instances, like with Imus, some sort of good show, grand-scale punishment is issued (by whom I really don’t know): two weeks off the air, Imus. Take that! That’ll teach you not to badmouth emotionally fragile, self-loathing black girls (even if in this case most are probably 6 feet tall and 150 pounds) with hair issues that go back centuries!
Can someone please talk about something that will actually change something on the subject of race? As part of his mea culpa Imus told Sharpton he helps sick black kids at his charity ranch in New Mexico. You help sick black kids? That’s your response? Don Imus, are you serious?