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2011-03-26T19:41:00.001-07:00

2009-04-10T02:26:00.001-07:00

2009-04-07T16:40:00.001-07:00

2009-04-07T12:51:00.000-07:00

Video reveals G20 police assault on man who died

Exclusive footage obtained by the Guardian shows Ian Tomlinson, who died during G20 protests in London, was attacked from behind by baton–wielding police officer

Paul Lewis
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 7 April 2009 17.53 BST
Article history

The Guardian obtained this footage of Ian Tomlinson at a G20 protest in London, shortly before he died. It shows Tomlinson, who was not part of the demonstration, being assaulted from behind and pushed to the ground by baton-wielding police Link to this video

Dramatic footage obtained by the Guardian shows that the man who died at last week's G20 protests in London was attacked from behind and thrown to the ground by a baton–wielding police officer in riot gear.

Moments after the assault on Ian Tomlinson was captured on video, he suffered a heart attack and died.

The Guardian is preparing to hand a dossier of evidence to the police complaints watchdog.

It sheds new light on the events surrounding the death of the 47-year-old newspaper seller, who had been on his way home from work when he was confronted by lines of riot police near the Bank of England.

The submission to the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) includes a collection of testimonies from witnesses, along with the video footage, shot at around 7.20pm, which shows Tomlinson at Royal Exchange Passage.

The film reveals that as he walks, with his hands in his pockets, he does not speak to the police or offer any resistance.

A phalanx of officers, some with dogs and some in riot gear, are close behind him and try to urge him forward.

A Metropolitan police officer appears to strike him with a baton, hitting him from behind on his upper thigh.

Moments later, the same policeman rushes forward and, using both hands, pushes Tomlinson in the back and sends him flying to the ground, where he remonstrates with police who stand back, leaving bystanders to help him to his feet.

The man who shot the footage, a fund manager from New York who was in London on business, said: "The primary reason for me coming forward is that it was clear the family were not getting any answers."

The Guardian's dossier also includes a sequence of photographs, taken by three different people, showing the aftermath of the attack, as well as witness statements from people in the area at the time.

A number of witnesses provided time and date-stamped photographs that substantiate their accounts.

Some said they saw police officers attack Tomlinson.

Witnesses said that, prior to the moment captured on video, he had already been hit with batons and thrown to the floor by police who blocked his route home.

One witness, Anna Branthwaite, a photographer, described how, in the minutes before the video was shot, she saw Tomlinson walking towards Cornhill Street.

"A riot police officer had already grabbed him and was pushing him," she said.

"It wasn't just pushing him – he'd rushed him. He went to the floor and he did actually roll. That was quite noticeable.

"It was the force of the impact. He bounced on the floor. It was a very forceful knocking down from behind. The officer hit him twice with a baton when he was lying on the floor.

"So it wasn't just that the officer had pushed him – it became an assault.

"And then the officer picked him up from the back, continued to walk or charge with him, and threw him.

"He was running and stumbling. He didn't turn and confront the officer or anything like that."

The witness accounts contradict the official version of events given by police.

In an official statement on the night of Tomlinson's death, the Metropolitan police made no reference to any contact with officers and simply described attempts by police medics and an ambulance crew to save his life after he collapsed – efforts they said were marred by protesters throwing missiles as first aid was administered .

The force said officers had created a cordon around Tomlinson to give him CPR.

"The officers took the decision to move him as during this time a number of missiles - believed to be bottles - were being thrown at them," it said.

Yesterday, the IPCC began managing an investigation by City of London police into the circumstances of Tomlinson's death after the Guardian published photographs of him on the ground and witness statements indicated he had been assaulted by police officers.

The IPCC commissioner for London, Deborah Glass, said: "Initially, we had accounts from independent witnesses who were on Cornhill, who told us that there had been no contact between the police and Mr Tomlinson when he collapsed."

"However, other witnesses who saw him in the Royal Exchange area have since told us that Mr Tomlinson did have contact with police officers.

"This would have been a few minutes before he collapsed. It is important that we are able to establish as far as possible whether that contact had anything to do with his death."

The IPCC added that Tomlinson was captured on CCTV walking onto Royal Exchange Passage.

"This is the aspect of the incident that the IPCC is now investigating," it said.

It was here the video was shot. A post mortem carried out by a Home Office pathologist last Friday revealed Tomlinson died of a heart attack.

Prior to seeing the dossier of evidence, Tomlinson's family said in a statement: "There were so many people around where Ian died, and so many people with cameras, that somebody must have seen what happened in the Royal Exchange passageway.

"We need to know what happened there and whether it had anything to do with Ian's death.

"We know that some people who were at the protest may not feel comfortable talking to the police.

"People are putting pictures on the internet, writing on blogs and talking to journalists. But we really need them to talk to the people who are investigating what happened."

Twitter's Biz Stone on Colbert

2009-04-03T13:02:00.000-07:00

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2009-04-02T14:17:00.000-07:00

BRUNO trailer

2009-04-02T14:05:00.001-07:00

Publik Occurences 1778 blogging

2009-03-30T21:12:00.001-07:00

Watch CBS Videos Online

Octomom VS Gloria Allred

2009-03-27T12:59:00.000-07:00

2009-01-22T12:07:00.000-08:00

2008-11-06T21:34:00.000-08:00

2008-11-06T21:07:00.001-08:00

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2008-11-02T13:51:00.001-08:00

2008-10-31T18:15:00.001-07:00

Meghan McCain is a Punk Rocker

McCain daughter Meghan: she blogs, she's threatened to get a tattoo, and now she's declaring herself punk as fuck when asked about her friendship with Linda Ramone, wife of Johnny from the Ramones—the band whose punk-rock ethics were offset by many of its members' kneejerk Queens-bred working class Republicanism.

2008-10-31T16:29:00.001-07:00

2008-10-31T13:28:00.000-07:00

2008-10-31T11:24:00.000-07:00

Lydia Hearst Goes As A Page Six Tabloid For Best Halloween Costume Last Night

2008-10-31T10:49:00.000-07:00

2008-10-30T10:52:00.000-07:00

Bizarre Video of Joaquin Phoenix Announcing his retirement from acting

2008-09-28T23:33:00.000-07:00

William Morris Agency sells headquarters

A group led by South American investors pays $143 million for the Beverly Hills complex.

By Roger Vincent
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

September 29, 2008

William Morris Agency, the century-old talent firm that has represented generations of movie stars and other artists, has bucked a tough real estate market and sold its Beverly Hills headquarters complex for $143 million to a consortium led by South American investors.

The price amounted to $783 a foot, about twice the average price of an upscale Los Angeles office building. But the buyers, a partnership consisting of Cape Horn Group of Chile and Lincoln Property Co. in Dallas, aren't complaining.

"We are extremely happy with the properties," Eduardo Covarrubias, a co-founder of Cape Horn Group, said in a phone call from Chile. Owning them offers a sense of financial certainty in an uncertain era, he said.

"They give us ideal protection from inflation at a time when there is turmoil in the financial sectors," Covarrubias said. "We're putting our money into hard assets that are going to preserve their value."

William Morris said Friday that it would stay at its current site as a tenant until 2010, when it expects to move into an environmentally friendly building under construction on nearby North Beverly Drive.

The three-building complex, dating to the early 1950s, holds down a prestigious corner near the intersection of Wilshire Boulevard and Rodeo Drive and hasn't been on the market before. So it drew strong interest from investors even though financing for real estate deals has nearly dried up in recent months because of the global credit crunch, said David Binswanger, who heads Lincoln Property's L.A. office.

One of the buildings fronts Rodeo Drive and is backed by the other two facing El Camino Drive.

With sales of properties that cost $50 million or more growing rare in the last six months, "there is no way to dispute that this [sale] is an anomaly today," said Marc Renard of Cushman & Wakefield, one of the brokers who represented William Morris in the sale.

The talent agency has owned and occupied most of the 182,000-plus square feet of space in the buildings for decades, Chairman Jim Wiatt said, but it's time to go.

The company's expansion and planned relocation "was the catalyst behind our decision to sell these incredible assets," Wiatt said.

William Morris will move about 400 employees to the new six-story headquarters in 2010. The building being developed for them by George Comfort & Sons Inc. will include a private movie theater, seating as many as 200 people, and restaurants on the ground floor.

After the agency leaves its historic home, the new owners plan to rent the offices. "The space is immaculate," Binswanger said. "William Morris is very image-conscious."

The acquisition is the first in Southern California for Cape Horn, which also owns about 1 million square feet in Chicago and Miami.

"We've been looking for over a year to get into the L.A. area," Covarrubias said. "We focus on purchasing prime properties and hope to buy more in Southern California."

2008-09-18T09:56:00.001-07:00

Palin’s hacked email account — what’s next?

By Jimmy Orr | 09.18.08

The news buzz last night was all about Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin’s hacked email account.

Palin’s personal Yahoo account was apparently plundered late Tuesday evening and the contents of the account — personal emails, email addresses of her parents, children and friends, private family photos, and phone numbers — were published all over the Internet Wednesday.

Shocking invasion

News of the break-in received a harsh response from the McCain campaign.

“This is a shocking invasion of the governor’s privacy and a violation of law,” McCain’s campaign manager said. “The matter has been turned over to the appropriate authorities, and we hope that anyone in possession of these e-mails will destroy them.”

Those appropriate authorities are the FBI and the Secret Service as they’ve teamed up to investigate the breach.

Yeah, but…

The hacking community however isn’t really in to the “authority thing.”

Upon word of Davis’s statement, one blogger at Gawker.com said - we think with a touch of sarcasm - “I guess we’ll have to blow up the internet now?”

Ryan Tate over at Gawker doesn’t condone the break-in but said the hacker “succeeded in reviving the unanswered question of why the Alaska governor had two quasi-official email addresses.”

“This use of the accounts is a naked affront to public records laws in Alaska,” Tate writes. “But it’s not exceptional: It’s one battle in a 30-years war between conservatives and civil libertarians over government openness, during which the current presidential administration itself blurred the lines between public and private email. Is there any way to finally stop these hijinks?”

Why use Yahoo?

The topic of whether Palin should be using a personal account for state business has been subject of a lot of talk recently. Two days before the email account was hacked, the Anchorage Daily News discussed it.

“Even before the McCain campaign plucked Palin from Alaska, a controversy was brewing over e-mails in the governor’s office. Was the administration trying to get around the public records law through broad exemptions or private e-mail accounts?” the newspaper asked.

Pssssstttt

The British IT website The Register published an article early this morning with the wonderfully attractive headline: Memo to US Secret Service: Net proxy may pinpoint Palin email hackers.

Translation? If the feds were to contact an individual named Gabriel Ramuglia they might be able to track down the, as President Bush and Aquaman would say, “evil-doers.”

The 25-year-old webmaster and entrepreneur is the operator of Ctunnel.com, the browsing proxy service used by the group that hacked into the vice presidential candidate’s personal email account and exposed its contents to the world. While he has yet to examine his logs, he says there’s a good chance they will lead to those responsible, thanks to some carelessness on their part.

“Usually, this sort of thing would be hard to track down because it’s Yahoo email, and a lot of people use my service for that,” he told El Reg in a phone interview. “Since they were dumb enough to post a full screenshot

Act now and save

The article, written by a San Francisco based reporter named Dan Goodin, suggests the law enforcement communities get working now as the logs on the server which house this information expires in seven days.

Ramuglia told The Register he would “probably” comply with requests from law enforcement but has not yet been contacted.

Karl Rove

Former Bush strategist, Karl Rove, gets brought up nearly every time a controversy with a Republican candidate emerges. No different this morning. Farhad Manjoo, over at Slate, this morning says the use of the Yahoo based email is “Rovian” in nature.

“The Yahoo breach does raise a few questions about Palin’s e-mail habits,” Manjoo wrote. “Why was she using Yahoo? Critics say she was taking a page from Karl Rove, who cooked up the idea of using an off-site e-mail address to confound investigations of his activities in the Bush administration.”

Web proxy firm working with FBI to trace Palin e-mail hacker

The webmaster of a Ga. company says he's been asked to save server logs

by Jaikumar Vijayan

September 18, 2008

The webmaster of a proxy service called Ctunnel.com, which may have been used by a hacker to illegally access the e-mail account of Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, is working with law enforcement authorities to track down the person behind the break-in.

Gabriel Ramuglia, the Athens, Ga.-based webmaster of Ctunnel, said today that URLs in screenshots of Palin's e-mail -- photos were posted online yesterday on 4chan.org and other sites -- suggested that whoever accessed her Yahoo Mail account had used his proxy service.

Ramuglia said in an interview that he was contacted by FBI officials last night and asked to retain computer logs of the past few days' activity on his service and to make sure nothing is deleted. Ramuglia, who normally stores only a week's worth of log data, said he would not have deleted anything anyway because of the illegal nature of what had happened.

Ramuglia is now in the process of importing more than 80GB worth of log data into a database for analysis. He said he's reasonably confident that he can help authorities sift through the logs and trace access back to the originating IP address -- especially because the self-professed hacker has admitted using just one proxy service to access Palin's account.

The alleged hacker said in an online posting that he gained access by simply resetting the password to the Alaska governor's Yahoo e-mail account using its password-recovery service. That's according to a description of events posted on a blog site run by conservative syndicated columnist Michelle Malkin.

The first-person account was originally posted on 4chan.org by a poster identified only as "Rubico." That post, along with a related thread, was later deleted from that site -- but not before a reader of Malkin's blog apparently snagged a copy of it and sent it along to Malkin. Rubico's claims could not be verified, and security analysts have been skeptical of the claims.

According to the Malkin blog reader, 4chan.org hosts multiple boards, each of which is dedicated to specific subjects. The individual who first broke into Palin's e-mail account apparently belonged to a group called "/b/," which the reader described as the "most notorious" of the boards on 4chan.org. "'/b/tards,' as its denizens are called, are interested only in their own amusement," the reader claimed.

Rubico allegedly became interested in Palin's e-mail after reading media reports of her using a Yahoo Mail account. He decided to try to access it by resetting her password. "It took seriously 45 minutes on Wikipedia and Google to find the info [needed]," Rubico claimed. "Birthday? 15 seconds on Wikipedia. ZIP code? Well, she had always been from Wasilla, [Alaska], and it only has two ZIP codes (thanks, online postal service!)."

Rubico said it was harder to find the answer to one of the other questions needed for a password recovery: Where had Palin met her husband? After some digging, Rubico determined that the couple first met at Wasilla High School.

He said he used the information to reset Palin's password and go through her e-mail to see for anything incriminating that might "derail her campaign."

It was only after finding nothing that the hacker realized how easily he could be caught, since he had used only one proxy to access the account. So he decided to make access to it available to others on the /b/ board by posting Palin's recently reset password. Rubico claimed that he "then promptly deleted everything and unplugged my Internet and just sat there in a comatose state."

However, one of the other members of the bulletin board whom Rubico described as a "White knight f...," saw the thread and used the new password to go back into Palin's account and reset it. That person then sent an e-mail to a "friend of Palin's" informing her of the new password and what had happened, Rubico claimed.

2008-09-18T09:56:00.000-07:00

September 18, 2008

You Just Can’t Kill It

By CINTRA WILSON

DON’T know how it happened. It felt more like a gradual, irresistible drift, but in retrospect, it might have been a sudden, overnight conversion. Maybe our local video store rented “The Hunger” one too many times.

Perhaps one teenager too many lay awake after midnight, unable to get Edward Gorey’s disturbing Black Doll image out of his head. Maybe a girl with 14 piercings in each ear sang Siouxsie and the Banshees’s “Cities in Dust” to her cat enough times to warp the entire light spectrum.

But there was a distinct point in San Francisco, in the late 1980s, when all the postpunk wardrobes of my extended tribe — a lower Haight-Ashbury aggregate of motorcyclists, college dropouts, would-be artists and nightclub workers — turned as abruptly and completely black as if a wall of ink had crept up from the Pacific and saturated everything, save for occasional outcroppings of little silver skulls.

Secretly I nursed grandiose ideas that my funereal vintage attire aligned me with beatniks, existentialists, Zen Buddhists, French Situationists, 1930s movie stars and samurai. (In reality, my style could probably have been more aptly described as “Biker Madonna with mood disorder.”)

We were all young and poor: If your clothes were all black, everything matched and was vaguely elegant (especially if you squinted). Entropy was a thrifty, built-in style; if your tights ripped into cobwebs, that, too, was a look.

We lived in squalid tenements and worked until 4 a.m. Goth was a fashion response to doing infrequent laundry and never seeing the sun. A Northern California anti-tan could be an advantage if you made yourself even paler. On the bright side, our new monochromism was helpful to community building: We were able to recognize our neighbors as well as if we had all adopted regional folk costume. You knew you could rely on your blackly attired ilk to answer questions like, Hey, where should I go to get my 1978 Triumph Bonneville repaired/get green dreadlocks/get the word Golgotha tattooed in five-inch letters across my back/buy jimson weed/cast a reverse love spell for under $14/(insert your vaguely but harmlessly sinister demimonde activity here)?

“ ‘Gothic’ is an epithet with a strange history, evoking images of death, destruction, and decay,” the fashion historian Valerie Steele writes in “Gothic: Dark Glamour” (Yale University Press), a new coffee-table book, written with Jennifer Park. An exhibition of the same name, curated by Ms. Steele at the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology, unpacks the evolution of goth in fashion from its early beginnings in Victorian mourning to its most current expressions.

“It is not just a term that describes something (such as a Gothic cathedral), it is also almost inevitably a term of abuse, implying that something is dark, barbarous, gloomy and macabre,” she wrote. “Ironically, its negative connotations have made it, in some respects, ideal as a symbol of rebellion. Hence its significance for youth subcultures.”

But goth fashion is not just for maladjusted latchkey kids. A recent proliferation of Haute Goth on the runways of designers like Alexander McQueen, Rick Owens, Gareth Pugh and the spidery crochet webs of Rodarte (not to mention various darkly inclined Belgian designers) suggests, once again, that black still is, and probably always will be the new black.

The goth subculture, however, for those who live it, is more than the sum of its chicken bones, vampire clichés and existential pants. It remains a visual shortcut through which young persons of a certain damp emotional climate can broadcast to the other members of their tribe who they are. Goth is a look that simultaneously expresses and cures its own sense of alienation.

This sentiment was echoed by Wendy Jenkins of Powell, Ohio, whom I contacted via a goth group on Facebook. “To me, Goth is like an escape,” wrote Ms. Jenkins, who is 18 and attends Olentangy Liberty High School.

“No one really judges each other,” she continued. “It doesn’t matter if you are tall, short, black, white, heavy, thin. Goth can fit everyone! I think it is a great way to bond with others who are different and who are just like you at the same time! Because we are wearing black most the time we are EZ to find!”

Missy Graf, 20, of Edmonton, Alberta, became fascinated by the goths at her Catholic high school. “One of the goth girls was in the choir with me,” she wrote in an e-mail message, “and we talked about depression and God’s apparent absence from her life. It was one of my first encounters with the world outside of the ‘Christian bubble.’ ”

“I guess I slowly became (eh-em) ‘goth’ starting a year and a half ago,” she added. “I was afraid of what my mom would think (she is still convinced that goth is associated with Satan-worshipping and that dying my hair black is one more step into the oblivion ... oh mom! You dye your hair red. Don’t you know that Satan panties are red, not black?). Whatever. Eventually I got to the point where I stopped trying to make people accept me.”

The Bay Area was home to a number of influential goths. Courtney Love successfully introduced the kinderwhore look: filmy Victorian nightgowns with fright-wig doll hair and heavy makeup. The band Specimen kept an apartment in the Mission District strewn with artificial cobwebs. Diamanda Galas frequently gabbled in demonic tongues on concert stages with her grand piano. I was privileged to direct the poet/performance artist/goth icon Danielle Willis in “Breakfast in the Flesh District,” her candidly hilarious, autobiographical one-woman show about working in the Tenderloin’s strip clubs as a self-styled vampire.

Ms. Willis, who embraced goth the second she saw Tim Curry’s “sweet transvestite from Transylvania” in “The Rocky Horror Picture Show,” used to write great articles on the ironies of goth fashion, like “Lord Damien Stark’s Makeup Tips for the Bleak” (originally printed in Ghastly Magazine):

“Whiteface should create the illusion that you really are that pale, and not that you have a bunch of makeup from Walgreens caked all over your face. Done badly, Gothic makeup can look painfully stupid. After spending money on a decent base, take the trouble to apply it evenly. It’s appalling how many Goths overlook something so basic and vital to their entire aesthetic. Equally bad and unfortunately just as frequent is the tendency to overpowder and the tendency to end one’s pallor at the jawbone. I can understand someone having difficulty with liquid eyeliner, but some mistakes are just inexcusably stupid. Don’t make them.”

I just wore black, but Danielle Willis was a Satanic blood fetishist who had her own 19th-century phlebotomy kit, permanent fangs dentally bonded to her eyeteeth and serious drug problems. I once teased her about her decorative penchant for red velvet chaises, heavy curtains, ball-and-claw side tables, stigmata and other forms of morbid opulence, saying that they didn’t necessarily mean she was goth, just Italian. She clocked me pretty hard.

THE origins of contemporary goth style are found in the Victorian cult of mourning.

A Victorian mourning dress from the 1880s.

“Victorians had a joke when women got into fashionable mourning dress — they called it ‘the trap rebaited.’ ” Ms. Steele said, showing me one of the highlights of the F.I.T. exhibition: a 1905 Victorian cult-of-mourning gown by Desbuisson & Hudelist that was off-the-shoulder, had a plunging neckline and was covered with matte-black sequins.

The show also makes a healthy foray into what Ms. Steele calls the “diabolism, dandyism and decadence” of Dracula. “Just as the devil is the prince of darkness, the dandy is the black prince of elegance,” she explained. “And the paradigm of the gothic man is a dandy vampire aristocrat.”

The vampire introduces the idea of the “erotic macabre” into gothic fashion. There are stunning examples in the show of vampiric sex appeal — e.g., a voluminous blood-red gown by John Galliano for Dior, printed with a Marquis de Sade quotation: “Is it not by murder that France is free today?” (Which, accessorized with its huge chain and cross made of railway spikes, would inspire even the Easter Bunny to absinthe and Emocore.)

One display acknowledges the fetish culture’s influence on goth (“kinky nihilism,” as Ms. Steele describes it): buckled PVC corsets and other snazzy bondage accouterments in addition to the usual Morticia Addams styles.

But to Wendy Jenkins, vampires represent more than just a hot batch of spooky formalwear. They provide a romantic narrative for sympathizing with her own perceived abnormalities. She wrote to me: “I think vampires are freeking sweet because they have such true emotions that no mere mortals can express! I too at times think I am a vampire being with my hate of garlic and how my eyes r sensitive to light.”

This sense of bathos-dripping, emotional fragility draws no small ridicule to the idea of “goth.” The word still brings to mind Anne Rice à la Renaissance Faire, moody bodice-ripper connotations, as well as ruffled shirts, tarot cards and sad girls who wistfully change their names to Pandora and Esmeralda (a tendency finally ridiculed to death in the “Saturday Night Live” sketch Goth Talk, with its teenage hosts, Azrael Abyss, “Prince of Sorrows,” and his friend, Circe Nightshade).

Nocturne Midnight, a k a Josh Klooster from Millet, Alberta, a 17-year-old student at Leduc Composite High School in Edmonton (and another goth in the Facebook group), prefers “a suave gentleman style,” he wrote. “Dress shirt, dress pants, top hat, spiked collar, light make-up. It makes me feel like an aristocrat.”

Tia Senat, 15, a sophomore at Ellsworth High School in Ellsworth, Kan., identifies her goth-influenced style as “emo.”

“Some Goth people seem different, but really they’re just normal people hidden behind a sort of personality ‘curtain,’ ” she said. “Emo is being extremely sensitive and showing your emotions.

“What drew me to it was because it basically explained how I acted. You can’t just decide to be. It really just happens. Many people believe that all teens such as me participate in self-mutilation, or cutting, and that they whine about their life and how bad it is compared to other people. Not all Emo kids do this unless something very very traumatic happens, believe me.”

Mr. Midnight takes exception. “Emos tend to take themselves far too seriously,” he said. “Every emotion they have is one extreme or another. Extremely happy, crushingly sad, screaming rage. Just too much emotion. All the time.”

Looking back at my own experience, it seems that black clothes were a response to certain catastrophic influences that came up with terrible regularity. We had all lost, or were in the process of losing, friends to AIDS, addictions and accidents. There were always disappointments in romance, and no surplus of mental health or functional families. Boots, black and leather provided a certain group with a certain emotional exoskeleton, a blustering attempt to express an edgy, careless willingness to hurl ourselves into oblivion. But the writing on the collective black flag, for all our reckless posturing, may have been best articulated as: “Ow, I’m hypersensitive. Please don’t hurt me again.”

Nocturne Midnight explains the importance of being goth: “It’s a part of who I am,” he said. “Nothing else worked. Goth just seemed to fit. I suppose Goth invokes in me a feeling of happiness, of belonging.”

Later Wendy Jenkins wrote to tell me: “Case you didn’t know, I am in a wheelchair.”

There are certainly worse ways to misspend a youth than living it in a vampire costume. After all, sometimes the most sympathetic character in a story is the villain.

But being goth doesn’t mean you have no sense of humor.

“Gothic style should be as opulent, decadent and individual as possible,” Danielle Willis wrote. “If you’re not up to making the effort necessary to carry off this most high maintenance of affectations, try wearing plaid shirts and listening to Nirvana instead.”

2008-09-16T20:18:00.000-07:00

2008-09-16T20:17:00.000-07:00

If You Don't Have Sirius…

Perezzers talked with Howard Stern for almost an hour this morning!!!!!

Things went sooo well. Check out the first part of our chat above.

2008-09-13T01:40:00.000-07:00

2008-09-11T11:42:00.001-07:00

MSNBC.com

AC/DC to return to road for first time since ’01

Band to open North American leg on October 28 in Wilkes-Barre, Pa.

By Mitchell Peters

Billboard

Sept. 11, 2008

LOS ANGELES - Anglo-Australian rockers AC/DC will launch their world tour on October 28 at the Wachovia Center in Wilkes-Barre, Pa.

The 24-date North American leg of the arena jaunt is scheduled to wrap December 18 at the Time Warner Cable Arena in Charlotte, N.C.

The worldwide trek follows closely behind the October 20 release of "Black Ice," the band's first album in eight years, which will be sold exclusively in Wal-Mart and Sam's Club stores as well as at ACDC.com. The first single, "Rock'n'Roll Train," rocketed 10 places to No. 5 on Billboard's latest Mainstream Rock chart.

Tickets for the North American dates will go on sale during the weekend of September 20 via Ticketmaster and ACDC.com. Specific on-sale dates and ticket prices have not yet been announced.

Following the North American run, AC/DC will visit South American, Europe and Asia, with dates to be announced. The Black Ice World Tour will be AC/DC's first outing since 2001.

Here are AC/DC's North American tour dates:

October 28: Wilkes-Barre, Pa. (Wachovia Arena)

October 30: Chicago (Allstate Arena)

November 3: Indianapolis (Conseco Fieldhouse)

November 5: Auburn Hills, Mich. (Palace of Auburn Hills)

November 7: Toronto (Rogers Centre)

November 9: Boston (TD Banknorth Garden)

November 12-13: New York (Madison Square Garden)

November 15: Washington, D.C. (Verizon Center)

November 17: Philadelphia (Wachovia Center)

November 19: East Rutherford, N.J. (IZOD Center)

November 21: Columbus, Ohio (Schottenstein Center)

November 23: Minneapolis (Xcel Energy Center)

November 25: Denver (Pepsi Center)

November 28: Vancouver (General Motors Place)

November 29: Seattle (KeyArena)

November 30: Tacoma, Wash. (Tacoma Dome)

December 2: Oakland, Calif. (Oracle Arena)

December 6: Los Angeles (The Forum)

December 10: Phoenix (US Airways Center)

December 12: San Antonio (AT&T Center)

December 14: Houston (Toyota Center)

December 16: Atlanta (Philips Arena)

December 18: Charlotte, N.C. (Time Warner Cable Arena)

2008-09-10T16:52:00.000-07:00

2008-08-24T12:28:00.000-07:00

Heaven’s Angels

A companion in the hands of Rescue Ink member Desi Calderon.

By CAROLINE H. DWORIN
August 24, 2008

THEY met on the local hot rod scene. They saw one another at tattoo conventions around the area, comparing bikes. They looked like heavies, a band of Hells Angels, with nicknames equally tough: Mike Tattoo, Big Ant, Johnny O, Batso, Sal, Angel, Des.

They meant no harm. Clad in leather, inked to the hilt in skulls and dragons, with images of bloodied barbed wire looped about their necks, they shared something else — a peculiar tenderness for animals, and the intensity needed to act on the animals’ behalf when people abuse them.

“I’m a vegetarian,” said Mike Tattoo (real name Mike Ostrosky), a former bodybuilding champion with a shaved head, great arms covered in art and a probing clarity in his blue eyes. “And Big Ant has in his backyard three guinea pigs, a couple of rabbits, birds, cats — and fish everywhere. But just because a person has tattoos, they wouldn’t come running with us.”

The group became a little larger over the course of about 15 years, with various animal-loving, tattooed bikers in the New York area joining the conversation. One member, Angel Nieves, a 47-year-old retired city police detective, grew up in the projects on West 125th Street and remembered taking in strays from the streets as a boy, as did many of his cohorts. He owns a tiny, white bichon frisé named Cris.

Having run in crowds where animal abuse was rampant, often involving pit bull fights, the men volunteered at shelters and the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty Toward Animals, and they tried to solve cases of missing or abused animals that other organizations had neither the time nor the resources to address.

Next month, the bikers will begin a program in the city’s public schools to educate children about being kind to all animals, even the less attractive breeds. They will be accompanied by Elwood, a small, hairless Chihuahua mix judged in an annual California contest to be the World’s Ugliest Dog.

A man named Robert Missari pulled everything together. Mike Tattoo met Mr. Missari about 18 months ago at a hot rod convention called the Rumbler. Though Mr. Missari is not inked — he works in catering — he loves animals and broached the idea that the bikers should become more than just friends bound by a commitment to a common cause; he wanted them to become an organization. About a year ago, they took up the name Rescue Ink, and now work full time investigating cases of animal abuse.

Mr. Missari is the executive director and the dispatcher for this biker brotherhood, working from his office in Manhattan, where he spends some of his time phoning in leads to the men on the road (“Yo, we got a report of five pit bulls living in 55-gallon drums”). He gets up to 250 calls a day.

One case: On Columbus Avenue on the Upper West Side, a woman left her pedigreed Maltese, Mao, in her car as she stepped away to get something to eat. When she returned, the window was smashed and the dog was gone. Rescue Ink put up fliers and checked the street’s video cameras.

“It was a crackhead,” Angel said, “sold the dog for a few hundred dollars, drug money to a woman walking down the street. We got a tip. Someone said they had bought the dog on 129th Street, I think it was. We picked the dog up from somebody else, on First Avenue.”

The men rescue pedigreed animals sold for a pittance to buy drugs, animals used for fighting and bait, and colonies of feral cats that angry neighbors have tried to shoot or poison. They have received calls from Australia (“Dingoes, I guess,” Angel said) and reports of a serial cat killer in Pennsylvania.

They hand cases of criminal activities to the police. “That’s not our specialty,” Mr. Missari said. “We specialize in getting the abuser away from the dog. We truly work with the abuser. We go to a house; if it’s really cold out, we see two dogs in the back, we build them a doghouse.”

Slower days begin like this one. Setting out from their meeting site at the stables in Van Cortlandt Park, in the north Bronx, a band of four rode in Angel’s S.U.V. on a warm morning in mid-August. All but 3 of the 11 members of Rescue Ink live scattered around the boroughs. Each day begins differently, with any number of men traveling in any number of vehicles to help any number of species.

The first stop was Elmhurst, Queens, where a caller had reported that five pit bulls were caged in the back of a used-car lot.

A large man with dark hair and a tidy goatee, Angel is built like a bouncer who might ruin someone’s night. A retired police detective with 20 years on the force, he investigated killings, narcotics and larceny, and speaks with the clipped cadence of a good film noir.

“It’s a big extreme between homicide and a stolen dog,” he said. “Homicide is an A felony, and a stolen dog is larceny. But the comparison here is that person can’t tell no tales. Neither can a dog.”

In the back seat, Nick Maccharoli, who goes by the name Batso, chatted with Desi Calderon, known as Des, the Cat Man. Batso, 74, who holds a record for power lifting in Connecticut, wore a Fu Manchu mustache and a pointed beard. His head is shaved as bald as a snow globe, except for a skinny black ponytail. Tattooed spider webs creep about the back of his neck, a snake coils over an ear, and where the ponytail begins, the two wings of a huge bat conjoin. On his left calf, Jesus hoists a barbell.

As the men reached the Major Deegan Expressway, Des took a call about strays found on 141st Street in Manhattan, writing the details in neat script on his pad. Soft-spoken and gray-haired, Des held a gym bag on his lap. When the call ended, he looked over his notes, then unzipped the bag to produce a tiny kitten, which had been sleeping on a newspaper.

“What the——!” said Batso. “He’s got a cat back here! Why you got a cat with you, Desi?”

The kitten clambered over Des’s leather wristband and gnawed at his spiked silver ring. With one finger, Des stroked the pale underside of its neck. He had been carrying the cat everywhere for a week and a half.

“This little guy has to eat every few hours,” he said, “He’s a he, but I keep calling him a she.”

Speeding across the Triborough Bridge into Queens, the S.U.V. pulled into the parking lot of a McDonald’s on Queens Boulevard in Elmhurst. There, Big Ant, also known as Anthony Missano, was waiting, reclining on his Harley, along with Mike Tattoo on a 1959 Honda.

Big Ant, “a little guy,” as the others describe him, is a little more than 6 feet tall and around 320 pounds. He was wearing a sleeveless T-shirt and sunglasses with small orange lenses. The tattoo of a red lightning bolt sliced down his enormous arm.

Other members of the squad arrived, among them Johnny O (John Orlandini), a former bodyguard who once waded waist deep into a pond near a sewage pipe to rescue a duck; and Biagi, who is to dogs what Des is to cats: a psychic force.

Bruce Feinberg, the group’s organizer, distributed copies of the day’s schedule. A middle-aged woman who had alerted Rescue Ink about the first case on the list stood awkwardly among them.

The group was joined by a man from the Humane Society and an investor from Canada, a tall, slim figure with gelled hair who saw Rescue Ink on “The Ellen DeGeneres Show” in May and flew down from Vancouver to ride along and talk about branding.

The used-car lot around the corner at 76th Road and Queens Boulevard was the place they had come to investigate. The men approached from the back, across a sidewalk that was under construction. The workers stopped their jackhammers and stared as a half-dozen tattooed men followed a nervous woman wearing a floral blouse.

Several of the men climbed up a stack of concrete slabs to peer over a wall into the lot. In a large enclosure behind a chain-link fence, four pit bulls stared back at them, tails wagging, coats sleek and mouths wide open, like smiling crocodiles. As it turned out, they were not confined and in fact had ample space.

“We get calls from everywhere,” Mr. Feinberg said as they walked around to the front of the office. “They’re more often false alarms. We get a call: ‘There’s a fish in the ocean!’ ‘What’s the matter with it?’ ‘It’s wet!’ ”

Inside was a female pit bull. A litter of pups yelped in a room behind her. Batso rubbed the dog’s head, and she wagged her tail. He fed her a treat from his pocket and patted her neck. “Aw,” he said, “she’s O.K., she’s a good girl.”

Like a gust of authority, Biagi, who uses only his last name for security reasons, strode over. “This is no good,” he announced. “You see that? You see the saggy teats? She’s a breeder. It puts a big strain on the dog.”

When members of Rescue Ink reached the owner by phone, they asked if he needed help placing the puppies. Big Ant adopted one, and the owner agreed to let the bikers take the mother and the other three female dogs to be spayed and returned to him at no cost.

Next on the schedule came reports of two German shepherds being kept as guard dogs in a wooden cage with bars in Long Island City, Queens.

“You know how old I am?” Batso announced as they headed toward the site. “I’m 75 next month. Born in 1933. Yesterday, I ran two hours on the treadmill, and then I did 120 minutes on the rowing machine. And you know what else I can do?” he said. “I can pull 100 pounds. With my neck.”

At an auto shop on Queens Boulevard and 37th Street, in a small shed with a corrugated iron roof, dogs barked and lunged at the bars around their enclosure. Biagi spoke with four men who stood nearby, smoking cigars.

“These dogs get out?” he demanded, his huge arms folded across his chest. He was assured that yes, the dogs got out at night.

“You need anything for these dogs,” Mike Tattoo asked. “Food? Shots?”

Big Ant was examining the angle that the sun struck the roof of the shelter.

“Is there a way you can move the roof over a bit?” he asked. The men shrugged. One placed an electric fan in front of the shed. “When the angle of the sun changes,” Big Ant explained, “it gets them.” Before they left, he added menacingly: “We’ll be back. To check out your construction work.”

The S.U.V. pushed on, following the Harley and the Honda, a formidable cavalcade that prompted heads to turn at every stoplight.

Soon, they pulled in at an old-fashioned diner below the No. 7 train on Roosevelt Avenue in Woodside and piled in. Des removed the kitten from his bag and dabbed ointment on its chin. Batso mentioned that he often took his dog with him to church. The investor from Canada talked about how he might help the men turn news media attention into money, like a music manager discovering the next big boy band.

As the day wound down, they pursued a follow-up matter. Recently, they had encountered a man selling puppies, possibly for fighting, out of his car, and had warned him they’d be back. And so they returned to Thompson Avenue and 30th Place, in Long Island City, where they first saw him.

“A lot of people think a pit bull fighting is millions of people sitting in a ring cheering,” Big Ant said. “It’s not. It goes on in an abandoned box truck. A van is perfect. Just two guys. They throw the dog in the back; then one guy goes in there and says which dog is dead. Two teenagers that think they’re tough.”

The men see a lot of pit bull fights in the city, most of it unreported. Mainly, they say, the fighting is organized by teenagers or young men, often in the Bronx and Brooklyn. Sometimes gentler breeds are used as training bait, their mouths duct-taped shut so they cannot fight back.

Rescue Ink works closely with law enforcement agencies, as members are quick to point out when they are accused of vigilantism. While they may get rough, they never break the law. “If Option A doesn’t work, we go to Option B,” Mike Tattoo said. “If that fails, there’s always Option C.”

Since they started doing this work, which takes up more time than most full-time employment, two of the men have lost their construction jobs. They spend their nights researching and making phone calls, and spend fair amounts of money on pet food and vet bills.

En route to the final stop, an undercover investigation of illegal exotic animal sales, the men got lost on Northern Boulevard. Following the bikes, laughing, meowing at Des, bouncing around the S.U.V. like 18-year-olds, they looked around and realized that the signs on the stores provided little help.

“They’re all in Chinese!” someone cried out.

“It’s Korean,” Des said. “You’re so uncouth.”

2008-08-11T12:41:00.001-07:00

The incredible story behind "Generation Kill"

You see it on the screen, and it seems very realistic: A group of the U.S. military's elite fighting forces, the First Reconnaissance Battalion of Marines, operating behind enemy lines in the opening days of the Iraq War in HBO's gritty new drama miniseries, "Generation Kill."

What you probably don't know is how amazingly realistic it is — and what one journalist went through in order to write the story that the creators of "The Wire" would then convert into the television event of the summer.

At the time, the invasion of Iraq in 2003 seemed like a high-tech race to Baghdad, with bunker busters and 3-D maps and real-time video from sat phones.

But in Evan Wright’s mesmerizing book Generation Kill — and the faithful adaptation of it currently airing on HBO — the war plays out more like Hannibal’s army on elephants: slower, dustier and a whole lot bloodier than what we saw on the news.

On assignment for Rolling Stone, Wright was an embedded reporter with the Marines of Bravo Company, 1st Reconnaissance Battalion, who acted as the “spear tip” of the invasion. Severing all contact with the outside world, Wright joined the fewer than 400 men who lumbered northward in aging Humvees toward the Iraqi capital, often ahead of all other U.S. forces, taking on and returning enemy fire through 16 firefights.

Despite the constant peril — the chilling ambush that opens the book would prove typical — Wright stayed embedded and won the Marines’ trust. He kept copious notes, in pen. When there was a break in the action, he would interview others, triangulating their recollections to create vivid and accurate accounts of what they were going through.

The first Marine he bonded with was Lt. Nathaniel Fick, the platoon’s Dartmouth-educated commander. Wright had studied medieval history, and Fick, who was interested in antiquity, would soon become Virgil to his Dante, guiding the author through the rings of Hell en route to Baghdad.

“Every time (the convoy stopped), I would get out and go to Fick and say, ‘What happened?’ ” Wright says. “As a result, my book is written with an artificial omniscience.”

Wright says Fick made one request of him, and it’s a line heard in this second episode of “Generation Kill”: Turning to the reporter (played by Lee Tergesen), Fick (Stark Sands) says simply, “Write this as you see it.”

The author wrote down what he heard as well, and these conversations among the men of Bravo Company are what endear them to the reader. Postmodern accounts of war, like the novel The Farther Shore by Kansas Citian Matthew Eck, plunge the reader into the disorienting fog of war.

Wright, by contrast, calls attention to the community formed by the Marines of Bravo Company, primarily through storytelling and shared experience. The fog, or dust cloud, is still there, but it often seems unimportant to these expertly trained killers, who pride themselves on being utterly prepared for anything.

When Wright got home, he transcribed 1,000 pages of material from his notes and wrote “The Killer Elite,” a three-part series for the magazine. Empathy combined with hard work and the luxury of magazine deadlines resulted in an instant classic of war journalism.

“Not only did he have the time to construct a coherent and almost artistic narrative,” an admiring reviewer later wrote, “but also he was writing for a publication willing to print the unexpurgated musings of the Marines. Wright could include the homoerotic joking, their violent fantasies and even their discussions of bowel movements.”

“The Killer Elite” was optioned by HBO, which also bought the rights to Wright’s book-length version. Yet it would be two years before the story of this new band of brothers would find its way into the hands of producers who were ideally suited — perhaps even predestined — to bring it to the small screen.

Through storytelling and shared experience, HBO’s “Generation Kill” focuses on the community of the Marines of Bravo Company, 1st Reconnaissance Battalion. Jonah Lotan, who plays Doc, helps a child in this scene.

David Simon had just wrapped the third season of “The Wire,” another gritty study of an American subculture, when Kary Antholis, a senior vice president of HBO Films, offered him Generation Kill.

A former newspaper writer, Simon had read In the Company of Soldiers by former KC Star reporter Rick Atkinson, but hadn’t heard of Wright’s book until then. He immediately took to it and told the author at their first meeting that he wanted to reproduce it as closely as possible.

“We’re going to make your book if we can,” he said.

Ed Burns, Simon’s co-executive producer, broke down the book into scripts while Simon involved Wright in writing, casting and the training of actors on location in Africa.

Both men credit Eric Kocher — who served five tours in Iraq and Afghanistan and was hired as a key military adviser for the TV series— with ensuring the final product was both accurate and realistic from a Marine’s point of view. (Above: Simon, Kocher and Burns on the set in Africa.)

During the intensive mixing of the series’ multilayered audio track, Kocher wrote much of the radio chatter and suggested other lines that could be dropped into the background (“Semper Gumby — always flexible!”).

As the final episodes were in post-production, Kocher started firing off increasingly antagonistic e-mails complaining about the so-called light armored vehicles. They were not actual “LAVs,” in fact, but South African-made trucks that the producers tried to pass off as LAVs on screen. Finally, Kocher declared that the fake LAVs made him “want to vomit.”

Freedom isn’t free — nor, it turns out, is verisimilitude. HBO spent $210,000 to have the vehicles digitally altered to look like the real deals.

I’m at poolside with Kocher, Wright, Simon, P.J. Ransone (one of the actors) and another First Recon member, Jeff Carisalez, who advised on the series.

They’re sitting around a table, eating, drinking, telling stories on one another and laughing uproariously. Having gone through unbelievable violence together, both inflicted and suffered, these men now proudly belong to the P-T-S fraternity. (“To me,” says Kocher, “it’s not a disorder. It’s just P-T-S: post-traumatic stress.”)

As the storytelling gets louder, Wright leans over my recorder.

“Strange as it sounds,” he says, “when I was in Iraq, we were up on this one bridge about 20 kilometers from any other U.S. forces. We were totally surrounded. There were only about 50 of us. And — it was fun. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s the way we’re wired as humans, or as men.”

2008-08-11T12:30:00.000-07:00

August 11, 2008

The Classic Rock Magazine Is Switching to a Smaller, Rack-Friendly Size

Jann Wenner, chairman of Wenner Media and founder of Rolling Stone magazine, compares the magazine’s new, smaller size format to the old.

By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA

Some packages like the curvaceous old Coke bottle become so iconic that they are recognizable at 30 paces. So it is with Rolling Stone, whose large format has stood out on magazine racks for more than three decades. It won’t for much longer, however. With the Oct. 30 issue, which will go on sale Oct. 17, Rolling Stone, published by Wenner Media, will adopt the standard size used by all but a few magazines.

In an interview in his office, Jann Wenner, founder, publisher, editor and general guiding force behind the nation’s biggest music magazine, was characteristically brash about the change. Leaning back in his chair, one leg slung over the side of it, he said, “All you’re getting from that large size is nostalgia.”

But as he knows well, nostalgia is a powerful marketing force, as is a package that instantly evokes not only the product, but an era. It is tempting to apply that logic to a 41-year-old magazine that seems to put as many pensioners as teenagers on its cover, but Rolling Stone’s readership, bigger than it has ever been, has a surprisingly young median age, in the early 30s, according to market research firms.

Rolling Stone, published every other week, has paid circulation in the United States of more than 1.4 million, the highest in its history, but its single-copy sales have fallen from 189,000 in 1999, to 132,000 last year. Magazine racks at bookstores, newsstands and checkout counters tend to be made for the standard dimensions, and if Rolling Stone is there, it is often on a high or low shelf, out of eye level, or even on its side or folded over.

Gary Armstrong, chief marketing officer for Wenner Media, pointed to Vanity Fair, which has lower overall circulation than Rolling Stone, but nearly three times the single-copy sales. With a standard format, he said, it should be possible to raise newsstand sales significantly.

“The consumer we want to reach watches ‘Lost’ on a big TV screen, on a computer screen and on an iPhone,” he said. “They’re agnostic on format.”

While the people who run the magazine argue that there is much to be gained from the change — in advertising, sales and aesthetics — they also admit to losing something that made Rolling Stone distinctive. “I myself was kind of torn about it,” Mr. Wenner admitted.

Along with the change in size, Rolling Stone will switch to heavier, glossy paper and sleeker page designs, and it will be glued rather than stapled — “perfect bound” instead of “saddle stitched,” in magazine lingo — giving it a flat spine rather than a tapered edge. In all, the revisions make for a more professional, more grown-up look.

Those might be fighting words to Rolling Stone’s original audience, and no big deal to a generation raised on desktop publishing that makes even dorm-room projects look polished. The changes fit a magazine that, after taking a much-maligned detour in the 1990s toward more celebrity, pop culture and bite-sized reports, has returned to form in the last few years, winning awards for long articles on topics from Iraq to presidential politics.

To save money on paper, many newspapers and magazines have taken to printing smaller pages, fewer pages or both. But Rolling Stone says it will spend more and print more, not less: in addition to using more expensive paper and binding, it plans to add 16 to 20 pages per issue.

Magazine size has become increasingly standardized, at around 8 by 11 inches, give or take a fraction. Rolling Stone, at 10 by 11 3/4 inches, is, like ESPN and W, one of the few large-circulation magazines left that are significantly taller and wider.

Rolling Stone is profitable, according to Wenner, a privately held company — outside analysts agree — but like the industry as a whole, it is going through a rough period. The magazine had 486 ad pages in the first half of 2008, according to the Publishers Information Bureau, down 33 percent from the same period in 2005.

On balance, going to standard size should appeal to advertisers, according to Brenda White, senior vice president for publishing at Starcom USA, a major media agency. “But when you change something that’s been that way for — how many years? — people might hesitate,” she said.

For most advertisers, she said, the improved picture quality on glossy paper more than compensates for the smaller size, and it will save many of them the expense of revising their usual ads to fit in Rolling Stone.

Media buyers and Rolling Stone executives say the change in size is likely to make a bigger difference in selling insert ads, like those with scent strips or tear-out postcards. For technical reasons, it is more difficult and more expensive to put them into saddle-stitched magazines than into perfect-bound ones.

Independent experts agree that the new size could help Rolling Stone strike better deals with retailers, distributors, even printers — all fields that, over the last decade, have experienced great consolidation and a drive toward standardization.

“There are disadvantages to being an odd size in handling, moving it through distribution centers, in addition to retail display,” said John Harrington, editor of The New Single Copy, a newsletter about magazine marketing. “If you came forward trying to sell a brand new magazine today with that size, you’d have to have a lot of money behind it for it to be accepted.”

Rolling Stone created a prototype issue at the smaller size in July, sent it to more than 3,000 readers and asked them to take a survey. The company says the reaction was overwhelmingly positive, and it showed the survey results to some of its major advertisers and ad buyers.

In the large format, long articles often turn up as daunting expanses of almost uninterrupted type. With the revision, such pages are smaller and less intimidating, and more likely to be broken up with photographs. Sections filled with shorter items look less cluttered with fewer of them on a page. Smaller design changes give the pages a slightly airier, cleaner look.

“We’ve evolved,” Mr. Wenner said. “But the core tradition, the mission, remains the same.”

2008-08-11T12:24:00.000-07:00

Another Consumer Scammed By FreeCreditReport.com

Freecreditreport.com is NOT actually free, nor is it related to Annualcreditreport.com, the free credit report that you are entitled to under federal law. So why are people still being tricked into signing up for a credit monitoring service in order to get something that they are entitled to under federal-freaking-law? Because the credit bureaus are linking them to the website and most consumers don't believe that a major credit bureau would try to trick them. Always read the fine print!

Reader Brian is one such consumer. He clicked through to Freecreditreport.com from a credit bureau website and was later socked with a charge for a credit monitoring service he knew nothing about. Here's his letter:

A few weeks ago I decided that it was time to do my annual check of my credit report. All of the major credit reporting agencies seem to strong arm you towards www.freecreditreport.com.

I went through the sign-up and authentication procedure. As a part of the procedure you have to enter a valid credit card that appears on your report. It’s followed by the usual legalize eye-watering disclaimers.

Last week I checked my current MasterCard bill online. I was greeted by the following entry:

07/28/08 CIC*Triple Advantage 877-4816825 CA $14.95
Not immediately recognizing the company, I called the company and found out that it was an alias for FreeCreditReport.com. After navigating the menu tree I was eventually connected to a woman who seemed to be annoyed that she had to deal with a customer. I asked her about the charge and she started asking far more personal information than was contained in my credit report. When I refused to provide more than the basic information, she relented and insisted that I had signed up for the monthly monitor. She further stated that since I hadn’t cancelled it within the first month (I didn’t know about it until the bill came) I was obligated for a one year membership.

Not one to take this type of thing sitting down, I advised the woman in direct (not offensive) terms that
· I did not knowingly sign up for the service.
· I did not authorize this service
· I do not want this service
· I will not pay for this service
· I will be filing a formal complaint with the AG’s office in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts about their deceptive marketing practices

The woman put me on hold for about five minutes and finally came back and said that the account had been cancelled and that a refund would be forthcoming. As of this morning, approximately a week later, the credit has yet to show up on my credit card statement.

The moral to this story is that freecreditreport.com is a scam set up by the credit reporting agencies. It is not there to fulfill their legal obligation to provide you with your credit reports. It is, instead, a sleazy way of selling their “value-added” services. I think that most people would be afraid to stand up to a reporting agency.

If you're a regular reader of Consumerist, you may have known about this issue for a long time, (or are the type of person who always reads the fine print, which is very admirable) but most consumers are simply not aware that Freecreditreport.com isn't the "free credit report" that they're entitled to by law. What's more, they implicitly trust the heavily advertised guitar playing loser from the commercials, or the recommendation of a major credit bureau.

Warn your friends. Freecreditreport.com isn't free.

2008-08-10T01:28:00.000-07:00

August 9, 2008

Scientist Officially Exonerated in Anthrax Attacks

By ERIC LICHTBLAU

WASHINGTON — Six years after labeling Steven J. Hatfill a “person of interest” in the anthrax attacks, the Justice Department formally exonerated him on Friday and told his lawyer it had concluded that Dr. Hatfill “was not involved in the anthrax mailings.”

The department agreed in June to pay $4.6 million to settle Dr. Hatfill’s lawsuit against the government, but until Friday it had conspicuously avoided declaring that he had nothing to do with the attacks.

Jeffrey A. Taylor, the United States attorney for the District of Columbia, said in the letter to Dr. Hatfill’s lawyer that “we have concluded, based on laboratory access records, witness accounts and other information, that Dr. Hatfill did not have access to the particular anthrax used in the attacks, and that he was not involved in the anthrax mailings.”

The lawyer, Thomas G. Connolly, declined to comment Friday, except to say that “the letter speaks for itself.”

The formal exoneration underscored the wrong path that the investigation had taken before the F.B.I. began looking two years ago at a colleague of Dr. Hatfill, another military scientist named Bruce E. Ivins.

The Justice Department said this week that it was now convinced that Dr. Ivins — who died 11 days ago after taking an overdose of painkillers — was the anthrax killer and that he had acted alone in a crime that killed five people and shook the country.

Leading lawmakers have promised to examine the course of the F.B.I.’s investigation and called on the Justice Department to explain how a scientist who appeared to have been hiding in plain sight was missed for so long. Dr. Ivins, who had specialized in anthrax vaccines at a military research facility at Fort Detrick, Md., assisted the F.B.I. in the early stages of its investigation, but his mental instability and suspicious habits appeared to have been well known to many acquaintances and co-workers.

Senator Charles E. Grassley, the Iowa Republican who sits on the Judiciary Committee and has been a critic of the pace of the F.B.I.’s anthrax investigation, said in a telephone interview Friday that Congress needed to conduct hearings to determine what went wrong in the investigation.

“We’ve had a seven-year investigation and $15 million spent on it and one of the ‘people of interest’ bought off for $5.8 million over what was obviously an F.B.I. screw-up,” Mr. Grassley said. “We need answers.”

The F.B.I. bought Dr. Hatfill an annuity that will be worth $5.8 million to him and his lawyers.

The House Energy and Commerce Committee will expand its investigation into the risks of government laboratories to include the screening of personnel at Fort Detrick and elsewhere, said the committee chairman, Representative John D. Dingell, and the chairman of the investigations subcommittee, Representative Bart Stupak, both Democrats of Michigan. They urged a moratorium on construction of laboratories housing research into highly infectious agents.

Beginning in 2002, within months of the anthrax attacks in the fall of 2001, Dr. Hatfill became the sole suspect publicly linked to the case, in part through news reports and in part through the public statements of the authorities. John Ashcroft, who was then the attorney general, said in an unusual pronouncement in August 2002 that Dr. Hatfill was “a person of interest” in the anthrax investigation.

Dr. Hatfill declared his innocence from the start, saying the notoriety threatened to ruin his career and his life. “I am not the anthrax killer,” he declared outside his lawyer’s office in an emotional pronouncement a week after Mr. Ashcroft’s statement.

But the F.B.I. searched his home and maintained nearly round-the-clock surveillance on him for years.

In June, the Justice Department agreed to the multimillion-dollar settlement with Dr. Hatfill to end the lawsuit he had brought alleging that his privacy was violated by the government’s leaks linking him to the case. Dr. Hatfill also sued The New York Times and the columnist Nicholas D. Kristof, saying that columns Mr. Kristof wrote about the case had libeled him by suggesting that he might be the anthrax mailer. That lawsuit was dismissed last year, but Dr. Hatfill has appealed the dismissal.

The Justice Department’s announcement of its settlement with Dr. Hatfill, unlike some of its past agreements with people wrongfully suspected in investigations, did not include any exoneration of Dr. Hatfill or an apology to him. Officials said later that when they reached the settlement, they did not want to alert Dr. Ivins to their possible interest in him by declaring that they had cleared Dr. Hatfill.

At a news conference on Wednesday laying out the case against Dr. Ivins, officials went out of their way to avoid mentioning Dr. Hatfill by name, and they stopped short of clearing him.

“With respect to the other individual you mentioned,” Joseph Persichini Jr., the head of the F.B.I.’s Washington field office, told a reporter who asked about Dr. Hatfill, “we were able to determine that at no time could that individual be put in the presence of that flask from which these spores came.”

But Dr. Hatfill’s lawyers were said to be unsatisfied and pressed the department for an explicit exoneration, according to one person close to the case who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Olympics Judo

2008-08-09T18:25:00.001-07:00

Exclusive Summer Olympics news & widgets at NBC Olympics.com!

2008-08-09T13:01:00.000-07:00

MySpace president is Paris Hilton's latest accessory ???

DeWolfe (in the gray jacket) and Hilton (in the pink dress) leaving a club in L.A. together.

It's not the sort of TechCrunch post you see every day: the Valley blog reported on Friday night that Chris DeWolfe, president of News Corp.'s MySpace, is dating ubiquitous heiress Paris Hilton.

It's been going on for a few weeks, editor Michael Arrington wrote, adding that he was tipped off to it when he saw the two together in a video clip from paparazzi site X17.

The gossip column of the New York Post has also mentioned offhand that Hilton has been spotted at parties in a house that DeWolfe has rented in Southampton, N.Y. (That's an upscale summer party town on Long Island, for those of you unfamiliar with mid-Atlantic geography.)

DeWolfe, 42, is married but going through a separation process, according to TechCrunch. Hilton, 27, ostensibly still has a boyfriend, but really, who the heck knows?

Maybe this is what happens after Paris Hilton articulates her proposed energy policy via Web video and receives a resoundingly positive response: she stops dating Greek shipping heirs, B-list musicians, and reality show stars, opting instead for digital-media executives.

It also might be a publicity stunt, a sort of way for DeWolfe to make a statement about MySpace's identity. I mean, could you ever see Mark Zuckerberg doing something like this? TMZ.com once hounded the young Facebook founder as he walked out of a chic restaurant in L.A. with a cute date. In fact, she was his girlfriend of several years; all the pair was willing to do for the cameras was laugh for a few minutes and then walk away.

2008-08-09T12:57:00.000-07:00

Some say ad casts Obama as the antichrist

McCain spot may have themes on the apocalypse

Supporters of Barack Obama said the ad from the McCain campaign furthered rumors that Obama is the antichrist.

By Foon Rhee Globe Staff
August 9, 2008

Does John McCain's Web ad that mocks Barack Obama as "The One" have a darker design?

Outraged Christian supporters of Obama say it does - that it is intended to further Internet-fueled rumors that Obama is the antichrist. Deconstructing and analyzing the ad, they say the images and language play into apocalyptic themes, including those featured in the best-selling "Left Behind" series, fictionalized accounts of the end of the world.

McCain's campaign, which did not respond to requests for comment yesterday, has said that the ad was intended merely to poke fun at what they see as Obama's arrogance.

But the buzz over possible apocalyptic subtexts in the ad, which has been viewed nearly 1.1 million times since it was posted a week ago on YouTube, has become so loud that yesterday Time magazine and The Wall Street Journal reported on the controversy and the authors of "Left Behind" issued a statement about it.

Authors Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, in the statement issued through their public relations firm, said they don't believe Obama is the antichrist mentioned in the biblical prophecies in the Book of Revelation. Their series of 16 novels has sold more than 63 million copies worldwide.

"I've gotten a lot of questions the last few weeks asking if Obama is the antichrist," Jenkins said in the statement. "I tell everyone that I don't think the antichrist will come out of politics, especially American politics."

LaHaye added: "I can see by the language he uses why people think he could be the antichrist, but from my reading of scripture, he doesn't meet the criteria. There is no indication in the Bible that the antichrist will be an American."

Those analyzing the ad point to the opening words - "It should be known that in 2008 the world shall be blessed. They will call him The One" - and a clip of Obama saying in a speech: "A nation healed, a world repaired. We are the ones that we've been waiting for."

In the "Left Behind" series, the antichrist is a charismatic young political leader who is founder of The One World religion and promises to heal the world.

"Short of 666, they used every single symbol of the antichrist in this ad," Eric Sapp, a Democratic operative who advises Democrats on reaching out to faith communities, told the Journal. "There are way too many things to just be coincidence."

LaHaye and other believers say the antichrist will come from Europe, maybe Romania and possibly a leader of the European Union.

But for the last few months, there have been viral e-mails that compare Obama to Nimrod, whom some evangelicals believe was the first evil king of world history and who is black in some accounts, said James Tabor, chairman of the department of religious studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

While the Obama-as-antichrist accusation is on the fringes now and not seriously mentioned from the pulpit, Tabor said, "I think that could come."

After reviewing the video yesterday, Tabor, a specialist in ancient apocalyptic thought, said that while the ad's creators might have wanted to play with apocalyptic themes in a tongue-in-cheek way, it could have "serious consequences."

"Is anyone naive enough to believe and watch that and say, 'Oh no, I won't vote for him because he's the antichrist?' I'd have to say in our country, yeah," Tabor said.

And, he noted, another biblical prophecy is that the antichrist gets wounded, and a disturbed believer could try to fulfill that prophecy. A man has been charged in Florida for threatening to assassinate Obama, who requested and received Secret Service protection last year at the earliest point for any presidential candidate after his campaign received hate mail.

"This stuff is very, very dangerous," Tabor said. "It can be seen as playful, but too many times in history it has led to armies marching and people dying. The ad is really unfortunate."

2008-08-08T13:54:00.000-07:00

L.A. Superior Court

BC388904

Jane Doe

Splash News & Picture Agency Inc.; Kevin Smith; Gary Morgan; Eric Munn; Darren Banks; Does

A reporter for People magazine claims paparazzi drugged the late actor Heath Ledger and videotaped him against his will during a seven-hour cocaine party at the Chateau Marmont Hotel. The paparazzi, who threw the party, made $1 million by publishing the footage after Ledger died, the Jane Doe plaintiff claims in Los Angeles Superior Court. She sued the photographers and their employer, Splash News & Picture Agency, claiming fraud and intrusion.

Doe says she and two photographers met Ledger at a Screen Actors Guild Award after-party. She claims her date, Darren Banks, and his friend, Eric Munn, invited Ledger to her hotel room, and concealed their professions from Ledger.

She claims the following took place: In the hotel room, Banks and Munn gave Ledger cocaine, which Doe says they bought with Splash’s money. Ledger also had some of his own cocaine. The three men snorted the cocaine, then Munn left the room. Eventually, Doe saw that Munn was hiding on the balcony, shooting video footage through an open window. Ledger got angry when he discovered that the men were paparazzi. Munn bought more cocaine for Ledger in an effort to calm him down.

Doe says she and Ledger demanded that the two men destroy the video. Munn left the room with the video, claiming he was going to throw the tape away, but he took the tape to his car instead. Munn and Banks “kept insisting” that the tape would “never see the light of day,” the lawsuit states.

Then, Doe says, Munn invited his cocaine dealer to the party. She says she told Munn to leave at least five times, but he refused. Munn and the dealer raided the plaintiff’s minibar, racking up $700 in charges.

“At least three times she tried to bodily lift up Munn from the couch, in an attempt to get him out of her room,” the suit states.

Doe says she forgot about the incident for several months. But shortly after Ledger’s death, “Entertainment Tonight” ran the footage, calling it the “Heath Ledger Drug Tape.”

Doe claims “Entertainment Tonight” made it appear that the video depicted hotel guests partying with Ledger, rather than a paparazzi entrapment scheme.

“Splash spun the story so that it sounded like they had purchased the video from a hotel guest and not from their staffers, who first drugged Mr. Ledger and then videotaped him, with plaintiff’s image and voice clearly present in the background,” the complaint claims.

“Entertainment Tonight” allegedly bought part of the video for $200,000. Splash has sold the video all over the world, according to the complaint. The video also allegedly shows the plaintiff, and contains her voice, which is enhanced with subtitles.“In short, employees of Splash drugged Mr. Ledger, a known drug user, and then videotaped him without his consent for the purpose of damaging his reputation and to make money,” the suit claims. Doe says defendants“victimized and duped” her in order to “create a story by getting this actor to take drugs and then secretly film him and exploit his illness.”

Causes of action:

Filing counsel:

2008-08-08T12:21:00.000-07:00

Hollywood player Bernie Brillstein dies at 77

Brillstein helped guide the careers of John Belushi and Jim Henson, and bring "Saturday Night Live" and "The Sopranos" to the screen.

August 8, 2008

Bernie Brillstein, a Hollywood talent agent, manager, producer and studio head who over half a century guided the careers of "Saturday Night Live" comedians and helped package a slew of TV and movie hits, has died. He was 77.

Brillstein died of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease Thursday night at a Los Angeles hospital, according to information provided Friday by Brillstein Entertainment Partners.

Starting in the mail room of the William Morris talent agency in 1956, Brillstein moved up to become a Hollywood power broker famous for putting together TV and movie deals, often starring talent he represented and with himself as executive producer.

Brillstein helped guide the careers of John Belushi and Muppets creator Jim Henson, and bring "Saturday Night Live" and "The Sopranos" to the screen.

With partner Brad Grey he founded the influential management and production company Brillstein-Grey Entertainment in 1991.

Among the successful shows he helped bring to TV were the long-running variety show "Hee Haw" and "Alf." He was executive producer on Dan Ackroyd's hit movie, "Ghostbusters."

Brash, sharp and rotundly rumpled, Brillstein exemplified the old-school stereotype of an agent rather than the slick, corporate "Jerry Maguire" operator.

In his 1999 memoir, "Where Did I Go Right? -- You're No One in Hollywood Unless Someone Wants You Dead," he recalled that early on at William Morris Agency in New York, he helped negotiate a Broadway musical deal for an actress -- only to find out that she had been dead for four years.

"Now that's classic agenting," he recalled. "We got a dead person a $250-a-week raise. I knew I was in the right business."

Brillstein had a reputation for caring deeply for his clients. Agenting, he told CNN in 1999, was much more than cutting deals for clients.

"You're a wife. You really are," he said. "You take care of everything and get them ready for the day."

"How do you take an actor or comedian or a writer and point them in the right direction and go through all that garbage unless you love it and love them and think they're talented and worth it?," he said. "It's an amazing experience."

Brillstein, who was married several times, is survived by his wife, Carrie; sons Michael Brillstein, David Koskoff and Nick Koskoff; daughters Kate Brillstein and Leigh Brillstein, and a grandson, Alden.

FOX News propaganda machine for White House

2008-08-07T15:38:00.000-07:00

2008-08-06T14:41:00.000-07:00

Howard Stern Sidekick Artie Lange Heads to Rehab

August 06, 2008

Artie Lange, the plus-sized sidekick on Howard Stern's Sirius radio show, has checked himself into an intensive outpatient rehab program, the New York Post reports.

The comedian, 41, was scheduled to appear at the filming of the Comedy Central roast of close friend Bob Saget on Sunday, and a source told the newspaper he "felt awful for not being there for Bob, but needed to make his health a priority."

Lange's rep confirmed the news for the Post.

Lange, who has appeared on "MadTV" and in the movie "Elf," also canceled his stand-up shows this weekend, but plans to resume his role on "The Howard Stern Show" when it returns from hiatus.

The comedian has had well-publicized struggles with drugs, food and alcohol. In 2007, he told the Miami New Times that "I don't think I can keep doing what I'm doing right now as far as my health is concerned. The lifestyle I'm leading is brutally bad. I'm fatter than I've ever been. It's depressing."

2008-08-06T14:32:00.000-07:00

Paris Hilton responds to McCain, announces her presidential candidacy and profound energy policy

Aug 5 2008

Paris Hilton has finally responded to the taunting attack ad which so insensitively compared her to Barack Obama.

Paris shows that unlike either Obama or rival John McCain (to whom she refers herein as "that wrinkly white-haired guy"), that she can gracefully and eloquently explain complicated matters of energy policy...while wearing a bikini and heels and looking at magazines.

"I'm not from the olden days and I'm not promising change like that other guy," she explained. "I'm just hot."

But though her aspirations may have been limited before, that all changed when McCain exploited her image in his ad. "Which I guess means I'm running for president," Hilton pledged.

Hilton then explains her energy plan, an incredible feat unto itself, as the heiress explodes all prejudices against her intellectual prowess by saying like 25 big words in a row without messing up.

If no one else has done so yet, I would like to be the first to endorse Paris Hilton for president of the United States.

UPDATE (5:01 pm): The McCain camp has apparently responded to the Paris video, telling TMZ: "Sounds like Paris is taking the 'All of the Above' energy approach that John McCain has advocated -- both alternatives and drilling. Perhaps the reality is that Paris has a more substantive energy plan than Barack Obama." Wow, seriously, is this an election for 5th grade class president?

UPDATE 2 (5:48 pm): The video's creator, Adam Mckay (the guy behind "The Landlord") talks about the moment he came up with the idea here.

2008-08-06T14:29:00.000-07:00

Dr. Bill Dauber's Top Five Books

Journalism Professor Dr. Bill Dauber (UC Berkeley alumnus) shares his top five books that students might enjoy.

Many of my students say they don't have time to read and that books just don't hold their attention. It's with their words in mind that I compiled my list, not of my top five books, but a list of books that start fast and end faster.

1. The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien
Give O'Brien one paragraph, the first 271 words, and you'll be hooked. This novel details the lives of Vietnam soldiers and the things they carried into battle, both physical and mental, and the things they carried home. The writing is just plain great, and I think the subject is important today.

2. No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy
My favorites of McCarthy include the border trilogy: "All the Pretty Horses," "The Crossing," and "Cities of the Plain." "No Country" is a good place to start because this book is less work than his others, and it features a fantastic beginning. It's a dark novel about a drug deal that went bad and an old-fashioned sheriff who realizes that he's dealing with a different type of criminal, one that he doesn't want to become like in order to catch.

3. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
I was living alone when I first picked up this book and made the mistake of reading it at night. The book details the murder of a Kansas farm family in 1959, and the author takes you so close to the residents of Holcomb and the killers that it's scary. This book introduced me to literature as non-fiction. Read it during the day.

4. The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
My hope is that once you start reading Didion you won't stop. With all her books, you get a sense that Didion spends a lot of time searching for the perfect paragraph, sentence and word. "Magical Thinking" is a gift to Didion's readers as she writes about her husband who died suddenly and a daughter who is battling a life-threatening illness. Didion consults experts about the medical and psychological experiences of grief, but it's her feelings of grief and the ability to express them perfectly that makes this book great.

5. The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje
I remember calling friends on the telephone just to read them passages from Ondaatje's book. This novel, which has been translated into 300 languages, chronicles the lives of four damaged people living in an Italian villa at the end of World War II. Read this book for the language and share it with a friend.

2008-06-13T14:58:00.000-07:00

U.K. shuts out product placement

Minister says it 'contaminates programs'

Gatorade product placement in 'Friday Night Lights.'

By STEVE CLARKE

The U.K. media minister has attacked product placement in TV shows and said he will not allow the practice on British broadcasters even though it has been approved by the European Union.

The news is likely to infuriate TV companies, including beleaguered terrestrial giant ITV, which are all trying to find additional revenue streams as new media continues to make inroads into traditional advertising.

Andy Burnham, secretary of state at the Dept. of Culture, Media and Sport since January, dropped his bombshell Wednesday in his first big policy speech on broadcasting.

He said product placement would undermine the status that British TV enjoys internationally and “contaminate” programs.

He added, “There is a risk that, at the very moment when television needs to do all it can to show it can be trusted, that we elide the distinction between programs and adverts,” referring to the phone-in quiz scandals that rocked all British terrestrial webs last year.

“As a viewer, I don’t want to feel the script has been written by the commercial marketing director,” he added. “British programming has an integrity that is revered around the world, and I don’t think we should put that hard-won reputation up for sale.”

Last week, ITV topper Rupert Howell, in a speech about the new economics of TV, eagerly anticipated a time when U.K. television would be allowed to follow the U.S. example and use product placement.

Howell said it was vital to find new revenue streams soon and that product placement would be an important source of coin.

He said: “If we do it badly, people will switch off or switch over. We have to do it well. It will not be big, but it will be valuable.”

2008-06-13T14:55:00.001-07:00

2008-06-13T14:51:00.000-07:00

Facebook No Longer The Second Largest Social Network

It was sort of inevitable given Facebook’s monster growth over the last few years, but April 2008 was the milestone: Facebook officially caught up to MySpace in terms of unique monthly worldwide visitors, according to data released by Comscore and shown above. Both services are attracting around 115 million people to their respective sites each month.

Most of Facebook’s user growth, however, has been in international markets - MySpace is still dominates Facebook in the U.S. market, with 72 million monthly uniques. Facebook has 36 million monthly uniques, up from 23 million a year ago.

Facebook added 75 million monthly uniques over the last twelve month, but just 13 million of those visitors are located in the U.S. MySpace added 5 million U.S. uniques during that period - at this rate it will take 4+ years for Facebook to catch up to MySpace in the U.S. market.

There’s a real question about how valuable all these international users are from an advertising standpoint. We’ll be publishing our thoughts on that next week.

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CrunchBase Information

Facebook

Website:	facebook.com
Location:	Palo Alto, California, United States
Founded:	February 1, 2004
Funding:	$496M

On February 4th, 2004 Mark Zuckerberg launched The Facebook, a social network that was at the time exclusively for Harvard students. It was a huge hit, in 2 weeks, half of the student body… Learn More

MySpace

Website:	myspace.com
Location:	Beverly Hills, California, United States
Founded:	August 1, 2003
Acquired:	July 1, 2005 by Fox Interactive Media for $580M in Cash

MySpace is a popular social networking site that lets friends share, message and stay connected. The site lets you browse profiles, blog, email and join groups. MySpace also has videos, music and classifieds. Music artists can add friends, stream… Learn More

2008-06-13T14:45:00.000-07:00

Russian Billionaires Are Buying All The Pop Stars

Russian billionaires: they're powerful, they're flush with profits from semi-monopolized industrial concerns, and they're ready to party. So they think nothing of paying outrageous sums to international pop stars to come play private parties for them and their closest friends.

The most recent example is poor drug-addled soul singer Amy Winehouse, who will be pocketing a cool $2 million to play a show for the girlfriend of billionaire politician and businessman Roman Abramovich.

All $2 million of which will surely be spent to further Winehouse's ongoing demise.

The point is, she's not the only superstar who's been seduced by a gig like this. Soon you won't be able to see anyone from Madonna to Rihanna without a plane ticket to Moscow and tight connections to the vestiges of the Kremlin's power structure. It's a trend!

George Michael, 75-minute concert on New Year's eve, 2007, for nickel billionaire Vladimir Potanin. Price: $3.5 million
Rihanna, 40-minute show for billionaire Oleg Deripaska on New Year's eve, 2008. Price: $500,000.
Jennifer Lopez, 40-minute birthday party show for billionaire Andrei Melnichenko in April, 2007. Price: $1.2 million.
Christina Aguilera, three songs at Andrei Melnichenko's wedding in September, 2005. Price: $3.6 million.
And to put it all over the top, Madonna is reportedly considering an offer from "an unnamed Dubai-based tycoon" for a one-night private performance. Price: $10 million.

Fortunately, you can still hire Pat DiNizio of The Smithereens to play in your living room for $2,000.

2008-06-13T12:55:00.000-07:00

Fox News presenter taken off air after Barack Obama 'terrorist fist jab' remark

By Alex Spillius in Washington

13/06/2008

A Fox News television presenter is to be taken off air after she accused Barack and Michelle Obama of greeting each other with a "terrorist's fist jab".

The decision by network bosses came as the Obama campaign launched a website to dispel rumours about his faith and patriotism and his wife's views on race as he prepares to compete for the White House in November.

The website, www.fightthesmears.com , offers detailed responses to several rumours that have continued to circulate online and in conservative news outlets, including that Mr Obama is a Muslim.

E. D. Hill, a veteran of the Fox network, made her comment after the presumptive Democratic nominee and his wife affectionately bumped fists on stage last week as he prepared to make his victory speech.

Before a commercial break on her America's Pulse show, she asked: "A fist bump? A pound? A terrorist fist jab? The gesture everyone seems to interpret differently. We'll show you some interesting body communication and find out what it really says."

The gesture, derived from black street culture, is however commonplace in many walks of American life. Media commentators noted that former president George Bush once used it with the tennis player Anna Kournikova.

Ms Hill's remarks are one of several instances where the Right-wing network has disparaged the Obamas recently.

It characterised Mrs Obama as "Obama's Baby Mama", a derogatory term used for black single mothers, while Liz Trotta, a journalist and Fox contributor, joked about assassinating both Mr Obama and Osama bin Laden after supposedly muddling their names.

Both Ms Trotta and Ms Hill apologised, with the latter claiming that her comment had merely "characterised" discussions in the media about the Obamas' greeting.

However it appeared her analysis was extrapolated from a single comment on an article on the Right-wing HumanEvents.com, which posited that Hizbollah fighters used the same mode of greeting as the Obamas.

Some US commentators have noted that the Fox owner Rupert Murdoch spoke approvingly of Mr Obama recently, but it is not clear if the media mogul played any role demoting Ms Hill, who is however staying with the company. A Fox representative said changes to the afternoon schedule had been on the cards for weeks.

Karl Frisch, a spokesman for Media Matters, a liberal watchdog, said: "This is part of a broader problem with Fox: out of bound comments are followed by a half-baked apology. At some point Fox has got to decide if it is a responsible news source."

One of the first items on the new Obama website said that Mrs Obama, who like her husband is black, has never used the racially divisive term "whitey," as some blogs and conservative commentators have claimed.

It also tackles false claims that Obama, who will take on Republican Senator John McCain in the November election, follows Islam, and shows a photograph of Mr Obama with his hand on a Bible when he was sworn into the US Senate in 2007, to counter rumours that he used the Koran.

2008-06-13T12:41:00.000-07:00

Judge Alex Kozinski recuses himself from obscenity trial

The 9th Circuit chief judge makes the decision three days after admitting he had posted sexually explicit photos and videos on his personal website.

Judge Alex Kozinski, shotgun, and racoon

By Scott Glover
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

June 13, 2008

A federal appeals court judge today recused himself from a closely-watched obscenity trial in Los Angeles, three days after acknowledging that he had posted sexually explicit material on a publicly accessible personal website.

"In light of the public controversy surrounding my involvement in this case, I have concluded that there is a manifest necessity to declare a mistrial," said Alex Kozinski, chief judge for the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. "I will recuse myself from further participation in the case and will ask the chief judge of the district court to reassign it to another judge."

The obscenity trial in Los Angeles federal court was suspended Wednesday after The Times reported about the images on his website.

Kozinski, one of the nation's highest-ranking judges, granted a 48-hour stay in the obscenity trial of a Hollywood adult filmmaker after the prosecutor requested time to explore "a potential conflict of interest concerning the court having a . . . sexually explicit website with similar material to what is on trial here."

In an interview Tuesday with The Times, Kozinski acknowledged posting sexual content on his website. Among the images on the site were a photo of naked women on all fours painted to look like cows and a video of an encounter between a half-dressed man and a sexually aroused farm animal. He defended some of the adult content as "funny" but conceded that other postings were inappropriate.

Kozinski later said that his adult son may have been responsible for posting some of the material.

Kozinski said that he thought the site was for his private storage and that he was not aware the images could be seen by the public, although he also said he had shared some material on the site with friends. After the interview Tuesday evening, he blocked public access to the site.

Kozinski, 57, is and has been mentioned as a possible candidate for the U.S. Supreme Court. He was named chief judge of the 9th Circuit last year and is considered a judicial conservative on most issues. He was appointed to the federal bench by President Reagan in 1985.

2008-06-13T12:18:00.000-07:00

Atlantic Records Sues Stone Temple Pilots' Weiland, Kretz

June 13, 2008

Emily Chasan, Reuters

Atlantic Records sued two members of Stone Temple Pilots yesterday (June 12), accusing them of trying to prematurely end their recording contract with the Warner Music Group label.

The suit, filed in U.S. District Court in Manhattan, claims lead singer Scott Weiland and drummer Eric Kretz have threatened to stop performing under their contract and have indicated they would like to end the agreement unless Atlantic makes significant changes.

The record company said in the suit that while Stone Temple Pilots has already delivered six albums, it wants the group to record a seventh album and deliver up to two more if Atlantic decides it wants them.

Stone Temple Pilots reunited last month for its first national tour in eight years. The group, whose momentum was often curtailed by Weiland's drug problems, had fallen apart shortly after a 2002 tour. In late 2003, the other two members of the group, guitarist Dean DeLeo and bassist Robert DeLeo, were released by Atlantic from their recording contract as they said they wanted to pursue separate careers.

Atlantic said in the lawsuit that the group -- Weiland, Kretz and the DeLeos -- was now touring successfully and had indicated its intention to record together again. The record company said its contract with Stone Temple Pilots was written under New York laws and that the musicians are trying to use California laws to terminate it.

Atlantic said claims by Kretz and Weiland that they have a right to terminate the contract "have given rise to a definite, real and substantial controversy between the parties that threatens to harm Atlantic's business."

Atlantic is seeking a court declaration of its rights under the recording contract, the costs of its legal fees and any other relief the court decides is appropriate.

In a statement, STP maintains it "never threatened anything more than remaining away from the studio until equitable terms could be arranged. The precipitous filing of this action is yet another example of the difficulties facing artists in the new music environment, as relationships between artists and their labels fall further and further apart."

The band says it hopes the suit will be shelved "to permit negotiations to continue in a positive spirit rather than under a dark cloud of hostility. Should everyone operate in good faith, STP are certain that a new album from the band will be available soon. Should Atlantic instead pursue this scorched earth policy towards the band, the ultimate victims will be STP's fans, who will never be able to enjoy a new album from the group."

2008-06-12T23:08:00.000-07:00

2008-06-12T22:49:00.000-07:00

Metallica reverses their previous blog-reviews position -- blames band manager Q-Prime Management for "error"

Metallica issues official statement on matter:

6/11/2008

While we occasionally enjoy reading the various comments, rumors, speculation, reviews, gossip and all the good that the internet brings, rarely do we feel the desire/need to respond to the "blogosphere" . . .

hey, everyone is entitled to have their thoughts and opinions, right?

However, once we re-surfaced on Tuesday after a few weeks on tour in Europe, we were informed that someone at Q Prime (our managers) had made the error of asking a few publications to take down reviews of the rough mixes from the new record that were posted on their sites.

Our response was "WHY?!!!

Why take down mostly positive reviews of the new material and prevent people from getting psyched about the next record. . . that makes no sense to us!"

So after a few rounds of managerial ear spank and sentencing everyone at Q Prime to 20 push-ups each, we figured why not take matters into our own hands and just post the links here on our site. Kerrang, Metal Hammer, The Quietus.

You see, we have maintained an "in the press" section here on Metallica.com for many years now, posting links to reviews of shows, album and DVD releases, and various other tidbits we've come across while surfing around. Some good, some not so good, but we put 'em all up . . . sort of the same way we treat our message boards on this site . . . welcoming all feedback.

So in the spirit of keeping this section current, we've put as many of the reviews of the rough mixes of the new record up here as we could find.

If we missed any, let us know . . . and in the meantime, we're always adding, so peruse at your leisure.

2008-06-12T19:19:00.000-07:00

Perez Hilton

“I think what I do is noble. I think my job title is entertainer. I shine the light on celebrities behaving badly, and I also shine the light on those that get it right. And those that get it right, I applaud.”

By Andrea Chang, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
June 13, 2008

The gig: As the self-proclaimed "Queen of All Media," Hilton has become a pop culture phenom with his Hollywood gossip blog, which draws about 7 million page views a day. PerezHilton.com is filled with snarky comments and paparazzi photos and helped usher in 24-hour celebrity "info-tainment."

Education: Bachelor's degree in drama from New York University.

Former jobs: Publicist, actor and journalist at gay publications and tabloid Star magazine.

Got the idea: Hilton, whose real name is Mario Lavandeira, began blogging as a hobby after seeing how easy it was. He focused on Hollywood "because it was something I was inherently curious about, fascinated with. And, let's face it, celebrities -- a lot of them -- are crazy."

Along the path: Started his blog, then called PageSixSixSix, in 2004 with a post about Howard Stern. Within months, tabloid TV show "The Insider" dubbed it "Hollywood's most-hated website." This led to a huge boost in Web traffic.

Name change: After getting sued by the New York Post, which publishes gossip section Page Six, Hilton changed the blog's name to PerezHilton.com. The name reflects his Cuban roots and "the wacky world of celebrities." And what does pal Paris Hilton think? "She loves it."

How it works: Hilton, 30, constantly checks his e-mail, text messages and voice mail and scours the Web for the latest gossip on "A-listers to D-listers to Z-listers," updating his blog an average of 40 times a day. His sources include publicists, agents, managers, dog walkers, nannies and celebrities themselves. Advertisers pay as much as $54,000 to run a one-day ad package on the site.

First big purchase: A new Toyota Camry.

Most surreal moment: When Madonna made him a video in which she seductively asked, "Who do you love more: me or [Hilton's dog] Teddy?" Naturally, Hilton posted the clip -- and his response -- on his blog.

Guilty pleasure: "Cheesy pop music," especially British group Girls Aloud.

The Perez brand: Hilton debuted a clothing line, sold exclusively at retail chain Hot Topic, last week. He also appears in a summer movie, "Another Gay Sequel: Gays Gone Wild," hosts a syndicated radio show, is writing a book on celebrities and is in talks to start his own record label. "I want my own little empire."

What fame hasn't brought: Hilton dishes that "in 2007, I got laid once. One time. Which, for a gay man, is unheard of. That's like, celibate."

In his own words: "I think what I do is noble. I think my job title is entertainer. I shine the light on celebrities behaving badly, and I also shine the light on those that get it right. And those that get it right, I applaud."

2008-06-12T19:15:00.000-07:00

Alex Kozinski calls for investigation into his porn postings

The Calif. judge asked an ethics panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to initiate proceedings after the disclosure about his trove of sexually explicit material.

By Scott Glover
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

June 12, 2008

A federal judge who acknowledged maintaining his own publicly accessible website featuring sexually explicit photos and videos today called for an investigation of his own conduct.

Alex Kozinski, 57, chief judge of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, asked a court ethics panel to initiate the proceedings after The Times reported Wednesday that he posted lewd photos and videos on his personal website.

Kozinski was presiding over a closely watched obscenity trial in Los Angeles federal court when he acknowledged the website.

"I will cooperate fully in any investigation," Kozinski said in a statement.

Kozinski suspended until Monday the obscenity trial of a Hollywood adult filmmaker after the prosecutor requested time to explore "a potential conflict of interest concerning the court having a . . . sexually explicit website with similar material to what is on trial here."

Although Kozinski requested an investigation, it's unclear what, if any, discipline he could face. Circuit judges are appointed for life and can only be fired by Congress, though they can be censured by fellow jurists.

In an interview Tuesday with The Times, Kozinski acknowledged posting sexual content on his website. Among the images on the site were a photo of naked women on all fours painted to look like cows and a video of a half-dressed man cavorting with a sexually aroused farm animal. He defended some of the adult content as "funny" but conceded that other postings were inappropriate.

Kozinski said that he thought the site was for his private storage and that he was not aware the images could be seen by the public, although he also said he had shared some material on the site with friends. After the interview Tuesday evening, he blocked public access to the site.

Kozinski is one of the nation's highest-ranking judges and has been mentioned as a possible candidate for the U.S. Supreme Court. He was named chief judge of the 9th Circuit last year and is considered a judicial conservative on most issues. He was appointed to the federal bench by President Reagan in 1985.

After publication of an latimes.com article about his website Wednesday morning, the judge offered another explanation for how the material might have been posted to the site. Tuesday evening he had told The Times that he had a clear recollection of some of the most objectionable material and that he was responsible for placing it on the Web. By Wednesday afternoon, as controversy about the website spread, Kozinski was seeking to shift responsibility, at least in part, to his adult son, Yale.

"Yale called and said he's pretty sure he uploaded a bunch of it," Kozinski wrote in an e-mail to abovethelaw.com, a legal news website. "I had no idea, but that sounds right because I sure don't remember putting some of that stuff there."

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, expressed concern about Kozinski's website.

"If this is true, this is unacceptable behavior for a federal court judge," she said in a statement.

Stephen Gillers, a New York University law professor who specializes in legal ethics and has known Kozinski for years, called him "a treasure of the federal judiciary." Gillers said he took the judge at his word that he did not know the site was publicly available. But he said Kozinski was "seriously negligent" in allowing it to be discovered.

"The phrase 'sober as a judge' resonates with the American public," Gillers said. "We don't want them to reveal their private selves publicly. This is going to upset a lot of people."

Gillers said the disclosure would be humiliating for Kozinski and would "harm his reputation in many quarters" but that the controversy should die there.

He added, however, that if the public concludes the website was intended for the sharing of pornographic material, "that's a transgression of another order.

"It would be very hard for him to come back from that," he said.

Kozinski has a reputation as a brilliant legal mind and is seen as a champion of the 1st Amendment right to freedom of speech and expression. Several years ago, for example, after learning that appeals court administrators had placed filters on computers that denied access to pornography and other materials, Kozinski led a successful effort to have the filters removed.

The judge said it was strictly by chance that he wound up presiding over the trial of filmmaker Ira Isaacs in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles. Appellate judges occasionally hear criminal cases when they have free time on their calendars, and the Isaacs case was one of two he was given, the judge said.

Isaacs is on trial for distributing sexual fetish videos, featuring acts of bestiality and defecation. The material is considerably more vulgar than the content posted on Kozinski's website.

The judge said he didn't think any of the material on his site would qualify as obscene.

"Is it prurient? I don't know what to tell you," he said. "I think it's odd and interesting. It's part of life."

Before the site was taken down, visitors to http://alex.kozinski.com were greeted with the message: "Ain't nothin' here. Y'all best be movin' on, compadre."

Only those who knew to type in the name of a subdirectory could see the content on the site, which also included some of Kozinski's essays and legal writings as well as music files and personal photos.

The sexually explicit material on the site was extensive, including images of masturbation, public sex and contortionist sex. There was a slide show striptease featuring a transsexual and a folder that contained a series of photos of women's crotches in snug-fitting clothing or underwear.

Kozinski told The Times that he began saving the sexually explicit materials and other items of interest on his website years ago.

"People send me stuff like this all the time," he said.

In turn, he said, he occasionally passes on items he finds interesting or funny to others.

Among the sexually explicit material on his site that he defended as humorous were two photos. In one, a young man is bent over in a chair and performing fellatio on himself. In the other, two women are sitting in what appears to be a cafe with their skirts hiked up to reveal their pubic hair and genitalia. Behind them is a sign reading "Bush for President."

"That is a funny joke," Kozinski said.

The judge said he planned to delete some of the most objectionable material from his site, including the photo depicting women as cows, which he said was "degrading . . . and just gross." He also said he planned to get rid of a graphic step-by-step pictorial in which a woman is seen shaving her pubic hair.

Before suggesting that his son might have been responsible for posting some of the content, Kozinski told The Times that he, the judge, must have accidentally uploaded the cow and shaving images to his server while intending to upload something else. "I would not keep those files intentionally," he said. He offered to give a reporter a demonstration of how the error probably occurred.

The judge emphasized that he never used appeals court computers to maintain his site.

The presence of copyrighted music files on Kozinski's site raises other issues.

More than a dozen MP3 tracks were listed, and they were neither excerpts nor used to illustrate legal opinions, which experts said might have qualified their copying as "fair use." The artists included Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan and Weird Al Yankovic.

Uploading such files could violate civil copyright laws if friends or members of the public visited the site and downloaded the songs, according to attorneys who have litigated file-sharing cases for both copyright holders and accused infringers.

Even if no one downloaded the songs, just making them available might run afoul of the law, said Corynne McSherry, staff attorney at the nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation, which often argues the other side of such issues.

Late last year, three of Kozinski's Circuit Court colleagues noted in a ruling that "the owner of a collection of works who makes them available to the public may be deemed to have distributed copies of the works," a violation of copyright law if done without permission.

"For him to actually be held liable would take some further investigation, but I think it's possible," McSherry said. "It's a strange story. It's surprising to me."

Kozinski was not asked in the Tuesday interview about the music files, and he could not be reached for comment Wednesday afternoon.

2008-06-12T19:10:00.000-07:00

Google Apologizes For Killing Newspapers

All these people who accidentally destroyed the newspaper industry feel so bad about it! Craig Newmark, whose Craigslist decimated the classifieds sections of the nation, endowed some chair at Berkeley's journalism school to assuage his guilty conscience.

Now Google, whose ad company is destroying the revenue model newspapers depend on, is hopping on the "we totally love journalism" bandwagon. Google head Eric Schmidt claimed that their DoubleClick ad service will aid newspapers! In getting more online revenue, obv, not with the whole "saving newspapers themselves" thing. "It's a huge moral imperative to help here," Eric said. Too little, too late, Google! ONCE A WHORE, ALWAYS A WHORE.

Without providing specifics about how it might be accomplished, Schmidt said DoubleClick's system for serving up online display ads could generate "significant" revenue online for newspapers.

Still, he acknowledged the boost probably won't be enough to restore the hefty profit margins that newspaper publishers historically have enjoyed from print advertising.

It's sad to see the people who killed print have these regrets so publicly. They probably wake up in a cold sweat after terrifying dreams of bloody broadsheets calling their names—"you killllled meeee!" But seriously, it's too late, Eric. Not only is this ad thing a slap in the face, but Google has a nasty habit of aggregating and indexing lots and lots of newspaper content without paying anyone. So give it up and embrace your role! You are become death, destroyer of print! You made $16.6 billion in revenue last year!

At least Craig bought the newspaper industry a little going-away present. This empty talk is just sad.

2008-06-12T19:08:00.000-07:00

2008-06-12T17:11:00.000-07:00

Scientology vs South Park

2008-06-12T16:28:00.000-07:00

Tom Cruise Proves Sanity By Calling Shrink Dr. Drew A Nazi

Drew Pinsky is downright respectable, at least by TV doctor standards. Unlike "Dr. Phil," he has an actual medical degree, practices medicine and even teaches psychiatry. His reality show, Celebrity Rehab, is both more gripping and responsible than other celebrity "reality" vehicles. But Tom Cruise has allowed his lawyer to compare "Dr. Drew" to Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels, because the doctor told Playboy the following about movie star Cruise's fevered devotion to the Church of Scientology:

A lot of people in the public eye who behave strangely have mental illness we can learn from, and much of it is based on childhood trauma, without a doubt. Take a guy like Tom Cruise. Why would somebody be drawn into a cultish kind of environment like Scientology? To me, that's a function of a very deep emptiness and suggests serious neglect in childhood - maybe some abuse, but mostly neglect.

Cruise's high-powered attorney, Bert Fields, a frequent client of convicted wiretapper and racketeer Anthony Pellicano, called Pinsky an "unqualified television performer who is obviously just looking for notoriety," adding, "The last time we heard garbage like this was from Joseph Goebbels."

Cruise has already spoken on record about his abusive father. Strange, then, that he would snap so viciously over speculation he was neglected.

Perhaps the megastar interprets Pinsky's statements as a slam against his mother, the presumptive neglector. More likely, it was the line about Scientology's "cultish" environment that sent Cruise, a church bigwig, into attack mode.

But a slam this over the top only makes Cruise look more crazy while drawing attention to his own deep involvement with the sect.

2008-06-12T16:19:00.001-07:00

2008-06-12T15:56:00.000-07:00

Motley Crue to Motley Crue band Manager: We've Been Motley Scrued

Jun 11th 2008

The members of Motley Crue have filed yet another lawsuit against their management, once again claiming they're the victims of a major money and power grab.

In the lawsuit, filed today in LA County Superior Court, band members say manager Burt Stein and his management companies were supposed to watch their back -- but instead took money and made backroom deals without their permission in order to cash in on the band's popularity.

If this sounds familiar, it is. Last year the band sued another manager, essentially alleging the same thing. That case was settled.

Motley Crue - "Saints of Los Angeles"

2008-06-12T15:15:00.000-07:00

The wife U.S. Republican John McCain callously left behind

By Sharon Churcher
8th June 2008

Now that Hillary Clinton has at last formally withdrawn from the race for the White House, the eyes of America and the world will focus on Barack Obama and his Republican rival Senator John McCain.

While Obama will surely press his credentials as the embodiment of the American dream – a handsome, charismatic young black man who was raised on food stamps by a single mother and who represents his country’s future – McCain will present himself as a selfless, principled war hero whose campaign represents not so much a battle for the presidency of the United States, but a crusade to rescue the nation’s tarnished reputation.

Forgotten woman: But despite all her problems Carol McCain says she still adores he ex-husband

McCain likes to illustrate his moral fibre by referring to his five years as a prisoner-of-war in Vietnam. And to demonstrate his commitment to family values, the 71-year-old former US Navy pilot pays warm tribute to his beautiful blonde wife, Cindy, with whom he has four children.

But there is another Mrs McCain who casts a ghostly shadow over the Senator’s presidential campaign. She is seldom seen and rarely written about, despite being mother to McCain’s three eldest children.

And yet, had events turned out differently, it would be she, rather than Cindy, who would be vying to be First Lady. She is McCain’s first wife, Carol, who was a famous beauty and a successful swimwear model when they married in 1965.

She was the woman McCain dreamed of during his long incarceration and torture in Vietnam’s infamous ‘Hanoi Hilton’ prison and the woman who faithfully stayed at home looking after the children and waiting anxiously for news.

But when McCain returned to America in 1973 to a fanfare of publicity and a handshake from Richard Nixon, he discovered his wife had been disfigured in a terrible car crash three years earlier. Her car had skidded on icy roads into a telegraph pole on Christmas Eve, 1969. Her pelvis and one arm were shattered by the impact and she suffered massive internal injuries.

When Carol was discharged from hospital after six months of life-saving surgery, the prognosis was bleak. In order to save her legs, surgeons

had been forced to cut away huge sections of shattered bone, taking with it her tall, willowy figure. She was confined to a wheelchair and was forced to use a catheter.

Through sheer hard work, Carol learned to walk again. But when John McCain came home from Vietnam, she had gained a lot of weight and bore little resemblance to her old self.

Today, she stands at just 5ft4in and still walks awkwardly, with a pronounced limp. Her body is held together by screws and metal plates and, at 70, her face is worn by wrinkles that speak of decades of silent suffering.

For nearly 30 years, Carol has maintained a dignified silence about the accident, McCain and their divorce. But last week at the bungalow where she now lives at Virginia Beach, a faded seaside resort 200 miles south of Washington, she told The Mail on Sunday how McCain divorced her in 1980 and married Cindy, 18 years his junior and the heir to an Arizona brewing fortune, just one month later.

Golden couple: John and Cindy McCain at a charity gala in Los Angeles

Carol insists she remains on good terms with her ex-husband, who agreed as part of their divorce settlement to pay her medical costs for life. ‘I have no bitterness,’

she says. ‘My accident is well recorded. I had 23 operations, I am five inches shorter than I used to be and I was in hospital for six months. It was just awful, but it wasn’t the reason for my divorce.

‘My marriage ended because John McCain didn’t want to be 40, he wanted to be 25. You know that happens...it just does.’

Some of McCain’s acquaintances are less forgiving, however. They portray the politician as a self-centred womaniser who effectively abandoned his crippled wife to ‘play the field’. They accuse him of finally settling on Cindy, a former rodeo beauty queen, for financial reasons.

McCain was then earning little more than £25,000 a year as a naval officer, while his new father-in-law, Jim Hensley, was a multi-millionaire who had impeccable political connections.

He first met Carol in the Fifties while he was at the US Naval Academy in Annapolis. He was a privileged, but rebellious scion of one of America’s most distinguished military dynasties – his father and grandfather were both admirals.

But setting out to have a good time, the young McCain hung out with a group of young officers who called themselves the ‘Bad Bunch’.

His primary interest was women and his conquests ranged from a knife-wielding floozy nicknamed ‘Marie, the Flame of Florida’ to a tobacco heiress.

Carol fell into his fast-living world by accident. She escaped a poor upbringing in Philadelphia to become a successful model, married an Annapolis classmate of McCain’s and had two children – Douglas and Andrew – before renewing what one acquaintance calls ‘an old flirtation’ with McCain.

It seems clear she was bowled over by McCain’s attention at a time when he was becoming bored with his playboy lifestyle.

‘He was 28 and ready to settle down and he loved Carol’s children,’ recalled another Annapolis graduate, Robert Timberg, who wrote The Nightingale’s Song, a bestselling biography of McCain and four other graduates of the academy.

The couple married and McCain adopted Carol’s sons. Their daughter, Sidney, was born a year later, but domesticity was clearly beginning

to bore McCain – the couple were regarded as ‘fixtures on the party circuit’ before McCain requested combat duty in Vietnam at the end of 1966.

He was assigned as a bomber pilot on an aircraft carrier in the Gulf of Tonkin.

What follows is the stuff of the McCain legend. He was shot down over Hanoi in October 1967 on his 23rd mission over North Vietnam and was badly beaten by an angry mob when he was pulled, half-drowned from a lake.

War hero: McCain with Carol as he arrives back in the US in 1973 after his five years as a PoW in North Vietnam

Over the next five-and-a-half years in the notorious Hoa Loa Prison he was regularly tortured and mistreated.

It was in 1969 that Carol went to spend the Christmas holiday – her third without McCain – at her parents’ home. After dinner, she left to drop off some presents at a friend’s house.

It wasn’t until some hours later that she was discovered, alone and in terrible pain, next to the wreckage of her car. She had been hurled through the windscreen.

After her first series of life-saving operations, Carol was told she may never walk again, but when doctors said they would try to get word to McCain about her injuries, she refused, insisting: ‘He’s got enough problems, I don’t want to tell him.’

H. Ross Perot, a billionaire Texas businessman, future presidential candidate and advocate of prisoners of war, paid for her medical care.

When McCain – his hair turned prematurely white and his body reduced to little more than a skeleton – was released in March 1973, he told reporters he was overjoyed to see Carol again.

But friends say privately he was ‘appalled’ by the change in her appearance. At first, though, he was kind, assuring her: ‘I don’t look so good myself. It’s fine.’

He bought her a bungalow near the sea in Florida and another former PoW helped him to build a railing so she could pull herself over the dunes to the water.

‘I thought, of course, we would live happily ever after,’ says Carol. But as a war hero, McCain was moving in ever-more elevated circles.

Through Ross Perot, he met Ronald Reagan, then Governor of California. A sympathetic Nancy Reagan took Carol under her wing.

But already the McCains’ marriage had begun to fray. ‘John started carousing and running around with women,’ said Robert Timberg.

McCain has acknowledged that he had girlfriends during this time, without going into details. Some friends blame his dissatisfaction with Carol, but others give some credence to her theory of a mid-life crisis.

He was also fiercely ambitious, but it was clear he would never become an admiral like his illustrious father and grandfather and his thoughts were turning to politics.

In 1979 – while still married to Carol – he met Cindy at a cocktail party in Hawaii. Over the next six months he pursued her, flying around the country to see her. Then he began to push to end his marriage.

Carol and her children were devastated. ‘It was a complete surprise,’ says Nancy Reynolds, a former Reagan aide.

‘They never displayed any difficulties between themselves. I know the Reagans were quite shocked because they loved and respected both Carol and John.’

Another friend added: ‘Carol didn’t fight him. She felt her infirmity made her an impediment to him. She justified his actions because of all he had gone through. She used to say, “He just wants to make up for lost time.”’

Indeed, to many in their circle the saddest part of the break-up was Carol’s decision to resign herself to losing a man she says she still adores.

Friends confirm she has remained friends with McCain and backed him in all his campaigns. ‘He was very generous to her in the divorce but of course he could afford to be, since he was marrying Cindy,’ one observed.

McCain transferred the Florida beach house to Carol and gave her the right to live in their jointly-owned townhouse in the Washington suburb of Alexandria. He also agreed to pay her alimony and child support.

A former neighbour says she subsequently sold up in Florida and Washington and moved in 2003 to Virginia Beach. He said: ‘My impression was that she found the new place easier to manage as she still has some difficulties walking.’

Meanwhile McCain moved to Arizona with his new bride immediately after their 1980 marriage. There, his new father-in-law gave him a job and introduced him to local businessmen and political powerbrokers who would smooth his passage to Washington via the House of Representatives and Senate.

And yet despite his popularity as a politician, there are those who won’t forget his treatment of his first wife.

Ted Sampley, who fought with US Special Forces in Vietnam and is now a leading campaigner for veterans’ rights, said: ‘I have been following John McCain’s career for nearly 20 years. I know him personally. There is something wrong with this guy and let me tell you what it is – deceit.

‘When he came home and saw that Carol was not the beauty he left behind, he started running around on her almost right away. Everybody around him knew it.

‘Eventually he met Cindy and she was young and beautiful and very wealthy. At that point McCain just dumped Carol for something he thought was better.

‘This is a guy who makes such a big deal about his character. He has no character. He is a fake. If there was any character in that first marriage, it all belonged to Carol.’

One old friend of the McCains said: ‘Carol always insists she is not bitter, but I think that’s a defence mechanism. She also feels deeply in his debt because in return for her agreement to a divorce, he promised to pay for her medical care for the rest of her life.’

Carol remained resolutely loyal as McCain’s political star rose. She says she agreed to talk to The Mail on Sunday only because she wanted to publicise her support for the man who abandoned her.

Indeed, the old Mercedes that she uses to run errands displays both a disabled badge and a sticker encouraging people to vote for her ex-husband. ‘He’s a good guy,’ she assured us. ‘We are still good friends. He is the best man for president.’

But Ross Perot, who paid her medical bills all those years ago, now believes that both Carol McCain and the American people have been taken in by a man who is unusually slick and cruel – even by the standards of modern politics.

‘McCain is the classic opportunist. He’s always reaching for attention and glory,’ he said.

‘After he came home, Carol walked with a limp. So he threw her over for a poster girl with big money from Arizona. And the rest is history.’

2008-06-12T14:55:00.000-07:00

Five Reasons Why Metallica Will Doom Bonnaroo Forever

If you like the Bonnaroo music festival, don't read this story. As history shows, Metallica's about to ruin everything.

Bonnaroo, it was nice knowing you.

We'll miss your gray market economy, with Frisbee-chucking weirdos selling burritos, beer and mystery balloons from the back of Econoline vans. We'll miss the way you blended hippie jam bands like Rusted Root with indie rock bands like Death Cab for Cutie and the resultant nine-car social pile up that ensued. Hell, we'll even miss the sunstroke and smell of the non-VIP camping area.

But it's all over now. You could have had yourself a nice little time with David Cross in the comedy tent, dozens of stoners mesmerized by “The Big Lebowski” and maybe a nice Phil Lesh/Lupe Fiasco duet, but no. You got greedy. You wanted a big-time name near the top of the bill. You had to go cock things up and get Metallica.

Let there be no question: Metallica will kill Bonnaroo. When they're done, Manchester, Tenn. will be a post-apocalyptic swath of scorched farmland, burned out VW Microbuses and tufts of shredded hair yanked from hipster beards. Why, you ask? Because this band is like Rogue from the X-Men, it kills everything it touches. Here are five solid examples to ponder before the special brownies kick in.

1. They killed Lollapalooza.

OK, so maybe a festival that included Soundgarden, Nine Inch Nails and Public Enemy on its rosters wasn't the feel-good touring franchise of the century. But before Metallica played in 1996, the biggest problem facing this festival of dancing Shaolin Monks, adult jungle gyms and piercing stations was Billy Corgan getting pissed off because people liked the Beastie Boys better than his band. Once big daddy Perry Farrell left, though, the wheels came off the cart. An event that once featured teens crying over the loss of Kurt Cobain now reverberated with the sound of pizza delivering high school dropouts chanting “Die, Die, Die” as Lars Ulrich and company laid into their Passover-themed crowd favorite “Creeping Death.” The next year, Lolla tried to save face by putting on a Prodigy/Orbital-fueled rave, but it was too late. The whole thing went on hiatus until 2003, when the tour limped to an unmerciful end -- relegated to one-off, stiflingly hot summer shows in Chicago's Grant Park. One of Metallica's lesser offenses, they may not have ultimately kicked the chair, but they certainly helped secure the noose.

2. They killed hair metal.

The average long-haired, black-shirted true believer wasn't altogether pleased when The Black Album went platinum and “Enter Sandman” was all over MTV, but at least this gave Metallica a chance to knock the world on its ass with some thrash metal, no? Wrong, fucko. After Sandman's success, they cut their hair short. Then singer James Hetfield, who inspired the band's nickname "Alcoholica," got sober. Finally, the band released Load, which will go down in history as one of the greatest adult contemporary albums ever released -- easily equaling anything released by Carly Simon or Bread. To pour rock salt into the wound, a year later, the band released the equally pitiful and decidedly unmetal ReLoad, then followed that with an album of Bob Seeger, Thin Lizzie and Blue Oyster Cult covers called Garage Inc., and punctuated the whole mess with symphonic recordings of several of their songs in 1999. With metal's flagbearers out of the picture, metal became the punchline to a cultural joke: Pat Boone recorded an album of metal covers, Ozzy's reality TV show turned him into America's Sweetheart, and Sebastian Bach ended up on The Gilmore Girls.

3. They killed Woodstock '99.

Some would argue that Woodstock as a franchise needed to be killed (which is true) and that the mayhem that erupted at the 1999 edition was Limp Bizkit and Rage Against the Machine's fault (which is slightly false). That's like saying Scottie Pippen and Toni Kukoc were the driving forces behind the Chicago Bulls dynasty. Professional wet fart Fred Durst and fair-weather activist Zach de la Rocha (our feelings on that here) may have fanned the flames, but the inclusion of Metallica in the lineup made the presence of those bands possible in the first place. Organizers rolled the dice with Metallica once at Woodstock '94 and got lucky. Not this time. There's oppressive heat, overcommericialization and $4 water at nearly all such events, but Hetfield & Co. lit the fuse. You know, it takes a special breed of asshole to see how unhappy the crowds were and still crank out “Fight Fire With Fire” while beer-fueled idiots tear the place apart and then act stunned when there are four rapes and the place is torched a night later. Welcome to the peace festival, motherfuckers!

4. They killed Napster.

Remember this? Back in 2000, "Napster Baaad!" became one of the Web's first viral videos.

There's a reason many of your friends' CD collections come to an abrupt halt in the mid-'90s. It was called Napster, and it was good. Labels and artists cried that it stole their livelihood, but made the same argument about blank cassette tapes years ago. So they adjusted, right? Well, no. Ulrich and several other millionaires called a press conference in 2000 to rat out more than 300,000 fans that downloaded music "illegally." (Technically, it wasn't illegal yet.) Lars singlehandedly saved the music industry and kept CD sales flourishing while labels and artists alike came up with new and innovative ways to get their music to listeners and still earn a profit. At least that's what he'll tell you. Today, the music industry is on deathwatch and the only people who got rich off legal downloads seem to work at Apple. The rest of us still download music illegally, only it's more difficult, stealing songs from Hype Machine and that one guy at work who downloaded every album ever made from Napster eight years ago.

5. They killed Jason Newsted.

The death of original Metallica bassist Cliff Burton in tour bus accident was a tragic and senseless accident. But what they did to poor Jason Newsted makes the shit that goes on at Guantanamo look like a visit to Six Flags. Listen to the ...And Justice For All album sometime and point out the bass parts. If you can't, you're not alone, as Newsted says he was elbowed out as part of Hetfield and Ulrich's little frat-boy hazing ritual that only intensified over time. Sure, they threw Newsted's belongings out hotel windows, jarred him awake at 4 a.m. and tricked him into eating wasabi just for laughs, but how bad did it get? Consider this excerpt from a January 2001 interview in Playboy:

PLAYBOY: Did you know they were telling people you were gay?

NEWSTED: No. I mean, dude, there was so much, that's like a minor detail.

Flogged like an unwanted stepbrother for much of his time with the band, his departure was foreshadowed when Hetfield told him “Jason, you're too metal for your own fucking good, man” during a concert in Mexico City recorded for the band's Live Shit: Binge and Purge boxed set in 1993. Ten years later, as Hetfield and Ulrich had their group hug during the Monster therapy sessions, Newsted was working on a side project. Feeling threatened by Newsted's other venture, Metallica got pissed and Newsted finally had his Tina Turner moment, calling the band's therapy adventure, “really fucking lame and weak.” Newsted's in some band called Voivod now, which is the metal equivalent of the witness protection program.

2008-06-12T14:45:00.000-07:00

Outrage directed at Fox over 'baby mama' smear

June 12, 2008

One would hope that Barack Obama's just-unveiled myth busting Web site won't need to reproduce a copy of his and Michelle's marriage license, but it seems some in the conservative media are unconvinced of the validity of their matrimony.

Fox News, the network of assassination fantasies and "terrorist fist bumps," is being called out for its reference to Michelle Obama as her husband's "baby mama." The phrase is offensive on a variety of levels, according to various liberal commentators, who point out that the term generally refers to unmarried women who are estranged from the fathers of their children.

The "baby mama" reference was printed on a graphic during a segment discussing the coming wave of right-wing attacks on Michelle Obama, including an announced "documentary" that would feature damaging footage of the candidate. (Some pro-Hillary forces, such as committed Clinton fan Larry Johnson, also have been instrumental in spreading smears and rumors about Michelle Obama, as the segment noted.)

Unmentioned in all the condemnation of Fox's apparent racism is the fact that their structuring of the segment further demonstrated the extent to which the network has abandoned any attempt to live up to its "fair & balanced" moniker. The only guest invited to speak about the smears and rumors was ultra-right-wing blogger Michelle Malkin; no liberal or moderate voices are present in the segment at all.

The phrase "implies that like too many people in the black community, she is a mother on her own with no man around doing his job," writes blogger Oliver Willis, who is black, in a post titled "Hey Fox News, Just Call Her A N** And Be Done With It, Okay?"

Except, Barack and Michelle Obama are the exact opposite of this, and that is one of the reason America - especially black America - are so proud of them.

But Fox News is the network that tears down those who do not toe the line, and if that means they should resort to jive to describe a black woman as a “baby mama” despite the strength of her family and her own personal success, so be it.

Screw you guys.

According to a tally being maintained by Jeff Fecke at the blog Shakesville, the "baby mama" smear is at least the 54th instance of racially motivated hostility directed at Obama.

So yeah, irony is officially dead. Tomorrow, I assume Fox will put up a graphic, "Obama downs a 40 of malt liquor, and shoots cop in drive-by." Or perhaps they can just post a picture of the Obama family with the legend, "Negroes." Only, you know, the other N-word, just in case you didn't get the point that the Obamas are totally black.

Unsurprisingly, there are at least a few Fox-can-do-no-wrong voices defending the conservative network and trying to pass off the smear as no big deal.

Firedoglake, though, points out that this is just another example of behavior trotted out around every election.

Every four years the nation gathers, not just to vote, but find out what slander the Republicans will use against the wife of the Democratic Presidential Nominee this year:

1988: Kitty Dukakis, and the myth of the feces coated flag.

1992: Hillary Clinton and the "ball-busting communist harpy" (should be 1992 to present)

1996: See above, add dash of "murdering lesbian inside-trader".

2000: Tipper Gore, broke the heart of Oliver's old rich-guy father Oliver, claimed you never had to say you're sorry and later co-starred in 'Convoy'.

2004: OMG! Teresa Kerry is rich, intelligent and has an accent, and she replaced a Republican with a Democrat. We cannot have TWO Arianna Huffington's in this world!

2008: She's well-educated, a lawyer, and a black woman -- unleash the hounds!

It remains to be seen whether whoever crafted the graphic will be reprimanded or if Fox News again trot out a less-than-sincere seeming apology for its latest affront to the Democratic candidate and his family.

2008-06-12T14:39:00.000-07:00

Alex Kozinski suspends L.A. obscenity trial after conceding his website had sexual images

The 9th Circuit chief judge admits he posted some of the explicit content. He says he didn't think the public could see the site, which is now blocked.

Alex Kozinski

By Scott Glover
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

June 12, 2008

A closely watched obscenity trial in Los Angeles federal court was suspended Wednesday after the judge acknowledged maintaining his own publicly accessible website featuring sexually explicit photos and videos.

Alex Kozinski, chief judge of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, granted a 48-hour stay in the obscenity trial of a Hollywood adult filmmaker after the prosecutor requested time to explore "a potential conflict of interest concerning the court having a . . . sexually explicit website with similar material to what is on trial here."

In an interview Tuesday with The Times, Kozinski acknowledged posting sexual content on his website. Among the images on the site were a photo of naked women on all fours painted to look like cows and a video of a half-dressed man cavorting with a sexually aroused farm animal. He defended some of the adult content as "funny" but conceded that other postings were inappropriate.

Kozinski, 57, said that he thought the site was for his private storage and that he was not aware the images could be seen by the public, although he also said he had shared some material on the site with friends. After the interview Tuesday evening, he blocked public access to the site.

Kozinski is one of the nation's highest-ranking judges and has been mentioned as a possible candidate for the U.S. Supreme Court. He was named chief judge of the 9th Circuit last year and is considered a judicial conservative on most issues. He was appointed to the federal bench by President Reagan in 1985.

After publication of an latimes.com article about his website Wednesday morning, the judge offered another explanation for how the material might have been posted to the site. Tuesday evening he had told The Times that he had a clear recollection of some of the most objectionable material and that he was responsible for placing it on the Web. By Wednesday afternoon, as controversy about the website spread, Kozinski was seeking to shift responsibility, at least in part, to his adult son, Yale.

"Yale called and said he's pretty sure he uploaded a bunch of it," Kozinski wrote in an e-mail to Abovethelaw.com, a legal news website. "I had no idea, but that sounds right because I sure don't remember putting some of that stuff there."

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, expressed concern about Kozinski's website.

"If this is true, this is unacceptable behavior for a federal court judge," she said in a statement.

Stephen Gillers, a New York University law professor who specializes in legal ethics and has known Kozinski for years, called him "a treasure of the federal judiciary." Gillers said he took the judge at his word that he did not know the site was publicly available. But he said Kozinski was "seriously negligent" in allowing it to be discovered.

"The phrase 'sober as a judge' resonates with the American public," Gillers said. "We don't want them to reveal their private selves publicly. This is going to upset a lot of people."

Gillers said the disclosure would be humiliating for Kozinski and would "harm his reputation in many quarters" but that the controversy should die there.

He added, however, that if the public concludes the website was intended for the sharing of pornographic material, "that's a transgression of another order.

"It would be very hard for him to come back from that," he said.

Kozinski has a reputation as a brilliant legal mind and is seen as a champion of the 1st Amendment right to freedom of speech and expression. Several years ago, for example, after learning that appeals court administrators had placed filters on computers that denied access to pornography and other materials, Kozinski led a successful effort to have the filters removed.

The judge said it was strictly by chance that he wound up presiding over the trial of filmmaker Ira Isaacs in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles. Appellate judges occasionally hear criminal cases when they have free time on their calendars, and the Isaacs case was one of two he was given, the judge said.

Isaacs is on trial for distributing sexual fetish videos, featuring acts of bestiality and defecation. The material is considerably more vulgar than the content posted on Kozinski's website.

The judge said he didn't think any of the material on his site would qualify as obscene.

"Is it prurient? I don't know what to tell you," he said. "I think it's odd and interesting. It's part of life."

Before the site was taken down, visitors to http://alex.kozinski.com were greeted with the message: "Ain't nothin' here. Y'all best be movin' on, compadre."

Only those who knew to type in the name of a subdirectory could see the content on the site, which also included some of Kozinski's essays and legal writings as well as music files and personal photos.

The sexually explicit material on the site was extensive, including images of masturbation, public sex and contortionist sex. There was a slide show striptease featuring a transsexual, and a folder that contained a series of photos of women's crotches in snug-fitting clothing or underwear.

Kozinski told The Times that he began saving the sexually explicit materials and other items of interest on his website years ago.

"People send me stuff like this all the time," he said.

In turn, he said, he occasionally passes on items he finds interesting or funny to others.

Among the sexually explicit material on his site that he defended as humorous were two photos. In one, a young man is bent over in a chair and performing fellatio on himself. In the other, two women are sitting in what appears to be a cafe with their skirts hiked up to reveal their pubic hair and genitalia. Behind them is a sign reading "Bush for President."

"That is a funny joke," Kozinski said.

The judge said he planned to delete some of the most objectionable material from his site, including the photo depicting women as cows, which he said was "degrading . . . and just gross." He also said he planned to get rid of a graphic step-by-step pictorial in which a woman is seen shaving her pubic hair.

Before suggesting that his son might have been responsible for posting some of the content, Kozinski told The Times that he, the judge, must have accidentally uploaded the cow and shaving images to his server while intending to upload something else. "I would not keep those files intentionally," he said. He offered to give a reporter a demonstration of how the error probably occurred.

The judge emphasized that he never used appeals court computers to maintain his site.

The presence of copyrighted music files on Kozinski's site raises other issues.

More than a dozen MP3 tracks were listed, and they were neither excerpts nor used to illustrate legal opinions, which experts said might have qualified their copying as "fair use." The artists included Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan and Weird Al Yankovic.

Uploading such files could violate civil copyright laws if friends or members of the public visited the site and downloaded the songs, according to attorneys who have litigated file-sharing cases for both copyright holders and accused infringers.

Even if no one downloaded the songs, just making them available might run afoul of the law, said Corynne McSherry, staff attorney at the nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation, which often argues the other side of such issues.

Late last year, three of Kozinski's Circuit Court colleagues noted in a ruling that "the owner of a collection of works who makes them available to the public may be deemed to have distributed copies of the works," a violation of copyright law if done without permission.

"For him to actually be held liable would take some further investigation, but I think it's possible," McSherry said. "It's a strange story. It's surprising to me."

Kozinski was not asked in the Tuesday interview about the music files, and he could not be reached for comment Wednesday afternoon.

2008-06-11T21:39:00.001-07:00

2008-06-11T14:19:00.001-07:00

HBO Polanski documentary changed after 'fabrication' complaint

Roman Polanski

June 10, 2008

LOS ANGELES (AFP) — A documentary on fugitive director Roman Polanski has been altered after complaints from Los Angeles court officials over a key assertion in the film, US cable channel HBO said Monday.

A statement regarding a judge's action in the film "Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired", which spotlights the film-maker's 1978 trial for having sex with a 13-year-old, drew an angry response by the Los Angeles Superior Court.

The initial version of the film said a Los Angeles judge in 1997 had told lawyers Polanski could return to the United States and face no further time behind bars -- provided his sentencing hearing was televised.

However the Los Angeles Superior Court on Monday issued a statement describing the assertion "as a complete fabrication without any basis in fact."

A spokeswoman for HBO later said the wording of the text in the film, due to be premiered in the US for the first time later Monday, had subsequently been changed to reflect the court's complaints.

"We have updated a statement at the end of the film to reflect new information that was provided to us by the court only late last week," a statement from HBO said.

According to the HBO statement, the film's wording says that the judge involved in the case agreed Polanski would serve no more time in custody if he returned to the United States.

"'However the judge insisted that the hearing be held 'in public, on the record and in open court.' Given the possibility that it would be televised, Polanski declined,'" the updated text reads, according to HBO.

The original wording read: "The judge agreed that if Polanski returned to the US, he would serve no more time in custody. On one condition: The judge wanted the proceedings to be televised. Under those circumstances, Polanski declined."

Polanski, 74, remains a fugitive from US authorities, having fled the United States before sentencing. US prosecutors have vowed to arrest him if he ever returned, a fact that prevented Polanski from collecting his best director Oscar for "The Pianist" in 2003.

2008-06-11T12:39:00.000-07:00

June 9, 2008

The Media Equation

Golden Age for TV? Yes, on Cable

kimbo slice

By DAVID CARR

Maybe it’s because I’m from Minneapolis, but I’ve always had a soft spot for the Saturday nights on CBS that I spent with Mary Tyler Moore during her show’s heyday in the ’70s. Sure, Saturday night on the Tiffany network also had “All in the Family,” “M*A*S*H” and “The Bob Newhart Show,” but who else could take a nothing day, a Saturday for instance, and suddenly make it all seem worthwhile?

How about Kimbo Slice, a massive guy with a Unabomber beard and bare hands capable of performing autopsies?

A week ago, Mr. Slice — and I mean absolutely no disrespect, in case his range of interests includes this newspaper — stepped into the ring on “CBS EliteXC Saturday Night Fights,” the first in a series of mixed martial arts cage matches on the network, and solved a few mysteries.

1) Who would watch this stuff on network television? A lot of folks, 4.9 million of them in fact, including the precious young males advertisers love.

2) Is Saturday night, as Frank Sinatra suggested, the loneliest night of the week? Not when Mr. Slice has drawn a bead on you. Son, if that’s the case, you have plenty of company.

3) Most compellingly, what could possibly be inside the cauliflower ear of Mr. Slice’s opponent, a tomato can named James Thompson? As all of us found out by the end of the fight, some really yucky stuff.

In CBS’s Saturday night pantheon, the girl who could turn the world on with her smile has been replaced by a man whose missing teeth may be his most compelling feature.

Confronted by an audience that is either on the Web or a milk carton, and a writers’ strike that left the scripted cupboard a little bare, networks are opting in on all manner of contests and challenges, including human cockfighting.

Randomly flip on a network broadcast and people are dancing, fighting, singing and conniving their way to the top. The sitcom laugh track is petering out, as are the kinds of tent-pole dramas and news coverage that gave networks their brand identity.

However, for anybody with cable — and that includes most of us — television is in something of a golden age. Cable networks other than the fancy subscription services like HBO and Showtime used to be the realm of stupid human tricks and commercials for six-minute abs, but networks have shot by them in the race to the bottom.

Channels like TNT, AMC, FX and others came up with their own versions of “Trading Places” and carved out niches, sometimes huge ones, by letting viewers know that narrative, quality and drama have not gone off the grid. Those characteristics have just switched coordinates. Sure, “House” and “Grey’s Anatomy” still rule the water cooler, but shows like “Mad Men,” “The Closer” and “Saving Grace” are bubbling up as well.

Need more evidence of cable’s sneaky plan to produce quality programming to get quality audiences? NBC’s big push for next season is expanding “The Biggest Loser” to two full hours. Those of us who are looking forward to the third season of “Friday Night Lights,” a riveting drama about the American family through a pigskin prism, will have to wait because the network decided to share the property with DirectTV by splitting production costs and letting satellite viewers get first dibs.

If networks are no longer in the business of coming up with must-see serials that mature over time — we all know that “M*A*S*H,” “Cheers,” “Seinfeld,” you-name-it took a long time to turn into hits — what business are they in?

“They are on an endless search for the next big thing,” said Steve Koonin, president of Turner Entertainment Networks, which includes TNT and TBS. “There is very little consistency in what they are doing, and people don’t know what to expect when they turn on the broadcast networks. They are still in the business of appointment television, but there are fewer and fewer appointments. There’s a great big opportunity for cable networks.”

The writers’ strike may have done some damage to the network mode, as well. Not only did viewers tune out in droves — all three networks were down double digits — but competitors also grabbed a tasty share of that pie, with ad-supported cable audiences up 9 percent. Over the course of the strike, cable grew to a 48 percent share, up four points, all of it coming from the hide of the networks.

And it’s not just broadcast entertainment that is hurting. Part of the reason that networks seem to be losing their exalted status is that news programming, typically great for the image and not so much for the ratings, has been given over to the cable news stations. When issues of civic moment are nigh, consumers have been trained to tune in to Wolf or Chris, not Brian or Katie.

Last Tuesday night was a historic one, given that a black candidate became the presumptive presidential nominee of a major party. ABC made the lonely decision to cut away from regular programming to give its viewers a seat on history. NBC covered it with short news breaks while telling its viewers to head over to MSNBC for news. And CBS broadcast the speech only to pre-prime-time West Coast audiences.

For its trouble, ABC was beaten in the ratings by a cable station, CNN. According to my colleague Brian Stelter, it was only the second time in history that a cable news network attracted more viewers than a broadcaster during a major news event. (Fox News lodged the first during the Republican convention in 2004.)

There are other signs that the signal between cable and networks is being scrambled. Tonight at 8 p.m., CBS will broadcast an episode of “The Bill Engvall Show,” a TBS sitcom. In exchange for getting a shot on network air to promote the second season of the show, which begins on Thursday on the cable network, TBS has agreed to give CBS space this coming fall to promote its new lineup.

The move suggests that cable commercial time, once thought of as the province of cheap kitchen gadgets and cut-rate loan sharks, has gained luster. And it will give additional momentum to a “The Bill Engvall Show,” a goofy family program of the kind in which networks used to excel. Last year, the show gathered 4.1 million viewers.

Turner is not only sporting networklike numbers, but it is also beginning to act like a network. Last month, the cable network went toe to toe with the networks at the upfronts, giving a presentation during the same week. Mr. Koonin did everything he could to etch a shift in paradigm, pointing out with a pop quiz from the stage that while TNT has shows with gilded performers like the Oscar winner Holly Hunter and the Emmy winner Kyra Sedgwick, the networks were pushing shows about talking cars and guys in leotards.

ABC finished the upfronts with a flourish of its own, hyping “Wipeout,” a contest that brings the aesthetic of “America’s Funniest Home Videos” — gee, that looked like it really hurt — to a set that involves robotic boxing gloves and giant rubber balls. ABC picked YouTube’s pocket to bring a little mayhem to the small screen with better resolution by producing “I Survived a Japanese Game Show.” Now if it could just get a series out of that video where a bear gets shot out of tree with a tranquilizer gun, hits a trampoline and lands on a 4-year-old, my life would be complete.

Sensing an opportunity, ad-supported cable networks will jump in front of the fall network television station lineup with new episodes of “The Closer,” starring Ms. Sedgwick, and “Saving Grace,” starring Ms. Hunter, in July, while USA has already introduced its heavily promoted show about the witness protection program, “In Plain Sight,” and Lifetime’s spicy “Army Wives” came back for a second season last night.

In the meantime, network viewers will have to settle for Mr. Slice. Saturday night’s all right for fighting, but then, so is just about every night on the network schedule.

2008-06-11T12:34:00.000-07:00

DVRs lifting network TV ??? Copy that

June 11, 2008

The growing popularity of digital video recorders is brightening the picture for network TV, which has been buffeted by steady erosion to cable.

Only 23% of TV homes owned a DVR in May, Nielsen says. But that's nearly double the 12.4% average for the 2006-07 season. And because DVR users watch more TV than others, their impact on ratings is magnified

"People with DVRs have the capability of watching this stuff whenever they want," says ABC's Larry Hyams, adding that the most-recorded shows have ratings 40% higher in DVR homes.

Take Lost. "Live" viewership was down 12% last season to 11.3 million viewers. But the decline was only 7% when factoring in those who delayed it but watched the same day.

Add those who watched it anytime within seven days of the initial telecast, and the drop is a modest 3%, based on new year-end Nielsen figures. The total audience rises to 14.7 million, a net gain of 3.4 million, or 23% of its total. Among adults ages 18 to 49, delayed viewing accounts for 28% of the audience.

The equation is similar for shows in competitive time slots. Thursdays at 9 ET/PT, CSI's live viewing is down 11%, but its seven-day total is off 6%. Grey's Anatomy is down a sharp 24% live, which moderates to a smaller (but still significant) 16% drop when seven-day viewing is factored in.

NBC's The Office bucked the trend entirely: The comedy was off 1% live but up 10% overall last season, for a total of 9.9 million viewers. And CW's Smallville is down 12% live, but only 2% with delayed viewing included.

CW's low ratings give delayed DVR viewing an outsized effect. Just 653,000 viewers watch Gossip Girl that way, but that figure is 24% of the show's total, second only to The Office's 26%.

Problem is, until recently, networks haven't profited from procrastinators. In a compromise, they can now charge advertisers for delayed viewership, but only within three days. DVR users also can more easily skip commercials.

Still, it could be worse. "The biggest challenge is apathy," says ad buyer John Rash of Campbell Mithun. "If the network programming is compelling enough for some viewers to DVR, that's a much better scenario than audiences simply not watching."

2008-06-11T12:31:00.000-07:00

Tough Paparazzi Laws in France Could Benefit Brangelina

Wednesday, June 11, 2008

PARIS — Perhaps Brangelina chose southern France for its blue skies, vineyards and the availability of an estate with a moat. But there's another reason the world's most famous expecting couple was smart to come here: French law is tough on paparazzi, especially when it comes to snapping photos of children.

That could come in handy after the birth of Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt's twins — particularly if they hope to sell rights to the first baby pictures for millions.

In France, where the Jolie-Pitts are believed to be setting up house to prepare for the births of children Nos. 5 and 6, other celebrities have waged war on gossip magazines with relentless, precedent-setting lawsuits.

Often, the tactic pays: Monaco's royal family grossed $681,120 through lawsuits in France in 2006, the newspaper Le Figaro has reported. On top of fines, magazines are regularly ordered to slap huge "mea culpa" notices across their covers.

"This country is medieval in terms of its legislation about printing information about celebrities," fumed Loic Sellin, editor of glossy Voici magazine. "It's shameful. Absolutely everything can be considered an attack on someone's private life."

Case in point: Former presidential candidate Segolene Royal won more than $12,000 from Paris Match magazine after it ran photos of her praying in an Italian church.

The lines are blurry and debatable, but there's general agreement on the need to shield children from the media glare. To avoid lawsuits, magazines regularly blur out the faces of celebrities' children or simply pull the photos.

The four Jolie-Pitt children — 6-year-old Maddox, 4-year-old Pax, 3-year-old Zahara and 2-year-old Shiloh — are an exception, simply because they have been seen out in public so often.

But if any magazines were to obtain snapshots of Jolie and her as-yet-unborn twins, two French lawyers say they would counsel them to blur the babies' faces in most cases. Jolie has said in the past that the babies are due in August but there has been no further word.

"Let's say she went to the French Open with her children, I would say, 'she's out in public and knows she'll be seen, there's no reason to ban the photo,"' said lawyer Daphne Juster, who regularly defends photographers. "But if she's strolling in the park in sunglasses, minding her own business, she could say, 'I tried to be discreet, this is not part of my public life,' and can sue."

Emmanuel Pierrat, who defends both gossip magazines and celebrities, said he might urge magazines to run photos of the babies snuggling up against their mother, or turned from the camera, so their faces do not show. Of course, he says, "some would take the risk anyway."

In which case, he said, there would be an added incentive for Jolie and Pitt to sue: The couple sold exclusive photos of Shiloh to People magazine for a reported $4 million and donated the money to charity, a practice they're likely to duplicate, with rumors brewing of a bidding war inching toward $10 million this time around.

There is no indication that paparazzi laws played a role in the actors' decision to settle in the Provence village of Correns, in a sprawling stone villa with a tile roof and blue shutters.

The town's mayor says they have moved in already, and a helicopter has been spotted taking off and landing at the site, but it is unclear if the couple is actually there. Though Pitt has been glimpsed nearby in Italy and Switzerland, Jolie has remained out of sight since the Cannes Film Festival in May.

2008-06-11T12:02:00.000-07:00

9th Circuit's chief judge posted sexually explicit matter on his website

Alex Kozinski, who is presiding over an obscenity trial in L.A., acknowledges that he had posted sexually explicit photos and videos. He says he didn't think the public could access the site.

Judge Alex Kozinski, now chief of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, during a 2003 hearing in San Francisco.

By Scott Glover
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

June 11, 2008

One of the highest-ranking federal judges in the United States, who is currently presiding over an obscenity trial in Los Angeles, has maintained a publicly accessible website featuring sexually explicit photos and videos.

Alex Kozinski, chief judge of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, acknowledged in an interview with The Times that he had posted the materials, which included a photo of naked women on all fours painted to look like cows and a video of a half-dressed man cavorting with a sexually aroused farm animal. Some of the material was inappropriate, he conceded, although he defended other sexually explicit content as "funny."

Kozinski, 57, said that he thought the site was for his private storage and that he was not aware the images could be seen by the public, although he also said he had shared some material on the site with friends. After the interview Tuesday evening, he blocked public access to the site.

Asked whether the contents of his site should force him to step aside from the pending obscenity trial, Kozinski declined to comment. Opening statements in the trial are scheduled for this morning. In the case, Ira Isaacs, a filmmaker based in Los Angeles, is accused of distributing criminally obscene sexual-fetish videos depicting bestiality and defecation.

Stephen Gillers, a New York University law professor who specializes in legal ethics, told The Times that Kozinski should recuse himself from the Isaacs case because "the public can reasonably question his objectivity" concerning the issues at hand.

Gillers, who has known Kozinski for years and called him "a treasure of the federal judiciary," said he took the judge at his word that he did not know the site was publicly available. But he said Kozinski was "seriously negligent" in allowing it to be discovered.

"The phrase 'sober as a judge' resonates with the American public," Gillers said. "We don't want them to reveal their private selves publicly. This is going to upset a lot of people."

Gillers said the disclosure would be humiliating for Kozinski and would "harm his reputation in many quarters," but that the controversy should die there.

He added, however, that if the public concludes the website was intended for the sharing of pornographic material, "that's a transgression of another order."

"It would be very hard for him to come back from that," he said.

Kozinski said he would delete some material from his site, including the photo depicting women as cows, which he said was "degrading . . . and just gross." He also said he planned to get rid of a graphic step-by-step pictorial in which a woman is seen shaving her pubic hair.

Kozinski said he must have accidentally uploaded those images to his server while intending to upload something else. "I would not keep those files intentionally," he said. The judge pointed out that he never used appeals court computers to maintain the site.

The sexually explicit material on Kozinski's site earlier this week was extensive, including images of masturbation, public sex and contortionist sex. There was a slide show striptease featuring a transsexual, and a folder that contained a series of photos of women's crotches as seen through snug fitting clothing or underwear. There were also themes of defecation and urination, though they are not presented in a sexual context.

Kozinski, who was named chief judge of the 9th Circuit last year, is considered a judicial conservative on most issues. He was appointed to the federal bench by then-President Ronald Reagan in 1985. He has a national reputation for a brilliant legal mind and has developed a reputation as a champion of the First Amendment right to freedom of speech and expression. Several year ago, for example, after learning that appeals court administrators had placed filters on computers that denied access to pornography and other materials, Kozinski led a successful effort to have the filters removed.

The judge said it was strictly by chance that he wound up presiding over the Issacs trial in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles. Appeals court judges occasionally hear criminal cases when they have free time on their calendars and the Isaacs case was one of two he was given, the judge said.

Kozinski said he didn't think any of the material he posted on his website would qualify as obscene.

"Is it prurient? I don't know what to tell you," he said. "I think it's odd and interesting. It's part of life."

Before the site was taken down, visitors to http://alex.kozinski.com were greeted with the message: "Ain't nothin' here. Y'all best be movin' on, compadre."

Only those who knew to type in the name of a subdirectory could see the content on the site, which also included some of Kozinski's essays and legal writings as well as music files and personal photos.

The judge said he began saving the sexually explicit materials and other items of interest years ago.

"People send me stuff like this all the time," he said.

He keeps the things he finds interesting or funny with the thought that he might later pass them on to friends, he said.

2008-06-11T11:33:00.000-07:00

law firm Skadden to law firm Quinn Emanuel: Find Your Own Hotel

by Dan Slater
June 9, 2008

Two heavy-hitting litigators, Skadden’s Tom Nolan and Quinn Emanuel’s John Quinn, went to Riverside, California, a couple weeks ago to fight over dolls. According to the Daily Journal, they’ve also been fighting over hotel rooms.

The spiral staircase inside the Mission Inn, in Riverside, Calif. Built over 30 years beginning in 1902, the grand hotel is a collision of Spanish architecture and M.C. Escher-like whimsy.

The piece (link unavailable) reports that when Quinn and his legal team, who are rep’ing Mattel, tried to book rooms in Riverside’s Mission Inn (pictured), a century-old historic landmark, they found that Nolan’s clients, MGA Entertainment, had the hotel sign a contract barring Quinn and his team from sharing the accommodations. Nolan, whose L.A. office is about 55 miles away from Riverside, said MGA and its former counsel in the case, O’Melveny & Myers, decided the contract was necessary because they had concerns about accidental delivery of their case file boxes or faxes to opposing counsel’s rooms during trial.

Quinn and Nolan are in Riverside to litigate the Bratz-Barbie dispute, in which Mattel accuses MGA of essentially stealing the idea for Bratz dolls. Mattel is trying to seize ownership of the $500 million per year Bratz franchise. MGA denies wrongdoing, and accuses Mattel in a separate suit of copying Bratz.

Quinn reportedly asked District Judge Stephen Larson, who is presiding over the Bratz trial, to deem the contract unenforceable and clear the way for his firm to stay at the inn. Larson declined to resolve the dispute.

But the contract didn’t end up being an issue. In a conference with Larson, Nolan said, lawyers representing the Mission Inn pointed out that there was “an exception to the exclusionary contract” that gave Quinn & Co. the option of booking rooms at the Mission through a travel agent, but not directly through the inn.

“It didn’t prevent us from staying” at the hotel, said Quinn. Quinn said he and most members of his team opted instead to register at the nearby Riverside Marriott, but half a dozen of his colleagues ended up with rooms at the Mission Inn. He said he opted for the Marriott ($149-$350/night) because it had more amenities for trial preparation and was “less expensive” than the Mission Inn ($215-$2,000/night).

Nolan said an issue arose the day Quinn Emanuel and Skadden lawyers checked-in at the hotel. He said a delivery person inadvertently routed a package for a Quinn lawyer to the room of a Skadden partner. Nolan said his colleague brought the box to the Quinn attorney. Now, the entire Quinn legal team, according to the Daily Journal, has since moved to the Marriott.

LB Readers: In the article, Tom Nolan said exclusion contracts are commonly used to “ensure no break in privilege or inadvertent disclosure” of case material.

2008-06-11T11:10:00.000-07:00

June 11, 2008

Google Co-Founder Books a Space Flight

A Soyuz spacecraft approached the International Space Station on a mission in April.

By JOHN SCHWARTZ

Space tourists are getting their own ride. Space Adventures, a Virginia company that arranges passage for wealthy explorers to ride on Russian Soyuz rockets to the International Space Station, plans to buy a Soyuz flight all its own in 2011, with the option of buying more.

A new investor is likely to occupy one of the two available seats on Space Adventures’ 2011 flight: Sergey Brin, a co-founder of Google. He made a $5 million investment in the company that will serve as a deposit on a future flight.

Space Adventures plans to announce the flight and Mr. Brin’s participation in a news conference Wednesday morning at the Explorers Club in New York.

Mr. Brin, who is president of technology at Google, said in a Space Adventures statement, “I am a big believer in the exploration and commercial development of the space frontier, and am looking forward to the possibility of going into space.”

His company is a sponsor of the Google Lunar X Prize, a $25 million competition to land an unmanned craft on the moon.

Space Adventures, the only company that sends tourists to space, has sent five of them so far. But its continued ability to provide these orbital experiences has been a subject of speculation recently. In April, Vitaly Lopota, the president of Energia, the Russian spacecraft company, said that he was no fan of space tourism and that his nation flew private explorers to make up for financial shortfalls.

Sergey Brin, of Google, has invested in space tourism.

“We have built the I.S.S. not for space tourists but for serving the needs of the people of Earth,” he said.

Anatoly Perminov, the head of the Russian space agency, has said repeatedly that the seats for tourists could disappear in 2010, when the size of the station crew expands to six from three and requires more of the available seats on the Soyuz.

Space Adventures has seats reserved for flights to the space station this October and April 2009. Clients have paid $20 million to $40 million for their trips. The company did not disclose what the private flight will cost.

In the past, the Space Adventures spot was a spare seat on a Soyuz mission that was headed for the station anyway. For the private Soyuz mission, Space Adventures will book two seats on the three-seat spacecraft, with a Russian commander taking the other seat. The mission will be scheduled so as not to interfere with the official flights of astronauts to and from the station, the company said.

More important, said Tom Jones, a former astronaut who is an unpaid adviser to Space Adventures, the passengers will have greater control over their flight and not simply be “piggybacking” on a government-sponsored flight. They could, for example, have more freedom to carry experiments of their own aboard the Soyuz, which has little cargo capacity, nearly all of it reserved for station business.

“From a passenger point of view, you wouldn’t be a fifth wheel on the flight to the space station,” he said. “It’s a move toward a more mature commercial space travel industry.”

Eric Anderson, the chief executive of Space Adventures, said that the deal meant “we become a space mission company, not simply a seller of seats.” Future missions could take travelers to other destinations like privately run space stations, he said.

The move to a purchased mission is “a different paradigm,” said Dr. John Logsdon, the director of the space policy institute at George Washington University, and could help NASA determine what it ought to be paying for its own passage to the station aboard the Soyuz craft.

2008-06-11T10:52:00.000-07:00

Vinyl LPs See A Rebirth In Modern Market

Fred Meyer manager Dave Parker prepares to play the Beatles Abbey Road record at a display in the Portland, Ore. Store.

PORTLAND, Ore., June 10, 2008

(AP) It was a fortuitous typo for the Fred Meyer retail chain.

This spring, an employee intending to order a special CD-DVD edition of R.E.M.'s latest release "Accelerate" inadvertently entered the "LP" code instead. Soon boxes of the big, vinyl discs showed up at several stores.

Some sent them back. But a handful put them on the shelves, and 20 LPs sold the first day.

The Portland-based company, owned by The Kroger Co., realized the error might not be so bad after all. Fred Meyer is now testing vinyl sales at 60 of its stores in Oregon, Washington and Alaska. The company says, based on the response so far, it plans to roll out vinyl in July in all its stores that sell music.

Other mainstream retailers are giving vinyl a spin too. Best Buy is testing sales at some stores. And online music giant Amazon.com, which has sold vinyl for most of the 13 years it has been in business online, created a special vinyl-only section last fall.

The best-seller so far at Fred Meyer is The Beatles album "Abbey Road." But musicians from the White Stripes and the Foo Fighters to Metallica and Pink Floyd are selling well, the company says.

"It's not just a nostalgia thing," said Melinda Merrill, spokeswoman for Fred Meyer. "The response from customers has just been that they like it, they feel like it has a better sound."

According to the Recording Industry Association of America, manufacturers' shipments of LPs jumped more than 36 percent from 2006 to 2007 to more than 1.3 million. Shipments of CDs dropped more than 17 percent during the same period to 511 million, as they lost some ground to digital formats.

The resurgence of vinyl centers on a long-standing debate over analog versus digital sound. Digital recordings capture samples of sound and place them very close together as a complete package that sounds nearly identical to continuous sound to many people.

Analog recordings on most LPs are continuous, which produces a truer sound - though, paradoxically, some new LP releases are being recorded and mixed digitally but delivered analog.

Some purists also argue that the compression required to allow loudness in some digital formats weakens the quality as well.

But it's not just about the sound. Audiophiles say they also want the format's overall experience - the sensory experience of putting the needle on the record, the feeling of side A and side B and the joy of lingering over the liner notes.

"I think music products should be more than just music," said Isaac Hudson, a 28-year-old vinyl fan standing outside one of Portland's larger independent music stores.

The interest seems to be catching on. Turntable sales are picking up and the few remaining record pressers say business is booming.

But the LP isn't going to muscle out CDs or iPod soon.

Nearly 450 million CDs were sold last year, versus just under 1 million LPs, according to Nielsen SoundScan. Based on the first three months of this year, Nielsen says vinyl album sales could reach 1.6 million in 2008.

"I don't think vinyl is for everyone; it's for the die-hard music consumer," said Jay Millar, director of marketing at United Record Pressing, a Nashville based company that is the nation's largest record pressing plant.

Many major artists - Elvis Costello, the Raconteurs and others - are issuing LPs and encouraging fans to check out their albums on vinyl. On Amazon.com, one of the best-selling LPs is Madonna's latest album, "Hard Candy".

Some artists package vinyl and digital versions of their music together, including offers for free digital downloads along with the record.

"We've definitely had some talks with the major retailers about exclusives on the manufacturing end," Millar said of United Record Pressing, which focuses primarily on independent recordings.

An avid music fan himself, Millar says he has moved to vinyl in recent years.

"Once I got my first iPod ... I'm looking at my wall of CDs and trying to justify it," Millar said. "The things I like - the artwork, the liner notes, the sound quality - it dawns on me, those are things I like better on vinyl." He welcomed back the pops and clicks, even some of the scratches.

"I like that fact that it's imperfect in a lot of ways, live music is imperfect too," Millar said.

Independent music stores, which have been the primary source of LPs in recent years, say many fans never left the medium.

"People have been buying vinyl all along," said Cathy Hagen, manager at 2nd Avenue Records in Portland. "There was a fairly good supply from independent labels on vinyl all these years. As far as a resurgence, the major labels are just pressing more now."

In this game, big retailers aren't necessarily competing head to head with independent sellers' regular clientele of nostalgic baby boomers, independent label fans and turntable DJs.

"I cannot see that Best Buy or Fred Meyer would order the same things we would," Hagen said. "They aren't going to be ordering the reggae, funk, punk or industrial music."

2008-06-11T10:37:00.000-07:00

Metallica Kills Early Reviews of Upcoming Album

By Eliot Van Buskirk June 09, 2008

Oh, Metallica, why can't you get it right? The band seemed to have learned somewhat from the dark days of the Napster debacle by offering fans online access to pre-release material and in-studio video footage, but now it has apparently unleashed another potentially damaging fiasco upon itself by forcing bloggers to take down reviews of their upcoming album.

Metallica representatives played the album for The Quietus contributor "Bob Mulhouse" in London last Wednesday, after he did what one would expect: he posted a review on his blog. They did, after all, invite him to listen to it, knowing that he reviewed music online. Soon thereafter, the band's management had the review expunged from the internet, along with other early reviews that were a result of the same listening party.

"Metallica held an album listening party for selected music journalists in London this Wednesday past," Quietus editor Luke Turner told Blinded by the Hype (via Idolator). "One of the writers was kind enough to write a piece about the album which, if you were lucky enough to read it before it was taken down, was full of praise about a return to form. At no point was the writer ask[ed] to sign a non-disclosure agreement. The Quietus and other websites ran pieces on the album, but were quickly contacted by Metallica's management via a third party and told to remove the articles."

Let me get this straight... Metallica held a listening party for music reviewers and was surprised when some of them wrote reviews? That has to be a public relations first.

Update: Some sources say that Metallica's representatives requested that the reviews were taken down because the listening party heard an early mix of the album. It's still unclear why Metallica's management didn't require the reviewers to sign non-disclosure agreements if they didn't want them to write about it.

"The Quietus kept our article up the longest and, as no non-disclosure agreement had been signed, [was] not prepared to remove it merely due to the demands of Metallica's management," Turner continued. "We only eventually removed the article earlier today to protect the professional interests of the writer concerned (the piece was written anonymously)."

Ironically, the offending review wasn't even negative: "This album could be good, or it could be mediocre – too much depends on the other four songs to make a call at this point."

Or, it won't matter because Metallica's foot is even bigger than its mouth.

2008-06-10T14:53:00.000-07:00

Malibu turns to Ken Starr to help get paparazzi under control

The city wants the former independent counsel in the Clinton case to find ways to rein in the pesky photogs.

Ken Starr stands outside his office at Pepperdine University law school

By Andrew Blankstein
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

May 9, 2008

Can Ken Starr tame Malibu's rabid paparazzi?

That's what Malibu officials are hoping as they turn to the independent counsel who investigated President Clinton's involvement with White House intern Monica Lewinsky to help them craft restrictions on "pap packs" that descend on the celebrity-rich coastal town.

Malibu officials say their town has been overrun by members of the celebrity media, who camp out at the city's few shopping centers and follow celebrities down Pacific Coast Highway. In the last few years, merchants have complained about photographers blocking store entrances and staking out restaurants and Malibu's multiplex movie theater.

Brad Pitt placed a massive tarp around his beachfront mansion to foil paparazzi. Recently, dozens of photographers swarmed pop star Miley Cyrus during a trip to a Cross Creek Road shopping center, forcing bystanders aside to get their shots.

Malibu Mayor Pamela Conley Ulich said Thursday that she'd asked Starr, dean of the Pepperdine law school, to convene a group of experts in the media and legal community to help draft a city ordinance that might include "buffer zones" at certain locations as well as a possible tax on the paparazzi.

"We're coming up on another summer season. Let's hope we are not in store for another tsunami of paparazzi," Ulich said. "Maybe they will think twice before shoving a camera in your face."

Ulich said residents are particularly concerned because paparazzi are hanging out near local schools and following celebrities home after they pick up their kids.

Malibu has been an out-of-the-way playground of the rich and famous for decades. But veteran paparazzo say that only in recent years has it become a destination for the photographers.

Frank Griffin, co-owner of a Los Angeles-based photography agency, said the tipping point occurred two years ago when Britney Spears made the seaside town her home. She was famously photographed driving with her toddler on her lap on Pacific Coast Highway -- images that sparked a tabloid firestorm.

She moved to Studio City but the paparazzi never left -- in part because they discovered how many stars live there, including Pierce Brosnan, Mel Gibson and Barbra Streisand.

"They are like crows on a telegraph line, just rows and rows of them," Griffin said of the photographers. "They thought this is nice and comfy: 'I have my Starbucks, the taco stand and can even go surfing.' Who wants to sit in the Valley in 104 degrees?"

Tony Koursaris, owner of Taverna Tony off Pacific Coast Highway, has noticed the surge in photographers -- and their aggressive tactics toward celebrities.

"They come right in their face when they come in and come out," Koursaris said. "They suffocate them. They have no regard for anybody or anything. They are not even afraid of the police."

Officials are just beginning to discuss how Malibu could regulate the photographers. One idea that officials acknowledge might not be legally possible is taxing celebrity photos taken the city.

"They get thousands of dollars for these photographs," said Ulich.

Earlier this year, Los Angeles City Councilman Dennis Zine proposed an ordinance to create "a safe zone" around celebrities or others who were subjected to swarms of photographers at residences, in the streets or facilities

But the idea, which had been prompted by a virtual siege at Spears' Studio City home and pursuits during her trips to hospitals, has met with lukewarm support, including from LAPD Chief William J. Bratton, who argued that no new laws are needed to deal with the problem.

Starr was not immediately available for comment, but Los Angeles County sheriff's spokesman Steve Whitmore said Sheriff Lee Baca agrees with Bratton that current laws were adequate. Malibu contracts with the Sheriff's Department to provide police services.

"We believe the laws on the books are sufficient to deal with anybody that violates them, whether it's driving inappropriately or reckless, obstructing movement, battery whatever it is," Whitmore said. "We would encourage anyone who is thinking of adding a new ordinance to contact the Sheriff's Department and the district attorney's office to see if such an ordinance is even feasible."

Peter Eliasberg, an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California, said he is concerned that efforts to target the media, including the paparazzi, would infringe on 1st Amendment rights.

"I hope that Dean Starr and the committee recognize existing laws are sufficient to address the problem," Eliasberg said. "The courts allow a variety of legal remedies, both civil and criminal. To the extent that there's problems, it's an enforcement problem not a lack of laws problem."

John Brashear, who works at the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf in Cross Creek Plaza, said there were good arguments on both sides of the debate on whether to limit paparazzi.

But he noted that even locals stop and take out their cellphone cameras to capture their brush with fame.