switchback | おばあちゃんの味

2005.10.05 Wednesday

おばあちゃんの味

純露という味覚糖が出している飴があるのは、知っていました。

おばあちゃんの家に行くと、だいたいお菓子が詰まったかごの中にこれが入っていて、何となく子供の頃の自分はおばあちゃんの所でしか食べられない飴という認識でした。

この前、同僚と話しているときに純露が意外と通じないことが発覚しました。
じゃあなんて言ってたの？と聞くと、黄金糖と答えが返ってくるじゃありませんか。
なにそれーと思って調べてみたら、株式会社黄金糖が作っているものらしいですね。奈良県の会社みたいなので、西の方で出回っているのでしょう。

ちょっとしたことだけど、意外と通じないことってあるんだなぁと改めて認識しました。
ふ菓子も知らない人が多いみたいだしなぁｗ

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canada goose expedition parka at 2013/09/01 06:22 AM: ?A teenage rape victim has waved her anonymity to condemn the man who attacked her and the prosecutors who failed to jail him. Chloe O’Neill was 15 when she says a friend’s father forced her to have sex with him. She told police, but prosecutors decided there wasn’t enough evidence to charge him. But her abuser, Stephen Whitworth, later admitted the attack on Chloe – after being jailed for seven-and-a-half years for sexually attacking two young children. Now aged 17, O’Neill has waived her right to anonymity to condemn Whitworth, 41, and demand to know why he wasn’t brought to justice sooner. 'If they had believed me at the time, he would have been locked up and those two children wouldn't have been hurt by him,' she told the Daily Mail. 'I've been through two years of hell because of what he did to me and it's awful that they are now going to have to go through it as well.' O’Neill, who has attempted suicide twice after being taunted in the street and called a liar, is planning legal action against prosecutors for her years of trauma. She said: 'It was hell - everyone thought I was making it all up.'?Milly Justene Plissé Border Print Dress, £378New York designer Milly is a firm favourite with the fashion set. See what all the hype is about and invest in this cute mini dress, complete with plissé skirt. The red and black print contrasts vividly with the crisp white background, giving it a real art deco vibe. ?Notice to our readers…We'd like to let you know that this site uses cookies. Without them you may find this site does not work properly and many features may be unavailable. More information on what cookies are and the types of cookies we use can be found ?Notice to our readers…We'd like to let you know that this site uses cookies. Without them you may find this site does not work properly and many features may be unavailable. More information on what cookies are and the types of cookies we use can be found ?Notice to our readers…We'd like to let you know that this site uses cookies. Without them you may find this site does not work properly and many features may be unavailable. More information on what cookies are and the types of cookies we use can be found ?Notice to our readers…We'd like to let you know that this site uses cookies. Without them you may find this site does not work properly and many features may be unavailable. More information on what cookies are and the types of cookies we use can be found ?Tracey EminArtist Tracey Emin was just one of the famous faces on show at Royal Academy of Arts' famous Summer Exhibition Preview Party, held at Burlington House in London yesterday. Ever one to make an entrance, the controversial Brit struck a pose in dazzling red Vivienne Westwood, teamed with metallic heels. ?Notice to our readers…We'd like to let you know that this site uses cookies. Without them you may find this site does not work properly and many features may be unavailable. More information on what cookies are and the types of cookies we use can be found ?Notice to our readers…We'd like to let you know that this site uses cookies. Without them you may find this site does not work properly and many features may be unavailable. More information on what cookies are and the types of cookies we use can be found ?Notice to our readers…We'd like to let you know that this site uses cookies. Without them you may find this site does not work properly and many features may be unavailable. More information on what cookies are and the types of cookies we use can be found ?Top models Freja Beha Erichsen and Arizona Muse were photographed shooting what appears to be part of Chloe's SS12 advertising campaign. The duo were captured posing and laughing between shots at the Chateau Marmont hotel in Los Angeles, both dressed in those covetable Chloe stripy maxi dresses, we had seen floating down the catwalk earlier this year. Both girls are popular campaign stars with Freja taking a starring role in . ? turned the 2011 Tribeca Film Festival into a family affair, picking the event to debut new flick, Jesus Henry Christ, which she worked on with her sister and husband. Jules took to the producing chair for the project alongside older sis Lisa Gillan, while her hubbie, cinematographer Danny Moder, shot it.?Blake LivelyWith the eagerley anticipated collection hitting stores , a host of stylish stars from the world's of TV, film, music and fashion came out to celebrate the launch of by attending a glitzy catwalk show and party in New York. A clutch of A-listers hit the star-studded event, including Gossip Girl actress and fashion muse Blake Lively, who shone in a monochrome studded strapless dress from Versace's Resort 2012 collection, which she teamed with a smart black jacket and matching accessories. ?MadonnaA clutch of stars hit the red carpet in New York last night for the Cinema Society screening of the Wallis Simpson film, W.E. Director Madonna was the star attraction, setting flashbulbs popping in a sparkling black cocktail ensemble by Roberto Cavalli and towering Christian Louboutin heels. ?Notice to our readers…We'd like to let you know that this site uses cookies. Without them you may find this site does not work properly and many features may be unavailable. More information on what cookies are and the types of cookies we use can be found ? The landmark “License to Ill” album turns 25 this year. Yikes!Watch their sick/hilarious new video for “Make Some Noise” below. And get into the analysis, via . Get schooled!“…The Beastie Boys have decided to celebrate the milestone with the release of a 30-minute retelling of the events that followed the epochal “Party” clip, with a host of Hollywood stars (Danny McBride, Elijah Wood and Seth Rogen) playing the B-Boys and a boatload of wink-wink celebrity cameos thrown in for good measure. It is funny and pretty clever, to be certain; it is also about 25 minutes too long. “Noise” is a riot. McBride, Rogen and Wood are clearly having a ball here (and, it should be noted, Wood does a killer imitation of Ad-Rock’s posturing), slugging beers, terrorizing bystanders and basically acting very much like the Beasties themselves, circa 1986. The guest stars ? everyone from Ted Danson and Jason Schwartzman to Will Ferrell and Chloe Sevigny ? ham it up with equal glee (and Beastie fans will no doubt get a kick out of comedian David Cross throwing on Nathanial Hornblower’s lederhosen).And, presumably, that’s the entire point of “Make Some Noise”: It’s a treat for both Beastie Boys fans and anyone who enjoys a quick game of “spot the celebrity” too. Whether it also symbolizes the beginning of the group’s slow wave goodbye remains to be seen ? though, if this really is their funeral, at least a whole lot of people showed up.P.S. The Beastie Boys/ new album, , is due May 3 ?Law & Order: SVU has long been known for its array of popular guest stars, and this evening’s episode features one of the most interesting yet — former indie queen Chloe Sevigny. The Boys Don’t Cry and Big Love star will play a woman and video chatting her husband in Hong Kong, played by Rich Sommer from Mad Men. With these two names stopping by to hang with Detective Olivia Benson this week, we thought what better time to take a look at the .So check out Chloe tonight in her own ripped from the headlines story and see how she compares. We are thinking she is going to be amazing and maybe, just maybe, could get that long overdue Emmy. ? The Edgy Industrialist Chris Cush Brooklyn, NY You may remember Chris from the short-lived HGTV series Design School, which followed the lives of students at LA’s Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising. Now Chris resides in Williamsburg, Brooklyn where he recently opened Cush Design Studio. Let’s all crush on Cush, shall we? . The Neo-Modernist Andrew Yes New York, NY Part artist, part interior designer, this brooding mustachio recently made a splash with his ultra-modern designs at the in New York City. Check out his site for featured works and shop his collection of poppy . The Casual Collector David Cafiero New York, NY With an impressive list of clients that include Chloe Sevigny and designs for hot spots like New York City’s Beatrice Inn, Cafiero’s style is as effortlessly chic as he is himself. Visit his site for more and be sure to check out his shop, Cafiero Select, in Manhattan’s East Village. The New Traditionalist Grant Gibson San Francisco, CA An up-and-coming favorite among the interior design community, this blondie keeps things buttoned up both in dress and designs. Though his rooms are inspired by tradition, you can always expect some modern twists here and there. The West Coast Eclectic Parvez Taj Los Angeles, CA You’ve probably seen this laid back babe’s work through collaborations with big name retailers like CB2, but this L.A.-based designer’s real talent lies in the abstract handmade patterns he creates for wallcoverings, light boxes, flooring and more. ?It’s spring, all of a sudden, and we’re feeling like it’s finally time to put the sweaters and heavy woolen things away. We’re craving nothing but color, color and more color — and we think these bejeweled and gemmed cuffs might just do the trick.We’ve selected nine blingy and bright cuffs, perfect for your spring ensembles. One large statement cuff says a lot, don’t you think?Bita Pourtavoosi Turquoise Chunky Spike Cuff, Watch out, this Bita Pourtavoosi gold plated cuff features both oval and round cut turquoise stones and spikes.Ted Rossi Pyramid Cuff in Orange, This Ted Rossi cuff deftly combines python, metal and neon components. For the very bold.Alexis Bittar Gold Sputnik Cuff, From Alexis Bittar’s avant-garde Miss Havisham Collection, this Gold Sputnik Cuff features colorful stones set in gold.?? Lacoste L!ve Cuff, This colorblocked resin cuff practically jumps off the wrist with joy.Pagie Novick Kat Medallion Cuff, Paige Novick’s cuff places turquoise into a gorgeous gunmetal-plated brass setting. Charles Albert Agate Solid Cuff, Charles Albert’s agate cuffs come in blue, pink, nude and green (pictured) agate stone colors.Kelly Wearstler Turquoise Cuff, Wearstler’s turquoise cuff features a turquoise chunk that’s sure to get noticed.Marni Bracelet, Handmade from salvaged old vinyl and perfect for the record fanatic.Dannijo Colorblock Stingray Cuff, Yes, this colorblocked bracelet is made from real exotic stingray skin. Sexy, no? ?Montreal, Quebec’s largest city (and the second largest in Canada after Toronto), is steeped in a braided French and English heritage both past and present. Yet for all its bifurcation of culture, architectural influence, and language (though French is the official tongue, English is spoken a close second), it is a city notable more for a sense of solidarity than cultural divide. This island city of just over 1.8 million rallies together over their favorite sport (Hockey, mais oui–Go Habs!) as passionately as they bond over the ferocity of their cruel winters.Unity through diversity, after all, is what makes supremely gay-friendly Montreal such a rich and rewarding travel destination, from its mind-blowing shopping options to its nightlife to most especially its dizzying array of dining experiences, where eating out is the city’s finest form of entertainment. As we ate our way through Montreal, we found new appreciation for the city’s palate, as well as its taste. (Even our wonderful stay at the (10 Rue Sherbrooke West, 514.843.6000)?-right on the border of the Plateau neighborhood–was highlighted by a superior breakfast buffet, as well as cocktail-hour canapes in the bar.)First we headed off to see where Montreal’s cooks find many of their ingredients: a visit the (138 Avenue Atwater, 514.937.7754) and the (7075 Avenue Casgrain, 514.277.1379), two of Montreal’s several noteworthy food markets. Atwater is located in the southeastern section of the city, around the corner from David MacMillan’s and Frederic Morin’s culinary hotspots (2491 Rue Notre-Dame West, 514.935.6504) and (2501 Rue Notre Dame West, 514.313.6049). Jean-Talon is in the north-central part of the city near Montreal’s Little Italy district. Both markets are bursting to the gills with all the local produce and products one could hope for. From fresh breads and pastries to their vast array of seasonal fruits and vegetables, the markets also have well-regarded specialty stores. La Fromagerie Atwater is the top-shelf cheese shop in Montreal. At Jean-Talon, do not miss the Isabelle Drouin’s Quebec-centric (280 Place du Marche-du-nord, 514.271.3811), a store specializing only in local foodie fare, from local wines and microbrews to charcuterie artisanal cheeses–including “Grand Manitou” (a three-cheese blend of goat, sheep, and cow’s milk) and sharp cheddars aged longer than Rene Angelil. (Fun fact: Quebec produces over 350 artisanal cheeses!)Montreal’s thriving Jewish community has spawned its own mini-gastro industry, no player more visible than (3895 Saint-Laurent Boulevard, 514.842.4813), a traditional Montreal delicatessen that packs in customers all day long. The draw here is the spice-rubbed smoked meat–a slightly different take on the cured meat one will find stateside. If you’re not prepared to wait the queue out the door, however, skip the lines and head right across the street The Main (3864 Saint-Laurent Boulevard, 514.843.8126); they have equally succulent smoked meat sandwiches, matzoh balls to die for, and potato varenekes (fried perogi-like dumplings that are light and flavorful in equal measure). And then there is the Great Montreal Bagel War. There’s nothing wrong with a little healthy competition, exemplified by the city’s two bagel-baking dynasties, (74 Avenue Fairmount West, 514.272.0667) and (263 St. Viateur Rue West, 514. 276.8044). Montreal bagels are generally smaller, cake-ier and denser, with Fairmount’s far sweeter than a New York bagel, while St. Viateur’s tend toward the salty. How fierce is the competition? Both stores are open 24/7–Fairmount doesn’t even have a lock on their door, since they never, ever close. The winner of our bagel pool? St. Viateur’s!Both bagel shops are located in the Mile End neighborhood of Montreal, which–along with the Plateau and Little Italy neighborhoods–provides endless foodie delights. A stroll up St.-Laurent and St.-Denis streets is a must; the former featuring a motley mix of shops and ethnic fare, while the latter provides a more refined variety stores, including the delightful tea house Au Festin de Babette (4085 Rue St-Denis, 514.849.0214). For an unpretentious meal in the area, try (5064 Avenue Papineau, 514.523.8999). A loud and cheery bistro, the mixed and animated crowd keeps things lively as you dine on a mixture of traditional and offbeat dishes including fanciful crepes and tender scallop, pork, and beef mains. The real treat here is the formidable imported wine selection, including a colorful array of after-dinner digestifs that will send you merrily on your way.Speaking of getting merry, Quebec has a signature dish all its own, seemingly created to soak up the excesses of an evening of drink. A concoction of potato, gravy, and cheese curds, is a hungover soul’s delight, a comfort food bonanza offered day and night. Hit the 24-hour (994 Rue Rachel East, 514.525.2415) for their vast selection of imaginative poutine dishes (25 and counting) such as the B.O.M. topped with bacon, sauteed onions and merguez sausage. Good poutine relies on the quality of the fries, and La Banquise’s are homemade and handcut. If you’re still hungover and hungry, head down to the Village, Montreal’s gay mecca. There you’ll find the best burger and shake in the city at La Paryse (302 Rue Ontario East, 514.842.2040).But enough about comfort food–let’s talk fine dining. Nowhere is the rise of Montreal’s haute cuisine more apparent than (900 Place Jean-Paul-Riopelle, 514.499.2084), where Normand Laprise’s kitchen serves up a seemingly endless display of culinary delights. Though the dining room is a bit stuffy the food is anything but, exemplified by the surprise 7-course tasting menu that began for us with blood orange juice with thyme foam as an amuse-bouche and continued on with salmon confit, ravioli stuffed with guinea fowl, and lamb medallions cooked to perfection. This one will cost you, but it’ll be worth it, no matter the current exchange rate.Another stellar restaurant of note is (311 Rue Saint-Paul East, 514.878.2232), tucked into an airy and bright corner across from the at the heart of Vieux-Montreal. While not as ostentatious as Toque, the food is no less impressive; chef and proprietor Laurent Godbout (who studied with Toque’s Laprise) serves superb main courses of frog leg fritters, Alberta beef, and a divine veal cheek and lobster plate. The presentation is nothing if not exquisite, from the artfully arranged dishes to the menus playfully printed on paper sacks. Be sure to pick up some of the epicier items on the way out; the pickled ginger vinegar is a particular stand-out. Our favorite stop on the trip.No article on Montreal’s restaurant scene would be complete without mentioning (536 Rue Duluth East, 514.281.1114). The restaurant is a local mainstay and, along with Godbout and Leprise, chef Martin Picard forms the triumvirate of local foodie demi-gods. Other highlights of Montreal’s culinary scene include (423 Rue St-Claude, 514.861.1112), (1499 Rue Laurier East, 514.523.9396), (99 Laurier West, 514.271.3095), and La Montee de Lait (371 Rue Villeneuve East, 514.289.9921). Many of these places are explored in greater detail on , a lovingly compiled Montreal foodie blog.For a sweet ending, (375 Rue Roy East, 514.849.5550) is everything a chocolate lover could want. The chocolates themselves are out of this world, including bonbons in bold, imaginative flavors such as Szechuan pepper and Earl Grey that border on the alchemical. The real score, however, is the hot chocolate, served in a small jolt closer to a shot glass than a mug. Once you taste it you’ll know why: a rush of heavenly richness, your eyes will roll back in your head as the ambrosial concoction warms you in places you never knew existed.Now that you’ve eaten your way through the city, it’s time to head home to create your own inspired creations. The kitchenware shrine (152 Avenue Laurier West, 514.278.0008) is a paean to your inner chef, a well-stocked and immaculately rendered supply shop that practices what it preaches, offering intimate cooking classes with some of Montreal’s finest chefs (including some who have already cooked for you). You won’t want to leave the store empty-handed!The cuisine of Montreal has come into its own, a must stop for food lovers of all stripes that only strengthens the city’s reputation as one of North America’s most sophisticated destinations. Just a hop away from much of the Northeast and Midwest (the flight from New York is just under an hour), you’ll be glad you came, glad you saw, and, most of all, glad you ate. ? For Fall ’10, forget Dior, McQueen or even Rag & Bone. It’s all about Seibei! By Marc LeonardGeek is in; the writing is on the entertainment wall! Looking even beyond a little show called Glee we’re seeing hot geeks all over shows like Chuck, Bones, and we already miss the begeekzus out of 24‘s Chloe. And at the multiplex it’s been a banner summer with movies like Kick-Ass and Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World. So this winter we’re all about Geek Chic, and this weekend we checked out to see the latest in Geek couture. Taco or sandwich? Take your pick! We were mainly on the hunt for that ultimate geek wardrobe staple, the t-shirt; after all we’re dressing for comfort here, not style! First stop was a visit to the booth of Brooklyn artist whose now classic sandwich monster t-shirt we discovered at a Brooklyn arts show last year. Since we last met him, David’s expanded his collection of original t-shirts to include a Mexican variation of his hungry dinosaur, as well as fun new tees “I’m Fat Let’s Party” and a rainbow pooping dog. Size matters.More hot geek daywear after the jump! A new favorite collection for us was the work of . We love the shirt that challenges the stereotype about clams’ happiness, their rendition of a steampunk Mr. Peanut, and “Solstice is Wiccan Awesome”. Check out their site for more quirky and darkly humorous cartoon drawings on t-shirts. Literary sex jokes and fresh clams. Geeks got it goin’ on! All the wiccan in the house say “Yeeeaaahhhhhh!” We also dig the shirts at ; their Gotham Ninjas Athletics team jersey combines three of our favorite things: Gotham City, ninjas, and wearing cooler sports jerseys than actual jocks. We also love their line of adorable little cartoon animals hoisting lethal weapons. Nothing quite says cute on the outside, sharp-tongued sassy geek on the inside, quite like an adorable baby cartoon bunny aiming an uzi. Stop or my turtle will shoot! As usual Comic Con had no shortage of Star Wars-themed shirts and swag. But our new favorite by far was at the booth, for the Tosche Station Power Converters (“Worth Whining About!”). This is a refreshingly original take on a Star Wars tee because it’s not overtly clear to only but the biggest geeks what this is a reference to. But if you’re a real Star Wars fan you’ll likely find yourself giggling uncontrollably every time you look at this (we did!). Get it? For a show that lasted only half a season, Buffy creator Joss Whedon’s Firefly sure has inspired quite the selection of geek swag. We visited fan group the ‘ large booth offering a huge array of shirts, bags, gun replicas, and other items for Firefly fans, or just fans of western/space/Asian fusion culture. Our favorite shirt of the bunch is the one worn by Jayne in the Firefly movie Serenity; the Chinese characters say “troublemaker”. A Serenity souvenir. (The shirt, not the guy.) In accessories we’re loving the folks at and their spectacular line of theatrical and custom contact lenses that’ll help you achieve your nonhuman look of choice. The wolf eye lens was weirdly sexy, while the various alien, zombie, and vampire models were somewhat less so.Our favorite accessory was these groovy and very geeky Lego earrings from Bricks and Boards Toys. We also loved the passionate toy brick-themed t-shirts which are also an original design. The original design earrings are available from the Ohio-based store whose site is currently down, but you can get more information on how to find these stylish items at Speaking of Legos, while this last item isn’t geek fashion it’s definitely tres chic. Check out the incredible from artist . This was easily one of the coolest things we saw and that’s saying a lot since we’d just seen Tricia Helfer AND Katee Sackhoff minutes before discovering this geeky art. If you happen to be in NYC check out Sawaya’s gallery exhibition at in Chelsea from Nov 23 to Dec 14. Stacked! Thanks for playing! Now buy a new T-shirt, comb your hair and leave the house! Or not. ?Starting today, we’ve got lovely NYC-based guest blogger (man about town, fashionista, a writer and editor at mags like Genre & Next) chipping in to serve up some of his current musical picks. We’ll call this section, "Ring My Bell" or something like that once we commit to it… Enjoy! Which of the wives on "Big Love" does this guy look like the most? This new album from A.R.E. Weapons is a clue…" It’s no secret that has a special relationship with the gays. From her sexually adventurous roles in Kids and Boys Don’t Cry, her captivating performance as a nun navigating AIDS in Africa in 3 Needles, her BJ in Brown Bunny, to her campy and bitchy role on Big Love, she’s got us gay boys and girls wrapped around her adorable little pinky.What some of you may not know is that Chloe has a brother. A pretty spiffy brother, at that, who plays keyboards in a kick-ass rock band called . His name is Paul. While the band is not entirely new ?- music insiders have given them accolades since their inception in 2003 -? their third studio album, , out now, has the kind of poignant riffs that could finally land them on the radio, if not on your frequently played tracklist.Mostly, we’d like to draw your attention to a track called Sure, A.R.E Weapons boasts no gay members, but we can tell from the words in this track, they’re definitely down with the cause. –Matt Bell From left: Paul and fellow Weapons dealers Matt and Brian step it up. They recommend you "F what ya like," boyz and girlz! ? This may get my vote for “Absolute Bar.” It travels with you! Cheers!The sassy saga of the continues today full-throttle. Those nice, gay-friendly (and gay-advertising?just look around this page) folks at Absolut want to hear from you. If you go to their , you can vote on 100 different categories of cool stuff, on what rocks your world.For example, you get to for cool categories like “Best Restaurant,” “Best Pickup Line” (eeek!) “Best Hotel” or “Best Podcast.”Or you can weigh on some of these nominees already posted. Like these…For Absolute Gay Icon… (click to see them larger) Who works for you? Liza or Judy? Activist Elizabeth Birch? RuPaul?For Absolute Cocktail Occasion… (click to see them larger) Full Moon in Thailand? Or Christmas in the city? Or just any Friday afternoon?Who’s the Absolute Metal Band? (click to see them larger) Led Zeppelin? Marilyn Manson? Or your kid brother out in the garage?And what’s the Absolute Bag? The Muse by YSL? Chloe’s Paddington bag? Or this time-tested classic? ?Beyond the clothes and shoes and bags and ‘dos of the spring collections this past month, one thing became very, very evident — American models are having a moment.This may not seem so novel, there has never been a shortage of American models, and ones who are household names at that. But since the birth of the modern modelling era in the 1970s, there has seldom been a large influx of American beauties snagging spots on the big runways and all the major editorials and ad campaigns.The last time we saw this was roughly ten years ago in the early aughts when the” It girls” of the late ’90s and new American faces all seemed to thrive over a four year period.Erin Wasson, Frankie and Missy Rayder, Bridget Hall, Maggie Rizer, James (now Jaime) King, Angela Lindvall, Carolyn Murphy, Amber Valletta, Guinevere van Seenus, Amanda Moore, Jessica Miller … just a few of the American beauties who could be seen in every magazine, fronting every campaign and on every runway.What’s more, Wasson, Lindvall and both Rayders are still thriving. 36-year-old Frankie?lent her picture perfect face to both the Alexander Wang and Givenchy shows this season, blending in seamlessly with models who were literally almost half her age. Wasson, 29, also popped up at Givenchy and Michael Kors and Missy, 33, turned out to support pal Giles Deacon and his eponymous line.This is not to discredit American supers like Christy Turlington, Stephanie Seymour and Cindy Crawford, but these girls were more a?part?of an international crew that included Linda, Claudia, Naomi, Tatjana, Nadja, Helena and later on Kate. It must also be noted that these ladies, most now in their early forties, are also?still scoring some very major, and some season’s every major,?campaigns.Cut to now and there?is an almost endless rooster of?established American girls like Heidi Mount, Arizona Muse, Sessilee Lopez,?Jacquelyn Jablonski, Lindsey Wixson (a vet at 17), Britt Maren, Chanel Iman, Ruby and Lily Aldridge and Hilary Rhoda being joined by some very, very strong newcomers.Arizona native Kelly Mittendorf, 17, managed to score perhaps the most amazing debut gig ever. While the all coveted Prada exclusive?has always been?the ultimate in the industry, Mittendorf decided to just skip over that and book the campaign for Fall 2011. Did we mention she had yet to walk a runway at that point?Maria Bradley meanwhile scored an exclusive for a little line called Balenciaga this past season. That in addition to stopping by Versace (another exclusive), Alexander Wang (she opened), Tommy Hilfiger and Proenza Schouler. Not bad for a 17-year-old kid from Kansas.And there is more national pride to be had in the form of 16-year-old wonders Josilyn Williams and Court (just “Court,” like Cher), 17-year-old free spirit and pink coiffed Charlotte Free and Long Island gal Allaire Heisig, another old soul at 17, who closed the fall Marc by Marc show, scored a spot at the Valentino couture show this past July and found herself in the pages of the September issue of Italian Vogue –?without the aid of being the victor on a CW program. Not bad work if you can get it.? And balance it with your high school schedule as well of course.But we saved the best for last. Britain has Kate and Naomi, Canada Linda and Daria and Brazil Gisele and Raquel. At this point the two American names that come to mind for most are Christy and Cindy, stunning beauties both but 20 years removed from the height of their fame. Enter Karlie.19-year-old Karlie Kloss has everything going for her. Debuting as a Calvin Klein exclusive at the very tender, and now outlawed, age of 15, Kloss has managed to somehow become more and more gorgeous with age. So gorgeous that it sometimes seems when flipping through the pages of industry bible Vogue that the the almighty Anna Wintour has forgotten there are in fact other models with editorial availability.The problem is, no other model can do what Kloss can do. She can be the All-American girl at one second, a seductive sultress the next and even, despite her just having graduated from high school, the urban working woman to close things out. It would be easier to list a mood or persona this teen can’t nail down rather than run through how pitch perfect she is in absolutely everything she does.Editorial not enough? Let’s take a look at her walk. Kloss has one of, if not the, best runway walks ever. A testament perhaps to her years of ballet, when Kloss catwalks in a designer’s wears stylists want to snag it, creative directors want to shoot it and, best of all, every woman, and no doubt some men, want to find a way to buy it in hopes they too might look like the leggy beauty. It’s no wonder Kloss tends to only hold two slots?in most every?runway show she does?– open or close.And there’s more! Have you ever seen an interview with Kloss? Modelling is an incredibly, incredibly difficult world, even more so for a girl of 15 to enter. Kloss however is the most pleasant, cordial and unpretentious girl in the business. A huge credit no doubt to her parents, but an even bigger credit to a girl who had booked campaigns for Christian Dior, Marc Jacobs, Chloe, Oscar de la Renta and a feature article, yes article, in Vogue before she turned 18. That is the kind of resume that allows one to play darts with a BlackBerry and their assistant’s head should they so desire.Kloss, much like the original ppa?seems to be well on her way to forming her own international posse as well, like her idol Christy, with pals Toni Garn, Frida Gustavsson and best bud Jourdan Dunn filling out the crew. What’s more, her debut on another coveted catwalk seems almost guaranteed later this year as, now no longer a minor, Kloss will surely be tossing on a pair of wings for a certain lingerie company that another pal, Iman, joined last year.So keep an eye on all the American gals kids, and Kloss specifically. The girl managed to move beyond even fashion mags this September when Life made her one of just a handful of models to have ever graced their cover, joining the ranks of the iconic Veruschka, Suzy Parker and Naomi Sims.So all that is missing now is her music video debut. Think George Michael is up for a “Freedom ’11?” ? Roving reportrix Damiana Garcia (left) always gets her story. And Tanya Roberts, too! Ace lady reporter (the drag alter ego of ) has covered many an exclusive story and fabulous event for (the production company behind “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” “Drag U” and ) – she’s even rocked the red carpet at the 2010 NewNowNext Awards. Now Damiana embarks on a new weekly web sketch series - “The Damiana Files”!Each week Damiana will put her investigative reporter skills to the test as she talks to a different fascinating individual (played by many of the funniest sketch performers to be found in LA and the interweb at large).In her first episode, Damiana visits former “Charlie’s Angel” Tanya Roberts (played here by the hilarious of and “” viral video fame) for some of Tanya’s affordable interior decorating tips, along with a heaping portion of crazy.The “Damiana Files” theme song is by gay music duo .Watch and get ready to take down Tanya’s tips!!!! Shorthand may come in handy… Get ready for more of “The Damiana Files” coming at you regularly right here and on ! ?Diane Kruger is , possibly the and is certainly not lacking for work, but doesn’t it seem like the actress should be getting far larger and far meatier roles over here in America? She is currently starring in the french film Farewell, My Queen playing Marie Antoinette, and we think it’s time American audiences got to know this lady beyond her work in the National Treasure franchise. For enduring Nicholas Cage during the making of two films alone, this bitch needs more work.Let’s look at her five best performances below.Troy The part of Helen of Troy in this big budget film was one of the most coveted and heavily debated roles in Hollywood for a good while, with Indian star Aishwarya Rai reportedly turning down the role before Kruger became the face that launched a thousand ships. The part required little of her, but certainly proved she could share the screen with the biggest names in Hollywood.Joyeux Noel This French film was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Picture and proved what a talented actor the former model had become. Kruger played Anna, a Danish opera singer during the World War I Christmas truce in 1914. Sadly she did not do her own singing, with that left to opera legend Natalie Dessay.Inglorious Basterds Kruger’s biggest role in America to date, the actress received a SAG nomination for this Best Picture contender in which she played German film star Bridget von Hammersmark. Her performance would have?brought on?better roles in America?one would think, but either she is turning them down for better work in Europe?or nobody is smart enough to be offering her any.Mr. Nobody This very brilliant, and very, very long film from Jaco Van Dormael, seemed to sit on the studio shelf forever before getting a very limited American release. It is too bad, as Kruger’s performance along with Sarah Polley and Linh Dan Pham as the wife of the last mortal man on Earth, played by Jared Leto, was phenomenal.Farewell, My Queen Just look at this trailer. Amazing. ? Cazwell, as photographed by Danilo Omo. He wants you to “Get Into It.”WATCH HIS MOUTH I’m in the mood to give props today to , the NYC-based rapper who’s full-on album, Get Into It, is coming out in just three weeks. He had one video from the disc, the foxy-risque become a major hit on , and he’s currently working on the follow-up, finshing up a new video for the track “Watch My Mouth.” If you’re a New Yorker, you also know Cazwell as riotously good party host. Check his and give him a listen! Editor-at-Large! Watch how My Comrade’s deft Linda Simpson grills a fearful Austin Scarlet. Watch out, Barbara Walters!HER COMRADES New York downtown superstar and highly esteemed editrix is one of the world’s smartest and most scintillating drag divas. And I’ve loved her revolutionary gay magazine throughout its many incarnations. And I’m very much loving its new online persona, . Go there now for fun blog dish, salacious photos of party people, insightful commentary on the news of our time, daffy links, and news about Linda’s parties. This was taken at some point during Grizzly Bear’s recent tour (that’s Ed on the right). Are they really happy or really sad?GRIZZLY LIST The Brooklyn-based melodically ambient-ish rockers of (led by out frontman Ed Droste) have just wrapped a lengthy tour opening for indie smash TV on the Radio. And they’ve about it. Music fans, you’ll love their “Best Of” list of clubs and shows across the North America. Congrats, Minneapolis. Watch out, Toronto! Jacob and Joshua: Tellin’ it like it is to RadarOnline.JACOB & JOSHUA ARE ON YOUR RADAR The twins gets interviewed by the snarky folks at . And the results are pretty fun. I love it when Jacob and Joshua get snippy with each other. Learn the secrets of their musical roots, their flight attendant pasts and which one dyes his hair. Props to them for having great senses of humor! Chloe Sevigny: Dishing tales of indie royals and nightlife crooks.THE JOY OF CHLOE Finally… How did I not see this before? As her AIDS-in-Africa-related film, , gears up for its December 1st release, turns up in this with . She talks about club kids, fag hags, playing nuns?and her indie princess rivalry with Parker Posey. Fun! Honey, these folks were glamorous back in the Reagan era… Work!PARTY LIKE IT’S 1984 NYC’s legendary has been a player in the electronica world for ages, and a downtown party maven for just as long. But what I’m loving today is this he made back in 1984 with fellow clubsters Joey Arias and Boy Adrian. It’s for a tune called and is a completely brilliant time capsule of New Wave and burgeoning hip-hop. Talk about gay history… RESPECT!!! ?Anne Hathaway and James Franco, seconds before lip-syncing for their lives.By now we all know that likes dressing up in drag as much , and we know that from appearing on General Hospital, to studying for his doctorate, to snagging Oscar noms to , there’s no limits to what he will do in the name of creativity or craziness, but America’s sexiest adjunct professor is about to take it to a whole new level.I am beyond thrilled to report that for the April 25th series finale of this season of , James Franco will appear as RuPaul’s special guest co-host!!! And unlike, RuPaul (who helms each weekly drag outing dressed in his male persona and in lady finery) Franco be co-hosting the show with RuPaul COMPLETELY IN DRAG.Franc-ly, it seems a fitting way to wrap a season that’s featured the heavy-duty star talents of Oscar caliber thesps like Lily Tomlin and Chloe Sevigny. And what’s even more intense? He’ll be doing it during Exam Week everyone! He might have to take a few study breaks during the show, but, I don’t know about you, that’s a price I’m willing to pay. (Interior Illusions lounge = professor’s lounge.)Is this bizarre? Maybe not? After all, Franco does have some experience in drag. From his Marilyn MonrOH NO YOU DIDN’T moment at this year’s Academy Award telecast, to this Candy Magazine cover he shot with Terry Richardson:James is letting the river run with this ’80s power business lady look, but not his mascara.I’m sure he’ll be able to dole out some sound advice to our Season Three queens, and he’ll probably Tweet photos of himself while he’s doing it! Also, if this is just some performance art prank thing then he better PERFORM because you know this season’s judges (Santino, Billy B and the queen of no bullsh*t Michelle Visage) will not settle for anything less.Clearly, if the lad can hack his own arm off during a weekend trip to the desert gone wrong, I’m confident he can hold his own against the The Heathers or some Puerto Rican drag divas.Best of all, the opportunties for Franco to deflate the furor around his heavily critiqued Oscars gig are boundless! Can we just start calling Ru “Man Hathaway?” Let them have it, James!And don’t F*CK IT UP.After the jump, hear what RuPaul herself has to say about her foxy, Oscar-worthy co-host to be!!! Can we expect some backstage Twitpics of Franco testing his tucking skills?? SPOILER ALERT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!When asked for comment about working with Mr. Franco, the Supermodel of the World had this to say… Thanks for playing, kids!!! Yes, we’re just playin’ with ya! The lovely Mr. Franco will not be co-hosting the Drag Race finale… But don’t you think he’d do a fantastic job??But have a fierce weekend anyway… And watch this hot sneak peek clip from this coming Monday’s new episode! Manila’s straight-boy drag-sister Matt is adorable!!! Need to catch up on ? It’s getting closer to the finale and — Franco or not — you need to be ready, Hunty!!! Watch And tell them Franco, sent ya! ? may be a hip and low-key gal, but it seems there is one drag queen that lady has no time for — Chloe Sevigny. The Hit & Miss actress was interviewed for the new issue of , and showed no love for , whose videos impersonating the starlet have all gone viral.“At first I thought, Oh, they’re funny. They’re not even really me, they’re these weird art pieces. But I’ve turned a little. I’m slightly offended because he’s calling me pretentious, and I’m not,” she told the mag.But does she love ? ?At long last we have our first look at playing the transgendered Mia in HIT & MISS, the British miniseries set to air on this July. This is the same film that landed Chloe in hot water when she in an interview.Mia is a transgender assassian who, upon learning she fathered a child years ago, must balance her new family life with her killer instincts. Just like every other romantic comedy.Check out the trailer above. ?Drew Droege is back as after a long, long absence, and this time extolling Chloe’s love for reading.Watch above as Chloe tells us what she is reading now and recalls a recent “burnt bone massage” with Kimbra.Then, go enjoy Drew c.It’s pretty funny. ?The whole female assassin thing has been done before in films like La Femme Nikita and every other Angelina Jolie movie, and that lady is a dude was of course popularized by The Crying Game, but the new miniseries?combines the two in a way that is shocking, violent and, dare we say, touching., who plays the , gets most of the credit for the show’s success. Sevigny is always bewitching in her roles, whether she is playing an aloof NYC teen in Kids or a polygamous sister wife in Big Love, and manages to infuse Mia with the perfect balance of emotion and, for lack of a better word, balls.The series opens with Mia completing a job, before heading home to shower and endure an intense workout. It would appear Sevigny went through the same training as well as the actress looks unbelievably fit and toned. Mia’s?isolationist world is turned upside down however when she learns that she fathered a son years earlier, and that the boy’s mother will soon die of cancer.This sends Mia on a journey from the grimy streets of Manchester to the vast nowhere of Northern England. Arriving too late, Mia comes upon the son she never knew she had, and his three half-siblings, all living without parental supervision in a rundown farmhouse.Having been named the children’s legal guardian, Mia stays, and with time slowly wins the children over. Everyone seems to take her transition relatively well too, something that is no doubt aided by her ability to kick the living shit out of a mouthy and heartless male landlord.So Mia begins her new double life as guardian by day and assassin by night, making the jaunt back and forth to Manchester to complete jobs. It certainly pays the bills and cash jobs are always best.Director Paul Abbott, who is known for the popular British series Shameless, does an amazing job invoking the mood and feel of Mia’s two different world. The quiet open space of Northern England juxtaposes nicely with the dark and claustrophobic Manchester, whose only open space seems to be Mia’s empty city loft. He is also particularly good at creating believable relationships between the children and their less than ideal guardian, something he also did to great affect in Shameless.It remains to be seen if the series, airing on DirecTV,?can stick to this level or if the writing will remain on?par with?Sevigny’s acting abilities, but for the time being there are very few things one could watch on televison that are any better.Don’t believe us? . ?Last week, , the much-anticipated UK miniseries starring Chloe Sevigny as a transgender woman whose life as an assassin changes when she finds out she fathered a daughter. The first teaser was just scenes set to music, but in this one we finally hear Chloe’s deepened-for-this-role voice as she sings “Hush Little Baby” to her kid. It’s creepy and ominous, cut with scenes of Chloe’s character’s violent job. Hit & Miss premieres on DirectTV’s Audience Network on July 11th. ? recorded a video to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Outfest, and you will never believe who she name dropped — our very own !Watch Chloe, or rather the very talented , talk about riding?half-bucket in hatchback?with America’s most polarizing drag queen above.How we have missed her… ?At long last we have the full trailer for?‘s turn as?the transgendered Mia in HIT & MISS, the British miniseries set to air on this July. This is the same film that landed?Chloe in hot water when she in an interview. Most recently, .Mia is a transgender assassin who, upon learning she fathered a child years ago, must balance her new family life with her killer instincts. The accent seems to be Irish and?Chloe looks to be pretty convincing in the role, sure to garner her some award attention next year.Check out the trailer above. ?In the above video from MTV After Hours, all kinds of celebrities, from to Amber Rose to Chloe Grace Moretz to Questlove to Max Greenfield joke about playing tributes in The Hunger Games, and ending up on the cutting room floor. It’s cute – especially Colfer (“Did someone tell you that I can’t read? Was it Hutcherson?”) Video, above. ?Hilary Swank in Charlize Theron in – scribegrrrl from Via , I came across a list of the "." It recognizes some truly stunning instances of shape-shifting in the service of art, including these:But, as usual, the list was mostly male-oriented. So here are some cinematic chameleons of the female variety. I’m including TV as well as film, and some of these are really evolutions over the span of a career, rather than transformations for a specific roles. But hairdos, makeup, wardrobe and weight changes have definitely helped these actresses play their parts. Here they are in no particular order. 1. Chloe Sevigny, vs. Big Love From breathtaking butch to what-is-that-hair-about housewife. I much prefer her on her bike.2. Leisha Hailey, vs. I fell in love with her pink hair and adorable face. I’m still swooning, but she’s sizzlingly sexy now, rather than cute ? I can’t really see her as that quirky kid in the guitar store.3. Nicole Kidman, The Others vs. The Hours Two haunting characters with two contrasting honkers. Actually, what impressed me even more than her proboscis in The Hours was the way she carried herself ? stiffly, but also with submerged energy, as if her frame were straining to contain all those weighty Woolfian words.4. Toni Collette, Muriel’s Wedding vs. everything else since then I love her in any shape, size or accent.5. Laurel Holloman, vs. I miss cute little chivalrous Randy Dean. I also miss pre-breakup Tina, but maybe she’ll be back next season.6. Frances McDormand, Fargo vs. From "funny is sexy" to "sexy is sexy" with the doffing of an earflap cap. Oh, and a baby and an ear-melting, side-splitting accent. 7. Meryl Streep, Manhattan vs. The Devil Wears PradaThis is what you call aging very, very well. It’s all about the hair ? or is it all about the pursed lips? 8. Julie Andrews, Mary Poppins vs. Victor/Victoria I love her in any role too. But she was so dashing when she played a man playing a woman. More like Victor/Victori-yum! Who has made you do a double take? This list is only a start, and we have Chloe Sevigny to thank for that ? when I see her in butch mode, my brain surrenders to much baser instincts and I’m useless for at least a day. ? has a very special guest this week as he tackles a very funny reader question — gay comedian Drew Droege aka .Watch above as the pair help a viewer deal with a boyfriend who frequently laughs during sex, not that you will have much sympathy for the young man after learning he is having sex twice a day.For more Conner, check out his and him your sex questions. And follow Drew and check out his latest Chloe video, ?Dark Shadows, the , will be released tomorrow. Starring Johnny Depp, Michelle Pfeiffer and , the film looks amazing, but critics seem to be a little split. Let’s take a look at what they have to say.“Dark Shadows isn’t among Mr. Burton’s most richly realized works, but it’s very enjoyable, visually sumptuous and, despite its lugubrious source material and a sporadic tremor of violence, surprisingly effervescent. There has often been something moribund about Mr. Burton’s period efforts, and it may be that he tends to be more at ease, feels aesthetically freer, when he’s having fun with pop culture (his inert redo of Planet of the Apes Dark Shadows ? the show first surfaced in the middle of the Vietnam War, when real horror was playing out daily in the news ? Mr. Burton’s gift for deviant beauty and laughter has its own liberating power. – “With an oddball premise that’s right up his alley, director Tim Burton has stylish fun with a morally-and-time-warped family visited by an undead 18th century relative, as does Johnny Depp in the role of the antique British-accented vampire. But the humor slithers between the clever and the sophomoric and the film too often seems willing to settle for mild humor at the expense of hippie-era mores instead of pursuing the palpable temptation to become genuinely twisted. Still, with its central bloodsucker vs. witch rivalry and Depp in one of his patented bizarre roles, this has all the ear and tooth marks of an early summer winner for Warner Bros.” – “Filled to bursting with voracious stares and high collars (and even an Alice Cooper cameo), Dark Shadows struts its glam harder than any film since Velvet Goldmine?again, a good thing. Just as we’re getting used to Depp’s lovelorn vamp, attempting a resuscitation of the family cannery business, along comes Eva Green’s sex-on-wheels succubus, poured into a Bacall slouch, to kick the movie into overdrive. Burton, as usual, is great on atmosphere and comic timing (these are his weirdest moments since Ed Wood), but less so at reining in an overcomplicated plot and dimly lit action scenes. You sense the project was forced into a high-octane summer mold; it’ll probably serve nicely as background for your Halloween bash.” – “Yet as genially macabre as Dark Shadows is, it tries to serve too many masters. Initially it’s an epic valentine to the show (Victoria’s arrival, set to “Nights in White Satin,“ is indeed trance-inducing). Then it’s a vamp-out-of-water story as Barnabas gets in tune with the Me Decade. Soon it’s a gung-ho comedy as the fanged patriarch takes over. Finally it’s a monster flick leading up to an effects-filled battle between a vampire, a witch, a werewolf and a ghost, as a potential corpse bride sleepwalks. Jinkies!” – “All right, so Burton has made less a revival of the old show than a hit-or-miss parody pageant. This could be the pricey video record of a masquerade weekend that a group of bored glamorati spent in a rented mansion after someone had brightly proposed, “Let’s play Dark Shadows!” But attention must be paid to movie allure, in a star like Depp and his current harem. Angelique may be the only satanist among the women here, but they’re all bewitching.” – ? Ne-Yo tells tales on Britney, Meryl takes her “Mamma” out in Greece, and Dolly’s hitting Broadway–in two years. sounds off about the , then sold to Pussycat Doll Nicole for her solo debut. That’s why they call it the music business, okay? in sunny Greece on the -led movie version of the Broadway musical It costars Christine Baranski and Julie Walters as the best gal-pals, and Pierce Brosnan, Stellan Skarsgard and Colin Firth as her former lovers who might just be her grown daughter’s daddy. Fun, fun, fun!That big that ’s been hard at work at? It’s headed to Broadway in 2009. Hurrah, Dora Lee!AND…Oh, yeah… for the new season of her show. It’s L.A.’s (no, he’s not a porn star) who’s other day job is working at KROQ. Busy!So if you’re and your life is sort of a mess, what would help sort things out? Getting pregnant!!??? Word has it she .Fashion vs. Showbiz: is gonna play for Dior’s 60th anniversary bash in Paris; and ’s debuting a line of her own at NYC’s Fashion Week. Oh, the glamour of it all…And in L.A., you can buy a creamsicle from the ice cream man and then belt out a tune, too? Yep, it’s Which is either genius, or really annoying… ?Blake Lively, Diane Kruger and Chloe Moretz are three of the most stylish women in Hollywood and frequently find themselves atop many a best dressed list , a difficult feat for such scrutinized stars. Even more remarkable, according to a new article, is that these three women style themselves — but do they?Lively comments: “I’d go to fashion shows and call my publicist and say, ‘Can I wear that?’ I think I became my own stylist by not knowing any better.” Um, kind of, but does it really count when you have access to everything and anything?It is of course just as easy to look bad in an expensive dress as it is a cheap one, but it is far easier to find looks that work for you when you can sit at a fashion show and then make a call requesting a piece. 99% of people would probably dress infinitely better if every time they went shopping they could grab whatever they want, before, of course, professional make-up artists and hair stylists came by to ready them for the day ahead.So can we stop with the claims that these celebrities are dressing themselves? Kruger is a lovely lady and style icon to many, but she is also one of Karl Lagerfeld’s muses and has free access to more Chanel than probably anyone — in the world. Also, do you know who else dresses without help? EVERYONE IN THE WORLD.Maybe we should drop these girls at a Daffy’s and see how well they fare at their next red carpet event. Things might turn out a little different for our gals.Independence Day: Stars Who Style Themselves [] ?“It’s time for nuptials,” says the actual Chloe Sevigny before officiating the wedding of her very dear friends David Hawe and John Paul Kane.It’s our pal Drew Droege, of course () as Chloe Sevigny, and if you happen to not be familiar with him yet, stay put because it’s recently come to my attention that you have to learn yourself on several things. Here are a couple of our favorite Drew-as-Chloe moments:The return of the persimmon… Seared pork fingerlings, with a scuppernong aioli… Previously: [via ] ? It’s time to summon your “charisma, uniqueness, nerve and talent” all over again, children. The kind folks at Absolut have stirred up a tasty cocktail for you today. From deep below the bar in the Interior Illusions lounge they’ve shaken up a strong and powerful video cocktail that’s gonna get you all tipsy and teased up for the drama coming your way with .It looks good, right? First, you glimpse some ladies in some star-spangled drag! Yay, America! Then it seems that we’re seeing lots of big fake boobs this season. (I blame Tyra Sanchez for that one…)And the guest stars (are they guest judges)? I spied Carmen Electra, Chloe Sevigny, Lily Tomlin, Johnny Weir, Sharon Osbourne and Margaret Cho up in there… Oh, yes; back up. I did indeed just say Chloe Sevigny and Lily Tomlin. LEGENDARY!!!! Oh, and LATOYA JACKSON. I die.And yes, we see some wacky, draggedy outfits. Screaming and tears. Some queens falling down and hauling each other around the stage… And Manila Luzon crying with a duck on her head. Wurrrrrk! Glamour! Tears! And lots of kiki-ing in the Interior Illusions lounge, folks… Check yourself! WATCH. IT. NOW. So yes, get ready. is coming at you Mondays in late January, folks!!!! ?If you’ve been watching Don’t Trust the B—- in Apartment 23, surely you’ve noticed Chloe’s chic, subtely-devilish sense of style. While going out and buying a whole new wardrobe that only encompasses the colors red and black is a little unrealistic, getting the coy con artist’s more understated handcuff necklace could be the better option. And Krysten Ritter isn’t the only celeb sporting this look–the dainty police accessory has been spotted on the likes of , Demi Moore and .Here are five twists on the popular look:????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? ?????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? ? Tens across the board!!! Talk live tonight with Mariah, Jujubee, Venus D-Lite and sexy-meister Mike Ruiz. Got romantic plans tonight? I know I sure do… It’s just gonna be me, a bottle of sweet wine, some chocolates, a spritz of , and about 10 drag queens, RuPaul and thousands of TV watchers all co-mingling dreamily over the new episode of , airing tonight on Logo at 10pm ET/PT.And… Extra! Extra! The queens of RuPaul’s Drag Race are busting their asses and bursting through the headlines on this week’s episode as our girls grab the news world by the balls, as they have to (and weather girls, etc). Trust: No assignment is too tough for our fearless anchors!How will the ladies do? Especially with special casting their keen eyes of experience over the rabble? Who will be tonight’s top story, and who is just another newsflash in the pan? Lights! Camera! Contraction! It’s RuPaul’s Drag Race in the newsroom!AND — Like every week, there’s gonna be a newsworthy LogoTalk Live Blog Party raging online at LogoTV.com during the new episode (and Untucked, which will follow it), and tonight you can come and chat with some of your favorite Drag Race stars. During the East Coast airing, Season 2′s legendary Laotian will be present in the chat action at LogoTV.com, so come kiki with her about tonight’s big show as it airs. And find else what else Miss Juju is working on these days!Also, will be chatting live from the ATL. It’s madness… You can watch her on the show, and chat with her live about what’s going down with her onscreen!A-List star/celeb photographer (and Drag Race guest judge) will be present, too; as will Gawker’s own resident snark-meister, NYC’s own astute and sly will also be present and dishing.If you’re on the West Coast, head to LogoTV.com as you watch to get the news-scoop fromSeason 3’s gorgeous , who like Walter Cronkite was taken from us far too soon. But like Glenn Bleck, she just refuses to stay down! An L.A. legend, count on her to serve you tonight’s tidbits sticky and sweet.Plus, intrepid lady reporter , who covers the globe for will also be chatting. Think of the LogoTalk Live Blog Party like a master class of newsy/media wisdom. A couple of headline-worthy news titans: Gawker’s Brian Moylan and World of Wonder’s Damiana Garcia! Come join us in the newsroom at . See you there at 10pm on either coast! ? No, it’s not a 1950s game show. It’s John Krasinski, Inglourious Basterds’ Diane Kruger and Justin Timberlake assembled to announce the Golden Globe noms this morning in Hollywood. Aren’t they adorable? The nominess for this year’s were announced this morning in Hollywood, courtesy of Justin Timberlake, The Office‘s John Krasinski and Inglourious Basterds actress Diane Kruger. The prizes are seen as a preview of what will likely get nods for Oscar nominations in January (as if you didn’t know).Since everybody loves George Clooney, his Up in the Air led the pack of nominations, scoring six. The musical Nine, starring Daniel Day-Lewis, Fergie, Penelope Cruz, Marion Cotillard, Nicole Kidman and Sophia Loren, received five nominations. Precious performed well, as did the gay-themed A Single Man, snagging noms for its actors Colin Firth and Julianne Moore.On the TV side of things, gay-beloved Glee got noms for its cast members Lea Michele, Matthew Morrison, Jane Lynch and the show itself in the Best Comedy category.The Globes will be doled out on Jan. 17 at the Beverly Hilton. Check out the full after the jump! Who ya rooting for?MOVIE CATEGORIESBest Picture, Drama Avatar The Hurt Locker Inglourious Basterds Precious Up in the AirBest Picture, Musical/Comedy 500 Days of Summer The Hangover It’s Complicated Julie & Julia NineBest Actor, Drama Jeff Bridges, Crazy Heart George Clooney, Up in the Air Colin Firth, A Single Man Morgan Freeman, Invictus Tobey Maguire, BrothersBest Actress, Drama Emily Blunt, The Young Victoria Sandra Bullock, The Blind Side Helen Mirren, The Last Station Carey Mulligan, An Education Gabourey Sidibe, PreciousBest Actor, Musical/Comedy Matt Damon, The Informant Daniel Day-Lewis, Nine Robert Downey, Jr., Sherlock Holmes Joseph Gordon-Levitt, 500 Days of Summer Michael Stuhlbarg, A Serious ManBest Actress, Musical/Comedy Sandra Bullock, The Proposal Marion Cotillard, Nine Julia Roberts, Duplicity Meryl Streep, It’s Complicated Meryl Streep, Julie & JuliaBest Supporting Actor Matt Damon, Invictus Woody Harrelson, The Messenger Christopher Plummer, The Last Station Stanley Tucci, The Lovely Bones Christoph Waltz, Inglourious BasterdsBest Supporting Actress Penelope Cruz, Nine Vera Farmiga, Up in the Air Anna Kendrick, Up in the Air Mo’Nique, Precious Julianne Moore, A Single ManBest Director Kathryn Bigelow, The Hurt Locker James Cameron, Avatar Clint Eastwood, Invictus Jason Reitman, Up in the Air Quentin Tarantino, Inglourious BasterdsBest Screenplay District 9 The Hurt Locker It’s Complicated Inglourious Basterds Up in the AirBest Score Up The Informant! Avatar A Single Man Where the Wild Things AreBest Song “Cinema Italiano,” Nine “I Want to Come Home,” Everybody’s Fine “I Will See You,” Avatar “The Weary Kind,” Crazy Heart “Winter,” BrothersBest Animated Film Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs Coraline Fantastic Mr. Fox The Princess & The Frog UpBest Foreign Language Film Baria Broken Embraces The Maid A Prophet The White RibbonTV CATEGORIESBEST TELEVISION SERIES ? DRAMA Big Love (HBO) Dexter (Showtime) House (Fox) Mad Men (AMC) True Blood (HBO)BEST TELEVISION SERIES ? COMEDY OR MUSICAL 30 Rock (NBC) Entourage (HBO) Glee (FOX) Modern Family (ABC) The Office (NBC)BEST PERFORMANCE BY AN ACTOR IN A TELEVISION SERIES ? DRAMA Simon Baker, The Mentalist Michael C. Hall, Dexter Jon Hamm, Mad Men Hugh Laurie, House Bill Paxton, Big LoveBEST PERFORMANCE BY AN ACTRESS IN A TELEVISION SERIES ? DRAMA Glenn Close, Damages January Jones, Mad Men Julianna Margulies, The Good Wife Anna Paquin, True Blood Kyra Sedgwick, The CloserBEST PERFORMANCE BY AN ACTOR IN A TELEVISION SERIES ? COMEDY OR MUSICAL Alec Baldwin, 30 Rock Steve Carell, The Office David Duchovny, Californication Thomas Jane, Hung Matthew Morrison, GleeBEST PERFORMANCE BY AN ACTRESS IN A TELEVISION SERIES ? COMEDY OR MUSICAL Toni Collette, United States of Tara Courteney Cox, Cougar Town Edie Falco, Nurse Jackie Tina Fey, 30 Rock Lea Michele, GleeBEST PERFORMANCE BY AN ACTOR IN A SUPPORTING ROLE IN A SERIES, MINI-SERIES OR MOTION PICTURE MADE FOR TELEVISION Michael Emerson, Lost Neil Patrick Harris, How I Met Your Mother William Hurt, Damages John Lithgow, Dexter Jeremy Piven, EntourageBEST PERFORMANCE BY AN ACTRESS IN A SUPPORTING ROLE IN A SERIES, MINI-SERIES OR MOTION PICTURE MADE FOR TELEVISION Jane Adams, Hung Rose Byrne, Damages Jane Lynch, Glee Janet McTeer, Into the Storm Chloe Sevigny, Big LoveBEST MINI-SERIES OR MOTION PICTURE MADE FOR TELEVISION Georgia O’Keefe (Lifetime) Grey Gardens (HBO) Into the Storm (HBO) Little Dorrit (PBS) Taking Chance (HBO)BEST PERFORMANCE BY AN ACTOR IN A MINI-SERIES OR MOTION PICTURE MADE FOR TELEVISION Kevin Bacon, Taking Chance Kenneth Branagh, Wallander: One Step Behind Chiwetel Ejiofor, Endgame Brendan Gleeson, Into the Storm Jeremy Irons, Georgia O’KeefeBEST PERFORMANCE BY AN ACTRESS IN A MINI-SERIES OR MOTION PICTURE MADE FOR TELEVISION Joan Allen, Georgia O’Keefe Drew Barrymore, Grey Gardens Jessica Lange, Grey Gardens Anna Paquin, The Courageous Heart of Irena Sendler Sigourney Weaver, Prayers for Bobby ? Who cares about the Golden Globes winners? This is all you need to see right here. Kinda fun, kinda long, kinda boring. See the for the full run-down. And has good coverage.Yay for Meryl Streep! Best actress ever and, as always, best speech-giver ever. Mo’Nique is looking more and more to be the sole prize winner for Precious at these award shindigs. How about some love for Gabby?I was just happy to see Cher and Xtina onstage. And to ogle the always deadly handsome hot mess Colin Farrell. And any excuse to trot on stage is worthy, too. tweeted this from the show: Sitting directly in front of this guy:Worried that he might try to fight me. What should I do?!?After the jump, some pics. And the best Tweets during the show from the likes of Justin Bond and Diablo Cody, and some great Facebook updates from draglet (soon to be seen on RuPaul’s Drag Race starting Feb. 1st).So a handfull of my fave gay Tweets during the show… (from fab performer Justin Bond)I’m writing a movie about Prop 8 called “Inglorious Drag Queens” where we carve high heels in the 4-heads of fundamentalists! (from screenwriter Diablo Cody)James Cameron and Mel Gibson are next-door neighbors? Do they have Avatar vs. Braveheart blue makeup parties? (from MTV News’ Jim Cantiello)Is Jodie Foster starring and directing a movie called THE BEAVER? And they say lesbians have no sense of humor. Poppycock! Or…poppyvag? (one more from Justin!)Colin Farrell looks like he just got tit-slapped by a hooker!And over on Facebook, drag darling was killing me with these status updates during the show…Pandora Boxx You know you’re gay when you get excited seeing Teri Garr & Sandra Bernhard & half naked men in a GG tribute and then think, Who is this about?Pandora Boxx I love Mickey Rourke’s Tranny Cowgirl out-on-the-town look!Pandora Boxx Ohh those other directors are so not happy that Dorothy Zbornak’s movie won. Oh wait that’s James Cameron. Golden Girl James Cameron? The Queen of everything, Meryl Streep. Fun winner for Sherlock Holmes, Robert Downey, Jr. TV Supporting Actress winner Chloe Sevigny. Don’t step on her dress! The Glee girls celebrate their Best Comedy Series win. Winner Mo’Nique and some tall apricot-colored lady. Hot wet piece Colin Farrell can totally stand under my umbrella, thanks very much. ? Top row: Vanessa Williams! Amber Rose! Cheryl Tiegs! Middle Row: Susan Powter! Latoya Jackson! Chloe Sevigny! Bottom Row: Lily Tomlin! Jody Watley! Fantasia! As you probably know, is Naomi-Campbell-walking its way to you on Monday, January 24th. But there’s now more news about all that gets unveiled when RuPaul opens her box to you for another season of drag, dreams, drama and decadence.First, the big premiere night is gonna kick off with a casting special (What is this? American Idol? Oh wait… Yes, it sort of is, thanks.) at 9pm. You’ll see home video submissions from queens who didn’t quite make the cut, and from those who did. It’s a going to be a happy hot mess!Then at 10pm ET comes the big 90-minute premiere episode, and then right after at 11:30pm, fasten your spanks because the behind-the-scenes series, is gonna escort you back into the Interior Illusions lounge for some Absolut vodka-swilling (hic!) and lots of tantrums, tears, merriment, accusations, cattiness and whacked-out draggedy drama.But my favorite news… Check out the divas pictured above and listed after the jump. The roster of guest judges this season is sickening. Cheryl Tiegs? Vanessa Williams? Chloe Sevigny? Lily Freakin’ Tomlin??? I die.And just watch a of the season right up in here!!!! OK. Here’s the preposterously fabulous list of guest judgery… All that’s missing is Judge Judy herself!!!?Billy B. ?Wayne Brady ?Margaret Cho ?Eliza Dushku ?Carmen Electra ?Fantasia ?Gigi Levangie Grazer ?LaToya Jackson ?Debbie Matenopoulos ?Arden Myrin ?Sharon Osbourne ?Susan Powter ?Amber Rose ?Rita Rudner ?Sara Rue ?Mike Ruiz ?Chloe Sevigny ?Cheryl Tiegs ?Lily Tomlin ?Alessandra Torresani ?Aisha Tyler ?Bruce Vilanch ?Jody Watley ?Johnny Weir ?Vanessa WilliamsGet more good dish on the coming season of at the ! And start shopping for your new weaves for the new season now, thanks. ?It seems that pantless men are everywhere these days. From the and a European yacht that held a , to any that allows for?a paparazzo with a zoom lens to peer. Heck, even good old Chloe Sevigny stripped to her skivvies on the to promote her new series , in which she plays a transgender assassin.So, to mark this new trend, let’s take a look at famous men in their underwear through time. From good old up through and .Enjoy. ? is one of nicest guys ever. Plus, he’s funny, opinionated, sassy, smart, quick, sometimes cantankerous, sharp and totally lovable as one of the outspoken gays on the Logo (and MTV Canada) hit late-night series, For all of those reasons, when Yerxa was in NYC a couple of weeks ago, we grabbed him, then snagged some stoop space and a video camera to chat one-on-one. In so doing, we learned about Yerxa’s boyfriend, his bestie/castmate Dean, the wackiness of being recognized by fans and .Yerxa also dished about cast-mate sex crushes and talking penises. HURRAH!!!If you need to catch up on , you can watch weeknights on Logo at 11pm ET. And check out .And just ‘cuz we’re nice, here’s a full recent episode featuring faboo Yerxa. You’re welcome!And because I had to go photo-hunting for this post anyway… Below are some cute Yerxa images. If you’re a fan, you’re welcome! Cheers! ? – Siege from Word has it that Terminator 4 has risen from the depths of development hell to the point of listing a release date and creating . In fact, rumors are rampant that Chloe Sevigny and Rachel Weisz have been gallivanting about town trying to convince the producers to cast them in the new flick.Now, I don’t know about you, but as much as I liked watching Claire Danes and Kristanna Loken chew up scenery in Rise of the Machines, things just were not the same without Linda Hamilton and her biceps.Now imagine it without the Governor of California, because Arnold is not a part of the upcoming project. So, no Sarah Connor and no T100. Kate Brewster and John Connor reportedly figure in the new story, but Claire Danes and Nick Stahl appear to be uninvolved, at least at this point.The new film will reportedly be the first in a new trilogy exploring a new character’s arc. That character’s story will be influenced by John Connor, but not centered on him. Makes me wonder how screwed up this timeline is going to be by the time we’re done with it.So, exactly what roles are Sevigny and Weisz trying to land? The story is still being written, so I guess anything is possible. It is said to take place several years after T3 left off, during the war against the machines. That should provide plenty of fodder for the storytellers, and plenty of action for whatever lady or ladies are signed on to the cast. In light of the infinite possibilities, I thought I would suggest some casting options to the filmmakers.For starters, might I suggest a little Gina Torres?I loved watching her kick tail and take names in Firefly. I even have to admit to being one of the 7 people who actually watched Cleopatra 2525.Speaking of Cleopatra 2525, why not take a look at Victoria Pratt?She played an Amazon Queen in Xena and Mutant X‘s Shalimar Fox. Why not the newest Terminator model?Perhaps I have Xena on the brain today, but I’d also love to see Renee O’Connor with a new gig.Especially if that gig involves her showing off those fighting skills she learned alongside Lucy Lawless.If none of those folks work for you, what about Gabrielle Union?We know she can bring it, and I’m convinced she could kick a few terminators to the curb.I’ve got a ton of other ideas about which women I’d like to see run around a post-apocalyptic Earth as either terminators or resistance fighters. But, rather than monopolize the conversation, I’d like to hear some of your ideas. ?‘s new film Spring Breakers is currently shooting in Florida and the on set, courtesy of costar ‘s Twitter, shows the actor looking very much like . Very, very, very much like Kevin Federline.In the movie, which also stars Vanessa Hudgens, Ashley Benson and Heather Morris, Franco plays a drug and arms dealer who bails four college girls out of jail after they rob a restaurant and asks them to do some dirty work for him. The work evidently involves them driving around town in a bikini as we can see above with Gomez looking like the to Franco’s Federline.Perhaps the most shocking thing about the film though is that it is written and directed by Harmony Korine of Gummo fame. The same man who did a movie about a group of very eccentric oddballs in Ohio and dated Chloe for years is now making a film with the girl from Wizards of Waverly Place and putting James Franco’s hair in rows.How time changes us all.Twitter [] ? and Prince William may look like the perfect couple, but the truth is Kate won’t have sex with him. Could it be that she hates him? Is she afraid of getting pregnant and ? Maybe she has a Chloe Sevigny ? Or it could just be that today, friends, is .The members of the MacArthur Fellows Program over at spoke to anyone who would answer their phone sources close to the royal couple who claim it has been four months with no penetration in the royal bedroom. “More often than not [for Kate], it’s a case of off to bed for the night on her own while her husband is working,” says Pippa Middleton a super secret insider.Also weighing in is Nicholas Davies, a grown man who wrote an unauthorized biography of Prince William. “My guess is that she doesn’t want to spoil that gorgeous figure,” says the man who has never and will never meet Kate.Sadly, the magazine could not find anyone to say Kate was having an affair with Prince Harry to add some extra spice, of the ginger variety, to this report.So next time you are feeling sexually starved or neglected, just think of poor, sexless Will and Kate.! ? I don’t know the consensus on : I’ve only seen her in Shattered Glass and in Zodiac – not in Big Love, but I hear I should. She’s oddly beautiful, but not someone I’d expect to do loads of modeling, which seems to be her new path – hence the NYLON spread.Her performance as a model doesn’t do it for me – she seems aware of what she’s doing, which isn’t fashion-y – but she’s a good actress, lives in New York and loves her gays, so I’m with her. More Chloe in NYLON … after the jump… Chloe’s even a little gay herself! But she aptly reminds us most people are. She told gay mag Genre…"I’ve had my whole life, I think most girls do. In high school, I was teased by the other kids?they called me a lesbian. I never really had full relationships, just kissy-smoochies here and there." ?My favorite time to be in is the autumn, hands down. While I do of course enjoy the endless crowds of drag queens, party boys and hand-holding couples that is summer in Ptown, the post Labor Day season has a charm all its own. What could be better than biking through the cool, crisp fall air of New England, a steaming bowl of delicious lobster bisque, and a burly Canadian tourist awaiting you in bed back at the hotel? (It’s my fantasy people, just deal with it.)Accommodations are easier to obtain (and more affordable) once the summer crowds have departed. One of my favorite places in town to stay is the historic (a mid-nineteenth century Sea Captain’s house, revamped into a grand compound). The guest rooms and suites are all beautifully appointed and immaculate, and the grounds feature landscaping that is lush and somewhat Asian-inspired, as well as a heated pool, and two Jacuzzis. It’s a very luxe environment for this kooky seaside port, but the vibe is one of relaxed elegance. Also on site is the wonderful Bistro restaurant, and just past the koi pond is The Shui Spa. There’s nothing I like better than a good massage after a day of gorging myself on saltwater taffy!Though right in the center of town (an Empire Victorian Cottage built in 1872) is situated on a peaceful side street, and is a delightful guesthouse for folks traveling with pets. The guest rooms are cozy and clean, and the resident canines?spunky Jack Russell Chloe and sweet, mellow lab Colby?add to the warm and homey atmosphere. The courtyard is a peaceful retreat, with a hot tub, gorgeous plantings and the sounds of trickling water fountains. In the morning guests are treated to a tasty buffet style breakfast; and I have to admit I went a little carb crazy. The french toast was delicious!Now here’s a little insider information for you: There are plenty of places to eat in Provincetown, but much of the food in town, to be perfectly frank, sucks! Case in point: A certain cafe named after a historic pilgrim-toting seafaring vessel on Commercial Street. Granted, this is just my personal opinion, but it’s stomach-turningly bad. I mean how hard is it to mess up pasta? Meanwhile, there’s the long-time late-night gay favorite (aka “Stare At Us” pizza), which is the place where all sentient beings in town seem to flock to at 1 AM, but people definitely come for the scene and not the food. Call me a grump, but I find the pizza to be overpriced, bland and cold, and the staff is beyond rude. They will serve you your slice unheated unless you tell them otherwise, and they can’t be bothered to look at or speak to you. They don’t have to, they know people are going to go there anyway. But so rude! On my last swing through Ptown, I asked the counter girl inside for a cup of water for my friend’s dog, and she told me she “lost the recipe.” Evil!Now there are some wonderful eateries in town, of course. is a new entry on the scene. Spend an autumn afternoon at one of their outdoor tables, enjoying a tasty Thai Chicken Salad Wrap and watching the world stroll by. A bit east on Commercial Street is , a longtime Ptown favorite. The lobster ravioli?Oh… My…God. Heaven! is another hotspot, with friendly service, a lively crowd and a menu that includes a very yummy Chicken Athena (and you thought she was a local drag performer!)But enough about food… Chances are you’re heading to Ptown for the fun scene. And while summer sees most of the big events in Ptown?Summer Camp, Bear Week, Carnival?the fall season has plenty of fun activities in store. September 25 – 27 This is a fantastic annual event created by the town’s no-kill Carrie A. Seaman Animal Shelter. Highlights include a Pet Parade, Pet Tea Dance at the Boat Slip, and the Blessing of the Animals at St Mary’s of the Harbor. Woof! October 2 – 4 October kicks off with the popular Mates Leather Weekend, a gathering for the Leather, Rubber and Uniform community. There’s a Leather Market at A-House, a Jockstrap Party at the Vault, and a Rubber Ball at Club Purgatory. I don’t know if the salty sea air is bad for leather & rubber, but it’s sure to be a blast! October 9 ? 18 It’s all about the gals during this annual week’s worth of events, from October 9 ? 18. God-des & She will be rocking out at The Post Office Cabaret, the dance floor at the Vixen will be packed, and a slew of lady-loving comics will be in town, including Kate Clinton and Jessica Kirson at the Crown & Anchor, and Judy Gold and Poppy Champlain at the Art House. October 18 ? 25 The week-long Fantasia Fair is is the oldest and longest-running gathering of transgender persons for education, support, parties and events! Don’t miss the Fashion Show or the Fantasia Fair Follies! October 31 – November 1 Halloween always brings a big scary batch of activities every year to Ptown, and it also brings out the big guys for Spooky Bear Weekend. The fun kicks off with a “Meet & Greet & Eat” party, rocks on with a beer blast and costume contests, and ends with a Sunday breakfast buffet. Those boys are hungry!) As the weather gets truly nippy in November, the beauty of Provincetown’s natural landscapes and historical architecture become even more evident. On November 25th from, 5-7 pm the annual () takes place, and it’s always a spectacular sight. From there on, the holiday season in Ptown goes into high gear with the annual Provincetown Business Guild’s from December 4-6. (). There’s the Holly Folly Shop Hop, a concert by Boston Gay Men’s Chorus, the Snow Ball at the A-House, even a Mr. & Ms. Santa Photo-Op at Song of Myself Photography. And you just know that Mrs. Claus will have a five o’clock shadow.AND NOW… Mike Diamond’s Provincetown Videos. Our apologies to everyone involved already…For more info on what’s on in Ptown during the off-peak months (and all year long) you can visit . ?has been tapped as the new face of Miu Miu, the second time the 37-year-old actress has fronted a campaign for the . That Miu Miu has chosen a celeb face should come as no surprise as, beginning with Drew Barrymore in 1995, the brand seems to alternate between high fashion models and Hollywood starlets for their ad campaigns.So, feeling nostalgic, we rounded up some of the many faces of the brand from Barrymore through Sevigny, including Kim Basinger, Evan Rachel Wood, Mia Wasikowska, Katie Holmes and more, above.Take a look, and please note how in 16 years, . ?Buried in the news that and Jason Segel would be hosting upcoming episodes of Saturday Night Live, great actors both but the typically generic and inside the box choices the show loves to make, was one piece of amazing, amazing news — Charlie Day would be hosting the November 5 episode of the show! Let’s get ready for some “Dayman!”While Day has long been one of the funniest people on television, it is no doubt his role in Horrible Bosses that snagged him this gig. Still, whatever it takes to bring us 90 minutes of Charlie Kelly is worth it.With that in mind, here are some more stars that the folks over at SNL need to get on the show. Stat.Kaitlin Olson — The absolute funniest person on television, and Day’s It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia costar, anyone who has seen this lovely lady in action can attest to the fact that she can make anything funny. And coming from a show that has had her: steal a dumpster baby, develop an addiction to crack, whore herself out to a local politician and date a possibly mentally challenged white rapper, it is safe to say that Olson can sell almost any skit you give her.Christopher Plummer — Captain Von Trapp seems to be aging backwards. After an already jam packed career, the 81-year-old is earning rave reviews for playing an older father who comes out of the closet in the touching comedy Beginners. And he is still not slowing down on the work front. So get him on in December before everyone sees him playing the patriarch of a mysterious family in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. Added bonus, we know he’s got the pipes to belt out a few songs. Seconded added bonus, maybe Julie Christie will stop by.Trey Parker and Matt Stone — These two prefer voice work to being in front of the camera of course, but the South Park and Book of Mormon creators would certainly bring an amazing new depth to the show. And they would also probably provide some down time for the writing staff by chipping in with some of the skits. Think about the ratings guys, do you know when the next available ticket to see Mormon is? 2012. When you think sweeps, think Stone and Parker.Jennifer Hudson — The girl can sing, act, drop massive amounts of weight, there is nothing she has failed at yet. So let’s see her do some comedy, because we are sure she is going to hit that out of the park as well. You save money on a musical guest too with Hudson, and even more money in that she sings herself so none of that pesky dubbing and what not that leads to those amazing Ashlee Simpson moments.Chloe Moretz/Elle Fanning/Hailee Steinfeld — Kind of like when all the ladies of SNL past joined for the 2010 finale, only much younger and, sorry to say this guys, much, much hipper. This teen trifecta, ages 14, 13 and 14 respectively, have been everywhere this year. Together in a spread for Vogue and each on their own LOVE cover, decorating their mantles (which are still at their parents’ home) with a slew of awards and looking picture perfect on every red carpet. What’s more, there does not seem to be a bad apple in this bunch. So have these professional ladies come do their thing for one night, they are more talented than most of the stars that stop by, even though they are less than half their ages. ?Awards season is fast approaching and, as a result, studios are now releasing their strongest films. While this is the time where the Brad Pitts and Sandra Bullocks of the world get to show off their acting chops, it is also a time for the new generation to wow with breakthrough performances that catapult them from no names to, at times, the A-list.Last year, , Hailee Steinfeld, Elle Fanning and Chloe Grace Moretz where just a few of the girls who became household names following their amazing performances in critically hailed films. Lawrence and Steinfeld even earned tickets to the Academy Awards, where both were nominees.So who are the five ladies whose name you will almost certainly be uttering next year at this time? Take a look.Felicity Jones — 26-year-old Jones took the Sundance Film Festival by storm, and walked away with a Special Jury prize, for her role in the Grand Jury prize winning Like Crazy. Co-starring Anton Yelchin and the aforementioned Lawrence, the film details the long distance relationship between two college sweethearts, one in Los Angeles and one in London. If that’s not enough, Jones can also be seen holding her own this fall opposite Maggie Gyllenhaal and Hugh Dancy in Hysteria and Rachel Weisz and Bill Nighy in Page Eight.Elizabeth Olsen — This emerging star, only 22, has been getting Oscar buzz for her role as a young girl escaping a cult in Martha Marcy May Marlene since the film premiered in Sundance last January. Lucky for her that should she have any trouble handling the storm of her new public life, she has two great mentors — big sisters Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen. Shortly after Sundance, the NYU student hopped on a plane to begin filming Red Lights opposite Robert DeNiro and Sigourney Weaver, before getting back to finish up her studies. She better get that degree quick however as it seems her professional life is going to be getting even more hectic.Shailene Woodley — Teens and tweens know this 19-year-old actress from her four seasons on the ABC Family show The Secret Life of the American Teen, but now a whole new audience will be introduced to this California native when she stars alongside George Clooney in The Descendants later this year. While some may be skeptical of her abilities, do not forget that Woodley caught the eye of director Alexander Payne for this new movie, the same man who brought us Reese Witherspoon in Election, Laura Dern in Citizen Ruth and Margo Martindale in the strongest segment of Paris Je T’aime. If?there is anyone who knows how to find the best actress of the bunch, it is Payne.Berenice Bejo — With her turn in husband Michel Hazanavicius’s Cannes favorite The Artist, Bejo seems poised to become the next European star to take Hollywood by storm. The much beloved movie was the talk of the croisette and while costar Jean Dujardin may be getting a majority of the attention, do not be surprised to see Bejo at every awards show later this year. Are we looking at the new Marion Cotillard?Adepero Oduye — This Brooklyn born actress gives one of the most arresting performances of the year in the very grim, and very real, Pariah. Another Sundance favorite, the film details a teenager’s struggle with her sexuality and Oduye, who has been with the film since it was first shot as a short in 2007, does not strike one false note. There is little doubt this talent will soon be finding her way into the mainstream with this remarkable performance. ?Kiernan Shipka, star of Mad Men, is 11-years-old. Hudson Kroenig, son of male supermodel Brad, is three-years-old. Yesterday both were the subjects of features detailing their vast designer wardrobes and love for Chanel. Get ready to cry.Let’s start with young Kiernan, who is amazing as the young Sally Draper on Men. In interviews she comes off as down-to-earth and fun loving, but that doesn’t mean this young celeb is shopping at the Gap. In fact, little style superstars Elle, Hailee and Chloe better watch their backs cause Kiernan is bringing it.In her style diary for Lucky, Kiernan wore clothes and accessories from the following labels over the course of one week: Chanel, Stella McCartney (twice), Paul & Joe, J Brand, Ralph Lauren (kids), Burberry, Marc Jacobs (twice) and an American Apparel skirt for good measure. And this pales in comparison to young Hudson’s closet.Do you know who Hudson’s good pal is? It’s Karl Lagerfeld! This is why Hudson walked the Chanel show with dad Brad when he was one, and got to keep his outfit. He also shot a Fendi campaign with dad, and got to keep his outfit. Oh and Karl sends him gifts, clothes and custom stuffed animals, kind of like your aunts and uncles only infinitely better.Hudson also loves Nikes, and there are at least seven different pairs showcased in his fashion spread, not to mention the two pairs made by Fendi and the Chanel jean boots. And he can wear the Fendi sneakers with his Fendi jeans, Fendi sweater and Fendi fedora for a day at the park!Why wasn’t our father Karl Lagerfeld’s muse?Kiernan Shipka: Eight Days, Eight Outfits []Hudson Kroenig [] ?While most actors and actresses get their start on?Law & Order?episodes as “victim’s sister” or “druggie murderer”, Chloe Sevigny is pressing pause on her productive career for a guest stint on?SVU.Chloe will play a stay-at-home mom who “is attacked and kidnapped while video-chatting with her husband, who’s halfway around the world.” Hopefully they weren’t having Skype sex.On?Big Love?Chloe’s character was all about staying at home and being a mom, as well as being a sister wife with a power-hungry evil father in charge of a Mormon compound. Sounds like “victim” in?SVU?won’t be too much of a stretch. ? As all you gays must know – Super Bowl, huh? – is in full-swing at this very moment! And with so many cool pictures on Getty, how about a quick photo roundup for those of us who can’t go?I collected a few shots of celebs around Bryant Park, as well as (subscription-included!) runway pictures I found majorly fierce! To give you an idea, I was a big fan of Diane Von Furstenberg and Herve Leger.Check out pictures after the jump!Let’s start off with the show; so glamorous!…Now for half of the fun: celebrities! The beautiful Anne Hathaway and Chloe Sevigny have been bustling around Bryant Park… and they can do no wrong!…And here we have ; totally dreamy and gorgeous……Frumpy Miss Mandy actually looks hot; Angie Harmon is still almost too pretty; and as if Tyra was actually doing any work. (Make sure the cameras are there!) …Yeah, I’m including ; Kimora is crazy, but I liked some of her stuff……Ew! Who invited Joss Stone? Lindsay already did that dress, by the way; you don’t want to compete with her. ? has just released the video for their song “Amazing,” the jam any fan of has no doubt heard and loved hundreds of times, and there is one big surprise.Watch above to get a look at season three winner making a cameo in the vid, and even getting a chance to lip sync.We hope it was not for her life. ?has been dominating at Wimbledon the past two weeks, and hopefully later today will hoist her fifth championship plate, but the star of the show as always has been her nails. In fact, for the past three years the only thing more striking than Serena’s game has been her perfect manicures.Take a look at some of her best designs in the gallery above, all done by Serena herself. She is a certified manicurist (is that a word?), famously did Oprah’s nails on her show and almost had her own reality show about her hobby.Looks like someone’s got a great fallback career when tennis is over. ? and Abby Lee Miller stopped by the and Hot 100 party in LA this Monday, and it seems the star and Dance Moms instructor have become the best of friends. Hey, villains got to stick together.Watch above as the ladies talk about who they think is hot, and Shangela discusses her new single “Professional.”We have got to get these two ladies a show. ? With spring comes yellow flowers. And sailors!I’m feeling kind of West Coast today, and it’s not just because I’m listening to stuff like or or …It’s because today’s spring fashion head’s up is coming fresh out of San Francisco from Jess Cuevas the supercool lesbian calling the shots and curating the looks at in SoMa… Friends from out west: Jess from The Seventh Heart; a bridge.As Jess puts it: The Seventh Heart offers clothing for men and women. We carry , , some of our graphic t-shirts are by , , basics by and Alternative. Jewelry and accessories by and . We specialize in clothing and looks that you don’t have to max out all your credit cards to afford. For Jess’ spring pics fresh from SF: Jump! My style? I am personally inspired by: Leather daddies, big huge dandy bows and ribbons, vintage t-shirts and pretty boys. Sweet inspiration…Here are Jess’s picks for hot looks this spring: Some shiny tux shoes can dress up your best ratty jeans.1. Worn + Fresh, Old + New I really like the idea of mixing very worn in clothes with something clean cut. Shiny tuxedo shoes in any color with your everyday jeans and a t-shirt, this is something that would look amazing on boys and girls Work the street with an old tank and pleated trousers. Tuff!2. Pleats + Tanks I like the idea of a modified pleated pant, low rise, and loose with a sexy fitting tank top. High-waisted jeans are sassy. REALLY high-waisted jeans are REALLY sassy.3. Get (High) Waisted I also like the exact opposite idea, a high-waisted really tight skinny jean that sits at a woman’s natural waist. Wear a bow around your neck, or on your chest or back. Or wherever…4. Take A Bow Tying all this up with a is a perfect accessory. It could be a beautiful satin ribbon you buy from a fabric store and do your own take on an Oscar Wilde look or dressing up a regular . Color is good: On your butt and legs, or on your head, or on your feet. Fruit it up!5. Rainbow Bright Pop some bright colors into your outfit, colored skinny jeans, shoes, bracelets, necklaces and headbands. Enjoy spring in sexy style! ? Some Proenza Schouler white shades to lighten up your spring?As you kids know, super-clean super- have been all ovah these past few months. And heading into spring and summer, the propensity for stylish folks to accessorize further with glacier-hued accoutrements is going to let up. Even today, the are declaring it’s all about getting shady with this season. Classic brands like Ray-Bans are still on top, as well as newer classics from Proenza Schouler, Selima Optique and Henrik Vibskov. Or just grab some cheapies at your local Walgreens. Yep, you can look like a ’70s French ski instructor or mod chick or an ’80s New Wave icon and be completely au courant when you toss own your white Ray-Bans this spring. And yes, you can still wear those . And for toting around your school books or beach reading, you’ll want the upscale collegiate vibe brought by the gleaming , another hot item, like, now. And you might wanna carry along one of those when things get scuffy. ? Miranda Cosgrove and Chloe Moretz on the set of Best Coast’s “Our Deal” video. Photo by Estevan Oriol. ROMANCE IS NOT DEAD. In ‘s fab new Supervideo for their single romance is strutting, kicking, punching, tagging and alive and well. Well, for a while, anyway…Directed by and featuring Miranda Cosgrove, Chloe Moretz, Donald Glover, Shailene Woodley, Alia Shawkat and “Teen Wolf”‘s , the video is a killer mix of West Side Story, Romeo & Juliet, The Warriors and other teen angsty gang classics. Here are the deets…“Two Gangs. One ruled the streets by day. The other by night.” So begins the mini-movie channeling the rival gangs of Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean” video and West Side Story‘s Tony and Maria. Here’s the CliffsNotes version: Moretz plays Veronica, member of the Night Creepers, who falls for Lucky (Posey), a member of the Night Creepers’ arch nemesis, Day Trotters. As their respective gangs continually feud, the two fall in love and Veronica asks Lucky to run away with her. He declines. Or does he? The video climaxes with one tragic punch that would win the VMA for “Best Irony in a Music Video” (new category alert, execs). You’re going to need pictures of unicorns and puppies to counteract your emotions at the end of this one. You’re welcome.But honestly? THE VIDEO IS ALL ABOUT THE HAIR. Chloe, Tyler and Miranda give great big, tousled, flowing hair. And Tyler’s tank tops ain’t too damn bad either. And a red denim jean jacket is your new summer must-have. See many blazingly fab from the set.When you’re finished checking out the video, we’ve got some behind-the-scenes footage and interviews with all the video’s major players. And admit it: any video with its own “Graffiti Coordinator” on-site has to be cool, right? And go behind the camera with director Drew Barrymore, Best Coast and the hot cast. After the jump, watch a video interview with Teen Wolf‘s Tyler Posey. And get the dish on all the fresh fashion in “Our Deal.” This may be the cutest photo in the history of mankind. Photo by Estevan Oriol. Is it wrong that I want to be Tyler Posey’s tank top? Tyler gets religious — and crotchy. Photo by Estevan Oriol. Psssst! Best Coast is all summer. Go see ‘em! ? As our way of celebrating and paying homage to the genre, we here at Newnownext, have compiled, for your reading pleasure, an extensive list of our favorite gayest, most rockin’ movies spanning, oh, the last thirty years or so. This coincides with the occasion of the (our #3 pick!) on Logo, this Sunday, July 22nd. We hemmed and hawed over the exact entries on the list for quite a while, enlisting help from our siblings at AfterEllen and AfterElton. We decided to err more on the side of rock than camp (oh don’t worry, there’s some camp, see #10 Xanadu) and found the gay where some might not. We fully expect to receive your expert feedback on our final choices. So without further ado, I give you our queer rock movies, starting at #21 and moving up towards #1. I’ll give you a shiny new nickel if you can guess #1 without looking.#21 - (1979) The musical Hair may not have made for a great film, but it was a pretty seminal event. A song called “Sodomy” celebrating sexual freedom? Button-downed military recruiters chiming in with hippie girls to sing the praises of “Black Boys,” and correspondingly, black officers smiling and cooing, “White boys give me goosebumps!” While Nell Carter sings along, even the film’s straight-boy protagonist declares, “I wouldn’t kick Mick Jagger outta bed.” Queer much? Check this out if you’re doubting me… Oh, the 1970s…P.S. Back in the ’90s, the Lemonheads (with dreamy lead singer Evan Dando) did a cover of Hair’s sweetest ballad, “Frank Mills,” and in keeping with the show’s queer spirit, Dando sang of his sweet boy love for Frank. Awwww… - John#20 ? (1979) Bette Midler is fabulous — we all knew that already. But when she channels Janis Joplin in The Rose, she goes right past fabulous and ascends into queer rock heaven. The blues! The booze! The breakdowns! It’s enough drama to fill a stadium. Oh, and there’s a gleeful drag show, too, not to mention a bathhouse (this is Bette we’re talking about, after all). By the time you get to the kissy reunion with an old female "friend," you understand why some say love, it is a flower, never queerer than The Rose. -If you stop reading now, your Netflix queue will remain pitifully empty and heterosexual and devoid of danger.#19 - (1988) Mondo New York is essential viewing for anyone interested in the (very queer) downtown arts scene in New York in the 80′s. It’s not a narrative film, but rather a series of documented performances (yep, it’s arty!) The film follows a nameless female character who doesn’t talk, but roams the city traveling from one venue to the next. In one scene, the ever-fantastic (drag) performer Joey Arias delivers a spot-on cover of the Beatles’ "Hard Day’s Night" as Billie Holiday, complete with an over-sized plastic gardenia behind his ear. In another scene, Karen Finley delivers one of her trademark rants in which she takes off her clothes and covers herself with food and glitter. Another scene features some S&M flogging and yet another scene shows an Afro-Caribbean religious ceremony involving live chickens. The film also includes work by Ann Magnuson, Kid Creole & The Coconuts and (one of my personal faves) John Sex. Oh how I wish I had gone to the Mudd Club… -Jon Mallow#18 - (1980) Spectacularly bad and insidiously fascinating, The Apple ranks right up there with Xanaduas one of the most gloriously wretched musicals ever made. Beginning at a futuristic version of the Eurovision Song Contest and ending with God himself flying down from heaven in a car to save the heroes, this movie is filled with one bad choice after another. Evil record producer Mr. Boogaloo — a slim snipe of a queen with a flaming sidekick — is so much more interesting than the ultra-bland leads that you almost root for him and his nefarious Bim company to take over the world with their awful techno and leave the loving folk singers in a ditch somewhere. Tasteless, tacky, and garish to the extreme — what’s not to love? -#17 ? (1980) I remember being a kid and sneaking over to my neighbor Charles Fugate’s house to watch the Queen-music filled, insanely garish 1980 film take on the classic comic hero, Flash Gordon. The Fugates had HBO at their house, which was scandalous enough. But watching Sam J. Jones (a former Playgirl model) charge around in tight white pants and a snug shirt as Freddie Mercury bellowed out deliciously theatrical rock histrionics is pretty delightfully gay.Queen aside, maybe there’s nothing super rock-and-roll about the movie, but that’s enough for me. Sing along, dammit: “Flash!!! Aaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhh… He’ll save every one of us!” If only…Check out Queen doing “Flash Gordon”?with some clips from the film?right here:- John#16 - (2001) I worship Stevie Nicks. And so do lots of other gay folks. And this film is a fab road movie in which a sensitive little goth teen and his brassy fag hag bff hit the road to head to NYC to attend the still-raging (I went this year!) and blisteringly queer annual celebration known as “Night of 1,000 Stevies.”In the movie, you get some gay romance and hook-ups, lots of eyeliner, feathers and shawls, and brilliant coming-of-age heartache. And an Amish lad gets seduced by a Goth boy. Hurrah! Plus, Karen Black, a rest-stop hook-up, tunes from The Cure and the rockin’ “Gold Dust Woman” spirit of Stevie pervades. If only they’d been able to use her tunes…. Hmmmm… -John#15 – (1978) The movie, not the album. When Robert Stigwood, the brains behind Saturday Night Fever and powerhouse RSO Records, produced a film version of the Beatles’ 1967 magnum opus in 1978, he stepped into a cloud of brand confusion and negativity. Then again, what else should you expect when you voluntarily recreate music from the most influential rock album in the history of the world?Critics dismissed Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and the Fab Four disliked it, although fans of this now classic cult film today generally insist that, “It’s getting better all the time.” The film, a rock opera told through the Beatles’ songs, follows a band as they wrestle with the music industry and fight evil forces threatening their town of Heartland and stealing their musical instruments. Talent is provided in the form of the Bee Gees, Peter Frampton, Aerosmith, Alice Cooper, and George Burns. Despite its shortcomings, and there are a few, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band redeems itself by opening an exquisite window into 1970s pop culture. The last scene of the film, in fact, imitates the Beatles’ famous Sgt. Pepper album cover ? the one with the busy design and all those people? and includes guest appearances from Carol Channing, Heart, Robert Palmer, Chita Rivera, and Tina Turner, among many, many others. In other words, they got by with a little help from their friends. Here’s the trailer: -Julie Bolcer#14 - (2005) Yes, the Broadway musical is a theatrical landmark. It presented queer characters, gay love lives, drag queens, AIDS, starving artists, a sparring and hot lesbian couple, confused twentysomethings, and NYC’s East Village culture to mainstream culture with unapologetic force and musical impact back when that was still bold. And kids still flock to it.Sadly, the movie wasn’t so good. In my opinion… But many critics disagreed, and so did die-hard fans. And because it’s got a big heart, big openly gay stories, and some people in it you gotta love (why isn’t Idina Menzel in more movies?), it’s here. But I really wish some super-creative, visionary director had taken the musical, deconstructed it or revamped it (a la Moulin Rouge?) and really served up something as innovative and gutsy as the musical originally was.Still the opening notes of that cloying yet powerfully effective tune which begins “525,600 minutes…” do give me goosebumps. Here’s the trailer, y’all…-John#13 – (1974) Predating Rocky Horror by a year (and visually strikingly similar to the far more successful later film), this ghoulish glam-rock retelling of Faust from budding auteur Brian De Palma has just about everything: great music, bizarre production numbers, a hissing, disfigured anti-hero, and Paul Williams himself as a diminutive Svengali bent on controlling the great rock acts of the world. Rock band frontman Beef, a hyper-macho stage presence who in his downtime is a mincing fairy, adds a good deal of camp value and some wacko humor to the proceedings, including one of De Palma’s first homages to the shower scene from Psycho (with Beef getting a plunger to the face as a punch-line). -#12 – (2002) Although the title of this 2002 film may describe your life in the months after you came out, or worked at that all-night massage parlor, 24 Hour Party People, like rock music itself, is one of those indirectly gay subjects. The film depicts musical developments that have indelibly influenced queer pop culture, even if they weren’t entirely about us. Not about us? How can we as members of the LGBT community stand for that?24 Hour Party People dramatizes a soiree closer to two decades in duration, launched in , in 1976, with the founding of the legendary Factory Records. The label roared from the punk era through the 80s, and into the famed Manchester scene of the early 90s.Factory Records was home to bands such as Joy Division, New Order, and the Happy Mondays. Perhaps you’ve heard of them. -Julie Bolcer#11 – (2005) One of the weirdest faux-documentary rock films ever made, Brothers of the Head was penned and created by gay filmmakers (who are also a couple) Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe. It’s a grimy, well-made story (totally made-up, but told with exacting style) of a pair of conjoined twins who almost inadvertently become culty punk rock stars! And one of them is gay! And they’re played by puppy-dog cute-in-a-gaunt-British-way real-life twins Harry and Luke Treadaway.And as will happen with gay/straight conjoined twin brothers who are as close as two guys can be (and who are also a messy, shaggy mosh of hormones and attitude), things get a bit frisky. Yep, it’s freaky like that. This film’s a must if you’re a fan of obscure Brit rock of the ’70s and ’80s. And you’ll wanna spot the cameos by U.K. film stars like Jonathan Pryce, Jane Horrocks (AbFab’s Bubble!) and legendary director Ken Russell, as himself.Watch the trailer, and add it to your Grit-rock/Brit-rock movie queue: -John#10 - (1980) Okay, is it “rock”??? Um, hello? How is a cavalcade of songs by ELO not rock? Is it awful? Sure! Is it amazing? Absolutely. And yes, there’s not any real gay storyline, but any homosexual in the free world can’t help but feel a tingle at the very mention of the world Xanadu, with images of Olivia Newton-John on rollerskates, or how her blow-dried blonde locks float back and forth regally as she breathily purrs, “A place… Where nobody dared to go…” Yep, she went there. Bliss! You can watch the long-ass finale number …Sure, I can hardly remember any other bits of the film, except the cute lead boy who was a dead ringer for Andy Gibb, who sort of never did anything else. And yes, I do know that the awfulness of the movie killed the movie musical for a while, and nearly buried Olivia Newton-John. But I also know that as an emerging little gay 11-year-old I raced out and bought a copy of the soundtrack and worshipped it.Xanadu sort of transcends camp or kitsch and makes up a vocabulary all of its own… “A million lights are dancing and there you are, a shooting star…” What more could any human wish for? Hmmm… Maybe a spoofy Broadway musical version? -John#9 – (1997) Sometimes compared to Kids, another film teeming with the dirty, confused scent of CK1 sexuality from the 90s, this debut from sisters Alex and Sylvia Sichel (If These Walls Could Talk 2) offers a gritty take on the lesbian coming of age tale. All Over Me unfolds against the backdrop of the riot grrl music scene in the “seedy” Manhattan neighborhood of Hell’s Kitchen. Wait. Hell’s Kitchen unsavory? What a difference a decade makes in the gayborhood!Two high school students, one played by teen angst veteran Alison Folland, careen toward same-sex desire, but summer break and separate paths of self discovery prevent an actual collision. Like any good adolescent drama, a parade of therapeutic supporting players includes Wilson Cruz as the reliably helpful gay friend, and a romantic distraction in the form of a pre-The L Word Leisha Hailey.Troubled? Go ask Alice. If the youngsters onscreen are loaded, even more so is the impressive, and genuinely good, . Babes in Toyland, Ani DiFranco, Sleater-Kinney, the Geraldine Fibbers, the Patti Smith Group, and The Amps all contribute, and that’s just the butchier side of the bill. -Julie Bolcer#8 – (1995) Although no film could possibly capture the insane, ribald, musical theatrics and queer madness that is Wigstock?the almost annual dragfest that set NYC afire each summer from the late 1980’s all the way up to 2005, skipping a few years along the way and moving from Tompkins Square Park to the west side and back again?1995’s Wigstock: The Movie does a pretty good job. Most notably it captures for posterity most of New York’s most legendary drag talent from the 1980s and ’90s, including Leigh Bowery, Lady Bunny, Misstress Formika, Lypsinka, RuPaul, Tabbooo, Kevin Aviance, the Dueling Bankheads and legions more. Plus, it follows dragsters Jackie Beat and a pre-trans Alexis Arquette, as they prep for the big fest. And lots of Deee-Lite, still in their heyday.But basically, watch it for the music. The queens rock out, as does house diva Crystal Waters, and there’s even an early appearance by Antony Hegarty, of Antony and the Johnsons fame.A highlight? Leigh Bowery on film! Lypsinka on film! And Formika’s “Age of Aquarius” is eternal…. -John#7 – (1986) “Love kills.” That was the tagline for this 1986 biographical account of Sex Pistols’ bassist Sid Vicious and his junkie-groupie girlfriend Nancy Spungen, a pair of burnt out rock icons traveling the drug and sex sign-posted road of mutual destruction. But the slogan might actually refer to wayward former Hole singer Courtney Love, who reportedly threatened in a video audition to kill the film’s producers if they did not give her the lead role.Love received a minor part, and Spungen was played by Chloe Webb, who later appeared as Mona Ramsey in Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City. Esteemed actor Gary Oldman personified Vicious in his waning, post-Sex Pistols days of squalor, addiction and violence in Manhattan’s Chelsea Hotel. More disgusting than a mosh pit during a thunderstorm, Sid and Nancy is a cautionary coming out tale for would-be punk rockers, codependents, and anyone who thinks bizarre high-profile murders only began with O.J. Simpson. -Julie Bolcer#6 - (1990) Okay so it’s a musical. But it’s a musical about rockin and rollin and whatnot. Or at least a musical making fun of musicals about that. And although it is, without a doubt, a John Water’s film, my claims to its gay content are spurious at best. The camp of this movie centers more around white-trash culture and a Romeo and Juliet ? type romance than anything overtly homo. But I don’t think it’s grasping at straws to find some common ground in a story about social misfits. This is a movie for all of us out there with an affinity for rockabillies (I swoon for Johnny’s lone front curl). And looking back on it now, I can’t help but think of Johnny Depp’s recent role as a flaming pirate and take notice of Iggy Pop’s cameo (see Velvet Goldmine). And let’s face it, Divine would have been in this movie, if it wasn’t for her tragic demise. -Ambrose#5 - (1984) While queers were barely beyond legal and medical labels naming their “sexual deviance” a criminal pathology, Prince was brazenly flaunting an artful tangle of slut, pervert, aristocrat, street-wise, stage-humping hotness to the tamest mainstream. Purple Rain is like an elongated version of all the high-healed frilly strutting of his searing masculinity on stage, plus the appalling acting of Apollonia and the suave pimpin’ tude of Morris Day. All the characters, in the end, stand in awe of the final culmination on stage of Prince the person and Prince the performer, with none of the brilliance lost. What’s more queer than a brilliant performer who knowingly plays with dimensions of sexuality as thoroughly the musical instruments? -Ambrose#4 - (2003) It’s appropriate that I would write about this movie, given my recent obsession with all-girl bands. And, well, I’ve always been obsessed with cynicism and tragedy, which this film has in aces. The courageous, masculine and rockin’ bravado of these female band members is second to none in the film world. Plus they’re mostly dykes. And even if they weren’t, the presence of Gina Gershon and Lori Petty (who have been queer icons since Tank Girl and Bound), would make it so. And their band is called Clamdandy (awesome!). But really it’s not the lesbian love/sex that does it for me in this movie (though it’s nice that it’s there); it’s Gina Gershon’s pure rock n roll performance. She is so tough/vulnerable and hot/sad that you can’t help but be entirely in her tattooed grip. -Ambrose#3 – (1998) To my mind, Todd Haynes is our strongest queer filmmaker making movies today; and he may be the best all-around filmmaker, period?at least when it comes to weaving intelligence, art, cinematic craft and commentary all into one brilliant package. Films like Far From Heaven and Safe are unique and legendary. And then there’s Velvet Goldmine, which I also think is stunning, raw and sharply insightful?even as it occasionally veers a bit out of control. It’s decadent, garish, a little messy but also splendid and spot-on in capturing the queerly glam, crustily tawdry glitter rock era. And hello? It’s got characters pretty much based on David Bowie and Iggy Pop and messing around, and played (respectively) by the always sexually prurient and horned up Jonathan Rhys-Meyers and the oft-pantsless and besotted . They’re gay or bi or not or both?and damn it’s fun to watch them meltdown. They’re pretty much illustrating that entire early 1970s androgyny and rock and roll queer-boundary pushing thing. And how can you not swoon when junkie Curt Wild (McGregor) says to his boy-crush, Brian Slade (Rhys-Meyers): “…Heroin was my main man, but now I’m on the methadone… You could be my main man.” Awwww…Plus, with Christian Bale as a little gay rock fan-ster coming of age in 1970’s London and with Toni Collette as the hapless wife whose rocker hubby likes to play with boys, you’ve got an all-star cast of queer captivation. And here’s a little video mash-up of gayness from the film (with a tune from Air):Final word: It’s glam rock! Which is GAY! -John#2 – (2001) As its title suggests, every inch of this beloved film about a transgender East German rock n’ roll impresario screams with uber gayness. Behind its handsome plot layers of a botched sex change operation, Communist kitsch, a failed military marriage, and American trailer park living, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, at its feverish and pulsating queer core, is a tale of dreaming, disillusionment and, ultimately, survival.Adapted from the ginormously successful 1998 rock theatre musical written by John Cameron Mitchell (Shortbus) and Stephen Trask, who helped score Dreamgirls, the 2001 movie version of Hedwig has already approached the cult status of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Though each film may speak to a different generation, they share the timeless themes of stellar music, in this case 70s glam rock and punk, and an outsider genius propelled and sustained by the impulse to create. Such is the juice of life, and “The Origin of Love,” as Hedwig might say.-Julie Bolcer#1 - (1975) I am not one of the legions of insatiable fans who have attended so many screenings of the film that they chant the words, wear costumes, hold props and dance along with The Time Warp. “It’s the pelvic thrust that really drives you insane!” Okay, so I know a few of the lyrics. But I am not as die hard of a fan as those who have seen the movie over 1300 times (seriously). But I do love Rocky Horror and I do believe it deserves to be number one on our Queer Rock Movies list. For one thing, it was 1975, and as you know, at the end of the film, the castle flies back to the planet Transsexual. Many people who have ended up seeing this cult classic in the last 32 years had never even heard of that planet. But aside from all the queer perviness (not to mention cannibalism and incest), it was the songs and the amazing performances by Susan Sarandon and Tim Curry and the rest of the cast that made this a movie that will never be forgotten. It’s like they took the idea of a rock n roll musical to the 22nd power. They went all the way, which could be argued is the whole purpose of entertainment. We get to live vicariously through the sheer outrageousness of it all. -Ambrose ? Women on Top: Jennifer Hudson and Melissa Etheridge both scored Oscars last night, resulting in gay rejoicing all over the place. last night seemed fantastically lesbian to me… for Best Song and planted one on her wife, Tammy Lynn Michaels and excitedly once onstage. And I don’t know the story behind that costume designer, , who won the , but she was very cool (and channelling Judy Davis as George Sand, in that froofy costume drama-comedy about 16 years ago). Loved that… Love this shot! Oscar winning costume designer Milena Canonero (for Marie Antoinette) seems quite taken with her presenters, Emily Blunt and Anne Hathaway. Who can blame her, eh?I was happy to see … And I was sorry Eddie Murphy didn’t win, but there ya go.But in other major gay movie news, the results from all of are in. AND… Gay America (and elsewhere, I’m thinking…) totally voted for Helen Mirren, Jennifer Hudson and Forest Whitaker to all win Oscars! Yay! But us gays also voted for Eddie Murphy to win for Best Supporting Actor, and for Little Miss Sunshine to win Best Picture, so… Urf.But even more fun might just be the non-Oscar-related categories that the gays voted for. The full list (and I mean full… it’s long) is after the jump. Check ‘em out. Turns out the gays love a sexy James Bond, and an even sexier (given the enthusiastic vote) Lost-star turned Bloodrayne warrior (meaning the women are liiiiving for Michelle Rodriguez). And you voted The Devil Wears Prada for Best Comedy and Children of Men as Best Drama, and Shortbus as Sexiest Movie, and Borat’s rump-smooching won for Best Kiss and…Awww, just check out all the gabby details, already…And, go online to watch of our about . (Full disclosure: I’m in the videos. Ack!) Women We Love: Your sexy favorite, Michelle Rodriguez, hit last night’s Vanity Fair Oscar Party. And so did Portia and Ellen, natch.The Short List of LogoOnline’s Queer Year in Film Poll winners:Favorite Comedy ? The Devil Wears Prada Favorite Action Movie ? Casino Royale Favorite Serious Drama ? Children of Men Favorite Scary Movie/Thriller ? Saw III Sexiest Movie ? Shortbus Best Gay Indie Film ? Adam & Steve Best Socially Aware Documentary ? An Inconvenient Truth Favorite Animated Animal Movie ? Happy Feet Favorite Guilty Pleasure ? Another Gay Movie Favorite Gay Filmmaker ? Bill Condon, Dreamgirls Sexiest Male Movie Star ? Daniel Craig, Casino Royale Sexiest Female Movie Star ? Michelle Rodriguez, Bloodrayne ? by a BIG margin Favorite Gay Movie Couple ? Rachel & Luce, Imagine Me & You ? also by a BIG margin Least Favorite Gay Movie Character ? Sharon Stone’s bi killer, Basic Instinct 2 Biggest Oscar Snub – Dreamgirls, not nominated for Best Picture Fiercest Female Character ? Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep), The Devil Wears Prada Best Kiss ? Borat and his friend’s rear end Character Most Likely to Inspire Drag Queens ? Any of the women from Dreamgirls Most Lesbianish Non-Lesbian Film ? The Descent Biggest Disappointment ? The DaVinci Code Best Action Movie with a Coincidentally Gay Storyline ? V for Vendetta Character You Most Want to Get Drinks With ? James Bond (Daniel Craig) Film Most Looking Forward to in 2007 ? Harry Potter and the Order of the PhoenixAnd that’s just for starters! Below is THE ENTIRE LIST of how the gay universe chimed in on the (as of results at 8am this morning):The OscarsWho do you think deserves the Best Actress Oscar? Penelope Cruz, Volver ? 10% Judi Dench, Notes On A Scandal ? 12% Helen Mirren, The Queen – 36% Meryl Streep, The Devil Wears Prada -34% Kate Winslet, Little Children ? 7%Who do you think deserves the Best Actor Oscar? Leonardo DiCaprio, Blood Diamond ? 16% Ryan Gosling, Half Nelson ? 15% Peter O’Toole, Venus ? 7% Will Smith, The Pursuit of Happyness ? 17% Forest Whitaker, The Last King of Scotland ? 45%Who do you think deserves the Best Supporting Actress Oscar? Adriana Barraza, Babel ? 4% Cate Blanchett, Notes on a Scandal ? 14% Abigail Breslin, Little Miss Sunshine ? 21% Jennifer Hudson, Dreamgirls ? 54% Rinko Kikuchi, Babel ? 7%Who do you think deserves the Best Supporting Actor Oscar? Alan Arkin, Little Miss Sunshine ? 18% Eddie Murphy, Dreamgirls ? 32% Mark Wahlberg, The Departed ? 28% Djimon Hounsou, Blood Diamond ? 15% Jackie Earle Haley, Little Children ? 7%Which film deserves to win Best Picture? Babel ? 15% The Departed ? 26% Letters from Iwo Jima ? 5% Little Miss Sunshine ? 31% The Queen ? 23%Who deserves to win Best Director? Clint Eastwood, Letters from Iwo Jima ? 12% Stephen Frears, The Queen ? 18% Paul Greengrass, United 93 ? 5% Martin Scorsese, The Departed ? 51% Alejandro Gonzalez Inarittu, Babel ? 14%What deserves to win Best Original Song? “I Need to Wake Up” from An Inconvenient Truth [Music and lyric by Melissa Etheridge] ? 23% “Listen” from Dreamgirls [Music by Henry Krieger and Scott Cutler; lyric by Anne Preven] ? 32% “Love You I Do” from Dreamgirls [Music by Henry Krieger; lyric by Siedah Garrett] ? 25% “Our Town” from Cars [Music and Lyric by Randy Newman] ? 13% “Patience” from Dreamgirls [Music by Henry Krieger; lyric by Willie Reale] ? 7%What deserves to win for Best Original Screenplay? Guillermo Arriaga, Babel ? 13% Michael Arndt, Little Miss Sunshine ? 39% Iris Yamashita & Paul Haggis, Letters From Iwo Jima ? 4% Guillermo del Toro, Pan’s Labyrinth ? 23% Peter Morgan, The Queen ? 21%What should win for Best Adapted Screenplay? Patrick Marber , Notes on a Scandal ? 20% William Monahan, The Departed ? 37% Sacha Baron Cohen & others, Borat ? 21% Todd Field & Tom Perrotta, Little Children ? 10% Alfonso Cuaron & others, Children of Men ? 12%What should win the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film? After the Wedding (Denmark) ? 10% Days of Glory (Indigenes)” (Algeria) ? 6% Lives of Others (Germany) ? 9% Pan’s Labyrinth (Mexico) ? 67% Water (Canada) ? 8%What should win for Best Animated Film? Cars ? 35% Happy Feet ? 50% Monster House -15%What should win the Oscar for Best Art Direction? Dreamgirls – 32% The Good Shepherd ? 2% Pan’s Labyrinth ? 39% Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest ? 22% The Prestige ? 5%Which film should win for Best Cinematography? The Black Dahlia ? 18% Children of Men ? 14% The Illusionist ? 18% Pan’s Labyrinth ? 45% The Prestige ? 5%Which film should win for Best Costume Design? Curse of the Golden Flower, Yee Chung Man ? 7% The Devil Wears Prada, Patricia Field ? 33% Dreamgirls, Sharen Davis ? 31% Marie Antoinette, Milena Canonero ? 21% The Queen, Consolata Boyle ? 8%Which film deserves to win for Best Documentary Feature? Deliver Us from Evil ? 8% An Inconvenient Truth ? 72% Iraq in Fragments ? 6% Jesus Camp ? 12% My Country, My Country ? 2%What film deserves to win for Best Film Editing? Babel ? 28% Blood Diamond ? 11% Children of Men ? 11% The Departed ? 30% United 93 ? 20%What deserves the Oscar for Best Makeup? Apocalypto ? 20% Click ? 9% Pan’s Labyrinth ? 71%What deserves to win for Best Original Score? Babel, Gustavo Santaolalla ? 19% The Good German, Thomas Newman ? 5% Notes on a Scandal, Philip Glass ? 13% Pan’s Labyrinth, Javier Navarrete ? 33% The Queen, Alexandre Desplat ? 30%What was the biggest Oscar snub this year? Dreamgirls, not nominated for Best Picture ? 40% Volver, not nominated for Best Foreign Film ? 27% Bill Condon, not nominated for Best Director ? 6% Steve Carell, not nominated for Best Supporting Actor ? 16% Sasha Baren Cohen, not nominated for Best Actor for Borat – 11%Fess up. Which highly regarded film are you most unlikely to see? Babel ? 11% An Inconvenient Truth ? 12% The Last King of Scotland ? 20% Letters from Iwo Jima ? 44% Little Children -13%Who gave the most memorable Oscar acceptance speech ever? Sally Field, when she exclaimed “You like me!” ? 35% Halle Berry, sobbing ? 31% Gwyneth Paltrow, sobbing – 2% Jack Palance, doing push-ups ? 12% Roberto Benigni, after climbing on chairs ? 20%The Best of 2006What’s your favorite comedy of 2006? Borat ? 12% The Devil Wears Prada ? 44% For Your Consideration – 4% Jackass Number Two ? 6% Little Miss Sunshine ? 31% Talladega Nights ? 3%What’s your favorite action movie of 2006? Blood Diamond ? 9% Casino Royale ? 33% The Departed ? 32% Inside Man ? 7% Miami Vice ? 2% Superman Returns ? 17%Your favorite serious drama of 2006? 3 Needles ? 8% Children of Men ? 23% Flags of our Fathers ? 13% Little Children ? 16% The Good Shepherd ? 20% United 93 ? 20%What was your favorite scary movie/thriller of 2006? The Covenant ? 17% The Descent ? 25% The Hills Have Eyes ? 11% Saw III ? 33% See No Evil ? 6% The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning ? 8%And what was the sexiest movie of 2006? The Black Dahlia ? 8% Casino Royale ? 28% Imagine Me & You ? 18% Perfume: The Story of a Murderer ? 2% Shortbus ? 31% Tristan & Isolde ? 13%What was the best gay indie film of the year? Adam & Steve ? 27% Another Gay Movie ? 24% Imagine Me & You ? 17% Quinceanera – 10% Shortbus ? 22%Best socially aware documentary of the year? An Inconvenient Truth ? 63% Iraq in Fragments ? 3% Jesus Camp ? 11% Last Letters Home ? 4% Shut Up and Sing – 19%Your favorite animated animal movie of the year? The Ant Bully ? 2% Barnyard ? 5% Charlotte’s Web ? 16% Flushed Away ? 7% Happy Feet ? 52% Over the Hedge ? 18%Your favorite guilty pleasure movie of 2006? Another Gay Movie ? 42% The Descent ? 9% Jackass Number Two ? 13% Madea’s Family Reunion ? 18% Rocky Balboa ? 7% Snakes on a Plane ? 11%Your favorite gay filmmaker of the year? Pedro Almodovar, Volver ? 16% Jamie Babbit, The Quiet ? 5% Bill Condon, Dreamgirls ? 25% John Cameron Mitchell, Shortbus ? 18% Bryan Singer, Superman Returns ? 11% Nicholas Hytner, The History Boys ? 3%The StarsWho’s the Sexiest Male Movie Star of 2006? Daniel Craig, Casino Royale ? 38% Andre 3000, Idlewild ? 6% Jesse Garcia, Quinceanera ? 13% Johnny Knoxville, Jackass Number Two ? 11% Matthew McConaughy, Failure to Launch ? 19% Patrick Wilson, Little Children ? 13%Who’s the sexiest female movie star of 2006? Beyonce, Dreamgirls ? 8% Penelope Cruz, Volver ? 10% Famke Janssen, X-Men: The Last Stand ? 4% Kristanna Loken, Bloodrayne ? 2% Michelle Rodriguez, Bloodrayne ? 73% Hilary Swank, The Black Dahlia ? 3%Favorite Gay Movie Couple of 2006? Adam & Steve, Adam & Steve ? 13% Rachel & Luce, Imagine Me & You ? 75% Annabelle & Simone, Loving Annabelle ? 2% James & Jamie & Ceth, Shortbus ? 6% Mr. Jellineck & Mr. Noblet, Strangers With Candy ? 4%Who was your least favorite gay character of 2006? Bad lesbian mom Annette Bening, Running with Scissors ? 8% Suicidal gay Steve Carell, Little Miss Sunshine ? 11% Psycho closeted lesbian Judi Dench, Notes on a Scandal ? 15% Pedophile Joseph Fiennes, Running with Scissors ? 18% Trashy bi killer Sharon Stone, Basic Instinct 2 ? 48%Fiercest female character onscreen this year? Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep), The Devil Wears Prada ? 56% Effie White (Jennifer Hudson), Dreamgirls ? 29% Jerri Blank (Amy Sedaris), Strangers With Candy ? 6% Jazmin Biltmore, (Mo’Nique), Phat Girlz ? 4% That final surviving woman from The Descent ? 5%The Red CarpetWho worked the best signature pose this year? Beyonce’s armpit pose ? 26% Lindsay Lohan’s peace sign pose ? 10% Borat’s thumbs up pose ? 33% Jamie Foxx’s pointing pose -11% Renee Zellweger’s perennial pucker ? 20%Which actress dressed to impress best at the Golden Globes? Drew Barrymore ? 17% Penelope Cruz ? 20% Jennifer Hudson ? 21% Helen Mirren ? 17% Reese Witherspoon ? 25%Which actor brought sexy back at the Golden Globes? Sacha Baron Cohen ? 14% Leonardo DiCaprio ? 27% Aaron Eckhart ? 13% Jamie Foxx ? 15% Mark Wahlberg ? 31%Which actress should have fired her stylist after the Golden Globes? Vanessa Williams ? 31% Jennifer Love Hewitt ? 9% Cameron Diaz ? 20% Rinko Kikuchi ? 23% Chloe Sevigny ? 17%Who wore the best worst Oscar dress ever? Bjork’s swan dress ? 32% Barbra Streisand’s see-through pants ? 2% Gwyneth’s see-through dress, 2001 ? 31% Uma Thurman’s milkmaid look ? 5% Celine Dion’s backwards white tux thing ? 22% Cher, just about any year ? 8%Movie MomentsBest Movie Kiss of 2006? Annette Bening & Kristen Chenowith, Running With Scissors ? 17% Jerri Blank and her football jock, Strangers With Candy ? 9% Hugh Jackman and Famke Janssen, X-Men: The Last Stand ? 23% Patrick Wilson and Kate Winslet, Little Children ? 13% Brandon Routh & Kate Bosworth, Superman Returns ? 11% Borat and his friend’s ass, Borat ? 27%Best Dance Number/Choreography? Adam & Steve ? 18% Dreamgirls ? 53% Little Miss Sunshine ? 27% Borat ? 2%Overall, which movie had the most amazing costumes, hair and makeup? Dreamgirls ? 24% The Devil Wears Prada ? 31% Kinky Boots ? 5% Marie Antoinette ? 19% Pirates of the Caribbean, Dead Man’s Chest ? 19% Running with Scissors ? 2%Best Action Scene? The boat turns over, Poseidon – 10% Opening parkour/jumping/chase scene, Casino Royale ? 36% The non-stop snake action, Snakes on a Plane ? 5% Effie sings “And I Am Telling You…” Dreamgirls ? 24% Steve’s explosive “messy” scene, Adam & Steve ? 8% Any of the orgy scenes, Shortbus ? 17%Best Use of a Prop? The nonstop cell-phone usage, The Departed ? 6% Naked James Bond’s seatless chair, Casino Royale ? 24% The beer bong, Jackass 2 ? 5% Flying fur coats and bags, The Devil Wears Prada ? 32% Graham Norton’s appendages, Another Gay Movie ? 23% That chick who replaced Effie, Dreamgirls ? 10%Other QuestionsCharacter most likely to inspire drag queens? Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep), The Devil Wears Prada ? 30% Any of the women from Dreamgirls – 46% Marie Antoinette, Marie Antoinette – 9% Peneope Cruz’s hot housewife, Volver – 3% Johnny Depp, Pirates of the Carribean ? 12%Most lesbian-ish non-lesbian film of the year? Bloodrayne ? 21% The Descent ? 26% Stick It ? 15% Underworld: Evolution ? 14% John Tucker Must Die ? 24%Biggest large-scale disappointment of the year? All the King’s Men ? 9% The DaVinci Code ? 32% Lady in the Water ? 27% Snakes on a Plane ? 14% The Pink Panther ? 18%Best action movie with a coincidentally gay storyline? Poseidon ? 7% See No Evil ? 3% V for Vendetta ? 47% X-Men: The Last Stand ? 43%Which character would you most wanna get drinks with? James Bond (Daniel Craig), Casino Royale ? 37% Emily (Emily Blunt), The Devil Wears Prada ? 29% Queen Elizabeth (Helen Mirren), The Queen ? 8% Effie White (Jennifer Hudson), Dreamgirls ? 14% The dudes of Beerfest ? 12%Best Film in which to catch a Noah’s Arc star? Darryl Stephens in Another Gay Movie ? 49% Darryl Stephens in Boy Culture ? 14% Wilson Cruz in Coffee Date ? 17% Wilson Cruz in Bam Bam & Celeste ? 8% Rockmond Dunbar in Dirty Laundry ? 12%Movie you’re most looking forward to in 2007? Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix ? 34% Ocean’s 13 ? 6% The Simpsons Movie ? 15% Spider-Man 3 ? 20% Transformers – 8% Zodiac ? 17%Whew! Thanks for voting! Don’t agree with the results? You can still chime in and change who won! ?The Dark Shadows trailer is out at long, long last and looks amazing. And, as awesome as Johnny Depp looks in the role of Barnabas Collins, as stunning as Eva Green looks playing the witch Angelique and as thrilled? as?we are to see Michelle Pfeifer back on screen in a role where she is not romancing Zac Efron, it is Chloe Moretz who in her brief appearance.What’s more, the?kid is 15 and can put Jack Donaghy to shame. Get it girl.Check out the trailer above. ?Lady reporter is back with a special Halloween report and a brand new installment of her classic video series, !Damiana reunites with her pal, ex-Charlie’s Angel and Tahiti Village spokeswoman (played by the hilarious of drag “Chloe Sevigny” fame) to get her advice on how to best enjoy the spooky surprises and marvelous mischief of Halloween!Be afraid. THERE WILL BE BLOOD.Love Damiana? Want more? Get much more of her via , and dig into her of ! ? Who’s the skinny hippie with Ms. Damiana? Say hello to Raja, y’all!!!! PRIDE! Talk about stealth journalism! At L.A. Gay Pride 2011, newslady and LogoTV.com personality used her lady reporter wiles to slip into the VIP tent! There, she chatted with , who performed her new single on the L.A. Pride Main Stage.And that was just the beginning… Also amongst the mayhem backstage Damiana chatted with Manila Luzon, Morgan McMichaels, R&B pop diva Mya, “NCIS”‘s Pauley Perrette, Kat Graham, Perez Hilton, drag queen porn director Chi Chi LaRue (flanked by two porn stars from AustinZane.com), Jessica & Hunter, Drew Droege (of drag “Chloe Sevigny” fame), drag comediennes Kelly Mantle and Willam Belli and many more.And er, um… Much of the language in this video is rather NSFW. You’ll love it. And stick around for the end when Damiana interviews two full-on human-sized vaginas. Now that’s Pride!!!! Oh, Hollywood… I love how in L.A. even Gay Pride is a celebrity-riddled affair. BAM!!!!!!And don’t miss Damiana’s weekly recaps all summer long for the new season of . Do you love some draggedy schooling? Then sign up for a with Damiana! ? And your big honorees for L.A. Pride are… Magaret & Andy!!! LOOOOOVE them! Pride Season is nearly here! As every good gay knows, every June brings a rainbow-filled Pride month, with celebrations from coast to coast celebrating the spirit of equality and LGBT pride that was launched officially at the Stonewall riots in New York City back in 1969. Expect parades, rallies, social events, dance parties, political moments and a focus on how far the LGBT community has come in the past 40+ years and on the new battles we’re still fighting (gay marriage, adoption rights, equal protection under the law, hate crimes). And what’s Pride without a few boldfaced names to lend a bit of celebrity wattage to our annual proceedings. (Remember when Lady Gaga was new to us all and rocked San Francisco Pride wayyyyy back in 2008? Awww, monster memories…) Here’s a very early and quick rundown of who you can expect to see onstage at a festival or riding atop a convertible in big-time parades in three big-deal cities!L.A. PRIDE, JUNE 12-14One the earliest big Pride celebrations will take place in L.A. the weekend of June 12-14 and as would befit any celebration in the land of showbiz, expect names, names, NAMES!First off, L.A. Pride has two fab gaytastic celebs selected as their big this year. At the top of the heap is Margaret Cho, who’s being honored with L.A. Pride’s Morris Kight Lifetime Achievement Award, which recognizes an individual whose lifetime of work has left a lasting major imprint on the LGBT community. And who better than our community’s #1 champion, Ms. Cho. She’s a killer comedian, fab actress, major activist and a staunch humanitarian bringing laughter to the world, and especially the LGBT community, as she advocates for acceptance and equality.Also up for big props in L.A. is Bravo-lebrity Andy Cohen, host of the channel’s “Watch What Happens Live” (and all those “Housewife” reunion specials). Cohen will receive the Person of the Year award, which is given annually to an individual who is continually involved in an important undertaking that makes a positive statement for the LGBT community as a whole. Well done, Andy! Here’s a peek at some of the sassy talent hosting your Pride Fest in L.A. Expect to see Cho and Cohen all over West Hollywood’s Pride festivities throughout the weekend. And they’re just the tip of the celeb iceberg at L.A. Pride. On Friday night, the big women’s event, The Purple Party, will feature a performance from music superstar Macy Gray. Then on Saturday and Sunday, the Pride Festival will feature a massive cavalcade of bigtime performes on its stages, including (get ready) as Candis Cayne, Drew Droege as Chloe, Jessica & Hunter, Rhea Litre, Mr. Gay USA Eddie Rabon and others! for L.A.’s Pride Fest will include (for starters) Cece Peniston, Prince Poppycock, Mya, Matt Morris, Our Lady J, Aimee Allen, the Perry Twins, and Sunday look out for pop diva Estelle, hottie Sam Sparro, Magaret Cho, Justin Utley, Kat Graham, TranzKontinental and lots more! For the full run-down visit LAPride.org. And, some of your onstage musical talent for L.A.! Encore, encore! TWIN CITIES PRIDE, JUNE 25 & 26Pride is by no means limited to just coastal celebrations. All across the big fab U.S. you can march and party with likeminded and celebratory LGBT’ers and their friends and family. And of the biggest and best parties anywhere is , which rocks Minneapolis/St. Paul the last weeked in June.And yes, they’ve roped in some star quality talent to take the stage and thrill the masses. For their big Pride in Concert event on Saturday night at Loring Park, dance under the stars with queer rap/pop superstars God-dess and She, and then keep moving as the Billboard’s dance charttopper Kaci Battaglia gets things rolling. And finally, wrap up the Prideful night with pop legend Deborah Gibson, delivering her classic and hits from Broadway and beyond. And yes, there will be fireworks to cap off the night.NEW YORK CITY PRIDE, JUNE 18-26Yep, NYC is the big granddaddy of Pride. After all right back in 1969, this is where it all began. So it’s not surprising that every year the city is packed with starry fierce events popping up all around Pride. Even our run-of-the-mill local politicians marching in the parade are superstars (Bloomberg! Cuomo! The Clintons! Names, Sweetie, names!!). Dance parties are hosted by world-class DJs, any bar may be crammed for gay reality starlets, and even our clubkids are nationally known (Work, Amanda Lepore!)So for our official slots of Pride Grand Marshal, Heritage of Pride tends to choose inspiring local talent or strong grass roots activist types at Grand Marshals for the big . This year it’s all about honoring journalist and rabble-rouser Dan Savage and his partner Terry Miller for their work creating the life-saving “It Gets Better” campaign. Also, local activist legend Rev. Pat Bumgardner is honored for her lifetime of work for the community, and NYC’s flamboyant fundraisers, the Imperial Court of NY wil also be bearing the scepters of official Grand Marshals. Who’s-who at NYC Pride? (Clockwise from top left) Oh Land, Terry Miller & Dan Savage, DJ Lina, DJ Ana Paula and your fab Pride Rally host Ross Mathews! Also, this year Pride Week kicks off with the annual , held for the second year in a row at Summerstage in Central park. It’s on Sunday, June 18, hosted by TV personality Ross Mathews (Loooove him!) and indie-pop siren Oh Land will be headlining. And lined up for Sunday’s legendary (aka “the Pier Dance”) you’ll find international circuit superstar-DJ Ana Paula helming the decks. And she’s supported by opening DJs (and NYC legends Lina and Vito Fun. The children will be twirling!!! And as always, there’s the wide open possibility for a big special superstar performer. In year’s past, Jennifer Hudson, Jennifer Lopez, Whitney Houston and other mega-talents have surprised the mobs. Who might show up this year? Who can say? Get your ticket early (if dancing amond shirtless throngs is your thang) and find out! Of course, no matter where you celebrate Pride ? L.A., Minneapolis, NYC or in Peoria or Palm Beach ? you’re the real star. Helleaux, Happy proud traveler! As Gaga would say, “Paws up!” And let your fierce freak flag fly!!!For more on L.A. Pride, visit ; for details on Twin Cities Pride head to ; and for all the basics on the official NYC Pride happenings, check out . ? Best Coast’s Bethany and Bobb. They’re gonna show you their deal. L.A.’s (Hi Bethany!) has something big coming at you. The indie/surfy-pop titans have teamed up with director/actress/icon(?) Drew Barrymore, and together they’ve cooked up a video for Best Coast’s next single “Our Deal.” And that’s not all! The video stars Teen Wolf’s , Kick-Ass star Chloe Moretz, Miranda Cosgrove, Donald Glover, Alia Shawkat and Shailene Woodley. AND… Here’s a sneak peek JUST. FOR. YOU. And yes, I’m already way into the Grease meets Rebel Without a Cause meets West Side Story meets The Warriors vibe of what’s happening. And Chloe’s blonde hair??? SOLD!The full “Our Deal” video as well as fun bonus clips and behind-the-scenes stuff will get posted next Tuesday (August 2). But we just wanted to spice up your Thursday a little with this tease.And meanwhile, BC is all summer. Go see ‘em!Zing! ?While You Were Sleeping: Kristen Stewart’s ‘Vanity Fair’ Cover?Drake and Chris in happier times. Photo Credit: Getty Images?While You Were Working: Kirk Cameron Really Is The Worst Ever?Happy Friday! Here’s what happened while you were preparing for your weekend:* “,” a hilarious “ode” to internet trolls by Isabel Fay and Clever Pie just came out today, and we predict it will be one of the biggest viral videos of all time, because it’s not just funny, it’s useful! Everyone is going to paste it into every trolled conversation. (It really is very funny though, too!)* , but is okay enough to claim it wasn’t her fault so it’s probably no big deal.* and watching Cops with his husband Jonathan Adler, and about getting mistaken for a beloved Will & Grace character.* Is Mad Men ?* There’s now a .* to play a woman who was born a man in the most revealing Hit & Miss teaser yet.* The while clothed!* Or, if you prefer shirtless men, whoa!* This week’s with Louis Virtel is all about Pride: ?Yep, we are still talking about this Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes divorce. ?While You Were Working: ‘Girls’ Snags Patrick Wilson?Forget about that , television has introduced a whole crop of characters who would be far, far worse to live with than the boozy and immoral Chloe. There is every male cast member on Smash, whose egos would drive you to lay in traffic no doubt, Andy and April over on Parks & Rec whose complete disregard for a clean living area and utensils would have even the most understanding roomie moving out in days and most every character on a CBS sitcom, just because.These five however seem like they would be the absolute worst. Take a look.Jess (New Girl) She may be “adorkable” and sweet as pie, but Jess is one giant . She is always perky and happy, something no one enjoys all the time, and she is FULL of suggestions. In fact, she spends almost every week helping her male roommates change their lives. Now we love this show and it is amazingly written, we are just saying that thirty minutes a week with Jess is ideal for us, living with someone like that however would drive us insane.Michelle Duggar (X Kids and Counting) “Guess what roomie? I am pregnant. Again.” Michelle and her family are a lovely group but can you imagine living with this woman? She is probably always eating and you know you are going to have to take her to the doctor on a weekly basis. What’s worse, she is never going to have a tampon or a condom when you need one. And what kind of roommate is that?Shadow Monster (Game of Thrones) We know but it looks like it just lives wherever it damn well pleases, whether you invited it or not. Also, given its shadowy looking acrylic nails and fangs, something tells us that Shadow Monster is a wee bit murderous. Not to mention a night owl from what we have seen, and no one wants a quiet night of sleep interrupted by a psychotic shadow.Cat (My Cat From Hell) Just watch. Also, this poor, poor man.That Bitch Edith (Downton Abbey) Let’s say you are having a fun night with a guy and one thing leads to another and he comes home and you two are having some bedroom fun and he dies. Awful, horrible moment and you want your roommate of all people to understand, but this bitch will straight up start a letter writing campaign to bring you down. What’s worse, . A future spinster does not a good roomie make. ? Chloe Sevigny dresses down (and gets sweaty, sort of) for the global AIDS drama, 3 Needles. is a moving new film about the perverse economics and complicated psychology driving the global AIDS epidemic at the beginning of the 21st century. It features a rock solid all-star cast (as in , , , , , ) and is divided into three distinct parts, each telling a unique local story about AIDS and the havoc it continues to wreak. Olympia Dukakis doesn’t appear until the third section of the film but her character (a nun!) also narrates the entire film. (Which is a good thing, because Dukakis sort of elevates anything she’s involved with. Except for maybe Look Who’s Talking Now.) Lucy Liu: Oustanding in her field.The first segment of the movie takes place in rural China and stars Lucy Liu as an Jin Ping, a woman who sets up an illegal blood bank to sell blood products on the black market. Ping’s “company” pays local residents to donate blood and then ships the blood for sale elsewhere. While Ping’s business has a professional and medical veneer, it is actually just an illegal smuggling racket like any other, and the business ends up causing a local epidemic which leaves most of its host village sick or dead. Beautifully shot in northern Taiwan, this part of the film is entirely spoken in Mandarin (who knew the New York City-raised Liu actually spoke Chinese?!). Liu does a fantastic job of portraying the struggle her character faces between her own financial needs and the realization that she is responsible for much of the devastation around her. Like the film in general, this story flows easily from the incredibly personal and small scale story of one woman to the much wider social significance of her actions. Mom Stockard and son Shawn Ashmore. Giving new meaning to “blood” relations.“3 Needles, Part Deux” takes place in Quebec and is performed in a combination of English and French. (Yep, this flick’s language-tastic!) It stars Shawn Ashmore as Denys, a small-time straight porn star who passes his monthly HIV tests by substituting his dying father’s blood for his own. Stockard Channing plays Denys’s mom, a woman who has to cope with both her husband’s and her son’s illnesses. Once Denys is exposed and can no longer perform in porn, Channing (serving up frazzled fierceness and a Quebecois-accent) comes up with an insurance fraud scheme that solves their financial problems, but doesn’t absolve either of the guilt associated with Denys’s deceitful past and irresponsible behavior. Channing, as usual, is shockingly brilliant as she transforms from a run-down waitress to a wealthy but troubled scam artist. Ashmore plays a porn star. This is a pic from a pilgrim porn scene. Really.The third and final part of the film stars Olympia Dukakis, Chloe Sevigny and Sandra Oh as habit-clad missionaries sent to South Africa to save as many dying souls as possible. They set up camp in a small mission atop a seaside hill in what may be one of the world’s most striking locations. Faced with the difficult prospect of helplessly watching many of the locals die, Chloe Sevigny’s character, Clara, gets involved in the lives of one family of orphaned children and ends up making a deal with a local Afrikaans plantation director which helps the kids, but tests the strength of her beliefs. All three actresses are great here (as is the rest of the cast). And yes, Chloe totally rocks with nun realness. Talk about versatile. From The Brown Bunny to this! Dukakis & Sevigny — such devoted sisters.It was great to see Olympia Dukakis and Sandra Oh together again (astute LOGO watchers will remember that they appeared before together in ). Chloe Sevigny is at her best here ? the perfect combination of sincere innocence and worldly sex appeal (which may sound strange considering the whole nun thing ? but it’s perfect for the character). Sandra Oh: A river runs near her. succeeds best at dramatizing the complexity of the AIDS epidemic around the world. The crisis moves ahead at full force, and the reasons for this are many, from financial to governmental to emotional to religious to psychological and beyond. Individuals bare significant responsibility for the spread of the disease, both those who carry it and those who facilitate its spread, but blame is often hard to assign. Interestingly, there is almost no gay presence in the film. Gay cinephiles take note: The only gay character appears in the Quebec story: when Stockard Channing’s character learns of her son’s infection she goes to a community heath center to get information and overhears a gay man speaking in a support group about his path to infection. As is the case throughout the film, this character’s struggle with his own illness as well as with the reasons why he let himself become infected, and it’s presented in an unusually subtle and complicated way ? at a time when HIV’s means of transmission and protection methods are widely known, the reasons why HIV continues to spread so virulently are obviously not easy to explain. This film doesn’t shy away from the difficult questions and ends up telling a troubling but moving story. My big issue with this film (which isn’t that big) is that the scenes in China and Africa are so incredibly beautiful that they risk overly romanticizing rural life in these countries. The impoverished residents of the rural Chinese village wear incredibly ornate clothing and the rolling hills of the African coast are staggering in their natural glory. Granted, the beauty of these settings contrasts with the sadness of the stories in a way that makes the human tragedy seem even more senseless, but it also felt at times like period film about the colonial era. I found myself feeling that perhaps the local customs and traditions were being overly exoticized, although of course this is part of the point ? (post-)colonial culture and economics continue to have new and heartbreaking impact across the globe. Regardless, as we commemorate yet another World AIDS Day, this is a movie worth checking out.If you wanna read more about the film, has up with director Thom Fitzgerald, Lucy Liu and GMHC honcho Dr. Marjorie Hill.Finally, for a wee bit of levity, here’s a pic of Sandra Oh in her brilliant turn as Bambi Kanetaka from the Tales of the City series. Love her! “Oh,” yes indeed! ? Bill Clinton: Talkin’ the World AIDS Day talk on CNN?and leading the charge to provide cheaper AIDS meds worldwide. today about the current state of the fight against AIDS. And, the former President has with some .However, the , critics say.In a special World AIDS Day report, . And they’ve also got a sobering report on the current state of the AIDS pandemic, and a special video focus on the film out today, 3 Needles, which focuses on the world view of the disease and stars Lucy Liu, Chloe Sevigny, Shawn Ashmore and Sandra Oh., too. Meaning, it’s time to customize the attack culturally, depending where you’re focusing. These include looking at tactics which involve Circumcision? Um, yes. But it’s a hetero-related thing. Read more .Not surprisingly, 25 years ago. But you can join in the fight.And even (Remember the “Mmm-Bop” boys?) . You can check it . ? – scribegrrrl from Brad Brevet of RopeOfSilicon.com recently compiled a Of all time? That’s ambitious. It actually seems to be just of the last 10 years or so. Here are some of his choices (he didn’t really specify any criteria) and some of my additions.1. The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants (2005)Here’s Brevet’s take: "I realize how much little girls seem to love this film, and even some older girls as well, but to deny the fact that The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants is an awful title demands a smidge of insanity."Nah, it’s a great title! There are pants. And a sisterhood. And traveling. What could be more appealing? And all you have to do is see "America Ferrera" on the poster and the rest of the words disappear anyway. (Although I will admit that this is an easy title to pornify, which to me is an important consideration for titles. Don’t call your movie Eyes Wide Shut if you don’t want it to inspire Legs Wide Open.)2. Thir13en Ghosts (2001)Brevet says, "Substituting numbers for letters in a title is not cute, cool or scary." I totally concur. In fact, it’s ugly, lame and off-putting.3. Lucky Number Slevin (2006) Sigh. Don’t even get me started, as Molly Shannon‘s lesbian comedian character would say.4. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford Word. Rather, way too many of them.5. I Heart Huckabees (2004)Well, maybe the title is weird ? especially now that the name Huckabee will evermore be associated with Republicans ? but the movie’s pretty great, mostly because of Lily Tomlin. (And it’s , as it happens.)Here are some additions from me ? trying to expand the scope a little beyond recent movies:1. C.H.U.D. (1984)It just sounds gross. But I guess that’s the point, since it stands for Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dwellers.2. What Dreams May Come (1998)This was my girlfriend’s immediate response when I told her about this post. And talk about easy to pornify ? I remember everyone calling it Wet Dreams May Come. Because how can you not?3. The People Under the Stairs (1991)It seems like a placeholder title. Like "The One About the People Under the Stairs."4. Female Perversions (1996)I like the movie, but the title is just asking for trouble.5. The Brown Bunny (2003) It sounds kind of sweet. Not disgusting, like it actually is. Vincent Gallo and Chloe Sevigny are not anything like a cuddly child’s toy in this movie. And then once you know what happens in the film, the whole concept of a brown bunny is forever tainted.6. Relax … It’s Just Sex! (1998)Again, I kinda liked the movie, but way to guarantee that nobody will take you seriously. And you don’t even need to pornify it ? it’s already pornified!7. The Upside of Anger (2005)The downside of trying to seem poetic and deep.8. Everybody Gets It in the End (1982)Sadly, it was just what you thought it would be. Again, no pornification necessary. (Apparently it was also called Tag: The Assassination Game, which isn’t better. My hometown movie theater went with the first option, and I can’t believe my parents actually let me see this movie.)9. Maggie and Annie (2002)Oh, wait; that’s not the worst title ever ? it’s the worst movie ever. It should have been called Don’t Watch This Unless You’re Seeking a Lobotomy via Movie.I seem to be thinking of bad movies rather than bad titles, so I’ll stop now! ? Join the likes of these… Audition for Project Runway Season 4! wants to flirt with you. is ready to sneer at you. is ready to beam his orange-hued countenance upon you. And , well… She’s probably busy nursing one of her 14 Seal pups right about now, but she’d be more than happy to show up with crazy hair, raise a glass of champagne with you, welcome you, and then return at the end of the challenge to decree your efforts “boring.” See! With all that awaiting you, why wouldn’t you to ?Yep, it’s time, so gather up your sample garments, your sketchbooks and a whole garment bag full of crazy and hoof it to L.A., Chicago, Miami (Hi !!!) or NYC to get your creative cooter on TV. The audition roadshow begins March 30th, so step on it!More fashion drama after the jump…‘s got a hunch the time is right for to take this show by storm. (R.I.P. Zulema.) I mean, after (gay, white, male), (straight, Asian, female) and (straight, white, male), it seems like the moment for a cool lesbian (perhaps of color?) to come and get this whole fashion thing sorted.Of course, be warned: As this article shows, , even if you win.If nothing else you can get the satisfaction of beating either or when one of them returns for yet another stab at this. Or maybe will resurface. Fleurchons are forever, people!See you at Camp Jubilee Jumbles! ?1-mile awards at the Long Island Festival of Races Published: May 7, 2012 5:11 PM ONE MILE RUN - MALE OVERALLPlace First Name Last Name Ag S Town St Time ===== ======================= == = ==================== == ======= 1 ADENIR FUENTES 26 M ROCKY POINT NY 5:53 2 COLLIN LYNCH 48 M GLENDALE NY 6:01 3 ANTHONY MONACO 12 M CENTER MORICHES NY 6:23 4 CHRIS MESSINA 16 M VALLEY STREAM NY 6:28 5 PETER MARTIN 62 M BELLMORE NY 6:32 6 THOMAS DICKSON 19 M MERRICK NY 6:47 7 DANIEL...?100 Holes of Golf to benefit youth ranch June 2, 2012 6:30 PM By MARK HERRMANN Anyone who says "I just can't get enough golf" might want to check with some East End stalwarts after they leave the course a week from Tuesday. Each golfer will play five rounds, and then 10 more holes after that, in one day at Olde Vine Golf Club in Riverhead. Their 100 Holes of Golf will raise funds for the Timothy Hill Children's Ranch (www.timothyhillranch.org)."What they do at that...?10k awards at the Long Island Festival of Races Published: May 7, 2012 5:19 PM *******10K - MALE OVERALL WINNER ************ Place First Name Last Name Ag S Town St Finish Pace ===== ======================= == = ==================== == ======= ===== 1 ELMUSTAFA MCHKIRARE 31 M ASTORIA NY 34:19 5:32 2 PETER FRANCIS 21 M JACKSON HEIGHTS NY 35:54 5:47 3 CORY BATTLES 32 M UTICA NY 38:12 6:09 4 JAIME PALACIOS 57 M FRESH MEADOWS NY 39:04 6:18 5 THOMAS JOSLIN 33 M YORKVILLE NY 39:19...?A dragon-tattooed girl fight Published: December 15, 2011 12:34 PM By JOHN ANDERSON. Special to Newsday The cinema gets a much-needed surge of "Girl" power Tuesday with the release of director David 's version of "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo," which takes the concept of female empowerment to complex, violent extremes, and kicks off what could be the season's hottest debate among movie fans: Who's your favorite Salander? Is it Noomi , the riveting Swedish-Spanish actress who played the graphic, Sapphic, punkish and perturbed Lisbeth Salander in the original Scandinavian adaptation of the bestseller? Or is it (""), the American ingenue who plays director Fincher's spacier, jumpier, more vulnerable version of the late 's signature swashbuckling she-nerd? Rapace seemed perfect, but has her virtues; each is an affecting centerpiece of a sex-and-murder story that is destined to be one of the season's bigger hits (and a likely Oscar contender to boot). But each is also part of the inevitable debate that erupts whenever "improves" a foreign movie, especially one that plenty of people don't think needed the attention. Why a remake? There are a couple of arguments for remaking "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo," even if the story remains essentially the same: Disgraced investigative journalist Mikael Blomkvist () is hired by the wealthy Swedish industrialist Henrik Vanger () to investigate the 36-year-old disappearance of his great-niece, whom Henrik believes was murdered. When Mikael discovers that Lisbeth () has hacked into his computer -- because Vanger hired her to do a background check -- Mikael enlists her in his search for the killer, which doesn't lead very far from the Vanger homestead. Originally titled "Men Who Hate Women," 's novel was first adapted by Danish director , but as a foreign-language film in the U.S. market didn't draw the kind of numbers Fincher's film is sure to attract. Also, the material seems more than ripe for Fincher's elevated sense of noirish style (as seen in "The Dark Knight," "Panic Room," and even, to a degree, ""). So "Girl" may be a special case. But putting economics aside, is there a solid artistic defense for America's virtual knee-jerk co-opting of material originally made famous elsewhere? Sometimes, it's a really bad idea. Among the seemingly endless examples of misguided remakes, the original, 1954 Japanese "Gojira" was far better than 1998's "Godzilla"; the original "La Cage Aux Folles" (1978) was better in French than "The Birdcage" (1996) was in English; anyone familiar with 1955's "The Ladykillers" cringed at the Coen brothers' 2004 remake. Sometimes, though, it's a tossup: "The Seven Samurai" (1954) is a masterpiece of world cinema, but there's a lot to be said for its Old West counterpart, "The Magnificent Seven" (1960). Likewise, "The Departed" (2006) which was inspired by the thriller "Infernal Affairs" (2002). Plenty of people are just as fond, and frightened, of "The Ring" (2002) as they were of its Japanese ancestor, "Ring" (1998). It's also hard to believe that "Some Like It Hot" (1959) isn't vastly superior to the film that preceded it -- "Fanfaren der liebe" (West Germany, 1951). "Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" is a remake of a foreign film, but it's specifically a remake of a film from Scandinavia, which has been supplying with raw material since "Intermezzo" (1936) starring -- which was remade as "Intermezzo" (1939) starring Ingrid . A film by the other Swedish , Ingmar -- "The Virgin Spring" (1960) -- was the source material for horrormeister 's "The Last House on the Left" (1972). More recently, "Let the Right One In" (2008), the acclaimed Swedish vampire tale, was remade last year as "Let Me In," starring Chloe Moretz ("Hugo"). "That's about the only one that wasn't offensive," said Jytte Jensen, a curator of film at the , and a Dane by birth. She hasn't seen "Girl with the Dragon Tattoo," but was looking forward to it. Most of the time, however, she said the effort is a wasted one. Changing the tone "What's important about a film isn't just the story," Jensen said. "It's all the texture behind the story." The idea that audiences can only understand a movie in the context of their own home "means in most cases that you take all the excitement and originality out of a film, because it's exactly the texture, the locale, the country, the tone, even the foreign language that emits something to the viewer, even if you don't understand it. All of that gets lost." " 'Insomnia' did fairly well as a remake," said veteran Manhattan publicist and Nordic film specialist Gary Springer, of the Norwegian psychodrama of 1997. "The Norwegian version was much better, but the American film had and , and in some ways Williams was more interesting that the Norwegian guy. Of course, no can compare to Stellan's performance," Springer said, referring to Stellan Skarsgard -- the Swedish actor who, coincidentally, plays a central character in the new "Girl With the Dragon Tattoo." At least Skarsgard gets to play a Swede this time around: Hollywood has cast him as just about every flavor of European, mostly villains, and in doing so made him representative of the American film industry's attitude toward anything foreign, or "exotic": It's strange, it's scary, and -- in the case of "Dragon Tattoo" -- it could make a lot of money. The Swede Smell of Success Like remakes in general, the one-way traffic between Hollywood and Scandinavia continues unabated: Easy Money ("High School Musical") is reportedly planning to produce and star in a retitled remake of the Swedish hit "Snabba Cash." The Snowman is reportedly going to direct this serial-killer thriller from the book by the Norwegian novelist , from whose work "Headhunters" -- one of the most successful Scandinavian films of all time -- was adapted. TrollHunter A remake of the 2010 Norwegian mockumentary was announced this year by director Chris ("The Lightning Thief") Columbus' company, 1492. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy The remake of the John LeCarre novel (and celebrated BBC TV miniseries) was directed by Tomas Alfredson of "Let the Right One In." "Tinker" opened to spectacular returns Dec. 9. ?A start to the holiday season at the Montauk Lighthouse Sunday November 28, 2010 4:19 PM By Erin Geismar Photo credit: Erin Geismar The Montauk Point Lighthouse had a few thousand extra visitors this weekend for the third annual Lighting of the Lighthouse and Christmas celebration.The white Christmas lights that outline the lighthouse tower and keeper’s house were turned on for the first time of the season Saturday night to a crowd of more than 3,000, said Brian Pope, assistant manager of the lighthouse museum.All... ?ABC's fall lineup Tuesday May 17, 2011 10:39 AM By Here's the ABC fall lineup, announced a little while ago. Of note? An all-comedy Wednesday, and the "Charlie's Angels" reboot lands Thursdays at 8. (Hmmm.) "Body of Proof" and "Happy Endings" are back; "Detroit 1--8-7" is not. The lineup and show descriptions: DAY TIME SERIES MONDAY: 8 p.m. “Dancing with the Stars” ;10 p.m. “Castle” TUESDAY: 8 p.m. “Last Man Standing”; 8:30 p.m. “Man Up”; 9 p.m. “Dancing with the Stars the Results Show” ;10 p.m. “Body of Proof” WEDNESDAY: 8 p.m. “The Middle”; 8 p.m. “Suburgatory”; 9 p.m. “Modern Family”; 9:30 p.m. “Happy Endings”; 10 p.m. “Revenge” THURSDAY: 8 p.m. “Charlie’s Angels”; 9 p.m. “Grey’s Anatomy”; 10 p.m. “Private Practice” FRIDAY: 8 p.m. “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition”; 9 p.m. “Shark Tank”; 10 p.m. “20/20” SATURDAY: 8 p.m. “Saturday Night College Football” SUNDAY: 7 p.m. “America’s Funniest Home Videos”; 8 p.m. “Once Upon a Time”; 9 p.m. “Desperate Housewives”; 10 p.m. “Pan Am” NEW FALL AND MIDSEASON SERIES: DRAMA “CHARLIE’S ANGELS” Everyone deserves a second chance -- even a thief, a street racer and a cop who got in a little too deep. After all, the three women who solve cases for their elusive boss, Charlie Townsend, are no saints. They’re angels... Charlie’s Angels. Set in Miami, this fun, glamorous, action-packed take on the 1970s smash hit series introduces us to three new angels, all fearless detectives, head-turning beauties and close friends. There’s Abby (Rachael Taylor), a Park Avenue princess who became a world-class thief. Then there’s Kate (Annie Ilonzeh), a Miami cop who fell from grace, losing both her career and her fiancé. Finally there’s Gloria, a disgraced army lieutenant who has a way with explosives. When one of the angels’ missions ends in Gloria’s tragic death, Charlie persuades them to partner with Gloria’s childhood friend, Eve (Minka Kelly), a street racer with a mysterious past. They may not know each other yet, but one thing’s for sure -- Abby, Kate and Eve will always have each others’ backs. “Charlie’s Angels” stars Annie Ilonzeh (“General Hospital”) as Kate Prince, Minka Kelly (“Parenthood,” “Friday Night Lights”) as Eve, Rachael Taylor (“Grey’s Anatomy”) as Abby Sampson and Ramon Rodriguez (“The Wire,” “Daybreak”) as Bosley. Written and executive-produced by Alfred Gough & Miles Millar (“Smallville”), “Charlie’s Angels” is also executive-produced by Drew Barrymore (“Charlie’s Angels” movies), Leonard Goldberg (the original “Charlie’s Angels”) and Nancy Juvonen (“Charlie’s Angels” movies). It’s directed and executive-produced by Marcos Siega (“Vampire Diaries,” “Dexter”). “Charlie’s Angels” is produced by Millar/Gough Ink, Flower Films and Panda Productions in association with Sony Pictures Television. “GOOD CHRISTIAN BELLES” The soap returns to Dallas in this wicked new drama that shows that you can go home again... but only if you’re ready to face the sins of your past. Amanda Vaughn (Leslie Bibb), once the ultimate high school “mean girl,” is forced to return home in disgrace after her marriage ends in scandal. Amanda is nothing like the girl she was 20 years ago, but as her old classmates reacquaint themselves with the new Amanda, will her home town welcome her with open arms or seek revenge? No one in this town is a saint, but that doesn’t mean they can’t have a heart. As Amanda and her teenage kids try to adjust to their new lives, the ladies from her past alternate between sympathy and scheming. “Good Christian Belles” stars Leslie Bibb (“Iron Man”) as Amanda Vaughn, Kristin Chenoweth (“Pushing Daisies”) as Carlene Cockburn, Annie Potts (“Law and Order: Special Victims Unit,” “Joan of Arcadia”) as Gigi Stopper, Jennifer Aspen (“Rodney”) as Sharon Peacham, Miriam Shor (“Swingtown” “Damages”) as Cricket Caruth-Reilly, Marisol Nichols (“24”) as Heather Cruz, Brad Beyer (“Jericho”) as Zack Peacham, Mark Deklin (“Lone Star”) as Blake Reilly and David James Elliott (“JAG”) as Ripp Cockburn. Based on Kim Gatlin’s hit book, "Good Christian Bitches," “Good Christian Belles” is executive-produced by Darren Star (“Sex and the City”), Robert Harling (“Steel Magnolias”) and Aaron Kaplan. The pilot is written by Robert Harling and executive-produced and directed by Alan Poul. “Good Christian Belles” is produced by ABC Studios. “MISSING” Becca Winstone (Ashley Judd) learns that her son, Michael, disappears while studying abroad, and it’s a race against time when she travels to Europe to track him down. A surprising turn of events reveals just how far one mother will go to protect her family. Exotic locations and thrilling twists will keep you riveted in “Missing.” How far would you go to save the only thing you have left in the world? At 8 years old, Michael watched as his father, CIA agent Paul Winstone, was murdered. Now 10 years later, Paul’s wife, Becca, is faced with the reality of her son growing up. When Michael is afforded the opportunity to study abroad, his mother reluctantly agrees it’s time to let him go. Just a few weeks into his trip Michael disappears, and Becca immediately suspects foul play. When she arrives in Rome, she begins piecing together the clues left behind. It isn’t long before the kidnappers realize they’ve picked a fight with the wrong woman. Becca Winstone has a secret of her own -- before Paul’s death, she was also a lethal CIA agent. But if she wants to find her son alive, Becca will have to rely on old friends and reopen old wounds. Her resourcefulness, skill and determination will be put to the test – but a mother’s love knows no limits. “Missing” stars Ashley Judd (“Double Jeopardy,” “Kiss the Girls”) as Becca Winstone, Sean Bean (“Game of Thrones”) as Paul Winstone, Cliff Curtis (“Trauma”) as Dax, Adriano Giannini (“Oceans Twelve”) as Giancarlo, Nick Eversman (“Cinema Verite”) as Michael Winstone and Tereza Voriskova (“Borgia”) as Oksana. “Missing” comes from writer Gregory Poirier (“National Treasure: Book of Secrets”) and executive producers Gina Matthews, Grant Scharbo (“The Gates”), Steve Shill (Emmy winner for directing “Dexter” who will direct episodes of “Missing”) and James Parriott (“Sons of Anarchy”). “Missing” is produced by Stillking Films. “ONCE UPON A TIME” From the inventive minds of “Lost” executive producers Adam Horowitz and Edward Kitsis comes a bold new imagining of the world, where fairy tales and the modern-day are about to collide. And they all lived happily ever after – or so everyone was led to believe. Emma Swan knows how to take care of herself. She’s a 28-year-old bail bonds collector who’s been on her own ever since she was abandoned as a baby. But when the son she gave up years ago finds her, everything starts to change. Henry is now 10 years old and in desperate need of Emma’s help. He believes that Emma actually comes from an alternate world and is Snow White and Prince Charming’s missing daughter. According to his book of fairy tales, they sent her away to protect her from the Evil Queen’s curse, which trapped the fairy tale world forever, frozen in time, and brought them into our modern world. Of course Emma doesn’t believe a word, but when she brings Henry back to Storybrooke, she finds herself drawn to this unusual boy and his strange New England town. Concerned for Henry, she decides to stay for a while, but she soon suspects that Storybrooke is more than it seems. It’s a place where magic has been forgotten, but is still powerfully close… where fairy tale characters are alive, even though they don’t remember who they once were. The epic battle for the future of all worlds is beginning, but for good to win, Emma will have to accept her destiny and fight like hell. “Once Upon a Time” stars Ginnifer Goodwin (“Big Love”) as Snow White/Sister Mary Margaret, Jennifer Morrison (“House MD”) as Emma Swan, Robert Carlyle (“The Full Monty,” “Trainspotting,” “SGU Stargate Universe”) as Rumplestiltskin/Mr. Gold, Lana Parrilla as Evil Queen/Regina, Jamie Dornan as Sheriff Graham, Jared Gilmore (“Mad Men”) as Henry, Josh Dallas as Prince Charming/John Doe and Raphael Sbarge as Jiminy Cricket/Archie. “Once Upon a Time” was written by Edward Kitsis and Adam Horowitz, who are also executive producers, along with Steve Pearlman (ABC’s “V”). The pilot is directed and executive-produced by Mark Mylod (“Entourage”). “Once Upon a Time” is from ABC Studios. “PAN AM” Passion, jealousy and espionage... They do it all – and they do it at 30,000 feet. The style of the 1960s, the energy and excitement of the Jet Age and a drama full of sexy entanglements deliciously mesh in this thrilling and highly-original new series. In this modern world, air travel represents the height of luxury and Pan Am is the biggest name in the business. The planes are glamorous, the pilots are rock stars and the stewardesses are the most desirable women in the world. Not only are these flyboys and girls young and good looking, but to represent Pan Am they also have to be educated, cultured and refined. They’re trained to handle everything from in-air emergencies to unwanted advances – all without rumpling their pristine uniforms or mussing their hair. There’s Dean (Jonah Lotan) – a cocky, charismatic and ambitious new pilot – the first of a new breed not trained in the war. On the sly against company policy, he’s dating Bridget, a stunning beauty with a mysterious past. A rebellious bohemian, Maggie (Christina Ricci) turns into a buttoned up professional for work so she can see the world. Rounding out the crew are flirtatious Collette (Karine Vanasse), the adventurous Kate (Kelli Garner) and, finally, Laura (Margot Robbie) – Kate’s beauty queen younger sister, a runaway bride, who recently fled a life of domestic boredom to take to the skies. “Pan Am” stars Christina Ricci (“Penelope”) as Maggie, Kelli Garner (“Going the Distance”) as Kate, Karine Vanasse (“Polytechnique”) as Colette, Margot Robbie (“Neighbours”) as Laura, Jonah Lotan (“24”) as Dean and Michael Mosley (“Justified”) as Ted. Jack Orman (“ER,” “Men of a Certain Age,”), Tommy Schlamme (“The West Wing,” “Parenthood,” “Mr. Sunshine”) and Nancy Hult Ganis (“Akleeh and the Bee”) are the executive producers of “Pan Am.” Orman is also the writer, with Schlamme directing. “Pan Am” is produced by Jack Orman Productions, Out of the Blue Entertainment and Shoe Money Productions in association with Sony Pictures Television. “REVENGE” Wealth, beauty and status define the people in this town, but one woman is willing to destroy everyone for the sake of revenge. Emily Thorne (Emily Van Camp) is new to the Hamptons. She’s met some of her wealthy neighbors, has made a few new friends and seemingly blends into the town. But something is a little odd about a young girl living in a wealthy town all on her own, and the truth is that Emily isn’t exactly new to the neighborhood. In fact, this was once her old neighborhood, until something bad happened that ruined her family and their reputation. Now Emily is back, and she’s returned to right some of those wrongs in the best way she knows how – with a vengeance. “Revenge” stars Madeleine Stowe (“We Were Soldiers,” “The Last of the Mohicans”) as Victoria Grayson, Emily Van Camp (“Brothers & Sisters,” “Everwood”) as Emily Thorne, Gabriel Mann (“The Bourne Identity”) as Nolan Ross, Henry Czerny (“Mission: Impossible,” “Clear and Present Danger”) as Conrad Grayson, Ashley Madekwe (“Secret Diary of a Call Girl”) as Ashley Davenport, Nick Wechsler (“Roswell”) as Jack Porter, Josh Bowman (“Prowl”) as Daniel Grayson, Christa B. Allen (“13 Going on 30”) as Charlotte Grayson and Connor Paolo (“Gossip Girl”) as Declan Porter. “Revenge” is written and executive-produced by Mike Kelley (“Swingtown”), along with executive producers Marty Bowen and Wyck Godfrey (“Twilight”). The pilot is directed and executive-produced by Phillip Noyce (“Salt”). “Revenge” is produced by ABC Studios. “THE RIVER” “The River” follows the story of wildlife expert and TV personality Emmet Cole. Emmet set course around the world with his wife, Tess, and son, Lincoln, while filming what would become one of the most popular shows in television. After he goes missing deep in the Amazon, his family, friends and crew set out on a mysterious and deadly journey to find him. Famed explorer Dr. Emmet Cole (Bruce Greenwood) went looking for magic deep in the uncharted Amazon and never returned. The shocking truth about his disappearance is out there, somewhere, just waiting to be discovered. To the millions of kids who grew up watching his nature show, Dr. Cole was a hero. To his own son, Lincoln (Joe Anderson), he was more of an enigma. Now, six months after he vanished, Lincoln is finally ready to bury the past when Dr. Cole’s emergency beacon suddenly goes off. At the urging of his mother, Tess (Leslie Hope), Lincoln reluctantly joins her on a search for his father. To fund the rescue, they agree to let Dr. Cole’s cagey ex-producer, Clark (Paul Blackthorne), film the mission documentary-style. The mixed crew of old friends and new acquaintances includes the sexy and resourceful Lena (Eloise Mumford), loyal mechanic Emilio (Daniel Zacapa) and lethal bodyguard Captain Kurt Brynildson (Thomas Kretschmann). “The River” stars Bruce Greenwood (“Star Trek”) as Emmet Cole, Joe Anderson (“The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Parts 1 and 2”) as Lincoln Cole, Paul Blackthorne (“Lipstick Jungle”) as Clark, Paulina Gaitan as Jahel, Leslie Hope (“24”) as Tess Cole, Eloise Mumford (“Lone Star”) as Lena, Shaun Parkes (“The Mummy Returns”) as Adjay, Thomas Kretschmann (“King Kong”) as Captain Kurt Brynildson and Daniel Zacapa (“Resurrection Blvd.”) as Emilio. “The River,” from Amblin’s Steven Spielberg, Daryl Frank and Justin Falvey, showrunner/executive producer Michael Green (“Heroes,” “Kings”), is also executive-produced by Oren Peli (creator of “Paranormal Activity”), Zack Estrin, Jason Blum and Steven Schneider. Teleplay by Michael R. Perry and Michael Green, story by Oren Peli & Michael R. Perry and Michael Green. The pilot is directed by Jaume Collet-Serra and produced by ABC Studios. “SCANDAL” From the creator and executive producers of “Grey’s Anatomy” and “Private Practice” comes a drama revolving around the life and work of a professional crisis manager and her dysfunctional staff. A former media relations consultant to the president, Olivia Pope (Kerry Washington) dedicates her life to protecting and defending the public images of our nation’s elite. After leaving the White House, the power consultant opened her own firm, hoping to start a new chapter -- both professionally and personally -- but she can’t seem to completely cut ties with her past. Slowly it becomes apparent that her staff, who specialize in fixing the lives of other people, can’t quite fix the ones closest at hand -- their own. “Scandal” stars Kerry Washington (“Ray”) as Olivia Pope, Henry Ian Cusick (“Lost”) as Stephen Finch, Columbus Short (“Stomp the Yard”) as Harrison Wright, Guillermo Diaz (“Half-Baked”) as Huck, Darby Stanchfield as Abby Whelan, Katie Lowes as Quinn Perkins, Tony Goldwyn (“Ghost”) as President Fitzgerald Grant and Jeff Perry (“Grey’s Anatomy”) as Cyrus. “Scandal” was written by Shonda Rhimes (“Grey’s Anatomy,” “Private Practice”). Rhimes and Betsy Beers (“Grey’s Anatomy,” “Private Practice”) are executive producers. Paul McGuigan is the director. “Scandal” is produced by ABC Studios. COMEDY “APARTMENT 23” After a naïve Midwestern girl’s big city dreams are dashed her first week in New York, she finds herself living with her worst nightmare in this hilarious, contemporary comedy about a female odd couple who are surrounded by an outrageous cast of characters. June (Dreama Walker) moves to Manhattan for a dream job and the perfect company apartment, only to have them disappear in a puff of reality, thanks to a chief executive from the Bernie Madoff school of embezzlement. Deep in debt and out on the streets, June scrambles to land a job and place to live. It seems her luck has turned around when she gets hired at a coffee shop and finds Chloe (Krysten Ritter), a charming, vivacious roommate... with the morals of a pirate. She swindles June out of all her savings, but she and her snarky friend, James Van Der Beek (playing himself), soon learn that, just because June’s naïve, she isn’t stupid. June ingeniously turns the tables on Chloe, who is so shocked about being scammed herself that she decides to pull June into her colorful band of friends. Sure, it’s all dysfunctional, bizarre and overwhelming, but so is New York City. And with the help of Chloe and the other oddballs around her, June might just learn the survival secrets she needs to make it there. “Apartment 23” stars Krysten Ritter (“Breaking Bad,” “Gilmore Girls”) as Chloe, Dreama Walker (“The Good Wife,” “Gossip Girl”) as June, Eric André as Mark, Michael Blaiklock as Eli and James Van Der Beek (“Varsity Blues,” “Dawson’s Creek”) as James Van Der Beek. Created and written by Nahnatchka Kahn (“American Dad”), “Apartment 23” is executive-produced by Kahn, Jason Winer (“Modern Family”), Dave Hemingson (“American Dad,” “How I Met Your Mother”) and Jeff Morton (“Modern Family”). Winer is also the director. “Apartment 23” is a production of 20th Century Fox Television. “LAST MAN STANDING” Today it’s a woman’s world, and this man’s man is on a mission to get men back to their rightful place in society. Tim Allen returns to ABC in this new comedy from Jack Burditt (“30 Rock”). Men may have built civilizations, invented the locomotive and created ESPN, but they’re about to find out that it’s not a man’s world anymore. You can’t get manlier than Mike Baxter. He’s the marketing director for an iconic outdoor sporting goods store, he loves to have adventures while he’s traveling for work and, of course, he drives a pick-up truck. While Mike is king of the hill at work, he’s the odd man out in a home that is dominated by women -- namely his wife, Vanessa, and their three daughters, 22- year-old Kristin, 17-year-old Mandy and 14-year-old Eve. After being a stay-at-home mom for years, Vanessa recently returned to the workplace and was quickly promoted (much to the dismay of her primarily male co-workers). As a result of Vanessa’s increased work load, Mike is pulled into more hands-on parenting than ever before. The show stars Tim Allen (“Home Improvement”) as Mike, Nancy Travis (“So I Married an Axe Murderer,” “Three Men and a Baby”) as Vanessa, Molly Ephraim as Mandy, Alexandra Krosney as Kristin, Kaitlyn Dever as Eve and Hector Elizondo (“Chicago Hope”) as Ed. “Last Man Standing” was written by Jack Burditt (“30 Rock”), who also serves as executive producer with Tim Allen, Becky Clements, Marty Adelstein (“Prison Break”), Shawn Levy (“Night at the Museum”), Richard Baker (“The Santa Clause,” The Santa Clause 2”) and Rick Messina (“The Santa Clause,” The Santa Clause 2”). John Pasquin (“Home Improvement,” “The Santa Clause”) directed. “Last Man Standing” is from Twentieth Century Fox Television. “MAN UP” Three modern men try to get in touch with their inner tough guys and redefine what it means to be a “real man” in this funny and relatable comedy. Will’s grandfather fought in WWII. Will’s father fought in Vietnam. Will plays Call of Duty on his PS3 and drinks non-dairy hazelnut creamer. So what happened to all the real men? They’re still here -- they just smell like pomegranate body wash now. Meet Will (Mather Zickel). His evolved, sensitive nature is why his awesome wife, Theresa (Teri Polo), married him. But Will and his friends find themselves wondering -- in a world of Axe ads and manscaping -- what does it really mean to be a guy anymore? Will is more interested in finding the perfect gift for his son Nathan’s (Jake Johnson) 13th birthday than in doing his job selling insurance; sensitive soul Craig (Christopher Moynihan) still pines for his college ex, Lisa; and Kenny (Dan Fogler) clamps down on his anger and asks himself, “What would Tobey Maguire do?,” when his ex, Brenda (Amanda Detmer), starts seeing a guy (Henry Simmons) who is everything he’s not and much better looking. After Craig crashes Lisa’s wedding to try to win her back, they are all faced with an opportunity to Man Up and be like their forefathers. The show stars Christopher Moynihan as Craig, Mather Zickel (“The Cape”) as Will, Dan Fogler (“Balls of Fury”) as Kenny, Teri Polo (“Meet the Fockers”) as Theresa, Amanda Detmer (“What About Brian”) as Brenda and Henry Simmons (“Shark”) as Grant. “Man Up” comes from writer/executive producer/actor Christopher Moynihan (“100 Questions”), executive producer Victor Fresco (“Better off Ted”), Ron West and Kelly Kulchak of Tagline Television (Psych) and director Beth McCarthy-Miller (“SNL,” “30 Rock”). ”Man Up” is produced by ABC Studios. “SUBURGATORY” Single father George only wants the best for his 16-year-old daughter, Tessa. So when he finds a box of condoms on her nightstand, he moves them out of their apartment in New York City to a house in the suburbs. But all Tessa sees is the horror of over-manicured lawns and plastic Franken-moms. Being in the ‘burbs can be hell, but it also may just bring Tessa and George closer than they’ve ever been. Tessa (Jane Levy) and George (Jeremy Sisto) have been on their own ever since Tessa’s mom pulled a “Kramer vs. Kramer” before she was even potty trained. So far, George has done a pretty good job of raising Tessa without a maternal figure in their lives, but suddenly he’s feeling a little out of his league. So it’s goodbye New York City and hello suburbs. At first Tessa is horrified by the big-haired, fake-boobed mothers and their sugar-free Red Bull-chugging kids. But little by little she and her dad begin finding a way to survive on the clean streets of the ‘burbs. Sure, the neighbors might smother you with love while their kids stare daggers at your back, but underneath all that plastic and caffeine, they’re really not half bad. And they do make a tasty pot roast. The show stars Jeremy Sisto (“Law & Order”) as George Altman, Jane Levy (“Shameless”) as Tessa Altman, Carly Chaikin (“The Last Song”) as Dalia Royce, Allie Grant (“Weeds”) as Lisa, Alan Tudyk (“V”) as Noah Lerner and Cheryl Hines (“Curb Your Enthusiasm”) as Dallas Royce. Ana Gasteyer (“Saturday Night Live”) guest stars. Emily Kapnek (“Hung”) writes and executive-produces this bitingly ironic single-camera comedy. “Suburgatory” was directed by Michael Fresco (“Raising Hope”), who also executive-produced the pilot. It is produced by Warner Bros. Television. “WORK IT” This high-concept comedy centers on two unrepentant guy’s guys who, unable to find work, dress as women to get jobs as pharmaceutical reps. Not only do they pull it off, but they might just learn to be better men in the process. With unemployment an ongoing issue and women now outnumbering men in the workforce, the new comedy series “Work It” follows two alpha males who realize the only way to beat the current “mancession” and land a job in pharmaceutical sales is to pass themselves off as women. Combining all the best elements of the workplace comedy, the buddy comedy and the family comedy, “Work It” centers on Lee Standish (Ben Koldyke) -- a quick-witted and likable family man who used to be a top car salesman until he got laid off -- and Angel Ortiz (Amaury Nolasco) -- a single, hot-headed ladies’ man with no filter -- who quickly learn there are fundamental differences in the worlds of men and women that go beyond teetering in high heels and tightening up with Spanx. Lee and Angel are determined to keep their ruse going for as long as they can -- and keep their newly found jobs — in this smart, funny and relevant look at male and female relationships at work, at home and socially. Being a better man sometimes means having to be a better woman. The show stars Ben Koldyke (“How I Met Your Mother”) as Lee, Amaury Nolasco (“Prison Break”) as Angel, Beth Lacke (“Happy Hour”) as Connie, John Caparulo (“Chelsea Lately”) as Brian, Rebecca Mader (“Lost”) as Grace, Rochelle Aytes (“Detroit 1-8-7”) as Vanessa, Kate Reinders (“Sherrie”) as Kelly, Kirstin Eggers (“Aussie and Ted’s Great Adventure”) as Kristin and Kacie Lynch (“Barney and Friends”) as Kat. “Work It” was written by Andrew Reich & Ted Cohen (“Friends,” “Rules of Engagement”). Reich and Cohen are the executive producers. Beth McCarthy Miller (“Saturday Night Live,” “30 Rock”) is the director. “Work It” is produced by Bonanza Productions, Inc. in association with Summer School Productions and Warner Bros. Television. Tags: ?After TV show, '24' may become a movie Originally published: May 24, 2010 8:50 PM Updated: May 24, 2010 9:42 PM By VERNE GAY Photo credit: getty jack back on the attack Yes, , there may be a "24" movie after all. Jack Bauer lives, and as Bauer goes, so goes the franchise that ended on TV Monday night after eight thrilling, wonderful, violent, ridiculous years. (And come to think of it, how could a movie ever top any of that? Maybe if it's in 3-D . . . ) The two-hour series closer had everything that has made this franchise so exhilarating, while precisely spelling out - unintentionally one can assume - why it had to end. The showdown between President Allison Taylor () and wife of assassinated President Hassan, Dalia Hassan (Necar Zadegan), absolutely jumped off the screen, while Taylor's tortured decision over whether to abort the peace agreement was one of the most memorable performances of the season. But as any "day" progresses, "24" eventually demands that you take your disbelief and suspend it to the bitter end. Stuff needs to happen to get the show across the finish line, and that stuff doesn't need you or me to nit-pick it. Don't ask how Jack () just happened to get into Jason Pillar's (Reed Diamond) car; don't ask how Jack avoided a million security cameras around the UN; don't ask . . . oh, just don't ask. Was Jack's conversion from a maniacal revenge missile about to take out the Russian president to OK-Chloe-let-justice-take-its-course entirely plausible? Maybe not, but after eight days of what Jack Bauer has gone through, mental consistency is bound to be a casualty. Jack can do whatever he wants to, and who's about argue with him? Over the course of two days, two classic decade-defining TV series have come to an end - "Lost" and now "24" - and neither had finales that were completely satisfying. ("" may yet get a reprieve.) But we loved these shows - really loved them - and how foolish to judge them based on these last, flawed glances. ?Cable heats up for summer with new shows Published: June 2, 2011 5:37 PM By DIANE WERTS. Special to Newsday Photo credit: TNT and star in 's "Franklin and Bash. " The pilot episode aired June 1, 2011. Look at the TV show titles on these pages. And you still think fall is the tube's big premiere season? Summer is hot. Maybe not so much for the broadcast networks -- yet -- but cable is charging hard with splashy original scripted series on more nights of the week. No longer is it one hour here or two shows there. By month's end, USA will boast originals on Sunday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, which makes four nights of the week (five, if you count ""). will run original drama pairs Sunday, Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday nights. Family stakes its claim Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. FX likes Tuesday and Thursday. has its comedies on Wednesday night, while Syfy will stack three originals on Monday. Add scripted originals from cablers like , , , , , BET, , Lifetime, Spike, IFC and even . For every CMT that fails with a sitcom like "Working Class," there's a stepping up with a scripted romance like "Single Ladies." Among the summer highlights: NEW DRAMA AND COMEDY SERIES FRANKLIN & BASH (TNT drama, already on, Wednesdays, 9 p.m.). and pair up as best-bud legal eagles. TEEN WOLF ( drama -- two-part premiere: Sunday at 11 p.m., Monday at 10 p.m.; then Mondays 10 p.m.). High school is tough enough. But becoming a werewolf makes things harder. Can you still play lacrosse? And, OMG, what about hormones? Tyler Posey and Crystal Reed are about to find out. SWITCHED AT BIRTH (ABC Family drama -- Monday, 9 p.m.). Teens affected by the title trauma learn how the other lives: One is well-to-do, one struggling and deaf. Their mothers are played by and . SINGLE LADIES (VH1 romance -- series starts Monday, 9 p.m.). Soap suds: , LisaRaye McCoy and Charity Shea are Atlantans whose well-laid plans for love and career go melodramatically awry. THE PROTECTOR (Lifetime drama -- June 12, 10 p.m.). Divorced mother (Ally Walker) juggles caring for her sons and disabled brother with her work as an L.A. homicide detective. Tisha Campbell-Martin and co-star. THE NINE LIVES OF CHLOE KING (ABC Family drama -- June 14, 9 p.m.). Offbeat teen (Skyler Samuels) discovers she has heightened abilities and may be the sole hope for an ancient race. Amy Pietz plays her single mother. HAPPILY DIVORCED (TV Land comedy -- June 15, 10:30 p.m.). adapts her real life: She's a divorced woman still friends with her live-in gay ex-husband (John ). FALLING SKIES (TNT adventure -- June 19 premiere 9-11 p.m., then Sundays at 10). turns action hero as aliens invade Earth in this hour from executive producer . COMBAT HOSPITAL (ABC drama -- June 21, 10 p.m.). Kandahar military medical personnel cope with war casualties plus their own personal crises. With , Michelle Borth, , . WILFRED (FX comedy -- June 23, 10 p.m.). gets advice from his canine neighbor (Jason Gann in a dog suit) in this quirky comedy adapted from an Australian smash. SUITS (USA drama -- June 23, 10 p.m.). Patrick J. Adams plays a dropout with a photographic memory who's hired to help a Manhattan lawyer (Gabriel Macht). With , Long Islander Rick Hoffman. STATE OF GEORGIA (ABC Family comedy -- June 29, 8:30 p.m.). Raven-Symone moves to New York seeking show-biz fame with geeky best friend Majandra Delfino. Also features . NECESSARY ROUGHNESS (USA drama -- June 29, 10 p.m.) -- Long Island divorcee (Callie Thorne) does psychotherapy for ' football player. Inspired by ' Dr. Donna Dannenfelser, a Commack native. ALPHAS (Syfy drama -- July 11, 10 p.m.). Ordinary folks with peculiar abilities investigate odd cases of similar activity. David Straithairn leads the team that includes and Warren Christie. WEB THERAPY (Showtime comedy -- July 19, 11 p.m.). expands her Web ad-lib shorts about a "self-professed psychotherapist" who treats celebrities in quickie online sessions. plays her mom, her husband. THE LYING GAME (ABC Family drama -- Aug. 15, 9 p.m.). Foster kid and her newly discovered twin sister switch identities. Then sis disappears, amid mystery about their birth mother. Returning dramas and comedies SUNDAY "The Glades" (A&E, 10 p.m.) TUESDAY "White Collar" (USA, 9 p.m.); "Covert Affairs" (USA, 10 p.m.) JUNE 14 "Pretty Little Liars" (ABC Family, 8 p.m.); " Beat" (TNT, 9 p.m.); "HawthoRNe" (TNT, 10 p.m.) JUNE 15 "Hot in " (TV Land, 10 p.m.) JUNE 19 "Drop Dead Diva" (Lifetime, 9 p.m.) JUNE 23 "" (Comedy Central, 10 p.m.); "" (USA, 9 p.m.); "Rookie Blue" (ABC, 10 p.m.); "Louie" (FX, 10:30 p.m.) JUNE 26 "" (HBO, 9 p.m.); "" (TNT, 9 p.m.) JUNE 27 "Weeds" (Showtime, 10 p.m.); "The Big C" (Showtime, 10:30 p.m.) JUNE 29 "Melissa & Joey" (ABC Family, 8 p.m.); "" (USA, 9 p.m.) JULY 8 "" (Starz) JULY 10 "" (HBO) JULY 11 "" (Syfy); "Warehouse 13" (Syfy); "" (TNT); "Rizzoli & Isles" (TNT) JULY 13 "" (FX); "Damages" () JULY 15 "" (Syfy) JULY 17 "" () JULY 24 "" (HBO) UNSCRIPTED -- NEW SHOWS "Finding Bigfoot" (, Sunday at 10 p.m.) "The Laura Berman Show" (OWN, Monday at 10 p.m.) "Ridiculousness" (MTV, June 9 at 10 p.m.) "Finding Sarah" (OWN, June 12 at 9 p.m.) "The Project" (Oxygen, June 12 at 9 p.m.) "Ice Loves Coco" (E!, June 12 at 10:30 p.m.) "Rocco's Dinner Party" (Bravo, June 15 at 11 p.m.) "Paranormal Challenge" (Travel, June 17 at 9 p.m.) Visionaries: Inside the Creative Mind" (OWN, June 17 at 10 p.m.) "Ryan & Tatum: The O'Neals" (OWN, June 19 at 10 p.m.) "Staten Island Cakes" (WE, June 21 at 9 p.m.) "101 Ways to Leave a Game Show" (ABC, June 21 at 9 p.m.) ": Talking to Strangers" (Fuse, June 22 at TKTK p.m.) "Expedition: Impossible" (ABC, June 23 at 9 p.m.) "Rhett & Link: Commercial Kings" (IFC, June 24 at 10 p.m.) "Love in the Wild" (, June 29, 10 p.m.) "Legend Quest" (Syfy, July 13) "Run My Makeover" (, July 20) "Same Name" (CBS, July 24) "Take the Money and Run" (ABC, Aug. 2) "Born to Dance: LaurieAnn Gibson" (BET, Aug. 2) "Whisker Wars" (IFC, Aug. 5) UNSCRIPTED -- RETURNING "" (History, Sunday at 9 p.m.) " Star" (Food, Sunday at 9 p.m.) "The Real L Word" (Showtime, Sunday at 10 p.m.) "" (Fox, Monday at 8 p.m.) "Locked Up Abroad" (NatGeo, Wednesday at 10 p.m.) "Keeping Up With the Kardashians" (E!, June 12 at 10 p.m.) "Cupcake Wars" (Food, June 14 at 8 p.m.) " Family Jewels" (A&E, June 14 at 10 p.m.) "Countdown With " (Current, June 20 at 8 p.m.) "Hoarders" (A&E, June 20 at 9 p.m.) "Intervention" (A&E, June 20 at 10 p.m.) "History Detectives" (/13, June 21 at 8 p.m.) "Wipeout" (ABC, June 21 preview at 8 p.m., then June 23 at 8 p.m.) "The Marriage Ref" (NBC, June 26 at 10 p.m.) "Celebrity Rehab" (VH1, June 29 at 10 p.m.) "" (MTV, July 5) "Big Brother" (CBS, July 7) "Design Star" (HGTV, July 11) "Who the Bleep Did I Marry?" (ID, July 13) "The Green Room" (Showtime, July 14) "" (Syfy, July 15) "Hell's Kitchen" (Fox, July 19) "Shark Week" (Discovery, begins July 31) "Bachelor Pad" (ABC, Aug. 8) ?Chloe Altchek of Maidstone leads LI women's amateur Tuesday August 10, 2010 8:07 PM By Mark Herrmann Chloe Altchek of the Maidstone Club shot 77 and is the first-round leader of the Long Island Women's Amateur at Bethpage Red. Here's how the leaderboard looks (along with the Wedneesday starting times) Chloe Altchek, Maidstone Club 77 9:56 am Denise Martorana, Southampton Golf Club 79 9:56 am Michelle Rosenhouse, Engineers... ?Chloe Altchek wins LI Women's Amateur Thursday August 12, 2010 10:27 AM By Mark Herrmann Chloe Altchek of Maidstone Club in East Hampton held onto her first-round lead and won the 36-hole Long Island Women's Amateur Championship Wednesday. She shot 5-over-par 157 on Bethpage Red (which played at par 76). She secured a one-shot victory over Denise Martorana of Southampton Golf Club. Claire Rothschild of Cherry Valley Club was third at 161.Altchek just finished her... ?'Chloe King' delivers ancient teen angst Published: June 10, 2011 6:19 PM By DIANE WERTS. Special to Newsday SERIES PREMIERE "The Nine Lives of Chloe King"WHEN WHERE Tuesday night at 9 on ABC FamilyREASON TO WATCH To see the top-cat title chick hiss before she butt-kicks the bad guy, "Dying sucks, and I'm sooo not doing that again."WHAT IT'S ABOUT Ordinary teen Chloe King (Skyler Samuels of last summer's ABC series "The Gates") turns out not to be. She's just your average gorgeous...?'Dark Shadows:' Johnny Depp and Tim Burton at it again Originally published: May 9, 2012 4:31 PM Updated: May 10, 2012 11:01 AM By RAFER GUZMAN Photo credit: Handout as Barnabas Collins in Pictures' and Village Roadshow Pictures' "Dark Shadows," a Warner Bros. Pictures release. By rights, 's vampire comedy "Dark Shadows" ought to be about as fresh as a buried corpse. After years of vampire mania, do we really need a vampire spoof? Aren't the "Twilight" movies funny enough? "Dark Shadows" doesn't add anything new to the genre, but it's a surprisingly high-spirited and genuinely black-humored comedy. Fans of the '60s-era soap-opera of the same name may be disappointed to see the straight-faced characters and fog-enshrouded locale become fodder for farce, but the rest of us will welcome "Dark Shadows" as the antidote to "Twilight," with 's aristocratic vampire-hero, Barnabas Collins, refreshingly free of the saintly chastity and healthy diet of Edward Cullen. Barnabas is more like the serial-killer protagonist of 's "Monsieur Verdoux," whose slippery amoralism only makes him more endearing. Unlike Edward, Barnabas isn't above bedding the help (common practice in 1750, no doubt), and after awakening from slumber in 1972, he finds that women's lib has its benefits. But the new world isn't all fast women and slow-moving, tender hippies. Depressed by the decrepit state of his family's mansion (now graced by macrame and resin grapes), he slumps across the keyboard of the nearest organ, triggering a preprogrammed drumbeat. Though over-gesticulates a bit and the film sometimes overdoes the lava-lamp jokes, "Dark Shadows" shines thanks mainly to its terrific supporting cast, including as a steely matriarch, as a pill-popping shrink and Chloe Grace Moretz as a discomfitingly sultry teenager. Bella Heathcote gives Barnabas' wholesome beloved, , an eerie, doll-like quality. The show-stealer, however, is ("Casino Royale") as the spurned servant Angelique, still alive and hopping mad. And though Barnabas doth protest, she's clearly his soul mate in soullessness. Their room-wrecking love scene is a treat, and unlike the one in "Twilight," played entirely for laughs. PLOT An ancient vampire rises from his coffin in the strange new world of 1972. RATING PG-13 (comic horror violence, sexual content, some drug use, language and smoking) CAST , Eva , , Michelle LENGTH 1:52 PLAYING AT Area theaters BOTTOM LINE Even after years of vampire-mania, this comedy is fresh, funny and -- be warned -- surprisingly bloody.Lucky seven for and 'Dark Shadows" is the eighth movie has directed. Here's how the other seven collaborations have performed at the box office: 1. (2010) -- $334,191,110 2. Charlie and the (2005) -- $206,459,076 3. Sleepy Hollow (1999) -- $101,071,502 4. Edward Scissorhands (1990) -- $56,362,352 5. Tim 's Corpse Bride (2005) -- $53,359,111 6. Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007) -- $52,898,073 7. Ed Wood (1994) -- $5,887,457 Source: boxofficemojo.com ?Depp sinks teeth into 'Dark Shadows' role Wednesday September 14, 2011 11:31 AM By Photo credit: AP For those who remember running home from school in the 1960s and '70s to watch the soap opera, "Dark Shadows," there's a film version on the way with actor Johnny Depp starring as the vampire, Barnabas Collins. The website has just released first photos from the set of Tim Burton's "Dark Shadows"adaptation. Johnny Depp looks like a typical, creepy, colorful, Burton character as he takes his turn as Barnabas, famously played in the television series by actor Jonathan Frid. The soap opera, which aired on ABCfrom 1966 to 1971, is centered around the Collins family and its run-ins with the supernatural and Halloween-like creatures.Thefilm, set to be released in 2012, is currently in production in the United Kingdom and will also star Burton's wife and muse, Helena Bonham Carter, Chloe Moretz, Eva Green and Michelle Pfeiffer.The official film synopsis from Warner Bros. Pictures reads: "In the year 1752, Joshua and Naomi Collins, with young son, Barnabas, set sail from Liverpool, England, to start a new life in America. But even an ocean was not enough to escape the mysterious curse that has plagued the family. Two decades pass and Barnabas (Johnny Depp) has the world at his feet -- or at least the town of Collinsport, Maine. As the master of Collinwood Manor, Barnabas is rich, powerful and an inveterate playboy, "until he makes the grave mistake of breaking the heart of Angelique Bouchard (Eva Green). A witch, in every sense of the word, Angelique dooms him to a fate worse than death -- turning him into a vampire, and then burying him alive."Two centuries later, Barnabas is inadvertently freed from his tomb and emerges into the very changed world of 1972. He returns to Collinwood Manor to find that his once-grand estate has fallen into ruin. The dysfunctional remnants of the Collins family have fared little better, each harboring his or her own dark secrets. Matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard (Michelle Pfeiffer) has called upon live-in psychiatrist, Dr. Julia Hoffman (Helena Bonham Carter), to help with her family troubles." Tags: ?Division II women's hoops preview Published: November 5, 2011 6:21 PM By STEVEN MARCUS Division II women East Coast Conference C.W. A banner year for the women's team at culminated with the East Coast Conference crown for the first time since 2001. Two-time East Coast Conference player of the year Janea Aiken has graduated, but coach Deirdre Moore may still has enough from last year's 17-13 team to defend its conference title. Guards Felicia Joyner (12.7), Ashley Caggiano Kenyatta Sears and Alexis Peters form a strong core of guards. At forward, Catherine Lutz and Samantha Kopp have transferred from Iona. F Nicolette Marciniak (8.1, 5.6) blocked 30 shots. Forwards Shayna Gatling and Nijah LaCourt will see increased minutes. Dowling Joe Pellicane begins his eighth season and has all his top players back from last year's 17-12 finish. Leading scorer Connie Simmons (11.2) returns, so does F Sarah Schicher (10.5, 8.0). G Seja Gamble (8.6) completes the experienced returnees. The newcomers are G Christine Verrelle and F Kristin McMahon, who attended St. John the Baptist. Molloy Injuries held back Molloy as the finished 8-13. The return of G Ashley Addison (10.9), G Christina Marra (9.5) and Jessica DeNicola (7.5) could put Molloy back into contention in the ECC. Coach Tim O'Hagan has brought in three transfers, led by G Laura Rivera, who played in Division I at Manhattan. G Julia Finlay was at UNC-Wilmington and G Amanda Bartlett has transferred from Queens, where she averaged 20.1 points. NYIT Coach Anthony Crocitto looks to improve on a 6-15 record with the return go all-ECC G Cierra Baker (17.5, 12.4) and G Rebecca Lynch (11.2, 6.0). Also returning is G Demitra Apergis, who made the all-rookie team. Newcomers include F Amber Davis, C Chloe Johnson, a transfer from Queens, G Nikki Jo Rotolo, G Sabrina Moore and G Ashley Hightower. Queens Queens, 10-19 last season, will rebuild under new coach Bet Naumovski. Senior G Cadie Chu (7.1) and sophomore G Nicole Caggiano (6.5) are back. PG Bria Jackson, a transfer from -Eastern Shore, will help. F Megan Lonergan and F Samantha Gillman, a transfer from Monroe CC, will contribute. Northeast-10 Conference Adelphi This is the second season for coach Heather Jacobs. She had an 8-18 record, 5-17 in the highly competitive NE-10. G/F Kara Tancredi (11.8, 6.1), F Jessica Kitrys (9.1, 5.3) are the experienced players. Four new freshman forwards join the team: Kelly Mananix, Samantha Milhaven, Jenna Halaby and Breanna Gonsalves. ?'Don't Trust the B---- in Apartment 23' could clean up Published: April 9, 2012 2:23 PM By VERNE GAY Photo credit: ABC "" stars as James Van Der Beek, as Chloe and as June. SERIES PREMIERE "" WHEN WHERE Wednesday at 9:30 p.m. on /7 REASON TO WATCH Come on, admit it. With a title like that, you almost have to. WHAT IT'S ABOUT New York, New York, the city so nice they named it twice, except it's not so nice to newcomers like June (Dreama ), who arrives from only to find her big new job nuked in the wake of a -like scandal at the company that hired her. With no job and no apartment, she starts looking for a place to live, and knocks on the door of one Chloe (Krysten ). Chloe's a scam artist who figures she has the perfect con: Act so crazy that her roommates leave without their deposit or assorted other valuables. The pervert in the apartment next door, Eli (Michael Blaiklock), hastens their departure. But nice, wholesome June can't say she wasn't warned. Robin (Liza Lapira) down the hall warns her: "." Too late. June's already moved into apartment 23. At least Chloe has an unusual friend -- , formerly of "," playing himself. MY SAY Like a jilted lover -- or, say, like poor June -- "Apartment 23" has bounced around development hell for five long years. Fox first took a look and passed, then , which did as well, until a new boss at the network's entertainment division arrived and finally gave this a green light. Will his faith be rewarded? The answer's a bit complicated. Wednesday night's pilot is tentative and unsure of itself. The show, along with this hard sell of a premise, feels more like a misfit than a highly polished sitcom with reliable laugh lines. But next week's episode is a sharp departure -- and one for the better. As the preening I-used-to-be-a-contender TV hunk, Van Der is an inspired casting move. Hounded by "" fans who want him to recite some cherished bit of Dawson Leery dialogue, he just wants to be taken seriously (as an interpreter of Shakespeare, no less). Walker and Ritter, likewise, have plenty of vitality and charm. Raunchy and at times genuinely funny, "Apartment 23" is jam-packed with promise -- and inconsistencies. BOTTOM LINE Sluggish start, but "Apartment 23" gets better. GRADE B+ ?For women on TV, it's easy being smart Originally published: November 17, 2011 4:44 PM Updated: November 17, 2011 4:49 PM By ELLEN GRAY. Philadelphia Daily News Photo credit: CBS Sean Murray, left, , center, and Jackie Geary have to uncover the truth, on NCIS. Watching TV might not make you smart, but unless you spend all your tube time keeping up with the Kardashians, chances are it's at least broadened your view of what smart looks like. For more than 20 million viewers a week, it looks like Abby Sciuto, the pigtailed Goth girl Pauley plays on ' "." A forensic specialist who's been known to narrow a list of suspects by analyzing the DNA in people's poop -- a dirty job that happily occurred off-screen -- Abby has a different skill set, but she's the glass-is-at-least-half-full version of Chloe O'Brian (Mary Lynn ), the grumpy CTU worker whose computer wizardry on Fox's "" helped Jack Bauer () survive some of his worst days. Abby's so popular that when CBS was ready to spin off its No. 1 drama, it had Perrette help in the handoff to "NCIS: Los Angeles" with an early crossover. Chloe's so iconic that including a woman who's good with computers and other technology -- think Penelope, the Caltech dropout Kirsten Vangsness plays on CBS' "," 's Astrid on Fox's "" or Angela, 's tech-savvy artist on Fox's "" -- is now more the TV rule than the exception. "Bones," of course, is a geek-girl extravaganza, a romantic comedy (with, yes, corpses) built around a brilliant scientist-novelist named Temperance Brennan () and her less cerebral agent partner, Seeley Booth (). "I think that for years we saw one thing, which was men and technology and math and science and women being the heart and soul and spiritual person, and I think that all of us eventually -- the people who make TV, networks, studios and TV writers -- look at that and get tired of that," said "Bones" creator . , whose character was initially less comfortable with science than most of her colleagues at Washington's fictional Jeffersonian, has seen Angela become tech-savvy. "I think the thing about Angela is I think she thinks she's not a geek," Conlin said. "She kind of postures as this very cool kind of, you know, street-smart gal, but I think she's actually a real dork at heart. And I think that's why she's been at the Jeffersonian for so long. You can't have that sort of skill set and know how to do all those things that those people do there without being kind of geeky." "Our hard shiny lab has had its effect on everyone," said Hanson, "except for Booth, who it should have, and Brennan, who just lived there always from the beginning." If seeing is believing, some think having grow up seeing women on television with math and science backgrounds may lead to more women pursuing those careers in those field. It's already happening, said Perrette, who's participated in a public-service campaign to promote careers in science and technology. "They call it the Abby Effect, actually. We've been on the show nine seasons, and these girls started watching when they were young, and they're in college now," Perrette said. "I get letters and stuff from people all the time, all over the world -- parents, grandparents, kids themselves -- that say this fictional character that I play" influenced them, "and now they're pursuing math and science ... I went to college, I loved school. I love math and science myself. And to be able to play this character that has literally made young girls think that it's OK for them to pursue math and science is unbelievable." , who plays Amy the neurobiologist on "," said she gets "a lot from the geek male culture, an appreciation for this kind of female being presented and represented. But I think also for females in sciences, I've heard a lot from women who are either wanting to be scientists or who, you know, find it inspiring to see someone in science." Jovana J. Grbic isn't surprised. The creative director of Los Angeles-based ScriptPhD, Grbic, who has a doctorate in chemistry, specializes in "science communication in entertainment, advertising and media. We're kind of in a really interesting time in terms of girls studying science," she said, noting that at one point in her graduate career, she was one of two women in her lab and "there were no female professors," but that in another program she was in, women were better represented. "I think what we're seeing reflected in pop culture is a changing dynamic in terms of our belief that women can do this ... and that it's sexy." She called the depiction of women like Abby on "NCIS" and "24's" Chloe both "aspirational and reflective." TV, Grbic said, is showing change that's under way, but in a technical environment, "you're not going to see a Chloe at every desk." For her part, Rajskub, whose pre-"24" background was mostly in comedy, -- she was a regular this season on CBS' short-lived sitcom "How to Be a Gentlemen" -- sees women like Chloe as just another expression of TV diversity. "I think the whole climate of shows right now, in different aspects, for women is fantastic. Because it's showing a lot of different angles and complexities," she said, adding, "Not that being a smart woman is complex." ? ?Real smart girls, and that's no joke ? The lure of the lab has also been felt in comedy. One of TV's most-watched sitcoms, CBS' "The Theory," started out as a show about superbright male roommates (Jim Parsons and ) and their blond, less academically gifted female neighbor (). "Big Bang" has only gotten funnier as it has expanded the guys' to include women scientists, especially the two played by Mayim and Melissa Rauch. In real life, "I revolve in the world of geekdom," said Bialik, who, like her character, Amy Farrah Fowler, has a doctorate. (The character's doctorate is in neurobiology, while "I'm a neuroscientist," said Bialik. "It's a distinction.") Glammed up for a CBS press party this summer, the former "Blossom" star was barely recognizable as the fashion-challenged Fowler, but the red-carpet look was just a facade, Bialik insisted. She may appear more comfortable socially than Amy-- "I have a different sort of training as a performer, I guess", but "I'm known in certain circles for being socially awkward. Socializing is hard for me, especially with a lot of trendy, hipster kind of people," Bialik said. "That's kind of actually why I like working on 'Big Bang.' Our writers are such interesting intellectual types that at any random party we have to go to, there's always a heavy philosophical discussion that I find myself in and I appreciate that. I'm much more comfortable competing on that level than at the 4-inch-heels level," Bialik says. Rauch plays the girlier of the two scientists. The Monmouth County, N.J., native said she borrowed the high-pitched voice for her character, Bernadette Rostenkowski, from her mother, "without the accent." "What's really cool about the characters that have been brought to 'Big Bang' is that we're kind of geeks in our own way. I think we're seeing more and more of that on other shows as well," she said. -- Philadelphia Daily News ?Forever 21 debuts three designer holiday lines Tuesday September 27, 2011 12:46 PM By Nina Ruggiero Forever 21 fans can find some special holiday shopping when the store launches three new collaborations — with Sanrio's girlie Hello Kitty, jewelry designers Alex & Chloe and vintage-chic designer Rory Beca.Rory Beca's 18-piece capsule collection is inspired by glamorous 1980s nightclub Studio 54, with sheer maxi skirts and flirty dresses. This is Beca's second Forever 21... ?Former Mepham H.S. coach Douglas Gerek Sr. dies Published: October 22, 2010 9:47 PM By GARY DYMSKI To escape the stress of family and work, Douglas W. Gerek Sr. sought the solace of the sea. He loved to fish on his boat, and often he would search for striped bass in the Fire Island Inlet, beneath the Robert Moses Causeway Bridge."Coming back in the early mornings, with the sun coming up on the inlet, he found a great deal of peace in that," said his son, Stephen Gerek, of Ponte Vedra Beach,...?Franco's tweet revenge, Giamatti's 'Win' Originally published: February 22, 2011 5:47 PM Updated: February 23, 2011 1:14 PM By RAFER GUZMAN Photo credit: Getty Images Actor James Franco attends the New York premiere of "127 Hours" at Chelsea Clearview Cinema in Manhattan. (Nov. 2, 2010) WHO THE DEAL Perhaps taking a page from , the Oscar co-host recently launched a Twitter page. One recent post said: "They pulled this from the Oscar show. damn it," followed by a link to himself singing "You Haven't Seen the Last of Me," 's non-nominated song from "Burlesque." Franco also thanked former Oscar host for promising not to tweet a running commentary during Sunday's Oscar broadcast. As of press time, he had not yet tweeted anything about his co-host, . ? THE MOVIE "Win Win" THE DEAL , the actor famous for playing deeply flawed men ("Sideways," "") tackles a somewhat different role in this drama about a lawyer moonlighting as a high-school wrestling coach who befriends a talented but troubled teen (Alex Shaffer). The Furman Film Series is holding a screening that will be attended by three young local actors - Austin Ward of , Dean Shmuely of and Christopher Federlin of - who appear in the film. The movie was partially filmed in and other locales. INFO Thursday at 7:30 p.m. at Squire Cinemas, 115 Middle Neck Rd., . Tickets are $20. 516-829-2570; greatneckarts.org. ? WHO THE MOVIE "Hugo Cabret" THE DEAL The Oscar-winning director known for his violent gangster movies is tackling a children's book for his upcoming film. Based on "The Invention of Hugo Cabret," an illustrated young-adult novel that draws inspiration from the real-life French filmmaker Georges Melies, the movie features an eclectic cast that includes Asa Butterfield, Chloe Moretz, , , and . plans to release it in 3-D on Nov. 23. ?Friday the 13th turns lucky for one shopper Thursday April 12, 2012 1:56 PM By Nina Ruggiero Photo credit: Isaay.com Tomorrow is Friday the 13th, but online luxury shopping destination Isaay.com is going to turn one shopper's luck around with a $5,000 shopping spree. Just register for free today on isaay.com, "like" the Isaay Facebook page and leave a comment letting them know why you deserve a new spring wardrobe. After shopping designers like Alexander McQueen, Badgley Mischka, Chloe... ?From 'Harry Potter' to 3-D: 25 new fall movies Originally published: September 9, 2010 3:49 PM Updated: September 10, 2010 12:30 PM By RAFER GUZMAN Photo credit: Jaap Buitendijk Scene from "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows," the sixth installment of the billion-dollar franchise. Just as leaf peepers marvel at fall foliage, so moviegoers watch the seasons change at the multiplex. Usually the difference is noticeable: Comedies give way to dramas, action films turn to message movies, loud blockbusters make room for intimate character studies. Not this time. Though audiences have been groaning in disappointment all year, Hollywood's fall and winter schedule looks a lot like spring and summer. That means more young-adult fantasies like the animated "Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole," another "Narnia" installment and part one of the "Harry Potter" finale. Speaking of sequels, there will be plenty, including Oliver Stone's "Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps" and Disney's much-hyped "Tron: Legacy." There also are more remakes ("Let Me In," based on an acclaimed Swedish vampire drama), more comic-book movies (the action-comedy "Red," starring Bruce Willis, due Oct. 15) and more spinoffs from existing brands ("Yogi Bear"). How about more 3-D? You got it - get ready for bug-eyed versions of the stunt comedy "Jackass 3D" (Oct. 15), the horror film "Saw 3D" (Oct. 22) and even "The Nutcracker in 3D" (Nov. 24). As for Oscar, we may have difficulty finding 10 best picture nominees. There have been few obvious contenders so far - maybe "Toy Story 3" - and there aren't many more coming. Potential bright spots include "The Social Network," David Fincher's up-to-the-nanosecond history of the creation of Facebook; "Hereafter," a drama about near-death experiences directed by Clint Eastwood; and the Coen Brothers' latest literary adaptation, "True Grit" (it was a novel by Charles Portis before it became the 1969 John Wayne classic). Here are 25 releases that, for better or for worse, may define the rest of your moviegoing year. Easy A Sept. 17 Wholesome high schooler Emma Stone ("Zombieland") goes along with a false rumor that she lost her virginity. Oddly, her reputation improves. With Penn Badgley, Amanda Bynes, Thomas Haden Church. The Town Sept. 17 Ben Affleck directs, co-writes and stars in this crime drama about a career bank robber who falls for a hostage (Rebecca Hall). With Jeremy Renner, Jon Hamm, Blake Lively, Chris Cooper. You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger Sept. 22 Woody Allen's latest dispatch from London concerns a man (Anthony Hopkins) in midlife crisis, a call girl (Lucy Punch), a novelist (Josh Brolin) and a mystery woman (Freida Pinto). Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'hoole Sept. 24 Director Zack Snyder ("Watchmen") tackles the young-adult fantasy genre with this 3-D animated tale about a young owl who dreams of becoming a great warrior. Based on novels by Kathryn Lasky. Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps Sept. 24 Oliver Stone follows up his go-go 1980s classic "Wall Street" with Michael Douglas once again playing alpha-financier Gordon Gekko. Shia LaBeouf plays his newest acolyte; Carey Mulligan is Gekko's daughter. Let Me In Oct. 1 The American remake of the acclaimed Swedish vampire drama "Let the Right One In," starring Chloe Moretz as an unusually pale little girl and Kodi Smit-McPhee ("The Road") as her smitten neighbor. Matt Reeves ("Cloverfield") directs. The Social Network Oct. 1 Folks at Facebook have seen this biopic about co-founder Mark Zuckerberg - played by Jesse Eisenberg as a nerdy outsider desperate for acceptance - and they aren't happy. David Fincher directs from a screenplay by Aaron Sorkin. It's Kind of a Funny Story Oct. 8 Zach Galifianakis plays a mental patient who takes a stressed-out teen (Keir Gilchrist) under his wing. Also with Emma Roberts, Zoë Kravitz and Viola Davis. Written and directed by Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden ("Half Nelson") from Ned Vizzini's 2006 novel. Hereafter Oct. 22 Clint Eastwood's latest follows an American psychic, a French journalist and a London schoolboy as they grapple with questions of death and spirituality. With Matt Damon and Cécile de France ("Un Secret"). Due Date Nov. 5 Robert Downey Jr. plays an expectant father who hitches a cross-country ride home with an aspiring actor (Zach Galifianakis). Directed by Todd Phillips ("The Hangover"). Fair Game Nov. 5 Naomi Watts and Sean Penn star as outed CIA agent Valerie Plame and her husband in this political thriller based on Plame's autobiography. Directed by Doug Liman ("The Bourne Identity"). Megamind Nov. 5 In this animated feature, supervillain Megamind (voiced by Will Ferrell) defeats good guy Metro Man (Brad Pitt) but becomes so bored he creates another superhero, Titan (Jonah Hill). With Tina Fey and David Cross. Unstoppable Nov. 12 An action film about train engineers, in which Chris Pine ("Star Trek") and Denzel Washington try to stop a runaway locomotive. Directed by Tony Scott. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - Part 1 Nov. 19 Watch the trailer Warner Bros. is milking the final chapter of this franchise by breaking it into two parts. (So that's where "Twilight" got the idea.) In 3-D and IMAX. The Next Three Days Nov. 19 Elizabeth Banks has been convicted of a murder she didn't commit, or so says husband Russell Crowe. His plan: Spring her early. Written and directed by Paul Haggis ("Crash"). Tangled Nov. 24 Disney's animated feature gives a twist to the tale of Rapunzel (Mandy Moore), who teams up with a dashing bandit (Zachary Levi) to escape her tower. The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader Dec. 10 Watch the trailer The latest installment in the "Narnia" franchise, this time in 3-D. Tilda Swinton returns as the White Witch; the new director is Michael Apted ("Coal Miner's Daughter," "Nell"). The Fighter Dec. 10 Mark Wahlberg trained for years to play boxer "Irish" Micky Ward in this drama from David O. Russell ("Three Kings"). The stellar cast includes Christian Bale, Amy Adams and Melissa Leo ("Frozen River"). The Tempest Dec. 10 Julie Taymor ("Across the Universe") tackles Shakespeare. With Russell Brand, Felicity Jones, Alfred Molina, Alan Cumming and Helen Mir- ren as the sorceress Prospera. How Do You Know Dec. 17 Reese Witherspoon, Owen Wilson and Paul Rudd make a love triangle. Written and directed by James L. Brooks ("Terms of Endearment," "Broadcast News"). Tron: Legacy Dec. 17 Disney tries again with this sequel to its 1982 flop, "Tron," with Jeff Bridges returning as super programmer Kevin Flynn. Daft Punk replaces Wendy Carlos' original synth score. Yogi Bear Dec. 17 Part animation, part live-action, all in 3-D. Dan Aykroyd and Justin Timberlake provide voices for Yogi and Boo-Boo, respectively; Anna Faris stars. Gulliver's Travels Dec. 22 The Jack Black version of Jonathan Swift's classic novel - in 3-D, yet. With Jason Segel, Emily Blunt, Amanda Peet and Billy Connolly. Little Fockers Dec. 22 Robert De Niro and Ben Stiller are back as frenemies-in-law. Newcomers to the franchise include Laura Dern, Harvey Keitel, Jessica Alba and, in the director's chair, Paul Weitz ("American Pie"). True Grit Dec. 25 The 1969 John Wayne Western was a novel first; the Coen Brothers are readapting it with Jeff Bridges as Marshal Rooster Cogburn and Matt Damon as Texas Ranger LeBoeuf. Also with Josh Brolin and newcomer Hailee Steinfeld. 11 other coming attractions you might not want to miss Never Let Me Go (Sept. 15). Based on Kazuo Ishiguro's novel about a creepy boarding school. With Carey Mulligan, Keira Knightley and Andrew Garfield (the "Red Riding" trilogy). Catfish (Sept. 17). In this documentary, two friends filmed another as he prepared to meet his online girlfriend. Critics are keeping admirably mum about the unexpected ending. Howl (Sept. 24). James Franco stars as the young Allen Ginsberg. With Jon Hamm, Alessandro Nivola, Jeff Daniels. Nowhere Boy (Oct. 8). Aaron Johnson plays John Lennon on the cusp of fame. Life As We Know It (Oct. 8). Josh Duhamel and Katherine Heigl are two confirmed singles trying to raise their late mutual friends' orphaned infant daughter. Carlos (Oct. 15). Cannes critics who saw this 319-minute saga about terrorist Carlos the Jackal weren't all in agreement - but they all wanted to talk about it. Directed by Olivier Assayas ("Summer Hours"). Paranormal Activity 2 (Oct. 22). Not a "sequel" to last year's micro-budget horror hit but "the next chapter." 127 Hours (Nov. 5). Writer-director Danny Boyle follows the Oscar-winning "Slumdog Millionaire" with a drama based on the true story of Aron Ralston (James Franco), the hiker who amputated his arm to survive. The Nutcracker in 3D (Nov. 24). Sugar plum fairies - comin' at ya! With Elle Fanning, Nathan Lane, John Turturro. Songs by Tim Rice ("The Lion King"). Burlesque (Nov. 24). Christina Aguilera is the small-town girl with big dreams; Cher owns a sexy nightclub. With Cam Gigandet and Kristen Bell. Black Swan (Dec. 1). Natalie Portman and Mila Kunis star as obsessively competitive ballerinas in this psychological thriller from Darren Aronofsky ("The Wrestler"). ?Get your back-to-school look at six Hudson Valley shops Originally published: August 23, 2012 12:30 PM Updated: August 24, 2012 7:58 PM By BRANDHYZE STANLEY SPECIAL TO NEWSDAY Photo credit: Faye Murman Brandhyze Stanley models a look available at Ruby Sue boutique in Katonah. (Aug. 17, 2012) It's time to dust off those mental cobwebs and do a little homework to prepare to head back to school. And we're not talking about reading and writing and arithmetic --?we're talking about fashion homework.?Whether you're in the market for some trendy new outfits or are just looking to update your look with fashion-forward accessories, we've found six stores where you can satisfy your back-to-school...?Girl power: Action heroines with 'Punch' Originally published: March 17, 2011 4:41 PM Updated: March 18, 2011 12:50 PM By RAFER GUZMAN Photo credit: Courtesy Warner Bros. Entertainm/Photo courtesy of Warner Bros. P (L-r) JENA MALONE as Rocket, EMILY BROWNING as Babydoll and ABBIE CORNISH as Sweet Pea in Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary Pictures epic action fantasy "SUCKER PUNCH," a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Black undies? Or white? It was a choice that confronted writer-director while making "Sucker Punch," a mostly female action-fantasy starring Emily Browning as a gun-toting, sword-swinging killer deceptively named Babydoll. She dispatches zombies and robots with the kind of brutality that made 's mostly male "300" a hit in 2007, but she also wears a thigh-high skirt that, as viewers will discover when "Sucker Punch" opens March 25, can be rather revealing. The underwear question involved more than just aesthetics. As it turns out, wanted the color to downplay any titillation, not increase it. "I did make a concession to say, 'Let's make her underwear black,' " says. "Otherwise, I'm noticing it too much. If it was white, you see it. But those are the kinds of things we did, because I didn't want the movie to be about that." It's a small but important point that underscores the tricky nature of a movie whose sexual politics are as multilayered as its plot. A three-tiered narrative that unfolds in an insane asylum, a brothel and the escapist fantasies of its beleaguered heroine, "Sucker Punch" is a visual blend of pulp comics, steampunk and video-game violence, all shot in Snyder's signature heightened style. One minute its female characters are invincible warriors, the next they're chattel. And almost always, they are thoroughly rouged and suggestively dressed. "It was difficult, at first, to convince the studio, not because it's about all-female action characters but because it was so different," says Snyder's wife, Deborah, who helped produce the film for Warner Bros. "You usually pitch them a set of comps" -- that is, clips of comparable movies -- "but there were no comps for a movie like this. That was both exciting and scary." What has been done before is the revved-up mix of female-driven action and overt sexuality. The 1970s television show "" was famous for strategically jiggling its heroines; 's 1965 cult classic "Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!" featured women with aggressive personalities and outsize bosoms. More recently, 's Lara Croft character often wore combat boots and little else. "You have to recognize that we are making a genre movie, a movie that has elements of, say, Japanese anime," says , who plays the brothel's mother hen, Madam Gorski. "In '300,' the men wore less clothing than we're wearing! It is absolutely embracing that women can be sexy, strong, smart, all of those things." "Sucker Punch" features five young actresses cast somewhat against type. Browning (Babydoll) starred in the kids' film "Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events." (Sweet Pea) played ' love interest in the costume drama "Bright Star." Jamie Chung (Amber) recently had an eye-candy role in 's "Grown Ups." Jena (Rocket) is known for indie films like "Bastard Out of Carolina." And Vanessa Hudgens () is a dimpled tween idol from 's "High School Musical" franchise. For "Sucker Punch," however, they practiced martial arts, trained with assault rifles and worked out under Logan Hood, a former Navy SEAL who also wrangled Snyder's actors on "300." Malone, for one, piled 10 pounds of muscle on her 5-foot-6-inch frame and eventually pushed her rack dead-lift weight to 300 pounds. "I get incredible work as an actor," Malone says. "But no one ever says, 'When I look at you I see someone who can kill 40 men with heavy artillery.' Never had I had anyone instill that belief in me. It was incredible." The film goes so far as to exclude men entirely from the main cast. There are no "boyfriend" roles at all, and most of the male characters are villains, from Babydoll's abusive stepfather to brothel owner Blue (, ""). plays the Wise Man, a benevolent father figure who sends the women into battle; he is the film's only "redemptive" male, according to Snyder. At the same time, Snyder wanted his female characters to embrace certain traditional sexual archetypes -- "the nurse, the French maid, the schoolgirl," he says -- and simultaneously take control of them. Such archetypes are common in movies with explicit sexual content, he notes, yet "Sucker Punch" seems destined to cause some hand-wringing, even though it contains no sex scenes at all. "The most dangerous place to go, I think, with female sexuality, is when people are conscious of their own sexuality and it becomes a tool," Snyder says. "The power of it, when they're aware of it -- that's dangerous. Society is not into that, for whatever reason. I thought we had a sexual revolution and everyone is cool with that. But apparently it's still a hot-button issue." ?Lady killers from Crawford to Angelina ? BY RAFER GUZMAN, rafer.guzman@newsday.com The female action heroes of "Sucker Punch" are unusual in , but not altogether new. Here are 10 of moviedom's toughest ladies, from Western gunslingers to alien killers. JOAN CRAWFORD -- In the gender-bending 1954 Western "Johnny Guitar," she wore the pants and packed the pistols, while co-star mostly strummed. TURA SATANA -- As the leader of a girl gang in 's 1965 sexploitation classic, "Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!," she literally kills a man with her bare hands. SIGOURNEY WEAVER -- As Ripley in 1979's "Alien," she turned a distressed-damsel role into a tough-as-nails character who survived three more films. LORI PETTY -- She played the title role in 1995's "Tank Girl," the poorly reviewed adaptation of the sci-fi comic books. Perhaps it was ahead of its time? BRIDGET FONDA -- She starred as a deceptively pretty assassin in 1993's "Point of No Return," though 's original 1990 French version, "Nikita," remains a landmark among action chick flicks. MILLA JOVOVICH -- The cat-eyed actress has helped make the pulpy "Resident Evil" franchise, based on a video game, a dependable seller at the box office since 2002. UMA THURMAN -- Her otherworldly beauty made her an odd but surprisingly effective choice in 's ultraviolent "Kill Bill" movies (2003-'04). NOOMI RAPACE -- In 2009's "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo," the Swedish actress originated the role of Goth-punk bisexual sleuth Lisbeth Salander. Fans are waiting to see if can fill her boots in the upcoming American version. CHLOE GRACE MORETZ -- In last year's "Kick-Ass," she played the 11-year-old superhero Hit Girl, racking up the highest body count and cursing a blue streak. -- One of the few widely successful female action stars, Jolie recently took the lead in the thriller "Salt," a role originally written for a man. Her "Lara Croft" franchise is set for a relaunch; her replacement has not been announced. ?Girl, 2, found drowning in W. Babylon pool, dies Originally published: May 27, 2010 8:39 PM Updated: May 27, 2010 9:36 PM By YAMICHE ALCINDOR The 2-year-old girl found drowning in the in-ground pool at her West Babylon home died Wednesday, according to Suffolk Police.Chloe Acosta's mother had found her Saturday night in the fenced-in swimming pool of their home, police said.The toddler was taken to Good Samaritan Hospital Medical Center in West Islip in critical condition, the spokeswoman said.She remained in critical...?Hansen makes his way back, Lochte, Phelps advance Originally published: June 26, 2012 1:24 PM Updated: June 26, 2012 11:44 PM Photo credit: AP starts in the men's 200-meter freestyle preliminaries at the U.S. Olympic swimming trials. (June 26, 2012) OMAHA, Neb. -- was done with swimming after two doses of Olympic heartache. He's feeling a lot better now. Next stop: London. Hansen, who retired from the sport after the Games but couldn't stay away, made his comeback worthwhile by winning the 100-meter breaststroke at the U.S. Olympic trials Tuesday night. "No one would ever expect me to do something like that," Hansen said. "I'm not a flashy guy. I don't have grillz in my mouth [like Ryan Lochte]. I don't have eight gold medals [like Michael Phelps]." is heading back to the Olympics, too, and this time he doesn't have to worry about battling cancer. He rallied to finish second to Hansen, pumping his fist when he saw his position, slapping hands with the winner, then running across the deck to kiss his wife. , a gold medalist as a teenager in 2004, missed out on the team four years ago while battling injuries and health problems. It's all good now. She got off to a blistering start and soared through the water to easily win the 100 butterfly. One night after Lochte beat Phelps in the 400 individual medley, Lochte edged him out again in the semifinals of the 200 freestyle. Also claiming a spot on the Olympic team was , who got off to a huge lead in the 400 free right from the blocks and held on to win in 4:02.84. earned the second spot in 4:04.18. Seventeen-year-old was the top qualifier in the semifinals of the 100 backstroke, putting up a time (59.06) that was less than a second off 's world record. Teenagers claimed the next three fastest times, as well: 18-year-old Rachel Bootsma, 17-year-old Olivia Smoliga, and 18-year-old Elizabeth Pelton. stamped himself as a favorite in the 100 back with the top semifinal time (53.10). Olympic gold medalist leads the semifinals of the 100 breast (1:05.88), more than a second ahead of world-record holder (1:06.88). -- AP ?Helen E. Fay (1917-2012) Published: July 29, 2012 8:19 PM By SPECIAL TO NEWSDAY Helen Elizabeth Salvati-Poucher-Fay, 95, died July 25, 2012.She was born July 8, 1917, in Middletown to parents Frank and Catharine Salvati.Her survivors include two daughters, JoAnn Marino and her companion, Dick Ludwick, and Barbara Ford and her husband, Dean Ford; four nephews, Richard Welch and his wife, Dorothy; James Brown and his wife, Linda; Michael Welch and his wife, Tina;...?Help us find a house: The Sapirs want to buy Friday May 27, 2011 10:53 AM By Photo credit: Newsday / Karen Wiles Stabile THE BUYERS Woodmere residents Jennifer and Brian Sapir have been looking at homes for sale for months. "We have seen approximately 10 to 15 houses each weekend since January, and all we've gotten is a reality check about how difficult it is to actually find our dream home," says Jennifer, 29, an English teacher at John F. Kennedy High School. She and Brian, 29, a Manhattan attorney, want to spend between $350,000 and $500,000 for a house in Nassau County -- either Bellmore, Merrick or Roslyn Heights. They want at least three bedrooms and 1½ bathrooms with a yard large enough for their two Boston terriers, Holden and Chloe to play. "We'd like to keep the taxes around $10,000, but are flexible depending on the price of the house," Jennifer says. Their non-negotiables? They want an updated kitchen or new bathrooms -- "I'm not sure we could handle doing both," she says -- as well as a bathroom on the same level as the bedrooms. They also do not want the property to back up to a main road or highway. But probably the same most important factor, adds Jennifer, are good schools. THE AGENTS Three Realtors were asked to sort through the listings and pick the perfect home for the Sapirs: Galina Richards of , Janet Salvaggio of , and Lea Frank of . THEIR PICKS 1. Richards chose this three-bedroom, two-bath Colonial in Bellmore that is listed for $299,000. Built in 1910, the house features an updated kitchen and bathroom. It is on a 75-by-93-foot lot with annual property taxes of about $9,196. The property, says Richards, "fit the buyer's criteria about . . . towns, school districts, number of bathrooms and bedrooms, price and condition." 2. Salvaggio picked this five-bedroom, three-bath 1930 Colonial in Merrick, even though it has a slightly higher asking price, because it is "loaded with amenities." Listed for $549,000, there is an open floor plan, vaulted ceilings, a new kitchen, new bathrooms and a two-car detached garage. The property is 50 by 100 feet, and annual property taxes are $10,999. 3. Frank says she thinks this Roslyn Heights Colonial for $449,999 could be perfect for the Sapirs "if they are willing to spend a little bit more on taxes." The taxes for the 75-by-113-foot property are $11,138 a year. But, Frank says, there might be some flexibility in the asking price. The 1911 three-bedroom, 1.5-bath house is on a dead-end street. The 75-by-113-foot property features a gazebo, patio and pond. There is new siding, gutters, windows and pavers. THEIR REACTION The Sapirs generally like the three choices. But the couple “really, really likes” the Roslyn Heights home, says Jennifer. “We are willing to be a little flexible on the taxes, because that one is right in our price range. We like that it’s updated, and that we wouldn’t have to start gutting the house as soon as we'd move in.” YOUR TURN Vote in the poll below to tell us which house you think they should choose. COMING UP We will post updates the Sapirs’ search online and in print. Do you need help search for the perfect home? E-mail us at and you might be featured online and in print. Top photo: Brian and Jennifer Sapir with their Boston terriers Holden and Chloe in their apartment in Woodmere. Long Island real estate agents are helping the couple find the perfect house. (May 14, 2011) Tags: , , , , , , , ?'Hugo' is a clockwork homage Originally published: November 22, 2011 3:58 PM Updated: November 23, 2011 4:37 PM By RAFER GUZMAN November 23, 2011 2:18 PM goes to the Cinematheque Francaise in "Hugo," a fantasy-adventure from Martin that also doubles as a crash course in film studies. Movie buffs will revel in its poetic re-creation of the early days of cinema, though whether young viewers will also feel the magic remains a question. The film is based on Brian Selznick's Caldecott-winning graphic novel, "The Invention of Hugo Cabret," about a young orphan, Hugo (), who lives in the walls of a Paris train station in the 1930s. His prize possession, left behind by his clockmaker father (, briefly), is a broken mechanical mannequin that, tantalizingly, holds a pen. Hugo tinkers with it, hoping to someday read its message. A local toy seller, Papa Georges (Ben ), has a mysterious connection to the automaton but won't say what. Hugo seeks help from Georges' goddaughter, Isabelle (Chloe Grace Moretz, charming), and together they begin to suspect that Papa is actually Georges Melies, the real-life cinematic pioneer whose brilliant short films -- more than 500 in all -- have mostly vanished. Scorsese, as much a film scholar as a filmmaker, is clearly in love with this fact-based fancy. "Hugo" mixes modern 3-D effects with century-old techniques like iris shots and multiple exposures, and it brims with joy when re-creating Melies' charmingly inventive sets and props. makes an appealingly avuncular Melies, and is touching as his wife and favorite actress, Jeanne d'Alcy. To keep things moving, "Hugo" includes several chase scenes ( plays an almost too-menacing Station Inspector), but its real purpose is to re-establish movies as the locus of young fantasies (and to stealthily promote the preservation efforts of Scorsese's Film Foundation). That's a worthy goal, even if "Hugo" may appeal more to your inner child than to the real one sitting next to you. PLOT In 1930s Paris, a young boy discovers a forgotten link to the creation of cinema. RATING PG (mild innuendo, some scarey scenes) CAST , Chloe Grace Moretz, Asa LENGTH 2:06 PLAYING AT Area theaters, some in 3-D and IMAX BOTTOM LINE An entertaining if slightly scholarly fantasy-adventure that may appeal mostly to older children and movie buffs. ?'Hugo' trailer Monday July 18, 2011 4:18 PM By Here's the trailer for "Hugo,"Martin Scorsese's entry into the 3-D, young-adult movie game, due in theaters Nov. 23. Based on this brief glimpse, the film has some things going for it. One is an excellent cast, including Chloe Grace Moretz (donning a British accent), Sacha Baron Cohen as a scary but perhaps benevolent train-station official and Ben Kingsley as an avuncular, moustachioed magician. Jude Law looks quite convicing as a bespectacled dad whose eccentric inventions drive the film's plot. Asa Butterfield ("The Boy in the Striped Pajamas," "Nanny McPhee Returns") plays the title role. Though it may be a children's film, "Hugo"isn't completely out of Scorsese's wheelhouse. The film is based on a graphic novel centered on the invention of cinema; Kingsley's character is the French filmmaking pioneer George Méliès. And if there's anything Scorsese loves better than violent gangsters, it's film history. Still, "Hugo" raises some questions. Does the director of "Goodfellas" and "Raging Bull" have a touch light enough to pull off slapstick and whimsy?How will he handle shooting in 3-D, a format generally still seen as an unnecessary gimmick? Will anyone in the film be shot in the head and dumped into a garbage truck? Just kidding on that last one.?Hundreds turn out for annual pet parade at Gillette Park in Sayville Sunday July 15, 2012 2:45 PM By Ursula Moore Photo credit: Ursula Moore Katie Post adopted her 7-year-old Havanese from Yorkie 911 Rescue last year.Angie was rescued from a puppy mill in Ohio.“When I first saw Angie, she was underweight, very tired and didn’t socialize well with others,” said Post, 12, of Sayville. “She had been living in a cage.”But what a difference a year makes.On Saturday, Angie won a trophy for the most feminine dog... ?Kelly, LoManaco help Chaminade top MLK Published: October 2, 2010 8:58 PM Dan Kelly scored on an assist from Tom Roulis in the 41st minute to lift Chaminade in a 2-0 win over nationally ranked Martin Luther King of Manhattan Saturday in non-league boys soccer. Giovanni LoManaco scored off a pass from Kory Seibt in the 74th minute to provide the final margin for the Flyers (6-1-2). MLK (9-2) is ranked 20th in the latest ESPN Rise poll and Chaminade is 15th.East...?Kidsday: A day of good deeds Published: October 4, 2012 2:49 PM By BAYLEE DELMONTE, AVA OSHER AND LILI SILVERSTEIN. Kidsday Reporters Mitzvah Day was April 29. We are a part of The Community Synagogue, which is the biggest temple in Port Washington. This Mitzvah Day was a communitywide day, and all five temples in the town participated.We accomplished so much for people in need. We worked on making survival bags for the Queens Children's Advocacy Center. These bags are for children whose guardians have been arrested, and...?Kidsday: Finding a miniature you Published: October 7, 2011 1:54 PM By ASHLEY HANSEN. Kidsday Reporter Personalized figurines can be ordered with a likeness of yourself from the website sculpteo.com. Just send photos (front and side views). Once they get the photos they can be customized for any type of occasion such as a graduation, sports or cheerleading. You can order just the head likeness of yourself or a full body of yourself. You can even turn it into an ornament for your Christmas...?Kidsday: Helping kids with diabetes Published: February 27, 2012 6:28 PM By CHLOE ROTHENBERG. Kidsday Reporter My class has been together for two years. We looped up from third to fourth grade. Our teacher, Mrs. Therese O'Loughlin, has a nephew, Sean Boody, who is 11 years old. He came to our class to speak about juvenile diabetes and show us the insulin pumps that he has to wear. We painted pillowcases with fabric markers and put a stuffed animal and a book (from Kohl's) inside every case. We donated them...?Kidsday: Who's behind the blue mask? Published: June 7, 2012 4:50 PM By CHLOE ROGERS. Kidsday Reporter Have you ever seen someone with a blue mask or no hair? Have you ever wondered why? I'm like that; I wore a blue mask and now have short hair (I did lose all my hair at one point). I am like this because I have Fanconi anemia, a blood disorder that lowers my ability to make blood cells and fight infections. I wore a blue mask not because I have Fanconi anemia but because I had a bone-marrow...?Kidsday interviews 'Camp Rock 2' stars Published: September 2, 2010 9:02 PM By MARIA BIVONA, SONJA DRABIN, CATALINA FEDER, WILLIAM SHEELINE AND SIENA TOSCANO Kidsday Reporters, Age 13, Glen Cove, Oyster Bay and Huntington “Camp Rock 2: The Final Jam” is a sequel to the popular Disney Channel movie “Camp Rock.”In this film, there is a lot more dancing and singing than in the first, and we definitely think there are more songs to remember and sing along with. It was great to see how the camp changed, and this time, there is a new rival camp across the lake. The rivalry between the two camps forms the basis of...?Kidsday interviews 'Happy Feet Two's' Elijah Wood Published: November 17, 2011 3:14 PM By JENNA DEVINCENZO, KEVIN KRATINA, ANTHONY PAPADOPOULOS AND CHLOE ROTHENBERG Kidsday Reporters, Age 9, Island Trees Photo credit: Newsday/Pat Mullooly Kidsday reporters Anthony Papadopoulos, Chloe Rothenberg, Jenna DeVencenzo and Kevin Kratina with actor (voice of Mumble in the movie "Happy Feet Two") at the screening room in Manhattan We went to Warner Bros. Studios in Manhattan to see a preview of the new film “Happy Feet Two” in 3-D. We were soooo excited to see the movie because we all loved the original “Happy Feet.” The sequel was amazing!The setting is still Antarctica, and Mumble is still the main character. The movie begins with Mumble (voice by Elijah Wood) and his fledgling son, Erik (Ava Acres). Erik is not...?Kidsday interviews Jamie Deen Published: June 19, 2012 6:36 PM By EMMA BERK, NOELLE OEHLER AND. CHLOE REINHOLD. Kidsday Reporters, 10 and 11,. Holtsville and Holbrook Last week we visited the Food Network studios in Manhattan to meet Jamie Deen. His show, "Home for Dinner," airs Saturdays at 10:30 a.m.Tell us about your new show.It's called "Home for Dinner," and my wife [Brooke] and both my boys are going to be on it. I'll be making healthy food for the whole family that's easily prepared, and making good food taste good. It doesn't have to taste...?Kidsday movie review: 'Rango' Published: March 3, 2011 9:54 PM By AHUVA MAHGEREFTEH, NILY BARATIAN, COBY SHARIFIAN AND CHLOE KALIMIAN Kidsday Reporters, Ages 9, 10 and 11, Great Neck Photo credit: Newsday/Pat Mullooly Kidsday reporters Coby Sharifian, Nily Baratian, Ahuva Mahgevefteh and Chloe Kalimanian with actress , who stars as Priscilla in the new animated movie "Rango" We had the privilege to go to a screening of the animated movie “Rango,” in which Johnny Depp voices the title character. The beginning of the movie was kind of slow. It took some time to get to the plot. When it finally did, we really liked it.The story line begins when a chameleon (voiced by Depp) is lost in the desert. He meets an armadillo who gives him some advice about finding his true...?Kidsday review: 'Happy Feet Two' Published: November 16, 2011 12:46 PM By JENNA DEVINCENZO, KEVIN KRATINA, ANTHONY PAPADOPOULOS AND CHLOE ROTHENBERG. Kidsday Reporters, Age 9, Island Trees We went to Warner Bros. Studios in Manhattan to see a preview of the new film "Happy Feet Two" in 3-D. We were soooo excited to see the movie because we all loved the original "Happy Feet" movie. The sequel was amazing! The setting is still Antarctica and Mumble is still the main character. The movie begins with Mumble (voice by Elijah Wood) and his fledgling son, Erik (Ava Acres). Erik is...?Kidsday review: 'Wonderland' Published: May 6, 2011 5:43 PM By MEGAN FERGUSON AND JOHN LUKE HOONHOUT Kidsday Reporters, Ages 12 and 13, Smithtown Photo credit: Newsday/Pat Mullooly Actress Carly Rose Sonenclar, center, from the musical "Wonderland" with Kidsday reporters John Luke Hoonhout and Megan Ferguson at the Mariott Marquis Hotel in Manhattan In the lively Broadway musical “Wonderland,” Alice is a troubled adult with an 11-year-old daughter, Chloe.After Alice falls asleep, she travels to a new kind of Wonderland, where she meets old and new characters that help her find her way back to New York City. Along the way, these characters help solve her problems.The part of Chloe is played by Carly Rose Sonenclar. Carly is a sixth-grader...?Kotowski's OT goal lifts CSH Originally published: September 19, 2011 9:24 PM Updated: September 19, 2011 9:39 PM Photo credit: James Escher 's Victoria Kotowski, right, slips a shot past goalie Olivia Demeri to even the score, 2-2. (Sept. 19, 2011) Victoria Kotowski scored two goals, including the winner with 3:26 left in overtime, to lead Cold Spring Harbor over Manhasset, 3-2, Monday in Conference I field hockey.Garden City 5, Friends Academy 1: Tara Mahon and Alexandra Bruno each had one goal and one assist for Garden City.Bayport-Blue Point 1, West Babylon 0: Clara Bates scored off a pass from Jackie Muller with 18:48 left in the...?Leftovers: Great Neck South vs. Friends Academy Wednesday October 5, 2011 1:03 PM By Stephen Haynes Some of the things said following Friends Academy's 6-0 win over Great Neck South on Tuesday.Quakers defender Jalisa Clark Shutout: “It felt really good to have solid defense. Between Steph, Katie and myself, it worked out well. Finally getting a win: “It feels good, but we still need to remember that there are other good teams out there and we have to play hard.” Chloe Friedman... ?'Legally Blonde' the musical at Gateway Originally published: June 28, 2011 8:55 PM Updated: June 29, 2011 3:20 PM By STEVE PARKS Photo credit: Jeff Bellante A scene from "," the musical, at Gateway Performing Arts Center, Bellport, through July 9, 2011. If torts were candy canes and judges were hairdressers, then Reese Witherspoon -- or in this case, Ruby Lewis -- could be the pride of Harvard Law and win every case.In "Legally Blonde," the 2001 movie and 2007 Broadway musical, we're asked to believe that a fashion-marketing major who thinks you only wear black when there's a dead person in the room not only gets into Harvard Law School...?LETTERS: Gabreski too quiet, role of trainers Originally published: November 24, 2010 8:04 PM Updated: November 26, 2010 7:15 AM What's happening with Gabreski? I often pass Gabreski Airport in and observe an unutilized wasteland. Why is it that instead of being an active landing strip, it looks like an abandoned tarmac? Shouldn't County be asking the federal government for some of that shovel-ready project money to renovate and turn this region into a productive gold mine? Just think of the revenue that can be raised from helicopter tours, private jet landings and flying lessons. Just think of the new employment that could be created, especially if the Shinnecock casino goes up in that same vicinity. Chloe Mack The proper role of school athletic trainers As an athletic director and a former student athletic trainer, I agree with most of the comments made by 's head trainer, Tim Prohinsie ["Athletic trainers help avoid damage," Letters, Nov. 14]. However, he failed to consider the actual State Education Department's regulation that requires any student-athlete who is diagnosed with a potential head injury to be cleared by the chief medical officer of the school district before he or she may return to play. Athletic trainers may certainly identify and evaluate head injuries, but the "return to play" authorization may only come from the chief medical officer. I also feel that Prohinsie is oversimplifying how schools treat injured athletes. If there is a physical therapy clinic involved, chances are that group offers student-athletes access to doctors, physicians' assistants, athletic trainers and therapists who under normal circumstances would not be there if the school district employs a general practitioner. Prohinsie is correct when he says that athletic trainers should be given adequate compensation, but even that does not always guarantee a district will find a qualified person. The hours are brutal (2 p.m. until the last team leaves, nights, Saturdays and an occasional Sunday), and if that athletic trainer is like most, he or she works a morning stint in a clinic similar to the ones described earlier. Those factors make for a high rate of burnout. To help with the availability of trainers, the Suffolk County High School Athletic Trainers Association provides access to qualified professionals. Editor's note: The writer is the supervisor of physical education, athletics and recreation for the school district. This letter stated that contracting with a physical therapy office to provide athletic trainers is a "worse" option. It is actually a better solution. Most physical therapists hold either a master's degree or a clinical doctorate and many are board certified in different practice areas, including orthopedics and sports. Specialists in sports physical therapy are equipped to be immediate on-field responders during athletic events due to their emergency response training. This high level of specific training allows for further detailed evaluation of the neuromuscular system and avoids delay in treatment that may lead to disability. Allen Eshmoili Editor's note: The writer is a vice president with Reddy-Care Physical Therapy. ?LI fans react to first 'Hunger Games' screenings Published: March 23, 2012 5:05 AM By BETH WHITEHOUSE Photo credit: Kevin P. Coughlin Friends Chloe Adamczyk, 12, left, and Coral Jacobellis, 11, at "The Hunger Games" premiere at the Farmingdale Multiplex. (March 22, 2012) Moviegoers seamlessly transitioned from loving “The Hunger Games” book to embracing the film when it premiered at 12:01 a.m. Friday at the Multiplex, cheering for protagonist Katniss Everdeen, crying with her when death struck her ally and relishing her onscreen kiss. “Instead of the princess that has to be saved, she’s basically the savior,” said Wendy Gil, 19, who came to the premiere dressed as Katniss, wearing a replica of a Hunger Games training jacket with a No. 12 on the sleeve representing the heroine's district. Although viewers had some quibbles with details that differed from the page to the screen, they were on the whole quite forgiving. “Because I’m a fan, I give it 10 out of 10,” Gil said as she left the theater after 2:30 a.m. “Technically the day just started, but it’s already the best day ever.” The “Hunger Games” takes place in a dystopian future in what’s left of the United States. Each year, 24 children between ages 12 and 18 are forced into a reality TV-style competition in which they must fight to the death until just one "winner" is left. The other contender from Katniss’ district, baker’s son Peeta Mellark, is in love with Katniss, as is a teen left behind at home, Gale Hawthorne. The movie is rated PG-13. The sold-out 12:01 a.m. showing was one of seven scheduled showings at the theater between 12:01 and 12:30 a.m., and it was filled with mostly teenagers ? and some parents who were sucked into the hoopla. Spirits were high throughout the theater as moviegoers awaited the dimming of lights. Chloe Adamczyk, 12, of , who was wearing a "Team Peeta" shirt, stood up and yelled “Team Peeta ? because Gale rhymes with fail!” Her friend, Coral Jacobellis, 11, urged Peeta fans to raise their hands.? Coral’s mom, Karen, said she was surprised her daughter wanted to see the movie, given its violent nature. “She never even wanted to watch movies that had something die. I was surprised she would have an interest in something like this,” she said. Brian Mazza, 16, a junior at High School, is writing an article about the movie for his high school newspaper. “I was impressed with the way they portrayed the Capitol,” Mazza said. “It was exactly what I imagined while reading it. I was a little disappointed with the fighting. I thought it would be more intense. They made it too brief.” Megan Van Aken, 14, of , wore a Hunger Games T-shirt to the showing and was accompanied by her mom, Brigid, 42. Their whole family ? including Michael Jr., 12, and Michael Sr., 42 ? read the book at the recommendation of Michael Jr. Megan said she doesn’t usually follow her little brother’s advice, but this time she’s glad she did. Both Megan and Brigid cried during the movie, dabbing their eyes with tissues while mom put her arm around her daughter. “It was perfect,” Megan said after the movie. “I thought it was really true to the book.” Because her brother has a test at school Friday, he has to wait until Friday night to see the movie with dad. At dinner before Megan left for the show, Michael told her: “Megan, you better not tell me anything that happens in that movie.” Or what would happen to her? “I don’t want to know,” Megan said.? ?Lively, DiCaprio split, 'remain friends' Published: October 4, 2011 9:22 PM By FRANK LOVECE. Special to Newsday Blake Lively's romance with Leonardo DiCaprio, in which the two globetrotted from Venice, Italy, to the French Riviera to Disneyland, has ended.Representatives for both stars confirmed the breakup to Us Weekly Tuesday, saying the two "remain friends." "Inception" star DiCaprio, 36, and Lively, 24, of TV's "Gossip Girl," were first spotted as a couple in May on Steven Spielberg's yacht in...?Long Islanders' storm stories Originally published: January 12, 2011 11:05 AM Updated: January 12, 2011 12:58 PM By STAFF REPORTS Photo credit: Newsday / Bill Bleyer Dawn Curley and Mike Washington brave the snowy conditions during Wednesday's storm. (Jan. 12, 2011) The snow accumulation that came with the storm was a welcome sight to some day laborers, who have been competing for scarce construction work during the winter.While other people may have had snow days, the storm presented an opportunity to work. Many of those men walked the side streets of Huntington Station, shovel in hand, ready to clean driveways. "It beats spending all...?Louis V, Miu Miu and Elie Saab give grand finale Originally published: October 3, 2012 2:54 PM Updated: October 3, 2012 3:17 PM By The Associated Press THOMAS ADAMSON (AP Fashion Writer) Photo credit: AP Models wear creations by fashion designer Marc Jacobs for 's ready to wear Spring-Summer 2013 collection presented in Paris, Wednesday, Oct. 3, 2012. (AP Photo/Jacques Brinon) PARIS - (AP) -- , more than anyone, knows that it's not what you say but how you say it. The Louis Vuitton showman thus capped an incredibly strong Paris fashion week -- with help from artist Daniel Buren -- by building a life-size shopping mall inside the . Understatement is not a word in ' vocabulary, so a collaboration with the minimalist artist -- who made the famed striped columns in Paris' Palais Royal -- might have raised eyebrows. But Buren rose to the occasion. "(The Louvre) was already big, all I did was make it bigger," said Buren, with trademark humor. "It was others that called me a minimalist, not me." The sky's the limit when you're backed by Europe's richest man and -owner , with whom he mingled before the show. Meanwhile, Miuccia , who herself presides over a lucrative fashion empire, felled a small forest in aid of her presentation for Miu Miu, one of the final day's other big shows. Fashion insiders clutched wooden invitations as they walked down a wooden "red carpet" and into the auditorium with a 30-meter (yard) wooden runway, and the show's huge wooden-tiered seating. There was some irony that the collection was held at Paris' grand Environmental Council. Paris Fashion Week designers are often described as show-stopping, but none more than Elie Saab. The Lebanese designer threw huge graphic chunks of moon rock down the catwalk as set, to evoke his more geometric theme. Unfortunately, one attendee didn't pick up on the visual props and tripped head over heels -- slightly delaying the show. Trends on the ninth exhausting day of the season included prints -- both graphic and colored -- as well as sheer transparencies and cutouts. LOUIS VUITTON What do you get if you mix up the world's most famous checks and Paris' most famous stripes? The answer: Louis Vuitton, whose 1960s style spring-summer fashion show twinned the iconic checked Damier pattern with a set designed by artist Daniel Buren. Buren created four full-scale escalators, featuring his signature 8.7cm stripes, which wowed spectators inside. "It's exquisite, beautiful," said 29-year-old Christina Malaki. "What a spectacle." In fashion terms it was strong, with most of the 64 retro looks delivered in -style checks that made a bold optical statement in black and white, as well as browns, gray and leaf green. Slightly puffed rounded shoulders, miniskirts, beehives and a few exposed midriffs pointed to one thing: The swinging 60s are back. The silhouettes -- often flat and loose-- prioritized the Damier above the female form, which rippled nicely in skirts as the models, who walked in pairs, filed by with handbags. Louis Vuitton is a house that is proud of its tradition, but also likes to evolve. The collection saw the ubiquitous monogram banished for the first time. Instead, one recurrent feature was, so say the program notes, "the smallest sequins ever produced." Thousands of microscopic sequins brought a dazzling metallic shimmer to dresses and skirt suits, though when it was used on the blocked Damier pattern it was slightly too much. "It's all about being graphic. (Buren's escalators) are a mathematical equation," Jacobs told journalists after the show. Another math equation will come from the buoyant receipts from this, a highly saleable collection. It's a fair bet that by next year this bold check will be everywhere. MIU MIU Miu Miu's spring-summer 2013 show in Paris had a wintery vibe. Despite the slightly off-kilter season it was a slick display, with lashings of faux fur on coats and stoles with dyed patterning at the brand often seen as 's baby sister offshoot. It picked up nicely on this season's fascination with prints as contrasting explosions on loose skirt suits -- sometimes resembling the negative of a photograph. As ever, it remained demure, but interesting back features graced a few reversed boxy tops. Alongside looks in denim and the prints, it gave the clothes a distinctly cool edge which reached its peak in a few eclectic, asymmetrical pieces. Only a master like Prada can make a tiny strapped cropped camisole work underneath a thick fur coat, accessorized with leather gloves and jeweled Roman sandals. Uber-cool actress -- and Miu Miu spokesperson -- watched from the front . ELIE SAAB Elie Saab, master of the va-va-voom silhouette, broke out of his strict mold for his spring-summer 2013 show in Paris. The Lebanese designer must have been feeling in an adventurous mood: He dabbled in graphic details and floral prints in Wednesday's show. But never fear, his bread-and-butter traffic stopping dresses and sequins were still there -- in cerulean blue and vermilion. After all, it's what his buyers and celebrity wearers such as singer on the front row expect and love. But the palette this season was updated to include a beautiful cobalt, which in turn exploded into fluorescent color prints on gowns, some full length, others above the knee, that fluttered by in silk muslin. Saab included the odd peplum and some '90s looks with black-and-white geometric lines. The catwalk set of graphic angular moon rocks signaled to fashion insiders even before the show started that Saab would move in this direction. ______ Thomas Adamson can be followed at http:/ /Twitter.com/ThomasAdamsonAP Copyright 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. ?Mich. couple’s kids born on 8/8/8, 9/9/9, 10/10/10 Published: October 15, 2010 1:28 PM By The Associated Press Photo credit: AP Chad and Barbie Soper of Rockford, Mich. hold their children Cearra, left, born on Oct. 10, 2010, and , Chloe, born Aug. 8, 2008 and Cameron, born on Sept. 9, 2009. (Oct. 14, 2010) A southwest couple shouldn’t have too hard a time remembering their children’s birthdays. After all, it’s as easy as eight, nine, 10. Or more specifically, 8/8/8, 9/9/9 and 10/10/10. Chad and Barbie Soper’s three kids were born on those dates. The most recent, Cearra Nicole, was born this past Sunday. Barbie Soper, 36, said she often is asked whether the couple manipulated the birth dates. The answer is no. Well, sort of. The Sopers’ first child, Chloe Corrin, arrived exactly on the couple’s due date. But the second baby, Cameron Dane, was born with induced labor ahead of the Sept. 20 due date. Cearra came early because Soper’s physician wanted to prevent potential health complications. The original due date was Nov. 4. "At some point, probably 20 weeks into the pregnancy, we decided it was better for her to deliver early,” Dr. Andrew Van Slooten told The Grand Rapids Press. “There is this window we had. We definitely had the option to shoot for that (Oct. 10) day and did. "But it wasn’t like delivering her three weeks early just to hit that date." Soper told the newspaper she’s excited about her children’s unique birth dates and that they “all get to share in it.” The big question, though, is: What are the chances of an 11/11/11 baby? "Definitely no," Soper said. " ... We wanted three, and I’m glad we have that."? ?Mildred Space (1924-2012) Published: September 2, 2012 10:00 PM By NEWSDAY.COM Photo credit: Courtesy of David T. Ferguson Funeral Home Mildred Space Mildred "Millie Garrity" Space, 88, of Howells, died Aug. 21, 2012, at St. Joseph's Place in Port Jervis.Mildred was born April 30, 1924, in Port Jervis to parents James and Mildred Romaine Garrity.She worked for the Middletown Psychiatric Center for 35 years.Survivors include her husband, Leon L. Space, of Howells, four daughters, Marlea VanAmburgh of Wallkill, Darlene Dolan...?Mineola fifth-graders getting iPads in classroom Originally published: September 13, 2010 9:39 PM Updated: September 13, 2010 9:47 PM By JENNIFER SINCO KELLEHER Photo credit: Kevin P. Coughlin Fifth grade students Ava Collica, Michael DeLelas, Flabio Anjo, Chloe Katinas, and Juliana Lupo at Jackson Avenue Elementary School in Mineola use their iPads, Monday. (Sept. 13, 2010) When fifth-grade teacher Dee Wojis found out she would be using Apple's iPad in her Mineola classroom, she was a little nervous about her own ability to handle the newfangled device.Meanwhile, most of her students at Jackson Avenue School had no qualms about getting their hands on them."At first, I can say I was petrified," Wojis said Monday of that summer meeting when Superintendent...?Murdoch's wife a star after pie attack Originally published: July 19, 2011 9:57 PM Updated: July 19, 2011 10:04 PM By CASSANDRA VINOGRAD. The Associated Press LONDON -- Her husband was in the hot seat, but Wendi Deng has emerged as the unlikely star of a British hearing into phone hacking at Rupert Murdoch's newspapers. Video of 42-year-old Deng jumping forward to smack a protester who was aiming a pie at Murdoch's face quickly went viral, and numerous fan pages quickly popped up on social networking sites such as Facebook praising her quick rapid...?My friend, Frank Rich. Yes, Frank Rich Published: March 6, 2011 7:01 AM By CAL THOMAS One of the pleasures of an earthly transition is that you can write nice things about a person while they are still around to read them. And so, I rise to praise my friend and favorite newspaper writer, Frank Rich Jr., as he leaves for New York magazine. MORE: CARTOONS: What, you say? You are a conservative and he is among the most politically liberal people in journalism. Or, as someone asked me one night when they heard I was going to dinner with former Sen. , "How can you eat with a man like that?" "Easy," I replied. "He's my friend." And so was , I am happy to say. After all, Jesus was "a friend to sinners" and if they were good enough for Him, they are certainly good enough for me. The point, though, is irrelevant, but it is indicative of our political discourse today. It is not a cliche to say, "Some of my best friends are liberal ." I write a biweekly column with Bob Beckel whose liberal credentials are beyond reproach. Why has our political discourse caused us to hate one another if we are of different parties or persuasions? Why must a member of another party or persuasion always be seen as being on "the other side"? The are on the other side. My fellow American is my fellow American, regardless of politics. There are many reasons for such divisions, none of them valid. I first "met" Frank when he called me about a column he was working on. I was completely taken aback. After providing him with the information he requested, I do what I often do when meeting someone for the first time. I asked him where he was from. "From Washington," he said. So am I. It turned out we both played clarinet as kids and both owned a KLH stereo, the stereo of choice for teenagers at the time. And we both loved the theater. He was an usher at Washington's National Theatre. I was a frequent patron. We never met, though he might have handed me a program as I walked to my seat. We would subsequently meet, attend Broadway shows and have meals together, learning about each other and what brought us to our points of view. Our wives often joined us. Frank's wife is Alex Witchel, who resembles in my mind the beautiful of 's "." Witchel writes for The New York Times Magazine and shares Frank's gift. As far as I know, Frank didn't "convert" to conservatism, or I to liberalism. If you read his autobiography, "Ghost Light," you will understand more of Frank Rich, the man. And that is another point, made recently by in his Sunday interview with . Asked, "Why do so many people hate you?" the president responded, "They don't know me." Whether one thinks he might still hate the president if he got to know him is not the point. So many people see other people as labels and define them as such. --liberal-conservative-independent-religious-secular. None of these tell you anything about a person. What are we missing as Americans by dismissing people we may disagree with politically as unworthy of our friendship, or even citizenship in a country that has always been diverse in its opinions? In 1776, a considerable number of our ancestors wanted to remain British and denounced those who didn't as traitors. Frank Rich's 14 years as chief drama critic for The New York Times and his 17 years as an op-ed opinion columnist may be unsurpassed for writing of this kind. When you get to know someone, including their failures, insecurities, family dynamics and fears, you come to appreciate them on a level far above the political chatter. Politics come and go; friends are forever. As wrote, "It's friendship, friendship, just a perfect blendship. When other friendships have been forgot, ours will still be hot." I am proud to call Frank Rich my friend and to wish him well in his new digs at New York magazine. Their gain is the Times' loss. ? Cal Thomas is a Tribune Media Services columnist.?Readers may send him e-mail at . ?Designer laptop cases debut Tuesday November 30, 2010 10:56 AM By Linda Perney Looking for a stylish laptop case? Designer Chloe Dao has come up with a line of cases for Nuo Tech which will be on sale for the holidays. Patterns range from floral to pinstripe prints, and prices start at $24.99. Sizes accommodate 15.6 and 11.6 inch screens, the iPad, and the Kindle.The bags are available at Staples stores nationwide as well as online. You can also find them at Dell.com... ?New York Film Festival celebrates 50 years Wednesday June 13, 2012 4:03 PM By The New York Film Festival will celebrate its 50th anniversary this year when it runs from Sept. 28 to Oct. 14. The line-up hasn't been announced yet, but a press release from the festival contained a list of the last 49 years of opening-night films, which makes for fun reading (at least for film-geeks). It's a pretty impressive roster. Imagine being among the first to see Jean-Luc Godard's revolutionary "Alphaville" in 1965, Gillo Pontecorvo's merciless "The Battle of Algiers" in 1967, Bernardo Bertolucci's transgressive "Luna" in 1979 or Jim Jarmusch's genre-defining "Down By Law" in 1986. Recent years have been pretty good, too, with Alexander Payne's "About Schmidt," Stephen Frears' "The Queen" and David Fincher's "The Social Network." Here's the full list: 1. 1963 The Exterminating Angel (Luis Bunuel, Mexico) 2. 1964 Hamlet (Grigori Kozintsev, USSR) 3. 1965 Alphaville (Jean-Luc Godard, France) 4. 1966 Loves of a Blonde (Milos Forman, Czechoslovakia) 5. 1967 The Battle of Algiers (Gillo Pontecorvo, Italy/Algeria) 6. 1968 Capricious Summer (Jiri Menzel, Czechoslovakia) 7. 1969 Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (Paul Mazursky, US) 8. 1970 The Wild Child (Francois Truffaut, France) 9. 1971 The Debut (Gleb Panfilov, Soviet Union) 10. 1972 Chloe in the Afternoon (Eric Rohmer, France) 11. 1973 Day for Night (Francois Truffaut, France) 12. 1974 Don't Cry With Your Mouth Full (Pascal Thomas, France) 13. 1975 Conversation Piece (Luchino Visconti, Italy) 14. 1976 Small Change (Francois Truffaut, France) 15. 1977 One Sings, The Other Doesn't (Agnes Varda, France) 16. 1978 A Wedding (Robert Altman, US) 17. 1979 Luna (Bernardo Bertolucci, Italy/US) 18. 1980 Melvin and Howard (Jonathan Demme, US) 19. 1981 Chariots of Fire (Hugh Hudson, UK) 20. 1982 Veronika Voss (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, West Germany) 21. 1983 The Big Chill (Lawrence Kasdan, US) 22. 1984 Country (Richard Pearce, US) 23. 1985 Ran (Akira Kurosawa, Japan) 24. 1986 Down By Law (Jim Jarmusch, US) 25. 1987 Dark Eyes (Nikita Mikhalkov, Soviet Union) 26. 1988 Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (Pedro Almodovar, Spain) 27. 1989 Too Beautiful For You (Bertrand Blier, France) 28. 1990 Miller's Crossing (Joel Coen, US) 29. 1991 The Double Life of Veronique (Krysztof Kieslowski, Poland/France) 30. 1992 Olivier Olivier (Agnieszka Holland, France) 31. 1993 Short Cuts (Robert Altman, US) 32. 1994 Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino, US) 33. 1995 Shanghai Triad (Zhang Yimou, China) 34. 1996 Secrets & Lies (Mike Leigh, UK) 35. 1997 The Ice Storm (Ang Lee, US) 36. 1998 Celebrity (Woody Allen, US) 37. 1999 All About My Mother (Pedro Almodovar, Spain) 38. 2000 Dancer in the Dark (Lars von Trier, Denmark) 39. 2001 Va Savoir (Jacques Rivette, France) 40. 2002 About Schmidt (Alexander Payne, US) 41. 2003 Mystic River (Clint Eastwood, US) 42. 2004 Look At Me (Agnes Jaoui, France) 43. 2005 Good Night, and Good Luck. (George Clooney, US) 44. 2006 The Queen (Stephen Frears, UK) 45. 2007 The Darjeeling Limited (Wes Anderson, US) 46. 2008 The Class (Laurent Cantet, France) 47. 2009 Wild Grass (Alain Resnais, France) 48. 2010 The Social Network (David Fincher, US) 49. 2011 Carnage (Roman Polanski, France/Poland)?No slowing down North Shore girls basketball Published: January 29, 2011 10:04 PM By JAMES CREPEA Photo credit: Kathy Kmonicek The North Shore girls basketball team walks on to the court in a game against Manhasset. (Jan. 28, 2011) Andrew Fierstein cannot look away for even a second. As a basketball shot clock operator his job requires constant attention but during North Shore girls basketball games Fierstein's position is the most demanding on Long Island."The girls game is a lot quicker, there's a lot more change of possessions," said Fierstein, a sophomore at North Shore. "They really take shots quick."The...?No sun, no problem at school solar car race Tuesday May 22, 2012 1:52 PM By Arielle Dollinger Photo credit: Barry Sloan Middle schoolers who came to the Cradle of Aviation Museum in Garden City Monday to participate in the Junior Solar Sprint, a solar car race, faced the worst possible challenge -- no sun to power their cars.But contestants wouldn’t be stopped by the unforgiving sky. The competition was moved into the building’s lobby, and students used battery packs to make their vehicles move.The... ?Northport kids take vacation, in the past Thursday April 21, 2011 2:26 PM By T.C. McCarthy The Northport Historical Society and Museum gave kids a hands-on history lesson this week.It was the museum’s first-ever “History Takes a Vacation” program, started by the museum's assistant director, Kari-Ann Carr. Students learned about the battle at Fort Salonga, spy operations on Long Island, and what 19th century children did for fun.“We are taking different... ?Northport students homeless for a cause Saturday November 5, 2011 2:40 PM By T.C. McCarthy More than 100 Northport High School students will experience homelessness next Thursday in an attempt to raise awareness.Sheltering the Homeless and Needy This Year, or SHANTY, is a 16-year-old program at the school in which students spend the night in cardboard boxes, listen to experts on homelessness and eat only a peanut butter-and-jelly or cheese sandwich for dinner.“It was the... ?On sale now: This week's top picks Wednesday March 14, 2012 12:34 PM By Nina Ruggiero Love designer clothing but hate paying full price?Me, too.Searching the Web for sales can be a time-consuming activity, so I've gathered my five favorite discounted items online this week.This week's picks include Madewell boots, huge savings on Chloe jeans, a perfect spring green Anthropologie cardigan and more.To view them, visit long-island.newsday.com/shopping. Have... ?Phelps wins 200 backstroke at Charlotte Published: May 15, 2011 8:59 PM By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS CHARLOTTE, N.C. ? beat in the 200-meter backstroke Sunday at the Charlotte UltraSwim. Phelps, keying more on clocking consistent splits for this USA Grand Prix meet than wins, finished in 1 minute, 57.20 seconds. Hungarian Katinka Hosszu set a meet record of 2:12.29 in the 200 individual medley, topping Southern teammate Stina Gardell. ' win in the 100 freestyle (49.46) was his first in almost 10 years in his hometown meet. Distance specialist won the 800 free in 8:31.20, ahead of Andreina Pinto's 8:33.37. ?Pop culture influence seen in baby names Published: December 1, 2011 10:09 PM When it comes to baby names, close to 2 out of 5 moms find inspiration among famous people and celebrities, according to the annual survey from BabyCenter.com based on the names of 300,000 babies born in 2011 to moms registered on the website.Aiden tops the boys' list for the seventh consecutive year, and Sophia leads the girls' for the second year in a row. Rounding out the top 10 for girls...?Port Jeff fire department celebrates 125th year Sunday June 10, 2012 12:11 PM By Kathleen Fordyce Photo credit: Kathleen Fordyce Since the day Ryan Corey, 2, visited the Port Jefferson Fire Department and was given a tour of the trucks and equipment, he has loved firefighters.“That started the fire in him,” said his mom, Jessica Corey. “The firemen were all so welcoming.”On Saturday night, Corey sat in his red wagon with his friend, Luke Donarummo, also 2. The duo, wearing firefighter costumes and hats, clapped... ?Port Washington's Shon impresses at U.S. Amateur Published: August 13, 2010 7:24 PM By MARK HERRMANN Port Washington teenager Kelly Shon is on her way to Princeton, and, from the looks of her week at the U.S. Women's Amateur, she also is on her way to a place on the national scene.Shon was impressive in two rounds of stroke play at Charlotte (N.C.) Country Club and easily won her first two matches against strong opponents before losing in the round of 16 to Stephanie Sherlock, the top women's...?Project Sage gallops to horses' rescue Originally published: August 7, 2010 9:41 PM Updated: August 9, 2010 8:41 AM By TULA BATANCHIEV Photo credit: Nancy Siesel People get to know some of the horses during the Project Sage Horse Rescue and Two Cousins' Farm grand opening at Ketcham Farm in Northport. (Aug. 7, 2010) When Brittany Rostron's horse, Sage, died in 2006, she tried to find a way to remember him. A year later, she devised a plan to immortalize her thoroughbred by creating Project Sage Horse Rescue -- a rescue, rehabilitation and adoption program.At a ribbon-cutting ceremony on Northport's historic Ketcham Farm Saturday, Project Sage's rescued horses finally had a barn to call home."It's...?Sample sales Friday December 10, 2010 6:27 PM By Ginny Dunleavy and Julie Gordon Nanette LeporeBig savings on dresses, jackets, coats, skirts, pants and tops plus Oonagh by Nanette Lepore cashmere, cardigans, pullovers and knit dresses, Dec. 16-17, 9 a.m.-7 p.m., at 225 W. 35th St., 4th floor; 212-594-0012.Temperley London and ALICE by TemperleyUp to 80 percent off pre-fall and fall items plus bridal sample pieces, Dec. 13-17, 11 a.m.-7 p.m. 453 Broome St., 2nd... ?Shoptalk and Sample sales Published: December 14, 2010 2:08 PM Dec. 15-16SHOP FOR A CAUSE at the Temple Beth Sholom of Smithtown's fashion sale, featuring classic styles from Anik NY, today 11 a.m.-7 p.m., and tomorrow 11 a.m.-5 p.m., 433 Edgewood Ave., Smithtown; 631-724-0424. A portion of the proceeds will go to Make-A-Wish Foundation of Suffolk County. Dec. 16 PADMA LAKSHMI VISITS BERGDORF GOODMAN with her winter 2010 jewelry trunk show,...?Sklar, Friedman key to Friends' C crown Originally published: November 6, 2011 8:15 PM Updated: November 7, 2011 12:12 AM By STEPHEN HAYNES Photo credit: Kathleen Malone-Van Dyke Friends Academy's Morgan Landown #12 celebrates her goal with teammate Erica Sklar #9 as 's Katie Megiel #8 reacts in the Class C field hockey final. (Nov. 6, 2011) Despite what a concept of time may lead you to believe, Oct. 4 was a long time ago. It says so here on this Friends Academy field hockey calendar.The Quakers starting the season 0-5 and struggling to muster offense? That's a "once upon a time . . . " story."It seems so long ago, I can't even believe it was this year," senior Erica Sklar said of the date her team earned its first win...?Sklar, Friedman lead Friends' victory Originally published: October 4, 2011 9:09 PM Updated: October 4, 2011 9:25 PM By STEPHEN HAYNES Photo credit: James Escher Friends Academy #4 Chloe Friedman, right, heads downfield as #18 Ally Farishian gives chase in the second half. (Oct. 4, 2011) First Erica Sklar scored. Then Chloe Friedman scored. Friedman again. And Friedman once more. Then Sklar. And Sklar . . . Ah, you get the picture.Can't keep a good team down for too long. And the same can be said for good scorers. Behind a barrage of goals from those firing forwards -- three each -- Friends Academy beat Great Neck South, 6-0, Tuesday in Nassau Conference II field hockey.It...?Soldier who lost 4 limbs back in Michigan hometown Originally published: October 4, 2012 11:43 AM Updated: October 5, 2012 12:57 AM By The Associated Press MIKE HOUSEHOLDER (Associated Press) Photo credit: AP Yellow ribbons hang on street lights in Vassar, Mich., Thursday, Oct. 4, 2012 honoring Army Staff Sgt. Travis Mills who is visiting his hometown for the first time since losing all four limbs while fighting in . Mills, his wife, Kelsey, and their 1-year-old daughter, Chloe, will be the grand marshals of Vassar High School's homecoming parade on Thursday evening. (AP Photo/Carlos Osorio) (AP) -- Army Staff Sgt. Travis Mills had been a lot of places since losing his four limbs in Afghanistan. The one place he hadn't been was where people knew him best.He finally returned to his Michigan hometown this week -- six months after the explosion that cost him his arms and legs -- to serve as the grand marshal of his old high school's homecoming parade."I didn't come to Vassar...?Sophia, powerhouse Jacob top list of baby names Originally published: May 14, 2012 12:08 PM Updated: May 14, 2012 12:35 PM By KEN SCHACHTER Photo credit: Fotolia The announced the top baby names of 2011, with Sophia and Jacob taking the prize for most popular male and female names. Notice a lot of Jacobs in your town's mommy-and-me or elementary school classes?That's because Jacob has been the No. 1 boys name for 13 years running, according to the Social Security Administration, which released its list of the nation's most popular baby names for 2011.On the female side, the top name for 2011 was Sophia, which has had a steady climb from 42nd place in 2000. Sophia...?Summer's hot sunglasses are not subtle Originally published: July 15, 2011 2:48 PM Updated: July 15, 2011 4:42 PM By JOSEPH V. AMODIO. Special to Newsday Photo credit: Handout These Ray-Ban Original Wayfarer Sunglasses, $145, come in a various shades and a washy, watercolory print; at select Lord and Taylor stores and . Tortoise, schmortoise. This season, frames on sunglasses have got a lot more going on. Like stripes, dots, checks, florals and 3-D cutouts, to name a few."Clothes collections often lead the way," says Karen Sacco, co-founder (with fellow optician Dianne Szwed) of Optical Heights in Roslyn Heights. Apparel designers have pushed animal prints, for instance, "and now you're seeing that in frames,"...?The Boston Tea Party Ships and Museum Originally published: September 4, 2012 6:57 PM Updated: September 7, 2012 12:39 AM By ALEXANDRA PECCI. The Washington Post Photo credit: The Washington Post / Alexandra Pecci The Boston Tea Party Ships & Museum offers visitors an opportunity to yell and throw things. (Aug. 21, 2012) storms into the meetinghouse, and he's angry. He pulls off his hat and waves his fist in the air, shouting about taxes and tyranny. Even our playing cards are taxed, he cries. Hisses and calls of "fie" emanate from the angry crowd. We, too, have had enough. "What shall we do with the king's tea?" he calls. The answer is clear. Outside, it might be a regular weekday afternoon in the year 2012. But where I'm visiting, it's always Dec. 16, 1773. The Boston Tea Party Ships & Museum reopened in June after a devastating fire forced the old museum to close in 2001. The newly revamped and rebuilt version is an interactive, multimedia experience that crams costumed role players, high-tech exhibits, audience input, replica ships, a film and one historical artifact into a 60-minute tour. PATRIOTS, NOT PIRATES I'm visiting the museum with my 3-year-old daughter, Chloe, who's having fun, despite wondering why there are so many pirates in this place; the re-enactors' tricorn hats are throwing her. "They're not pirates," I whisper in her ear. "They're patriots." We follow a guide outside to board what the museum calls a "floating nautical exhibit": a painstakingly crafted replica of the Brig Beaver, one of three ships the rebels boarded by night to destroy 342 crates of tea to protest British taxes. Bedecked with feathers to disguise ourselves as American Indians, we take turns shouting "huzzah!" and tossing replica tea crates overboard before hauling the dripping parcels back onto the deck of the ship. Next, it's back inside the museum, into a darkened room that houses a re-creation of Griffin's Wharf, complete with the sounds of seagulls and crashing waves. According to our guide, it's now the morning after the Tea Party. "We are all now rebels in the eyes of the crown," he says. Suddenly, holograms of two women -- one a rebel, the other a loyalist -- appear in the scene. This hyper-modern image seems like a strange addition to me, but I go with it, imagining they're ghosts as they glimmer against the black background and debate the events of the night before. ORIGINAL TEA CHEST In the next room, portraits of and King George "come alive" to argue the merits of the rebels' cause. But the real star here is the Robinson Half Chest, which sits in a clear display case and slowly rotates on a pedestal. According to a voice-over, it's one of only two tea chests known to have been recovered from the Boston Tea Party. Soon, we're ushered into the Minuteman Theatre, where we sit in rows to view "Let It Begin Here," a short film that re-creates the events leading up to the start of the Revolution, from 's ride to the battle at Lexington Green. When the tour officially ends, Chloe and I head upstairs to Abigail's Tea Room, a cafe where we're greeted by yet more costumed actors, trading stories about life in the colonies and how to properly serve tea. Our table overlooks the Brig Beaver, and (for an additional charge) Chloe and I share cups of tea and pastries while we watch another group of visitors toss tea crates from the ship. The entire finely choreographed experience offers a whirlwind overview of the Boston Tea Party and its aftermath. Admission isn't cheap, but we certainly had fun. Plus, every kid on the tour seemed to relish the opportunity to yell and throw things. For parents, that alone might be worth the price of admission. If you go BOSTON TEA PARTY SHIPS & MUSEUM: Street Bridge, Boston; 617-338-1773, WHEN Daily 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., with museum tours beginning every 15 minutes; reservations recommended ADMISSION $22.50, children $13.50, 3 and younger free. Abigail's Tea Room fixed-price menu is $14.95 for adults and $9.95 for kids. ?The top 40 movies for fall Originally published: September 1, 2011 5:05 PM Updated: September 3, 2011 7:44 PM By RAFER GUZMAN Based on a real life experience, "50/50" is a touching, yet funny, story about how a young man copes with finding out he has cancer and his 50/50 chance of surviving. Starring: and In theaters: Sept. 30, 2011 The summer's bruising battle of the blockbusters is over, but isn't taking a rest. Over the coming weeks, the studios will trot out brand-name Oscar contenders, crowd-pleasing family films and snazzy-looking action movies, with several releases clearly going head-to-head. We'll see dueling biopics with as in "J. Edgar" (due Nov. 9) and as in "The Iron Lady" (Dec. 16). The long-awaited thrillers "Mission: Impossible -- Ghost Protocol" and "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" will arrive on the same day, Dec. 21. And will compete with himself, releasing two family-oriented movies, "The Adventures of Tintin" and "War Horse," less than a week apart in December. Time will tell whether "The Muppets" (Nov. 23) will relaunch a dormant franchise, whether will succeed as an action-hero in "Abduction" (Sept. 23), or whether the remake of "Footloose" (Oct. 14) will galvanize today's teen audiences. As for the upcoming wedding episode of "," due Nov. 18, is anyone worried it won't be a hit? All told, nearly 100 releases will hit screens between now and the end of the year. We've picked the 40 biggest movies of the season, listed below. CONTAGION (Sept. 9) The soon-to-retire filmmaker delivers this thriller about a fast-spreading airborne virus. With , , , and . I DON'T KNOW HOW SHE DOES IT (Sept. 16) A comedy starring as a beleaguered working mother. With and . Douglas McGrath ("Emma") directs. 3-D (Sept. 16) The 1994 favorite returns to theaters with "collectible" 3-D glasses. ABDUCTION (Sept. 23) Taylor Lautner leaves the "Twilight" world for this espionage-thriller about a young man searching for his birthparents. ("2 Fast 2 Furious") directs. DOLPHIN TALE (Sept. 23) A family film based on the true story of an injured dolphin and an imaginative prosthetics doctor (). also stars. Directed by Charles ("Never Cry Wolf"). KILLER ELITE (Sept. 23) It's tough-guy heaven: , and are, respectively, a special ops agent, his mentor and a cunning villain. MONEYBALL (Sept. 23) Baseball sabermetrics? Not so sexy. How about an underdog team led by ? ("Capote") directs this adaptation of Michael Lewis' nonfiction book about the Oakland A's. With and . WHAT'S YOUR NUMBER? (Sept. 30) Worried that she may have overlooked her true love, ("") decides to revisit her 20 exes. also stars. THE IDES OF MARCH (Oct. 7) directs and also stars as a presidential candidate; is his ambitious press secretary. With , and . REAL STEEL (Oct. 7) In a future where robots have replaced human boxers, a hard-luck trainer () discovers a rusty contender. If this sounds like an episode of "The Twilight Zone," that's because it was. In IMAX. WANDERLUST (Oct. 7) In this comedy, and are a Manhattan couple who seek happiness in Elysium, a freewheeling, clothing-optional community. FOOTLOOSE (Oct. 14) The unknown replaces in a remake of the 1984 teen classic about a city kid trapped in a party-free burg. With and . Brewer ("Hustle & Flow") directs. THE BIG YEAR (Oct. 14) , and grapple with very different life crises in this road-trip comedy. David Frankel ("Marley & Me") directs. THE THREE MUSKETEERS (Oct. 21) Another adaptation of the Dumas novel, this time with ("Percy Jackson & the Olympians") as D'Artagnan and a cast of foes that includes , and . IN TIME (Oct. 28) In this futuristic thriller from ("Gattaca"), time is almost literally money and the rich can live forever. With , and . MARGIN CALL (Oct. 21) The 2008 financial crisis is the backdrop for a thriller about a junior stock analyst who learns more than he was meant to. With , , and . THE RUM DIARY (Oct. 28) continues his obsession, starring in an adaptation of the author's colorful early novel about journalists in Puerto Rico. With and . PUSS IN BOOTS (Nov. 4) The animated origin story of the swashbuckling feline who first appeared in "." With the voices of , and . In IMAX. TOWER HEIST (Nov. 4) is a little guy seeking revenge on a swindler in this caper-comedy. The oddball cast includes , , and . ("Rush Hour") directs. A VERY HAROLD & KUMAR 3-D (Nov. 4) and return for another half-baked adventure through New York City. With and . J. EDGAR (Nov. 9) Leonardo DiCaprio is founder J. Edgar Hoover in this probable Oscar contender from director . With , Armie Hammer ("") and (CBS' "The White Shadow"). IMMORTALS (Nov. 11) Humble stonemason Theseus () battles the power-hungry King Hyperion (). , the man behind Pepsi's Greco-Roman "We Will Rock You" commercial, directs. JACK AND JILL (Nov. 11) Adam plays twin siblings, one married to , the other being stalked by (as himself). Longtime Sandler director does the honors. HAPPY FEET TWO (Nov. 18) A sequel to the Oscar-winning 2006 cartoon, with returning as the voice of Mumble, the dancing penguin. And now he has a son. Also with , Brad Pitt, and Matt Damon. THE TWILIGHT SAGA: BREAKING DAWN PART 1 (Nov. 18) Here comes the first screen version of 's notorious final "Twilight" novel, in which Bella () violently consummates her love for Edward () and pays the price with a difficult pregnancy. Director ("Dreamgirls") accepts the challenge. CHRISTMAS (Nov. 23) The latest from Aardman Animation ("Flushed Away") follows a little boy who discovers Santa's high-tech headquarters. With the voices of and . HUGO (Nov. 23) ventures into the young-adult genre -- in 3-D, yet! -- with this story of an orphan () who discovers a world of whimsical, cinematic inventions. Based on Brian Selznick's graphic novel and starring Chloe Grace Moretz, and as the French film pioneer George Méliès. THE MUPPETS (Nov. 23) Writer-producer-star relaunches the franchise with this tale, in which the Muppets must raise money to save their theater. With , , Kermit the Frog, Miss Piggy and a new Muppet, Walter. NEW YEAR'S EVE (Dec. 9) Remember 's star-packed rom-com "Valentine's Day"? This one stars , , Robert De Niro, , , . . . you get the idea. TINKER, TAILOR, SOLDIER, SPY (Dec. 9) plays former British agent George Smiley in this adaptation of the classic le Carré novel. With , and John Hurt. Thomas Alfredson ("Let the Right One In") directs. YOUNG ADULT (Dec. 9) plays a writer trying to relive her high-school days in this comedy-drama from the "Juno" team of director and writer . With and Patton Oswalt. ALVIN AND THE CHIPMUNKS: CHIPWRECKED! (Dec. 16) The critters and their female counterparts (the Chipettes) find themselves stranded on a desert island. With and . THE IRON LADY (Dec. 16) Meryl Streep plays Margaret Thatcher. Should we just give her the Oscar now? Directed by Phyllida Lloyd (). Also with and . SHERLOCK HOLMES: A GAME OF SHADOWS (Dec. 16) and Jude Law return as and . With , the original "Dragon Tattoo" girl, and ('s "") as the arch-villain Professor Moriarty. directs. THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO (Dec. 21) Oscar-nominated director follows "The Social Network" with this long-awaited adaptation of the bestselling Swedish crime novel and popular Swedish film. replaces Noomi Rapace as the Goth-punk-hacker heroine; is her partner in more ways than one. MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE -- GHOST PROTOCOL (Dec. 21) returns in the fourth "M:I" film, which marks the live-action directing debut of 's ("The Incredibles"). Paramount isn't saying much about the plot, but it involves a bombing at the Kremlin. With and . THE ADVENTURES OF TINTIN (Dec. 23) Steven Spielberg adapts the popular Tintin comics -- about an intrepid young reporter and his faithful dog, Snowy -- using motion-capture animation and the voices of , , Daniel Craig and . WE BOUGHT A ZOO (Dec. 23) co-wrote and directs this drama, based on the true story of a single dad (Matt Damon) who changes his family's life by renovating a broken-down zoo. With . EXTREMELY LOUD & INCREDIBLY CLOSE (Dec. 25) A boy (Thomas Horn) scours Manhattan for clues about his father (), who died in 9/11. Based on 's novel and directed by ("The Reader"). With , and . WAR HORSE (Dec. 28) Steven Spielberg adapts the 1982 children's novel (now a wildly successful Broadway play) about a young boy who joins to search for his horse. With , and Toby Kebbell ("Rocknrolla"). And 10 more films to keep in mind DRIVE (Sept. 16) This neo-noir, an award winner at Cannes, stars Ryan Gosling as a getaway driver and playing against type as a violent crime boss. Also with . FIREFLIES IN THE GARDEN (Oct. 14) , and Emily Watson star in this story of a family shattered by a serious accident. The semiautobiographical screenplay comes from director . THE SKIN I LIVE IN (Oct. 14) Antonio Banderas plays an inventive plastic surgeon looking for a human guinea pig in this thriller from Pedro Almodóvar. MARTHA MARCY MAY MARLENE (Oct. 21) Elizabeth Olsen, the little sister of Mary-Kate and Ashley, is already earning raves for her performance as a young woman fleeing a charismatic cult leader (, ""). LIKE CRAZY (Oct. 28) Paramount Vantage purchased this Sundance award-winner about a British college student () and an American (Anton Yelchin) trying to keep a long-distance love alive. MELANCHOLIA (Nov. 11) earned best actress at Cannes for her role as a depressed woman facing the actual end of the world. ("Antichrist") directs. THE DESCENDANTS (Nov. 23) Family man George Clooney re-evaluates his life after his wife is severely injured in a boating accident. ("Sideways") co-wrote and directs. I MELT WITH YOU (Dec. 9) , , Christian McKay and are college buddies who reunite for a debauched weekend. Surprisingly, it's a drama. W.E. (Dec. 9) Madonna directs a fictionalized account of the real-life romance between King Edward VIII and an American divorcee. With Abbie Cornish, Oscar Isaac and James Fox ("Performance"). IN THE LAND OF BLOOD AND HONEY (Dec. 23) Angelina Jolie's writing and directing debut follows a Serbian military leader (Goran Kostic) and a Bosnian woman (Zana Marjanovic) whose lives are shattered by the Bosnian war. ?Thousands send messages of post-9/11 hope Published: September 9, 2011 6:44 PM By EMILY NGO. Special to Newsday Photo credit: Patrick E. McCarthy Lily Grimstead from , looks to place a ribbon on the "9-11 Ribbons of Hope" interactive art project designed to commemorate the 10th anniversary of 9/11 in Battery Park. (Sept. 9, 2011) The fluttering ribbons came from near and far, their messages and prayers weaving a tapestry of emotions in lower Manhattan. "Never give up hope" . . . "Let us love every neighbor" . . . "I pray we have a true respect for others, regardless of religion." Organizers of "9/11 Ribbons of Hope" in Battery Park said they had collected more than 10,000 messages by Friday evening and are hoping for a total of 50,000 by the time the exhibit closes Monday morning. The ribbons, each bearing a handwritten message, are tied to 12 tall vertical mesh panels. PHOTOS: MORE: The messages were solicited from across the country by a New York City-based coalition of interfaith groups as part of the Prepare New York initiative, which aims to foster community in the aftermath of the controversy generated by a proposal to build a mosque near the site. Some groups mailed in batches of messages while others came in digital form that the coalition transferred on to physical ribbons. Visitors can make and add their own ribbons to the exhibit until Monday. "It's a simple gesture that all kinds of people can make, writing down a thought or prayer," said the Rev. Robert Chase, executive director of Manhattan-based Intersections International. "It's a forward-looking kind of thing instead of a retrospective." The ribbon that caught one visitor's eye read simply, "Forgiveness." "I made a photo of this because I think it's a first step to beginning again," said Lorenzo Della Rocco, 30, of Bologna, Italy. "It's a good project. And it's important because it gives a voice to everyone, from those who say, 'Forgive,' to those who say, 'Fight on.' " A visitor from London, Deborah Blaustein, 21, remembered that Sept. 11, 2001, coincided with her first day of secondary school. "9/11 affected the whole world. It affected us," she said. "It's actually weird coming here to New York, because we're not part of the story, but we are at the same time. We want to contribute to the healing." Dialogue encouraged by interfaith events empowers New Yorkers, said the Rev. Chloe Breyer, executive director of the Interfaith Center of New York. "Let us not be defined as victims," she said. ?TV on DVD: '24': The Complete Series Originally published: December 17, 2010 1:37 PM Updated: December 19, 2010 9:20 AM By DIANE WERTS Special to Newsday Photo credit: Brian Bowen Smith / FOX/ Kiefer Sutherland is the protagonist Jack Bauer on the hit FOX television show, 24 Jack Bauer. SERIES ON DISC "24" - The Complete Series. LIST PRICES Fox Home Entertainment's DVD box of all 8 seasons carries a list price of $350; expect discounts around $200. (Not available on Blu-ray.) Also new from Fox is the final single set, "24" Season 8, at a list price of $60 DVD/$70 BD. WHAT YOU GET IN THE BOX Eight-plus danger-packed days in the life of one Jack Bauer. Surely you don't have to ask "Who's Jack Bauer?" (as one Season 8 character did, mostly to give us a laugh). 's uber-agent/punching bag saves the world from terrorists, nukes, assassins, et al. Eight seasons of 24 real-time episodes are packaged individually in thick, clear cases with plastic flip-pages holding the discs. That uniformity is welcome, compared to the original season sets, which started as really thick fold-outs (Seasons 1-4) before changing to boxed slimcases (Seasons 5-6) and then flip-page clear cases (Seasons 7-8). The double-wide cardboard outer box with matching slipcase is unusually sturdy. But - and it's a big but - that's pretty much it. A cardboard box. No lenticular cover, no informative book, no cool replica props, posters or other collectibles. Nothing even remotely approaching the "24" Season 1 Special Edition tin with its built-in countdown clock. That's disappointing, to say the least, for such a beloved series - especially after the jam-packed goody chest that was August's complete-series pyramid box of "Lost," a show somewhat comparable in its run, ratings and intensity. Add to this the absence of a Blu-ray full-series set, and the cynical fan might expect yet another complete-show release before long, with more goodies possibly and more definition certainly. EXTRAS Besides the nine plastic-case sets in the "24" DVD series box - don't forget "24: Redemption," the placeholding miniseries from the 2007 season's writers strike - there's one little CD-size cardboard sleeve holding new DVD content. This "exclusive bonus disc" boasts a nice half-hour retrospective of "24," ushering us through Jack Bauer's evolution from happy husband to disillusioned rebel to dedicated patriot, while exploring key scenes and antagonists (in clips and interviews). There's another half-hour of 2009's pre- Season 8 Comic-Con panel with cast (including , and ) and crew (led by executive producer Howard Gordon). Also a wrap-party reel, plus a Chloe "bonus scene" (duplicated on Season 8 Blu-ray, but not Season 8 DVD). It adds up to little more than an hour. Existing bonus features are retained from the season sets (Season 1 has the Special Edition extras), and those are often pretty meaty. Which may be why there aren't more new extras on the "bonus" disc. Or not. WHY TO BUY (OR NOT) If you've held out till now on "24" DVDs, or you need a gift for a fan who has, and you're not out to own every last extra/collectible, or you like your season sets to look matched, go for it. High-def viewers lovin' the Blu-ray sharpness of Season 7 (and now Season 8) might want to hold off for a future ultra-resolution box. ?TV trend: Fashion comes to fall series Originally published: September 22, 2011 5:20 PM Updated: September 25, 2011 2:27 PM By BOOTH MOORE. Los Angeles Times Photo credit: ABC/Nathan Bell features fashion from high-end designers such as Chloe, , and . It's the throwback '60s style as much as the story lines that have made "Mad Men" a success. The AMC series, which enters its fifth season in 2012, ushered in a ladylike trend in fashion that has reverberated all the way to the Paris runways and inspired a collaboration with retail chain Banana Republic. So is it any wonder that the big three networks are looking for their own fashion gold? Many...?Uncharted 3: treasure hunter Nathan Drake Originally published: November 4, 2011 1:24 PM Updated: November 7, 2011 10:05 AM By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Photo credit: AP Photo A gameplay shot "Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception." Uncharted 3 finds treasure hunter Nathan Drake, who claims to be a descendant of Sir Francis Drake, on a quest to uncover a mythical city known as the "Atlantis of the Sands" that's apparently buried somewhere in the Middle East. His journey is more personal this time, providing much needed character development for Drake and his cohorts.Nolan North again gives a pitch-perfect performance...?Warnings, tweets, Jenga off-camera at debates Published: October 4, 2012 12:51 AM By The Associated Press JULIE PACE (Associated Press), KASIE HUNT (Associated Press) Photo credit: AP protesters rally against the presidential debate, which was being held at the on Wednesday, Oct. 3, 2012, in Denver. (AP Photo/The Denver Post, Hyoung Chang) MAGS OUT TV OUT ONLINES OUT (AP) -- Most voters watched the debate on the television and didn't get to see what happened before and after President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney took the stage. And even then, some of the nonverbal exchanges were lost in broadcast.Here's what those voters missed:___OUTSIDE THE HALLNot everyone was a fan of what was happening on the University of Denver campus.About...?Win Chloe Grace Moretz's celebrity closet Monday September 17, 2012 1:46 PM By Nina Ruggiero Photo credit: Aeropostale ActressChloe Grace Moretz and Aeropostale have teamed up to help one lucky shopper win their dream celebrity closet.Moretz will hand pick the winner, who will receive a $10,000 shopping spree.To enter, upload a picture of your closet at facebook.com/aeropostale or on a mobile device at aerocelebcloset.com and explain why you should be chosen.Vote on who you think should... ?Winners from the 20th annual MTV Movie Awards Published: June 6, 2011 12:50 AM By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Winners from the 20th annual MTV Movie Awards: ? Best Movie: ": ." ? Best Male Performance: , ": ." ? Best Female Performance: , "The Twilight Saga: Eclipse." ? Best Comedic Performance: , "Easy A." ? Best Breakout Star: Chloe Grace Moretz, "Kick-Ass." ? Biggest Badass Star: Chloe Grace Moretz, "Kick-Ass." ? Best Villain: , ": Part 1." ? Best Kiss: and , "The Twilight Saga: Eclipse." ? Best Fight: Robert Pattinson vs. and Xavier Samuel, "The Twilight Saga: Eclipse." ? Best Jaw Dropping Moment: , ": Never Say Never." ? Best Line from a Movie: "I want to get chocolate wasted," Alexys Nycole Sanchez, "Grown Ups." ? Best Scared-as-S--t Performance: , "." ?YSL underwhelms, as Chloe and McCartney get fresh Originally published: October 1, 2012 8:22 PM Updated: October 1, 2012 8:22 PM By The Associated Press THOMAS ADAMSON (AP Fashion Writer) Photo credit: AP A model wears a creation by French-born fashion designer Hedi Slimane for St Laurent his ready to wear Spring-Summer 2013 collection presented in Paris, Monday, Oct. 1, 2012. (AP Photo/Jacques Brinon) PARIS - (AP) -- Everyone loves a high-profile rivalry, but perhaps the fashion world more than most. This might explain why fashion writers have so eagerly pitted the two new influential faces of Paris' ready-to-wear calendar against each other. In the Christian ring, -- the house designer appointed in April whose Friday collection wowed journalists -- and in Yves Saint 's, Hedi , the 44-year-old appointed in March, who himself used to work at Dior menswear. Amid incredible pressure to deliver, Paris-born Slimane unveiled his new vision for the rival house Monday, with YSL themselves adding to the buzz through their strict guestlist and restricted invitations. Meanwhile, the front presence was proof enough of the brand's enduring allure: From French First Lady Valerie Trierweiler, actress and a roll call of his designing peers , and . So who won? YVES SAINT LAURENT When fashion editors put down their pens halfway through a catwalk show, it's always cause for worry. This was the case at 's disappointing debut at Yves Saint Laurent -- a rather confused ode to excess that used fringing, leather, lacing, tassels, feathers, sequins, skinny menswear tailoring, baggy pants, cinching cummerbunds, capes, tribal pendants and almost everything else under the sun. Pierre Berge, Saint Laurent's former partner said: "(Slimane) knows the Saint Laurent DNA, the spirit." There was definitely a nod to that. For example, black silk neckbows, a house signature that was used as a leitmotif. But the collection lacked the empowering sex appeal that made Saint Laurent one of the most famous names in fashion. The bows, rather symbolically, instead of unifying the collection, fought with other busy materials for attention. Unflattering floppy Stetson hats capped it off. Slimane took a gamble on the no-holds-barred approach to impress, but somehow fell short of the mark in his basic silhouette. Many individual garments -- like one sumptuous look with side a spread of black feathers -- were highly creative. But here the plumes' dynamic horizontal energy was drowned out by the bow. Slimane pulled it off well when he wasn't trying too hard: A classy skinny menswear pant looked great with a sharp shouldered tuxedo -- and a spot on merging of YSL and Slimane's own personal style. Had he kept it cleaner, Slimane might not have given the upper hand so easily to his Dior rival. CHLOE The Chloe fashion house is celebrating its 60th birthday during but its spring-summer 2013 show proved it's still as fresh as a daisy. Designer Clare Waight 's collection takes its cue from founder Gaby Aghion's mantra: "I lived the life I wanted." Chloe, founded in 1952, practically invented ready-to-wear in the first place and has always confidently led the way. That rebelliousness came out Monday in the clothes -- strongly feminine and diaphanous but also structured with laser-cut edges in many large frills and ripples. "I wanted a feminine spirit, but sharp...like a knife," Waight Keller said after the show. This contrasted with the collection's soft side. Transparent organza silks played on volume, giving a layered three-dimensionality to soft, oversized T-shirts and knee-length skirts. The light touches came from hibiscus flower appliques on sheer white tops, or in one instance, in green down a singular pant leg. Features like this can look overly busy if handled poorly. But here the looks were paired with a clean-cut minimalist vest, jacket or to tasteful effect. STELLA MCCARTNEY "Palatable, everyday." That's how Stella McCartney, backstage, describes her fresh, optimistic and relaxed spring-summer outing. If she hoped the collection to be everyday, the show itself -- in the gilded foyer of the Paris Opera Garnier with ornate, swinging double chandeliers in gold , not to mention the famous faces like , Salma Hayek and McCartney's former Beatle father Paul -- was not. It's hard to be casual when you were born with one of the most famous dads on the planet -- but she got full marks for trying. Silhouettes ignored the waist, with a cool, low-slung belted vibe, and the big curves of last season were gone. Thinking outside the box, McCartney created some fantastic elliptical curves in vibrant saffron yellow and forest green, sculpting a feminine shape like a geometric hourglass. Black and white camouflage print looked fantastic on a silky jumpsuit, worn by sassy model of the moment Karlie Kloss. This look wasn't exactly everyday, but it's sure going to sell. HAKAAN There's going to be a one-hour hole in the normally tight Paris Fashion Week calendar, after representatives of label said its entire collection had been lost. Turkish designer Hakaan Yildirim was set to present his spring-summer 2013 to the media on Tuesday afternoon. But PR company Karlaotto sent out emails Monday to all those with invitations saying the preview was canceled -- after all the clothes had mysteriously disappeared. "The whole collection is lost," said Karen Nitsche of Karlaotto. "It was when they were being transported. We don't know how." Last November, Marc Jacobs canceled a London press preview after his collection was stolen during its transfer from Paris. ____ Thomas Adamson can be followed at http:/ /Twitter.com/ThomasAdamsonAP Copyright 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. ?Zac Posen dresses for less than $200 Thursday April 19, 2012 2:34 PM By Nina Ruggiero Photo credit: Handout From Reese Witherspoon and Demi Moore to Rihanna and Katy Perry, A-list stars love Zac Posen.Now the designer, whose glam gowns are known for their powerful, sexy sillhouettes, has a new collection geared towards the fashionable everyday woman.The collection consists of 12 new dresses that Posen calls "clean, simple, flirty, sophisticated and accessible." Sold exclusively... ?'3 NEEDLES' A trio of cautionary tales about the spread of AIDS. With Lucy Liu, Stockard Channing, Chloe Sevigny. Directed by Thom Fitzgerald. (2:03) At Village East. Unrated: Language, sexuality/nudity. In multiple languages with subtitles. 2 stars If it weren't for the pamphlet-style narration read by Olympia Dukakis, you might think the disease linking the three stories in writer-director Thom Fitzgerald's "3 Needles" was cynicism rather than AIDS. Neither AIDS nor HIV is mentioned in the movie; the invisible enemy destroying people in its African, Chinese and Canadian settings is simply referred to as "the virus." But cynicism is visible everywhere. In the first story, Lucy Liu is a black-market blood dealer who travels the rural back roads of China collecting blood from poor farmers and spreading the virus through dirty equipment as she goes. The second story introduces us to an HIV-positive Montreal porn star (Shawn Ashmore), who substitutes his father's blood for his own to pass his weekly tests and keep working. The story takes a pornographic twist of its own when his mother (Stockard Channing) substitutes his blood for hers to defraud a company buying her life-insurance policy. We end up on an AIDS-decimated plantation in coastal Africa, where three newly arrived nuns (Dukakis, Chloe Sevigny and Sandra Oh) find themselves at odds over whether their mission should be saving souls or saving lives. To Clara (Sevigny), the choice is clear, but to get the money and supplies she needs to help the workers, she has to sleep with the plantation's corporate owner (Ian Roberts). When "3 Needles" premiered at Toronto last year, the stories were overlapping, in the style of "Babel" but without a unifying theme. It's less cumbersome as three separate stories, but they do not add up to much. Only the African story feels complete, while the Chinese story is gloomily hopeless and the Montreal story is just a bad idea. "3 Needles" is not about AIDS; it's about the exploitation of it.?WHAT THE BUTLER SAW. By Joe Orton. With Chloe Sevigny, Dylan Baker, Peter Frechette, Lisa Emery, Karl Geary, Max Baker. Directed by Scott Elliot. Set design by Derek McLane. Costumes by Mattie Ullrich. Lights by James Vermeulen. Sound by Ken Travis. Presented by The New Group at St. Clement's, 423 W. 46th St. Tickets, $25-$35. (212) 279-4200. Mining laughs from subjects like rape, incest, nymphomania and drug abuse may have seemed kinda groovy - and not a little shocking - back in the late '60s, when British playwright Joe Orton wrote "What the Butler Saw." These days, though, the sexual depravity at the heart of Orton's famed farce is not so much shocking as it is unsettling. Revived by The New Group company, "What the Butler Saw" is still raucously funny at times, especially in the first act. But the laughs come uneasily after a while, with the zany antics of characters caught up in all the traditional elements of bawdy farce - door-slamming exits, mistaken identity, loads of undressing and cross-dressing - soon giving way to vulgar situations. Chloe Sevigny ("Boys Don't Cry") and Dylan Baker ("Happiness") star in this tale of a forced seduction that degenerates into a chaotic, madcap mess set in a psychiatrist's office. Innocent dimbulb Geraldine Barclay (Sevigny) is interviewing for a secretarial position with Dr. Prentice (Baker), the respected head of a London mental institution. The good doctor has bad intentions, however. He tricks the comely young Geraldine into disrobing for a medical exam, only to be interrupted by his wife (Lisa Emery), a gin-swilling sex maniac who's being blackmailed after willingly giving in to a hotel bellhop who tried to rape her. While Prentice tries to hide a naked Geraldine from his wife, a government auditor (Peter Frechette) arrives to investigate the clinic. What follows is a series of slapstick scenes that has most of the cast - including a London bobby looking for the missing private parts of a statue of Winston Churchill - running in and out of the office in various stages of undress. As the unfortunate victim of circumstance, Sevigny doesn't have much to do - except get shaved, straitjacketed and humiliated. Baker, who played a similarly likable lecher as the sympathetic pedophile in "Happiness," fares better as the deadpan doctor trying vainly to save his career. The second act is basically an extended rehash of the first, except bullets fly, blood is shed and one character engages in a drug-fueled act of masturbation. Only an absurdly happy ending - where incest is played for broad laughs - somehow saves this from being totally ugly.?The ribbons on the harbor with the on the horizon are light enough to flutter in the breeze, but the messages written on them are not."Never forget.""Let us be a nation of First Responders for all." " has persevered.""Love is always greater than hatred.""Lord, cast your angels of protection around .""Dare we love one another? All others?""Unable are the loved to die for love is immortality.""Our hope is that the tragedy of 9/11 that drew us together will continue to remind us that we are all in this together."The ribbons, in until tomorrow, are multi-colored, like New York. That's just how New York's religious leaders, including some of the 900 chaplains who served 24/7 at St. Paul's Church during the 9/11 recovery process, planned it.They counseled parents who tried to get into to dig for their children with their bare hands. They led prayers in The Pit with recovery workers every time even a small bone fragment was found, and then gave them solace."People wondered, 'How could this happen?' " recalled EMT and Unitarian minister , of Disaster Chaplaincy Services. "Why would anyone do this?"They remember it as a time of unity, as the of the recalls: "One day, a semi-truck pulled up to the site, and inside were people who'd driven all the way from the South. They said, 'God told us to deliver barbecue.' "In the past 10 years, these ministers, priests, rabbis, imams and Buddhist monks have grown worried as that unity deteriorated into anti-Muslim sentiment and violence.They formed PrepareNY, and posted the video "We the People" on their site to show how Quakers, Jews, Catholics and others were oppressed for their beliefs, then accepted."Our strength in this country, and especially in , lies in our diversity," says the of ."We enrich our own lives when we experience people who are different from us. We overcame religious intolerance in the past, and we can do it again."jmolloy@nydailynews.com?Police in central Indiana have released a chilling 911 call in the case of a 4-month old baby who died Saturday after her father left her roasting in his car during a record-setting heatwave.Screams of anguish can be heard in the background as Joshua Stryzinski's brother urges a police dispatcher to send paramedics to their parents' Greenfield home."My brother's baby is not breathing and we need paramedics here right now!" says the brother, who was not identified.The little girl, Chloe, was pronounced dead later at a local hospital.Stryzinski, 18, was charged with neglect of a dependent leading to death.He pleaded not guilty on Monday, and was released from Hancock County Jail on $50,000 bail., Stryzinski dropped Chloe's 17-year-old mother at an Arby's restaurant for work on Saturday morning and then brought the tot by a friend's house on the way to see his parents.He and the friend changed Chloe into a short-sleeve onesie to keep her cool, police said.Temperatures in Indianapolis hit 104 degrees on Saturday, breaking a 76-year-old record for July 7.Stryzinski told investigators his friend strapped the tot into her car seat before he and the baby drove away, the Star reported.But when he got to his parents’ home, the young dad forgot Chloe was in the back seat, he told investigators.Stryzinski said he got mixed up and thought he had left the girl with his friend."The normal routine is that someone is always watching my kid," he told police, according to the Star.Investigators said Stryzinski was at the house for a few hours, chatting with his brother and parents, who were getting ready for vacation, before he got back in his Saturn to pick up Chloe's mother from work.He screamed when he realized his little girl was locked inside, and ran back to the house holding her in her car seat, according to the affidavit.An autopsy showed Chloe suffered third degree burns -- presumably scorched by the surface of the car seat, which cops said reached 119 degrees.Local police said it was one of the worst cases they've ever seen.“I've been in law enforcement for 20-plus years, and I can't wrap my head around this one," . "I'm a parent, and like many other parents, I'm wondering, ‘How do you leave your child in the car?’"A friend of Stryzinski's defended him as a responsible father who made a terrible mistake."Anyone that knows Josh would say that he's a wonderful person. Great guy, great friend," Sean Allee, 17, told WISH-TV."I just tell them I'm not defending what he did. I'm defending him in the matter of, I know who he is," Allee added. With News Wire Services?A Child's True Book of Crime By Chloe Hooper Scribner, $24 Kate Byrne is a 22-year-old schoolteacher who is more precocious child than young adult. Fittingly, she plays the role of a naughty girl to arouse her married lover, who's the father of one of her students. There will be consequences. Set in her native Tasmania, Chloe Hooper's debut novel is tasty literary suspense, luring the reader through stages of intelligent, woven menace that forces Kate, at long last, to join the grownups. It takes the threat of violent death to get her there, though. Byrne's lover is Thomas Marne, a lawyer who moved to the seaside town of Endport to accommodate his wife, Veronica, a true-crime writer. Her book, "Murder at Black Swan Point," details the slaughter of a young townswoman by her lover's wife 12 years before. The story resonates with Kate, as it must. In fact, she imaginatively reconceives it as a children's tale, one in which bush animals with playful names like Terence Tiger and Kitty Koala investigate the murder. That her detectives are all members of endangered species adds a certain piquancy. In her adult guise, Kate puzzles the crime further, deconstructing Veronica's book and developing a theory that involves an alternate killer. Another outcome would go a long way toward reassuring her. Kate is convinced, of course, that languid, lovely Veronica is trying to kill her. Her fear escalates into paranoia the day the brakes on her car are cut. In the classroom, Kate always made a point of protecting Marne's 9-year-old son, Lucien, a "short adult" who antagonizes his classmates with his knowingness and who draws pictures cluttered with body parts. As she begins to suspect that she herself is caught in a collusion between Thomas and Veronica, her concern for Lucien reaches a crescendo. Yet, Kate, by having it off with Lucien's father, has done as much to disturb the boy's world as anyone. "Wouldn't it be lovely if there were some recipe to avoid becoming an adult," whispers Kitty Koala at one point. Childhood is torn away and innocence feverishly clung to in this eerie, gripping novel in which no one is truly innocent.?THE QUIET ROOM. Chloe Ferguson, Celine O'Leary. Directed by Rolf De Heer. At the 68th St. Playhouse. Running time: 91 mins. Rated PG. 3 1/2 STARS A 7-YEAR-OLD CHILD WATCHES, IN silence, as her parents' marriage dissolves. Her wordlessness may be a way of compelling attention from her battling parents, or it may be a more profound disorder possibly autism. In "The Quiet Room," Australian director Rolf De Heer limits himself entirely to the girl's point of view, restricting the action to the bedroom she never leaves (with occasional flashbacks to her early childhood) and reproducing her unhappy and confused interior monologue on the soundtrack. When she thinks back to happier days, her 3-year-old self materializes "Me, when I was then," she says. In De Heer's original and unsentimental vision, childhood looks a lot like a theatrical performance, taking place on a brightly colored, three-sided set that has the jarring vividness of first experience. The children, played by sisters Chloe and Phoebe Ferguson, are refreshingly uncute, and De Heer directs them with unusual patience and respect, never forcing them into obvious effects. A fascinating attempt to re-experience childhood from the inside out, this unique film is concentrated and solemn rather than conventionally beguiling. (PG: May be upsetting to younger children.)?Even likes cougars … on screen at least. A French-subtitled trailer of the actress' new film, "Chloe," has leaked online and reveals Seyfried, 24, in a steamy kiss with , 49. One of the shots also shows Seyfried in the buff seductively posing in front of a mirror. In the film, Moore's character, Catherine, hires a female escort (played by Seyfried) to spy on Catherine's husband (played by ) and seduce him. It's a remake of 2003's French thriller "Nathalie." The role is a new turn for the actress, best known as the dumb blond from "Mean Girls," the crooning daughter in "Mamma Mia!" and the high school nerd who locked lips with in "Jennifer's Body." "Chloe" opens in theaters March 26. ? and got close (to say the least) on the set of their upcoming thriller, "Chloe" ? in which they have an incredibly steamy sex scene.Seyfried says that while getting down with the very famous on camera wasn't necessarily an easy task, Julianne made it doable because she's such a pro."Shooting an intimacy scene is awkward no matter what, so it was definitely tough," the 23-year-old?admitted at the movie's premiere at the Thompson LES on Monday night."But Julianne just walked in and was so professional about it ? I didn't have a choice but to just, well, get into it!"TIGER PAL TAKES HER SHOT may be returning to the links, but a tell-all book that's on the way from one of his girls, Ferriolo, could leave him in the rough.Her lawyer, , told News reporter that Ferriolo's book recounts "many of her encounters with Tiger, including details never released to the public regarding his sexuality."SEEN & HEARD and chatting at a table for two at on Thursday night ... having dinner with his wife, Naomi, at on South on Monday night ... getting bombarded by fans at JFK Tuesday morning ... and Bill -Murray lunching separately at Pulino's Tuesday.?Thriller about a call girl obsessed with a female client. With , , . Director: (1:36). R: Sexuality, nudity, language. At area theaters.At the recent premiere of "," director Atom Egoyan described his latest film this way: "It's complex. It's edgy. It takes risks."Um, okay. Everyone has a right to their opinion, after all. Mine, though, would go more like this: "It's tacky. It's predictable. And it's laughably self-indulgent." Still, if you've been waiting desperately for a lesbian "Fatal Attraction" that manages to be simultaneously slick and tawdry, your wish has finally been granted.For reasons that remain a mystery, Julianne Moore stars as , a wealthy, gynecologist who suspects her husband (Liam Neeson) is unfaithful.Naturally, she takes the most reasonable approach to this dilemma: She hires a beautiful call girl named Chloe (Amanda Seyfried) to seduce him.When Chloe reports back on their affair, Catherine is devastated, and has her own, passionate evening with the escort. The next day she's shocked by her impulsiveness, and hopes to return to life as usual. Unfortunately, an obsessive Chloe immediately starts infiltrating Catherine's family, pulling out every psychotic trick short of boiling bunnies.We might have had fun with so much campy excess, but everyone onscreen takes these proceedings completely seriously. Having adapted a film ? via Wilson’s screenplay -- from an erotic French drama called "Nathalie," Egoyan appears convinced that he's creating a suspenseful work of art, rather than a mildly kinky bit of arthouse exploitation.As a result, Moore genuinely seems to believe she's taking risks simply by dropping her top, while poor Seyfried looks lost every time she's directed to behave like a lunatic.Egoyan could have found something interesting to say about high-priced escorts and the complex relationship they share with their clients. Instead, he's more interested in fetishizing the (barely-there) sexual tension between his gorgeous, oft-naked actresses. So in the end, all "Chloe" really feels like is the whim of a man who was able to order up his wildest fantasy, and charge it straight to his expense account.eweitzman@nydailynews.com?Even luxury retailer wants to make sure the bedbugs don't bite.The Fifth Ave. shopping mecca is the first high-end retailer to acknowledge it's worried about the city's bedbug infestation - and has even hired an insect-sniffing beagle to root any out.Ever since , Abercrombie & Fitch and stores in the city announced cases of the creepy crawlies, shops around the city have been on high-alert - but keeping mum. Swanky Bergdorf Goodman staffers, though, openly say they hope to catch the critters before an outbreak ever occurs."We haven't had any reported cases of bedbugs, but it seems to be something everybody is concerned about," said , vice president of corporate communications for Bergdorf Goodman. "The anxiety level is clearly high in . It seemed important to go the extra mile."The pooch has been on regular patrols around the men's and women's departments for several weeks.He only goes on the prowl once customers go home for the evening, and so far no bedbugs have been found, officials said. But the pooch will remain on patrol until the infestation subsides.Customers browsing the aisles yesterday said they were surprised that a classy store would have to deal with such a low-end problem, but they were relieved the company is trying to take a bite out of the problem."It is not the first thing that you would think, that Bergdorf would have a bedbug problem," said , 51, from "I'm surprised to hear about that. But if you've got an issue and you have a way to address it, then address it."Another shopper wholeheartedly embraced the beagle news."It's an attraction for me," said , 25, a nanny from , . "I like dogs and I don't care for bedbugs."Ivers added, "I'm surprised that any store has the problem. I thought bedbugs were just in bed."?The good news is that Billy asks the mother of his new baby to marry him Friday on "The Young and the Restless."The bad news is that she is still married to his brother."Billy wants to man up," says Billy Miller, who plays the part. "He found a conscience somewhere between whoring and drinking. He wants his kid."Even if he is not in love with her mother."What's love?" says the actor. "Billy loves a lot of people. Right now, he is in love with his daughter."And he just had sex with his brother Jack's wife, Sharon."Yeah, he may have a couple of broken noses coming to him," says Miller.Chloe accepts Billy's proposal on Monday, even though he tells her it won't be a real marriage - she'll be living in the Abbott pool house."That's Jack's idea," says Miller. "For better or worse, Billy always follows Jack's advice - which may land him in the poky very soon."Because Chloe is still married to Cane?"They kind of gloss over that and talk about her getting an annulment," says Miller. "Billy stays out of those affairs. He says, 'It's not my business. You guys figure it out. I'm going to be over here whoring around.'"Not exactly husband material."I don't think he's making Chloe do anything she doesn't want to do," reasons Miller.As for Billy's other brother, "Cane was duped for nine months into thinking he was having a kid, so he has a right to be miffed. But legally he does not have a leg to stand on."So Billy will soon be engaged to a woman he doesn't love, to get custody of a baby he previously refused to claim."I know," says Miller with a laugh. "How can it possibly work? Billy is a selfish schtupper, and Chloe is a selfish psycho. But selfish people make for good drama."Throw his much-divorced brother Jack in the mix giving Billy and Chloe advice, and there's little chance they'll even make it to the "I do's.""I imagine they do get married and hilarity will ensue," says Miller. "Watching Jack play the moral compass is pretty funny. Having Jack look over your moral family-hood is kind of like having a drunk architect build your house."Comings and goings: Tuc Watkins exits "One Life to Live" next week as David Vickers, er, Buchanan.? would be a welcome addition to her community board - but she'd have to apply like everyone else."We have a merit-based process," says Borough President . "There's no special treatment here."The "Big Love" star expressed interest in the gig in an online video interview with Bust mag, in which she gave cameras a tour of her E. 10th St. digs."I was actually thinking about joining a community board to help preserve some of the older buildings, try and save as many as possible and try to stop them from building as high," Sevigny said.But whispers among downtown nightcrawlers are that Chloe could be campaigning for the job for another reason: Her brother is nightlife impresario ."Community boards have huge control over the nightlife scene," says one in-the-know source. "Chloe has been openly invested in keeping the city's after-hours scene alive, ever since her brother Paul's infamous Beatrice Inn got shut down in 2009."But don't strap on those dancing shoes just yet, party people - despite all the hype, Sevigny still hasn't officially applied for the job. And if she does, the actress would have fill out an application, go before an independent screening panel and sit down for an interview with Stringer's staff.She won't be alone: The borough prez adds that he gets hundreds of applications every year for community boards, and he would then make a decision based on things like Sevigny's previous involvement in community issues.Stringer couldn't help but add that he would be in favor of her applying."It actually is exciting that someone of her stature and notoriety would even consider serving her community as a board member," he said., who chairs Manhattan's Community Board 3 - of which Sevigny could be a part, agreed.Says Pisciotta: "It's great to have anyone that would want to dedicate their time to bettering the community."?Would a wear leather underwear? and may play sexually conflicted sister-wives on the drama "," but in real life they share a love of spicy unmentionables. , 31, told that gave her a gift of "pretty, sexy, black leather lingerie." "I trust anything she says, especially when it comes to fashion," said.? "Girls know how to make their girlfriends feel sexy." Sounds like good news for , actor , if he's into leather.? The two late last year. Sevigny, 35, has been making fashion statements for years, ever since she was discovered by in 1993.? She recently designed a collection for the chic boutique Opening Ceremony.?An alleged sighting of exes and last weekend has sparked speculation that the former couple may be back together. reported that the "" stars were seen holding hands in the VIP Rose Garden on Saturday, but a rep for the actors, who share the same publicist, has called the report "wrong.""She is shooting a film on the East Coast," the rep told the Daily News, adding that Badgley was at the music festival with "friends."Lively, 23, has been working on the movie "Hick," also starring and , in , The actress and Badgley, 24, called it quits last fall after three years together.But the stars, who first met several years before they started acting together on "Gossip Girl" in 2007, have remained close.They finished filming the show's fourth season together last month, and Lively surprised Badgley with a birthday cake on set last November, shortly after their split."Penn was so surprised by her nice gesture," a source told The News at the time. "They seem to really be making their friendship work."?We won't see any plus size models flaunting their curves during next week's Miss USA pageant (a rep has confirmed) but will be the first size 14 contestant to strut her stuff at the finals of the Miss England pageant. Hopefully it's a trend we'll pick up on stateside.Marshall, a 17-year-old beauty school student, is 5'10" and weighs 176 pounds. While Marshall clearly stands out amongst the average pin-thin pageant girls and models, she's proud of her curves."I love my body. People seem desperate to get me to say that I don't, that deep down I'm not happy and would rather be thin, but the fact is I wouldn't change myself at all," Marshall told the Daily Mail as she posed in the skimpy white official Miss England bikini for a photoshoot.Credit is due to Dove for their global Campaign For Real Beauty which, according to their site, "aims to change the status quo and offer in its place a broader, healthier, more democratic view of beauty." To that end, Dove has taken up several initiatives including a massive ad campaign featuring real women with real curves, and a "Girls Only Interactive Self-Esteem Zone," which teaches girls about image manipulation in the media.In the , the has put out a plea to the fashion industry and invited top editors from mags like Vogue, Elle and Hello! to discuss restricting the use of "photoshopped," or digitally-enhanced photos. Hope we follow suit!?The National Health Service in is under fire after a report indicating that care of a 5-year-old girl stabbed 52 times to death by her mother in 2003 was "sadly lacking," the reported today.Just as the here in the city has taken flack after the deaths of kids like at the hands of their parents and caretakers, the NHS-commissioned report found that? 's social workers' assessment of mom the day before the ritualistic killing was "seriously flawed."The report indicated that while offered his "sincerest apologies to the family," it also said that little 's death could not have been prevented, according to the BBC. Murray, a paranoid schizophrenic, killed Chloe at home in Stretford in June 2003 one day before she had to be physically separated from her child when dropping her off at school, the BBC reported. Details of the incident were not available. Chloe's dad, , who acted as a carer for Murray, was not consulted, according to the news outlet. The report said that rather than listen to the "intuition" of family, despite the fact that "they knew Ms. B (Murray) the best. As a result they [the family] are bound to feel let down by a system that failed to act in relation to a situation that they rightly thought was bound to end in danger to Child A [Chloe]."In shades of many ACS cases here, the social worker in charge of the Fahey case had the "best of intentions" but her case load was too heavy, the BBC reported. Murray pleaded guilty to murder in 2004, but her conviction was overturned in 2008 and she was instead found guilty of manslaughter on grounds of diminished responsibility.?Sissy Spacek, Chloe Moretz as Carrie White The world learned early on not to push Sissy Spacek's buttons. The geek-turned-psychotic-killer headlined 'Carrie' in 1976. Now, Chloe Grace Moretz has been cast as the teen turned telekinetic killer in a remake of the modern horror classic. Moretz, who appears alongside Johnny Depp and Michelle Pfeiffer in Tim Burton's "Dark Shadows," is a veteran to the horror screen. She starred in 2005's remake of "The Amityville Horror" and was a bloodthirsty mini-vampire in 2010's "Let Me In."?The celeb: Spotted: 60th Primetime Creative Arts The trend: DrapingThe Style Guru: Hope Greenberg, Lucky's fashion directorThe Verdict: Chloe almost always wears something that's surprising and edgy and this dress is no exception. I love the hair, makeup and accessories she chose to work with a dress that has such strong details. The gold jewelry is cool and punky and perfect with the shine of the dress. Diamonds or sparkly jewelry would have been too much. The shoes are great, too, with a slightly tough edge, and the hair and makeup complement the the drape and length of? of the dress. The jagged, asymmetrical hemline top is is definitely interesting, but but maybe a bit too extreme. I think a less pointy bodice would have been more flattering but, really, Chloe could rock a burlap sack!?Who's who? A. Caryn Johnson B. Yvette Stevens C. Phoebe Moses D. Chloe Wofford E. Joyce Frankenberg F. Tula Finklea G. Edna Gillooly H. Brenda Webb I. Mary Collins J. Patsy Ann McClenny 1. Cyd Charisse 2. Bo Derek 3. Morgan Fairchild 4. Crystal Gayle 5. Whoopi Goldberg 6. Chaka Kahn 7. Annie Oakley 8. Toni Morrison 9. Ellen Burstyn 10. Jane Seymour Answers:A-5, B-6, C-7, D-8, E-10, F-1, G-9, H-4, I-2, J-3 1-F,4-I,5-L,6-H,7-A,8-B,10-C,11-D,12-G,13-E Bonus: How did actor Martin Landau get his start? Answer: As an artist at the Daily News.?At age 15, actress is already an ambassador.It's for Aeropostale, the youthful fashion brand, and it's a job that's likely to come with some clout and influence ? especially with teenage shoppers.Moretz's new gig was to be announced later Monday. She will be featured in advertisements through next spring, largely wearing clothing she's selected and styled herself. She will also curate collections in-store and online."I get my own section, I got to pull my own clothes. Girls can go and see what I love and what I wear in the shoots. It's a way for me to be in touch with girls," Moretz said in a recent phone interview.Moretz starred in "Hugo" and "The Amityville Horror" and has the title role in the upcoming remake of the horror classic "Carrie."The young actress said she sees a shift in her fan base since her Aeropostale ad campaign began appearing in magazines a few weeks ago. She noted her screen roles until now have been in films that typically attract adults. "I was in the airport a few days ago and these girls were reading their Teen Vogues, and then the girls came up to me!"She describes her own style as fun, flirty and colorful, and she lives in skinny jeans cuffed at the ankle when she's not working. Most of her style cues come from her mother, but she greatly admires the look cultivated by Michelle Pfeiffer, her co-star in "Dark Shadows.""She has the coolest clothes," Moretz gushed.Moretz says she hasn't regretted one fashion choice she's made yet, whether it's for the first day of school or a celebrity-filled red carpet. "Fashion is another way to hone your artistic ability and to express your personality."(Her favorite back-to-school outfit was in early grade school, she recalls, when she wore a blue dress covered with yellow elephants.)Choosing Moretz for the brand was ultimately an easy decision, but not one that company officials took lightly, said Scott Birnbaum, senior vice president of Aeropostale marketing and e-commerce. The brand did its homework, seeking input from magazine editors, photographers and other industry insiders."When we met Chloe, it was really an instant love affair," he said. "She has such great style, she can mix it up. She wears great high-end designers and everyday stuff.""We think she's a role model," he adds. "She's quirky and actually really funny, and those are things our brand stands for."?She's no longer hopelessly devoted to him., 25, the daughter of "" star , has canceled her wedding to fiance , a martial arts instructor.It's a shame, especially considering how much Driskill seems to like getting married. According to , Lattanzi broke off the engagement after learning that her beau was still married to the woman she believed to be his ex-wife."Chloe is devastated and so is her mum," a friend of the family told New Idea.Indeed, reports Driskill is still married to his wife, . Though he filed for divorce in July and the couple has been split up for over two years, they're still legally wed.Just weeks ago, Lattanzi's father, actor , told the same magazine that her relationship seemed to be very strong.Despite his daughter's struggles with eating disorders, Matt said, "Right now she is not in that place -- especially because of this very balanced relationship she's in.”At the time, Chloe had released the video for her song "," which featured graphic images of drug use and suicide attempts. Still, her father thought that her relationship was strong enough that what the video portrayed was fantasy and nothing more.Now that his daughter's beau has been revealed to be so dishonest, perhaps the video is a bit more difficult to ignore.? does not have big love for her show this year.In an interview with , the actress denigrated the fourth season of "Big Love," in which she plays one of?three wives to a polygamist."It was awful this season, as far as I’m concerned," the former indie film queen told the Web site. "I’m not allowed to say that!"On the show, Sevigny plays , the second wife to (), a polygamist and Republican state senator in . According to the actress, Bill’s campaign for public office this season coupled with a sub-plot about a eugenics program are "very telenovela."The actress claimed to be speaking for her co-stars (Bill's remaining wives)?when she voiced her disapproval."Me and the girls [ and ] definitely were not very happy with where it was going," she told the A.V. Club. "It seems like they’re really pushing it.”Sevigny explained that HBO stiffed?"Big Love"?on air dates because of all their original programming, particularly “.”"I think that they had more story than episodes," she told the site. "I think that’s what happened."?Chloe Sevigny and Pauly D a couple? Fughetaboutit!The and Golden-Globe winning actress shot down rumors that she’s dating the cast member when asked the “Big Love” star if she and DelVecchio were an item."No, but I wish, because that would be hilarious," said. "That would be the weirdest couple in the world. It would be like the apocalypse."Rumors started to swirl that the two were more than just acquaintances when they were seen sitting courtside at the -Spurs game Jan. 4 at .When pressed why the mythical couple would open so many eyes, Sevigny cited their different professional lives as a potential deal breaker.??"I think it's because we're both kind of extreme. We represent extremes, in opposite directions. So for us two to come together, it would be a very strange meeting of the minds or colliding of two worlds," Sevigny said.?But that doesn’t mean Sevigny hasn’t checked out DelVecchio’s antics on the widely popular show."I haven't watched that many episodes, but of the ones I have... if I were to pick one of the dudes on the show, I'd definitely pick him," Sevigny said.??"He seems more affable and kind of funny and easygoing."?Actress Chloe Sevigny has yet to star in a production of "Of Mice and Men," but she's living in a real-life version at her luxury Union Square co-op. Sevigny, who sublets a 20th-floor studio apartment from fellow actress Natasha Lyonne, is among the residents who've been coping with an invasion of the rodents in recent weeks - apparently sparked by a construction project in the neighborhood. "Chloe caught two mice in special traps that don't kill," her publicist told me yesterday. "She took them outside on the sidewalk and set them free. She likes animals. Tell that to PETA!" The 29-year-old indie-movie siren, whose recent films include the critically admired "Shattered Glass," is lucky compared with Erika Wadler, another renter in the prewar 200-plus-unit building. And more forgiving. The 27-year-old advertising exec for the lad mag Stuff told Lowdown that she has caught and killed 24 mice that wreaked havoc in her 15th-floor, one-bedroom apartment. When Wadler returned from a 10-day vacation in Costa Rica Jan. 1, she found her home overrun. "They ate and nested in the couch," she said yesterday. "They had babies in the couch. There was mouse poop all over the dishes, my pots, my pans. They went everywhere - they even ate my houseplant." Wadler continued: "They ate my Ethan Allen armoire. I made all my pillows and my throws - and everything I had sewed was ruined. I have these really expensive Aubusson rugs, and they were ruined. There was mouse pee on them. Everything smelled. ... I ended up throwing away close to $20,000 worth of stuff." Wadler lodged a formal complaint with building management and was supplied with glue traps by her doorman - with horrific results. "The mice die a slow and painful death and they squeak the whole time," Wadler said. "You can hear them squeaking, and it takes about eight to nine hours for them to die. It's awful." Wadler claims that the building management company, Mark Greenberg Real Estate, has repeatedly ignored her urgent requests for an exterminator. Two weeks ago, she moved to temporary quarters, where she sleeps on a mattress on the floor. "I have spent $27,000 net this year to live in this building," Walder wrote to the management. "This building is considered a luxury building. Am I missing something?" Jim Goldstick, vice president of Greenberg, told Lowdown that an exterminator did show up "and successfully treated the infected apartment. It is the opinion of the exterminator that the building was not and is not infested.?THE LAST DAYS OF DISCO. Chloe Sevigny, Kate Beckinsale. Directed by Whit Stillman. At the Lincoln Plaza, Coronet, 19th St. East. Running time: 111 mins. Rated R: Strong language, adult situations, brief nudity. 3 1/2 Stars SET IN 'THE VERY EARLY 1980S' IN AND around an ultra-chic Manhattan disco that could be Studio 54 (but which, probably for legal reasons, is not) and centered around a group of recent college graduates who are no strangers to the upper East Side world of money and privilege, "The Last Days of Disco" sounds like an easy swipe at times and people safely past. But it is the particular gift of writer-director Whit Stillman ("Metropolitan," "Barcelona") to be able to take the well-to-do with a certain degree of seriousness and sympathy, without losing sight of their limitations. In his hands, "The Last Days of Disco" becomes a small miracle of comic social portraiture, a sometimes affectionate, sometimes ironic study of a specific group at a specific moment. His work is deeply evocative and enjoyable. Alice (Chloe Sevigny, the sweet, gawky Jenny of "Kids") and Charlotte (pert English actress Kate Beckinsale of "Cold Comfort Farm") didn't like each other in college; now, they're working at the same entry-level jobs at the same midtown publishing house and frequenting the same downtown disco where their old friend Des (Stillman regular Chris Eigeman) is the womanizing assistant manager. Inevitably, they become roommates, if not quite deeply and permanently friends. At the club, Stillman assembles a group of suitors around them, drawn by their very different qualities Alice's innocence and moral commitment, Charlotte's sophistication and happy hedonism. Mackenzie Astin is Jimmy, a junior ad executive with a backbone problem; Robert Sean Leonard is a reserved upperclassman who impulsively seduces Alice; Matthew Keeslar is an idealistic prosecutor with a breakdown in his past. The club actually constructed in a disused movie palace in Jersey City is portrayed as a sort of Shakespearean enchanted forest, a magical place where (once the formidable barrier of getting past the doorman has been crossed), all erotic possibilities seem to flower, and any and every alliance is possible. Stillman creates characters who are bright, articulate and self-aware, but without the experience they need to make sense of their lives. The events of "Last Days," which include a number of pairings and repairings, professional upheaval and a brush with the law, lead some of the characters to a new sense of maturity, and leave others in a state of blissful self-involvement yet Stillman doesn't judge them. The days of disco end in a riot of record burning that Stillman makes look like the French Revolution just as the idyll of young adulthood must eventually end, as well. Stillman's film looks back on both periods with affection and amusement it makes you glad to have been there, and glad that it's over.?A pregnant woman was fatally stabbed in her apartment Friday - and the boyfriend who said he found her was being questioned by cops, police said.The killer repeatedly plunged a knife into ' chest sometime before 4a.m., when her beau called 911, cops said. Flores, 26, died 20 minutes after paramedics arrived at the 58th St. apartment in . "She was a kind person," said , 36, who shared an apartment with Flores for two years. "It's very sad." Flores - who moved to Brooklyn from , , six years ago - had two young boys and was several months pregnant, friends and neighbors told police. She had an order of protection out against her kids' father, but he has since been deported, friends said. Her current boyfriend was at the 66th Precinct stationhouse for hours Friday, but no arrests have been made. Cops recovered a knife from the murder scene. The stabbing left residents feeling nervous. "I could walk here at 3 in the morning and feel safe," said , 58, a retired teacher who lives nearby. "It's scary." ?A 3-year-old girl who accidentally drowned in a backyard swimming pool at her Hewlett home was identified by Nassau County police yesterday as Chloe Pastillo-Marcinanis.The tot was found Sunday night floating in the pool by her 11-year-old brother, who had only minutes earlier watched her playing outside, police said.The boy, whose name was not released, alerted his father, who called 911 and attempted to revive the child with CPR. Chloe was taken to South Nassau Communities Hospital, where she was pronounced dead at 7:30 p.m.?A serial gay basher who terrorized men on the has been arrested - and cops are hunting for accomplices, police said Friday. Driton Nicaj, 19, is accused of two alleged attacks on gay men - and allegedly admitted to police he was on the scene when a third man was assaulted. He was charged with robbery and aggravated harassment, both as hate crimes, said . Cops said Nicaj, an Albanian immigrant, was part of a roving pack of thugs who beat and robbed gay men over the last few weeks. "The investigation is going forward," Kelly said. "We're looking for other people involved in these assaults." The first attack happened May 31 in Carl Schurz Park near when at least four other men surrounded two gay men and robbed them. The gang struck again June 27, accosting resident at E. 81st St. just after 4 a.m. The 36-year-old victim was pistol-whipped and robbed of his wallet, glasses and a , said chief spokesman . Nicaj admitted to witnessing Holladay's attack but claims he didn't participate, police said. The next day, , 40, was pummeled on Second Ave. near 84th St. A witness walking his dog saw two men kicking Doane in the head, Browne said. Doane, who lives on the Upper East Side, suffered two skull fractures and a broken nose and his was stolen, Browne said. Nicaj, who was captured on security cameras, confessed to beating and robbing Doane, police said. He was arrested with the help of witnesses, who told cops they saw a gold fleeing from one attack. Nicaj, who has prior drug and drunken driving arrests in , was expected to be arraigned Friday evening. ?Looks?like these hot dogs got into some serious hot water.Cops were seen taking a street cart on a perp walk of sorts on the upper West Side?Friday after arresting the vendor for failing to have a license. , 35, was picked up at the corner of Broadway and W. 60th St. when she failed to show up for a court date, despite several warnings from police. She refused to go quietly, yelling, "I can't leave my stuff," and only agreed to get into the police car when officers assured her the cart would be close behind. "She wasn't getting into the police car," said onlooker , 40. "They calmed her down by telling her they would bag her stuff, attach the cart to a police minivan and take it to the station." While two officers grappled with Regeh, another pair guarded the cart - and one was seen plucking a hot dog out of the water and putting it in a bun. He decided against eating it. As they wheeled the cart to the 20th Precinct stationhouse, curious onlookers shouted: "Can I get one with everything on it?" and "I want sauerkraut with that." Regeh had an asthma attack when she reached the stationhouse and was taken to . She was charged with resisting arrest, disorderly conduct and various vending charges. ?What her movie is about-Angelina Jolie "Girl, Interrupted": A clinically depressed woman struggles for her sanity in a 1950s mental hospital. -Catherine Keener "Being John Malkovich": A filing clerk discovers a secret passage into the mind of actor John Malkovich and starts a business selling entrance fees. -Toni Collette "The Sixth Sense": A psychiatrist guilt-ridden over the suicide of a young patient devotes himself to helping a child tormented by visions of death. -Chloe Sevigny "Boys Don't Cry": The true story of Teena Brandon, a Nebraska woman who assumed the identity of a man and was murdered by friends who felt betrayed by her. -Samantha Morton "Sweet and Lowdown": A narcissistic jazz guitar virtuoso self-destructs during the Great Depression. Who she plays-Angelina Jolie "Girl, Interrupted": Lisa, a manic-depressive who raises, then lowers, the spirits of her fellow patients at a mental institution. -Catherine Keener "Being John Malkovich": Maxine, a bisexual who satisfies both desires by seducing a man whose mind is occupied by another woman. -Toni Collette "The Sixth Sense": Lynn Sear, the caring, confused mother of a clairvoyant child. -Chloe Sevigny "Boys Don't Cry": Lana Tisdel, Teena Brandon's unsuspecting lover. -Samantha Morton "Sweet and Lowdown": Hattie, a mute laundry worker whose silence is golden to her egocentric lover. Her acting challenge-Angelina Jolie "Girl, Interrupted": Using her own charismatic screen presence to the benefit of a character who is both appealing and dangerous. -Catherine Keener "Being John Malkovich": Making love to a man as if he were a woman. -Toni Collette "The Sixth Sense": Not giving away the film's startling plot twist. -Chloe Sevigny "Boys Don't Cry": Giving credibility to a woman naive enough not to know her lover is a woman. -Samantha Morton "Sweet and Lowdown": Creating a pivotal character without a word of dialogue. Why she was nominated-Angelina Jolie "Girl, Interrupted": The daughter of Jon Voight is a star in ascendance, in classic Hollywood tradition. -Catherine Keener "Being John Malkovich": The gifted young actress is also a star in ascendance, at least among her acting peers. -Toni Collette "The Sixth Sense": Carried in on the tide of support for a crafty, popular hit. -Chloe Sevigny "Boys Don't Cry": Even in a transgendered affair, it takes two to tango. -Samantha Morton "Sweet and Lowdown": For stealing every scene she was in with a talented veteran like Sean Penn. Why she'll win-Angelina Jolie "Girl, Interrupted": Perfect role at the perfect time. -Catherine Keener "Being John Malkovich": Younger Academy voters love "Being John Malkovich." -Toni Collette "The Sixth Sense": She gets the gold only if "The Sixth Sense" sweeps. -Chloe Sevigny "Boys Don't Cry": Only if enough voters go for her and Hilary Swank as a ticket. -Samantha Morton "Sweet and Lowdown": Fellow actors, who rep more than 50% of voters, know what she did. Why she won't win-Angelina Jolie "Girl, Interrupted": Her offscreen bad-girl act is already wearing thin. -Catherine Keener "Being John Malkovich": A lot of people didn't "get" her movie. -Toni Collette "The Sixth Sense": Beyond the gimmick, the role doesn't require much. -Chloe Sevigny "Boys Don't Cry": Co-star Hilary Swank got most of the attention. -Samantha Morton "Sweet and Lowdown": Director Woody Allen's declining stock costs her votes.?Now you see her! Magician David Copperfield, 54, who has stunned audiences by flying through the air and making the Statue of Liberty disappear, has just unveiled what could be his most impressive stunt. According to , Copperfield and his longtime girlfriend, French model Chloe Gosselin, 26, have revealed that they're the proud parents of a baby girl. And she's over a year old! The reveal of Sky, who is 16 months old, was a bit less dramatic than, say, pulling her from a hat. The infant enchantress was simply spotted traveling with her parents in New York City, Las Vegas and The Bahamas. Perhaps Copperfield's most impressive bit of sorcery was simply not announcing to the world that he was a dad. Poof! No paparazzi!When a rep for the magic man was reached, however, all was uncovered. "Forget vanishing the Statue of Liberty," the rep said, according to the Daily Mail. "David's next illusion will be disappearing the dirty diaper. A lot more practical."?Today's plays: $20 to win on Shoop (6th) and Chloe Pond (10th) for $40. Yesterday's card: 1st: All the money came in on firster Say It Both Ways and he won for fun under John Velazquez. Rejoice by Choice took second and now is 0-for-9. 2nd: Little Champ ran down longshot Watchmenow at the wire for her fourth career score. Chalk Lucky Currency was no factor despite a perfect trip. 3rd: Heavy chalk Prospectress split horses in the lane and proved much the best under Mike Smith. 4th: Skifalett took command from chalk Holy Bolla in the lane for her ninth score from 40 starts. 5th: Firster Royal Whisper proved best, outlasting late bids from Gigabyte and E's Other Paddock to break his maiden. Chalk Laude, blinkers on, was under the whip early and often, finishing last in a poor effort. 6th: Firster Phone Sophia took control in the lane to pull away for an impressive score in her debut. Back her next time. 7th: Jose Espinoza and Glockenspiel held off Tigerish in the lane for his second career score. Tigerish improved greatly while making his grass debut. Chalk Golden Furiously was a distant third and continued the trend of well-bet Bailey-Mott horses running up the track. 8th: Gilded Diablo led start to finish to take the 86th running of the Fashion Stakes by 11/4 lengths. Chalk Finder's Fee got up for second by a nose over Token of Gold. 9th: Popular Gigalo caught chalk Spring Salute late in the first running of the Grade I Meadowbrook Steeplechase. 10th: Longshots Columbia Lion and Good Man Sam hit the wire together, with the photo giving the nod to Lion, who rallied down the middle of the track. Yesterday's plays: Two chalks and two losers. Down $40 to start the week.?JULIEN DONKEY-BOY. With Chloe Sevigny, Ewen Bremmer, Werner Herzog. Written and directed by Harmony Korine. At the Angelika. Running time: 94 mins. Rated R: Language, sexuality, disturbing images. 2 1/2 STARS The person who introduced New York avant-garde director Harmony Korine's "Julien Donkey-Boy" at the Toronto Film Festival last month promised the audience as if this were reason enough to select it for the prestigious festival that "you haven't seen anything like it before." The truth was told. I'd never seen anything like it, and can say that I hope to never see anything like it again. "Julien" is a schizophrenic movie about a schizophrenic, shot and edited in a style meant to convey the fitfully clear, confused, frightened, disorienting view of its subject, and watching may induce symptoms in its audience which is just the point. Filmed on video, the camera often hidden on the actors' bodies, "Julien" drops in on a Queens family that includes Julien (Ewen Bremmer), his abusive father (the German director Werner Herzog), his brother (Evan Neumann) and his sister (Chloe Sevigny), who may be pregnant with Julien's child. Occasionally, Julien has a telephone conversation with his mother, who gently reminds him that the voices he hears are not trying to hurt him. It's hard to know how much of a grip Julien has on reality. In the opening scene, he appears to kill a young boy in the nearby woods, but we're never certain whether what we see is real or a delusional event in his mind. Working with a minimal script, "Trainspotting's" Bremmer gives a performance so convincing you'd think Korine recruited him from an institution. And Herzog, one of Korine's outspoken supporters, makes the father a controlled sociopath the film's genuine villain. Korine, who wrote the script for Larry Clark's urban-teen freak show "Kids" and made his own directing debut with the revolting "Gummo," certainly builds on his reputation as American independent film's enfant terrible. Whether he's a boldly innovative stylist for the 21st century or an overpraised fraud is yet to be determined.?The Dog Who Loved and Other Tales of Excess. By , Tabori & Chang, $16.95.Chloe, a 5-year-old golden retriever, fell despondent when her owners betrayed her by bringing home a baby. One day, though, the baby dropped a fistful of Cheerios from its perch in the high chair. Chloe cheered up immensely, and when a second infant came through the door, she only saw the possibilities. At least, that's what her wagging tail seemed to suggest.This true story and others are contained in the delightful collection "The Dog Who Loved Cheerios and Other Tales of Excess" (Stewart, Tabori & Chang, $16.95), by photographer . She included her own dogs, of course, as well as the dogs of friends and canines who had been the subject of her paid portraits. The only qualifier was that the pup had to have a "quirk." "Any reluctance towards the camera was overcome with the magic of cheese," she says, freely handing off a professional tip. Except for Chloe's passing heartbreak, there isn't a sad story in the pack. Even Wilbur (pictured with his bunny, above), an abandoned, deaf, albino pit bull who in no way lives up to the breed's fearsome reputation, triumphed his way into a loving home. Scout, a German shepherd, is so set on her bedtime that she will wake herself up to go her room at 9 p.m. Max, a shepherd/husky mix (so cute!), appears normally proportioned but has astonishing reach with his foreleg. Meanwhile, Arlo, an Old English sheepdog, is scared of the outdoors. Ironically, his favorite toy is a stuffed sheep. ?THE BROWN BUNNY With Vincent Gallo, Chloe Sevigny, Cheryl Tiegs. Written, directed, edited, produced and photographed by Gallo. At Landmark Sunshine (1:32). Unrated: Graphic sex, language. 1 STAR. Despite what you may have heard about the very real oral-sex scene between stars Vincent Gallo and Chloe Sevigny, the biggest thing in "The Brown Bunny" is Gallo's ego. It is on display more than his body parts, and it eats up valuable screen time in what could have been - in the hands of professionals - a devastating portrait of a man made hollow by loss, regret, guilt and anger. Gallo stars in this weird, virtually one-character piece of minimalism that was booed out of the 2003 Cannes Film Festival. It is not the worst movie ever made, as some critics claim, but it does a passing imitation. A nauseating hand-held camera trots after the lead character, Bud Clay (Gallo), practically licking his face (and more) for 92 disorienting minutes. For that you can blame the cinematographer, who happens to be ... Gallo. (How he shot that sex scene I am afraid to ask.) Gallo was also director, writer, editor and producer, and the ego inherent in that distracts from every frame of this ugly-looking, windshield-splattered road picture. No doubt he also would have liked to play the odd women (including a wordless Cheryl Tiegs) who gaze adoringly at the needy, childlike Bud and can't wait to kiss him and kiss him and kiss him some more. The whole movie has an oral fixation. Despite all that female attention, Bud, an itinerant motorcycle racer (the credits tell you what bike Gallo rode, if not what brand of toothpaste he used), cannot forget his last girlfriend, played by Sevigny, Gallo's real-life ex. She will show up toward the end of the movie - as everyone already knows - to do him a kindness. If Sevigny really wanted to do him a kindness, she would have washed his hair. Bud's lack of grooming, coupled with his child-pitched mumbling in the few laughable bits of dialogue, makes him one of the least attractive protagonists ever to get lucky on screen. There is no question that "The Brown Bunny" is poorly made. However, it was not poorly conceived. The sex scene may be blunt, but it is organic, if you will, to the story. And the movie's punchline is a worthy howl of anguish - or it would have been if executed by someone who could pull himself away from the mirror for a moment.?The end of Fashion Week was sweet and slinky, the kind of day that makes you hate to see it go.The style set went to bed Wednesday night dreaming of 's wild journey, which took the audience through zebra prints and eel skin skirts to the rhythm of rapid drumbeats.They woke to a dreamy vision in pastels: 's update of , all summer hats, satin and silk georgette. The girls nuzzled feather boas and hid demurely under capelets. Others bared their shoulders - a silver gown with sheer straps gave the illusion that it was about to slip away. Beaded flapper looks came in white and the lightest of blue-greens, like a seaside watercolor from a tender era. Getty; ; Getty; WireImage picked up a palette of flesh tones, the most metallic of which verged on copper, but stayed shyly on this side of anything brassy. White and black, bodice-centric dresses with curved seams were delicate and inviting. , and sat front row.It was on the mirrored runway of that the gowns eased back into the tones that have colored this week. There was bold orange, red saturated pink, hot yellow and deep purple. The backless, shimmering numbers were tailored to the red carpet, suggestive of a night at .Interestingly enough, however, Khan's ladies paraded to .Not that he needed hard rock to demand attention. Just the sight of the last look receding down the runway was enough to make us say, "Turn around, come back." , Emmanuel Dunand/Getty?KIDS. Leo Fitzpatrick, Justin Pierce, Chloe Sevigny. Directed by Larry Clark. Running time: 95 mins. At Angelika Downtown and Lincoln Plaza Theaters. Unrated. 3 Stars NOT SINCE 'LORD OF the Flies" have children in a pack posed such a threat to the social order as they do in "Kids." Larry Clark's lethal movie shows 24 hours in the lives of a group of aimless Manhattan teenagers as they both prey on and protect each other. They drink, get high, talk trash. But mostly what they do is have unprotected sex. The movie opens and closes with two very disturbing images of teenage lust (which is the title of one of Clark's collections of photographs). Two clearly young people his body has the scrawniness of childhood, hers the baby fat of pre-pubescence hungrily kiss for what seems like forever. It's not erotic; it's as if they're chewing on each other. The boy is Telly (Leo Fitzpatrick), a self-proclaimed "virgin surgeon." He gets his kicks by seducing virgins, the younger the better, promising them that he cares for them, that it won't hurt, that they won't get pregnant. Then he runs off to wave the banner of having captured their metaphorical treasure. "Virgins, I love 'em!" he crows. "No one has the power to do that to them again." Eventually, Telly can be seen as a one-man death machine he is unknowingly HIV-positive and sex has been reduced to the nasty vestigial drive of a dying population. In the horrific finale, a zonked-out girl at a party is as lifeless as a rag doll, her anklets waving in the air, providing a chilling echo of the opening. In this movie, sex equals death. Clark's very success with his nonprofessional young actors and cinema-verite style is what has created all the fuss over this movie "Kids" looks so real that it makes the viewer feel unhinged and skeevy (and grateful to have survived one's own adolescence). Are today's teens really like that, sociopaths in the making? Are girls so pliable as to fall for Telly's insincere flattery? Yet, for all the offending subject matter, dim view of humanity and disconcertingly youthful actors, there is hardly a more anti-sex movie. Because "Kids" is going out unrated it failed to get an R from the MPAA its release will be severely limited, and teenagers who might benefit by the movie's stern morality won't have as much of a chance to see it. Clark hired a teenage skateboarder he met in Washington Square Park to write the screenplay. Harmony Korine, now 21, is not without lineage he's the grandson of Bowery Boy Huntz Hall. Korine's coarse, naturalistic teenspeak roots the characters in a place that may or may not exist, but feels authentic. It's a boundary-pushing subject that will no doubt inspire discussion. In movie terms alone, "Kids" is to be commended for staying completely true to its own universe, a chilling world where there are no parents, no limits except those provided by peer pressure, and where the specter of death hangs over every teenage folly. (Unrated: Underage sex, explicit language.)?Call out the tow trucks: A 60-foot black-and-white billboard showing Chloe Sevigny pleasuring Vincent Gallo was unveiled Saturday on Hollywood's Sunset Blvd. The steamy and controversial ad, plugging a notorious scene in the upcoming "X-Rated Adults Only" flick "The Brown Bunny," which opens next month, went up near the famed Chateau Marmont Hotel. Wonder what they'll charge for a room with a view. "The film is about a broken-down love, so I thought this image represents a lot of conflict," Gallo told us. "I feel that there is an extremely complicated subtext to what they are doing." Morning commuters might not be the only ones getting a shock from the picture. Gallo, who also wrote, produced and directed the film, said he "doesn't think Chloe has seen [the image]." (We sent a copy of the billboard with a request for comment to Sevigny's agent, but no response was forthcoming.) And Gallo thinks this should just be a start: "Chloe is one of the most beautiful and talented people in the world; she should be on 10 billboards on Sunset Blvd." However, local leaders - many of whom view the billboard as pornographic - are threatening to protest the promo and are promising to bring it down. Gallo is now in New York and says he will attend the Republican National Convention later this month. "I'm here trying to help out in any way that I can. I have made it clear that I am open in any way to promote and protect the Republican administration," he said. Well, the GOP, which openly supports and courts the Religious Right, might very well greet him with a chorus of: "Mr. Gallo, tear down that billboard!" The 'Daily' summit Hours after the final gavel ended the Democratic National Convention in Boston, Jon Stewart and Leonardo DiCaprio still huddled at the Roxy with New York Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-Brooklyn & Queens) and his finance aide, Dolev Azaria, They stayed until the wee hours Friday. "We could have gone longer," Weiner told us. "That's the problem with Boston - everything closes at 2 a.m." Weiner, who shared a group apartment at 50 Grand St. with Stewart when the "Daily Show" star was waiting tables at Lupes and breaking into standup, said: "Jon doesn't go out much in New York. So it was great that he could be out." The group had an intense discussion about politics, with the young rep (who will run for mayor against Mayor Bloomberg next year) and the actors "building up the Democratic party so Jon can tear it down next week.?These tweens are- are taking green to a whole new level.A group of 22 girls sat huddled around a table in , Queens, creating jewelry. The twist? This jewelry was made of recycled bike parts."I think that it is a cool color. It goes with my style," said Mercedes Free, 12, as she attached a gear to her creation, "By doing my part today, I'm helping to make a change.""This is our chance to make something old new," said , 12.The girls who participated last Thursday in the recycling activities attend the Green Girls summer institute run by the . It was held in conjunction with Recycle-A-Bicycle."This is the building block to creating social and environmental change," said , who founded Recycle-A-Bicycle, a nonprofit organization that refurbishes used bikes."I feel good about helping the environment. This is where we live, this is our community. We should be able to change it in a good way," said , 12, as she put the final touches on a bracelet., 12, of , , decided to give a bicycle gear a second life in the form of a charm for her backpack."It is fun to use recycled bike parts and put color into them," said Samantha. "We're not throwing away stuff we can use. Instead, we are re-creating and helping the environment."?Dozens of?activists transformed a vacant East lot into a tent city?on Thursday?as part of a protest to demand more housing for the poor."They say gentrify, we say occupy," members of the group Picture the Homeless chanted as they set up shelters on property owned by . The demonstrators began camping out about 11 a.m. Cops moved in a few hours later. The said it gave the 89 protesters four warnings and about 80 people left. Nine stayed and were arrested. Charges were pending. Two priests were among the arrested. "We are going to keep on fighting," said the shortly before he was loaded into a police van in plastic handcuffs. Picture the Homeless is calling for warehoused lots and buildings to be brought back into use as housing for the poor and homeless. At the lot on 115th St. between and Fifth Aves., about 15 one-man tents were pitched before the crowd chanted, danced and played drums. "Homeless people and allies aren't waiting around," said Beka Economopoulos, 34, from . "We are going to free the space and open the land," said a group board member, , 52. "We are liberating those spaces and giving them back to the community."?Their crowning?moment is still two days off - but the five winners of a Daily News essay contest enjoyed a pretty good time Wednesday, too. met and hailed the writers, who will be among the first allowed back into Lady Liberty's crown when it reopens on the Fourth of July. "These young people demonstrate the best of what it means to be a patriotic American," Weiner said after meeting the five students. The Democrat told the quintet that he would put their winning essays into the Congressional Record, and presented each with certificates and mini-copies of the U.S. Constitution. "When you walk up the steps to the Statue of Liberty, try to remember the new Americans that came by that beautiful Lady and what it meant for them," Weiner advised. The winning essayists were excited as their big day approached. , 9, of the , has visited the statue three times before - but never made it to the crown. "I feel grateful, I'm ecstatic," she said. "It's going to be great, and exciting." , 10, of , was looking forward to the view from atop Lady Liberty. "I feel that it will be very exciting and very cool to be up there," she said. The shut down the statue after the Sept. 11 attacks, citing security concerns. The crown remained off-limits until a News campaign led to its much-anticipated reopening. Weiner hailed the paper for its efforts. "When it became clear that the National Park Service was doing worse then dragging their feet ... refusing to open it, the Daily News wouldn't let up," Weiner said. ?Someone made a big payday at a tribute party for the late ? and insists it wasn't him.Though he was one of the featured performers at what was billed as the rap mogul's "first party in ," Diddy says he had nothing to do with the outrageous $100-$150 being charged at the door. But the folks lined up outside the Lab Banquet Hall Tuesday night thought otherwise and flooded Diddy with comments via , reports The News' ."I cannot pay $100 to get in, " one angry fan tweeted. (Advance tix were $30.)"This is what happens when you have someone like P. Diddy hosting," wrote another."Let's hope the money is going to [Biggie's] Memorial Foundation," a third posted.But it wasn't ? not to the foundation or to the college fund for the children of the rapper, who was shot dead in 13 years ago. ? Diddy tweeted back: "I am not promoting the party. I'm not making money from this. ... As soon as I get there, I will tell them to stop trying to overcharge people."SEEN & HEARD"Prime" star ignoring the gaggles of girls fawning over him at Avenue on Saturday night. … showing off his Brazilian dance moves at Union Square Lounge on Sunday night. strolling solo on Bleecker St. on Tuesday. and a male pal enjoying the warm weather in Thompson Square Park Tuesday afternoon.? and should be happy with the way their pal, , portrays them in her fun new mystery novel, "Whacked," but other celebs may want to put a hit on the author.Asner - former model, former E! Entertainment correspondent and still-reigning wife of director - builds her modern noir tale around , a writer for the TV forensic show "Flesh and Bone." When Dani discovers that her slow-to-propose director boyfriend, Dave, has been making it with starlet , she vows payback. Along the way, pops up at a party, trotting around "with no shoes, kissing everyone hello on the lips" and prompting two guys to whisper that, now that Barrymore has turned 30, "she's about to expire like spoiled milk." Asner has fictional characters slice and dice other real-life stars - like the scene where two women analyze the authenticity of 's breasts. "God doesn't really make size-zero women with size-36C bustlines, right?" asks one. "Well, except for Angelina Jolie." Says her friend: "Oh, darling, especially Angelina Jolie." Asner also tempts us to guess the templates for other fictional characters. is the wife of an Oscar-winning director and "so anorexic and so tan she looked like a walking X-ray." (Shame on you for drawing any comparisons between Miranda and !) And the loathsome starlet du jour, Chloe, sports freckles - just like . "I didn't ask permission. Maybe I should have!" Asner told us. "I know Ryan [Seacrest] - I don't think he'd be bothered. And Jen [Aniston] is the sweetest, nicest person in the world. I'd only mention her in a great capacity." While Asner has always been fascinated by Tinseltown tragedies like , she wouldn't speculate on whether Lindsay and fellow train wreck will end up dead of self-inflicted party excess. But Asner does have ideas about why certain actresses stand the test of time. ", , - you don't hear about them being all messed up at a club, because they're actually working," she says. "This young set, I guess they're actors, but I can't remember actually seeing their movies." Her own hubby - who's mentioned in passing as having directed vile Chloe - encouraged her to write whatever she wanted. "He's really great - he's the coolest guy I know," she says. "He loves the book." Well, he better.? has gone from a hungry teen in "" to the star of "."The 20-year-old actress has won the coveted role of Katniss Everdeen, the heroine in ' futuristic best-seller about kids competing to survive in a dystopian world.The rising star was offered the role on Tuesday and closed the deal the next day, blog reported.Lawrence's rep did not return emails for comment in time for print.Though there is no confirmation on whether she will reprise the role for the trilogy, follow-ups will include "Catching Fire and "Mockingjay" adaptations.Lawrence reportedly beat out fellow ("True Grit") for the role as well as , , , and ."Beastly" star recently told that he met with producers about the role of Peeta Mellark, Katniss' ally."Undecided yet, still [waiting] to see a script," he told the entertainment channel."Hunger Games" will be direcetd by and is set to hit theaters on March 23, 2012.?BLEECKER BOUTIQUE Trendy retailer Intermix isn't taking over the world yet, but they are adding to the cachet of the West Village with a new store at Bleecker and Charles Sts. You'll find clothing and accessories from Chip & Pepper, Luella Bartley, Matthew Williamson (r.) and Chloe, all in one user-friendly, one-stop boutique. Open now at 365 Bleecker St. (212) 929-7180. DIVORCE & DATING Soon after Leslie Fram (above, r.) started dating a divorced man, she realized she got more than she bargained for: an ex-wife who called with disturbing frequency, kids who didn't need another mom and a mate who paid out half his income to another family. So she wrote "How to Marry a Divorced Man" (HarperCollins, $22.95), a collection of caveats and tips. As she told her tale Tuesday night in a Fifth Ave. apartment, the 15 or so women there nodded, recognizing their own stories. They're all women who are dating or considering dating divorced dudes and who attend L.A.-based Fram's nationwide chats, called "Ditch and Bitch" sessions. "I'm dating somebody whose ex-wife lives downstairs," said Willa, 37, a lawyer, to audible gasps. "How do I keep boundaries?" The group's response: Move. KITSCHY KITCHEN Beverly Feldman, designer of flashy sequined shoes and accessories, has created a collection of cleaning supplies for the woman who likes to do everything - even toilet scrubbing - in style. Trimmed with leopard print, denim, ribbons and flowers, the mops, dish brushes, gloves and more will add flair to your cleaning routine. Feldman credits the "lucky love broom" for picking up her love life. It will at least pick up your dust. Available next month at Beverly Feldman, 7 W. 56th St. at Fifth Ave. MORE CELEB CLOTHES If listening to her CDs and watching her movies aren't enough, now you can finally wear Beyonce's clothes. Inspired by designers from Roberto Cavalli to Marc Jacobs, the booty-licious star has signed a deal to create a line that could be called "A Touch of Couture," according to Women's Wear Daily. "Hopefully we will have the line ready and in stores by next year," she told WWD. "It will be completely based on my style and what I wear. I just want it to be more accessible so that other people can wear it, too." CHIC SNEAKS If you love Nike Shox, you'll love the new Shox for Her collection three times as much. The slightly weird but definitely comfy sneakers come in three shock-absorbing varieties: cross-training, running and walking. The difference? The signature columns in the heel have been reconfigured for each style. Cross-trainers feature triangular columns for side-to-side movement, running shoes have oval stabilizers and walking shoes are fitted with circular cushions. $100 a pair, available June 3 at Niketown or at www.niketown.com.?It's a little bit ironic … don't ya think? Just as the romantic comedy "Valentine's Day" debuted in on Monday night, leading ladies and were suspiciously without their men. Biel arrived sans beau , while Garner was without hubby . The "State of Play" actor was later spotted cruising aimlessly by the Chateau Marmont?- and looking worse for wear. "He looked like he hadn't shaved for days," a shutterbug snitched?- but a source claims Affleck was merely "on his way home to baby-sit the kids."As if he and Jen can't afford a baby-sitter ...Ashlee's last act left "" in style. The singer/actress bade farewell to her castmates by throwing an impromptu bash at hubby 's hangout, Angels & Kings, on Sunday night. Singer Michelle Williams took over Simpson's role on Monday.SEEN & HEARDIman reading as she lunched solo at Delicatessan on Monday. … laughing with at the School of Visual Arts premiere of "The Robert Verdi Show" Monday night. … admitting that she doesn't "want to be that girl who's at every Fashion Week show and party?- it's not a good look," at the Second Stage Theatre bowling event at Lucky Strike on Monday night. ?Jim Carrey is going back into the super villain business.The rubber faced actor has signed on to play the nefarious Colonel Stars in the sequel to 2010’s “Kick-Ass,” Director Jeff Wadlow, who is taking over for Matthew Vaughn, broke the news in a tweet.“We’ve been talking very informally about this for a little over two years now,” . “We didn't quite know what Jim was going to be doing in the sequel, but the entire team loves him to bits and I’ve been a fan since I first saw him.”Carrey. who played the Riddler in 1995’s “Batman Forever,” apparently feels the same way about “Kick Ass.” He appeared in a costume from the original movie for a “super hero duet” on Conan O'Brien’s show in 2010. (See video below)“Kick Ass 2: Balls to the Wall” returns Aaron Johnson as the titular bumbling teenager turned vigilante super hero. Chloe Grace Moretz and Chris Mintz-Plasse also return for the film, which is due out next year.?HAZELWOOD JR. HIGH. By Rob Urbinati. With Margaret Burkwit, Stephanie Gatschet, Heather Gottlieb, Brooke Sunny Moriber, Chloe Sevigny and Amy Whitehouse. Sets by Derek McLane. Directed by Scott Elliott. At IS 70, 333 W. 17th St. IN THIS FIERCE, DISTURBING LAMENT for the death of childhood, the characters hardly change. But the audience does. Six junior-high-school kids remain, through terrible events, suspended in a moral vacuum. We, however, move from open laughter to uncomfortable giggling to deep, dark silence. Scott Elliott's gripping production of Ron Urbinati's first play takes us, literally, onto the terrain of youth. It is staged in the auditorium of a Manhattan intermediate school. The actors, ages 14 to 22, convincingly create characters who are even younger. But the action is as far from sweetness and innocence as it is possible to go. The play is based on a real case in Indiana in 1992, when a 12-year-old girl was killed by some older schoolmates because she had developed a lesbian relationship with the girlfriend of one of them. Though the play retains a deadpan documentary feel, withholding judgments and explanations until near the end, it is very much a dramatic artifice. Urbinati immerses us in the girls' world. He sweeps us into the warped logic by which a lunchroom tiff escalates into a dreadful crime. And this logic is stitched into dialogue where perspective and proportion are scarily absent. The play is initially funny in the way the girls switch casually from the lurid to the banal, from "Carrie" to "Clueless." A typical exchange: "Does she really drink her own blood?" "Yeah, but she has a car." Urbinati creates a mental jungle in which vampires and cuddly toys, Pentecostal visions and Kmart are tangled together. Slowly these juxtapositions lose their humor and become an angry, insistent protest at the failure of the adult world to provide these kids with a way through. By the time one of the girls says "I'm gonna hate myself for this later" referring, not to the murder in which she has just participated, but to some food she has just eaten at McDonald's the laughter has been replaced by the pain of damaged, disordered lives. This is deft and morally serious writing, never exploitative and ultimately full of pity. And it is perfectly realized by Elliott and his brilliant cast. Chloe Sevigny ("Kids," "Palmetto"), making her stage debut, gives a vivid account of hurt breeding hatred. Stephanie Gatchett, just 14, creates a victim who is never merely passive. Everywhere, there is the kind of precision and care that such a subject demands. The performances are so truthful, in fact, that by the time we are given a glimpse into the cruelty that created these dangerous children, we already have a good sense of what lies beneath the surface.?For her very first day of filming on "Kick-Ass," actress , then 11, found herself at a putrid sewage treatment plant, pelted by rain and repeatedly jerked off her feet with a wire pulled by stuntmen.It's a pivotal scene in director 's dark comedy about superhero wanna-bes. Moretz's pint-sized vigilante is shot by her father () as a lesson on the use of a bulletproof vest. Like her character, Moretz gamely picked herself off the ground after each shot."You put on a 'jerk-vest’ [attached to] a long rope that goes about 20 yards back," says Moretz, now 13. "They grab it and they yank you back as hard as they can. And your whole body is being jolted, so it's like whiplash."It was fun."?Now the real fun begins: "Kick-Ass," based on the very graphic comic book series by writer and artist , hits theaters riding a wave of buzz. And smack dab at the center of the buzz is Moretz's Hit Girl, who tosses out profanity-laced one-liners and Ninja stars with equal aplomb -- exciting moviegoers and shocking some critics in the process."She blew it straight out of the park. I've never even seen adults pull off anything like this," says actor , who plays the film's titular superhero.While most tweens were studying algebra, Moretz’s curriculum for the film included martial arts training and crash courses with gymnasts and 's old stunt crew, as well as learning how to break down and reassemble a handgun.But one thing that was a little harder to prepare for was the backlash on the other side of the pond, where it opened two weeks earlier. What has gotten some critics especially incensed is a scene in which Hit Girl spits out a jarring slang term for a female body part before slashing her way through of a pack of drug dealers. London’s Daily Mail called the screenwriters “sick” for putting that word in a little kid's mouth."It's just a word," says Moretz. "When you see it in the context of the movie, it doesn't make you disgusted by Hit Girl or anything. I took it in context of the role."Chloe didn't say it. Hit Girl said it. When I put that wig on and they say rolling and they say action, I'm not Chloe. Right when they say cut, I'm out of character. I'm laughing, I'm playing."If she ever dared use that word in her real-life household, says Moretz, "I'd be grounded for the rest of my life.""Even watching a child dismember a gang of adults using the worst language imaginable coming from the cutest face in the movie, somehow you walk out of the movie still on her side and feeling good about it," says Millar, who is also a producer on the film. "[Watching Moretz perform] is like discovering in 1976."?Call it beginner’s luck for reality star-turned-author . The 23-year-old’s first foray into book writing has proven to be successful as her debut novel, "," has taken a firm stance in the top spot on the Best-Seller List two weeks in a row. "If someone said to me five years ago when this all started that I would one day make the New York Times Best Seller list I wouldn't have believed it," Conrad told . "I am so honored that it is now a reality." The young adult novel, which loosely mirrors Conrad's own life, tells the story of a 19-year-old beauty who moves to and ends up starring in her own reality show. If Conrad’s current status on the Best Seller list is any indication to her future in publishing, the star of 's "The " may have found the perfect fallback job if her career in fashion design doesn’t work out. "L.A. Candy" is the first of Conrad’s three-book deal with . The reality star is currently working on her second book, despite having setbacks by her dog, Chloe. "Working on edits for my second book," Conrad wrote on . "This would be much easier if Chloe didn't mistake my reading glasses for a chew toy." Follow the Daily News on Twitter ?Retribution By Jilliane Hoffman Putnam, $24.95 Jilliane Hoffman's debut thriller, "Retribution," is a little bit James Patterson, a little bit John Grisham. In other words, it's highly derivative. Nonetheless, it pretty much works - though not at every turn. Chloe Larson is a law student in New York. The stunning blond has everything going for her, except the stalker she is unaware of. After returning home from a date with her high-powered boyfriend, Chloe is attacked and tortured by a rapist wearing a clown mask. He's never caught, and Chloe can free herself from the trauma only by becoming someone else. Meet C.J. Townsend, assistant chief of the Miami-Dade State Attorney's Office. In her new incarnation, Chloe is somewhat frumpy and hardworking. And she goes strictly by the books. That is, until she hears a voice in court that returns her to her old self, the 24-year-old the cops found tied to a bed bleeding from multiple stab wounds and vaginal injuries. At that moment, she realizes that William Bantling, who she is about to prosecute for a series of murders involving women sliced open and torn apart, is the man who surprised her in her sleep 12 years before. Townsend's dilemma, beyond the obvious, is that the statute of limitations has run out on her rape, and if she acknowledges her brutalization by the accused, the case will be taken out of her hands. Any other prosecutor playing catch-up will be no match for Bantling's defense. "Retribution" sparked a bidding war among publishers, and the movie rights were quickly sold for $1 million. Hoffman was once an assistant state attorney in Florida and, like many a lawyer-turned-writer, has a cinematic way with a courtroom scene. It's too bad, though, that her plot escalates from an unlikely coincidence to the improbable. There's also the uninhibited use of italics. "Tick-tock, tick-tock goes the clock," Townsend thinks at one point. "Oh, really," mused this reader. Still, there's enough of the good stuff here to keep the pages turning. Bantling uses a drug cocktail to keep his victims conscious so they can feel each incision. He's vengeance-worthy, and on that score "Retribution" delivers. E-mail: sconnelly@edit.nydailynews.com?An woman tried to get into her fourth-floor apartment through the window - but lost her grip and plunged to her death on Friday, police said., 37, was known for sneaking into the W. 76th St. brownstone through the roof - and it appears that's what she was trying to do Friday. She slipped and fell onto pavement in the courtyard about 10:20 a.m., police said. She died at . Police said it appears Perez's death was accidental. Perez, who lived with her boyfriend, had a troubled past, neighbors and sources said. Her rap sheet - dating to 1997 - includes convictions for assault, weapons possession and selling drugs.?BRIGHT YOUNG THING In "Match Point," opening Wednesday, Emily Mortimer plays Chloe, an upper-class Londoner who gives herself too easily to her brother Tom's poor Irish tennis coach, Chris (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers). With marriage and babies on her mind, she fails to detect he is consumed with lust for the brother's sultry American girlfriend, Nola (Scarlett Johansson, see cover story). Sweet and trusting though Chloe is, Mortimer brings an edge to the character. Cocooned in wealth and privilege, she and Tom (Matthew Goode) are quick to deride Chris when he orders -chicken instead of a fancy dish like caviar -blinis for dinner, and also when he offers a somber philosophical thought. Once she and Chris are married, she pouts and mopes when he says he's too tired to make love - though, given his obsession with Nola, she has good cause to complain. The Oxford-educated daughter of "Rumpole" creator John -Mortimer probably found Chloe closer to home than most of the characters she has played, not including her giddy '30s socialite in "Bright Young Things." Certainly, Chloe has none of the ragged desperation of the women Mortimer portrayed so bravely in "Lovely & Amazing," "Young Adam" and "Dear Frankie," but it's another typically subtle performance by the excellent 34-year-old actress.?Love never goes out of style - and this spring, fashionistas literally are wearing their hearts on their sleeves. Although iron-on decals are nothing new, designer Stella McCartney made them all the rage when she emblazoned her Chloe tank tops, and baseball and muscle tees, with "I Love You." Now those three little words are broadcasting women's emotions at premiere parties, in lounges and on the street. The body-hugging tops are an instant attention-getter, perfect for striking up a conversation. But bystanders, beware: Not all women are true to their words!?Fans of are in for a shock today when Chloe runs into Esther, the maid at the Chancellor mansion, and Esther calls her "Kate.""It's true," says , who plays snooty stylist Chloe. "Chloe is really Kate, Esther's daughter." Chloe changed her name and has been covering up her parentage the whole time she has been in Genoa City. She is only busted now because she just married Cane, the rich grandson of Esther's boss, Katherine. "She hasn't seen Esther this whole time, and has never been to the Chancellor mansion," says Hendrickson. "[Cane's mother] Jill was going to throw them an engagement party, but Chloe got out of that by saying, 'Let's elope.'" Which they did this week. "Chloe thinks she's in the clear, but then they want to have a wedding party. She tries to pretend she is sick, but Cane makes her go. She's praying she won't see Esther." No such luck. The party is raging when "her mother comes in with the drinks for the guests. Esther says, 'Kate?' I played it like 'Who?' Everyone was looking at me, so I looked behind me, like, 'Who are they looking at?'" The maid's daughter, who just married the millionaire son (and grandson) of Esther's employers, that's who. "Katherine and Jill haven't seen her in years," says the actress. "Jill makes a comment about how the last time she saw her, she was young and overweight with braces." Not anymore! Next week, Chloe tries to spin her lies. "They all rip into her," she says. "Katherine calls Chloe out on her crap. Her defense is the truth: 'I came here to start fresh and and I wanted to do it on my own. I didn't tell Cane because I was afraid he would think I was going after him for his money. There was no plotting.'" Unless you count Chloe getting pregnant by Cane when he was drunk and trapping him into marriage. "Okay, that was definitely plotting," she says, "but not because of who he is. She just wanted him." Anyone who thinks Chloe's lies are over hasn't been paying attention. Is the baby even Cane's? "That I cannot confirm," says the actress. Don't touch that dial: On Tuesday's episode of "General Hospital: Night Shift" (11 p.m. on SOAPnet), Jagger finally accepts that his son Stone is autistic and joins a support group. The show hired actors whose children have autism in real life, and their stories are real. ?A German Shepherd named Chloe was killed and her master was hurt Friday after their boat caught fire and sank in the - taking the dog to a watery grave.Chloe's owner, Mark Stoss, managed to escape the blaze that consumed his 46-foot catamaran, but he couldn't save his beloved dog."I couldn't get to her," he said in the emergency room. "I couldn't."Stoss, 42, who was being treated for smoke inhalation and hypothermia, said losing Chloe broke his heart."I feel just plain hurt," he said. "It's been a helluva night."Chloe escaped death just last month after she either fell or jumped into the frigid river water and was rescued by a plucky police officer."She's a wild child," Stoss said of his 4-year-old pooch at the time.But Chloe's luck ran out early Friday when a fire erupted around 2:30 a.m. on the boat where she lived at Pier 59 near W. 17th St., officials said.Investigators said they suspect a faulty electric heater aboard the Quid Pro Quo sparked the fire, which took 65 firefighters two hours to extinguish.Stoss said he "woke up to black smoke" and tried to reach Chloe but "the flames were too much."They quickly consumed the catamaran and then spread to another boat docked nearby, the Roman Holiday. Nobody aboard that boat was injured."My boat is finished," said boat owner , 66, of , "It's completely destroyed."Stoss reportedly shared his boat with fiancee , 31. Anaya was not believed to be on the Quid Pro Quo when it sank.Dock workers said the couple had another German Shepherd, which died "a few weeks ago."Celebrities such as , and former Giants coat all have boats docked nearby, officials said.With ?A 22-year-old man made a grisly discovery in his apartment early Friday - his pregnant girlfriend repeatedly stabbed and left for dead, police sources and friends said. The victim - whom friends identified as - was mortally wounded in her 58th St. apartment when her beau called 911 at 4 a.m. Someone had plunged a knife in her chest several times, cops said. Paramedics tried to save Flores, 26, but she died 20 minutes later. "She was a kind person," said , 36, who shared an apartment with Flores for two years. "It's very sad." Cops recovered a knife in the apartment. The boyfriend was interviewed, but no arrests have been made. Friends and neighbors told cops Flores - who had two young boys - was pregnant. The medical examiner's office will analyze the body Saturday. Flores came to Brooklyn six years ago from her native , . She had an order of protection out against her kids' father, but he has since been deported, friends said. The stabbing left residents stunned. "I could walk here at 3:00 in the morning and feel safe," said , 58, a retired teacher who lives nearby. "It's scary." ? was grilled for five hours Thursday about claims that his company discriminates against women who try to take maternity leave.The closed-door session allowed lawyers suing to ask the mayor about claims that more than 80 pregnant women were harassed, demoted or fired if they took leave. "Mr. Bloomberg does pride himself as a hands-on, detail-oriented owner, businessman and now mayor," said , the lawyer for five of the women. "We are determining if and when Mr. Bloomberg became aware of these issues, whether they were happening under his watch and if so, what he did about them." Bloomberg is not a defendant in the lawsuit, and his company has denied the allegations. Roth said the mayor was cooperative, cool and collected during the session. Bloomberg came to the meeting straight from a speech at the , which Bloomberg's company has donated to for 12 years. "It's been a very exciting week for me and women," the mayor said.??DEMONLOVER Running time: 116 mins. Unrated: Graphic sexual images. In English, French and Japanese with subtitles. At Landmark Sunshine, Lincoln Plaza. 3 STARS. Sharp, erotic performances are the mainstay of Olivier Assayas' unnerving "Demonlover," a visually stylish movie that equates and fuses high-stakes corporate negotiations with the video-game mentality. Connie Nielsen and Chloe Sevigny are boss and assistant, respectively - they hate each other - at a company vying to acquire new Japanese anime technology whose primary use will be to enhance pornographic images on the Internet. There are double- and triple-crosses as this intelligent thriller slyly ratchets up the action, just as in a multi-level arcade game. Gina Gershon is a negotiator who enters at a high level of play, and the movie gleefully goes for the guts when the competition reaches its peak, posing the question: When all is said and done, have 3D images replaced humans or vice-versa? Jami Bernard TIBET: CRY OF THE SNOW LION Running time: 100 mins. Unrated: Violence. At the Village East. 3 STARS. Tom Peosay spent 10 years making this unabashedly heart-tugging documentary about the plight of Tibet under Chinese occupation. Though the Chinese government won't be too happy about it, everyone else ought to be deeply moved by the tragedies Peosay records. Interweaving the stories of Tibetans who are both high-profile - the Dalai Lama - and unknown - martyred monks, displaced children - Peosay makes a fervent, impressively comprehensive plea for the freedom of a decimated country still hoping, against all experience, to save itself through enlightenment and compassion.Elizabeth Weitzman IN THIS WORLD Running time: 90 mins. Rated R: Adult themes. In English, Farsi, and Pashtu with subtitles. At the Loews 34th St.3 STARS. The story of two young Afghan refugees searching for a better life, Michael Winterbottom's docudrama is, appropriately enough, a grueling experience marbled with moments of tentative elation. Facing bleak prospects in their bombed-out village, teenagers Jamal and Enayat (non-actors Jamal Udin Torabi and Enayatullah) will chance any risk to escape. Armed only with their wits and a few rupees, the pair sneak onto buses, trucks, trains and boats during an increasingly grim trip to London, their idea of the promised land. Winterbottom informs us that, though fictional, his story represents thousands of real lives, and there is a hardly a false note, which makes this both a difficult and exceedingly memorable film to watch.E.W. EMERALD COWBOY Running time: 117 mins. Unrated: Violence. In English and Spanish with subtitles. At Cinema Village. 1.5 STARS. According to this dramatized biography of his experiences as a Colombian emerald exporter, Japanese-born businessman Eishy Hayata is genius, saint and martyr. What he is not is a filmmaker. Having written, co- directed and played the lead in this awkward, ego-driven memoir, Hayata has turned a genuinely compelling life story into an embarrassing vanity production. Re-creating his battles with a corrupt government, mercenary colleagues and even vicious drug lords, Hayata clearly sees himself as a self-made hero. It would be easier for us to admire him if he weren't also such a self-aggrandizing one.E.W.?If you're going to splurge on a pricey designer bag, why not make sure some of your money finds a good home? Harper's Bazaar has teamed with UNICEF, Portero and eBay to offer nearly 30 purses, from designers including Chloe, Stella McCartney and Marc Jacobs, in an auction that gives all net profits to tsunami relief. Visit www.harpersbazaar.com and click the auction banner on the left.?He doesn't like being called grumpy, but if the sock fits ...The sock salesman deemed the "grumpiest man on Earth" by actress isn't embracing the title - but he isn't denying it, either. "I have my moments," acknowledged , 45, owner of The Sock Man on St. Marks Place. "I'm from . We all have our moments." Sevigny recently told a reporter Rosen was the ultimate crab while discussing a pair of tights she bought from him. "I love that place, but the guy's the grumpiest man on Earth. He's like the , but he sells socks," Sevigny said, referring to the nasty chef made famous on "Seinfeld." Indeed, staff and customers say Rosen steals employees' sandwiches, slyly puts trash in irritating patrons' bags and yells at people for browsing too long. But for a grump, Rosen was decidedly Zen about Sevigny's comments. "She still shops here, so I'm not going to say anything to dis her," he said, sipping a cup of peppermint tea. "I'd rather let it go and say I'm the grumpiest sock man in . I don't care. I'm the Sock Nazi." The city does seem to bring out many folks' inner curmudgeon. The Soup Nazi earned his moniker by denying soup to customers who ordered incorrectly. Then there's superintendent , who was dubbed the city's "crankiest super" after placing his tenants' trash bins on the roof. As for Rosen, longtime Sock Man employee Luis Acevedo, 33, agrees that his service doesn't always knock your socks off - so to speak. "He's grumpy toward all the customers. He's just grumpy as hell," he said. In addition to eating staffers' lunches, he also has tried to sell any personal items they leave in the shop. , 23, who has worked at The Sock Man for more than a year, recalled Rosen's response to a customer who kept trying on socks, despite a store policy against it. "I really can't stand you," Rosen barked at the woman. "You shouldn't come back here anymore." Forget haggling, said , 27, who works at a tattoo shop next-door. Tkach's girlfriend asked for a discount on Christmas Eve when she picked out $83 in merchandise. Rosen took a measly $3 off the bill. Pirino said some customers deserve the icy treatment but, "As a store owner, he probably shouldn't act like that." Rosen, a resident who wears his long, curly hair in a ponytail, encouraged Sevigny to walk a mile in his socks. "Dealing with retail isn't the easiest thing, and maybe she came in when I was grumpy," he said, then added gruffly, "Maybe she was upset that I didn't know who she was." ?Is it - just maybe - time for to find a nice, comfortable sitcom and settle down? Because the movie thing really isn't working out the way it should be. Granted, we appreciate that she chose to play a Daily News reporter in "The " (PG-13, $28.95). But that's pretty much the highlight of this contrived action comedy, in which she and fight, flirt, and uncover corruption in the . ? doesn't always make the best choices either, though she does get credit for making daring ones. Her sexual thriller "" (R, $27.96) is basically late-night cable fare classed up with a cast that includes as Moore's husband, and as the call girl who seduces them both. ? Solid actors also struggle through "" (R, $26.98), a melodrama starring and as parents who've recently lost their teenage son; "An Education"'s is the young woman carrying his child. Better is 's incisive and unsparing indie "" (R, $29.98), in which 's abrasive slacker dares everyone?including us?to like and hate him at the same time. ? More in the mood for some mindless viewing? We've got a few guilty pleasures on offer. Start with "" (PG-13, $29.99), a cheerfully broad comedy featuring as an overwhelmed bride-to-be. The straight-to-DVD romance "Love Chronicles: Secrets Revealed" (NR, $19.93) stars and . And if you start humming as soon as you see the title "Don't You Forget About Me" (R, $19.99), you're definitely the audience for this look at the legacy of , with , , and . ? There isn't much on the TV front, though it is time to say goodbye to 's troubled detective in "Saving Grace: The Final Season" (NR, $49.98). And you'd better move fast if you want to catch up with the fourth year of "Psych" (NR, $59.98): season five begins this week. ? Finally, make some kids (and kids-at-heart) happy with the charming special ": 20 Years and Still Counting" (NR, $14.98), which was originally hosted by in 1989. There's also the more recent? ": Triton's Revenge" (NR, $16.99), which offers creative casting at its finest when guest stars and play mother and son.?Eleven-year-old Aniyah Smith shook up her regular breakfast routine Tuesday with a new treat: sushi.Smith bought her unusual meal at the newly opened Pop-Tarts World in , where the toaster staples are the inspiration for confections ranging from trail mix to sundaes.Sweet-toothed passersby were instantly drawn inside the sugary storefront, not far from similar M&M's and 's outposts."I think this is really cool. If I could, I would eat Pop-Tarts for breakfast every day, all year," said , 18, of , as he pondered the menu, ultimately deciding on a berry sundae.Some customers at the 42nd St. shop, which is renting until at least January, thought the store was over-the-top - and too icky sweet."Pop-Tarts are the ultimate road-trip food," acknowledged , 39, of , "but it is a bit weird. I didn't know that Pop-Tarts warranted a whole store."Other folks were positively eating up the shop, which boasted several dozen Pop-Tarts-inspired snacks and desserts and a "varietizer" machine that allowed shoppers to customize their own box of pastries., for one, wanted even more."I like Pop-Tarts," said the 18-year-old from , "but when I first heard about it, I thought there would be more merchandise and make-your-own. I would give it an B-, C+."Her mom, , added, "It's a bit disappointing. This store is not 'Pop'ping."?Well, she's no . 's daughter, , is facing some serious backlash from an Australian parents group over a new violently dark music video for her song "Play With Me." The suicide-themed clip shows a 25-year-old Lattanzi in various states of self-inflicted violence: maimed and electrocuted in a bathtub, pointing a gun at her own head, and graphically slitting her wrist while in bed with a man. "I think it's sad that this young woman has such a need for attention that she needs to push the envelope of good taste and appropriateness this far," and the Media president told . "This simply glamorizes a range of harmful behaviors and does nothing to help empower young people to cope [with] relationship problems," she added. "Never knew love could hurt like this / What is this feeling?" Lattanzi sings at one point. Later, cocaine fuels a drug binge during which a second woman lies nearby, seemingly overdosed or passed out. But Lattanzi maintains the video was made "purely for artistic value." She responded to her critics from down under with a video titled "Thank You To All The Fans And Haters" in which she said, "Some people are taking it a little bit too seriously. "I know it may be quite disturbing but I appreciate you tuning in and all the opinions that are voiced."Mom Olivia Newton-John has yet to comment. ?Mr. Paradise By Elmore Leonard Morrow, $25.95 Elmore Leonard took his sweet time coming home, but after two long decades, he has once again set a novel in Detroit, and for sure, "Mr. Paradise" has that Motor City reverb. "I'm too lazy to move" is how one character explains staying put, even though relocating to Manhattan would stoke her career as a Victoria's Secret model. There's also less traffic in Detroit, which means she can drive fast. There is, of course, nothing lazy about Kelly Barr, another of Leonard's sublimely savvy female characters, who will educate the acting chief of homicide, Frank Delsa, to the ways of a smart, aggressively sensuous woman. But first they have to get past the little matter of Kelly's having assumed the identity of her friend Chloe on the occasion of the prostitute's demise. Leonard never restricts himself to one perp per novel as Kelly and Delsa stumble across each other in the course of seamy pursuits. In "Mr. Paradise," there's the execution of three Mexican drug dealers as well as the nut crime - the murder of 84-year-old former personal-injuries lawyer Tony Paradiso, found shot dead in front of his television with an expired topless cheerleader on his lap. Kelly and Chloe look enough alike to be twins and act like sisters, except that Kelly earns her living on the runway while Chloe earns hers on her back. Chloe reckons she has a good thing going when the old guy starts paying her $5,000 a week to dance next to his TV set in a bitsy pleated skirt as he replays Wolverine games. Plus, he promises his generosity will continue beyond the grave. On the night Chloe and Paradiso are taken out, Kelly is upstairs with the lawyer's fetch-it man, Montez Taylor. First Chloe conscripts her as part of the evening's entertainment, then Taylor brutally intimidates her into passing as Chloe to get at whatever the old man stashed in a safe deposit box in the now-dead hooker's name. So it is that Kelly presents herself to Delsa as the woman she isn't. Leonard, now in his 70s, has got pop culture down cold, from Eminem to bikini waxes. What's always to marvel at is his ability to establish a fully idiosyncratic character in a terse phrase. From the redneck hit men Krupa and Fontana to Lloyd, Paradiso's Uncle Tom houseman, Leonard creates another crew of miscreants and misfits who believably walk the walk and, more importantly, talk the talk. Because when it comes to dialogue, Leonard proves in his 39th novel that it's still the case that nobody does it better. E-mail: sconnelly@edit.nydailynews.com?They claim killed their little girl.The parents of a British 15-year-old schoolgirl blame "huge pressure" and "modern complexities" of social networking Web sites for the suicide of their teen daughter, The Online reported Monday. Holly Grogan jumped 30 feet to her death from a bridge last week and was hit by traffic after abusive messages were relentlessly posted onto her Facebook page, according to Times Online.Her parents, Steve, 45, and Anita, 44, warned other families of the dangers of cyberbullying. "Holly struggled to cope with the huge pressures placed upon her by the modern complexities of 'friendship groups' and social networking," her parents said in a statement. "Every responsibile parent will empathize with our constant battle to instill self-belief and confidence in our children."Holly, who attended in , "had the biggest smile in the world," but was targeted by girls at the Catholic school, said her friend , 16."Girls used to gang up on her and call her names and she didn't have anything to say back," Chloe said. "She just froze up. Girls used to bully her on Facebook and leave comments on her wall calling her names. They've probably all deleted them now."The bullying was so bad at Holly's first school that she had to switch, said Chloe, who attends Chosen Hill secondary school in . But the abuse didn't stop."I heard that the girls who bullied her at her old school told their friends at her new school to bully her as well, and so it just kept on and on," Chloe told Times Online. “Apparently there was a girl at her school yesterday who was running around crying because she used to bully her, but she should have thought about that at the time."Despite the tragedy, Holly's parents, and her brother Tom, 17, held on to happy memories of their "beuatiful, kind and caring Holly," whose "outwardly vivacious zest for life was apparent to all who knew her." The Grogans were also found solace through cybermessages of support."The family has been greatly comforted by the comments and tributes left on various social networking sites," the Grogans' statement said.Holly's ordeal and subsequent suicide echoes the tragedy of in . The 13-year-old user connected with a group of people who created a fake account in 2006 under the name "." When one of the fake users, writing as Josh, told Megan the world would be a better place without her, Megan hanged herself in her bedroom.?An adventurous pooch survived an icy swim in the Hudson Friday thanks to quick-thinking cops.A harbor unit detective jumped into the 46-degree waters off of Pier 59 and saved 4-year-old Chloe, a rambunctious German Shepherd."I gave her a big hug," said relieved owner Mark Stoss, 42, who lives aboard a catamaran docked near the driving range. "She was just petrified."Stoss said he was coming back to the boat this morning after successfully fighting a ticket for walking Chloe in when he heard noises under the pier."I was walking down the dock, and I heard squeaking," he said. "I just started to panic."He found the pooch under the floating dock, petrified. She must have fallen from the deck of his boat and swam toward the shore, Stoss said."Her head was just above the water," he said.Stoss called 9-1-1, and an harbor unit pulled their boat close to where Chloe was waiting under a piling.Detective Matthew Sherman pulled on gear and jumped into the 20-foot-deep water, while and waited aboard the black zodiac with a line to toss. The dog swam out from the pier and they were able to help her onto the zodiac.After a warm shower and some cuddling, Chloe was doing great.Stoss said that it wasn't the dog's first dip in the Hudson - she also jumped in once during the summer. But he said he hoped that now she would stay out of trouble for at least a little while."She's fearless. She's a wild child," Stoss said. "But when I'm here, she's a lamb."?A 13-year-old summer school student was shot in the leg Thursday near a Queens school, setting off a swift lockdown of 1,000 children, officials said.A bullet struck the boy in the leg as students were being dismissed from Public School 43 on Beach 29th St. about noon.The student, who was not identified, flagged down a lifeguard on about four blocks away, sources said.He was taken to , where he was in stable condition, officials said.A fight preceded the gunfire, but it was unclear if the teen was the intended target.The gunfire caused a panic among children and administrators."When they told us there was a gunshot, I was scared in case someone was still out there," said a 10-year-old student.??-"Project Runway" (Bravo) - When the final five get their latest challenge - designing complete makeovers for each other - they are horrified. Worse yet, they have to walk the runway themselves. Daniel V. chooses to dress pixie-like Chloe in a cinching scarlet number with a leather corset that leaves judge Michael Kors questioning the effort Daniel put into the task, given his immunity. Worse yet, Santino dresses hippie Kara in a too-tight body suit that he glued onto her at the last minute and that fell apart on the runway. Chloe won the challenge for dressing Nick in a pink-accented, pinstripe pants-and-vest ensemble - her first stab at men's wear - but Nick was sent packing for outfitting Daniel in an overambitious (and girly) suit. NOW THAT'S GOOD TV: With peacemaker Andrae gone, Nick and Santino were free to clash. The best moment was when Santino childishly began repeating everything Nick said (repeating everything Nick said). -"Skating With Celebrities" (Fox) - This week was all about injuries. First, fearless Kristy Swanson and her daredevil partner, Lloyd Eisler, successfully repeated the move that nearly cost them the competition and caused quite the chin wound last week. Then, Jillian Barberie pulled a muscle in her ribs, but managed to skate through the pain. Lastly, Bruce Jenner fell on his face in practice and had to have 16 stitches above his eye. "Do I think skating is dangerous?" the 55-year-old former Olympian asked. "You're damn right I do. Skating is not for sissies." Playing it safe didn't pay off for Nancy Kerrigan and Dave Coulier, though, and they were booted. NOW THAT'S GOOD TV: Few people pay attention to the ridiculous things the announcers say at the start of the show. This week's classic opener was scarier than Jenner's bleeder: "Bringing more sparkle to the ice than a 2006 Zamboni." Groan.?The energy is being?considered as a partial contributor to the death of a British student at a club last year.An inquest into the September 2008 death of revealed Monday that the 21-year-old had consumed around four cans of the caffeine-loaded drink along with several VKs - a vodka-based drink that also contains caffeine - before suddenly collapsing around 3 a.m. on a dance floor in the city of Hull. Leach had been diagnosed with epilepsy in 2001 and was also believed to suffer from QT syndrome, a condition that affects the electric activity in the heart. Hull coroner ruled out drug consumption and excessive drinking, saying that Leach died of natural causes.? "Chloe was out that evening enjoying herself with friends as young people do," Saul said. "None of the events leading up to her death reflected badly on her or any of her friends." ? The most likely trigger of Leach's collapse was Long QT Syndrome, said , a consultant neuropathologist who spoke at the inquest. Although Chloe was never officially diagnosed with the syndrome, she had a QT "upper limit" which could have increased in the years following her scans."QT sufferers are prone to sudden arrests, the threat of which may not be detected during normal scans," Scott said. "The QT levels may have grown over a few years, or it may have been artificially pushed over the limit by caffeine." Leach took her epilepsy medication regularly and was vigilant about her caffeine intake, said her mother, Tina. "Chloe was careful regarding her consumption of caffeine," said. "She would drink Red Bull occasionally and was aware it contained caffeine." contains 80 milligrams of caffeine in each can, compared to 40 milligrams in an average cup of coffee.? isn't just 's home; it's her vacation."I have to travel to or wherever for work," she says. "But New York, I hate being busy in New York. I'd rather just sit in all day and not do anything."The resident has been taking a breather since the end of her series "," but she has just hit the big screen with "Mr. Nice," in which she plays , the wife of (), a Welsh-born drug dealer who specialized in hashish and racked up almost four dozen pseudonyms while on the run from the law.The real Howard is still living, and so is the real Judy."I met her near the end of the shoot, in . She lives there," says Sevigny. "And then we've been emailing for a while. She's an awesome woman."This month, Sevigny will debut her fourth collection for Opening Ceremony in a runway show ? the first time the retailer has ever taken to the catwalk for any of its lines. Looking pretty in a summer dress of her own design, the actress sat at the Playwright pub on Eighth Ave . to talk about New York nightlife, her stylish brother and her drag queen doppelganger.Where would you wear your new line in New York? Well, I live in the East Village, so of course I would wear it there. I would wear it for cocktails somewhere. I mean, do we want to get specific?If you want to reveal where you go. I go everywhere.Do you ever get hassled by people who recognize you? I just go where I want to go and whatever happens, happens, you know? I go to this party on Sundays at Sway, it's like a Smiths night thing, and it's usually like a lot of foreigners that come up to me there. So it depends on where you're going. I go eat at Raoul's all the time, nobody says anything, or Omen, nobody says anything. At Veselka, sometimes kids come up to me. I think it's more where the tourists are, maybe?Do people ask you about "Big Love "? "Big Love," or they say, "Oh, I love your style." There's a lot of that. I don't know what that means. Or, "I've loved you since "Kids." I get that a lot. And I go, " That was like 500 years ago."Do you do any star spotting of your own? I saw on the street the other day. It was hot. He checked me out, but I don't think he knew who I was. I was in sunglasses.Your older brother Paul is a DJ and nightlife impresario. Was he always cool? I hero-worshipped him. I didn't look up to singers or anything, I didn't have that many icons, but I was really into my brother. He was like the coolest thing on the planet. He was really into skateboarding. He was a hard-core kid, used to go to this club called the Anthrax all the time and when New York bands would come through they would stay at our house, like the kids from Burn and stuff.Did you take style cues from him? His high-school sweetheart, this girl named Ellie, was my style icon. I just wanted to be her and listen to everything she listened to.How often do you and Paul hang out? He went away to school, because he was a delinquent. He got shipped off ... and then he went away to college and came back and now we live three blocks from each other in the city. When my career first started picking up and I used to go to a lot of film festivals, during "" and that whole period, I brought him everywhere with me. He was really charismatic, obviously, and handsome and charming and everybody liked to talk to him. And I was really shy, so I could let him talk to everybody. Are you sad that "Big Love" is over? I'm relieved that I don't have to go back to L.A. anymore. That was really disruptive. I'm sad to say goodbye to the character and I'm sad to say goodbye to my friends and everyone who worked on the show. I had to go out to L.A. for work recently and I stayed with , in her guest house. What is Jeanne Tripplehorn's guest house like? She'd just had the bathroom redone, and she had fresh fl owers and a water decanter for me, and fresh towels. ... She cooked for me every morning and night, we had wine, we played with her son, talked to her husband. It was better than a hotel.Have you seen this guy who does drag impersonations of you on ? I met him. He was terrified. ... He was like, "I thought you were going to be mean to me!" And we just joked. The videos are really funny, but I don't know, to me it's not me, it's just some sort of art piece.What are you going to do next? Release a single? A cookbook? [Laughs] Not right now. No. No. I gave this kid some money to do a short film, and there's this book I might help publish. I try to do things like that, help kids out I know, who are trying to show stuff. At the fashion show, I'm working with this new artist and we're going to showcase some of his work there. I'm trying to get into a kind of patron mode.?Real or faux, diamonds have always been a girl's well, you know. After all, sparkling rocks make us look rich and glamorous, even if we're not. Ever since Dolce & Gabbana and Chloe sent diamante togs down the runway, gem-studded clothes and accessories have been glittering all over town. Even though you can never have too many diamonds, the best way to wear them is as one blinding accessory. We've spotted women at stylish parties doing just that with a sleek rhinestone belt, necklace, dog leash (or two) and body art. *1 June Hayes, a public relations executive, wears a Dolce & Gabbana rhinestone cummerbund. 2 Model Imani Powell flashes her diamante eyebrows. 3 Singer Aaliyah sparkles in a dangly hip belt. 4 Janice Combs, Puffy's vivacious mom, says even her pooches deserved to be pampered with dazzling leashes. 5 Public relations exec Jackie Mangione sports a Dolce & Gabbana diamante choker.?Here's a tough job: selling in the heart of .So, the Store pulled out all the stops at its grand openingon Thursday:a boardwalk with real sand, lobster sandwiches and salt water taffy, and an impersonator.Nothing’s for sale at the storefront on Broadway and 11th St. ? the space designed to drum up interest in excursions to Jersey’s shore towns.Joining the effort was ’s Miss Crustacean ? a hermit crab named Copa Crabana and a guy in a bathing suit building sand sculptures.“It’s a little bit of the beach in the city. You don’t see much of that.” said , a Chelsea resident who happened by.The store, sponsored by state tourism officials, will be open for at least six weeks. Future events include free poker lessons and spa treatments courtesy of shore resorts. ?Chloe is back in Salem, which turns out to be a big problem for Belle Friday on "Days of Our Lives.""Belle is coming out of an airport hotel room and she bumps right into Chloe," says Nadia Bjorlin, who just returned as popular Chloe Lane Black. "It's obviously a surprise for both of them. For Belle, it's even more of a surprise. Chloe says, 'Oh, my gosh. You guys are here on your honeymoon! I don't want to bother you, but I'd love to say 'Hi' to Shawn." Unfortunately, newlywed Belle isn't there with her new husband, Shawn. She's there with Chloe's ex, Philip. "Belle acts all nervous and some of her answers don't really add up," says Bjorlin. "Then she gets a phone call on her cell from Shawn. Chloe starts figuring out, 'Wait a minute. He's not here? Okay, where can I find Philip?' Belle claims not to know where Philip is. She doesn't have his number. Right then, Philip comes walking out of the hotel room." Busted! Viewers know that Belle agreed to spend one last night with Philip in exchange for Philip helping Shawn get back in good with the police department. And that they also have feelings for each other ... "Philip spends the next few episodes trying to convince Chloe that nothing's going on," says Bjorlin. "He says, 'We're just talking about Claire, but we keep it from Shawn to keep Shawn from feeling jealous.' Chloe doesn't buy it for a second. She's a smarter cookie than that." Chloe pretends to believe Philip, though. Then she shares some news of her own. "She tells him, 'Life didn't really work out the way that I thought it would. The career didn't come as easy as I thought it would.' "She's not the same naive, sweet Chloe. Even though Chloe has always had a bit of cynicism and sarcasm to her, it's been amplified since she went to live abroad, got married and is now divorced." Yup - Chloe and Brady are divorced. "It would be easy to say, 'I'm back in town. I'm divorced. Now, I want Philip.' But we're not quite sure what Chloe's intentions are," Bjorlin continued. "She does instigate a little something with Philip, but then she realizes Philip wants nothing to do with her. He only has eyes for Belle." Which Chloe will use to her advantage. "That makes Chloe go, 'Hmmm' and the wheels start to spin," says Bjorlin. "She has grown up!" Pouring for Charity: There will be a celebrity bartending event for Pancreatic Cancer next Thursday (7-10 p.m.) at Blondies Sports Bar, 212 W. 79th St. in Manhattan. Scheduled to be behind the bar are "As the World Turns'" Jennifer Landon (Gwen), whose father, Michael Landon, died of the disease; Martha Byrne (Lily) and Grayson McCouch (Dusty); "All My Children's" Thorsten Kaye (Zach), Bobbie Eakes (Krystal) and Colin Egglesfield (Josh); "Guiding Light's" Robert Bogue (Mallet), Beth Ehlers (Harley), Gina Tognoni (Dinah), Ricky Paull Goldin (Gus), and "One Life to Live's" Michael Easton (John), John-Paul Lavoisier (Rex) and Melissa Archer (Natalie). For more info, go to Please do not call the bar - they have no information! Comings and Goings: Betty White appears on "Ugly Betty" Thursday, then returns to "The Bold and the Beautiful" as Ann on Dec. 10. ... Jackie Zeman (Bobbie) has been bumped to recurring status on "General Hospital" after 33 years. Don't touch that dial: Jack is busted next week on "The Young and the Restless" (12:30, CBS) by the person he hates most in the world: his father's widow, Gloria! Hinsey is the editor of Soap Opera Weekly.?Daniel?splits?with Kate next week on "Days of Our Lives" and goes right for Chloe - who is engaged to Kate's son, Lucas."It's something he just can't seem to control," says Shawn Christian, who plays the devilish doctor. "He had her in his arms at midnight on New Year's and a phone call stopped them. Either that or a twitch of morality." There's not much "morality" at the engagement party Kate throws for Lucas and Chloe later in the week. "Lucas decks Daniel at the party because he thinks Daniel dumped Kate," says Christian. "Daniel probably deserves it on many levels, but it's actually Kate who breaks up with Daniel. She wants to focus on her family and her health." After being dumped and decked, Daniel courts danger. "He goes upstairs after he gets decked by Lucas and he finds Chloe," says Christian. "Her dress happens to be unzipped. Gentleman that he is, he helps her. Then he expresses his feelings, and she expresses her feelings." After all these months of denial, Daniel and Chloe finally admit they care about each other. "Everything explodes in this room," says Christian. "It's raw, honest emotion. Once the feelings are out, she starts slapping him and hitting him. She tells him, 'I hate you!' Rather than just jump each other's bones, they resist. He genuinely says it's not just about sex. It would be easier on both of them if it was just sex." In the course of all that slapping and denying, things eventually go where they insist they don't want them to. "If you've seen the fantasies Daniel has been having, then you know what's been going on in his head. Actually, he has shown remarkable restraint up to this party." Clothes start coming off, but then the third corner of their triangle comes looking for her. "Lucas finds them before anything serious happens," says Christian. "He knocks on the door and they scamper to their respective corners in complete denial." No one is the wiser at the party, and the two vow to keep things strictly platonic. "But the next day Chloe goes to Daniel's apartment to confront him on this very issue. The scene opens with, 'This will never happen again!'" Yeah, right. "Now that they've laid their cards on the table, so to speak, it's going to get really interesting," says Christian. "That zipper works the other way, too!" ?A blown transformer caused the ferry crash that injured 15 passengers this week, officials said yesterday."We know a transformer failed, and things went from there," said Staten Island ferry . The four-year-old ferry, the , struck a pier at the St. George Terminal on Wednesday evening. The vessel was taken out of service for repairs. DeSimone said the ferry fleet undergoes quarterly inspections by the and additional city checks he compared to preventive maintenance. The transformer wouldn't normally be inspected and would be expected to last about 15 years, he said. The city plans to question the manufacturer about why this one failed so soon, DeSimone said. The crew acted well in piloting the ferry into the slip safely and with relatively minor injuries, he said. Standard alcohol and drug tests are pending. "I'm not minimizing what happened, but from time to time you're going to have some problems," DeSimone said.?Some terrorists.The four fools who conspired to blow up two synagogues in the name of Allah were booze-swilling losers who hung out at a Roman Catholic community center in upstate Newburgh. "Amateurs," Bloomberg said Friday. "That doesn't mean they couldn't have killed a lot of people. But they were not part of a professional worldwide terrorist ring." The alleged ringleader was 44-year-old , a career crook from the Bronx who converted to Islam while in jail. His big sister, , called him "the stupidest man on the planet." "I'm still waiting for the punchline," Walker, 45, said yesterday. "This is a like a joke to me. I'm waiting for the camera to come out of the closet and say, 'This is Candid Camera.'" His cohorts are , 28, a former chef who also did time for drug dealing; , 32; and Haitian immigrant Lagueere Payen, deemed too insane to be deported after an assault conviction. Both Williamses spent a lot of time hanging around on Cromitie's porch in Newburgh. Neighbors said they routinely barbecued and boozed it up even though devout Muslims shun alcohol and pork. Another haunt for the gang: the , a Catholic shelter open to people of all faiths. "Those four would come into our ministry and sit down and drink coffee on a regular basis," said a source. "They never caused trouble. They just sat and drank their coffee and talked. Maybe they were plotting?"With ?For the longest time, brooches looked like grandma's jewelry. No longer. Thanks to pin enthusiasts like Jennifer Lopez and Chloe Sevigny, they're the hottest accessory since, well, J.Lo's diamond hoops. But if you want to look hip, don't wear your brooch the old-fashioned way: on a lapel. Take your cue from the stars and affix it to a hat, handbag or even a belt. If you don't have a family heirloom, shop for what looks like one at vintage stores and flea markets around the city. The trendiest styles are Art Deco-inspired and glitter with rhinestones or diamonds. But remember, it doesn't matter if it's real or fake - it's how you wear it.?Fashionable girls around town are giving everyone the cold shoulder. No, they're not being snippy. They're stepping out in sexy off-the-shoulder styles. This great '80s look has made a comeback, thanks to designers like Chloe's Stella McCartney, Louis Vuitton's Marc Jacobs and Victor Alfaro. They know how to cut tops that fall seductively. The wide-necked blouses and dresses we've been spotting at parties around town are made of slippery fabrics like silk and satin. Take a tip from "MTV House of Style" host Molly Sims and wear a strategically placed diamond or rhinestone brooch: It will weigh down one side.?With "," has placed a bet that teenage girls will watch a mash-up of teen romance and supernatural powers that doesn't involve vampires or werewolves.Even better, the network gives the supernatural powers to the girl. Smart move, and it should enhance the chances "The Nine Lives of Chloe King" will get at least one decent television life. plays , who is about to turn 16 and is so smart and pretty that one of the show's toughest challenges might be making viewers believe she's never been kissed.She swears she hasn't, at least since she was 7, and that's the dramatic launching pad for the show. With her 16th birthday just hours away, she tells her best friends Amy (Grace Phipps) and Paul () that her life has been so unremarkable that she's just dying for something exciting to happen.She may not have been thinking that would mean being pushed off a 12-story tower, but that's one of the things that happens, and afterward she has to admit it does qualify as "remarkable" in a don't-want-to-do-it-again sort of way.It turns out that Chloe, who was adopted as an infant in , belongs to an ancient exotic race called the Mai, pronounced "my," who fall halfway between humans and gods.For many centuries they were friends and protectors of humans. Then, alas, the two sides had a falling-out and now some humans want to eradicate all surviving Mai.That's not necessarily the news you want to hear for your Sweet 16, but it does come with an upside, which is that Chloe can jump a little higher and move a little faster than the other kids at her high school. She can also turn her fingers into razor claws, which is helpful in self-defense situations.Oh yeah, at the risk of spoiling things, she can survive a 12-story fall, though we are warned she can't do that indefinitely.Nor does she want to. Even if you live, it seems that falling 12 stories onto a concrete sidewalk hurts. Go figure.Tomorrow night's first episode sets up Chloe's situation and starts her on the path to sorting it all out. Who can she tell? Who can she trust? Who's on first?Meanwhile, heeding one of the elementary vampire show lessons, "Chloe King" sets all this against a backdrop of clever teenage banter and the awesomeness of teenage romance.It's an age when everything has extreme dramatic urgency, and ABC Family is betting that between the fate of a supernatural race and tough decisions that Chloe's new powers force her to make about hot guys, the channel's teenage viewers won't even miss the vampires.?'Hiding my true feelings is not my strong suit," divulges Chloe, the narrator of "The Truth About -Diamonds," the new novel by -Nicole Richie. Richie seems to have similar troubles, if this 224-page "fictional account" is in any way autobiographical - which we suspect it is. In fact, Richie's flawed protagonist has a number of things in common with the -author: Chloe, born of humble origins, is adopted by a rock superstar and subsequently battles - quite publicly - her drug -addiction. More notably, there's Chloe's partner in crime, Simone. This tall, leggy, Paris-like figure, who's "famous for being famous," and "inarticulate to the point of mental incompetence," loses her cell phone (its contents are then posted online) and stars in a night-vision-enhanced sex tape - just to name a few, er, coincidences. Richie's clumsy writing is thoroughly -entertaining, but is reading a thinly veiled account of a celebrity's life worth anyone's time? "Most celebrity fiction is ferociously bad -because most celebrities, by definition, lack the essential ability to stand outside looking in," says Ben MacIntyre, writer at large for The Times of London. "One can either see or be seen." Still someone just keeps on publishing them. The laundry list of celebs who have taken the author route includes Ethan Hawke, Kirk Douglas, Joan Collins, Ivana Trump, Gene Hackman, Marlon Brando and even Pamela Anderson. At least critics don't seem to have fallen for the hype. Hawke's "Ash Wednesday" was described by The Boston Globe as "unfinished, unpolished, as if we are hearing an early draft." The Palm Beach Post yawned that Anderson's "Star" was "tediously naive." In all fairness, Daisy Maryles, executive -editor of Publishers Weekly, believes the bad reviews may be prompted as much by the -authors' day jobs as by their poor writing. "People will go out of their way to slam the book," says Maryles, "because [the authors] are successful in other areas." In the same way that movies panned by critics still rake in cash at the box office, poorly reviewed celebrity-penned novels don't seem to suffer. "A lot of buzz comes out about these books, and a lot of people are paying attention," says Maryles. Anderson's "Star" reached No. 11 on the Publishers Weekly fiction best-seller list. A few stars, such as Steve Martin, have straddled the creative divide with aplomb. Most recently, Martin's novella "Shopgirl" was adapted into a somewhat well-received film. But with the public still fascinated by stars' every move, it seems that virtually anything with a celebrity face attached to it will sell, and sell well. Snoop Dogg frankfurters, anyone??A satisfying slice of kitchen-sink realism, "" follows Lorraine () and Marie (), who are trying to get on with life after being released from an English prison.In some ways, it recalls 's "Getting Out," but British playwright breathes fresh life into the subject with a tough and tender story that flows like an indie movie. Over 85 minutes and 11 scenes set in Marie's squalid flat, the women's lives and relationship?- past and present?- slowly come into focus. It's not a very pretty picture.Moss' dialogue always rings true, except for having Marie ask about Lorraine's crime ? a point that would have come up in prison. Otherwise, she peppers the play with smart, telling details: For example, the widower next door, seen from Marie's? window, searches 24/7 for "treasure" with a metal detector, underscoring that the women are after better lives.Guided with a firm but not overbearing touch by , who directs the production, the actresses play off each other beautifully. Pill, seen recently in "The ," is much more at home in this contemporary setting. There's no one better at playing wounded young women.Falco, on a break from "," brings volatility and vulnerability to the shaky Lorraine, who's forever adjusting her goggle-size eyeglasses and standing with a leg propped to the side. Finding a balance in life has never been easy.? has apologized for comments made to FOXnews.com in which he said Mormons supportive of California Proposition 8, a constitutional ban on gay marriage in the state, were 'un-American'.FOXnews.com reports that in a statement issued through his publicist, Hanks said "I believe Proposition 8 is counter to the promise of our Constitution; it is codified discrimination . . .But everyone has a right to vote their conscience; nothing could be more American . . . To say members of the who contributed to Proposition 8 are 'un-American' creates more division when the time calls for respectful disagreement. No one should use 'un- American' lightly or in haste. I did. I should not have."Hanks made his initial remarks to FOXnews.com at the premiere of the , of which he is a producer.In the series plays a fundamentalist Mormon who's broken from the church to engage in a polygamous marriage with three wives, played by , , and . ?SERIES 8:00 p.m. (NBC) "Friends." This is a repeat of the episode that sends Joey (Matt Le Blanc) to Las Vegas - setting the stage for the gang to follow, and, in the season cliffhanger (repeated next week), head to the chapel. 10:30 (COM) "Frank Leaves for the Orient." Frank (Stan Cahill), with only days to go before he heads to Japan, bumps into his old girlfriend Chloe (Meredyth Hunt), a heartbreaker who, in this clever episode, grabs hold of his heart all over again. SPORTS 8:00 p.m. (9) "WWF Smackdown." This is the third installment of this new Thursday UPN series - and the last time it won't face any serious network competition. Next week, Fox premieres a double dose of its highly anticipated "Action" series; the week after that, NBC rolls out the season premieres of "Friends" and "Frasier." NONFICTION 10:00 (ABC) "Nightline in Primetime." Science and emotion: can the heart play as big a part as the mind, even in the operating room and laboratory? Robert Krulwich explores the issue tonight - and based on how much heart he's thrown into this wonderful prime-time summer series, it's a good bet which side he'll end up taking. MOVIES 8:00 p.m. (AMC) "The Grapes of Wrath." This 1940 movie, starring Henry Fonda and John Ford, is still so potent, and so stirringly acted and photographed, that it's a joy to watch whenever it's televised. And wherever you are, if you're watching this movie tonight, I'll be there. SPECIALS 8:00 p.m. (MTV) "16th Annual MTV Video Music Awards." Live from the Met, it's Chris Rock? Yes, it is - and Rock is an inspired repeat host for this year's fest, which seeks inspiration from its borrowed New York location, the Metropolitan Opera House. Scheduled performers include Ricky Martin, Britney Spears, Eminem and TLC. Video of the Year winner? My guess is "Livin' la Vida Loca," which even Rock, in his recent HBO comedy standup special, allowed was a catchy tune that wasn't vanishing from the cultural landscape any time soon. 9:00 (Fox) "Cheating Death: Catastrophes Caught on Tape." The title might suggest otherwise, but this Fox repeat does not contain any footage from UPN's "The Secret Diary of Desmond Pfeiffer."?Guess there is?such a thing as bad publicity.New A-list hot spot Kenmare wound up in hot water after officials read about underground parties there in the gossip pages, the Daily News has learned.The Nolita hangout, whose backers include actress 's brother Paul, doesn't officially open to the public until March, but it's quickly becoming a celebrity staple, hosting private Fashion Week parties that attracted the likes of .But that's not how the owners of Kenmare portrayed the spot to the State Liquor Authority when it was granted a liquor license in early February.Officials were told Kenmare would be a simple restaurant that closed at midnight on weekdays with only "background music" - not a private, late-night party spot with a deejay and dancing into the wee hours."We are paying close attention to them," said . "They are supposed to be operating as a restaurant."Celebrity pictures site patrickmcmullan.com has photos of a Valentine's Day bash at Kenmare filled with smiling scenesters.Guy Vantresca, 54, lives above Kenmare and said he called the manager Valentine's night to complain about the thumping music."He told me the deejay was going to move everything downstairs to the lounge," Vantresca said.But Kenmare never told the SLA or Community Board 2, which first approved the opening, about the basement dance-floor, said Community Board 2 Chairwoman Jo Hamilton."When you read in a blog that Mick Jagger is dancing, it is illegal in that location," said.Kenmare's owner said "we are not yet open" but "did host our friends for a few dinners during Fashion Week."Jones said Kenmare could face penalties as severe as losing its liquor license.?State officials Tuesday unveiled a $376.3 million plan to reduce delays, taxiing time and congestion at .The bad news: They'll have to close the airport's busiest runway for four months to do it. said the Bay Runway - which handles a third of the airport's activity - will be widened to 200 feet from 150 feet and get upgrades to its drainage and electrical systems. "What we're trying to accomplish here today is to really pull [JFK airport] into the 21st century," Paterson said. Port Authority Director , who described the rehab as "open heart surgery" on an airport, said the runway would have to be shut for 120 days next year. Officals said the would "reschedule flights" so the other three runways could "absorb" the extra traffic. "It will be only four months in development, but it will change this airport for all time," Paterson said. The Port Authority and the FAA will finance the rehab, which is expected to generate about 2,500 jobs. ?WHEN THE CAT'S AWAYColumbia TriStar 91 mins., rated R What Chloe (Garance Clavel) needs is to get a life. She's a single girl living in Paris, but she's still managed to look for love in all the wrong places. Then her four-footed feline friend disappears, setting this sweet comedy (and Chloe's life) into motion as Chloe enlists a cast of quirky characters to help search for her cat. Sallie Han FIRE DOWN BELOWWarner 95 mins. rated R There's supposedly an ecological message here somewhere, but "Fire Down below" is really just an excuse for Steven Seagal to lay a few beatings on some Kentucky rednecks. Looking lumpier and acting crankier than usual, Seagal plays an undercover EPA agent posing as a church handyman (dressed in expensive leather jackets) investigating toxic-waste dumping in the Appalachians. Despite Kris Kristofferson as the heavy and Marg Helgenberger as the small-town girl with a secret, "Fire" smells about as good as the gook the corporate baddies are dumping in the Kentucky coal mines. Robert Dominguez MASTERMINDSColumbia TriStar 120 mins., rated PG-13 Belligerent teen computer hacker Ozzie (Vincent Kartheiser) has just dropped off his little stepsister at her tony private school when a team of terrorists takes over the vast edifice. They are led by a former security consultant (Patrick Stewart), who plans to hold the wealthiest kids for ransom. Ozzie manages to dodge bullets and crimp the operation by fashioning a cell phone and setting plastic explosives, among other feats. The distasteful film works only as a very guilty pleasure for action buffs. Gerry Putzer HOODLUM MGM 135 mins., rated R A tedious Depression-era crime pic about Harlem racketeer Bumpy Johnson and his battle with sicko mobster Dutch Schultz. Laurence Fishburne and Tim Roth star in this handsome dud. Christopher Cornell, Knight-Ridder COMING SOONTUESDAY Cinderella (Disney) Career Girls (Fox) Picture Perfect (Fox) Temptress Moon (Miramax) Money Talks (New Line) Soul Food (Fox) Dream With the Fishes (Columbia TriStar) Children of the Revolution (Miramax)?RACHMANINOFF TO RAVEL . Lorin Maazel conducts the New York Philharmonic in a program featuring Honegger's Pacific 231, Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 1 and Ravel's "Daphnis et Chloe" at Avery Fisher Hall in Lincoln Center. 7:30 p.m., $25-$90 (tickets to an open rehearsal at 9:45 a.m. are $15). Broadway and 65th St. (212) 875-5656. THEY'VE GOT SKIN COVERED . Tina Alster, founding director of the Washington Institute of Dermatologic Laser Surgery, offers free skin-care tips at the Lancome counters at Saks Fifth Ave. and Bergdorf Goodman. Visitors learn about the latest trends in at-home skin care, test Lancome's new Resurface Peel and receive a personalized skin-care analysis. At Saks (611 Fifth Ave.), 11:30 a.m.-12:30 p.m. and 1:30-2:30 p.m. At Bergdorf (754 Fifth Ave.), 5-6 p.m. THE DOG DAY OF WINTER . New York Dog magazine hosts a Doggie Day Out at W New York Union Square. Parade your canine before a panel of judges and chat with expert holistic vets, doggie chefs and groomers. 7-9 p.m., free. 201 Park Ave. South, at 17th St. (888) 718-4764. PIERCES PIECES . The Pierces, a sister duo from Birmingham, Ala., perform tracks from their latest release, "Light of the Moon," at the Living Room. 9 p.m., no cover/one-drink minimum. 154 Ludlow St., between Stanton and Rivington Sts. (212) 533-3376. WAY TO GLOW . The Empire State Building shines bright white. Dusk to midnight, 34th St. and Fifth Ave. Fax complete information on openings and other events to (212) 210-2203 or E-mail bheldman@edit.nydailynews.com.?New York Democrats vowed Wednesday to go to to urge Senate Republicans to confirm for the Supreme Court. City Controller and mayoral hopeful , the , and several City Council members urged that Sotomayor's nomination not get bogged down in partisan bickering. "It is important that we not mire or in any way muddy with partisan politics the true American story of what this young lady has accomplished," Sharpton said outside the housing project where Sotomayor grew up. "She has more experience as a judge than any judge presently sitting on the Supreme Court," he said. "There should be no question on either side about affirming her." Criticism from Republicans in the Senate has been relatively mild, and the biggest fight so far has been whether hearings can start before the August recess. Thompson urged the Senate to work quickly. "It is important that ...Democrats and Republicans and independents come together, that themembers of the Senate all work as quickly as possible, in a focused fashion, to get this nomination approved," he said. At the Houses, where the 54-year-old federal appeals court judge grew up, locals said Sotomayor was a role model. "Someone coming from the projects and getting a high achievement like that, that's a big milestone," said Jadira Goodine, 31. "If she can make it out of the projects, anyone can." "I'm happy for her," said Elba Rosario, 46, who has lived in the Bronxdale Houses for eight years. "It's very hard in these days for a woman to make it that far. You've got to struggle." ?VISITING DESIRE. Lydia Lunch, Chloe Dzubilo. Directed by Beth B. At the Cinema Village. Running time: 70 mins. Unrated. 3 StarsTHE STRANGE TENDENCY OF late-20th-century American culture to reduce every experience to a self-help exercise is definitively illustrated by Beth B's "Visiting Desire," an oddly engaging Downtown production that begins by promising unplumbed depths of perversity and concludes with warm tears and affirmative hugs. B, a veteran of the New York underground ("Vortex," "Two Small Bodies"), invited a diverse group of subjects to drop by an apartment where a bed and a stranger would be waiting for them. For the ensuing 30 minutes, they were invited to act out whatever fantasy they wished with the unknown other, while B's video camera recorded the results. There are a few stabs at traditional kinkiness one young woman commands her male subject to dress in a silk nightgown and read to her in a little-girl's voice but mainly what these people want to do is talk about themselves and their insecurities. The two most interesting monologists are Lydia Lunch, the rock star and performance artist, who reenacts her first sexual experience, and Chloe Dzubilo, a self-described "gender outlaw" whose amazing line of confessional patter disarms all comers. B's camera assumes the position of detached voyeur, moving in for the occasional closeup but for the most part keeping a careful distance. Getting no sympathy from the director, the subjects turn to each other for comfort. Infantile regression quickly settles in, with confessions of childhood trauma and presentday vulnerability results that once would have taken years in analysis, but are now instantly provoked by the sight of a lens. (Unrated: But not a good idea for children.)?'Project Runway," like so many reality shows, promises contestants fame, success and a position in their industry of choice. In "Runway's" case, that's fashion - winners are given an internship with Banana Republic, and last year's runner-up, Daniel Vosovic, was offered a position with one of the show's judges, designer Michael Kors. But when the cameras have stopped running, does the success match the hype? Chloe Dao, for example, hasn't received her prize since winning in February. "Nothing is going on with Banana Republic at this point," she told us yesterday. "I'm too busy to do the mentorship. I think they're too busy to deal with me, too." Daniel's offer from Michael Kors also fell flat. "I sat down with him for a while to talk about it," Vosovic confessed. "He called me a few days later, and unfortunately he said he didn't have a place at his company at that time." But success, according to both "Runway" vets, comes through some of the many other doors than have been opened for them since the last season of the show. "I'm doing a big ol' trunk show on Wednesday, at the EMc2 store in SoHo," Chloe told us, adding that she makes about 100 versions of each of her designs to keep them exclusive. "Kara Janx, Emmett McCarthy and Nick Verreos are all showing, and Tim Gunn has generously agreed to host. It's all of us trying to sell our stuff." Vosovic says that unlike his co-star, Santino Rice, who designs gowns for celebrities, he wants to learn from a master before designing on his own. "I'm looking to work for another designer for maybe two or three years - I'm going on interviews," he explained. "I hope to gain a little more practical experience working under someone." Meanwhile, he pays the bills with contracts like the one he's working on now: designing uniforms. "I'm designing all the outfits for this modern hotel chain called Nylo," Vosovic explains. "It's a great challege. With 150 locations eventually across the country, it's a balancing act. There's a lot of things to take into account. I don't want to alienate someone in Idaho, or bore someone in New York." The show's first-season winner, Jay McCarroll, is preparing his debut collection, which will be shown during New York Fashion Week in September. In addition to dresses, he's working on an accessories line consisting of specialty items like limited-edition T-shirts and hoodies, bags, hats, scarves and gloves.?Now that it’s been, oh, almost two years since we declared the Beatrice (that was when it hadn’t opened and it was going to be a restaurant!), it’s about time to anoint a new one — but what will it Bea? Incredibly, we may have found the answer. Hidden under , the undertrafficked Lower East Side bistro, is Chloe — no relationship to Sevigny (it’s named after an ex of the designer, who goes by the mysterious name of M). To date, it’s been holding preopening parties for the fashionable friends (e.g. folks at Nylon) of the owners, among whom are Casanis' Sebastian Maczko and the refreshingly unpretentious face of the operation, Brooke Smy, who worked in production at Rolling Stone and now does events and marketing for Rockefeller Center. As you can see from our slideshow, this place looks just stunning enough (and familiar enough!) to make Bea-types feel right at home. She might be a little smaller than the Beatrice (we didn’t bust out the measuring tape) but that hasn’t prevented dancing, and it has one thing the Bea doesn’t have: is available from 7 p.m. (when it opens) till midnight. In fact, depending on how things go, escargot and the like may eventually be served until the current closing time of 2 a.m. (Monday through Saturday). The drinks are made using fresh juices and such — from what we tasted, they could use a little tweaking, but then you’re not coming here for the perfect Manhattan. It’s more about the thrill of the unmarked door — which, yes, will be closely guarded, though probably not as strictly as Angelo's. Well, for now, at least., 81 Ludlow nr. Broome St.; 212-677-0067?ABC Family announced its new lineup today, picking up most of its series but kicking poor Nine Lives of Chloe King to the curb. Teenage members of an ancient race of cat-wizards just don't have the same kind of draw as leggy deaf girls (Switched at Birth), panicky teens being stalked by a ghost or something (Pretty Little Liars), or people earnestly talking about sex every five seconds (The Secret Life of the American Teenager). Make It or Break It got picked up for another season ? at last, sighed those of us who know the delicious joys of the bitchy-gynmansts drama ? and The Lying Game got picked up, too. ABC Family also announced four new pilots it put into production, including one from Amy Sherman-Palladino called Bunheads, about a Las Vegas showgirl who "impulsively" marries a guy and moves to his hometown, where she starts teaching at his mother's dance school. It's Miss Patti: The Early Years, sighed those of us who know the delicious joys of one of the weirder characters on Gilmore Girls. ?The part of Chloe, which is one of the most aggressively sexual roles for a young actress in recent memory (we don't count Orphan), was frightening because it was so different, says Seyfried: "I have really gotten by with playing people who are really close to myself." Plus, she fretted that fans of her wide-eyed, romantic work (Big Love, Dear John) might be turned off by seeing her in such an erotic, crazy role. "I think the risk factor came with [the worry] that I might not pull it off," she said. "And also that the nudity might — could potentially, I don't know — create some damage with my American audience. It's sad to say, but it's true." Fortunately, Guys Who Like Young Blonde Actresses But Hate Seeing Them Naked is a very small demographic. ? Posted June 7, 2006 There are many appealing things about this sparrow necklace by Alex & Chloe: the wistful shape, the stackable size, the totally doable price, and the fact that Alex & Chloe is a tiny little company that won’t mass produce your style to oblivion. But maybe the best part is that it’s made from reflective Lucite, so if you need to check your face before a big appearance, just give it a little tug, look down, and adjust your eyeliner accordingly. All in all, brilliant. $48 at Oak, 668 President St., near Fifth Ave., Park Slope, Brooklyn; 718-857-2080. Available online at alexandchloe.com. ?MacGibbon was a key member of the design team under former creative director Phoebe Philo, and helped define the hip femininity that catapulted Chloé to fashion’s big leagues. ?Remember: Camp Starts With the Journey ?When we go to the bus, my mom will make a scene and cry and kiss me. She could hug me, but not too much. It would be pretty embarrassing if I couldn’t breathe.? ?sebi foresi, 10, camp winaukee?I don’t want to look like a snowman when I get on the bus, so buy sunscreen that doesn’t leave white stuff all over me.? ?Ava Marie Hunt, 9, Camp Ouareau Don’t Indulge in P.D.A. ?My mom embarrasses me by waving too much. I wave back the first two times, but after that, Okay, you can stop. Also, she’s always taking pictures. My friends think my mom is a picture maniac.? ?Katy Mayerson, 10, Usdan Center ?At closing ceremony, when I’m dancing onstage, my mother shouts out my name and tells everyone around her, ?That’s my baby. That’s my baby.’ That’s the worst.? ?Chelsi Thomas, 12, Mariner’s Educational Center Do Write, at Length ?Parents should always make letters at least a page long. Short letters mean they don’t care.? ?Katie Schwartz, 13, Tranquillity Camp ?It’s great when parents encourage friends and family to send mail. We want to hear from other people, too.? ?Chloe Olewitz, 14, Island Lake Camp Don’t Share Personal Details ?Please don’t call me by a little baby nickname in front of everyone. Also, don’t tell the bus driver private things, like ?She had a lot of trouble getting ready this morning because she’s tired.’ ? ?Ava Marie Hunt ?My mom will tell a story about when I was 3 years old, and no one thinks it’s funny but her.? ?Chloe Olewitz Do Send Stuff ?The best thing is to get a package at camp. Everyone wants to know what’s in there. My mom sends the most random, hilarious things, like spy glasses.? ?Chloe Olewitz ?My parents send plastic drawers already set up with underwear, socks, etc., so all I have to do is put the drawers in my cubby.? ?Katie Schwartz, 13, Tranquillity Camp But Make Sure It’s Cool Stuff ?Don’t send a favorite blankie or a stuffed animal. That would be really embarrassing.? ?Raphael Wolf, 10, Surprise Lake Camp, Sleepaway ?One girl got a fifteen-pound bar of cooking chocolate. That was really embarrassing.? ?Chloe Olewitz Do Supply Barter Material ?It’s a good idea to put two Gogurts in my lunch so I can trade one.? ?Ava Marie Hunt Don’t Fuss on Visiting Day ?Parents should not make their kids eat food like asparagus or pickles or broccoli.? ?raphael wolf, 10, Surprise Lake Camp ?My parents always clean my cubbies and remake my bed. All the other kids are showing the parents where they sleep.? ?Henry Schwartz, 8, Tranquillity Camp But Do Get There Early ?The good thing is my parents are always first to arrive on visiting day, which shows how much they love me. The kid whose parents arrive last is the most embarrassed.? ?Katie Schwartz?Gaby Aghion started Chloe in 1952 with a vision she called “luxury pret-a-porter.” Her focus on wearable yet beautiful daywear gave the line currency with chic young women. In the seventies, its bohemian, feminine details made it a favorite of icons like Grace Kelly, Brigitte Bardot, and Jackie O. Chloe is known for launching the careers of young designers, including a 28-year-old Karl Lagerfeld in 1966 and a 26-year-old Stella McCartney in 1997. Today, the label is helmed by London native Hannah MacGibbon, a former assistant to Phoebe Philo, the house’s seminal director from 2001-2006. Bags and shoes continue to rank among Chloe’s most coveted wares. The brand’s romantic Left Bank insouciance burns brightly despite?or perhaps because of?its rapidly revolving roster of young design talent. In June 2011, Clare Waight Keller, credited for transforming Pringle of Scotland into a contemporary fashion brand, replaced Hannah MacGibbon as the creative director of Chloe.StatusEstablished, Household NameClientsNatalie Portman, Kirsten Dunst, Lou DoillonOther Product LinesEyewear, Fragrances, Handbags, ShoesOwned ByRichemont GroupAddress5-7 Avenue Percier Paris, France 75008 33-44-94-33-33Where To Buy, , Related Websites?Review Egoyan’s psychosexual thriller about a high-strung doctor who hires a call girl to seduce her husband after she theorizes that he’s cheating on her gives your head plenty to play with, but the oppressive artiness takes away from its potential impact. ?Profile Get past the door gestapo at this subterranean hideaway and you’ll run smack into that band of nightlife mavens which quickly branded Chloe a legit challenger to reigning celeb hang Beatrice Inn upon its opening in the fall of '08. Wednesdays through Fridays are the best nights to find size 0glitterati packed into the tight space, swaying to the D.J.'s nimble pop playlists and juiced off the stiff drinks. The décor?red leather booths, white-tile walls, and a low vaulted ceiling (though thankfully not as low as Beatrice’s)?is sort of a Paris-bistro-meets-Chicago-speakeasy thing, with a little Cielo club lighting thrown in. Keep an eye out for petite blonde co-owner Brooke Smy, often seen mingling among her minions. — Melissa Lafsky?In October we predicted — and we weren’t just saying that because they kind of look the same and have girl names. Per a feature in Anthem, it looks like she’s all grown up now. Chloe 81 has become the Eastside’s Biggie to the [Beatrice]’s Tupac in an epic battle of the hips. Though the two typically entertain the same clientele — a veritable who’s who of young fashion types — the variation that Chloe provides seems to be a welcome addition to its habitués. This Lower East Side hideaway first gained notoriety with the increasingly popular Wednesday party The Ivy, hosted by NYLON’s Men’s Market Editor Jared Flint and Ethan James Group founder Mike Townsend. Though they remain faithful friends with their Westside foe, these gentlemen realized that having only one viable destination for beautiful people, fun tunes and some serious liver exercise was becoming a tad dull. The Ivy was christened during Fashion Week, and has since met with an overwhelming response among hipsters of the night, thus adding to Chloe’s growing credibility. So the question now becomes: Will (where Kenzo Minami’s Thursday-night party is growing and just started a Wednesday-night coldwave party) be the new Chloe? Suddenly we have options, people! [Anthem]?First , now goes to Montauk! That’s right, we’re told that starting June 6, Jared Flint, Mike Townsend, and Steven Rojas, a.k.a. the team behind the “Ivy” (where are), will be throwing Saturday pool parties at the hotel (a name almost as baffling as LEVANTeast). Confirmed D.J.'s: Harley Viera-Newton and Cassie. Staff uniforms are, of course, by Trovata. Here’s another look at the pool lounge — hipsters, meet the Hamptons. ?Synopsis Eric Rohmer ends his cycle of Six Moral Tales with this delightful film starring Bernard Verley as Frederic, a happily married man who discovers that he can't stop looking at beautiful women. As he says in a voiceover, I feel marriage closes me in, cloisters me, and I want to escape. His escape comes to him in the form of Chloe (Zouzou), a woman from his past. Chloe had left for America as a successful model but has now returned to Paris, bored with her life and saddled with a man she doesn't love. Although Frederic is reluctant to see her at first, they agree to meet in the afternoons -- just to talk. He feels a freedom with her that he doesn't experience with anyone else because they have, he thinks, no commitments to each other. So, they talk of their problems and their relationships and, before long, Frederic finds that he is becoming increasingly attracted to her.~ Paul Brenner, All Movie Guide?Further to the magazine’s peek at the at Chloe’s Ivy party, here’s a Facebook rundown of each and every one of them invited to the next one. Clearly, in the words of Calvin Harris, Chloe’s got love for you if you were born in the eighties, the eighties. Actually, at least one of these kids was born in the nineties — careful, now! []?Malle, who was raised in New York City and graduated from Brown, has spent the past few years as a freelance writer, covering residential real estate for the New York Observer and contributing to the Times' style section. She was in Vanity Fair's "Bright Young Things" section last year, where she wholesomely proclaimed her appreciation for Winnie the Pooh, Disney movies, and green vegetables. "You can never have too many: Glue sticks, cheeseburgers, bookshelves, friends," she wrote. She also listed her ambitions: "To publish a novel; to get a master’s in public health; to travel the world and write about the people I meet along the way.” This is her first staff position at a publication.?The third and fourth of the many new LOVE covers feature Chloe Moretz and Hailee Steinfeld crying ? but you know, pretty crying, just like Elle Fanning. (So that will be a theme then, unless Mert and Marcus were feeling particularly mean on set that day.) Derek Blasberg also last night that Katie Grand had revealed the other cover stars, and they're all models: (her previous cover was just a preview, it turns out), , , , and . So fashion's current teen triumvirate are continuing to share the spotlight pretty equally, at least so far. That'll surely keep them all playing nicely together at A-List parties and auditions. []?Undead enthusiast Chloe Moretz is considering a switch from vampires to zombies, . She's in talks for Maggie, a 2011 Black List script about a father-daughter relationship in the midst of a zombie apocalypse. (Spoiler: One of them develops a taste for brains.) Also, if anyone is sitting on a script about a mummy uprising, Chloe seems like the girl to send it to.?Thirteen-year-old Kick-Ass actress Chloe Moretz tweets from airplanes, tweets about the song "6 Foot 7 Foot," and if you ask her what she's doing in New York, she tells you over Twitter: "for all those ppl asking what im doing over there im going to be shooting an episode of #30ROCK! yayy can't wait!" Very cool. When is she filming? "First day shooting #30Rock! Excitementt!" she tweeted today. So we can speculate about what her role will be, or you can probably just ask her over Twitter. [ via ]?HAIR • Michael Phelps says despite having chlorine-damaged hair he'll never shave his head. “If it falls out then it falls out," he says. In other news, as part of a new Head & Shoulders campaign, his face gets printed on the brand's shampoo bottles. []• Chloe Moretz debuted pink-streaked hair at last night’s Costume Designers Guild Awards. []• Gayle Giacomo, star of Style Network'sJerseyliciousand owner of the Gatsby Salon, is starting her own hair care line, called “GATSBY." []?This past weekend, Vulture that the search for the title character in the remake of Stephen King's Carrie had been narrowed down to just two actresses: Chloe Moretz and Haley Bennett. Now Deadline that MGM and director Kimberly Peirce have officially offered Moretz the job, and as it happens, we spoke to the 15-year-old actress last night at the Metropolitan Opera's gala premiere of Manon. "I love Kimberly Peirce," Moretz told us. "I think she's a phenomenal director." It's not lost on Moretz, either, that Peirce once directed her lead actress to an Oscar win for Boys Don't Cry. "Hilary Swank is a very wonderful actress, and working together as a pair, I think they did a very amazing movie," Moretz added. There will be a lot of pressure to live up to Brian De Palma's first take on the material, but Moretz is undaunted. "If you're going to do movies, why not do something that excites you?" she said.?Chloe Moretz is on an adaptation roll. The 13-year-old actress has spent the year starring in movies that were adapted from comic books (Kick-Ass), other movies (Let Me In), and historical fiction (Martin Scorsese's upcoming Hugo Cabret), but with Emily the Strange, she'll face her biggest challenge yet: playing a character made famous on a sticker. Dour, teenaged Emily was as sort of a proto-Daria, and soon became a counterculture icon spanning merchandise, clothing, and comic books. If this makes it easier for Paul Giamatti to fund his dream project Kilroy Was Here, so be it. []? Most heavy-metal concerts don’t start at 9 A.M. on Sunday. But Chloe Piene managed to draw a crowd of 250 to hear the Brooklyn band Candiria?and to turn Piene, briefly, into the crowd-surfing rock goddess of Self-Portrait (2002). For the 35-second video loop (inspired by Matthias Grünewald’s Isenheim altarpiece), ?we had a spot on me so that my upper body would overexpose, and you get a glowing, ethereal figure supported by all these metalheads,? she says. ?They’re anchored to the earth, like big trees?they throw their weight around.? ?With HBO's Big Love beginning , its enigmatic star Chloe Sevigny said she's reading the script for the Broadway play , and she might star in the production opposite Katie Holmes. However, her real dream role would still be on TV, starring in a latter-day Friends. Naturally. "I’m not opposed to another [TV] series but I don’t think I’d do one in Los Angeles," she explained. "I’d like to do a half-hour comedy on a cable network in New York where I play someone really glamorous and really goofy. That’s my dream job!" Always , this one. []?Profile The women’s clothing, shoes, and bags at Chloé’s Upper East Side boutique have remained highly coveted since its opening in 1999, despite a revolving door in the company’s creative director’s office. Karl Lagerfeld, Stella McCartney, Phoebe Philo, and Paulo Melim Andersson have all designed for the French label, yet no matter who is in charge, the line has maintained its quirky yet sophisticated aesthetic. The ready-to-wear collection relies on a mixture of menswear-inspired designs?like wide-leg trousers and vests softened by earth tones?and girlish details like Peter Pan collars and jeweled and lacy bibs. Everything from the casual T-shirts to the metallic party dresses, and from the demure jumpers to the buckled, round-toe high heels possesses an unassuming elegance. True to the neighborhood, these mature, well-tailored garments are priced on par with nearby upscale boutiques?which explains why the label’s more youthful and less expensive See by Chloé line is not to be found here. — Kendall Herbst SalesMid-December sales to clear out fall clothes. ?Rumors emerged this week that has already started interviewing candidates to replace lead designer Hannah MacGibbon and that her tenure at the label would be determined following the reactions to her fall 2011 Paris Fashion Week show. Chloe said they will issue a statement saying that MacGibbon is not going anywhere. The rumors may have started because her current contract is ending. [] ?? Cathy Horyn was unable to confirm rumors that former CEO Ralph Toledo was fired by the brand, but his departure has surprised many people in the industry. []? Cartier is now targeting EditorsCloset.com and IvoryTrunk.com for allegedly selling damaged watches. []? Joe Zee will be Extra’s “special fashion correspondent” at the Emmys this year. []? The Daily Mail disapproved of the dhoti pants worn by Jessica Alba yesterday, calling them "completely unflattering trousers that hung around her bottom like a giant nappy." []?Ralph Toledano, who was the CEO and chairman of Chloe for eleven years before stepping down last August, is said to be the new chairman of St. John, reports WWD. Just a few months ago, St. John CEO Glenn McMahon stated his desire to capture younger, more stylish women: "We really believe that our future success will be in our ability to capture the daughters of our current customer." Clearly, Toledano was brought on do just that. []?In the print ad for ’s latest fragrance, Love Chloe, is reportedly wearing a belt by , not Chloe. The fragrance was launched in August, but no one noticed the belt mix-up until now, probably because, well, it looks exactly like . []?Let Me In director Matt Reeves yesterday that finding young actors unfamiliar with the film's source material, the Swedish vampire movie Let the Right One In, would be key to "pulling off the [film's] emotional complexity." At the Let Me In panel today, the adorable Chloe Moretz admitted that, even now, she still hasn't seen all of the original: "My mom won't let me watch the whole film," she said, adding that her mother screens her scripts before handing them off to her. Reeves said he asked Steven Spielberg for advice on working with such young actors, and Spielberg told him: "Let them come up with stuff that makes you choose what you're going to do, and have them keep a journal in character."?THE HITS: ? "Burton did herself and the rarefied Alexander McQueen ethos proud with an exquisite collection? As for the evening gowns, the word breathtaking understates the reality." []? "Many of these dresses were beautiful, with their haute couture aesthetic and workmanship... But it was dispiriting to see a female following the McQueen misogyny by strapping her models into harnesses. Take them off and there were lovely dresses." []? "[T]hese were scarcely clothes for the real world. That wasn't really the point. It felt much more like Burton wanted to remind the planet that she isn't channeling the McQueen DNA, she is the McQueen DNA?. Here, serenity ruled. Which, in the interests of future princesses everywhere, is probably a wise option." []? "[T]onight’s show was about the reality of brilliantly constructed, beautiful clothes? The house of McQueen is safe in her hands." []?After dispensing some fairly useless advice on , BlackBook does the same with Beatrice East a.k.a. . Your best bet: “Having sexual relations with DJs that spin at Chloe. Working in fashion. Knowing secret passwords. Having breasts.” []? Few films go as obviously and bewilderingly wrong as Chloe, but for the first hour it’s a potent little melodrama in which the smooth, super-controlled storytelling contains the theme of unruly obsession like a straitjacket. A wealthy Toronto OB-GYN, Catherine (Julianne Moore), feels more and more estranged from her husband (Liam Neeson)?and from her own aging features in the mirror. It doesn’t help that she stares at the private parts of young, sexually active women all day. It also doesn’t help that she stares out her office window and often sees a creamy, angel-faced blonde (Amanda Seyfried) on the arms of various older men. When she finds an intimate text message sent to her husband by one of his students, she decides to hire the blonde, a hooker named Chloe, to test her husband’s resistance. The test-the-spouse idea never turns out well, and using someone who looks like Seyfried doesn’t exactly tip the scales in favor of fidelity. When Chloe relays what happened, Catherine listens with dread, but also something else. Perhaps?it’s hard to tell?she’s turned on by the thought of living through this alluring young woman. Director Atom Egoyan likes to ?mediate? his subjects, to frame his characters with video screens or camera lenses or telescope sights or doors and windows?anything to reinforce the ways in which they’re cut off from one another and the soulless modern world. (His home base, Toronto, helps: It’s not exactly the City of Love.) With Chloe, Egoyan is directing for the first time a feature-film script he didn’t write (it’s by Erin Cressida Wilson, based on a French film called Nathalie ? ), and for once he doesn’t overworry the material and fracture it into too many little screens. He goes with the story, and his distancing devices don’t call attention to themselves. And, anyway, he can get only so far away from Julianne Moore. She’s extraordinarily raw and affecting. She doesn’t hide behind another accent, and she barely seems made-up: Her skin is translucently pale, her freckles more prominent than ever before. She looks as if a strong sun?literal or metaphorical?would incinerate her. Neeson lost his wife in the middle of making this film, and it shows. He often looks haggard, encased in his own private woe. That makes the chasm between this fictional husband and wife seem even more unbridgeable. Egoyan is an expert at isolating people, but he’s less sure of himself when it comes to how they connect. So what happens to the character of Chloe is the worst kind of surprise, the ?Huh?? that throws you fatally out of the movie. Seyfried can’t pull off the transition?she seems out of her depth. But what actress could have? She’d need to have written her own backstory, maybe even her own separate script. It’s like we’ve fallen through the looking glass into a Lifetime TV Fatal Attraction knockoff. The enjoyably rambling crime picture Leaves of Grass addresses the eternal conflict between the Socratic view of the world, which argues that the goal of life is to control and channel one’s passions, and the ribald surrender to instinct. I’m not reading into it: The theme is announced. It’s announced, in fact, during the first minute of the film, by the trim, lucid Ivy League classics professor Bill Kincaid (Edward Norton), although his paean to rationality is somewhat undercut by the openmouthed lust of his female students, especially the busty girl who delivers a Latin oration while trying to hump him over his desk. It’s also undercut by the back-and-forth cutting between the prof and his Okie identical twin, Brady (Norton, too), a prodigious marijuana grower and imbiber who drawls his own odes to the bud structure and crystal density of his exquisitely engineered hydroponic dope. The unkempt Brady, under threat of being knocked off by a local kingpin, lures his estranged sibling to sweet home Oklahoma, where the poor, studiously self-contained Bill gets beaten to a pulp by goons who think he’s his brother. When Bill and Brady share the screen, Norton?not a self-effacing actor?gets the rare opportunity to upstage himself, which he does over and over and with increasing gusto. He has found his ideal co-star. Written and directed by Tim Blake Nelson (who also plays Brady’s slow, steadfast sidekick), Leaves of Grass is part goofy drug comedy, part shocking bloodbath. It’s a riot of tones and genres, but unlike that other recent hybrid, Pineapple Express, the parts add up to something larger. Nelson, like the writers of the classic Roman and Greek dissimilar-twin comedies, turns our irreconcilable dual natures into the stuff of farce?in this case farce set in a cruel, perhaps godless universe. It’s certainly a fatherless and motherless universe. The brothers’ dad threw himself with suicidal fervor into the Vietnam War and died young. Their mother (Susan Sarandon) surrendered to sixties self-gratification and smoked pot with her kids. One son went to seed, but at least had a genius for cultivating that seed. The other suppressed a part of his essential nature, but at least had a genius for finding ancient texts that suggest why doing so is a good thing. Neither is whole, but as comic characters they’re 100 percent there. They have goofball stature. Leaves of Grass has plenty of off notes. Some of the action is flat-footed, and Nelson depicts Tulsa’s culturally incongruous Jewish community with too hammy a hand. But at its best, the movie reminded me of Charles Willeford’s Miami-set crime novels, which shamble along amusingly and erupt, without warning, into gory (and often tragic) violence. There’s also a dash of Joel and Ethan Coen: hyperliterate dialogue for brains and bumpkins alike, all of them blinkered (and made rabid) by self-interest. Nelson’s heart, though, is more on his sleeve. He has made Bill’s love interest a pretty schoolteacher (Keri Russell) who catches giant, wriggling catfish with her bare hands (?noodling?) while reciting Walt Whitman on the existential necessity of unabashed passion without drawable restrictions. Too good to be true? Yes. But I think I’ve found my new feminine ideal: a Whitmanesque noodler.?? Photographer David Sims shot ’s spring ad campaign, which features models and and will drop in February. []? Sebastien Faena shot Paz de la Huerta sucking her thumb for the winter cover of Muse magazine. [] ? Neiman Marcus has named Ann Paolini senior vice-president and managing director of the retailer's Last Call division. []? The schedule for London Fashion Week in is, and launched a new iPad app, and highlights include backstage footage of McCartney's latest spring/summer 2011 show and a performance by Pharrell Williams and N*E*R*D at the after-party. []?SALES STARTING TODAY ? Merchandise is 50 to 70 percent off at the Chloe & Reese sample sale. Wool and cashmere day dresses are $120 to $190 (originally $395), silk party dresses are $130 to $250 (originally $500), and blouses are $90 (originally $295). Dresses start at $50. Through 1/9. 313 W. 37th St., nr. Eighth Ave., Ste. 601A (888-317-1695); T?F (11?7), S (11?5).ENDING TOMORROW ? Stock up on footwear at the twelfth annual New York City Shoe-Inn warehouse sale, featuring 10,000 pairs of shoes from designers like , , Stuart Weitzman, Cole Haan, and Frye. All shoes are $19.99 to $99.99 and all booties and boots are $34.99 to $199.99 (originally up to $1,250). Through 1/6. Gotham Hall, 1356 Broadway, at 36th St.; 9?7.ONGOING ? Fall/winter shoes are 1/3 off at the sale. Shoes will be reduced to 50 percent off in mid-January. Through 2/1. 31 W. 54th St., nr. Sixth Ave. (212-582-3007); M?F (10:30?6), S (10:30?5:30), Su (noon?5). ?&#8226 Remember the cotton field in ? Supima, the company behind the stunt, offers 35 percent off their cotton stock of tees and jeans at its pop-up store . Zooey, Gilded Age, and AG Adriano Goldschmied will all be on sale. Through 4/10. 72 Greene St., nr. Broome St.; no phone; Wed. and Thurs. (4–7). ENDING TODAY &#8226 Mark Ingram Bridal Atelier offers up to 80 percent off retail prices at their exclusive sample sale starting tomorrow (original prices were $3,200 to $6,000). Gowns from , , , Peter Langner, Jenny Lee, Rivini, Ulla Maija, and more will be marked down. Must call for appointment. Through 4/9. 110 E. 55th St., nr. Park Ave., eighth fl.; 212-319-6778; Tues. (12–8), Wed. (10–4). STARTING TOMORROW &#8226 Boutique on 57 hosts a huge sample sale featuring shoes, apparel, and accessories from , , , , Emilio , , , and more up to 70 percent off. Dresses that went for $5,500 are now $750 and shoes that were $680 are now $125 (designers not specified). Through 4/11. Regency Hotel, 540 Park Ave., at 61st St., penthouse suite; 917-940-9934; Thurs.–Fri. (10–7).? Photographs by Martynka Wawrzyniak Connor Morse has come dressed for the occasion. She’s wearing neon-pink Converse sneakers, a flouncy blue skirt, and a sequined jacket over what appears to be a football jersey. A men’s tie is knotted into a large bow on top of her head, and she’s completed the look with a pair of heart-shaped sunglasses, which she persists in wearing inside. The outfit is her best impression of Madonna circa Desperately Seeking Susan, cobbled together from thrift-store finds to wear specifically in honor of the launch of Material Girl, the clothing line the singer and her 13-year-old daughter Lourdes (Lola) Leon debuted this month. The Material Girl line is perfect for you if you are an NYU art major with a killer body. There’s lace and leather and a lavish assortment of body-con dresses. But Connor doesn’t really have curves. What she does have is some softness about the middle that signals a coming growth spurt. Connor is 8 years old. Not that her age or physical development diminish her fervor for Material Girl as she runs about the shop that’s been set up in the juniors’ department on the fourth floor of ?Mom!? she squeals at the sight of a faux-fur vest. ?Oh, Mommy, come here!? Then she’s darting off after a short tulle skirt. ?Can I get this, Mom? Can I?? A pair of sequined zebra-print leggings stop her in her tracks. ?Mommy, will this fit?? She holds them up against her small frame. ?How about the little cardigan?? asks her mother, Linda, who is dressed in a sensible button-down in a neutral shade. ?I want the zebra pants!? ?She can have the taste of a stripper, if I don’t watch it,? Linda sighs. ?I just let her go with it as long as it’s not low cut or too high. No belly. We don’t show our tummy.? Linda points to a pair of long, dark plaid pants. ?Do you like that, Connor?? ?Kind of,? Connor replies, scrunching up her nose. ?Kind of, but not.? If Connor spends $50 she will get to have her picture taken, not with Santa, but with Taylor Momsen, the actress who plays the naughty younger sister on the TV show Gossip Girl. The front woman of a band called the Pretty Reckless and now the face of Material Girl, Momsen has only just finished performing (in a midriff-baring bustier, over-the-knee stiletto boots, and enough black kohl about the eyes to make her look like a victim of domestic abuse) on a makeshift stage set up between racks of clothing. ?She’s 16 years old. What the...?? one woman in the audience mumbled as Momsen sang/growled the lyrics ?Does what I’m wearing seem to shock you? Well, that’s okay? while lolling her head about in a manner that seemed both suggestive and drug-induced. This pose was dropped the moment she got backstage. ?I took an interest in fashion at a very young age,? she tells me, smiling brightly. ?Pretty much at like 3. I was the weird kid at school who wore, like, cutoff black T-shirts and leather jackets and combat boots every day. And I had a bunch of heels.? Not that Momsen, who just turned 17, approves of the same wardrobe for her younger sister, who is 13. ?When she starts going, ?Can I wear your heels?’ I’m like, ?No, you’re a baby! You can’t wear my heels. What are you talking about?’ ? She giggles behind her scrim of dark makeup. If Momsen’s affect is bipolar, she’s hardly to blame. It’s difficult to know how, exactly, to represent a line that peddles pleather bandeau bras and sequined hot pants to a junior demographic, just as it’s difficult to know what, exactly, one should peddle to them in the first place. Throughout history, cultures have had strict dress codes relating to age, but no longer: Our fetishization of youth not only means that older women are dressing younger, but also that young girls are dressing older, pushing themselves into sexualized terrain. For tweens at the intersection of childhood and adulthood?an age that’s a natural fashion fault line?this role reversal can present particular confusion. No one knows quite what to wear. Not even Madonna. ?I always have two reactions when Lola comes into my room with an outfit on,? she says in a video discussing the line. ?One is, ?Oh my God, she looks amazing, what incredible style.’ And then my second reaction is, ?She’s dressed completely inappropriately for school.’ ? The current mecca for tween couture is Justice, which proclaims itself the ?largest premier tween speciality retailer in the world ... for girls ages 7 to 14.? It’s a suburban staple?the only stores in New York are in Queens and Staten Island?though from the ?catazine? no borough is safe. The inside of an actual Justice store looks like a rainbow got drunk and upchucked all over a strip mall. There is a blinding profusion of pinks and purples and aquas amid aisles roughly the shoulder-width of a 9-year-old. Fall tween trends are there in force: jeggings, graphic tees, gauzy scarves, bright plaids, camo, and tutus. One pattern is not sufficient; pants clearly require two, shirts three or more. If just seeing apparel leaves your senses wanting, you can find clothes that smell: T-shirts of the scratch-and-sniff variety. ?Top models — and rumored dating couple — and shot what appears to be part of 's spring 2012 ad campaign this past weekend. The pair were photographed around the Chateau Marmont hotel in Los Angeles, posing and strolling along a sidewalk in from the label's spring runway collection. (And was styled into a softer bob.) So here's the inevitable question, just to get things started: Is all the smizing and camaraderie just a good case of "acting" for the camera, or a sign of something more lovey-dovey??? ’s spring 2011 H&M campaign is here. []? Laure de Sade, previously of , has been named the new designer of See by Chloe, Chloe's lower-priced line. [] ? After a spat on Twitter with designer/clothing-store owner Dawn Simorangkir, Courtney Love was forced to pay $430,000 in libel charges. []? A luxury line of Ugg shoes and handbags is coming. []? has produced a collection of fifteen dresses in a new partnership with website TheOutnet.com. []?Two thirds of the current A-list teen-girl triumvirate were out and about over the weekend (where were you, Elle Fanning?): Hailee Steinfeld attended Teen Vogue's annual Young Hollywood party in L.A., wearing a black dress with black-and-white striped panels from the 2012 resort collection. She accessorized the outfit with bright yellow heels and a clutch. Also in an ensemble with a pop of yellow: Chloe Moretz at the premiere of Iris, a new Cirque du Soleil movie. She paired black lace pants with an underlay of the sunny hue with a black long-sleeved tee, a black leather biker jacket, and strappy black heels. While both of these looks use the same accent color, do you prefer Hailee's sweet take or Chloe's edgy spin? ?In a stroke of technological savvy, Chloe announced on its and this morning that head designer Hannah MacGibbon would be replaced by Clare Waight Keller on June 1. The announcement follows rampant speculation as to MacGibbon's fate at the house during the fall 2011 show season, when John Galliano exited Christian Dior and Christophe Decarnin exited Balmain, and the industry could scarcely help but gossip their faces off. MacGibbon leaves her decade-long run at the house, where she began as an assistant, to pursue "new projects," Chloe said in a statement. And if she needs a job at another fashion label, and are just two labels in need of designers.?Hannah MacGibbon's contract at was up after this past season, and last month the house was rumored to be interviewing potential replacements, . A Chloe spokesperson that MacGibbon was leaving but neglected to confirm her contract's renewal until today, when it was reported that her contract has been extended for another season. Her , which was under high scrutiny due to her supposedly precarious standing at the house, received . When reached for comment, Chloe’s CEO, Geoffroy de la Bourdonnaye, said, “Hannah is still with us, that’s all I can say.” [WWD]? Gavin Brown’s Enterprise is on Greenwich Street in the still-industrial-feeling area that is neither Soho nor the West Village. The building is a former meat--processing plant, and it takes up the entire block. ?I don’t know anyone else who has a whole block,? Brown says as he walks the perimeter of his gallery with his dog, Dotti. He is nearly 50, he has three kids, and here with Dotti on a leash he looks like the kind of liberal-arts professor who would quietly ask the undergrads if they knew where he might score some pot. But why a whole block, anyway? ?Because it was for rent,? Brown says, and then smiles. He’s being cute about it. Sure, it was for rent, but what is far more interesting is that Brown was in the position to rent it because he has been, over the past decade, an enormous commercial success, the majordomo of an art-world clique that is currently passing from cool kid to Establishment. It’s a tricky line to walk, and it’s not clear which side of it Brown is on these days. And perhaps his success depends upon the whole thing remaining blurry. Undeniably, Brown sells a huge amount of very expensive art. His roster includes highly collectible artists like Alex Katz and Elizabeth Peyton, but also Rirkrit Tiravanija, who’s been known to serve dinner as art. And now the bulk of his space is occupied by a work by Frances Stark in which the text of her online flirting and sex chats with Italian strangers (?mmmmm,? ?omg?) is projected onto walls in sync to Don Giovanni. ?I wake up in the morning thinking, What a great way to make a living,? Brown says. ?Artists are the most important members of our society. So success is how much their communication is being received, understood by other human beings ? Rirkrit did a model of my gallery in the Whitney Biennial, and I guess a lot of it is feeling a sense of pride. Not that you’ve done it but that somehow you’re in the orbit of something you believe will continue to have some positive effect on our ability to survive. But, of course, I’m not going to say that I like a painting because I’ve got a good chance of selling it.? Brown first came to New York from En-gland in 1988 as an artist in the prestigious program. The only problem was that he decided his art, which he says was ?proto-conceptual,? was no good. ?I couldn’t ever quite suspend disbelief. I looked at these things, and they felt empty to me. I made a practical decision. I wasn’t selling any art, so I had to make money.? He opened his first gallery in a tiny Soho space. Then, in 1997, he opened a gallery on West 15th Street with a bar called Passerby attached whose floor itself was a work of art by Piotr Uklanski. Like the floor in Saturday Night Fever, it changed color in response to the thumping music. Passerby was the center of things for a while. There was lots of Chloë Sevigny and Moby stopping by for drinks. ?That’s beyond ancient history to me,? he says. ?I’m not interested in nostalgia. But I will say that I hadn’t found the New York I was interested in.? So he made his own?though ?I guess it’s a strange thing for a misanthrope to open a bar.? He’s being cute again, because another key to the Gavin Brown ascendancy is his parties; Mary Boone wielded as much power from her perch at as she did from her gallery, and Brown is often front and center in the social realm, throwing dinners to which most of Chelsea would like to be invited. ?I like hanging out with my friends, you know? I get lonely. We’re social animals.? Brown is so socially entrenched that his close ties with the ?he represents Verne Dawson, the husband of onetime New Museum curator Laura -Hoptman?led to whispers that he was part of some art-world cabal after the museum held solo shows for his artists Urs Fischer and Peyton. ?Boring,? Brown says. ?Small-minded bean counters. How’s that for a good quote? I mean, the whole thing is so insulting to the artists, that they got those shows because of some relationship that I may have had with a curator.? ?Kate Bosworth wore a henley top with black skinny jeans and studded boots by to lunch in West Hollywood yesterday. She accessorized with a structured bag and black sunglasses.Kate has a knack for making high-fashion clothing look casual and accessible. What do you think of her laid-back yet designer-heavy outfit??Chloe Grace Moretz, 13-year-old actress and C-word-saying star of Kick-Ass, has a Twitter! It's composed entirely of Chloe replying "ha-ha," "thank you!!," or "yay!!" to her fans. Thousands of times. Even among celebrity Twitters, it's robotic. She should at least throw in some bad words if she wants to publicize the film. []? Let’s talk about your style. I’m really influenced by my mom, and right now she’s doing a lot of stuff with chains. And medallions. And I don’t know, I guess I shop at, like, . What are you up to? I’m about to go home, to Bay Ridge. I don’t really like it there, but that’s where I live. It’s Republican, which is definitely not my scene. I live in a really beautiful three-story house with my family; that’s the only good thing. But my brother got to leave. Now he goes to Oberlin. Where would you like to live? I kind of want to live in Providence. I kind of want to go to Brown because they have no core curriculum, and that’s definitely a priority for me. I want to study photography. I’ve already had a photo published in some Brooklyn newspaper. I don’t even know which one. What are you reading? I just read Susan Sontag’s On Photography. It changed a lot of what I thought about photography. I never thought about photography over the course of history. But she made me feel a lot better about my portraiture. What are you wearing today? It’s just something simple. Like a plain black turtleneck and a belt that my mom got from Forever 21. Skinny jeans are from I don’t know where, and the boots are from Target. My jacket is from a street vendor in Paris. For, like, nine euros. It was a good deal. What are you listening to lately? I’ve been listening to a lot of Nickel Creek, which is a band that used to be bluegrass, but then they got too poppy. They’re a little cliché, but they’re good. Do you have favorite designers? John Galliano. Oh, my God, so much with John Galliano. His stuff is theatrical, which is what I think fashion should be. It should be more about art. I think that all you have is your body, and you might as well dress it up. ?FRAGRANCE ? Mary J. Blige will shill her second fragrance, called "My Life Blossom," on HSN on Saturday. Her first scent, sold back in July 2010, set a sales record. []? As part of plans to cut costs, Liz Claiborne Inc. has sold the rights to its fragrances to Elizabeth Arden. []? At Fashion's Night Out next month, will launch a new fragrance. []MAKEUP ? Actress Imogen Poots, the new face of 's fragrance, is not a big fan of makeup: "I think it’s a shame to see a lot of young girls with a lot of makeup on. I think you need to embrace what you have, which is hard to do." Yes, but no doubt it's easier when you look like Imogen Poots. []? added new sets of "Passion Duo Gloss Fusion" lipsticks and "Perfect Finish Creamy" foundations to their makeup lines. []?Chloe Moretz will receive the 2012 Women in Film Max Mara Face of the Future Award, given to an actress in recognition of "her outstanding achievements and her embodiment of style and grace." At 15, Moretz is less than half the average age of the award's previous six recipients — Elizabeth Banks, Zoe Saldana, and 2011's Katie Holmes among them. Keeping to an clearly paid off for her.?Meet the Lost Hunger Games Tributes, Played by Max Greenfield, Chloe Moretz, and Other Famous People?Bon Duke got his first break in the fashion world when the CFDA hired him to shoot Proenza Schouler accessories for their 2009 awards ceremony (the year Jack and Lazaro won Accessory Designer of the Year). "I had to Google the CFDA," confesses Duke, who was then a newly minted grad of the School of Visual Arts. His photos, which are edgy with an element of romance, apparently made an impression; not long afterward he found himself shooting for Prabal Gurung, Philip Lim, Zac Posen, and Chloé (check out the video he did for the brand, below).Click through our slideshow to see the work of the 24-year-old Greenpoint, Brooklyn, native and hear more from our interview.?New resort is here! In addition to the gauzy layers and animal patterns at , the newest cruise collections include statement prints at Prabal Gurung, breezy separates at Chloé, and Ashley Olsen's billowing silk from the Row. See these looks and more in our .• • • • • ?Now that Paris is over, it's time to really take a look at the accessories. Check out close-up shots of the best shoes, bags, beauty looks, and more in our details galleries. Click "view full screen" and you'll be closer than front row. DETAILS ?For Karl by Karl Lagerfeld's new campaign, stands out in bright-green eye shadow. Meanwhile, tapped and to star in its fall advertisements, and models and team up once again for , shot by Mario Testino. See all these images and more in our .?For their fall men's campaign, hired filmmaker Vincent Gallo to pose thoughtfully with his hands in pockets. He stars alongside actress Gemma Arterton, who retains her spot in the women's campaign after debuting in last season's ads. Also, enjoy more stunning shots, for , and more assorted models frolicking in a forest in 's campaign. See these images and more in our . ?Single-shot previews of the , , and campaigns debuted today, shot by Inez & Vinoodh, David Sims, and Steven Meisel respectively. Meisel also photographed ? in a statuesque old church ? the fall ads, four more of which came out today. They're all in our . Click through to see everything.?Today is the last day of Paris Fashion Week and we are rolling out the runway slideshows and backstage galleries faster than you can say "how high do go?" Don't miss the latest:RUNWAY ?To a resounding , mixed geometric prints and lacy trim with carefully measured grace. In other shows, Clare Waight Keller debuted her first collection for ? loosely tailored stripes and pleats, all in pastels ? and Stefano Pilati's latest line for showcased bold colors and clean lines, broken up just so by distinctive ruffles. See the full collections, plus , , , and more in our runway galleries. RUNWAY ? ? ? ?Paris Fashion Week soldiers on! And today, made us all feel lazy by sending yet down a European runway (she two weeks ago, too). showed coats, pants, and sweaters in a mix of warm pastels and deep autumn colors, while 's collection was black, white, and red all over, and Stefano Pilati for — sculptural separates covered with beautiful O'Keeffe-esque orchid prints. Check out these shows and lots of new details in our .RUNWAY• • • • • • • • • • • ?Here they are: the weekend's Paris shows! Check out 's gold jackets and figure-hugging dresses, 's colorful ponchos, and 's trailing silk hemlines. Happy Monday! ?The latest collections from Paris were full of fur and ruffles. Check out full-screen slideshows of what you missed, including Chloe's slouchy trousers, Chanel's wooly boots, Jean-Charles de Castelbajac's Bambi prints, and more.RUNWAY ?It was a fruitful weekend over in Paris, and between 's tassel-fringed tops and 's enormously puffy sleeves, there are tons of runway shots ripe for the clicking. In addition to , 's collection featured spiky mullets, mesh bustiers, and frilly corsets. Today, layered sheer tulle skirts over bloomers, while 's models milled around on a grass lawn in petal-printed pumps. Click ahead to browse all of those collections and more.? ? ? ?Page Not Found We apologize for the inconvenience but it appears the link you've selected is broken. • Please visit our and try again.• To let us know about a broken link, .?After his eleven-year stint as chairman and CEO of, Ralph Toledano leaves the fashion house to join luxury conglomerate Puig, where he's been hired as the new president of . He'll reportedly take over additional duties at Puig's other large Paris-based label, , in a few months. The move signals Puig's dedication to beefing up its presence in the fashion industry.?Stella McCartney presented a strong, functional, and multifaceted collection featuring her signature chunky knits in solid and striped gun-metal grays as well as feminine silk dresses in both warm and cool palettes. Stella juxtaposed soft and sexy volume alongside heavy and chunky pieces. Highlights were fun and flirtatious off-the-shoulder dresses in stormy hued-wools, oversize scarves, washed-mohair sweaters, and playfully layered chiffon. Heavy platform knee-high wedges, booties, and stilettos complimented both head-to-toe knit dressing and flowy frocks. ?See Chloe Moretz and Julianne Moore in Some Gory Stills From the Carrie Remake?We hear it's difficult to pry Angelenos from their cars, so an extra amount of applause goes to the fine citizens of L.A. who turned up to the city's Fashion's Night Out. This is how Hollywood does it: with breezy dresses, various hats, and many, many pensive faces. We sent Chloe Aftel into the wild— click ahead to see whom she found.?Kiss, Kiss, Shoot, ShootA photographic portfolio, taken at the shows in Paris, Milan, and New York.?Watch the Teaser Trailer for Hit & Miss, Which Stars Chloe Sevigny As A Pre-Op Trans Woman?Visit Alabama’s den of sin in the Film Noir Collection Classics: Volume 5 By the time you get to volume five of any DVD series, you’re reaching deep into the archives. Warner’s latest crime-flick garage sale offers up eight films you’ve never heard of: Cornered, Desperate, Dial 1119, Armored Car Robbery, Crime in the Streets, Deadline at Dawn, Backfire, and the fascinating The Phenix City Story. Phenix City, Phil Karlson’s tale of local Southern corruption, pits an upstanding war vet against the pimps and crooks of an Alabama town, and that town is the film’s real star. Shot documentary style, seedy, trashy Phenix City — “Alabama’s city of sin and shame,” the posters roared — is a great place to visit for 90 minutes. Is The Bounty Hunter the worst film of the year? There's only one way to find out! In late December, there will be arguments over which film is absolutely the worst film of the year. While The Last Airbender, Marmaduke, Killers, and Furry Vengeance will offer stiff competition, you really can’t ever rule out Jennifer Aniston (See: Love Happens, Along Came Polly, Rumor Has It), especially as an unconvincing crook thrown in a trunk by Gerard Butler. To prepare for your end-of-the-year Razzies pool, rent (do not buy) this one now. And in the meantime, see how Butler fared when compared with another famous bounty hunter, . ?There's a new, longer trailer for Atom Egoyan's upcoming remake of the French thriller Chloe, and it's scary as hell (and also kind of funny!). Julianne Moore plays a wife who suspects her husband (Liam Neeson) of cheating because he laughs maniacally at the computer, so she hires a call girl (Amanda Seyfried, who has crazy eyes down) to try to seduce him, and guess what happens? Amanda Seyfried gives him a hand job in a greenhouse. When she tells Julianne Moore about it, Julianne is like, "I didn't ask you to do that." And then Amanda Seyfried turns out to be crazy and refuses to stop seeing Liam Neeson and ends up in Julianne's office and home and does something to Julianne's neck with a sharp object and sexual overtones. It's a total throwback to the wonderful trashy thrillers of the eighties and nineties (we miss you , come back!). Basically, it's going to be the best movie of the year and "This business transaction is over!" is going to be 2010's "I drink your milkshake." So get ready!?Chloe Green, the 21-year-old daughter of Topshop owner Sir Phillip Green, unveiled her shoe line for the retailer yesterday. The collection is titled "Chloe Jade Green" and has soles to match its name. Green tells the Telegraph that the platforms are "comfortable."?The impressive cast of Tim Burton's supernatural movie Dark Shadows, an adaptation of the , currently boasts Eva Green, Michelle Pfeiffer, and, of course, Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter. Now also on board: wunderkind Chloe Moretz, as Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, the daughter of Pfeiffer's family matriarch character. This is good news for the movie because Chloe Moretz is a very talented young actress, but also it's good news for the movie because now the wrap party will probably have Fruit by the Foot. []?SALES STARTING TOMORROW ? Get up to 60 percent off of spring merchandise , including samples and brands like Acne, Filippa K, Rachel Comey, and more. Through 9/6. 208 N. 8th St., nr. Driggs Ave., Williamsburg, Brooklyn (718-782-0521). M?S, 11 a.m.?8 p.m.; Su, 11 a.m.?7 p.m.? If you're willing to take a road trip to save some cash, is offering extra discounts on top of the usual 25 to 65 percent reductions. Take an additional 40 percent off at Banana Republic, Betsey Johnson, Burberry, Kate Spade, and more. Through 9/7. 498 Red Apple Ct., nr. Route 32, Central Valley (845-928-4000); Daily, 10?9.ENDING TOMORROW ? The Chloe & Reese ready-to-wear collection is 50 to 60 percent off, including party and day dresses, silk blouses, pencil skirts, and more. Prices range from $50 to $160. 313 W. 37th St., nr. Eighth Ave., Ste. 601 (888-317-1695); noon?7.?SALES ENDING TOMORROW ? Past-season merchandise is 60 to 80 percent off at the Chloe & Reese sample sale. Wool coats are $175 (originally $600), silk blouses are $70 (originally $275), skirts are $125 (originally $365), and party dresses are $170 (originally $495). 209 W. 38th St., nr. Seventh Ave., Ste. 1207 (888-317-1695); M?W (11?7). ? Fall/winter merchandise for men and women is up to 70 percent off at the Domenico Vacca sample sale. The stock includes suits, ties, outerwear, cashmere, gowns, handbags, and shoes. 14 E. 60th St., nr. Fifth Ave. (212-920-1211); M?W (10?6).?EVENTS ? Swap your drugstore shampoo for a free bottle from Fekkai's latest hair-care line. Bring a full-size bottle of any shampoo ? full or empty ? into Saks, and you'll receive a complimentary eight-ounce bottle of a Fekkai Advanced shampoo of your choice in return. 611 Fifth Ave., at 50th St. (212-753-4000); 10?8.STARTING TOMORROW ? Kidrobot is offering 75 percent off hoodies and 70 percent off shirts and hats at the sample sale. Through 9/18. 56 W. 22nd St., nr. Sixth Ave., second fl.; Th?F (11?8).Chloe & Reese is hosting a sample sale. Silk faille party dresses are $90 to $180 (originally $495), skirts are $70 to $110 (originally $275), and day dresses are $70 to $150 (originally $340 to $385). Through 9/19. 313 W. 37th St., nr. Eighth Ave., Ste. 601 (888-317-1695); Th?F (noon?7), S (11?5). ENDING TOMORROW ? Three pairs of flip-flops are $20 at the Havaianas sample sale. Spring St., at Wooster St.; 11?6. ONGOING ? Buy one, get one item 50 percent off at H&M with . Through 9/20. . ?Artist and videographer caught up with Alexa Chung backstage at . Chung was hungry, but the only food in sight was a sad plate of lettuce leaves and tiny bits of cheese. Woe is the life of a jet setting model. ?Artist and videographer spotted model sitting front row at , and popped by for a 27-second chat ? captured in the video below. ?This week, Christopher Mintz-Plasse and Chloe Moretz don capes and codpieces as a pair of foul-mouthed, gun-toting superheroes in Kick-Ass, a movie New York's is a "compendium of all sleazy things, and it sings like a siren to our inner Tarantinos." Luckily, fans of the pair won't have to wait until Kick-Ass 2 to see them together onscreen again. When we spoke to Mintz-Plasse for in the current issue of the magazine, he told us he also teamed up with Moretz for a segment of the upcoming anthology movie Untitled Comedy, which will feature contributions from Brett Ratner, Bob Odenkirk, and the Farrelly brothers, among others. "You know those movies like New York, I Love You, with those vignettes? The Farrelly brothers are doing that, but it's twenty comedic shorts," says Mintz-Plasse. "I got to work with Chloe in the same one. Elizabeth Banks directed it."?Thirteen-year-old actress Chloe Moretz attended the premiere of Justin Bieber: Never Say Never in L.A. yesterday, wearing from Burberry's 2011 resort collection. Equally enviable is her noticeable lack of tights, sleeves, a coat, and scarf, while we freeze our asses off on this coast. But she's such a button it's hard to get mad at her for enjoying these luxuries.How do you like the turquoise belt on this look?? Toni Morrison never liked that old seventies slogan ?Black is beautiful.? It was superficial, simplistic, palliative?everything her blinkered detractors called Morrison’s complex novels when the 1993 Nobel Prize transformed her into a spokeswoman and a target. No better were those blinkered admirers who invited themselves to touch her signature gray dreadlocks at signings, as though they harbored some kind of mystical power. Still, even at 81, sporting both a new novel and a new hip, Morrison is as grand as she’s ever been. When we meet in her many-gabled house in the aptly named village of Grand View-on-Hudson, about 25 miles north of Manhattan, that bountiful woolen hair matches the lower half of a soft, enveloping sweater. Her face is polished in places and fissured in others, like the weathered stone of Mount Rushmore: the first black woman Nobelist, who’s lived long enough to speak to the first black president. Born only two years after Martin Luther King Jr., she’s a great-grandmother of assimilation?and she looks the part. Morrison’s voice is as layered and visceral as her writing. The author growls, purrs, giggles, and barks. Discussing politics, her voice rises in indignation before cresting and breaking into a loud chuckle. (?They should have that in the military, or the prisons?a little affirmative action! Let’s bring some white guys in!?) She surrenders to a wheezing, shoulder-shaking, freight-train laugh when describing a particularly gruesome Funny or Die video. She booms theatrically in recounting the ghost stories her parents would tell every night. (?Sharpen my knife, sharpen my knife, gonna cut my wife’s head off!?)She slows to a pedagogical rhythm while discussing her ?invisible ink??symbols and allusions in her work that would be picked up only by a deep reader, or maybe someone writing a dissertation twenty years from now. And in more confessional moments, Morrison reverts to a register that’s gotten stronger with age, a husky but girlish whisper imparting both vulnerability and authority. That’s how she broaches, gingerly, the death of her son Slade, sixteen months ago, at 45, ?which has clouded everything, everything, everything, everything,? she says. ?It’ll be with me like a shroud, or a cape, forever.? Toni Morrison was born Chloe Wofford, and still thinks of that as her real name. She picked up the nickname ?Toni? in school (from her saint’s name, Anthony), and Morrison was the last name of her long-ago ex-husband. To this day, she deeply regrets leaving that now world-famous name on her first novel, The -Bluest Eye, in 1970. ?Wasn’t that stupid?? she says. ?I feel ruined!? Here she is, fount of indelible names (Sula, Beloved, Pilate, Milkman, First Corinthians, and the star of her new novel, the Korean War veteran Frank Money), and she can’t own hers. ?Oh God! It sounds like some teenager?what is that?? She wheeze-laughs, theatrically sucks her teeth. ?But Chloe.? She grows expansive. ?That’s a Greek name. People who call me Chloe are the people who know me best,? she says. ?Chloe writes the books.? Toni Morrison does the tours, the interviews, the ?legacy and all of that.? Which she does easily enough, but at a distance, a drama-club alumna embodying a persona?and knowing all the while that it isn’t really her. ?I still can’t get to the Toni Morrison place yet.? That might be because Chloe knows Toni doesn’t belong to her. The things that made her Toni Morrison?Nobel laureate, political litmus test, college staple, gray-haired eminence?have never been completely in her control. Which isn’t to say that she didn’t break seemingly impenetrable barriers. As a student, then an editor, then an author and academic, Morrison fought unapologetically for the importance of considering racial politics in literature and of bringing marginalized American forces and shameful American secrets into the cultural mainstream. No one benefited more from her bold stance on the barricades of inclusiveness than Morrison herself. And then the tide receded. Countervailing forces swooped in. ?Political correctness? became a wedge issue, ?cultural studies? a joke. Morrison still collects laurels most living authors would happily die for?the latest being the 2006 selection by a panel of top literary figures of -Beloved as the best novel of the past 25 years. But two decades after she won her Nobel, Toni Morrison’s place in the pantheon is hardly assured. A writer of smaller ambitions would live on contentedly in this plush purgatory, but Morrison writes?more and more consciously, it seems?for posterity. Having once spearheaded the elevation of black women in culture?Maya Angelou, Alice Walker, Oprah?she now finds herself struggling to cut them loose, to admit at long last what she’s always believed: that she’s not only the first, but the best. That she belongs as much with Faulkner and Joyce and Roth as she does with that illustrious sisterhood. That she will pass the test that begins only after Chloe Wofford is gone, and Toni Morrison is all that’s left.?One of the stops on Prince William and Kate Middleton's weekend in L.A. was a , and one of the other guests in attendance was Zoe Saldana. She wore a floaty floral halter neck dress from the label's 2012 resort collection, which she paired with a peach belt, a pair of wedges, and some sharp L’Agence by SAMA sunglasses. This seems like a pretty perfect summer's day look. But is it worthy of royal approval?? - Radar ReporterDance Moms teacher sent shockwaves through her Pittsburgh dance school when she had the team of children perform a risque showgirls routine at a competition, and has the video.The girls on the team ? ranging in age from seven to 13 ? were slightly uncomfortable in their outfit of nude bras and white booty shorts, but it was the mothers that were really outraged by it!"The audience should think that you're nude," Abby informs the kids, to the shock of everyone."I don't want to be naked on stage," little Mackenzie says, looking at the skimpy outfits. "How's this going to fit me? I can fit this on my American [Girl] doll!"Not only do the mothers deem the costumes inappropriate, but they're not pleased with the sexy dance moves in the routine either."No one ever wants to hear the word 'nude' associated with their 10-year-old. Ever," Chloe's mom Christi says. "Those are crazy looking."Abby remains adamant that the big pink feather fans will detract from the children's revealing outfits and is sure the routine will wow the judges, directing the kids during rehearsal with phrases like, "I'm hot, I'm mean, you can't have me, you can't afford me.""Everyone in in the industry knows the girls are completely covered and everything is harmless," Abby tells everyone. "These mothers need to stop questioning me. What I do works."But what they did didn't work, as the usually successful dance troupe failed to place during their group number at the competition.See the video clip below:RELATED STORIES:? - Radar Style & Beauty EditorHollywood’s hottest stars got glammed to the max for on Thursday night, modeling rocking and shocking designer looks hot off the runway ? but not everyone was dressed to thrill! has all the wardrobe winners and sinners from the annual show in a special fashion photo feature. is really doing it up this awards season! After from Hollywood, the star is completely back in action and we are loving every second of it. The Young Adult star got clad in a totally dramatic Azzedine Alaia dress, which was terrifically tiered all the way down. She finished off the fab look with a Bvlgari ring and Giambattista Valli silver sandals. had an a la mode mishap, dressing up like a little Dutch girl in pastel hues. The Help star wore a white and yellow Honor Spring 2012 dress with pastel Casadei wedges, looking more like an Epcot Center employee than a movie star!As for wacky, resembled a penguin in a YSL Edition Soir 2012 three piece suit. Though we admire her ability to think outside of the box, the look was just too awkward for our taste.Other style scores included in a white hot Armani gown, in a sleek Calvin Klein slipdress, in a gorgeously green patterned Jason Wu, in a beautiful black and white Chanel gown and in Prada.For all the best, worst and wackiest fashion of The Critic’s Choice Awards, .RELATED GALLERIES:?The 38th annual People’s Choice Awards is sure to be a thrilling, star packed show, and will be live blogging all the winners, losers and highlights as they occur! With a line-up including , , , , and ? and performances from , and , the 2012 People’s Choice Awards is heavy on the star power.Broadcast from the downtown Los Angeles Nokia Theater, the show will be going out live on CBS at 8/9 central ? but if you can’t get to a TV, never fear, as we will bring you all the highlights, as they happen.There’s a total of 43 awards presented, and although not all of them will be shown live we will get to see all the biggies, like Favorite Pop Star, Favorite Actor, Favorite Actress, Favorite Movie and Favorite Reality Show., who won‘t actually be attending due to , is slated to be a big winner of the night with a whopping seven nominations in total.Keep refreshing the page for live updates (see below) on the 38th Annual People’s Choice Awards, here on .***RELATED GALLERIES:? - Radar Style & Beauty Editor may be a decade older than Hugo star , but is her style sense more Gossip worthy?It was a battle of fashion’s fiercest ‘It’ girls on Thursday night at the Jason Wu for Target launch party in NYC, as 24-year-old Blake faced off on the red carpet against 14-year-old Chloe, both wearing looks from the celebrated young designer’s frugal fashion collection ? and has the photos. The Gossip Girl, ’s ex-husband , showed off her hot bod in a black and white peplum dress, which featured Swarovski embellishment, finishing the look off with Christian Louboutin FiFi pumps and Lorraine Schwartz coral bling.Moretz, who is quickly making a name for herself not only for her acting skills, but for her superior style sense as well, was clad in age appropriate sophisticated schoolgirl attire.Other stars at the stylish soiree included Hart of Dixie’s and Real Housewife .Who dominated the red carpet of the Jason Wu for Target party?? Sound off below.RELATED STORIES: ? &lt;a href="http://s27.sitemeter.com/stats.asp?site=s27radaronline" mce_href="http://s27.sitemeter.com/stats.asp?site=s27radaronline" target="_top"&gt; &lt;img src="http://s27.sitemeter.com/meter.asp?site=s27radaronline" mce_src="http://s27.sitemeter.com/meter.asp?site=s27radaronline" alt="Site Meter" border="0"/&gt;&lt;/a&gt; ? &lt;a href="http://s27.sitemeter.com/stats.asp?site=s27radaronline" mce_href="http://s27.sitemeter.com/stats.asp?site=s27radaronline" target="_top"&gt; &lt;img src="http://s27.sitemeter.com/meter.asp?site=s27radaronline" mce_src="http://s27.sitemeter.com/meter.asp?site=s27radaronline" alt="Site Meter" border="0"/&gt;&lt;/a&gt; ? - Radar Style & Beauty EditorMiami Beach is one of the most happening vacation spots in the world with the hottest celebrities showing off their bombshell bods on the shoreline in the sexiest swimsuits imaginable. has photos your favorite stars, stripped down into barely there bikinis and making a splash on the South Florida beach.Cameron Diaz is a SoCal girl by birth, but the bigscreen bombshell has spending most of her time lately in South Beach. Ever since Cam started playing the field with New York Yankee slugger Alex Rodriguez, the Floridians have gotten to enjoy her flawless and fab figure in next-to-nothing.Where do Real Housewives go on vacay? Miami of course! Kelly Bensimon, Teresa Guidice and Bethenny Frankel all strip down and show off their crazy curves when they jet down to the tropics on a little getaway.? Lucky girls!Katie Holmes has been spending a lot of time down in Miami lately, as her hunky hubby Tom Cruise is filming Rock of Ages this summer. The Hollywood hard body has been treating the locals to quite a show, flaunting her flat abs and toned tush all over the place.What other stars love to get sexy on the beach in Miami? Click to find out.? &lt;a href="http://s27.sitemeter.com/stats.asp?site=s27radaronline" mce_href="http://s27.sitemeter.com/stats.asp?site=s27radaronline" target="_top"&gt; &lt;img src="http://s27.sitemeter.com/meter.asp?site=s27radaronline" mce_src="http://s27.sitemeter.com/meter.asp?site=s27radaronline" alt="Site Meter" border="0"/&gt;&lt;/a&gt; ? &lt;a href="http://s27.sitemeter.com/stats.asp?site=s27radaronline" mce_href="http://s27.sitemeter.com/stats.asp?site=s27radaronline" target="_top"&gt; &lt;img src="http://s27.sitemeter.com/meter.asp?site=s27radaronline" mce_src="http://s27.sitemeter.com/meter.asp?site=s27radaronline" alt="Site Meter" border="0"/&gt;&lt;/a&gt; ? - Radar Style & Beauty EditorIf you’ve got it girl, flaunt it! is known for dressing conservatively on the red carpet and off, so we were delightfully surprised to see the star flaunting her fabulous figure and enormous assets at the Paris premiere of One for the Money on Tuesday night. Wearing a stunning Maria Lucia Hohan gown that showed off her beautiful back and covetable cleavage, the actress dropped jaws as she sashayed down the red carpet.She finished off the look with Rene Caovilla sandals, Sutra earrings and a Judith Leiber clutch.Also dressed in impeccable fashion was at the London screening of A Dangerous Method. The Brit babe paid homage to her homeland, wearing a rich red Burberry Prorsum gown that also bared her back.For all the best, worst & wackiest fashions of the week, .RELATED STORIES: ? Radar ReporterAs the world marvels at new power couple and , there’s one person who is far from happy with the ? her stepdad!At a speaking engagement in Boston on Wednesday, Bruce Jenner told the crowd: “I'm not that excited, but we'll see.""Kimberly and I have had a conversation about them and their potential relationship,” said the former Olympian, who is thought to be most worried about the soon-to-be twice divorced Kim jumping into a relationship so quickly.Bruce’s cold reaction to the new romance is a sharp contrast to that of his wife, as , publicity-hungry Kris Jenner is thrilled about having the Grammy winner as a potential son-in-law.“She loves that they’re together and thinks Kanye is a huge step up for Kim after her marriage to Kris Humphries,” a source told RadarOnline.com. “Dating Kanye puts Kim in a whole new stratosphere. Kris was making a few million dollars a year, but Kanye is a world-wide multi-millionaire superstar.”Meanwhile, Kim’s little sister Khloe agrees with Bruce, and is concerned about Kim jumping . "Khloe just wishes that Kim wouldn't get involved with anyone for at least a year," revealed an insider close to the family."Kim isn't even divorced yet and Khloe is extremely worried that Kris (Humphries) is going to try and attempt to use her new relationship as ammunition to score a bigger settlement.”?RELATED STORIES:? Radar Style & Beauty EditorFrom the Tribeca Film Festival to the street of Los Angeles, stars were dressed to rock and shock on Monday - and RadarOnline has all the photos in our daily fashion feature.When Chanel throws a soiree, the chic factor is always at a high! The French fashion house invited its fashionable friends to the Tribeca Film Festival Artist Dinner, where Naomi Watts and Rose Byrne both got beautiful in chic Chanel dresses. Indie darling Chloe Sevigny was also at the event, opting to wear an ivory lace Shumaq number with shoes from her collection for Opening Ceremony.Vanilla Ice called, Lacey Schwimmer - and he wants his harem pants back!The Dancing diva stepped out in Los Angeles wearing some tacky slacks, which didn’t need to be resurrected from 1991.Other fashion flops included Eva Mendes, who was in the red with her scarlet Gucci gown at the TFF premiere of Last Night and Madonna, who sported some overly shredded denim in NYC.See all the best and worst looks of the day, ? - Radar Style & Beauty EditorFrom the swankiest film festivals, movie premieres and red carpet events to the city streets, Hollywood’s hottest stars were dressed to rock and shock on Monday in the best and worst fashions ? and has all the photos in our daily feature. is ready for a comeback in more ways than one!? After keeping a low profile for several years, the South African sexpot is back and than ever with two upcoming blockbuster films to promote. The Academy Award winner hit the 21st Annual Gotham Independent Film Awards sponsored by euphoria Calvin Klein in NYC, showing off her luscious legs in flapper fashion with her dramatically lowcut Gucci halter dress. She finished off the look with gold sandals and an Alexander McQueen clutch. Other notable a la mode at the opening night festivities included Elizabeth Olsen in Valentino, Lake Bell in Vivienne Westwood RED and Jennifer Carpenter in Marc Jacobs.Talk about a sci-fi socialite! Beer heiress definitely grabbed attention at the in a far-out, plastic armor look, while glammed up in Stella McCartney and rocked one of her own Posh frocks.For all the rest of the best and worst looks of the day, .RELATED GALLERIES:?If you've got about $11 million dollars to drop on a new home, than we have just the place for you!Former Friend David Schwimmer put his Mediterranean-style Hancock Park mansion on the market this Friday and RadarOnline.com has all the photos and details about the impressive property! The 9 bedroom, 7 bathroom 11,000 square foot mansion resides in the swanky Hancock Park neighborhood of Los Angeles and features such luxuries as five fireplaces, a butler area, a wood-paneled library, screening room and two powder rooms as well as a pool, tennis court, pavilion and guest house.The listing is featured on .The sprawling home was originally built in the 1920's and was designed by Koerner & Gage architectural firm, who also designed Beverly Hills City Hall., Chloe, with wife Zoe Buckman in May 2011.RELATED STORIES:? - Radar Style & Beauty EditorNew York Fashion Week is in full-swing, and some of Hollywood’s hottest stars are sending their collections down the catwalk, so there’s no better time to honor the sexiest and most talented celeb designers. has photos of stars who not only have hot bikini bodies, but also crave-worthy clothing lines!Former Spice Girl Victoria Beckham has one of the most exclusive clothing lines on the market. Her Victoria Beckham collection is oh-so-expensive and totally Posh!And Bootylicious bikini babe Beyonce knows how to rock designer duds to perfection -- and also how to design them. The mom-to-be and her mother Tina design their House of Dereon together.And who knew that reality television stars could transition into designing women so easily? Kim Kardashian, Whitney Port and Lauren Conrad all have successful clothing lines.And talk about sisterly style! Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen, along with Sienna and Savannah Miller, teamed up to launch their lines.What other hot stars have their own clothing lines? Click to find out.?Dexter star Michael C. Hall has a secret new girlfriend and has exclusively learned she is 15 years his junior.The 40-year-old actor has been having secret trysts with Vanessa Abrue, a Showtime staffer, and the two have been going to great lengths to keep the relationship low-key since they started dating in March - just three months after his ex, Jennifer Carpenter, filed for divorce from him."No one would ever suspect these two were together because she isn't what anyone would expect Michael to be with," the insider said. "They hardly go out together but when they do it's always with a group of people so no one would suspect he's with someone."According to the source, Vanessa brags about dating Michael to her friends but uses the code names "Ginger" or "my friend" when she speaks about him in front of other people.The young brunette bears a striking resemblance to Hall's 31-year-old ex-wife and Dexter co-star, Carpenter, who he was married to for nearly two years."Vanessa would constantly talk about Michael texting her at all hours of the night but said she thought it was all worth it," the source told ."They mostly hang out at Michael's house, but when she does go out in public with him it's only with others and she walks at a distance."Vanessa, 25, has also worked on the television show Weeds but has been a staffer on Dexter since last season, and spends so much time with Michael that people think she is his assistant."It's more like Michael, Vanessa and a few others that work on Dexter that are not actors. They are all close to Vanessa's age," the insider said."When they all hang out at Michael's, Vanessa would always stay the night with him but I don't think Michael realizes how much Vanessa talks about him to friends."Another source tells that they think Michael dating Vanessa is "gross" because he is so much older than she is but believes that he is "going through a midlife crisis dating a twenty-something."The insider says that no one says anything because Michael, who battled cancer last year, is fun to hang around with and gets them into showbusiness events.As for rumors that Michael was dating blonde beauty Julia Stiles, who also starred on Dexter last season, the insider said that was just a ruse and they were never together."The Julia Stiles speculation last season was an 'inside' lie created to use Julia as a scapegoat and throw people off," the source said."Vanessa even mentioned Julia as a scapegoat at one point."Michael has been married twice - first to Amy Spanger, which ended in 2006 after three years and then he eloped with Carpenter in 2008 but they filed for divorce in December 2010.RELATED STORIES: ?Kim, Kourtney and Khloe Kardashian appeared Wednesday on Good Morning America, where they discussed Kim's recent gala wedding and the rumors they'll be having babies -- in stereo.Of her marriage to NBA baller Kris Humphries, Kim said that the presence of reality cameras have made for some of "the best home movies."She said, "We always say we feel so fortunate to have all these memories caught on tape for us to look back on for years."Kim said she was "actually really calm" during her wedding last month."I wish I had more time to really enjoy the wedding because there is so much going on," she said. "You are running around and now I look back and think it all happened so fast and I wish I had more time!"As for the proposal, she said she "was so shocked that Kris even allowed one camera in there when he proposed to me, because that was something I didn't think he would really ever do -- I was not expecting that at all."Now that the knot is tied, the obvious question is, when will Kim -- and/or her sisters -- again be hearing the pitter patter of little feet?GMA anchor Robin Roberts tackled the issue head on, asking the sisters,"Word on the street is, you guys are in a race to see who's gonna get pregnant first -- is there any truth to that?"Said Kourtney: "I think it'd be fun if it was all at the same time."Not so fast, said Kim."I don't know how realistic that is," Kim said. "I kinda wanna enjoy my marriage for a little bit, and just enjoy each other, and whatever is meant to be will be."Khloe added that she could envision a scenario where the magazines would try and spin the situation as the sisters trying to outdo one another."I hate how they make a positive thing into something negative," she groused.Watch the video on RadarOnline.comKardashian's wedding and reception was taped for a two-part E! special airing in October; Keeping Up With the Kardashians airs Sundays at 10/9c on E! RELATED STORIES:? would NEVER have admitted in divorce papers that was not his biological child, says the woman who married him after he divorced .In the wake of erroneous reports that Robert's divorce papers somehow proved his paternity of Khloe, is setting the record straight in a new interview with and makes it clear that Robert hid the fact that Khloe was not his biological child, after catching wife Kris cheating on him.“He would never say in court documents that Khloe wasn’t his,” Jan said on Friday, in response to the well-known fact that Robert listed Khloe as his biological child in his divorce papers."He would never do that to Khloe. He loved her," Jan told RadarOnline.com. "She’s always been treated the same. In fact, he treated her even better than the other kids."Jan stunned the entertainment world this week when both she and Robert's next wife, his widow Ellen, independently revealed Kardashian told them that Khoe was not his biological child.His wife Kris was cheating during the marriage and Robert told his two subsequent wives that he was not having sex with Kris.Jan made her comments in a blockbuster interview with Star magazine, which also tracked down Robert's widow, Ellen Kardashian, who confirmed her story, saying Robert made similar comments to her.Khloe's outrage over the remarks struck many as strange, as she has openly questioned if she is a Kardashian, even turning the question into an episode of the family's TV show in 2009.Both Jan and Ellen were aware that in Robert's divorce papers from Kris he listed Khloe as one of his biological children, but both women reveal that proves only what a decent man he was, and that he did not want to subject Khloe to a DNA test. He made it clear that even though he believed he was not her biological father, he considered himself her dad. and he didn't want to drag her into a court battle. with her siblings to see if they have the same biological father.While some media outlets have tried to contend that the divorce papers "prove" Robert was Khloe's biological father, both Ellen and Jan say that simply isn't the case and because they were married to Robert after the papers were filed, they knew all about it and admired Robert for not putting it in the papers, despite his hatred for Kris Jenner."Robert was embarrassed that Kris was running around," Jan told RadarOnline.com on Friday. "He hated her so much. I heard it all the time."In this week's Star magazine, both Jan and Ellen give full details about Kris' affair and how Robert covered up the Khloe paternity scandal.Both women also confirm that Khloe has openly questioned her paternity throughout her life.RELATED STORIES: ? Movie Actor Daniel Radcliffe Hugh Jackman Johnny Depp Robert Pattinson Ryan ReynoldsMovie Actress Anne Hathaway Emma Stone Jennifer Aniston Julia Roberts Reese Witherspoon Movie Star Under 25 Chloe Moretz Daniel Radcliffe Emma Watson Rupert Grint Tom Felton Movie Bridesmaids Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 The Help Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides Transformers: Dark of the Moon Network TV Drama 'The Good Wife' 'Grey’s Anatomy' 'House' 'Supernatural' 'The Vampire Diaries' TV Drama Actor David Boreanaz Hugh Laurie Ian Somerhalder Nathan Fillion Patrick Dempsey TV Drama Actress Blake Lively Ellen Pompeo Emily Deschanel Eva Longoria Nina DobrevNetwork TV Comedy 'The Big Bang Theory' 'Glee' 'How I Met Your Mother' 'Modern Family' 'Two and a Half Men' Album of the Year 21 by Adele 4 by Beyonce Born This Way by Lady Gaga Femme Fatale by Britney Spears Own The Night by Lady Antebellum Male Artist Blake Shelton Bruno Mars Eminem Enrique Iglesias Justin Bieber Female Artist Adele Beyonce Katy Perry Lady Gaga Taylor Swift? Radar Style & Beauty EditorFrom the streets of NYC to the red carpet, stars were dressed to rock and shock on Monday in the best and worst fashions and has all the photos.Katie Holmes was dressed to thrill at the 6th Annual Drama Desk Awards in NYC, rocking an fabulous fuchsia ensemble from her own collection. The bigscreen babe rocked a Holmes & Yang crepe de chine blouse with a pleated skirt with a black clutch and heels, scoring herself the best look of the day.Just another manic Monday a la mode for Lady Gaga!? The sassy singer, who was busy promoting her latest album Born This Way, wore or should we say didn't wear one barely-there ensemble after the next. Other notable looks included Jennifer Lopez in Zac Posen and Rose Byrne in Peter Pilotto, while fashion felons of the day included Chloe Sevigny and Jessica Biel. RELATED STORIES:?Sure, everyone from Jeremy Lin to Kris Humphries to Chloe Sevigny was in the house to watch the Knicks and Nets battle at Madison Square Garden, but no one took the limelight from proud parents Jay-Z and Beyonce.The A-listers stepped out Monday night in their first public appearance since Bey , Blue Ivy.The 30-year-old Houston-born Dreamgirls stunner wore a yellow shirt and black pants, showing no extra girth since having her first child January 7. Jay-Z played it casual in a grey top and khaki pants, and the pair looked like the happiest of couples.? While Lin turned in a fine effort with 21 points, 9 assists and 7 rebounds, it was the Nets -- buoyed by Humphries’ 14 points and 14 rebounds -- to prevail. Fun fact: Jay-Z is a part-owner of the Nets.?RELATED STORIES:?David Letterman had a full house with three queens on Tuesday's edition of The Late Show, conducting an interview with the Kardashian sisters, Kim, Kourtney and Khloe.The highlight of the interview centered around -- what else? -- newlywed Kim's oft-celebrated tush, as the sisters brought Dave the famous X-ray of Hollywood's most-talked-about derriere, proving false the rumors she’s had implants in her caboose."Is that painful, to have a butt X-ray?" the Indiana funnyman asked the socialite, who said, "No, you just kind of lay there.""Kind of like my honeymoon," Dave wisecracked.A touch of sibling rivalry filled the air when Khloe complained about Kim's fanny-friendly genetics."That's where all of the fat goes -- right to her a**!" Khloe complained. "All she does is eat junk food, and all it does is go to her booty -- nowhere else!"Kim explained that she has an extra hard time keeping the pounds off when she's in the Big Apple."New York kills me," she said. "I'm here for a couple of months and it's just the death of me ... those nuts on the street corner ... I put on an extra 10 pounds every time."“Well thank God we got to the bottom of that, you know what I’m saying?” Letterman joked.Also in the interview, Kim said her recent wedding was a combination of magic and stress."It was a lot of fun," she said. "I just had no idea how hard it was to plan a wedding... if that was my job, I'd go crazy."Kardashian's wedding and reception was taped for a two-part E! special airing in October; Keeping Up With the Kardashians airs Sundays at 10/9c on E!RELATED STORIES:? - Radar Senior ReporterKim Kardashian graced the cover of a magazine “makeup free” and her sister Khloe followed in her footsteps Thursday -- without the aid of photoshop!The 27-year-old hit a gym in Los Angeles sans war paint, showing what women really look like without makeup, and has the photos.Dressed in an all black outfit, the youngest of the Kardashian trio of sisters looked serious as she headed into her workout.Khloe has stayed out of the scandalous spotlight lately, since the Kardashian family has come under fire following Kim’s from her NBA star hubby Kris Humphries after just 72 days of .Khloe and her husband, LA Lakers star Lamar Odom, had a romantic dinner at The Little Door in Los Angeles the night before she hit up the gym to work off the calories, and she was looking her usual glamorous self.RELATED STORIES: ?Khloe is not a Kardashian!Robert Kardashian's ex-wife and widow have come forward in a Star magazine exclusive in which they both claim that the late Kardashian expressed his doubts about the paternity of Khloe."Khloe is not his kid -- he told me that after we got married," Jan Ashley, 63, the woman who married Robert after Kris Jenner, revealed to Star."He just kind of looked at me and said [it] like it was a matter of fact. He said, 'Well, you know that Khloe's not really a Kardashian, don't you?' And I said…'OK,' and that was it."Ellen Kardashian, 63, married Robert in 2003 just two months before his death, after dating for nearly six years -- and she has also come forward after eight years of silence to "tell the truth" about the Kardashian family."Khloe brought it up all the time," Ellen told Star. "She looked nothing like the rest. She was tall, had a different shape, light hair, curly hair. Didn't look anything like the other three children."And while Kris recently admitted in her new book that she cheated on Robert during their marriage, both Jan and Ellen said they've always known she cheated, and so did Robert."Robert did question the fact that Khloe was his," Ellen said. "Any normal man would if they knew their wife had cheated on him."Since Robert's death in 2003, Ellen fell on hard financial times -- filing for Chapter 7 bankruptcy in 2010 and last October the home that she and Robert shared in Indian Wells, Calif. was sold after going into foreclosure.But in a final bombshell, Ellen claims Robert told her that he and Kris weren't even sleeping together at the time Khloe was conceived."[But] he never would have considered a DNA test," Ellen concluded. "He loved her very much."To read the full, explosive story, pick up a copy of Star magazine -- on newsstands Thursday.?RELATED STORIES: ? isn’t sugarcoating it -- she never liked .The wife of Dallas Maverick , appearing on The Tonight Show Tuesday, explained how the New Jersey Nets forward stuck his foot in his mouth the very first time they met, and how it foreshadowed, for her, how his whirlwind marriage to sister Kim was not meant to be (72 days, to be exact).?? "When I met Kris the very first time, I had just landed in New York and it was late at night ... and he was in Kourtney and Kim's suite,” Khloe said, setting the stage for Hump’s massive faux pas. "And I went in there to say, ‘Hi’ because Kim was like, ‘Oh, I wanna introduce you to my friend,'” she recalled. “They'd just started dating. And you know, one of the first things that came out of his mouth -- like within the first five minutes -- was, 'So, how much you getting paid to fake your marriage? Like how long are you gonna keep this up for?'"Khloe, 27, admitted she was put off by the implication her marriage to the then-Los Angles Laker was no more than a publicity stunt. “I was like, ‘Dude, I don’t know if you’re trying to make me laugh,’” she said, adding Kris "just rubbed me the wrong way. “So, ever since then, I had a very defensive wall brought up."Khloe said that while her bad blood with Kris would go on to cause some dissention with older sister Kim, she felt it was better to be honest than tell Kim what she wanted to hear.? “I’m gonna be a good sister ... but I can’t lie and say this is perfect if I feel in my heart I just didn’t agree with it,” she explained.? The beauty’s reality show, Khloe & Lamar, airs Sunday on E! At 10/9c.RELATED STORIES:?Khloe Kardashian’s got a good sense of humor -- even when it comes to herself.The wife of Lakers forward Lamar Odom was not at all upset by Saturday Night Live's of her and her sisters with a skit titled "Kim's Fairytale Divorce" special.The socialite wrote on her Twitter page late Sunday: "Ha! I just saw the SNL skit they did and I could not stop laughing.... LOL ... Its SNL... They r supposed 2make fun Its not who we are&I know that."The skit cast Nasim Pedrad as Kim, who said she was not upset at the abrupt end of her marriage to Kris Humphries because "I'm single and there's an NBA lockout."Watch the video on RadarOnline.comIn related news, the real Kim in Los Angeles from Minnesota late Sunday, wearing all-black except for a leopard skin scarf. She met for two hours Sunday at estranged husband Kris Humphries' lakefront Minnesota home with Pastor Joel Johnson, who officiated the couple’s August wedding ceremony.Related Stories:?Khloe Kardashian's week from has taken another dramatic turn.The 27-year-old reality star's husband of more than two years, Dallas Mavericks Lamar Odom, had a wild night with strippers at a notorious Washington D.C. strip club on January 8, has exclusively learned.Multiple eyewitnesses have told RadarOnline.com that Odom dropped hundreds of dollars on dancers and at one point was sprawled out in a dimly lit corner of Stadium Club strip club, a venue that bills itself as a "five star dining and premier gentleman's club experience.""Strippers were grinding on him," the onlooker said in an exclusive interview.He attended the seedy club with Mavericks' teammates Shawn Marion and Delonte West in the hours before the 2011 NBA champions were honored by President Barack Obama in a ceremony at the White House on January 9.Another club-goer told RadarOnline.com: "Lamar looked to have about 500 one dollar bills in his hand and he gave all of the money to the dancers through-out the night. He made sure the girls were well taken care of. He was throwing money at the women."At one point, the eyewitness said Odom, 32, even went into a private room with one stripper who was a "Khloe look-a-like!""That's where the VIPs go when they don't want to be seen publicly with a stripper," the source at the venue said."Lamar disappeared into the back of the venue where the private rooms are. He was there for quite awhile, but eventually came back to hang with the strippers in the main area again. The stripper that gave him most of his lap dances was a complete Khloe look-a-like."While Odom cavorted with the women, Khloe was home alone at the couple's swanky at the Dallas W Victory Hotel & Residences. That night, she Tweeted: "Thunder in Dallas... And Lammy is in DC. I guess ill cuddle with leopard tonight :) awww my blankey :)"Stadium Club, in the Langdon Park neighborhood of D.C., offers all-nude lap dances from $40 to as much as $300, including some in private rooms with beds.Several strip-clubbers posted Tweets about Odom's visit, too.@IamBentleyEvans wrote, "Oh oh Lamar Odom gon (sic) be at Stadium. Khloe can sleep well tonight.? The girls r too pretty and not muscular enough for him."Another person even Tweeted Khloe to forewarn her that her husband was apparently up to no good.@Dai_laSoul wrote, "Lamar Odom at stadium n dc ACTING BAD @KhloeKardashian."It's been a tumultuous week for Khloe, who is facing from her late father Robert Kardashian's ex-wives that she isn't a biological Kardashian.Jan Ashley, the woman who married Robert Kardashian after he split from Kris Jenner, told the latest issue of that Khloe was not Robert's blood daughter."Khloe is not his kid -- he told me that after we got married," said Ashley, 63. "He just kind of looked at me and said [it] like it was a matter of fact. He said, 'Well, you know that Khloe's not really a Kardashian, don't you?' And I said...'OK,' and that was it."Ellen Kardashian, 63, who was married to Robert at the time of his death in 2003, backed up Ashley's claims."Khloe brought it up all the time," she told Star. "She looked nothing like the rest. She was tall, had a different shape, light hair, curly hair. Didn't look anything like the other three children."However, as , mom Kris Jenner has vigorously denied the two women's claims. “It just gets weirder and weirder: I have never heard such crap in my life. I mean, I was there!” Kris told GMA. “I gave birth, I know who the dad was.” (Interestingly, Kris didn’t get specific as to who the dad was!)?RELATED STORIES:?The controversy over Khloe Kardashian's paternity continued growing Thursday, with neither side backing down: While Kris Jenner was on GMA denying Star's exclusive report quoting Robert Kardashian’s ex-wife and widow, Jan Ashley and Ellen Kardashian respectively, the women stood firm behind their claims. “It just gets weirder and weirder: I have never heard such crap in my life. I mean, I was there!” Kris, clad in a sleek black get-up, told GMA. “I gave birth, I know who the dad was.” (Interestingly, Kris didn’t get specific as to who the dad was!)The “Momager” continued, “Everything’s good. We’re all good -- don’t worry about it,” adding Khloe’s fair hair color to her sister’s dark hairdos have made for a long-running “family joke” regarding her paternity.But it was far from a family joke, say both of Robert's ex wives, who personally observed Khloe talking about it for years and heard Robert talk about it directly. Star spoke again to Ellen, who said that she had many conversations with Robert Kardashian about it ? and that its not a question whether he said it or not ? she heard it with her own ears! Despite the reality TV family’s denials, Ellen's made it very clear that Robert didn’t want to take a DNA test; and that despite the fact that Kris cheated on him, he loved Khloe very much, which is all that mattered to him.In addition, Jan reconfirmed that Robert told her point blank that "Khloe is not mine" -- and told the same thing to ET Wednesday. Both women said they observed Khloe going around saying she did not believe she was a Kardashian.An irate Khloe took to Twitter Wednesday, saying, "The audacity you have to mention my father’s name like this! Should be ashamed of urself! I let a lot of things slide but this one is really low… YOU ARE DISGUSTING! (yes you know who YOU are)."Despite her outrage Wednesday, Khloe once made the issue a storyline on their TV show when she took a DNA test in 2009 on camera. (Interestingly, she only did it with her mom? -- and NOT her siblings!)"Khloe is not his kid ? he told me that after we got married," Jan, the woman who married Robert after Kris Jenner, revealed in this week’s Star. "He just kind of looked at me and said [it] like it was a matter of fact. He said, 'Well, you know that Khloe's not really a Kardashian, don't you?' “And I said…'OK,' and that was it."For more on this exclusive story, check out this week’s edition of Star magazine, on newsstands now. RELATED STORIES:? - Radar Legal Editor hasn't let her move to Dallas derail her plans to get pregnant, and the reality TV star is now interviewing fertility doctors in Texas, is exclusively reporting.Khloe and hubby have been trying to get pregnant for more than a year. She had been getting fertility treatments in Los Angeles, but when Lamar was abruptly traded from the Lakers to the Lone Star State, Khloe immediately began researching top fertility specialists in Dallas. "Khloe has been meeting with fertility doctors in Dallas, and Lamar has been going with her to several appointments. It makes sense for her to have a fertility doctor in Dallas, as well as Los Angeles. Khloe very much wants to have a baby with Lamar, and their inability to get pregnant has had its rough moments, but this has only made their relationship stronger," a source close to the situation tells us. Cameras have been with Khloe and Lamar ever since their move to Dallas, and their struggle to get pregnant will be featured on their own E! reality spin-off show. "Khloe wants to shine a light on this very sensitive subject. Khloe has received such a warm welcome in Dallas, and she thinks that the move may actually help her get pregnant. Khloe is constantly asked when she is getting pregnant, it just made sense to let viewers know what is really going on," the friend says. Lamar's Dallas Mavericks played the Los Angeles Lakers at the Staples Center on Monday night, and his wife was in attendance, along with her momager, and stepdad . (The Dallas Maverick's lost the game.)Follow 's Managing Editor David Perel on Twitter at RELATED STORIES: ? - Radar Assistant Managing Editor is concerned that the timing of her sister, 's new romance with , is going to hurt her with , is exclusively reporting., Kim was snapped slinking out of West's NYC apartment last Thursday morning wearing the same outfit she was wearing on her date with the hip hop star on Wednesday.Despite reports that say Kim and Kanye started dating , sources tell that Humphries claims that it has been on/again off/again and the Grammy award winning hip hop star for much longer."Khloe just wishes that Kim wouldn't get involved with anyone for at least a year," a source close to the family tells . "Kim isn't even divorced yet and Khloe is extremely worried that Kris is going to try and attempt to use her new relationship as ammunition to score a bigger settlement. Khloe doesn't want her sister to get hurt again and she is extremely concerned about cheating allegations that have been made against Kanye in the past. Kim is extremely vulnerable, and the last thing she needs is to have her heart broken."As , Humphries wants to know if Kim spent any money on West while they were married. Even though California is a no-fault divorce state if a spouse spends money on a lover while married the other person is legally entitled to recover those funds."Kris absolutely wants to know if Kim spent money on Kanye while he was married to her. If Kim took Kanye out to dinner, bought him any gifts, etc., Kris wants to know how much she spent, if anything at all. Under the law in California, Kris is legally entitled to that money and he deserves it, if it can be proven," an insider told .RELATED STORIES: ?It's always snarky in Philadelphia.At least that was the case for reality superstars Kim and Kourtney Kardashian when they were mimicked after a recent appearance on the local Fox morning show Good Day to promote their upcoming Sears clothing line.Co-anchor Mike Jerrick couldn't stop snickering at the fashionista duo, mimicking their high-pitched voices and the shoulder-padded jackets they were wearing in the spot."Can they still hear us?" he joked, while co-host Sheinelle Jones smacked him and made mea culpas for her co-host’s politically incorrect (yet funny) demonstration."I love them, I think they're stunning," Jones said.Jerrick called the incident "just another foot in mouth" on Thursday adding, "I have mad cow disease or something -- I must."The gorgeous sisters appeared via video link from New York, where they're promoting their line at Fashion Week. In the meantime, Kim’s recent wedding and reception was taped for a two-part E! special airing in October.Keeping Up With the Kardashians airs Sundays at 10/9c on E!RELATED STORIES:?Just to clarify, isn’t really seeing a marriage counselor again ? it’s just !The returned to the Atlanta set of Tyler Perry’s The Marriage Counselor on Friday, looking more somber than usual ? and has the photos. The reality show bombshell, who usually has a wide smile slapped across her face for the cameras, donned a black leather jacket as she walked around with her script in hand.After in Minnesota with her estranged husband, , getting some real counseling with the Pastor that married the couple, Kim jetted over to Atlanta earlier this week to film her part in Perry’s movie. As , Perry’s decision to cast the reality vixen -- who shocked the world when she from Humphries, her husband of 72 days, last week -- has irked a number of his fans, who took to the message board of his website to vent.Said one poster: “I believe it is against your better judgment to have Kim Kardashian star as a supporting actress in your upcoming movie. You still have a moral responsibility to your supporters to maintain a level of integrity when it comes to casting your movies. I have to boycott this film if Kim Kardashian is part of this project.”Another wrote, “Well Tyler, since you are going ahead and keeping Kim Kardashian in your new movie in spite of how your fans feel tells it all. You’re beginning to sound arrogant. I felt so proud of how hard you work and how connected you are to your fan base. I don’t see it as your fans telling you what to do and feel like we can because of our undying support, but dang TP, Kardashian does not fit.”Kardashian and Humphries tied the knot August 20 in that was broadcast on E!; the wedding racked up huge ratings, averaging 4.4 and 2.7 million viewers, respectively, on consecutive nights.RELATED STORIES:? - Radar Senior ReporterKim Kardashian’s 72-day marriage that many are saying was all a , has earned her the title of the “Most Ill-Mannered Person of 2011.”The reality star received the dubious distinction from the “for making a private matter public and disrespecting the institution of marriage.”Kim married Kris Humphries in a lavish, in August and then on Halloween in a move that blindsided her husband.As RadarOnline.com exclusively reported, and claims there isn’t anything real about the entire Keeping Up with the Kardashians clan.While Kim was found to be the most ill-mannered, Kate Middleton was awarded the title of Best-Mannered Person of 2011 “for the poise and dignity with which she conducts herself in the public spotlight.”"The annual selections are based on the demonstration of dignity, honor, and respect," said Elizabeth Anne Winters, NLJC National Director. "Kate Middleton, Duchess of Cambridge, was chosen for the exemplary manner in which she has conducted herself, before and after her marriage to Prince William."Also on the list were Justin Bieber “for consistently showing courtesy to his fans,” and Taylor Swift “for inspiring young people with her music and her manners.”Do you think Kim Kardashian was the most ill-mannered person of 2011? Tell us in comments!RELATED STORIES:?"Today is the day!" an excited Kim Kardashian wrote on Saturday morning. Just hours away from her wedding to Kris Humphries, the bride-to-be wants her fans to share in her big day, and has opened up a virtual guestbook."I can’t believe it’s finally here! Thank you so much to everyone who made this day happen!!!!!" Kim wrote."Even though you can’t all be there to help me celebrate today, it would mean so much to me if you would sign my ‘Virtual Wedding Guestbook‘ by leaving a comment below!You guys mean the world to me, and I want to thank you for all your love and support. I love you!!!Xo Kim"Kim and Kris will wed later today at a $29 million estate in Montecito, Calif.? Nearly 500 guests, including Justin Bieber, will be attending.Check back to RadarOnline.com throughout the day for all the latest news about Hollywood's wedding of the year.RELATED STORIES:?’s mother, , wants to make it very clear that her daughter won’t make any money off her .In a new interview with Rob Shuter on HDNet’s Naughty But Nice With Rob, the momager that Kim, 31, didn’t make any money off her short lived marriage to .“First of all Kim didn’t make millions off her wedding,” Kris says on the show, which airs Thursday at 8:00 p.m. on HDNet.“She made less than $1 million from selling pictures and the wedding special was part of her show deal with E!. She will not be selling a divorce interview and plans to continue to donate to charities.”As , Kim filed for divorce on October 31, after just 72 days of marriage.Kardashian and Humphries, a free agent during the NBA lockout, in a lavish wedding with stars like Ryan Seacrest and among the 400 guests in attendance. The TV special chronicling the nuptials, E!'s Kim's Fairytale Wedding: A Kardashian Event, aired last month to huge ratings, averaging 4.4 and 2.7 million viewers, respectively, on consecutive nights.RELATED STORIES:? has decided not to file a formal police report against Christina Cho, the woman who threw a on the reality star last month on the red carpet at the event for her new fragrance, is exclusively reporting.As , Kim was flour bombed by the PETA activist at the swanky West Hollywood hotel, The London. The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department took a non-criminal battery report of the , and Cho was briefly taken into custody, but wasn't arrested. In the days after the attack Kardashian hinted that she was going to against Cho, but she has had a change of heart. "Kim ultimately decided that it was going to be more trouble than it was worth, and she didn't want to give Christina Cho a platform for her to promote whatever agenda she obviously has," a source close to the reality star tells Radar. "Kim is just too busy and has so much going on with her life to file the report, meet with investigators and possibly testify at a trial if Cho was going to be charged. Remember, only prosecutors can determine if charges are ever going to be filed, that decision was never up to Kim. "What Kim could have done is filed a formal complaint or a police report and then that would have been turned over to prosecutors to determine if there was enough evidence to charge Cho. Kim is already going through exhausting and taxing , she doesn't want to get involved in yet another legal drama." As , Kim's younger sister Khloe severed ties with PETA after it was revealed that Cho had close ties to the group. "Not only has PETA lied to the public, but they have proved that they support this kind of behavior. I’ve been a vocal supporter of PETA for a long time, but I have also been very vocal about anti-bullying, so this was a huge disappointment for me. As you all know, I don’t condone violence and bullying and what happened last Thursday was just that.. I'am absolutely disgusted by [PETA’s] behavior. Everyone is entitled to their own beliefs and opinions. I personally don’t wear fur but that doesn’t mean I am going to force my views on anyone else, ESPECIALLY by violating them," Khloe said on her blog shortly after the attack.Meanwhile, "Kim has moved on from the attack and has taken appropriate precautions to ensure her safety. Kim is in a really good place right now enjoying her new romance with Kanye and she doesn't want to dwell in the past," the source says.?RELATED STORIES:? - Radar Legal EditorSay it isn't so!Kris Humphries is telling his friends and family that his soon to be , Kim Kardashian's reality shows are way more fiction than fact, is exclusively reporting.A source close to the situation tells RadarOnline.com a particularly damning anecdote, which would seem to give great weight to the NBA free agent's claim."Kris was with Kim and her family in Bora Bora, and he playfully threw her in the sea. Kim emerged from the water, freaking out, with cameras rolling, shrieking that she had lost one of her diamond earrings, which are worth $75,000," the source says. "Kim was crying hysterically, but then miraculously, one of her younger sisters found the earring in the ocean, where the group had been swimming. It was probably 6-8 feet deep, and Kris commented to Kim how unbelievable it was that the valuable earring was found as the current in the ocean in Bora Bora is very, very strong. Kim just said, 'I know,' with very big smile on her face."Although Kris' eyes have been opened, and he's been left with a nasty taste by the whole experience of his whirlwind relationship and 72-day marriage, he does still have respect for one member of the family."Kris says that Kim's reality shows are a total sham. He doesn't think there is anything real about the shows at all. Kris thinks that Khloe is truly the only authentic one among the Kardashian sisters," The source says. "Even though they didn't get along, at all, he respects that Khloe does what she wants. If Kim and Kris had stayed together, and he had gotten traded to Dallas, like Lamar did, he knows Kim wouldn't have moved with him like Khloe is doing."?RELATED STORIES: ?She sold one roommate's hair to a wig company and swapped another's birth control pills with breath mints. Yeah, it's safe to say Chloe (Krysten Ritter) is the housemate from hell. "If Holly Golightly and Satan had a child, it would be her," says Krysten, but there's a method to Chloe's madness. On the edgy new comedy Don't Trust the B---- in Apartment 23, her plan is simple: collect rent money from bright-eyed new arrivals to New York, make their lives miserable, chase them away and keep the profits.Chloe's newest mark is June (Dreama Walker), an Indiana girl whose job and company-supplied apartment fall through when her boss is hauled off to jail. Desperate for a place to live, she moves in with Chloe, who promptly swindles her. But June soon catches wind of the scam and turns the tables on Chloe, selling her furniture and earning a little respect. "June outsmarts Chloe, and that's part of what makes her like me in the end," Dreama explains. "It's a special little dynamic we have." The result makes for one of Manhattan's most unlikely living situations ? and that's saying something. While many consider this Krysten's breakout role, the real scene-stealer is James Van Der Beek. He plays himself ? or, rather, a self-centered, blowhard version of himself ? who is Chloe's ex-boyfriend and current BFF. "This character is really sweet, but he's completely narcissistic," says the Dawson's Creek alum. "I said, 'Don't ever be afraid of offending me. Let's always go for what's funniest and see where it takes us.'" Though James is having a ton of fun on set, there is a downside to playing a guy who tells boring Hollywood stories and uses his old Dawson's flannel to seduce women. Says James, "Every once in a while I come back home to my daughter and say, 'Sorry for what I'm doing to the family name, kiddo.'"?by Radar StaffTragedy has hit close to home for Lamar Odom and Khloe Kardashian.The classy Los Angeles Lakers forward and his socialite wife each tweeted memorials late Monday, after a 15-year-old boy died just days after he was hit by a motorcycle that was hit by a car Odom was a passenger in.The accident took place last Thursday in Jamaica, Queens, New York, where Odom was in town for a family funeral.After the tragic death, Odom tweeted: "Thank you for your support and prayers! My thoughts and prayers are with the young boys family."Khloe, on her page, wrote: "My heart/soul goes out 2every1 in pain from any suffering. Pray 4 all of the angels surrounding us constantly. May our spirits stay strong. Above all, love each other deeply, b/c love covers over a multitude of sins. Offer hospitality 2 1another without grumbling 1 Peter 4:8-9."Therefore, do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own. Our love will give us strength! Love conquers ALL!"?RELATED STORIES:? - Radar Assistant Managing Editor, the Hookah Lounge manager that alleges , met with two LAPD detectives Tuesday morning at an undisclosed location for more than an hour, is exclusively reporting. Lohan, 25, was driving away from the Sayers Club in Hollywood almost two weeks ago in her new black Porsche when she says she was blocked by a horde of paparazzi and club patrons from the nearby Hookah Lounge. As Lindsay was trying to make a U-turn among the crowd at the late night hotspot, she allegedly hit Kamal and his car and then sped off.Kamal was interviewed by for more than an hour, and his attorney, Mark Geragos, was present. "Thaer gave an honest and accurate account of what happened to him that night," a source close to the situation tells RadarOnline.com. "He wants Lindsay to be held accountable for her actions. She shouldn't have driven away after hitting him, period. He doesn't want her to get away with it. Thaer feels that Lindsay's camp has bullied him by making up stories that he was being investigated for insurance fraud. He was steadfast in his conviction that he has never committed any crime, and hasn't been investigated ever for fraud. Thaer is fearful for his family back in Iraq, he has done nothing wrong, he didn't break any laws. He served with the United States Army for six years and seven months, and has a spotless record. He obeys all laws, and he wonders why Lindsay doesn't." As , media reports circulated last week that Kamal was being investigated for insurance fraud in eight different cases for staging fake car accidents and filing bogus claims. "Let's be very clear about this, Thaer Kamal has never been investigated for insurance fraud, fraud, staging car accidents or anything even remotely related to any illegal criminal behavior," a source close to the situation told RadarOnline.com. "Thaer doesn't have a criminal record, has never been arrested and this is the first time he has ever filed a claim with his insurance company. Thaer is disgusted that these false reports have been made."Kamal's attorney is looking into who has been slandering their client. "Mark will be investigating who made those false statements about Thaer being the focus of insurance fraud investigations and will take the appropriate legal action against those responsible for the false and defamatory comments if necessary," the insider said.Geragos turned over the surveillance video that captured the alleged hit and run, as well as Thaer's medical records. "The detectives were very receptive and interested in Kamal's statement. It was done professionally, and away from prying eyes so that Thaer can try and maintain some sort of privacy because of security concerns for his family in Iraq," the source says.Lindsay is scheduled to appear for Thursday in connection with her necklace theft case. Despite media reports that Lindsay is in the clear from this incident, our law enforcement source says, "that isn't accurate because this is still an ongoing criminal investigation. It's a fluid situation and the detectives will be conducting further interviews with eyewitnesses."UPDATE: "Lindsay will be appearing in an episode of Glee," Lindsay's rep, Steve Honig said in a statement but would offer no further details about when the episode would be airing.RELATED STORIES:? &lt;a href="http://s27.sitemeter.com/stats.asp?site=s27radaronline" mce_href="http://s27.sitemeter.com/stats.asp?site=s27radaronline" target="_top"&gt; &lt;img src="http://s27.sitemeter.com/meter.asp?site=s27radaronline" mce_src="http://s27.sitemeter.com/meter.asp?site=s27radaronline" alt="Site Meter" border="0"/&gt;&lt;/a&gt; ?UPDATE: RadarOnline.com has learned that court documents confirm that James Driskill is still legally married to Nina Hauser but he filed for divorce on July 7, 2011.Up until May, he was listed as living with Nina at their Santa Monica home, but in the months since then he is down as having a different Santa Monica address with Chloe.Singer Chloe Lattanzi has cancelled her wedding to fiance James Driskill just weeks before she was due to walk down the aisle because she found out he’s still married.RadarOnline.com has learned that Olivia Newton-John's only child pulled the plug on the wedding plans after she was tipped off that her fiance was leading a double life, ."Chloe is devastated and so is her mum," a family friend told New Idea.Lattanzi, 25, had been dating martial arts instructor Driskill since 2009 and got engaged last year, much to the delight of the troubled singer's parents.Her actor dad Matt Lattanzi praised Driskill for "saving her from a tortured place," after his daughter had battled emotional problems including anorexia."Right now she is not in that place, especially because of this very balanced relationship she's in (with James Driskill). In fact, I think she is able to express herself about these dark places with more confidence."When the couple first met, Driskill had been separated from his wife of four years, Nina, for four months, but Chloe's friend has now broken the news to her that Nina and James never divorced and still lived together for financial reasons.Driskill, who teaches martial arts at the Kron Gracie Jiu Jitsu Academy in Los Angeles, hasn't tried to hide his relationship with Lattanzi and there are romantic photos of the pair on his Facebook page, which gives no indication that he is already married.Lattanzi recently caused a scandal with her disturbing music video, Play With Me, which portrayed graphic scenes of suicide and drug-taking.In one scene, she can be seen in a hotel room as a man sits alongside, ignoring her. Lying on the bed in a black dress, she keeps whispering the words "notice me."?RELATED STORIES:?We're still hopelessly devoted to Olivia Newton-John.The Grease beauty, who turned 63 last month, shined on the red carpet at a photo call for her upcoming comedy A Few Best Men at the sixth International Rome Film Festival in Rome, Italy Friday.Fun fact: Thirty years ago, John was nominated for a Grammy for her hit single Physical.A Few Best Men -- starring John, Rebel Wilson and Xavier Samuel -- hits theaters next year.?RELATED STORIES:?Reese Witherspoon's has caused ripples of disgust among animal lovers and has outraged PETA, RadarOnline.com can report."No matter how much Reese paid for that bag, the animals paid a much higher price," Nicole Dao,?Media Liaison for the?PETA (People for the?Ethical?Treatment of?Animals) told RadarOnline.com.As RadarOnline.com , the Water For Elephants star has been spotted several times in Los Angeles carrying a?Chloe Paraty python and leather purse, which she clearly didn’t buy in California because the popular snakeskin has been banned from sales there since 1970."We can't imagine that she'd wish to contribute to this hidden suffering, especially for something as frivolous as a fashion accessory that can be replicated with no bloodshed," said Dao, who went on to explain the grotesque manner in which pythons are impaled on trees and skinned alive for their sought-after scales.This is not the first time America's sweetheart has upset the animal rights organization.PETA nominated Reese for the title of 'World's Sexiest Vegetarian' in 2005, she ultimately lost out to Carrie Underwood and Chris Martin, which was a good thing as just a year later the actress went on the Ellen DeGeneres show and gushed about how "everything tastes better with bacon," .Witherspoon's Walk The Line star Joaquin Phoenix certainly won't approve of her latest?$3,820 purchase. The actor recently narrated an undercover video for PETA campaigning against the exotic skins industry."Exotic animals are mostly unknown to us and so is what they suffer before being turned into belts and bags," the Golden Globe winning actor revealed in a heartfelt video message on ."Every year millions of reptiles are slaughtered so that handbags, belts and shoes can be made from their skin," said Phoenix. "The animals'?welfare?is not a concern to those who hunt, poach and slaughter them."Joaquin called out the major fashion houses, such as?Christian Louboutin?and?Jimmy Choo, to choose compassion over cruelty by eliminating exotic-skins from their collections and using cruelty-free alternatives like Nike and H&M do."These days, it's easy to have a look that kills without killing - with fake snake, mock croc, python pleather, and other designer items that pay tribute to the beauty of these animals without massacring them," Dao told RadarOnline.com.According to the California Penal Code Section 653o it is unlawful to import python into California for commercial purposes, to posses with intent to sell, or sell within the state, however, it is not illegal to purchase python in another state and carry it over.You can watch Joaquin’s horrifying video expose here on RadarOnline.com ? Be warned though, it is NOT for the faint-hearted.?RELATED STORIES:?It is hard to imagine these bigscreen bombshells looking anything less than gorgeous, so when they undergo major make-unders for the art of acting, it is impossible not to take notice. has photos of the sexiest Hollywood stars who have played ugly, stripped down and showing off their flawless figures in the skimpiest of swimsuits.? Click the next sentence to see sexy stars who have played ugly.Gwyneth Paltrow is one of the most gorgeous gals in Tinseltown.? With her long, blonde locks, flawless face and rock hard bikini body, the Academy Award winner always dazzles on the big screen-and on the beach!? When Gwyn appeared alongside Jack Black in Shallow Hal, piling on the pounds with the help of a fat suit, she proved to the world that she wasn't just another pretty face!Playing ugly scored bigscreen beauties Charlize Theron, Hilary Swank and Halle Berry Oscars.? While South African sizzler Charlize played down her looks as a homely serial killer in Monster, and hard-boded Hilary pretended to be a boy in Boys Don't Cry, Halle toned down her model looks as a poverty-stricken single mother in Monster's Ball.Sexy songbird Mariah Carey bounced back from her box office flop Glitter, playing a frumpy social worker in the Academy Award nominated movie Precious.And Jessica Alba may be one of the most smoking hot bikini babes on the beach, but she wasn't dropping jaws An Invisible Sign Of My Own, playing dowdy math genius Mona Gray.RELATED STORIES:? &lt;a href="http://s27.sitemeter.com/stats.asp?site=s27radaronline" mce_href="http://s27.sitemeter.com/stats.asp?site=s27radaronline" target="_top"&gt; &lt;img src="http://s27.sitemeter.com/meter.asp?site=s27radaronline" mce_src="http://s27.sitemeter.com/meter.asp?site=s27radaronline" alt="Site Meter" border="0"/&gt;&lt;/a&gt; ? Radar Style & Beauty EditorFrom a swanky fashion show in the South of France to the streets of Beverly Hills, Hollywood's hottest stars were dressed to rock and shock in the best, worst & wackiest fashions and has all the photos in our daily feature.Chanel kicked off the Cannes Film Festival with their annual Cruise fashion show, attracting the A-list likes of Blake Lively and Rachel Bilson.? The Gossip Girl scored the top style slot, rocking a sizzling hot sequin blazer with a micro-mini tulip skirt, while the former OC star was close behind in her Chanel Couture strapless top and leather short look. Both babes finished off their fab looks with Christian Louboutin heels.Dude looks like a homeless! Steven Tyler left his lady clothes at home, stepping out in Beverly Hills in transient threads. The Aerosmith frontman may be an American Idol when it comes to his career, but not with his couture!Keira Knightley was a Valentino vixen on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, while Sarah Jessica Parker looked Sexy in the City in a powerful purple Halston gown at the Robin Hood Foundation Gala but what was up with her hair?What other stars were dressed to rock and shock on Monday?? Click to find out.?Last week Kiehl's Since 1851 hosted a bash at their Santa Monica store to celebrate the skincare company's Earth Day collaboration with Dexter's Michael C. Hall and Big Love's Chloe Sevigny and has all the photos.Both Chloe and Michael designed Limited Edition labels for Kiehl's Rare Earth Deep Pore Cleansing Masque, with 100% of the company's net profits going to benefit the Waterkeeper Alliance, which is a grassroots organization that protects and purifies community waterways.Other celebrity guest included True Blood's Sam Trammell, The Hills stars Kristin Cavallari and Stephanie Pratt, One Tree Hill's Robert Buckley and Brothers & Sisters babe Gilles Marini.To purchase Chloe's Limited Edition Rare Earth Pore Cleansing Maque for $23.00 and to purchase Michael's .RELATED STORIES:? &lt;a href="http://s27.sitemeter.com/stats.asp?site=s27radaronline" mce_href="http://s27.sitemeter.com/stats.asp?site=s27radaronline" target="_top"&gt; &lt;img src="http://s27.sitemeter.com/meter.asp?site=s27radaronline" mce_src="http://s27.sitemeter.com/meter.asp?site=s27radaronline" alt="Site Meter" border="0"/&gt;&lt;/a&gt; ? Radar Style & Beauty EditorHollywood's hottest stars continued to flock the French Riviera for the Cannes Film Festival, hitting the town dressed to rock and shock in the best, worst and wackiest fashions.Bar Refaeli didn't let her recent split from Leonardo DiCaprio get in the way of her Cannes plans! While the Hollywood hunk was busy yachting around with Blake Lively, the Israeli supermodel was hitting the town in bombshell fashion, wearing Roberto Cavalli's uber-chic designs to perfection.Goldie Hawn had a boob blunder at the de Grisogono dinner, where Quincy Jones made a statement at pink.And Kirsten Dunst lightened up her look for the Melancholia photocall on Thursday, wearing a divine and sunny Chloe Chiffon dress with Jimmy Choo heels.Who else rocked and shocked on the fashion front at Cannes over the past few days? Click to find out.? &lt;a href="http://s27.sitemeter.com/stats.asp?site=s27radaronline" mce_href="http://s27.sitemeter.com/stats.asp?site=s27radaronline" target="_top"&gt; &lt;img src="http://s27.sitemeter.com/meter.asp?site=s27radaronline" mce_src="http://s27.sitemeter.com/meter.asp?site=s27radaronline" alt="Site Meter" border="0"/&gt;&lt;/a&gt; ? &lt;a href="http://s27.sitemeter.com/stats.asp?site=s27radaronline" mce_href="http://s27.sitemeter.com/stats.asp?site=s27radaronline" target="_top"&gt; &lt;img src="http://s27.sitemeter.com/meter.asp?site=s27radaronline" mce_src="http://s27.sitemeter.com/meter.asp?site=s27radaronline" alt="Site Meter" border="0"/&gt;&lt;/a&gt; ? &lt;a href="http://s27.sitemeter.com/stats.asp?site=s27radaronline" mce_href="http://s27.sitemeter.com/stats.asp?site=s27radaronline" target="_top"&gt; &lt;img src="http://s27.sitemeter.com/meter.asp?site=s27radaronline" mce_src="http://s27.sitemeter.com/meter.asp?site=s27radaronline" alt="Site Meter" border="0"/&gt;&lt;/a&gt; ? &lt;a href="http://s27.sitemeter.com/stats.asp?site=s27radaronline" mce_href="http://s27.sitemeter.com/stats.asp?site=s27radaronline" target="_top"&gt; &lt;img src="http://s27.sitemeter.com/meter.asp?site=s27radaronline" mce_src="http://s27.sitemeter.com/meter.asp?site=s27radaronline" alt="Site Meter" border="0"/&gt;&lt;/a&gt; ? &lt;a href="http://s27.sitemeter.com/stats.asp?site=s27radaronline" mce_href="http://s27.sitemeter.com/stats.asp?site=s27radaronline" target="_top"&gt; &lt;img src="http://s27.sitemeter.com/meter.asp?site=s27radaronline" mce_src="http://s27.sitemeter.com/meter.asp?site=s27radaronline" alt="Site Meter" border="0"/&gt;&lt;/a&gt; ? Radar Style & Beauty EditorIt was a glam-packed night in NYC as stars like Jessica Alba, Ashley Greene and Naomi Watts hit the annual CFDA Awards dressed to rock and shock in designer duds and has all the photos.Victoria's Secret supermodels Alessandra Ambrosio and Miranda Kerr sexed up the style scene with craftily cutout dresses. While Ale rocked a red hot Prabal Gurung gown, Orlando Bloom's wondrous wife looked drool-worthy in Michael Kors.Kirsten Dunst experienced a fashion flop wearing Patrik Ervell menswear a la mode, while Chloe Sevigny wore an ensemble from her collection with Opening Ceremony, which failed to impress.As for wacky, leave it to Lady Gaga to up the shock factor! The sassy singer wore a custom created look from Mugler with towering platforms, arriving fashionable late of course!What other stars were dressed to rock and shock at the CFDA Awards and what were they wearing? Click to find out.? &lt;a href="http://s27.sitemeter.com/stats.asp?site=s27radaronline" mce_href="http://s27.sitemeter.com/stats.asp?site=s27radaronline" target="_top"&gt; &lt;img src="http://s27.sitemeter.com/meter.asp?site=s27radaronline" mce_src="http://s27.sitemeter.com/meter.asp?site=s27radaronline" alt="Site Meter" border="0"/&gt;&lt;/a&gt; ?From the red carpet to the streets, stars were out in full force this weekend dressed to rock and shock -- and has all the photos in our weekend roundup.If you’ve got it, flaunt it girl! Katharine McPhee showed off her sexy side at the opening night of the Broadway musical How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, wearing a skintight flesh-toned Herve Leger bandage dress, with matching patent peep-toes. The American Idol looked nearly nude in the incredibly sexy but tasteful look, scoring herself the best look of the weekend.They say “Don’t hassle The Hoff,” but the former Baywatch star made it nearly impossible to resist when he hit the Los Angeles premiere of Hop, dressed in Easter Bunny attire. Living large in a white suit, light pink blouse and bow tie, the wacky actor landed himself worst dressed status.Olivia Munn and Dita Von Teese both looked beautiful in blue. While Munn looked magnificent in Marchesa at The Comedy Awards, the burlesque babe rocked Jenny Packham to Perez Hilton’s birthday bash.The stunning Keira Knightley had an a la mode miss at the Jameson Empire Awards, wearing an unflattering open-shouldered Rodarte frock, while Vanessa Hudgens had a little too much slither in her style at a Sin City party celebrating her Sucker Punch movie.What other stars rocked and shocked over the weekend? ? &lt;a href="http://s27.sitemeter.com/stats.asp?site=s27radaronline" mce_href="http://s27.sitemeter.com/stats.asp?site=s27radaronline" target="_top"&gt; &lt;img src="http://s27.sitemeter.com/meter.asp?site=s27radaronline" mce_src="http://s27.sitemeter.com/meter.asp?site=s27radaronline" alt="Site Meter" border="0"/&gt;&lt;/a&gt; ? Radar Style & Beauty EditorThese bikini bombshells always steam up the sand, showing off their boobalicious bikini bods in the skimpiest of swimsuits.? has photos of the sexiest supermodels, bigscreen babes and reality stars in this special photo feature, honoring the most ample assets from the Pacific to the Atlantic.? There is no question why Brooklyn Decker, Bar Refaeli and Doutzen Kroes get paid the big bucks to strip down into the skimpiest of swimsuits?they all fill out their bikini tops in ample fashion! Kim Kardashian and Audrina Patridge have some of the most covetable curves in Hollywood, and the reality show stars aren’t shy about showing them off in totally sexy swimwear. And Courteney Cox, Kate Gosselin and Denise Richards are all Hollywood supermoms, who have a lot more to be proud of than their adorable children.? RELATED STORIES: ?? - Radar Style & Beauty EditorFrom the red carpet to the streets, stars started sporting festive fashion early this year dressed to rock and shock in the best and worst fashions ? and has all the photos. looked white hot and sophisticated at the Swarovski Elements and Rodeo Drive holiday lighting ceremony in Beverly Hills. rocked a white Carolina Herrera Resort 2012 frock that featured a black belt with snaky heels and Swarovski bling, finishing the look off with smoky eyes and nude lips. Oh ! The Hole rocker was dressed to shock at the NYC premiere of Hugo, baring her boobs in a dangerously lowcut red satin gown. Also at the premiere was the darling Chloe Moretz, who was dressed to thrill in Dolce & Gabbana. also grabbed a lot of attention on the fashion front, hitting her Barney’s New York window unveiling in a custom-made Chanel frock and then hitting the 39th in a super slitty Stephane Rolland gown ? which showed off her sheer panties.For all the rest of the best and worst dressed stars of the day, .RELATED GALLERIES:?It's refreshing to hear that some celebrities listen to the voice of public opinion, especially when it comes to animal welfare. has decided to ditch her python skin purse after the cruel accessory sparked outrage from PETA, can exclusively report.As , the Water For Elephants star has been spotted several times carrying a Chloe Paraty python and leather purse, which she clearly didn't buy in California because the popular snakeskin has been banned from sales in the state since 1970.Upon hearing the news from Radar that Reese had the purse, the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals rushed a copy of their of the exotic-skins industry to Witherspoon.? The video was coincidentally hosted by her Walk the Line co-star, Joaquin Phoenix.The graphic video describes how snakes and other reptiles are often skinned alive and how they suffer slow, painful deaths for the sake of fashion."Thankfully, Reese has just informed PETA that she will no longer carry the bag," PETA Media Officer Wendy Wegner told Radar."We've long known Reese to be a kind person, so we're pleased - and not surprised - that she is hanging up her python bag for good," PETA Senior Vice President Lisa Lange went on to say."We hope Reese's honest mistake will serve as a reminder for all of us to be extra-certain that what we're buying is mock crock or fake snake."According to the California Penal Code Section 653o it is unlawful to import python into California for commercial purposes, to posses with intent to sell, or sell within the state. However, it is not illegal to purchase python in another state and carry it over.RELATED STORIES:?Is going to be animal rights activists next target?America’s sweetheart has been sporting a brand new designer bag around town made out of an exotic animal!? Witherspoon has been snapped several times carrying the uber-luxe Chloe Paraty python and leather purse, which she clearly didn’t buy in California because the popular snakeskin has been banned from sales in California since 1970 ? and has the details.According to the California Penal Code Section 653o it is unlawful to import python into California for commercial purposes, to posses with intent to sell, or sell within the state, however, it is not illegal to purchase python in another state and carry it over.Reese’s python Chloe bag is for sale in black for $3,820.Do you think Reese should be rocking a python purse?? Leave your comments below.RELATED STORIES:? - Radar Reporter’s to the Dallas Mavericks has fallen flat as he has been demoted to the D-League, is reporting.Once a star forward for the Los Angeles Lakers, ’s? husband will now be playing for the Mav’s affiliate team, the Texas Legends, on Saturday in nearby Frisco, according to ESPN.com.The move is a major slap in the face for 32-year-old Odom, who as had recently canceled games to be by the side of his ailing father, Joe, back in L.A. and has not hit the court with his teammates since February 20.? “He has been excused to tend to a family matter. He will rejoin us after the [All-Star] break,” said Coach Rick Carlisle at the time, but instead the reality star didn’t arrive back in Dallas until Wednesday, where team owner Mark Cuban reportedly met with Odom and his agent, Jeff Schwartz, to work on a timetable that would ease him back into the fold after his weeklong personal leave.Mavericks point guard Jason Kidd revealed that Lamar’s inconsistent effort and extended absence was worrying for his teammates. "Trust factor is always big," Kidd said, according to ESPN. "For that, he's going to have to earn it with a lot of the guys. But we all give second chances, third chances. For that, we just want him to be him and be comfortable and play."Meanwhile, an NBA source revealed to that the root of Lamar’s problems was most likely in his head, not his shooting hands. “He's been struggling with the offense on the Mavericks. The Lakers ran an offense called ‘The Triangle’ under former coach Phil Jackson, and he was Lamar's coach the entire time,” said the insider.“No one else in the league plays an offense like that so he's been struggling with playing with the Mavericks, who play a more traditional offense.? Plus because of the NBA lockout and his late trade, he missed out on the benefit of training camp to learn the ropes.“However, the Lakers aren't playing that this year under new coach Mike Brown, so it is possible that Lamar could have struggled anywhere,” he explained.Khloe and Lamar were delighted to Dallas in December to escape the family drama and media spotlight that surrounded them back in Los Angeles.RELATED STORIES: ? - Radar Style & Beauty EditorFrom the red carpet of the hottest movie premieres to the city streets, Hollywood's hottest stars were dressed to rock and shock on Tuesday in the best & worst fashions, and has all the photos.Magnificent metallic a la mode was on hand at the Los Angeles premiere of Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows. dropped jaws in a stunning Marchesa gown from the Resort 2012 collection.The big screen bombshell rocked Christian Louboutin heels with the floor-sweeping, cowl-backed dress. Noomi Rapace also dazzled at the star-studded event, wearing and awesomely embroidered Valentino gown. was looking extraterrestrial in the city, hitting Live with Kelly pairing her rose-hued Valentino number with bright aqua tights! She finished off the look with Jimmy Choo heels and House of Lavande bling.Other style scores included in Lanvin at the Pirelli Calendar Gala Dinner and at the Paris premiere of Hugo.For the rest of the best and worst dressed stars of the day, .RELATED GALLERIES:? - Radar Style & Beauty EditorFrom the red carpet of the hottest movie premieres and the swankiest soirees to the city streets, Hollywood’s hottest stars were dressed to rock and shock on Wednesday in designer duds ? and has all the photos and details in our daily fashion feature! did it again! The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo star sexed up the New York premiere of her highly anticipated movie, this time, rocking a short and sexy Prabal Gurung number.? She paired the cutout dress, which featured a sheer overlay back, with Christian Louboutin heels., Rooney’s big sis, was also styled in fab fashion to support her. The gorgeous actress rocked a fem and flirty Christian Dior pleated cocktail dress with Brian Atwood heels and a Miu Miu clutch. was up to his old attire antics at the American Idol auditions in Los Angeles. The Aerosmith rocker sported shredded lace-up bell-bottom jeans with snaky cowboy boots, a silk top and lots of feathers.Other best dressed babes included in Yves Saint Laurent at The ZOE Media Group Launch and Paula Patton in Dolce & Gabbana at the Rio premiere of Mission: Impossible ? Ghost Protocol, presented by Paramount Pictures and Coke Zero.For all the rest of the best and worst fashions of the day, .RELATED GALLERIES:?Soap actor Nick Santino committed suicide after being overcome with guilt for putting down his healthy beloved pit bull, Rocco.The Brooklyn born performer had become embroiled in a doggy dispute with his neighbors at his upper West Side condo, according to .Santino apparently felt under pressure to get rid of his pooch after the policy in the building changed disallowing any new pit bulls to live there.Although as a current resident Santino was legally allowed to keep Rocco in the building, he was allegedly harassed by neighbors for months who wanted the dog gone from the building and made life difficult for him.So last Tuesday, on Santino’s 47th birthday, he had his best friend euthanized.But the struggling actor, who has had parts in All My Children and Guiding Light, immediately regretted his decision and his grief was too much, leading him to take his own life.Santino’s body was found on Wednesday after overdosing on pills. He had made a final call to an ex-girlfriend at 2 am before killing himself.“Today I betrayed my best friend and put down my best friend,” Santino wrote in a suicide note according to his friend Stuart Sarnoff.“Rocco trusted me and I failed him. He didn’t deserve this.”Santino adopted Rocco from a shelter several years ago and had posted on his Facebook that he “did not rescue Rocco, Rocco rescued me.”RELATED STORIES:? &lt;a href="http://s27.sitemeter.com/stats.asp?site=s27radaronline" mce_href="http://s27.sitemeter.com/stats.asp?site=s27radaronline" target="_top"&gt; &lt;img src="http://s27.sitemeter.com/meter.asp?site=s27radaronline" mce_src="http://s27.sitemeter.com/meter.asp?site=s27radaronline" alt="Site Meter" border="0"/&gt;&lt;/a&gt; ? &lt;a href="http://s27.sitemeter.com/stats.asp?site=s27radaronline" mce_href="http://s27.sitemeter.com/stats.asp?site=s27radaronline" target="_top"&gt; &lt;img src="http://s27.sitemeter.com/meter.asp?site=s27radaronline" mce_src="http://s27.sitemeter.com/meter.asp?site=s27radaronline" alt="Site Meter" border="0"/&gt;&lt;/a&gt; ? Radar Style & Beauty EditorFrom the beaches of Malibu to the stands of the France Open and the Monaco Grand Prix, stars were dressed to rock and shock this holiday weekend and has all the photos.Katie Holmes spent her Memorial Day chasing Suri around the beach in Malibu, rocking totally chic a la mode. The bigscreen babe paired casual cutoff shorts with a fitted blazer, summery booties and a floppy hat, a perfect look for a Hollywood party on the beach.Painfully skinny LeAnn Rimes traveled home from Mexico without her pants on, while Chelsea Handler hit a Hamptons Magazine party, looking like she just rolled out of bed.Blake Lively spent the weekend in the South of France, looking white hot wearing a flirty mini, BCBGeneration sandals and a See by Chloe bag, while Kim Kardashian and The Ring made a marvelous appearance a la mode in Monaco.What other stars were dressed to rock and shock over the holiday weekend? Click to find out.? - Radar Style & Beauty EditorThe fiercest fashionistas and top models kicked off New York Fashion Week on Wednesday night, hitting the 2012 amfAR New York Gala at Cipriani Wall Street dressed to rock and shock in designer duds ? and has all the wardrobe winners and sinners!Famed fashion designer Roberto Cavalli was honored at the annual fundraiser, so it wasn’t shocking that several of the guests were decked out in gowns from his collection! , , and all dazzled in Cavalli, showing off their hot bods to perfection in gorgeous gowns.Though half the age of many of the guests, sported a la mode of the evening.? The troubled starlet was not looking her very best, wearing a bright white Tom Ford sleeved dress with grey Prada pumps.As for wacky, definitely grabbed attention in a fire-engine red dress ? bizarrely adding a gold, shiny shower-cap looking hat!For all the rest of the best, worst & wackiest dressed stars at the amfAR New York Gala, .RELATED GALLERIES:? - Radar Features EditorFrom the , Hollywood’s hottest stars were dressed to rock and shock in the best, worst & wackiest fashions ? and RadarOnline.com has a roundup of all the wardrobe winners and sinners in our weekly feature!Summer is coming and things are getting a little bit brighter! rocked our favorite getup of the week, nailing the neon look during on a Brazilian talk show. The delightful diva paired a neon green Michael Kors sleeved skin-hugging mini with hot pink Casadei heels and Jacqueline Nerguizian jewelry. also sported standout style with hot hues in NYC, pairing a hot pink Michael Kors sleeved top with a powerfully patterned Etro skirt.Who missed the mark with their colorful clothing choices?? Ice-T’s wife proved that she doesn’t need a to show off her crazy curves in barely legal style!? The reality show star walked her dog in NYC, leaving little to the imagination with her ill-fitting neon orange tracksuit.It’s her birthday and she can wear ? or not wear ? what she wants to!? As for wacky, , , celebrated her 26th like a queen!? Wearing a tiara that perfectly matched her studded jacket, the chart-topper decided to leave her pants at home.For the rest of the best, worst & wackiest dressed stars of the week, .RELATED STORIES:??? - Radar Style & Beauty EditorWho was dressed to rock and shock at the 2012 People’s Choice Awards? has photos and details about all of the wardrobe winners and sinners at the annual awards show in our trademark Best, Worst & Wackiest Fashion feature! Though several star were right on the a la mode mark with their fabulous fashion choices, we have to say that a certain Disney star deserves the top haute honors. is embracing her beautiful body and we are loving every second of it! The young singer showed off her covetable curves in a coral-colored sweetheart strapless Marchesa gown that featured gorgeous embellishment.Beware of the lampshade look, ladies! We love , but the House M.D. star seriously looked like a floorlamp in a fringed hemline embroidered dress with her hair in a super high bun on top of her head.The most talked about hairstyle look of the evening was courtesy of Fashion Police host herself. Though her colorfully cool dress was on our haute list, we couldn’t get over her granny grey hair. Hopefully this is a tress trend that won’t catch on anytime soon.The most delightfully out of character stars of the night were and .? While the Twilight star wore a gorgeously goth, custom-made leather and lace DKNY dress with Brian Atwood heels, The Hunger Games hottie showed lots of skin in a dramatically daring Viktor & Rolf Spring 2012 mesh swirl masterpiece.As for trends, it looks like this award’s season is going to be quite colorful!? A bevy of beauties like in Elie Saab, and Whitney Cummings in ASOS looked gorgeous in green, while donned hot pink, and ravished in red and Busy Phillips and Jennifer Lawrence looked beautiful in bright blue.For the rest of the best, worst & wackiest fashions of the 2012 People’s Choice Awards, .RELATED GALLERIES:? &lt;a href="http://s27.sitemeter.com/stats.asp?site=s27radaronline" mce_href="http://s27.sitemeter.com/stats.asp?site=s27radaronline" target="_top"&gt; &lt;img src="http://s27.sitemeter.com/meter.asp?site=s27radaronline" mce_src="http://s27.sitemeter.com/meter.asp?site=s27radaronline" alt="Site Meter" border="0"/&gt;&lt;/a&gt; ? &lt;a href="http://s27.sitemeter.com/stats.asp?site=s27radaronline" mce_href="http://s27.sitemeter.com/stats.asp?site=s27radaronline" target="_top"&gt; &lt;img src="http://s27.sitemeter.com/meter.asp?site=s27radaronline" mce_src="http://s27.sitemeter.com/meter.asp?site=s27radaronline" alt="Site Meter" border="0"/&gt;&lt;/a&gt; ? Radar Style & Beauty EditorFrom the MuchMusic Video Awards in Canada to biggest Sin City soirees, Hollywood’s hottest stars were dressed to rock and shock over the weekend in the best, worst & wackiest fashions and RadarOnline.com has all the photos in our weekly feature.Selena Gomez brought her steamy style north of the border for the Canadian awards show, rocking a super chic and sexy Burberry Prorsum mini on the red carpet. The Disney diva paired the tiny little thang with bright purple Giuseppe Zanotti peep-toes, dominating the red carpet. Also at the show, Avril Lavigne wore another Sk*er girl outfit (blah!) while Lady Gaga upped the wacky factor wearing one Versace outfit after another.Miley Cyrus experience a crop-top catastrophe Down Under, while Heidi Klum made an appearance on a German television show looking totally out of character in a crazily patterned catsuit.Kate Bosworth looked pretty in hot pink at the Life Happens premiere of the Los Angeles Film Festival, rocking a Richard Nicoll number with Chloe sandals, while Kim Kardashian showed off her crazy curves at Khloe’s 27th birthday bash, wearing a sexy Herve Leger by Max Azria bandage dress with black Christian Louboutins.What other stars were dressed to rock and shock over the weekend? Click to find out.? &lt;a href="http://s27.sitemeter.com/stats.asp?site=s27radaronline" mce_href="http://s27.sitemeter.com/stats.asp?site=s27radaronline" target="_top"&gt; &lt;img src="http://s27.sitemeter.com/meter.asp?site=s27radaronline" mce_src="http://s27.sitemeter.com/meter.asp?site=s27radaronline" alt="Site Meter" border="0"/&gt;&lt;/a&gt; ? Senior Radar ReporterNot sure what to dress your little girl up like for Halloween? How about as a pageant princess from Toddlers & Tiaras!In this exclusive hilarious video from the hit reality TV show, the pageant girls show off how to “Toddler-ify” a regular girl into a beauty queen star.Here is the list of what you need: Hairspray ? Eden Wood says “I don’t really like hairspray, I? can’t even breath when she sprays it!” Hairpiece ? Sobbing ensues when the hairpiece is clipped in Makeup ? MaKenzie says “I don’t want my eyes to look pretty and blue, blue is for boys!” Earrings ? “It hurts! You sticked me!” MaKenzie cries Spray tan ? Chloe runs screaming from the spray Flippers ? Fake teeth “My flipper is to make your smile bigger!” NiNi ? MaKenzie’s pacifier Eyebrow waxing ? “She’s a little bit nervous,” the waxing lady admits Attitude ? A MUST!Check out the video of TLC’s Toddlers & Tiaras biggest stars showing off how they get ready for their contests and how you can get ready for Halloween!RELATED STORIES:? &lt;a href="http://s27.sitemeter.com/stats.asp?site=s27radaronline" mce_href="http://s27.sitemeter.com/stats.asp?site=s27radaronline" target="_top"&gt; &lt;img src="http://s27.sitemeter.com/meter.asp?site=s27radaronline" mce_src="http://s27.sitemeter.com/meter.asp?site=s27radaronline" alt="Site Meter" border="0"/&gt;&lt;/a&gt; ?by Radar StaffTwilight was the big winner at Sunday night's MTV Movie Awards in Los Angeles, taking home 5 popcorn trophies, including Best Film.Robert Pattinson was the star of the evening, dropping the F-bomb, locking lips with co-star Taylor Lautner and collecting awards for Best Kiss, Best Fight and Best Male Performance for The Twilight Saga: Eclipse. Host Jason Sudeikis, not surprisingly, made Arnold Schwarzenegger the source of many jokes throughout the night, including one zinger: "Watch out for his next film, Pumping the Iron-er."Selena Gomez came in for a little light ribbing too - Sudeikis commented on Selena and Justin Bieber sucking face all week and warned the blushing teen to be careful as she had already swallowed three of Bieb's baby teeth!Justin Timberlake and Mila Kunis spiced things up with an on stage grope fest... After denying they are dating and insisting they are like "brother and sister."Robert Pattinson turned the air blue by dropping the F bomb and his Water For Elephants co-star Reese Witherspoon followed up with one of her own then proceeded to rip reality TV stars and celebrities that make sex tapes.But leave it to Gary Busey to steal the show as he rolled on stage to present the final award - in a giant hamster ball!The full list of the night's winners: Best Male Performance - Robert Pattinson (Twilight Saga: Eclipse)Best Villain - Tom Felton (Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - Part One)Best Fight - Xavier Samuel and Bryce Dallas Howard Vs Robert Pattinson (Twilight Saga-Eclipse)Best Jaw Dropping Moment - Justin Bieber (Never Say Never)Best Kiss - Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart (Twilight Saga-Eclipse)Best Line From A Movie- "I want to get chocolate wasted" from Grown-Ups.Best Scared As (beep) Performance- Ellen Page (Inception)Best Breakout Star- Chloe Grace Moretz (Kickass)Best Female Performance-? Kristen Stewart (Twilight Saga: Eclipse)Biggest Badass Star- Chloe Grace Moretz (Kick Ass)Best Comedic Performance- Emma Stone (Easy A!)Best Movie-? Twilight Saga: EclipseRELATED STORIES:?As the crowd cheered, Prince William and Kate Middleton visited young people in northwestern England Monday on their last official trip before they wed later in April.Under rainy skies, the couple was on hand for the official opening of the Darwen Aldridge Community Academy, an independent non-fee paying school that specializes in entrepreneurship. (The school actually opened its doors in September, 2008.)Meanwhile, new details about the guest list for the royal wedding guest continue to trickle out. As expected, many foreign dignitaries and members of Britain's aristocracy will attend the nuptials, but according to The Mail on Sunday, some unexpected celebrities, personal aides, friends and even exes also made the list.The latest celeb to make the cut is none other than Madonna's ex, British director Guy Ritchie, as well as comedian Rowan Atkinson, Daniella Helayel (the designer of Kate's royal engagement dress), and former English rugby coach Sir Clive Woodward.In a sharp break with royal tradition, Prince William has invited a number of his aides to the reception. Among them are two of his former nannies, his press officer, his private secretary and his personal secretary. Also invited is William's former headmaster from the Ludgrove School, the provost of Eton College, and William's housemaster at Eton College.The couple, who visited the Caribbean island of Mustique in the past, included some of the locals on the wedding guest list. The owners of the villa where the couple stayed, the island's head tennis coach, yoga teacher, doctor and the owner of Basil's Bar all received invitations, along with the owners of the villa where William and Kate previously stayed.Among William's friends at the wedding will be a number of former Etonians, including banking heirs James and David Jardine-Paterson, polo player Ben Vestey and his wife Chloe, and Thomas van Straubenzee, who is expected to assist Prince Harry with the best man's speech, along with his younger brother Charles.William's best friends from Gloucestershire are all on the list, including all of the Duke of Northumberland's children, polo player Captain Jack Mann, Olympic gold medalist Richard Meade, and Susanna and Jake Warren, the grandchildren of the Queen's former racing manager, the Earl of Carnarvon.Several members of William's inner circle of friends, including Guy Pelley -- who helped organize the bachelor party -- will attend the wedding along with his mother, father and two brothers; millionaire Arthur Landon and his mother Katalina will also be in attendance.\The couple's friends from St Salvator's residence hall at St. Andrew University have been asked to the evening reception. The guests include Virginia Fraser, neighbor of the couple while at St. Andrews, and former roommates Olivia Bleasdale, Oli Baker and Fergus Boyd. The Prince and Miss Middleton have also invited Sir Henry Cheape, who owns the Strathtyrum Estate in St Andrews where the couple shared a farmhouse.In a move that may surprise some people, it appears as if both William and Kate have invited their exes to the royal wedding. Rupert Finch, whom Kate dated briefly at St. Andrews and her rumored high school boyfriend, Willem Marx will attend, along with all of William's former flames: Isabella Anstruther-Gough-Calthorpe, Jecca Craig, Arabella Musgrave, Olivia Hunt and Davina Duckworth-Chad.Kate's sister, Pippa will bring her boyfriend of one year, Alex Loudon, while her brother will go to the wedding solo.Prince Harry has not revealed if he will have a date to the wedding, but The Mail on Sunday confirmed that his on-and-off girlfriend Chelsy Davy has been invited to the wedding and the evening reception.As RadarOnline.com previously reported, David and Victoria Beckham and Sir Elton John also received invitations. Two people who did not receive invitations include President Obama and wife Michelle.William and Kate will wed Friday, April 29 at Westminster Abbey.It's estimated nearly 2 billion people worldwide will watch the wedding. RELATED STORIES:? &lt;a href="http://s27.sitemeter.com/stats.asp?site=s27radaronline" mce_href="http://s27.sitemeter.com/stats.asp?site=s27radaronline" target="_top"&gt; &lt;img src="http://s27.sitemeter.com/meter.asp?site=s27radaronline" mce_src="http://s27.sitemeter.com/meter.asp?site=s27radaronline" alt="Site Meter" border="0"/&gt;&lt;/a&gt; ? - Radar Style & Beauty EditorAwards Season is heating up!Hollywood’s hottest stars hit The National Board of Review Awards Gala on Tuesday night in New York City, heating up the red carpet in the latest designer duds ? and has all the photos and details about what everyone was wearing.? is certainly going to be a staple at all the shows this season, accompanying her leading man .? The professional wrestler opted for another super sophisticated style, wearing a Marchesa gown that featured an ultra-embellished neckline with Rene Caovilla heels.? looked beautiful in a buttery yellow J. Mendel cocktail dress, while took a break from her dramatic The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo fashion, keeping it simple in a Miu Miu LBD and YSL heels.We weren’t too impressed with Shailene Woodley’s too-mature a la mode. The Descendents star wore a L’Wren Scott cocktail dress that would have been better suited for someone 10 years her senior!To find out what everyone wore to The National Board of Review Gala, .RELATED GALLERIES:?Sometimes, it’s hard to tell how old people are in Hollywood!From sexy singers and silver screen sirens to , is playing a fun “who is older than who” game with the 20 hottest stars under 25, and you will be shocked with some of the results! and compete for the same roles because of their similar looks, but the actresses are not quite the same age. Stone definitely dresses more sophisticated than Lohan and has a better reputation with the law, but is she older?’s little sisters and are still in high school, but the statuesque duo are already dressing like their big sis, while and are in the same age range and not showing quite so much skin. Can you guess who is older than who?And has one of the most soulful voices in the world and , but is she as advanced in years as a certain Disney star?Find out how old your favorite stars really are, and who is older than who, by clicking .? - Radar Features EditorHollywood’s hottest stars got all glammed up and hit the Metropolitan Opera Gala Premiere of Jules Massenet’s "Manon" on Monday night, but not everyone was dressed to thrill! has photos and details about all the stars and what they wore to the star-studded event.? Yves Saint Laurent was the main sponsor of the evening, so it isn't surprising that several stars donned gowns from the designer collection. scored the best look of the night, showing off her bombshell body in a slinky, body-skimming and back-baring gown, while also scored points for her sweetheart strapless jumpsuit belted in red.? Hugo star looked elegant in a dark blue tiered strapless gown, while looked like a matronly housewife from the 1950s in a body-drenching, sleeved style that featured a side slit.Luckily Shameless star brightened up the night, rocking a fabulous fuchsia YSL Edition Soir 12 strapless gown, which was slit in the front.And we didn’t dig ’s getup, which consisted of a strapless gown, black cape and grey gloves.RELATED STORIES: ? Yes, we were all still on Jessica Simpson baby watch and our dream of the perfect J.Crew shoe collaboration was shattered, but in the meantime we did learn a few surprising things over the weekend that make for some interesting Monday morning watercooler chatter:FashionSorry kids, the J.Crew and Manolo collaboration has been put on hold indefinitely. ()Fern Mallis says future designers should steer clear of Project Runway if they want a “real” career in fashion. ()Rachel Zoe is investing in a new members-only shopping site. Will you feel any “gilt” checking it out? ()Watch out man boobs, Simon Doonan is out to get you. ()NYC isn’t the most fashionable city in America?!? We’re callin’ faulty data on this one. ()BeautyEver wonder how much it REALLY costs to look like Kate Middleton? ()Who knew neon nail polish was illegal to make in America? ()Lauren Conrad is on the ombre hair wagon again and we’re lovin’ the pink locks! ()Miss out on Benefit Cosmetics’ hilarious training video that previewed at the Tribeca Film Festival? Here’s your chance to catch the highlights. ()Would you use a polish remover that smelled like white chocolate? From the people that brought us the caviar makeover comes a sweet treat for your nails. () LifestylePick up the new must-read book about tomboy style featuring pics of Alexa Chung. ()Meet New York’s most loveable fashion mascots. ()Check out the new dating site that matches you based on your Klout score. (Wow, now Kim K. and Kanye suddenly make sense). ()The secret’s finally out. New York fashionistas DO use their ovens for clothing storage. ()Yummy treats inspired by the Fall/Winter 2012 fashion collections? Yes please. ()CelebrityMariah Carey and Nick Cannon renewed their wedding vows in Paris on Friday (yawn). ()Guess which Hunger Games star used a fake ID to buy some booze? (Stars, they’re just like us — desperate to get good buzz over the weekend.) ()Lady Gaga‘s “Born This Way” Ball in Korea was totally a success (minus the annoying protestors). ()Rachel Zoe‘s former assistant Taylor Jacobson goes on record about her new Oxygen show, former boss and Brad Goreski. ()Blake Lively as a redheaded druggie drifter? See it to believe it. ()?get worn on the subway, watching the neon trend come to life.In the winter the voyuerism game isn’t as fun due to the proliferation of black boots and puffy coats even the most fashionable among us can abandon our sartorial sensibilities in the face of blinding winds. But it’s the first day of summer! In honor of that, let’s check out five girls who are doing summer proud and take note.?CONFIRM YOUR SUBSCRIPTIONIncoming… In a sec, you’re going to receive an email from StyleCaster asking you to click on a link to confirm your subscription to the StyleCaster newsletter.?, you are a wealth of information for the wealthiest 1/2% of the world, and your particular brand of “everyone must be as rich and awesome as me” approach is refreshingly sheltered for a superstar. Today’s edition didn’t touch upon Deepak Chopra or cooking with million dollar truffles, but we did get a day in the life of Gwen gal-pal who is actually refreshingly normal, until all of those YSL meetings start.Below 8 things we learn about Stella via GOOP: 1. Her bebe wakes up and announces things like, “Mummy I need a poo!” Gross and yet cute because it sounds British!2. Her son Beckett is heir to the empire. He’s two and is obsessed with “choosing his own trousers.”3. Las Vegas is the next Stella McCartney shop that’s going to open. 4. YSL beauty meetings are hardcore. “They come over from Paris and have an agenda from hell.” 5. She holds meetings in cars with people like Artist Dinos Chapman when she’s running late, and thinks people think her a “dweeebo” for it. Cute!6. She uses the word “major” just like us!7. She attends parents night at her kids school. No word on what she wears. 8. She calls her kids “monkeys.”Thesis: Although sweet, apparently being a mom makes even international fashion designers and children of Beatles a bit bo-ring.Photo: Andrew H. Walker, Getty Images for Stella McCartney?(a cinematic love letter to stylish older women) that recently captured our hearts and peeked our curiosity.Like the subjects of her film, Plioplyte believes that fashion is simply a happy way to get through the day. “Let’s dress up and celebrate life!” she says. “I think that dressing up makes a day better, makes one happier and lets one express oneself better.”Born in Lithuania, Plioplyte came to the states to study journalism at the University of Colorado in Boulder, and then spent a short time in Southern California, where, “I always felt a little alien,” she says. Seeking creative kinship, she took the advice of countless Americans who directed her to New York, where, upon her arrival in 2007, Plioplyte claims that she instantly “felt at home.”We talked to Plioplyte about her new project with flamboyant design duo Duckie Brown and discovered that, like her eclectic fashion sense, her artistic influences are equally as dynamic.You can watch Plioplyte’s video work on herThe Inside Source: How did growing up in Lithuania influence you as a filmmaker and visual artist?Lina Plioplyte: Lithuania is a very special place. The woods, the sea, the sun (and the lack of it) as well as my childhood memories are all part of my work and who I am. We grew up reading Greek myths instead of fairy tales, witnessing Soviet kitschy grandeur and watching dark, gritty, realistic movies by Lithuanian and Czech directors. That definitely influenced my sense of humor and need for joy, bright colors and sparkle.The Inside Source: We fell in love with your Stylish Ladies short on Tell us how that evolved?Lina Plioplyte: Several years ago I met Ari Cohen, whose blog, Advanced Style, is all about elderly stylish ladies. I always admired him. We became friends and I thought, one day, I would love to film his subjects. We started with a few videos for his blog (you can find them all on, my website), and then realized that these ladies would be amazing for a documentary. They are so inspiring. We hang out with them, visit their homes and go to events with them. My boyfriend laughs that I fit right in with the Advanced Style ladies since I dress like a kooky old lady already!Lina Plioplyte (all photos by)The Inside Source: Was fashion part of your world as a child?Lina Plioplyte: I always loved to dress-not fashionably-but weirdly. I like to express my mood through clothes and to discover how clothing affects people. My mother got into thrift shopping when second hand stores started opening in Lithuania in the ’90s.They were great outlets for kooky fashions.The Inside Source: Do you seek inspiration on and off the fashion runway? How important are the streets to you?Lina Plioplyte: I get inspired looking at textures. Architecture is a great field of inspiration for me. Nature, passers-by, Freddie Mercury, old movie stars, Mods… So many things are inspiring. Looking at things on Facebook can be inspiring. The streets are very important to me! They are definitely more important than the runway, inspiration-wise. Runway fashion shows are great for a rough idea and to admire clothes, but it feels rather unreal and unattainable. Of course, I would love a python Chloe bag, but I would rather find something weird in the Urban Jungle thrift store in the East Village.The Inside Source: Do you mix new and vintage? Who are your favorite fashion designers?Lina Plioplyte: I always mix new and vintage. Alexander McQueen is the one and only-the best fashion designer ever. He is a huge inspiration for me. I really like what Duckie Brown does too, especially after filming them. I love when clothes have stories and a deeper meaning, and they really pay attention to that. Even though they design menswear, I would wear every single piece.The Inside Source: What are five pieces in your wardrobe you couldn’t live without?Lina Plioplyte: That’s a tough one! I guess I could not live without my wonderful velvet slippers, a sparkly St. John jacket (a $10 find!), an old black nightie that is the most comfortable day dress, my three favorite rings and any scarf that I could make into a turban or any kind of headpiece.The Inside Source: What project are you working on now?Lina Plioplyte: I am just finishing a documentary about the designers Duckie Brown and I am very excited about it. I followed Steven and Daniel, the flamboyant designer duo, for half a year. I think it’s a very raw and real story about fashion, survival, life and gender. It’s very exciting because it’s my first documentary!The Inside Source:Where would we find you on a typical Saturday night?Lina Plioplyte: Probably editing at home, ha! Or at a friend’s barbeque, riding my bike, or down by Bay Ridge looking to the water… Or maybe Upstate, or at yoga…The Inside Source: What do you collect?Lina Plioplyte: Fridge magnets from trips, hippie knick-knacks, vintage teacups and saucers, rocks, random objects found in the street… and I’ve just started on old tin cans and crystals!The Inside Source: Do you use eBay?Lina Plioplyte: eBay is the best. I am on it all the time. I just bought this amazing crystal cluster and I saw a great Rod Stewart picture there too, recently. One of my favorite finds is a pair of culottes-beaded evening shorts. It was one of those no-one-noticed-how-amazing-this-is-but-me moments and I got them really cheap. I noticed that when I am stressed out, I can spend hours on eBay, just putting something like “vintage leopard” in the search bar and seeing what pops up. It’s like retail therapy, but very eclectic and unexpected.?with the list of models who were to be featured on , after images of Chloe Moretz, Elle Fanning, Hailee Steinfeld and Nyasha Matonhodze were already released, I didn’t believe it mainly because there seemed to be a newcomer theme that those others didn’t seem to fit into. But, now that the photos of Lara Stone, Mariacarla Boscono, Kristen McMenamy, and Daphne Groeneveld are out, there’s little denying it and I have to apologize for being a doubter, because they’re completely perfect.The Super Natural issue, as #6 is being pegged, draws upon the other worldly beauty of these ladies looking all melancholy, tearful, and more often than not, wearing some sort of odd headgear including a giant stuffed crow, by Pam Hogg, worn by Nyasha or sporting some religious iconography. The Mert and Marcus shot, Katie Grand styled images are so incredible, I can’t wait to flip through the full mag. Is there a more inspiring magazine being printed right now?[]?, all shot by Mert and Marcus for the mag’s Supernatural issue.The face of Miu Miu is keeping with the tearful theme for the covers, complete with Victorian lace gloves and some blingy cuffs. These covers are straight hang-above-your bed worthy. So will the last one be another it girl, or a second new model to watch?[]?, last night’s event that brought together the digital world’s finest for a full-on fashion show, we jumped at the opportunity.In support of , which helps students become start-up studs, techies rushed the doors of New York’s Armory to watch everyone from media mavens to venture capitalists strut down the runway. StyleCaster’s very own editor Susie G (or, as I like to call her, StyleCaster’s resident expert in all-things hip) styled the finale line for the show. Including illustrious sparkles from in every look, Susie carefully dressed each Silicon Alley-cat in everything from Rodebjer and Feminine & Masculine to Vans X Jesse Jo, making sure her very own pairs of and Frye boots made the catwalk cut.The best part of the event? Seeing StyleCaster’s Pres and co-founder @David_Goldberg rock the DJ booth at a contest against the likes of Courtney Boyd Myers (), Dennis Crowley (), and Fred Wilson ().Check out some shots of our lovely models backstage in the slideshow above!?, although we fall in love with everything she does from designing to just hanging around in her best.Now, photographer Peter Miszuk has posted behind the scenes shots from the Elle shoot to his blog, . See what Chloe’s like in between takes and take a peek at the amazing array of accessories that Kate Lanphear had on hand to style with.?) Drew Barrymore was hired to be the video’s director. This is the latest music video for MTV’s newest “Supervideo” series, that features young actors, instead of the musicians themselves, in videos for buzzworthy bands.This is a cinematic short that meshes the story line of the classical Broadway musical West Side Story with the stylish appeal of a modern day Grease. Grease fans should notice the shooting location for a scene in this clip is at the Los Angeles River culvertthe same location where the famous drag race scene was shot for the 1978 film.Major props go to Drew Barrymore and MTV pulling in their Hollywood connections to recruit some of the West Coast’s most promising talents like Community‘s Donald Glover, Arrested Development‘s Alia Shawkat, Kick-Ass‘ Chloe Moretz (who could almost be mistaken for ) and Teen Wolf‘s Tyler Posey.Watch the clip below and let us know what you think about Drew Barrymore’s directing chops or which gang had the best graffiti tag in the comments section![via ]?)Beyonce covers the new issue of L’Officiel Paris in celebration of its 90th issue. She looks stunning as always, but chatter is all about the fact that she voluntarily darkened her face to “get back to her African roots.” Doesn’t seem that groundbreakingly crazy to me. You? ()Word vaguely rumored on the street is that Kate Middleton will wear Erdem to officially become a princess. I love me some Erdem, but I don’t believe it. ()The Biebs shorn his locks. The hair fell like tears from a tweens eyes. ()Kenzo PR took to the Twitterverse to send Tweets that allude to the idea that Stefano Pilati is getting the boot from YSL. Sadness if it’s so. ()DOUBLE SHOT: TWEET TWEET RT @ I am feeling _______________ Freezing and sick of winter.RT @ Watch Chloe Sevigny impersonate her YouTube impersonator & reveal her axe murdering plans with HBO No seriously, watch it.RT @ Me: I look twelve today. Jess: No… No. Definitely not. You look at least thirteen or fourteen. Better than 50! RT @ A little bit of Ksubi to brighten up your life Definitely bright!RT @ So far, my favorite fall trends include: Dalmation print fur, crochet knits inspired by Roseanne’s couch, and one-size-fits-all ponchos. Random!?designer Chrissie Miller must have realized this, and gathered her friends, Jen Brill, Lesley Arfin and Scott Campbell among themto play a few rounds of every pre-teen’s favorite game, Truth or Dare. Directed by Cass Bird, Sophomore’s latest film Truth or Dare gives us a voyeuristic look at the group’s intimate get-together, and Miller sites Madonna’s 90s documentary of the same name as her inspiration. The game play ranges from girls kissing girls to awkward sex stories to sharing each others’ biggest fears, all while modeling Sophomore’s latest collection. The film is being screened in its entirety all week exclusively by , the purveyor of the evening’s liquid courage. I mean, who spills their deepest, darkest secrets while sober? ?(or as they say in St. Barth, Targt) with items ranging in price from $1.99 to $79.99. Now, generally speaking, St. Barthelemy conjures up images of all things tres cher: think Birkins on the beach, Dom Perignon on the reg, James Bond-worthy yachts teeming with James Bond-worthy girls that sort of thing. Calypso’s new collection for Target lets you look the part without breaking the bank. From casual tye-dye and frocks to crocheted and beaded and tunics, Calypso’s laidback island aesthetic offers the perfect complement to such jet-set extravagance. Check the slideshow to see some of our favorite looks from the collection, which will be available from May 1 to June 11 at all Target stores as well as Target.com.?, Lindsay Lohan jetted off to London last weekend where she may or may not have been stalking ex-girlfriend Samantha Ronson (there are conflicting reports about this). In a nutshell, photographic evidence suggests that Lindsay spent the weekend shopping at department store Harvey Nichols, coming and going from Samantha’s hotel room, and partying at hotspots like Bungalow 8- all while wearing a in royal blue python. Pretty standard. is a Paraty Tote that is similar to Lindsay’s (minus the whole exotic skins thing)?CONFIRM YOUR SUBSCRIPTIONIncoming… In a sec, you’re going to receive an email from StyleCaster asking you to click on a link to confirm your subscription to the StyleCaster newsletter.?CONFIRM YOUR SUBSCRIPTIONIncoming… In a sec, you’re going to receive an email from StyleCaster asking you to click on a link to confirm your subscription to the StyleCaster newsletter.?and get to have a slumber party-slash-pillow fight with Natalia Vodianova in Vogue, she’s the leading lady in Best Coast’s stylish new video for “Our Deal,” directed by the one and only Drew Barrymore. With the help of stylist and fashion editor Alicia Lombardini, Drew created an eclectic Romeo & Juliet meets West Side Story tale that mixed together styles from Teddy Boys of the ’50s, ’70s punk rock, ’80s hip-hop influences and classic urban streetwear. Watch the duo behind the video’s fashion discuss their creation below, and try not to miss the sick gang jackets, heavy bling and neon converse & nails.?on more than one occassion. Kane is literally the ideal choice for a pretty, young ingenue and the actress looks bright and pretty in a black and every color of the neon rainbow graduated hemline dress by the designer paired with Rupert Sanderson shoes. Moretz kept the accessories minimal which is obviously the way to go when you’re wearing that statement on your body.Are you digging this bright statement??If you ever needed a reason to walk into an store at a mall near you, now you’ve got a good one: reports that 15 year-old actress and burgeoning “It” girl will be the new face and brand ambassador of the teenage-targeted American retail chain store.This will no doubt add some cool cred to a store that offers up basics and a few fast fashions (a.k.a. nothing too groundbreaking on the style front) at pretty affordable prices, thanks to Chloe’s own personal killer style, both on and off the red carpet.“She’s extremely interested in fashion,” a spokesperson for the retailer told WWD . “She sits in the front row at all . She’ll judge contests for us and be the spokesperson for our Teens for Jeans campaign.”While there are already a few images floating on the internet of the new campaign, the official Aeropostale website holds an exclusive video campaign preview, featuring Chloe in a handful of from what we’ll assume is the brand’s new fall collection.The campaign starring the “Kick Ass” actress will officially launch in-store and online on July 16th, so don’t forget to mark your calendars.[via ]?. “I like to push the boundaries in what I wear, in that it’s new and kind of funky. I’m usually a bit different than almost everyone else on the carpet.”I can definitely agree with that — Chloe has an excellent way of maintaining her youthfulness while rocking some seriously adult labels. Never fear, she’s not some spoiled little child star — she isn’t allowed to splurge on luxury items. Of course, the perks of being an actress have given her access to some major swag. In fact, she’s more than comfortable with the big C.”Actually Chanel gave me my first two Chanel purses ever,” she said. “They’re just so classic. I love it.”Ugh, jealous! We can’t to see what else is in store from Chloe.?helped change the current trend game – are you sick of hearing minimalism,, camel and sportswear yet? Yah, we’re not either. Hannah McGibbon has Chlo in her blood, having been Pheobe Philo’s assistant during its late 90s heydey – remember all those high waisted jeans and little white dresses paired with cowboy boots?Since becoming queen bee, she’s ensured that she’s not losing any of the spirit of the true French woman that Chlo embodies, evidenced once again the . It’s 70s, clean, there’s some camel, it’s certainly still sportswear, and in case you’re wondering the bags are sick. Yep, the kids are still all here, and no one wants them going anywhere anytime soon. This time there’s a color blocked poncho and a Mongolian fur coat. Has this French working woman gotten a shot at a weekend in Morocco?Click through and let me know your thoughts on paisley.?CONFIRM YOUR SUBSCRIPTIONIncoming… In a sec, you’re going to receive an email from StyleCaster asking you to click on a link to confirm your subscription to the StyleCaster newsletter.?, the 36-year-old (who knew?) dishes about her seemingly rebellious style, her, and why she’s scared of the internet Google, especially. She also mentions a time she tripped in a pair of Balenciaga boots, resulting in an emergency room visit and a dentist appointment to fix her broken front teeth. Chloe still calls them some of her No hard feelings, I see. Check out the flirtatious and borderline seductive (there’s ) as the Big Love star gets cozy in front of the camera with a photo shoot, lensed by Cedric Buchet.?, and to launch its designer collective. The store was stocked with the 34-piece collectionconsisting of the most popular dresses from Target’s 17 past designer collaborationswhich includes , Luella Bartley, Thakoon, and Richard Chai. Friends and fans of and Target turned out in droves, and Michelle Trachtenberg, Olivia Munn and Lake Bell shopped along with the crowd. Chloe Sevigny and Liv Tyler arrived with OC owners Carol Lim and Humberto Leon, just in time to catch performances by Mia Moretti (with violinist Caitlin Moe), Sheila E. and Santigold. Between the adorable clothes, the freeflowing drinks, the amazing music and snacks provided by John Dory Oyster Bar, Target threw a party that certainly rivaled any of those during Fashion Month. The Go International collective hits Target stores and on March 13, and judging by the pushing and shoving I witnessed at Opening Ceremony last night, you’re going to want to get on this one fast. ?CONFIRM YOUR SUBSCRIPTIONIncoming… In a sec, you’re going to receive an email from StyleCaster asking you to click on a link to confirm your subscription to the StyleCaster newsletter.?said yesterday at WIE, the first-ever Women’s Inspirational Symposium. “Very often women are afraid to…let it out. But inside every woman is an enormous wealth of strength,” she continued.The organization gathered to promote global awareness for safe motherhood, and finished with a -hosted rooftop runway show at Skybar. Amazingly enough, nine major contributed white gowns to the cause. As each dress came down the runway, it was incredible to guess and then hear the female design powerhouse behind each unique look.From Vivienne Westwood’s edgy, tied-up style column dress to Stella McCartney’s one-shouldered romanticism, it was hard to choose a favorite. Scroll through the photos and let us know in the comments which one you liked the most. And for those who really love the dress all gowns are up for auction at CharityBuzz. You’ll feel great in the gown, and also knowing all proceeds go to the White Ribbon Alliance and The Urban Zen Foundation. ?.Fall 2011 features go-to ad girl Arizona Muse, joined by Sigrid Agren, Malgosia Bela and Zuzanna Bijoch in the brand’s covetable snakeskin prints of the season, shot by David Sims. The images are easy, breezy, ethereal and sun dappled. That 70s vibe still reigns for the Parisian based label, and those Marcie bags look almost as sweet as those reptilian heels. Amazing how an ad can make you want to buy stuff…?is no longer designing and Clare Waight Keller hasn’t yet started, but the design team is doing rather stellar all on their own, if Resort 2012 is any indication.Chlo is a brand with a completely formed aesthetic, you know it when you see it it’s elegant, a bit quirky, streamlined in shape, fun in fabrication (a green sequin suit!). Little white dresses remain a mainstay, a black ruffled mini is perfect, a long white ethereal dress maintains a girlish smirk and a ruffled shorts/green PVC jacket combo is stellar. With such a wide range, another brand might get lost, but Chlo knows who she is and we love her for it. And even if you happen, for some crazy reason, not to love perfectly Parisian looks, just enjoy 35 pretty pics of Jacquelyn Jablonski.?is getting to the bottom of the Hannah MacGibbon lay off and going to the source. Geoffroy de La Bourdonnaye, chief executive at Chlo explains, I think shes been extremely good for the house. She put the house back on track, no question about it. OK, that sounds like the review you get before a raise, so what happened? Que pasa, Chlo?Turns out, perhaps it was less about Hannah than her replacement, Clare Waight Keller, who the Chief Executive said had the “dicipline” to do the job. “At Pringle, she showed that she can take a house out of a very narrow product range and put it on a global reach” and “You also have to know how to communicate very well within the house, de La Bourdonnaye explains. Apparently, Keller is also pregant with her third child, which is kind of nice for working mom’s everywhere.These compliments can kind of be taken as digs at MacGibbon, but maybe I’m just the sensitive type. I just know I’d be all like, “um discipline? I’m disciplined, I brought your brand back into the spot light, I made you an “it bag” in a post-it bag era…and you fired me.” But, you know, that’s just me. I’m sure the new girl will do a fine job.?, written by NYC resident Coco Limberakis.More than simply a style blog, Coco confronts her lifelong insecurities with weight, and how she has allowed fashion to empower, rather than hinder, herself. “Every time I meet a girl who shares my insecurities and is dressed terribly it breaks my heart,” she says, “This blog is about dressing for your body type and interpreting hard-to-wear trends for your shape.” The fashion industry veteran does just that, and shares her personal pictures along with musings on how to wear items like zip-front dresses, bright blazers, and jersey dresses, all of which many curvy girls tend to shy away from.With each type of clothing she profiles, she describes the ways in which they can be used to highlight your features.”On curvier figures, a skirt that is looseat the hip tends to be more flattering. I know it may be difficult, but resist piling yourself into a bandage skirt. The Herve Leger bandage trend has been exhausted, let it rest in peace along with harem pants and shoulder pads,” she writes.Okay, it also doesn’t hurt that she has an enviable wardrobe, to say the least. Vintage Ferragamo bags, Louboutins, Chloe dresses, and a whole lot of YSL are all a part of the package. Even if you don’t have these labels lying around your boudoir, this is a great, positive, and to check out next time you aren’t feeling like Kate Moss when you look in the mirror.?collection is definitely channeling those childhood days, with Crayola-bright colors, prints and accessories boasting every letter of the alphabet. There were even letters littering the runway!Although this nostalgic collection is pretty unique, I couldn’t help but notice plenty of similarities between it and two of last season’s most lauded collections Prada and . The neon colors were almost identical, and D&G replaced the monkeys, bananas and wide stripes that Prada showed with the ABCs. It’s almost as if the two collections had a baby and are currently teaching it to read. Despite the flashback to my Sesame Street days, I’m really loving the continuation of brights and bold prints for fall. Click through to see how the D&G collection stands up to Proenza and , and let us know which of the three you like best!While we’re on the topic of Sesame Street, how amazing would it have been if the run-of-show read, “This collection was brought to you by the letters D and G?”All photos via Imaxtree?, $290, at net-a-porter.com.REASONS FOR LUST:REASON #1: Because the leather details make your summer aviators look naked in comparison.REASON #2: Because classic aviators are a must-have in your accessory arsenal.REASON #3: Because I want you to look like a ‘Top Gun” while you are piloting fall fashion .?CONFIRM YOUR SUBSCRIPTIONIncoming… In a sec, you’re going to receive an email from StyleCaster asking you to click on a link to confirm your subscription to the StyleCaster newsletter.?CONFIRM YOUR SUBSCRIPTIONIncoming… In a sec, you’re going to receive an email from StyleCaster asking you to click on a link to confirm your subscription to the StyleCaster newsletter.?that I picked up during the show, the kitchy, Americana star print was super cute, but something I’d definitely seen beforeand relatively recently.Turns out, my mind was bringing me back to Spring 2008, where Karl showed a fifties-inspired collection, complete with stars, stripes and all denim everything. Dolce & Gabbana’s take on the American flag trend isn’t quite as literal, and the design duo was able to inject plenty of its signature sexiness with corsets, lace and sheer silk. Plus, there was an entire menswear element that added a completely different dimension to the show. I’m not saying that Dolce & Gabbana knocked off Chanel, but one thing is clear: The “” trend isn’t going anywhere fast. Which of these star-spangled collections would you rather wear? ?plays house mom to young Hollywood wonder kids Elle Fanning, Hailee Steinfeld and Chloe Moretz in Vogue’s May issue, shot by Bruce Weber.The location is LA’s historic party spot, the Chateau Marmont, but I prefer to imagine the scene as some super preppy New England boarding school, where Natalia is the glamorous wife of the head master who all the kids die for including those cute young actor boys chilling in the pool. Oh, and Ed Harris is the school chef. Dakota Fanning also makes an appearance bitchy senior?[]?, and of course (to match mommy’s). However, those labels are all about to change.Fresh from her divorce from Tom Cruise (who is apparently known for spoiling his children rotten), Katie Holmes wants to scale back Suri’s estimated $3 million closet now that she’s being assimilated into regular society and won’t just be jet-setting with her famous parents. A source told UK mag that “all that inappropriate dress up and make-up was down to Tom and Katie’s key word now when it comes to Suri is ‘normal.’ Tom loved to spoil Suri and indulge her, but Katie has other ideas.”As much as we’re a little bit devastated that Suri won’t be traipsing around in kitten heels and bold red lips anymore (we’re especially interested to hear what thinks of all of this), it’s probably for the best. Plus: This doesn’t necessarily mean that Suri will be shopping the sale rack at Gap Kids, per se. She may just have to wait a couple of years before venturing into Bergdorf Goodman.?is totally sophisticated and inspiring, simultaneously helping girls understand the art of layering and that there’s something alluring in being a bit covered up. We chatted first fashion moments, Katy Perry, and the best parts of being a fashion blogger. Read on and click through for pics of B.Jones live from New York Fashion Week and from her illustrious blog!If you had a theme song what would it be? I would say Coldplay’s Yellow, and I think they’ve said they don’t even know what that song’s about, but I think my color is yellow. My husband calls me yellow. Do you have a first real fashion memory? I feel likenot that this was probably the firstbut I remember, maybe 8th grade, and overalls were the new thing, but Im from a small town and no one had done it yet. I remember, I went to the basketball game in overalls. I remember everyone was like What are you wearing? So that was my first time being like Yeah Im doing it. Thats right! Here I go in my overalls! And now Im wearing them again! Which is crazy! Theyre back in. My sister thought I was in a gangAmazing! When did you launch your blog? And what inspired you to start blogging? I started originally with The Vintage Society, which was my first blog and I started that in January 2007. So in blog years thats a long time ago! At that time I started because I was thinking about the idea of opening a store that was going to be vintage and modern. Then, then of course blogging blew up and I got to be on the ride with it. But now I have B. Jones Style, which I officially started doing it the way I am now in September of 2010, but Ive been in the blogging world for a while now.If you had to choose a fashion uniform what would it be? I think definitely a uniform for me is high-waist anything. Like, high-waist jeans, high-waist trousers. I love a high-waist! Im a curvy girl, a Marilyn Monroe. Whatever! So I like to accentuate those things. I think if I had to choose one thing it would be a camel-colored high-waist trousers. In the summer, maybe a great tank top tucked in with a woven belt and some platform sandals and then I would layer it up with a blazer and some statement jewelry. And Id say hats! Im a hat girl. What would you say is the best thing that has happened to you since you started blogging? For me right now, a personal triumph is launching , my daily fashion planner that I have. And there are some cool things maybe in the works and brewing with that right now. So Ive self-published it at this point, but even just seeing girls get so excited about it and really start to use it and respond to it has been huge! Ive had that idea sitting in my brain for 3 years or something and to see it finally come to fruitionIs blogging what you do full-time? Blogging is kind of this core of everything I do. I also do some personal styling; I do some editorial styling and writing here and there, but Id say blogging is the core.Do you have a secret style weapon? Id say hair. I really try to use my hair as an accessory to what I wear. I feel like that is such a lost art that women dont use as much anymore. In the old days women would do crazy French twists and the bouffant and everything. I think even if you have a really simple outfit on, if you have an amazing braid or whatever even if its down but you have really interesting curls or something I think its a great accessory that more women should use.What are some designers that you gravitate towards? I love usually something very 70s-oriented. So I think every season I see someone else pick the 70s thing. But I mean, consistently, Im drawn to Chlo. Im drawn to s stuff. Recently Ive been inspired by Tory Burch and her collection for spring.What are you currently reading? I have The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo and I brought it on the last couples trips Ive gone to and Im reading it! But I havent dug in just yet So Im currently trying to. Ive heard its hard to get through the first 100 pages of that. Thats what everybody says! The first 100 pages! I just need to get past that, which I kind of struggle to do a lot of times. So Im trying!Whats your favoriteIm calling it high street shopping spot? Actually, we went to this summer and Cos, which is an H&M company. Its almost like a higher-end H&M? Or its just it was amazing. And the price-point was amazing. So I would say probably that, but I cant get that here. So I die every time I go in Zara. I probably dont always end up buying something, but Im always like, Ooh! Ooh! Ooh! Because I feel like they end up having something Chloe-esque or very much like Celine…So I asked if you had to explain your style as X+X+X, what would you say it is? + 70s + drama.Your idea of fashion heaven. Oh gosh, fashion heaven I feel like I dont know if I could pick one person, maybe Iris Apfel’s closet. Or some woman in her 70s who has saved everything and she was a total wonderful fashionista her whole life.Whats the last song that you played on your iPod? Mumford and Sons? Whats that song? I dont know. But I love it! Or Katy Perrys Firework. I love that song! So cheesy. I love her.Tell me something people would be surprised to know about you. I think maybe just the fact that Id rather not be in the scene or in a hot bar. Id rather be tucked away in a little pizza joint with my husband having a Diet Coke and really good pizza or like, the best Mexican food ever, instead of going out to some fabulous party. But Ill probably still wear a fabulous outfit to that little joint!Whats one thing that you have in mind to buy for spring to update? Im obsessed right now with the whole color-blocking thing. So Im now starting to pick up all of these very basic, but solid, bright colors and mixing them all together. Thanks so much!All photos: Laurel Dailey?has more than often received a bad rap for ripping off designer’s designs, it’s quite refreshing to see them do legitimate collabs with solid fashion creative types like Brian Lichtenberg and Rory Becca every once in a while.Today marks the debut of their latest designer collaboration with , the jewelry and designers based in New York City.The duo’s collaboration with Forever 21 has sparked a small jewelry collection that features black and silver colored rings, bracelets, necklaces and earrings. But the real icing on the accessory cake is the fact that no single piece in this capsule collection is more than $16!Pretty amazing, huh? We think so too.Head over to the Forever 21 website to see if will be carrying the collection, or just from the convenience of your own bed!Don’t forget to also check out this short little teaser below to see what you’re in for from ALEX & CHLOE:?has made her mark in fashion by way of her androgynous features, although as pictured here, she looks anything but. In place of her normal chin-length hair, Erichsen struts down Chloé’s fall 2009 runway with feminine long, wavy extensions and a soft side-bang. A far cry from the minimalist makeup palettes seen at Balenciaga and Rick Owens, Hannah MacGibbons for the label consisted of flawless makeup.According to , hairstylist Guido Palau used 80’s icons Christie Brinkley and Brooke Shields as inspiration for the buoyant locks he created for the show. “We’re going for very feminine, flowing Eighties hair,” said Palau, who generously applied to achieve the desired volume.Erichsen’s eyes shone in metallic neutrals expertly blended with a shimmery white shadow in the upper and lower inner corners of her eyelids. This is a great trick for brightening eyes and really making them pop. Just a little bit of silver or a light gold shadow is all you need to get the look. In WWD’s interview with makeup artist Charlotte Tilbury, who worked with MAC cosmetics, she sought to create an “all-American sportiness, like an Antonio Lopez drawing.”?)Laure de Sade used to work at Isabel Marant and now she’s the new designer of of See by Chlo. When in Paris… ()Zara is moving in to the former NBA store space on 5th Avenue. Score. ()Rumors abound that Kanye is going to study design at Central Saint Martins. I feel like Kanye does the kind of stuff I would do if I woke up a multi-millionaire. () DOUBLE SHOT: TWEET, TWEETRT @ I’m coming home tomorrow due to an allergic reaction to the make-up from the day before. Way to hurt a teen, Vikto & Rolf…RT @ On my way to @ show and then @ anniversary party! Still sad MK didn’t have the partay stateside.RT @ A bag for pill-poppers from Jeremy Scott for Longchamp Prozac Nation/90s shout out?RT @ I love when people who work here ask me who made my chic bag & are shocked when I say DKNY um, really?TRIPLE SHOT: WATCH IT!A little teaser of that tennis tease Nadal for Emporio Armani… ?CONFIRM YOUR SUBSCRIPTIONIncoming… In a sec, you’re going to receive an email from StyleCaster asking you to click on a link to confirm your subscription to the StyleCaster newsletter.?Fresh Faces in Fashion curates some of the best new designers, showcasing them in an ensemble fashion show during New York Fashion Week for . Previous designers who made their debut here include the Mulleavy sisters of Rodarte and Phillip Lim. This year the designers included , , , , , and Gen Art global contest winner who came all the way from Kenya. The show was hosted by Gossip Girl and Sparkle actress Tika Sumpter.? The collections were fresh, innovative and less commercial than some of their more established peers.Each designer presented a short video introducing their line, aesthetic and just why fashion is important to them.? Standout pieces included metallic tweed pants from Gretchen Jones, animal inspired jackets from Anne Sofie Madsen and great chiffon and cotton draped blouses and shorts from?Katungulu Mwendwa. Almost all designers had their version of the perfect spring dress in floral prints while Chloe comme Parris also showed great jackets.It was interesting to not only discover these new designers, but also to forecast the direction and influence on fashion that these new designers are bringing to the mix. Expect to be hearing a lot more about these labels in the near future.?accented by Madison Embossed Python clutch.The Coach festivities continue tonight at London’s FNO. Gwyneth and Alexandra Shulman – Editor-in-Chief of British Vogue, are hosting a private event at the Bond Street store. Taxis will transport guests into the world of Coach in cars covered in the brand’s Legacy stripe. The exclusive 41 collection, created to celebrate the new store and the brand’s establishment in 1941, will be available throughout the evening. Sounds like the perfect way to ring in a new chapter in the iconic brand’s history!?were a special time in history – , the end of the Vietnam War but we’re not thinking about Nixon, we’re reliving all of the flared, platform shoes, maxi dress bohemia of it all. is getting in on the 70s style game beginning April 20, three styles of traditional Swedish brand Swedish Hasbeens – a wood-soled and leather look that was all the hotness in the 70s and created with eco-conscious materials will be available exclusively at the mass fashion superstore. Click through for all the looks and just try not to get in a Jodie Foster in state of mind.All photos courtesy of H&M?would renew her contract at the house for at least one more season in an attempt to dispel rumors that she was on her way out. As it turns out, the speculation about the designer’s departure was true. reported this morning that after 10 years, MacGibbon is out at the French fashion house, and former Pringle of Scotland creative director Clare Waight Keller will take the helm, effective June 1. A statement on Chlo’s website claims that MacGibbon’s departure was in the best interest of both parties, and that the designer would leave the house to “pursue new projects.” MacGibbon’s move comes on the heels of less-than-stellar reviews of her Fall 2011 collection, and at a time that designer shakeups are running high and Dior specifically. With all of the shuffling, we’re sure that MacGibbon will have a new gig in no time. At this point, the industry rumors that were running rampant during Fashion Month all seem to be put to restnow all we’re waiting on is the official confirmation from LVMH.Photo of Hannah MacGibbon via Imaxtree?.But when we arrive at our table I learn what the curiosity was all about. My friend leans in and says:“Did you hear what they said?”“Nope,” I reply with a shrug.“The one girl looked at you from head to toe, focused on your shoes and goes, ‘Ooohhh Chloe’.”We both erupt with laughter followed by a very cheesy high-five.What was so funny was that I had just purchased these shoes earlier that day at one of the slickest shops in the city. The shoes are Jeffrey Campbell and while they bear a strong resemblance to a Chloe style they are a fraction of the price!That’s the thing about fashion-style and taste have nothing to do with money spent. It’s all about how you wear it. Just as Andre Leon Talley once said, “Everyday I pray that people with money will find taste and people with taste will find money.”Check out my picks from the These stylish stilts are sure to keep you affordably styling.Garble, Manero, Pauline and Darian in orange are a MUST!?for staying true to its original image season after season and still managing to churn out collections that are unexpectedly refreshing. I love that I can walk in to the store and see a classic, black cashmere on one mannequin and turn to find a pair of flashy on another. Advancing this charming approach to casual chic to the next level of dreamy design, J.Crew offers its ‘Collection’ line. True to form, J.Crew masterfully mixes a dash of in with a rugged tomboy aesthetic in its Spring 2011 Collection Lookbook. Satin-strapped heels in muted, peek out below perfectly tailored, suede motorcycle pants. Glittering sequins glamorize the chinos. A softly flowing evening gown looks effortlessly casual when accompanied by flat sandals and a slouchy cashmere sweater. Whatever your personal preference, J.Crew’s Spring 2011 Collection addresses your craving for the rebellion of rule-breaking without the typical downside of an end-of-the-season expiration date. Needless to say, I have already gone a little click-happy and saved pretty much every piece to my Wishpace… ?sequin pants? When faced with such a necessity, photographer turned designer Erin Wahed did just that and started her jewelry line .During a Christmas vacation, the idea of Bande Des Quatres was conceived out of Wahed’s personal need for a to compete with said wild outfit she was planning on wearing to her photography exhibition. From there Wahed collaborated with Montreal based designer (also Wahed’s mother) to design a full collection for Bande Des Quatres. Her debut collection is a series of whimsical but edgy rings made of 18KT yellow and palladium white gold, sterling silver and precious gemstones. As Wahed draws inspiration from a wide variety of sources and moreover is influenced by her formal training in photography, her designs tread the fine line between statement pieces and everyday wear. However, the distinguishing factor is that Bande des Quatres rings hardly appear to be rings at all rather, they effortlessly float in between the fingers, despite their bold size.StyleCaster speaks with Wahed about her collection, inspiration and sideways subway glances….SC: What about designing rings piqued your interest? EW: The idea that I was designing something that is really truly me. Something that I believe in, from the design, to hand-made quality, to the branding. SC: What was the starting point for Bande Des Quatres? EW: Van der Rohe, Mondrian and Breuer were the rings that started the entire line [...] There is this sense of illusion with Bande des Quatres, that makes the viewer wonder how they stay on the hand. In the case of Van der Rohe, the ring became a conversation starter, even causing disgusted looks on the subway. Neither my mother or I never saw it when designing the ring, yet people seemed to perceive that I had pierced my finger.I am not that hard core, but hey, its fun for people to think I am. SC: Your inspiration draws upon so many different sources and mediums. What influenced this debut collection the most? EW: The Bauhaus movement is the biggest inspiration for this debut collection, in so much that I named each ring after a Bauhaus Master. The idea behind the brand identity, came from wanting to give each ring a personality and for Hugo to shoot them in a non contrived, every day urban manner. I wanted to portray the woman or man who would be wearing the ring and how they dress, how they act, etc. SC: What is your favorite piece from the collection? Do you envision girls wearing these as one statement piece or layered up till their fingertips? How many pieces of jewelry do you wear on a daily basis? EW: Van der Rohe lives on my right hand, while Breuer lives on my left and the only time they come off is at the gym and in the shower. My hands, more than my fingers, feel naked without them. I sometimes layer Moholy-Nagy and Van der Rohe, however, the rest of the line is meant to be worn as statement pieces. The name Bande des Quatres, is French for Band of Four and the reason for the name is that these rings run across all four fingers.In addition, once worn, the wearer becomes part of an exclusive group.SC: Where is Bande des Quatres available? How much does it retail for? EW: Bande des Quatres is currently available by contacting me at info@bandedesquatres.com. I am currently in negotiations with a few retail stores. The price points are $400 to$2000 and more information can be found under the collection tab on the website, under price list.SC: Any teasers you can divulge about Bande des Quatres future collections? Inspiration for the next collection? Expanding into other types of jewelry? EW: There are many more designs that have been sketched that are under lock and key. Bande des Quatres, right now is a ring line, but the possibilities are endless.Clothing, shoes, furniture… Who knows?Photographer: Art Director / Producer: Creative Director: Video:Chris Luttrell for Communication Design: Eva Green Hair & Makeup: Models:, Margaux Le Pierrs, PhotoAssistant: Post Production: Special thanks to?chief executive Sidney Toledano said in a statement. “Pending the results of the inquiry, Christian Dior has suspended John Galliano from his responsibilities.”A source tells though, that Kate’s wedding dress man of choice may have a different version, explaining to the mag, “We had a table at La Perle and John Galliano sat next to us.”“He spoke to a couple at a nearby table to say ‘Cheers’ and they insulted him. An argument started and the police came, so Galliano’s bodyguard suggested that they should go to the police station to sort it out. He wasn’t ‘busted’ aggressively by police, it was very quiet and peaceful. I definitely didn’t hear him say anything anti-Semitic, or against any religion, it was all very calm.”It seems all very he said, they said, but what we want to know is whether a certain Jewish Oscar nominee will still be willing to wear his dresses, even if she is a face of the brand.Photo: Eric Ryan, Getty?). In next month’s issue of Vogue China, photographer Willy Vanderperre takes the opposite approach, and captures two of today’s youngest models looking very, well, young. Hailey Clauson, 15, and , 16, celebrate their youthful essence in “Child in Time,” wearing hairbows, knee-highs and colorful clothing from Prada, Marni, and . All the while, they partake in some marvelous childhood activities, like playing with teddy bears, skateboarding and blowing up balloons. These girls usually look so grown up, and it’s refreshing to see them embrace their adolescence. Be kids while you can girls, you’re likely going to be working in this industry for a long time! Click through to see the full spread. ?)Check out Georgia May Jagger’s Hudson jeans campaign. Apparently this chick can pull of Chanel and skinny jeans equally amazing. ()GAP HQ is leaving the sunny freedom of San Francisco to set up shop in freezing, grey NYC. Sorry, it’s been a long winter. ()Bruce Oldfield who is rumored to be designing Kate Middleton’s dress but probably isn’t went on Good Morning America to give his two cents, explaining, “I’m sure the dress is going to be modest in terms of coverage. It has to be, you know? It will have sleeves, it has to have sleeves. You can’t walk down Westminster Abbey in a strapless dress it just won’t happen. ()David Yurman is launching a Facebook contest today featuring bloggers like Rumi Neely of fashiontoast, Jenn Camp of Le Fashion and Le Love, and Lauren Sherman of Fashionista. All you have to do is upload your fave original romantic pic and have your friends vote for you – winners get two pieces of jewelry and one is supposed to go to your BF as if he has a shot at you not keeping both. ()DOUBLE SHOT: TWEET, TWEET RT @ Mayjor models alert @! Every turn I take I run into half a dozen. Obvs castings are in high gear! They all look so young! #obviouslyRT @ Quote of the Day: Everyone makes mistakes! Erase your need for perfection & replace it with understanding! Hmm, maybe don’t tell your boss this one.RT @ Vera Wang Is today your lucky day?? WIN TICKETS to Vera’s Fall 2011 Runway Show (Feb 15 @ Lincoln Center) Follow to enter: Just a little public service announcement for you…RT @ Time traveling to the 80s at Starbucks. It’s like Hot Tub Time Machine!RT @ Aww thank you @ for the Valentines surprise! I love it! Fashion gifts are better than bf gifts, no?? Illesteva Leonard sunglasses, $160, at Venessa Arizaga “Heroes & Villians” necklace, $395, at DAY Birger et Mikkelsen Day Moroccan embellished cotton shoulder bag, $220, at Chloe Sevigny x OC boots, $145, at Table Manners dress, $88, at Isabel Marant Pop Life brass tiger’s eye ring, $165, at Floral print cotton snood, $32, at ?and it features another young, barefaced one, Chloe Moretz (who was awesome in 500 Days of Summer). Chloe’s cover comes on the heels of the lovely Elle Fanning’s and Nyasha Matonhodze’s.Chloe also looks morose, slightly Victorian and completely beautiful for the Super Natural issue, with tears sliding down her face. The issue hits newsstands next week, so presumably, we’d have to wait to find out which other girls received the honor…if it weren’t for that lovely social media site, Twitter.Derek Blasberg just , “Dinner with & Katie . She dished on the three covers (Chloe, Elle & Haillee), but won’t name the other five!” The adorable face of Miu Miu, Hailee Steinfeld it is. So, who’s lucky number 5? Any guesses??Jet Set Girls celebrate the opening of with their top picks for summer. Fashion Pulse Daily does an exclusive interview with the incredibly stylish KRISTOPHER DUKES is using .Manolo says, that is more suitable for the milkmaid on the springtime bender in the city, than the worldly sophisticate at the movie premiere. SHEfinds rounded up the . You will not be disappointed. Second City Style wonders if shoppers who “dress up” receive better service than the patron in sweatpants in Stiletto Jungle has fallen hard for funky-yet-dignified . Camilla Skovgaard wedge bootie, $558, at , crazy cat lady? Allie is Wired has the scoop. If you are forever a rocker chick at heart, then Bag Snob has the . Beauty Snob has the ! Coquette is in a bohemian state of mind thanks to . Shopping and Info found lots of great nautical and cargo Vince twisted sweater, $150, and striped sweater, $148, both at Get ready for summer with StyleBakery’s StyleHive shows that, just in time for summer, is creepin’ from your favorite outerwear staple to take over the realm of shorts. The Beauty Stop plays hit-or-miss with Chloe Sevigny. The Fashion Bomb finds and more in her weekly Mail Bombs section.Related: ?For anyone still keeping score, the game of designer musical chair continues this week with big new appointments at two major labels.In London, Alexander McQueen’s secondary line, McQ, named Alistair Carr to the position of head of design, . The McQ collection has been making major strides both with editors and celebrities on the red carpet ever since Sarah Burton breathed new life into it (after creating the world’s most memorable wedding gown for Kate Middleton). Carr had been the design director at Pringle of Scotland until he left his post in April and was replaced by an in-house team of designers. Previous to Pringle, Carr has worked at labels like Chloe and Marni, so we’re betting he’ll exceed expectations in his new gig, where his first collection will be for Pre-Fall 2013.Stateside, Gap has at last made an announcement about a new creative director, appointing?Rebekka Bay creative director and EVP for Gap Global Design. The brand has been without a top design talent ever since Patrick Robinson left the label back in 2011, so it will be interesting to see how the aesthetic shifts after she starts on October 1. Prior to her position at Gap, Bay was responsible for H&M’s COS brand, so perhaps that label’s success is a clue as to the direction in which Gap is hoping to head, design-wise.After months of moving and shaking on the high fashion design front (ahem, Dior, Jil Sander, YSL, and otherwise), these are some major moves on the secondary and retail-friendly level — just in case you’re wondering why your Gap button-downs and your McQ pencil skirts are a little different next year!?from Made in Heaven.A model who embodies that whole hot bohemian vibe not dissimilar to the girls who first wore Made in Heaven, Marloes Horst, poses for the spring 2011 campaign and lookbook, styled by Simone Konu, and shot by Magnus Klackenstam.It’s all kinds of beachy and sandy and sort of overcast and Marloes isn’t even wearing a top in most of them, because it’s about the that before you would have had to source in some vintage shop and hope the zipper still works. Haven’t you heard? It’s all about the flares.?make for a lovely mid-summer present. More than a few design houses were all about moody black and white imagery while others were still riding Spring’s 70s sophisticate vibe for Fall. Daria pops up more than once, Anja channels Hitchcock and is back at D&G. Check out the pics and start planning your Fall inspiration board with our slideshow above. Related: ?]The Prada creepers are hot targets for knock-offs, and Jeffrey Campbell is as guilty as they come. []For a country that has so much rain, the Brits throw an awful lot of garden parties. This one has Armani and Julia Restoin-Roitfeld! []Apparently, Terry Richardson’s inappropriate and tacky photography isn’t just limited to skinny white models. []It’s the end of an era: The Chlo Fall 2011 campaign, the last season with Hannah MacGibbon at the helm, was just released. []DOUBLE SHOT: TWEET, TWEETRT Lazaro Hernandez of speaking on behalf of the this morning in favor of. Testimony bit.ly/rlA1cp via UTLawGirl Give ‘em hell!RT Kristin Cavallari Walks Miami Swim Week in a Vodka-Inspired Swimsuit Made of Glass Shards Ouch!RT Tiger Woods’s ex-wife, Elin Nordegren has found a new billionaire boyfriend Yeah, it’s that easy for us too.RT 8:45 – i should consider getting out of bed to make it to work by 9. It’s Friday, does the office exist before 10?Photo: LE FLOCH/Sipa?]Check out this beyond amazing Louis Vuitton cruise 2012 campaign featuring Arizona Muse.[Via ]Google is so over Blackberry.[Via ]Miss Piggy makes some pretty hilarious points in her shout-out to the gay community.[Via ]In a weird (and kinda cool) turn of events, Terry Richardson makes out with Chloe Sevigny … while she is dressed up as Terry Richardson. Huh?[Via ]?]Despite our own personal opinions, Missoni for Target is still way more popular on eBay than Versace for H&M.[Via ]Are Freja Beha Erichsen and Arizona Muse the faces of Chlo’s spring ad campaign?[Via ]Check out the 11th issue of A magazine, curated by the wonderful ladies of Rodarte.[Via ]Would you let your eight-year-old girl wear this thong?[Via ]Image courtesy of Modelinia.?]Get ready Harry Potter freaks … J.K. Rowling is publishing a new novel and proving that she’s all grown up. [Via ]We’re super excited for the Manolo Blahnik and J. Crew collab, but it turns out Blahnik himself had no idea this was all going down. [Via ]Chris Brown tried to steal a fans iPhone. The guy is definitely on a roll (read: downward spiral). [Via ]Remember when former presidential candidateJohn Edwards made a sex tape with his mistress? Well that bad boy is about to get destroyed. [Via ]?will be on racks, and budgeting fashionistas everywhere will rush to get their hands on discounted Proenza, Rodarte, and Thakoon. In celebration, produced Step! Clap! Go! a video featuring the Bad News, a girls’ step team from the Bronx, who showcase their moves while the 34 dresses in a lively, fierce routine. While the young girls have more swag than I could ever pull off, it’s nice to know I could at least snag their cute clothes on March 13 both in stores and online. Hey, if you got yourself some Richard Chai for less than $50, wouldn’t you want to dance too? from on .?, Hannah MacGibbon has definitely struck a chord with the house. Her Fall 2009 collection was muted and romantic with masculine, almost Western silhouettes interspersed by sweet Parisian detailing. The separates felt realistic, but special while a velvet jumpsuit worn by Raquel Zimmermann was a moment of Yves Saint Laurent fantasy. Here’s to hoping that Chloé’s revolving door of designers has finally ended.?. Festsaal Kreuzberg Thomas Gtz von Aust & Eigk Weber Skalitzer Str. 130 11:30 PM – 2:30 AMLONDON: Personal favorite London ‘hood Dalston is kicking off the weekend in solid East End style with help from party collectives Do It! and Snap Crackle & Pop as they bring in headliners MYLO, Villa and O.Children to DJ at the trendy Dalston Superstore. Get there early for free admission and more importantly, to beat the queue that I guarantee will form out on Kingsland High Street. 117 Kingsland High Street E8 2PB London, United Kingdom 9 PM – 4 AM Free entry before 10:30 PM, 5 afterNEW YORK: With an open vodka bar and JD Samson headlining on the 1′s and 2′s at one of LES’ newest, hottest venues, Friday night at Tammany Hall is going to be one heck of a dance-your-pants-off bonanza! Get ready to dance your work-week blues away and rage into the wee hours of the morning! Tammany Hall 152 Orchard Street New York, NY 9 PM to 4 AM Advance $5 tickets available at SATURDAY, MAY 7, 2011NEW YORK: Forget the British Invasion – this Spring it’s all about the Swedish invasion as will be celebrating their 6th year as Sweden’s official music documentary film festival. Last year marked the film festival’s debut in the US with special screenings held in New York and Washington, D.C.. This year, the film festival will once again have special events going on in both East Coast cities, with a special kick-off event in collaboration with Brooklyn-based at the Tribeca Grand Hotel this Saturday night. Party tip: Meet a Swede who will teach you how to say “I am a sex machine” in Swedish la the 1998 film Can’t Hardly Wait. Tribeca Grand Hotel 2 Avenue of the Americas New York, NY 10 PM – 4 AM RSVP: Events@GrandLifeNYC.com LONDON: If there was ever a party to go to in order to check out the latest sounds emerging from the grimey East London scene, this would the party to hit up this weekend. With a billing that consists of fairly unknown acts like Jam City, TKNY, Eternal Roar and Dux Content, be sure to mosey on over to Dalston hipster favorite night spot Visions to get a healthy heaping of indie electro music. Visions Video Bar 558 Kingsland Road Dalston, London, UK 10 PM – 1 AMSUNDAY, MAY 8, 2011LONDON: Be sure to catch the last day of the designer sample sale this Sunday. This is the ideal way to indulge in guilt free designer label clothing at up to 90% off the recommended retail price. Some of the brands offered are See by Chloe, J Brand, , Missoni, Rock and Republic, DKNY, French Connection, Hugo Boss, Luella, Armani, Juicy Couture, Dirty English, , Oliver Spencer and many more. This is a perfect way to sober up from the weekend’s debaucheries as well as saving up some extra quid for next Friday’s jaunt to the pub.Sample Hunters Designer Sample Sale The Old Truman Brewery, Brick Lane London, UK Friday 11 AM 7 PM Saturday 11 AM 6 PM Sunday 11 AM 5 PM NEW YORK: Sunday is Mother’s Day here in the US. And if your Mother happens to be a bit hipper than your average female parental, may we suggest treating Mommy Dearest to a post-brunch visit to the Met to see the latest “” exhibit that just debuted this week. Exactly one hundred designs will be on display, with pieces ranging from McQueen’s Central Saint Martins postgraduate collection from 1992 to his final Spring/Summer 2010 collection which includes the famous shimmer-scale one-suit and armadillo heels that are now instantly recognizable thanks to ‘s “Bad Romance” music video. Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty The Metropolitan Museum of Art Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Exhibition Hall, 2nd floor 1000 Fifth Avenue New York, New York May 4 – July 31, 2011 ?at Le Bain this Friday. If you haven’t been to a FIXED party before, the crowd will probably be similar to as if there was a cool, hip party being thrown inside an (which coincidentally is also based out of Philadelphia). Local trendy boutique OAK shall be hosting Friday’s fiesta, because Neo-Goths need to party too.FIXED Le Bain at The Standard Hotel 444 W 13th st New York, NY 11 PM – 4 AMLONDON: A big name in Paris’ underground, DJ circles, Tim Paris’ label Marketing Music will be launching their first night in London. Joining them will be DJ Chloe who is one of the biggest female DJs from the Parisian scene. With a trifecta of disco, house and techno jams lined up for the evening, this will sure be one heck of a soiree. East Village 89 Great Eastern Street London, UK 6 before 11pm, 8 after Ticket available at SATURDAY, MAY 14, 2011LOS ANGELES: “Fanning the flames of the birther conspiracies, Rhonda neither confirmed nor denied any of the rumors surrounding her origin and was last seen jetting off to London while releasing only the following statement: ‘Where I come from and where I’ve been are none of your concern; all that you need to know is that I’m here now and I’m not going ANYWHERE.’ Rhonda is expected to return just in time for this Saturday’s at which time we will catch up with her and her two British souvenirs MOCK & TOOF. The heavy hitting London duo will be crossing the pond just to bang into the minds of the skeptics that international Rhonda relations are at an all-time high and that we should follow our fearless leader without question.” – RhondaA Club Called Rhonda El Cid 4212 W. Sunset Blvd. Los Angeles, CA 9 PM – 4 AM $5 before 10 PM with RSVP, $15 after midnightNEW YORK: The pool at Le Bain has been collecting many urban legends over the last few years. Stories of beautiful-yet-crazy people jumping naked into the pool have been sprouting up, creating rumours that Le Bain doesn’t just have a pool up there on the 18th floor, but a baby-making hot tub. To celebrate the official opening of the Le Bain pool for the season, residency DJ crew The Night People will be joined by swimwear line who will have a few of their on display that night. Maybe we’ll even see a few birthday suits too? Le Bain at The Standard Hotel 444 W 13th st New York, NY 11 PM – 4 AM TORONTO: One of Toronto’s most forward-thinking boutiques, Jonathan + Olivia, will be hosting a Surface To Air Jewelry Trunk show this Saturday at their Ossington Avenue based shop. The celebration continues at Parts and Labour with the crews from J+O, Surface to Air and Uncle Otis, as their friends from Broken Social Scene, DFA Records, and Throne of Blood will be manning the DJ booth. With so much awesomeness in attendance, you really have no excuse to not go. Trunk Show at JONATHAN + OLIVIA 49 Ossington Avenue Toronto, CAN 2 PM – 6 PMJONATHAN + OLIVIA x Surface to Air x Uncle Otis After Party Parts and Labour 1566 Queen Street West Toronto, CAN 11 PM – 2 AM Free entry before Midnight, $5 after SUNDAY, MAY 15, 2011NEW YORK: If you never been to out in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bushwick, do yourself a favor and go. The outdoor-garden-a-la-scrap-yard vibe is surprisingly charming as well as a great backdrop to spend a lazy Sunday afternoon, soaking up some sun and . This Sunday is the one year anniversary of their bi-weekly dance party called “Tiki Disco.” Enjoy eight hours of pizza, sun and fun! Roberta’s 261 Moore Street Brooklyn, NY 2 PM – 10 PM ?Last night, StyleCaster teamed up with a handful of particularly awesome and creative folks from the social, start-up and tech field to bring a few hundred of New York’s nerd-less notables to the Tribeca Grand Hotel for some drinks and dancing, thanks to some help from StyleCaster’s go-to DJ, Neil Jackson.So, you may ask yourself, “What happens when style kids get down and start talking nerdy?” Well it’s quite simple: Geeks get chic and fashion gets a retro flare.Check out the slideshow above for some totally taggable visuals, snapped and produced by Joy Jacobs and StyleCaster’s contributing photographer .Special shout-out to our host committee of socially savvy and incredibly creative friends: Albert Azout @ Sociocast, Courtney Boyd Myers @ TheNextWeb, Daniel Saynt @ Socialyte, Dave Altarescu @ Spotify, Doug Imbruce @ Qwiki, Jesse Israel @ Cantora, Lindsay Kaplan @ Chloe + Isabel, Mike Keriakos @ EveryDay Health, and Soraya Darabi @ Foodspotting.?‘s 12-piece collection for Forever 21 is the first time that the retailer has done a jewelry collaboration, and none of the punk and gothic-inspired jewels cost more than $16! We love the line’s bold geometric shapes, and each piece feels as good as they look!28-year-old designer has dressed the likes of Rachel Bilson and Blake Lively in looks from her eponymous line, and her second-ever capsule collection for Forever 21 was inspired by Studio 54′s disco glam moment. Although in person the 18 pieces are more feminine than glamorous, the sheer skirts and blouses are well-made and cost just $15.80 to $27.80.Rory Beca’s collection hits Forever 21 stores October 28, 2011 and Alex & Chloe jewelry will launch in December. Click through for a sneak peek of what you can expect to see!?. The spring show took place back in September, and even though that seems like ages ago, we haven’t forgotten how jaw-droppingly beautiful the clothes werethe ladylike tweeds, the incredible embroidery and textures, and the sheer, colorful chiffon pieces that let a little bralet peek out all combined to create the collection of our dreams. If you’ve been saving up and are looking to splurge on something neon and awesome, the spring accessories and Ready-to-Wear looks are now available on . Don’t worry if you don’t have the funds to feed your PS addictionhead on over to the site anyway to check out a that features close up, detail shots of all of the goods. Click through the slideshow above for some backstage shots featuring Jack, Lazaro and some really amazing clothes. ?boys, but we weren’t expecting them to be so skilled at witty banter! In the latest issue of Magazinewhich hits newsstands March 1the design duo sat down with their pal for a chat about their growing business, and we’ve chosen some choice quips that made us fall in love with Jack and Lazaro even more. Jack and Lazaro say that one of their biggest regrets is the name of the company. “It’s like alphabet soup. There are so many letters. Even coming up with a font was a mission. We had to do these fine, little letters. We couldn’t do strong, bold letters because it would be, like, out to here.” McCollough Although many peopleincluding Anna Wintourpronounce the brand Proenza Shooler, that’s incorrect. “It’s Schouler, as in late for school. I think people think Shooler is more sophisticated than Skooler.” Sevigny The boys waited until the eleventh hour to decide on their brand’s name. “The whole reason why we even picked that name in the first place was that when we started, Barneys had just bought our collection and we didn’t have a name. We thought, Hernandez McCollough? Doesn’t sound so high end, does it?” McCollough… and they’re in LOVE. (This one is a bit of an assumption on our part.) Hernandez: “Like Jack and I could break up and then what would happen? Hmm.” McCollough: “Whoa! What are you insinuating? I don’t need you.” Sevigny: “He can read the menu, but he can’t order anything off of it.”Jack and Laz have the whole yin and yang thing going on, which is what makes Proenza Schouler successful. “We have to find something in-between what we both want. It’s hard. But Proenza Schouler wouldn’t look the way it does if it were me by myself or Jack by himself. We do gray because I like white or he likes black. But none of us really likes gray, in a weird, metaphorical way.” HernandezOn “the friendly competition”and . “I think in the very beginning when we were trying to break through, we reacted to people who had already broken through a bit with something like, “I hate him!” But now we feel more like there’s room for everyone. Everyone does something different. All the young designers now are doing something interesting.” HernandezPhotos: Craig McDean for Interview ?REASONS FOR LUST:Reason #1: As traditional weather folklore goes, if on , the friendly neighborhood groundhog crawls out of his burrow and doesn’t see his shadow, spring is on its way, but if he does, it means six more weeks of winter.Reason #2: Yesterday, Punxsutawney Phil saw his shadow, leaving us dreading six more weeks of cold, harsh weather.Reason #3: While this isn’t the result we were hoping to hear, it is a good excuse to add another chic coat to your closet and this See by Chloé number is a fresh reminder that six weeks isn’t that long anyway.?Reason #1With combat boots gracing the runways earlier this year, there’s never been a better time to trade in your Louboutins and kick it in these grunge-inspired stunners.Reason #2On a cool day there’s nothing better than throwing on a cozy flannel shirt and a pair of leggings, and now you’ll have the perfect boots to complete the look; you won’t even have to worry about getting any snide Kurt Cobain remarks.Reason #3Paired with flirty florals, lame leggings or a tulle dress, these boots are a fierce way to top off any outfit, no matter the occasion.?might have something to do with our own current obsessions. We’ll be honest Big Love has never been on our priority TiVo lineup, but somehow Sevigny’s face is constantly popping up on our radars and usually in the most coveted runway looks. The New York girl is always styled with her own twist see the graphic print above paired with lace-ups and socks. Basically, everything we need now. Below, check out the pieces we’d love Sevigny to sport next time she makes an appearance in front of the lens. 1. Anthropologie Sonnet Reader Boater Hat, $88, at . 2. Dr. Martens Floral 1940, $128, at . 3. Chloe Belted Cotton Playsuit, $365, at . 4. Rika Leopard Tee, $93, at . 5. Rogan Areil Skirt, $249, at . 6. Opening Ceremony Caged Leopard Flats, $415, at . 7. Stella McCartney Tan Linen Blazer, $1,765, at . 8. Something Else Geometric Print Dress, $82, at . 9. Standard Finery Black Cotton Bustier, at . 10. Karen Walker Number Six Sunglasses, $170, at . 11. Black knee high socks by . 12. Alexa Hudson Cortina Clutch at . 13. San & Soni Button Up Shirt, at . 14. Revlon Matte Lipstick, $7.99, at .?, do you only care about the label? Have you seen a fantastically wild dress but hesitated to buy it because you didn’t know who made it? Take the quiz below to find out if you’re a brand snob!1. What is the most you’ve ever spent on an article of clothing? a. You can’t quite remember but you know you’re still paying it off And now that is calling your name. b. $300 on a J.Crew bridesmaid dress that you were begrudgingly obligated to purchase. c. $400 on a classic long wool camel coat.2. What is your favorite online shopping destination? a. Net-A-Porter.com b. ModCloth.com c. SaksFifthAvenue.com3. Who do you turn to for ? a. Vogue. Which then becomes a shopping list… b. The mirror. Does it fit? Yes? Good. Ring it up. c. StyleCaster. Your one stop shop for a variety of fashion opinions.4. When you see a , you… a. Bypass it and head to the new inventory for spring. b. Shop exclusively from it. c. Browse through it for hidden gems.5. Which celebrity do you identify with style wise? a. and those Christian Louboutins she calls feet. b. Celebrity gossip is a thousand times more fun than celebrity style. c. Olivia Palermo and her eclectic mix of clothing.6. You just found a pair of Celine pants at a sample sale but they’re a size too small. So a. You buy them anyway. They’re Celine. They’re worth the. b. Who’s Celine? What’s a ? c. Shrug oh well. The tunic fit better anyway.7. Have you ever sold old clothes to a second hand store? a. No! Never! You’re creating an archive to hand your treasures down to your first born. b. Of course. But you usually end up turning that money back over to the store. You’re a sucker for a $10 dress even if it’s used. c. Every now and then. Mainly when you outgrow something.Mostly A’s Nose in the Air Brand Snob You only bother with clothing and accessories with a designer name in tact. Whether you’re buying it full price or vintage, it must have a credible source. If it doesn’t have a label, how do you know whether it’s weird in an edgy or weird in a stupid way? You use brand names to gauge the value of a piece and moreover use these brand names to demonstrate your knowledge of the fashion trends. Head to toe you want to be able to recite the designers that make up your outfit just in case you get stopped by ! Mostly B’s Brand Snubber Oscar. Carolina. Zac. When brands are referred to without their designer’s last name, you pause a moment before recognizing their name. Rather, you have a roster of retailers that you frequent and ignore the brands you purchase. You have a hard time justifying an expensive purchase because regardless of whether or not you can afford it, you wonder, “How can this cotton dress possibly be worth $350?!” It’s not that you’re ignorant or frugal, you’re just practical about clothing; you can’t get attached to a pair of jeans that will inevitably be or go out of style in two seasons.Mostly C’s Brand Balancer Every magazine has touted the benefits of striking a balance between high and low end pieces within one outfit. You are not above pairing your Jil Sander skirt with an American Apparel t-shirt or Rag & Bone sweater with H&M jeans. You can appreciate having a nice piece of clothing that requires , but don’t mind pairing it with a Hanes t-shirt lifted from your boyfriend.?. Ever.I mean, just try and come up with an outfit that wouldn’t look good with these shoes.However, ringing in at $595, not all of us commoners can afford the Chlolook. We’ve rounded up some more affordable options that match some of the trends of the Chlo sandalthe low, chunky heel, metallic accents and cognac leather.?premieres on ABC. While there are many things to look forward to about the hilarious show (including, but not limited to, the man who started it all, Mr. ), one of the most prevalent themes that we can all relate to is the dynamic of living with a new roommate.The series follows June Colbern (played by Dreama Walker, who previously played the girl that Jenny Humphrey stole a Valentino dress from on Gossip Girl) as she moves to the big city and begins to live with Chloe (played by the hilarious Krysten Ritter) who loves booze, boys and conning her roomies.?I mean, if you haven’t been in a similar situation (okay, maybe I’ve never lived with a con artist, at least to my knowledge), then you haven’t lived! There’s nothing like a crappy roommate to make you appreciate your friends, your family and your life.In honor of this foray into bad roomieville, I’ve decided to compile a list of the best and worst television roommates of all time. Sure, there are some that may not have made the cut, so please let me know if you disagree with my choices. Click through the gallery above and enjoy!?this morning sold out quickly, especially the coveted . And, it’s no suprise that people were excited to get their hands on them at $98- the same exact frames were just listed on full price for $290.Basically, we are fascinated by how Gilt is doing business and can’t wait for to launch.?, windswept cheeks were one of the many looks that caught our eye. so that it is smashed into your cheeks within limits of its life is pretty typical for most of us – striving for just that “hint” of color that we’ve been taught all of our lives. Well ladies, it looks like it’s time to mix things up this spring, leaving more color on your cheeks. Below are a few looks from our favorite spring shows, teaching us how to embrace color. The ladies at paired their dusty eye color with nude lips and an undone chignon. To complete the look, Dick Page, makeup artist for Shiseido gave the girls a windswept look adding blush on their cheeks and tip of the nose. Balenciaga’s tight buns and clean faces were complimented by soft rosy cheeks and pale pink lips. Instead of blending in the blush on the cheeks, they left them to pop, giving the girls a doll-like look. The dewy skin at Chloe’s spring show was completed with a strong highlight of blush to contour the cheek, leading all the way up to the eye. Ralph Lauren, always the embodiment of the All-American girl, also chose a rosy pink cheek for their clean makeup look. Leaving the rest of the skin matte and brows deep and full, the pink cheeks were the highlight of the look. ?runways were flooded with sheer looks. The delicately free flowing shapes of spring offer a refreshing shift as they juxtapose the hyper, retro-feminine silhouettes from fall. The sheer trend mixed in with the soothing made for an airy and transcendental look for spring.Scroll through the images above for some inspiration with some of our favorite sheer pieces to glide down the runways. Janice ChouNote Partial nudity.Photographer: , Stylist: and , Makeup: , Hair: Britney Williams, Model: , ?CONFIRM YOUR SUBSCRIPTIONIncoming… In a sec, you’re going to receive an email from StyleCaster asking you to click on a link to confirm your subscription to the StyleCaster newsletter.?within the continually growing and fiercely competitive world of street style photography. Both fellow fashion bloggers and magazines utilize her images, noting her incredible sense of light and talent for portraying emotion in a fleeting moment. She’s also done freelance work, including a regular column in the soon-to-be relaunched Grazia.it magazine.Chris Frey, a regular contributor to , eBays digital style magazine, about the aha! moment that changed her life and requested that from her thousands of photographs, she give us her current personal Top 10.Tell us about how playing with your husband’s point-and-shoot camera led to a full-time career? In December of 2007 Ijoined the photo-sharing website Flickr and became part of a project called “100 Strangers. Itwas the first time I had ever photographed people other than snapshots ofmy friends at parties back home in Sydney. In the beginning I was completely and utterly terrified: the thought of approaching arandom stranger on the street and asking if I could take their photo wentway beyond my comfort zone. However, I persevered and the projectbuilt up my confidence in terms of approaching strangers of all ages and backgrounds. Gradually I started to learn more about light, composition, my DSLR camera settings (I upgraded from the Fujicamera) andediting techniques. I have always loved fashion and style, however, and moved into shooting street style images in March 2009. You describe what you do as a love affair. Do you shoot every day? Yes, almost every day I take photographs. Even if I don’t physicallypick up my cameras or my iPhone camera, I am constantlythinking about making images.I absolutely can’tswitch my brain off from thinking about ideas for shootsthe people and places that I would love to photograph.And I really believe that practice, practice and even more practiceis the only way to become better at taking photographs.You live in London. What defines London street style? I think the girls in Londonhave certain edginess and cool that is completely unique to them. I love it, but the lightcan be difficult for my style of photography. I think I would be better suited to living in California!Do you have a favorite place to shoot? Absolutely anywhere with good light! I am obsessed with light. I love the vibrancy and energyof New Yorkthere is nowhere else like it in the world. Plus, Iadore Paris. It issuch abeautiful place any time of the year.Having been shooting for several years now do you have certain people youre always on the lookout for? There are a number of girls I have met since I started shooting during Fashion Weeks that I could take portraits of over and over again and never become bored.It is a combination of unique beauty, style, energy and,most importantly, personality. I love happy peopleor at least people who are happy to have me photograph them!people who are willing to trust me and whounderstand my vision.Who are your personal favorite fashion designers? If I had an unlimited budget I would wear Celine, Aussie label Scanlan&Theodore, Chloe, and Lanvin flats and sneakers. Unfortunately I do not have an unlimited budget!Do you ever shop on eBay? eBay is my absolutego-to place for film cameras. I am in love with the look and feel of film images and eBay is excellent for sourcing older cameras. to see Jackmans 10 favorite looks from her blog, along with the eBay pieces we paired with six of them. Meredith Barnett is the Editorial Director for The Inside Source, a digital style magazine presented by eBay. The Inside Source writer Chris Frey authored this article in its original form. to read it in full. (Images courtesy of Vanessa Jackman.) Photos:VanessaJackman.com?To celebrate 10 years of being one of the coolest boutiques in New York City (and in the world for that matter), Opening Ceremony will be releasing what looks to be a good textbook-size publication on all things OC from publishing house Rizzoli, that has also given us must-have reads on Alber Elbaz and Lanvin, , Christian Louboutin, Rick Owens, Carine Roitfeld and many more pieces of high-fashion-minded literature. According to their website, the Opening Ceremony book will include “…original photography by Terry Richardson, ‘zine inserts by and Spike Jonze, and memories and artwork by Ryan McGinley, , Sally Singer, M.I.A., Terence Koh, Marcel Dzama, Rodarte, Proenza Schouler, Jason Schwartzman [swoon], and so many more…”For anyone who is a die-hard Opening Ceremony fan, even if you can’t afford anything in one of their shops, this book sounds like the perfect accessory to complete any school nerd ensemble in addition to being a must-read. If you head over to , you can pre-order the book now for its release on September 4th of this year.And at $65 a pop, you can definitely put a few pennies aside to save up for a copy. Think of it this way?it will definitely make one hell of a stylish addition to your book shelf, or if you’re the kind of person that likes to put long reads next to the toilet, then the bathroom would be a safe bet too (though the thought of doing that makes us kind of cringe).[via ]?’s Wonder Lotion perched next to my stack of unread magazines. Just about every time I pump a little in to my hand a gentle scent, called First Bloom, fills the air and someone proclaims, “That smell’s nice!” And that’s exactly it; Chloe & Jane products are really nice.The line was started by two friends who wanted a hobby that would let them relax and spend time together. The products are all eco-friendly and the truly sweet part is that Chloe and Jane have extended a discount to all StyleCaster readers. When you visit their site and make a purchase, use the stylecaster28 promo-code to receive 20% off un December 31st.. Personally, I’m going to be stalking up on the travel kits, since they make especially nice stocking stuffers.?]Putin calls the US a “parsite” on the global economy. Perhaps he didn’t hear we came to a resolution for the debt-ceiling crisis. No good, Pute?[Via ]Estranged spouses, Maria Shriver and Arnold Schwarzenegger, got together to celebrate his birthday on Sunday?! You think the illegitimate love child got the invite?[Via ]Chloe’s former Chairman, Ralph Toledano, is taking over @ St. John.[Via ]Hawaii drops cursive writing from mandatory school curriculum. Kind of sad about this one. How do you feel about it?[Via ]?, brands and fashion media called just in case you weren’t sold on the day-long festivals and steady stream of that SXSW is notorious for. In addition to hosting the first-ever Shop Hop, Austin’s newest push to induce localized buying awareness through up-and-coming brands, Style X will bestow more awesome in the form of fashion wisdom. Bringing you said wisdom is our very own head honcho (sometimes more formally known as StyleCaster’s CEO) Ari Goldberg, who will deliver a special address at the on South Congress Avenue. The Friday event officially opens to the public at 2 p.m., but if you’re already booked up on the 18th, swing by Cheer Up Charlie’s on Saturday for StyleCaster’s own at 1 p.m. StyleCaster’s in good company other panelists set to take the stage this weekend include , Project Runway Winner Chloe Dao and Marissa Evans, CEO and Founder of GoTryItOn.com. Style X Co-Founder Joah Spearman named the City of Austins Music Division and Small Business Development Program on board as a sponsor, calling the event “a testament to this citys innovative thinking and entrepreneurial spirit.” We think Style X could very possibly be the best element of the week-long festival.Be sure to tweet @ with #AustinHTL to keep us posted on your whereabouts!?Since starting her blog at age 11,?Tavi Gevinson?has done just about everything under the sun when it comes to fashion. When we were 16, our main concerns tended to be related to boys or curfews. Meanwhile Tavi gets up everyday and ?(which also happens to be pretty excellent).?She then proceeds to put on thick glasses and an inspired outfit and heads to high school.While it may seem like Tavi’s plate is pretty much full, there’s apparently room for a starring role in a major motion picture. UTA and has booked a big acting debut in a currently untitled project for Fox Searchlight. ?She will play Chloe, an only child whose parents paid no attention to her, forcing her to grow up faster than her peers. Well, Tavi should have no problem playing a precocious teen. In fact, our guess is the role was probably written with her in mind.We’re most excited to see what her costumes are like. Considering her style tends to angle towards that of a delightfully nutty (but chic) grandmother, we’d love to see her have to dress down in Juicy sweats or something. Oh, and if you want a direct glimpse into Tavi’s closet, .Image via StyleLikeU?, actress and red carpet fixture, has teamed up with herfianc Keith Britton (a former model) to help provide some order to the chaotic world of fashion. Their website, My Fashion Database () is inspired by , which organizes movies, actors, directors, producers and so on to make entertainment more accessible.The site is aesthetically gripping; the opening page is heavy on images and light on text. You can easily navigate from magazine covers to editorials to MyFDB’s blog, where you can read up on current fashion news (including hot lil’ nuggets of goodness from the StyleCaster crew). Everyone is credited and everything is archived. You can search through upwards of 5,000 brands, 60,000 industry workers and 60 different job titles, all conveniently compiled onto one site.I decided to give the site a test run, so I typed in model Selita Ebanks’ name. Seconds later a list of links popped up, including her biography and various editorials and covers she was featured in. Click on one of the links and you are taken to the photos, where you find a longer, more detailed list of everyone who contributed to the shoot. Easy peasy.Saldana reminds us that there are, ” – a lot of people that come together to build a brand, campaign editorial or fashion spread.” Generally, the large names (Anna Wintour, , Oscar de la Renta) get thrown around, but little attention is afforded to those behind the scenes who are making it all happen. Given Saldana’s early fashion influences — her mother and grandmother were seamstresses — it’s understandable that she recognizes the many hands that go into creating a collection and a look.Check out Saldana’s new site and let us know what you think!?finally enter adulthood with the release of the newest image featuring mega model Lara Stone. Like the other covers featuring Elle Fanning, Chloe Moretz and , Lara Stone is crying and looking soft and otherworldy.The Calvin Klein spokesmodel doesn’t seem to fit the pattern of the other four cover stars but there’s never enough Lara Stone in the fashion realm, so I’m not going to question it. What do you think of Lara’s cover? Because we’re kind of obsessed.?about his illustrious career (fashion director of i-D magazine at EIGHTEEN), being black in the fashion industry, and of course, Anna Wintour. It’s kind of long, and it’s Friday, so we brought you the good stuff.Enninful wanted to highlight Christina Aguileras role as an icon for the upcoming cover. For me, she’s a real woman. She’s got ups and downs and now she’s back up again. And really, it was sort of to celebrate that, the fact that through all this she’s come out on the other end as a cultural icon.Some hints about Ws September issue.We’re going to feature the industry’s biggest names and well-known photographers. I think you’ll be pleased. And what I love about this sort of blend of photographers is that each one has their own unique style.Enninful is keeping his lips locked when it comes to the celebrity hed like to feature for mags fall issue, but he did mention some of his favorites like Gwyneth Paltrow, Chloe Sevigny and newcomers like the Fannings and Emma Stone.Even though he left Vogue, he wont talk smack on Anna.Vogue is an institution, and I’ll always have a little bit of a soft spot in my heart for the magazine and its editor, Anna Wintour.He has high hopes for W and we like the sounds of them! the photography’s exquisite, the editorials are all avoiding expectations and I just want W‘s fashion coverage to be all that. You know, fun, fresh, art-inspired, original, forward-thinking, approachable and most importantly, wearable.Hes ready for the number of black people in the industry to increase.The American fashion industry really has had to reassess its approach to fashion, particularly because Obama came into office. You know, for one of the most influential women [First Lady Michelle Obama] in the country to be black. I know that meant a great deal to a lot of black people in the fashion industry.?walked away with FIVE awards — and then didn’t even bother to show up.Sure, I’m biased because I am a longtime devotee of glorious ways, but it’s safe to say that the best moment of the show was him debuting his newly-shorn locks, while sitting next to America’s sweetheart Betty White. (Check out the above photo and swoon. If this doesn’t make you want to marry him and introduce him to your grandmother, you really have no soul.)As for the red carpet, it was predictable and boring, but my little cupcake Chloe Moretz showed up in a killer Proenza Schouler, thus she deserves the title of best dressed of the night in my book.The award winners were predictable and boring too, but it’s interesting to me that after all the backlash following the termination of her five-second marriage, walked away with the award for “Favorite Celebreality Star.” She was also a no show, but still found time to tweet about it.Look, let’s just put this to bed already and get amped for the Golden Globes this Sunday. I don’t know about you, but I’m excited for some couture disasters, people! Stay tuned to StyleCaster for all the glam, gossip and Sunday night shenanigans the GG’s are notorious for.?‘s $2 birthday sale today, you had to act fast to score deals from top designers like Pucci, Valentino, Chloe, Fendi, and many more.Trying to avoid the debacle of last year’s $1 sale, in which demand far exceeded supply, The Outnet gave only 2,000 access to the sale this year. After receiving an email a few days ago that I had won access to the sale (and singing “I’ve Got a Golden Ticket” in my head from Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory), I waited patiently this morning for the link to the sale to arrive in my mailbox. At 11:12 AM, I got the email, clicked on the link, and was greeted by 17 pages of itemsmost worth going through, others not so much.The Outnet claimed that there would be enough merchandise for every ticket holder to score once (there was a one item limit), but I was focused on seeing the most covetable items. In the span of 5 minutes, I breezed through a clutch, silk paneled dress (sold out in my size), Pucci ball gown (gorgeous, but when would I wear it?), Michael Kors salmon colored cardigan (I have too many sweaters), and countless other things. I ended up with a printed dress, which retailed for over $1,000. Once I checked out, I couldn’t view the rest of the available merch, which prevented me from second guessing my purchase. Overall, I had an exhilarating time, I and realize that I was very lucky to have been able to participate in the sale! Did you score a ticket to the sale? If so, tell us what you scored for $2, and check out the slideshow for by other shoppers.?since it launched last September, and were smitten with the manifesto: serious fashion, not fashion taken too seriously. The Pleaters, as they call themselves, are Julie Chen, Samara DAuria, Tiffanie Graham and Desiree Marr, a group of seasoned fashion magazine editors who honed their expertise at publications including Glamour, Lucky, Jane, Elle Girl and Life & Style Weekly, and, as a team, work to inspire but never intimidate their audience. Their beautifully laid out blogazine site is easy to navigate and replete with helpful style ideas, eye candy and shopping options that inspire but never intimidate. Profiles of It-Girls, and the Pleaters’ intermingle with up-to-the minute coverage of designers and fashion trends, on and off the runway. We adore their whimsical page and cant get enough of the incredible steals in the section.The Pleat blogazine crew met while living in New York and working for Life & Style Weekly, headquartered in New Jersey. The concept of the site came about during our carpools! recalls Julie Chen. We checked in with Julie and Desiree Marr, one half of the Pleat team, to learn more. The Inside Source: Where and how did you begin your careers in the fashion industry? Julie Chen: I decided I wanted to be a fashion editor after watching “MTV’s House of Style.” Cindy Crawford was the host, and she spent an episode shadowing two fashion editors from Harper’s Bazaar. They covered some fashion shows and talked about trends, played with some clothesI made up my mind that was the job for me! Little did I know it was going to be way harder than that. I think I was 11.During my senior year at [the Fashion Institute of Technology], I started working as an intern for the fashion department at Jane. My first job was closet girl at Glamour, where I was in charge of ordering hangers and garment bags. The rest is history! Desiree Marr: I wanted to be a journalist but have had a potentially unhealthy obsession with fashion ever since childhood (when my yearly highlight was back-to-school shopping at the Esprit outlet). However, I never thought about combining the two until Tim Gunn inspired me to apply to Parsons on the first season of “Project Runway”! I was accepted after I wrote an essay stating my intentions to become the next Diana Vreeland. While attending, I interned at Conde Nast Traveler and Details. Following graduation, I started out briefly as the glamorous closet girl at Teen Vogue and then Lucky. The rest is history for me as well! I ran into Tim Gunn shortly after I moved to New York and thanked him for giving me the courage to follow my dreams. He probably thought I was nuts.TIS: You study street style, the fashion runways and everything in between, but what or periods do you return to for fashion inspiration time and time again? JC: I love looking at the wealthy women in Slim Aarons photos from the ’50s thru the early ’80′s. Stevie Knicks. Stylist Catherine Baba. Clich, but . The ’70s and early ’80s Connecticut preppy (“Ice Storm” to “Who’s the Boss”). ’70′s Halston. And Nan Kempner. DM: Julie is way classier than I am! Joan Collins and every character on “Dynasty” in a white faux fur stole and giant shoulder pads. Jem and the Holograms and especially the Misfits. Cindy Mancini from Can’t Buy Me Love. I love the entire movement and think there is nothing sexier than a woman who can wear a suit, preferably a YSL Le Smoking. Fictionally, Auntie Mame. Currently Cate Blanchett and. But its perhaps my grandma who is the best dressed woman I know. Granted you have to love sequins, metallic purses (with matching shoes of course!), all shades of purple, piled on jewelry and chopsticks poking out of your giant updo, but who doesn’t?TIS: What fashion trends are exciting you for Spring 2011? JC: I sound like a scratched CD, but the ’70s!!! I like the floatier, looser, less structured shape of the clothes, high waistlines and lower hemlines. I like that bags are staying structured with longer shoulder straps, and skirts are simpler and longer. DM: I can’t believe I am saying this, but I am kind of looking forward to . I am starting to get a bit tired of the over-embellishment (especially studs and chains), the , the constant layering and complicated dressing. Anything streamlined that is unfussy and chic sounds good to me!TIS: Is there a dream piece from a 2011 Spring fashion collection that you are coveting right now? JC: I would like the entire Fendi spring runway show. Or at least a bag and a pair of shoes. DM: Nicholas Kirkwood for Rodarte’s hand-carved wood platforms are detailed and elaborate, yet still maintains a slight boho, ’70s-style sense of ease. They remind me of the faux wood paneling in my grandparents home, combined with trees from Santa Cruz, alongside the brown retro print from my parent’s old couch. TIS: Are there smaller clothing collections or fashion designers really exciting you at the moment? JC: I kept seeing this amazing dress around my neighborhood. Two of my friends had it; they told me it was by Electric Feathers. Also love this new swim and resort line by Laura Woodard from Blue Stripe PR. It’s called Salty Seas. DM: They aren’t exactly small designers but my friends,Carly Cushnie andMichelle Ochs from , truly blow me away. For being so young, their craftsmanship, maturity and sense of restraint is unheard of. I guarantee they will be competing with the larger design houses in no time. I am also obsessed with many talented Australian designers, including Zimmerman, making their way to U.S. shores. Also love any bag designed by Olivia Harris and I am beyond picky about bags. TIS: What are five fashion pieces that you’ve kept in your wardrobe for years or simply can’t live without? JC: I have a pathological buying problem with 1. Chambray shirts 2. Trench coats 3. Plain grey sweatshirts 4. Striped sailor shirts (last count I had 9 versions, plus a dress). 5. A rotating cast of floaty, super feminine, ’70s chiffon dresses that never get thrown out. DM: 1. Leather jackets are a staple. I swear you can throw a motorcycle jacket over anything and instantly appear chic (and slightly edgy). 2. Anything disco-y, glittery and sequined as if I am headed to a party… because you never know when you might end up at one, so you better be ready! 3. Blazers of all kinds, be it slouchy, tailored, boyfriend, you name it. Including vintage YSL and Givenchy bought on eBay. 4. Costume jewelry, especially cocktail rings that are big and bold! (I don’t even own a genuine gemstone) 5. Ankle boots in every shape, color and material. The higher the better. I trip in flats and can run in heels. Seriously. TIS: What we can look forward to in the coming year from The Pleat blogazine? JC: We’d like to be more service oriented to our readers in terms of fashion or shopping advice, and will eventually be incorporating short videos on the site.DM: Julie has a great idea to show readers how to create a cute wardrobe for every day of the week using very few pieces: like 10 pieces = 1 week of dressing. Also look for some tried-and true postings where we test out figure-fixing products and other less traditional fashion items, such as sneakers that tone you up or bras that enhance your bust size by two whole cups. Do they really work? Also, well explore ways to wear some of the crazier pieces on the runway in the real world.Julie Chen tells The Inside Source that when she regrets not buying something retail and obsesses over the item forever, eventually, she finds herself stalking it on eBay. Disiree Marr proudly states that shes been shopping eBay longer than anyone I know. Its even .Both Chen and Marr love finding discounted upscale beauty products on eBay. They gave us a peek at their current obsessions. Disiree Marr claims that searching for her picks was difficult because I kept stopping to bid on stuff!?and . The braids will be given an edge with Rebecca Minkoff’s leather strips, but be sure to get there early – no doubt girls will be lining up to get their hair styled for the big night.611 Fifth Avenue 5th floor, 6-8pm2. Get Jamming At AllSaints While Enjoying a Sweet Discount. The downtown Brit brand will be hosting musical guests at both of their locations with performances by The Pierces at their SoHo flagship and by Penguin Prison in the Meatpacking District. While we’re all for rocking out, some serious multi-tasking will also be going on, seeing as we’re going to have to take advantage of that 20% discount.512 Broadway and 411-417 West 13th Street3. Trust Your Senses at DVF. We’re not exactly sure what this might entail, but . We’ll definitely be tapping into one of the five senses (taste,duh) as we enjoy complementary hors d’oeuvres and what are sure to be killer cocktails by SVEDKA vodka. On top of this, there will also be an interactive flip book photo booth to practice our posing, a fragrance sampling station to get our scent on and an exclusive performance by R&B star, Estelle. Oh, now we get it, that was taste, sight, sound, smell… but what about touch? Perhaps that’s supposed to happen when we’re grabbing at all of the pretty dresses we want to try on.874 Washington Street4. DKNY Brings the Best of New York. Did you miss the crazy-adorable documentary that was ? Don’t worry, DKNY’s got you covered. Any shoppers who make a purchase of $250 or more will get a free copy of the DVD and a limited edition tote bag to go along with it – not a bad deal. But wait, it gets better. While shopping, you will be assisted by some of the most stylish New Yorkers in the city, as the winners from the brand’s “” contest, which was featured on , will be there all night to offer up their fashion and style advice. Don’t forget to bring your BF’s to this one too, ladies – the guys from the are transforming the men’s floor into their speak-easy slash barber shop to give out complimentary haircuts and shaves. To top it all off, there will be free beer, free popcorn and a chance for you to win tickets to the upcoming fashion show.655 Madison Avenue5. Prada Partners With Vogue and Gets Artsy. At its 5th Avenue location, Prada will be recreating a mod editorial from the September issue of Vogue (guessing it’s getting all 60′s and romantic on the beach?) curated by Grace Coddington herself. Seeing Grace’s work up close and personal like that seems like it has the potential to be pretty fascinating. Equally as mysterious and intriguing, anyone who purchases the Prada Candy fragrance will be receiving a “special pouch”.724 Fifth Avenue6. Marc Jacobs Steps Out With One of Our Favorite Style Stars. Naturally, Marc Jacobs will be taking over Bleecker street this year with a carnival-themed celebration. We, however, plan on heading over to the SoHo store for the ultimate celebrity sighting: Dakota Fanning will be there with Marc himself to promote their collaboration on his Oh, Lola! fragrance - -giving away tote bags to those who purchase the scent. We’re already having too much fun speculating what she’ll be wearing…163 Mercer Street7. Double the Fun AtAlice + Olivia. Speaking of carnivals, we’ll be channeling our inner-child at either of Stacey Bendet’s bashes, which will be held at both the Bryant Park and Madison Avenue boutiques, for a night of whimsy that includes sno-cones, cotton candy, carnival games and raffles. Not to mention, will be there to give guests colorful hair extensions. Stacey, you had us at sno-cone. 755 Madison Avenue and80 West 40th Street8. Teen Vogue’s Bleecker Street Bash. The magazine will be hosting another block party on Bleecker Street this year and it seems like it’s going to be the best yet. Freebies include AriZona Iced Tea smoothies and popsicles as well as manicures by famed nail polish brand, Essie. Vans will also be selling limited-edition sneaks designed by the oh so stylish Teen Vogue editors. The best part? One of , the Electro Pop singing Sky Ferreira, will be performing.Bleecker Street at West 11th Street, 6pm9. For Those Who Want to Go Low-Key, Head toHelmut Lang. Chow down on some Luke’s Lobster Truck and sip drinks from Death and Company while watching a live performance by to celebrate the launch of Helmut Lang’s ecommerce site – need we say more?93 Mercer Street10. Bergdorf Goodman, Your One Stop Shop. The gigantic department store will be hosting an all-out extravaganza for FNO starting at 3 p.m. with complementary beauty services to get ready for the night. After you get all dolled up, don’t forget to have Oscar de la Renta sign a copy of his “Face of Fashion” fall beauty palette. Then, head on out to the windows to kick off the night with Linda Fargo and Michael Kors. From 7 p.m. onward the store’s schedule is chock-full of events including tarot card readings on 5F, performances by The Blue Vipers and Audrianna Cole, a cat/dog show featuring the furry friends of like the likes ofJoseph Altuzarra and Reem Acra, a Jason Wu doll signing and many more fun, fashion-filled activities.745 Fifth AvenueWhich events will you guys be hitting up? ?.The alternative sister line to boasts ruched A-lines dresses, cropped suit ensembles and even scandalous mesh-like tops in breathable fabrics like linen and cotton for their latest spring/summer 2012 fashion film.With a chill house soundtrack playing in the background, watching the short film below may urge you to pack up your and sandal wedges, and head straight for theMediterranean coastline (which honestly sounds like the best thing right now, especially on a Monday morning).[via ]?begun work on their they took notes from the rougher parts of the city, drawing inspiration from a London/New York grunge downtown girl, and the result? A free-spirited, finely cut collection of throw-on layers, perfectly positioned sheer paneled stripes, solid-structured coats and jackets adorned in silver thorns. For the more fitted looks, the duo drew inspiration from style icon’s like , Kate Lanphear and Leigh Lezark, creating some pretty hot topics for Toronto Fashion Week.Chloe Comme Parris’ Fall 2011 collection is a feminine and sharp unit of things you can mix, match and work with for any occasion. Did I mention they expanded the collection into accessories, providing some amazing must-haves, like the (plastered in my brain) triple buckle back-packs. I can’t wait to see so much more of these girls they have such a bright future ahead of them!?; (2) Forever 21 Dominique Beaded Tunic, $29.80, at ; (3) Burn Out Scarf, $9.99, at ; (4) Rogan Brice Short, $96, at ; (5) Grandpa’s Woven Leather Watch, $38, at ; (6) Cosmic Headband, $32, at ; (7) Gold Bubble and Rhinestone Cocktail Ring, $38, at ; (8) Cole Haan Genevieve Triangle Tote, $276.50, at ; (9) Kimchi Foldover Bootie, $40, at ; (10) Double Wrap Belt, $44.99, at ?and has showed off her ridiculously opulent apartment in taxidermied zebra and all. I thought that the only aspect of the business she hasn’t dabbled in was design, but it turns out that I was wrong. is reporting that Traina has created a 14-piece capsule collection for the French contemporary brand Maje. The partnership is fitting since she’s the face of the label’s campaign, and she looked to minimalist 90s fashion as inspiration for her “silk and delicate looks.” No photos of the clothes have been released as of yet, but you won’t have to wait much longer to take a gander at them: her collection drops on March 23 at Barneys locations in New York, Beverly Hills and Traina’s hometown San Francisco.?What can we say? We’re major suckers for celebrity baby news, especially when that celebrity baby news involves the only daughter of one of our all-time favorite fashionistas. We’ll admit we’ve been following all the news about Harper Seven — the daughter of ?and??– since it was first announced that the duo were expecting.We’ve enjoyed watching Harper grow –??– and watched her turn one merely a week ago. She’s growing up even faster than we’d expect, and now it turns out she’s walking! Best of all, the first visual proof of baby Harper’s first steps was taken in — of course — a department store.Victoria was in Dublin for a promotional event, and Caroline Kennedy, who handles PR for the store, ?of she and Harper walking together at the Brown Thomas department store.??Our guess is that this wasn’t Harper’s first time getting up on her feet, but it’s certainly the first time we’ve seen it. How appropriate that Posh Spice’s daughter took her first public steps towards a designer clothes-filled emporium? Sigh. Like mother, like daughter!?. Her approach for the Golden Globes went like this: Being pregnant, your body is very specific, and it changes everything, she says. Im trying to keep her looking clean, modern, and flattering and trying not to fall into pregnancy clichs. ()covers the 2nd to last Carine French Vogue. The countdown is making me sad, but the cover is so optomistic and bright it doesn’t last long! ()Nicole Kidman had a baby on December 28, but Faith Margaret was delivered via surrogate. I want to think this new trend is all kinds of odd, but it sounds like kind of a good idea. ()Kim Catrall is the new face of Olay’s Total Effects Anti-Aging body wash and lotion. Better her bod than her Botox-enhanced face. () is making over the Hotel Mtropole Monte-Carlo in Monaco in honor of Prince Albert of Monaco’s wedding to Charlene Wittstock on July 2. He created cocktails, other sweets and uniforms themed on love. Aw. ()DOUBLE SHOT: TWEET TWEET RT @ Click here to see Arizona Muse’s American Vogue debut! We heart her, and it’s about time!RT @ What did you get during our winter sale? A sense of foreboding sadness since I’ve put myself on a spending freeze.RT @ Big news right here! This makes us smile RT @: @ New Biggie Size: The ‘Trenta’ Americans are officially off drugs, on coffee. RT @ Bag Snob I want to learn J.Lo’s “gaze” on red carpet. She has this faraway look in her eyes &no matter the angle it’s as if she’s looking right at u. hmm, hot or creepy?RT @ [DKNY PR Girl] Meeting in ten minutes….runway show discussion..come on, sing along…..”It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year”…. I need to type in only Sarcasm Font.TRIPLE SHOT: WATCH IT See some of Spike Jonze’s best work ever in this video he directed for Opening Ceremony. Just kidding but it is cute of Chloe. ?, who instantly cast her in his critically praised spring 2011 show. The breakout star gained her cool-kid seal of approval a few days later by walking at . Here, the girl whos got even the most jaded talking gives StyleCaster an exclusive glimpse into her world from the frenzy and excitement of backstage to the at-home hair care treatment she indulges in. Through it all, this high-school student remains refreshingly down-to-earth, as evidenced in a recent tweet from two days before NYFW: Another day another pizza, tomorrow yet another day and….fashion week!?Video shot with Kodak Easyshare Digtal Camera and edited by Blake Martin. ?, mock turtlenecks are not cool, repeat, not cool.When I saw ‘s Rodarte go down the runway I’m sure I thought, oh beachy and blue and cute. But in real life, it looks like she had to run straight from the luau to the Big Love party. I know you’re in LA, Chlo, but it’s still January.Admit it, Zoe looks like your mom in the late 80s/early 90s, and possibly like she got a body suit from the aforementioned Express and paired it with a ruffle skirt. It’s hard to make her look bad, and this isn’t hideous, but it’s not good.Will you heed my warning or do you support the mock?Chloe Sevigny, Zoe Saldana Photos: Jason Merritt, Getty Images Alberto E. Rodriguez, Getty Images?. But who rocked the metallic hotter? Let’s discuss.Zoe is one of those chicks who looks good in every single thing she puts on, which sometimes make it hard to discern that good from the “she’s just pretty and skinny.” But, this Westwood draped number is so, so amazing. It fits perfectly, isn’t too short, is sexy without being over the top, and I want it. Having said that, the got no favors from vintage looking red and tan shoes. I’m all for balancing looks, but this is just an off combo.came out of whatever hole she’s been living in (I’m sorry, that’s mean, but what happened here? I lived for The OC, she was so beautiful and fresh faced…but, I digress). Mischa looks a bit confused in this pic, and her dress has a run in it and is tied with a shoe lace. But, the drape on the bottom is very pretty, and I prefer the leopard combo to the red combo.Overall though, I have to give this win to Zoe, she looks stunning, although I would advise a shoe swap. What say you?Photo: Donato Sardella and Craig Baritt, WireImage courtesy of Vivienne Westwood?. But, there’s more to the beautiful actress than just her looks: She co-founded the site, and admits she’s also a .The New-Jersey-born, Queens-raised starlet moved to the Dominican Republic when she was 10 and soon discovered her love of performing. Saldana loves to play strong females (um, did you see Colombiana?!) and doesn’t bite her tongue when it comes to things she’s passionate about, such as diversity in the fashion industry.Browse through the gallery above to check out some of !?6 Reasons Opening Ceremony’s Owners Are Cooler Than You by 12:44 pm, September 28th, 2010 Opening Ceremony is the coolest, and by extension, its owners Humberto Leon and Carol Lim are the coolest. The LA natives met at Berkeley, and their close friendship helped conceive what is arguably our favorite store in the city (world?). Humberto explains what was going through their heads a decade ago: “What do we love? We love traveling, we love shopping, we love eating, we love magazines, we love music. So what can we do to incorporate all these loves into, you know, a business?”They in New York Magazine‘s entirely delightful “Who Runs New York?” power issue, and we’re here to break down what exactly makes them so awesome. Yeah, they’re the coolest. ?9 Shades To Keep You Smiling Through Summer by 10:53 am, June 27th, 2010 My Ray Bans just officially died — they were saldy literally run over by a cab. What are some cool new sunglasses I can get that won’t be knocked off in a hot minute?Well, I can’t guarantee they won’t be knocked off, those magical elves that churn out copycat sunglasses have been working overtime the past few years. However, I can steer you in a cool shades direction that will make your Ray Bans feel as stale as that pair of UGGS in the back of your closet.First of all you have to know who Linda Farrow is. Farrow produces luxury eyewear with designers like , , The Row, , Raf Simons, and OMG this list goes on forever. ?I peruse through her site on the daily and then cry myself to sleep since I can probably only afford a cleaning lense towelette. ?Linda Farrow has some awesome one-of-a-kind vintage shades as well –? –?but the true genius is absolutely in their collaborations. I am dying over the Alexander Wang? and the frames.I do think every lady should have a pair of Audrey’s (black glasses that go with everything) and a pair of Cindy’s (as in Lauper, a totally and fun pair of shades).Another trend I have been noticing in the sunglass realm are frames in — which?looks particularly adorable on brunettes and red heads. Also currently obsessing over any and all eyewear, which has both a feel to it. If you still want to be apart of the aviator trend (which I still secretly love) you should check out this pair of . Adorable.Or if you are still not 100% over your ray bans, it is a grieving process, you could opt for Grey Ant’s status shades which are like ?PHOTOS: Which Star Looked Best At The AFI Awards? by 12:21 pm, January 14th, 2012 This weekend’s red carpet madness started off with a bit of a whimper at the 12th annual AFI Awards.?We have to remind ourselves that the AFI Awards are a far cry from tomorrow’s Golden Globes in terms of glam factor, but we were still nonplussed. Everyone looked fine, but just fine, nothing more.This was disappointing given that two of our favorite stylish stars ? Chloe Moretz and Rooney Mara ? were on hand. Moretz went for a quirky printed top and pleated skirt by Versus, which she paired with black tights and pearlescent Mary Janes; Mara opted for black and beige ruffled Lanvin.?Bright shoes were also on display, with Claire Danes in blue pumps to match the belt buckle on her white Donna Karan dress, and Viola Davis in red ones to liven up her black and white David Meister ensemble. Conversely, Jessica Chastain stayed true to a monochrome palette in Andrew Gn. Enable JavaScript to check out our fancy slideshow.?An Open Letter To Alexa Chung’s Flats (And/Or Kitten Heels) by 11:36 am, October 7th, 2010 UPDATE: A few people have pointed out that Alexa Chung’s “flats” may in fact be by Valentino. The she wore them, they definitely looked like flats, but we’ll admit that this photo (left) gives credence to the kitten heel potential. However, when compared with the Valentinto shoes (which can also be on The Sartorialist), you’ll notice that Chung’s version are ever so slightly different. The Valentino shoes have three ankle straps, and a studded piping around the toe. Chung’s have only two ankle straps and an extra strap at the toe. That said, and in the words of one of our tipsters, they are still not very attractive, and thus our Open Letter stands.***Dear Alexa Chung’s Flats (Or Possible Kitten Heels),Why do you exist? No, really: why? How did you, an extremely pointy, creamy beige-colored flat featuring a studded t-strap with no less than three cross-straps including an ankle one, come to be? I’ve done some looking, and I haven’t managed to uncover who designed you, but I’m sad for them. Pointy-toed flats are a tough sell for (and on!) a lot of people. But when you throw in a studded ankle strap, you’re doing an instant and extreme disservice to anyone who tries to wear you. Talk about cutting someone off at the, um, ankles.Alexa Chung clearly loves you — she’s in one heavily photographed week! — but even Ms. Chung is suffering at your seriously dowdy hands, mainly because she insists on wearing you with cutesy dresses. While I’ll admit that I have a categorical distaste for pointy flats, more than a have pointed out that you are at your highest potential when paired with high-waisted, wide legged trousers or jeans. In other words: you look best when covered up and when your angry point is juxtaposed against the loose drape of a large cuff.But in your current iteration and excess ornamentation, you’re all I see! Alexa Chung is a beautiful woman and her checkered frock and classic trench deserve to be the focus of this look, not you. You know what you are? You’re an attention hog. By being so long, so extreme, and so studded, you’re stealing the spotlight of a show that isn’t and should not be yours. If you had a heel and thus were adding some value (in inches) to this ensemble, then sure — you could close your eyes, bow, and bask in the spotlight. But, as you stand, you don’t.I don’t mean to be mean, so maybe you and I can come to an agreement. I’ll leave you alone if you promise to only share your point with wide-legged trousers — may I suggest those luxurious looking ? If not for me, then for Ms. Chung.Yours in polite but strongly voiced disagreement,Me ?PHOTOS: Stars Shine In Alexander McQueen At Last Night’s Met Gala by 8:45 am, May 3rd, 2011 This year’s Met Gala celebrated the genius of . The Costume Institute‘s exhibit opens tomorrow, and breathtaking doesn’t even begin to describe it. But more on that later! The Met Gala is arguably the most fashionable event of the year, so it’s no surprise than many of the A-list guests dressed in keeping with the fashionable McQueen theme.While all his work had undertones of gothic romanticism (or savage beauty, if you will), McQueen was no one-trick pony. His designs ran the gamut, as exhibited by the varied looks of the night. For example,?Anna Dello Russo wore pants! She looked like the love child of a quirky matador and ? you know, because she wore an headpiece. Sarah Jessica Parker wore a beaded archive McQueen gown that was several shades subtler than the tartan number she wore as the designer’s Met Ball date in 2006 (!).Other celebs also went archive. chose a dress she originally wore on the spring 2004 runway, and donned one that wore in the fall 2005 show. was full-on avant garde in McQueen couture, while Chloe Sevigny looked downright demure in high-necked black lace.Some went new school McQueen with creations; Salma Hayek, , and were all part of the Burton crew. Of course, changed into a spring 2011 feathered frock in the Barneys window. Oh, and Burton herself also wore one of her own designs.?(And while this post is admittedly about the ladies, we must give a shoutout to John Legend. For not only did he wear an Alexander McQueen tux, his ensemble included a skull bow tie. Amazing. Also, !)Check out the girls (and boy) in McQueen below! Which look is your favorite? Enable JavaScript to check out our fancy slideshow. ?Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty, By The Numbers by 5:54 pm, August 8th, 2011 That’s it, folks. The show’s over. And by show, we mean the totally incredible Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. But oh, did it have a successful run!Let’s do a by-the-numbers, shall we?? 661,509: Total visitors who saw Savage Beauty during its three-month run from May 4 to August 7? 80,000: People who saw the exhibit in its final week? 50: Dollars it cost to see Savage Beauty during ? 17,000: People who saw the show on those eight Mondays? 1: Rank among the Costume Institute’s most popular exhibits? 8: Rank among the Met’s most popular exhibits? 23,000: New members who joined the museum during the past three months? 100,000: soldSo, yeah, impressive. For context, the Met’s best-selling exhibit was the four-month showing (spanning 1978 and 1979) of Treasures of Tutankhamun with 1,360,957 visitors. The runner-up was Mona Lisa, which saw 1,077,521 visitors in just one month in ’63. The previous record for a Costume Institute exhibit was held by 2008′s?Superheroes: Fashion and Fantasy, which 576,000 people saw.The exhibit remained hot up until the very end, with Joe Zee squeezing in a yesterday and showing up at the museum to sign catalogs last night (our intern saw her!).?Sadly, according to the release we received: “The exhibition could not be extended further because the galleries need to be turned over for the preparation of the exhibition Wonder of the Age: Master Painters of India, 1100-1900, which will open on September 28.” Sigh. ?Did Kim Kardashian Copy Alexis Bittar’s Jewelry Line? by 4:49 pm, October 5th, 2011 A lot of people have said a lot of mean things about Kim Kardashian, but we don’t think anyone had ever called her a thief until jewelry designer Alexis Bittar accused her of copying his designs for her own line of baubles, Belle Noel.Bittar Alexa, the fashion magazine of The New York Post, that he won’t lend Kardashian any more of his jewelry to wear because he thinks her line looks a little too much like his. Bittar, a CFDA-award winning designer, makes some of the chunkiest statement jewelry we’ve ever seen, and numerous celebrities, including Kardashian, have borrowed pieces to wear on the red carpet. But on a recent trip past one of Kardashian’s stores in New York City, Bittar noticed that some of his pieces made it a little farther than a few ritzy events.“In the reality TV world, there are so many people coming out with lines to capitalize on their TV shows. They are not designers and they are just stealing. I passed the Dash pop up store on Broadway, and I saw that Kim’s pieces were very similar to mine, and she definitely has been taking note (of my designs). The tricky thing is that we have sent pieces to Kim in the past to wear, so now I have told my staff we cannot send anything to her. She was definitely influenced by my designs without a doubt.”We have our own misgivings with celebrity fashion lines, but we’re not so sure that Kardashian actually stole anything from Bittar. At least not specifically. While Bittar’s pieces are fun and imaginative and made from seriously high quality materials, they’re not necessarily groundbreaking original works of metal art. There are a lot of jewelry designers who make crystal-encrusted hoop earrings similar to Bittars, and if there’s a single contemporary jewelry company out there that’s not making multi-strand chain necklaces or Lucite pendants, we haven’t come across it.Bittar’s indignation isn’t unwarranted, it’s just misplaced. Kardashian’s jewelry line isn’t copying him, it’s copying a contemporary approach to accessories. Bittar told Alexa he doesn’t plan on pressing charges, and that’s probably because he realizes he couldn’t win a copyright infringement lawsuit against Kardashian. To us, the solution is clear: if you don’t want your stuff to get copied, don’t make things that are easy to copy.Take a look at a few comparisons of what Bittar does (left) and what Kardashian does (right) below. Enable JavaScript to check out our fancy slideshow. [ via ] ?Balmain To Launch Lower-Priced Line, Pierre Balmain, In September by 3:49 pm, May 23rd, 2011 Diffusion lines are awesome things, as they allow consumers to buy designer duds at cheap-o prices. We love both designer duds and cheap-o prices! So, we were especially excited to hear that Balmain is launching such a line! Sort of!From what we gather, calling it a is a bit of a misnomer. Under new creative director (and ) Olivier Rousteing, Balmain will debut a lower-priced line called Pierre Balmain. (Yes, it’s named after the house’s founder.) We’ll get to see the spring 2012 goods in September, and there will be both men’s and women’s collections. A spokesperson calls the line “young”.This sounds more like a Marc by Marc Jacobs or See by Chloe situation than a Rodarte for Target one. Still! Balmain for less! Woo! Kanye‘s probably .[] ?WATCH: Zooey Deschanel, Mary-Kate Olsen, & Bjork Get Quirky On SNL by 11:47 am, February 12th, 2012 Say what you will about Zooey Deschanel‘s twee brand of . The actress-singer-blogger-crafter knows how to poke fun at herself.Last night Zooey hosted Saturday Night Live, and our favorite sketch was undoubtedly “Bein’ Quirky With Zooey Deschanel” in which Abby Elliott plays a pitch-perfect Zooey and Zooey plays a pitch-perfect Mary-Kate Olsen. Oh, and Kristen Wiig plays a pitch-perfect BJORK! There’s trash repurposing and knitting. And next week’s guests are “Chloe Sevigny and an American Girl doll”.Watch below, please: ?WATCH: Chloe Moretz Gets Grease-y In New Drew Barrymore Video by 9:39 am, August 4th, 2011 14-year-old actress and Chloe Moretz has again stolen our hearts. This time the current is showing off her acting chops in the Drew Barrymore-directed music video for Best Coast’s song “Our Deal”. The video, a timeless spin on Romeo and Juliet, features a slew of young stars including Miranda Cosgrove , Danny Glover, and Shailene Woodley all rocking some seriously eclectic duds.Teen dream Tyler Posey stars as Lucky (a.k.a Romeo), a member of city gang The Day Trotters, with Moretz as his star-crossed lover and rival gang member, Veronica (a.k.a. Juliet). The video follows the ill-fated duo as they explore young love and face their inevitable tragic end. So it’s a bit closer to the West Side Story take on Shakespeare’s classic — but Barrymore doesn’t want you thinking this story is set in the ’50s, or any other era for that matter. In fact, she wanted the vid to be completely un-time specific. That’s made clear in the wild costumes in the video, which are a complete combination of greaser, grunge and rocker. Drew’s inspiration for the eclectic wardrobe? “A jean jacket,” the director says. “It totally transcends. It works in the ’50s, it was punk rock in the ’70s, it was grunge in the ’90s. I wanted to bring in that timeless quality.”The song is great, the outfits are awesome, and we are officially obsessed.Watch for yourself, below. And two behind the scenes videos with actor interviews and a wardrobe tour:[, ] ?A Handy Guide To The Best Cyber Monday Deals Out There! by 9:39 am, November 29th, 2010 Happy Cyber Monday, everybody! Chances are if you’re online today, it’s probably because you’re trying to buy a gift for someone (or maybe one for yourself!). The National Retail Foundation anticipates that online holiday shopping will increase about 10 percent this year, with over 100 million people pointing and clicking to their holiday heart’s content. Wanna get in on the fun? Check out the roster of online sales, savings and deals below.: You get $50 off every $250 spend, except for beauty and fine jewelry. : The already discounted stock at this site is getting an additional 10 to 20 percent off.: Again, the more you spend, the better the discount gets. Just don’t believe that if you spend more, you save more. That just doesn’t make any sense.: 40 percent off and free shipping on orders over $125? What’s not to like about that?: Free shipping on all orders over $25, plus discounts on over 40,000 items in the store. : Free shipping on orders over $75, sales on stuff in nearly every department (just not mattresses, sorry) and 25 to 40 percent off on clearance items.: Need jewelry? Be sure to check out the deals here — this site is trying out the same spend more, take more off strategy as other smart stores.: The more you spend, the better your discounts gets. A cart filled with $250 will earn you $50 off, but if you spend $1,500, you get $500 off.: Get up to 75 percent off makeup and other beauty products. : If you spend $300, you get 30 percent off. Plus, there’s a limited edition tote if you spend over $150 and free shipping and gift wrap no matter what your order looks like.: Last day for free shipping! Men’s outerwear is up to 40 percent off, and the Thanksgiving Sale is still going strong.Now, this isn’t a comprehensive listing, so be sure to search far and wide before you buy — you might be able to get a better deal somewhere else. Happy shopping, and be sure to let us know what deals you score! [CNN Money] [People Style Watch] [Stylelist] [StyleCaster] ?Glam Squad Gurus: Fashion’s Top 5 Makeup Artists by 4:48 pm, April 14th, 2010 Makeup artists are a special breed. They live and die for glamour and work their fingers and brushes to the bone to create flawless faces that defy logic and reality. Whether they’re painting faces of top models who stomp down international runways or glamming up their celeb clients for paparazzi pics on Robertson Blvd., makeup artists are the masters behind some of the most beautiful women in the world and without them wielding their beauty brushes, we wouldn’t have anyone to covet, envy or obsess over!Here are my top five Makeup Artists of all time!Pat McGrath – Creative Couture She is the go-to girl for all things high fashion and beauty. Known for her stunning work backstage at fashion shows from Paris to New York to Milan, McGrath can go from creating sun-kissed dewy faces for Chloe to avant garde geisha-inspired lips for Dior that scream haute couture. This Northampton born and bred makeup artist is a true innovator in that she doesn’t let conventional ideas of makeup and beauty limit her. In 1999 she helped create the Armani Cosmetics line and in 2004 she was named the Beauty Director for Max Factor and Cover Girl cosmetics. She is a makeup legend and a beauty trendsetter with her finger on the pulse of all that’s glamorous and beautiful. Gucci Westman ? International Beauty Whether she’s prepping a celeb client for a photo shoot or overseeing the creation of new products for cosmetic powerhouse Revlon, she is one of the top editorial makeup artists in the business. Gucci was born in Southern California and raised in both California and Sweden. Her unique viewpoints and inspirations can be seen in her work. She is known for creating looks that convey sensuality as many of her celeb clients such as Drew Barrymore and Natalie Portman are known for their natural sex appeal. Even though she has toned down much of her editorial work due to the birth of her son, she is still working her beauty magic as the Global Director of Revlon. Sam Fine ? Master Colorist When it comes to beauty and makeup, women of color have had the unfortunate task of settling for less. Many companies don’t make foundation or powder shades that work well for the diverse range of tones which exist in various ethnic communities. That’s where Sam Fine steps into the picture. He is a prominent celebrity makeup artist known for his amazing work with such luminous beauties as Iman, Patti Label and Vanessa Williams to name a few. This Chicago native honed his craft behind the cosmetics counter and soon branched out into the world of editorial makeup where he began “beating” the faces of Tyra Banks, Naomi Campbell and Veronica Webb. Sam Fine has given women of color a beautiful new outlook on makeup.Tom Pecheux ? Glamour God When major fashion houses such as Gucci and Prada need to shoot their ad campaigns, they call on this amazing makeup artist to craft the looks that will grace the faces of the models hawking their high-end wares. Known for his exquisite techniques, Pecheux is one of the most sought after editorial makeup artists in the world. His work has been featured on the covers of several international Vogue magazine covers and he’s recently been tapped to be the Creative Director of the worldwide cosmetic giant Estee Lauder. Pecheux’s French sensibilities are one of the reason’s he is such a gifted artist. The world of beauty owes much to this master makeup artist.Charlie Green ? Nonconformist The first thing you notice about Charlie Green is her platinum blonde shock locks, bright lips and zany personality. She is the Betsey Johnson of the beauty world with her colorful approach to makeup. This British beauty expert has worked the faces of many of the world’s top models and celebs as well as created looks for several ad campaigns for some of the top fashion designers and beauty companies. This fearless artist isn’t bound by rules or set notions of beauty and style. She uses her imagination and lets her creativity flow through everything that she does. She’s a true trend-setter and an artist that embodies the true beauty of makeup.***Linda Ripoll is a certified beauty addict with an unhealthy obsession for fashion magazines, sushi and shopping. She holds a Bachelors of Arts degree in Sociology from the University of California at Berkeley and a Masters of Fine Arts in Screenwriting from the University of Miami. As a beauty editor for the past twelve years, she has had the pleasure of writing about the beauty business from all angles. She recently launched a beauty blog which highlights the latest in beauty for today’s biracial/multiracial woman. She is also the Beauty Editor for , a new high fashion and beauty publication for today’s affluent woman of color. Follow her on Twitter . ?PHOTOS: Beyonce & Jay-Z Wear Matching Shoes At The Knicks Game by 10:47 am, April 16th, 2012 Back from their , Beyonce and Jay-Z went to a basketball game last night.The New Jersey Nets owner and his lovely wife watched the New York Knicks take on the Miami Heat courtside. Chloe Sevigny wasn’t there , but Jay and B kept admirers amused by being way too cute for their own good. (That said, the teenage boys who sat behind them didn’t seem to care that the coolest pair of all time were mere inches away. We, on the other hand, would have totally flipped out.)Beyonce looked cool and casual in animal print pants and a loose black top ? plus her hot pink heels totally matched Jay’s sneakers.?Other things to love: Jay helping B over a puddle, B pulling a Wintour in her shades, the power couple sipping beers.?Check out the pics below, and swoon away: Enable JavaScript to check out our fancy slideshow. ?PHOTOS: Carly Rae Jepsen Is The New Face Of Wet Seal by 10:59 am, September 8th, 2012 So…buy their clothes, maybe? (Sorry, had to.)Teeny bopper favorite Wet Seal tapped Carly Rae Jepsen as their new spokesmodel. And we actually think the pairing is pretty genius!Carly for the retailer’s online catalog, and the brand is giving away a $1,000 shopping spree with the signer at their NYC store as well as tickets to her show with Justin Bieber. This is what she said about it:“I’m thrilled to be partnering with Wet Seal as I gear up to release my album?Kiss. I loved going through and selecting the different looks for the shoot from the upcoming styles. Each outfit reflects a part of my personality, which made the experience lots of fun.”Carly also wore a look form Wet Seal for an appearance on Access Hollywood. The pairing strikes us as similar to ? maybe these mall brands will be getting some new life breathed into them! Check out a slideshow of a few of the looks Carly modeled for Wet Seal below.****** Enable JavaScript to check out our fancy slideshow. [via ] ?Fashion Folks Turn It Out For CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund Awards by 11:04 am, November 15th, 2011 Last night’s CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund Awards emerging talent like and ? it was also an opportunity for fashion’s cool kids to show off their best duds.Some of the styling choices were not at all surprising ? Amanda Seyfried in Prabal Gurung, Zoe Kravitz in Alexander Wang ? while others made us do a double take ( in Christopher Kane! in Marni!). Highlights included in glasses and a chest-bearing blazer, Olivia Wilde in a cutout Cushnie et Ochs dress, and Chloe Moretz in a billowy printed frock.And let’s not forget the men! The dudes were on point last night. Waris Ahluwalia paired one of with pink suede lace-ups! wore dark jeans, a teal shirt and coordinating tie, a silk embroidered blazer, and maroon velvet loafers! There was also a whole lot of blue, courtesy of , , and . All in all, well done!Check out the fashionable guests below. Which looks do you love? Enable JavaScript to check out our fancy slideshow. ?PHOTOS: Everything You Need To Know About Chanel’s Spring Show by 10:32 am, October 3rd, 2012 If you’re planning on taking a beach holiday with anytime soon, don’t count on packing light. For starters, you’re going to have to save some space for what may be the world’s largest beach bag — an already-infamous quilted number suspended between a pair of hula hoops. And then there’s the headgear. For Spring 2013, Chanel offered wide-brimmed sun hats crafted from clear vinyl, fitting, perhaps to shade yourself from the rays streaming down on a runway crafted from faux solar-panels.We’re dubious as to the UV protection offered by the material — but then we’re also dubious about the functionality of Chanel’s , and that doesn’t stop us from coveting them. One thing that definitely did serve its purpose, however, were the 12 wind turbines that the house had set up in the atrium of the Grand Palais, the latest in a long line of grandiose installations that have run the gamut from clusters of to a the size of a small house (or, we suppose, a palatial NYC apartment). They spun throughout the show, and represented only a portion of the 20 that had been ordered to provide atmosphere for the spectacle.Taking in the show were Kanye West and Jennifer Lopez, the latter of whom lit up the front row with her adorable tot Emme Maribel in tow. They were joined by the usual coterie of chicer-than-chic filles and femmes: Lou Doillon, Ines de la Fressange, Ellen von Unwerth, and Julia Restion-Roitfeld, along with Chanel ambassadors Poppy Delevigne, Leigh Lezark, and Caroline Sieber.The turbines and panels pointed to themes of lightness and energy, a refreshing change after what has been a very dark spring, at least as far as Parisian designers are concerned. Models breezed into the cavernous hall, first in roomy skirt suits encrusted in gobstopper-sized pearls, followed by a parade of cropped jackets paired with slim bottoms corseted to the ribcage. Fabrics were waffled, tech-y, tweed (of course), and, in the final exits, embroidered with three-dimensional florals. The solar panel motif also proved surprisingly versatile, finding its way onto slope-shouldered skirt suits and glitzy cocktail dresses alike. We hope the irony won’t be lost on the wearer if they find themselves packing the pieces away for a jaunt on a gas-guzzling yacht.That’s not to say there weren’t some questionable moments, as well — that back-to-front denim minidress brings back unfortunate memories of middle school DIYs — but Karl just wouldn’t be Karl if he didn’t give us something at which to called the show “a symphony of fabulous clothes in a collection packed with ideas” and offered a pointed dig at ‘s press relations :“His ability to refresh without convulsive reinvention may make him fashion’s ultimate modernist. But he’s got some pretty old-school ideas about the workplace. When it comes to his collections, thematic secrecy? No. Preview? No problem. Sound bite? He’ll give you 30. Banishing longtime front-row types to the second row, or disinviting those who have written ill of him? Nope.”‘s Tim Blanks, meanwhile, questioned the “slightly schizophrenic quality” of the collection, but concluded that “in the end, the path of excess did lead to the palace of wisdom, or at least the clarity of dressy white pieces appliqued with flowers that looked like candy wrappers. Sweetness prevailed.”And as for , who has had quite a few weeks herself, the critic the textural symphony of the collection, and the “huge, light-hazy stage, framed by the minimalist towers, the spectrum of colors ? royal blue, pink, aqua, red, sage, lavender ? blurred into random drops, much as your eye picks out the bright hues in crowded streets.”Check out the show below and judge for yourself: Enable JavaScript to check out our fancy slideshow. ?Chloe Moretz Snags A LOVE Cover (Plus Details On The Rest!) by 11:04 am, July 28th, 2011 On Tuesday, we dubbed Elle Fanning the . Today, Chloe Moretz is giving her a run for her money. Turns out the 14-year-old snagged the third of LOVE magazine’s eight .Like Elle, Chloe is fairly bare-faced, bold-browed, and crying, though she’s lucky enough to be wearing a pair of sparkly horns on hers. A second cover was also posted yesterday, featuring model Nyasha Matonhodze wearing a dead bird on her head and streaming inky tears. While LOVE typically likes to keep their covers kinda under wraps, fashionable man about town last night that editor gave him the.Not only will all the covers feature tears, but Grand has thrown one more teen into the mix: Miu Miu muse . If we extrapolate from Blasberg’s first name only tweets, the remaining four covers are made up of , , , and.No word on whether there will be any more dead birds but we’ll definitely keep you posted. Enable JavaScript to check out our fancy slideshow. ?PHOTOS: Teen Queen Chloe Moretz Wears Lacy Dolce & Gabbana by 4:33 pm, October 16th, 2011 Chloe Moretz is just one of the many teen stars whose style we covet. But did she show she could hold her own against , , and the like at last night’s Spike TV Scream Awards?Well, that’s for you to decide! The 14-year-old donned a black and white Dolce & Gabbana skirt paired with a black lace top. Though the original runway look showed just a bra under the see-through shirt, Chloe opted for a more demure black tank. She accessorized with an embellished belt, black bowed heels, and nary a piece of jewelry. Enable JavaScript to check out our fancy slideshow. ?PHOTOS: Chloe Moretz Dons Dolce At The Premiere of Hugo by 3:03 pm, November 22nd, 2011 We don’t intend to make any apologies for how much we adore teen queen (yes, queen) Chloe Moretz and her inimitable red-carpet style — and luckily, she keeps giving us look after look to fawn over. Last night at the New York premiere of Martin Scorcese‘s new movie Hugo, Moretz wore a tulle Dolce and Gabbana dress with a full skirt the exact same color as her skin.And before you say anything about this being a naked dress, let us confirm that it is not. The dress’s bodice looks like it’s being attacked by a flurry of little bows, and the gown is so full that Moretz looks more like she’s playing dress up than going to a big Hollywood event. But she’s probably doing a healthy portion of both — and of that, we approve.Take a look and let us know what you think. Enable JavaScript to check out our fancy slideshow. ?Chloe Moretz Covers Interview, Talks Style And Ryan Gosling by 2:02 pm, November 4th, 2011 So we have this kind of fangirl obsession with (see also: ,), which is why we were amped to see her on the cover of Interview looking fabulously and appropriately grown up, but it turns out that our girlcrush isn’t unwarranted — we’ve got at least one thing in common, which is to say: an irrationally for Ryan Gosling. Moretz chatted with former child star turned entertainment mogul Drew Barrymore for the Interview, and Gosling came up no fewer than four times. A few examples:BARRYMORE: Okay. If you could go on a date with anyone, who would it be and where would you go? MORETZ: Oh, no . . . This is hard! In my age range there’s not many people to date, so . . . BARRYMORE: A lot of women would say the same thing! MORETZ: [laughs] My date would have to be with . . . Maybe Ryan Gosling.Later…BARRYMORE: Would you want to fly helicopters with Ryan Gosling? MORETZ: Obviously. Who wouldn’t want to do that?And even later…BARRYMORE: On the other side of the coin, what male figure would make you fall down onto your knees in respect and awe? MORETZ: Ryan Gosling.Moretz, gurl, we have four words for you: welcome to the club. And for those of you looking for a style angle, well, here’s her dream closet:BARRYMORE: Okay, magic wand time. Fantasy clothes by any designer made especially for you right now. Go. MORETZ: Oh, no! It’s like a ball gown or something amazingly huge and beautiful. It would probably have to be either, like, Valentino or Oscar de la Renta. And then if it was something beautiful that Audrey Hepburn might wear?you know, just perfect and cute and special?it would probably be either Givenchy or Chanel. And if it was crazy?like, amazingly psychotic?it would have to be Vivienne Westwood.Read the whole interview . Enable JavaScript to check out our fancy slideshow. ?PHOTOS: Cool Girl Chloe Moretz Wears Cool Brand Kenzo by 6:26 pm, October 24th, 2011 Whoa. Chloe Moretz and/or her stylist has sick taste. The 14-year-old solidified her rank among Hollywood’s cool girls by donning head-to-toe Kenzo at Variety‘s Power of Youth event.We love the mixed pattern situation ? green jacquard sweater with a black, white, and orange raffia skirt ? as well as the strappy pink heels. So cute! ?And age-appropriate! And just COOL. It look’s like Humberto Leon and Carol Lim could have a . Enable JavaScript to check out our fancy slideshow. ?Chloe Moretz Talks To David Letterman About Driving & Johnny Depp by 11:00 am, May 4th, 2012 Chloe Moretz dropped by the Late Show with David Letterman last night to discuss, among other things, driving and Johnny Depp.What did we learn? The 15-year-old is set to get her driver’s permit this summer, and Dave (and her mom) really want her to drive stick. Also, her first words upon meeting Depp were:?”I really like your necklaces.” HA. And just so you know, Moretz wore a super cool, leather-trimmed, print Christopher Kane dress for the appearance.Here, watch: ?Chloe Moretz Confesses Her ‘Call Of Duty’ Addiction by 2:01 pm, April 10th, 2012 Chloe Moretz fronts the May issue of and we totally dig the teen’s bubbly look.Unlike the dark and edgy styling we saw for , the 15-year-old starlet looks age-appropriate in a printed Monrow tank, Cult Candy shorts, and a Nanette Lepore belt. We could have gone without the cheesy windswept hair, but she looks super adorable nonetheless. Inside the issue, Moretz dons more patterned shorts and dresses that make us wish for spring.We’ve already our girl crush on Chloe, but we’re not the only ones. Moretz herself gushed?to Seventeen about Hick co-star Blake Lively ().“Blake wears the most amazing clothes every day of her life. I went into her closet one night when she was trying things on for an event, and she was getting dressed, and I was helping her choose what dress to wear. She had brought probably a hundred pairs of Louboutins, and she was like ‘Try these on, try those on.’ We basically had a shoe party!”Yes, Lively has some . But Moretz told the mag that she’d pick video games over shoes any day:“I just got my phone back yesterday. My mom had it for two days. I was supposed to read a book and I really wanted to play Call Of Duty. It’s not like I want to go read the hot story in Cosmo and get locked up! No, I get caught for playing video games. I probably play more than any guy does.”Chloe, we have some for you.Check out the spread in the gallery below: Enable JavaScript to check out our fancy slideshow. [] ?WATCH: Chloe Moretz On Blake Lively, And Why She Can’t Wear Couture by 12:38 pm, November 17th, 2011 Gah. We’re starting to have a really, really serious teen girl crush on Chloe Moretz. The , , awesome actress covers this month’s Teen Vogue, and while the are great and the is interesting, it’s the behind-the-scenes video that sealed the deal.She talks about working with Martin Scorsese (“He’s super Italian”), her favorite brands (“My mom doesn’t really let me buy a lot of high fashion stuff, ’cause she’s like, ‘You get to do it in photo shoots and stuff, so you don’t get to do it in real life!’”), and Blake Lively (“She’s like the sister I never had.”). Just watch it. Enable JavaScript to check out our fancy slideshow. [.] ?WATCH: Chloe Sevigny’s Voyeuristic Video For Opening Ceremony by 6:08 pm, August 21st, 2012 Chloe Sevigny is giving us , and this time, she’s showing off her namesake collection with Opening Ceremony.In the vid, Sevigny throws on her favorite items to the haunting tune of “Fly the Sky” by Colony Farm. The video is creepily cool. It has a ’90s vibe to it, thanks to the old school television static and over-saturated colors, but also a bit of of voyeurism, courtesy of some gratuitous boob and thigh shots. Either way, we watched it several times. So should you: ?PHOTO: Chloe Sevigny Covers ELLE Korea by 2:32 pm, December 28th, 2010 As fun as it is to playfully at Chloe Sevigny (and as much attention as the ELLE brands have attracted for allegedly the color of their cover stars), we can’t deny that the January 2011 cover of ELLE Korea is pretty great. It’s clean simplicity (and that awesome net-overlay trench coat Sevigny is wearing) make for an awesome start to a brand new year. And at any rate, it’s an improvement over the the actress did for ELLE UK in 2008. But that’s just what we think. And we can’t help but ask … [ via ] ?PHOTOS: Who Was Best Dressed At The Big Love Premiere? by 9:40 am, January 13th, 2011 The stars of HBO’s polygamist drama Big Love stepped out Wednesday night to celebrate the premiere of the show’s fifth season. And as any good fashionista knows, where Chloe Sevigny goes, a fashion moment will follow. But Ginnifer Goodwin gave Sevigny a run for her money on the red carpet and now it’s up to you to decide: who was last night’s best dressed? Enable JavaScript to check out our fancy slideshow. ?Love It Or Leave It: Chloe Sevigny Lays It On Thick by 1:10 pm, October 10th, 2010 We always appreciate Chloe Sevigny‘s singular sense of style, and we’re digging the chic fall look she showed up in at the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN) Respect Awards in LA.Sevigny wore a black dress with a gold belt under a structural black and gray coat with stylized lapels. She carried a drawstring purse with gold detailing, and adorned her feet with heavy black ankle-strap heels. Her hair was pulled back, and red lips added a boost of color to the ensemble. Enable JavaScript to check out our fancy slideshow. ?PHOTOS: Chloe Sevigny’s Surprisingly Timeless Style by 1:45 pm, October 14th, 2010 We’ve been obsessed with Chloe Sevigny ever since we saw her in the wearing a patchwork hat of her own design. And while she’s not necessarily everyone’s cup of tea, she certainly knows how to make a statement on the red carpet. But as we looked through the archives to pull our favorites of Sevigny’s looks, we noticed something very interesting. For as “hip” as her look may be, it’s also incredibly timeless. Take a look back at the last ten years of Sevigny’s style and tell us if she couldn’t wear any and all of it today. Enable JavaScript to check out our fancy slideshow. ?WATCH: Chloe Sevigny’s New Year’s Resolutions by 11:45 am, December 27th, 2010 While everyone else in the world is busy dusting off and airing out their LBDs for New Years Eve fetes, Chloe Segivny has already written her resolutions.Well, OK — it’s not actually the beloved actress and , just some guy who bears a creepily good resemblance to her when he puts on a wig and a little makeup. Still, we don’t know any other actress who could inspire a drag queen to try to inspire all of YouTube to think outside the boot and really understand the color orange — and those are things everyone should do in 2011.WATCH: [YouTube] ?Chloe Sevigny And Derek Blasberg Do The Charleston In Silent Film by 5:10 pm, June 28th, 2012 This silent film, directed by Dasha Zhukova as part of SHOWStudio‘s series, features , who runs into the Peter Brant II (as a waiter) at a fashion event. She then sees a gorgeous Prada dress that mentally transports her to the ’20s, where she dances the Charleston with Derek Blasberg. In short, it contains everything that is good and fashion-y. Feast your eyes on this precious 3 and half minutes of film below![] ?PHOTOS: Chloe Sevigny Channels Transgender Assassin For Interview by 3:59 pm, January 19th, 2012 The only thing we love more than is Chloe Sevigny modeling, when she gets to combine being an actor and a lover of fashion for the sole purpose of our visual gratification. And that’s exactly what she’s doing in February issue of Interview magazine.Segivny, who plays a transgender assassin in the upcoming film Hit and Miss (does the headline make sense now?) posed for photographer wearing everything from Nina Ricci to Yves Saint Laurent. The pictures exude a masculine energy, and so does some of the styling — but the clothes, while a little tough, are about as feminine as it gets. Hooray, duality!Check out the photos below. Enable JavaScript to check out our fancy slideshow. [] ?Chloe Wears Suspenders, Holds Down Friend’s Skirt by 12:30 pm, June 4th, 2010 Our hats go off to the for deeming this story newsworthy, but it seems Chole Sevigny is as altruistic as she is stylish. Yesterday, the paper reports, the suspender clad starlet rescued a hapless friend after her flimsy white dress got caught up in a rogue gust?of wind. If only she’d been there to come to Marilyn Monroe’s aide. For our part, we can’t decide if we’re more obsessed with Chloe’s selfless act of ass grabbing or her daytime get-up. The high waisted mom jeans plus suspenders plus clogs plus a rolled-up?Cramps tee! Where to even begin? If we were Chloe Sevigny we would totally wear this outfit, though personally we fear any ?attempt to combine suspenders and clogs would quickly veer into Pee-Wee Herman meets school nurse territory. Ah, if only it were Freaky Friday. ?Chloe Sevigny Is So Over The Fashion Industry by 5:25 pm, July 3rd, 2011 Let’s be clear: we love (and her ), but we’re not sure how we feel about the she gave of The New York Times’ Style section, in which Sevigny claimed (repeatedly) to be “bored”, “not into”, and “not excited by” the fashion industry. While anyone who has spent as many years as Sevigny in front of fashion’s fawning lens has a right to be a bit jaded about it all, it almost feels like Ms. Sevigny doth protest too much.On contemporary fashion:“I’m just not as excited by it,” Ms. Sevigny said… “I don’t know if it is a reflection of what they are producing, or just my feelings toward it. I bought a pair of Birkenstocks today ? let’s be real. I wanted a chunky sandal that was functional. That should tell you where I am at as far as fashion.”On shows:“I hate going to fashion shows,” she said, [laughing]. “I find them boring.”On the club scene:“As of late, I am more of a homebody,” she said. “I like having people over. You can smoke in the apartment. I’m just not into going out so much. The crowd is getting younger and younger.”On her own design aspirations:It’s funny, she said, that she was approached recently with a proposal to make a mass-oriented fashion brand, on the scale of other celebrity collections, but she declined. “I think I would feel gross for it to be like that,” she said. “I just want the clothing to be an extension of me, of who I am and my career.”While she certainly makes no shortage of good points, the whole thing smacks a little of “been there, done that” condescension. Then again, would we love Sevigny as much if she wasn’t so delightfully honest (and contrarian)? Probably not. [NYT] ?Chloe Sevigny Can Get A Magazine Cover, But Not A Valentino Dress by 4:44 pm, July 11th, 2012 has been a fashion It Girl for , but she still can’t get something so simple as a Valentino dress for a routine red carpet appearance. Is there no justice in the world?You would think the entire fashion universe would be scrambling to dress her, but Chloe reveals in the interview accompanying her -lensed that she only received 2 of the 20 dresses she wanted to wear for the UK premier of Hit And Miss:“‘Aren’t I one of the top searches on Style.com, for crying out loud?’ she says with mock disgust. ‘How hard is it to get a f—ing dress from Valentino?’”Seriously, if Chloe only has a 10 percent success rate, there sure isn’t any hope for anyone else.She also admits that she’s quite so enamored with () YouTube.“At first I thought, Oh, they’re funny. They’re not even really me, they’re these weird art pieces,” she says. “But I’ve turned a little. I’m slightly offended because he’s calling me pretentious, and I’m not.”Aw.[ via ] ?WATCH: Chloe Sevigny Impersonates Her Impersonator by 9:34 am, February 22nd, 2011 Besides having some seriously , Chloe Sevigny is one of Hollywood’s most fascinating celebs — that notwithstanding. She’s so fascinating, in fact, that she’s inspired a hilariously spot on (the surest sign of fame), whose videos she watches for the first time in this delightfully intimate interview from. Other things we learn in the clip: she’s playing 19th century Lizzie Borden in an HBO miniseries, she doesn’t quite understand the press obsession with her (though she admits most other celebrities play it safe), and she’s got a very healthy sense of humor.[via .] ?PHOTOS: Chloe Fetes 60th Anniversary At The Palais De Tokyo In Paris by 10:39 am, September 29th, 2012 French house Chloe threw a massive bash last night at the Palais de Tokyo museum in Paris to kick of an exhibit called “Chloe: Attitudes” that showcases the label’s work over the last 60 years. Naturally, there were models everywhere, showed up, and everyone looked just smashing.Chloe founder Gaby?Aghion told of the house, “I created the house just after couture, and all I ever wanted was for it to have a happy spirit, to make people happy.” And we think it’s safe to say that that goal was achieved at last night’s party. Gold and silver ballons filled the room, songstress Cecile Cassel performed, and everyone danced the night away. And of course, Lagerfeld, who was at the helm of the house from 1966 to 1983 and again from 1992 to 1997, had things to say about the exhibit:“I’m not really into archives, so it will be fun to see. I don’t keep documents. In any case, Gaby Aghion told me the years she worked with me were the best years.”He’s always so humble. Check out some photos from the event below! Enable JavaScript to check out our fancy slideshow. [] ?PHOTOS: Chloe Moretz Steals The CinemaCon Red Carpet by 12:59 pm, April 27th, 2012 !Last night the CinemaCon Awards were held in Las Vegas, and lots of celebs attended. Most of them (Michelle Pfeiffer, Jennifer Garner, Charlize Theron) wore pretty basic black, though Theron‘s Dion Lee number had some questionable cutouts and armband sleeves. We happen to think cool kid Chloe Moretz stole the show in Kenzo‘s metallic blue dress with a purple print and pockets. Enable JavaScript to check out our fancy slideshow. ?PHOTOS: Rooney Mara Stole The Show At The Costume Designers Guild Awards by 10:45 am, February 22nd, 2012 Maybe we’re biased, but it almost feels unfair to pit red carpet attendees against each other when Rooney Mara is on the scene. As Trish Summerville quipped in her acceptance speech at last night’s Costume Designers Guild Awards, Mara “[let] me torture her and cut her hair and bleach her eyebrows and dress her up and try and make her ugly ? which didn’t work.” Especially if last night is anything to go by. Mara was joined by fellow style stars Chloe Moretz, Ellie Kemper (whose gown appeared to on an iPhone), Kate Beckinsale, , and Madeleine Stowe. Our vote is with Mara, for her exceptional makeup, slicked back hair, and clean lines. The plunging neck of her aubergine J.Mendel dress did well unadorned — but Moretz’ pink streaks come a close second. Oh, to be fifteen again. Enable JavaScript to check out our fancy slideshow. ?WATCH: The Genius Behind Courtney Love’s Crazy Personal Wardrobe by 2:48 pm, December 22nd, 2011 Let’s give some credit where credit is due. Courtney Love is sort of a major fashion person — and, well, this is not a recent development. The singer has apparently been collecting clothing longer than she’s been — longer, in fact, than some of us have been alive.Our friends at Stylelist enlisted the help of model manager extraordinaire to usher of Love’s closet, which has pieces in it that date all the way back to the 1920s. Love says she’s been collecting clothing since the early 1980s, when she worked in the costume department at Paramount. Since then she’s amassed a huge wardrobe that touches every fashion house from Chloe to Marc Jacobs — and a few places we’ve never even heard of.And that’s probably the coolest thing about Love’s collection: it comes from everywhere (on occasion, it’s stuff that she cut up and sewed back together herself) and makes no judgements or distinctions between things that are basically thrifted (read: stolen) and things that are couture. Take a look at her collection below.[] ?PHOTOS: Last Night’s Dark Shadows Red Carpet Was Appropriately Dark by 10:13 am, May 10th, 2012 Did the ladies at last night’s London Dark Shadows premiere call each other to discuss what they would wear to the red purple carpet? Chloe Moretz and Michelle Pfeiffer looked like twins in bordeaux-colored frocks, while Helena Bonham Carter, television presenter?Edith Bowman, and singers?Paloma Faith and?Kimberly Wyatt went for black ensembles. Australian actress?Bella Heathcote and Eva Green kept with the dark theme in navy dresses.Check out the gallery below, and tell us who you think was best dressed: Enable JavaScript to check out our fancy slideshow. ?Blasberg’s Book Party Brings Fashion’s Classiest To Barneys by 10:10 am, April 7th, 2010 Last night, Barney’s New York celebrated the launch of fashion writer Derek Blasberg’s new humorous handbook, The book promises to teach readers how to “climb the social ladder with grace, how to feel confident in every situation, [and] how to make a lasting impression (but not the kind that lands you on the latest “Worst Dressed List.”)Who better to offer this advice than Mr. Blasberg, who has written features for Vogue, V, Harper’s Bazaar, and Interview Magazine, among others?Fashion’s elite showed up to congratulate their friend and fellow colleague. Attendees included Simon Doonan, Zac Posen, Dennis Basso, Jessica Stam, and Harper’s Bazaar editor in chief Glenda Bailey — to name a few. We can’t wait to grab our copy and let you know how it is. Stay tuned for a Styleite review…Chloe SevignyJessica StamLeigh LezarkNEXT: Rachel Roy, Tory Burch, Zac Posen, and Charlotte Ronson… Pages: 1 ?Judith Leiber Does Ms. Havisham Proud With Blingy Birdcage by 5:47 pm, April 7th, 2010 Can’t stomach spending ? Well, how about dropping it on, say, a ? We kid you not. Leave it to Judith Lieber – auteur of all things overly ornate, crystal encrusted and Tic-Tac sized — to?completely bling out a birdcage and try to pass it off as a legitimate, not to mention expensive, accessory. Of course, the good folks over at Net-a-Porter tried to play down the fact that this might just be the best batty old-lady accessory we’ve ever set eyes on by pairing it with a demure Chloe dress and Choos. But come on, who else besides the ever bat-tastic Ms. Havisham would consider this pricey bauble? So save the Chloe— we think this crazy old lady “It Bag” just begs for some painted on red-lipstick, a heady dose of perfume, and the requisite chicka boom, chicka boom boom. Here’s how we’d style it:Nars Lipstick in Red-Orange Matte: All the better if it’s smeared on like only a kindergardener or geriatric could do. Extra points if it makes it onto the front teeth.Half a bottle of Diorissimo Perfume by Christian Dior Woman: Nothing says washed up grande dame quite like the overly floral notes of this classic perfume. Think scent of old lady mixed with just the right amount of mothballs.We would have preferred a gnarled black veil, but we think this hot-pink bow headpiece works as a passable substitute for an aspirant Havisham. Really brings out the bird in the birdcage, no? We think it would look sublime worn over a white, matted mane.Full disclosure, the traditionalist in us sort of loves Lanvin’s .?In fact it almost makes us want to get stood up in the alter just so we could spent the rest of our adult life chain smoking cigarettes, drinking bourbon, and wearing this stunning frock. Naturally, we’d pair it with piles and piles of tarnished gold jewelry and a full length fur.Finally, to anchor the look…. ?Dolce & Gabbana’s New Underwear Ads Star A Brood Of Babies by 1:52 pm, July 7th, 2012 Who knew you could sell underwear without having , ladies writhe around in bed? Or, you know, a David Beckham?Apparently Dolce & Gabbana did, since their newest underwear ads feature Italian model looking all Sunday-morning-gorgeous with her faux brood of kids and hunky baby daddy. And while Balti does in fact have a daughter of her own, five-year-old Matilde is not one of the tots featured in the campaign. Instead, the brand seems to have cast Chloe Moretz‘s tiny brunette doppelganger. Do you see the resemblance as much as we do?And now, the question we know you all are asking yourselves: are those Dolce diapers the littlest ones are wearing? We knew the house was getting into the game, but that is some serious commitment to keeping your kids looking luxe. Enable JavaScript to check out our fancy slideshow. [ via ] ?PHOTOS: Elizabeth Olsen Almost ‘Retired’ From Acting by 3:58 pm, September 18th, 2012 Elizabeth Olsen is . That doesn’t mean we like the twins any less, but have you seen Elizabeth in Martha Marcy May Marlene? Exactly.The 23-year-old star The Guardian‘s September issue, and in the , Olsen works rich autumnal hues and designer labels like , Holly Fulton, and Chloe. A glossy brown mane and matte burgundy lips complete her look.The actress talks about being an Olsen, her love for auditioning for roles, and living in New York versus Los Angeles. Olsen also reveals?that she actually “retired” from acting when she was 10-years-old, and didn’t want to start her professional career until she was 18:“My parents made me write down a pros and cons list. And the cons just piled up. So I figured I’d keep acting as a hobby until I was older. Because I felt that pressure, and that people would say, ‘Oh, that’s nepotism.’ I decided that as long as I felt confident and worked hard for it, instead of having it handed to me, no one could take that away from me. I don’t have any insecurity about it. I never got any job because of my sisters. I could have pulled a few strings through them, but I never needed to.”We’re certainly glad Lizzie’s back in the game ? whew! Enable JavaScript to check out our fancy slideshow. [] ?Emma Roberts, America’s Next Top Designer? by 1:15 pm, April 9th, 2010 It’s rare that a child star makes an entree into the adult world unscathed. Drugs, boys, leaked naked pictures, typically seem to interfere with some of Hollywood’s most promising starlets. Obviously Lindsay Lohan is the first example come to mind, but don’t forget that Drew Barrymore went to rehab at 14 and Macaulay Culkin divorced his parents, paving the way for child stars everywhere to let loose and continue on the path of Young Hollywood madness.There are a few moments of glimmering lights, and one of the brightest is 19 year old actress Emma Roberts, whose career seems to have exploded after playing Addie in Nickelodeon’s Unfabulous. Aside from her acting abilities, which have landed her roles in 5 to be released major films in the coming year, Roberts has been an increasing presence on the fashion circuit, showing up well-turned out to enough red carpet events to land herself a well-deserved place on best-dressed lists.She looks aboslutely glowing in today’s WWD Beauty Biz magazine, appearing in three shots wearing the likes of Alberta Ferretti, Preen, Cynthia Steffe, and No. 6.Roberts, who sat down with to discuss her evolving personal style, can spit names of fashion’s greatest as though they’re already on the tip of her tongue. Some of her favorites include Alexander Wang, See by Chloe, Miu Miu and Christian Dior. “I would like to be recognized for my style, because I love clothes,” she told WWD, “Audrey Hepburn is amazing because she was so beautiful, but at the same time, she wasn’t a big-boobed bombshell.”And recognized for her style she has. Roberts was named “Girl Of The Month,” by and is currently a brand ambassador for Neutrogena skin care products. Roberts’ next mission, in addition to continuing her budding acting career, may be a design deal. “I want to do something in fashion that wouldn’t be cheesy,” she told WWD. “I wouldn’t do, like, Emma Roberts for Target. I’d want do to something more like the Olsen twins did, Elizabeth and James and The Row, something that is really cool, wearable and still unique.”We think Roberts would be a great addition to the celebrity designer clan, and with her promise to not do something “cheesy,” we’re in full support. Let’s just hope she keeps it. ?5 New Year’s Resolutions Your Closet Will Appreciate by 5:15 pm, January 1st, 2011 We’ve been thinking a lot about New Year’s resolutions today — which ones are worth making, which ones aren’t, and which ones are actually going to help us live better, more stylish lives in the year to come. And among the many we’ve tossed around in our collective head (including drag Chloe Sevigny‘s to “always think outside the boot”), we decided that it might serve us well to turn the focus away from ourselves (just for a moment) and onto our frequently overburdened closets. Read on to find out what we mean.Wear more of what you’ve already got, or donate what you don’t wear to charity. Think about your closet in its entirety. Now think about how much of that entirety you actually wear in your everyday life. If there’s good stuff that’s just collecting dust — or worse, taking up space that could be occupied by garments you’d actually wear — then take it out and give it to someone who could use it.Buy for your taste, not trend appeal. If a trendy, of-the-moment jacket isn’t sewn to last, buying it might turn out to be a waste of money. It’d be even worse if you bought something super trendy from a high-end label (ie that ) and you don’t wear it that often.Become better friends with your dry cleaner. You might not have to send your shirts out to be pressed every week, but that doesn’t mean whoever professionally cleans what needs professional cleaning can’t be a regular part of your clothes’ maintenance. With all that stain-fighting, garment-improving knowledge, your dry cleaner should certainly be able to impart a little wisdom that’ll guide your efforts in the laundry room.Remember what you’ve already got. Building a wardrobe can be a lifelong enterprise, and like any magnum opus, your closet should be chock full of references to who you are. Buying an outlandish sweater just because you look good in it is fine, but if it doesn’t play nice with the shirts and skirts you’ve got back at the house, it’ll stand out. In a bad way.Don’t take your clothes too seriously. Seriously. What’s the point of getting dressed in the morning if you’re not having fun? ?Florence Welch Doesn’t Really Look Like Herself On This Vogue UK Cover by 6:13 pm, December 5th, 2011 Florence Welch has snagged yet another Vogue cover in which she does not look like herself.First shot the songstress (looking like a lady Kaiser) for , and now she’s fronting the of Vogue UK. While we’re into her pleated Chloe dress and the fact that her tattoos are on display, she looks kind of dead in the eyes and confused in the face. Do you agree?[via ] ?Golden Globes 2010: Fashion Hits and Misses by 11:08 pm, January 17th, 2010 This year’s first red carpet has finally been walked. For the most part, no drastic fashion statements were made. Purple was the color of the evening (Nine’s Fergie, 30 Rock’s Jane Krakowski, Damages’ Rose Byrne, Alfre Woodard, The Blind Side’s Sandra Bullock, Leona Lewis) and the Haiti support pins were without a doubt the accessory of the evening.The Hits Olivia Wilde looked absolutely flawless in a black sparkling Gucci gown. From the incredible draping to the plunging neckline, Wilde did Frida Giannini’s brand justice while accessorizing thoughtfully with a a jaw dropping ring and cuff.January Jones may have had the best dress of the evening had she not paired her stunning Lanvin black gown with that distracting satin headband. Why the strange accessory? Albert Elbaz’s masterpiece of a gown and her dramatic Paris Chanel red lip were enough on their own. Why the ribbon Jones?Diane Kruger (top photo) deserves a shout out for supporting Christian Lacroix, whose fashion house has had quite the tumultuous year. While the dress itself may not be one of the evening’s best, Kruger gets major points for sporting a designer in need of serious support. Color, questionable. Earrings, could have done without. White accent, gorgeous. Silhouette, unmistakably Lacroix.Other hits: Penelope Cruz, Anna Kendrick and Kate Hudson (both in Marchesa), Emily Blunt, Lea Michele, Jennifer Morrison. Pages: 1 ?PHOTOS: It Girls Gather To Celebrate Gossip Girl’s 100th Episode by 3:07 pm, November 20th, 2011 Gossip Girl sure knows how to attract the cool young things. At last night’s soiree celebrating the series’ 100th episode (woo !), Blake Lively, Leighton Meester, and crew were joined by the awesome one-two punch of Chloe Moretz and . Whatever did they wear?!Lively arguably owned the red carpet in an intricate Marchesa dress, dripping in fringe and revealing a fair amount of her torso. Meester seemed a bit uncomfortable in strapless white Balmain, while Michelle Trachtenberg wore a ton of Erickson Beamon baubles and Kelly Rutherford looked as elegant as ever in a metallic silver number with gray feather detailing. As for the super cool guests not in the cast, 14-year-old Moretz opted for an age-appropriate head-to-toe Stella McCartney ensemble that included tights, and Kloss chose a graphic black and white frock.Who looked best? Check out the photos below, and decide for yourself! Enable JavaScript to check out our fancy slideshow. ?Is Gwyneth Paltrow Designing A Line For Topshop? by 1:58 pm, June 29th, 2011 Looks like Gwyneth Paltrow will be bringing her eye for fashion to a Topshop near you! The actress/singer/cook/blogger with , head of the British clothing store, in London last night.Gwyneth would be filling the shoes of former Topshop celebrity designer?, whose?3-year, ￡3 million contract with the chain . It had been reported that Chloe Green, Sir Philip’s 19-year-old daughter, , but we’d happily take Gwyneth, who is older and a little more seasoned in the fashion world, over the boss’ daughter.Paltrow, who lives in London and the US, is not new to the design world. In 2009 she did a 70s-inspired line for ZOEtees, the same French fashion label that designer designed for.So between , rocking it on the red carpet, and now a possible collaboration in the works, Gwynnie is officially a major player in the fashion world. Since it seems there’s nothing the woman can’t do, we hope last night’s dinner really was about a Topshop design deal, but we’re trying not to get our hopes up since Rhianna‘s meal with Sir Philip last year?.[] ?Hailee Steinfeld Is Crying Neon Tears On Her LOVE Cover by 4:37 pm, July 28th, 2011 First came , then came , and now we have 14-year-old Hailee Steinfeld’s supernatural Love cover and, just like the others, she’s crying. She’s also wearing a crown, lace gloves, and the most gorgeous bracelets we’ve ever seen.It’s a pretty tough call, but this cover may just be our favorite. (So far, at least.) Also, can you believe this girl is only 14? Kids these days.See the rest of Love’s covers .[] ?Hannah MacGibbon Is Leaving Chloe After All by 9:36 am, May 9th, 2011 After weeks and weeks of speculation about whether would keep her job as creative director at Chloe, the brand has announced she’s leaving to “pursue other projects.” MacGibbon will be replaced by , who was previously the creative director of Pringle of Scotland.MacGibbon’s career trajectory with Chloe looked more like a roller coaster than anything else. She’d been with the brand for almost a decade, succeeding Paulo Melim Andersson as creative director in 2008. Right after the Paris Fashion Week turmoil with and , The New York Times that MacGibbon’s waning contract with Chloe wasn’t likely to be renewed. Then a few weeks later came a story from WWD claiming that yes, in fact, MacGibbon’s contract for at least another season. Chloe’s CEO Geoffroy de la Bourdonnaye told the paper vaguely, “Hannah is still with us, that’s all I can say.”De la Bourdonnaye told WWD a lot more today, saying that the brand is thankful for MacGibbon’s work, but looking forward to what Waight Keller can do for the brand. She credited herself with turning Pringle from an overpriced knitwear company into an “international luxury brand.”And that’s something that every brand wants to be — a global business. MacGibbon’s work may have been beautiful, but if Chloe and its owner Compagnie Financiere Richemont SA want a businesswoman at the helm of their creative operation, Waight Keller might be the right choice. And maybe, in the interest of making money and streamlining businesses (and keeping crazy, indulgent artists out of the boardroom) fashion companies want their creative officers to look and think more like their executives. [WWD] [WWD] [NYT] ?Harper Beckham Has A Brand New Damien Hirst Painting In Her Nursery by 12:55 pm, August 3rd, 2012 While most of our nurseries featured art along the lines of cutesy mobiles and dancing bear wallpaper, most of us are not one-year-old , whose bedroom wall now displays the kind of piece that would make most contemporary art galleries green with envy. Yes, the celebu-tot is the proud new owner of a Damien Hirst original, personally commissioned by daddy David Beckham.Not to worry, though, baby Becks isn’t going to be forever traumatized by a formaldehyde-immersed shark or diamond-encrusted skull. Rather, the painting adorning her wall is reportedly a nursery-friendly rendering of a lilac heart, appropriately named “Daddy’s Girl.” The soccer star is on the September cover of Esquire UK, and if you manage to tear your eyes away from the long enough to read the interview, you’ll see he tells the glossy how much he loves having a baby girl after three boys.“I’m still amazed we have a little girl. I change her nappy and I’m still amazed that it’s a girl. Amazing.”We wonder if older sibs Brooklyn, Romeo, and Cruz got any big ticket pieces back when they were toddlers? We have a hunch little Harper is the of the bunch.[] ?4-Month-Old Harper Beckham Wears Fancy Chloe Tights by 6:24 pm, November 28th, 2011 Harper Beckham is one fancy 4-month-old! and David‘s was spotted hanging out with her mom in a sweet striped dress and ribbed Chloe tights.While we’ve in the past, that does seem a bit steep for . But whatever, :[via ] ?Proof Harper’s Bazaar Gives Its Advertisers Special Treatment by 4:01 pm, November 11th, 2010 While our initial response to viewing the following document was, “And this is news, how?”, it is news. Because as much as those of us in this industry know that the designers featured magazine editorials are dictated by how much advertising dollars they spend, it’s rare that you see cold, hard evidence of this fact. But that’s exactly what a Racked tipster lying on the desk next to the public computer in a Los Angeles hotel.The following document was found () in the lobby of a large Los Angeles hotel. And while Racked initially meant to publish the documents anonymously, they forgot to redact the magazine’s name on one page — and the cat is : the magazine is Harper’s Bazaar. The document, which according to Racked was vetted by Bazaar editor in chief, splits designers into two groups: advertisers and non-advertisers, and sorts the former “in priority order.” Translation: it’s sorted according to who has spent the most advertising dollars with the mag. The sheet (which you can ) opens with the details of the shoot: “Minimal” is the working name, it’s a 10-page spread, and below that are the names of the the photographer, fashion editor, and location. Then, below that, it lists the advertisers in the aforementioned “Priority Order.”1. 2. 3. Calvin Klein 4. YSL 5. Chloe 6. Versace 7. Akris 8. 9. 10. CelineAnd so on, and so forth. Below that are the non-advertisers which are prioritized as: 3.1 Phillip Lim, Helmut Lang, , , and Proenza Schouler.While we like to think that editors, when they put together editorials, are genuinely showcasing the best, most fabulous, most must-have articles of clothing, this document proves that if they’re doing that, they’re choosing from amongst a group of pre-selected brands: those that, through advertising, pay the magazine’s bills.And while we’re certainly cringing for the employee who left these documents behind (they will, almost certainly, be fired), we’re cringing even more for the moment when Bailey and her cohorts at Bazaar get a call from the advertisers near the bottom of the list. Oh, to be a fly on that wall.And if you’re looking for more juicy tidbits, we highly recommend taking a look at , which includes a list of accommodation for the editors, assistants, and those even lower on the ladder. [Racked] ?PHOTOS: Lots Of Girls On The Girls Red Carpet by 2:04 pm, April 5th, 2012 Last night?Claire Danes, Chloe Sevigny, and more?celebrated the premiere of HBO‘s newest show?Girls.(Some context: writer-director?Lena Dunham stars alongside?Jemima Kirke, Zosia Mamet, and Allison Williams in the series about four young women living in New York. It . It looks amazing. Watch the trailer below, please.)While Danes and Sevigny wore patterned frocks that resembled the step-and-repeat on the red carpet, Mamet and Williams opted for simple solids. Rachel Roy was there, too!?Check out all the red carpetness right here: Enable JavaScript to check out our fancy slideshow. And here’s the trailer: ?Hilfiger’s New Ad Campaign Embraces “Twisted” Heritage by 10:47 am, July 13th, 2010 Words we would used to describe Hilfiger, as a brand: All-American. Classic. Sporty. Preppy. Words we wouldn’t: Twisted. But that’s exactly what designer and founder claims is the ethos of the brand’s “25-year heritage” and the inspiration behind a new, interactive ad campaign.“This is the first campaign to truly capture the brand’s 25-year heritage of twisted, pretty American sportswear,” Hilfiger .“Meet The Hilfigers” falls somewhere between a Wes Anderson movie and “Arrested Development”, and featuring a cast of 16 semi-dysfunctional family members. The brainchild of advertising company Laird + Partners, the campaign kicks off with 10-page inserts in Vogue, GQ, Harper’s Bazaar and Vanity Fair, depicting the family’s slightly off-kilter tailgating party.While Hilfiger might be somewhat delusional about his brand’s “twisted” history, the campaign is a cool idea — if hindered by a few missteps here and there. We’re not sure how interestingly dysfunctional the family is, so much as it suffers from a particular brand of rich quirkiness that can get tiresome if not handled lightly enough. Think NYC Prep versus Gossip Girl.And though the interactivity is well thought out — some of the characters will have their own Facebook and Twitter pages, others will be part of online features such as “Chloe’s Closet” and “Morgan’s [one of the basset hounds] Must-Haves” — we’re still stuck on the image of young, wealthy, white kid wearing a and captured mid-war cry mimic.Fashion loves to be provocative, but sometimes it’s just .What do you think? [.] ?Black, White, & Cool All Over At The Independent Spirit Awards by 11:22 am, February 26th, 2012 The Independent Spirit Awards are like the Oscars‘ cooler younger sister ? and the stars definitely took that to heart on the red carpet.We’re not saying all the looks were knockouts, but there was definitely an overarching element of cool. Shailene Woodley wore Christopher Kane, Elizabeth Banks wore Timo Weiland, and Anna Kendrick wore McQ! Michelle Williams paired shorts with an Olympia Le Tan ! Kirsten Dunst mixed it up with a?Dolce & Gabbana dress and a?Chloe jacket!?Kate Beckinsale sported a jumpsuit!?Elizabeth Olsen was…there! See, lots of cool!Who looked best? Click through the slideshow below, and tell us in the comments. Enable JavaScript to check out our fancy slideshow. ?Isabella Blow Author Talks Biopic And The Demise of Galliano by Christina Ohly 3:29 pm, March 4th, 2011 London-based writer, Lauren Goldstein Crowe, author of Isabella Blow: A Life In Fashion spent some time chatting with Styleite about everything from the upcoming biopic based on her book, to her favorite local haunts to the ugly dismissal of. (Because who isn’t chatting about it??)Why are people continually fascinated by Blow and her story? She was a one-in-a-million person. Even in her darkest moments she could make people laugh and make them feel better about themselves. Her shaky relationship with reality was a constant source of amusement ? in completely harmless ways. One of my favorite stories was when, as a Sloany teenager, she ran into a girlfriend outside of Asprey and said she’d just spent her last ￡500 on a luxury picnic basket with Wedgewood plates. Her friend, Sarah St. George, said, “Why would you do that?” and Isabella said, “It’s for me and my lover.” Sarah asked, “What lover?” and Isabella replied, “I haven’t met him yet.” She was a fantasist long before the fancy clothes came along. How did you come to know Ms. Blow? What compelled you to share her story? I’d only met Isabella a few times and doubt she knew who I was. The most memorable time was when I was pregnant with twins and absolutely huge. I sat next to her at a show early in the morning and she introduced herself, told me she was getting divorced, and asked if I knew of any men for her. Not your average front-row chat with a stranger! The book was the idea of Karyn Marcus, my editor at St. Martin’s Press. I thought it’d be an interesting move away from business books like my first, The Towering World of Jimmy Choo, and more towards personality-driven pieces. The Isabella Blow biopic is to be produced by Anders Palm, with you as consultant – when will production begin? I’m afraid I’m contractually not allowed to talk much about it, but I think it’s safe to say it’s very early days still. I’ll be consulting on the script and the story. Hopefully they’ll get someone better equipped to do the designs. The screenwriters, Max Newsom and Nicola Broughton, were recommended to the producer, Anders Palm, by a mutual friend.Who is slated star? There are lots of rumors about everyone from Lady Gaga to Chloe Sevigny to Brad Pitt as Phillip Treacy? Sorry, no hints!And what of Mr. Galliano? Rumor was he’d play himself… Well… Not anymore would be my guess. I don’t know if he ever was slated for a role or if that was a rumor, but I think he’d be well advised to lay low for a long, long time. Who would you like to see play Isabella Blow? Or the role of Alexander McQueen? To be honest, I haven’t thought much about it. They’re such vivid characters as people that it’s hard for me to imagine anyone portraying them. Pages: 1 ?J.Crew Continues Its Quest To Be America’s Chicest Export by 12:23 pm, March 31st, 2010 Fashion has a ridiculously short memory. Take J. Crew, for example. We’re pretty sure it wasn’t too long ago that the mass-market retailer was more or less indistinguishable from The Gap, what with its prep-friendly range of high-rise khakis, $40 cable knit sweaters, and the occasional peacoat. But thanks to the entree of C.E.O-cum-magician and creative director Jenna Lyons, there is a definite chic in the chain. Gone is the drab, dress code-approved garb, and in it’s place is some serious , not to mention higher price tags — $300 satchels, anyone?And now, with the transformation of Frankenstein proportions nearly complete, that the all American chain has?opened itself up to the U.K. market via Net-A-Porter. Yes, that Net-A-Porter — the same one that sells Chloe, Marchessa and Valentino. Well, if we can have TopShop then we suppose the Brits have a right to enjoy all the red, white and blue glory that is J. Crew.Still, we can’t help but attempt to piece together at what point exactly J. Crew became a full-fledged, Net-A-Porter approved luxury brand? Our best guess is that it happened somewhere amidst the Michelle Obama’s sunshine cardigan on the Jay Leno Show, Erin Wasson fronting their catalogue, and the recession — which, as we know, drove even the most fashion faithful to the sale racks.So as much as we bemoan the uptick in prices (since it drives us to bankruptcy every season), you’ve got to admire their image overhaul. Because what’s more fashion-y than a makeover??And hey, if worked for J.Crew, maybe mass-market, mom-friendly ?retailers likes might just be able to stage some mall madness of their own. (Because, god knows, they’re trying.) ?Why You Shouldn’t Buy Jason Wu For Target On eBay Right Now by 11:51 am, January 31st, 2012 goes on sale Sunday. This is exciting! We’ve seen the collection in pictures and in real life, and it’s one of the retailer’s most solid collaborations in a long time. But that doesn’t mean you should buy it on eBay right now.Last week we attended a for the collection. There were celebrities (Chloe Moretz flashed us a huge smile!) and loud French food (foie gras!) and loud music. This wasn’t just a mingle-and-eat event, however. A mini-shop was built and filled with all of the Wu for Target goodies. The shop was crowded the entire night, and we ultimately decided to skip out on any purchasing and nibble on Laduree instead.As we enjoyed our macarons next to Blake Lively, we noticed that a lot of people bought several bags worth of merchandise. While some of the stuff will undoubtedly be worn by the purchasers or gifted to friends and family, a lot of it will end up on eBay. In fact, a lot of it already has.As of today, nearly two dozen Jason Wu for Target items are on eBay; five have exactly one bid, while the rest have zero. You shouldn’t buy any of them. Why? Because, at this point, it’s a scam! Sellers aren’t even trying to be sneaky about where they got the goods or just how much they’re ripping you off. Check out (written in Comic Sans, naturally):This collection will not be in stores until later in February; I received this from the private pre-launch party at Skylight Soho in NYC; it is in my house and ready to ship so this is your chance to wear it first! Winning bidder may purchase a limited edition Jason Wu for Target shopping bag for extra $8 ($12 for international buyers)- please contact me before paying and I will adjust the invoice.On top of the fact that the starting bid on the she’s selling is $79.99, she is also graciously willing to let you pay her $8 for a paper shopping bag. How kind!Here’s the deal: you don’t even know if you’re going to have a hard time snagging your favorite piece(s) since the collection doesn’t go live for another five days. Yes, , but this is a smaller-scale collaboration. We’d be shocked if the website crashed again, or if the less-trafficked stores didn’t have a healthy amount of for months.So, wait. Relax. Prep for Sunday. And do not patronize these eBay scammers. ?FLASH FASHION: Cool Classics At Organic By John Patrick by 11:16 am, September 10th, 2010 We love fashion, but we know not everybody has the time to scroll through every look in a runway show. Consider this your Cliff Notes to New York Fashion Week.What do you get when you cross the classic prep of American fashion and the Parisienne chic of French lines? Organic by John Patrick.At his presentation on the unofficial start of New York Fashion Week, , designer of the line, Organic, showcased beautiful pieces that could easily have been the outcome of a J.Crew and Chloe love affair. From pleated olive shorts to white lace trousers to grey tops mixed with ? surprise ? grey bottoms, Patrick hit all the high notes of the latest fashion trends seen on both the U.S. and French runways.Neutral tones, refined lines and girly details are the anchors of Patrick’s Spring 2011 collection. Beginning with a cream shorts-and-blazer combo, the collection moves from classic look to classic look, reminding fashion insiders of the bold statement subtle silhouettes and impeccable detail can make. Continuing with American nostalgia, conservative skirts and prairie dresses reminiscent of Sara Plain and Tall and Laura Ingalls are interspersed among the more modern trousers-and-button-down looks. The practicality and wearability that has recently become essential in fashion is an innate part of Organic’s SS2011 collection. Who wouldn’t want to sport a dandy floral shell and cuffed cotton shorts in the sweltering summer sun?While mixing the simple with the daring ? ahem, a completely sheer nude blouse ? Patrick shows that he has American classics down to a T… or would that be “tee”? The collection exudes the cool attitude that any East Coaster, Southern Belle, or California Beach Babe always has packed in her fashion arsenal. From can’t-live-without-‘em button-downs to comfy chic shorts ? and even an over-the-top huge floppy hat perfect for those times when you just want to make a statement ? Organic’s latest collection is one that fashion frontrunners around the country are sure to be flocking to come Spring. Enable JavaScript to check out our fancy slideshow. ?PHOTOS: Juicy Couture Gives Itself A Makeover For Fall Ad Campaign by 1:18 pm, July 7th, 2011 Juicy Couture is going for a new look this fall. The brand has ditched its usual pastel-colored, over-the-top and costume-y ads for a sleeker, more urban ad campaign.Juicy Couture President and Creative Director LeAnn Nealz the change in the ads, saying, “We really wanted to stand behind the couture in Juicy Couture with this campaign so we played more to our fun, glamorous unapologetic side.”, who’s posed for Chloe and Louis Vuitton, among others, modeled a school-girl inspired tartan blazer and skirt that makes us think of Cher Horowitz of Clueless. She also poses in a black fur coat and red pants against a black, white, and turquoise background. The ads are pretty generic (and as bizarre as the old Juicy ads were), but there’s something kind of classic and beautiful about their whimsical backgrounds and soft color schemes. The ad was shot by power duo and , who also shot . In addition to the couture ads, the couple did the fall campaign for the Juicy’s fragrance, Viva La Juicy. The perfume ads sound a little more characteristic of the brand. Model lies on a couch with the signature oversized perfume bottle. We haven’t seen the ad yet, but the description makes it seem more classic Juicy — past ads have featured models dressed in oversized bows and hats, styled like Marie Antoinette, and made to look like dolls. Also to look forward to from the brand: a revamped way to wear the terry cloth track suit that originally put Juicy on the map! Nealz said Juicy “wanted to showcase the true evolution of the brand’s most iconic item, the tracksuit, styled with modern ready-to-wear pieces.” We’re hoping she means more juicy ball gowns, like the one Erin Fetherson that left us shockingly craving velour for the first time since middle school. Check out the ad below. Our biggest qualm is Zimmermann’s leg on the right. It looks a little out of place, no? Enable JavaScript to check out our fancy slideshow. [] ?PHOTOS: A First Look At Karl Lagerfeld’s Macy’s Collection by Melanie Chan and Verena von Pfetten 9:48 am, July 21st, 2011 ‘s collaboration with Macy’s is launching , and now we have our first sneek peek, courtesy of this month’s issue of Vogue and a few sketches revealed in today’s Women’s Wear Daily.In Vogue’s “Steal of the Month” feature, True Blood’s Deborah Ann Woll wears a floral frock from the capsule collection. According to the accompanying interview, the dresses are based off of his creations at Chloe during the ’70s — fittingly so, due to that era’s sartorial influence this spring (high-waisted trousers and maxi dresses appeared everywhere from to Louis Vuitton). And in addition to two sketches, WWD also shared some more details on the price and run of the collection.The Karl Lagerfeld for Impulse collection will have 45 limited edition styles and an average price tag of $100, though items will range from $50 to $170, putting it within Macy’s “better” price zone. Lagerfeld’s exclusives for Macy’s will have a limited run, from six to eight weeks, depending on consumer reaction.While Macy’s chief merchandising officer acknowledges that “some of [the clothing] customers will get right away ? some of it will be a reach,” we’re pretty sure this collection is going to do gangbusters — both in sales and for the Macy’s brand. Enable JavaScript to check out our fancy slideshow. [via , ] ?Donna Karan Hires Teenage Karlie Kloss For Fall Campaign by 9:07 am, June 23rd, 2010 Just on the brink of her 18th birthday, shot ‘s fall 2010 ad campaign. But considering the consumer and how the brand is normally marketed, we can’t help but find it a little strange that Donna Karan would use a 17-year-old model to showcase her line. See by Chloe ads, — these seems to be more Karlie’s speed. Donna Karan’s collection typically skews older, so why hire a model that is so distanced from your target audience? Wouldn’t someone like or have made more sense? Someone with a more mature look?They say age is just a number, and particularly when it comes to fashion, we tend to agree. Despite her age, Karlie had no problem looking completely at home in the spring 2010 ad campaigns for both Hermes and Christian Dior. But if you ask us, those brands make a lot more sense for Kloss’ face than Donna Karan. All that said, we think Karlie looks stunning. These three ads highlight her incredibly contoured body, porcelain skin, and doll-like face. And we’re always excited to see a model that once was solely devoted to teen magazines and Marc by March Jacobs runway shows progress. But regardless of how beautiful she looks, we still are left scratching our heads and wondering, why Karlie? That white ruffle shirt and dramatic black fur caplet were made for a more seasoned woman. [] ?Kate Moss To Design A Line With Top Shop CEO’s Daughter by 10:05 am, October 5th, 2010 just can’t quit Topshop, can she? Just a month after the chain announced that Kate’s fall collection for Topshop will be her for them, there is talk that Kate may collaborate for the brand with Chloe Green. Just who is Chloe Green? The 19-year-old daughter of Topshop CEO Sir Philip Green.Chloe told :I saw Kate a few days ago and we talked about doing something together in the spring, collaborating on a collection. She’s really into vintage and I love clothes that are a little bit more modern, so I think it will be an interesting mix to work together.Though Chloe is currently studying all aspects of the fashion industry (marketing, merchandising and the like), she says what she really wants to do is design. She explains Kate taught her to design for herself because “that’s how she designs.” And though her dad would be supportive of whatever she decided to do, she says he is definitely pleased she wants to work for Topshop: “I think he would have been secretly a little bit gutted if I hadn’t [wanted to], but he’s really supportive of us.”We’re curious to see this collaboration come to fruition![via ] ?WATCH: Kate Moss’ Last Topshop Line Drops Nov. 2nd by 4:35 pm, October 24th, 2010 We were sad to announce that ‘s fall collection for Topshop would be her for the brand (though she may with Chloe Green, daughter of Topshop CEO Philip Green). The clothes will be in stores November 2nd, but we have a for you!The teaser video below is set to the lovely “Thieves” by She & Him, and gives us a glimpse of the collection which looks like pretty standard Kate Moss for Topshop fare ? lots of floaty fabrics, prints and sequins. We like. [via ] ?Don’t Worry, Kate Moss For Topshop ‘Isn’t Going Anywhere’ by 1:43 pm, November 3rd, 2010 Yesterday ‘s for Topshop arrived in stores, and hearts got heavy with the thought of a Kateless Topshop. We were comforted, however, by owner ‘s that Kate would still be a part of the .Said Green: “I’m not going anywhere and neither is she. This collection still works, and our relationship hasn’t ended. But we now need to go away for a while, and think about how to do things differently. This collection takes a lot of hard work ? she wants to do other things and so do I ? but our relationship is as strong as ever.”Rumor has it Kate’s capsule collections will be a twice-annual affair, composed of a dozen pieces. Perhaps Kate will collaborate with Green’s daughter ? Whatever the outcome, we’re excited. A spokesperson for the company said future Kate Moss for Topshop goods will be “whatever takes her fancy,” maybe “some special pieces in cashmere, for example, or some amazing vintage treasures Kate has uncovered.”We’d be down for that. We also appreciate Topshop’s willingness to try something new ? “not formulaic and tied to seasons, like a machine.” Well said.[via ] ?Top Shop Gives Kate Moss’ Clothing Line The Half-Hearted Axe by 9:52 am, August 30th, 2010 We at Styleite are always cautious of the shrinking celebrity. But one celebrity — and one we watch very closely — is shrinking in a slightly different way. According to WWD, ‘ line for TopShop will be a little smaller in upcoming seasons.TopShop owner and CEO Sir Philip Green announced that Moss’ last full range will hit stores this fall. Down the road, he says, her designs will only be part of “smaller capsule collections.”In a phone interview, Green told :“We’ve honed it down to a smaller base. She’s done brilliantly well, but to produce these collections takes time, real time. We thought it would be better to go forward with something smaller. That’s a better way forward.”These smaller collections will include some in-demand pieces from previous collections as well as new designs, averaging 12 to 15 pieces, two to three times a year. And while it seems as though the decision to cut her line could be a hostile one, Green insists it’s only a time issue, and an insider agrees that Moss’ contract with TopShop “reached its natural conclusion.” But, we can’t help but point out that if Moss’ collection was selling as well as it could, then producing full collections would still be worth it.And of course, like any fashion drama, there’s another layer to the story.Green’s daughter, Chloe Green, is joining the TopShop staff. Could the owner be making room for a new, up and coming designer? Do we smell a bit of nepotism in the air? Green denied the rumors to WWD, but we’re keeping our eyes peeled. ?PHOTO: Katy Perry’s Colorful, Normal-Looking Elle Cover by 12:28 pm, February 8th, 2011 must have felt a profound responsibility to right all the wrongs done to Katy Perry’s body on recent magazine covers (we’re talking to you, , and ), because the singer looks fantastic on the March cover of Elle magazine.Everything about the cover proclaims that color is back — there’s even a cover line that says so. Perry stands in the middle of a lot of bold, bright pink text wearing a kaleidoscope of green, turquoise and purple — topped off with her famous red lips.While Perry’s cover story isn’t available yet, there are a few quotes from it online. Below, find out what Perry had to say about her stardom, her body and her style, and take a look at her cover and a few shots from the magazine.On life before making it:“I had two cars repossessed, and I was writing bad checks, but I gave myself a timeline. I thought, Okay, if I don’t make it by 25, I’m just going to get married and pop out some babies and do some crafts.”On her body:“I was shaped like a square at one time. I was! I’m generally around 130 pounds, which is totally fine for me. But when I was a kid, I was the same height and weighed more like 145. And I had enormous boobs that I didn’t know what to do with, so I wore minimizers, which were not cute. Those thick-ass straps! I got made fun of for the over-the-shoulder boulder holder…and all I wanted was to look like . Little did I know…that these things would come in handy someday.”On her personal style:“Bettie Page meets Wonder Woman meets Doris Day meets Judy Jetson meets Natalie Wood meets Daphne Guinness meets Chloe Sevigny kind of look.” Enable JavaScript to check out our fancy slideshow. [Elle] ?Kiernan Shipka Inspired By Grace Kelly, Loves Bieber by 12:54 pm, February 16th, 2011 Kiernan Shipka leads quite a life. Independent of the fact she plays Sally Draper on Mad Men, the 11-year-old’s day-to-day existence is kind of awe-inspiring. She dresses like “an editorial assistant at Vogue,” and lives in a “pastel wedding cake of a mansion” with her parents and two German shepherds and plenty of strawberry-pomegranate cream cheese. It’s just all a bit much. Alas, it’s hard not to love the tween actress after reading her in this week’s New York Magazine.First of all, she totally gets (and loves) fashion:“I follow fashion trends. My closet’s full of Papo d’Anjo. They’re my main brand. I just absolutely love them because the quality is so amazing. Chloe has some amazing kids’ pieces, too, and I have a lot of D&G Junior. Grace Kelly is my fashion inspiration?a classic look, with beautiful pieces, and very pretty.”She also likes to golf and bake.?But lest you think she’s too precocious, there’s this:Then she erupts in laughter. “I have the best idea: fashion Halloween!” she squeaks later, the words coming out in a torrent. “I’m always something like Catwoman, Cinderella, or Rapunzel, with really, really long hair, and we always decorate our house like crazy?we even have a fog machine. But this year, I want to have a fashion Halloween! We’ll have people dress up as Donna Karnage.” Giggle. “Michael Korpse.” Giggle. “Burbloody.”Adorable! And, of course, there’s Justin Bieber, the greatest of all tween equalizers:Then Justin Bieber comes up, and Kiernan goes wild. “I love him,” she squeals, her eyes lighting up with the same excitement she experienced when she came up with Burbloody. “I would love to meet him.” She bites her lip. “But I wouldn’t be allowed to date him. I can’t date until I’m 16.”Kiernan wins. She just does.[] ?Kim Kardashian’s Purses Are Pretty Flagrant Designer Knockoffs by 5:02 pm, November 4th, 2011 We’ll understand if you’re not at all interested in hearing about any more of Kim Kardashian‘s , but this totally tugs our “fashion law” heartstring. It hasn’t gone unnoticed that a lot of the bags in the Kardashian Kollection look way, way similar to some very well known designer bags, and now we in the blogosphere are questioning just how long it’ll take before some of those designer brands start suing.Kim and her sister Khloe made a few appearances in Australia to launch the handbag collection earlier this week, only to leave the landmass because of the stress of her divorce. We wonder how much more stressed she’ll be when the head counsels at Balenciaga, Chloe and Yves Saint Laurent deliver cease-and-desist letters asking Sears to stop selling her relatively low-priced bags, some of which are almost direct copies of designer purses that have been on the market for years. And if you’ll recall, Kardashian has already over the similarities between one of her bags and Monica Botkier‘s Trigger Clyde tote.Take a look at a few of the more flagrant abuses of trade dress below, and let us know if you want to set up a pool for when the first lawsuit will land. We’re guessing it’ll be Balenciaga sometime before Christmas. What say you? Enable JavaScript to check out our fancy slideshow. [] ?Irresponsible Study Claims Counterfeiting Is A Good Thing by 4:42 pm, August 31st, 2010 An adviser to the British Home Office has co-written a study claiming that counterfeit designer goods aren’t really that bad for the fashion industry, The Daily Mail . In fact, the study claims, counterfeit goods have less of a financial impact on the rag trade than we previously thought, and that selling fake Louis Vuitton Speedy 25s on the side of the road is really a good thing:Professor David Wall, who co-authored the report and advises the [British] government on crime, said the real cost to the luxury goods industry could be one-fifth of previously calculated figures. ‘It’s probably even less,’ he said yesterday. ‘There is also evidence that it actually helps the brands, by quickening the fashion cycle and raising brand awareness.’ He added: ‘We should be focusing on the trade in counterfeit drugs, dodgy aircraft parts and other stuff that really causes public harm.But that misguided pronouncement takes for granted that counterfeiting is an honest business that operates within the bounds of other legitimate enterprises. In reality, nothing could be further from the truth. The reason that counterfeiting is called counterfeiting is because it’s illegal, and for Wall or anyone else to say that it’s not as illegal as, say, the international trafficking of drugs, smacks highly of stupidity and snobbery.Just because someone sells a low-rent copy of a high-end bag does not mean he or she is a nice person who’s interested in getting fashion on the cheap. It means he or she is engaged in a criminal activity that largely relies on child labor and seedy customs officials who are on the take. Making fake bags is just as bad as making fake currency, and it does serious damage to a multibillion dollar global industry that shoulders its fair share of our world’s economy. Why counterfeiting in fashion should be taken any less seriously than counterfeiting in the pharmaceutical industry, we’ll never understand.In fact, when the good people at Harper’s Bazaar hosted a in May, they found that the business of counterfeiting supports terrorism, takes money away from hardworking people and can even be hazardous to your skin — a L’Oreal employee at the panel said we probably wouldn’t want to know what was in knockoff cosmetics.To wit, industry insiders told The Daily Mail that counterfeiting really is bad for business:A spokesman for Louis Vuitton said: ‘The sale of counterfeit goods is a serious offence whose revenue funds criminal organisations at the expense of consumers, companies and governments.’ A spokesman for Burberry said: ‘Counterfeiting is taken extremely seriously. Where a case is proved, Burberry will always push for the maximum penalty.’ The Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) insisted that far from making consumers happy faking fashion goods was ‘not a victimless crime’. ‘Businesses, individuals, and the public purse all suffer as a result of such activities,’ said a spokesman.And we’re inclined to agree with comments like that from people who actually know something about the fashion industry. Wall himself has an and has written a long list of books about crime and the Internet, but we were hard pressed to find evidence that he could tell Chanel from Chloe. So we’re gonna stick with the camp that says fake fashion really is a bad thing.[ via ] ?Kristen Wiig Explains Her Ghostly Golden Globes Look To Vogue by 6:07 pm, February 24th, 2012 Kristen Wiig’s look at this year’s Golden Globes was largely panned, but it turns out there was a method to her madness. Wiig about her styling inspiration in their March issue:The Saturday after she squeezes the Vogue shoot into her workweek, she will get home from the show at 2:00 a.m. to be picked up at 4:00 for a 6:00 a.m. flight to L.A., where she will immediately go into hair and makeup to appear at the Golden Globes, where she has been nominated as Best Actress in a Comedy for Bridesmaids. “I’m going to need a lot of under-eye work,” she deadpans. “Concealer.” …As for the Globes, she hasn’t decided what to wear yet. “I’m going for forties-sexy with a little bit of rock ’n’ roll and kind of a little ghostly,” she says cryptically. “I always say I want to look haunted.” (She ends up wearing a suitably spectral floaty and flesh-colored Bill Blass dress.)That said, Wiig also counts and among her style icons, so there’s hope to be had. Also, if she had two hours of sleep before the Golden Globes, we want the number of her makeup artist. Enable JavaScript to check out our fancy slideshow. Image via VOGUE/Annie Leibovitz. ?Lady Gaga Is Creating A Soundtrack For Thierry Mugler by 12:56 pm, January 17th, 2011 has asked his friend and client to provide the music for his first men’s show at . Because that’s the sort of thing this man can just do.WWD that Gaga will add the title “musical director” to her resume when she debuts an exclusive remix of a song we haven’t even heard yet (from her new album Born This Way) in Paris on Wednesday. So the show’s audience will be the first to experience two hotly anticipated debuts — Gaga fans everywhere are cringing with anticipation for her album to drop in May, and the fashion world is curious to see just what Formichetti has been doing since he at the embattled label last September.Formichetti is perhaps most famous for helping Gaga create some of the strangest, most fashion forward outfits in recent memory (let’s all say it together now: ), but he also worked as a stylist to other celebrities, including Robert Pattinson and Chloe Sevigny. His editorial work (which he said he planned to continue even with his new responsibilities at Mugler) has been in magazines from Vogue Hommes Japan to Dazed and Confused.But it’s the work he did for Gaga that got Formichetti the job at Mugler, so we wouldn’t be surprised to see a little of her eccentricity in his ready-to-wear collections. He’s alread some for the men’s collection, called “Anatomy Of Change,” and eccentric doesn’t even begin to describe what we’ll see coming down his runway this week. [WWD (Subscription Required)] ?PHOTO: Lara Stone’s LOVE Cover Is Pretty In Pastel by 5:00 pm, July 29th, 2011 The covers just keep on coming. Lara Stone now joins , , , and model Nyasha Matonhodze with her very own tear-eyed LOVE cover.Stone’s tears are a little more subtle, but if you look carefully you can see the faint tracks streaming down her cheeks. Her braids, however, are inspiring and may just be our new go-to summer ‘do. The full issue comes out on Monday and we’ve still got three covers to go: , , and. Which is your favorite so far? Enable JavaScript to check out our fancy slideshow. [via .] ?Lazaro Hernandez On The Time A ‘F*cking Hipster’ Stole His Dog by 4:05 pm, February 24th, 2011 Last week, I was for ‘ new fragrance Daisy Eau So Fresh because my 6-year-old French Bulldog (a recent rescue from rural Oklahoma) had taken an unsupervised ride in my building’s elevator and ended up wandering happily around the fourth floor, no doubt wondering what sort of parallel universe he’d been transported into because everything was the same and yet so very different. And if you’re wondering why on earth I’m telling you this, it’s because the exact same thing happened to Proenza Schouler’s and his five-pound canine, Jojo. Well, almost.Hernandez and his design partner are interviewed by their good friend and Chloe Sevigny in this month’s Interview magazine, and while is worth reading (especially the part where they explain how to pronounce the name of their line and reveal they regret naming it so in the first place), I couldn’t help but relate to Hernandez tale of lost dogs, artsy hipsters, and rogue elevators.The story begins at the Proenza Schouler studio:I was here alone, eight o’clock at night. I had my bags. I was going to Italy the next morning. I grabbed my dog and my bags and I’m waiting for the elevator but it doesn’t come. It’s taking forever so I’m like, “Fuck. What’s going on?” And I had to take a piss. So I run to the bathroom to pee, and I come back to the front, and the dog is gone. I have no idea where he is. I’m like, “He must have taken the elevator. He must be in the lobby.” I press the elevator again. It takes another 10 minutes for it to come. The elevator door opens. It’s packed, packed, packed with [art] people — Dan [Colen] and Nate [Lowman]. …They’re like, “Hey, Lazaro.” I’m like, “Hey. It’s my building. I’m going home. I lost my dog.” Well, I get to the lobby and there are hundreds of people. There’s a line down to Broome Street. I asked some guy, “Have you seen a dog?” He’s like, “Oh, yeah. Someone left a dog in the elevator. I don’t know where he went. He’s somewhere in the building.” I have no idea it’s Harmony [Korine]‘s or Rita [Ackermann]‘s [art exhibit] opening. So I go to the Swiss Institute and it’s packed with hundreds of people. My dog weighs five pounds! I’m freaking out. [I'm like], someone stole him. One of these fucking hipsters stole my dog. …I’m at this party. I start bumping into Harmony and Terry [Richardson] and all these people. I’m thrown into this party environment and I’m just looking for my dog. I’m really scared. All of a sudden you [Chloe] call me. I thought you were at the party and you had seen me or something. I thought, Oh, Chloe must be here. I picked up, and you said, “Did you lose your dog?”Well, it turns out that Sevigny wasn’t at the party — instead, she was in Los Angeles, where she received a call from a friend Sid, who she knew from high school. Sid had apparently happened upon the dog, somehow figured out that it was Hernandez’ dog, and called Sevigny to get in touch with the designer. Hernandez found Sid and Jojo in a corner two minutes later, and all were reunited.The moral of the story: if you’re going to lose your dog in an elevator, it pays to be friends with Chloe Sevigny. Or something. [Interview] ?Leather Shorts: The Be All, End All Of Seasonal Dressing? by 1:25 pm, July 5th, 2010 Letting go of our cold weather classics can be difficult when the weather starts turning toward the warm persuasion. Part of us secretly hates parting ways with our faithful black tights and loyal leather jackets. We feel stripped of our pieces that have become more like security blankets rather than clothing. But, with some of the popular items of the season simply being renditions of our winter wardrobe staples, you have to wonder if this is trans-seasonal styling at its finest or recession dressing still rearing its big and (questionably) ugly head. Having recently encountered a piece that pushes the boundary even further, I now am putting my sky-high platform wearing foot down and having it out with this debate once and for all.Leather is a relatively common commodity in any fashionable closet these days. Leather jackets, skirts, and even a vest or two find homes in some of the chicest armoires. However, in trekking through the sweltering New York City heat this weekend, an awkward confrontation occurred with a relatively familiar item: the leather short. At a point in the summer where even denim bottoms seem too heavy to sport without risking the chance of extremely unattractive sweat marks, one has to wonder: Leather? Now?Leather shorts abounded at the Spring/Summer 2010 runways thanks to Chloe paving the way a few seasons prior. dominated with his pristine black leather shorts, supple and casually rolled, as to say ‘yes, I’m leather, and no, I don’t care.’ Lam enforced the possibilities of leather to a clientele that perhaps may have been a bit cautious to test this material previously reserved for bikers and rockers in the past. Even did a take on the popular item offering tie-dye printed lambskin shorts this season. With the likes of these designers, larger retailers were sure to follow, and it wasn’t terribly long until Zara released their version of these beloved bottoms. This is all great and grand, but still doesn’t answer the question; does leather have a time-stamp on it? Should we completely retire this faithful and reliable material for almost a whole year ? or what feels like it — even if it is cut into a summertime piece? Shouldn’t we capitalize on the opportunity to wear simple dresses that we can’t possibly wear in the winter? As trans-seasonal dressing progresses and the economy begins to perk up a little, we now have the opportunity to purchase items that will not only last, but will look ravishing no matter what the environment may dictate. We can invest and collaborate with our seasonal closets. Thanks to this funky limbo economic climate, we’re able to play around with our own personal comfort zones in how we dress for the day. So, although you may be a bit heated in your leather bottoms, I say, rock it out, have fun, and enjoy your springtime/summertime/wintertime/fall looks sisters. ?PHOTOS: Leighton In Leather! by 10:27 am, January 24th, 2011 Leighton Meester might be our new favorite style star. While we love the fact that she’s not afraid to take risks on the red carpet, it seems like her choices over the last few months have become more and more spot on — though no less surprising. On Sunday, the new stepped out in a leather cutout dress from ‘ 2011 . Meester kept the look super minimalist with zero jewelry, subtle, if smokey makeup, and stick straight hair. We’re absolutely loving this look — and loving the way she’s embraced both the leather and minimalist trend without looking like she’s trying to hard. But what do you think?(For comparison purposes, check out Kate Bosworth’s by Chloe. The sheer tights / overwrought heels are throwing us off. Too much!) ?The Rest Of The LOVE Covers (Starring Kristen, Daphne, & Mariacarla!) by 2:19 pm, July 31st, 2011 We’ve been crushing hard on the newest set of LOVE covers, and we know what the remaining three will look like!The magazine chose eight different cover models for its latest issue, which drops tomorrow. We’ve already seen?, , ,?Nyasha Matonhodze, and ‘s faces grace LOVE Issue 6 ? now we bring you , , and .While these aren’t the actual covers, these are in fact the photos from the Mert & Marcus-shot editorial that were used for the models’ covers. Just as with the previous five, all of these show the women bare-faced (that’s right…no makeup!) and tear-streaked. Additionally, they are wearing various types of headgear! Also, from what we gather, the photo for Matonhodze’s?cover was switched out with another from the shoot. We’ve included it along with the others below: Enable JavaScript to check out our fancy slideshow. And here are the previously unveiled covers: Enable JavaScript to check out our fancy slideshow. [via ] ?PHOTOS: Who Was Best Dressed In Max Mara Last Night? by 11:03 am, June 12th, 2012 Max Mara hosted a party in honor of Chloe Moretz in Los Angeles last night. As such, the Italian fashion house dressed guests in both Max Mara and its contemporary label SportMax. Everyone looked pretty great, but who was best dressed?We thought Moretz’s teal striped dress was simple and sophisticated, while?Gia Coppola was sweet in a pink frock. However, ‘s turquoise statement necklace looked better than her plain LBD, and?Rainy Quaily and Jacqui Getty‘s ensembles looked like they stopped by the party after work. Nina Dobrev, who’s in something sexy and glam, should’ve ditching her boring white camisole for a lacy bra. You win some, you lose some.Check out the gallery below, and tell us who you think is best dressed: Enable JavaScript to check out our fancy slideshow. All images via Donato Sardella, Wireimage. ?Megan Fox Talks Unibrows, Lips, And Tanning With Allure by 5:38 pm, May 18th, 2010 Oh sexy Megan Fox. Do you appear on the June cover of Allure just to force us into jump-starting our summer diets? Or do you actually have some good beauty advice for us?Megan Fox gets hotter with each new cover and photo shoot she does. And it seems like the more famous she gets, the more high fashion photographers and stylists make her. Gone are the days where Megan wore tube tops and spent too much time at the tanning salon, and here to stay (we hope) is a more natural skin tone — she told Tranformers‘ director Michael Bay that tanning is “not going to happen again because of the damage and the possible skin cancer” — and better clothing.In Allure’s June issue, Fox admits to having a unibrow in elementary school:“I remember having that unibrow, which I always hated. I used to beg my mother to let me pluck my eyebrows.” She denies rumors of surgically enhanced lips (though we’ll admit, we’re not sure…):“I will say for people who question the authenticity of my lips, you can clearly see that my lips are my lips.” She discusses her hatred of public bathrooms:“Every time someone uses a bathroom and they flush, all the bacteria is shot into the air. Putting my mouth where a million other mouths have been, just knowing all the bacteria that you carry in your mouth? Ucch!”And makes the following admission:“I could go days, weeks, without talking to another human being. I hate receiving compliments. I hate being told I’m talented or people think I’m going to be a movie star. I always feel that it’s forced or fake.”Regardless of some of her odd habits, she looks abosolutely breathtaking — not just hot — in her spread, which features clothing from and See by Chloe, among others. Makeup artist Virginia Young did a brilliant job on what could be called an already perfect canvas. “Megan usually has bronzed skin and smoky eyes,” Young told . In this instance, “I played down her sexiness and made her more fresh.”Creative director Paul Cavaco’s intention was to channel the 1979 movie Tess starring Nastassja Kinski, who was innocent and barefaced throughout the film. Fox’s natural beauty shines through in each shot with her accented freckles and wavy hair. She looks relaxed, toned down, and comfortable: a beautiful adjustment from the bombshell vixen box in which Hollywood has placed her. [via ] [via] ?PHOTOS: Who Were The Belles Of The Met Ball? by 11:32 pm, May 3rd, 2010 Monday night marked the single biggest event on fashion’s yearly calendar: The Metropolitan Museum’s Costume Institute Gala. The theme this year was American Woman: Fashioning a National Identity and, appropriately, focused on American style through the ages. We’ve touched on some and wondered how exactly the Gap — this year’s sponsor — was going to outfitting stars for the red carpet, but the photos are up and the guests have made it past the very velvet rope, so now the fun part begins. (And if you’re feeling a little snarky, the lackluster looks can be found .)BEST DRESSED (in no particular order): Anna Wintour Pages: 1 ?PHOTOS: The 10 Worst Dressed Celebs At The Met Gala by 12:17 am, May 8th, 2012 We never thought we’d end up with so much Prada on the worst dressed list for an event in honor of the brand, but it just goes to show that label isn’t everything. On an evening where everyone’s watching (and werking) there really is no room for error.And in the end, so much came down to fit. While Florence Welch’s froufy Alexander McQueen was inexcusable (and ), Gwyneth Paltrow’s pale purple Prada would have had potential if it had resembled anything more than a child-size apron. Kristen Stewart ran into the similar (if opposite) problem in her thoroughly modern Balenciaga look, which bagged around her hips and ran at least an inch or two too long, especially when paired with thick-strapped white sandal-booties. Scarlett Johansson‘s gown made the list both for looking dated and having a bafflingly long bodice, Eva Mendes gave us a first rate lesson in how not to wear a peplum, and Jessica Chastain managed to once again not meet our inexplicably high (and, at this point, unwarranted) expectations. Lea Michele needs to learn how to choose between a and , has worked in fashion long enough to know that while, white ones most definitely look cheap, and not even Chloe Sevigny’s badass bootie clogs could save her from the folly that is forgetting one’s slip.A final caveat: Diane Kruger made this list not because she looked terrible, but because she failed so spectacularly at wearing a violet, feather-fringed Prada creation that would have been stunning had it not bagged so distractingly around her torso. Enable JavaScript to check out our fancy slideshow. ?The Metropolitan Opera Brings Out The Jumpsuits by 11:23 am, April 13th, 2010 The stars came out Monday night in Manhattan for the New York premiere of Rossini’s Armida at The Metropolitan Opera House, sponsored by Yves Saint Laurent. Look of the night? Pants. Maggie Gyllenhall, Ginnifer Goodwin, and Chloe Sevigny all sported jumpsuits. Pants at the opera? We’re a little old school and think that while Maggie looked divine, the jumpsuit was a tad inappropriate for the event. Did all celebrity stylists have a jumpsuit convention where they decided their clients should wear the look exclusively? The opera should be an excuse to wear your fanciest and don a pair of elbow-high gloves, not an event to showcase fashion’s latest trends. It’s the theater, ladies. Get your classy on. Love the outfit, but aren’t you cold? It’s not summer yet, Maggie, and we would have preferred you threw on a dress. Thank you Camilla for literally being the Belle of the ball. The dress fits beautifully and the empire waist is a perfect style for the opera. She looked absolutely angelic. Chloe did better than Maggie. Since your pants suit was black and you donned a classy pair of gloves, we won’t rip you apart for not knowing the ins and outs of opera dressing. But for someone who loves a good ball gown, we wonder why you opted for a silk jumper. While we’re delighted to see a dress at the Met, Jennifer Morrison’s white gown was horribly unflattering. Her decolletage was oddly cut off by the neckline of the dress and her black clutch seemed harsh against the white gown. Another jumpsuit! This time strapless and worn by Ginnifer Goodwin. The bustier top looks cheap, and while the fit of the pants is impeccable, it does not scream Metropolitan Opera in any way. Props to the black outfit with blue accessories and we love your hair, but please, next time, let’s dress up. Four words for Patricia Clarkson: What were you thinking? Patricia, you’ve got . ?Michelle Obama Responds To Dress Controversy by 9:45 am, January 31st, 2011 Honestly, the First Lady was just wants to wear what she likes. That’s how she responded to a question from Robin Roberts of Good Morning America during an interview last Friday. The two sat down to talk about the First Lady’s work with military families, the Let’s Move initiative and how she’s getting ready for the 2012 presidential campaign.But Roberts would have been remiss if she hadn’t asked about the red dress Obama wore to the for China, you know — the one that the entire fashion industry freaked out about. First there was saying that Obama should have worn an , then he explained what he meant to say (which was that she should have worn an American designer). Then and the entire CFDA , and we questioned why Obama shouldn’t be allowed to wear what she wants. thought Obama was into wearing an American designer () for the president’s address a week later. This is what Obama herself had to say about the matter:“Look, women, wear what you love. That’s all I can say. That’s my motto. It’s nice to have on a nice suit, but it’s a lot nicer to change a generation in terms of their health … It’s a better use of my time to focus on rallying this country around our military families. There’s so much that I hope to do in this role that makes a difference in people’s lives.”The Huffington Post saw the show and that Obama added, “I wear what I like because…I gotta be in the dress, so…”So. That settles it. If she turns up at the next state dinner in Chloe or Versace, we don’t wanna hear anything from the peanut gallery. [ABC News]Related: [Styleite] [Styleite] [Styleite] [Styleite] ?Michelle Williams Is Gorgeous In Grey (Also: Ryan Gosling!) by 12:44 pm, May 18th, 2010 Michelle Williams stepped out in Cannes for the photo call of her new movie, , wearing a grey print and pocketed ruche-sleeve dress paired with a pair of ivory and beige wedges, and topped off with a freshly blonde and cropped mop of hair.The cut of the dress is very Proenza Schouler (, anyone?) but we’re not sure. Any guesses? And with nary a single piece of jewelry in sight, we think the look epitomizes spring’s version of 90s minimalism. We love it. Do you?UPDATE: According to a handy-dandy press release, Michelle Williams’ dress is Fitted Bodice Mini Dress in Black Astro Dots from their Fall/Winter 2010 collection. And while we’re at it: Helllllooooo, Ryan Gosling. Men, consider this photo a lesson in how to pull off white shoes.[Images via Wenn.] ?How The Mighty Have Fallen: Mischa Barton by 4:29 pm, April 5th, 2010 Mischa, Mischa, Mischa. What can we say?Once upon a time, we’d tune into the O.C. obsessively every week and crave your media mentions so that we could drool over your outfits. Chanel and Chloe were regulars of your wardrobe. You looked impeccable, clean, and put together — even when you were sporting your more casual L.A. look. On and off screen, we wanted to be you. And now there’s this.First, let’s address the midriff. I don’t care if you’re rail thin — it’s not about weight. That much skin is not okay. Besides, it’s only March! How hot could it be outside? There was no conceivable reason that you had to wear a floral button-down tied in a knot, exposing both your black bra and your stomach, ribcage to waist line.Then there are the pants. They could use a boost of color; I’m not sure if at one point they were a bright, sunny yellow and were simply washed too many times, or whether you bought them knowing they look like a pale banana. And we can’t mention the pants without mentioning the red heels which, besides looking worn, are the wrong color for 100 reasons.Mischa, what were you thinking? We miss you — the old you. May we suggest giving your still well-dressed former co-star Rachel Bilson a call? We’ll be waiting.xx, StyleiteMischa during her better days…(We kindly ask that you please play the song “Memories” while viewing these photos to get the full effect.) Mischa knew how to do yellow in September of 2006 Mischa in October, 2008 Mischa in September, 2008 Mischa in May, 2007 ?PHOTOS: Natalia Vodianova Hosts A Vogue Slumber Party by 4:50 pm, April 17th, 2011 If invited us to a slumber party, we would totally attend. Wouldn’t you? Elle Fanning, Hailee Steinfeld, and Chloe Moretz sure would.Vodianova stars in a -shot in?Vogue‘s May issue with Hollywood’s youngest (and ) stars, and the results are pretty great. And there are all sorts of references! Steinfeld dons a striped Prada stole ? perhaps a nod to her striped Prada ensemble from the ??while Vodianova also poses with Elle’s older sister Dakota, looking every bit the grownup in a tailored red suit.By the way, the shoot took place at the Chateau Marmont, the setting of Elle’s starmaking Somewhere. Also of note? In one photo, Vodianova wears the same Balenciaga frock showed off at?, the , and . Enable JavaScript to check out our fancy slideshow. [via ] ?PHOTOS: Who Was Best Dressed At The National Board Of Review Awards? by 12:24 pm, January 11th, 2012 It’s officially awards season, which means that between now and March, there’s basically a red carpet event every other night. Last night, style stars like Emma Stone, Tilda Swinton, Rooney Mara, and Chloe Moretz (among many, many others) stepped out for the National Board of Review Awards Gala in everything from Miu Miu to J. Mendel. But with the Golden Globes just around the corner, who’s setting the style bar the highest?Our vote, despite our mild disappointment in last night’s look, goes to Mara, though Stone’s ivory detailed cocktail dress by J. Mendel is a perfect example of winter white. But Swinton is in a class of her own, as always. Enable JavaScript to check out our fancy slideshow. ?CONFIRMED: Thierry Mugler Taps Nicola Formichetti by 10:50 am, September 13th, 2010 WWD reported in the wee hours of the morning that ‘s stylist will become the new creative director of Thierry Mugler. Formichetti will oversee two designers as they create men’s and women’s ready-to-wear collections, the first of which will debut for fall 2011.After former creative director Rosemary Rodriguez quit recently, there were rumors that the house was courting Formichetti. We that we didn’t know whether his style would be stifled under the careful watch of a multi-billion-dollar parent company, but the press releases from both the designer and his new employer seem dedicated to a growth and success based on Formichetti’s vision.“We were looking for a young talent who could really bring new energy to the brand,” stated Joel Palix, president of Clarins Fragrance Group, Mugler’s parent, and director general of the Mugler company. “Nicola is a multicultural, techno-savvy expert involved in fashion, communication, image and entertainment. He and the appointed talented designers will represent a new direction for French fashion.”“Thierry Mugler is about the power of glamour and walking straight into the future,” Formichetti said in a statement to WWD. “He’s been a god for successive generations in the fashion industry. He fused pop and high fashion, told a story in style and combined fantasy with reality. My approach is personal and always very eclectic. I’d like to find new ways for a luxury brand such as Thierry Mugler to excite people.”We don’t doubt that Formichetti will have any trouble doing just that — after all, he has a seemingly limitless fountain of creativity juice, and he puts it to use as a stylist for celebrities from Robert Pattinson to Chloe Sevigny, and for his editorial work in Vogue Hommes Japan, V Magazine and Dazed and Confused. In fact, it’s said he’ll keep up all of that work in addition to his new job.Formichetti’s women’s wear designer is Sebastien Peigne, who has been head of the Balenciaga studio since 2006. His men’s wear designer is 28-year-old Romain Kremer, who had his own fledgling label and produced mostly experimental looks. If the three plan to present a collection for fall 2011, they might already be working together. Paris’ fall fashion week kicks off on March 2.[Via ] ?Olivia Palermo Is Getting Her Own Television Show! by 12:38 pm, November 19th, 2010 We’ve got some good news for those of you who have been seriously jonesing for your weekly Olivia Palermo-As-An-Evil-Villian-In-My-TV-Box fix. While The City may have gone the way of the The Hills and Laguna Beach, Palermo won’t be missing from your screens for much longer.Palermo was in Barcelona earlier this week for Mango’s Spring 2011 fashion show — she and her boyfriend Jonathan Huebl both star in the brand’s fall campaign — where ELLE had the chance to with the socialite-turned-tv-star-turned-model.When ELLE asked what Palermo what she was up to now, she told the mag, “I’m currently working on a TV project, my own show.”While there’s no word yet on what the project is, we don’t doubt Palermo will have a problem getting it picked up. Is it wrong that we’re harboring a not-so-secret hope for a love-related reality show about her relationship with Huebl? They’re just so pretty.While we’re on the topic, check out Palermo’s Chloe-esque ensemble for the show. Gorgeous. Enable JavaScript to check out our fancy slideshow. [ELLE] ?WATCH: What Chloe Sevigny Was Probably Like As A Child by 4:56 pm, September 7th, 2012 Take a break from all the Fashion Week madness with this super-creative video from Opening Ceremony, starring some seriously precious kids.The clip was made to commemorate the mega-boutique’s 10-year anniversary. But the fun part is that it tells you the story of the brand’s founding and expansion through tots acting as its founders, and ,?and other important players in its story. Our personal favorite? A pint-sized . It just doesn’t get any cuter. Really, if you only watch one time-wasting video today, let it be this!****** ?Opening Ceremony To Launch Its Very Own Magazine This Summer by 1:59 pm, May 14th, 2012 and of Opening Ceremony are launching a magazine this summer!Some details: it’s called OC Annual and each?issue will have a central theme. The first will focus on sports in honor of the Olympics. (This is fitting, as OC drew inspiration for its name and concept from the Olympics!) Photographers like , Walter Pfeiffer, Todd Cole, and Tim Barber have signed on for the debut issue.WWD got hold of an internal memo in which Lim :“As magazine fanatics, O.C. founder Humberto Leon and myself are aiming to create a collectible publication for a new generation, something beautiful and special in the vein of Benetton’s Colors,?Comme des Garcons’ Six and Joe McKenna’s Joe. We want to make a magazine that will appeal to kids in Nebraska as much as industry people.”30,000 copies of the mag will be published, but distribution (which will begin in August) has yet to be announced. Collectible, indeed. Hopefully, an upcoming issue will feature more shots of?‘s awesome?.[] ?PHOTOS: Who Was Best Dressed At Last Night’s People’s Choice Awards? by 10:58 am, January 12th, 2012 While we couldn’t tell you who won what at last night’s People’s Choice Awards (and let’s be honest, it’s not like you actually care), we can who wore what and, more importantly, who wore it best. Chloe Moretz wore the cocktail dress of our dreams, a shimmery green Proenza Schouler number that was perfectly age appropriate and still stood out. Lea Michele posed vampishly in an off-the-shoulder, white fringed design by Marchesa which was dialed up a notch by her fuchsia lipstick. (A spring must-have, if you ask us.) Kelly Osbourne looked minimalist but in a white and orange number by Honor, her grey-ish brown hair notwithstanding, while Jennifer Morrison channeled the roaring twenties in an dress and oversized ballerina bun.Ashley Green and Kristen Bell opted for short leather dresses (DKNY and Valentino, respectively) which weren’t exactly the best looks of the night so much as they were cute and inoffensive. Let it be known, ladies, that the stakes will be lot higher on . Which brings us to the best of the best dressed of the night, Emma Stone. The style star wore head-to-toe Gucci: slim black pants featuring gold ankle buttons, a deconstructed white shirt, and a green and black tuxedo jacket in the most perfect shade of emerald we’ve ever seen. Ladies, you’ve met your match. Enable JavaScript to check out our fancy slideshow. ?Phoebe Philo Is The Most Well-Adjusted Designer Working Today by 2:10 pm, July 18th, 2011 In the wake of with at Dior, what could be more refreshing than a designer who doesn’t draw any attention to herself, doesn’t seek the spotlight, and doesn’t design clothes to be editorialized and then forgotten? Nothing, that’s what. Which is probably why this extremely rare interview with Celine designer (who fits the anti-Galliano bill to a T) was arranged. Philo, whose brand is owned by the same people who used to employ Galliano, is extremely press shy, but you can see why and the rest of her bosses at LVMH would want her to talk about herself in a widely-circulated publication. She’s a talented designer, a wife and mother, and an uncompromising manager who gets things done. And her clothing empowers the women who wear it to do the same.Philo with The Independent to talk about how she transformed not only Chloe, which she took over in 2001, but also Celine, where she signed on as creative director in 2008. Since then, the brand has blossomed under her no-nonsense direction, primarily because her simple, stripped back clothing made sense for women who didn’t want to make brash displays of their wealth at a time when the world would have hated them for it. Philo says she’s making clothes, not showpieces, and she can’t be bothered with the spectacle of being a fashion designer. So she doesn’t let it get to her. Take in our favorite parts of the interview, below.On her design philosophy:“What I love is this idea of a wardrobe,” says Phoebe Philo, “the idea that we’re establishing certain signatures and updating them, that a change in colour or fabric is enough. I do think that the world doesn’t need many more frivolous bits and bobs that end up left in cupboards or landfills.”On working 9 to 5:Philo insists on a reasonable working day. “I think that’s a discipline I’ve taught myself,” she says. “We’re just organised. Everybody in this building knows when I arrive and when I leave and the important things are done within those hours. That’s just the way it is. And it works. “I have a fantastic team and it’s much easier having children, because that creates a natural limit. If I have a good time with them before they go to sleep, it’s worth everything to me.”On why she hates talking to journalists:“I think that the clothes say it all much better than I can. I always find it strange after a show when everybody comes backstage and says: ‘What was it all about’? It’s like: ‘You’ve just seen it. What do you mean?’ My instinct is to say: ‘What did you think? What did you get from it?’ And yet they want you to fill in even more. “To me, the show is quite a complete story. There’s nothing more for me to say and, anyway, it doesn’t matter what it was meant to say. It’s out there. It can be whatever anyone watching it thought it was, surely.”Spoken like a real artist. Philo doesn’t mention Galliano, Arnault or Kanye West, who’s one of her , in the interview, and maybe that’s part of the mystique. Let the clothes speak for themselves. Take a look at the rest of the interview .[ via ] ?PHOTOS: It Was A Poor Showing At Last Night’s Critics Choice Awards by 11:35 am, January 13th, 2012 Sometimes, not even Prada or Rodarte can save a red carpet. Case in point: last night’s Critics Choice Awards, which featured a host of A-list style stars and celebs wearing no shortage of high-wattage designer duds on the dreariest, most shoddily constructed grey carpet we’ve ever seen. Step and repeat set up aside, things were not good. Diane Kruger bombed in an ill-fitting Prada gown while Emma Stone looked like she was swimming in her green and navy Jason Wu creation. Elle Fanning looked fun and fresh in Rodarte but it wasn’t exactly what we’d call a home run. Fellow tween-er Chloe Moretz looked positively and inexplicably morbid in black Chanel. Kirsten Dunst, Evan Rachel Wood, and Charlize Theron all looked beautiful but, yep, boring in black gowns by Christian Dior, Valentino, and Azzedine Alaia, respectively, which is to say: thank goodness for Michelle Williams and Tilda Swinton, whose black and white ensembles by Chanel and YSL were by far and away the best of the night. And note to VH1, next time someone pitches the idea of hanging some grey fabric from a curtain rod and calling it a red carpet, say no. Enable JavaScript to check out our fancy slideshow. ?PHOTOS: Jaime King And Chloe Moretz Are Red Carpet BFFs by 6:12 pm, November 14th, 2011 Hollywood has enough red carpet events that you wouldn’t think they’d need a special one dedicated just to style, but lo and behold: they do! And honestly, we’re not complaining. Mainly because we get to see Chloe Moretz and Jaime King cuddle like they’re the bestest friends in the world and that is awesome because Chloe is one of favorite teens and Jaime was once the most awesome teen of all time (at least according to Jennifer Egan’s seminal NYT Magazine article, , which we will never tire of referencing in every Jaime King post we write) and remains awesome to this day.Anyway! The Hollywood Style Awards took place at Smashbox Studios in West Hollywood, where Las Vegas’ Palazzo recreated their iconic hotel, complete with poolside lounge. King wore a graphic dress from Calvin Klein’s 2012 Resort collection and accessorized with Palladium diamond studs, while Moretz looked adorable and, yes, age appropriate, in Miu Miu.Whose look did you love best? Enable JavaScript to check out our fancy slideshow. ?PHOTOS: Starlets, Celebs, And Chanel Galore At Last Night’s MOMA Gala by 10:24 am, November 16th, 2011 Hollywood and fashion A-listers went all out for last night’s Chanel-sponsored celebration of director Pedro Almodovar at New York City’s Museum of Modern Art. Accordingly, almost everyone wore Chanel, though Chloe Moretz, in a champagne pink dress with textured sequin leggings absolutely stole the show. Perennial style favorite Blake Lively worked her couture look, though her brown tights and awkward booties (Louboutin, no doubt) weren’t the best choice. Sarah Jessica Parker’s dress-and-sleeveless overcoat ensemble was certainly the of the night, whether or not you liked the look. And gets points for her bright blue patterned Peter Pilotto dress, though we can’t help but point out that it borrows pretty heavily from . Enable JavaScript to check out our fancy slideshow. ?Project Runway: The Fascinating And The Fascinatingly Bad by 2:55 pm, July 30th, 2010 Project Runway‘s eighth season kicked off last night on Lifetime with not just 16, but 17 designers ready to make it work. “And Sew It Begins” began with the designers informed they weren’t officially contestants, and that one or more would be eliminated before the hour-and-a-half show was up. But first, let’s meet the contestants:Ivy thinks the show should be renamed “The Ivy Show,” uses “luxurious” fabrics and has “amazing” construction skills. The egotism provided some foreshadowing for the competition to come. We met Casanova (it’s his “real last name”), who has “already done everything in Puerto Rico” and was missing the bottom half of his tie. Sarah just moved to NY from LA, A.J. is from Missouri, McKell is from Utah, has dreads and a baby girl.Peach describes her focus as “the ladies who lunch,” and thinks she’ll be the old lady of the bunch. But how will she get along with the young, gregarious designers? Nicholas says he “can’t wait to beat” her. Kristin is the “accidental apparel designer” who “allows the mistakes that I make to be a part of the final piece.” This will either be a great asset and implies she’s going far, or that she’ll screw up horribly in the first challenge and get excoriated by Nina Garcia.Jason is the tough guy, because he likes “to mesh men’s wear and women’s wear together” and he is shown working out with a punching bag. Gretchen is from Oregon, Mondo says “if you’re misunderstood then you have something really good going on.” Christopher Collins (full name needed — it’s a ready-made designer name) is from San Francisco, April “just graduated” and loves to “destroy and create” and Michael Costello opened his first store at 17. It takes more than 20 minutes before we meet the other three — Michael Drummond, Valerie (who is already crying) and Andy. The challenge was to take an article of clothing out of your suitcase, hand it to the person next to you and let them go to town destroying and creating. Casanova gives up a $1,070 pair of pants that he’s never won, but “shit happens.” The guest judge was Selma Blair, Gretchen won (Michael Kors called it “wearable but interesting”) and McKell didn’t even make it to the apartment. Here’s a breakdown:Quote of the Week: “Side cleavage is a rare thrilling moment for anyone.” – Michael Kors, describing the McKell “trainwreck.”Quote of the Week (that made me laugh): “I like to play with seaming.” – NicholasQuote of the Week (by Tim Gunn): “Is it sexy, or is it vulgar?” – Describing Casanova’s dress. It was vulgar.Insult of the Week: “It’s such an unfortunate pant to begin with.” – Selma Blair, dissing Peach’s actual pants. Runner-up: “This is like a hot mess.” – Heidi Klum, of April’s “shredded” look.Fashion Term I Had to Look Up: Feed Bag. Context: “If you’re a designer, you should know how to work with a feed bag.”Even I Knew This was a Bad Sign: James stapling his dress together. Stapling. Kors didn’t even catch this — he just noticed the pins.And my early pick for which four will show at Fashion Week: Kristin and Christopher (my two favorites from the first week, solid performers in the vein of winners Chloe/Leanne), Michael Costello (the prodigy — shades of Christian) and A.J. (a wildcard — Jeffrey-ish).Here’s Casanova getting destroyed (and created). Nina Garcia called his creation “almost fascinating. It’s fascinatingly bad”: ?PHOTOS: Who Was Best Dressed On Last Night’s Red Carpets? by Jada Wong and Hilary George-Parkin 12:55 pm, September 5th, 2012 While the ladies are definitely the at the , we can’t forget about other equally glitzy events. Last night, we saw Kirsten Dunst, Zoe Saldana, and Brooke Shields hit the town in New York, while Kiera Knightley,?Azealia Banks, Jessie J, and stepped out in London. Who was best dressed? This is a tough one!Across the pond, Knightley broke out the big guns in Chanel Couture for the premiere of Anna Karenina, and though the gauzy, pale pink gown was undeniably gorgeous, the silhouette of the skirt left something to be desired. British Vogue editor and fellow attendee Laura Bailey also opted for the interlocking Cs, but the oversized ruffled sleeves unfortunately overwhelmed the entire look. Even if it wasn’t quite as opulent, the downtown, rock n’ roll Burberry ensemble on Cara Delevigne had to be our favorite look of the evening. And here in NYC, Kirsten Dunst and Zoe Saldana earned our votes for best dressed in two very different ensembles. Dunst looked adorable in separates and Chloe ankle-strap pumps, while Saldana smoldered in a backless Elie Saab number. Well done, ladies! Enable JavaScript to check out our fancy slideshow. ?PHOTOS: Who Was Last Night’s Best Dressed Star? by 12:30 pm, May 4th, 2012 Last night, celebs were scattered across the glove, walking red carpets in New York, Los Angeles, London, and Paris. But, you know, who looked best?Ensembles ran the gamut from casual (Claudia Schiffer in green jeans to celebrate Guess‘s 30th anniversary in Paris) to fancy (Tali Lennox in a gauzy white evening gown for the Women for Women International Gala in London), avant-garde (January Jones in Mary Katrantzou at a screening in New York) to classic (Emma Roberts in Valentino at a different screening in New York). Also, Mischa Barton wore an odd pleated-and-gathered number, Sharon Stone donned a black jumpsuit (and carried a bag that looked like a mini-boombox), and Chloe Moretz whipped out floral Dolce & Gabbana.Take a peek, and make a pick: Enable JavaScript to check out our fancy slideshow. ?Reese Witherspoon In Hot Water Over Illegal Handbag by 6:05 pm, November 1st, 2011 What do you do when your favorite handbag gets you into trouble? That’s the question Oscar-award winning actress Reese Witherspoon is asking herself after being rudely informed that her python purse from Chloe is actually against Californian law.The Daily Mail that while Witherspoon won’t actually be arrested (and thank goodness, because look at her: she wouldn’t last two minutes in jail), she was the subject of some criticism from animal rights groups, including PETA. A spokeswoman for the organization detailed to the Mail just how the pythons used to make the $3,820 Paraty bag were likely killed, then offered to send Witherspoon an documentary expose of the exotic skins industry narrated by her Walk The Line co-star Joaquin Phoenix. And just in case this was hitting the actress close enough to home, PETA has voted her the world’s “sexiest vegetarian” in the past.Still, that doesn’t mean her stylish tote is above the law. The California Penal Code says that importing python skin for commercial purposes is prohibited, including “possession with intent to sell, or sell within the state.” Buying a python bag somewhere else and bringing it to California, however, is totally fine.So as long as Miss Legally Blonde doesn’t try to hawk that thing on eBay, everything should be OK. Except for a few worried heads in PETA’s public relations department.[] ?Runway Review: Can Something Old Ever Be New Again? by 11:09 am, March 27th, 2010 If we learn anything from our pasts, it’s that fashion, like history, repeats itself. Usually, though, we can take this mantra with a grain of salt — color palettes change, ruffles are added, and silhouettes are tweaked to satisfy more modern appetites. This doesn’t, however, seem to be the case with fashion these days. Today’s fashion records seem to be stuck on repeat, with no new track in sight. Shoulder pads, pleat-front pants, sequins and even scrunchies have been spotted on runways and donned by trend-setters around the globe. Have we travelled through time and landed smack dab in the middle of the 1980s? Nope, these the trends of today. It seems that with each new fashion month, a new decade becomes all the rage, with the 80s being the longest reigning period of choice. In Fall 2009, the 80s took over with cliches like big shoulders, sequined leggings and poufy micro-minis thanks to Betsey Johnson, Erin Fetherston, Marc Jacobs, and the king of ode-to-the-80s designs, Christophe Decarnin of Balmain. Thankfully, Spring 2009 saw hints of 90s grunge from designers like Alexander Wang and Balmain, with oversized bags, ripped jeans, and baggy tops. Now we’re past the dark attitudes of the 90s, big hair of the 80s and into the neutral tones and flowy tailoring of the 70s. Hannah MacGibbon of Chloe and Phoebe Philo of Celine hit the trends on the head with button-up shirts, wide-leg pants and tailored silhouettes for Fall 2010. And Rochas sent models down the runway that looked eerily similar to that ultimate 70s good girl, Mary Tyler Moore. Other designers followed suit by incorporating bell-bottoms and earthy, muted color palettes ?- anything but black ?- into their collections. One of the most noteworthy 70s nods of the fall runways came from Boy by Band of Outsiders with their brown and tan plaid trousers. Why is it that we get so excited about trends that we’ve seen ? and hated ? before? How have shoulder pads, the bane of our mothers’ existences, been welcomed with open arms by Gen Y? Who would have thought that the grunge looks of our favorite early 90s rock stars are being repeated by industry newbies? Is it that each season’s trends are simply so different from those that saturated the market prior, that they give our eyes a much needed rest from over-exposure? Or is it that the fashion greats have already created everything there is to create? What is it about these tired trends that keeps us drooling for more? And even though the fashion world has -? thankfully -? moved on from the tough-chic, rocker-girl looks of the past couple seasons, we’re still not seeing anything ground breaking. Designers continue to draw inspiration from trends of the past. And it seemed popular for designers to pit their pre-Fall and Fall inspirations as arising from the late designers of their respective fashion houses (i.e. Nicolas Ghesquiere using carapace-back jackets that Andre Leon Talley described as “so Cristobal” in Vogue’s March issue). It has become a rareity for fashion designers of today to be truly artistic and revolutionary — really forward thinkers. A few of the greats — Galliano, Lacroix, Lagerfeld ?- do send looks down the runway that really are works of art. The late Alexander McQueen was also in this league of designers, and his passing reminds us of the vision, talent and yes, opinion, that it takes to keep fashion a relevant medium in the art world. Creativity did show some signs of revival on the Fall 2010 runways. Issey Miyake gave us tops and head pieces made of Crayola-colored scarves and Gareth Pugh kept us on our toes with Matrix-like outerwear and a chain-linked gown. But typically avant-garde lines like Rodarte and Ann Demeulemeester fell short of compelling this season, further evidencing the stagnant industry. Even though fashion is cyclical, and we can always count on seeing trends of late resurface, it’s tiring to see fashion front-runners become so enthralled with “new” looks that are really anything but. As economies around the world continue to improve and sentiments continue to rise, hopefully we can see a resurgence of innovation in fashion. If the Fall 2010 runways were any indication, creativity seems to be making a slow comeback, but a comeback nonetheless. Here’s to an inspiring 2011 season!Get Styleite directly to your inbox – ?Selfridges Opens Biggest Shoe Salon In The World by 10:41 am, April 15th, 2010 In September, architect Jamie Forbert will unveil what shoe lovers across the world could only dream of: a shoe salon that will apparently be larger than the first floor of the Tate Modern in London. Talk about a shoe-gasm. This will be the store’s largest endeavor since being bought by the Westons in 2003 for ￡628 million (approximately $963 million U.S.). reports that the shoe store will feature exclusive designs from favorite shoe designers like Givenchy, Chloe, Stella McCartney, Rodarte, and Alejandro Ingelmo. There will be six different shoe salons and ten separate brand specific boutiques. I die. Try and estimate how many hours it would take to truly delve into the entirety of the shoe salon. The salon, which in my mind is more like a museum than a store, would take hours, if not days, to get through. Hours and days well worth spent. [Editor's Note: ] ?StyleDish: How To Wear This Season’s Maxi Skirt by 5:06 pm, April 12th, 2011 You wouldn’t know it from the weather in New York but spring is (allegedly) here and summer is just around the corner. Thankfully, Refinery29 has a handy how-to guide for this season’s hottest look: the maxi skirt. But for those looking for a meatier course, Jezebel’s has a rundown of the very stupidest things Vogue has ever published about politics. (Her words.) All that and more, coming right up! [Refinery29] [Vogue] [Grazia][Racked NY] [StyleCaster] [The Gloss] ?StyleDish: High Fashion GIFs And Anonymous Models by 5:14 pm, April 18th, 2011 In today’s, the fashion world timewarps and embraces the animated GIF, Kirsten Dunst lolls about with a lion for Bulgari, and Fashionista reports on the latest anonymous model blog. Enjoy! [Refinery29] [StyleCaster] [Fashionista] [The Gloss] [The Cut] [The Frisky] ?StyleDish: Beyonce And Jay-Z Make Our Hearts Explode Yet Again by 6:06 pm, May 9th, 2012 They are just the CUTEST. [HuffPost Style] [BuzzFeed Shift] [Modelinia] [The Coveteur] [Racked] [Exposed Zippers] ?StyleDish: Gucci Gucci, Louis Louis, Fendi Fendi, Prada Bandaids by 4:18 pm, October 29th, 2011 Today’s is all about luxury bandaids, hilarious search terms, and fake Chloe Sevigny. [High Snobette] [The Gloss] [Racked] [The Frisky] [Rookie] [StyleCaster] ?StyleDish: Guess Who Owns The Row’s Fancy Backpack? by 5:33 pm, May 15th, 2012 She has a dreamy fiance, too. [The Gloss] [Teen Vogue] [MTV Style] [The Cut] [BuzzFeed Shift] [High Snobette] ?StyleDish: How To Pose Like Coco Rocha by 6:10 pm, November 2nd, 2011 Today’s comes in question form: What would you pay to get a private lesson in posing from ? Would you wear television-inspired sneakers? Which couture designer do you think was inspired by ‘Friends’? And how freaky-looking is dressed up as? Answers to all that and more, below! [Fashionologie] [The Cut][Racked] [HuffPost Style] [Fashionista] [The Gloss] ?StyleDish: Kate Middleton Goes Green, Inspires Peplum Mania by 5:07 pm, March 17th, 2012 Take a break from your St. Patty’s Day revelry to listen to Madonna‘s new track, check out Kate Middleton‘s festive outfit, and muse about the no makeup trend. [Telegraph] [National Post] [PopSugar] [Refinery 29] [Huffington Post] [Financial Times] ?StyleDish: Katie Grand’s New Website & Chloe Sevigny’s Runway Plans by 4:21 pm, May 22nd, 2011 Today’s gifts us with Katie Grand‘s extensive portfolio, news of Chloe Sevigny‘s first runway show, and insight into North Korean capitalist fashion. [Fashionista] [Go Fug Yourself] [Elle] [Style File] [Jezebel] [The Independent] ?StyleDish: Michael Jackson’s Nephew Took Kim K’s V Card by 4:24 pm, July 15th, 2012 [Examiner] [Daily News] [InStyle] [Examiner] [Complex] [The Fashion Spot] ?StyleDish: Fake Chloe Sevigny Shills For Alexis Bittar ‘Azzessories’ by 5:29 pm, October 4th, 2011 Good evening, America. Welcome to the age of sponsored content, where even celebrity spoofs are eligible for a little corporate love. Today, our friends at The Frisky dug up the latest in a series of Drew Droege’s spoofs of the actresses, sponsored by none other than jeweler Alexis Bittar. After you learn all about azzessories, take a bite out of today’s StyleDish, which includes furrier ‘s upcoming nuptials and a little magnetic nail polish. [The Frisky] [The Cut] [Vogue Daily] [The Gloss] [StyleCaster] [BuzzFeed] ?StyleDish: Emma Stone For W, Lauren Bush’s New Bling by 5:53 pm, December 15th, 2010 Today’s has a little bit of something for everyone, including Chloe Sevigny’s latest collection for Opening Ceremony, two-for-one holiday updos, and ten teen stars who (thankfully) dress their age. [PopEater] [The Observer] [College Candy] [Grazia] [HuffPost Style] [TIME] [The Gloss] [The Fashion Spot] ?StyleDish: Kim Kardashian’s Wedding Is Going To Be Krazy by Melanie Chan 6:54 pm, August 18th, 2011 Today’s brings us more hype (this time for your nails), lots of obscure fragrances you’ve never heard of (fancy wearing the same scent as Angelina Jolie?), and Judith Lieber handbags as goody bags — if you’re one of Kim Kardashian’s bridesmaids, that is. Also, a lustworthy accessory that will break both your wallet and your willpower. [The Gloss] [Refinery 29] [Fashionista] [Elle] [Fashion Etc] [Racked NY] ?StyleDish: Hamish Bowles Is Writing An Autobiography by 5:24 pm, June 2nd, 2011 We seriously cannot wait to read all the juicy dish in the autobiography Vogue‘s European editor is working on (imagine everything he must know about !), but for now we’re content with today’s , which includes features Gwyneth Paltrow joining Twitter, Andy Roddick designing shorts and a slew of awesome summer sandals. [Fashionista] [The Cut] [StyleCaster] [The Hairpin] [The Gloss] [Teen Vogue] ?Katie Holmes, Doting Mom: Suri Designs Her Own Clothes! by 11:18 am, August 16th, 2010 When we were four years old, we were trying to learn things like how to tell the difference between similar dark colors and how to count past 20. Suri Cruise, however, has already moved on to designing her own clothes.In an interview with New York Magazine‘s Amy Larocca, actress/designer Katie Holmes (she’s one half of the label Holmes and Yang) said she’s been designing bespoke clothing for Suri since the day she was born — sort of in homage to her own fascination with clothes as a toddler. I always loved clothes growing up. My mother had a drapery business. And now, part of being in this business is that you’re around really nice clothes. You do these photo shoots, you get exposed to Hermes and Chloe and Armani, and you start to feel the difference.And now that Suri is old enough to know the difference between a box pleat and a kick pleat, she’s telling her mom how she wants her clothes to look.She says, “I want this sleeve cut,” and it’s like, “Okay, we’ll cut it.” She picks out all of her own clothes and has since she was 1?. But it’s not just her own wardrobe that Suri has a say in — she’s also been picking out clothes for her mom since 2008.Tom and I went to the Met ball a couple of years ago, and I had this beautiful red gown and these royal-blue shoes that I wasn’t planning on wearing, but Suri made me put them on and so I was like, “Okay, I trust you.”And with an eye for color like that, who wouldn’t?So what’s ahead for the young Miss Cruise? She seems destined for fashion, but at age four it seems just a touch too early to call her future as a designer or a stylist or an editor a done deal. But whatever she ends up doing with her life, we’re pretty certain she’s going to be really, really well dressed doing it. ?PHOTOS: Stars Align At The Target GO International Launch by Justin Fenner and Julia Rubin 12:59 pm, March 11th, 2011 Last night we forwent our plans to have a quiet night at home and headed to Opening Ceremony‘s outpost at New York’s Ace Hotel, where celebrities of every stripe assembled to fete the launch of Target‘s GO International Design Collective. We reported last month that Target would be bringing back a sort of of the designer collaborations they’ve done over the years, and the dresses that will hit stores again this month were out in full force — both on display and on the fabulous people who attended the party.But there’s fabulous, and then there’s fabulous — and this party was definitely of the brand you have to italicize. Actresses Chloe Sevigny, Lake Bell and Olivia Munn sipped champagne with Opening Ceremony founders and . While celebrity stylist June Ambrose vamped for the cameras on the red carpet, we chatted with designer and fashion editor Nina Garcia about what they buy when they go to Target, their personal style, and whether they braved the rain to shop, party, or both. Afterward, Santigold came out of hiding to debut a new song, and there was a surprise performance by 80s legend Shiela E.Check out some pictures of the party below, and see what the style stars in attendance had to say. And head to your local target between March 13 and April 10 to get your hands on some these . Enable JavaScript to check out our fancy slideshow. ?Jason Wu Fetes New Target Collab With Blake Lively And Chloe Moretz by 1:52 pm, January 27th, 2012 Target‘s party celebrating its collaboration with designer was a star studded-affair wrapped in a gigantic line drawing of Paris. And Wu told us last night that that’s exactly how it should have been.“It’s a manifestation of everything we’ve worked so hard on for the last year and a half,” Wu said. “We shot the campaign in London. We shot the campaign in Brooklyn. It’s sort of the accumulation of all these creative ideas that came together. And it’s just fun.”And who wouldn’t have fun partying with everyone from actresses Blake Lively, Emmy Rossum, Jaime King and everyone’s favorite teen queen Chloe Moretz? Still, the party wasn’t just a party — it was also a shopping extravaganza and a mini French feast. While some chose to take advantage of the chance to buy pieces of the collection before it hits stores, others chowed down on mini bowls of French onion soup and macarons from Laduree. Fun, fun, fun. And fashion!“I love that it’s going to transcend time,” King told us. “I love that the girls or women or whoever buys it are going to be able to wear it any season you can transform the clothing. And it will never go out of style. Like it’s not one of these things that you look at it and it’s like, ‘Oh, that’s so ’97,’ you know what I mean?”Wu said the collection has “legs of its own,” and is excited to see people wearing it. You can take a look at a few people doing just that below. Enable JavaScript to check out our fancy slideshow. ?Tavi Hires Christine Staub Despite Runway Debut Faux Pas by 9:14 am, July 9th, 2010 Danielle Staub, the villainous vixen on Bravo’s Real Housewives of New Jersey was devastated when her daughter, Christine, fell ill during her first runway show. While standing in line with the other models at the show at New York Fashion Week, Christine felt faint and was escorted off the runway.Such a devastating occurrence would be traumatic for any young model, but Christine’s moment of weakness was broadcast on national television. Ouch. Would Christine model ever again? Would her bad-itude paired with her less than smooth runway debut stunt her modeling career? Success is often measured by the people that have faith in you. And lucky enough for Christine, in addition to being insanely gorgeous, some people still have faith her in. And is one of those people.Fashion critics everywhere have been anxiously awaiting to see what the fate of fashion blogger Tavi will be. It was recently announced that she will be styling her very first photo shoot for Black Book magazine’s September issue. After the first choice model — Chloe Sevigny — backed out due to scheduling conflicts, Tavi thought long and hard about a replacement. Finally, she and Black Book settled on Christine for the ten-page editorial.Leave it to Tavi to throw us for a loop. We figured she would choose some sort of obscure, odd-looking androgynous model. Not a more obviously stunning reality television cast member. But even Tavi’s pretentious eye was able to look past Christine’s mother, her shaky start, and see her potential. We’re just keeping our fingers crossed for some behind the scenes footage of this one. [] ?Tavi Gevinson Is Adding ‘Actress’ To Her Already Impressive Resume by 12:57 pm, August 7th, 2012 If you feel like you haven’t been getting enough lately, despite her four-year-old , online teen mecca , imminent print mag , recent , and major New York Times , well you’re in luck (you crazy fangirl, you)! The enterprising sixteen-year-old will soon be hitting the big screen.As tells it, Gevinson recently inked a representation deal with major Hollywood talent agency UTA and, not one to waste any time, has already been cast in her first movie role. So while we don’t really see Gevinson as an L.A. chick, we imagine she’ll eschew the LiLo-and-paparazzi route for something more along the lines of Didion and Rodarte. And any Rookie reader knows what that means: top-notch vintage Hollywood snapshots and California writings, coming your way!Surpringly, the film in which Tavi is set to make her acting debut isn’t one of the dreamy Sofia Coppola features that the teen is so very fond of (though she still counts the director as a friend, natch), nor is it a Wes Anderson quirky, kitschy flick in the vein of Moonrise Kingdom. Rather, set to direct the film is Nicole Holofcener, whose oeuvre also includes 2006′s Friends With Money and a smattering of Sex and The City episodes. Gevinson will play Chloe, a character who bears some marked similarities to the blogger herself (though the Reporter is quick to note that Tavi’s own parents are very supportive):an only child who never received much attention from her parents, forcing her to grow up faster than her peers.According to the as-of-yet-untitled movie’s , Tavi will act alongside of James Gandolfini and one of our other all-time favorite people, Julia Louis-Dreyfus. Advance ticket sales here we come![ via ] ?Tavi Gevinson Spills Details About New Project At Sassy Tribute Show by 5:46 pm, July 31st, 2011 Last week, after a long day of blogging, we made our way to Brooklyn to catch The Talent Show at Littlefield. The theme of the night was Sassy Magazine, and we were as intrigued by the premise as were by the biggest name on the bill: .Yes, we saw Tavi IRL. It was exciting! She, as , has grown up, but she’s every bit an almost-awkward 15-year-old who happens to really, really . She took part in a recreation of Sassy‘s “Dear Boy” section, asking comedian Kurt Braunohler about a flaky guy she has a crush on. (“Does he skate?” “Yeah.” SO. GOOD.) She also sat down for a Q&A with Ira Glass to discuss her upcoming project. And we actually learned a few things about it!Okay, first of all, it is definitely called Rookie (not ) and it definitely has both a web and print component. She has amassed a staff of around 25, which includes contributors from around the world. New Daily Intel hire (and former Runnin’ Scared ed) Joe Coscarelli is the “token guy” of the crew, and he even participated in the night’s Janeane Garofalo-hosted “Sassiest Boy In America” contest. (Though we found him quite sassy, he lost to a 16-year-old.) Tavi was mum about specific details, but made it clear this wouldn’t be a Sassy ripoff and that the tone would be more alternative than the content itself.Interestingly, Tavi revealed she’s been getting some business advice from the girls over at Hello Giggles, which has helped her decide to “own everything” for Rookie in order to avoid the issues that led to Sassy‘s demise. We’re curious to see how this will work since she’s with Sassy founding editor Jane Pratt (and xoJane backers SAY Media).Of course, the event wasn’t really about Tavi at all. It was about SASSY. How Sassy Changed My Life authors Kara Jesella and Marisa Meltzer (who Tavi is shopping a with) moderated a panel of former staffers, and the tunes of Sassy band Chia Pet were played by teenage girl band Supercute! Elizabeth Spiradakis provided a slideshow of Sassy fashion editorials, and we were enlightened to the fact that Lauren Santo Domingo was a Sassy model. Seriously! There were also some pretty rad shots of the mag’s?intern Chloe Sevigny. And while?Pratt couldn’t make it, she taped a “wish I was there” message for the audience, as did too-cool-for-school entertainment editor Christina Kelly.Allow us to leave you with LSD in Sassy: ?Taylor Made: 4 Muses That Prove It’s All In A Name by 1:33 pm, March 29th, 2010 Sure, it’s not exactly Shakespearian. But if fashion’s cardinal rule of threes (and fours) is to be believed, it seems lately there’s something to the name Taylor. Of course, it’s not quite up there with, say, a Kelly or a Birkin, but try and think of the last time you went anywhere — a newsstand, a grocery store, even the dentist’s office without experiencing some sort of run-in with this moniker-of-the-moment. But make no mistake, it’s not just a certain Ms. Swift that is making our ears itch. Speaking chic, there’s Tomasi: the red-haired Marie Claire editrix whose street style snaps have created a mini-sensation in the blogosphere, and Jacobson: the sunglass-loving stylist/former Rachel Zoe-tege. And who could forget the not-so-little Upper East Sider turned kohl-rimmed bad girl, Ms. Momsen? With spring rounding the corner, we’re always on the hunt for a few new muses, and this four-tete of well turned-out trendsetters seemed as good as any. Because seriously, if there’s one thing that’s worth your time, it’s finding the perfect Taylor.Taylor Momsen: Despite her place atop the high-school food chain, make no mistake: this trendsetting teen is no . Instead, the 16-going-on-30 year old wears her rock and roll heart on her sleeve — because, really, when was the last time she wore pants — along with a thick rimming of kohl-liner and the requisite religious relic. Girl loves her leather, her transparent lace, and, oh yeah, her Marlborough Reds. xoxo.Images above left, clockwise from left; Black Pearly Snap Perforated Driving Glove, $92 ,available at ;?Pyramid Stone Cross Necklace by Alex & Chloe, $270, available at ;?Jeepers Creepers Boots, $124, available at ;?Cut Out Dress by Cheap Monday, $64, available at ;?Classic Aviator Sunglasses by Ray Ban, $139, available at .***Taylor Swift: As guilty pleasures go, they don’t come much sweeter. So there should be little surprise that her look is equally syrupy — think?fairy princess meets Pollyanna with a dash of country western charm. Sure, it’s super romantic and probably the sort of thing we’d?balk at (at least in public), except, come warm weather and sunshine, who doesn’t want to throw on a flouncy floral frock and go skipping through the tulips with guitar in hand?Images above right, clockwise from right; The Rolled Short by Current/Elliot, $205, available at ;?Leather Square Satchel Bag, $50, available at ;?Uma Espadrille Wedge in brown by Dolce Vita, $158, available at ;?Garden Collection Floral Sun Dress by H&M, $25, available at H&M;?Moto Jacket by Steven Alan, $348, available at NEXT: Taylor Jacobson and Taylor Tomasi… Pages: 1 ?Taylor Swift Fierce And Fearless In Elle by 10:33 am, March 16th, 2010 This month marks Elle’s Work and Power issue, and many will wonder why the magazine opted for a . While Taylor Swift is undeniably popular, would it not have made more sense to put someone a little, well, older on the cover? Maybe someone who could, at the very least, legally have a happy-hour cocktail? Had it been , it would be a different story. After all, every time a major fashion magazine features a tweeny-bopper on the cover, one wonders whether the editor in chief was a) trying to look cool in front of his or her kids or b) trying to trick a younger generation of subscribers into purchasing the issue. But since it’s Taylor, and we love Taylor, we applaud Robbie Myers for celebrating the superstar’s hard work. Her most recent album Fearless, was last year’s best-selling album and stayed on Billboard’s Top 200 for longer than any other album in the last ten years. She received four Grammy awards (and eight nominations) this year, and last month, she began the which takes Swift to over 30 cities, playing 37 shows across North America. And thanks to the brilliant styling of creative director Joe Zee, readers get to see Swift dressed to kill and — take a deep breath here — with straight hair. Anyone who follows Swift is used to seeing her in sparkly princess dresses. But the cover, which shows Taylor in a rockstar-chic Michael Kors leather jacket and Balmain T-shirt, gives the first hint that this is not what’s to come. The first image of the spread has Taylor looking a lot like Mischa Barton did in her O.C. days. In a peach lace Jason Wu dress and clear-crystal Prada sandals, Swift appears understated and appropriately sexy, playing with her rarely-straightened hair. She looks powerful. She looks confident. But thankfully, she also looks her age.The next spread features her dancing around (as she is wont to do) in a Ralph Lauren Collection organza vest and tunic, followed by her in Oscar de la Renta Chanel-esque shorts, lace top, and a fabulous Patricia Underwood braided fedora. A Valentino feather-trimmed prairie dress, Sonia Rykiel studded sandals, and classic Chloe dress are right behind. The looks are significantly more mature — fashionably speaking — than what we’re used to seeing Taylor wear, but she seems to be confident in the clothes. Is Taylor moving on from the endearing glitter glam that we know and love her for? Compared to her celebrity peers, those whom we’ve salaciously watch fly off the handle, Swift seems to have gotten it right. She is poised yet playful; a teenager who is able to gracefully alternate between loving glitter and making major decisions about her unimaginably successful career. So if we think about it like that — which seems to be what Elle did — and ponder how many people’s careers rest on one barely legal girl, Swift seems the perfect choice for their Work and Power Issue. She certainly deserves a cocktail. ?PHOTOS: Who Was Best Dressed At The Teen Choice Awards? by 11:04 am, August 8th, 2011 The Teen Choice Awards rolled out their blue carpet last night and for those of you as far out of their teens as we are, it’s the one where honorees win surfboards. Anyway! While we managed to only recognize about two-thirds of the attendees (apparently we need to beef up on our CW television line-up), we were able to separate the good from the bad looks and the boring from the bold ones. Blake Lively stepped out in a sherbet orange Gucci dress which she paired with her go-to jeweler, Lorraine Schwartz and while we love the color, the whole look just served to remind us that we’re officially bored with Blake. Moving on! Zoe Saldana killed it in a crinkly metallic look by Lanvin which will now haunt our penniless dreams while Zooey Deschanel took the somewhat obvious (for her) route of a nude and black lace a-line number courtesy of Miu Miu. Rachel Bilson wore a frothy white dress by Chloe that was as pretty as it was snooze-worthy and Selena Gomez managed to make a toilet paper train look acceptable. Emma Stone skipped the carpet but took the stage in a covetable Christian Dior resort dress with metallic accents and Justin Bieber started what is about to be the next big thing in teenage formalwear: the undone bowtie. Our final thoughts go to Pretty Little Liars star Lucy Hale, who is apparently following in ‘s footsteps (really?) and Cameron Diaz who hereby wins the award for Most Predictable Dresser Ever. Is it short, tight, and strapless? Cammie will wear it! Thankfully, she was saved by her delightfully eye-catching accessories: a pair of coral, black, and white Burak Uyan heels, a metallic-trim clutch by Chloe, and several Vhernier cocktail rings. Now it’s your turn! Whose look did you love? Whose did you hate? And whose are you planning on recreating this Saturday night? Enable JavaScript to check out our fancy slideshow. ?PHOTOS: Terry Richardson Dresses Cute Little Girls Like Himself by 5:02 pm, January 16th, 2012 Part of ‘s shtick involves dressing up celebrities, friends, and just about like himself ? plaid, glasses, and thumbs up intact. But is it cool he did so to a couple of toddlers?Richardson was tasked with shooting the for French brand Eleven Paris. Non-children Ash Stymest and Tali Lennon (daughter of Annie!) posed for Richardson in Eleven Paris gear, but that didn’t stop the photographer from throwing some mini-mes into the mix. (For the record, as far we can tell Eleven Paris doesn’t sell children’s clothes.) While the little girls are super cute ? those curls! ? the whole thing leaves us with an icky feeling. Cute kids dressed up like a ? No thanks. Enable JavaScript to check out our fancy slideshow. [via ] ?Terry Richardson Kisses Chloe Sevigny Dressed As Terry Richardson by 2:31 pm, November 10th, 2011 Gross. dressed up like for Terry Richardson and kissed Terry Richardson. It’s the ickiest. Uncle Terry giddily exclaims, “We gotta do a kissing shot! That would be great!” Then he gets momentarily bashful, and then they kiss and it’s super gross. All we can think about when we see this is . ?The Zoe Report: Sole Mate by 11:26 am, September 29th, 2010 A woman after my own heart, Carrie Bradshaw once told her friend Charlotte that she had no fear of heights, as evidenced by her shoes. Seeing that elevation is the first characteristic I notice in my own footwear?closely followed by material and comfort level?it is no wonder that I have appointed Chloe’s as my shoes du jour!While I don’t necessarily like to play favorites when it comes to accessories?these wedges will definitely be glued to my feet throughout the fall and winter season. Between their knock-you-off-your-feet (literally) structure, luxe python detailing and convenient ankle strap, they define the meaning of ba-na-nas. Since they are likely to take center stage in any look, I suggest pairing them with opaque black tights and an understated sweater dress. xoRZAvailability: Chloe ($1095). For additional retailer information, visit .Style It With: , , Parallel Universe Jeffrey Campbell $99 ?17 Things We Learned About Tom Ford Last Night by 7:50 pm, May 9th, 2012 “Wow, there’s a lot of you,”?Tom Ford said to last night’s 92Y audience. His talk, part of Fern Mallis‘s “Fashion Icons” series, had been sold out for four months. An upstairs room held guests who watched the conversation on a livestream. Everyone wanted to see Tom.Mallis tackled everything, from Ford’s childhood to his present-day status as a womenswear designer for his eponymous label. We learned lots (and lots) of things about the designer, which we’re now going to share with you.1. Ford is a Virgo. When asked if he believed in astrology, he responded quickly: “Oh god, yes.”“In fashion there’s a lot of Virgos ? Stella McCartney, Karl Lagerfeld, Carine Roitfeld. There are lots of us.?I think to really obsess over a millimeter on a shoe heel, it helps to be a Virgo.”2. He grew up in Texas and New Mexico, and has always been into the all-American?Ralph Lauren aesthetic.“Oh, I grew up that way, and I still have the cowboy thing! It’s funny because my family’s been in Texas since the 1840s or something. I put on a cowboy hat, and you can see the genetics. It’s like, I don’t look stupid. Most people look stupid in cowboy hats! I put on a cowboy hat, and it’s like it just grew there on my head. It’s very bizarre. So I actully look surprisingly good in jeans and a plaid shirt on a horse in a cowboy hat.”3. Ford gets a lot of good advice.From his grandmother: “You have one decision to make in life: you can either be happy or you cannot be happy.”From his former boss, Dawn Mello:?”Only hire people you want to have dinner with.”4. He wanted to be 50 years old, even as a kid, which got him bullied.“The big thing was to put rocks at the end of a sock and swing it around and whap me. Or slit my car tires ? see I was 50! ? my bicycle tires. I didn’t want to carry a backpack, I thought it looked?messy. I had a nice little overcoat, and I had a briefcase ? and it was a real man’s briefcase! When you’re 7, a real man’s briefcase is like going to school with luggage.”5. Ford didn’t know he was gay when he was younger, but he also just despises the label.“No. Am I gay?! First of all,?I hate that word, I hate that word. Yes, of course I’m gay. I don’t like these labels. I look so forward to the day when we say, ‘Oh, you’re married. Are you married to a man or to a woman?’ Yes, I’m gay, and I’m absolutely and completely open about it. But I’m also anal retentive, pain in the ass.”6. After dropping out of NYU, he became an actor. He eventually quit acting because “I become too weird, I couldn’t do it, I was too insecure”.“I’ve never told anyone what they were. I had 12 national commercials running at the same time. I acted under a different name, so you will not find it, it will not be on YouTube, you will not be able to pull it up.”7. He later matriculated at Parsons, though he got his degree in environmental design, not fashion design. One summer he interned at Chloe‘s press office in Paris, where he organized the sample closet. Getting a real job in fashion required some creativity, however. This is what went down when he applied for a job with Cathy Hardwick:“I wanted a job in fashion, but I did not have a degree from Parsons in fashion design. But I could sketch, so I drew up a fashion portfolio. Of course you would assume if someone is showing you a fashion portfolio that they studied fashion. I didn’t. I got the job. She then said later I got the job because I had pretty hands, not because she liked my drawings. The first day on the job she said, “Draw some circle skirts.” And I’m like, “Shit.” So I went to Bloomingdales, flipped open the circle skirts, saw where all the seams were, ran back to the office, sketched some circle skirts, and put them on her desk. I learned a lot on the job.8. His first boss also played matchmaker.“Cathy introduced me to Richard Buckley, the love of my life. We went to this David Cameron fashion show, and I remember this silver salt-and-pepper-haired guy. I remember turning and looking, and he’s staring at me with these piercing, water-blue eyes. It scared me. It really scared me, and later I realized it scared me because when I looked into his eyes, I absolutely saw and knew my entire future, because he was the one. But I didn’t realize at that moment why it scared me. I just couldn’t look at him. I just couldn’t look at him in the eyes. At the end of the show, I just bolted. I just had to get out there. I couldn’t talk to him, I couldn’t look at him.”They met again at the Women’s Wear Daily offices, and moved in together after three dates. They have been a couple for over 25 years.9. Ford once worked for Marc Jacobs.“I worked for Marc. Marc hired me. He had just gone to Perry Ellis, and he hired me to design Perry Ellis America, which was the jeans collection. And a few weeks after that, Perry Ellis ended up splitting. I only ended up working for Marc for a few weeks.”10. At Gucci Group, he was responsible for bringing on Christopher Bailey, Francisco Costa, Stella McCartney, Alexander McQueen, Stefano Pilati, and Hedi Slimane. By the end of his time there, he held positions as creative director of Gucci Group, creative director and designer of Gucci, and creative director and designer of Yves Saint Laurent. As per Ford, “Yves Saint Laurent was bought for me to design.”“Yves was very friendly at first. We knew each other, and he very much wanted me to design the collection. As things started to go well, and as the shows started to get better reviews and better reviews and our sales started going up and up and up, Yves was no longer my friend. And I actually have some wonderful handwritten letters in very beautiful handwriting in ink: ‘In 13 minutes you have destroyed what I worked 40 years to create.’”11. Ford has a pragmatic approach to design.“I am a commercial fashion designer. I’ve always designed jackets with two sleeves. People have two arms! That doesn’t mean I don’t admire jackets with three sleeves or that can turn into tables or that layers and layers come off of them like little dolls in Russia. But I’m a practical commercial fashion designer. I love it. It’s creative. For me it’s a creative endeavor, it’s an artistic endeavor, but it is not art for me. Now for Alexander McQueen, it was art. He had to express himself, and that was his art.”12. But he will not be doing a diffusion collection with H&M (or anyone else).“I keep reading that, and I find that amusing. I’ve never had a conversation with H&M. I’m really happy doing what I do. What excites me now is the very best: the best stitching, the best fabric, the best quality. And that’s what excites me. Unfortunately, or fortunately, that does tend to cost money. I want to design for people who get excited about the same things that I do.”13. He kept his first womenswear show under wraps just in case things fell through.“I honestly was not sure we could pull this off. So I wanted to keep it secret in case, at the last minute, it didn’t work. It wasn’t just clothes. It was shoes, it was bags, it was everything, it was jewelry. It was everything. I thought if I’m going back in fashion, I have to have something new to say. Otherwise, why go back?”14. Ford embargoes images of his collections so people don’t get sick of his clothes.“I think sometimes when I look at fashion six or seven months before you can buy it, I’m a little bored with it by the time I see it. Our customer doesn’t necessarily want to wear the same jacket that she’s seen in all the magazines and, ‘Who rocked it best?’, 49 percent vote this. She’s getting dressed and she’s thinking, ‘Am I going to rock this as great as Jessica Biel did? I don’t know. Everyone’s seen it, they didn’t like it on Fashion Police, I shouldn’t buy it.’ I have to say I’m not sure this will work ultimately.15. He takes four to five baths a day, but only uses soap during his first one in the morning.“People seem to tease me about my baths. If I’m sending emails, and I’m getting all wound up and stressed and I don’t know what to do with myself for 20 minutes, I fill up the tab with hot water and I lie there and think. I get out, I dry myself off. It’s meditative for me, it’s relaxing.”16. Ford hates cell phones. A lot.“I live on the internet, yes absolutely. I do not carry a cell phone, but I’m on my computer 8 hours a day. I feel like if something really happens, somebody’s going to get to me. And I can’t stand talking to people on cell phones. I say, ‘Are you on a cell phone? Let’s talk later when you’re on a hard line.’ I can’t do it.”17. He thinks fashion is hard.“If there’s anything else in the world you could be happy doing, do that. This is the hardest industry. Creating and creating on command and on a schedule and on a calendar, a store needs new merchandise every six weeks so that people can shop, so that people can buy. To be creative like that on a calendar is ? if you love it ? great, you will have a wonderful life. It you doubt it, it is a tough, tough industry, but it can be a wonderful, wonderful industry.”RELATED: Photo courtesy of Joyce Culver/92Y ?PHOTOS: Who Made Vanity Fair’s Best Dressed List? by 4:44 pm, August 3rd, 2010 Vanity Fair‘s anxiously awaited list has finally been released. And while there was no shortage of the obscure European royals — whose outfits, to be honest, we don’t quite understand) we were glad to see some of our favorite, more familiar fashion faces.Diane Kruger‘s undying love for Chanel snagged her a place while VF clearly loves Carey Mulligan‘s iconic pixie hair cut as much as we do. Michelle Obama — who, with the help of Jenna Lyons made J. Crew cool again in only the matter of a year — made the list, as did another First Lady across the pond, former model and fashionista . Designer ‘s famously oversized bowties earned him a spot on the list, and Glamour’s editor in chief, ‘s love for classic elegance — most notably her Chloe black shift dress, which she calls her “uniform” — made her the only magazine editor to make the cut. Finally — someone other than Anna!Other recognizable names — some of whom we’ve seen before — included Julia Roitfeld, Lady Gaga, , and . Enable JavaScript to check out our fancy slideshow. To see the full list and more photos, click . ?PHOTOS: Who Looked Best At The Versace For H&M Fashion Show? by 12:32 pm, November 9th, 2011 What would a Versace for H&M be without tons and tons of celebrities?In the most Versace of fashions, the red carpet was equal parts super bright and super black. We love the bold ensembles of Emma Roberts (rocking one of the collection’s printed legging/bustier combos) and Mark Ronson (all pink everything), as well as the simpler looks of Jessica Alba and Sofia Coppola. Coco Rocha seemed out of place in a rather formal floor-length gown, while Chloe Moretz was sweet in pastel yellow and Alan Cumming rocked a wild black and white print.That is all to say, we were pretty pleased with the whole thing!?We do have a rather large complaint though: the step-and-repeat was less than photo friendly! So much crazy flash reflection! Also, a black carpet is never the right choice, especially when many of your guests are in black shoes.So, who looked best? Check out the photos below, and tell us in the comments! Enable JavaScript to check out our fancy slideshow. ?PHOTOS: Who Was Best Dressed At VH1′s Do Something Awards? by 11:39 am, August 15th, 2011 August red carpet events are always kind of strange. It’s a bit of a dead month, which means the guest list averages around a B and the fashions run the gamut from red carpet to bottle service — and last night’s turn out for VH1′s Do Something Awards was no exception.Justin Bieber wore sparkles (as he is ), color-blocked, Kim Kardashian went all white and all tight, Rose McGowan made Dolce & Gabbana look cheap, Olivia Wilde looked confusing in Chloe, and our personal fave Jane Lynch wore . Enable JavaScript to check out our fancy slideshow. ?Vs. Delivers 4 Big Time Covers, One Unexpected Photographer by 5:52 pm, August 15th, 2012 , Guy Aroch, and are three people we’re accustomed to seeing behind the lens for fashion magazines photographing pretty young things. Drew Barrymore, on the other hand, is usually the one mugging for the camera. Not this time, though! The pregnant, Barrymore shot fellow actress Rachel McAdams for one of the four covers of Vs. magazine’s September issue (a magazine she herself covered back in 2009). We knew she was a multitalented kinda gal ? let us not forget that Best Coast video she starring Chloe Moretz or her Shailene Woodley earlier this year ? but, being a September cover, this is probably her most high-profile lensing gig to date. While we’re not blown away by the image, it’s a solid effort, and it’s not as if she was short on competitition from the high-impact pairing of von Unwerth and or the haunting gaze of a Wild Things-style Liv Tyler.What do you think? Do Barrymore’s shutter skills measure up? Or should the actress consider sticking to her day job? Enable JavaScript to check out our fancy slideshow. ?10 Important Things We Learned Last Week: Dec. 26-Jan. 1 by 12:02 pm, January 2nd, 2011 1. Willow might be , but little girls still like to to “Whip My Hair”.2. Terry Richardson shot a porny ad campaign for . Surprisingly, his campaign for was pretty tasteful.3. Kanye has a new?! He is also responsible for?Nicki Minaj‘s?.4. Skinny Karl Lagerfeld is in a . Fat Karl has a thing for .5. Real Chloe Sevigny is on the of Elle Korea. Fake Chloe has some .6. The Kardashians can definitely sell .?We just don’t think Kim will be rocking in Vogue.7. Hugh Hefner is , but Natalie Portman is . So many ? cue the wedding dress speculation!8. PETA wants Nate Robinson to?, which would put him right at home in .9. Lady Gaga could have a cameo in the , and Michael Musto may have one-upped her .10. It really is the New Year: lots of , and ! ?10 Important Things We Learned Last Week: December 4-10 by 12:26 pm, December 11th, 2011 1. Lindsay Lohan‘s Playboy leaked! And so did the?! As such, the issue will?.2. A proved Karlie Kloss‘s Vogue Italia spread was definitely not Photoshopped. The model thinks the photo the magazine took down was .3. Chloe Sevigny‘s is awesome. Also awesome? Her with Tavi.4. H&M‘s e-commerce models are , a was banned for being harmful to children, and a mom called her daughter’s “comical”.5. Former?ANTM winner Whitney Thompson is launching a , and upcoming?ANTM winner Angelea Preston was for using Facebook.6. Florence Welch is covering , Kristen Wiig snagged , Meryl Streep got , and Carey Mulligan got . And confusingly, Mulligan’s Elle France cover was from her Vogue one.7. The Valentino Garavani Virtual Museum is? ??he really? its debut in style.8. Mario Sorrenti his Pirelli calendar to be sexy, though the pictures sure are . Milla Jovovich has some on the matter.9. A BYU-Idaho testing center turned away a “curvy” girl in .10. Oscar de la Renta is starting a . Also, his was really lovely. ?10 Important Things We Learned Last Week: July 24-30 by 12:22 pm, July 31st, 2011 1. Kate Moss was photographed? by Terry Richardson, might be writing a , and has an upcoming?Sex and the City-inspired? in?Vogue. Relatedly, SATC rumors are swirling!2. Daphne Guinness is the star of an about Jean Seberg.?She also? with Amanda Harlech for V.3. Mariah Carey. 4. Stephen Colbert‘s on those offensive Summer’s Eve ads is hysterical. And luckily, the ads were .5. Prince William gave Kate Princess Diana‘s . The happy pair attended another this weekend, though Kate was not a .6. LOVE Magazine‘s latest issue rules. Cover stars include , , , and . Oh, and they’re all crying.7. Marquita Pring taught us all about plus-size model , just in time for Vogue Australia‘s .8. Louis Vuitton gave Rachel Zoe‘s son Skyler an $1,100 . And if you’re not jealous of that, you should be jealous of the infant’s . RZ might actually be designing a , and she’s now a .9. The fate of Amy Winehouse‘s is unknown, but her dad did her clothes to mourning fans.10. Isaiah Mustafa came back to his Old Spice throne, and Fabio became a in Portland. ?10 Important Things That Happened Last Week: November 6-12 by 12:46 pm, November 13th, 2011 1. The Victoria’s Secret was quite the spectacle!?Adriana Lima‘s? was insane, while Chanel Iman‘s was much more?. Anderson Cooper totally?.2. Kate Middleton might be , but we’re just going to focus on her for now.3. Drug smugglers were busted for trafficking Manolo Blahniks made out of , and the government is the designer duds one woman bought with the $34 million she embezzled from her employer.4. The? for Duran Duran‘s “Girl Panic” is filled with supermodels. Perhaps Kate Moss‘s sister Lottie will? one day.5. A $4,000? from The Row is almost as unnecessary as an $8,450?.6. The Versace for H&M went off without a hitch, though the collaboration?. We’re just jealous of the? who wore pieces from the collection to the show ? and the? is nuts!7. Chloe Sevigny would be cool with Snooki . She also? Terry Richardson while dressed as Terry Richardson.8. There was tons of red carpet action this week. Celebs turned it out for the , the?, the , and the .9. Marc Jacobs at Dior. However, he’ll flex his acting muscle as a in , and he plans to get a tattoo of his .10. The Olsens are Vogue‘s ,?while W for the Fannings. In related news,?Dakota‘s fragrance ad got . ?10 Important Things We Learned Last Week: October 2-8 by 12:33 pm, October 9th, 2011 ?1. We were : Jason Wu is with Target.2. Paris Fashion Week wrapped up! Chloe Sevigny closed the , and Kate Moss did the same at . Sarah Burton at Alexander McQueen, Carine Roitfeld threw a , and there was an epic .3. Willow Smith is . And Beyonce has a !4. The Olsens‘ $34,000 alligator backpack for The Row is . Anderson Cooper is about this.5. Some people think the Michelle Obama Target photo was , Woody Allen says she’s his , and the First Lady . In related news, Barack is Lady Gaga.6. Pippa Middleton wore a tacky , Kate‘s made a whole lot of money, and Princes William and Harry when they were tots. Alas, Queen Elizabeth is with Duchess Catherine covering Vogue.7. The world Steve Jobs by buying his signature .8. Kanye who trashed his first collection, but that didn’t stop from hating on it. Of course, Anna Dello Russo wore to McQueen.9. Gasp ? the store with the worst customer service of all time ? is .10. Karl Lagerfeld took us with Chanel and made us remember . He also thinks he and that .P.S. Do you ? ?10 Important Things We Learned Last Week: October 23-30 by 12:19 pm, October 30th, 2011 What did you dress up as for Halloween? Check out our favorite?, plus one very royal costume?.While everyone was dressing up for Halloween,?Courtney Stodden was showing us the wrong way to dress for a trip to the pumpkin patch. She later felt the need to?. On national television.Someone tried to get us to believe that Ryan Gosling . And it turns out he does! Well. , anyway.All the magazine covers in the world came out this week! We saw on Glamour, on Style.com‘s print issue, on the cover of V, and landed the cover of Flaunt.Relatedly, Lindsay Lohan . La Lohan also apparently to be her style consultant. Guess what Apfel said?J.Crew president and creative director? got attention for? and her possible new?.?Fox Newstried to use this story to prove that J.Crew has an?.We really appreciated one college’s? against racist Halloween costumes. Almost as much as we appreciated this video all of?Urban Outfitters’ “Navajo” products.Kate Middleton exercised her at her first solo charity event. Meanwhile, Queen Elizabeth looked really steezy on her , but Prince Charles has never actually .Secy. of State Hillary Clinton made the mistake of . But don’t worry — Bill made some pretty back in the day.The red carpet got red hot this week! Check out in Giambattista Valli, in Chanel and in Kenzo. ?10 Important Things We Learned Last Week: October 30-November 5 by 12:47 pm, November 6th, 2011 1. Celebrities of their Halloween costumes and then to . Some people think Amanda Knox‘s was insensitive, and?Michelle Obama wore .2. Blake Lively loves , Alexa Chung thinks , and Mindy Kaling digs the .3. Courtney Stodden looks almost normalish .4. Kim Kardashian from Kris Humphries. Kris Jenner her daughter’s marriage, and Kim about the whole thing and then . Unfortunately for Vera Wang, herdoesn’t hit stores until next year.?Also, Kim’s purses are .5. The Chloe Moretz is almost as great as the Harper’s Bazaar . 6. Cafe Press got rid of its offensive , Forever 21 sells , and Anthropologie has a .7. Justin Bieber thinks , while?Lady Gaga covered the? and Madonna launched a for grownups.8. Model Carre Otis named the man who when she was 17.9. Justin Timberlake ! Pippa got a , and?Sarah Burton revealed how she kept Kate‘s dress a .10. Joe Zee Joe Fresh to New York, and the CFDA brought New York Times to the masses. ?10 Important Things We Learned Last Week: October 2-8 by 11:55 am, October 9th, 2010 1. Gap got a? that everyone hates. They’re trying to?, but CEO Marka Hensen‘s? totally sucked.2. Lady Gaga might this year. She also , went ,? and is . Our favorite bit? She with Katy Perry and Rihanna.3. There was lots of debt talk:?,?,?and .4. Kanye and wore the most ridiculous? on SNL. Additionally, he thinks Lindsay Lohan created a “.”5. There were some awesome guest models in Paris. Beth Ditto and?Anna Dello Russo (with a stuffed lamb).6. Marc Jacobs let us see his Louis Vuitton show from all?, which was perfect for viewing his?.7. Kate Moss at Dior. She is planning to team up with the? to create another line for the brand, and tried? on for size.8. Abercrombie & Fitch for eating a croissant. More upsettingly, their fragrance?!9. Alexa Chung wears . We . Also, she wore the as Blake Lively and doesn’t have an .10. Sarah Burton did an? at McQueen. We really of her beautiful show. ?10 Important Things We Learned Last Week: October 9-16 by 12:08 pm, October 17th, 2010 1. Gap returned to their?! Woo!2.?Justin Bieber designed a for Nicole. Not to be outdone, Katy Perry designed a for OPI. She also came out with for her new fragrance and is?headlining the with Akon.3.?Kim Kardashian is? on the cover of W, while Taylor Momsen‘s Revolver cover has her holding a…?. But it’s cool, because Blake Lively totally? in a really awkward interview.4. Drug problems helped Kate Moss . She also may have?.5. On the sports beat, soccer star Lionel Messi signed a?, while Brett Favre could lose his?.6. Sesame Street killed it this week. Not only did they?, they also told black girls to?.7. A Project Runway contestant might have , but our fave PR item of the week was? of cute kids reenacting the show.8. Footage of?Gaga‘s? surfaced, and we found out that?Tim Gunn .9. Models, models, models: Coca Rocha has a?, Lara Stone digs?, Heidi Klum is shilling for?, Dior totally messed up Karlie Kloss‘s? and Raquel Zimmermann was styled in YSL for a?.10. Karl Lagerfeld is? off the coast of Dubai ? just one of his many?. ?PHOTOS: Who Was Best Dressed On Last Night’s Red Carpets? by 3:10 pm, June 13th, 2012 California had two star-studded events last night, but one was obviously better since more people showed up on the red carpet! Leading ladies like Meryl Streep, Chloe Moretz, and Viola Davis attended the?Women in Film Crystal + Lucy Awards, while Katy Perry and Chelsea Handler honored Bob Pittman at a City of Hope event.Max Mara its hosting-and-dressing gig, and outfitted attendees at the Crystal + Lucy Awards.?Streep chose a gray draped number, and Christina Applegate looked red-hot in a peplum top and skirt combo.?Chloe?Moretz‘s LBD was yawn-worthy, but the neckline was an unexpectedly cool touch. Lauren Remington-Platt‘s motorcycle was nice, but Holly Robinson Peete‘s sparkly tee felt too causal for the event. We’d also like to point out Grace Valerie‘s lace dress. Thumbs up for Kate Middleton, but thumbs down for the fit (too tight) and length (too short).Over at the City of Hope event, Perry showed off her inner flapper in a ’20s-inspired ensemble. She paired a coral slip dress with a long strand of pearls and a beaded headband, while Handler went for the total opposite look in a black maxidress and boots.Check out the gallery, giggle at some photos, and tell us who you think is best dressed: Enable JavaScript to check out our fancy slideshow. ?PHOTOS: Who Wore Calvin Klein Best At ELLE’s Women In Hollywood Tribute? by 10:50 am, October 18th, 2011 Last night, ELLE magazine held their 18th annual Women in Hollywood tribute. And as we began collecting our favorite looks from the evening, we couldn’t help but notice that everyone and their mother was wearing Calvin Klein. What happened?, we wondered. How did Calvin pull off such a complete and utter red carpet takeover? And then we saw the giant CALVIN KLEIN logo emblazoned across the step and repeat and realized they were a sponsor. Oh, the business of fashion. Anyway, it makes for a perfect slideshow competition, does it not? Freida, Chloe, Abigail, Amber, and Elizabeth are all below, in their minimalist best. Enable JavaScript to check out our fancy slideshow. ?CATWALK JUSTICE: WTForever21 Is Back Online by Charles Colman 5:01 pm, July 1st, 2011 After doing , I decided I kind of like the format. Styleite decided it kind of liked the format, too. So this week, we’re trying an experiment: this writer, one Charles Colman of , will brief Styleite readers on the more colorful happenings in fashion law over the past week. Let us know what you think (unless you don’t like it, in which case, you can just go ahead and leave for vacation.)? In , well, ever, Rachel Kane of WTForever21 that she would resume blogging about Forever 21′s “design disasters” despite the retailer’s legally baseless threats about the blog’s supposed trademark and copyright transgressions. Admittedly, I may not be completely objective here, as is representing Kane in this dispute; fortunately, the appears to agree that Forever 21 has no ground to stand on here. As far as what we lawyers call “,” Rachel’s use of Forever 21′s website images to critique the company’s fashion missteps is clearly ; Forever 21′s trademark claims are frivolous for reasons too numerous to mention. Plus, just as a matter of common sense, if consumers can’t use company trademarks in their commentary, or borrow images of a company’s products in order to criticize them, it would be to express one’s opinion on the activities of any corporation. On a side note, as more than one media outlet has observed, there is unmistakable irony in the attempted vindication of (bogus) intellectual property rights by a company that had been called “notorious for ripping off designs.” By the way, if you get a threat from a big, scary corporation for your “gripe site,” head ; unfortunately, this situation is more common than one would hope.? Despite with in April, I’m starting to feel a bit sorry for the who has now been besieged by no fewer than of both tangible and intangible theft. At the risk of pissing off my gracious host, I must take issue with Styleite writer ‘s assertion that Gaga “almost had a right to” the Tumblr account “Amen Fashion” because “it was her song title, after all.” As I explained in my of the already barely-dressed Ke$ha last month for her ridiculous legal threats against the manufacturer of the iPod Nano accessory marketed as “Tik Tok,” trademark claims based on song titles can be a very tough sell.? Louis Vuitton and Burberry scored a in a Canadian court this week against Vancouver- and Toronto-based fakeries (like bakeries, but cooking up counterfeit goods instead of snickerdoodles.) The judgment of $2.5 million (Canadian) in damages may be the largest such award of its kind in Canadian legal history, according to Ashlee Froese, an Ontario-based fashion lawyer whom I on my blog earlier this week.? Finally, at opposite ends of the piety spectrum, Rihanna has been () for allegedly lifting copyrighted imagery to use in her music video for S&M, while The General Council of the Assemblies of God was awarded over $6 million in its suit against a website selling knockoff religious garb that infringed the trademark rights of the Pentecostal Christian ministry. For those still tethered to their desks so painfullly close to the now-imminent long weekend, you can read up on the legal issues in the Rihanna music video dispute (from the first time around); as for the church lawsuit, I’m just going to say — “the thing speaks for itself.” At least, that’s my final word on the subject for now, since my zipcar isn’t going to drive itself out of the city. Happy holiday weekend![This post is for entertainment and informational purposes only, and does not constitute legal advice or create an attorney-client relationship among any individuals or entities. Any views expressed herein are those of the writer on the particular date of this post, and should not necessarily be attributed to his law firm or its clients.] ?Oops! Raquel Zimmermann Wears YSL Belt In Chloe Ad by 4:06 pm, October 14th, 2010 What’s the most embarrassing thing that can happen to someone who styles an ad for a fashion company? Probably styling your models in clothes that another brand made.In the ad for Chloe‘s newest fragrance Love, someone decided it would be a good idea to style model in head-to-toe Chloe with an Yves Saint Laurent belt. Because the belt looks so much like other Chloe belts, no one noticed until the ad was blown up a few hundred magnitudes to be put on a billboard. And when a belt is enlarged to the point that it’s wider than your car is tall, it’s hard not to notice what brand it is.Or at least it’s not hard for the eagle-eyed reporters at WWD, who rightly aim the blame not at Chloe, but instead at Coty, the licensing company that produces fragrances for everyone from Marc Jacobs to Sarah Jessica Parker. It was Coty that hired photographers Inez Van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin. But the buck probably stops with Ezra Petronio, the scent’s creative director. We don’t know if heads will roll for this or not, but it’s a pretty foolish mistake. Perhaps the worst part is that the ad has been floating around since August, when the fragrance was launched, so this flub has been waving in people’s faces for over a month. The (fantastic-looking) flub, below:[Via ] ?Jessica Chastain Fulfilled Her Role As A YSL Spokesperson Last Night by 11:41 am, August 14th, 2012 Jessica Chastain, Chloe Sevigny, and more flocked to YSL‘s screening of Lawless in New York last night. The flick stars Tom Hardy, Shia LaBeouf, and Chastain, who is also YSL’s new scent Manifesto. As such, the 35-year-old actress wore a?vintage black YSL number and accessorized with an arm full of colorful bracelets. And what about everyone else?Perennial It-girl Sevigny toughened up her pastel floral frock with black boots and a black bag. We also totally love Japanese actress Rinko Kikuchi‘s quirky ensemble ? a “Pet” tee, suspenders, black and white pencil skirt, and a yellow polka dotted . Alas, Fern Mallis‘s caftan outfit gets a thumbs down???girl looks like she got lost somewhere between a safari and a red carpet — but we’re seriously digging her jewels.See those looks and more in the gallery below: Enable JavaScript to check out our fancy slideshow. ?Yvan Mispelaere Steps Down From Creative Director Position At DVF by 1:28 pm, September 12th, 2012 Yvan Mispelaere has left after spending just two-and-a-half years as the company’s creative director.Mispelaere, whose resume includes time spent at Gucci, Chloe, and Valentino, stepped down just two days after (which, for what it’s worth, we loved), and only three weeks after?Joel Horowitz was named cochairman,? says.?In a company press release, Mispelaere said the following:“I came to DVF to help further the brand’s mission and create a world-class design team. I am confident we have been able to achieve that during my time with the company. I can’t thank Diane enough for the opportunity to work with her and such talented people. The group is now well-positioned for even greater success, and I am eager to take on my next challenge.”He could not be reached for further comment, but von Furstenberg made the following statement:“I am so grateful for the contributions Yvan brought to DVF and fully support him as he takes the next step in his career. Yvan joined us almost three years ago and has added enormous value. He also put together a highly skilled design team to support our growth both in fashion and accessories,” von Furstenberg said. “I am very thankful and proud of his accomplishments here and I look forward to our strong team continuing to create the signature DVF look for women everywhere.”DVF will not seek a replacement for Mispelaere, but instead von Furstenberg will continue to direct the design team herself. We’re interested to see what directions both Mispelaere and DVF take going forward![] ?Mr McLoughlin, MP for Derbyshire Dales since 1986 and a former member of the National Union of Mineworkers, faces tough decisions in rail, too. Sir Richard Branson has launched a legal challenge against Ms Greening’s decision to strip Virgin Rail of its role running the West Coast Mainline and award the franchise to FirstGroup. In the next few months he will also have to decide the route of the £33bn high-speed rail network to Birmingham. Tory big-hitter Michael Fallon has replaced Mark Prisk as Small Business Minister at Vince Cable’s Department of Business, where he will be joined by Matt Hancock, a former advisor to the Chancellor. Phil McCabe, of the Forum of Private Business, said Mr Fallon “has to come out of the traps quickly with fresh eyes, fresh thinking, and be prepared to consider the unconventional.”Mr Prisk has switched to housing minister. Stewart Baseley, chairman of the Home Builders Federation, welcomed his “background in the sector”. Mark Hoban, the minister handling the Bank of England reforms, has been moved to Minister for Work and Pensions. Paul Deighton, the multi-millionaire ex-Goldman Sachs banker and chairman of Locog, will replace Lord Sassoon, the former UBS banker, as Commercial Secretary to the Treasury at the end of the year with a brief for economic delivery. Sajid Javid, a former investment banker and aide to George Osborne, has taken over from Chloe Smith as Economic secretary to the Treasury. ?Perched on a cliff edge on an island that is visited almost exclusively by native weekenders (because of its easy access from Athens), the house was built on a piece of land formerly belonging to family friends. ‘It is almost impossible to buy land next to the sea in Greece, so when my friends suggested that we look at their plot I jumped at it, and bought it on the spot,’ Karayiannis says. As part of a development of houses, architect plans had already been drawn up for the house, but, she continues, ‘my biggest task initially was to shake off the architect. I knew exactly how I wanted the house, and while I kept to his basic skeleton for the house, the layout was custom made to suit my family.’?Peter, Chloe and Kim Rice hold their pet python Lily at home in Guyhirn, Cambridgeshire, England. The 17-foot-long albino python is probably Britain's longest pet.Picture: John Robertson / Barcroft Media?When we get to the reception, I do what I always do as soon as I arrive at a wedding reception: I check out the seating plan. And, for the first time ever, I am not on the naughty table! I am not seated next to waifs and strays. I am sitting next to other couples. My smug levels are practically through the roof. If I were me a year ago, I would smack me in the face. In fact, I think Chloe would like to do just that. 'Thank goodness I am on the naughty table,’ she says, downing a flute of champagne before heading off to get another. 'It means I’ll be nowhere near you.’ At dinner I drink a lot of white wine and listen patiently as the man next to me drones on about his job in the City. I try to talk to my boyfriend, but he is engrossed in conversation with a leggy brunette who can speak five languages, has three degrees, and wears a sparkling diamond on her wedding finger. I hate her. I am grateful for the speeches because it means I no longer have to hear about how convenient Berkshire is for commuting into London, not to mention how good the schools are. I look over at Chloe, shrieking with laughter at the naughty table, and wonder for a moment if life isn’t more fun there. ?Celebrity News in Pictures David Tennant, Britney Spears, Ekaterina Ivanova, Rosario Dawson, Hayden Panettiere, and Alexa Chung are all featured in our reguarly updated review of pap-snaps.?Whitaker’s fellow Yorkshireman Joe Clayton was second with Antello Z and Stockdale (Fresh Direct Kalico Bay) third, just in front of Robert Whitaker (Catwalk IV). “He is a super-careful horse,” said Whitaker, whose time of 22.31 sec was three-tenths better than Clayton. “It was first class tonight.”Meanwhile, seven Olympic champions, including Britain’s Nick Skelton, and nine of the world’s 10 top-ranked riders are in Rio de Janeiro for Latin America’s most important equestrian event. The Oi Grand Prix, in which riders take on 4ft-high jumps, carries an £800,000 prize, making it the best-remunerated equestrian event worldwide, according to the organisers. ?How did you manage to get the right atmosphere for the really dark moments in Let Me In?It’s acting you know? You make it up. You may not be a vampire but you act like you are one. You imagine what you might remember from your life if you were 300 years old. My character Abby deals with the burden of killing people when she doesn’t want to kill them but she just has to, to eat – I had to really imagine that. She’s dealing with stuff that would make anyone sad just thinking about it. There were a lot of different ways I got into character. In the gruesome moments I had make-up on – that always helps me get into character. When you put in the teeth and you put on the blood, when you’re in that costume you become a different person you become the animal as soon as they say ‘Action’. I also wrote a journal in the mindset of Abby. That definitely helped me get into role. There’s very little talking in the film. Did you find it harder to act without much dialogue?It’s definitely a lot different. A good actor can really talk with their eyes. Eyes in real life are the window to your soul. You can look in someone’s eyes and know what kind of person they are. With real actors you can see it in their face, you see it in their smile and in the way they look at you. Everything they do is the character, nothing can take you out of the film. That’s kind of the way I try and act – you have to be in the moment and if you’re not in the moment it’s completely obvious. Did you watch the original movie Let the Right One In?I didn’t to begin with but I have seen it now and I really like it. Ours is a little different and there’s a little bit more talking in it – there’s still not much though – ours is a bit more mainstream. I think people who haven’t seen Let Me In but have seen Let The Right One In can still appreciate our movie. They are both phenomenal in their own ways. When you first started out doing Kick Ass and Let Me In did you realise how dark they might get?They are both pretty dark movies but they both have that twinge of something else to them that breaks you away and stops you from feeling depressed. With Kick Ass there was the comedy and with Let Me In there is a bit of comedy and there is the love story which brings a different side to the film. Hit Girl and Abby were lots of fun to do. They are real character pieces, which is more interesting. But at the same time I do love doing comedies. Has fame changed the way that you live?I’m still normal – I have to do chores and make my bed – everything’s still pretty much the same as before I got ‘famous’. My whole family help me choose the movies I do too – It’s me, my mum and my brother. If they like it they pass it on to me and if I like it then I go for it and we all do it. I’ve met a bunch of really cool, different people though, who I never would have imagined I’d meet. Meeting Brad Pitt was just amazing. I get some people recognising me in the street – I do get some teenagers and a lot of guys that have seen Kick Ass – they recognise me a lot. How was it working on Martin Scorsese’s new film Hugo Cabret?I’ve just finished shooting it. It was so fun – it’s Martin Scorsese what can you say? It is in 3D and it stars Sacha Baron Cohen, Jude Law, Emily Mortimer, Sir Ben Kingsley, Sir Christopher Lee, Frances de la Tour – all these people who make you think – ‘woah I can’t believe I’m working with you’. I’m the female lead in the movie – it’s a movie based in the 1930s in a Parisian train station. I play this young schoolgirl – it’s a comedy drama, a coming of age story, it’s a kids film. I’d like to stay in acting for a while – I’d like to make it my career – but you never know. I hope I can. 'Let Me In' is released on DVD and Blu-ray now?Career highlights:She has racked up 155cm / 5ft 0in international caps in two Commonwealth Games, three European Nations Cups, two World Cups, four Champions Trophies and one Olympic Games at Beijing, where she was part of the British team that finished sixth.?Rivals:Holland, Hungary and America are likely to battle amongst themselves for podium positions. This will be the first ever appearance by a Great Britain women's team in this sport at the Olympics, so they will be looking to raise the profile of the sport for future generations.?Chris Harvey Chris Harvey writes about TV for the Telegraph and lives in hope of seeing a better drama than The Wire. He has also written for the Saturday magazine on subjects as diverse as gadgets, boxing and polar bears. ?She had gone to the cinema with two friends to see Batman film "The Dark Knight Rises" and was among the victims when a gunman dressed in body armour began spraying the audience with bullets.Twelve people were killed and 58 injured. Suspect James Holmes, 24, who later identified himself to police as "The Joker," made his first appearance in court on Monday.Miss Anderson's mother Kim Anderson, who has terminal cancer, said her daughter was expected to make a full recovery."I believe that she was not only protected by God, but that she was actually prepared for it," she said. "God won't let the suffering or the setbacks have the last word."Brad Strait, the family's Presbyterian pastor who was at the hospital with them, said: "Kim and I know a miracle when we see it. The doctor explained that Petra's brain has had from birth a small 'defect' in it."It is a tiny channel of fluid running through her skull like a tiny vein through marble. A millimetre in any direction and the channel is missed, the brain is destroyed, evil wins a round."Another woman who survived the mass shooting on Friday went into labour in the same hospital where her critically injured husband is being treated.Katie Medley, 21, gave birth to a boy she named Hugo, while her husband Caleb Medley, 23, a stand up comedian, was one floor away in a medically induced coma.He has lost his right eye and suffered some brain damage, according to his family. He was one of 16 victims still in hospital.Mrs Medley said of the shooting: "I thought it was a prank at first, or someone playing along with the movie because it happened during a fight scene."Then he opened fire and Caleb was shot in the right eye as they all tried to duck and cover."A friend of Caleb and Katie Medley said their first baby was “doing great.” Michael West added: “He is loud and full of life just like his daddy.”Family members said Mr Medley was showing some improvement and “can tell who we are.”It was unclear if the baby would be brought to see him because of the risk of infections.Bomb disposal experts revealed more details about the booby traps Holmes placed in his apartment before the attack.There were 30 homemade grenades and 10 gallons of gasoline in glass containers. Had they gone off they would have engulfed the entire apartment block.A control box had been positioned in the kitchen with wires leading to it like "spaghetti." A law enforcement officials said the set up was similar to improvised explosive devices in Iraq and Afghanistan. A man who was in the audience when the gunman opened fire is suing the cinema, movie producers, and doctors.Torrence Brown, Jr, whose friend AJ Boik was killed, is suing the Warner Bros studio, claiming Holmes copied violence in the film.He said: “Somebody has to be responsible for the rampant violence that is shown today.”He is also suing Holmes’ doctors who he argues should have monitored him.?Jamie Oliver, TV chef, is a good role model, says David Cameron10.23 While there have been a few cheeky tweets using the hashtag to ask some questions of Mr Cameron's political make-up, the PM holds the public in high esteem. "They are the boss," he says. "They will pass judgement."10.18 Our online political editor Rosa Prince says:Fair to say the rather soft grilling Glamour readers are giving the PM isn't going down too well on Twitter.James Burke has compared it to The Thick Of It, while Dan Howells says: "Hardly Frost v Nixon ... or Chloe Smith v Paxman!"10.11 Mr Cameron is discussing the Olympics now, after it was announced that former PM Tony Blair would be Labour's adviser on Olympic legacy. Of the Games, the PM said: "A great festival of sport. There's a saying in Britain – we do best at the sports we sit down for… "Hopefully a great success. Hope the legacy is the inspiration. Get children into sport and volunteering."10.06 It's safe to say Mr Cameron has found his audience when it comes to high street shopping. He tells the panel parking charges need to be cut for the regeneration of towns and tells readers that the high street can be saved by shopping there. Twitter: Glamour Magazine UK - PM on regeneration: Need to save high st by shopping there! Mary Portas trying to help but town council needs to be involved 10.01 It appears Florence has reached the terrible twos. Mr Cameron tells the all-female Glamour readers' panel that his toddler reads over his shoulder. He also touches on paternity leave and says: "It's important men are there in early days but it's often a month or so in you need them around."09.58 The PM has moved on to tackle childcare: Recognise an issue for mums and dads. I want women to have the choice to go back to work. Help IS expensive. Some countries deliver lower cost childcare. Aim of commission to ask searching questions. We don’t want low quality childcare, but we’ve taken regulation too far. Is tax credit the right answer? Work is satisfying and keeps people out of poverty. It sets a good example to our children.09.51 The Prime Minister is defending . Twitter: Glamour Magazine UK - PM on the Arts cuts: We're having to make cuts in gov spending. Cuts aren't as much as what some businesses are having to do 09.48 Mr Cameron touches on personal issues such as the stress of everyday life at Number 10. Amazing satisfying job. However tough things are you meet people who inspire you. I have three children who distract you, but you do need a decent nights sleep. I wake up everyday thinking what an extraordinary opportunity I have to work with such talented people.09.42 So far, Mr Cameron has touched on older people, school leavers, pupils at school and mental health. On older people: • "Need to give them dignity but challenge is pensions for the future. Introduce a single tier pension"On school leavers: • "Clear path to university, increase apprenticeships. Go back to primary school, teaching basics."On children struggling at school: • "We have a good special needs system but need to identify who is struggling at an early age."On mental health: • "Very moved by the MPs who stood up and talked about their own mental health challeneges." • "Stigma attached to mental health. Need to get rid of this."09.40 We are but 10 minutes into Glamour's Q&A with the Prime Minister and he's already being overshadowed by his Coalition partner. Twitter: Sarah Belsom - When will you be doing your interview with Glamour magazine? I'd be far more interested in what you have to say 09.35 To set the scene, the PM is meeting the ladies from Glamour and 30 readers in the Number 10 room where "Hugh Grant danced across the floor in Love Actually."09.32 Glamour editor Jo Elvin will be meeting the Prime Minister in neon red Joseph trousers. Mr Cameron is understood to have gone for a more conservative look. Twitter: Glamour Magazine UK - The Prime Minster is wearing a blue tie…09.23 If, perchance, the Prime Minister is asked about his favourite biscuit, he should take a look at this list of what your selection from the biscuit tin says about you. Shortbread, anyone?: Choco Leibniz: Europhile Jaffa Cake: Extrovert Chocolate Millionaires: Lovelorn Digestive: Frugal Malted Milk Cow Biscuits: Toddler Jammie Dodgers: Hyperactive Dark Chocolate Gingers: Posh Shortbread: Really Posh HobNobs: Grounded Bourbon Creams: Traditionalist 09.15 Welcome to our rolling coverage of David Cameron's question and answer session with 30 readers of Glamour magazine at Downing Street. As we learned from Mumsnet, public Q&A sessions can make or break a politician's reputation. Who could forget the disaster for Gordon Brown that was ? One member of the Glamour crew has already tweeted she has a "verrrry" important question for Mr Cameron. We wait the 09.30 start with bated breath. Twitter: Jennifer Lynn - So tomorrow morning I shall be heading to Downing Street to ask Mr Cameron a verrrry important question... ?Tall and broad-shouldered with beetling eyebrows which give him an air of authority, Mr Gauke was born 40 years ago and comprehensively educated in Ipswich, Suffolk. From there, he studied law at Oxford, and went on to qualify as a lawyer in 1995. While still studying, he began working as a researcher for Barry Legg, the Conservative MP for South West Milton Keynes. A legal high flyer, he worked for top City law firm Macfarlanes, which boasts of helping its clients create "tax efficient" systems. But Parliament called, and in 2001 Mr Gauke unsuccessfully fought in a safe Labour seat, before being rewarded with selection for Hertfordshire South West. He was elected to the Commons at the 2005 general election. It was a busy time for Conservative MPs, with a new leader and general election to win, but Mr Gauke soon caught the eye, serving on the Treasury Select Committee in 2006 and 2007 before being invited to join Mr Osborne's shadow Treasury, a role he kept when the party moved into government in 2010. Like many MPs, Mr Gauke did not emerge unscathed from the Daily Telegraph's 2009 investigation into parliamentary expenses. It emerged that he had claimed more than £10,000 to cover the stamp duty and other fees from the purchase of his second home in London, and it is this which many members of the public have raised in response to the minister's "morally wrong" comments about tax evasion. Then there is his wife, Rachel, also a solicitor, who features in a photograph proudly displayed on Mr Gauke's constituency website a day after the birth of one of their three young sons. Like her husband, Mrs Gauke is a tax expert; she currently works as an adviser to LexusNexus, specialising in corporate tax law. The firm's website states that its staff “support every tax practitioner on the front line as they deal with the tax collector“. But, as callers to one radio phone-in said, everyone has their own view of which forms of tax avoidance - or "efficiency" - are "morally wrong". ?Sue smiles and ponders as if asked to consider something vaguely surprising. 'We love every new addition,' she says. 'We love the hustle and the bustle. There is always something going on in the house.' The response seems a little unsatisfactory. When I ask her if she is addicted to the process of having a baby, either physically or emotionally, she smiles again and says she just likes having the children around her. 'It's not like we've known anything different,' says Noel, who has completely lost track of the 15 birthdays so that he now keeps a list in his wallet. 'Oh I haven't a clue!' he says. 'We were so young when we had Chris that it's not like we're 25 and looking back to a former life without children. If that had been the case, perhaps it would have been different.'Sue had Chris when she was 14. The couple, who both lived in Kendal, first met when Sue was eight and Noel, who lived nearby, used to visit to play with her brother. After having the baby, she went back to school, leaving him with her mother, and then left school at 16 to be a full-time teenage mother. By the age of 17, Sue and Noel were married ('Don't try to keep them apart,' the family GP told Sue's parents). By 18 she had Sophie, and then Chloe, 'a very difficult baby', at 21. 'We really thought we'd stop at three,' Noel says. 'And then we thought we might stop at nine with James,' Sue adds. But they didn't – they just couldn't help themselves. After her seventh, Sue's mother stopped telling her not to have any more. 'She just gave up,' Sue says, 'and now she loves each one as they come.' In fact, Sue's mother is the only help she has – a couple of mornings a week, when she'll take the younger children for a walk and then some weekends when she'll take three children to lighten the load for Sue. In five months' time, Oscar will join Tilly and Max at nursery for the three mornings when Sue's mother doesn't come and Sue will go back to helping Noel in the bakery, working until 1.30pm every day. She had a nanny for a couple of years, working mornings, but didn't really like it. Nor would she like a cleaner. 'I know how I want things done,' Sue says.Sue and Noel admit that with so much early resistance to their relationship, they were determined to show the world they could make it work, almost as an act of defiance to all the naysayers. Laidback to the point of being horizontal – 'I'm bottom of the pile in this family,' says Noel, who places himself 'between the two dogs and the rabbit' – the couple never argue, they say, apart from the odd bicker about DIY (and I believe them).Perhaps, too, it is relevant that both of them were adopted. Noel was born on Christmas Eve (hence the name) and given away by his birth mother immediately. Both Sue and Noel have one sibling each, a brother (Sue's brother has only one child). Sue knows little about her birth mother, except that she had had eight children before giving Sue up for adoption as an infant. It is this detail, perhaps, that is both heartbreaking and revealing, although Sue is not one for over-analysing her own motivations. But an outsider is compelled to ask: does Sue want to succeed where her birth mother 'failed'? 'Being adopted is not something I feel consciously,' Sue says, 'but maybe. Who knows.''We do want to adopt ourselves,' Noel says, as if a 16th child would be no great strain. 'I just like the fact that we're both adopted and that we could help somebody.' 'And I would like another one of our own,' Sue adds. Are you serious, I ask. When? 'Oh, perhaps in the spring,' she replies. She is going back on the contraceptive pill in the next couple of months, she says, as she always does after delivering her babies, but her GP always says to her, 'Three months' supply, Mrs Radford?' and she nods and they both know she won't be back.Then, like clockwork, her name will appear on the maternity admissions board at the local hospital and the midwives will fight over who delivers her baby (always induced two weeks early now after she nearly had Katy in the car). She is a familiar face on the labour ward. 'This time, one called another one over and they peered at my stomach. No stretch marks and completely toned,' Sue says proudly. No matter what, Sue always finds time to do her tummy exercises and her pelvic floor exercises, either first thing in the morning or during the babies' nap time. Sue does look amazing. 'It's all the babies!' Katy chips in.Noel says that having so many children has made their marriage stronger, even though their life is constant hard work (although they certainly don't see it like that). 'Sometimes I say to Noel, "Remind me not to have any more!" but it never lasts for long,' Sue says. The only time they are alone together – when they are not firefighting a problem, be it a play-fight between the boys gone wrong, or a toddler in tears or an exploding nappy – is when they flop into bed at 10pm, exhausted. They never go out for a meal, or to the cinema. There is no leisurely reading the Sunday papers, no books to discuss, and from what I saw over the course of 12 hours, hardly any conversation between them at all outside the business of running the children.The only thing Sue has for herself is a special display cupboard containing six untouched, brand new Radley handbags, 'too nice to use', each one a different design – a symbol, almost, of an alternative life – her soap operas, which she watches with the girls, and a bit of 'me' time in the evening, when she might concentrate on her appearance (hair, nails, skin etc). Fifteen minutes before the children wake in the morning she straightens her hair and puts on her make-up, then her focus switches. Raising children is a selfless business, but between the hours of 7am and 7pm, often later, much of Noel and Sue's time is devoted to their children. 'We are just very lucky we found each other,' Noel says. 'Sue's a right trouper.' (He goes to the bakery at 4.30am and returns for the 7.30am breakfast routine and school drop-off, goes back to the bakery and then picks the children up at 3pm, then he is straight into the after-school hours.) He is right. When Sue had Oscar, two days later Noel returned to work. It was the start of half-term and she was alone in the house with 13 children (the two eldest were at work). 'I don't know how I did that,' she reflects, although she says she has a very good 'icy glare' which often is enough to bring the children completely into line. It's worth saying, too, that situations that would bother most parents – siblings niggling one another, or bouncing giant balloons around the kitchen while they are trying to cook supper – leave Sue completely unfazed. Similarly, she battles on through stomach bugs and diarrhoea and patiently combs at least 10 heads of hair each week for nits, assiduously preventing one of her worst 'nightmares'. Noel runs everybody around in the minibus and cooks dinner every night – spaghetti bolognese, stews or pies from the bakery – and happily admits that nobody listens to him. Chloe is going through teenage hormones – she has just dyed her silky black hair peroxide blond, burning it so badly with the bleach that a lot of it fell out. She blatantly ignored the fact that Noel forbade her from doing it and it's obvious that it pains Noel even to look at it now. Sue is trying to potty-train three-year-old Max, despite having Tilly and Oscar. Amy is going through a whingey stage, and passing it on to Ellie (the pair are like 'best friends').As Sue and Noel chat away, the younger children, dressed one after the other by their mother in the sitting-room, are running around playing games or watching television. 'They've always got a friend, always got something going on,' Noel says. The boys haven't surfaced yet and won't for hours, Sue says. Nor have Chris and Sophie, the eldest children who are, Sue says, the most loving, helpful and reliable pairs of extra hands. They are not substitute parents – 'why would people have babies so that their children can bring them up?' she says sternly – but they do fulfil a vital role of backup support, always ready as babysitters if Sue has to nip out and do the food shopping (about £250 a week). The boys all look up to the eldest, Chris, who is a manual worker in a glass factory. He tells me later that he 'can talk to Dad about anything'. When I ask him why he still lives at home amid the chaos, he says, 'I'd be lost if I lived on my own.' He settles on the sofa to watch Dora the Explorer with Tilly tucked in his lap. None of other children thinks it's the least bit strange that they have so many siblings.Katy, the family's early bird, is already hungry. Sue has now limited the amount of food she has in the house 'because if it's there they eat it, and I found I save quite a bit of money just buying meal-by-meal at Asda round the corner. When you have a family our size, you are always looking to find savings.' Neither Sue nor Noel worries excessively about money, but they are careful. Outgrown clothes are handed down, for example, and when they go on their annual one-week holiday to Lanzarote the hotel gives them a generous discount. Recently Noel took the low-energy lightbulbs out of the fittings in the children's room to try to teach them the importance of turning off the lights. Although both Sue and Noel are aware of the environmental criticisms often levelled at big families, Noel tells me that he takes great pride in recycling, often fishing out tins and cardboard from the bin.Josh, who has just started reception, is learning to read. 'We try to do 10 to 15 minutes' reading with the little ones,' Noel says, 'and the older ones do their homework on their own.' Josh fishes out a chocolate bar from the toy box and Sue helps him unwrap it. There are no rules on food as such, apart from James, who is banned from cola because it makes him hyper. Television time and Xbox time is unlimited, and none of the children does any housework, apart from tidy their rooms for the odd £1 here and there. 'I like to do it all myself, really. My mum thinks I'm mad,' says Sue (who also washes and irons for Sophie's boyfriend), as she gets the vacuum and gives the downstairs a quick going over. By my standards at least, Sue is compulsively clean and tidy. She vacuums two floors of the house at least twice a day, cleans the four bathrooms every day ('you need to with so many boys') and changes all the beds once a week. She feels in control, she says, if the house is clean. It quickly becomes apparent that for a lot of the time the school-age children are left to their own devices. When 18-month-old Tilly staggers into the sitting-room clutching a half-full bottle of white wine, grabbed from the fridge, Sue roars with laughter. It is Tilly, Sue explains, ousted from her position as the youngest, who is really feeling unsettled at the moment. 'She's been a bit clingy since Oscar arrived, but she loves him very much.'It is a different kind of parenting, less intense and less centred on individual needs, more crowd control and general mayhem and the children happily running in packs of twos and threes and fours: 'I do try to give them one-on-one time, but it is difficult,' she trails off. Sue is not, it is safe to say, a tiger mum nor a helicopter parent. 'I can't talk to Mum,' Milly tells me with no particular sense of injustice. 'She's always doing the washing.' 'Milly!' Chloe says, 'that's not true.' (In fact, Sue does spend an awful lot of time washing and sorting the laundry, which, apart from nit combing, is her least favourite chore.)Still, Sue says she prides herself on her children being able to talk to her. 'We're an open family,' she says. Sophie, the 18-year-old, who works full-time in the bakery, immediately takes Oscar from her mother for a walk in the pram. She wants children, she tells me, 'but not yet', and nowhere near so many. None of the children wants to follow their mother, all of them putting a limit around the two or three mark, 'because it's a lot of hard work'. 'Sophie was very open with me saying she wanted to have the contraceptive implant,' Sue says. 'I was fine about it. She's going to New York for her birthday with her boyfriend and she said, "Mum, why can't you all come with us? We'll be bored." 'Lunch – a couple of loaves of bread, a dozen eggs and piles of Müller Light yogurts – has been cleared away and all seven primary-school-age children, plus Oscar (in Sue's arms) and Chloe, are climbing into the minibus to go to their school's Christmas fair. Outside the house, Noel shows me the heavy wooden gates he commissioned to stop the younger children running into the road. Somehow, Sue says, the children have learnt how to travel together as a pack, looking out for one another. Once nestled into the chaos of the Christmas fair, 16-year-old Chloe is assigned Max as her charge and the rest somehow stay with their parents. There is no grabbing at cakes, whining for sweets or any demands for presents. 'People say when we go out that they are a credit to us,' Sue says proudly. 'I love this kind of thing,' she adds, gazing round at the mince pies and the tinsel. 'It's all about the family, it's all about the children.'This Christmas will be particularly poignant for Sue because it will mark the anniversary of her first and only miscarriage. On December 23 last year she found at her 12-week scan that her foetus was without a heartbeat. She is still deeply upset by the loss, so unexpected for her given the 14 trouble-free pregnancies that preceded it. 'I don't know how I'll be,' she says, 'but obviously having Oscar will help.' (She became pregnant again in February.)Once back from the fair, fuelled by the chocolate selection boxes that each child was given as a gift from Father Christmas, the play-fighting starts. Katy gets out her cornet and blows no particular tune. Milly is screaming at her brother, 'Luke's a girl!' which provokes headlocks and wrestling. Max pulls the kitchen curtains off their poles ('I've given up wanting nice furniture,' Sue says). A repeat of I'm a Celebrity is playing on the wall-mounted television (James threw a bottle at the old one and smashed the screen) and Oscar is on his umpteenth nappy change. Supper is homemade pizzas, with each child choosing his or her topping – and then not eating much after all the chocolate. Just when things are beginning to seem manageable, Smokey, the family rabbit, brought in from his hutch by Luke, scampers behind the Christmas tree, followed by three-year-old Max. The tree tips down, falling in the middle of the sitting-room, glass baubles smashing everywhere. 'Don't worry! Don't worry!' shouts Milly as Sue stands propping up the tree, 'I'll go for the Hoover!''You see, this is my life,' Sue says. 'Always some disaster.' But I get the impression that's exactly how she likes it.A three-part series, '15 Kids and Counting', looking at some of Britain's largest families, starts on January 17 on Channel 4 ?Kingsdale – an academy with complete freedom from local authority control – was visited by the Prime Minister last year. He described the school as “brilliant” and it has also been rated as “outstanding” by Ofsted. But statements made by more than 20 pupils and teachers from the school – and obtained by Channel 4 News – allege widespread cheating in exams, changing of scripts after tests and fabrication of coursework. Chloe Smith, who took her GCSEs at the school in 2011, claimed that teachers who were not supposed to be in the exam hall entered to give pupils the correct answers. "He started pointing out my wrong answers and telling me to correct them and then started showing me how to get extra marks on the ones which were already right," she said. One former teacher, who did not want to be identified, said that Kingsdale "moderated" coursework marks, so that some pupils who gained D grades got a B instead. "Numbers were being plucked out of the sky," she claimed. Dame Tessa said: "I think this really reveals something profoundly disturbing about the new academy status.”In a statement, the school said: "We are satisfied that the investigation to date has not highlighted any evidence of institutional examination malpractice at the school. The welfare of students at Kingsdale remains the school's top priority and we remain confident in the examination processes at the school."?Most problematic of all is the relationship between Fred and his clever daughter. When Melissa’s mother left, she chose to stay with Fred. But what exactly were the consequences of that choice? When a baseball bat appears from behind the counter early in the proceedings, you can be fairly sure that its principal role in the drama will not be as a prop in an impromptu staff baseball match. Fred’s Diner has a wonderful, sparkly design by Andrew D Edwards, and the direction, by Tim Hoare, and the performances by Cush Jumbo as Melissa, Tracey Wilkinson as Heather and Olivia Poulet as Chloe are equally sparkly. Skinner’s verbal adroitness is always joyful, and the production sets off at a tremendous pace on a wave of well deserved laughs. It is when the emotional spectrum darkens that flaws begin to emerge. Skinner’s characters, initially so persuasive, settle incongruously into stereotype as her plot skids off-course on a slick of heavy irony and veers headlong towards a soap operatic crash landing. She is a writer full of talent and promise, but her latest play has a pronounced whiff of theatre as television: stylish, neatly crafted, great fun to watch — but, despite its powerful themes of love and hope corrupted, curiously forgettable. ?Also joining the business department is Matthew Hancock, a former aide to Mr Osborne and Bank of England economist. Sajid Javid, a former City banker, was appointed Economic Secretary to the Treasury. Greg Clark, the planning minister, joins the Treasury as minister in charge of the City and financial regulation. Mr Clark’s planning job was taken by Nick Boles, a former think tank chief who is close to Mr Cameron.Mr Boles will find himself at the forefront of a political battle over planning in the coming weeks, when Mr Osborne unveils an Economic Development Bill that will make it harder for residents to object to major building projects.Among the junior ministerial appointments, Liz Truss, a leading member of the Conservative Free Enterprise Group, was sent to the Department for Education. She is the co-author of a book arguing that Britain must make far-reaching reforms if it is to compete in the 21st century global economy. Conservative sources said the appointments proved that Mr Cameron was serious about pushing ahead with pro-business reforms, even if the Lib Dems objected.Also at the Treasury, Paul Deighton, the chief executive of the Olympics organising committee Locog, is to be made a peer and become minister for infrastructure and economic delivery. Mr Deighton, a former Goldman Sachs banker, will replace Lord Sassoon, who is leaving his post to return to the private sector.Chloe Smith, 30, was moved on from her job as economic secretary to the Treasury. Miss Smith, who has only been in Parliament since 2009, endured a disastrous grilling on fuel duty from Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight in June. She will become a parliamentary secretary at the Cabinet Office.?The Prime Minister's spokesman today confirmed that Mr Osborne alone took the decision to scrap the rise due in August. Ministers were not told about the move before he announced in it Parliament on Tuesday. Nadine Dorries, a backbench Conservative MP, accused the Chancellor of being a "coward" for sending his junior minister to deal with questions. She launched a scathing attack on Mr Osborne on Twitter, the micro-blogging website, branding him a "submarine Chancellor" who goes to ground at the first sign of trouble. "I was at a dinner last night so didn't see Newsnight, however, if Osborne sent Chloe on re scrapping 3p he is a coward as well as arrogant," she wrote. "Newsnight last night would have been a tough gig for a Minister with years of experience - Chloe is a good egg and didn't deserve that. The submarine Chancellor sacrifices another Minister whilst he slips under the surface...again."Ben Bradshaw, the former Labour minister, also waded into the row to say the interview was "proof if you needed it that George Osborne is not a gentleman forcing poor Chloe Smith to crash on Newsnight". Louise Mensch, another Conservative MP, rallied round her colleague, saying "anybody can have a tough time with Paxman" as Newsnight is "hard stuff". The Prime Minister faced questions about why the Chancellor let Ms Smith do the interview during his weekly questions in the House of Commons. David Cameron said there was no question the Chancellor was "hiding away", as he had gone to the House of Commons to tell MPs the rise would be scrapped. "He was actually here making the announcement," he said. Ahead of his appearance, Maria Miller, the minister for disabled people, also struggled to answer questions about the rise on the BBC's Daily Politics. She defended the decision to put up Ms Smith for the interview, saying it is "absolutely right" that ministers take responsibility for Government policy. ?''I'm looking forward to going back to school so everyone can see it.''Chloe, of Swindon, Wilts., contracted streptococcal septicaemia after being struck down with chicken pox aged three-and-a-half.She spent three months in Bristol Children's Hospital, where her heart stopped four times and doctors feared she might not survive.Chloe lost all the fingers on her left hand and was left with one thumb and half a finger on her right hand. But her life has changed forever after being fitted with the bionic fingers, made by Touch Bionics in Scotland.Parents Sue and Pete, both 41, said they never had second thoughts despite the cost.''I sat down with Chloe and talked about it, and she said it was too much money,'' said Sue.''But we decided if it is going to help her and if she is going to use it, then it was something that we had to do.''We are all chuffed to bits with it and it is so much better than we thought it would be. I didn't think the fingers would all move individually but they do, it is great.''We were nervous going through the whole process because it is all new. They have only been doing it for about 18 months.''But it has completely changed her life, she can now do the simplest things, like cleaning her teeth and cutting up her own food.''The hand, which has been made specifically to fit Chloe's hand, is fitted with sensors in the sleeve which enable her to control the digits.Chloe is the youngest and first person outside of America to have the bionic fingers, which has put her at the centre of attention on numerous occasionsDad Pete said: ''I got her to come and collect my pint from the bar the other day and people just couldn't believe it.''Sue added ''She got stopped coming through customs when we came back from Scotland and they swabbed her arm for drugs.''They had never seen anything like it before but said they had to follow the rules. Chloe gave them a bit of a demonstration and they were stunned.''We are just absolutely delighted with it, it has made a huge difference to her life.'' ?Chloe said: "It was a fantastic trip - really good fun. We got in the helicopter and flew around for half-an-hour before being dropped off at our prom. "All our friends were really shocked - they could not believe it. We landed on a patch of grass right next to the tent where our prom was taking place. "We had wanted to get a limousine to the venue but they had all gone by the time we went to book it - but this was even better. The prom was brilliant too." The girls, from Archway School in Stroud, were attending the Year 11 promChloe now plans to study beauty therapy at South Gloucestershire and Stroud College. Lauren, from Cashes Green, near Stroud, will stay on to study in Archway's sixth-form department. ?IPL hair removal with Philips Lumea The new Philips Lumea offers effective and long-lasting hair removal, without the mess, cost or pain of other hair removal treatments. Philips Lumea uses Intense Pulsed Light (IPL) technology, similar to that used in beauty salons, to prevent hair growth and leave your skin feeling silky smooth. ?Chloë Sevigny looks good in a hoodie. This was one of the things that became clear early on in the new six-part drama Hit & Miss on Sky Atlantic. The former indie fashion queen has a way of wearing clothes that makes her look good in almost anything. She does not however look like a man, even when – no, especially when – shown naked wearing a prosthetic penis. This was a drawback for the role of Mia, which requires Sevigny to play a transsexual assassin – born male, but identifying as a woman. And just to make things harder for the Golden Globe-winning actress, she was also required to turn in an Irish accent. Strike two, I’m afraid. ?'Brownie?’ I say, offering her half of mine. She shakes her head, and I see how thin she has become. 'Are you OK?’ I ask, and it is then that she bursts into tears. I can count on one hand the number of times I have seen Chloe cry. She is so strong we joke that she is actually a robot, that tears would rust her. But those are the people you need to watch out for the most, and I see that now with Chloe. Good old reliable Chloe, who will always be there to dance on a table with – except now I worry that if I don’t give her a hug she won’t. 'Bryony,’ she splutters, embracing me tightly. 'I think I need help.’ ?Beside Hugo’s bed is the strange mannequin, which his father inherited from a museum. The boy’s attempts to repair it lead him to the bookish teenager Isabelle (Chloë Moretz) and her godfather, the groundbreaking French filmmaker George Méliès (Ben Kingsley), who’s now eking out a living selling toys at the station. Together, the children delve into the old man’s past and discover, their eyes wide and watery, the magic of the movies. Scorsese’s passion for early cinema is well documented, and Hugo is clearly an attempt to impress modern audiences in the same way Méliès’s work impressed turn-of-the-century Parisians. To this end, it’s entirely appropriate that he has made the film in 3D: if the technology had been available to Méliès, he would have almost certainly used it himself. The third dimension hasn’t been used this effectively in a mainstream live action film since James Cameron’s Avatar. Every shot is painstakingly composed to convey depth: the station’s roof is festooned with loudspeakers that hang in the foreground, corridors stretch off into the distance, and puffs of steam, flurries of snow and clouds of dust all enhance the sense of immersion. However, the long, gliding camera movements and methodical editing that 3D requires mean Hugo doesn’t particularly look like a Martin Scorsese picture (the child-friendly script, of course, means it doesn’t much sound like one either). It’s as if the entire film is composed of retreads of his famous three-minute tracking shot through the Copacabana nightclub in Goodfellas: it’s all scene-setting and no payoff. The casualties are the characters. While Scorsese has assembled an able team of players – Butterfield and Moretz are two of the most winning young actors working today, and Kingsley can twinkle like a Christmas tree – they aren’t given much to do apart from set up yet another swooping shot or chase sequence through the endless nooks and crannies of the station. Scorsese’s regular production designer Dante Ferretti has outdone himself with this set, and I can understand the desire to show it off, but this is the first time I’ve felt a closer attachment to one of his sets than the people who are on it. Hugo’s best moments are those that aren’t actually Hugo. The film is full of clips from old silent movies, by Méliès and others, and it’s a pleasure to see them lovingly restored and projected on to a cinema screen. The sequence from Safety Last!, in which Harold Lloyd dangles from a clock on the side of a skyscraper, gets the film’s biggest laugh, and the enduring weirdness of Méliès’s A Trip to the Moon still provokes chills. For all its worthy intentions and technical brilliance, Hugo is a hard film to love: not only for children, who may find the largely immobile plot a slog, but also to viewers of any age who’d rather be charmed than merely wowed. Late in the film, Scorsese draws an explicit parallel between cinema and magic tricks, and it’s painfully apt. Hugo is a coldly impressive contraption that provokes cries of “Ooh, that’s clever”, but not a great deal else. Hugo: Seven Magazine review, by Jenny McCartney Seven rating: * * * *Romantics will always be susceptible to the charms of Paris, and Hugo offers, in the splendour of 3D, a more seductive vision than most. This is Paris in the snowy winter of 1931, a city in which elegance is seasoned with a delicious hint of squalor, and steam trains rattle in and out of one of its majestic stations. There, in the station’s walls, is a secret apartment inhabited by a 12-year-old orphan called Hugo Cabret (Asa Butterfield).He lives alone, since his beloved father (Jude Law) died and his drunken uncle Claude (Ray Winstone) – whose job it was to wind up the station clocks and who first trained him in the task – disappeared. Now Hugo diligently winds the clocks himself to avoid any troublesome investigations of his uncle’s whereabouts, pilfers croissants, and dodges the fearsome, comic Station Inspector (Sacha Baron Cohen) who dispatches unaccompanied minors to the dreaded orphanage.The boy has one obsession, a gleaming automaton – or early robot – which his father rescued from a museum, and which he is attempting to restore with parts stolen from a crotchety gentleman, Georges Melies (Ben Kingsley) who sells clockwork toys. When he is caught thieving, it leads to an encounter with the shop-owner’s god-daughter (Chloe Moretz), who befriends him. Here – in a film that celebrates the gleaming precision of machinery – the character of Melies is the link to Scorsese’s exploration of the mechanics of early movie-making, and the pioneering film-makers who made (and sometimes destroyed) fortunes in the fledgling motion picture industry. At times the story itself drifts gently off-course, while Scorsese gives spectacle surreal and glorious rein. Many images are self-consciously cinematic, homages to the great set-pieces of the early directors: the boy gazes through a giant clock-face at the Eiffel Tower; seen from the other side, the parts of the clock-face resemble prison bars, holding him in. In Hugo’s dreams, a derailed train hurtles through a station, scattering the crowd like wheat, or he bemusedly discovers that his body has become that of the automaton.Butterfield, as Hugo, conveys the necessary mix of melancholy and hope, signalled with his bruised blue eyes. And in Scorsese’s direction one can sense the desperate passion of a cinephile, rushing to convey the impact of the Lumière brothers, Cecil B. de Mille et al before the world moves on so quickly it can no longer remember to look back. Adapted from Brian Selznick’s best-selling novel, Hugo is a wonderfully nostalgic film, and its magic will touch all ages.?The Boris phenomenon roars on. When re-elected earlier this year as London Mayor he joked he had won "in spite" of David Cameron's backing. But since then things have got bloody between the pair. Buoyed by the success of the Olympics Boris has opened fire on the government. He recently made a speech proclaiming that the Coalition was heading for "economic catastrophe" and said they were paying "lamentable attention" to the issue of airport capacity. A sure fire contender for next Conservative leader, he has the small matter of making sure he is Parliament if the situation arises. 3. (+4) MICHAEL GOVESecretary of State for EducationGove is now a real contender for the Conservative leadership, but as a loyal member of Cameron's inner circle he denies all claims that he has ambition to be leader one day. He has successfully used his own personal narrative to win over critics. As many new free schools opened their doors just a few weeks ago we have yet to see the real effects of this policy, but by all measurements it looks good. Possibly the most successful government department. Even Labour have resigned themselves to the fact that free schools are here today, a major victory for Gove. 4. (-2) GEORGE OSBORNEChancellor of the ExchequerAn awful year by all accounts for the Chancellor. Osborne's Budget was meet by derision from all quarters of society. From the pasty tax to the cut in the 50p tax rate, Osborne got more bad headlines from the budget than he was hoping for. Although he claims to be sticking to his economic guns when it comes to Plan A, he has managed to find money for new infrastructure projects. He has many right wing critics who have pointed out that his main objective of lowering the budget deficit will not be achieved. His reputation as a political strategist has taken a heavy hit, hence his fall. 5. (+1) WILLIAM HAGUEForeign SecretaryHis position as defacto Deputy Leader of the Conservative Party remains intact and he continues to be one of the Prime Minister's closest confidantes as well as remaining hugely popular with the voluntary party. Hague has remained resolute in his intentions to extradite Julian Assange who stills remains at the Ecuadorian Embassy. Hague faces two big challenges over the year ahead, renegotiating Britain's position within the EU and working with the US President post-election to sort out the crisis in Syria. 6. (+3) PHILIP HAMMONDSecretary of State for DefenceHammond performed well over at the Department for Transport introducing some surprisingly radical ideas, but was unexpectedly moved to Defence following the swift resignation of Liam Fox. In the Defence brief he has had to make some tough decisions from 20,000 redundancies in the Army to cutting 25% of the military top brass. He has always made them with a cool calmness. He questioned the suitability of private companies carrying out public services after the Army had to step in during the G4S face at the Olympics. He continues to impress and is even being talked about as a successor to Cameron. 7. (-2) EDWARD LLEWELLYNChief of Staff, Number 10 Downing StreetA close friend of Cameron since their days at Eton and Oxford, Llewellyn also worked with him in the Conservative Research Department in the early 1990s. He then worked as an adviser to Chris Patten in Hong Kong, before taking up a position with Paddy Ashdown in the Balkans. His role is the lynchpin of Cameron's private office. Had a tough time during the Coulson affair but has emerged unscathed. However, Tory MPs are starting to whisper against him, accusing him of keeping the Prime Minister too remote from them. 8. (+5) IAIN DUNCAN SMITHSecretary of State for Work & PensionsDuring the reshuffle Duncan Smith refused to be moved, but the fact he was even asked, rather than told, proved the respect that he has among the leadership. He has an ongoing battle with George Osborne over the cost welfare reform, but by all measurements appears to have won. He is now in the process of implementing those reforms, for a team that remained almost untouched during the reshuffle it may appear an easy job. It is not. Many of his key advisers are telling him that simplifying the benefit system and introducing a universal credit is "unworkable". But this is a battle IDS is determined to win. 9. (+6) THERESA MAYHome SecretaryMay has one of the hardest jobs in government, but unlike her predecessors has coped very well in the job. She's faced the Heathrow summer queues debacle, the G4S Olympics farce, was even booed at the National Police Federation, and yet has remained strong and resolute throughout. She is the best known female face (with the best known feet) on the Tory front bench, which insulates against those who don't 'get' her. May faces a bumpy road ahead with more pressure over internet snooping and the Gary McKinnon extradition case, but judging by her past performance she'll get through it. 10. (NEW) LORD COE Chair of London 2012The world is Seb Coe's oyster. This former Tory MP is publically adored for his role as Chairman of the London Organising Committee of the 2012 Olympic Games. His speech at the closing ceremony of the games invoked pride in the hearts of Britons up and down the country. It is said that he wants to succeed Jacques Rogge as the Chair of the International Organising Committee, but many would like to see him as the Tory candidate for London Mayor in 2016 despite protests he does not want to return to frontline politics. His autobiography is published next month entitled 'Running My Life'. 11. (-1) SAMANTHA CAMERONWife of the Prime MinisterThere's little doubt that SamCam is used as a key sounding board by her husband and that her views are a great influence on him. She is slowly emerging from her shell and becoming a public figure on her own right. 12. (-3) LORD ASHCROFTFormer Deputy Chairman of the Conservative PartyMichael Ashcroft's influence remains strong. His regular polling, although not conducted for the Conservative Party, are pored upon by strategists of all three parties. His growing political media empire, which includes Total Politics, Biteback Publishing, ConservativeHome and a large stake in Dod's mean that his political influence continues. Earlier this year we was appointed to the Privy Council and made Special Representative for Veterans Transition. 13. (+13) GRANT SHAPPSChairman of the Conservative PartyYoung and wildly ambition, Grant Shapps is one of the most prolific media performers the party has. Unsurprisingly he was chosen as the successor to Sayeeda Warsi as Chairman of the Party. Fizzing with ideas, his enthusiasm is infectious. Sadly for him his first big challenge is the Corby by-election which the Tories will undoubtedly lose. 14. (-6) ERIC PICKLESSecretary of State for Communities & Local GovernmentBy common consent, Eric Pickles has been one of the star performers of the coalition so far. He has gripped his department like few other ministers and implemented a dizzy array of eye-catching reforms which have led to massive cuts and efficiencies in his own department's budget. He is not one of David Cameron's inner circle, yet he has been a consistently high performer. His fall in this year's rankings reflects the rather quiet year he has had. 15. (+49) JEREMY HUNTSecretary of State for HealthMany were shocked when Jeremy Hunt was made Health Secretary in the reshuffle. Most suspected that he would either be demoted or even sacked after his poor performance in the DCMS brief, in which he garnered huge controversy over his relationship with News International and the Murdochs. It was the main point of attack coming from Labour and will undoubtedly plague the government for some time to come. It's sink or swim time for Mr Hunt. 16. (+18) CHRIS GRAYLINGSecretary of State for JusticeWe said last year that it would "only be a matter of time" before Grayling would reach the Cabinet table. After a long wait it happened when Chris Grayling was made Justice Secretary in the reshuffle. He was warmly welcomed by the grassroots as a right wing addition to the Cabinet. Although he has only spent a few weeks in the job he has stated he wants to rebuild public confidence in the courts, which means only one thing - harsher sentencing. 17. (+31) NIGEL FARAGE MEPLeader, United Kingdom Independence PartyA huge leap up the rankings this year for UKIP leader Nigel Farage. His media profile is bigger than ever and UKIP is now regularly polling as the third most popular party in the UK. He has been blunt about his ambitions for UKIP to top the polls in the 2014 European Elections. With wide public support for an EU referendum he is lobbying all three main parties to recognise this and call for one. His power of influence over the Conservative grassroots could prove a deadly weapon against Cameron at the next election. But despite high polling it has yet to be seen whether UKIP can win any seats in Parliament. 18. (-7) FRANCIS MAUDEMinister for the Cabinet Office and Paymaster GeneralMaude is one of the most outspoken critics of the Sir Humphrey attitude of Whitehall civil servants. In his role as Cabinet Office Minister he has promised to reform the civil service after he said it was "unacceptable" for mandarins to block government policy. He was widely criticised this year when he advised people to stock up on jerry cans of petrol causing a minor fuel crisis. It was also condemned as dangerous after a woman was severely burnt while decanting petrol. 19. (-2) OLIVER LETWINMinister for Government Policy, Cabinet OfficeAlthough Letwin rarely appears on the nation's airwaves this should not be seen as a sign of diminishing influence. On the contrary. His broad policy remit and his role on strategy are pivotal for the Coalition. He made a minor gaffe last year when it was discovered he was dumping confidential government papers in a bin in his local park. 20. (-) MATTHEW HANCOCKJoint Parliamentary Under Secretary at Education and BusinessThe highest ranked member of the 2010 intake on this list, his indomitable rise up the government ladder was always to be expected. Former Chief of Staff to George Osborne in Opposition, he was made joint minister at the Department for Education and the Department for Business. He will help to beef up support for free schools, while helping to defend against the worst excesses of Cable over at Business. His influence on the Chancellor should not be underestimated. Tipped to be the first of the 2010 intake to reach the Cabinet table. 21. (-7) ANDREW COOPERDirector of Political Strategy, Number 10 Downing StreetA Portillista under the Hague regime, Cooper left the employ of Conservative Central Office to found the polling company Populus. He has remained an important figure on the right and his recruitment to Number Ten last this year brought him back into the fold. Some more traditional Tories regret that fact that a pollster is directing strategy. Harsher critics find it difficult to even spot what the strategy is. 22. (-1) DANIEL FINKELSTEINChairman, Policy ExchangeFinkelstein is one of the key non politicians with in Downing Street circles. It has been said that what he says one day becomes Osborne's policy the next. On taking the chairmanship of Policy Exchange he has made himself one of the biggest players in centre right politics. He is undoubtedly one of the best interpreters of Tory prevailing winds. 23. (-5) PATRICK McLOUGHLINSecretary of State for Transport After seven years as Chief Whip, McLoughlin was promoted to the role of Secretary of State for Transport. He has immediately walked into the costly debacle over the West Coast main line, already being forced to apologise for the government's incompetent handling of the franchise deal. Over the next few years he will face other big policy issues like airport expansion and HS2. This Northern former coal miner is one of the few working class Tories in the government and could prove to be an inspired appointment if he lasts long enough in a job which traditionally is a stepping stone for greater things. 24. (-2) GRAHAM BRADY Chairman of the 1922 CommitteeGraham Brady and David Cameron are not, it is safe to say, bosom pals. Brady annoyed the leadership over his outspoken defence of grammar schools, after which he resigned his front bench position as shadow minister for Europe. This year he reignited the row by saying "I owe everything to my grammar school" and advocating reintroduction of academic selection. As Chairman of the 1922 he is a powerful voice for backbench interests. 25. (+15) ANDREW MITCHELLChief Whip Andrew Mitchell managed to build a big profile for himself as International Development Secretary, and developed a good reputation among the NGOs. After a fairly successful job at convincing Tories that they should not cut the aid budget, Mitchell was promoted to his natural home of Chief Whip. Nicknamed "Thrasher" at school, he will have an iron grip over the Whips' Office and enforce discipline. In his first week of the job he got himself into a major scandal after calling a police officer a "pleb". He may have survived it but he has been severely wounded. Otherwise he would have made the Top 20 this year for the first time. 26. (-7) ROHAN SILVASenior Policy Advisor, Number 10 Downing Street Silva previously worked alongside Rupert Harrison and Matthew Hancock to develop the party's economic policy in opposition, before coming economic advisor to George Osborne. He is now a Senior Policy Advisor to the PM, and is the brainchild behind Tech City in East London. It was Silva who came up with the idea of an iPad app which Cameron could run Whitehall from. Very political and forensic, his brain fizzes with new ideas. 27. (+8) GABRIELLE BERTIN Personal Press Secretary to the Prime MinisterGabby Bertin took over from George Eustice as David Cameron's press secretary and is well regarded by the political media. Fiercely protective of him, she is often seen at his side at events protecting him for intrusive interviewers. She is expecting a baby with City exec Michael Grist and will leave for maternity leave at the end of the year. Another blow for the Cameron team, depriving him of his most effective media operator. 28. (-4) CRAIG OLIVERDirector of Communications, 10 Downing StreetNewspaper journalist complain that he doesn't understand them and keeps his distance from them. He's been a very low profile appointment, but perhaps that's a good thing. He's a backroom boy who knows the meaning of the phrase. Yet the knives are out for Oliver after a series of media disasters. The Spectator believes he will be gone by the end of the year. 29. (-26) STEVE HILTONFormer Director of Strategy, Number 10 Downing Street Following the loss of Andy Coulson last year, another blow was dealt to Number 10 when Steve Hilton departed for a year's sabbatical to a Californian university. This was apparently due to a growing frustration with the slow pace of government reform. He was attacked with vitriol by Conservative commentators like Bruce Anderson, because upon his exit Hilton briefed the press that there was a lack of radicalism in the government. Despite this Hilton is apparently back on the scene and helping Cameron with his conference speech. He will be back in Downing Street before we know it. 30. (-5) RUPERT HARRISONSpecial Advisor to George OsborneAs Chief of Staff to George Osborne, Harrison is the most important of the four Treasury Spads. An old Etonian he is a smart, urbane and extremely clever, and has been described as one half of Osborne's brain. The creation of the Office of Budget Responsibility amongst other innovative things apparently stems from Harrison. In these tough times he is more important to the Chancellor than ever. 31. (+12) ANDREW TYRIE Chairman of the Treasury Select CommitteeA former full-time adviser to successive Chancellors, Nigel Lawson and John Major, Tyrie is a gifted economist with an impressive academic background. Nicknamed by senior Tory circles as Andrew Tiresome , he has proved to be a highly effective chairman of the Treasury Select Committee. Following the Libor banking scandal a Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards was launched, which Tyrie was appointed chairman of. Its findings will be influential on the policies of both the main parties. 32. (+9) CATHERINE FALL Deputy Chief of Staff, Number Ten Downing StreetCatherine Fall is one of the few members of David Cameron's backroom staff who have managed to keep out of the limelight. But she is the glue which holds his office together. Fiercely efficient, and very protective, she is one of the few people implicitly trusted by the Prime Minister. 33. (-5) TIM MONTGOMERIE Editor, ConservativeHome.comTim Montgomerie can pick up the phone to anyone in the party and they will take the call. In the view of many MPs, he is undoubtedly one of the most influential people outside the Cabinet. His website, a must-read for politicians and activists alike, has managed the transition well from opposition to government. The regular website polling also provides a real insight into the Conservative grassroots for Number 10 and journalists alike. 34. (-5) GREG CLARKFinancial Secretary to the Treasury A former director of the Conservative Research Department, Greg Clark was always destined for great things. He had a great platform for radical ideas when he was tasked with the localism brief upon the formation of the Coalition, and was this year appointed to Financial Secretary to the Treasury. Although a promotion, he has gone from being a big cog in a small machine to a small cog in the big machine. This very calm operator has the next few months to show us what he is made of. 35. (-19) ANDREW FELDMANCo-Chairman, Conservative PartyA surprise to many, Feldman kept his job as Co-Chairman of the Party alongside new Chairman Grant Shapps upon Baroness Warsi's departure. He is one of David Cameron's close personal friends from his university days, and was treasurer of his leadership campaign. Grant Shapps is front of house, while Feldman is tasked with reshaping the party's finances and headquarters organization. 36. (-6) DAMIAN GREENMinister of State for Police and Criminal JusticeDamian Green's thoughtful and non aggressive approach to the immigration brief won him plaudits and earned him a good media profile. Cameron then rewarded him a promotion in the reshuffle moving him to Nick Herbert's old job of Police Minister. He will now oversee the election and implementation of elected police commissioners later this year. Despite being on the left of the party, Green remains a popular figure across the party. He is one of the most talented ministers outside the cabinet. 37. (-5) MARGARET THATCHERFormer Prime MinisterMore than twenty years since her fall from grace, the mere mention of her name within Tory circles rouses a huge round of applause. Her shadow no longer casts itself over the entire party, but she is rightly still treated with huge respect and affection. Sadly because of her failing health her appearances at State occasions have ground to halt, yet a few anecdotes of her moments of brilliance have slipped through the net. One such occasion was when told about the LibDems plans to abolish the House of Lords she replied, "Ah, Liberals. We should abolish of few of them. No one shall abolish me."38. (-5) STEPHEN GILBERTPolitical Secretary, Number Ten Downing StreetA former Chief Executive of the Party, Gilbert became Michael Ashcroft's right hand man in planning and delivering the Tories' campaign in the marginal seats. His new role combines the job of Political Secretary in Number Ten with a campaigning role at CCHQ. He is widely respected throughout the professional party and among former candidates. Few would be surprised if he moved back to CCHQ full time as the election draws nearer. 39. (+38) JUSTINE GREENINGSecretary of State for International DevelopmentWhat a bumpy ride it has been for Justine Greening over the past year. Some felt she was promoted too early when she moved into the Cabinet as Transport Secretary following the mini-reshuffle after Liam Fox's departure. Her opposition to Heathrow expansion among other things lead to her demotion in the recent reshuffle to International Development Secretary. Her failure to spot the West Coast franchise fiasco may cost her dear. 40. (-2) DANIEL HANNANConservative MEP, Columnist & Blogger Another year another book from Daniel Hannan, this year's offerings are on his specialist subject entitled "A Doomed Marriage: Britain and Europe". Fiercely Eurosceptic, Hannan has established a powerful brand for himself. As the darling of the grassroots his fringe speeches at conference have become sell-out events. His logical thought process and brilliant oratory draw comparison with Enoch Powell, and many believe he would be of far more influence if he ran for a Westminster seat. 41. (-10) LORD STRATHCLYDELeader of the House of LordsA popular figure in all parts of the party Tom Strathclyde is part of the fixtures and fittings in the Lords. He is also very influential. He has made himself almost irreplaceable and Cameron relies on him to keep their Lordships in order. Strathclyde was an impressive defender of the House of Lords reform this year, despite for many years being a staunch opponent to reform. 42. (+11) MATTHEW SINCLAIRChief Executive, Taxpayers' Alliance Sinclair was made Chief Executive of the TaxPayers' Alliance this year, and has been a thorn in the side of government and local councils. The TPA is undoubtedly the most effective pressure group in Britain, holding local government and politicians account for every penny they spend. He is a regular on radio and television putting the case for small government and low taxes - just as well, since few Tory ministers are prepared to do it. 43. (+19) JOHN WHITTINGDALEChairman, DCMS Select Committee'Whitto', as he is affectionately known, made his name as Political Secretary to Margaret Thatcher. He rises this year due to his work as chairman of the DCMS select committee on the Murdoch inquiry, which he has chaired with great skill. Much respected by Tory MPs he is a good tip for next chairman of the 1922 Committee. 44. (+3) JESSE NORMANConservative MP for Hereford Jesse Norman is now known by many for one thing, his confrontation with Cameron over Lords Reform in the division lobby. He founded the Campaign for an Effective Second Chamber, where he helped lead and galvanise opposition against House of Lords reform. Cameron then confronted him and lost his temper accusing him of not being "honourable". The debacle earned Norman a whole host of new fans among the Tory grassroots. It's unfair to characterise him as just a rebel, he is one of the leader thinkers in the Conservative Party today. 45. (+33) LYNTON CROSBYPolitical StrategistThe "Wizard of Oz" successfully worked his strategic and tactical magic four times in his native Australia for Prime Minister John Howard. In six months he was unable to do the same for Michel Howard and the Tories at the 2005 general election, but he oversaw Boris Johnson's famous victory at the 2008 London mayoral election and repeated that feat in 2012. He and David Cameron are said to not get on, but most Tory activists want to see him running the 2015 election campaign. 46. (-10) SIR JOHN MAJORPrime Minister 1990-97Sir John has avoided the mistakes of his predecessors and only comments on current affairs when he has an important point to make, his microphone of choice being the Andrew Marr Show. Behind the scenes he is an important source of confidential advice for David Cameron, and when he speaks out it is usually a call for unity behind the leader. This year he was rightly recognised for his role in ensuring lottery fund went to sport when he was PM, enabling our success at the 2012 Olympics. He has a new book out called 'My Old Man' about the history of the music hall. 47. (+3) NICHOLAS BOLES Minister for Planning, Department for Communities and Local GovernmentIt was only a matter of time before Nick Boles was promoted, a loyal Cameroon and Coalition defender, he was made Minister for Planning following the reshuffle. He was the first new minister to appear on Newsnight with Paxo, and he displayed his typically brilliant media skills. He has long been highlighted as one of the most impressive members of the new intake, over the next year we will see if he can live up to that reputation. A few months before being made a minister he controversially called for an end to non-pension benefits like Winter Fuel Allowance and free bus passes. 48. (+37) SIR EDWARD LISTERDeputy Mayor of London A vital member of the Johnson team running London, he was appointed as Deputy Mayor for Planning and Chief of Staff to the London Mayor in 2011. Previously Sir Edward had served as Leader of Wandsworth Council from 1992-2011, making him the longest serving council leader in the country. His reputation as a fearsome cost cutter in Wandsworth has continued in the London Assembly, making £150 million spending cuts to pay for a council tax cut each year for Londoners. 49. (-22) MATTHEW ELLIOTTFounder of the TaxPayers Alliance and Big Brother Watch Former Head of the No to AV campaign, Matthew Elliott has long been a calm and powerful advocate of low taxes, light regulation and the small state, making his name as the founder of the Taxpayer's Alliance. He was considered as a replacement for Steve Hilton as the PM's Director of Strategy, but was allegedly blocked by the Liberal Democrats. He recently stood down as the TPA's Chief Executive, but rumour has it he has an even bigger project up his sleeve. 50. (-13) PAUL KIRBYDirector, Number 10 Policy UnitKirby a former KPMG partner, was brought in as the new Head of Policy Development following the Number 10 rejig after Andy Coulson's departure. He leads a team of 8 formulating government policy. Kirby is the man behind the massive shake of the public sector, proposing radical new policies to end the "state monopoly" over public sector services. However he does have many Tory critics who reckon are not seeing enough conservatism in the policy making of 2012. 51. (-12) MICHAEL HINTZEParty DonorAustralian born Michael Hintze is a highly successful hedge fund manager and philanthropist. His influence relates to the causes which he funds. He was the first to out himself as someone who had loaned the Conservative Party. One of the few donors who everybody in the party both likes and respects. It was revealed this year he was the funder of Lord Lawson's Global Warming Policy Foundation, and that he had dined with the PM in Downing Street. 52. (-10) KIT MALTHOUSEDeputy Mayor of London for Business and EnterpriseEarlier this year Malthouse made controversial comments that too many police resources were being wasted on the phone hacking scandal. Following Boris' re-election he moved Malthouse away from responsibility for the Met Police, and instead put him in charge of Business and Enterprise. We shall wait to see whether Malthouse can deliver on his promise of 200,000 new jobs. As an eloquent performer on the London media, he could well make a run for mayor himself when Boris has had enough. Formerly Malthouse was Deputy Leader of Westminster Council and remains an investment banker. 53. (-9) PATRICK ROCK Special Advisor, Number Ten Policy Unit Rock was brought back last year to join the No10 Policy Unit as a Special Advisor. He was the one time legendary SpAd to Michael Howard when he was Home Secretary, the other SpAd being a young, bright man by the name of David Cameron. Credited with coming up with the phrase "cows moo, dogs bark, Labour puts up taxes" in the 70s, he is a smooth operator but we have yet to see any significant policies come out of Number Ten this year. 54. (-8) AMEET GILLHead of Strategic CommunicationsAfter the departure of Tim Chatwin who left to join Google in the US, Cameron's rather elusive chief speechwriter Ameet Gill was appointed Head of Strategic Communications at Number 10. Gill has been working with David Cameron now for six years, but little is known about this head of comms who, like all good backroom boys, does his best to stay out of the limelight. Tale has it that he was put forward to Cameron by the author and historian Niall Ferguson whom he worked for as a researcher. 55. (New) SAJID JAVIDEconomic Secretary to the TreasuryThis time last year very few people had heard of the MP for Bromsgrove. Since then he has gone from PPS to John Hayes, to PPS to George Osborne and following the reshuffle now Economic Secretary to the Treasury replacing Chloe Smith. His fast rise up the greasy pole into George Osborne's inner circle is not only proof of this man's ambition but also his talent. At the age of 25 he became Vice Chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank, and later senior Managing Director for Deutsche Bank before entering politics. 56. (-5) DAVID LIDINGTONMinister for EuropeDavid Lidington has now been Minister for Europe for over two years. In the previous two years before that there were four holders of the post, so he must be doing something right. One of the few Tory MPs liked by virtually all his colleagues, Lidington was chosen for the role of Minister for Europe precisely because of his party wide popularity. Neither seen as a eurospectic nor a Europhile, he is a pragmatist. If anyone can suck the poison out of this poisoned chalice of a job, he can. 57. (+15) OWEN PATERSON Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural AffairsWhen Paterson was originally brought into Cabinet by Cameron many eyebrows were raised, yet it proved a shrewd move. His success in the Northern Ireland post won him a promotion in the reshuffle as he replaced Caroline Spelman at Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. A solid right winger and climate change sceptic, his promotion angered many green pressure groups, while at the same time pleasing the conservative grassroots who admire his pro-foxing hunting and anti-wind farm beliefs. 58. (-3) DAVID DAVISFormer Shadow Home SecretaryIt's never a quiet year if David Davis is about, and 2012 proved no different. He has a knack for putting his finger on the weak point of a policy and then launching a campaign to change it - often with success. He recently made a speech at the CPS calling for Cameron to cut more and faster, and to expand Heathrow which gained him much media traction. Davis has become the poster boy of the right, with "Don't blame me I voted DD" t-shirts being printed for this year's Party Conference - allegedly. 59. (-3) ANDREW HALDENBYDirector, ReformHaldenby set up Reform with Nick Herbert in 2001, having run the abortive David Davis leadership campaign. Reform is unashamedly free market and small government and has found the Cameron regime less to its liking than its predecessors. However, the Tories are starting to adopt some of Reform's radical ideas on a small state agenda and public service reform. 60. (-3) JOHN REDWOODConservative MP for WokinghamJohn Redwood continues his renaissance. His Economic Competitiveness Report was a model of its kind and Redwood's blog (johnredwoodsdiary.com) has attracted a large and influential readership. His media profile is increasing and his waspish sense of humour is finally being shown in public. Earlier this year he got into a spat with the Department for Health over a report he had written called Care for the Elderly in which he publicly denounced the Dilnot proposals. 61. (-3) OLIVER DOWDEN Prime Minister's Political DirectorDowden, nicknamed Olive, has yo-yoed between being a party apparatchik and the world of public relations. Prior to the election he headed up the political section of the Conservative Research Department, but now acts as Cameron's Political Director. Dowden is based at Number 11 and works closely with CCHQ, looking closely at opposition strategy and organising attack operations against Labour. He may keep a low profile but is integral to the Tory machine. Dowden has been tipped to run as an MP in the 2015 general election. 62. (+8) DOUGLAS CARSWELLMP for ClactonCarswell's influence has grown quickly since he was first elected to Parliament in 2005. Adding to Carswell's large collection of publications from localism to constitutional reform, he authored a new book this year called "The End of Politics and the Birth of iDemocracy", cementing his position as one of the party's brightest young thinkers. Though he has no chance of joining the government payroll people still listen to what he has to say. He made headlines earlier this year when he accused "Sir Humphrey of dominating policy". 63. (-40) LIAM FOXFormer Secretary of State for DefenceAn awful past year for Liam Fox, Fox was forced to resign as Defence Secretary after the controversy surrounding his friend Adam Werritty. A later investigation by the Cabinet Secretary revealed the details of the working relationship were improper. Since then he has been afforded the freedom to position himself as the champion of the right and to try and build a power base. In recent months Fox has spoken out for tax cuts, talked of leaving the European Union, and has also been feeding ideas to Mitt Romney. 64. (+3) SIR MERRICK COCKELLConservative leader of the Local Government AssociationCharming and urbane, Merrick Cockell made his reputation as leader of Kensington Council, which had the third lowest council tax in the country. Last year he took over the important position as Tory leader of the LGA, and this year pleaded with the government not to slash the local authority budget further. However he was criticised during the Olympics because instead of representing his London council, he took a holiday to a private villa in Spain. 65. (+3) DOMINIC GRIEVEAttorney General Grieve is the very definition of a safe pair of hands, and is wrongly viewed by many as simply being rather dull. Despite being in Cabinet for over two years he lacks influence on the party leadership because Cameron has never really understood Grieve and his more liberal instincts. 66. (-6) LORD HOWARDLeader of the Conservative Party, 2003-5 As a standard bearer of the Tory Right, Howard's remarks made almost 20 years that "prison works" are often still quoted today by people up and down the country. Although the speculation that he might return to frontline politics as Lord Chancellor after the election never came to fruition he still holds influence over his party. His vast parliamentary experience is always there to be called upon whenever the Prime Minister needs it. 67. (+5) DAVID WILLETTSMinister of State for Innovations, Universities & SkillsIt's been a quiet year for Willetts, though that was to be expected after the chaos of the last few years. Willetts is a survivor whose calmness and indefatigability during the student fees crisis were much needed qualities while others were chasing their tails. Despite a large drop in the number of students going to university, he has remained a staunch defender of the Government's market reforms to higher education. Although he is one of the finest political brains in the country, disappointingly this appears to be his last job in government. 68. (+6) DOMINIC RAABMP for Esher & Walton One of the greatest thinkers of the Class of 2010, Raab is a former aide to David Davis who has taken on his ex-boss's mantle as a champion of civil liberties. He has contributed to several policy oriented books including After The Coalition, The Future of Conservatism, and this year Britannia Unchained calling for radical cuts to regulation. He has had many public spats with Home Secretary Theresa May, more recently over US extradition particularly the Gary McKinnon case. 69. (-8) KENNETH CLARKE Minister Without Portfolio After his demotion in this year's reshuffle Ken Clarke does what Ken Clarke does best, he spent a relaxing afternoon watching cricket at the Oval. His indifference to the burdens of state and the way he sails through life as if he wouldn't care if his political career ended tomorrow is something we rarely see in politics anymore. His new role as Minister without Portfolio allows him the opportunity to share his vast experience with Cabinet and advise Cameron and Osborne on the economy without the burden of running a department. 70. (+5) MARTIN CALLANANLeader of the Conservative European Reform Group of MEPsCallanan is the first seriously eurosceptic leader the Tory MEPs have ever had in Brussels. Since his elevation to that role, he has not been afraid to make waves by publicly opposing British participation in further eurozone bailouts, for example. A Geordie who was educated at the same school as Paul Gascoigne, he is living up to his promise to lend "solid but not slavish support" to the Coalition Government - and his interventions will continue to give succour to grassroots activists. 71. (+5) NEIL O'BRIENDirector, Policy ExchangePolicy Exchange remains to be one of the most influential think tanks in Westminster and is often quoted as Cameron's favourite think tank. Neil O'Brien has succeeded in moving Policy Exchange on to a more aggressive, free-market agenda. Under his leadership the think tank has produced many radical papers on planning reform and education which have gone on to shape government policy. 72. (New) LORD FINKConservative Party TreasurerFollowing the resignation of Peter Cruddas over cash for access controversy, Stanley Fink was brought back into the fold as Treasurer of the Conservative Party. A grocer's son and grammar school boy, Fink went on to amass a personal fortune of £120 million in the hedge fund industry. He proved very successful at raising funds prior to the election, now Cameron hopes he can do the same in the run up to 2015. 73. (New) MARIA MILLER Secretary of State for Culture, Media and SportOne of the highest performing ministers in the Coalition, her hard work paid off when she was promoted to the Cabinet replacing Jeremy Hunt at Culture, Media and Sport. Educated at a Welsh Comprehensive school she is not your typical Tory and last month came out in favour of same sex marriage. She recently caused a stir when she said that she would vote to lower the abortion limit to 20 weeks. Expect to see a meteoric rise in next year's list. 74. (+5) GREG HANDSAssistant Treasury WhipDespite being overlooked for a ministerial position, Hands has remained a loyal part of Team Osborne as is well regarded by the party. He had a small promotion after the mini reshuffle caused by Liam Fox's departure moving from PPS to Assistant Whip. A devotee of both Thatcher and Reagan (he was born in the US and campaigned for Rudy Giuliani when he lived in New York), a ministerial red box ought to be his before too long. 75. (+6) LORD TEBBITFormer Conservative Cabinet MinisterNorman Tebbit is a figurehead of the Tory Right and inspiration to many, when he speaks he reminds people of the heady days of Thatcher rule. He still has the knack of getting to the nub of an issue with a soundbite designed to cause maximum effect. His Telegraph blog has given him a new lease of life and is required reading in the Westminster Village and beyond. He is major thorn in Cameron's side, which pleases the old bruiser no end. 76. (+7) PAUL GOODMANExecutive Editor, ConservativeHome.comGoodman's rise up this year's rankings are a reflection his increasing importance to ConservativeHome, the leading website of the grassroots and major critic of Cameron's government. Genial and pensive, Goodman quit Parliament at the last election even though he would have been a dead cert Minister of State in a Cameron government. Disillusioned by the state of party politics he has made a real impact in his new guise as an internet commentator - even winning the PoliticsHome Political Blogger of the Year awarded. 77. (NEW) TOBY YOUNG Journalist and AuthorCo-founder of the West London Free School, Young has been a huge supporter of Michael Gove and a vocal champion of his free school reforms. His very popular blog at The Telegraph came to a sad end earlier this year when he became a political columnist at The Sun on Sunday. 78. (NEW) HARRY COLE JournalistIn previous years Guido Fawkes has made an appearance on this list, but this year their News Editor makes it in his own right. Some say Guido Fawkes is neither as influential nor revelatory as it once was, but it still has the largest following of any political blog in the UK. Cole is also a Columnist at the Daily Star on Sunday, and recently became a Contributing Editor at The Spectator largely in charge of writing the Steerpike column. 79. (+9) ANDREW LANSLEYLeader of the House of CommonsLansley's time as Health Secretary can only be described as 'mixed', as he struggled steer the Health & Social Care Bill through the Commons. Although he successfully neutralized health as an issue for the Tories in opposition, it came back to bite them in government. He was duly demoted in the reshuffle to Leader of the House of Commons, a job which will see him in charge of arranging of government business and give him an opportunity to rebuild his reputation. 80. (+9) PRITI PATELConservative MP for WithamOne of the feistiest of the 2010 intake, Patel wowed Essex man with her Thatcherite rhetoric to win a seat where she doesn't fit the typical demographic. The embodiment of upward social mobility as envisaged by the Iron Lady, she is the daughter of Ugandan refugees and worked for Sir James Goldsmith and the Referendum Party in 1997 before being recruited to Tory HQ by William Hague when he was leader. Tipped for ministerial stardom. 81. (New) DAVID JONESSecretary of State for WalesAfter several years as Cheryl Gillan's loyal deputy both in opposition and government, this year David Jones was finally made Secretary of State for Wales upon her departure, making him the first Conservative Welsh Secretary who represents a Welsh constituency since Nicholas Edwards in 1987. A former lawyer, he is a fluent Welsh speaker and also used to be the Assembly Member for North Wales. Jones is by far one of the most interesting MPs on Twitter. 82. (New) HUGH ROBERTSON Minister of State at the Department of Culture, Media and SportRobertson was the government minister who oversaw the London Olympics this year. Post Olympics he was promoted from Parliamentary Under Secretary, to Minister of State for Sport. Not only will he been looking after the nation's sport, he is also in charge of maintaining the legacy of the Olympics especially tourism. The former Army officer got involved in gaffe when he reportedly said "You should damn well know who I am" to security guards refusing to let him into the Olympic grounds. Tipped as a future Chief Whip. 83. (New) DAVID GAUKEExchequer Secretary to the Treasury Described by many as "Osborne's safe pair of hands", David Gauke has kept a steady calmness as Exchequer Secretary for the last two years. He managed to survive the anger of tradesman up and down the country when he made controversial remarks that cash in hand was "morally wrong" - despite his wife being a corporate tax lawyer whose company boasted about their ability to reduce people's tax burden. He is a sure fire choice as Chief Secretary to the Treasury in a Conservative Government. 84. (New) MICHAEL FALLONMinister of State at the Department for Business, Innovation and SkillsThe Conservatives attack dog, Michael Fallon did the job Sayeeda Warsi was supposed to do when he served as Deputy Chairman of the Conservative Party. A favourite among the Conservative grassroots, Fallon was brought into the Business Department following the reshuffle to reign in the left wing tendencies of the Business Secretary Vince Cable. Upon his arrival at the department he said he would be a "voice for business" and start "relighting the bonfire of regulations". By any measure, he should be in the Cabinet. 85. (New) LIZ TRUSS Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at the Department for EducationOne of the bright young members of the Class of 2010, she founded the Free Enterprise Group which is thought in high regard by George Osborne and the Treasury. Its job is to foster an atmosphere of pro free market in a time of austerity, and to provide new policy ideas in hope of influencing the government. A co-author a number of books, she was recently made a minister at the Department for Education. She used to be in charge of the Liberal Democrats at Oxford University and campaigned to abolish the Monarchy. 86. (-23) NICK HERBERTFormer Minister of State for Police & Prison ReformThe man who helped to bring in the government's plans for elected police commissioners, Nick Herbert was expected to be a shoe-in for the cabinet. He resigned a Minister during the reshuffle, allegedly fed up of the lack of support for radical policies and the Yes Minister reality of the civil service. One of the brightest and most innovative thinkers of the Tory MPs, Herbert said he was going to be concentrating on "new ideas". 87. (New) SIMON BURNSMinister of State at the Department of TransportAfter a clear out of ministers at the Department of Health following the fiasco that was the Health and Social Care Bill, Simon Burns was moved to the Department for Transport. He has special responsibility for rail fares, HS2 and aviation, ensuring he will be in the spotlight as airport expansion becomes an ever increasing issue. Famed for calling Speaker Bercow "a stupid sanctimonious dwarf", Burns is a friend of former President Jimmy Carter and is very fond of the Clintons. 88. (New) ANNA SOUBRYParliamentary Under Secretary of State at the Department of HealthBefore being promoted in the reshuffle to minister, Anna Soubry was PPS to Simon Burns at the Department for Health. She immediately caused waves in the job by announcing her support for assisted suicide laws leading to the Department of Health having to deny it had any such plans. This was followed by an admittance that the Coalition government had "screwed up" NHS reform at a conference of medical professionals. Her indiscreet nature has made her a favourite with journalists. Described by one as "Edwina Currie on steroids". 89. (New) RUTH DAVIDSONLeader of the Scottish ConservativesRuth Davidson had big shoes to fill when Annabel Goldie stood down as Leader of the Scottish Conservatives after six years. She narrowly beat the more radical Murdo Fraser in the leadership contest. A young Scottish lesbian she is not your typical Tory, but she has yet to make a real impact in the job. The next few months will tell if she can step up the role, and also play a key part in the Scottish independence referendum. 90. (New) ZAC GOLDSMITHMP for Richmond ParkWith debates raging over government aviation policy, Goldsmith threw a grenade into policy discussions when he announced he would immediately stand down as a Tory MP and fight as independent if the government expanded Heathrow. The one time Cameroonian environmentalist was sacked last year as green envoy because he voted in favour of an EU referendum in the Commons. It has been reported that Goldsmith has had secret meetings with Boris Johnson over Heathrow, and there is speculation he could stand down in favour of Boris. 91. (New) ANDREA LEADSOMMP for South Northamptonshire A former Director at Barclays Bank, Andrea Leadsom entered Parliament in 2010 and last year founded and now runs the Fresh Start Project. 104 Conservative MPs turned up at their first meeting, with the aim of pushing the party in a more Eurosceptic direction and to redefine Britain's relationship with the EU. She didn't make many friends in Downing Street earlier this year when she called for Osborne to apologise to Ed Balls after implicating he was involved in the Libor scandal. 92. (New) KWASI KWARTENG Historian and MP for SpelthorneKwarteng has authored four books since he arrived in the Commons in 2010. He wrote a heavyweight tome on the British Empire, a book on transport policy, and co-authored a further two on general Conservative policy. It's amazing he gets the time to be an MP. Very bright, he was educated at Eton, Cambridge and Harvard. Many were surprised when Kwarteng was left on the backbenches in the reshuffle. 93. (-6) STUART POLAKDirector, Conservative Friends of Israel CFI has established itself as a highly effective lobby group. Polak regularly takes leading Conservatives on trips to Israel to educate them. The sceptics invariably return, if not indoctrinated, fully onside. A familiar face around the corridors of the Houses of Parliament, he has done more than most to promote Israel's case to the right of British politics. 94. (New) MARK LITTLEWOOD Director General of the Institute of Economic AffairsLittlewood became the first Director of the Institute of Economic Affairs to appear on Question Time. True to his style he controversially proposed that there were better free market alternatives to the NHS. Formerly Chief Press Spokesman for the Liberal Democrats, he is one of the best free market voices on the media and also recently became an independent advisor to Number 10. Never knowingly on message, the IEA has blossomed under his leadership. 95. (New) TIM KNOXDirector of the Centre for Policy StudiesThe Centre for Policy Studies has re-established itself as one of the most influential think tanks on the right. Working alongside the CPS's Chief Economist Ryan Bourne, Knox has overseen a renaissance at the CPS. With an increased number of influential reports and a boom in the number of their events, the CPS is on the rise. 96. (New) ALLISTER HEATHEditor of City AM and Telegraph Business columnistAs Editor of City AM, the free daily business newspaper distributed across London, Heath has seen the circulation rise to 100,000 copies a day making him one of the most influential voices in the London business community. He has created a network of free market journalists who provide some of the best libertarian content out there. The Frenchman also chaired the 2020 Tax Commission which produced an influential report investigating the ideal tax system for the UK. 97. (New) MARK PRISK Housing MinisterDuring the reshuffle Prisk took a sideways step from Business Minister to Housing Minister, replacing Grant Shapps. Prisk now faces one of the most challenging jobs in government, but has already pledged to work with the housing sector to draw up a long term plan to sort out the housing shortage in this country. If he performs well in this job too, he could be in the cabinet before too long. 98. (New) ROBERT HALFONMP for HarlowHalfon is a true Essex Man and an inveterate campaigner. He founded Right Angle, an online grassroots community aimed at creating a voice for the aspiring working class. Campaigns he has got involved with include lower taxes for lower earners, namely increasing the tax free allowance to £10,000, and Petrol Promise, campaign for cheap fuel prices. He is also a keen supporter of Conservatives joining trade unions. He himself is a member of the Prospect trade union. 99. (New) MARK HARPERMinister of State for ImmigrationFor the past two years Harper worked as Nick Clegg's deputy pushing the AV referendum through the Commons, and a valiant defender of the House of Lords reform which failed to make any progress. His loyalty was rewarded when he was made a Minister of State at the Home Office, with responsibility for immigration. He maybe a skilled performer but he has a tough challenge to take control of this poisoned chalice. 100. (New) JOHN HAYESEnergy MinisterMany were surprised when competent Energy Minister Charles Hendry was sacked in favour of John Hayes, who was previously at BIS. Hayes appointment to Energy has concerned some environmental groups as he is a known climate change sceptic who has past opposition to wind farms and other renewables. Many suspect he has been brought in to beef up Team Osborne in an ongoing dispute between the Chancellor and the Climate Change Secretary over the future of the UK's energy strategy. ?Ferdinand Marcos, elected in 1965, declared martial law in 1972, padlocking the legislature and the media, throwing opponents in jail and ruling by decree until a "people power" revolution threw him out of power in 1986. Marcos, as well as his relatives and allies, were accused of plundering billions of dollars during his reign, and the family was forced to flee to the United States. Mrs Marcos's ostentatious wearing of luxurious clothes and shoes, while most Filipinos endured poverty, came to symbolise the excesses of the family's time in power. However, after Ferdinand Marcos died in exile in 1989, his wife and children returned to the Philippines and slowly started rebuilding the family's power base. They have never been convicted of any crime, which they say is proof that the worst allegations against the family are baseless. The Marcos political momentum reached a peak in 2010, when Mrs Marcos won her congressional seat, Imee the governorship and Mr Marcos a spot in the Senate. When asked why Mrs Marcos and Imee wanted to seek second terms in office, their aides said they wanted to continue working on health, culture and other projects for the people of Ilocos Norte. The filing of candidacies for the mid-term elections began on Monday, with registration to close on Friday. Source: AFP ?It is my genetic legacy, then, to get snippy if a call-centre operator calls me by my first name. The idea of being vulnerable and bedbound in hospital, and then being clucked at by nurses a quarter of my age as though I were a child or a half-wit makes me shudder.But – and here’s the rub – a nurse who calls you “love” is unlikely to let you die of thirst. What you lose in dignity, you gain in care and I know which I’d prefer.Am I alone in finding it ridiculous that the NHS is fiddling about scolding staff who treat patients like people, rather than sacking the staff who don’t give a damn?When my time comes and I’m at the mercy of those who are supposed to look after me, but might not bother, I’ll be less exercised by demeaning endearments and rather more by the need for someone to empty my catheter and change the drip – in short, for someone just to care.A poise that puts us to shameWhen my 10-year-old daughter was little, she used to think her father was Boris Becker and that I was Myleene Klass and would get terribly excited when she saw “us” on telly, even though, spookily, we were never seen together.Unfortunately (oh, and dream on Myleene, you’ll never look as fabulous as me showering in the garden a white bikini), those days have, sadly, long gone. But the three-year-old has restored my faith by promoting me to the Duchess of Cambridge. An easy mistake to make as we are both, um, women. Before I frogmarch you off to the ophthalmologist, I want to thank you, darling girl, and tell you that as a token of Mummy’s appreciation you shall have dripping on your breadcrusts tonight.Anyway, I don’t know about you, but I was mighty impressed by how graceful I looked at Wimbledon. No gurning, no bellowing, à la Eliza Doolittle “Come on, Murray, move yer bloomin’ a----”.How could we ever have dubbed her “Waity Katie” and made unkind remarks about her hoping her Prince would come (back) and plight his troth with his dead mother’s engagement ring? I trust the unpleasant snobs given to muttering “doors to manual” as a reminder of her mother’s cabin crew career have been demoted, or better still, defenestrated. Kate is the least common commoner to be starring in her very own fairytale. Truly, the nation could not have found a prettier, more poised princess if they’d gone to central casting. Or indeed, my house.Kiss goodbye to the XXX pleaseIn the film When Harry Met Sally, there’s a memorable moment when Billy Crystal explains why he never drives any of his girlfriends to the airport, on principle. The principle, in this case, being that one day, after the first flush of romance has passed, his partner will turn round to him, reproachfully, and demand to know why he never drives her to the airport any more. It’s the same with cutesy XXXs on office emails, which a new survey reveals are a major source of awkwardness to 44 per cent of workers. Presumably, it’s only 44 per cent because the other 56 per cent have already hanged themselves in the boardroom.There are few experiences more conducive to paranoia than reaching the bottom of an email from a senior colleague and discovering that the toe-curling cyberkiss (however unwelcome, normally) is ominously absent.A right camping carry-on awaitsBy the time you read this, I shall be off on my jolly camping weekend in Trench Foot sur la Mer, drinking hot toddies ’neath lowering summer skies and a B&Q gazebo.We will no doubt already have run out of dry clothes for the children and the dog will have developed webbed paws, but there is a corner of a flooded field where I shall testily insist that everyone is Having A Great Time.It will be like Glastonbury, but muddier and instead of Kate Moss sashaying in tiny shorts and gum boots, there will be me in fetching flappy rain trousers.So let’s raise a toast to British Fun – OMG, we’ve run out of booze! Pack up this minute! Endless rain may be a downer, but a dry weekend – now that’s a real disaster.?EATYou can’t go to Lausanne without having a fondue. Pinte Besson, the city’s oldest restaurant, is where the locals head after a day on the nearby slopes () For a light, delicious dinner try the trendy (but not annoyingly so) Nomade. The lamb chops are especially good () DRINKYatus is a lively wine bar that seems to be a favourite among locals. It’s where the Genevois go when in town, too () Le Barbare is the place to get your hot-chocolate fix. Here it is more like a dessert so it’s just as well it’s on the climb up to the Cathedral of Notre-Dame () SHOPBongénie is a good spot if you’re after contemporary designers. Pick up Carven, See by Chloé and Isabel Marant, then head to the restaurant for lunch (place Saint-François 10) Lavaux Vinorama is part of the region’s Unesco World Heritage vineyards. It’s a concept store that brings the area’s best wines under one roof () On Saturdays the city’s quiet, cobbled streets turn into a vibrant street market. Go early to pick up anything from handmade jewellery to handpicked fruit (rue de Bourg) DO See a show by the Rudra Béjart ballet. If there are no performances while you’re there, you can watch the company rehearse () Many of the great works in the Collection de L’Art Brut are by people with mental illness, making for a moving gallery experience () The Musée de l’Elysée, housed in a picture-perfect 18th-century villa, is dedicated to photography. Check out works by 20th-century photograhers as well as up-and-coming talent from the area () BUY Visit the famous chocolate factory Cailler in Broc, just 30 minutes from Lausanne. The salty hazelnut milk chocolate is to die for () SPA Inside IO Soin de Soi you’ll find expert massages alongside 'wellness classes’ with top-notch yoga teachers () FLY WITHSwiss Air flies from Heathrow to Geneva, from £107 return ()?Women , 28 (3rd appearance at an Olympics) , 24 (1st Olympics) , 40 (6th Olympics) ------ Paula Radcliffe competing in the marathon at Beijing 2008ATHLETICS Men, 24 (decathlon) (2nd appearance at an Olympics) , 30 (1500m) (2nd Olympics) , 25 (4x400m) (2nd Olympics) 30 (discus) (1st Olympics) 34 (100m and 4x100m) (1st Olympics) 22 (110mh) (1st Olympics) 24 (100m and 4x100m) (1st Olympics) , 26 (200m and 4x100m) (1st Olympics) 28 (5000m and 10,000m) (2nd Olympics) 18 (100m and 4x100m) (1st Olympics) , 24 (high jump) (1st Olympics) 20 (400mh and 4x400m) (1st Olympics) , 26 (400mh and 4x400m) (1st Olympics) 33 (triple jump) (4th Olympics) 29 (50km walk) (1st Olympics) 26 (4x400m) (1st Olympics) 23 (400m* and 4x400m) (1st Olympics) , 26 (pole vault) (2nd Olympics) 29 (4x100m) (2nd Olympics) 27 (javelin) (1st Olympics) 33 (200m and 4x100m) (4th Olympics) 30 (5000m) (1st Olympics) 33 (marathon) (2nd Olympics) , 23 (discus) (1st Olympics) 22 (1500m) (1st Olympics) , 32 (shot put) (1st Olympics) , 20 (discus) (1st Olympics) 24 (800m) (1st Olympics) 29 (marathon) (1st Olympics) 19 (110mh) (1st Olympics) , 26 (800m) (2nd Olympics) , 25 (400m and 4x400m) (2nd Olympics) 24 (long jump) (2nd Olympics) 24 (hammer) (1st Olympics) 35 (3000mSC) (1st Olympics) 21 (4x100m) (1st Olympics) 31 (10,000m) (1st Olympics) 28 (4x400m) (3rd Olympics) 30 (long jump) (3rd Olympics) 31 (110mh) (3rd Olympics) 30 (800m) (1st Olympics) 30 (400m and 4x400m) (1st Olympics) 28 (400mh) (1st Olympics) 26 (4x100m) (2nd Olympics) Women 27 (200m) (1st Olympics) 39 (triple jump) (1st Olympics for Great Britain) 20 (pole vault) (1st Olympics) 30 (5000m* and 10,000m) (1st Olympics) , 25 (400mh) (1st Olympics) 27 (400m and 4x400m) (1st Olympics) 28 (pole vault) (2nd Olympics) 21 (4x400m) (1st Olympics) 28 (1500m) (2nd Olympics) 25 (1500m) (1st Olympics) 26 (heptathlon and 100mh) (1st Olympics) 29 (marathon) (1st Olympics) 26 (heptathlon) (1st Olympics) 20 (hammer) (1st Olympics) 27 (20km walk) (2nd Olympics) 18 (heptathlon) (1st Olympics) 21 (3000mSC) (1st Olympics) 33 (400m* and 4x400m) (3rd Olympics) 28 (400m and 4x400m) (3rd Olympics) 27 (4x400m) (2nd Olympics) 27 (100m* and 200m) (2nd Olympics) 32 (100m and 200m) (2nd Olympics) 38 (5000m and 10,000m) (4th Olympics) , 29 (5000m and 3000mSC) (2nd Olympics) 24 (100mh) (1st Olympics) 23 (long jump) (1st Olympics) , 34 (marathon) (5th Olympics) 30 (4x400m) (2nd Olympics) 29 (javelin) (3rd Olympics) , 23 (400mh) (1st Olympics) 21 (800m) (1st Olympics) 21 (1500m) (1st Olympics) , 38 (marathon) (2nd Olympics) ------ Chris Adcock and Imogen Bankier discuss tactics during the World Badminton Championships in 2011. BADMINTON Men 23 (1st appearance at an Olympics) , 25 (1st Olympics) Women 24 (1st appearance at an Olympics) 29 (1st Olympics) ------ Julie Page (pictured) is confident about Britain's chances at London 2012BASKETBALLMen 29 (1st appearance at an Olympics) 32 (1st Olympics) 26 (1st Olympics) 23 (1st Olympics) 27 (1st Olympics) 25 (1st Olympics) 23 (1st Olympics) 22 (1st Olympics) 31 (1st Olympics) 28 (1st Olympics) 38 (1st Olympics) 32 (1st Olympics) Women 22 (1st appearance at an Olympics) 24 (1st Olympics) 29 (1st Olympics) , 29 (1st Olympics) 19 (1st Olympics) 25 (1st Olympics) 24 (1st Olympics) 29 (1st Olympics) 35 (1st Olympics) 23 (1st Olympics) 28 (1st Olympics) 23 (1st Olympics) ------ Luke Campbell boxing in Sheffield in 2011BOXING Men , 24 (1st appearance at an Olympics) , 21 (1st Olympics) , 22 (1st Olympics) , 23 (1st Olympics) , 27 (1st Olympics) , 24 (1st Olympics) , 21 (1st Olympics) Women , 21 (1st appearance at an Olympics) , 29 (1st Olympics) 27 (1st Olympics) ------ David Florence at the Beijing 2008 GamesCANOE SLALOM Men , 33 (1st appearance at an Olympics) , 29 (2nd Olympics) , 30 (1st Olympics) , 32 (1st Olympics) Women , 24 (1st appearance at an Olympics) ------ Edward McKeever on route to gold at the World Cup in Poland 2012CANOE SPRINTMen’s K-1 200m 28 (1st appearance at an Olympics) Men’s K-2 200m 27 (1st appearance at an Olympics) 27(1st Olympics) Men’s K-1 1,000m 35 (4th appearance at an Olympics) Men’s C-1 200m & Men’s C1 1000m 25 (1st appearance at an Olympics) Women’s K-1 200m 22 (2nd appearance at an Olympics) Women’s K-1 500m (1st appearance at an Olympics) Women's K-2 500m Abigail Edmonds, 22 (1st appearance at an Olympics) Women’s K-4 500m Jessica Walker (as above) Rachel Cawthorn (as above) 34 (1st appearance at an Olympics) 23 (1st Olympics) ------ Can Sir Chris Hoy add to his four Olympic gold medals in LondonCYCLINGTrack (Sprint): 19 , 36 (4th Olympics) 24 (2nd Olympics) , 31 (3rd Olympics) 21 (1st Olympics) Track (Endurance): 24 (2nd appearance at an Olympics) , 27 (2nd Olympics) 37 (2nd Olympics) Peter Kennaugh, 22 (1st Olympics) 21 (1st Olympics) 23 (1st Olympics) 25 (1st Olympics) 26 (2nd Olympics) 19 (1st Olympics) BMX: , 23 (2nd appearance at an Olympics) , 23 (2nd Olympics) Cross Country Mountain Biking: , 30 (3rd appearance at an Olympics) , 21 (1st Olympics) Men’s Road:, 27 (2nd appearence at an Olympics) 27 (1st Olympics) 35 (1st Olympics) 25 (1st Olympics) 32 (4th Olympics) Women’s Road:, 23 (1st appearence at an Olympics) , 29 (3rd Olympics) 22 (1st Olympics) , 29 (2nd Olympics) ------ Tom Daley at the 2010 Commonwealth GamesDIVING Men 18 (2nd appearance at an Olympics) 17 (1st Olympics) 18 (1st Olympics) , 25 (2nd Olympics) (4th Olympics) Women 23 (1st appearance at an Olympics) 15 (1st Olympics) 23 (2nd Olympics) 27 (2nd Olympics) , 31 (1st Olympics) 26 (2nd Olympics) 17 (1st Olympics) ------ Charlotte Dujardin on Valegro has been in great form this seasonEQUESTRIAN - Dressage Team Men, 44 (4th appearance at an Olympics) Women, 27(2nd appearance at an Olympics) , 25 (1st Olympics) IndividualMen 57 (4th appearance at an Olympics) ------ Zara Phillips competing at Bramham Horse TrialsEQUESTRIAN - Eventing Men, 43 (4th appearance at an Olympics) Women 41(2nd appearance at an Olympics) 51 (6th Olympics) , 31 (1st Olympics) 35 (1st Olympics) ------ Nick Skelton who has selected for his sixth OlympicsEQUESTRIAN - Jumping 26 (1st appearance at an Olympics) 52 (1st appearance for Great Britain at an Olympics) 29 (2nd Olympics) 54 (6th Olympics) ------ Natalia Sheppard (right) trains with team-mate Anna BentleyFENCING Men 20 (1st appearance at an Olympics) 21 (1st Olympics) , 28 (3rd Olympics) 21 (1st Olympics) Women 31, (1st appearance at an Olympics) 30 (2nd Olympics) 21 (1st Olympics) 28 (1st Olympics) 25 (1st Olympics) 21 (1st Olympics) ------ England Women's all-time top goal scorer Kelly SmithFOOTBALL Men 22 (1st appearance at an Olympics) 32 (1st Olympics) 22 (1st Olympics) 19 (1st Olympics) 20 (1st Olympics) 22 (1st Olympics) 23 (1st Olympics) 22 (1st Olympics) 38 (1st Olympics) 21 (1st Olympics) 24 (1st Olympics) 22 (1st Olympics) 23 (1st Olympics) 21 (1st Olympics) 21 (1st Olympics) 22 (1st Olympics) 23 (1st Olympics) 23 (1st Olympics) Women Eniola Aluko, 25 (1st appearance at an Olympics) 27 (1st Olympics) 27 (1st Olympics) 22 (1st Olympics) 31 (1st Olympics) 24 (1st Olympics) 31 (1st Olympics) 24 (1st Olympics) 21 (1st Olympics) 23 (1st Olympics) 27 (1st Olympics) 25 (1st Olympics) 33 (1st Olympics) 30 (1st Olympics) 28 (1st Olympics) 24 (1st Olympics) 23 (1st Olympics) 32 (1st Olympics) ------ This will be three time world champion Beth Tweddle's last chance of an Olympic medal GYMNASTICS Men’s Artistic19 (1st appearance at an Olympics) 21 (1st Olympics) 23 (2nd Olympics) 23 (1st Olympics) 19 (ist Olympics) Women’s Artistic 23 (2nd appearance at an Olympics) , 18 (1st Olympics) 15 (1st Olympics) , 27 (3rd Olympics) 20 (2nd Olympics) Trampoline Individual Female26 ((1st appearance at an Olympics) Rhythmic Individual 21 (1st appearance at an Olympics) Rhythmic Group 18 (1st appearance at an Olympics) 18 (1st Olympics) 20 (1st Olympics) 17 (1st Olympics) 22 (1st Olympics) 19 (1st Olympics) ------ Lyn Byl shoots at goal during the London Handball Cup and 2012 test event HANDBALL Men 21 (1st appearance at an Olympics) 25 (1st Olympics) 22 (1st Olympics) 26 (1st Olympics) 31 (1st Olympics) 23 (1st Olympics) 29 (1st Olympics) 22 (1st Olympics) 28 (1st Olympics) 24 (1st Olympics) 25 (1st Olympics) 22 (1st Olympics) 29 (1st Olympics) 24 (1st Olympics) Women32 (1st appearance at an Olympics) 22 (1st Olympics) 22 (1st Olympics) 25 (1st Olympics) 29 (1st Olympics) 23 (1st Olympics) 18 (1st Olympics) 28 (1st Olympics) , 21 (1st Olympics) (1st Olympics) 22 (1st Olympics) 33(1st Olympics) 23 (1st Olympics) Zoe van der Weel, 21 (1st Olympics) ------ Laura Bartlett, Chloe Rogers and Alexandra Danson after playing Argentina in the Champions Trophy in February 2012HOCKEY 23 (1st Olympics) 31 (2nd Olympics) 28 (2nd Olympics) 31 (1st Olympics) 29 (1st Olympics) 31 (3rd Olympics) , 24 (3rd Olympics)* 29 (2nd Olympics) 28 (1st Olympics) 27 (1st Olympics) 19 (1st Olympics) , 28 (3rd Olympics)* 31 (3rd Olympics) 24 (1st Olympics) 29 (2nd Olympics)* 28 (2nd Olympics) Women 26 (1st appearance at an Olympics) 23 (2nd Olympics) , 26 (2nd Olympics) , 27 (2nd Olympics) 27 (1st Olympics) 24 (1st Olympics) 28 (2nd Olympics) , 30 (3rd Olympics) 27 (2nd Olympics) , 33 (2nd Olympics) 31 (2nd Olympics) 21 (1st Olympics) 24 (1st Olympics) , 32 (3rd Olympics) 27 (1st Olympics) 24 (1st Olympics) ------ Euan Burton competing at the 2008 Beijing OlympicsJUDO Men , 29 (1st appearance at an Olympics) 33 (2nd Olympics) 35 (3rd Olympics) 23 (1st Olympics) 29 (1st Olympics) 23 (1st Olympics) 29 (1st Olympics) Women 33 (3rd appearance at an Olympics) 30 (2nd Olympics) 25 (1st Olympics) 34 (3rd Olympics 21 (1st Olympics) , 25 (1st Olympics) ***** 20 (1st Olympics) **** ------ Four of the best: Sam Weale, Samantha Murray, Mhairi Spence and Nick Woodbridge during the team announcement at the Royal Naval College, LondonMODERN PENTATHLON Men , 30 (2nd Olympics) , 25 (2nd Olympics) Women , 26 (1st Olympics) , 22 (1st Olympics) ------ Mark Hunter, right, and lightweight sculls partner Zac Purchase will be aiming for gold at the London Olympics once more ROWING Men Men’s Pair: 22 (1st Olympics) 22 (1st Olympics) Men’s Four:  , 28  (3rd Olympics) , 28 ( Olympics) , 30 (2nd Olympics) , 33  (3rd Olympics) Men’s Eight: , 33 (2nd Olympics) , 25 (1st Olympics) , 29 (3rd Olympics) 20 (1st Olympics) , 29 (2nd Olympics) , 26 (1st Olympics) , 24 (1st Olympics) , 40 (4th Olympics) (cox), 32 (1st Olympics) Men’s Single Scull:  , 29 (3rd Olympics) Men’s Double Scull:   , 24 (1st Olympics) , 26   (1st Olympics) Men’s Quadruple Scull:   23 (1st Olympics) , 30 (2nd Olympics) , 31 (2nd Olympics) , 33 (4th Olympics) Lightweight Men’s Four: , 28 (1st Olympics) 22 (1st Olympics) , 27 (2nd Olympics) , 27   (1st Olympics) Lightweight Men’s Double Scull:  , 33 (3rd Olympics) , 26   (2nd Olympics) Women Women’s Pair: , 26   (1st Olympics) , 27 (1st Olympics) Women's Eight: , 28 (1st Olympics) , 27 (2nd Olympics) , 29 (2nd Olympics) , 30 (1st Olympics) , 27 (2nd Olympics) , 28 (2nd Olympics) , 24 (1st Olympics) , 24 (1st Olympics) , 29 (2nd Olympics) 26 (2nd Olympics) (cox), 29 (2nd Olympics) NB Eight from the ten rowers listed will be confirmed as racing in the eight. The two rowers not racing in the eight will be selected as reserves. Women’s Double Scull:   , 36 (4th Olympics) , 29 (2nd Olympics) Women’s Quadruple Scull: , 32   (3rd Olympics) , 31 (4th Olympics) , 29 (2nd Olympics) , 27 (1st Olympics) Lightweight Women’s Double Scull: 21 (1st Olympics) , 26 (1st Olympics) ------ Ben Ainslie secures gold in the Skandia Sail for Gold Regatta in Weymouth, Dorset in 2011SAILING Men , 35 (5th appearance at an Olympics) , 25 (1st Olympics) , 31 (4th Olympics) , 34 (2nd Olympics) , 33 (2nd Olympics) , 25 (1st Olympics) , 36 (4th Olympics) , 31 (2nd Olympics) , 35 (2nd Olympics) Women , 32 (2nd appearance at an Olympics) , 32 (1st Olympics) , 21 (1st Olympics) , 25 (1st Olympics) , 24 (1st Olympics) , 29 (2nd Olympics) , 25 (1st Olympics) ------ Cartridges fly out of Peter Wilson's gun at the London 2012 shooting test eventSHOOTING Men, 36 (2nd appearance at an Olympics) 35 (5th Olympics) , 31 (2nd Olympics) , 21 (1st Olympics) 29 (2nd Olympics) 22 (1st Olympics) , 25 (1st Olympics) Women , 39 (2nd appearance at an Olympics) 27 (1st Olympics) Charlotte Kerwood, 25 (2nd Olympics) , 20 (1st Olympics) ------ Rebecca Adlington competes at the 2011 World Aquatics ChampionshipsSWIMMING Men 21 (1st appearance at an Olympics) 18 (1st Olympics) , 23 (2nd Olympics) , 29 (3rd Olympics) 30 (3rd Olympics) , 28 (3rd Olympics) 27 (2nd Olympics) , 25 (1st Olympics) 26 (1st Olympics) , 29 (3rd Olympics) 22 (1st Olympics) , 23 (1st Olympics) 18 (1st Olympics) 23 (1st Olympics) , 19 (1st Olympics) , 21 (1st Olympics) , 23 (2nd Olympics) , 25 (2nd Olympics) , 26 (1st Olympics) , 27 (2nd Olympics) 23 (1st Olympics) 21 (1st Olympics) , 21 (1st Olympics) Women , 23 (2nd appearance at an Olympics) 20 (1st Olympics) , 21 (1st Olympics) 19 (1st Olympics) , 20 (2nd Olympics) , 22 (2nd Olympics) , 25 (2nd Olympics) , 25 (3rd Olympics) 22 (1st Olympics) , 22 (2nd Olympics) , 26 (3rd Olympics) , 22 (2nd Olympics) 16 (1st Olympics) , 24 (2nd Olympics) 23 (1st Olympics) , 21 (2nd Olympics) 24 (1st Olympics) , 24 (2nd Olympics) , 23 (1st Olympics) 19 (1st Olympics) 19 (1st Olympics) ------ Jenna Randall in trainingSYNCHRONISED SWIMMING Women 20 (1st appearance at an Olympics) 18 (1st Olympics) 23 (1st Olympics) , 22 (2nd Olympics) 23 (1st Olympics) 21 (1st Olympics) 22 (1st Olympics) , 23 (2nd Olympics) 24 (1st Olympics) ------ Paul Drinkhall during the 2010 Commonwealth GamesTABLE TENNIS Men 29 (1st appearance at an Olympics) , 22 (1st Olympics) , 18 (1st Olympics) Women 29 (1st appearance at an Olympics) , 24 (1st Olympics) , 24 (1st Olympics) ------ Sarah Stevenson in trainingTAEKWONDO Men 21 (1st appearance at an Olympics) , 25 (1st Olympics) Women , 19 (1st appearance at an Olympics) 29 (2nd Olympics) ------ Andy Murray at the All England Club, WimbledonTENNIS Men Singles, 25 (2nd appearence at an Olympics) Doubles27 (1st appearance at an Olympics) Ross Hutchins, (1st Olympics) (as above) Jamie Murray, 26 (2nd Olympics) WomenSingles, 28 (1st appearance at an Olympics) Anne Keothavong, 28 (1st Olympics) Doubles 18 (1st appearance at an Olympics) 20 (1st Olympics) ------ The Brownlee bothers win the 2012 Blenheim triathlon TRIATHLONMen, 24 (2nd appearance at an Olympics) , 22 (1st Olympics) 33 (1st Olympics) Women 20 (1st appearance at an Olympics) 26 (1st Olympics) 28 (2nd Olympics) ------Shauna Mullin and Zara Dampney will both make their Olympic debuts VOLLEYBALL - Beach Women 26 (1st appearance at an Olympics) 27 (1st Olympics) Men 33 (1st appearance at an Olympics) 30 (1st appearance at an Olympics) Team GB men's volleyball team with the Olympic flameVOLLEYBALL - Indoor Men 23 (1st appearance at an Olympics) 22 (1st Olympics) Nathan French, 22 (1st Olympics) Jason Haldane, 41 (1st Olympics) 22 (1st Olympics) 29 (1st Olympics) 29 (1st Olympics) 23 (1st Olympics) 24 (1st Olympics) 29 (1st Olympics) 25 (1st Olympics) 25 (1st Olympics) Women, 26 (1st appearance at an Olympics) , 34 (1st Olympics) , 27 (1st Olympics) 22 (1st Olympics) 28 (1st Olympics) 18 (1st Olympics) 26 (1st Olympics) 28 (1st Olympics) 22 (1st Olympics) 26 (1st Olympics) 31 (1st Olympics) 29 (1st Olympics) Team GB's women's water polo team will be making their Olympic debut in London WATER POLO Men, 33 (1st appearance at an Olympics) , 23 (1st Olympics) , 23 (1st Olympics) , 20 (1st Olympics) , 21(1st Olympics) , 24 (1st Olympics) , 27 (1st Olympics) , 23 (1st Olympics) , 25 (1st Olympics) 27 (1st Olympics , 24 (1st Olympics) , 23 (1st Olympics) , 22 (1st Olympics) Women , 22 (1st appearance at an Olympics) , 22 (1st Olympics) , 19 (1st Olympics) , 21 (1st Olympics) , 30 (1st Olympics) , 25 (1st Olympics) 26 (1st Olympics) , 23 (1st Olympics) , 21 (1st Olympics) , 25 (1st Olympics) , 23 (1st Olympics) , 25 (1st Olympics) , 26 (1st Olympics) ------ Zoe Smith at the 2010 Commonwealth GamesWEIGHTLIFTING Men 26 (1st appearance at an Olympics) , 24 (1st Olympics) , 21 (1st Olympics) Women 36 (1st appearence at an Olympics) 18 (1st Olympics) ------ Ukraine-born Olga Butkeyvch at the London Test Event in 2011WRESTLING FREESTYLE Women26 (1st appearence at an Olympics) ?Fun at the fairground: Team GB handball player Chloe Wilcox enjoys some candyfloss during a day off from training - follow Chloe Picture: @CHLOEWILCOX86 / TWITTER?“Athletes have come from Ukraine and other countries, but this leaves no legacy from the Games,” he said. “I think it’s no good for the country.”For Spiteri, the absence of any support makes it virtually impossible to function as an elite athlete. She has no coach, is forced to fit training around her long working hours as a personal trainer and has to pay her own travel expenses to competitions. She been abroad to train just twice in her career, and both times she arranged the trip herself through internet networking with overseas wrestlers. “If I had been given a chance four years ago, I’d be looking at winning an Olympic medal now,” she said. “Even now, I reckon I’m two-thirds of the way there and if I didn’t have to work and could train full time for the next eight months and go to all the possible tournaments, then I know I could still do well at the Olympics.”Instead, Spiteri finds herself feeling like an outsider in her own country. Last weekend, at her request, British Wrestling agreed to give her a place in the test event, though the only weight category available to her was fighting women 7kg heavier. She enjoyed the competition but her marginalisation from the British set-up was an uncomfortable experience. “I got nothing from Team GB,” she said. “None of the team or the coaches talked to me. I had the Turkish team and the Iranian teams looking after me. I had the world champion from Turkey show me headlocks and different techniques. “They all see the potential in me and were looking after me when it should have been my own country looking after me.” Spiteri’s fight for recognition and support from her own governing body is all the more poignant given her compelling story. Diagnosed at the age of three with a swelling on her brain and complex epilepsy, she developed profound behavioural and communication problems akin to severe autism and, when she was six, was excluded from mainstream education. Health professionals recommended 24-hour residential schooling and a prescription of the behavioural drug Ritalin and it took a determined battle by her mother to get her a place in a special needs school near their home in Dagenham, Essex. Remarkably, by the age of 13, Spiteri’s condition had improved so much that she returned to mainstream education and went on to gain 10 GSCEs, two A-levels and a BTEC in sports science before attending Brunel University, where she graduated this year with a sports science degree. Along the way, she also picked up numerous awards for her community work. She calculates she has carried about 3,000 hours of volunteering, including three years as a ‘Crossroads’ sports coach working with disabled children. Her love and aptitude for sport was, says Spiteri, a turning point in her own development because she was driven by the desire to prove herself. Taking part in a sporting summer scheme in 2007, she was spotted by coaches from a London wrestling club and invited to try the sport out. Within less than a year she was the English junior champion. “My aim was always to go to the Olympics and win a medal so that I would have a story to tell young people that no matter what your problem is in life, you can still achieve things,” she said. But a heart-warming story will not be enough to get Spiteri to the Olympics, and British Wrestling chairman Malcolm Morley warned recently that the sport was not prepared to select an Eddie the Eagle. Spiteri bridles at the comparison, pointing to the fact that when she funded herself to compete at last year’s Canada Cup and was drawn against Canadian three-time world champion Martine Dugrenier, she lasted until the end of the second round of the three-round contest. “No disrespect to Eddie the Eagle, but I’ve proved that I’m at a good standard,” she said. “I stood up to the world champion with no development behind me and no one coaching me, so imagine what I could do with some support.” ?London 2012 Olympics: Equestrian Latest equestrian news, images, updates in the build-up to the London 2012 Olympic Games. ?The British side came out in fighting in the second half, with Alex Danson scoring from a penalty corner within three minutes to take their lead to a more comfortable 3-1.They were soon on the defensive as Korea scored twice to equalise. Han Hye-Lyoung fired a penalty corner move through Storry's legs and a long pass from the inside-left whisked to an unmarked Park Mi-hyun to deflect in at the far post.But with ten minutes to go Georgie Twigg reversed the ball into goal after Richardson returned it back into the circle following a poor penalty corner. Minutes later Chloe Rogers tapped in another goal for a 5-3 lead.Leicester midfielder Rogers said the team had played for their captain. “She’s a fantastic player, she’s our captain, she’s our leader. But we’ve got other great players around her who can step up to the mark and deal with it,” she said. “You’re always going to miss a great player but we dealt with it and we did that for her today.”The official twitter account for Great Britain hockey ran a hashtag during the match, #winforkate.Great Britain have now won both of their matches, putting them at the top of their six-team group alongside Holland. Their next match is on Thursday against Belgium, the lowest-ranked team in the competition. Great Britain must finish the group stages in the top two in order to progress to the semi-final, where they play for the right to contest gold.Alex Danson was being checked by doctors last night and the extent of her injury was unclear.It is hoped 32 year-old defender Walsh can return to the Olympic village on Wednesday. Head coach Danny Kerry said the surgeon was adamant Walsh would be at no medical risk should she continue to play.Kerry said: “The surgeon has said that basically now her jaw has titanium plates in it it is stronger than it was previously so there is no medical risk to her playing."The real issue is her recovery from surgery and people react to general anaesthetic in different ways and that is currently what we are monitoring."The other issue is the level of pain and whether that can be kept under control."Kerry said he would make the decision on whether Walsh would participate in the rest of the Games, following consultation with his support staff.Midfielder Helen Richardson took on the captaincy for the match against Korea.She said: “Obviously these are not the circumstances that I would have liked. But to lead this team is amazing, especially at an Olympic Games. The team showed character in bucket loads today. To go up, get level and then come back, to keep pushing. There’s plenty of belief here and plenty of character. It was brilliant.”?Nigel and Rosemary West, who live with their daughter less than a mile from the school, said she was making a good recovery following treatment. In a statement issued by Birmingham Children's Hospital, the teenager's father said: "We would like to thank all students, parents and teachers who helped Chloe at the scene. "We do not know the names of all those who helped but we look forward to meeting them as soon as we can. "We'd also like to thank the emergency services who responded so quickly and gave Chloe the very best of care, both at the scene and at the hospital."Requesting that the family be afforded privacy while Chloe continues her recovery, Mr West concluded the statement by saying: "The surgeons have done a remarkable job of closing Chloe's wounds and are confident of a good recovery. "However, whilst the physical scars may fade, the memories of the day's events will remain forever."The school, a specialist science college, was closed in the aftermath of the incident but will reopen as normal on Monday. ?"Discrimination like this has no place in modern society and it is right that these rules are repealed. These long overdue reforms will send out a positive message that the stigmatisation of people who have mental health problems should not be tolerated." Mr Miliband added: "These changes will help bring public understanding and attitudes towards mental health into the 21st Century. "They will send a message that discrimination against people with mental ill health has no place in modern Britain. "If people with experience of mental ill health play a full part in public life, our country will be a better place for it." Charles Walker, a Conservative MP who has previously spoken movingly about his battle with mental illness, was among those who supported the new law. "I am delighted to say that I have been a practising fruitcake for 31 years," he told MPs. "What we're seeing is an absolute sea-change in the reporting of mental health problems. There's still some distance to go but things are improving and they are improving quickly." The legislation repeals part of the 1983 Mental Health Act which forces MPs and members of the devolved assemblies to stand down if they have been sectioned for more than six moths.It also relaxes the rules on jury selection and company directorships as they apply to mental illness. Mr Barwell said: "It is high time we dragged the law of the land into the 21st century. My Bill's purpose is very simple: to tackle the last legal form of discrimination in our society."To our shame the law of the land still discriminates against those with a mental health condition. "An MP or a company director can be removed from their job because of mental ill health even if they go on to make a full recovery. Many people who are fully capable of performing jury service are ineligible to do so. "The law as it stands sends out a clear message that if someone has a mental health condition, their contribution to public life is not welcome. That is an affront to a decent civilised society." Chloe Smith, a Cabinet Office minister, confirmed that the Government was giving its "full backing" to the Bill. "It cannot be right that in the 21st century it is possible for somebody to be automatically expelled from this place, from the House of Commons, because they have had a mental illness," she said. "It sends out entirely the wrong message that if you have mental health problems, your contribution is not welcome in public life, not only for the House of Commons but of course also on a jury and in a directorship." The Bill, which will now go on to the next stage of the Parliamentary process, has the support of mental health charities and the Royal College of Phychiatrists.?'The idea was a direct response to a growing need,’ says Anxiety UK’s chief executive, Nicky Lidbetter, who attributes this growth to the 2008 credit crunch. 'We were noticing a marked increase in callers to our helpline, many of whom had previously managed their anxiety but were really struggling now that so many real-life worries and practical difficulties were piling on top.’ NHS outpatient appointments for anxiety disorders across the country have quadrupled in the past four years, and it’s estimated that up to 2.2 million people in Britain are sufferers. Lidbetter says that among callers to Anxiety UK, women outnumber men by a ratio of about 60 to 40, although this could simply reflect the fact that women are more likely to come forward for help. While causes are thought to be a mixture of genetic, environmental and lifestyle factors, the standard NHS treatment for anxiety disorder is antidepressants and six sessions with a therapist. 'That’s all well and good – but then the therapy comes to an end and you’re back in the real world,’ says Lidbetter. 'There doesn’t seem to be much help beyond that. We had the idea of recruiting volunteers and training them to act as mentors. They’re not clinicians, they’re almost role models, saying, “I’ve been there – and I’m living proof that you can get to a better place.”’Now in its second year, the project supports people suffering from a range of anxiety disorders such as generalised anxiety disorder (GAD), panic attacks, agoraphobia, claustrophobia and OCD. Given Bev’s long struggle with social anxiety, it’s not surprising that six sessions with an NHS therapist was not enough to turn her life around. But the mentoring scheme might be. 'I’ve never been comfortable in social situations,’ she says. 'I was an overweight child and always had a fear of being judged. It’s hard to pinpoint what frightens me. There’s a bit of paranoia, a vulnerability, fear for my safety.’ These anxieties were manageable until the birth of Bev’s first child 16 years ago. She and her husband, Ian, were living in Manchester where Ian worked as a transport planner. 'When Stuart was born I felt overwhelmed and worried that I couldn’t look after him properly,’ she says. 'Very soon that escalated to not wanting to go outside with him on my own.’ The prospect of leaving the house without Ian brought on a rush of intense physical symptoms. 'I’d start shaking and feel unable to breathe,’ she says. 'I’d get “shushing” in my ears. My body would freeze.’Rather than seek help Bev sought to avoid these feelings at any cost, with Ian’s help. Worried that 18-month-old Stuart was missing out by being stuck indoors, the couple sent him to private nursery, even though they struggled to afford it. Ian switched to night work so he could do the nursery run. Their daughter, Caitlin, was born four years later and again Ian did the juggling. There were times he’d get up at 5am for a trip to Tesco. It was a life half-lived. 'I had no close friendships as I didn’t want people to know,’ says Bev. 'I could pick up the children or even go on holidays so long as I was with someone – usually Ian or my dad. On my own, I couldn’t even cut the grass in the front garden. Loneliness was the hardest thing – watching people doing things on TV, living their lives. The only person I’d speak to beyond family was the person bringing the online grocery delivery. Even then, it was hard to open the door.’Last year, following the death of her father, Bev finally went to her GP. 'I was close to my dad so it was a terrible bereavement,’ she says. 'But it also made me look at my own life. And my life was rubbish.’Antidepressants and six sessions of cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) helped. 'The CBT helped me talk about my anxieties properly for the first time and face up to them, starting with small steps like going into the garden. By the end I could walk to the local shop – which was great – but I didn’t want to stop there. We looked into private therapy but the fees were astronomical.’ Then Bev read about the mentoring scheme and contacted Anxiety UK. 'When I was told my mentor was 23 years old with long blonde hair, I thought, “Thanks a lot! A blonde goddess!”’ For her part, Chloe (the 'blonde goddess’) had been asked to mentor following a student placement at Anxiety UK. Her own experience of OCD at 13 years old put her in a strong position to help. 'It was mainly at night-time,’ says Chloe. 'I’d have to have my shoes in pairs and everything lined up perfectly on my desk. I’d check the back door was locked 10 times and that the electric sockets were all off. Then I’d have to touch the bedside table so many times and turn the light on and off. It literally took hours out of my day.’Though she doesn’t know the cause, Chloe wonders if her disorder was learned or inherited – several family members suffer from anxiety or panic attacks. She was treated with CBT and in the 10 years since has managed well. 'From time to time I’ll think, “If you don’t touch that door handle four times, you’ll fail your exams,”’ she says. 'I’ll start catastrophising. I’ll get a tightness in my chest.’ Occasionally, Chloe will touch the door handle to neutralise the anxiety, but more often she’ll push that thought away. 'Managing anxiety is an ongoing process,’ she says. 'You’ll never be rid of it – it’s about being able to still live your life.’Chloe and Bev hit it off from their first meeting in a leisure-centre café. 'Really luckily, we just clicked,’ says Chloe. 'There was an instant rapport and we both disclosed a lot. It’s like a confidential, safe, non-judgmental space for both of us.’ Bev agrees. 'It’s more friendly than therapy, you get more feedback,’ she says. 'It helps me to know that even someone bright like Chloe has issues. We bounce ideas off one another and Chloe’s confidence in me makes me feel I can do things.’Though the two have been meeting for little more than a month, Bev has already started self-defence classes – one of Chloe’s suggestions – and mastered public transport. 'Ian has been so patient, but when someone is that good to you it’s hard to push yourself out of your comfort zone,’ she says. 'It’s helped to have Chloe say, “Why don’t you get a bus and meet me in Starbucks?” I wouldn’t call it “pressure”, but I don’t want to let her down.’Dawn Perry, 34, is another mentee who has benefited from the scheme. Although her six months of mentoring has come to an end, she and her mentor, Emmy Smit, 50, have become firm friends. Dawn approached the project after she read about it in her local library. A single mother with a four-year-old son, Dawn was struggling with GAD, which has overtaken panic attacks as the most common anxiety problem seen at Anxiety UK. 'It’s excessive worry,’ says Dawn. 'You literally wake up feeling anxious and overthink every little thing you have to do, any place you have to go. You anticipate every possible problem, every worst-case scenario, then try to find ways of avoiding them. There’s always so much happening in your head, it’s hard to focus on anything. It’s exhausting.’Emmy was the perfect person to help. Married with two teenage children, she had calmed her own anxieties as a young adult through 'mindfulness’ techniques. 'I’d returned from travelling and was feeling anxious and unsettled,’ she says. 'My brother introduced me to the ideas of mindfulness and it changed my life. I wanted to see if it could help someone else.’ It certainly helped Dawn. 'From the moment we met, Emmy was so motivated, enthusiastic and energetic,’ says Dawn. 'The idea of “mindfulness” is to focus on being in the moment and stop forecasting. If a worrying thought comes I don’t engage with it and let it spiral. Instead, I visualise it and put it in a balloon or a cloud and let it go by. It sounds so simple, but for me it has been so effective.’Under Emmy’s mentoring, Dawn has signed up to study psychology at the Open University. 'I couldn’t have asked for a better outcome,’ says Dawn. 'Her belief in me has inspired me to do different things and get on with my life.’ Likewise, Dawn has inspired Emmy. 'Dawn is full of ideas,’ says Emmy. 'She started a Facebook support group for people with mental health problems and now I want to do something similar around mindfulness. It’s a mutually inspiring relationship.’Anxiety UK now hopes to roll out the mentoring project beyond Manchester, starting with the surrounding areas of Trafford, Oldham and Stockport. 'It’s quite demanding to run in terms of recruiting the right volunteer mentors, training them and matching them up,' says Nicky Lidbetter. 'But the results really speak for themselves.’ For Bev, a door is opening. 'I don’t think my anxieties will ever go away, but the more things I do, the easier it gets. My aim now is to get a job. My family have always loved me – they have to, we’re family! But it makes such a difference to know there’s someone else who accepts me. It’s so much easier to go out into the world when you know there’s someone in it who thinks you’re OK.’ ; 08444 775774 ?Midwest USA Our Midwest USA homepage features holiday ideas and travel advice including expert hotel reviews and all our latest Midwest USA articles. ?Miranda Seymour Miranda Seymour is a regular book reviewer for the Telegraph. A novelist and biographer, she has written many books, including the prize-winning memoir: In My Father's House. Her most recent book, Chaplin's Girl, drew on the unpublished records of Virginia Cherrill, the entrancing female lead in City Lights. Miranda Seymour is currently writing a study of England and Germany: The Pity of War.?Julia Bradbury said: "There is something wonderfully British about going for a walk; planning a route and getting everything together before heading out into the great outdoors. “Our amazing network of footpaths gives us access to a wonderful array of magical and spellbinding coast and countryside. I'm going to be looking for walks that capture the spirit of a place and take you on a journey of discovery."Fiona Reynolds, director-general of the National Trust, and an avid walker, said the nominated walk could be anything from a “family favourite" to an "ancient route with clues to the history of Britain". There are already hundreds of free downloadable walks on the National Trust website to choose from. ?Her friends were becoming parents and one friend in particular insisted that she must want children really. 'But I never did. My biological clock just did not tick. I enjoyed friends' children, but I could see they were knackered and I remember sending an email to some friends because they had been moaning about how tired they were and how awful their kids were, and I said, "Why do you have them?" And one replied, "It's because of love." And I think it's true. When I met my husband I fell in love with him and children just seemed to fit.'They met in 2002 at British Waterways in Watford, where she was the commercial manager for the southern region and David was an accountant. He was 27, she was 41 – and it was she who had just run her first triathlon. 'He also wanted to do a triathlon and he came out running with me one lunchtime. I thought, He's got quite athletic legs. ' They trained together in the evenings and weekends. She thought he couldn't possibly be interested in her, because she was too old. 'Apparently, he was thinking on similar lines: She will think I am too young. 'After three months she sent David a letter. It said, 'When I saw you yesterday I would have liked to have held your hand. I hope I haven't ruined a good friendship by saying that.'He moved in six months later and they got married in 2004. 'I said, "Look, I might be too old [for children]," and he said, "Let's give it a go." Six weeks later I was pregnant.' She had Alexander when she was 42; Isabella when she was 44. They weren't planning on having any more children. Then, in January 2010, she thought she might be having the menopause and came off the pill. Edward was conceived three months later. She took six months maternity leave for both Alexander and Isabella (plus her husband took six months' paternity leave when Isabella was six months old). Briggs then went part-time when her daughter was one. At the end of 2007, the couple moved from Bristol to Carlisle (for 'a better quality of life') where she worked as a development manager for the North West Regional Development Agency. Briggs was made redundant in April 2010 and was about to set up her own business when she discovered she was pregnant again. 'I've loved having a year at home with Edward.' But she says they can't afford for her not to work indefinitely, and now is looking for a managerial or surveying job.Briggs puts her good fortune down to genes ('My grandmother is a very young-looking 99') and exercise. She goes running and works out to a pilates DVD. She says older motherhood is the same as mothering at any age: exhaustion, career anxiety, expense. The only difference is that she is the same age as her children's headmistress, singing teacher and the lady who runs the breakfast club. And they are all grandmothers. 'Women are more independent now,' she says. 'It took until I was 40 for me to grow up and be ready to settle down.' Iain McMath, 54 found new love after his wife of 20 years left him. He now lives with Sue Cocking, 47, in north London. He has two sons, aged 26 and 24, and Sue has a daughter, 19One April evening in 2004 Iain McMath came home for dinner and was told that his 20-year marriage was over. 'My wife said she was approaching 50 and that she felt the need to go and do something else, to be on her own, or she would regret it.' He was heartbroken.His younger son was 18; his elder, at university. 'I thought it was a time of less pressure on us as a couple,' he recalls. 'We had finally got over all the hurdles. Had more income.' He thought they would be together for the rest of their lives. 'Obviously my wife felt differently.'McMath had trained as an arborist, but took on a sales position working for an agricultural suppliers when he realised there was no money in trees. He met his wife in a shared house, when he was 22 and she was 24. He worked his way up to become a marketing director and was appointed a CEO in 2002. When his marriage ended, they were living in a large farmhouse with a tennis court in Sussex.He felt wretched for his sons. They agreed not to tell the boys until after their exams in June, and to give it a positive spin. 'We sold it in a way that was amicable – that we wanted to do different things. I felt really guilty about them, although they probably got over it relatively quickly. Most of their friends' parents are divorced, so it's almost normal.'By the autumn of 2005 McMath was living in a bachelor flat in Guildford. After a hostile, protracted divorce, in the end they agreed a 50/50 share of their assets.'After the initial shock and the pain, I did find it freeing. What I came to realise is that when you get together when you're young, you're not sure what you want to do or what you want to be, and I discovered I had moulded my behaviour to suit my wife. When we did finally separate, the difference between our attitudes was marked. So when I was buying furniture for the flat I could buy all sorts of things I wouldn't normally have bought.' A life-size ceramic cow, for example, and a series of abstract paintings. 'My wife's taste was more traditional.'After a year McMath decided he wanted a relationship. He had started going to the gym, having never been before, 'to make sure I looked relatively attractive'. But mostly, he worried about how he would meet someone. 'It's the sort of thing you do naturally when you're younger – you go to bars and all sorts of places and chat to people. Suddenly it's terrifying. You think, do I just sit and wait and see what happens? Or do I try and chat someone up? I couldn't see myself doing that.'So in 2006 he joined a dating site, Drawing Down the Moon, and after being pleasantly surprised by the number and age-range (26-50) of interested women ('I found I wasn't past it!') he formed a relationship, which ended after 18 months. 'We had different aims and ambitions.' Then shortly before his 50th birthday, he met and fell in love with Sue Cocking, who had split up with her partner of 16 years in 2001. Their first date was in a bar in London. A drink turned into dinner. 'We spent two or three hours just talking,' he says. 'When we said goodbye I was very convinced that I wanted to see Sue again.' Soon after they met up again for dinner. 'We ended up walking the streets of London together most of the night, because we didn't want to say goodbye to each other.'What mesmerised me was how she moves, how graceful she is,' he says. 'She's also good at riffing, just so funny.' He felt euphoric – but also vulnerable, being back on the market after being married to someone else for so long. 'I was very anxious. Can it really be happening? Will I cock it up?'But it all worked out because last August they announced their engagement, and he has moved into her flat in north London, with her daughter, Liz, and a cat called Charlie (Liz is now at university). Sue has introduced him to 'wild' outdoor swimming in the Thames and Serpentine, which is somehow an emblem of his new life, a life full of adventure and possibilities. 'I feel, to a degree, reinvented,' he says. 'I am far happier now than I ever remember being – not that I wasn't happy before, but I feel freer.' His boys are independent – the older one works for a computer business; the younger has just finished drama school. And he no longer has the nagging obligation of school fees. 'I don't feel guilty about thinking about me now, rather than always thinking about the family.'I told my younger son about the engagement over dinner and he immediately leapt up and gave me a hug and said, "How fantastic!" And when I told my older son a couple of weeks later, he said, "About time." 'For my parents' generation you stayed together, because it was incredibly hard to get divorced. But we've seen a huge change in people's expectations. We're healthier and living longer and who's to say that having two or three relationships in your life isn't actually OK.'Wilfred Pugsley, 58 is due to qualify as a solicitor in July. Divorced, he has two sons, aged 30 and 27, and lives in BirminghamAt 54, Wilfred Pugsley, the lead consultant cardiothoracic surgeon to the Royal Wolverhampton Hospital Trust, took stock of his 28-year career in surgery and asked himself a question: what next? He knew he wasn't capable of doing the same things he had done at 20 – intricate surgery, for example – but he wasn't ready to retire. He felt fit and healthy. He didn't want to stop. 'Hopefully I'm looking at another 20-25 years of reasonably healthy life and just doing nothing didn't seem right.'So in 2007 he enrolled on a course to become a solicitor and after four years of balancing a 48-hour working week with studying, and being the oldest student at the College of Law in Birmingham, he is due to qualify in July.'Friends who work in law thought it was a crazy idea. "Why start again in something that's really competitive?" "You haven't got 30-40 years of career to offer people." But I wasn't deterred. I know there's no way I'm going to get a contract with the top-five law firms, and become a partner, but that doesn't mean I can't use my legal knowledge in another, more advisory capacity.'After studying medical sciences at Cambridge University, in 1975 he went on to St Mary's Hospital Medical School (now Imperial College), where he qualified in medicine in 1978 and decided to specialise in surgery. 'I worked on the cardiovascular unit, which was heart, lungs and blood vessels, and that really interested me. The surgery was neat and quite delicate and I liked dealing with patients.'In 1989, aged 36, he was appointed a consultant cardiothoracic surgeon at Middlesex Hospital, London (now part of University College London hospitals). But his dedication came at a cost. 'I'd set off at six in the morning and get home at about 10 at night and to use the words of my wife's solicitor, "She had to develop a life of her own." ' They divorced in 1992 after 13 years of marriage. His wife remarried; he has remained single and has kept a close relationship with his sons.Pugsley, it turns out, has a knack for unexpected career moves. By his mid-forties he was at the height of his medical career, but rather than relaxing in his spare time, he joined the auxiliary Royal Air Force as a (volunteer) military surgeon. 'I wanted to do something more physically demanding than golf.' The idea of the RAF came from his elder son, who was interested in the services.In 1998, at the age of 45, he joined 612 Squadron, based at RAF Leuchars, in Scotland, and liked it very much. He spent one weekend a month 'marching, living in a field, shooting weapons'. And in 2000, with the agreement of the NHS, he was deployed for six months to Kosovo.Alongside this, his main career progressed and in 2002 he was appointed the lead consultant cardiothoracic surgeon to the Royal Wolverhampton Hospital NHS Trust. But then in 2005, unexpected events ruptured his civilian career. Three of his patients died following heart surgery, and the 'cluster' of deaths alerted the authorities. The case was referred to the General Medical Council. Pugsley's legal team argued his performance results could not be found to be 'seriously deficient'. It took another four years before the GMC reported its findings ('they are really quite slow,' Pugsley says): he was banned from doing heart surgery but could continue to operate on lungs. (There were no restrictions on military/trauma surgery.) 'I hadn't done cardiac surgery for three years by then anyway,' Pugsley says. 'I believed I was doing a good job. The way I could have recovered my career would have been to spend six months under a supervised practice and somebody at the end would have gone, "Actually, he's OK." But you are kind of ruined by that stage.' In 2007 he made two big life changes. First, he made the RAF his main career by becoming a regular officer and a consultant surgeon in the Royal Air Force Medical Services, as he liked the challenge of deployments to such places as Afghanistan and Iraq. He deploys on average once a year for periods ranging from six weeks to three months. 'Most of what we see is life-threatening injury sustained in mine-strikes, explosions or firefights – blast, fragmentation or gunshot wounds. Our aim is to perform immediate surgery to save lives and limbs, before swift repatriation to continue care back in the UK.' The second change was even more radical. 'I'd already decided to go into law,' he continues, 'but going through the GMC regulatory process, which is very legal, all statutes and rules, made me understand the process of public law and questioning decisions.'Pugsley became a student again: he took a two-year part-time graduate diploma in law; then in 2010 went on to do a two-year legal practice course. His plan is to work in any aspect of law, but sees the most likely area as medical negligence, personal injury, and regulatory and public law.'I enjoy the fact that there is a business element to law and that a law degree has uses apart from earning a living. Law is also an interesting thing to debate. In medicine, you either know where a muscle is or you don't.'The course requires about 20 hours of study a week, and involves regular weekends at the College of Law in Birmingham. But mostly he studies at home. His routine is to work at the hospital (the RAF pays for him to work in an NHS hospital, deploying him abroad when needed) from 7am to 5pm. He drives home, and then cooks supper or goes to a restaurant – 'Just below the flat where I live does decent fish and chips' – before studying from 7pm to midnight. 'I'm still happy to be up late and the sacrifice is easier because I'm single.'The advantage to being an older law student is that he is more financially solvent and so can afford the course costs of £20,000. (This is partly funded by his NHS pension, which he was able to cash in; he will also receive a small RAF pension). He has also saved money on holidays – he used to take his sons on trips to such places as the United States and Australia, but 'they have their own partners now and need space to develop their own lives'.His reinvention has re-energised him. 'I could see an end and that was depressing. Now I'm looking at 25 years of a different life.' But there is a downside. 'The younger students in my class seem a lot cleverer and brighter than we were 40 years ago, but I suspect it's that I'm slower.' ?Mr Wright said: "Sadly, an agreement was reached between the defendant and her partner that she would supply details of patients at the clinic." In May 2010, a complaint was made by a patient, and Makin was suspended pending an investigation, the court heard. Three months later she was dismissed. "That was an event that was to have a considerable effect on this lady, both financially and psychologically," Mr Wright added. Makin and Campbell split in January 2011 causing her further "considerable distress", the court was told. The following month, on Valentine's Day, she learned she was to be summonsed to court to face data protection charges. Two days later Makin and her daughter were found when the defendant's mother, Sheila, forced her way into the house with a neighbour. Chloe was lying dead on her mother's bed in clean pyjamas and a dressing gown surrounded by cuddly toys. She had suffered knife injuries to her chest, neck and throat. Following the attack her mother had removed her blood-stained pyjamas and put them in a washing basket before dressing her in clean clothes. Makin was found alive but with serious injuries and rushed to hospital. Mr Wright added: "The defendant had cut her wrist, there was a bottle of anti-freeze on the floor and anti-freeze in a glass nearby. "Police were called and the defendant was taken to hospital where her life was saved. "The effect of the anti-freeze was to leave her permanently disabled and confined to a wheelchair." He said a number of suicide notes were found and also "an apology". In one of the notes Makin said: "I had no choice, my life was wrecked." She also wrote on a picture of her daughter: "I'm so sorry I've taken her away from you all but I couldn't leave her with no money, that would be too cruel. Sorry." Nick Johnson QC, defending Makin, said it was a case of "extended suicide". He said psychiatric examination of the mother revealed she believed her daughter was an "emotional extension" of herself. He said: "The defendant genuinely believed that if she took her own life, her daughter would be better off dead. "She did not try to kill herself because she killed Chloe. Dawn Makin killed her daughter because she wanted to kill herself." In the 18 months since Chloe was killed Makin has received psychiatric care, Mr Johnson said. He described her as "no longer a cause for concern" but told the court Makin's physical condition made her "acutely vulnerable".He added: "She has to live with the fact that she killed her child, something she can't remember. "She has severely tested the bond with her parents and she has deprived them of their granddaughter's love. "Finally, she has inflicted a terrible injury on herself and none of this can be undone." Makin sobbed throughout the hearing as she sat in her wheelchair in the dock. Her parents and Chloe's father, Michael Burke, also sobbed at times as they followed the proceedings in the public gallery. Passing sentence, Judge Anthony Russell QC, the Recorder of Preston, said the facts of the case were "appalling". He said: "Two highly experienced and distinguished psychiatrists agreed that at the time of the killing you had developed an abnormality of mind which arose from a recognised medical condition, namely a depressive disorder."Although you were able to understand the nature of your conduct, you were no longer able to form a rational judgment and were of the belief that there was no alternative but to kill yourself and your daughter."He said the loss of her job "appeared to trigger" the onset of Makin's mental health problems. He also noted a statement given by Mr Burke which described the defendant as a "fantastic mother who doted on Chloe". "This case must be treated as one where an intention to kill is proved," Judge Russell added. "The victim was your four-year-old child, vulnerable and someone who trusted you. "Chloe must have undergone considerable physical and emotional suffering." He jailed Makin for 12 years and ordered she serve at least six years before she can be released on parole. Speaking outside court, Mr Burke choked back tears as he spoke about his "bubbly and lovely" daughter. He said: "It's been an absolute nightmare. I just can't believe it."Chloe can rest now, now it's all over. I'm so glad it's over." He said Chloe was buried a short distance from his home and he visits her grave often. Mr Burke also said it was a tragedy that Makin never told anybody about her depression or asked for help. "She should have come to me," he said. Makin's solicitor, standing beside the defendant's mother on the steps of the court building, said: "Words cannot describe the utter despair that would drive a mother to take the life of her only child and thereafter attempt to take her own. "Equally, words fail to describe the desolation each day since the terrible tragedy has brought and continues to bring to Dawn Makin and her family. "This was a catastrophic crime committed by a mother who was seriously mentally deranged. "The law has taken its course and has recognised that at the time Dawn Makin suffered a serious mental illness and she must now live with the consequences." ?“That was so hard but I gave it everything I had,” she said. “I couldn’t give it any more. Just to be here is absolutely phenomenal. All I wanted was a medal and I got one so I’m really pleased with that.“I have been really, really poorly over the past six or seven months so this is really positive. I have spent a lot of time in hospital, so to make it here is really a dream. Not being here was not an option.”In 2004 Frederiksen won the British 10k open water championships and the 4.5km British Grand Prix in the same day and had her life not taken the turn it did she could have been swimming in the Olympics this summer.The details of the accident have never been revealed in public, not even to her team-mates, but it left her with limited use of her right arm and leg and after being told by a hospital consultant she would never swim again, she initially accepted her fate.But watching her friends, such as Olympic swimmer Joanne Jackson, swim in the 2006 Commonwealth Games she convinced herself she needed to make a return to the pool. Last night she proved that was the right decision.Millward, like Frederiksen, was also a high-flying non-disabled swimmer — she broke the British record for 100m backstroke aged 15 - before fate intervened and she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.On Friday night she not only won her first Paralympic medal — a silver in the S9 100m backstroke — but she shattered a reputation in the process by helping to beat South African Natalie du Toit, she of 11 gold medals, into fourth.“A silver medal is incredible,” Millward said. “Who’d have thought I’d have won a Paralympic medal? I am so proud. I feel on top of the world really.”Crisp, the former S9 100m backstroke Paralympic champion, swam two season’s bests in a day to win the 12th medal of his career.He missed the Beijing Games in 2008 due to a recurring shoulder injury but he made up for lost time on Friday night to touch the wall in 1min 03.62sec for silver.Moores swam a British record time of 1-04.44 to become the first intellectually disabled athlete of the British team to win a medal at these Games.Intellectually disabled athletes have only recently been welcomed back into the Paralympic fold following controversy at the Sydney 2000 Games. Sadly for British fans his fellow S14 swimmers, Chloe Davies, Jessica-Jane Applegate, Natalie Massey and Ben Procter could not add to the tally.?115 – Metres above the ground that torch bearer and Royal Marine Joe Townsend was suspended as he zip wired into the stadium, completing the flame’s journey. 3,000 – Number of adult volunteers who took part in the Opening Ceremony. 200- The number of copper petals that formed to make up the Paralympic cauldron. Team GB18 – Number of medals won by Britain’s most successful Paralympian, Mike Kenny, who competed in four successive Games from 1976-1988. Of those 18, 16 were gold and two were silver. 13 – The age of ParalympicsGB’s youngest competitor, swimmer Chloe Davies from Bath. 64 – Age of Britain’s oldest Paralympian, archer Kate Murray, who had her birthday on the first day of the Games. 12.41 – Number of seconds it takes ParalympicsGB’s Libby Clegg to run the 100m. 1,111 – Number of days separating the ages of Sam and Oliver Hynd, the brothers from Swansea who compete in Paralympic swimming. Sam is the elder, at 21, while Oliver is 17. Paralympic Games 2012 4,280 – Total number of Paralympian athletes competing this year. 60 – Top speed in mph that an under arm throw in Goalball can reach. 70 – Number of metres between Paralympic archers and their targets, which are 1.22m in diameter. 2 – Number of bounces allowed in wheelchair tennis, the only rule difference to the non-handicapped version of the sport. 3,500 – The cost in pounds of a high-performance level wheelchair used for wheelchair basketball. Specially designed, the level of intensity of the game can mean that they last as little as six months, despite being made from titanium. 174 – The number of extra wheelchair spaces added to the Olympic Stadium since the Olympics, bringing the total to 568. 5 – The number of days it took to turn the Olympic Village into the Paralympic Village. Adaptations included adding wheelchair ramps to medal podiums, switching the Olympic rings for the Paralympic Agitos logos and updating the billboards with images of Paralympians. 2012 – The first year that the Organising Committee of a Games has integrated the planning and staging of an Olympic and Paralympic Games. Previously, the two were kept as separate events. 2.5 million – total number of tickets expected to be sold for the Paralympics, exceeding sales from the Sydney, Athens and Beijing games. ?But when I peered into my saucepan, I did not see “unbeatable filled pasta”, but something resembling Albert Steptoe’s long johns after they had been boil washed.I glanced at my neighbours, seeking reassurance that they too were struggling. They were putting their perfect tortellini into Tupperware boxes, ready to take home. It was time to take a long hard look at myself. It seems that while I was happily trotting to Costcutter for a pack of the easy stuff, the rest of Britain had been gorging on culinary feats that a few years ago no one would have dared try at home.Like “wild yeast”: first catch your yeast (growing on berries or tree bark), then mix it with flour and water, allow the dough to ferment and use it to make your own bread. I had assumed such practices disappeared with the barter economy, but Leiths School of Food and Wine has recently created a two-day wild yeast course for amateurs wanting to make their own sourdough bread. It is proving popular. I have been left far behind.In 2009, the year Recipease started in Clapham, south London, and in Brighton, they gave classes to 4,500 people. This year, with a third branch just opened in Notting Hill, west London, they are on course to teach things like “becoming a sushi master” and “Vietnamese street food” to 25,000 pupils.Some said it was due to the vogue for artisanal food, the resurrection of near-forgotten techniques. (Sales of jam thermometers, for instance, rose by 17 per cent in the first half of this year.)My fellow Recipease pupil Paul Holloway, 42, a talent manager, admitted the influence of television. “We watch The Great British Bake Off, Come Dine with Me. We wanted to enjoy something creative, and perhaps a bit of the Generation Game thing.”The Recipease pupils, it seemed, were not ready to give up the day job – yet. Others have already done so.In September last year, Chantal Shalhoub, 36, was still behind a desk at an investment bank. “But it just wasn’t for me. Every day I felt I died a little.” She gave up the job and went to Leiths.One year on, and she has her food and wine diploma. She is establishing a cookery school in Richmond, south-west London, and has already been to a Provençal farmhouse and a Scottish castle to cook for families.Her first cooking job was at the home of a titled lady in Ladbroke Grove, west London.“The butler came down saying, 'You will never guess who’s upstairs: Lord Heseltine, Lord Rothschild, Lord Saatchi…”“I was nervous. But right from the starter – a cheese soufflé with a spicy tomato compote – everybody ate everything. The butler returned and handed me a glass of champagne. Moments like that are what it is all about.”The old-fashioned desire for self-improvement also features.“It sounds crazy,” says Claire Macdonald, 46, the principal of Leiths (and herself a reformed accountant), “but people aren’t just improving their skills, they are bettering themselves. “They realise they have achieved something. They develop as cooks, but also as people. And the young – perhaps especially the young – are discovering this too,” says Claire. On the 2010-11 diploma class, there were three school leavers. For 2011-12, there were 15 teenagers choosing Leiths over university.Lucy Lettice, 19, had offers from Manchester and Oxford Brookes universities to study archaeology and anthropology, but she paid her Leiths deposit before her first A-level exam.“I would rather spend the money doing something I am passionate about,” she says, between enthusing about sweating onions.Her friends at London’s fee-paying Putney High School were initially shocked, if supportive.With university tuition fees now rising to £27,000 for three years, however, the £19,850, nine-month Leiths diploma – with the multiple employment opportunities it brings – is starting to seem a bargain.“People are really questioning whether it is worth coming out of university with debt,” says Lucy. “The sense I have from my friends is that if there isn’t a university course you really want to do, then you shouldn’t go – you should find something more practical, something you care about.”Similar sentiments are expressed by Chloe Coker, 31, once a fraud litigator, now the author of Super Cute Cookies and one half of City Cook, the personal catering and teaching company.“There is a lot of satisfaction in conquering what you think is difficult,” she tells me. I will have to take her word for it. Back at Recipease I ask my fellow student, charity worker Emily Smith, if she would care to try some of my pasta.She pauses, looks anxiously towards her fiancé, Neil Wilson.“I know,” she says eventually, “why don’t you try some of ours?”?Peter, Chloe and Kim Rice hold their pet python Lily at home in Guyhirn, Cambridgeshire, England. The 17-foot-long albino python is probably Britain's longest pet.Picture: John Robertson / Barcroft Media?12.28 David Cameron is asked if the Government plans to bring back O-levels. (There was speculation that the Education Secretary had hinted at U-turn yesterday) You can read more about the story is . 12.24 Anushka Asthana, the Times' political reporter, makes an observation: Twitter: Anushka Asthana - Is Nick Clegg's bright red tie a sign? A flag of friendship for the party opposite? 12.20 Craig Whittaker, a Conservative backbencher, asks about the flooding in Calder Valley. David Cameron praises the resilience of the community. 12.15 The PM responds, pointing to the Ken Livingstone and Labour funder Andrew Rosenfeld's tax affairs. You can read the story of the latter . 12.14 @EdMPress, one of Labour's official Twitter feeds, is tweeting Ed Miliband's jokes: Twitter: EdMPress - Ed Miliband: "One rule for comedians on the stage, another rule for the comedians in the Cabinet."12.13 Ed Miliband asks his next question about David Cameron's choice to comment on the tax affairs of Jimmy Carr and Gary Barlow. 12.13 Jim Pickard, the Political Correspondent for the Financial Times, agrees with David Cameron: Twitter: Jim Pickard - Can't help agreeing with Cameron that labour position on Lords is a hopeless fudge, facing both ways at once.12.10 Mr Cameron responds by saying that he is "getting rid of Labour's tax increases". 12.09 The Telegraph's Michael Deacon observes: Twitter: Michael Deacon - Nonsensical from Cameron: Osborne wasn't "hiding away" as he was at the dispatch box. Er, not during Newsnight he wasn't12.08 Mr Miliband's second question makes a dig at Chloe Smith's interview. He quotes Nadine Dorries' tweet: Twitter: Nadine Dorries MP - I was at a dinner last night so didn't see Newsnight, however, if Osborne sent Chloe on re scrapping 3p he is a coward as well as arrogant.12.05 David Cameron hits back, saying that Mr Miliband should support the relief for families. 12.04 Ed Miliband's first question is an attack on the fuel duty U-turn. Twitter: C4 News FactCheck - Cameron kicks off with attack on Miliband line on Lord's reform: "Absolutely hopeless..to say he's in favour of it and he's also against it"12.00 David Cameron is on his feet - and the first question is on Lords reform. Mr Cameron says there are opponents in every party, but he people who support it should back the Bill (this is a dig at Ed Miliband and the Labour Party for their position on the Bill. They are supporting the principle, but not the timetable for debate). 11.49 Good morning folks. PMQs is going to be interesting. The is published today and it's going to cause controversy. Over 100 Tory MPs are said to be willing to rebel against it. Will the PM face questions on it? If so, how will react? Ed Miliband, on the otherhand, will be crowing over Ed Balls' perceived victory on the fuel tax that . The Shadow Chancellor called on him ditch the plan yesterday morning and the Chancellor scrapped it in the afternoon. The timing makes it look like Mr Osborne responded to his plee. There are also likely to be some jokes at Treasury Minister Chloe Smith's expense. She gave a car crash interview on Newsnight last night. You can watch it . We're recording the reactions to the debate here. Please send me your thoughts below or on Twitter (I'm @donatahuggins). ?(Incidentally, Miss Smith's biggest mistake on Newsnight – well, apart from babbling nakedly evasive nonsense throughout – was to patronise Paxman. "Nice question!" she cooed. A schoolgirl error. Whatever you do with Paxman, you don't tease him. It's like wiggling your fingers between the bars of a cage housing a furious chimpanzee. Paxman responded in the inevitable way. CHOMP.) Mr Cameron’s efforts to defend all this weren’t exactly convincing. Under pressure, he falls back on what any teacher could tell you is bad exam technique: instead of answering the question, he simply fires off anything he can think of on the given topic, whether relevant or not. Thus what he said was confident, fluent, and almost wholly specious. There was mock-sympathy for Miss Smith from Labour MPs: “Awww!” they chorused, when Mr Miliband alluded to her Newsnight misery. For some reason, she was nowhere to be seen on the Government benches. Surely she can’t have been hiding away. Perhaps, like her boss last night, she was simply at a nice party. ?That would be unfair to Rattle, who turned the aural magic to real expressive use. In the case of Ligeti’s masterpiece, he gave the music an unsuspected pathos by making it hover constantly on the edge of extinction. And what a great coup de théâtre it was, to conduct all the empty bars at the end of Ligeti’s piece (with the audience straining to tell whether the orchestra really had stopped playing, or simply was playing too quietly to be heard), so as to lead into the bright A major of Lohengrin’s Prelude. That simple device gave Wagner’s piece a subtly different flavour.Turning aural nuance into expressive refinement takes time, and often Rattle seemed to suspend the beat, so we could enter into a passing exquisite moment and savour it. He did the same in Sibelius’s Fourth Symphony, but here there are no exquisite moments, just gaunt gestures perched on the edge of silence, or great grinding dissonances which seemed to take for ever to resolve. The effect of Rattle’s meditative pauses was startling.Normally we expect performance to soften a piece’s strangeness, round off its edges, clarify its logic. This performance had the opposite effect, making Sibelius’s symphony more enigmatic that ever – which ultimately felt frustrating.Once back into the light, with Debussy and Ravel, the performances felt on safer ground. Rattle’s lingering over the quieter episodes in Debussy’s ballet brought out all the shy tenderness of the piece, and its flirtatiousness. And in Ravel’s Daphnis Suite, the astounding, not-quite-believable delicacy of the opening was offset by some enjoyably characterful playing in the Danse, particularly from principal clarinetist Walter Seyfarth.Hear this concert on the BBC iPlayer and all the Proms live on ?It's late May and we're talking at a pool in the Sneinton area of Nottingham, where Adlington, now 23, used to train as a girl. She's still an appealing mix of girlish and boyish – pink socks with butterflies on them, loose grey sweatpants and a burgundy sweatshirt, a white T-shirt with hearts on it. She's shorter (5ft 10in) than you might imagine, but with a long, loose-limbed grace. Most noticeable of all in person is her strikingly beautiful colouring: Nordic blue eyes, white-blond hair, fair skin. The triumphs of four years ago brought her instant fame: front-page headlines; an open-top bus parade in her home town of Mansfield; and the gold Jimmy Choo shoes that were presented by the mayor (she has a passion for designer shoes). She has faced some low points since then. There were the remarks made by the playground bully comedian Frankie Boyle about her looks (ruled 'offensive' and 'humiliating' by the BBC Trust), which excited the ugly pack instincts of internet trolls. There was also a dip in form that began at the World Championships in 2009. Adlington set a personal best in the 400m, beating her Olympic time by almost three seconds, but found herself back in bronze-medal position behind Italy's Federica Pellegrini and her British rival (and friend), Jackson. She crashed out of the medals altogether in the 800m, after being fastest in the heats. She cried in the post-race interview, saying that she felt she had let everyone down, despite the fact that she had elected not to wear the speed suits (which have since been outlawed) that led to a procession of world records at the Championships. Things hardly improved at the European Championships the following year. Despite winning gold at 400m, Adlington finished seventh in her favoured event. What was going wrong? 'Confidence is something that is so hard to gain but so easy to knock,' she says. 'Losing at the Worlds shocked me, but then to have a second disappointment in the 800m at the Europeans, was just like, oh my God. It became mental rather than physical, which is harder to overcome. If it's physical, you can change what you're doing in training. Done. But when it's mental, nobody can help you with that apart from yourself.' Later in the year, she got a confidence boost at the Commonwealth Games in Delhi, winning golds in both her main events. But at the World Championships in 2011 she faced a moment of crisis, after qualifying only seventh-fastest for the 400m final. 'I came out of the heat of the 400 and I felt awful,' she says. 'I had to tell myself, hold on, I'm a better swimmer than this. I could so easily have knocked myself back down again. But I was saying to myself, come on, you can do this. I had to not get panicky, and start thinking, "What's happened?" I just had to take that experience that I'd gained from those two years and put it into place. I'm glad I did go through the low points. It makes you stronger.' Adlington went on to take silver from the difficult position of lane one, then decisively won gold in the 800m. Now, she says, her goals are simple. 'I'm hoping I can go to the Olympics and go faster than I did at the Worlds last year, and if I do that I'll take whatever outcome that gives me, whether that's first or last place.' Adlington lives and trains in Nottingham, 20 miles from where she grew up in Mansfield. She is the youngest of three sisters and credits her siblings, Chloe, 28, and Laura, 25, as the inspiration for her swimming career. 'Becky always wanted to be wherever they were,' her mother, Kay, tells me. 'When we first took her swimming, at three or four, she was in the baby pool, and they were in the 25m pool. That gave her the impetus to get in the big pool as soon as possible. But it didn't stop there. They split the big pool into lanes, with beginners in lane one. And, of course, she didn't want to be in the beginners' lane, she wanted to be in the same lane as her sisters.' As first Chloe, then Laura, joined the Nottingham Nova swimming squad, they were followed by the baby of the family, whose desire to keep up had become seriously competitive. The older girls were stronger sprinters, but as soon as she was old enough to race longer distances, Rebecca began to catch up. 'We saw that it wasn't going to be too long before she would start challenging,' Kay recalls. 'The first time Becky beat one of the other girls at a county gala in Sherwood Pool, when she was about 12, Steve [Rebecca's father] and I just looked at each other and thought, "We're going to have a quiet journey home." ' 'My elder sister still claims that she can beat me on a 50 free now,' Adlington says. 'She hasn't swum in about 10 years. I'm like, "Really?" But my middle sister is only two years older than me so when I got to my early teenage years, I started catching her up and she hated it.' A regimented routine dominated Adlington's life over the next few years. From the age of 12, when she was selected to work with the swimming coach Bill Furniss, she began training early mornings and evenings four days a week, plus Saturday mornings. Most days began with a 4.30am wake-up call before the drive from Mansfield to Nottingham. Adlington's determination was already in evidence. 'I never had to wake her up,' Kay says. 'She was always ready.' Two-hour training sessions in the pool were followed by the journey to school. 'Becky perfected the art of eating cereal from a Tupperware bowl without spilling milk as I was going around roundabouts,' Kay says. 'I remember the winter mornings; Becky with damp hair, heaters on full blast, eating bread and jam.' After school, it would be back to Nottingham and into the pool from 5 until 7pm, then home to an evening meal and homework – week in, week out, year after year. It was during these years that Adlington forged the relationship with Furniss that still endures. I ask her whether it had been a tough decision not to join the British coaching set-up at Loughborough University, the nearest of British Swimming's 'centres of excellence', with its superb facilities and Olympic-sized pool, where a number of Britain's top swimmers are based. 'No,' she says simply. 'I've always wanted to be with Bill. Never wanted to leave Bill. We're very, very similar. I'm not a girlie girl, I don't like heart-to-hearts, I don't cry very often. I'm not like that and Bill's the same. We don't really say that much to each other, but we like it like that. We're kind of quiet, do-the-job people and I think that's why it works so well. We just get on with it.' In public, Furniss describes Adlington as the 'ultimate racer'. I wonder if he's tough on her in private? 'He is but he has his own way of being tough on me. He doesn't shout at me, he never raises his voice. Bill's not a shouter in general. He just knows my breaking point, he knows my limit, so he knows how hard to push me, and he knows when to ease back. He never pushes me so far that I'm just absolutely dead, that I can't get back up.' I catch up with Furniss on the phone a few days later, and ask him to pinpoint the trust that's at the heart of their relationship. 'I know Rebecca would never not give 100 per cent,' he says, 'so if she's having a bad session, she's still giving it her all. She knows I've always got her best interests at heart, she knows I respect what she does and I'll always look after her. 'At 12,' he adds, 'she was the same as she is now: honest, committed, never late, never complained. Even then she was prepared to pay the price.' He talks me through an intensive training session – a 'sick-bucket session', as he calls it. 'They're agony. They're about pushing yourself to the absolute limit. A main set might be 30 100m at maximum heart rate, starting one every one minute 40 seconds, and swimming close to race pace.' Adlington rates the ability to tolerate pain as one of the elements of mental toughness that are essential for distance swimmers, gained over a long period. In a race, it's extreme. 'It's very, very painful,' she groans. 'I just tell myself, it's got to be easier than childbirth. Once you've finished, it's like your body's burning, but you don't care because all your emotions take over. I've definitely noticed the older I've got, the more painful it has got.' Adlington has spoken of needing more recovery sessions at 23 than she did at 19. Is a recovery session a lot easier? 'You might not think it was,' Furniss laughs. 'A recovery session for Rebecca would still be 7,000m in two hours, but it would be focusing on technique – skills and drills.' The workload means that Adlington requires a lot of calories, roughly 2,800 per day, beginning with fruit juice and cereal before her first training session and ending with an evening meal that includes protein, such as braising steak or chicken (she doesn't like fish) served with something like sweet potato and carrot mash. She will eat four or five times during the day, and snack on fruit throughout the afternoon. Lunch might be four or five sandwiches and a yogurt. She has admitted in the past to treating herself to the occasional cupcake or glass of wine, too. Furniss says that Adlington was a rough diamond when she came to him as a youngster, but that she differed from many other promising young swimmers who hit a performance peak in their mid-teens because she just kept improving: technically, physically, psychologically. A profound event had an impact on that improvement. At 18, Adlington's sister Laura developed encephalitis after a bout of glandular fever. She spent two weeks on a life-support machine. Kay recalls the doctors telling her that there was nothing more they could do and her survival depended on how strong she was. Rebecca was also suffering from post-viral glandular fever at the time, and there was a real fear that both daughters might succumb to the brain condition. They didn't. Laura pulled through, although she suffered memory loss and had to take a year out of school. Rebecca, meanwhile, having been weakened by the illness, was unable to train to her usual intensity. Furniss spent the long recovery period focusing on developing the technical base to her swimming that has been so important to her success. She also learnt how to concentrate on swimming when her life outside the pool was in turmoil. Family life is still the mainstay of her world. 'I think that's what's helped me since Beijing. If I had moved too far away from home, I just wouldn't have been able to cope. I love my mum, she comes over and cooks for me three or four times a week and I go home every Sunday for a roast, to eat with the family. I train in the same pool I have done for 10 years and I like my routine, my comfort zone.' She lives in Nottingham with her boyfriend, Harry Needs, 20 – he is also a swimmer, who hopes to compete in the 50m and 100m butterfly events in the 2016 Olympics. He swims for the Nova Centurion club in the city, where the two met. I ask her if she is the sort of person who needs a stable relationship to take some of the pressure off her. 'Definitely. I think it helps that we both swim. A lot of people in the swimming world go out with swimmers, it makes it so easy. We've been together about 14 months. We live together, and we moved in after about four months, which is quite soon but it just felt right. I love the fact that Harry understands the lifestyle and he obviously wants to succeed in his swimming as well, so even on a Saturday night we'll go to bed at 10. It's nice in the winter, too, getting up with someone when it's dark and cold.' Are there things that she feels she has missed through the regimen of her lifestyle? 'No, because with swimming, most people retire in their mid- to late twenties, and you still have so much of your life left. If I want to learn to dance or do bike rides or learn to play tennis or go out with my friends to nightclubs or travel or whatever, I still have so much time to do everything.' She has talked before about a wish to go on Strictly Come Dancing after she finishes swimming. I wonder if the desire to perform is a factor in her swimming career. Does she enjoy the spotlight? 'I do once it's finished, if that makes sense. I love it when I've touched the wall, but before the race I don't notice anything. I don't ever really look up because you just have to stay so focused, but afterwards it is an incredible feeling.' She is looking forward to the crowds in London. Will the woman with the passion for Christian Louboutin shoes ('They're just my absolute dream') be taking the chance to go shopping in the capital? 'I'm sure I will,' she laughs. 'Obviously the swimming's in the first week, so in the second week we all get to go shopping.' First though, there will be the little matter of trying to defend her titles. The 400m event will be a 'dogfight' according to Furniss. Federica Pellegrini, the world record holder, will be the favourite. 'There are a lot of specialist 400m freestylers in the world and we'll try to get among them,' he says. 'The 800m is what we prepare for,' he adds. 'All you can do when you get to the competition is control what you can do. I can't control what Pellegrini's going to do, neither can Rebecca. You do the best that you can and take what you get. 'The only thing I can say is that no one will have tried harder, prepared better or put themselves through more pain and agony in the past four years than Rebecca. She's given it every last fibre in her body to deliver in London, and she will give everything. We'll see what that brings.' Rebecca Adlington is an ambassador for British Gas, a principal partner of British Swimming, which is giving away free swims around the country. See? Kenneth MacMillan, however, made four of his finest works for Haydée and Cragun as individuals or together: Las Hermanas (1963), a tense Lorca tragedy; the masterwork Song of the Earth (1965), set to Mahler’s song cycle; Requiem, a 1976 tribute on Cranko’s early death; and My Brother, My Sisters (1978), a claustrophobic piece about fatal sibling rivalry in which Cragun played the brother, charismatic and sinister.Richard Alan Cragun was born in Sacramento, California, on October 5 1944, the second of three sons. His father was chief librarian at Sacramento City College. Richard studied tap dance before moving to ballet class, and when the Royal Ballet performed in Sacramento he was an extra on stage — it was Margot Fonteyn who suggested he try for the Royal Ballet School. On a year’s scholarship there, aged 15, he was picked out by MacMillan for a graduation ballet, but as a non-Commonwealth foreigner he could not join the Royal Ballet itself. The company’s recently departed choreographer John Cranko, Stuttgart Ballet’s new director, recruited him, and within three years he was promoted to principal rank. Marcia Haydée, who was five years older and had also trained in London, was the star ballerina, and she and Cragun began what became a 30-year partnership . The pair’s gifts for romantic expression were accompanied by a potential for comedy. In The Taming of the Shrew (1969) Cranko created slapstick balletic battles for the warring Petruchio and Katharina; and in Brouillards (1970) Cragun danced a comic number, “Homage to S Pickwick Esq”, in a black hat and carrying a black umbrella.In 1970 Cragun showed his strengths as a classical performer when he partnered Fonteyn, who went to Stuttgart to dance Swan Lake and Cranko’s new work for her, Poème de l’extase .Among the many ballets created for Cragun and Haydée at Stuttgart Ballet were Cranko’s Opus 1 and R.B.M.E.; Peter Wright’s The Mirror Walkers and Namouna; Glen Tetley’s Voluntaries and Daphnis and Chloe; and, in the 1980s, Jiri Kylian’s Forgotten Land and Maurice Béjart’s La Danse and Operette.In his forties Cragun was acclaimed for his charisma in character roles such as the witch Carabosse in The Sleeping Beauty and Quasimodo in Roland Petit’s Notre Dame de Paris. In 1990 he returned to his first love, tap-dancing, to star in Stuttgart Ballet’s staging of the musical On Your Toes.After retiring from the stage in 1996, he spent three years as ballet director in Berlin’s Deutsche Oper, but tired of the pro-opera bias of Berlin and a losing battle with the Stuttgart and Hamburg ballet companies for status and funds.In 2000 he moved with his lover, the Brazilian choreographer Roberto de Oliveira, to Rio de Janeiro, where they launched a contemporary ballet project with the city’s black slum youngsters. DeAnima Ballet Contemporâneo aimed to counter street violence and gangsterism by persuading 200 children to come to dance classes. They formed a performance company, but Cragun protested angrily that, due to civic apathy, he was forced to use his illustrious former Stuttgart Ballet colleagues to fund it with German sponsorship.He was also outspoken about what he saw as ingrained racism in Brazil, and caused controversy during his three years as ballet director at Rio’s Theatro Muncipal when he cast a black male dancer in Giselle.Cragun lived for many years with Aids, but a stroke in 2005 ended his working career. Both Roberto de Oliveira and Marcia Haydée survive him.Richard Cragun, born October 5 1944, died August 6 2012?“He was still going to school and having a normal life and we wanted that to continue for as long as possible. “He knew he had a brain tumour and that he would have to undergo chemo and radiotherapy to keep it at bay. He also had steroids, which made him pile a load of weight on. “But through all the treatment, he smiled all the way through. He was the funniest, silliest, bravest boy I have ever known.”Adam had divided his time between his mother in Deckham, Gateshead, and his father, who lived in Barton near Hull. His suffered a fit while staying at Miss Netherton’s home early last year and was taken to hospital. “I remember being at work and waiting for the call to tell me the results. I just remember screaming out and other members of staff coming in to see what had happened,” she added. “I couldn’t believe it. My baby brother, the boy who slept in my bed because he loved his cuddles, the boy who was so smiley and cheeky, was getting his life taken away from him. “I was so proud to say he was my baby brother. I adored him like he was my own baby. He brought so much joy to our family,” said Chloe. “I love and miss him so much and always will.”Miss Netherton, a mother-of-one, said she and her family will raise money for the Bluebell Wood Children’s Hospice in her brother’s memory. ?Sheryl Garratt Sheryl Garratt writes for the Saturday Magazine.?There's a skin-shedding beauty to September, perhaps cemented by the memory of what it was like as a young teenager going back to school after the summer. Classmates felt new like pennies, and you saw them with new eyes. Chloe's face had morphed into angles and mystery and she now had a chest to rival Jane Russell, Joe's voice had broken and he had freckles from some faraway sun. Lola had a worldly weariness that could have had something to do with a Greek waiter, and fat Robert was now thin, and mean with it. The teachers struggled with the new us, gauging our emotional temperature with the old jokes that used to work, before we went and grew quietly behind their backs. So much can happen in 10 weeks. Long gone from school, I still know that much can shift in a summer. ? graduated with a degree in documentary photography from the University of Wales, Newport, in 2011. To date Chloe’s work has explored social issues concerning minority groups, the young, as well as the exploration of underground and alternative cultures. She is particularly interested in contemporary social concerns with a focus on human rights. Picture: CHLOE BORKETT?Workers moved the boxes to a dry room and some were later brought to a museum laboratory, where a small team of curators scrambled to assess the extent of the damage, a process that may take months given the huge volume of the apparel. Some items have obviously been damaged by termites and mold beyond repair, according to museum curator Orlando Abinion, who is heading the effort."We're doing a conservation rescue," Abinion told the AP. "There was termite infestation and mold in past years, and these were aggravated by last month's storm.""It's unfortunate because Imelda may have worn some of these clothes in major official events and as such have an important place in our history," he said.Imelda Marcos's massive shoe collection, including top US and European brands, astounded the world and became a symbol of excess in the Southeast Asian nation, where many still walked barefoot out of abject poverty.Ferdinand Marcos' successor, Corazon Aquino, accused him of stealing billions of dollars during his 20-year rule and ordered many of his assets seized.The clothes and shoes of the Marcoses were not among the assets allegedly stolen by them and sequestered by the government following the dictator's fall, according to Presidential Commission on Good Government official Maita Gonzaga. The government has so far recovered $2.24 billion worth of cash, bank accounts and prime real estate from the Marcoses and their cronies, she said.Imelda Marcos claimed many of the shoes were gifts from Filipino shoemakers in suburban Marikina city, the country's shoemaking capital, for endorsing their products. Marikina officials borrowed 800 pairs of her shoes in 2001 for a shoe museum, which has become a tourist spot. Massive flooding, however, damaged dozens of pairs of Marcos' shoes in Marikina in 2009.About 765 pairs, including famous brands like Gucci, Charles Jourdan, Christian Dior, Ferragamo, Chanel and Prada, survived the Marikina floods. Source: AP?1608 Cabinet has ended. The first session of the new team met for around an hour and 20 minutes. 1545 In this week's Spectator, James Forsyth reveals that three ministers wept in front of the Prime Minister as he wielded the knife yesterday, prompting Mr Cameron to tell an ally: "My party has gone mad."1539 Quentin Letts has told the BBC that the reshuffle was less of a lurch to the right and more of a "shimmy". He suggests that David Laws should have faced re-election before being brought back to Government, given his expenses past. 1534 An is doing the rounds of the web. 1531 Now with audio. Cameron says: "We have really demonstrated that this is a Cabinet that means business. Every department is an economic department. This is a huge effort right across government." He welcomes new Cabinet members, and those attending, and ends the clip by saying: "And with that, let's get down to business."1528 The Beeb is showing some silent film from inside Cabinet - Theresa May and George Osborne chatting away. Ken Clarke chortling to himself like he doesn't have a care in the world, Justine Greening also affecting to appear as happy as Larry. With the noble exception of Andrew Lanlsey, it seems the more you've been shafted in the reshuffle, the harder you try to wear a jolly face. 1517 David Laws is placed slightly back from the table, to reflect his non-Cabinet status. Lansley doesn't look too happy with the world. 1515 At least they will be kept sweet with those little glass bowls of what look like Fox's Glacier mints on the Cabinet table. 1512 It certainly looks like a tight fit around the table - Cameron has created so many Ministers Attending that it's like squeezing sardines into a tin can. 1511 So, Cameron, Hague, Hunt, Cable and Willetts are all in their shirt sleeves. The photo makes the Cabinet look even more male than it actually is. Only Villiers and Miller on display. May and Greening hiding behind the photographer. 1507 And here it is - No 10 has just tweeted this pic of the new Cabinet: Twitter: UK Prime Minister - PIC: Getting down to business - the Prime Minister chairs his first Cabinet meeting since the The Prime Minister chairs his first Cabinet meeting since the reshuffle (Twitter)1502 Labour oppo to Lord Tebbit over Owen Paterson's appointment. 1501 Watch . 1457 Just spotted this from earlier via Politics Home. Rob Wilson makes a bold declaration on Radio Berkshire: Twitter: politicshomeuk - . tells BBC Radio Berkshire the is "part of the process of the divorce with the Liberal Democrats".1455 Andrew Lansley has also declared himself delighted by his demotion: "I'm very happy to be Leader of the House." 1450 Ha ha - broadcasters report that Patrick McLaughlin, the new Transport Secretary, has arrived late for Cabinet - and by car. 1446 Justine Greening has said her new post at the Department for International Development is "a fantastic job - absolutely fantastic". That's it, chin up, Justine. 1444 The new Cabinet has begun to arrive - Andrew Mitchell rolls up, literally, on a handbike, according to Adam Boulton: Twitter: adamboulton - New chief whip Andrew Mitchell arrives for cabinet on a bike (crossbar, front basket)1442 The Standard reveals that - but not until after the 2015 election. 1441 The reshuffle in numbers: 28 ministers thought to have been sacked; 31 now entitled to sit around the Cabinet table. 1434 More Ed Miliband New Statesman nuggets: he left his phone at home when he went on holiday, read no papers and didn't watch TV news; he's opposed to Heathrow third runway; and he believes the Lib Dems made a "terrible, tragic mistake" by entering into a Coalition with the Tories. On his wife, Justine: "My family is the most important thing in my life and therefore that's always what you fall back on." . 1430 This week's New Statesman features an interview with Ed Miliband (apparently trying for a Hugh Grant dishevelled look on the cover) which they style as his "comeback". Top lines: reports of tensions with the "physically intimidating" Ed Balls are "nonsense," Labour remains commited to spending cuts, and party's big new idea is something he calls "predistribution". This baffling term is apparently about making work pay. 1428 ; not so much a fan of Baroness Warsi though. 1413 Michael Deacon's and a butch Prime Minister: 1407 During PMQs, Mr Cameron made much play of the appointment of Patrick McLoughlin, a former miner, to the Transport brief. Patrick O'Flynn from the Express tweets: Twitter: Patrick O'Flynn - In a meritocratic society you'd expect at least a third of Cabinet to come from working class backgrounds. We get "oh look, here's a miner".1341 Lovely contortions from new BIS minister Matthew Hancock, as Sky's Adam Boulton puts to him that the reshuffle shafted the Liberal Democrats: "I think that the Liberal Democrats and the Coalition will be stronger as a result of it. I am obviously honoured to have been brought in." 1337 James Kirkup brings us the at Heathrow. 1332 ITV's Alex Forrest on the most popular figure in Government: Twitter: Alex Forrest - Larry the cat survives the reshuffle. 1330 Patrick McLoughlin is making his first appearance in the Commons in his new role as Transport Secretary. He promises to address anomolies in rail faires: "where one train costs a huge amount more than another one 20 mins later". 1329 Umanna says it's "extraordinary" that Iain Duncan Smith was able to defy the Prime Minister and stay on at Work and Pensions. Maude and Hughes point out this isn't exactly an unknown occurance. 1327 James Delingpole is among the many who are after his Northern Ireland exile. 1321 Somehow Hughes and Maude have gone from Heathrow to having a fantastic intra-Coalition spat over House of Lords reform. The Lib Dem claims Tories broke Coalition Agreement, to fury of Maude. 1319 On the same programme, Labour's Chuka Umanna points out that business has been left with indecision and confusion. Maude hits back by saying Labour has u-turned on the issue. 1316 Lib Dem deputy Simon Hughes on WatO takes a conciliatory tone - saying it's right to look into future of aviation. 1315 Asked if he would lead a campaign against a third runway: "You bet I would." "My duty is to defend the people of London. I was elected on a very clear mandate to oppose a third runway." He points out that the Tories were nationally too. 1314 He claims George Osborne is in favour of a third runway, and says he's not convinced by Mr Cameron ruling out Heathrow expansion until the next election. 1313 Boris Johnson takes an unusually serious tone at the World at One - although he does allow himself to describe the aviation consultation as a "fudgorama". 1305 Reshuffle fever is catching. Now Alex Salmond is reorganising his team. Nicola Sturgeon rumoured to be taking over the constitutional brief as the SNP prepares to do battle over the independence referendum. 1302 Labour's Willie Bains tweets: Twitter: William Bain - Couldn't make this up: Cabinet Growth Sub-Committee charged with removing obstacles to economic recovery - to be chaired by George Osborne1255 Assistant Comment Editor Tom Chivers is t 1252 Grant Shapps is asked by Andrew Neil on the Daily Politics if he'll be running against Boris Johnson for the Tory leadership in future. "Naughty," he says. 1243 Steveten says in the comments: Cameron's shift to the right will be little more than hot air, unless the reshuffle is the first step towards collapsing the Coalition and governing briefly as a minority administration, before an early election.1240 Coffee House's Isabel Hardman spots Andrew Lansley looking forlorn: Twitter: Isabel Hardman - Tory MPs flee the green benches, leaving Andrew Lansley looking grumpy as he settles in to his new job as Leader of the House1239 The immediate response to PMQs seems to be that Miliband had a good day. 1236 One factette in there too - an announcement within days on aviation. Mr Cameron said he would not break the Tory manifesto pledge on building a third runway in this Parliament. But of course that doesn't mean it won't come along further down the line. Mayor Johnson wanted the PM to rule Heathrow expansion out forever. 1234 A bit of knockabout in there, but no killer blows on either side. This PMQs felt to me more of a scene-setter than a set-piece in its own right. Heathrow, growth and infrastructure will run and run. 1232 The blog will continue until after the Cabinet meeting this afternoon, so keep sending in your comments. 1231 And we're all done and dusted. No real surprises - Heathrow and the reshuffle among the main themes. A few nasty digs from Ed Miliand too about the lack of building in the housing industry and on infrastructure problems such as roads. 1230 The PM is forced - again - to defend the cuts to the military. 1228 Mr Cameron promises that he will not break his manifesto pledge on Heathrow. But what about after the 2015 election, you can almost hear Boris shouting at the screen. 1227 One from left-field, Mr Cameron is asked to ensure that the Post Office retains the DVLA contract to renew driving documents. He throws it over to his Business Secretary, but says there's a limit to how much ministers can interfere. 1226 Adam Boulton from Sky makes a point about the televisual impact of the new female Cabinet ministers: Twitter: adamboulton - New women cabinet ministers, Maria Miller Theresa Villiers donuting DC, right of screen1224 A roundabout way into the airport issue from Mark Garnier, who asks for greater support for regional airports. Mr Cameron says he hopes to make an announcement in coming days, and calls for cross-party support for the future of aviation. 1222 Mr Cameron is told that cuts in disability living allowance undermines the spirit of the Paralympics. He pays tribute to the country's support for the Games and denies money is being cut, saying the system is being reformed through the introduction of a independent living allowance. 1221 Mr Cable isn't the only one without a seat. Helen Lewis tweets: Twitter: Helen Lewis - Chloe Smith's punishment: not only a move to the Cabinet Office, but having to sit on the floor: 1220 Stephen Timms asks about . Mr Cameron says it is right to close bogus colleges and force "good universities" like LMU to take action. 1219 A good point from Telegraph senior political correspondent Chris Hope on Northern Ireland and the riots there: In the House of Commons there is no room for Vince Cable on frontbench at Prime Minister's Questions, nor for Iain Duncan Smith, who is left to stand opposite the Speaker. Instead new Northern Ireland secretary Theresa Villiers huddles close to Maria Miller next to George Osborne. But last night Northern Ireland saw its third night of rioting. Why isn't she there?It just fuels the impression that the Coalition is ignoring the province."1218 Mr Cameron is asked about . He says we should all do our best to help. 1217 Telegraph sketchwriter Michael Deacon gets in touch to say: So: it took only seven and a half minutes of the first PMQs for Cameron to use the phrase "The Shadow Chancellor landed us in this mess". Anyone have that in the sweepstake? "Further to that: just 10 minutes before Ed Miliband's first use of his old standby, "Back to the bunker"1216 Labour's Geoffrey Robinson asks why Government is borrowing ever more. PM says the deficit has been cut by a quarter, and points out that Labour's plans involve borrowing ever more. 1215 I made the point on Twitter this morning that Cameron may have underestimated public disquiet over the return of expenses cheat Laws. On a Radio 5Live phone-in outraged callers repeatedly compared him to benefits fiddlers. 1214 Ed Miliband is moving on the to reshuffle. He points out that PM brought back David Laws, who had been sacked, Jeremy Hunt, who he said "should have been sacked" and didn't sack George Osborne who many thought should have been. 1213 Miliband says Plan A is working. PM: "It is a hard road, it is a difficult road, but we will stick to that road because it's working for the economy."1212 ITV political editor Tom Bradby tweets: Twitter: tom bradby - PMQs...they've all been on holiday and it shows; they are all more relaxed.1211 Mr Cameron makes the point that Britain rising in the world competitive rankings. He accuses Miliband of having done nothing over the summer to come up with new policies. 1210 Miliband says new house building has fallen and no new roads built. He's now turning to planning - an issue close to Telegraph readers' hearts. 1209 Ann Treneman of The Times tweets: Twitter: ann treneman - George is booed as he arrives. He smiles and pretends not to notice.1209 Mr Miliband also raises George Osborne's roasting - saying the Paralympic audience spoke for the nation. 1208 The PM quips that he has his first choice of Chancellor, while Miliband has only his third. He says Mr Miliband still has to bring in the coffee himself in the morning, which isn't very "butch". Strange choice of word. 1207 Miliband asks about the national infrastructure plan - how many of the announced roads have actually been built? 1206 Cameron seems to be answering a question which wasn't asked of him, defending his new top team and saying there aren't divisions in the Government. 1205 Ho ho - Miliband asks who the PM had in mind when he said at the weekend he wanted to "cut through the dither." The PM isn't impressed - asking if that's the best he can do. 1204 Now it's Mr Miliband's turn. He also pays tribute to our Olympians. 1203 The awkward squad are out in full today. Nadine Dorries criticises Nick Clegg for his threat to torpedo boundary changes, and asks if Mr Cameron favours state funding for political parties. He doesn't. 1202 I'm right! Skinner's immediately raises the booing of Osborne. Mr Cameron quips: "I'm very sorry that when I was forming my Government of all the talents I couldn't find him on speed dial." 1201 And we're off. The PM begins with condolences to the fallen, and then pays tribute to our Olympic athletes and volunteers "I think they made an entire country proud and as they promise have inspired a generation."1159 Lib Dem Julian Huppert tweets: Twitter: Julian Huppert - In the Chamber for PMQs. If called, I'll ask the PM to confirm that this Government has rules out a third runway at Heathrow. 1158 Also expecting questions on the GCSEs debacle and plenty on Heathrow. Will Zac Goldsmith get a chance to make his case to the PM? 1151 Dennis Skinner, the Labour veteran heckler, has the first question for David Cameron today. The Prime Minister was forced to apologise earlier this year for describing thje 80-year-old as a "dinosaur" and suggesting he should retire. Mr Skinner seems to reserve particular ire for George Osborne - perhaps a joke then about the Chancellor being booed at the Paralympics. 1147 Of course, as well as being the first PMQs since the reshuffle, it's the first opportunity for backbench MPs to vent their spleens since coming back from their summer holidays. How many will seek to cash in on the Olympic and Paralympic spirit by prefacing their remarks with tributes to Team GB? 1146 Expect a few gags of the shuffling the deckchairs in the Titanic variety from Ed Miliband. It's likely he'll also push Mr Cameron on the economy and growth. 1143 David Cameron has just left No 10 for the Commons. He'll be back with the rest of the new Cabinet for their first meeting at 3pm. They'll have the traditional family portrait taken then. 1141 At this morning's Lobby briefing, the PM's official spokesman refused to rule out a new runway after the 2015 election. Boris won't be pleased. 1136 Read Ben Brogan's . 1129 Most of the reaction to the reshuffle has focused on a perceived shift to the right, and, of course, Boris Johnson's noisy protests at the ejecting of Justine Greening from the Transport brief. that a third runway at Heathrow was now back on the table, albeit not until after the election. 1127 It's always fun to see who sits where as ministers work out their pecking order. 1125 David Cameron will this morning take questions from MPs with attention certain to focus on the line-up of his new Cabinet. ?“Should I upgrade you?” I inquire. “Judith, I’m not sure what to say,” replies Siri, the “intelligent personal assistant” who lives inside my handset. “OK then, why must I buy a new iPhone every time a new one is launched?”“Allow me to direct you to Apple’s rather fabulous website,” he offers. “But don’t you think you are a good enough phone?” I persist. “I am good, but not great.”“Why are you not great?” I press him. “Is that what you think?” he blurts. Oh Gawd, now I’ve got a paranoid phone. Maybe it’s time to chuck it in a drawer with that vintage iPhone 1 and the wind-up Nokia. I couldn’t. Could I? Standing on the sidelines of this latest consumer orgy, it does remind me, slightly unnervingly, of my daughter’s seventh birthday party, when she asked for a Dr Who cake and half the kids went hyper after eating the blue Tardis icing. We’re all reduced to big kids when we get new stuff and the pleasure centres in our brains light up like the Blackpool illuminations. Which is why there’s something sinister about the creeping infantalisation at work in advertising. If it’s not the rinky-tinky, cutesy Toyota Prius TV commercial making overgrown children of us, it’s a motor insurance company offering free meercat soft toys to its customers. Not its customers’ children, its customers. Then there’s Waitrose, a shop I have always considered to be aspirationally mature, which has launched an ill-judged promotional campaign, inviting customers to finish the sentence “I shop at Waitrose because…”The immature, but very funny, entries included “I shop at Waitrose because I hate poor people” and “I shop at Waitrose because if you buy a full tank of helicopter fuel, you get 10 per cent off champagne”, which I hope will give the store’s brand managers food for thought. The worrying aspect is that if you treat people like children, they tend to behave accordingly – and our politicians are doing just that. David Cameron’s much-derided £2 million happiness survey – latest shock finding, having lots of money cheers you up – is no less puerile now than when it was launched. Nick Clegg’s cringeworthy apology for tuition fees, reminiscent of a groovy sixth-form teacher explaining why he inhaled, has received the wickedly funny musical send-up it deserves. Few of us would want to be considered childish, but we all strive to be youthful, whether that’s men dressed in cut-off trousers and sandals like their toddler sons, or women going to nightclubs with their daughters. Boundaries between generations are blurring; parents and teens routinely text, Facetime each other, listen to the same music, wear the same T-shirts and emulate one another to a degree unheard of when I was growing up. Which is all well and good until it’s time for someone to act the grown-up, turn down the sound system and spoil the party by saying, “You can sulk all you want, but nobody’s getting an iPhone 5. Except Mummy.”“What do you mean. why? Medical reasons. Her old phone’s off having psychotherapy.”Put her down, Katie, and have another Will somebody please give that woman a baby, now! Far be it from me to meddle in other folk’s fertility issues, but sometimes membership of the sisterhood, like Nato, demands unwelcome intervention. I am talking, of course, about Katie Holmes. The ex-Mrs Cruise has taken to carrying her six-year-old daughter, Suri, about like a living comfort blanket. It looks kinda weird – and that’s because it is kinda weird. If she’s not schlepping the slumbering child out of restaurants late at night, she’s hefting her home from her ballet lesson or cradling her human shield so close at various theme parks that the poor poppet can’t even see the rides she’s not allowed to go on. Assuming that Tom’s $33,000 monthly child support stretches to a shoe budget, ill-fitting footwear isn’t the issue here, although admittedly a lot of Suri’s heels look a lot more Louboutin than Start-rite). Which can only mean the problem lies with Katie’s inability to let go rather than her daughter’s ability to walk. The British equivalent to this behaviour is those peculiar women who breastfeed their offspring until they go to school. Secondary school. Aside from the fact that six-year-olds aren’t the best fine-dining companions (not least because they have a tendency to nod off before the cheese board arrives), suffocating Katie needs a new comfort blanket for everyone’s sake. So the obvious answer is a baby. Fellow actress Charlize Theron adopted her six-month-old son, Jackson, in March and he’s cuddlier than a clutch bag. in fact, hold the idea of an infant – let’s all chip in and buy Ms Holmes a new Hermès tote. The truth about elderly care We’re none of us getting any younger, which is why I wonder if the Government will have stopped dithering over care of the elderly by the time I reach retirement? Paying for social care for the estimated 2.4 million citizens who will be 85-plus in the next 20 years is, like printer ink and batteries, what consumer psychologists term a grudge purchase. Nobody wants to think about it until they reach the point where they absolutely have to. I’d say we’re already there. I suspect the foot-dragging is a lack of political will to admit the blindingly obvious. Namely, that we will probably have to sell our homes in whole or in part to pay £26,000-per annum care home costs. The sooner the nettle is grasped, the quicker we can (grudgingly) begin to deal with the world as it is, not as we would like it to be. Paxo lords it over HumphrysWho would have guessed that Jeremy Paxman was a morning person? I had assumed he was one of those crepuscular types who barely speaks until lunchtime, then peaks around 10pm in order to swoop on quivering little Treasury ministers, such as mousey Chloe Smith, who still bears the talon marks. But I was wrong – unlike Jeremy, who is always right. And yesterday morning, as he wrestled with John Humphrys for the hearts and minds of Today listeners, it was a triumphant putsch for the Newsnight presenter. What ought to have been a cosy, self-congratulatory chat about the 50th birthday of University Challenge turned into a magnificent gladiatorial clash, as Paxo, at his searing, sneering best, mocked the habitually fearsome radio anchorman for his drearily unimaginative line of questioning. It was all the more heart-warming when the University Challenge interrogator admitted to how much he “loves” the students’ enthusiasm. Given his often withering putdowns as Quizmaster General, such admiration has been kept magnificently concealed. Next, he’ll be expressing affection for John Humphrys. Spot shows his true tricoloreWe’re learning to read again in my house, and, if I’m honest, both the three-year-old and I are struggling a bit. Me, especially. Amid much excitement at the school nursery, she was sent home with a Spot book – a bilingual Spot book. I could manage the title: La Prima Passagiata di Spot, but I have to say, by the time the accident-prone pup had ambled as far as the hen-house –“Che c’`e nel pollaio, Spot?” – I was in linguistic meltdown. My daughter meanwhile kept yelling “Pasta! Gondola!”, her fondest highlights of our summer holiday in Italy. Maybe, I pondered, that was why she was given the book? And so I reapplied myself, with a sense of grateful relief we hadn’t gone to China. ?Not quite what you’d expect from an 82-year-old. But Rykiel is not your average octogenarian. When the former French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, awarded her the Légion d’honneur in 2009, he remarked: “You are terribly French.” And many of her designs are just that – she is most famous for her take on the classic Breton jumper, except hers have super-sized stripes in clashing colours, with a figure-hugging cut.But Rykiel’s influence stretches far beyond France. The Sonia Rykiel brand is now a multimillion-pound empire with more than 1,000 outlets; and her 2009 collaboration with H&M sold out in a matter of hours. Not bad for someone who had no formal training – and was not interested in fashion in the first place.She was born Sonia Fils into a bourgeois household in Paris where fashion was considered too frivolous for serious conversation. “I was a tomboy – my mother always said I would never become a woman because I loved to dress like a boy.”Rykiel’s comfortable background meant she was destined never to work but to become a wife and mother. And that was the way her life was going until, pregnant with her daughter, Nathalie, in 1962, she found herself frustrated by the lack of chic maternity wear.“Before then, I was not interested in clothes. I only started caring when I was pregnant. Because I was still so slim and I could wear nothing. Everything was for older women; nothing was for me. I wanted to look good. When you’re pregnant, it’s the most beautiful part of your life.”Luckily, her then-husband, Sam Rykiel, owned a boutique. Sonia swiftly designed a range of maternity clothes, as well as a figure-hugging knit that she named the Poor Boy Sweater. An item that could be worn to the office as well as to dinner, the Poor Boy was an instant hit – French Elle spotted it in the shop window and put it on their cover; while Audrey Hepburn, Brigitte Bardot and Catherine Deneuve started wearing theirs religiously.Rykiel opened her first store in 1968. Her clothes were playful, modern; a breath of fresh air in the stifling world of French fashion, which still centred around couture. “I didn’t want to dress like other women,” she says. “I wanted to find in dresses what I found in books. And it was impossible because nothing was made like that.”She was also one of a handful of women in an industry dominated by men. “But I wasn’t aware of being different.” Still, being a woman gave her a different perspective. “A man is sometimes more creative than a woman because he will not wear the clothes himself,” she has said. “Practical considerations to him are secondary.”“I am aware of the spirit of women,” she says now. “Especially because I have five sisters. Now I also have three granddaughters. And a daughter. I have always had women around me.”In 1972, the American magazine Women’s Wear Daily declared her the “Queen of Knits”. Yet she was a single mother and, although friends with Yves Saint Laurent, Karl Lagerfeld and other big names at that time, wasn’t part of that hedonistic scene. “Because I was a mother, I wasn’t a party girl,” she says. “I preferred having dinner parties with candles at home, seeing close friends, reading a lot.“It’s difficult having children but at the same time you have to keep on working,” she continues. “You can’t stop your life because of children. You shouldn’t be their slaves.”Today, her fashion influence is omnipresent. Rykiel was the first to print words on knitwear, the first to add studs and rhinestones. She was even the first to create garments with inside-out seams, deconstructing well before Belgian designers in the Eighties.Given her influence, it is understandable that she is reluctant to talk much about her Parkinson’s. She doesn’t want it to define her. Rykiel discovered she had the disease when she was 66 and didn’t tell a soul – not even her daughter. Her doctor advised her to keep it to herself, since she had a relatively mild form, so “I tried to be invisible, to pretend that nothing was wrong,” she wrote.Privately, though, she was terrified – her mother had developed Parkinson’s when she was 70, at a time when there was little in the way of effective medication, and Sonia remembered her suffering. When Rykiel could no longer keep it hidden, she decided to make the news public via her book.“The reaction has been very good from everyone,” she says. And even though she is tired, in pain much of the time, and shakes, “which I hate”, she is relieved that she no longer has to conceal it.“I have always written, since 1968,” she continues, very much drawing a line under the subject, “I’ve written 16 books [everything from children’s stories to erotic novels]. Some of my books tell women how to take care of themselves. Because when we go to school we learn only how to be mathematicians, to be scientists, to write. No one teaches you how to dress.”Earlier this year, the Sonia Rykiel brand was bought by Hong Kong investors. The Rykiel family still holds a 20 per cent stake. Sonia’s daughter, Nathalie, is now vice president (she also has a son, Jean-Philippe, who is a composer). Mother and daughter are extremely close – Nathalie lives with her husband in a flat upstairs – and Rykiel claims they always see eye-to-eye. “It’s fantastic because she has the same look, the same aesthetic, as me.”Rykiel remains proud that she never trained, thriving on her innate curiosity. “Fashion schools teach you in a certain way and you stay in that way,” she muses. “You don’t create by yourself. I get my influences from everything. For instance, the stripe I see in a cathedral can also end up in your sweater.”And have there been any mistakes along the way? “Of course! I’m never happy. But that, I think, is normal.”?11 April 2012: Private Jaco van Gass tries out his prosthetic ice axe for the first time, while testing equipment before his team begin their climb of Mount Everest. Private van Gass, who lost his left arm in a rocket blast in Afghanistan in 2009, put his own invention through its paces, and realised it needs some minor adjustments.Picture: David Cheskin/PA?Once she saw television news reports that Hazell was being sought by police, she said she immediately ran outside to tell her stepfather Nick Keeley. Mr Keeley, a 40-year-old plumber who used to play pool with Hazell, called 999 and said “loads” of police swarmed on the area "within five minutes". Chloe said: “When I found out I was really shocked. I feel a bit shaken up about it. "I didn’t know he was wanted so it was only afterwards when I realised the police were after him; that really shocked me."Hazell was arrested shortly afterwards on Cannon Hill Common, where he had been known to go fishing in the past. Local resident Billy Lock, 23, said angry members of the public had shouted abuse at Hazell as he was arrested. ?The British NRA, which is not linked to the American organisation, adopts a much less inflammatory approach. People here use guns for three main things: hunting, pest control on farms and target or clay pigeon shooting, and Mabbott says his job is simply to ensure they can use their weapons safely, without hassle and within the law. “Our members are ordinary people of all ages, young and old,” says Mabbott. “You can find yourself lining up on the ranges with a plumber on one side and a lawyer on the other. There are a lot of women, too.” In fact, gun ownership is at record levels. Some 1.2 million pick up a gun on a fairly regular basis today, more than ever before. Most are shotgun owners, but quite a large number own rifles, from a small bore 0.17 to 0.5 “full bores” which are so powerful they are used in the Army to blow up buildings. At Bisley’s .22 rifle range I meet 40-year-old Phil Martin, who used to work in the construction industry and is hoping to make the Olympic team in 2016. Wearing a specially designed leather jacket to constrict movement – it looks like a straitjacket – and what looks like a jeweller’s magnifying glass contraption on his head, he assumes the prone position and rests his cheek against a block of wood he has added to his stock to make it fit better. He gives a demonstration of his discipline, firing at targets 50 metres away without a tripod. He became interested in target shooting after trying it as part of his Duke of Edinburgh Award. “Unlike most sports,” he says, “you have to be as calm and still as you can be. Get into a Zen-like state.” Although .22 bullets are small they can be deadly. It was, after all, one of these which was used to assassinate Bobby Kennedy. And when Derrick Bird went on the rampage in Whitehaven, Cumbria, in 2010, killing 12 people, he was using a .22, as well as a shotgun. They are the two most common types of gun used in this country. And yet the criteria for owning them are very different. To get a shotgun licence, the onus is on the police to provide a good reason why the applicant shouldn’t have one. But, when it comes to a firearms licence, which is required for any type of rifle, the applicant has to provide a good reason why he should have one (namely, that he uses a gun regularly for sport or, in the case of farmers, pest control) and that he can be trusted with it “without danger to the public safety or to the peace”. You also have to prove your identity, give two referees of verifiable good character who have known you for at least two years, and you have to have your application approved by your family doctor. A thorough background and criminal record check of the applicant is then made by Special Branch (any person who has been sentenced to three years or more in prison is automatically banned for life from obtaining a firearms licence). Finally, your home, and the secure cabinet where you store your guns, has to be inspected by the police and a face-to-face interview is arranged with a Firearms Liaison Officer (FLO), known as “looking in the eye”. It is the licence-holder’s duty to ensure that nobody else has access to their gun cabinet. This state of affairs throws up problems in a number of different directions. For the law-abiding gun owner, the rules are needlessly pedantic. There have been several people who have had their guns confiscated because the police discovered that their wife, or in one case, their 80-year-old mother, knew where they kept the key to their gun cabinet. But, on the other hand, the strict regulations have done nothing to stop the trade in illegal guns. The weapon Reeve used was, after all, a handgun, which no one has been allowed to own in this country since 1997 – not even the British Olympic pistol shooting team, which has to train in Switzerland. And, a cruel irony this, gun crime has doubled since then. For complicated statistical reasons it is not easy to give exact figures, but very roughly there are around 10,000 firearms offences a year, around 40 of them involving people being killed – suicides as well as murders – with a further 2,000 or so injured. The majority of these occur in areas dominated by gang culture and involve illegal guns usually smuggled from Eastern Europe. But this doesn’t quite give the full picture either. Britain pretty much has the lowest gun crime figures in the world. It also has probably the most stringent firearms legislation, and this is a consequence of the two most infamous massacres – Hungerford, which resulted in the deaths of 16 people in 1987, and Dunblane which left 18 dead in 1996. Both cases involved guns that were legally licensed. The ownership of semi-automatic rifles was banned after Hungerford, handguns after Dunblane. Yet among more recent high-profile shootings, two have involved legally owned guns: a shotgun in Michael Atherton’s case (he was the man from Peterlee in Co Durham who shot dead three members of his family before turning the gun on himself, on New Year’s Day, 2012) and Derrick Bird with his .22 rifle. The question is begged then: how is it still possible that people who are clearly unhinged are allowed to own guns? This question has led some MPs, such as Labour’s Chris Williamson, to advocate a complete ban on all firearms. But a Home Affairs Select Committee that was set up after the Whitehaven massacre has been, for once, more measured in its response. It concluded that it might help if there is a psychological assessment of anyone applying for a gun licence, but it resisted the usual knee-jerk response of rushing through legislation to implement this. Apart from anything else, no one has yet been able to suggest a way in which this might actually work. But most people agree that the current situation is open to abuse. As things stand, applicants are left to assess their own mental ability – they have to tick a box on the application form to say whether they are suffering from any mental health issues which might disqualify them from having a gun. Even individuals who have been sectioned under the Mental Health Act don’t automatically have their firearms certificate revoked by the police. With the crackle of gunfire coming from the landscape all around me, I move on to meet my next gun enthusiast. Katy Poulsom, a 45-year-old clay pigeon shooting champion. A shotgun licence is needed for both clay pigeon shooting and game shooting. Poulsom runs a contract plant hire business and, when she first tried shooting clays 10 years ago, she knew straight away that it was the sport for her. “It was the fun of seeing a clay turn to dust when you hit it,” she says. “Also, it’s a lot easier than keeping horses!”She believes it is good to introduce children to the sport because it teaches them to be responsible. “Owning a gun is like owning a car,” she says. “In the wrong hands a car can be a deadly weapon, but that shouldn’t mean everyone should be banned from driving them.” When I ask what she made of the man in Peterlee who attacked his family with his legally owned shotgun before turning it on himself, she tells me something which leaves me speechless. “I don’t think psychological checks would have helped in his case. I think he would have found another way to do it if he didn’t have a gun. When someone decides to kill themselves they will do it somehow. I know because my husband killed himself with a shotgun six years ago.” Perhaps understandably, Poulsom has no inclination to try shooting quarry. “I don’t mind other people doing it,” she says, “but it’s not for me.” For a take on that side of shotgun shooting, I turn to 30-year-old Samantha Edwards, a former gamekeeper who now works as the political officer for the British Association for Shooting and Conservation. Part of her job is to lobby politicians and remind them that shooting is worth £1.6 billion to the British economy. “For me, game shooting is about the banter and camaraderie,” she says. “That and the chance to work my dogs. It’s not about being bloodthirsty.” Coached by Iain Robertson, the captain of the GB team, I have a go on the 600-yard range, firing the sort of rifle a deerstalker would use. It is a visceral experience. You feel the recoil in your shoulder and the power in your sinews. Alongside me is James Watson, who is also in the GB team. He says no one could have anticipated what Thomas Hamilton did in Dunblane, “but several members of his gun club warned the police that he seemed unstable. After that incident there was a tendency for gun lobbyists to keep their heads down, but that has been a mistake because it has just led to bad legislation. There is still far too much ignorance about the sport.” Finally I have a go at the big one, a .308, on the 1,200-yard range. The gun I use belongs to Olaf Jones, a former RAF man who describes himself as “wingless”, having lost an arm in a motorbike accident. He represents the GB team in the F class for disabled competitors. There is no magazine or safety catch on his gun, but there is a bolt and a two-stage trigger. Because it is on a tripod, and he has lined up the crosshairs of the telescopic sights for me, I am able to hit a target the size of a CD at 1,200 yards. And, yes, I do get a kick out of it. When I ask Jones why he gets a kick out of it, and why he keeps coming back for more, he gives me perhaps the best answer I’ve heard all day. “I just want the perfect score.” This article also appeared in SEVEN magazine, free with the Sunday Telegraph. Follow SEVEN on Twitter ?August 11: Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan are joined by Ronmey's granddaughter Chloe while talking to reporters on the charter flight between Virginia and North CarolinaPicture: Mary Altaffer/AP?Mocking the Prime Minister, the Labour leader questioned why he had forgotten to tell the rest of the Cabinet and the party's backbenchers about the plan. "So it was all part of a seamless political strategy?" he said. Speculation that the Chancellor might not have warned his colleagues was sparked when Mr Osborne was branded a "coward" by a Conservative backbencher today for sending Ms Smith on to BBC2's Newsnight to defend the policy shift. Mid-Bedfordshire MP Nadine Dorries – a vocal critic of the Tory leadership – said in a series of messages on Twitter: "If Osborne sent Chloe on re scrapping 3p he is a coward as well as arrogant." ?We sit at a picnic bench outside the zoo’s restaurant, watching two Brazilian tapirs pottering about in their field. The zoo has a simple charm. From the unmanicured edges of the grass to the homemade laminated signs, it almost feels like someone’s back garden. Which, of course, it is; the Mee house is right in the centre of the park, with no ropes or fences segregating it from the public.It was a series of life-changing circumstances that led to Mee buying the zoo. Mee, 46, a freelance journalist, and his wife, Katherine, had been living in the south of France with their children, Milo, now 10, and Ella, eight. Katherine had given up her job as an art director on a magazine and they had sold their flat in Primrose Hill, north London. Mee juggled writing with converting their two barns. In June 2004 Katherine was diagnosed with a grade-four glioblastoma brain tumour. She completed a course of chemotherapy but her doctors warned her and Mee that the tumour would return. Meanwhile, his mother, Amelia, was looking to downsize after losing her husband. Mee’s sister, Melissa, came across an estate agent’s brochure for Dartmoor Wildlife Park. The park was for sale at the same asking price – £1.2 million – as Amelia’s home. Knowing Mee’s lifelong fascination with animals, Melissa posted the brochure to him in France with a note: 'Your dream scenario.’'We all started focusing on this zoo,’ Mee explains. 'My dad would have said it was bloody ridiculous. He was a man who had come from a working-class mining town and built up his small fortune by being careful and working hard, but he wasn’t there.’ All the siblings agreed that the zoo would be a wonderful project for Amelia to be part of. They would each put their £50,000 inheritance into the pot and decide later who would move into the 12-bedroom house with Amelia.Persuading Amelia was easy: for her 73rd birthday she had spent a day as a big cat keeper, and she loved the idea of owning a zoo. But buying the zoo was not so simple. The first offer was rejected in favour of a higher bid. But that sale fell through and a year later, in April 2006, Mee saw a news story announcing there were 11 days to find a buyer or the animals would be put down. He knew he had to try again. Katherine, however, was not keen. 'I had made her sell our precious London flat to move to France so I could write a book and now I wanted us to buy a zoo,’ Mee says. 'She thought I should just finish what I’d started.’ Of Katherine’s initial resistance he adds, 'We had a 10-year relationship with very few arguments. Her job was to shoot down my more outrageous ideas, which she did beautifully. But this was a decision that was going to affect the next 10-15 years of our lives. If she wasn’t going to live that long – I was desperately searching for a cure, but the doctors kept telling us the tumour would return – then it would be me bringing up the children alone and I couldn’t think of a more incredible place to live.’He managed to persuade Katherine (they kept the French barns, which Mee has since sold), but his brother Henry, who was the executor of his father’s will, mounted a legal challenge to stop the purchase. Eventually Henry agreed to the purchase going ahead, but withdrew his £50,000 investment. This has taken its toll on the family: Benjamin and Henry no longer speak. Finally, in October 2006, the sale went through at £1.1 million. But by then the council had revoked the zoo’s licence: rotten fence posts and faulty electric fences were not safe and pathways had become unwalkable.And on the fourth day of their new lives, the jaguar escaped. An inexperienced keeper had not bolted the enclosure correctly and Sovereign jumped into the neighbouring enclosure, intent on fighting Tammy the Siberian tiger. Mee’s first job as a zoo director was to decide which animal to shoot dead. Fortunately it didn’t come to that – Tammy’s keeper managed to coax her back into her house and lock her inside. After an anxious night spent waiting for an anaesthetic dart gun to arrive from another zoo, Sovereign was sedated and returned to his enclosure. The zoo was spared a bloody battle. The keeper was fired.At the start of the Mees’ tenure, the zoo was costing £3,000 a week in utility bills, animal feed and staff wages. Mee needed £500,000 to make urgent repairs before he would be allowed to let the paying public back in (he needed 60,000 visitors a year to break even). He had already melted down credit cards and had even driven Amelia to a cash dispenser to withdraw the last of her savings. In a BBC documentary about the zoo in 2007 cameras catch an increasingly desperate Mee begging a bank manager for money, saying, 'The wolves are at the door…’ and, with his trademark humour, pausing to add, '… literally.’The next six months were exhausting. Just before Christmas Katherine’s tumour returned. In January she started another course of chemotherapy, which left her with debilitating depression. The loan was finally secured in February and repairs started immediately, but not before Parker, one of the wolves, escaped. After a frantic hunt involving armed police, Parker was caught in a quarry two miles away.Katherine died on March 31 2007, after two months of fading mobility, speech and mental clarity ('Most of the physical difficulties I could cope with, like helping her dress and go to the toilet, but I couldn’t bear to see her surprised that the light was controlled by the light switch’). But Mee could not give into his own grief – he had only two months until the zoo inspection.His extraordinary will and determination to succeed meant they passed, and on July 7 they opened to the public as the rebranded Dartmoor Zoological Park, with signs that Katherine had designed. 'Opening day was such a relief,’ Mee says. 'But all day strangers – who knew our story from the local paper – kept coming up to me saying, “Katherine would have been so proud of you.” I wasn’t expecting it. I had to go to the office to take a breath, but someone had put up my favourite picture of her on the wall. When I saw her there looking at me, I cried for two hours.’Mee takes a brief pause from his story to thank some people walking past for visiting the zoo. They say they have heard that there is a Hollywood film being made about the zoo. He laughs and tells them it is true. Mee still cannot really believe it. He had written about the whole experience in a book, We Bought a Zoo, published in 2008. A year later 20th Century Fox bought the rights and brought Cameron Crowe on board to direct. Matt Damon was cast as Mee (who was delighted: 'I believed he was thoughtful, self-aware and self-deprecating’). Within 20 months ('the fastest project I have ever worked on,’ Crowe says) the film was completed.As befits a Hollywood tear-jerker, Katherine’s death frames the plot. In the film she dies before Mee buys the zoo but she is shown through a series of flashbacks: 'She’s not here, and yet she’s there in every scene,’ Crowe tells me. The chronology of the story has shifted and the drama has been relocated to California, but the heart of the film is that rebuilding the rundown animal park is a restorative exercise for the bereaved family. 'That is how I feel about the zoo,’ Mee says. 'Rebuilding it was cathartic. But the zoo itself is also a tremendous place for healing. It connects you to the circle of life. We have births, we have deaths and they remind you that we are just another family unit that has suffered a loss – like the tigers who lost their grandfather or the tapirs who had a stillborn calf.’Mee checks his watch, jumping up from the bench and startling a peacock nestling at our feet. He is late to pick up the children. Life as a single father is a challenge that he says starts 'with a frantic search for the kids’ clothes’ before breakfast, dropping them off at school ('They usually need sports kit or costumes or any number of things which I might have forgotten’), overseeing the zoo, before going back to pick them up at 3pm. His affinity for single parents is reflected in admission prices with a discount for them on Tuesdays.Matt Damon tells me over the phone from Los Angeles that the idea of suddenly becoming a bereaved, single parent was one of the things that drew him to the story. 'For me, as a father, I was moved by the idea of how you help your children get through the loss of their mother and how you bring them up without your partner.’ Crowe thinks the best part is that the story continues in real life: 'You can leave the movie theatre and go through the turnstiles into Dartmoor zoo.’ The film ends with the zoo opening on a glorious Californian day with families queuing to get in (including the real Mees, who have cameo roles). But the reality in Dartmoor was of course very different. The July they opened was the wettest for 100 years, with the following three summers barely any better. Mee needed 1,000 visitors a day; instead he says it was not unusual to get four people. 'I used to look at the sky and every time it was raining I would think, “That’s £5,000 we should have made today.”’ Despite an initial £30,000 for the rights and another £250,000 once the film went into production (he will also get five per cent of net profits from the film), Mee was still in financial straits. His monthly bills were £47,000 for wages, amenities and food. 'At the end of every month I was worrying that we simply wouldn’t survive long enough for the film to come out.’The Mees have not wasted any money on beautifying their own home, and living conditions have been tough for Amelia particularly. But, Mee says, 'she loves owning the zoo. The stimulation of being part of such a busy environment has kept her mentally and physically active far beyond how she might have fared on her own. She feeds the monkeys in the morning, and watches the cheetah while doing her early-morning exercises. And we have finally managed to wire up her kiln in the house, so now she is making ceramic water bowls for some of the smaller animals, and animal models to sell in the shop.’Mee seems almost pained when I ask him which is his favourite animal in the zoo – as if I were forcing him to choose between his children – but admits that the two tapirs are top of the list. 'They are like a married couple,’ he says. 'You can tell when they’ve had an argument because one will be in the house and the other one will be swimming in the pond. Otherwise they are inseparable.’Conservation is Mee’s passion. The zoo has three Siberian tigers; in the wild there are now fewer than 400. Although the zoo cannot breed from the tigers – the previous owner was not judicious about properly monitoring mating among his animals and as a result most of the big cats are genetically related – Mee explains the importance of having them in zoos: 'I don’t particularly like looking at animals behind wire. But, as a zoo director, I understand that it is absolutely essential that we keep them there. We can build up a broad genetic population in zoos and then if we can work out a way to regain an area the size of Siberia, just for tigers, then we can re-release them.’ Recently the zoo has been given a pair of endangered white-naped cranes, and Dartmoor has been accepted on to a breeding programme monitored by the European Association of Zoos and Aquaria. It is after closing time, and Milo and Ella are playing with the pygmy goats under a 400-year-old oak tree in the middle of the park. Milo says that after school they help the keepers feed the animals, and on Saturdays and holidays they teach other children in the education department. Mee smiles. The zoo, he says, has enriched their lives in ways he could not have anticipated. Recently he was walking with Ella through a field of bluebells next to the wolves’ enclosure. 'She was dressed in her red cape and running ahead of me, with the wolves loping silently alongside her. I watched her and thought, “How many little girls can run along in their red riding hood outfits being chased by real wolves?” That’s what I’ve been able to do for her.’'We Bought a Zoo’ is released on March 16. ?Paxo is said to have commented that when interviewing politicians he keeps asking himself: why is this lying bastard lying to me? That seemed to be what he was doing here, as he asked the same question nine times. But while his encounters are normally entertaining, this was more like the scene in Cool Hand Luke where Luke, played by Paul Newman, challenges the prison bully, played by the towering George Kennedy, to a boxing match. All the other prisoners enjoy the spectacle of a big man knocking down a little man but then, when Luke keeps getting to his feet, they start shouting: “Stay down, stay down.” When Paxo asked Chloe “Do you ever think you are incompetent?”, television viewers across the land must have been shouting: “Stay down, Chloe, stay down!”Anyway, it makes you wonder why politicians put themselves through all this abuse, not only from hecklers and interviewers but even, it seems, from their staff. You have to wonder, too, why we, public and media alike, are so desperate to abuse them. I have a suggestion. It might help us to get it out of our systems if our leaders took it in turns to stand on a platform for an hour a day — the empty plinth in Trafalgar Square might serve — while anyone who wanted to screamed abuse at them. Those who wished to point and laugh would be welcome, too. It would be therapeutic and, afterwards, the politicians might be able to get on with running the country unmolested. They might even find it therapeutic themselves, because, deep down, they probably think they deserve it. ?"The Artist's Museum Happening" MOCA Los Angeles Gala?SURPRISE: The cast of Downton Abbey (PBS) It was no surprise that the much beloved Downton Abbey would enter the Best Drama race, but what was surprising was just how many of its cast members scored nominations in their respective categories, with Hugh Bonneville, Michelle Dockery, Maggie Smith, Joanne Froggatt, Brendan Coyle, and Jim Carter all grabbing nominations. For a show with such an expansive cast, it’s impressive to see six nominees emerge from the war-torn country manor this year (though the omission of Dan Stevens, who plays Downton heir Matthew Crawley, is strange). With six nominees?including several competing against each other?it will be interesting to see just how their individual races play out. Given the pivotal role that the Anna/Bates storyline played this season, I’m especially happy to see Froggatt and Coyle both receiving individual nods, and I feel that it’s time for the Academy to recognize the aura of nobility and honor that Bonneville brings to his role as Lord Grantham.?It’s been a long, hard road for pop culture’s pre-eminent post-9/11 hero, whose journey reflects the turbulent politics of the last decade.Throughout eight seasons Jack, embodied with steely resolve by Kiefer Sutherland, has repeatedly saved the country from terrorist plots (not to mention more than one nuclear explosion). But working for, and sometimes against, the fictional government agency Counter Terrorism Unit has cost Jack his sanity and more than a few loved ones. He’s tortured his own brother, endured the assassination of friends, and even killed innocent colleagues to prevent larger threats.The show was hatched as a smart action thriller, with Jack as its noble center, and a novel real-time narrative as its gimmick. But when 24 debuted on Fox in 2001, less than eight weeks after the 9/11 attacks, it was instantly super-charged with meaning?though it didn’t become an actual hit until its second season. An escapist fantasy to be sure, Jack’s heroics also served as a well-timed, black-and-white answer to the nation’s collective anxiety and anger. Here was a whatever-it-takes warrior whose aggressive methods of coercion on television seemed justified, even cathartic, given what had been lost in the real world.It was no surprise when the show found an especially vocal following among the Bush administration and , many of who held up Jack as the model patriot: A pissed off man-at-large in the War on Terror, breaking traitors down one finger at a time.But after several seasons of torturing his way to victory, headlines began to clash with the drama. Graphic accounts of prisoner abuse inflicted by American personnel at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo emerged. The national mood grew increasingly divided. Suddenly, Jack’s bloodied fists and rogue swagger didn’t seem so sexy to its creative team.“It didn’t seem distasteful until then,” executive producer Howard Gordon told The Daily Beast last week.“ 24 is really an action show,” Gordon said. “You may as well take every action hero from John McClane to Rambo to Dirty Harry and say they’re all repugnant anti-heroes that should be tried and convicted.”Yet some conservatives viewed the continued popularity of 24 as a sign of support; in 2006, the show averaged nearly 14 million viewers. That summer, conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation approached producers about hosting a panel?“ 24 and America's Image in Fighting Terrorism: Fact, Fiction or Does It Matter?”?during which then-Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff praised the show's depiction of the war on terrorism as “trying to make the best choice with a series of bad options. … .”(And still today, the image of Jack Bauer to the national debate on torture.)Gordon, a registered Democrat, recalled how the right-wing’s warm embrace marked a turning point for the show. “The idea was patently absurd that the show was a mouthpiece for any point of view,” he said. “That Jack Bauer was suddenly the poster child for this misbehavior, that there was this presumption of causality for misbehavior in the field among interrogators taking their cues from him? You know, we have graver systemic problems if that’s the case.”Still, producers understood that Jack and the world he lived in needed to evolve with the political climate. “It was a conundrum,” Gordon said. “What do you do without sort of calling Jack Bauer a war criminal and disabusing the show?"At the outset of Season 7 in Jan. 2009, Jack was forced to testify in a Senate hearing on human rights violations and sparred with fiery FBI special agent Walker, who initially recoiled at Jack’s violent reputation. And soon after the U.S. had installed Barack Obama as its new leader in real-life, Jack faced a new kind of adversary in the form of morally righteous President Allison Taylor (played by Cherry Jones), who was unbending in her anti-torture stance.That season also saw Jack’s torture tactics backfire when he got too tough with an innocent bystander he suspected of terrorism. By the end of those 24 hours, Jack was on his deathbed, asking for forgiveness of his “sins.”“He can’t stop being Jack, and he can’t renounce his character or his behavior, but he gets to the point where he’s questioning it. He‘s not so sure anymore, and he can‘t forgive himself for some of his actions,” Gordon said. “We don’t come to conclusions, but hopefully we presented a more nuanced kind of situation about a very complex issue.”Those decisions also set the stakes for Jack’s final meltdown this season, as it appears the guilt and loss have finally caught up to him.It doesn’t spoil the finale to say Jack will live on. A feature film is planned to continue his story. Whereas Jack reached his last straw on television, Gordon said the movie will revolve around “Jack trying to find his way home again.”By any means necessary? If that's what the times call for...Plus: .Denise Martin is a former television reporter for Variety and staff writer at the Los Angeles Times. She has also written for The Advocate, Premiere and The Hollywood Reporter and has a degree from Le Cordon Bleu College of Culinary Arts.?We also looked at the happiness quotient of each place’s residents, according to the most recent , which measures physical and emotional health and healthy behaviors via survey. Studies show that happy people are more open to relationships and a positive outlook is more attractive.Lastly, we combed Citysearch.com to find out the ratio of restaurants and bars in each city compared to the over-21 population.Plus: .Like and for updates all day long.For inquiries, please contact The Daily Beast at . #1, San Antonio, TX Singles: C Social life: A Emotional health: A Marriage: B Divorce: C Romantic hotspot: #2, Milwaukee, WI Singles: A Social life: A Emotional health: C Marriage: F Divorce: A Romantic hotspot: #3, Austin, TX Singles: B Social life: A Emotional health: B Marriage: C Divorce: C Romantic hotspot: #4, Virginia Beach, VA Singles: C Social life: A Emotional health: A Marriage: F Divorce: A Romantic hotspot: #5, San Diego, CA Singles: B Social life: D Emotional health: B Marriage: A Divorce: C Romantic hotspot: #6, Boston, MA Singles: A Social life: D Emotional health: A Marriage: B Divorce: C Romantic hotspot: #7, New Orleans, LA Singles: A+ Social life: A+ Emotional health: F Marriage: C Divorce: D Romantic hotspot: #8, Hartford, CT Singles: B Social life: C Emotional health: B Marriage: D Divorce: A Romantic hotspot: #9, Cleveland, OH Singles: A Social life: A Emotional health: F Marriage: F Divorce: A Romantic hotspot: #10, Portland, OR Singles: D Social life: A Emotional health: B Marriage: D Divorce: A Romantic hotspot: #11, San Francisco, CA Singles: A Social life: F Emotional health: A Marriage: A Divorce: D Romantic hotspot: #12, Los Angeles, CA Singles: A Social life: F Emotional health: C Marriage: A Divorce: D Romantic hotspot: #13, Columbus, OH Singles: B Social life: A Emotional health: D Marriage: F Divorce: A+ Romantic hotspot: #14, Orlando, FL Singles: C Social life: B Emotional health: C Marriage: A+ Divorce: F Romantic hotspot: #15, Seattle, WA Singles: D Social life: B Emotional health: A Marriage: D Divorce: B Romantic hotspot: #16, Atlanta, GA Singles: C Social life: C Emotional health: A Marriage: A Divorce: F Romantic hotspot: #17, Las Vegas, NV Singles: C Social life: A+ Emotional health: F Marriage: B Divorce: C Romantic hotspot: #18, Sacramento, CA Singles: C Social life: C Emotional health: B Marriage: B Divorce: B Romantic hotspot: #19, Baltimore, MD Singles: B Social life: B Emotional health: C Marriage: C Divorce: D Romantic hotspot: #20, Providence, RI Singles: B Social life: A Emotional health: F Marriage: C Divorce: C Romantic hotspot: #21, Salt Lake City, UT Singles: F Social life: B Emotional health: B Marriage: B Divorce: B Romantic hotspot: #22, Tucson, AZ Singles: A+ Social life: F Emotional health: B Marriage: B Divorce: F Romantic hotspot: #23, Chicago, IL Singles: B Social life: D Emotional health: C Marriage: C Divorce: B Romantic hotspot: #24, Buffalo, NY Singles: A Social life: A Emotional health: D Marriage: D Divorce: D Romantic hotspot: #25, Washington, DC Singles: D Social life: F Emotional health: A+ Marriage: C Divorce: B Romantic hotspot: #26, San Jose, CA Singles: F Social life: D Emotional health: A+ Marriage: A Divorce: F Romantic hotspot: #27, Memphis, TN Singles: A Social life: C Emotional health: D Marriage: D Divorce: B Romantic hotspot: #28, Raleigh-Cary, NC Singles: F Social life: B Emotional health: A Marriage: F Divorce: A Romantic hotspot: #29, Nashville, TN Singles: F Social life: B Emotional health: B Marriage: D Divorce: B Romantic hotspot: #30, St. Louis, MO Singles: C Social life: B Emotional health: C Marriage: F Divorce: A Romantic hotspot: #31, Denver, CO Singles: F Social life: C Emotional health: B Marriage: D Divorce: A Romantic hotspot: #32, Kansas City, MO Singles: F Social life: C Emotional health: A Marriage: F Divorce: A Romantic hotspot: #33, Minneapolis, MN Singles: F Social life: D Emotional health: A Marriage: F Divorce: A Romantic hotspot: #34, New York, NY Singles: A Social life: D Emotional health: D Marriage: A Divorce: D Romantic hotspot: #35, Pittsburgh, PA Singles: C Social life: A Emotional health: D Marriage: D Divorce: C Romantic hotspot: #36, Phoenix, AZ Singles: C Social life: F Emotional health: B Marriage: A Divorce: F Romantic hotspot: #37, Rochester, NY Singles: B Social life: C Emotional health: D Marriage: D Divorce: B Romantic hotspot: #38, Philadelphia, PA Singles: A Social life: F Emotional health: C Marriage: C Divorce: D Romantic hotspot: #39, Oklahoma City, OK Singles: D Social life: B Emotional health: C Marriage: B Divorce: F Romantic hotspot: #40, Houston, TX Singles: F Social life: B Emotional health: C Marriage: A Divorce: D Romantic hotspot: #41, Dallas, TX Singles: F Social life: F Emotional health: A Marriage: B Divorce: B Romantic hotspot: #42, Charlotte, NC Singles: F Social life: C Emotional health: C Marriage: F Divorce: A+ Romantic hotspot: #43, Indianapolis, IN Singles: D Social life: B Emotional health: C Marriage: C Divorce: D Romantic hotspot: #44, Richmond, VA Singles: C Social life: D Emotional health: D Marriage: B Divorce: F Romantic hotspot: #45, Miami, FL Singles: A Social life: F Emotional health: F Marriage: A Divorce: F Romantic hotspot: #46, Cincinnati, OH Singles: D Social life: C Emotional health: D Marriage: D Divorce: B Romantic hotspot: #47, Tampa, FL Singles: B Social life: D Emotional health: F Marriage: C Divorce: C Romantic hotspot: #48, Riverside, CA Singles: D Social life: F Emotional health: C Marriage: A Divorce: D Romantic hotspot: #49, Detroit, MI Singles: B Social life: F Emotional health: F Marriage: C Divorce: C Romantic hotspot: #50, Jacksonville, FL Singles: D Social life: C Emotional health: F Marriage: A+ Divorce: F Romantic hotspot: ?Despite the irony that Blyth has written about a subject that she seems to think has been overdone in our culture and inflated in our economy, the book is not without its charms. Self-aware of its dispensability, the book assumes a freewheeling approach, skipping between the centuries to paint an ever-evolving portrait of marriage. Blyth writes for an audience curious for the perspective of Queen Victoria and Madonna, Charles Darwin and Rod Stewart, and this high-low mash-up is difficult to resist. Before proposing to his cousin, Darwin lined up the arguments for and against. Pro: “My God, it is intolerable to think of spending ones whole life, like a neuter bee, working, working & nothing after all.” Con: “Loss of Time.?cannot read in the Evenings?fatness & idleness.” Rock star Rod Stewart was less equivocal upon his marriage to model Rachel Hunter: “I’m happy as a dog with two dicks.” is filled with morsels like these, with the more acerbic among them often proving to be the tastiest. “When the celebrated photographer Antony Armstrong-Jones fell out of love with Princess Margaret,” Blyth writes, “he spelled out his feelings by littering their home with lists entitled ‘Things I hate about you.’” Among the missives: “You look like a Jewish manicurist.” The marriage did not last. To open her chapter on the role that children play in marriage, Blyth quotes Napoleon Bonaparte. “I want to marry a womb,” he declared upon ditching his older wife for a younger woman. To preserve marital harmony, the wife of the novelist Georges Simenon accompanied her husband to his favored brothel and helped him choose his girls. D.H. Lawrence’s wife had a more bemused idea of sex: “When people talk about sex, I don’t know what they mean?as if sex hopped about by itself like a frog, as if it had no relation to the rest of living.”And there are genuinely touching episodes related in . When Nathaniel Hawthorne told his wife that he had been fired from his job, she left the room, returned with kindling and made a fire for him; “Next,” writes Hawthorne, “she brings pen, paper, ink, and sets them beside him. Then she touches the sad man on the shoulder, and, as he turns to the beaming face, says, ‘Now you can write your book.’” Mixed in with such wedding-toast fodder are statistics: A 1992 study found that unmarried women were 86 percent poorer and bachelors 61 percent poorer than the married or widowed over the course of their lives. Married individuals have less intense relationships with their parents than people who are divorced or have remained single, according to a 2008 study.But, ultimately, these vignettes and statistics don’t add up to much, and the book’s stance?between the high and low, vignette and statistic?doesn’t help to clarify the book’s purpose. Is it a historical survey or pop culture commentary? Entertainment or self help? The answer is that it’s a bit of everything, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But, when it veers toward inspirational instruction?as it’s marketed to be?it enters the realm of the painfully obvious. On the unique challenges of marriage: “Every marriage shares one secret,” Blyth writes; “[t]hat it is like no other.” Gee. On adultery: “Sadly, few people approach affairs with clarity.” To further explicate the obvious: “Uncommon”?i.e., adulterous?“arrangements vary hugely.” I should hope so. And, to assuage your raging fears about the little creatures spawned by so many marriages: “There is no such thing as an ideal parent.” Phew.Even more irksome than the aphorisms is the obviousness of the advice. “If you cannot resist the temptations of infidelity, practice to deceive,” Blyth writes. To assist with money matters: “The solution is to be generous and approach your union as one of financial equals.” A sentiment repeated so often in the book that I can’t even remember the context: “To work, marriage must balance our needs as individual and foster our partnership.” It’s not that this is bad advice, but it’s disappointing that a mind capable of gathering up so many tasty nuggets of other people’s matrimonial wisdom could not come up with a few of her own. Cliched description is lazy, but cliched proscription is just annoying. But maybe when it comes to a guide on marriage, that’s the most we can expect.Plus: .Chloe Schama is the assistant managing editor of The New Republic and the author of Wild Romance: A Victorian Story of a Marriage, a Trial, and a Self-Made Woman .?Ultimately, however, the deep and lingering fascination with this story lies less in contemplations of American innocence than specific horrors: the slashed throat, the splayed body?naked from the waist down?the bloody footprint found on the bathroom mat. And, in the relation of such detail, Burleigh is excellent, reporting with vibrant but sober diligence that also extends to less morbid matters: the history of Perugia, including the town-gown conflicts between the foreign-heavy student population and well-to-do Perugians; a legal system that allowed Knox and Sollecito to be detained for a year before being charged; the tumultuous childhood of Guede, born in Ivory Coast, brought to Perugia by his father, and later adopted by one of the richest families in Perugia. Burleigh is also thorough on matters of interpretation: The half-covered body, Burleigh writes, was “a sign, the prosecutor felt, of feminine pieta?sympathy. Later, Italian criminologists would bolster this notion and say publicly that killers who cover their victims with blankets are usually female. American criminologists say that gender has nothing to do with it.” Only occasionally does her investigation take her too far, eliciting some extremely banal statements: “Shutters are an important aspect of Italian life.”?Nicole Kidman: Rabbit HoleAfter her adventure Australia flopped in 2008, Nicole Kidman made headlines by saying she was from acting because the “burning desire” was gone. But two years (and another flop with Nine) later, Kidman triumphantly returns in , which just opened amid awards season. The Oscar winner’s performance as a woman struggling to cope with the loss of her young son has been hailed by as a “career-best performance.” says Kidman’s portrayal is “riveting because she essentially plays the entire film at two levels, the surface everyday life and then what is turning over and over again in her mind.” Whether Kidman’s “ ” will bag her Oscar gold remains to be seen, but considering she’s earned nods from the and the , she seems to be on her way.?Back when was adorable (yes, there was a time), she was cast in the dual role of twins Annie and Hallie?sisters separated at birth who reconnect and pull the ultimate prank: switching lives. Filled with cutesy scenes of poker games, fencing victories, and the inevitable at-home ear-piercing, this updated version of the 1961 classic boasts prank after prank. This scene shows an unsuspecting soon-to-be mother-in-law getting punk’d by the twins on a camping trip. As she drifts off to sleep, Lohan 1 and 2 drag her inflatable mattress into the middle of a nearby lake.?Most of you probably watched the Golden Globe arrivals on TV, but I was behind a glass window facing the red carpet on Sunday afternoon. The most fashionable accessory at the ceremony wasn't sparkly or even very expensive: it was a sea of red and white umbrellas that shielded the celebrities from the rain. Some stars (Taylor Lautner, Bradley Cooper) managed to stay dry, others (Harrison Ford, Sandra Bullock) weren't so lucky, and Robert Downey, Jr.'s tux was as soggy as Sherlock Holmes's trenchcoat. Toni Collette (best actress in a drama winner for The United States of Tara) summed it up best when she told the press room backstage that after she left her house, "I walked out into the rain, the chaos." Maybe that wasn't a bad way to prepare for a night with the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, the group of journalists who hand out the awards.Over the years, the Golden Globes have become the modern-day equivalent of Truman Capote's Black and White ball, a gathering where some of the most famous people in the world gather (hello Julia Roberts, Tom Hanks, Meryl Streep, George Clooney and ... Chace Craford) to mingle, booze and congratulate themselves. Harper Lee was even there, or at least an actress who played her?Sandra Bullock. But by its own rowdy standards?remember when Elizabeth Taylor seemed so tipsy she couldn't even announce Gladiator the winner??this year's ceremony was relatively tame, even with the foul-mouthed Ricky Gervais? as the show's host and The Hangover as the surprise winner for best comedy. Avatar picked up best drama, making it the frontrunner for the Oscar, along with Jeff Bridges (Crazy Heart), Bullock (The Blind Side), Mo'nique (Precious) and Christoph Waltz (Inglourious Basterds). Still, there were some unscripted moments. Here are nine things we learned backstage:(1) Please, stop asking Meryl Streep how she does her accents. For years, it was the one question that got under Streep's skin, because it oversimplified the art of what she does. After Meryl won best actress in a comedy for Julie & Julia, the first thing a journalist wanted to know was if she hammered out her accents at home in front of a mirror. Streep took a deep breath, and then said, "I don't think about it that way. I have an idea inside me of how a person speaks. Then I corroborate it," she said, by eavesdropping on real-life people. She didn't even seem too annoyed by the question. She really is a great actress.(2) If you get lost, you can always ask George Clooney for directions. Julianna Margulies (best actress in a drama for The Good Wife) didn't have a direct path to the stage when her name was called. "I was actually getting flustered because I couldn't get up there," she said, "and then I saw this faimilar face"?Clooney, her ER costar, who she pecked on the cheek. "It was very heartwarming for me." (3) Sandra Bullock, you just won your first Golden Globe, what the heck are you thinking? "My dress isn't see through, is it?" Bullock asked, like a character out of a Sandra Bullock movie. "You guys would tell me?"(4) Mention Tiger Woods, and Hollywood gets very nervous. Chloe Sevigny, star of Big Love, wouldn't comment on the golfer's big affairs. And Martin Scorsese nearly fled when he was asked if he'd ever consider making a Tiger biopic, and then gave a response that was cryptic even for him. "That's a story that's universal," he said. "It could be a number of people in history. Being human, that's the story."(5) The Hollywood Foreign Press went Glee-ful for Glee?best TV comedy?but the show's biggest fan is still Suri Cruise. "That blows me away," said one of the show's stars, Jane Lynch. "I take that as a compliment. The Church of Scientology is very powerful."(6) Fun Hangover fact No. 1: Mike Tyson agreed to play himself in the movie because he loved director Todd Phillips' comedy Old School. Hangover fact No. 2: the sequel is scheduled for release next Memorial Day, and it's not set in Las Vegas. Fact No. 3: Heather Graham took a stripper class to prepare for her role.(7) When actors say no, it sometimes means yes. Both Bullock and Jeff Bridges (best actor in a drama for Crazy Heart) turned down their award-winning roles, until the directors got them to change their minds.(8) Joan Rivers isn't the only one who had the wrong name listed at the airport. Robert Downey, Jr., winner for best actor in a comedy for Sherlock Holmes, said that his name often appears on airline tickets as Robert Downing.(9) In other airport related news, here's how Sam Worthington's life has changed since starring in Avatar. He admitted, "I get through customs easier." ??Hailee Steinfeld impressed filmgoers in the Coen brothers’ True Grit, and now the 14-year-old star is charming major designers. She donned a fun, age-appropriate Prada mermaid dress at a recent awards show?and quickly became a style starlet to watch. As Isabel Wilkinson writes, Steinfeld is only one of a growing crop of teen?and even pre-teen?stars now being wooed by major designers. Valentino and Chanel are fighting to get their dresses on stars younger than ever before. Elle Fanning, Chloe Moretz, and Willow Smith are making themselves viable fashionable forces, and have the unique ability to reach a young?and influential?audience. Thankfully, they’re wisely choosing what to wear down the red carpet?Prabal Gurung, Marchesa, Rodarte, and Christian Louboutin seem to be favorites.?#29, Tampa, FL Singles: B Social life: A Emotional health: D Marriage: B Divorce: DRomantic hotspot: #30, San Jose, CA Singles: B Social life: D Emotional health: A Marriage: A+ Divorce: FRomantic hotspot: #31, Plano, TX Singles: F Social life: A Emotional health: A Marriage: F Divorce: A+Romantic hotspot: #32, Atlanta, GA Singles: B Social life: A+ Emotional health: D Marriage: F Divorce: BRomantic hotspot: #33, Fort Worth, TX Singles: F Social life: C Emotional health: A Marriage: D Divorce: ARomantic hotspot: #34, Houston, TX Singles: D Social life: B Emotional health: B Marriage: B Divorce: DRomantic hotspot: #35, Glendale, AZ Singles: B Social life: A Emotional health: F Marriage: C Divorce: BRomantic hotspot: #36, Arlington, VA Singles: A+ Social life: F Emotional health: A+ Marriage: B Divorce: FRomantic hotspot: #37, Pittsburgh, PA Singles: C Social life: A Emotional health: C Marriage: B Divorce: FRomantic hotspot: #38, Spokane, WA Singles: B Social life: C Emotional health: B Marriage: F Divorce: BRomantic hotspot: #39, Milwaukee, WI Singles: A Social life: C Emotional health: F Marriage: F Divorce: ARomantic hotspot: #40, Wichita, KS Singles: A Social life: F Emotional health: B Marriage: F Divorce: ARomantic hotspot: #41, Arlington, TX Singles: F Social life: C Emotional health: A Marriage: C Divorce: CRomantic hotspot: #42, San Bernardino, CA Singles: B Social life: B Emotional health: F Marriage: D Divorce: BRomantic hotspot: #43, Fresno, CA Singles: A Social life: F Emotional health: F Marriage: A Divorce: CRomantic hotspot: #44, Cincinnati, OH Singles: C Social life: A Emotional health: F Marriage: A Divorce: FRomantic hotspot: #45, Newark, NJ Singles: B Social life: A+ Emotional health: F Marriage: A Divorce: FRomantic hotspot: #46, Minneapolis, MN Singles: D Social life: B Emotional health: C Marriage: F Divorce: ARomantic hotspot: #47, Denver, CO Singles: D Social life: A Emotional health: C Marriage: A Divorce: DRomantic hotspot: #48, St. Paul, MN Singles: D Social life: C Emotional health: C Marriage: C Divorce: BRomantic hotspot: #49, Baltimore, MD Singles: C Social life: B Emotional health: C Marriage: C Divorce: FRomantic hotspot: #50, Greensboro, NC Singles: A Social life: D Emotional health: C Marriage: D Divorce: CRomantic hotspot: #51, Durham, NC Singles: F Social life: B Emotional health: A Marriage: C Divorce: CRomantic hotspot: #52, Omaha, NE Singles: C Social life: C Emotional health: B Marriage: F Divorce: ARomantic hotspot: #53, Des Moines, IA Singles: D Social life: C Emotional health: B Marriage: F Divorce: ARomantic hotspot: #54, Henderson, NV Singles: C Social life: B Emotional health: C Marriage: B Divorce: FRomantic hotspot: #55, Toledo, OH Singles: A+ Social life: C Emotional health: F Marriage: B Divorce: DRomantic hotspot: #56, Richmond, VA Singles: C Social life: A Emotional health: D Marriage: D Divorce: CRomantic hotspot: #57, El Paso, TX Singles: B Social life: F Emotional health: C Marriage: B Divorce: CRomantic hotspot: #58, New York, NY Singles: C Social life: D Emotional health: D Marriage: A Divorce: DRomantic hotspot: #59, Nashville, TN Singles: D Social life: D Emotional health: B Marriage: C Divorce: CRomantic hotspot: #60, St. Louis, MO Singles: A Social life: C Emotional health: F Marriage: D Divorce: CRomantic hotspot: #61, Albuquerque, NM Singles: C Social life: F Emotional health: A Marriage: C Divorce: CRomantic hotspot: #62, Washington, DC Singles: B Social life: D Emotional health: C Marriage: B Divorce: DRomantic hotspot: #63, Raleigh, NC Singles: C Social life: B Emotional health: D Marriage: F Divorce: ARomantic hotspot: #64, Los Angeles, CA Singles: D Social life: D Emotional health: C Marriage: B Divorce: BRomantic hotspot: #65, Las Vegas, NV Singles: D Social life: A Emotional health: D Marriage: D Divorce: BRomantic hotspot: #66, Lubbock, TX Singles: A Social life: F Emotional health: C Marriage: D Divorce: CRomantic hotspot: #67, Dallas, TX Singles: F Social life: B Emotional health: F Marriage: B Divorce: BRomantic hotspot: #68, Kansas City, MO Singles: B Social life: C Emotional health: D Marriage: D Divorce: DRomantic hotspot: #69, Mesa, AZ Singles: F Social life: D Emotional health: A Marriage: A Divorce: FRomantic hotspot: #70, Hialeah, FL Singles: D Social life: C Emotional health: D Marriage: D Divorce: BRomantic hotspot: #71, St. Petersburg, FL Singles: C Social life: D Emotional health: D Marriage: B Divorce: DRomantic hotspot: #72, Tucson, AZ Singles: C Social life: F Emotional health: C Marriage: D Divorce: BRomantic hotspot: #73, Bakersfield, CA Singles: D Social life: F Emotional health: B Marriage: C Divorce: CRomantic hotspot: #74, San Antonio, TX Singles: B Social life: F Emotional health: F Marriage: B Divorce: CRomantic hotspot: #75, Baton Rouge, LA Singles: D Social life: B Emotional health: D Marriage: D Divorce: BRomantic hotspot: #76, Oakland, CA Singles: C Social life: C Emotional health: C Marriage: C Divorce: CRomantic hotspot: #77, Tulsa, OK Singles: C Social life: D Emotional health: C Marriage: C Divorce: DRomantic hotspot: #78, Aurora, CO Singles: D Social life: C Emotional health: C Marriage: A Divorce: FRomantic hotspot: #79, Buffalo, NY Singles: D Social life: B Emotional health: D Marriage: F Divorce: ARomantic hotspot: #80, Chicago, IL Singles: F Social life: D Emotional health: B Marriage: D Divorce: BRomantic hotspot: #81, Fort Wayne, IN Singles: B Social life: F Emotional health: D Marriage: B Divorce: DRomantic hotspot: #82, Birmingham, AL Singles: D Social life: A Emotional health: D Marriage: C Divorce: FRomantic hotspot: #83, Akron, OH Singles: C Social life: B Emotional health: F Marriage: F Divorce: CRomantic hotspot: #84, Madison, WI Singles: F Social life: F Emotional health: A Marriage: F Divorce: A+Romantic hotspot: #85, Philadelphia, PA Singles: B Social life: D Emotional health: F Marriage: A Divorce: FRomantic hotspot: #86, Oklahoma City, OK Singles: F Social life: C Emotional health: C Marriage: B Divorce: DRomantic hotspot: #87, Jacksonville, FL Singles: B Social life: F Emotional health: F Marriage: A+ Divorce: FRomantic hotspot: #88, Colorado Springs, CO Singles: F Social life: F Emotional health: A Marriage: F Divorce: ARomantic hotspot: #89, Jersey City, NJ Singles: F Social life: B Emotional health: F Marriage: C Divorce: CRomantic hotspot: #90, Indianapolis, IN Singles: B Social life: D Emotional health: F Marriage: D Divorce: CRomantic hotspot: #91, Reno, NV Singles: F Social life: C Emotional health: D Marriage: A Divorce: FRomantic hotspot: #92, Louisville, KY Singles: C Social life: D Emotional health: D Marriage: F Divorce: BRomantic hotspot: #93, Columbus, OH Singles: F Social life: C Emotional health: D Marriage: F Divorce: ARomantic hotspot: #94, Lincoln, NE Singles: F Social life: F Emotional health: B Marriage: F Divorce: ARomantic hotspot: #95, Anchorage, AK Singles: D Social life: F Emotional health: C Marriage: F Divorce: ARomantic hotspot: #96, North Las Vegas, NV Singles: F Social life: B Emotional health: D Marriage: D Divorce: CRomantic hotspot: #97, Modesto, CA Singles: F Social life: F Emotional health: C Marriage: A Divorce: DRomantic hotspot: #98, Detroit, MI Singles: C Social life: D Emotional health: F Marriage: B Divorce: FRomantic hotspot: #99, Phoenix, AZ Singles: D Social life: D Emotional health: F Marriage: A Divorce: FRomantic hotspot: #100, Winston-Salem, NC Singles: F Social life: D Emotional health: B Marriage: D Divorce: CRomantic hotspot: #101, Corpus Christi, TX Singles: D Social life: F Emotional health: D Marriage: B Divorce: DRomantic hotspot: #102, Stockton, CA Singles: F Social life: F Emotional health: C Marriage: A Divorce: FRomantic hotspot: #103, Memphis, TN Singles: C Social life: D Emotional health: F Marriage: C Divorce: DRomantic hotspot: #104, Lexington, KY Singles: F Social life: F Emotional health: F Marriage: F Divorce: A+Romantic hotspot: Clark Merrefield coordinated these rankings, with assistance from Tali Yahalom and Jaimie Etkin.? might rule TV, but crazy chicks have conquered the big screen. Not only do actresses win Academy Awards by playing insane?just ask Kathy Bates ( Misery), Nicole Kidman ( The Hours), Angelina Jolie ( Girl, Interrupted), or Jessica Lange ( Blue Sky)?but movies featuring women beyond the verge play equally well with female and male audiences. Women, we’re told, like crazy-chick flicks because “they can console themselves, thinking, ‘That woman is really attractive, but she’s crazy, so I’m better than she is,’” explains Sharon Packer, a New York psychiatrist who is writing about for a medical journal. As for male audiences, Packer says, “I think it has to do with the Sir Lancelot feeling. Men might be more attracted to someone who has a degree of helplessness: Being crazy is being helpless.” Or maybe it’s just that, as Black Swan fan Sean Kearney told us, “I can’t think of a crazy girl who isn’t hot.” Kearney, 26, a videogame designer from Los Angeles, plans to be first in line when The Roommate opens Feb. 4. That film features Gossip Girl’s Leighton Meester playing an undergrad who is so delusional, she dyes her hair the same color as her roommate, Sara (Minka Kelly), slips into bed with Sara’s boyfriend, and then chases everyone around with a gun.Actresses say they enjoy playing characters who’ve gone around the bend because it allows them a chance to stretch. “It’s a lot of fun to act, I’ve got to say,” says Barbara Hershey, who as the Black Swan matriarch plays “a mentally ill person taking care of a mentally ill person. It’s a family of crazies!” Erika Christensen, who portrayed a crazy chick in 2002’s Swimfan, says, “What appealed to me about the role was the fact that she was so different from me. She wasn’t just someone where I could be playing myself.” For The Roommate, Meester met with doctors who treated delusion. “It was really challenging,” she says. “I tried to remain in the mood as much as possible.” Halle Berry, who has been missing from the screen for a while, recently received a Golden Globe nomination for her stripper with multiple personalities in Frankie and Alice.? ? It goes without saying that, in real life, mental illness is a significant medical problem. Almost one in five Americans suffered some form of it in 2009, according to a study by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, and 11 million had a serious mental illness. Nonetheless, very few people seem to get offended when Hollywood uses mental illness as a plot point. While other like The Social Network and The King’s Speech have come under fire for questions about historical accuracy, the mental-health community hasn’t voiced any qualms about Black Swan yet. “Does it do damage?” asks Packer, the New York psychiatrist. “I think it brings attention to how prevalent eating disorders are or how perfection can drive someone to the brink. The psychiatric disorders do the damage.”The crazy chick has been a theatrical staple since the days of classic Greek drama, when vengeful women like Medea tromped around the stage, murdering their children. Shakespeare’s Ophelia went mad after her boyfriend killed her dad, and then handed out flowers like some proto-hippie before committing suicide. (Kate Winslet reprised the role in Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet, and Kidman pays homage in The Hours when her Virginia Woolf drowns, Ophelia-like.) The 1940s and ’50s gave us the femmes fatales of film noir, with murderous women like Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity. And who could ever forget Faye Dunaway in Mommie Dearest, her face smothered with cold cream, beating her daughter with a wire hanger?But the actress who created the modern-day template is Glenn Close. “I’m not going to be ignored, Dan,” Close warned Michael Douglas in Fatal Attraction, before cooking him dinner (rabbit, anyone?). Ever since then, actresses have been going nuts to play women who are off their rocker. For many actresses, playing crazy is good way to get noticed. Audiences didn’t know who Sissy Spacek was until she was crowned at the prom with pig’s blood in Carrie. Would Sharon Stone be a star if she hadn’t wielded an ice pick and forgotten to wear her underwear in Basic Instinct? And before playing Winona Ryder’s partner in crime in the loony bin in Girl, Interrupted, Jolie was just Jon Voight’s daughter.Not only do crazy chicks light up the silver screen, they invade our homes. (And, really, how can you describe Snooki without using the words “crazy chick”?) When Donald Trump invited Omarosa Manigault-Stallworth as a contestant on The Apprentice in 2004, she didn’t just scheme, she came across as completely bonkers. The performance made her an overnight celebrity: Talk-show appearances and other TV gigs followed. So did the imitators. There was Heidi Montag from The Hills, who is so out there, she reconstructed most of her face; Paula Abdul, who slurred her way through eight seasons of American Idol; and most of the cast of The Bachelor and The Real Housewives (we’re talking about you, Danielle, from New Jersey). For these women, “crazy” is a backhanded compliment, a path on the road to fame. Two of the most famous examples?Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan?wear the label “crazy chick” like a badge of honor, with the paparazzi trailing behind them to chronicle their every meltdown.But for men, crazy doesn’t carry the same cachet. We think of real-life terrors like Jared Lee Loughner or Jeffrey Dahmer. “Men go crazy all the time in the real world,” says Heyman, the Black Swan screenwriter. The majority of insane male characters onscreen are violent sociopaths, explains Dr. Frederick Miller, founder of the Academy for Film and Psychiatry in Chicago, an organization of psychiatrists with an interest in film. “The most classic character is probably the Joker,” he says. By contrast, mentally ill female characters tend to suffer from other personality disorders, he says, and are “women who desperately need the affection of a mate” (that is, until they stab their mate with a butcher knife).These females aren’t only more sympathetic than their male counterparts; they’re a lot steamier. “The aggressive sexuality is part of the draw,” says Swimfan’s Christensen. In most crazy-chick flicks, the female protagonist doesn’t just lose her mind; she loses her clothes. And sometimes she loses her sexual orientation as well. In Chloe, Amanda Seyfried stalks Julianne Moore and winds up in her bed. And most of the centers on the fantasy scene where Nina and her frenemy, Lily, stage a bedroom ballet. That’s a major reason why 45 percent of Black Swan’s audience is male, a fact that surprised even Nancy Utley, president of Fox Searchlight, which released the Darren Aronofsky film. When asked why men are so attracted to crazy chicks, Mila Kunis, who plays Lily, lets out a laugh. “I can give you a bullshit answer,” she says during the phone call. “I actually don’t know. I think girls want stability and understanding, but I think...” She’s interrupted by a noise in the background. “My father is changing a lightbulb. All my lights in my house went off at the same time. Dad, why are men attracted to crazy women?” She pauses. “He’s thinking.” She pauses again. “He won’t say it. He censors himself around me. Dad, is it dirty?!”Plus: .Ramin Setoodeh is a senior writer at Newsweek. He has written for The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times and U.S. News & World Report, among other publications.?10:57?Julia Roberts came out to drag the curtain down on this party, with her maharajah ruby necklace. (It symbolizes "wealth," or "spirituality" or something.) And the win of the night? She seems a little disappointed. And she should be. Quentin Tarantino looks cranky. Kathryn Bigelow certainly should be cranky. Daniel Day-Lewis? Definitely sorta disturbed by Avatar.I do think that what will happen is that there will be a fight, at some point, regarding animated movies, and CGI movies, and old-fashioned movies without motion capture. James Cameron's attempt to be inclusive--"pat yourselves on the back!"--is not playing in this crowd, because this is a bit "us v. them" at this point. There are clearly some, even in this crowd, who think that the likes of Avatar is just capitalism and not so much a chance for actors to ply their craft. (Don't tell that to Sam Worthington though.)So: Golden Globes, 2028. Will it have a 3-D-only Best Picture category? Will it have a no-CGI Best Picture category? Will the finance people agree with the art crowd that Tarantino & Bigelow are making substantially different categories of filmed entertainment from Bigelow's ex-husband?In other news, Christian Slater has already hit the afterparty. And I think it's time to join him. Here's to 2010: maybe a better year in movies.10:56?Best motion picture, drama, goes to Avatar.10:48?Jeff Bridges did, in fact, grow up in Westwood, so it is improbable that he has that folksy, earnest, backwoods accent. However! His folksy, earnest, backwoods face? He earned that, through living. It is terrific: the deep wrinkles, the double dimples. He got those by living large. We are now image-Googling for pictures of his stand-in, whom he thanked. Has his stand-in lived as hard and as terrifically? Only his face can tell the story of so many decades, lived so close to the edge.10:47?Best actor in a drama goes to Jeff Bridges.10:41?Remember when Robert Downey Jr. was circling the drain? All strung out and missing and nearly donezo? That was a near miss. What would we have done without him? He became the most delightful man around.10:40?Robert Downey Jr. wins best actor in a comedy or musical.10:37?Sandy Bullock Strikes Back! The Revenge of the Bullock! Romancing the Bullock! Sandy Bullock 2: Electric Bugaloo! America's Old Sweetheart is Once Again America's New Sweetheart! And you know, I'm not sad to have her back. (Just remember Miss Congeniality. Good times, those were.)10:36?Sandra Bullock wins best actress in a drama for The Blind Side.10:33?It's amazing that the governor of California isn't being pelted with glasses and rotten fruit. Hello, the state is bankrupt and here we all are, while people are probably looting five blocks away. Instead everyone there is laughing and applauding. And this is why they hate liberal Hollywood.10:29?You know, Best Comedy or Musical as a category was wide-open, and that is a true reflection of the problems of 2009. Movies and comedies were troubled. This category is full of small, or troubled, or iffy, or niche movies. So why not The Hangover? At least it made money! People saw the holy heck outta that movie. You know why? Because it was oh-so- raunchy and the kids today like the risque, and the dirty language and the sexual situations. (This is why in 20 years there will be an award-sweeping movie that stars a bunch of people's butts. But that's OK!)10:19? Glee wins for best TV series, comedy or musical.10:18?My party has gotten as drunk as the audience at the Hilton, and this means that they were underwhelmed by James Cameron's win for best director but a little bit excited that he can still remember his made-up Na'avi language, which you know what? There are not Internet Usenet groups devoted to Na'avi. The kids are not blogging in Na'avi. It is not Klingon. It's not really all the rage at all!10:15?James Cameron wins best director for Avatar.10:14?It's weird that it feels TOO SOON for Mel Gibson drunk jokes. (I think Ricky Gervais got booed a little when he basically called Gibson a Drunky McDrunk? Or were they booing Gibson? Which!) I mean, everyone (that matters) in the room is Jewish! Have we all really gotten over that incident? I pretty much haven't!10:02?Da Vinci, Picasso, Beethoven... Scorsese! Do you think that might be true? Or is it completely improbable? Or will no one remember Beethoven maybe?like, in the year 2178, will Lady Gaga be more important? In any event. This Scorsese tribute is in fact an exceptional montage. The King of Comedy is really the greatest movie ever, ever, ever.9:52?This is a win everyone can get behind: Christoph Waltz! I mean, we all loved his work in Die Zurcher Verlobung... Kidding! We love it when a kooky and excellent fifty-something Austrian who actually knows how to act gets to hang out with famous people!9:51?Christoph Waltz wins best supporting actor in a movie for Inglourious Basterds.9:48?Chloe Sevigny wins best supporting actress in a TV series or movie for Big Love.9:41?Christina Hendricks! That is amazing. (Almost as amazing as Jon Hamm's beard.) She is a stunning woman. Do you think in 60 years she will be on this stage again, in the Sophia Loren role, and everyone will give her a standing ovation and cry?9:39? Mad Men won for best TV drama.9:37?I guess it is OK that Michael Haneke beat out Pedro Almodovar. But It is not OK that they cut to ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER during Haneke's speech just because they are both Austrian, that is just plain old racist.9:36?Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon wins best foreign film.9:33?It's amazing that the Sophia Loren appearance is the highlight of the evening. This suggests that there is a little bit of a lack of pizazz tonight? That no one quite knows what to do in the face of Haiti? The room here erupted: "This outfit could be from the '80s you don't know!" "OMG what!" "Yay, love her glasses." "When they go outside they become sunglasses!" "Do not make fun of Sophia Loren! You cannot make fun of Sophia Loren!"9:27?Best comedy actor in a TV show goes to Alec Baldwin for 30 Rock. (And wasn't there to accept it.)9:24?Jason Reitman and Sheldon Turner win best screenplay for Up in the Air.9:23?Ricky Gervais' beard is getting thicker as the evening goes on, right? It's like some fast-motion Fantastic Mr. Fox animation.9:18?I'm going to say something! Maybe I am not supposed to say this? But... are there any other black people at this awards show besides the fine people at the Precious table? Oh, yes, hello Chiwetel Ejiofor! But... is that it? And can I get an Asian? (Related: What happened to Lucy Liu? Did Code Name: The Cleaner finally do her in? She was awesome.)9:15?Hey, now! Old New Drew Barrymore, come back! Remember that interlude of responsible adulthood between crazy behavior in front of David Letterman years ago and tonight's crazy Golden Globes speech? It was nice. We would like to turn back the clock to that again pretty please.9:14?For Grey Gardens, Drew Barrymore wins for best actress in a TV miniseries or movie.9:11?Kevin Bacon wins for best actor in a TV miniseries or movie for Taking Chance.9:05?A few important notes: 9:01?For best performance by an actress in a comedy, Meryl Streep won for Julie and Julia. (She was also nominated in the same category for It's Complicated.)8:55? Grey Gardens won for best miniseries or TV movie.8:48?Michael Giacchino wins for best score for Up8:47?One joke that never gets old is saying "I see you" to people, a la Avatar. It is the greatest, especially when they're mad at you. Like at the deli, when they're tired of waiting for you to find change. "I SEE YOU."8:46?"The Weary Kind" from Crazy Heart wins best original song, motion picture.8:44?I'm sorry, I blacked out for a minute during Cher and Christina Aguilera? You can't just spring that on people like us (gays) in the audience! Listen, they both looked amazing but kind of insane?one who had the "fake boob out" cutaway dress, and the other who had some sort of postmodern semi-corset? I sort of lost my mind and I can't even recover, but they did look like some kind of astral projection from Planet Amazing Sexual Crisis.8:39?Did you know that The Good Wife has like 14 million or so viewers each episode, on average? A huge number of people watch this show! It is insanely popular. And Julianna thanked Les Moonves for keeping dramas on at 10 o'clock, zing Jeff Zucker. Should I be watching this? This is a slightly odd awards show.Dexter and Tara are a very unlikely couple.8:36?Julianna Margulies wins for best actress in a television series drama for The Good Wife.8:34?Michael C. Hall wins for best actor in a television series drama.8:33?Neil Patrick Harris' shirt was perfect, right? It's blindingly white. And this is a hot category he's introducing--Hot Man In A Drama. It's impossible to have known who to have rooted for in this one! Jon Hamm's beard has been uprooting young women's feelings all over the Internet. (Just ask Twitter and Tumblr. Jon Hamm's beard is the biggest winner here tonight.)8:23?Tonight's theme is that pretty much everyone is having trouble above the forehead. I know that sounds mean, but we have HD now in America, and, we can see things we were never meant to see. Paul McCartney's hair dye is just off. But the guy from Up, is very hot in a really young Frankenstein way. He has great hair. And, apparently, two children, who he thanks. Aww.8:12?This awards show is going as fast as the American attention span! Toni Collette, beating out Tina Fey, is very nearly forced to admit that no one watches her very fine show. Her dress? Golden and A+. Her speech? Sweet and short. Took less time than Paul McCartney's umbrella took to pass on the red carpet.8:11?Because Mo'Nique wins for best supporting for Precious.8:10?The Haiti Issue was been disposed of without much fuss, by Nicole Kidman. This is both seemly and sort of disappointing. And yet we have our most fabulous moment of the evening, with Mo'Nique beating out Julianne Moore's enormous, multi-billion dollar earrings. This is going to be a strange new world when Mo'Nique is like stomping in and out of CAA and taking meetings with Brad Pitt's production company. Annnnnd she just regained all the status she sort of tossed away by being "difficult" and "troublesome" according to the blogs on the Internet!8:03?Tonight already has the charming feel of a very rich high-school reunion. It's cute! It looks swank, and doesn't have that overstuffed, enormous Oscar feel. It's small, and lewd, and drinky--and the loudmouth guy from math class is up at the podium.Newly invented Haiti ribbons everywhere and the world's most immense emeralds on Julianne Moore! My God. It's important to note just how shiny Ricky Gervais is. This is unacceptable. There are handy products made by Lancome for this purpose. In any event, Ricky Gervais is sort of killing. With his pint in hand.7:57?Don't you love how it's a crisis when it rains a little in Los Angeles? "Good luck, STAY DRY!" has been the way to say goodbye from the red carpet folks.In other news, the guy who plays the stupid guy on True Blood... doesn't sound all that smart in real life. Who would have thought.Also, Ryan Seacrest is head and shoulders above Billy Bush, in terms of "skills" (at least on the red carpet). Also Tina Fey got her outfit from Beetlejuice cast-offs.And the JETS WON! WHOO!Plus: . is co-proprietor of and is at work on a nonfiction book for HarperStudio.?An example of this would be at Paco Rabanne, a house that 40 years ago was known for its futuristic sensibility, particularly its use of chain mail. It has hired, fired, and lost an assortment of designers?including American . It is trying once again to rouse itself from a malaise with Manish Arora, whose own label boasts a certain outlandish stupendousness. When Arora debuted his Paco Rabanne collection at the Pompidou Museum, things looked promising?if only for a moment. There were bold minidresses with molded bodices that exaggerated an hourglass figure. And there were warrior-goddess tops in a jigsaw puzzle of metal?not quite Middle American tastes, but they could find a home on an .?In an entirely appropriate casting move, MGM has picked 15-year-old Moretz to star in a new take on Stephen King’s 1974 classic horror novel Carrie. If the film stays true to its source material, audiences will be treated to the flourishing of Moretz’s regular spunk into full-fledged psychopathy. Pig’s blood will be spilled. High schools will burn. She will telekinetically force someone’s heart to stop beating. The last actress to step into Carrie’s shoes, Sissy Spacek, earned a Best Actress Oscar nomination for her performance, leaving King unsure of how necessary another remake of his book might be. However, he can’t be too unhappy with the lead actress director Kimberley Peirce has chosen?he did, after all, imagine a much more unstable scenario at one point. “Lindsay Lohan as Carrie White…hmmm. It would certainly be fun to cast,” .?Rihanna attempted to call her assistant, who did not answer, according to the report. She then pretended to talk to her and told her to have the police ready when she got home. Upon hearing this, Brown looked at her and reportedly screamed, “You just did the stupidest thing ever! Now I’m really going to kill you!” He continued striking her on her left arm and hand, causing a contusion to her left triceps two inches in diameter as well as numerous contusions on her left hand. Rihanna went to text her other assistant and Brown snatched her cellphone away and threw it out of the car. She then went for his cellphone and he put her in a headlock while steering the vehicle with his left hand. He bit her left ear and continued to rain punches down on her face and arms. When he began choking her, she started to lose consciousness. With her left hand, she gouged at his eyes in an attempt to free herself. He bit her fingers and continued punching her, all while Rihanna desperately screamed for help.?Debo’s other sisters occupied themselves with politics, or, at least, with powerful political men. Diana married Sir Oswald Mosley, founder of the British Union of Fascists, in 1936 and spent much of World War II in Holloway Women’s Prison, thanks, in part, to Nancy’s secret assertions to the Foreign Office that her sister was “an extremely dangerous person.” Unity, aka Bobo?“always the odd one out”?fell hard for Hitler from afar, and, by stalking him at his favorite Munich restaurant, eventually secured herself a spot in his outermost circle. At the outbreak of the war, she shot herself in the head in a public park, survived, and lived the rest of her sad days tended to by “Muv,” the Mitford mother. Jessica, known as Decca, gravitated toward a different end of the political spectrum, becoming a communist and eventually settling in California with her second husband, a civil-rights lawyer. Her book chronicling the gruesome commercialization of the funeral industry, (1963), was a bestseller.Debo alone took the expected route, ending up in a rarified version of the life for which she had been cultivated. The main work of the duchess’ life after her marriage was not chickens but . After her husband, Andrew, inherited the dukedom in 1950, Debo found herself in charge of seven houses in short order. “No wonder,” she writes, “I put down ‘Housewife’ when filling in a form that demanded my occupation; I was wife to all of them.” Chatsworth was the grandest of them all and in disrepair when the couple took it over. They began an overhaul and moved into the crumbling estate with their children in 1957. The upkeep was a job, she writes, “big enough to occupy every waking moment.” In the dozens of rooms that they turned into their home they hosted extensively. Evelyn Waugh, Elizabeth Bowen, Lucian Freud (who painted their bathroom), Cecil Beaton, Jayne Wrightsman, Oscar de la Renta, and many others were among their guests. In the decades since the Devonshires took it over, Chatsworth has become one of the most beloved country estates, used by film crews (see Pride and Prejudice) and picnicking families alike.Despite her sisters’ proclivities, books and politics were decidedly not part of Debo’s work. “I am having a jolly time,” she wrote in a postcard sent from Tangiers in 1956; “no one goes on at me about learning to read.” Debo’s supposed illiteracy was famous. Nancy teased that she had only ever developed the intellect of a 9-year-old and (WFM, 277); Evelyn Waugh made her the subject of an elaborate prank:His new book arrived … & I thought how nice & felt rather superior. NOT BEING A GREAT READER, to get the damned thing straight from the horse’s mouth as it were, so I undid it & read something like “To Darling Debo, in the certainty that not one word of this will offend your Protestant persuasion.” Naturally I didn’t look any further, but Emma and my wife who were sitting there, bagged it & started to turn the pages which were ALL BLANK, just lovely sheets of paper with gold edges & never a word on one of them. That’s the sort of book which suits me down to the ground.“She hates books,” writes Fermor, she “has never read any of mine.” An ideal day was one in which all talk of literature was avoided: “I had a very jolly time in Scotland with Col Stirling, a visit after my own heart. No books were mentioned …” Writing, she explains in her memoir, came “unexpectedly” into her life. She’d “rather write a book than read one any day,” she once wrote to Fermor.She avoided politics with a similar alacrity. Although Andrew was named parliamentary undersecretary for commonwealth relations in 1960 and Debo played regular hostess to political figures ranging from “Uncle Harold” (Prime Minister Harold McMillan and Andrew’s uncle) to Lady Bird Johnson to Sir Ahmadu Bello, the Sardauna of Sokoto, she nimbly avoided politics. Recounting a conversation with an eager wife of a minister of state, she exclaimed to Fermor, “You see what it’s like. RUBBISH. Making women have anything to do with politics, it makes me very angry.” In her memoirs, she establishes her political persuasion, but offers little elaboration: “I have always voted Conservative and would never do otherwise.” Politicians are just another class of important people, useful for their gossip. “I talked secrets one day with the [prime minister],” she wrote to Fermor, “Most jolly & educational. He has become much more human all of a sudden and talks about things like Adultery quite nicely.”Debo deploys a similar reluctance to engage with the heavier aspects of her personal life. A forced abortion for her sister Pam is described as a drive “for miles over bumpy roads with the inevitable result of a miscarriage.” Although she allows that the effect of Andrew’s alcoholism on his children “was dire” and that, at times, “Andrew’s behavior was out of control and frightening to watch,” the disease is covered in about four pages. Privacy obviously motivates part of this reticence. But, part of it also seems like ignorance of her place in history, a glib gloss on events of incontestable consequence. Looking back on tea with Hitler in 1937, she is surprised, not by her blithe oblivion to his horrific capabilities, but that “he postponed his departure for two hours so as to be able to sit and chat to Unity and … to us.” Unity, Debo writes to Fermor, “was a round peg in a round hole & was a casualty of the foul war like millions of others.” Is a woman who accepted, as a personal gift from Hitler, an apartment recently vacated by a Jewish couple a casualty “like millions of others” of the war? Not quite like those millions of others.But one shouldn’t read these books for insight into literature, politics, tragedy, or encounters with evil. Even the hysterics of the Mitford household have been more comprehensively covered by Nancy and Decca. This is a book about shooting game and raising chickens, attending balls and renovating halls, matters of households and hedgerows, all of it recounted in Debo’s distinct and often charming voice. “I thought,” she wrote to Fermor in 1987, “a cut & laid hedge was a beautiful thing, but just a cut & laid hedge. I had no idea of the different styles, for instance Welsh is totally unlike Northamptonshire,” and on and on she goes; “They’re for keeping in (or out) different animals, see; steers & sheep & all the variants of them, v local like the breeds …” Only after she finishes her effusive appraisal of the National Hedging and Walling Competition does she mention the other matter at hand: “Have been in two minds or more as to whether to ring [Andrew] up & tell him Uncle Harold has conked.” The death of an uncle and a hedging competition are processed and recounted in due course. First things first.Plus: .Chloe Schama is the assistant managing editor of The New Republic and the author of Wild Romance: A Victorian Story of a Marriage, a Trial, and a Self-Made Woman.?Edie Falco is that rarest of rarae aves: a down-to-earth diva. She will hate the latter part of that designation, but after all the awards she won for her portrayal of Carmela Soprano for six seasons on HBO, and now all the accolades she has received in her two seasons as Nurse Jackie on Showtime, she should just accept it with the undaunted grace with which she greets everything else that comes her way.As for her down-to-earthiness, it is the result of two of the things that came her way?things she survived with the kind of grace that was not only undaunted, but, in the most literal sense, undying: addiction and breast cancer. Falco has now been sober for 18 years. And, in 2003, she went through a tough bout of chemotherapy. It was then she decided, as a single woman, to live her life to its fullest, which, to her, meant adopting her children, Anderson, now 5, and Mary, now 2.“I’m not sad about any of my life. It’s so unconventional. It doesn’t look anything like I thought it would.” For the first time in five years, Falco has returned to the New York stage. She opened last night at the tiny upstairs Peter Jay Sharp Theatre at Playwrights Horizons in a Naked Angels production of This Wide Night, a two-hander by Chloe Moss directed by Anne Kauffman and co-starring the extraordinary Alison Pill, about a couple of ex-convicts who seek each other out once they are released from a British women’s prison. Falco is giving a performance that, even when I saw it in her third preview, had the feel of legend about it. In my 35 years of theater-going in New York, I have seldom seen a performance of such nuance and artistry. It will be the talk of the town in the weeks?and maybe even the years?to come for those lucky enough to see it. Move over, , theatrical lore’s lush of a laureate for her portrayal of Amanda Wingfield in the original production of The Glass Menagerie, and make room for your sober version in the form of Edie Falco. I know that all sounds hyperbolical, but that’s the kind of talk divas?even those most down-to-earth ones like the late Laurette and the lively Edie?tend to inspire.? Why did you choose this play as a vehicle to return to the stage? Was it the maternal issues it touches on, now that you’re a mother yourself?That is the core of everybody’s shit when you come right down to it. But I never really know why I choose a play. I had been looking for a play to do for a long time and Geoffrey (Nauffts, the artistic director of Naked Angels) said he might have found a play for me. So when it comes from someone you know it’s a real gift. And I read it and thought, yeah, he’s right. There was something about the relationship between the two women that was so ambiguous.One is never sure if it is a substitute mother/daughter relationship for them or if they were lovers in jail. I think it’s meant to be unclear.But you do play it a bit butch.Yeah, it’s begun to get more like that. And the words lend themselves to that. I mean, she’s been around the block a few times.You do have a whole lesbian fanbase. You are aware of that.I know. I’ve been told about that. It’s thrilling. Maybe it’s because my character on Nurse Jackie doesn’t take a lot of shit. Not that that means that’s a lesbian thing.But they were your fans back during your Carmela days, too.Really! Wow! Then I don’t friggin’ know why.Have you ever buttered that side of your toast?I beg your pardon! I am so not going there. Wow. I’ve never heard it put that way either. But no. I’m afraid I like boys.OK, let’s get back to the play and why you chose it. Thank you. Well, it’s funny, but it’s also about the complications involved with people trying to connect and how perversely people go about it sometimes. At the core it’s about how people just want to love somebody and be loved by somebody. And when there’s slim pickins?like when you’re in jail?you try to find affection wherever you can. But that is true even in the world. This play really put a focus on that for me?how complicated relationships are, how hard we try, how often we fail, how poorly we do oftentimes in our ability to connect.Does it make you sad, Edie, that you’ve never been married?No. No. I’m not sad about any of my life. It’s so unconventional. It doesn’t look anything like I thought it would. I really am just making it up as I go along. And it took me a long time to realize that’s OK. But if the main centerpiece of all of this is supposed to be love then I am living in a deluge of it?the friendships that I have that are, on the average, 30 years old, my family, my children. In my household there is an insane amount of laughter and celebration. My kids have never seen me scream at anybody. They’ve never seen an argument. There’s never been even a cold silence. And those are things that I grew up with because my parents did end up divorcing.They married and divorced twice. That must have affected you in some marriage-less way.Twice or three times? Twice, I guess. It’s funny. It’s a big blur, all those years. I’m sure my parents' divorces did affect me in some way, but also in my life in general I don’t see a lot of marriages that look appealing to me. Because I’m not married I tend to get a lot of eye-rolling conversations with people about their marriages. Why would I want to head there? I want love in my life, no question about that. But I have a ton of it. My own kids have seen nothing but love and compassion and friendships that have been worked on diligently because friendships are like marriages in a lot of ways.But with young kids in your life now, doesn’t that cut down on the kind of freedom you can have in your love life?That freedom I had in the past was great fun but it’s also like drinking?it’s over. I don’t need that anymore. It was really fun. Really great fun. Affairs. Never being totally committed to one person. But then it all ended right about the same time my kids came into my life. And I don’t miss any of that. Not any of it. The truth is it became lonely and a burden after a while.But you wouldn’t say no to marriage if the right person came along.Uhh... well.... it has to be the really right person at this point. It’s like, I guess, when a really great play comes along.On some level you are attracted to plays as if they are relationships. For example, you are obviously attracted to two-handers. Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune and ‘night, Mother?two previous Broadway productions you starred in?were both two-character studies.I don’t like waiting backstage for my entrances. Maybe that’s all there is to it. I get so fucking nervous. And if I’m going to be dedicating this period of time to work, I’d rather be on the stage.There’s another aspect of this particular play that made me think of you and that is the adoption thread in the story of your character, except you are playing the woman whose child is adopted and not the adoptive parent as you are in real life. Was there a kind of empathy you were trying to mine that cut close to the bone for you?I’m sure that’s part of what drew me to the play. You’re right. The difference is that her son was taken from her in this play and ideally the parent of a child who is adopted makes that decision on her own, to give the child up for adoption. But, you know, in some cosmic sense I think we all are of-a-piece, in a way. If you have any belief in reincarnation in any way?which I am still on the fence about?then we’ve all lived many lives. We’ve all been adopted. We’ve all adopted others. We’ve all been men and women. So on some level I feel I completely understand what it must feel like to have given up a child and then try to regain contact with that child. It must be awful and yet all so deeply moving.Is it too personal to ask if your adoptions were open?No, they were closed. I know names of the parents but I don’t know much about them. They don’t know who I am.Do your children ask questions yet?They are still so young. To them it’s just a word right now. Maybe they don’t know that not everyone is adopted. There is just so much of it around them really. They go to school in Tribeca. A large number of the kids they go to school with are adopted. And the races are often different from the parents. It’s a fantastic place and time for my kids to be raised.Your own upbringing was a bit bohemian. Your mother was an aspiring actress and would put on children’s plays with you starring in them in your backyard on Long Island. Your dad was a jazz musician. They were artsy-fartsy.They sure were. And I loved it. I loved feeling that my family was a little different.When you took your curtain call the other night there was such a look of innocence and gratitude on your face. It made me think of that little Long Island girl doing plays in her backyard.The truth is that has got to be an AA thing. It started there. But also I’ve had a thousand years of therapy. I really am profoundly grateful just in general in my life. I’ve had an embarrassing amount of good fortune.But you’ve had bad fortune also?your cancer and the deep, deep darkness of your addiction years.But I’ve recovered from them and I’ve come out better and stronger each time. There are other people who have been afflicted with those two things who have either died or are still in them. The thing for which I am most grateful is that I was besotted with those two things yet was also given the strength to get through them. I am standing on the other side of them with an absolutely spectacular life far beyond my wildest dreams. At a certain point I realized I didn’t want to change anything about my life. For a long time I did. Going through that addiction stuff in my 20s, I was always moaning about wanting things to change. But now I realize I don’t want anything different. I just want to handle what’s in front of me. That’s the greatest gift?to be able to handle things.And you’re never tempted to use again even after 18 years? Do you ever have that voice inside your head still?No. No. Well, the same way I think about Christmas when I was a little kid. You know, you wake up and you get excited. You have those memories but they’re over. Those days are long gone. The truth is I had great fun with drugs and alcohol for a lot of years?and then I didn’t. You want to wake up in the morning and not feel sick and wincing at what happened the night before. Thank God, that doesn’t happen anymore. Now I’m woken up by my kid’s foot in my face.Your addiction years must help with your portrayal of Nurse Jackie, who is addicted to painkillers.When they first started the series, I told the creators I didn’t feel like she should be addicted because I have such strong feelings about addiction and you start to feel a sense of responsibility if you’re on television and if you’re lucky and people are watching you feel it even more so. You feel it begins to matter what you’re putting out there. But the two women who write the show are sober people as well so they said it might be great to watch Jackie struggle with it and the people in the world who are watching and also struggling with their own addictions might find some solace in it. And we might one day see her break free of it. But the best thing is that I am not responsible for making the show interesting. It’s their job to write it. I certainly have the option of finding out what’s going to happen next in our upcoming third season but I don’t want to know. I don’t know anything until a script is in front of me and I prefer it that way. I have no idea what the story arc is for next year. They do. They are brimming over with story ideas.Unlike many actors who become so identified with their television characters that they have trouble finding other avenues in their careers, you were able to move on from The Sopranos rather quickly with this new hit show.Yeah, I was out with my kids the other day at a carnival and someone yelled at me, “Hey, Nurse Jackie!” I have to admit it made me feel kind of sad not hearing “Carmela!”So Carmela’s finally dead.Yeah. I guess maybe she is.Plus: .Kevin Sessums is the author of The New York Times bestseller , a memoir of his childhood. He was executive editor of Andy Warhol's Interview magazine and a contributing editor of Vanity Fair and Allure. He is a contributing editor of Parade. His new memoir, I Left It on Mountain, will be published by St. Martins Press.?Hugh emerged first and loudly declaimed from his doorstep what appeared to be a well-rehearsed line: "Golly, this is just like Notting Hill!" (He was referring to the scene where his character is besieged by the press after it is discovered that he is dating the film star played by Julia Roberts.) He had planned to hop into a waiting black cab, but we all descended on him and started yelling nasty questions about Divine Brown. He struggled in a very Hugh Grant-ish fashion to the taxi, which was chugging away like a prop in a London tourism shoot."Look, gosh, do you mind?" Hugh puffed, his hair flopping hither and thither as the photographers hosed him down.Eventually he escaped. We settled down to wait for Liz. Half an hour later, a sleek black Mercedes pulled up outside the house. The front door opened again, and suddenly the yard was flooded with limelight.It was only 10 a.m. and a warm day, but Liz was wearing a fantastic Versace dress, high heels, full makeup, and a fur coat. Her hair was coiffed and bouncy just like it is in the ads. The flashbulbs popped, and Liz ? smiling if not actually waving?made her way down the little footpath of the London townhouse as if it were the red carpet at the Oscars. The ink-stained wretches parted like the red sea as the ethereal being floated toward her car.And then she was gone. That's when we realized that we had been so dazzled by Liz that we had forgotten to ask her anything. All 50 of us. I distinctly remember a burly cockney snapper from one of the tabloids shouting, "Did not one of you useless c---s think to ask 'er a fucking question?"Fast forward 11 years. Liz is dealing with another breakup, and showing the same dignified aplomb. Last week she formally filed for divorce from her estranged husband, the British-born, Indian-raised textile heir Arun Nayar, and has now, according to friends, jetted off to the Caribbean hidey-hole of Mustique with her son Damien?who has just departed his posh English prep school for the Easter hols?to nurse her broken heart.It is not known whether Hugh?who remains, despite everything, her closest confidant, and also the godfather of her son?will be joining her at the private island and providing a shoulder to cry on.Liz is dealing with another breakup, and showing the same dignified aplomb.It had been assumed by the press that Nayar was divorcing Hurley on the grounds that she was having an unlikely affair with the Australian spin bowler Shane Warne, with whom she flirted in full view on Twitter. (Specimen tweet from @ to @: "Ah, you mean the games I kept winning when we played? Snigger. Me prefer Tiger-Man-Gun").Divorce proceedings were in fact formally initiated by Hurley, with her citing Nayar's "unreasonable behavior" as the cause in court papers. But it is customary in (amicable) British society divorces for the gentleman to shoulder the blame, regardless of the sins of his wife. It's less embarrassing all around, and not many men want it to be recorded in the courts that they have been cuckolded. And Nayar, who announced his engagement to Hurley in the personal ads of The Daily Telegraph and has never given a press interview, is nothing if not the perfect gentleman.He is sometimes caricatured as a feckless Mumbai socialite, killing time partying while waiting for his half of a family fortune, but, while he had a wild adolescence and has since the split been spotted out and about at some Mumbai nightspots (Riyhad Kundanmal, a Mumbai industrialist and Nayar's friend says, "Arun is in a good mood and having a good time. He is a private person and will not go around talking about his life") that's far from the whole truth about the man.Nayar is half-German, and was born in a Leeds housing project in 1964. His family only became wealthy later, when his parents moved back to India and his father founded a textile company, Tijarat Impex, which boomed during the 1970s. Arun's money comes not from the family coffers, however, but from a computer firm he founded during the 1990s. He went to Oxford University. He no longer drinks. He collects watches. And he's made it clear that he doesn't want any of Liz's money despite the fact that nothing as tawdry as a pre-nuptial contract was ever signed. He is, friends say, "charm personified."When Nayar met Hurley in 2002 through a mutual, London-based financier friend, they were both in the romantic wilderness. Hurley was licking her wounds after being humiliated in Vanity Fair by Steve Bing, the father of her son, and Nayar was separating from his wife of five years, an Italian model named Valentina Pedroni. They started dating.It was hardly surprising that Hurley fell for the even-keeled Nayar. After her relationship with her soul mate Hugh fell apart despite her best efforts, she endured a string of busted romances and even more media speculation. She was allegedly linked with everyone from billionaire investor Ted Forstmann (unconfirmed) to the comedian Denis Leary (no truth in the rumor) to NBA star Steve Nash ("They vibed. The relationship is authentic," said Nash's agent at the time).The relationship with Nayar seemed different. In November 2004, Hurley threw a three-day birthday party for him at an 18th-century hilltop fortress in Rajasthan, and in November 2005, Nayar was granted the divorce that allowed him to marry Hurley the following year.Hurley met Shane Warne last July when she was presenting a prize at Goodwood races. She was wearing an "incredibly low-cut dress," one onlooker said."She was presenting the trophy and she was certainly flirting with Shane, but no one really thought anything of it because she flirts with everyone," says someone who was there and knows Hurley.What is her flirting style? "She ignores all women and sticks her cleavage in the man's face. She does the, 'You are the only person on the planet' thing. But she is funny and down to earth and she puts men at their ease. She would be easy for someone like Shane Warne to get on with. He's an old-fashioned bloke, and she's blokey, but with fabulous bosoms."Warne recently confirmed his separation from his wife but, after a fling with a porn star named Chloe Conrad, it seemed the Hurley-Warne relationship had fizzled out. Despite this, the tabloid speculation was reignited when, in March, Hurley and Warne met up in Los Angeles, where Hurley was filming Wonder Woman.Speculation that the two are now set for a longer term relationship is rife, but it may be wide of the mark. Hurley's latest tweet on the matter read, "Apparently I'm getting married & moving to Australia. Wow, my fictional tabloid life is exciting! Breathlessly awaiting next installment..."So are we, Liz. So are we.Tom Sykes, 36, is a British writer and journalist. He was formerly nightlife reporter for the New York Post and now tries to live a largely blameless life in Ireland with his wife, two kids, three pigs, six hens, and a turkey. He is the co-author, with Detmar Blow, of , a biography of Isabella Blow.?The events are taking place on opposite sides of the continent and showcase seemingly opposite poles of human endeavor, but they serve a shared purpose: celebrating skill and ingenuity, turning bright young talents into heroes, churning out new models of physical perfection over which the rest of us can obsess for the rest of this long, cold winter.But in the wake of those two deaths last week?designer Alexander McQueen's apparent suicide, discovered February 11, the first day of Fashion Week, and 21-year-old Georgian luger Nodar Kumaritashvili's fatal crash during a practice run just hours before the start of the Olympics?both now proceed under a pall.At first, there were touching memorials?flowers at the McQueen store in Manhattan and under the Olympic rings?and tearful moments of silence. Then, gradually, the old spirit returned. More than 65 million people watched the Olympic Opening Ceremony on NBC. While in New York, Kirsten Dunst, Chloe Sevigny, Jason Schwartzman, and Alexander Wang-clad throngs showed up for Saturday night's Opening Ceremony party at the Ace Hotel.Already the parallel spectacles have yielded new stars: In Vancouver, there are Torah Bright, the aptly named Australian snowboard princess, and women's freestyle mogul gold-medalist, American Hannah Kearney. In New York, designer Prabal Gurung is fashion's " ," and model Jacqueline Jablonski, the sloe-eyed goddess du jour.The media frenzy around both events has also continued unabated. Bob Costas and his fashion counterpart, supermodel Coco Rocha (who's been tweeting and broadcasting non-stop for "Fashion Week TV"), have ably guided viewers through heartbreak and triumph, through Apolo Anton Ohno's medal-winning skate and Diane von Furstenberg's latest array of textured knitwear.There have been bloopers to lighten the mood: The Olympic torch failed to rise and the Korean short track speedskating team wiped out together. While the normally steady Agyness Deyn fell twice during a runway walk at Naomi Campbell's benefit for Haiti. And there have been touching instances of patriotism: The U.S. athletes in their Ralph Lauren-designed uniforms marching together on Friday night; the large hoisted high above Marc Jacobs' show.And, of course, there have been plenty of VIPs preening for the cameras. The Bidens, Donald Sutherland, Sarah McLachlan, k.d. lang and Arnold Schwarzenegger took time out for the Winter Games. And who hasn't made an appearance at Fashion Week? It's been difficult to walk through Bryant Park without running into Jared Leto, Victoria Beckham, Mena Suvari, Amber Rose, or the cast of Gossip Girl.And there's still much to come. VIEW OUR GALLERY of the highs and lows of the Olympics and Fashion Week.Plus: .?2009 marked the return of the harem pant, billowing pants that gathered around the calf (and made famous by MC Hammer in the early 1990s!) But perhaps no one has done more for luxuriating sweats than J.Crew, whose catalogues instructed women to pair sweatshirts with silk skirts and dresses for many years before they began fabricating lounge tops in cashmere and selling them for $250. The style became so popular that they now even stock it bright colors for the summer. “I think there's always got to be something that sort of turns it off?meaning, if everything's shiny, there has to be something that feels a little casual, or something has to be a little messy,” its Creative Director, , said of the high-low trend in an interview with the blog PopSugar, “Things can't always be perfect, not everything can be buttoned…there's got to be something that turns it on its head.”?The usual suspects floated down the red carpet at the recent : Nicole Kidman, statuesque and swathed in black lace; Annette Bening, glittering in a floor-length beaded gown; and Natalie Portman?finally displaying that baby bump. But also there, beaming in the middle of the crowd, was , the 14-year-old nominated for her role in . She wore a fitted Prada mermaid dress with bold orange and pink stripes, her hair bounced in ringlets, and she flashed bubble-gum pink nails. When it originally came from Prada, the dress was strapless, but her stylist added thin black straps to make it more age-appropriate. Steinfeld was a red carpet double-whammy: both fashion-forward and every bit her age.Reactions were ?despite a few ? yet one thing was made clear: Hailee Steinfeld is very young, yet very . She is part of a new crop of tween starlets who have entered the awards season dress derby at ages younger than ever before. For the first time, storied fashion brands including Prada, Chanel, and Valentino are allowing their gowns to be worn by stars as young as 12. There’s now a fashion divide for up-and-comers: In one camp sit the ?and in the other are the serious actresses who are taking fashion risks in age-appropriate attire. These new “it” girls?Hailee Steinfeld, Elle and Dakota Fanning, Chloe Moretz, and even Willow Smith?are launching new designers, and helping older brands to reach teens.“What Michelle Obama did for first ladies, these girls have the potential to do for tween stars,” says Jane Keltner de Valle, fashion news director at . “They’re making themselves viable fashion forces, they’re elevating young designers to a global platform, and they’re getting people excited about fashion again.”Steinfeld burst onto the fashion scene at the Golden Globes last month, where she wore a white column dress by fashion newcomer and CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund finalist Prabal Gurung. Her hair was pulled back into a slick ponytail and she wore understated accessories. It was the Hollywood newcomer’s first major style moment. Practically overnight, she was voted best-dressed on . Says her stylist, Karla Welch: “A good dress opens many doors.” Next, Welch says, Steinfeld will appear in a dress from Prada's younger-sister line, Miu Miu.Gallery: ?The art-filled weekend began on Thursday night, with the opening of PRISM, a glowing building in West Hollywood, where 23-year-old Australian artist P.C. Valmorbida and Jared Najjar opened “mindthegap,” a vibrant exhibition of geometric art by Barry McGee and Phil Frost. A fashionable crowd that included Rachel Zoe, French Vogue editrix Carine Roitfeld, and Margherita Missoni packed the three-story building?which drove the young, artsy crowd to the hedge-hemmed roof, where, overlooking Sunset Boulevard, they partied late into the night.The next evening, fashion’s finest cleaned up for the launch of Prada’s new book at its Rem Koolhaas-designed store on Rodeo Drive. Jessica Biel, Chloe Sevigny, Jessica Alba, and Ginnifer Goodwin arrived in a glittering assortment of Prada frocks. The crowd tabbed through pages of Prada’s book?a catalogue raisonne that highlights the fashion house’s involvement in architect, film, and art.Early on Saturday afternoon, art’s heavy hitters packed Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills for a show of Jeff Koons’ new paintings?large-scale, Lichtenstein-inspired works with abstract vaginas painted over each. And the paintings, priced between $2.5 million and $3.5 million, were under close watch: One brawny security guard stood next to every work. It was Los Angeles’ most expensive exhibition to date. But that didn’t scare buyers away?all ten of the paintings reportedly sold.Studio heads and artists streamed into MOCA on Saturday night?in carefully pressed tuxes and glittering gowns?with the exception, of course, of Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. “Who are you wearing?” shouted one reporter as he walked down the red carpet. “This?” the mayor responded. “Off the rack!”The main event didn’t arrive until Saturday night when, just before the chicken was served, Lady Gaga took the stage at the 1,000-person MOCA fete. Pop’s high priestess appeared on stage in a cloud of smoke, wearing a tall velvet crown designed by architect Frank Gehry, which was reportedly too large for her head and had to be sewn onto her just before the show. She donned crystal skirt designed by Miuccia Prada. “Francesco Vezzoli and I were inspired by [Giorgio] de Chirico, and his paintings of the Ballets Russes,” Prada told The Daily Beast of her costumes for Lady Gaga and the Bolshoi. Gaga took her place at a bright pink grand piano designed by the artist Damien Hirst, decorated with his signature blue butterflies, which rotated in smoke as she sang.As soon as Lady Gaga and Francesco Vezzoli took their final bow, Pop Magazine Editor Dasha Zhukova and her entourage dashed out of dinner to get to her much-anticipated afterparty in a small wooden shed on Sunset Boulevard. And directly after the main event, the crowd followed: Kate Beckinsale, Gwen Stefani, Kate Bosworth, James Franco, Guy Ritchie, Eva Mendes, Rose McGowan, Pharrell Williams, Tom Ford, and artist Takashi Murakami, among others, packed the tiny building (and the PRISM gallery next door) to celebrate the glamorous night.After the crowd cleared, however, MOCA’s heavy-hitters went back to business: The piano went up for auction and, though it started at $70,000, reportedly sold to dealer Larry Gagosian (who represents Hirst), for $450,000. After the event, rumors abounded about the purchase. One MOCA insider speculated that Gagosian bought the piano as a gift for friend Brett Ratner; another guessed he had purchased it just to protect the price. A prominent artist present insisted that Hirst’s butterflies were merely stickers.In the end, however, the money went to the museum, which, after a long period of financial turmoil, confidently reemerged into the art world on Saturday night. “Tonight we celebrate the first 30 years,” said founding member Eli Broad. “‘MOCA New’ is, as I like to call it, a new beginning.”Plus: .Isabel Wilkinson is an assistant editor at The Daily Beast.?was the first to report that Lawrence signed on for the role on Wednesday. Lawrence was allegedly competing with approximately 10 other young actresses for the role, including fellow Oscar nominee Hailee Steinfeld of True Grit, Little Miss Sunshine's Abigail Breslin, Kick-Ass star Chloe Moretz, and The Lovely Bones’s Saoirse Ronan, and Emma Roberts.?Now comes Moore’s take on bourgeois lesbian life as stay-at-home mom Jules in Lisa Cholodenko’s comic drama The Kids Are All Right, opening today. Here we see an au naturel Moore, bra-less in faded rock T-shirts and vowel-mangling California accent. She has some of the best lines in the film and a monologue that feels award-worthy.But soon, she’s pushing the audience into intensely intimate moments where Moore’s expertise is most evident. One minute, she’s gamely burying her head in Annette Bening’s crotch as her tightly wound partner gropes valiantly for her libido. Then later, she’s explaining to her teenaged son why his mothers prefer gay male porn. Next, she’s on all fours, her auburn hair swaying loosely around her face as Mark Ruffalo feigns some convincing sexual acrobatics behind her.To hear Moore dissect that last scene, she was as much the voyeur of the moment as the participant. She and Ruffalo (and Ruffalo’s wife) are friends, she said, having spent their time on 2008’s Blindness holding hands; he was sightless, and she played his wife. But even Moore was a bit surprised by how graphic things got during that afternoon they spent shooting the sex scene.“There is stuff I don’t actually remember doing,” she says, her kitten-ish figure nestled into one corner of a loveseat. “When I saw the movie, I was like, ‘Did we do that?’ There’s a lot of moving around. I don’t remember it being that physical. But we wanted it to be funny and we really relied on each other.”(For his part, Ruffalo had a bit more pragmatic view. “You get in front of a group of total strangers wearing a sock and a piece of tape and you're asked to jump into these scenes,” he . “'OK, now bend her over.' It's not very sexy.")Moore comes across as strikingly grounded in person. She’s got a surprisingly firm handshake and an unabashed way of making eye contact that feels authentic. It’s likely her childhood as an Army brat?she attended two-dozen schools by high-school graduation?has something to do with this self-possession. Moore says acting came more naturally because she’d spent her young life studying the people around her, trying to assimilate.“You learn there’s a certain amount of universality to the human experience,” she says. “And you also learn that behavior is mutable.… that behavior is not character. So because you had access to this from moving around, you are able to read it and dissect it.”Moore first drew notice in Robert Altman’s Oscar-nominated ensemble drama Short Cuts as Matthew Modine’s adulterous artist-wife (who, it’s worth noting, delivers most of her lines in a blouse and ).And despite her affinity for nude scenes, she had the acting chops and the good judgment to keep from getting pigeonholed by them. By 1995, she was starring in Todd Haynes’ chilling and brilliant Safe as a San Fernando Valley housewife who is either allergic to modern life or is slowly going insane. (Even this film has its awkward sexual encounter. Moore stares vacantly at the ceiling as her husband moves rhythmically over her.)Though Moore has made the occasional detour into big-studio films, opposite Hugh Grant in Nine Months, Jeff Goldblum in Steven Spielberg’s The Lost World: Jurassic Park, and David Duchovny in the forgettable Evolution, she always gravitated back to the meaty material. And directors sought her out, because among her peers, Moore, 49 years old, stands alone in her fearlessness.“A lot of the movies I’ve done are not very plot-oriented,” she says. “A lot of them are kind of about what a human experience is, in a relationship or a family or some kind of a trauma. In those, it’s the emotional accessibility that matters most. My characters aren’t generally heroic or anything.”But they are almost always compelling. Take in Magnolia when Moore as the suicidal trophy wife Linda melts down in the drug store after ordering a battalion of drugs, growing more incoherent and disturbed by the moment, ultimately exploding with “Suck my dick!” Not the stuff of amateurs.“Our job is about allowing a certain kind of emotional accessibility on screen,” she says. “That’s how people enter a film. You enter a film through a character. I think people come to the movies to see themselves. They don’t come to see us.”Plus: .Gina Piccalo spent a decade at the Los Angeles Times covering Hollywood. She's now a contributing writer for Los Angeles Magazine and her work has appeared in Elle, More and Emmy. She can be found at .?“Every woman walks down the aisle thinking their marriage is going to last forever,’’ says Williams, who filed for divorce in 2009 after years of alleged abuse by Williams, and his eventual conviction on manslaughter and DUI charges. “You think you’re marrying this great guy and life is going to just be this wonderful dream world. But you’re never prepared for when everything changes and he changes with it. When that fame hits, everyone around your husband starts telling him he’s great and he’s perfect. As a wife, you’re supposed to just fall in line and go along with it all. That wears thins after a while.’’?“It would be a huge mistake,” said Reeves, “because no matter whether you make this with me or with anyone, it’s a story about being at that age, in that pre-adolescent moment. If you change that, you change what the story is about, which is a coming-of-age story in the guise of a vampire genre film.”Let Me In is definitely about that particular chasm between childhood and adulthood. Escaping the constant arguments between his divorced parents, Smit-McPhee’s Owen encounters a strange girl in the snow-covered courtyard of his apartment complex. He soon forms a bond with this girl whose secrets are far darker than his.“The movie for me was about being trapped,” said Academy Award-nominee Richard Jenkins ( The Visitor), who plays Abby’s enigmatic protector known only as “The Father,” as he unwrapped a grape Now and Later. “Whether you were Owen or Abby. I always thought vampires were free. They could change and fly. But you see this girl who has to have cardboard over her windows, can’t go outside, and is dependent on this man. She’s just as trapped as Owen is.”While Twilight might be about the escape of romance and of first love, Let Me In explores how we can find ourselves trapped within repeating patterns and how pivotal moments in our lives enable the chance for release. The knowledge that Abby is actually hundreds of years old but has to depend on someone to care for her is a chilling one.“What’s so great about that idea is she would need to groom someone new,” said Reeves. “You could imagine that that’s what Owen is for her. But it doesn’t mean that she isn’t lonely and doesn’t need someone and doesn’t love him.”“She’s still emotionally a 12-year-old and is stuck at that age,” he continued. “We realized that we didn’t want her to play a vampire. We wanted to find the emotional reality to it… She’s seen things and been through things that no 12-year-old should have to be participating in. But she’s still 12. That makes it worse.”It also separates it from other vampire dramas like HBO’s True Blood or the CW’s Vampire Diaries, which typically examine the vampire mythos through the prism of addiction, repression, persecution, or sexuality. Here, the romance isn’t about sexual release or abstinence, but rather something chaste and tender, a kinship among outcasts. Despite the glut of vampire-based programming, it’s the genre’s innate flexibility that allows for an alternate takes on bloodsuckers.“What’s exciting to me about genre stories is the use of metaphor,” said Reeves. “ Cloverfield is all about anxiety for me… The ways that this story explores the themes are very different: the complexity of how someone can do something so horrendous and yet there’s love in there… It’s smuggling in a story about the pain of being 12, being an outsider, being lonely and your parents getting divorced and being bullied mercilessly and having no one. And then finding someone and the pain of navigating that.”The film tracks the sorrow experienced not just by Owen and Abby but those around them as well, Jenkins’ “Father” character and Owen’s unnamed mother (played by Mad Men’s Cara Buono). It’s perhaps “The Father” (or Hakan, as he was known in the original Swedish film) who emerges the most tragic character of all.“How do you stay trapped in a world for 50-some years and not long for something else?” said Jenkins. “What is this hold she has over you? Is it fear? Is it love?”The movie, director Matt Reeves said, “is a coming-of-age story in the guise of a vampire genre film.”Ultimately, it’s those questions that linger long after the closing credits and the question mark that the plot’s unsettling resolution presents.“What’s most exciting for me is the idea of people living through Richard’s experience in the movie, living through Kodi’s experience and Chloe’s,” said Reeves. “Walking in these other people’s shoes and understanding how even in the darkest moments, you can relate to them and the humanity of that.”Plus: .Jace Lacob is the writer/editor of , a website devoted to television news, criticism, and interviews. Jace resides in Los Angeles. He is a contributor to several entertainment websites and can be found on and .?Barthelemy, who moved to New York from Buffalo in 2007 to work as a hairstylist, kept lots of secrets. She told her family she was stripping at a club, but business was slow. Her goal was to make enough money to return to Buffalo and open a hair salon. Along the way, she had her boyfriend's nickname "Blaze" tattooed on her upper back."She was pretty fearless," said her mother, Lynn Barthelemy. "She moved to New York all by herself."Her mother had no idea Melissa was advertising on Craigslist, selling her body on the streets of New York City, and working, on occasion, for an escort agency called James Bond Entertainment under the pseudonym Chloe. She also didn't know that on the night her daughter disappeared, she had lined up a date to the tune of $1,000.“I think he wines and dines them and brings them back to his house,” said a law-enforcement source.Earlier that evening, the blond beauty told her boyfriend that she might be going to Long Island, a frequent haunt of hers. She regularly hung out there with a girlfriend who also worked as an online escort, as well as at the home of a regular client. Her boyfriend said he would oftentimes pick her up from the john's house."She would go to Long Island a lot," said her boyfriend Johnny Terry, who spoke exclusively with The Daily Beast. "She had some older man she was chummy with."Terry, who law-enforcement sources say was Barthelemy's pimp, said she was very secretive about her plans that night and declined an offer for a ride. "This time she said no," said Terry, who denies that he was her pimp. "I woke up in the morning and she wasn't there."Last December, the bodies of Barthelemy, Megan Waterman, Amber Costello, and Maureen Brainard-Barnes were discovered along Ocean Parkway, a four-lane road that runs along the southern part of Long Island, about 45 miles from New York City. The bodies, which were found within 500 feet of each other, were all in various states of decomposition. It appeared that they had been killed elsewhere, robbing detectives of valuable clues.Police soon suspected the slayings were the work of an active serial killer. There is also some suggestion that some of the women veered from their usual routines when they fell prey to the murderer. Three of the women seem to have left on their dates alone, and both Barthelemy and Costello appear to have been enticed by the promise of big money the nights they disappeared.Interestingly, two of the women had a connection to the same Holiday Inn Express, located just off the Long Island Expressway in Hauppage, New York. According to Costello's roommate Dave Schaller, the pint-size escort received a call from a john who wanted her to meet him at the hotel at 1 a.m. a few weeks before she disappeared in September 2010. And Megan Waterman was staying at the same hotel with her boyfriend when she vanished without a trace three months earlier. Lorraine Ela, Megan's mother, said her daughter had logged onto Craigslist just after midnight on the night she went missing, and that videocameras showed her leaving the hotel at 1:30 a.m."I think he wines and dines them and brings them back to his house," said a Long Island law-enforcement source who didn't want to be identified. "They were all on their own. Maybe he dates them several times. Maybe he makes them feel comfortable.""It's sad [Melissa] went down that path," said Brittany Johnson, Barthelemy's half sister. "She was really nice and always happy. She used to do my hair. She can't do it now."Barthelemy's last apartment was in the basement of a Bangladeshi family's home on Underhill Avenue in the Bronx. It was one of many two-story homes on that block, with trees and minimally manicured lawns. Down the street, the barbershop, hair salon, and corner stores are mostly a mix of Dominican and Bangladeshi businesses clustered near a large Christian church and a mosque.Barthelemy moved into her $800-a-month apartment after a Bangladeshi friend saw an ad at the grocer on the corner. Landlord Gafur Mohammad told The Daily Beast that the man called him and referred Barthelemy, who lived in his basement apartment for about eight months. She was a good tenant who kept to herself. He thought she worked in a club in Manhattan because of the late hours she kept."She'd come home at 5 in the morning and leave home after midnight," he said. "She would call a cab. Sometimes she walked."Her Underhill apartment was a huge step up from her last Bronx address on Torry Avenue. There, she lived in a two-family house with chipped green paint and a dilapidated exterior. A metal gate stands in front of its lawn?part-parking space, part yard, with scattered patches of grass where kids play."She would dress up nice, wearing party clothes," said her neighbor. "I wish I would have spoken to her more."The day after Barthelemy vanished, Terry said he called her numerous times on her cellphone but the calls went to voicemail. A few days later, he said he went to the police to report her missing but was told that "they couldn't help me because she wasn't underaged or handicapped."Terry said his efforts soon made him suspect No. 1. "They were watching me and following me," he said of the cops. "I had nothing to do with nothing." He admits that he and Barthelemy broke up regularly, but "no matter what, she always texted me... That's why I got worried when she didn't answer her phone."Meanwhile, Barthelemy's sister, Amanda, began to receive calls, about one each week.The caller ID indicated the call came from Melissa's cellphone. The man who sounded like an "older white guy" wanted to know if the person on the line was Melissa's little sister. "The whole year I continued to pay for the phone bill," Melissa's mother, Lynn, told The Daily Beast. "It was only turned on when the guy would turn it on, when he made the phone calls. He would only keep it on for three minutes."The police traced the calls to cellular towers in Times Square and Madison Square Garden, but got nowhere. Lynn said they received five more calls, the last one on August 26, 2009. "The last call, he said he killed her," then hung up. Investigators also discovered that a call made to Barthelemy's voicemail the day she vanished came from Massapequa, a Long Island town about 20 miles from where her body was later discovered.Detectives and family members combed through her phone records. Lynn discovered that a few calls were made to the escort service James Bond Entertainment. Lynn's fiance Jeff called the number and spoke to a man who told him that Barthelemy had worked with him on a number of occasions. "He was prickly, like Jeff was bothering him," said Lynn.A few of the numbers belonged to her regular clients, one of whom was a married man who told police that Barthelemy didn't show up for their scheduled date at a motel in Jersey City."He was more worried about his wife finding out than being a suspect in a serial killer case," said the Long Island law-enforcement source. "Her clients were regular Joes. She wasn't working for Heidi Fleiss."Other numbers were traced to throwaway phones purchased in Manhattan. One of the phones was linked to the name Mickey Mouse.Around the same time, Terry said he began to get his own taunting phone calls. His calls were from a "white guy," he said."He was threatening me," recalled Terry. "He said, you like to do some crazy stuff with Melissa, I know where you be at. Most of the time he seemed to be drunk. He knew who I was. He knew I had tattoos on my back. Maybe he felt [Melissa] was doing something he didn't like."Terry said the anonymous caller called him more than 30 times over a period of eight months. He said he reported the calls to the cops. Months later, Terry said, he was approached by the police again, but this time not as a suspect. They wanted to know about the john on Long Island. They asked if he could describe the house and if he could pick it out if he was taken there. He said he could."They already knew about the guy in Long Island," he said. "I said if they come to get me I would go. They didn't come."Christine Pelisek is staff reporter for The Daily Beast, covering crime. She previously was a reporter at the LA Weekly, where she covered crime for the last five years. In 2008, she won three Los Angeles Press Club awards, one for her investigative story on the Grim Sleeper.Roja Heydarpour is an editor at The Daily Beast. She has reported for the The New York Times and The Times-Tribune.?Valeria Luiselli’s essay collection, , which was excerpted by The New York Times, deals with people’s relations to spaces?including her own sense of being “in between” and the United States, neither native nor foreign in either. Luiselli also writes about dealing with racism and ignorance when she became reduced to the category of “Latina” after moving to New York to study. She ruminates on the isolation of the city: “The more nights you spend in other rooms?hotels, rented apartments, borrowed beds, sofas, shared spaces?the more you will get to know yourself.” In Chloe Aridjis’s widely praised novel , the female Mexican protagonist, like most immigrants, struggles with xenophobia and cultural alienation while trying to preserve her humanity in Berlin. And Brenda Lozano’s All Nothing is an intimate, humorous portrait of a girl dealing with loss and grief.?“Get ready for a cultural ambush!” Jeffrey Deitch, director of , told a star-studded crowd at the museum’s gala on Saturday. And ambushed they were, as Gwen Stefani, Kate Bosworth, Chloe Sevigny, and Kirsten Dunst took in a big dose of art throughout the night. (On Monday night, MOCA announced that the gala raised more than $3.2 million.)Kristin Davis, in a red strapless dress, took a phone picture with a friend in front of a red Mark Rothko painting. “She stands out, but I blend in,” Davis joked. Will Ferrell and his wife admired a Lee Krasner canvas, and Gwen Stefani and Gavin Rossdale were entranced by Doug Aitken’s three-room video installation, Electric Earth, which surrounded viewers from all angles with large-scale video screens playing clips of a young man on the streets of Los Angeles.And inside the lavish 900-person dinner, the art continued: Aitken was the unseen master of ceremonies behind the event. He designed a ceiling installation with architect Barbara Bestor that sent ripples of light across the ceiling of the room. He worked with performers Beck, Devendra Banhart, and Caetano Veloso on the music, and created six percussive "sonic tables" that were played by drummers during dessert. Aitken also enlisted the help of Joanna Moore, owner of Venice-based restaurant Axe, to consult on the food: baked flat breads, wedges of lettuce, roasted vegetables, steak. “Doug Aitken did the salad,” one guest joked. “But he forgot the dressing!”The museum’s splashy last year was framed as a massive comeback after years of financial turmoil. Last year’s event was branded “MOCA New” as Lady Gaga debuted an original song on a Damien Hirst piano, and guests were treated to a performance by Moscow’s Bolshoi Ballet. The celebration this year couldn’t have been more different. Deitch as director in June, and has, since then, worked to reconnect the museum with its local roots. The new exhibition, The Artist’s Museum, is an ambitious show that features work from 146 local artists.Gallery: ?Celebrity baby name Knox, used by Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt for their twin son, is the third-fastest rising name for boys. Other hot boys’ names inspired by celebrities, their children, or the characters they play include: Enzo (Patricia Arquette and Annabeth Gish both used this for their sons), Easton (Jenna Elfman), Dexter (television’s genial serial killer), Cullen (surname of Twilight’s vampire family), and Armani (the designer). For girls, fast-rising celebrity-inspired names are Quinn (the character from Glee), Gia (daughter of Real Housewives of New Jersey star Teresa Giudice), Scarlett (Johansson and O’Hara), and Charlie (as in the young daughters of Rebecca Romijn and Julie Chen, not, we trust, Sheen).Fastest falling names with a celebrity connection include Gael (Garcia Bernal), Jonas (Brothers), Rihanna (no last name), Marlee (Matlin) and Marley (the dog).Elvis has fallen off the Top 1,000 for the first time since 1954, though Presley is holding steady at No. 274.Pamela Redmond Satran, a founder of , is the coauthor of eight books about names, including and .?The stories in are expertly told and often quirkily sad, much like the slices of life in . "Considering the Bittersweet End of Susan Falls" is charming and follows a legless, 15-year-old college freshman as she tries, and succeeds, to hook up with her crush, an older girl. "RSVP" is a mournful letter, in response to a wedding invitation, from a man whose best friend stole his girlfriend. And "Scientific American" is an O. Henryesque, absurdist saga of a married couple that opens with Levin's best lede?"A crack in the wall behind their bed oozed gel"?and closes with the husband learning, after years of trouble, what had caused the oozing all along. In addition to language, Levin plays with names. In "Jane Tell," the most adult and best-paced story in the collection, the title character has a fetish for being "Ricked," or physically abused by aggressive men, whereas the narrator, who is dating her, worries that he's a dorky "Steve." Such definitions become clear through context, and once established are then used for lyrical playfulness but also deep meaning: "I'd assumed for awhile that there was a continuum: Ricks at one extreme, Steves at the other, me somewhere in the middle. But ... maybe Ricks and Steves weren't mutually exclusive: maybe certain Steves were also Ricks in certain contexts, and certain Ricks Steves. Were Steves just Ricks who were too afraid to Rick?" Nicknames also appear in the book's shortest, tightest story "The Extra Mile," a perfect bit of Jewish gross-out humor in which four old men, all widowers, get into a graphic conversation about which of them "went the extra mile," sexually, with their wives. The narrator calls two of the men "Bill the Goy" and "Clyde the Schlub." Other tools Levin employs, many of them the same elements that made The Instructions stand out, include kid narrators (six of the ten stories are told by young people), dogs (one trained to kill on hearing the command "nasal spray," another made to eat potentially poisonous bacon), and violence of an oversized, cartoonish variety. The title story (from which the book also gets its cover illustration of balloons on a truck), about a tough-talking kid trying to impress a girl, features almost all of these elements. ?The Lovely LadiesThe both put on their shows in the past 24 hours: Diane von Furstenberg rocked her star-studded audience with bright colors, brilliant patterns, and lots of sophisticated pomp?in part thanks to new creative director Yvan Mispelaere, who has worked for Chloe and Gucci; and everything was coming up roses for Carolina Herrera on Monday morning, literally?her inspiration was botanical plates, which was evident in both the palette and structure of her clothes (one gown actually looked like a gorgeous bloom). And there was Lela Rose, the Texan whose spring looks bloomed on the runway in Peruvian-inspired prints and sparkly-sheer fabrics, on models wearing Blake Lively-braids and Payless shoes; her pretty popularity is indicative of a future powerhouse, like Herrera or DVF.?The playful, trendsetting style that has become the duo's signature appears throughout the pop-up shop within Lane Crawford's 82,000-square-foot store in Hong Kong's International Finance Center. Life-size toy animals huddle next to glass cases that offer up goodies like Pamela Love's iconic skull-inspired necklaces. Opening Ceremony special-edition shoes by brands like Robert Cleregie and Doc Martens fill shelves topped with tutus. The label's celebrated collaboration with Rodarte hangs on the racks."Here you get to see all the partnerships, all the different worlds of Opening Ceremony," Leon explains, walking through the store. "We are really big on storytelling, so at Lane Crawford we made these little vignettes, like movie sets." One hall was transformed into Opening Ceremony's homage to France, the inspiration for the label's current collection. Another corner pays tribute to Los Angeles, where Leon and the brand's CEO, Carol Lim, transformed Charlie Chaplin's former dance studio into their store. Another section channels a bohemian New York neighborhood, evocative of Howard Street, where the first shop opened in 2002.The founders?and their friend and frequent collaborator Chloe Sevigny?kicked off the Lane Crawford partnership with a party at the Hong Kong store Thursday night, attended by hundreds of the city's young and stylish set as well as local celebrities who partied to dance music, vodka Champagne, and mini burgers.Though the pop-up shop was well-received, many in the crowd wanted to know: Would this portend a permanent Opening Ceremony store in China? According to the company, there are no plans for an Opening Ceremony store there yet, but Lane Crawford will continue to stock the merchandise after the pop-up shop closes. The Hong Kong-based department store was one of the first to buy the brand when it launched.Gallery: For Lim and Leon, who are both from Los Angeles, realizing the Hong Kong-Beijing project is also about taking Opening Ceremony back to where it all began. While they were luxury fashion executives in 2001, Leon and Lim took a vacation to Hong Kong, where the idea was born. "We came and shopped and shopped and shopped," he says. They explored not only the upscale emporiums but also grungy open markets, small shops by young local fashion designers and tourist streets' trinket-sellers.Inspired by the sense of adventure and seemingly limitless shopping possibilities, they started Opening Ceremony with a mission. Leon says: "We took all that energy of buying everything and it morphed into the concept for the store. We want to show people that you can have fun shopping. So you get this saturation of information. And as you can see, we are fashion nerds.""Everything for us is personal," he adds. "People ask us how we plan for the next season, but we don't do it that way. It is about what inspires us at the moment in art and fashion. It is about what interests us."Plus: .Alexandra A. Seno is based in Hong Kong and writes about economics, culture and the economics of culture.?While these looks were called disasters at the time, they’ve certainly grown more fashionable with age. Looking back on some red-carpet “train wrecks” is a big surprise: these stars were actually more fashion-forward than anyone at the time could have ever imagined. A version of Kim Basinger’s asymmetrical satin ball gown from 1999 popped up on Viktor & Rolf’s Spring 2011 runway?and Chloe Sevigny recently wore a version of Barbara Streisand’s famous 1969 Arnold Scaasi gown. Some of the “worst” red carpet looks of all time, it turns out, were really just ahead of their time.Overall, we’ve lost risk-takers on the red carpet at the Academy Awards. All too often, stars play it safe. This is an homage to the people who gave us something to talk about?and created award-show moments that we’ll never forget.Plus: .Continuing to emerge as one of fashion and entertainment's most engaging talents, Brad Goreski most recently appeared on The Rachel Zoe Project as Style Director. He picked up his first Vogue at the age of 12 and has been enthralled by the world of fashion ever since. Originally from the small Canadian town of Port Perry, Ontario, he has resided in Los Angeles for the past nine years. High points of his career include going to the Academy Awards with Anne Hathaway, being photographed by Terry Richardson, and being featured on the cover of the Styles section of the New York Times in September 2010.?He was also quick to point out the similarities between the American Occupy movement and recent waves of Russian protest. Massive rallies that broke out in Russia’s cities before Putin’s inauguration in December 2011 were styled and named after Occupy, he told The Daily Beast, adding that “Occupy in the United States does not present one unified front, whereas in Moscow people have one issue that unites them,” referring to anti-Putin sentiment.?Movie theaters in the 1970s were positively overflowing with , from the real-life Watergate scandal of All the President’s Men to thrillers like Three Days of the Condor, Klute, and The Parallax View. But while these films captured the public’s distrust of public officials in the years following President Kennedy’s assassination, Richard Nixon’s resignation, and the Vietnam War, our own modern society seems more primed than ever for such paranoid dramas.Enter AMC’s latest series, Rubicon, which launches Sunday evening with a two-hour installment (including the sneak peek of the pilot that aired earlier this summer). It seems to pick up the torch laid down by the aforementioned films and carries its paranoid flame into the 21st century, setting it down among the ashes of a post-9/11 society that thrives on the immediacy of information in the social networking age, the pervasive stink of scandal, and the omnipresence of CCTV cameras. “It’s always hard being the youngest,” said star James Badge Dale. “ Mad Men and Breaking Bad have just raised the bar, almost to the point that it’s unattainable.”It’s that culture of distrust and fear that Rubicon taps into, casting as its hero not the tireless journalists of All the President’s Men but rather an astute intelligence analyst, Will Travers, played by 24’s James Badge Dale ( The Pacific), who uncovers a global conspiracy that stretches beyond the walls of the American Policy Institute where he works and into the three branches of government?and beyond.In the first episode, a four-leaf clover, acting as a symbol of a hidden fourth branch of the government, turns up as a clue in a series of crossword puzzles in major newspapers around the world. Its appearance causes a wealthy man to promptly kill himself in response, leaving behind a widow (Miranda Richardson) with too many questions.“Everything is public property but there are still things which are incredibly hidden and incredibly private but then you find that maybe they’re not and they’ve been on show the whole time,” said Richardson regarding the situation in which her character, the appropriately named Katherine Rhumor, finds herself.Just how Katherine’s story connects to Will’s investigation remains a tantalizing puzzle to be solved, much like the onslaught of information that has to be deciphered, analyzed, and assessed each day by the API staffers.? “Can you trust the immediacy of that information,” said Dale, speaking to The Daily Beast from the show’s New York set. “The idea that you can turn on cable news right now and get information right away should make you ask, who’s putting out the press releases, who’s giving you the real story? Someone orchestrates these things. There are men in rooms who sit down and decide what is our main story today and what is going to be our spin on it?”It’s only fitting that Dale should be the one to ask these questions of the media. His character is a man who has given his entire life to the intelligence agency he works for, having lost his entire family in the World Trade Center attacks. Set and shot in Manhattan, the specter of 9/11 hovers uneasily over the action of Rubicon, a constant reminder of both the dangerous nature of the world and what can happen when such attacks aren’t averted.“This was something that he was powerless to have control over, something that affected so many people’s lives,” said Dale. “It was instantaneous and felt random but yet someone had been planning it for years. One of Will’s biggest struggles is dealing with staying in the present and dealing with why things happen. He spends too much time in the past.”Still, said Dale, Rubicon isn’t a 9/11 show.“I’m hesitant to talk about it,” he said. “I’m a New Yorker and I lost someone very close to me on that day. I don’t think that it’s as important to Will and the show as much as it is to the implications of the randomness and violence of it.”Even so, it represents a point of no return for Will Travers and the show itself.The road to bringing Rubicon to the screen was not an easy one. Following an arduous development process, AMC granted a pilot order to Jason Horwitch’s as-of-then-untitled project, which revolved around the researchers at a government-sponsored think tank. But after the project was finally ordered to series about a year later, Horwitch left the ?allegedly due to creative differences?and was replaced by Brotherhood’s Henry Bromell, who took over as showrunner.The American Policy Institute was altered to become an actual intelligence agency, though it’s one that’s vastly different from 24’s technologically advanced CTU, where Kiefer Sutherland’s Jack Bauer often barked orders to Chloe (Mary Lynn Rajskub) to call up CCTV footage with a few flicks of the keyboard.It’s not the case with Rubicon’s API, where the emphasis is more on the human intelligence gathered by analysts, connections made by the firing of synapses rather than computer keystrokes. “We’re super low-tech, man,” said Dale, who admitted that Three Days of the Condor was one of his favorite films. “Like square wheel-type low tech… We ask the audience to forgive us a bit for not using Google.”The effect grants Rubicon both a realistic aspect (no huge touch-screen monitors here!) but also connects it back to those early forerunners of paranoia cinema, like Francis Ford Coppola’s . “I wanted to use the series to approximate films like [those],” said Bromell. But he was quick to point out that “conspiracy is not just five guys in a room.” He sought to give Rubicon an intense feel as the overarching plot unfolds not just over the course of the season but several seasons.Bromell is also no stranger to the inner workings of the intelligence community; his father worked for the CIA for 35 years. Ask him about the state of intelligence-gathering today and he’ll mention things like “pattern recognition,” “trans-national terrorism,” “centralized information,” and “human intelligence.”It’s that last comment that connects most clearly with Rubicon’s overworked analysts. “They are there for idealistic reasons,” said Bromell, “but the job makes them wary and weary.” It also makes them deeply suspicious of each other, and for good reason. An early plot twist?when Will’s mentor is killed in a train collision?pushes him into a position of authority, one that doesn’t sit well with him. And, as always, there are eyes watching, even within these corridors of power.“It’s hard to fill a dead man’s shoes,” said Dale, “especially when that man was a member of your family. Will is very unsure of what he’s doing and where he is going but there is no going back at this point… He’s had a personal Rubicon, another one.”But it’s AMC who is also facing its own point of no return. Rubicon marks the third original series the cable network has launched, after the critical successes of Mad Men and Breaking Bad. The common thread among the three, said Bromell, is the high quality of each of the productions. “Each is the best at what they’re doing,” he said, "whether that’s period drama, taut drug-fueled adrenaline ride, or conspiracy thriller.”But it also means the stakes are high and everyone is indeed watching.“It’s always hard being the youngest,” said Dale. “ Mad Men and Breaking Bad have just raised the bar, almost to the point that it’s unattainable… But it puts us in a position to really swing for the fences. Either this works or we fall completely on our faces. I think it’s a wonderful way to work. And a wonderful way to live.”Plus: .Jace Lacob is the writer/editor of Televisionary, a website devoted to television news, criticism, and interviews. Jace resides in Los Angeles. He is a contributor to several entertainment Web sites and can be found on Twitter and Facebook. ?“This deal is going to happen and it is going to happen fast,” said one source inside Shine who put the time frame in terms of weeks, not months. “This is the first step towards [Murdoch] setting the kids in place at News Corp.” A News Corp. representative declined comment for this story. A Shine representative confirmed that the company has hired JPMorgan Chase to explore strategic options, but declined to comment further.Sources cautioned that, as with any deal, talks could break down at the last minute. But they added that Murdoch’s desire to bring his daughter back to News Corp., combined with Elisabeth’s motivation to sell, will likely overcome any unforeseen obstacles to a deal.Murdoch turns 80 in March, and sources inside News Corp. say his main goal is to figure out a way to return Elisabeth, 42, and Lachlan, 39, to the company and divide up the empire between them and their youngest brother, James, 38, who is the only Murdoch child currently working at News Corp. According to sources, Murdoch and his three children have been actively talking for months about potential ways to work together again. (Murdoch’s eldest daughter, Pru, 52, is not involved in the family business, though she will inherit part of the family’s 37 percent voting control of News Corp. along with her three siblings. Grace, 10, and Chloe, 8, the two children Murdoch has with current wife, Wendi Deng, will inherit a financial interest in News Corp. but have no voting control.)According to a second source with close ties to Murdoch, the patriarch has talked in the past about a scenario in which Elisabeth would oversee News Corp.’s entertainment assets; James would continue as head of News Corp.’s European and Asian assets, with a focus on its satellite and distribution operations; and Lachlan would be brought back to lead its newspaper assets. Under that plan, Chase Carey, News Corp.’s current president and chief operating officer, would remain as Murdoch’s top lieutenant, serving as a policing agent who can provide objective oversight of the siblings until a successor is ready to be named.“They are working together as a group on a master plan,” says one of the News Corp. insiders. Indeed, subtle hints have emerged in recent months that lend credence to the “master plan” theory. All three kids recently had a meeting in London, for instance, says a third source with knowledge of the gathering. Elisabeth and Lachlan also attended the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas together this month. And in October, Rupert took what sources viewed as the unusual step of bringing James with him on his annual pilgrimage to Australia, where Lachlan spends much of his time these days.A window opened for Murdoch to achieve his longstanding dream of working with his children again when a confluence of events in the television industry conspired to put Shine on the block. Consolidation of independent production companies in recent years has resulted in a dearth of targets for Shine to acquire. (To be sure, Shine itself was a big driver of that consolidation, buying Reveille, Dragonfly, Metronome, and Princess Productions, among others, in the last few years). In turn, the competition among buyers for the remaining companies has driven up prices to the point that Shine could potentially fetch more than three times its $420 million in earnings last year, or around $1.5 billion. Lastly, Sony Pictures Entertainment essentially forced Shine’s hand last year when it announced that it was seeking a buyer for its 21 percent stake in the company.“Rupert would love to have Lachlan back running newspapers,” says a former News Corp. insider. “It is the part of the company that he thinks Lachlan knows how to operate better than anyone.”Liz resigned from News Corp.’s BSkyB in 2000 amid tensions with her father, the only Murdoch child to leave the company voluntarily. She declined an offer to join News Corp.’s board last year because it would have excluded Shine from receiving 25 percent of the programming budgets that big British broadcasters like BBC or Channel 4 are required to spend on independent programmers?funding that accounts for a large portion of Shine’s revenue. Nonetheless, she has been taking on a larger behind-the-scenes role at News Corp. She has sat in as an “observer” at several and was the singular voice that convinced her father to air , which has ranked as the highest-rated show on television since its debut nine years ago.Although Rupert Murdoch has not officially named a successor, sources say Liz’s imminent arrival at News Corp. isn’t expected to threaten James’ position as heir apparent, partly because he’s the one who stuck with his father and has the biggest presence among the siblings inside the company, and partly because she is understood to be more interested in content creation than being CEO of the company. “It’ll be hard for Liz to challenge James’ authority,” says a source close to the siblings.James has been very supportive during internal talks about Liz coming back to the company, but he has also been chomping at the bit to be formally named as his father’s successor, if for no other reason than to stop the continued speculation about who will eventually run News Corp. “There’s no way James can pipe up against Rupert even if he wanted to, so you have to look into his soul to know if he’s really on board with the move,” this source says.Once the Shine acquisition is completed, sources say Murdoch hopes to woo Lachlan back to the company. That will perhaps be his hardest challenge, as in part by his father. Although Lachlan remains on the News Corp. board as a non-executive director, sources say he has been resistant to the idea of going back to the company on a permanent basis. “Lachlan got tired of Rupert constantly criticizing and infantilizing him,” says a former News Corp. insider.Shortly after leaving News Corp., Lachlan established a company called Illyria to acquire media and entertainment companies. But aside from a few small deals for television and radio stations, he hasn’t made as big an impact on his own as Liz has, which led sources to speculate that he could be convinced to come back into the fold.A newspaperman at heart, Murdoch still prizes the ink-and-paper part of the company that most analysts and investors despise. Lachlan oversaw many of News Corp.’s newspaper assets during his time at the company, including leading the money-losing past archrival tDaily News in circulation during his time as publisher. That immensely impressed his father, who thinks that Lachlan is the best-suited among his children to lead the company’s legacy newspaper operations.“Rupert would love to have Lachlan back running newspapers,” says the former News Corp. insider. “It is the part of the company that he thinks Lachlan knows how to operate better than anyone, and I bet now that some time has passed he can be convinced to come back to the company.”Though Murdoch has always viewed News Corp. as a family business, it has only been that in theory, not practice. Now, however, he is closer than ever to making his vision a reality.Peter Lauria is senior correspondent covering business, media, and entertainment for The Daily Beast. He previously covered music, movies, television, cable, radio, and corporate media as a business reporter for The New York Post. His work has also appeared in Avenue, Blender, and Media Magazine, and he's appeared on CNBC, Bloomberg, BBC Radio, and Reuters TV.?But Cruise’s eyes were firmly set on Lachlan and Packer. The actor nurtured the pair with particular care and the three became close, with Cruise flying on private jets with Lachlan and using that time to spout the glories of Scientology. At the time, Packer was intrigued while Lachlan remained skeptical. Scientology, smelling major money (the Packer family is one of the richest in Australia and the Murdochs, well?they’re not doing so badly themselves), was eager to have two high-profile, wealthy converts. “It would have been Scientology’s biggest ‘get’ to have Lachlan Murdoch, then the heir apparent to Rupert, in the fold,” the source said. However, Lachlan didn’t bite and Rupert was not happy with the courting of his son. “Rupert didn’t like Scientology?thought it was a bunch of nonsense,” the source said. Lachlan soon terminated his friendship with Cruise and made it clear he would not be joining the Scientology fold. Over the years there has been talk inside the News Corp. building of an “intervention” that Rupert staged to make sure his son didn’t fall into the clutches of the church, but a high-level News Corp. source said, “(Lachlan) is smarter than that.”?Anyone who believes that human beings only use 5 percent of their brains at any given time has never sat down for a chin-wag with Simon Schama, the ebullient, tireless author, art historian, and public intellectual, whose 15th book?a collection of the journalism and essays he’s written in stray minutes, Scribble, Scribble, Scribble, came out last week. (The title comes from a bemused put-down the Duke of Gloucester made to the historian Edward Gibbon, author of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire: “Another damned, thick, square book! Always scribble, scribble, scribble! Eh! Mr. Gibbon?”)On Wednesday morning, the first day of his book tour, Professor Schama met with me in the offices of WNYC, before and after his appearance on NPR’s On Point, during which he declared the “absolute” need for President Obama to revive a constitutional debate on “first principles,” as when James Madison and Alexander Hamilton duked out the exact meaning of the Constitution’s preamble, more than two centuries ago. “How do you interpret ‘the general welfare?’ That’s the kind of debate we ought to be having right now!” Schama said. Conversation on this and a broad array of topics effused from him like a flawlessly rendered, beautifully complex Liszt etude, until, too soon, he was dragged off to appear on The Leonard Lopate Show. Earlier that morning, he’d addressed the Carnegie Council for an hour (“on the abuse of history, and fake history and Glenn Beck, and the Tea Party, and why we should be paying attention”) and edited proofs of a piece he’d written for the Financial Times on the Israeli opposition leader, Tzipi Livni, from the back seat of his car, via red-cased iPhone. After Lopate, Schama would go to CNN for an interview with Eliot Spitzer, and he would wind down the day with a reading at 192 Books, in Chelsea.?Thankfully, however, his words can be corralled after the fact, and brought to stand still on a page, where they can be admired at leisure. In our conversation, we spoke of many of the subjects that come up in the four dozen chapters of Scribble, Scribble, Scribble?disquisitions on England, America, art, oratory, family, travel, Churchill, Isaiah Berlin, politics, film, and food?quite enough to talk about, you would think…and yet, somehow, new topics and tangents continually reared up.For instance, in the book, Schama writes that he always begins each new writing project with a fountain pen, not a computer.?Really? I asked him. “Always?” “Yes,” he said, pulling out a Parker 51 and a Moleskine notebook, and drawing squiggles on the page to illustrate. “Somehow the words don’t have any vitality, any life to them unless I can feel it marking on a paper. That’s how I start. Once I’m off, then I switch to the laptop.?I think it would all just be prose if it started on a laptop?not that what I do is poetry.”?He said he likes Parker 51s for their heft, unlike the “too light” Pelikan pens, though he admires the “fantastic antique pen shop” in London called Penfriend, which has Swans and Blackbirds and an aviary of other covetable vintage models. But the Parkers are the pens his father used, and one senses that this is the real reason he favors them. “My dad was so flamboyant, immensely flamboyant,” he continued. His mother was a “hell-raiser” too, as a little girl, though in the book, she’s remembered more for her uninspired cooking, an aspersion that makes Schama wince guiltily. “I do feel slightly full of remorse,” he said. “She was a remarkable, tough, exuberant woman." When Schama was a “little Jewish boy,” growing up in London’s Golders Green in the 1950s, his mother would sing show tunes at breakfast, “she would be Ethel Merman, my father would be Jack Buchanan?he was a kind of hoofer, elegant, music-hall singer.” Arthur Schama worked in textiles?“the family schmatte business,” but was an impresario and producer of amateur theatricals for charity. “He did a killer 'Oklahoma!' and a damn good Macbeth.” Schama said. “Every Saturday morning before going to synagogue,?I got the biggest treat. My dad had this running story about a 10-year-old boy called 'Knock-‘em-down Ginger,' and I’d climb into bed, and there’d be a new episode?‘Knock-‘em-down Ginger gets into trouble again.’ Then we’d march off to synagogue.”?Then they’d head back home, for his mother’s cholent. “ Taam gan eden,’ she would murmur dreamily?‘The Taste of the Garden of Eden,’” he writes. But their son had a more global appetite.Of his uncompleted novel, he says, “I know the characters, and I know the plot. I know all that about the people in this book.”?In the 14 years since she became a fashion star, first as the designer of Chloe, and then as the namesake founder of her own brand, Stella McCartney has always marched to the beat of her own drum. In an industry where leather goods are a kind of bedrock, she has opted to work entirely with fabrics that don’t involve animal cruelty. She was also designing lower-cost lines for Target and H&M long before it became the “it” thing to do. Now, for the first time, she’s collaborating with her father, Paul, doing costumes for , the ballet he’s helmed with Peter Martins and The New York City Ballet. She spoke to The Daily Beast’s Jacob Bernstein about getting notes from her dad, why vegetarianism is important, and Kate Moss’s weekend-long wedding.?To understand how a billionaire private equity titan like Stephen Schwarzman can be so completely tone deaf?and policy ignorant?as to suggest that the idea of taxing Wall Street fat cats at the same rate as the rest of us is akin to the Nazi invasion of Poland, it’s instructive to follow him to lunch.I met the deal world’s top dog midway through my first meal at America’s power commissary, Manhattan’s Four Seasons restaurant, where $53 Dover sole is served in two soaring dining rooms (the “grill room” and the “pool room”) connected by Pablo Picasso tapestries and Frank Stella paintings. En route to my noontime table, in prime bubble era, late 2006, I passed media power (Mel Karmazin, Edgar Bronfman Jr.), political power (Vernon Jordan, Michael Bloomberg) and Wall Street power (AIG’s Hank Greenberg, Citi’s Sandy Weill). But it was Blackstone’s Schwarzman, a near-daily regular, who acted like he owned the place, bounding from table to table, including mine, crowing about his ill-fated $39 billion bid for Equity Office Properties. I had entered his clubhouse, and by the look on his over-tanned face, which stood out against his salt-and-pepper comb-over, he clearly reveled in it.Watch Randall Lane discuss Steve Schwarzman and the Decade of Greed on MSNBC’s Morning Joe People who bunker themselves solely among the like-minded, who forget what it’s like to eat a hot dog or a take a bus or answer their own phone, lose perspective. It happens in Washington and corporate boardrooms and Hollywood all the time. Yet one would think that the cataclysmic events of the past two years would have knocked some reality into the heads of Wall Street’s elite.Especially Steve Schwarzman, the poster child for greed in the decade I call . On Feb. 13, 2007, he gained infamy by throwing himself a $3 million 60th birthday party, transforming the giant Park Avenue Armory into a replica of his 35-room Park Avenue palace in the sky, down to the replica paintings, and buying himself serenades from Patti LaBelle and Rod Stewart. "Steve, you're more than a friend to me," joked emcee Martin Short, "you're a business associate." Even in an age of excess, giving a $3 million birthday party prompted a huge backlash, one that he has since tried to distance himself from. (The following year, as if in penance he announced a $100 million gift to the New York Library, though a broke out over how many times his name would be chiseled onto the main branch's facade.)Yet when President Obama, in an age of soaring deficits and 9.5 percent unemployment, makes an eminently reasonable proposal?close the tax loophole known as “carried interest” that lets the people who inflated the asset bubble pay a 15 percent tax rate, versus the 35 percent rate paid by most reading this article?Schwarzman trotted out the specter of the Nazis.“It’s a war,” , comments Newsweek revealed on Monday. “It’s like when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939.”Besides flubbing history?if we’re using awful Nazi metaphors, Obama’s dogged push on the carried interest loophole wasn’t a Poland-style sneak attack, but more of a sustained siege, a la Leningrad?Schwarzman is wrong on policy. So wrong that, among a half-dozen private equity players and money managers I previously asked about this, equal numbers of Republicans and Democrats, not one, even with the cloak of anonymity, chose to defend why they are paying less than half the tax rate ordinary mortals do.“Virtually everybody in the private equity community knows that they have been receiving a gift for as long as people can remember,” says one Schwarzman peer.Yet the most important person at the most important deal shop in the world, with a net worth of $5 billion or so, felt it legitimate to invoke the Nazis. And even as he spent Tuesday , it was filled with a “however” that just reinforced his original point.In other words, even after a $3 million birthday party and a Wall Street-fueled economic meltdown, Schwarzman still thinks the same way. And that’s scary.At its core, the entire carried interest debate is about a mind-set. Those who defend it truly believe managing money is somehow more noble than what the rest of us do for a living?that their lower personal taxes are justified by the risks they take (with other people’s money) to create growth and jobs.The past few years have taught the world the folly of that warped view. But the message hasn’t gotten to Schwarzman. Quite the opposite: He’s stumped up and down Capitol Hill, groveling for his tax rate superiority.Schwarzman’s declaration of war brought me back to another encounter, which took place just four months after his birthday bash, as he and I both found ourselves at a party celebrating Qatar Airways’ new service to New York, held at Jazz at Lincoln Center.The rich-and-anonymous and poor-and-connected were funneled straight into the receiving area, where bowls of caviar and Dom Perignon awaited. The famous entered via a red carpet on the left, set up for the benefit of the paparazzi. In came Donald and Melania Trump, Chloe Sevigny and Andie MacDowell, Julianne Moore and Maggie Gyllenhaal. And Steve Schwarzman, the sole Wall Street executive who opted for the red carpet.Following the CEO’s droning speech, we got the payoff: a private concert by Diana Ross. While the vast majority were content to bob and sway, looking down from my table, directly above Schwarzman’s, I saw the private equity titan dancing frantically.I remember thinking two things. First, 60-year-old white men should never dance alone at a public gathering?he was about as smooth as five-day stubble. Second, for all the public mea culpas about his over-the-top party, back among his element, nothing had changed. That was mid-2007. Now it’s mid-2010. And to Steve Schwarzman, the party is still going. That should worry all of us. is editor at large at The Daily Beast. The former editor in chief of Trader Monthly, Dealmaker and P.O.V. magazines, and the former Washington bureau chief of Forbes, he is the author of .?The reality? Probably both. But there are good signs of the latter scenario prevailing. Indie darling Kevin Smith, one of the original Sundance progeny, is back this year, with his film Red State. As is a (relatively) more recent festival discovery: Miranda July, who’s bringing The Future, her follow-up to Me and You and Everyone You Know. And the documentary category is feeling particularly strong, with Page One, Andrew Rossi’s inside look at The New York Times, and the ubiquitous Alex Gibney’s film about the Merry Pranksters (Magic Trip), to name just a few.?The Hunger Games series has not yet reached the same level of worldwide fan fervor as its contemporaries Harry Potter and Twilight, but it’s well on its way. The New Yorker in June dissected the , Time magazine named Collins one of its 100 most influential people, and unlike the guilty-pleasure stigma surrounding Twilight, Collins’ grim vision of the future is being heralded by both readers and critics. Authors Stephen King, Twilight’s Stephenie Meyer, and The Southern Vampire Mysteries’ Charlaine Harris have all praised the books. Kristen Bell seems to be on to help promote them. And Kansas State University has made the first installment for incoming freshman.All told, 5.6 million copies of three books are in print in North America. has spent two years on The New York Times’ bestseller list. The sequel, , debuted atop USA Today’s bestseller list in September, and its publisher Scholastic upped its initial printing of the final installment, to 1.2 million. Released Tuesday, the end of Katniss’ story is already receiving raves, leaving fans eager for news about the forthcoming film, slated to begin shooting in February. Jacobson, a former Disney studio chief-turned-head of her own production company Color Force, discovered the series a year and a half ago and describes herself as obsessed. Despite her concerns over how best to translate some of the book’s more grisly scenes for young moviegoers, she moved quickly to secure rights. By March 2009, she had partnered with Lionsgate on a future film with Collins’ blessing.“What Suzanne managed in the book is to explore violence and exploitation without it feeling exploitive or guilty of its own themes,” Jacobson said. “It’s critical… it pulls off being commentary and a really gripping page-turner at the same time.”With no premiere date in sight, eager readers have gotten creative. More than 470,000 people have viewed this impressive fan-made ?and it’s just one of the many, including . A group of fans have even created Hunger Games Web episodes where the . , , and the ? have already begun trying to cast the film; seemingly in the lead to play Katniss are Kick-Ass star Chloe Moretz?who has said she “ ” wants the role -- and The Lovely Bones’ Saoirse Ronan. Twilight star Kristen Stewart is also in the running on nearly all of the online shortlists.The difficulty in translating the book to film is apparent; both Jacobson and Lionsgate say the movie will be made for the book’s 12- to 18-year-old core audience, and as such they want a PG-13 rating. Scholastic Press editorial director David Levithan recalled his hesitation to the premise. “Oooh, that sounds brutal,” he remembered thinking. “I will fully admit that many of us, just based on the summary, thought this was going to be quite a challenge. Not just for us, but for Suzanne.”“And then the first book came in and we were all blown away.” Collins, who is currently on a 12-city tour to promote the Mockingjay, is still surprised by how popular the series has become. Hundreds of fans attended a midnight release party for the book at New York’s Books of Wonder, and a surprised : “I didn’t know there were so many of you until I came out.” Before writing The Hunger Games, she wrote the middle-reader series The Underland Chronicles and worked as a writer in children’s TV programming.The mother of two from Connecticut says she was flipping between reality shows and news from Iraq three years ago when she came up with The Hunger Games. "On one channel young people were competing for money. On the next channel, young people were fighting for their lives. I was tired, and the ideas merged," she told in an interview last September. Coupled with one of the Greek myths about Theseus?similarly ?Collins formed the framework for her post-apocalyptic story.In , Katniss and 23 other contestants between 12- and 18-years-old are trapped in a massive arena until only one winner is left standing. Throughout the games, she wrestles with the idea of trying to live when it means her competitors must die. And while Katniss succeeds in defying the Capitol in small ways from within the arena, the book does not shy away from the inevitable, nor does it seem to relish depicting deaths by stabbing, insects, or worse. The test for filmmakers will be to walk the same line. “The book’s ethics are clear, and we will find a director who can handle the material in the right way,” Jacobson said. “Suzanne was rightly concerned that it had the potential to be turned into something she hated, glorifying the violence the book is meant to critique.”“That was really our pitch to Suzanne?You don’t want the movie to become its own version of The Hunger Games,” she continued.Collins wrote a draft of the screenplay, and Billy Ray, who wrote State of Play and is set to adapt the Fox action drama 24 into a feature, completed a polish. Producers are now searching for a director.Lionsgate president of production Alli Shearmur collected all of the studio’s top brass to get on the phone when it came time to convince Jacobson they were in sync. “That never happens at a big studio,” Jacobson said. “We were all just really emotionally invested fans.”The Hunger Games has found older fans apart from the excited filmmakers, which is good news for a potential film franchise; Scholastic’s Leviathan estimates, based on word of mouth and members of , half of all readers are adults. The book’s mainstream appeal, he explained, can be attributed to any number of its themes. “It taps into the culture of fear we live in, definitely… But it’s also accessible in other ways. There’s action, a love triangle, a headstrong female lead, science-fiction… ”All involved agree that the film should play to older crowds but “should absolutely be rated PG-13,” Jacobson said. “It would be wrong to make the R-rated version of it.”“The situations are so intense and frightening; it’s just going to be a matter of creating suspense,” she said. “The power of movies can be just as much about what you don’t see as what you do.”Plus: .Denise Martin is a former television reporter for Variety and staff writer at the Los Angeles Times. She has also written for The Advocate, Premiere and The Hollywood Reporter and has a degree from Le Cordon Bleu College of Culinary Arts.?Mann was haunted by photographs of the 50 women whose bodies were discovered outside Texas City, Texas. She explains, “In many cases, all they had were school photographs of these young girls, smiling and looking straight at the camera. Some of the victims have never been identified, but they are all daughters and sisters.” While the women were the victims of a number of different killers, Mann and Ferrarone knew they needed to provide a plot that would link several of the murders to one killer, providing the framework of a whodunit without oversimplifying the case. So they created the character of one young girl in jeopardy, played by , to provide an audience focus for all the forgotten victims. “I wanted to give a face and voice to the victims,” Mann says, acknowledging that this gives the film a different feeling from many crime films made by men. She also wanted to avoid depicting the murders in a grisly way. “I wanted to be more evocative,” she explains, and she says that her chief influences were more atmospheric thrillers, like Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock and Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now.?The long-simmering feud between Fox News Chairman Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch’s adult children has finally erupted into full-scale war?a death struggle over the future of News Corporation, the financially beleaguered media and entertainment conglomerate that the 78-year-old Murdoch continues to control as chairman and chief executive.The first shot?really a nuclear device?was fired today on The New York Times’ Web site by British public-relations executive Matthew Freud, Murdoch’s son-in-law. Freud’s on-the-record quote, for a of the 69-year-old Ailes, who launched and runs News Corp.’s most profitable division, is stunning in its condemnation?a frontal attack on Ailes and an apparent attempt to force News Corp.’s founder to choose between blood and money, between his progeny and his most-prized executive.A source close to Freud said Wendi Murdoch was one of the family members who encouraged his Ailes attack in the Times.“I am by no means alone within the family or the company in being ashamed and sickened by Roger Ailes’ horrendous and sustained disregard of the journalistic standards that News Corporation, its founder and every other global media business aspires to,” Freud told the Times. A News Corp. spokesperson fired back: “Matthew Freud's opinions are his own and in no way reflect the views of Rupert Murdoch, who is proud of Roger Ailes and Fox News.”A spokesman for Ailes, who in a previous career was a brass-knuckled Republican media consultant who toiled for Presidents Richard Nixon and George H.W. Bush, had no response today to Freud’s charges. But a News Corp. insider told me the pugnacious Ailes, a self-made son of the working class who was paid $23 million last year, more than Rupert himself, is probably enraged at Freud and plotting his revenge. “Ailes would kill him if he thought he could get away with it,” the insider told me.? One thing is pretty clear: Freud’s opinions are much more than just his own. They undoubtedly reflect those of his wife Elisabeth Murdoch, 41, a former News Corp. executive who owns a television production company in London, and are very likely in sync with the views of James Murdoch, Elisabeth’s 37-year-old brother, who has been taking a larger role within News Corp. in recent years. Freud often maneuvers behind the scenes on behalf of his brother-in-law, who is chairman and chief executive of News Corp.’s Asian and European operations and widely seen as Rupert’s heir apparent.It’s unclear if Freud’s attack reflects the views of the previous pretender to the throne, 39-year-old Lachlan Murdoch?who in 2005 left the company and moved back to Australia after their father sided with Ailes in a dispute over Fox Television. As the Times story points out, Rupert owes a great deal to Ailes, who has turned Fox News into a $700 million profit machine?“believed to make more money than CNN, MSNBC and the evening newscasts of NBC, ABC and CBS combined.”Ailes, a barrel-chested man who doesn't shrink from a fight, especially in his earlier days when he was prone to physical confrontations, has an ego to equal his bulk. Aside from his pioneering role in political attack ads, Ailes' storied career includes producing daytime television's popular Mike Douglas Show in the 1960s, developing CNBC as a successful cable outlet in the 1980s, acting as a communications coach to such political figures as French President Jacques Chirac?and even producing Broadway shows.Freud, the great-grandson of Sigmund Freud, is also friendly with Rupert’s 41-year-old Chinese-born wife, Wendi Deng, a former News Corp. executive who has two young children with the billionaire mogul. While her views on Ailes are not publicly known, News Corp. insiders say she's not a fan. Indeed, a source close to Freud told me Wendi was one of the family members who encouraged his Ailes attack in the Times.Wendi is a skilled inside player, and a possible result of this corporate PR embarrassment would be to undermine Rupert's confidence in Elisabeth and James, thus ultimately advantaging Wendi's children?8-year-old Grace and 6-year-old Chloe Murdoch?in the inevitable successionary rivalry. It would help, of course, if Rupert hangs on as long as his formidable 100-year-old mother. Freud didn't respond to a voicemail message left on his cellphone.Lloyd Grove is editor at large for The Daily Beast. He is also a frequent contributor to New York magazine and was a contributing editor for Conde Nast Portfolio. He wrote a gossip column for the New York Daily News from 2003 to 2006. Prior to that, he wrote the Reliable Source column for the Washington Post, where he spent 23 years covering politics, the media, and other subjects.?The complete Top Ten for 2009:Girls: 1. Isabella 2. Emma 3. Olivia 4. Sophia 5. Ava 6. Emily 7. Madison 8. Abigail 9. Chloe 10. MiaBoys: 1. Jacob 2. Ethan 3. Michael 4. Alexander 5. William 6. Joshua 7. Daniel 8. Jayden 9. Noah 10. Anthony? Fastest riser for girls was Maliyah, inspired by first daughter Malia Obama (the Malia spelling also leapt up), with Isla, the Scottish name of actress Isla Fisher, making the second-biggest jump for girls. The fastest-rising boys’ name was Cullen, surname of the Twilight hero Edward Cullen.There was a pop culture element to the fastest-falling names too, with Marley (as in Bob, as well as the dog from Marley & Me), Miley, Lindsay, Brett (as in football great Favre), and Jonas (as in Brothers) all sliding down the list.Isabella’s popularity can be attributed to its cross-cultural appeal. It’s favored by Hispanic parents and Wasp-y ones, by families across the economic spectrum, by fans of Twilight’s Bella and the powerful Spanish queen of history. Factoring in other popular variations of the name?from Isabel to Bella to Izabelle?the name is even more widespread than its No. 1 status suggests.Emma enjoyed only one year in the spotlight before sliding down to No. 2, with longtime No. 1 name Emily sliding all the way to seventh place this year. Other downward-moving girls’ names are Madison and Abigail, while Olivia and Sophia?names that have a similar appeal as Isabella?moved up.On the boys’ side, longtime top name Michael slipped to No. 3. Also downwardly-mobile: Joshua, Daniel, and Anthony, while Alexander and William leapt up along with second-place Ethan.In the overall Top 1,000, other names upward for girls include Arabella and Annabella, Kinley and Kinsley, Juliet and Juliette, Paisley and Presley.For boys, fast movers include Jax and Jett, King and Colt, the militaristic Kason and Gunner along with the genteel Emmett, Jasper, and Brooks.Pamela Redmond Satran is a developer of the baby-naming site and the coauthor of 10 books on names, including , due out next month.?As models skew younger and provocation is rewarded with issues sold and page views "liked," maybe it was only a matter of time before the industry embraced someone as young as Blondeau. Jenna Saunders, editor of Jezebel, argues that it’s the fault of the industry?and the way we’re trained to look at fashion images?that makes the pictures of Blondeau sexual ones. “It's just that so many of the tropes of fashion photography?the focus on the long limbs, the aestheticization and objectification of these young bodies, the preference for blank expressions and softly opened mouths?are inherently sexualizing,” she . “But something about some of these pictures, on a level almost deeper than language, creeps me out. And for that, I blame fashion, not the child or her parents.”?4. Please GiveThough particularly relevant to city dwellers, the latest dramedy from acclaimed writer/director Nicole Holofcener ( Walking and Talking) is an insightful commentary on both the alarming wealth gap and the obsession with social mobility in America. Please Give follows Kate (Catherine Keener) and Alex (Oliver Platt), a couple living in New York City with their teenage daughter, Abby (Sarah Steele). They buy up furniture for far less than it’s worth at estate sales, spruce it up, and then sell it for huge profits at their furniture store. Kate and Alex want to expand their apartment and have bought the one next to theirs, but they can’t move in until its senile old tenant, Andra (Ann Guilbert), dies. The family befriends Andra’s two granddaughters?Rebecca (Rebecca Hall), a kindhearted breast cancer radiology technician, and Mary (Amanda Peet), a narcissistic cosmetologist. Kate becomes overwhelmed by her circumstances?scamming furniture sellers, the homeless people in her neighborhood, the Andra waiting game?and tries to assuage her guilt (unsuccessfully) by volunteering or handing twenty dollar bills to the homeless, much to her daughter’s chagrin. The performances are all great, but it’s the underrated Hall ( Vicky Cristina Barcelona) who steals the show as the film’s moral center. The Wall Street Journal’s Joe Morgenstern , “This gorgeous film, always tender and sometimes dark, is a deeply resonant comic drama that's concerned with nothing less than life, death, love, sex, guilt and the urban logic of mortality.” ?Like and for updates all day long. Jace Lacob is TV columnist for The Daily Beast and Newsweek, covering television as well as culture in general. His work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, TV Week, and AOLtv. A former television executive, Jace is the founder of television criticism and analysis website Televisionary and can be found daily on Twitter, offering his opinion on all things televisual. He is a member of the Television Critics Association and the Broadcast Television Journalists Association. Maria Elena Fernandez is a senior entertainment reporter for Newsweek/The Daily Beast. She previously covered television and nightlife for the Los Angeles Times and spent many years on the crime beat, writing for The Washington Post and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. She also worked at the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel, where she covered the AIDS epidemic. Her children’s book, , was published in 1996 under a pseudonym so that she wouldn’t be stalked by screaming children. For inquiries, please contact The Daily Beast at ?Twitter executive Chloe Sladden says there are “three major areas we discuss and explore with our journalism partners: How Twitter impacts how journalists source and shape stories. How Twitter has changed how news breaks and how audiences follow breaking stories. How papers engage their audience via Twitter.” She declined to discuss financial details, but Stone says the goal is to share revenue with the news outlets.Is Stone’s ego bruised by non-believers like Tom Brokaw, who recently said of Twitter that “an awful lot of it seems to be… just stuff that fills air”? Stone views such attitudes as a byproduct of the four-year-old company’s explosive growth. “The gap between people who’ve heard of Twitter and those who understand the value of it is still pretty wide,” he explains. “We have to get people to understand it’s not just for saying ‘I had a bran muffin today,’ that it’s an information network.”That is his preferred phrase, rather than social network, though in my experience there is a strong sense of community within the circle you choose. Stone’s point is that anyone can play: “CNN doesn’t have to approve you. Kanye West doesn’t have to friend you for you to get his tweets.”With 95 million tweets uncorked each day, Stone is conscious of what he calls the “noise” of Twitter. He says the company plans to make the rivers of information more navigable, not just by suggesting people to follow, as it does now, but by suggesting relevant tweets you should read?based on some algorithm that assesses your interests.(By the way, Stone gets overwhelmed by technology just like the rest of us. He insists on crafting polite replies to strangers who send him notes, and occasionally gets so backed up that he declares “email bankruptcy. I tell my communications team, ‘I just deleted all my email. If you had anything important, resend it.’”)When he gets in a groove, Stone can sound a bit starry-eyed. The global surge in mobile phones, he says, means Twitter can reach millions where there is no Internet access. “We can empower farmers in rural areas to have a better of idea of grain prices or weather. We have tremendous growth potential, not just for business purposes but for the purpose of real social change.”But first he’s trying to change the company’s image in Washington. He recently hired Adam Sharp, a former congressional staffer, as his first ambassador to the capital. Sharp won’t be lobbying but serves as more of a chief hand-holder, helping lawmakers master the art of tweeting and posting Twitpics.That, of course, could foster some goodwill in Congress, where nearly every lawmaker has a Twitter account, including Nancy Pelosi (23,000 followers) and John Boehner (72,000). The same goes for Sarah Palin (297,000 followers) and Barack Obama (5.9 million, though he’s acknowledged that “some 20-year-old” does his tweeting). Stone met this year with Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill (43,000 followers) and Republican Rep. Darrell Issa (15,000 followers). He told them he hasn’t been ignoring Washington but that Twitter was tiny, just 150 people working out of a San Francisco loft (it’s now up to 300). Stone doesn’t seem confrontational by nature, but he did take a swing at Malcolm Gladwell?despite being a “huge fan”?after The New Yorker writer’s recent piece Despite all the publicity over Twitter’s role in the Iranian street protests, Gladwell dismissed the “grandiosity” and “outsized enthusiasm for social media,” saying activists were more effective in organizing the Woolworth’s sit-in in North Carolina in 1960. Stone responded to his 1.6 million Twitter followers (“Mr. Gladwell, I totally dig your hair but…”) and at greater length in , insisting that real-time communication “allows many to move together as one.”“It was a straw man,” Stone told me. “He paints it in black or white. No one ever said forwarding a tweet is like the civil-rights movement in the 1960s… It’s absurd to say Twitter doesn’t have some complementary role to play.”In the meantime, Stone is having a blast. He recently shot a commercial for Stolichnaya vodka in which he debated his double?playing both parts?about whether Twitter is “just a constant stream of meaningless babble.”Stone recently saw alone because his wife, Livia, who runs a wild animal hospital in California’s Marin County, wasn’t interested in the Facebook film. Stone laughs at the notion that he, like Mark Zuckerberg, might one day be the focus of a major motion picture: “I think maybe they’ll make a bad CW comedy about us.”He is diplomatic when I ask whether Facebook’s moment has passed. “People could say, ‘Facebook’s not cool anymore. I think the Facebook guys would say, ‘Great, we’re not a fad anymore, we’re part of people’s lives.’ I don’t know that you want to be cool. That’s just a burden.”If Twitter still has a coolness factor, it’s a burden that Stone wears lightly. He looks slightly amazed to find himself rubbing shoulders with famous politicians and television anchors, as if it’s a dream from which he might wake up.So how does it feel to be an obscure geek one day and have worldwide influence the next?“It’s weird,” says Stone. “Sometimes we feel nauseous. Sometimes we feel elated. Sometimes we don’t know what to feel.”Correction: This article initially reported Stone's lunch with Ann Curry was with Jimmy Kimmel.Howard Kurtz is The Daily Beast's Washington bureau chief. He also hosts CNN's weekly media program Reliable Sources , Sundays at 11 am ET. The longtime media reporter and columnist for The Washington Post, Kurtz is the author of five books.?These females aren’t only more sympathetic than their male counterparts; they’re a lot steamier. “The aggressive sexuality is part of the draw,” says Swimfan’s Christensen. In most crazy-chick flicks, the female protagonist doesn’t just lose her mind; she loses her clothes. And sometimes she loses her sexual orientation as well. In Chloe, Amanda Seyfried stalks Julianne Moore and winds up in her bed. And most of the Internet buzz around Black Swan centers on the fantasy scene where Nina and her frenemy, Lily, stage a bedroom ballet. That’s a major reason why 45 percent of Black Swan’s audience is male, a fact that surprised even Nancy Utley, president of Fox Searchlight, which released the Darren Aronofsky film. When asked why men are so attracted to crazy chicks, Mila Kunis, who plays Lily, lets out a laugh. “I can give you a bulls--t answer,” she says during the phone call. “I actually don’t know. I think girls want stability and understanding, but I think...” She’s interrupted by a noise in the background. “My father is changing a lightbulb. All my lights in my house went off at the same time. Dad, why are men attracted to crazy women?” She pauses. “He’s thinking.” She pauses again. “He won’t say it. He censors himself around me. Dad, is it dirty?!”?Nationally, the fight over the mosque has escalated far beyond name-calling into an emotional, politically driven war over American values. Does being American mean holding the personal pain of some above the constitutional rights of others, as the Anti-Defamation League suggested in its statement proposing the mosque move somewhere else? Or does it mean seeing this country as a mighty power with a God-given mission to right global wrongs?rhetoric not heard since George W. Bush and the “Axis of Evil” days? Republicans running for election have seized on the mosque and Imam Rauf as symbols of what they see as President Obama’s inadequate and politically correct response to the terrorist threat. Not least among these is former House speaker Newt Gingrich, on the shortlist as a possible Republican presidential candidate in 2012. “Building this structure on the edge of the battlefield created by radical Islamists…is a political statement of shocking arrogance and hypocrisy,” he wrote recently. In the same piece, he connected Rauf to terrorist and fundamentalist Islamic groups. (When I asked how he knew this, he referred me to a National Review Web column by the former terrorist prosecutor and partisan activist Andrew McCarthy.) Rauf has asserted publicly that he believes American policies abroad in part inspired the calamity of 9/11, and in a recent radio interview he refused to say whether he saw Hamas as a terrorist group. He denies any link to any terrorist organization and “forcefully and consistently” has condemned all forms of terrorism, according to a statement from Khan.?And observers believe she also yields sartorial and other types of fashion influence. Before their marriage, Murdoch favored old-school business suits. With the advent of Wendi, the Aussie began to favor black turtlenecks, a la Steve Jobs. Before their marriage, Murdoch kept to establishment haunts like New York’s Upper East Side. Wendi seduced her husband downtown, setting him up in an apartment in SoHo. The Murdochs have two children together?Grace, who was born in 2001, and Chloe, born four years later. ?was even closer to than was previously believed. In an interview with Vogue, , said the former British prime minister is godfather to her 9-year-old daughter Grace, and was present at her baptism as well as that of their other daughter, Chloe, 8. Earlier reports said Australian actors Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman were Grace’s godparents. Blair’s spokesman refused to comment, while a News Corp. spokesman confirmed the report. Blair had previously appeared reluctant to condemn News International for the phone-hacking scandal, and had frequently come under fire for his close connections to Murdoch after Murdoch’s Sun tabloid famously crossed party lines to endorse Blair in 1997. Wendi Murdoch said it is “unfair” that her 80-year-old husband has been subject to the phone-hacking investigation and said she worries “about him being alone” in Britain with all the scrutiny. ?It was this story, more than any other, that furthered her reputation as a woman on the make, by detailing her befriending of an American couple who helped her to move from Guangzhou to Los Angeles when she was 19. She lived with the couple, sleeping in the room of their 5-year-old daughter and studying at Cal State Northridge. Things turned acrid when the wife discovered that Wendi was having an affair with the husband, 31 years Wendi’s senior. They divorced, and Wendi wed the man, Jake Cherry. “I loved that girl,” he told The Wall Street Journal. “She told me I was a father concept to her, and it would never be anything else.” Before long, they, too, were divorced, but not before Wendi had secured a green card.?Like and for updates all day long. Jace Lacob is TV columnist for The Daily Beast and Newsweek, covering television as well as culture in general. His work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, TV Week, and AOLtv. A former television executive, Jace is the founder of television criticism and analysis website Televisionary and can be found daily on Twitter, offering his opinion on all things televisual. He is a member of the Television Critics Association and the Broadcast Television Journalists Association. Maria Elena Fernandez is a senior entertainment reporter for Newsweek/The Daily Beast. She previously covered television and nightlife for the Los Angeles Times and spent many years on the crime beat, writing for The Washington Post and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. She also worked at the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel, where she covered the AIDS epidemic. Her children’s book, , was published in 1996 under a pseudonym so that she wouldn’t be stalked by screaming children. For inquiries, please contact The Daily Beast at ?It’s rare to see a bipolar character at the forefront of a television drama; they’re typically shoved to the sidelines, a crazed killer in a police procedural or an unstable individual in a chance encounter. In fact, one can count on both hands the few bipolar characters who have appeared on television in recent years: Jeremy Sisto’s Billy Chenowith on , ’s Erin Silver (Jessica Stroup), ’sMaggie Wyczenski (Sally Field, in an Emmy Award-winning turn), ’ Waverly Grady (Aasha Davis), and ’s Dr. Jennifer Devlin (Chandra West), to name a few. Film and theater haven’t been absent of bipolar characters, either. Films like Shutter Island, Michael Clayton, Mad Love, and The Informant! have all tackled the subject matter to different degrees, while Broadway rock musical Next to Normal depicted bipolar disorder’s effects on a family. (TNT will join the crowd this summer with Perception, which stars Eric McCormack as a who solves crimes through his hallucinations.) But as individuals become more open about their diagnoses, these portrayals have evolved significantly to become more realistic.?SEE: The DescendantsIt’s been seven whole years since the great last film, Sideways. Now, one of America’s finest directors is back with another poignant portrait of the male midlife crisis. The Descendants stars George Clooney?in a career-best performance?as a neglectful father who’s forced to reconnect with his two young daughters, played by and Amara Miller, when their mother falls into a coma after a boating accident. Then, after the father learns that his comatose wife cheated on him, the family is compelled to go on an adventure across Hawaii in search of her paramour. In typical Payne fashion, the film provides a beautiful ballet of emotions, transitioning effortlessly from tragedy to comedy, all the while dripping with pathos. The film, which has received near-universal critical acclaim, will be a force to be reckoned with come Oscar time?in particular Clooney, who is a shoo-in for a Best Actor nod, and Woodley, who wows audiences with a star-making performance, positioning her as the next go-to young all-American actress, a la Anna Kendrick.? In Butter you play a freakishly talented butter carver in Iowa. Do you have any skills that are similarly impressive without being remunerative? I am not burdened with a skill set. Acting was my only way to make a living. Everything else had been eliminated through a long process of failure and firings. You grew up in a small town in Oregon. Did the characters in Butter seem real to you? My grandfather was a farmer in Oregon, and he's partly why we moved out to this town of 200 people. When you get out there, the things that people get...?Rescuers recovered the last of the 18 students’ remains early Friday, about 18 hours after the landslide smothered the Tiantou Elementary School and three farmhouses and damaged six other homes and farmland in Zhenhe village, the Yiliang County government said on its website. It said a person from one of the houses was missing, and a heavily injured person was in a hospital in stable condition.(PHOTOS: )The landslide dammed a river, causing its water to pool 15 meters (45 feet) across and 7 meters (21 feet) deep around the buried area, hampering rescue efforts and forcing the evacuation of 800 other people, the government said. Rescue teams removed the blockage and the water was subsiding, it said.While officials have yet to give a cause for the landslide, the corner of Yunnan province has been lashed by rain in recent days and is prone to earthquakes. A series of quakes last month left 81 people dead and devastated parts of Yiliang county, which are still recovering.Though Thursday was a holiday across China, the students who were killed had been attending school to make up for days missed after the quake, Yiliang officials said. Their school had been damaged in the quake and they were sent to Tiantou temporarily, the official Xinhua News Agency reported.?(KABUL, Afghanistan) ? Insurgents on Saturday killed two American troops in eastern Afghanistan, an area that has seen heavy fighting in recent months, the U.S. military said.No other information about the deaths was disclosed, pending notification of family members.But a U.S. military official said two U.S. special operations forces were killed by small arms fire in Wardak province, southwest of Kabul.(PHOTOS:?)The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to disclose information about the deaths.So far this year, 296 international troops, including at least 257 Americans, have been killed in Afghanistan.In the south, an Afghan policeman was killed and another was wounded when a remote-controlled bomb planted on a motorbike was detonated in Sangin district of Helmand province, according to provincial spokesman Ahmad Zarak.In neighboring Kandahar province, a roadside bomb killed another Afghan policeman in Kandahar city, said provincial spokesman Ahmad Jawed Faisal.?(NEWPORT, R.I.) ? The bodies of three women were pulled Friday from a car that had been in Newport Harbor for hours after it plunged off a pier and landed on its roof, police said.Part of the Hyundai Accent was sticking out of about 4 feet of water when it was discovered around 6:30 a.m. at the Newport Shipyard, a privately owned marina near several of the tourist city’s largest hotels and vacation condo complexes, Newport police Capt. Fred Gonsalves said. A fuel deliveryman saw the car and alerted authorities, Gonsalves said.He said police are still investigating when the car went into the water and why, but said they did not suspect foul play.The car had Rhode Island plates, and Gonsalves said he did not know whether it was a rental car or was owned by one of the women in the car.The car was hauled out of the water by a crane around 8:30 a.m.(VIDEO:?)Newport police Capt. Russell Hayes told The Newport Daily News that one of the victims was from New York state and the two others live overseas. He said emergency personnel were notifying the victims’ families and no other information was available.The driver apparently missed a right-hand turn, Hayes told the newspaper.“I’m not sure if they intended to take the turn here and missed it because it was dark and because of weather conditions,” Hayes told the paper.A dense fog advisory was in effect in Newport until 9 a.m.The car went into the water near an area called the Travelift pit, the place in the marina where boats are lifted in and out of the water. Among the services the shipyard provides are dockage for luxury yachts and sailboats, as well as services for their owners, such as showers and workout facilities.Coast Guard Petty Officer Ryan O’Hare earlier said that the car had been in the water for at least several hours. Newport Fire Department Deputy Chief Frank Young said firefighters wearing wetsuits and goggles discovered the women inside the car in the shallow water.The shipyard is open 24 hours, and a security guard is posted at the entrance at all times.A spokeswoman for the shipyard referred all questions to police.By?ERIKA NIEDOWSKI and MICHELLE R. SMITH?() ? An extremist Egyptian-born preacher entered a U.S. courtroom Saturday for the first time to face multiple charges, complaining that his prosthetic hooks, medication and special shoes were taken away from him. The preacher was one of five terror defendants rounded up in Britain and extradited overnight to the U.S.Abu Hamza al-Masri was surrounded by several marshals in a Manhattan courtroom as he faced charges he conspired with Seattle men to set up a terrorist training camp in Oregon and helped abduct 16 hostages, two of them American tourists, in in 1998.The 54-year-old, white-haired Al-Masri exposed both of his arms through his short-sleeved prison shirt. His court-appointed lawyer, Sabrina Shroff, asked that al-Masri, indicted under the name Mustafa Kamel Mustafa, have his prosthetics immediately returned “so he can use his arms.”In the 1990s, al-Masri turned London’s Finsbury Park Mosque into a training ground for extremist Islamists, attracting men including Sept. 11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui and “shoe bomber” Richard Reid.(MORE: )Al-Masri ? jailed since 2004 in Britain on separate charges ? was flown overnight to New York from London along with four others accused of U.S. embassy bombings in Africa and with helping terror operations in Afghanistan and Chechnya. The men, who could all face life in prison, have been battling extradition for between eight to 14 years.U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara called the extraditions “a watershed moment in our nation’s efforts to eradicate terrorism.”“As is charged, these are men who were at the nerve centers of al-Qaida’s acts of terror, and they caused blood to be shed, lives to be lost, and families to be shattered.”In New York’s federal court, Khaled al-Fawwaz and Adel Abdul Bary, entered not guilty pleas to charges that they participated in the bombings of embassies in Tanzania and Kenya in 1998. The attacks killed 224 people, including 12 Americans. They were indicted in a case that also charged Osama bin Laden.In New Haven, Conn., Syed Talha Ahsan, 33, and Babar Ahmad, 38, entered not guilty pleas to charges that they provided terrorists in Afghanistan and Chechnya with cash, recruits and equipment.Al-Masri, a one-time nightclub bouncer, entered no plea, saying only “I do” when he was asked by U.S. Magistrate Judge Frank Maas whether he swears that his financial affidavit used to determine if he qualifies for a court-appointed lawyer was correct.(MORE:?)Shroff told Maas that al-Masri needed use of his arms. “Otherwise, he will not be able to function in a civilized manner.”She also asked for a dictating machine, saying he can’t take notes, the return of his diabetes medication and special shoes that prevent him from slipping. She said he will need a special diet and a full medical evaluation in prison.Al-Masri peered through glasses as he consulted with Shroff and another court-appointed lawyer, Jerrod Thompson-Hicks, in a proceeding that lasted less than 15 minutes.Al-Masri has one eye and claims to have lost his hands fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan. His lawyers in England said he suffers from depression, chronic sleep deprivation, diabetes and other ailments.“I don’t think he slept at all” on the overnight flight and hadn’t eaten since arriving in New York at 2:40 a.m., Shroff said outside court. Still, she added, “He seemed very much like a gentleman.”Shroff and Thompson-Hicks also represented al-Fawwaz, 50, a citizen of Saudi Arabia. Thompson-Hicks said he was concerned whether his client would be properly treated for hypertension and high blood pressure. Attorney Andrew Patel, representing Bary, 52, an Egyptian citizen, said his client needed asthma medicine and treatment for other medical issues.Patel, who declined to comment afterward, told Maas that Bary reserved the right to request bail in the future.Four others who were tried in 2001 in the August 1998 bombings in Kenya and Tanzania are serving life sentences.(MORE:?)Ahsan, 33, and Ahmad, 38, were kept detained while they await trial in Connecticut, where an Internet service provider was allegedly used to host a website. Their lawyers declined to comment.Ahmad made efforts to secure GPS devices, Kevlar helmets, night vision goggles, ballistic vests and camouflage uniforms, prosecutors said.Al-Masri is not the first Egyptian-born preacher to be brought to Manhattan for trial. A blind sheik, Omar Abdel-Rahman, is serving a life sentence after he was convicted in 1995 in a plot to assassinate then-Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and in another to blow up New York landmarks, including the United Nations and two tunnels and a bridge linking New Jersey to Manhattan. Abdel-Rahman has numerous health issues, including heart trouble.The overnight trip to the United States came after a multiyear extradition fight that ended Friday, when Britain’s High Court ruled that the men had no more grounds for appeal and could be sent to the U.S. immediately.“I’m absolutely delighted that Abu Hamza is now out of this country,” British Prime Minister David Cameron said. “Like the rest of the public, I’m sick to the back teeth of people who come here, threaten our country, who stay at vast expense to the taxpayer and we can’t get rid of them.”“I’m delighted on this occasion we’ve managed to send this person off to a country where he will face justice,” he added.Al-Masri has been in a British jail since 2004 on charges of inciting racial hatred and encouraging followers to kill non-Muslims.While al-Masri has been portrayed in the British media as one of the most dangerous men in the country, the case against Ahmad in Connecticut has raised concerns among legal experts and human rights advocates.Some lawyers and lawmakers have expressed concerns because Britain agreed to extradite the London computer expert even though his alleged crimes were committed in Britain; British courts declined to prosecute him for lack of evidence. Ahmad and Ahsan are accused of running websites to support Afghanistan’s ousted Taliban regime, Chechen rebels and associated terrorist groups.By?JOHN CHRISTOFFERSEN and?LARRY NEUMEISTER?When Windows 8 launches on Oct. 26, expect to see lots of that combine a tablet and a laptop into a single, convertible device.Acer’s Iconia W700 is an example of something different: the tablet-desktop hybrid.(MORE:?)Included with the W700, which starts at $800, is a cradling station that has three USB 3.0 ports — the tablet itself has another — and can prop up at either a 70-degree or 20-degree angle. Of course, it charges the device as well. The tablet also has a Micro-HDMI slot for connecting to an external monitor, and it comes with a Bluetooth keyboard.Acer isn’t the first company to announce a Windows 8 tablet with a docking station. Dell’s will have a dock with four USB ports, an Ethernet jack and a full-sized HDMI slot. The dock for HP’s will have all those connectors plus a VGA port and audio line out.But Acer’s Iconia W700 puts me in the desktop hybrid mindset for a couple reasons: Its display is larger than those other tablets, at 11.6 inches instead of 10 inches, and the tablet uses Intel’s more powerful Core processors, rather than the Clover Trail chips found in thinner and lighter machines.?It also has a higher screen resolution of 1920-by-1080, which isn’t even supported by Clover Trail-based tablets.I think the idea could grow beyond a simple set of extra ports. I’d love to see a dock with extra storage, especially because the solid state drives inside tablets are too skimpy for vast media libraries. A dock that had its own discrete graphic card would be even better, allowing the device to play PC games or handle extensive photo or video editing. And just maybe, it’d be cool to see a dock with its own larger, integrated display.A man can dream. For now, at least, Acer’s planted the seed of an idea. The W700′s other specs include 4 GB of RAM, a 5-megapixel rear-facing camera and a 720 front-facing camera. The basic $800 model has a Core i3 processor and 64 GB of storage, but there’s a 128 GB version for $900, and a $1,000 model with 64 GB of storage and a Core i5 chip.MORE:??There is hardly a political question in the U.S., Alexis de Tocqueville said, that does not sooner or later turn into a judicial one. The ‘s new term ? which began last week ? may show just how right de Tocqueville was. The court could issue landmark rulings on affirmative action, same-sex ? and, less politically, in an array of other cases, including one involving the Constitution and drug-sniffing dogs.The Supreme Court has a solid 5-4 conservative majority these days. The conservative Justices could deliver big setbacks to affirmative action and gay rights. But as the court demonstrated in June, when it unexpectedly upheld the new federal law, these things are not easy to predict.This term’s biggest case is likely to be a challenge by a white student to affirmative action in university admissions. The court will hear in the case, Fisher v. University of Texas, on Wednesday. In a pair of 5-4 decisions ? in and ?? the court upheld affirmative action against charges of reverse discrimination. But the court’s 2003 ruling was only possible because Sandra Day O’Connor, a moderate conservative, voted with the liberal bloc. Since then, Justice O’Connor has been replaced by Samuel Alito, who is not a fan of race-based admissions policies.(PHOTOS:?)The new lineup means there is a very good chance the court will strike down the University of Texas’ use of race in admissions. As a formal matter, the ruling would likely be limited to public universities, but it could clear the way for lawsuits challenging race-based admissions in private schools and race-based hiring. Still, a major unwinding of affirmative action is hardly a sure thing: the court could look at what a major change this would be for the nation and pull back.On same-sex marriage, the court could agree to hear a challenge to the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), the 1996 federal law that defines marriage as a union between a man and a woman. Same-sex couples argue that the law denies them equal protection, since it excludes them from rights other married couples enjoy, such as filing joint tax returns or ? if one spouse is not a citizen ??.In May, a federal appeals court in Boston declared DOMA unconstitutional, and opponents of same-sex marriage have asked the court to hear an appeal. Although the court has not yet decided to take the case, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg last month she thought the court would consider same-sex marriage this term.A second way same-sex marriage may reach the court is an appeal of a ruling striking down California’s Prop 8, which denied same-sex couples the right to marry. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit that the ballot initiative unconstitutionally took away rights from a single class of disfavored citizens ? gay people.(MORE:?)Many conservatives want the Supreme Court to hold back the gains same-sex marriage has been making, but despite the court’s 5-4 conservative tilt, it is not clear it will do so. Anthony Kennedy, who is generally the swing Justice, has supported gay rights in important cases in the past. If he again votes with the pro-gay-rights side, the court could deliver landmark rulings in support of gay marriage.There are other significant cases on the docket, including a pair involving a staple of on-the-ground law enforcement: the drug-sniffing dog. The court has struggled for years to define when a search is reasonable under the Fourth Amendment ? including when a dog does the searching. This term’s pose the question of when police need a search warrant to have a dog sniff the outside of a home and the inside of a truck.Court watchers will be focused on one more thing: Chief Justice John Roberts. He was a reliable conservative vote, but last June he unexpectedly provided the fifth vote to . The far right has demonized the Chief Justice as a traitor. The question now is, Will he continue his independent ways or was his defection a one-time aberration? NPR Supreme Court reporter , for one, says, “Don’t hold your breath waiting for John Roberts to vote with liberals in a closely contested case again.” So by?next June, affirmative action may be headed on a path toward oblivion and the same-sex marriage movement may have a powerful endorsement from the Supreme Court.MORE:??Army Major Greg Escobar served as an operations officer in Afghanistan in 2010 and 2011, training Afghan police in Kunar province for the first half of his deployment, and Afghan troops in Paktika province for the second half.He is a glass-half-empty kind of guy, as he makes clear in this July recently posted by the Combat Studies Institute at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Yet he believes his final mission ? training Afghan troops to defend their border with Pakistan and keep terrorists out — remains “doable.” Excerpts:In my opinion, pre-deployment training was a bit lacking. The things we focused on were language training and cultural awareness training. Although very important, the language that we were trained on was not the language for the area that we were deploying into, so it was a waste of time…We were trained in Dari, which is in my opinion what the United States is pushing on the country as a national language, which is why we were taught it, versus what the people along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border are speaking, which is multiple languages, primarily Pashtu…Cultural training, a lot of the cultural trainers, although they had a background from Afghanistan, it had been some years since they had been there. The female cultural awareness trainer left Afghanistan when she was three or four years old and spent the remainder of time in California. The stories from a child in Afghanistan are probably very different from the experience as an adult…My assumption is that she does not remember what happened while she was in Afghanistan, and was probably telling second or third-hand experiences from relatives…Cultural training, and I don’t know that you can do any more than get a good interpreter or translator, and that’s all the cultural training you need. It’s more interpersonal skills and communication skills that make that effective. Regardless of what you do or what you say, it’s going to go through an intermediary, and that intermediary is the one that defines if you’re culturally acceptable or not acceptable. We waste a lot of time on cultural training, when the things that actually come out of our mouths are not coming out of our mouths, they’re coming out of the translators and interpreters…One of the biggest barriers we had whenever we started implemented training was that we had to train hands-on. You couldn’t necessarily give them manuals or books because of the low literacy rates. To distribute, give homework, preparation for class, and then start to teach them hands-on, practical exercises was extremely difficult because they couldn’t do any prep work prior to classes…The first thing that needed to be addressed that we felt we could really control immediately was the equipping of the force. It was pulling, through U.S. channels, vehicles, weapons, body armor, helmets, those types of things. Those are the things we felt we could affect. The slower thing that was just a slow, painstaking process is teaching people how to read and getting literacy instructors down there. That’s just a slow, arduous process and by the time you get them to a reading level, it’s time for you to leave and pass on to the next guy, who maybe doesn’t think it’s as important…Yes, [outfitting Afghan security forces] had to be done through the Afghan supply system, but in order for it to work successfully, we had to parallel the systems. Any time that they’d send in forms or requests, we sent it through U.S. channels and ask, “Hey, did you send your forms?” and it would be a yes or a no. Many times the process for sending forms was, the form has been completed, “Now we’re going to hand it to a taxicab driver who’s going to drive it down to the headquarters in Kabul.”The amount of times that forms would get to where they needed to go and to the right person was slim to none. It turned into, “Alright, I have a copy of the form you sent, I’m now scanning it and emailing it to my counterpart who is mentoring your boss,” so that weeks later if that form doesn’t show up, that form is being handed over to keep the process jumpstarted. It was really the only way I found effective, unfortunately…[I'm almost afraid to ask this question, but how much progress were you able to make in even a small area before you got moved to your next assignment?]None. You spend more time figuring out what you don’t know…You’re only there a year, then you come back and you hope that the next time you go there it’s a different mission. Or else you beat your head against the wall because it’s the same problem over and over. I’m trying to think of the things we were successful at…Initially, we started giving classes and they were not very receptive. Some of it had to do with age disparities. There were 40 and 50-year-old men unwilling to accept instruction from late-20s and early-30s Soldiers that didn’t have police experience. That was a barrier. Then we had to translate it to, “Clearly classes aren’t working, we’re not going to have classes anymore. We’re going to now do some seminars.” They were then a little more receptive when we did seminars and brought in the police professionals. The things they were receptive to were map-reading classes and paramilitary type training…[Was there an understanding of why this training was so important, and what it was we were trying to accomplish in the bigger picture in Afghanistan?]From the Afghan perspective? I don’t think so…The priorities on the Afghan-Pakistan border at the time didn’t necessarily have anything to do with improving Afghan security forces. They had to do with securing the border and interdicting terrorists coming across the border…Overall assessment of the [Afghan army] unit, there was a huge amount of racism in the unit. There were a lot of inter-tribal issues. There were a lot of issues…I tried to focus on logistics systems, and then I tried to work on getting the right leadership in the right positions. The battalion commander that I fell in on had just been charged with raping one of his soldiers. That was the first step, identifying who the replacement was going to be, and why that leader was still in place at that time…He was replaced a week after I departed, so I was able to accomplish that. But then the guy who replaced him was killed by his own men in January of this year…A lot of it had to do with probably a little too much change a little too soon. In American eyes, it was probably not quick enough [Laughs] but in Afghanistan, as quickly as they move, it was way too fast, clearly. The guy we put in charge spoke pretty good English, had been to a couple of American schools.[This is the one that was just killed recently?]Yes…It’s hard to relate to all of the hardships that the people in the area are dealing with on a daily basis. It’s extremely hard for us to really understand the things that they’re dealing with. I don’t know how to fix it. I mean, during our RIP [relief-in-place] the police unit that we were working with ended up killing a captain that we had brought down from Special Operations.[A U.S. captain?]Yes, U.S.[So the police unit that you had been advising, when you RIP'd out, they killed a U.S. officer?]Yes, during the RIP to make a statement.[Oh, it wasn't an accidental shooting!]Oh no, it wasn’t accidental.[They did this on purpose to speak out against the Americans. I'm not sure there's really any way to overcome that.]I would agree.[This is a tough one, a tough issue. It doesn't sound as if you have a lot of optimism about our operations in Afghanistan right now.]Not on the border, absolutely not…Well, at some point, I could see us being successful there, but until the Afghan government can positively affect the people there, we’re wasting our time. We’re buying time for the Afghan government, and until that happens — which I think will probably be at least another 10 to 15 years before the Afghan government can even build roads and significantly help the people in the area — nothing we do is going to help…The people in the area don’t believe they’re in Afghanistan…They speak multiple different languages…There’s no national pride…In that area, it was Waziri. The country that they would be, if any, is Waziristan, which is not recognized by either Pakistan or Afghanistan, or anybody in the world.[These are huge geopolitical issues that they're asking an Army major to deal with. What are you going to be able to do?]I can’t affect that. The best I can do is make sure that Afghan units have enough ammunition, have enough fuel, have enough vehicles to patrol, if the leadership was willing to get on the side of the mission. For the most part the thing that they’re interested in is preserving their lives so that they can provide for their families, wherever they are inside the country…We have been extremely successful along the border killing terrorists, and I think we can continue being successful doing that. I think it would take a significant amount of time to train a capable force to continue doing that mission in that area, at least on the Afghan side. I think it’s doable.? When trying to understand a strange action by the U.S. government, I have found it's usually best explained by incompetence rather than conspiracy. Republicans have claimed that the Obama Administration deliberately deceived the American public about the terrorist attack in Benghazi by describing it as a spontaneous mob uprising rather than a planned operation. But if the Administration knew from the start that it was a terrorist attack, did it really think that it could conceal this from the world? That the Libyan government would make no investigation? That there would be no eyewitnesses in a public place where hundreds had gathered? A far more plausible explanation is that in the chaotic aftermath of the attack, the Administration--too hastily and without proper analysis--put out the reports it was receiving. That's clumsy, but it's not treason. The larger issue that the attack raises, however, which is fair game for a campaign conversation, is what the events in Benghazi tell us about terrorist organizations, in particular al-Qaeda. After years of being in retreat, is al-Qaeda back? After 9/11, we all worried about the spread of al-Qaeda and its ideology. There were attacks in Bali, Madrid, London, Riyadh and Istanbul. But in fact, governments around the world had begun taking the group seriously, tracking its money, chasing its people and attacking its bases. Soon al-Qaeda was unable to carry out its signature operations--against high-value U.S. targets like ships and embassies and other government installations. So instead of striking where it wanted, al-Qaeda--or groups operating in its name--attacked where possible. This meant hitting nightclubs, cafés, train stations and hotels. And that meant killing locals, not Americans. All of a sudden, Muslims, who had not been too exercised about al-Qaeda, began distancing themselves from it, especially in places like Saudi Arabia that had been critical sources of funding for the group. Meanwhile, the pressure intensified. The Obama Administration dramatically ramped up counterterrorism in Afghanistan--and more important, Pakistan--and destroyed the top leadership of the organization, including, of course, Osama bin Laden. Facing this onslaught, al-Qaeda has been shattered and has become less a coherent, centrally controlled group and more a brand, lending its name--and perhaps a little know-how--to militants in other countries. There is, however, a danger of overreacting to these new "al-Qaeda" offshoots. Remember bin Laden's words: "All that we have to do is to send two mujahedin to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al-qaeda in order to make the generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic and political losses." The strongest of the new groups was al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), based in Yemen. Newer branches have sprung up in Somalia, Mali and now perhaps Libya. The group that appears to have planned the Benghazi attack seems to have a very tenuous connection to al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) but not al-Qaeda central. In all these cases, however, the militants have followed a similar path: find a weak state and operate within that territory, claiming a link to al-Qaeda. The lesson of Libya is that as states fail, terrorists succeed.? Re "Flash Point" [Sept. 24]: The blaming of the U.S. for the production of the Innocence of Muslims is symptomatic of an animosity toward a country that, while believing itself to be the bastion of democracy, has stirred up hatred among less developed countries. This hatred has many roots, chief of which are jealousy and intolerance. Were this amateur film produced in any other nation, the reaction would definitely not have been as strong, but it would still have confirmed the danger that religion poses to our planet. Jon Ralph, CAPE...?A U.S. Air Force C-17 Globemaster III at Bagram Airfield Sept. 25.? Don't even think that you have a more difficult job than Tom Horton. Although some airline bosses can still seem besotted with this once glamorous business, at ground level it's an industry that has lost more than $60 billion in the past decade, erasing every penny earned in its 80-year existence. An industry whose combined market value, below $30 billion, is less than that of Starbucks, one of its vendors. One with irrational competition, uncontrollable fuel costs, a feckless regulator, and jets and airports filled with people who don't like you--and not just the passengers but your employees too. Beyond that,...? One night in 1961, Andy Williams heard a ballad that Johnny Mercer and Henry Mancini had written to be performed by Audrey Hepburn in the film Breakfast at Tiffany's. The singer loved the song, but his record label wouldn't release it as a single, fretting that homespun phrases like "my huckleberry friend" would baffle the kids. So Williams moved to Columbia Records and put the number on a 1962 album, Moon River and Other Great Movie Themes. The song won an Oscar, and the American midcentury's most amiable pop baritone, who died of bladder cancer Sept. 25 at 84 at his...? Arthur Ochs "Punch" Sulzberger is most celebrated--and rightly so--for his decision in 1971 to publish the Pentagon Papers, an archive detailing how the government had lied to the American people about the Vietnam War from the start. Punch was not a gifted journalist or a great editor. He was, however, something out of a Frank Capra movie--a man with a deep sense of decency and profound common sense who also had guts. It took great courage to publish the classified documents in defiance of the government, which was a seminal moment for American journalism. Sulzberger, who died Sept. 29 at 86,...? Raised in rural Kentucky and trained as a biologist, Barbara Kingsolver was perhaps destined to write Flight Behavior, her new novel about a young woman in backwoods Tennessee whose life is upended by ecological disaster. Why did you choose to make climate change such an important part of Flight Behavior? I live in southern Appalachia, and I'm surrounded by farms and coal mines. Our agriculture here has gone through one disaster year after another, so climate change is not some kind of abstract future threat. The people most affected by climate change already are people among whom I live: rural, conservative...? "Dr. Commoner, are you a serious candidate, or are you just running on the issues?" So went a reporter's question to the biologist, environmentalist and chronic gadfly during his quixotic presidential campaign in 1980. Commoner, who died on Sept. 30 at 95, won just 234,000 votes, but he was never afraid of long odds and never shied away from the issues. His work on the dangers of atmospheric radiation helped spur the 1963 Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, and he was a key figure in the first Earth Day, in 1970. As a teacher and activist, he helped create the modern environmental...?Ai Weiwei helped inspire the geometrical design of the celebrated "Bird's Nest" that helped symbolize the 2008 Beijing Olympics. In background and bottom: images of the Olympic Stadium, 2005-08; from left to right, Divina Proportione, 2006; F-Size, 2011.? Making serious movies for serious adults isn't a great business strategy. That's because there aren't that many serious adults left. Ben Affleck is one of the few directors who treat their audience like adults, figuring they're smart enough to follow along. Argo (in theaters Oct. 12) is very adult. The real-life story it tells is complicated: after the Iran hostage crisis erupted in 1979, the CIA financed a cheesy sci-fi movie as a cover to disguise six escaped U.S. diplomats as Canadian filmmakers and ferret them home. For this plot-heavy film, Affleck somehow uses far less exposition than I just did....? If you ever wonder what kind of economic development might be accomplished in this country with more bipartisan cooperation, consider Columbus, Ohio. This low-key, Middle American metropolis of about 800,000 is becoming something of a celebrity city, talked up in a recent New York Times Magazine piece on the success of Ohio and visited more than a dozen times by presidential and vice-presidential candidates. No wonder. After taking a dive during the recession, Columbus has roared back, with the metro area creating more new jobs than any other city in Ohio over the past two years. In many ways, it's a...?Spoiler alert: Jimmy yourself into a dank basement and then watch “Blue Bell Boy”?or don’t read further.We start with Sleater, who’s getting both a service from a prostitute and a phone call from Nucky. It’s unclear which one means more to Sleater, who takes the latter before allowing the conclusion of the former. Loyalty is the theme of this episode. Loyalty is more important to Nucky than money, but it’s difficult for anyone in this show to love, be loved, or especially to be loyal.No one thinks of Al Capone as a particularly loving figure, which is the smart thing about how his character is being written this season and how Stephen Graham is playing him. ,?4, is deaf and seems weak to the schoolboys who beat him. Al Capone?being Al Capone?wants his son to be able to fight. The boy’s weakness is a sign of his own.?In a truly gifted piece of writing and directing, Graham kneels before the boy, gets him to raise his little fists, and then alternates among bullying the kid, teaching him how he might punch, and helplessly hugging him. Boardwalk Empire portrays a hardened world, but the show orchestrated this scene with moving delicacy.Boardwalk is also a show free from advertising obligations, which means its vocabulary can be like part of an SAT. So in place of “pregnant,” the nun who is helping Margaret start her women’s clinic suggests “gravid.” It’s such a rare word for pregnant that they settle on “with child.” The nun also says that menstruation is “a regrettable neologism.” My dictionary got some use as I watched the episode.Onto the main set piece of the episode: His liquor transports threatened, Nucky shows up in Tabor Heights, the center of Rosetti’s small but growing empire. Nucky arrives to meet someone who calls himself Roland Smith and claims to be 15 years old. Smith is apparently helping guard the house that serves as Nucky’s way station for whiskey shipments from Atlantic City to New York.All of this sets up a fantastic conundrum: Nucky distrusts Sleater, who cuckolded him, and Sleater knows that the young man calling himself Smith is lying. Having shot another in the face, Nucky may be seeking another stand-in son. Nucky isn’t a gangster because he murders people but because he manipulates them. He gives the kid a cigarette, which is simultaneously an act of kindness and an act of harm. In an earlier episode, it might have stopped short of that. This time, Nucky decides to kill him before all the drama.A few thoughts before I shoot up the place:How far will the writers go to make Capone a sympathetic figure? He defends his smelly employee and sings for his son, but he ends up a , right??And yet in the Boardwalk version, even as Capone beats a man to death and throws money out for the funeral, I think I’m supposed to root for him.Eli is slowly asserting himself again. I don’t think there’s a way for Doyle to win their battle. I hope not. Please, again–let Doyle be shot. Let us see blood run from that giggling mouth.Every time the writers need a villain too distant from Nucky to hurt him, they seem to choose . I suppose we will see him again, but when? Will he be saved for the finale?? I don't think it's especially ungallant of me to have doubted J.K. Rowling. Like a hundred million or so other people, I have a genuine love for Harry Potter, but I wanted to be realistic: a lot of young-adult authors have tried their hands at literary fiction, and unless my literary sabermetrics are off, not a lot of them have succeeded. Not even Roald Dahl could switch-hit. But when I read Rowling's The Casual Vacancy, I was surprised not only by how good it was but also by the way in which it was good. I suppose I'd expected a kind...? Imagine chick lit gone country, with cosmopolitans replaced by shots of rum, Louboutin shoes by muddied boots, and corporate ladders by regular ones that actually reach past the ceiling. It turns out that city girls are starting to love the idea, at least in Australia, where what's known as farm lit or chook lit, chook being Australian slang for a chicken is publishing's latest phenomenon, with rural romances outselling other fiction.Farm lit is not entirely virgin territory. Colleen McCullough's 1977 antipodean saga, The Thorn Birds, sold 30 million books and birthed a miniseries....? 'The door may be closing, for good.' 1. BAN KI-MOON, U.N. Secretary-General, warning that the continued growth of Jewish settlements in occupied Palestinian territory "seriously undermines efforts toward peace" 'I can't get fined if I'm saying that the refs did a great job...so, they did a great job.' 2. GREG JENNINGS, wide receiver for the Green Bay Packers, after a muddled referee call, now known as the touchception, cost his team a game against the Seattle Seahawks 'You want to try it? Get in the ring.' 3. ANN ROMNEY, addressing her husband Mitt's detractors in a much ballyhooed segment on Radio...?(WAYNE, N.J.) ??A tour bus from Canada carrying about 60 people bound for New York City overturned on a highway exit ramp in northern New Jersey early Saturday, slid down an embankment and landed on its side, injuring 23 people on board, authorities said.The driver, who suffered a gash in his arm, told state police that he was cut off by another vehicle, though it was not immediately clear whether that caused the crash around 7:30 a.m. on eastbound Interstate 80 in Wayne.Some windows burst during the crash and their frames pinned three people, but they were quickly freed and taken to hospitals with the other injured. The bus had been chartered by a church group.Eight of the injured passengers were admitted in critical condition, hospital spokeswoman Liz Asani said. Further details on their injuries were not disclosed. The rest of the injured, including two young children, were being treated for minor injuries at two other hospitals.State police have said none of the injuries are considered life-threatening.(MORE:?s)“It was terrifying,” Norma Cumberbatch, 66, of Toronto, told The Star-Ledger of Newark. Cumberbatch, who was traveling with her 68-year-old sister, Marjorie, said she struggled to free her legs from fallen luggage and other debris before trying to find her sister.“I just took my leg out and then said, ‘Where’s my sister? I want my sister.’”Marjorie Cumberbatch said she heard “thump, thump, thump. Then I looked up and I saw people over me screaming and crying.”Passengers who were unhurt were put on another bus and continued their journey, authorities said.The coach bus was from Toronto-based AVM Max 2000 Charter Services Inc., state police said. The phone for AVM Max rang unanswered Saturday afternoon, and the company did not respond to an email Saturday.The crash was the latest of several coach bus accidents over the past few years on American highways. Last year, a bus carrying gamblers from a trip to a Connecticut casino struck a guardrail as it entered New York City, then toppled over and hit a signpost that sliced off the top of the bus. Thirteen people were killed. A manslaughter trial for the driver began last month.Saturday’s accident backed up traffic in the area for hours while law enforcement officials and emergency services vehicles attended to the scene. Several highways connect there, and the area is known locally as the “spaghetti bowl,” according to The Record.VIDEO:??() ? Californians woke up to a shock Friday as overnight prices jumped by as much as 20 cents a gallon in some areas, ending a week of soaring costs that saw some stations close and others charge record prices.The average price of regular gas across the state was nearly $4.49 a gallon, the highest in the nation, according to AAA’s Daily Fuel Gauge report.In Southern California, the price jumped 20 cents a gallon overnight to $4.53 in Ventura. And in the Los Angeles-Long Beach area prices went up 19 cents to nearly $4.54. And it wasn’t any better to the north, as a gallon of regular gas in San Francisco averaged nearly $4.60.In many areas, prices have jumped 40 cents in a week as refinery problems have created shortages and helped send wholesale prices soaring. Some stations ran out of gas and shut down Thursday rather than pay those costs.Even Costco, the giant discount store chain that sells large volumes of gas, decided to close some stations, the Los Angeles Times (lat.ms/OGwEV2) reported.“We do not know when we will be resupplied,” read a sign at one Southern California Costco, according to the Times.Other gas stations charged more than $5 a gallon. The Low-P station in Calabasas charged $5.69 Thursday. The pumps bore hand-written signs reading: “We are sorry, it is not our fault,” the Times said.While have spiked around the nation, refinery outages and pipeline problems have added to woes in California.Among the recent disruptions, an Aug. 6 fire at a Chevron Corp. refinery in Richmond left one of the region’s largest refineries producing at a reduced capacity. A power failure in Southern California has affected an Exxon Mobil Corp. refinery, and a Chevron pipeline that moves crude to Northern California also was shut down.The national average for gas is about $3.79 a gallon, the highest ever for this time of year. However, gas prices in many states have started decreasing, which is typical for October.But in California, gasoline inventories are the lowest in more than 10 years ? a situation made worse by the state’s strict pollution limits that require a special blend of cleaner-burning gasoline during hot summer months.Patrick DeHaan, senior petroleum analyst at GasBuddy.com, said he is seeing the highest prices in the state around Los Angeles, where on Thursday at least five stations have crossed the $5 a gallon mark, including $5.29 in Burbank and $5.11 in Norwalk.Prices will keep rising, he says, because in the past week wholesale gasoline prices have jumped $1 a gallon, but average retail prices have increased only 30 cents.“This is one of the easiest forecasts: Retail prices are going to skyrocket,” DeHaan said.The jump in wholesale prices can be particularly tough on independent gas stations that often pay more for their gas because they are not part of a larger chain.Tom Kloza, chief oil analyst at Oil Price Information Service, said he’s heard of a few California station owners shutting their pumps rather than charging the $4.90 a gallon or more necessary to break even.“Wholesale price increases lead to retail price increases,” Kloza said. “But there is some restraint among companies who do not want to exercise their current pricing power and irritate their customers.”Some analysts think prices nationally will begin to decline soon but say California could see a longer spike given its unique fuel requirements.“Nationally, I believe most prices will wobble to and fro for the next week or so, with an eventual slow but steady attrition in retail gas prices, particularly in the Midwest and Southeast,” Kloza said. “California is a wild card.”By Jason Dearen AP Energy Writers Jonathan Fahey in New York and Sandy Shore in Denver contributed to this report.? I have a promise to break. Like any self-respecting writer visiting Bhutan, I solemnly swore on a stack of travelogues to avoid clichéd references to Shangri-la, the mountain paradise of James Hilton's novel Lost Horizon. So sue me: Bhutan, a nation of 700,000 souls in the lap of the Himalayas, is the closest thing to Shangri-la I've ever seen.In a week of traveling through Bhutan, my wife and I have trekked up 3,100 m to an ancient Buddhist temple complex perched on the side of a mountain; we've shot arrows from...?Move over, pumpkin. There’s a new taste in town that’s turning up in everything from booze to bagels: candy corn. Yes, that waxy, tri-colored childhood favorite is this season’s “it flavor.”?Nabisco kicked off the corn-y trend when it released limited-edition candy-corn Oreos last month. The cookies, sold exclusively at Target, have vanilla wafers and yellow-and-orange cream filling.?There were reports of sellouts shortly after the cookies made their debut, but if you’re curious and missed the launch or don’t live near a Target, there’s a brisk secondary market for the cookies on Amazon.com.?(KANDAHAR, Afghanistan) — Police say a car bomb has killed at least two people, both Afghan intelligence officers, in a southern city.Helmand province police spokesman Fareed Ahmed says the explosives had been hidden in a vehicle parked outside of an office of the National Directorate of Security in the provincial capital of Lashkar Gah. Ahmed says the bomb went off Monday afternoon, wounding another three intelligence officers and four civilians.He says that he can confirm at least two deaths and that he is still waiting on information about whether there are others.By MIRWAIS KHAN?(DAMASCUS, Syria) ? A car bomb exploded Sunday near the police headquarters in central Damascus, killing at least one person and damaging nearby buildings, Syria’s state-run news agency said.The blast is the latest in a series of bombings and suicide attacks targeting security personnel and government institutions as Syria plunges deeper into chaos. Damascus, in particular, has become a frequent target for car bombs and suicide blasts, but there have been several massive bombings in the northern city of Aleppo and others cities across the country as well.Residents reported hearing a huge explosion that rattled the Syrian capital just after sundown Sunday. Another explosion was heard shortly after the first, but the nature of that blast was not immediately clear.A Syrian government official told The Associated Press the first blast was caused by a car bomb in the Fahameh district near police headquarters. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity in line with government policy, said the explosion damaged nearby cars and buildings. He did not say whether the police headquarters was among them.(PHOTOS:?)The official SANA news agency said one person was killed, and Syrian state TV described the blast as a “terrorist” attack. Syrian authorities deny there is an uprising in the country and blame the conflict on “terrorists” and “armed gangs” acting out a foreign conspiracy to destabilize Syria.The Syrian opposition denies any links to terrorists, but a Sunni extremist group called Jabhat al-Nusra has claimed responsibility for bombings in the past.Explosions in the capital have become increasingly common as Syria’s civil war escalates. On Aug. 18, rebels carried out a sophisticated bombing of a regime security building that killed four members of Assad’s inner circle.Last week, four bombs tore through a government-held district in Syria’s commercial and cultural capital of Aleppo, killing more than 30 people and reducing buildings to rubble.The uprising against Assad began in March 2011 and gradually became a bloody civil war. The conflict has killed more than 30,000 people, activists say, and has devastated entire neighborhoods in Syria’s main cities.By ALBERT AJI?(ATLANTA) ? Health officials say the death toll in a rare fungal meningitis outbreak across several states has risen to seven.In updated figures posted to its website Saturday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says the outbreak has spread to more than 60 people across nine states. The latest cases have been confirmed in Minnesota and Ohio.The outbreak has been linked a steroid produced by a specialty pharmacy in Massachusetts. The steroid has been recalled, and health officials have been scrambling to notify anyone who may have been injected with it.The New England Compounding Center has said it is cooperating with health investigators to determine the source of the infections.?(ATLANTA) ? Health officials say they have now confirmed more than 90 cases of a rare fungal meningitis that has been linked to a steroid commonly used to ease back pain.The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention posted updated figures to its website Sunday. The death toll stood at 7, the same number as a day earlier. The outbreak is spread across nine states, the same states reported Saturday: Florida, Indiana, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, North Carolina, Ohio, Tennessee and Virginia.The CDC figures show there are 91 cases in the U.S. altogether.The steroid linked to the outbreak has been recalled, and health officials have been scrambling to notify anyone who may have received an injection of it. The Massachusetts pharmacy that made it has said it is cooperating with investigators.MORE:?MORE:??(CARACAS, Venezuela) ? President Hugo Chavez put to rest any doubts about his masterful political touch in winning a third consecutive six-year term after a bitterly fought race against a youthful rival who has galvanized Venezuela’s opposition.The state governor who lost Sunday’s presidential vote, Henrique Capriles, had accused the flamboyant incumbent of unfairly using Venezuela’s oil wealth to finance his campaign as well as flaunting his near-total control of state institutions.Still, he accepted defeat as Chavez swept to a 10-point victory margin, though it was his smallest yet in a presidential race. This time, the former army paratroop commander won 55 percent of the vote against 45 percent for Capriles with more than 90 percent of the vote counted.Chavez will now have a freer hand to push for an even bigger state role in the economy, as he pledged during the campaign, and to continue populist programs. He’s also likely to further limit dissent and deepen friendships with U.S. rivals.Chavez spent heavily in the months before the vote, building public housing and bankrolling expanded social programs.“I think he just cranked up the patronage machine and unleashed a spending orgy,” said Michael Shifter, president of the Washington-based Inter-American Dialogue think tank.But Shifter also noted the affinity and gratefulness Venezuela’s poor feel for Chavez. “Despite his illness, I still think he retains a strong emotional connection with a lot of Venezuelans that I think were not prepared to vote against him.”“They still think that he’s trying hard even if he’s not delivering what he promised, that he still has their best interests at heart,” Shifter said.Chavez spoke little during the campaign about his fight with cancer, which since June 2011 has included surgery to remove tumors from his pelvic region as well as chemotherapy and radiation treatment. He has said his most recent tests showed no sign of illness.Tensions were high Sunday night as announcement of the results were delayed.?(MORE:?) Finally, fireworks exploded over downtown Caracas amid a cacophony of horn-honking by elated Chavez supporters waving flags and jumping for joy outside the presidential palace.“I can’t describe the relief and happiness I feel right now,” said Edgar Gonzalez, a 38-year-old construction worker.He ran through crowds of Chavez supporters packing the streets around the presidential palace wearing a Venezuelan flag as a cape and yelling: “Oh, no! Chavez won’t go!”“The revolution will continue, thanks to God and the people of this great country,” said Gonzalez.Capriles posed the strongest challenge yet to Chavez, who won by a 27-point margin in 2006 and by 16 points when he was first elected in 1998.“I will continue working to build one country,” said the wiry, 40-year-old grandson of Holocaust survivors who unified and energized the opposition while barnstorming across the country.He said in his concession speech that he rejects the idea of two Venezuelas divided by ideology and class.Capriles had vowed to address violent crime that has spun out of control, streamline a patronage-bloated bureaucracy and end rampant corruption, but his promises proved inadequate against Chavez’s charisma, well-oiled political machine and legacy of putting Venezuela’s poor first with generous social welfare programs.Yet with a turnout of 81 percent, Chavez only got 551,902 more votes this time around than he did six years ago, while the opposition boosted its tally by 2.09 million. Chavez appeared to acknowledge the opposition’s growing clout.“I extend from here my recognition of all who voted against us, recognition of their democratic weight,” he told thousands of cheering supporters from the balcony of the Miraflores presidential palace.A Capriles victory would have brought a radical foreign policy shift including a halt to preferential oil deals with allies such as Cuba, along with a loosening of state economic controls and an increase in private investment.Washington, which has often feuded with Chavez, declined to congratulate the president directly, but acknowledged the result.“We congratulate the Venezuelan people for the high turnout and generally peaceful manner in which this election was carried out,” said State Department spokesman William Ostick.“We believe that the views of the more than 6 million people who voted for the opposition should be taken into account going forward,” he added.President Raul Castro of Cuba, which could have been badly hurt by a Chavez loss, was among Latin American leaders sending warm congratulations to the former paratrooper on his victory after nearly 14 years in office.Chavez paid close attention to his military-like get-out-the-vote organization at the grass roots, stressing its importance at campaign rallies. The opposition said he unfairly plowed millions in state funds into the effort.One pro-Chavez voter, private bodyguard Carlos Julio Silva, said that whatever his faults, Chavez deserved to win for spreading the nation’s oil wealth to the poor with free medical care, public housing and other government programs. The country has the world’s largest proven oil reserves.“There is corruption, there’s plenty of bureaucracy, but the people have never had a leader who cared about this country,” Silva said after voting for Chavez in the Caracas slum of Petare.Capriles told supporters not to feel defeated.(MORE:?)“We have planted many seeds across Venezuela and I know that these seeds are going to produce many trees,” he told them at his campaign headquarters.At many polling places, voters began lining up hours before polls opened at dawn, some snaking for blocks in the baking Caribbean sun. Some shaded themselves with umbrellas. Vendors grilled meat and some people drank beer.Chavez’s critics accused the president of inflaming divisions by labeling his opponents “fascists,” “Yankees” and “neo-Nazis,” and it’s likely hard for many of his opponents to stomach another six years of the loquacious and conflictive leader.Some said before the vote that they’d consider leaving the country if Chavez won.Gino Caso, an auto mechanic, said Chavez is power-hungry and out of touch with problems such as crime. He said his son had been robbed, as had neighboring shops.“I don’t know what planet he lives on,” Caso said, gesturing with hands blackened with grease. “He wants to be like Fidel Castro _ end up with everything, take control of the country.”___by FRANK BAJAK and IAN JAMESAssociated Press writers Fabiola Sanchez, Christopher Toothaker, Jorge Rueda and Vivian Sequera contributed to this report.?“Think out loud.” That’s the slogan of the Chicago Ideas Week, a unique event co-hosted by Richard Stengel and TIME magazine, that brings together more than 100 of the greatest minds in politics (Rahm Emanuel, Colin Powell); fashion (Diane von Furstenburg, Elle MacPherson); technology (Steve Case); the military (Gen. Colin Powell, Gen. Stanley McChrystal) and much more for a series of conversations exploring the power of innovation and transformation. Beginning Monday October 8th, TIME.com will bring you the best of their insights and ideas.(MORE:?)Among the week’s highlights:“Democracy?State of Our Union”? (10/8)Richard Stengel, TIME’s managing editor and an array of TIME’s best political minds including Michael Duffy, Mark Halperin and Nancy Gibbs, will lead an in-depth discussion with NBC’s David Gregory, New York magazine’s John Heilemann, Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel, and Houston’s mayor Annise Parker about what makes democracy work at the local level. And with the presidential election heating up, they’ll also look at our political history and how the 2012 race could influence our future.“Disruptive Innovation: Reinventing Our World” (10/9)Newark Public Schools superintendent Cami Anderson, AOL co-founder Steve Case, Social Teeth founder Elaine Chang, Rockefeller Foundation president Judith Rodin are just some of the country’s most dynamic innovators who will join TIME’s Richard Stengel for an exploration of how individuals can disrupt the status quo with an idea or invention that refuses to abide by the rules. These ?successful “disruptors” will discuss the ways they were able to spur change by taking risks, building new markets and challenging standards.“Future of News: What’s the Story?” (10/10)Buzzfeed’s Jonah Peretti, Jumo’s Chris Hughes, Pulse’s Akshay Kothari and Syria Deeply’s?Lara Setrakian will join Richard Stengel in a discussion of how the news industry will change as we become an increasingly social media driven, paperless, and global society. These experts from old media, new media and new, new media will look at citizen journalism, digital media and the future of news as we know it.Check back daily during Ideas Week, October 8-14,?for updates and exclusive content.MORE: ?“Think out loud.” That’s the slogan of the , an event beginning October 8, co-hosted by Richard Stengel and TIME magazine that brings together more than 100 of the greatest minds in politics (Rahm Emanuel); fashion (Diane von Furstenburg); technology (Steve Case) and more to discuss the power of innovation. TIME will bring you the best of their insights and ideas. Photo: Getty Images (5)?Tune in to watch these talks live from Chicago Ideas Week:Military: From the Front Lines to the Home Front Monday, October 8 4:30 PM ??6:30 PM CDT SPEAKERS:? Major Gen. Marcia Anderson,? Tom Brokaw, Taryn Davis,? Gen. Stanley McChrystal,? Gen. Colin Powell, Paul Rieckhoff, Melissa StockwellMEGATALK: Democracy: State of Our Union Monday, October 8 7:00 PM ??8:30 PM?CDT Presented by TIME SPEAKERS:? Michael Duffy, Nancy Gibbs, Rahm Emanuel,? David Gregory, Mark Halperin,? John Heilemann, Annise Parker, Richard Stengel(MORE:?)MEGATALK: Disruptive Innovation: Reinventing Our World Tuesday, October 9 7:00 PM ??8:30 PM?CDT Presented by TIME ? SPEAKERS: Cami Anderson, Steve Case, Elaine Chang, Judith Rodin, Richard StengelFuture of News: What’s the Story? Wednesday, October 10 12:00PM ??1:30PM?CDT Presented by TIME SPEAKERS: Jonah Peretti, Chris Hughes, Akshay Kothari, Lara Setrakian, Richard StengelMORE:??It was the second launch of a Dragon capsule to the orbiting lab by the California-based SpaceX company. The first was last spring.This time was no test flight, however, and the spacecraft carried 1,000 pounds of key science experiments and other precious gear. There was also a personal touch: chocolate-vanilla swirl ice cream tucked in a freezer for the three station residents.The company’s unmanned Falcon rocket roared into the night sky right on time, putting SpaceX on track to reach the space station Wednesday. The complex was soaring southwest of Tasmania when the Falcon took flight.Officials declared the launch a success.(PHOTOS: )In more good news, a piece of space junk was no longer threatening the station, and NASA could focus entirely on the delivery mission.NASA is counting on private business to restock the space station, now that the shuttles have retired to museums. The space agency has a $1.6 billion contract with SpaceX for 12 resupply missions.Especially exciting for NASA is the fact that the Dragon will return twice as much cargo as it took up, including a stockpile of astronauts’ blood and urine samples. The samples ? nearly 500 of them ? have been stashed in freezers since Atlantis made the last shuttle flight in July 2011.The Dragon will spend close to three weeks at the space station before being released and parachuting into the Pacific at the end of October. By then, the space station should be back up to a full crew of six.None of the Russian, European or Japanese cargo ships can bring anything back; they’re destroyed during re-entry. The Russian Soyuz crew capsules have limited room for anything besides people. Technologies Corp., or SpaceX ? owned by PayPal co-founder Elon Musk ? is working to convert its unmanned Dragon capsules into vessels that could carry astronauts to the space station in three years. Other U.S. companies also are vying to carry crews. Americans must ride Russian rockets to orbit in the meantime, for a steep price.Musk, who monitored the launch from SpaceX Mission Control in Hawthorne, Calif., called the capsules Dragon after the magical Puff to get back at critics who, a decade ago, considered his effort a fantasy. The name Falcon comes from the Millennium Falcon starship of “Star Wars” fame.An estimated 2,400 guests jammed the launching center to see the Falcon, with its Dragon, come to life for SpaceX’s first official, operational supply mission.It was no apparition.“Just over a year since shuttle retirement, to be able to do that is, I think, what people are very excited about,” said NASA’s deputy administrator, Lori Garver.Across the country at SpaceX headquarters, about 1,000 employees watched via TV and webcast.SpaceX is shooting for its next supply run in January.Another company looking to haul space station cargo, Virginia’s Orbital Sciences Corp., hopes to launch a solo test flight in December and a demo mission to the station early next year.? I hate meetings like this!" illinois Congressman Joe Walsh shouted in frustration. A small-business man named Ted Kozlowski, a defense contractor, was explaining how he'd had to lay off nearly half his workforce because funding for one of his products, a machine-gun cradle, had been mysteriously suspended in February. "It's ridiculous what Washington is doing to you," Walsh went on to say. "They change the rules of the road every six months." A small problem here, though: Walsh, one of the more flagrant members of the Tea Party caucus, lives at ground zero of the congressional mess. He has proudly opposed every attempt at a budget compromise that would clarify the status of Kozlowski's funding. He told me he would continue to vote against any deal that raises tax rates. If he is re-elected. That could be a problem too. After he was elected in 2010, Walsh embraced the notion that he was a poster boy for the Tea Party, and there was a fair amount of truth to that: he had won a shocking victory over a Democratic incumbent in the Chicago suburbs, in the heart of blue-state Illinois. He proceeded to make a lot of noise, with an untoward candor that was less outrageous than that of another Tea Party poster child, Representative Allen West of Florida (who is also in trouble this year) but still offensive enough to women, homosexuals and Muslims to make national headlines. The question is, Will Walsh be a Tea Party exemplar of a different sort this year? If he and West and some other high-profile Tea Partyers lose, will the Republican Party take a moderating lesson from that--even if, as is likely, it retains control of the House? The deck is certainly stacked against Walsh. His district has been redrawn by the heavily Democratic Illinois legislature. It now includes a significant minority population. And he has a formidable opponent: Tammy Duckworth, an Iraq-war veteran who lost both her legs when the Black Hawk helicopter she was piloting was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade. Walsh has continued to make a fool of himself during the campaign, at one point saying Duckworth wasn't a "true hero" because she talked about her service all the time and real heroes don't do that. He also warned that Muslim terrorists were in the district--he specified three towns--looking to kill Americans. He told me he was talking about a national problem, but there were several attacks on local Muslim sites in the days after he made his comments. "When you say radical things," Duckworth says, "radical things can happen." Walsh does have a few advantages, though. He has become a superstar of super PACs in this race, four of which have put up ads supporting him, and together they are outspending Duckworth significantly. He's also a natural politician, fearless and gregarious, with the courage of his extreme convictions--and a few policy surprises. He told me, for example, that while he would oppose any budget deal that raises tax rates, he does support the complete elimination of such popular tax loopholes as the mortgage-interest and charity deductions. He has also favored cutting the Pentagon budget and wants an immediate end to the war in Afghanistan. "He's a very charismatic and appealing guy," Duckworth told me.? It might be counted as a minor miracle that Emma Donoghue sold more than a million copies of her disquieting 2010 novel Room, which is narrated by a 5-year-old boy held captive with his mother by her kidnapper and rapist. Donoghue's ambitious new collection, Astray, isn't exactly a beach read either. Its array of characters--a pet elephant cruelly sold off to the circus in 1882, an attorney taken for a ride by a con woman in 1735, a Texas slave who absconds with his master's wife in 1864--includes wanderers and bunglers, victims and outcasts. (The stories are all inspired by true...? The next great plague is out there, probably in a chimpanzee or a chicken, waiting to make the leap to humans. In his new book, Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic, science writer David Quammen patrols the boundary between animal and human health, where microbial threats are emerging faster than ever TIME: Why are we so transfixed by the threat of emerging diseases? Quammen: Well, we know that previous big ones have been very big. There are so many humans on the planet now--7 billion of us--and we live interconnected with one another. If we're pressing ever more insistently...? If Mitt Romney is to mount a robust comeback, he'll need a strong series of debate performances, starting Wednesday in Denver...He's spent a lot of time sparring in private with Ohio Senator Rob Portman, who has portrayed President Obama in debate practice sessions...A Romney revival would require many changes. Foremost, the candidate must improve his personal performance, both on the stump and in the debates; he needs to stop making errors, sharpen his message and deliver something more nourishing in TV interviews...Obama remains vulnerable on what he would do with a second term, but Romney hasn't filled in the details of his own plans...If Romney continues to claim his campaign is on track--or is not seen to be fighting for the job--his chances of victory will become even more remote...Increasing the number of campaign events per day would reach more voters and add a required sense of urgency. But Romney will also need some luck...Improving economic conditions and a rising confidence in Obama's ability to turn things around are compounding the Republican's problems...Romney's daily hopscotching from one message to another is baffling GOP pols...Meanwhile, large polling deficits in battleground states are leading many voters and Republican strategists to doubt that the challenger has any chance to win the race...Another headache for the GOP: weakness at the top of the ticket could mean the return of Nancy Pelosi to the House speakership, and Democrats could actually gain a seat or two in the Senate, with genuine prospects for victory in Massachusetts, Nevada, North Dakota, Virginia, Wisconsin, Indiana and Arizona. FIELD OPERATIONS Topical landscapers have combined two autumnal mainstays--the corn maze and the presidential election--to create a new rural attraction: waves of grain from Arkansas to Idaho (pictured above) sport the faces of Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. "This year's such an important year that everybody go out and vote," says Teresa Summers Greenwood, who carved portraits into her 13-acre Maryland spread. "We're trying to remind everybody." It's certainly something to stalk about. MAZES WITH A MESSAGE [The following text appears within a map. Please see hardcopy or PDF for actual map.] Meridian, Idaho New Carlisle, Ohio Winterset, Iowa Frederick, Md. Springdale, Ark. THE TALLY AUG. SEPT. 8 Number of days the U.S. Senate has convened since Aug. 3. A slightly harder-working House has met on 10 days in that time. Legislators broke for another recess on Sept. 21, making this the longest pre-election hiatus since 1960 URBAN AGRICULTURE Ready to taxi: Chicago's O'Hare airport plans to use goats, sheep or other grazing stock to consume heavy brush on part of the city's property ? The rise and fall of Edwin Wilson, a former CIA agent and businessman who died Sept. 10 at 84, has all the makings of a spy thriller. The "ice-man" of the CIA, a nickname TIME reported in 1981, Wilson made a mint setting up businesses as covers for the agency's dealings and was accused of arranging the killings of prosecutors, witnesses and his own wife. Convicted of shipping explosives to Libya's Muammar Gaddafi and scheming to murder federal prosecutors in 1983, Wilson went from a life in luxurious villas to solitary confinement in a maximum-security prison. Then in 2003, Wilson obtained...?(EL-ARISH, Egypt) — A troop carrier overturned on a mountain road in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula early Monday, killing at least 21 members of the security forces stationed on the border with Israel, officials said.Health Ministry official Tarek Khater said the driver of the vehicle was speeding downhill on the badly maintained single-lane road as he transported members of the paramilitary Central Security Forces along the borderline. A security official says the high number of casualties resulted from the vehicle rolling several times.Khater says another 11 were injured, several in critical condition. A security official said 24 were hurt. He retracted an earlier estimate of 48 injured. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the press.It was a different part of the Sinai from where the military is conducting a sweep against Islamic militants.Traffic accidents are common in Egypt due to poor road maintenance and spotty enforcement of traffic laws. Police estimate they kill about 6,000 people annually.By ASHRAF SWEILAMPHOTOS:?? Facebook. Amazon. Apple. Not too long ago, these were the companies upending the status quo--unleashing provocative business models that changed our daily lives even as they transformed entire industries. (See: bookstores, record labels.) Now it's their turn to face the newbies. Buoyed by rocketing investor enthusiasm--venture-capital funding hit $28.4 billion in the U.S. last year, up 22% from 2010--the next class of start-ups aims to disrupt the disrupters. "Are we worried about iTunes? Of course," says Daniel Ek, CEO of Spotify, a much hyped app that offers streams of songs legally and free. "But our goal is to be the best...?Eight Innovators Reshaping Our WorldFacebook. Amazon. Apple. Not too long ago, these were the companies?upending the status quo ? unleashing provocative business models that changed our daily lives even as they transformed entire industries. Now it’s their turn to face the newbies.The next class of start-ups aims to disrupt the disrupters. This drive to challenge norms is at the core of this year’s Chicago Ideas Week festival ? co-hosted by TIME ? which kicks off October 8 and features talks with Rahm Emanuel, Michael Bloomberg and many key entrepreneurs. It’s also at the heart of this list.We examined more than 100 companies across a variety of sectors to highlight eight particularly telling innovations. Some are already reshaping their industries, while others are just getting started. Either way, success is a challenge. “It takes a lot of tweaking,” admits Elaine Chang, CEO of Social Teeth. “But at some point, we’ll get to something really, really good.” Take a look at these eight innovators who are reshaping our world.MORE:??Sunday marks the beginning of the ‘s 12th year in .It ain’t quite the , but 12 years is 20% of this particular Battleland correspondent’s life.Eleven years ago today ? October 7, 2001 — also was a Sunday. I was at the , along with scores of colleagues, gathering whatever scraps of news we could. We’ve been doing it ever since.Four thousand and eighteen days. Two thousand and forty-four Americans , one every other day for 11 years straight. Historically, it’s not a lot, as wars go, unless it’s your son. About a dollars.Two months after the war began, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld me this campaign marked the return of American military might to the world stage:When I took this job I had a visit with the President shortly thereafter, and we talked about the situation that a lot of the people in the world had come to conclude that the United States was gun-shy. That we were risk-averse. And that there had been a series of things that had led people to believe that, and that the cumulative effect of it was to weaken the deterrent effect of the U.S. threat, if they do things that are harmful to our country’s interest, and that that was unhelpful to have that deterrent effect weakened, and that I wanted him to know and we discussed it and he and I concluded that whenever it occurred down the road that the United States was under some sort of a threat or attack, that the United States would be leaning forward, not back.Less than a year later, 9/11 happened. President Bush and his war council met at Camp David the next weekend. Rumsfeld continued:Tommy Franks, the general, the combatant commander, proposed a plan, it was discussed, it was agreed to, it was put in place, and it involved putting pressure on the Taliban and the al Qaeda and recognizing that some of what was going on would be visible, some would not be visible, and that we needed to be patient and that it would take some time, and that the world was expecting an explosion of cruise missiles on television and that they would have to have, that we would have to manage those expectations down. And we did do that.As people started worrying about the fact that we were on a track where the Soviets had been, or that some people in neighboring countries were characterizing it as being bogged down, and people in the press were characterizing it as a quagmire, the President was very firm and very stiff and said, `Look, we’ve got a plan, it’s a good plan, we’ve agreed to it, leave it in place,’ and General Franks encouraged him to do so, and that is exactly what happened.Two months later, in February 2002, I asked Franks, an Army four-star general, about the challenge of waging war in Afghanistan as we sat in his office at U.S. Central Command headquarters in Tampa., Fla. He responded with a recollection:On the day of [Afghan President Hamid] Karzai’s inauguration…one of the opposition group leaders, with whom we had worked earlier in the fight, walked up to me from across the room, hugged me and said, `Who do you want me to fight now?’ That’s instructive, because there’s a lot of that inside Afghanistan.Despite such concerns, the U.S. would soon decide that kicking the Taliban out of power for providing the sanctuary al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden needed to plot the 9/11 attacks wasn’t sufficient. Washington concluded that nation-building was the way to go, in a faraway land of tribes and warlords, as Franks acknowledged. Afghanistan had never had a strong central government — or even a nation, as most Americans understand the word.Rumsfeld and Franks have retired from running the war, where U.S. combat troops are slated to fight for another two years.Surprisingly, the anniversary appeared to pass without notice on the websites of the , , or the U.S.-led running the war in Afghanistan.The lone U.S. government-funded acknowledgement seemed to crop up in a Voice of America news? on the anniversary, which concluded:Coalition troops have begun pulling out of Afghanistan. All foreign combat troops are scheduled to be gone by the end of 2014. The U.S. and NATO say Afghan forces will be capable of taking over the fight against the Taliban after 2014.? However, many analysts predict a bloody new multi-factional civil war.The Taliban also took :With the help of Allah, the valiant Afghans under the Jihadi leadership of Islamic Emirate defeated the military might and numerous strategies of America and NATO alliance. And now after eleven years of unceasing terror, tyranny, crimes and savagery, they are fleeing Afghanistan with such humiliation and disgrace that they are struggling to provide an explanation.That may be a stretch. But you know what they say about who writes history. Check back in 11 years.? When Eric Hobsbawm died on Oct. 1 at 95, he was eulogized even by his ideological foes as the greatest historian of his time. Though the Cambridge-educated Briton was an unrepentant Communist who refused to quit the party even after the horrors of Stalin became clear, his work showed little trace of dogma. As a historian, he was interested less in the actions of great men than in the lives of ordinary people. Their struggles are at the heart of his most famous work, the best-selling four-volume Ages series chronicling the period from the French Revolution to 1991. Hobsbawm's histories, always...?French special forces shot and killed suspect Islamist extremist Oct. 6 in an exchange of gunfire during in the eastern city of Strasbourg. The action was as part of a daybreak series of sweeps targeting alleged Salafist radicals, and followed an investigation into the of a Kosher grocery store in a suburb that occurred amid international outrage among Muslim fundamentalists to a mocking film and French caricatures they called blasphemous to Islam.But the police action also came amid continuing debate about and other irregularities that may have allowed self-proclaimed Toulouse jihadi Mohammed Merah to execute his March, 2012 that left seven people dead. Though French counter-terrorism officials have recently told TIME they’ve seen no signs of imminent terror planning by extremists since Merah’s death, Saturday’s multiple sweeps may be indication that security forces and political leaders are learning the lessons of the Merah case by moving early and emphatically against any suspected radical considered even a potential threat. Though details of Saturday’s sweeps were still sketchy ahead of a press conference planned by justice authorities later in the day, the fatal Strasbourg raid is known to have been part of a coordinated series of moves on suspected extremists. Those raids occurred in Nice, , and locations around Paris, resulting in the arrest of 10 people. It now seems clear officials were justified viewing some suspects as security threats. During the raid of a , the suspect unloaded his .375 Magnum revolver on advancing police forces before being killed in return fire. Three police officers were slightly injured in the exchange, including one who took direct hits to anti-ballistic gear protecting his head and chest. In a coinciding operation near Paris, a suspect that in some reports termed “dangerous” was taken without violence, but found in possession of at least one gun.The raids came as French counter-terror authorities continue their investigation into the of a kosher shop serving the large Jewish population in Sarcelles, a disadvantaged and ethnically diverse suburb north of Paris. One person was slightly injured in that strike when an explosive device was thrown inside the store. That attack came amid the surge of anger and violence among Islamist militants around the globe in reaction to a California-made film denigrating the Prophet Muhammad and French print media caricatures mocking Islam?a wave of fury that now appears to be subsiding.Despite those apparently calming tempers France’s leftist government is signaling that it will tolerate no defiance or challenge from Islamist militants?even if that comes in response to provocation. France’s Socialist Interior Minister Manuel Valls banned demonstrations by groups denouncing the film and caricatures that they consider blasphemous to Islam. Furthermore, on Sept. 27 Valls ?in Strasbourg, as it happened?to put militant Salafists and fellow traveling fundamentalists on notice that he’d brook now challenge to French laws or secular traditions.“I will not accept behavior by Salafists or any other group that defies the Republic,” Valls warned during Strasbourg mosque inauguration. “The Republic will be intransigent with anyone who seeks to challenge it.”That hard line is in part an effort by French Socialists who took control of government in elections last May and June to disprove accusations from ousted conservatives that the left is soft on crime and security. It’s also a reflection of the reputation Valls earned as mayor of a disadvantaged and troubled Paris suburb for being tough on law-and-order issues–a stand so rigid that some disapproving leftists accuse him of being a conservative in all but name. But the intransigence with suspected Islamist extremists and sympathizing enablers also marks a move by Socialist President Francois Hollande to learn from in the Merah case to prevent future terror activity.French intelligence services continue facing accusations they repeatedly overlooked evidence Merah was a dedicated jihadi determined to carry a strike in France. In that process, detractors say, intelligence officials not only passed up opportunities to unmask and arrest Merah before he went into action, but were then slow to consider him as a suspect once he had. On at least one occasion, those services also ignored–inadvertently, it seems–information provided by other security forces about Merah’s radical associations and potential as a threat.Those allegations also carry a degree of political accusation. French security officials tell TIME France’s domestic intelligence service was given its dominating role in France’s anti-terror effort–often to the expense or exclusion of the nation’s other specialized units–by former conservative President . Shortly after his election in 2007, Sarkozy not only combined several parallel and at times competing intelligence units into the bigger, far more powerful outfit it is now–but also tapped some of his most trusted allies to run it.Since Hollande’s victory, the security officials say, moves have been made to bring the full range of specialized intelligence, investigative, judicial, and police services back into what has been France’s unique and centralized anti-terror model since the 1990s. As a result, that broader perspective and diverse experience may be coming up with different analyses and strategies of how to best fight the terror threat–including views about moving on people some units identify as even potential dangers earlier in the game. If so, Saturday’s raid may be both a reflection of that change–and an indication no one in France’s security or political system is willing to brave future accusations of having of being slow on the uptake or tardy to act again.?() ? A preliminary investigation has found friendly fire likely was to blame in a shooting that killed one federal agent and wounded another along the Arizona- border, the said Friday, shaking up the probe into an incident that reignited the political debate over border security.“There are strong preliminary indications that the death of United States Border Patrol Agent Nicholas J. Ivie and the injury to a second agent was the result of an accidental shooting incident involving only the agents,” FBI Special Agent in Charge James L. Turgal Jr. said in a statement.Turgal didn’t elaborate on the agency’s conclusions but said the FBI is using “all necessary investigative, forensic and analytical resources” as it investigates the Tuesday shooting about five miles north of the border near Bisbee.(MORE:?)Ivie was killed after he and two other agents responded to an alarm triggered by a sensor aimed at detecting smugglers and others entering the U.S. illegally.One of the other agents was shot in the ankle and buttocks, but was released from the hospital after surgery. The third agent was uninjured.The Cochise County Sheriff’s Office, which is assisting the FBI in the probe, said federal investigators used ballistic testing to determine the shootings likely were the result of so-called friendly fire among the agents.Jeffrey D. Self, commander of Customs and Border Protection’s Joint Field Command-Arizona, said investigators were making progress and noted the initial findings that the shootings appeared to be accidental didn’t diminish the fact that Ivie “gave the ultimate sacrifice and died serving his country.”“The fact is, the work of the Border Patrol is dangerous,” Self said during a news conference Friday in Tucson.(PHOTOS:?)While federal authorities declined to offer details of the shooting, George McCubbin, president of the National Border Patrol Council, said the three agents split up as they investigated the sensor alarm, noting they all fired their weapons.“Coming in from different angles, that is more than likely how it ended up happening,” McCubbin told The Arizona Republic of the shootings.A Mexican law enforcement official said Thursday that federal police had arrested two men who may have been connected to the shootings. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to release the information, said it was unclear if there was strong evidence linking the men to the case.Mexican authorities on Friday didn’t immediately respond to telephone messages from The Associated Press.After a meeting of border governors Friday in Albuquerque, N.M., Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer stood by the criticism she leveled earlier this week in response to the shootings in which she said a political stalemate and the federal government’s failures have left the border unsecured and Border Patrol agents in harm’s way.(MORE:?)“It’s the federal government’s responsibility to secure our border, and they need to do that, and then we can deal with all the other issues that have come about because our border hasn’t been secured,” said Brewer, who plans to attend Ivie’s funeral Monday in Sierra Vista.The Border Patrol couldn’t immediately comment on the frequency of friendly fire shootings involving its agents. But such incidents appeared to be extremely rare, if they’ve ever occurred at all.“I know of absolutely none in the past, and my past goes back to 1968,” said Kent Lundgren, chairman of the National Association of Former Border Patrol Officers, citing the year he joined the agency. “I’m not saying it never happened. I’m just saying I’ve never heard of it.”Also Friday, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano traveled to Arizona to express her condolences to Ivie’s family and meet with authorities. The family did not return calls from The Associated Press on Friday.Ivie’s death marked the first fatal shooting of an agent since a deadly 2010 firefight with Mexican bandits that killed U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry in December 2010 and spawned congressional probes of a botched government gun-smuggling investigation.Terry’s shooting was later linked to that “Fast and Furious” operation, which allowed people suspected of illegally buying guns for others to walk away from gun shops with weapons, rather than be arrested.Authorities intended to track the guns into Mexico. Two rifles found at the scene of Terry’s shooting were bought by a member of the gun-smuggling ring being investigated. Critics of the operation say any shooting along the border now will raise the specter that those illegal weapons are still being used.Twenty-six Border Patrol agents have died in the line of duty since 2002.By?JACQUES BILLEAUD and PETE YOST? Since the day he started at the National Football League as an office intern, no one has been more zealous about "protecting the shield" than Roger Goodell. The shield is marketing jargon for the NFL logo. On his way up the NFL ranks, Goodell worked relentlessly to make it a symbol of integrity, appointment television and sporting success. That's why, upon being named league commissioner in 2006, he took a hard line against player misconduct. That's also why, with science revealing that the NFL's relative ambivalence toward concussions was at best misguided and at worst negligent--as the more than 2,000 ex-players...? I expect people to see the good in me even when there isn't any. So when I volunteered to become a founding parent of a charter school in Los Angeles, I imagined getting a lot of kudos for my effort to improve my community, which I planned to do mostly by naming things or making speeches. I didn't really know what a founding parent did. But I did know that being one meant my 3-year-old son Laszlo would get priority when we enroll him in kindergarten--my real motivation. Sending Laszlo to public school is important to me because private school is...?Mars Incorporated has proclaimed that “Chocolate is better in color” with its M&Ms. But French beekeepers may beg to differ on that.Since August, beekeepers near the town of Ribeauville, in the northeastern region of Alsace, have been reporting their bees are producing blue and green honey, according to . And they’ve traced the cause back to a biogas plant that processes waste from an M&Ms factory.(PHOTOS: )Bees are apparently picking up vibrantly colored, sugary waste from the plant, operated by the company Agrivalor some 2.5 miles away from their apiaries. A statement from Agrivalor that appeared in the French newspaper said the company would clean its containers and store waste in airtight containers to prevent bees from reaching it.“We quickly put in place a procedure to stop it,” Philippe Meinrad, co-manager of Agrivalor, told Reuters.France generates 18,330 tons of honey per year, making it one of the largest honey producers in the European Union. In Alsace alone, about 2,400 beekeepers manage 35,000 colonies, which produce about 1,000 tons of the stuff per year. However, France hasn’t been spared by the largely unexplained decrease in the world bee population in recent years, Reuters reported.Gill Maclean, a spokesperson for the British Beekeepers’ Association, told the that the harsh winter of 2011-2012 may have affected bees’ ability to forage. This could be a reason why the bees sought out the alternate sugar.“Bees are clever enough to know where the best sources of sugar are, if there are no others available,” Maclean told the BBC.Rest assured: Consumers won’t see blue honey on store shelves anytime soon. Alain Frieh, president of the apiculturists’ union, told Reuters the only similarity between regular honey and their bees’ M&M-tainted byproducts might be taste.“For me, it’s not honey,” Frieh told Reuters. “It’s not sellable.”WATCH: ?(MOBILE, Ala.) ? Classmates and friends are questioning why a police officer fatally shot a University of South Alabama freshman who was naked and had been banging on a window at police headquarters.Campus officials didn’t give any indication that Gil Collar, 18, of Wetumpka had a weapon when he was shot. A university spokesman said he was fatally wounded about 1:30 a.m. Saturday after an officer heard a bang on a window and went outside to investigate.A statement issued by university spokesman Keith Ayers said Collar, who wrestled at Wetumpka High School before enrolling at South Alabama, assumed a “fighting stance” and chased an officer before being shot. The officer tried to retreat numerous times to defuse the situation before opening fire, the school said.(PHOTOS:?)But sophomore Tyler Kendrick said campus authorities haven’t provided any satisfying answers about why Collar was killed.“Really, it just upsets me that there’s no other way to apprehend an unarmed student rather than shooting him. I don’t understand that,” Kendrick said.Student Joshua Frye said it seemed the officer could have used something other than a firearm to stop Collar.“What I feel is that a cop has more than a gun,” he said.The officer was placed on paid leave, and an autopsy will determine if drugs or alcohol were involved.Campus officials said the confrontation was recorded by security cameras. The video and other information has been turned over to the district attorney and the Mobile County Sheriff’s Office, which will review the shooting.(MORE:?)Colgan Meanor went to high school with Collar and then enrolled at the same college.“He was a great, loving guy who always made people smile,” she said. “He’s not the kind of guy that people knew him and said he would do something like this.”Collar was the second person killed on the South Alabama campus since last year.A university freshman was charged with murder in the fatal stabbing of another teenager who was slain in an on-campus apartment in July 2011. The victim was a visitor to campus and was not enrolled, authorities said.Ayers said South Alabama, located near downtown Mobile, was still “a very safe campus,” despite Collar’s death.?Was the October, 2011 Muammar Gaddafi amid a crowd of insurgents in fact a professional hit by French intelligence services ? with an assist from Syrian strongman Bashar al Assad? That’s the speculation that has emerged from overlapping European media reports in recent weeks, suggests Gaddafi’s death may have been a bid to ?prevent the Libyan leader from revealing damaging secrets about the government of former French President Nicolas Sarkozy.That speculation arose from a by Italian daily Corriere della Sera looking into recent claims by former Libyan official Mahmoud Jibril. Jibril?an opposition leader who served as prime minister for Libya’s transitional government?told Egypt’s Dream TV Sept. 26 that “a foreign agent had been infiltrated into the revolutionary brigades to kill Col. Gaddafi”, who at the time was on the run in western Libya. The Italian report goes on to quote an unidentified European diplomat arguing the assassination-bent spy had to be French?noting France and its then-President Nicolas Sarkozy had much to lose if Gaddafi had been allowed to go public with their secret dealings.Why would France be more vulnerable than other nations that also dealt with Libya under the unsavory Gaddafi? In large part due to Sarkozy’s formerly cozy relationship with the Libyan. Just three months into his presidency, Sarkozy convinced Gaddafi to health workers imprisoned for years in Libya on what were considered bogus charges they’d intentionally infected children with HIV. That bargain took place amid murky financial and diplomatic transactions. Later, Sarkozy hosted Gaddafi during a high profile state visit to Paris?a trip that was supposed serve as the reformed Libyan’s return to polite global company, but which turned into an for France. That was when the pair’s friendship began to sour, ending entirely when Sarkozy spearheaded the NATO operation that resulted in Gaddafi’s ouster. It was during those hostilities that Gaddafi intimates the dictator had provided illegal funds to finance Sarkozy’s 2007 presidential campaign. Sarkozy has steadfastly denied those charges, though they continued to dog him.But even if Paris may have had motives for taking Gaddafi out, did it also have the means and opportunity? Perhaps so, according to the British paper Daily Telegraph. On Sept. 30 it published the former head of rebel intelligence services stating Syria helped France locate Gaddafi to his final hiding place. According to the story, Syrian president Assad offered to give Sarkozy the secret satellite phone number of his friend and fellow tyrant Gaddafi in exchange for Paris letting up on Damascus’s attempts to violently smother its own domestic uprising.Under this theory, rather than stumbling upon Gaddafi cowering in a concrete drainpipe in Sirte, Libyan rebels were directed to the area once French intelligence had tracked Gaddafi down via his satellite phone. In the chaos surrounding his capture, shots were fired that ended the dictator’s life?though even cell phone video taken of the scene doesn’t reveal who actually killed the bloodied despot.Doubts about who did may grow further still with new preceding the reports crediting a French intelligence operative. On Sept. 25 the young Libyan many people considered the person responsible for Gaddafi’s capture and killing died in a Paris hospital, from injuries suffered during his July abduction by Gaddafi loyalists. All new developments concerning Gaddafi’s last days and minutes seem to only raise new questions about exactly who brought them to an end.? — Californians woke up to a shock Friday as overnight prices jumped by as much as 20 cents a gallon in some areas, ending a week of soaring costs that saw some stations close and others charge record prices.The average price of regular gas across the state was nearly $4.49 a gallon, the highest in the nation, according to AAA’s Daily Fuel Gauge report.In Southern California, the price jumped 20 cents a gallon overnight to $4.53 in Ventura. And in the Los Angeles-Long Beach area prices went up 19 cents to nearly $4.54. And it wasn’t any better to the north, as a gallon of regular gas in San Francisco averaged nearly $4.60.(MORE: )In many areas, prices have jumped 40 cents in a week as refinery problems have created shortages and helped send wholesale prices soaring. Some stations ran out of gas and shut down Thursday rather than pay those costs.Even Costco, the giant discount store chain that sells large volumes of gas, decided to close some stations, the Los Angeles Times (lat.ms/OGwEV2) reported.“We do not know when we will be resupplied,” read a sign at one Southern California Costco, according to the Times.Other gas stations charged more than $5 a gallon. The Low-P station in Calabasas charged $5.69 Thursday. The pumps bore hand-written signs reading: “We are sorry, it is not our fault,” the Times said.While have spiked around the nation, refinery outages and pipeline problems have added to woes in California.Among the recent disruptions, an Aug. 6 fire at a Chevron Corp. refinery in Richmond left one of the region’s largest refineries producing at a reduced capacity. A power failure in Southern California has affected an Exxon Mobil Corp. refinery, and a Chevron pipeline that moves crude to Northern California also was shut down.The national average for gas is about $3.79 a gallon, the highest ever for this time of year. However, gas prices in many states have started decreasing, which is typical for October.But in California, gasoline inventories are the lowest in more than 10 years – a situation made worse by the state’s strict pollution limits that require a special blend of cleaner-burning gasoline during hot summer months.Patrick DeHaan, senior petroleum analyst at GasBuddy.com, said he is seeing the highest prices in the state around Los Angeles, where on Thursday at least five stations have crossed the $5 a gallon mark, including $5.29 in Burbank and $5.11 in Norwalk.(MORE: )Prices will keep rising, he says, because in the past week wholesale gasoline prices have jumped $1 a gallon, but average retail prices have increased only 30 cents.“This is one of the easiest forecasts: Retail prices are going to skyrocket,” DeHaan said.The jump in wholesale prices can be particularly tough on independent gas stations that often pay more for their gas because they are not part of a larger chain.Tom Kloza, chief oil analyst at Oil Price Information Service, said he’s heard of a few California station owners shutting their pumps rather than charging the $4.90 a gallon or more necessary to break even.“Wholesale price increases lead to retail price increases,” Kloza said. “But there is some restraint among companies who do not want to exercise their current pricing power and irritate their customers.”Some analysts think prices nationally will begin to decline soon but say California could see a longer spike given its unique fuel requirements.“Nationally, I believe most prices will wobble to and fro for the next week or so, with an eventual slow but steady attrition in retail gas prices, particularly in the Midwest and Southeast,” Kloza said. “California is a wild card.”?Google’s to settle a seven-year conflict with five major publishers over the search giant’s book-scanning initiative is a milestone in the publishing industry’s grinding transition from print books to e-books. The pact, struck by Google and the Association of American Publishers (AAP), does not address the underlying question of whether Google violated copyright law by scanning millions of books over the last several years. Both sides, apparently weary of legal wrangling, have agreed to disagree on that point. The deal also doesn’t affect an ongoing lawsuit filed against Google by the Authors Guild, which represents thousands of authors.Nevertheless, this landmark agreement is an important step toward the ultimate end-game in this conflict: a system in which Google works together with the publishing community to make of millions of hard-to-find books?accessible?to consumers. That’s the bottom-line: Google’s book-scanning project — now known as the Google Library Project –?holds?out the promise of a giant Internet library and bookstore, but that outcome is only possible if Google and the publishing community work together.“In the last few years, Google and the publishers have made their peace; this is just the treaty-signing ceremony,” James Grimmelmann, a copyright expert at?New York Law School who has closely followed the case, on his blog. “The publishers have embraced the digital transition in books; Google is now a player and partner in that ecosystem, rather than a dangerous disruptive presence.” The five major publishers included in the settlement are?McGraw-Hill, John Wiley, Simon & Schuster,?Pearson Education and Penguin Group (also owned by Pearson).(MORE:?)When Google announced its book-scanning project in 2004, the concept captured the imagination of many in the tech world. What if millions of books — including rare and out-of-print books — were made available on the Web? At the time, Google, which had just gone public and was the toast of the tech world, seemed like the only entity with the resources and resolve to undertake such a massive and ambitious project. Google Books was a signature project for company co-founder?Larry?Page, who made the effort a top priority.To kick off the initiative, Google announced partnerships with several important academic and cultural libraries including?Harvard, Stanford, Oxford, and the New York Public Library, to digitize their collections. This meant a time-consuming effort to physically scan thousands of print books, page-by-page, using sophisticated robotic cameras, some capable of?digitizing . To date, Google has scanned over 20 million books.Finally, it seemed, the dream of a universal library — a mythical goal that has existed for two?millennia since the destruction of the Library of Alexandria, the classical world’s central repository of knowledge — could be within reach, or at least somewhat closer to becoming a reality. (Harvard has since from the project in favor of an academic?effort?called the?Digital Public Library of America — but not until after Google had already scanned some 850,000 books from its collection.)Not so fast, said major publishers and the Authors Guild, which filed a lawsuit in 2005 claiming that the project violated copyright law, and didn’t adequately provide for compensation to rights-holders and authors. Since then, the two sides have waged an epic and closely watched legal battle that’s come to be viewed as a central front in the larger struggle between legacy pre-Internet industries, including publishing, music and movies, and new digital upstarts, led by Google, who aimed to bring those industries into the digital age.The two sides have tried to settle the dispute before, but failed, including last year, when U.S. federal judge Denny Chin? a proposed $125 million settlement, saying it violated the?“property rights” of people without their consent, particularly in the case of “orphan works,” out-of-print books whose authors can’t be located to obtain their consent. Google maintained that its project was protected by “fair use,” a legal concept that allows for certain types of reproduction, when used for?criticism, journalism, teaching, and?academic?research. After last year’s deal was rejected, the publishers and authors split, which is why the former was able to strike a new accord with Google, while the latter continues its lawsuit.(MORE:?)The settlement gives publishers the choice to make their books available to Google for its project. Those who participate will have the option to receive a digital copy for their use, including to sell online. In?Google’s model, users can browse up to 20% of books and then purchase digital versions through the Google Play online store, with rights-holders receiving an unspecified cut of the proceeds of the sale. (Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. As a settlement between private parties, the pact is not subject to court approval, according to the AAP and Google.)“We are pleased that this settlement addresses the issues that led to the litigation,” Tom Allen, President and CEO of the AAP, in a statement. “It shows that digital services can provide innovative means to discover content while still respecting the rights of copyright-holders.”?David Drummond, Google’s Chief Legal Officer, said: “By putting this litigation with the publishers behind us, we can stay focused on our core mission and work to increase the number of books available to educate, excite, and entertain our users via Google Play.”Michael J. Boni, a lawyer for the Authors Guild, the Associated Press that he was “cautiously optimistic” about the potential for a settlement with authors.?”We’re delighted that Google and the publishers forged an agreement,” he said. “We see that as a sign of Google’s willingness (to be open) to the concept of settlement. And we hope we can get to the bargaining table as soon as we can.”Google’s deal with publishers is a welcome step in the right direction, after seven years of litigation. Now, if Google can come to agreement with authors, the dream of a universally accessible digital book database may finally have the chance to become a reality. Consumers will always have to buy books, of course, but the Google Library Project holds out the promise of dramatically increasing the number of books that are available for purchase, particularly rare and out-of-print books. This will be good for Google, publishers, authors, consumers, journalists, scholars, and society at large. If we can increase the amount of knowledge available to all, we all win.MORE: ?SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Google and major book publishers have settled a lengthy legal battle over digital copyrights, but a bigger dispute still looms with thousands of authors who allege that Google is illegally profiting from their works.The truce announced Thursday ends a federal lawsuit filed in 2005 by several members of the Association of American Publishers after Google Inc. began stockpiling its Internet search index with digital duplicates of books scanned from libraries.Google has maintained that its scanning is covered by fair-use provisions of copyright law, although it offered to remove specific books from its index upon request. It also showed only snippets of the copyrighted books unless permission was given to show more.Publishers and authors, however, insisted that Google needed explicit permission from them before making the digital copies, let alone showing even snippets of text from the books on Google’s website.Google worked out a $125 million settlement with publishers and authors in 2008, only to have a federal judge in New York reject it after the U.S. Justice Department and other critics contended that it would thwart competition in the rapidly growing digital book market and flout U.S. copyright law.One of the reasons that settlement unraveled was because it would have given Google broad authority to copy books, unless an author or publisher notified the company not to make the duplicate.Terms of the new settlement weren’t divulged, but it won’t require court approval because its reach will be limited to the parties signing on.The scaled-down agreement with publishers is likely to make more copyright-protected books available online. Most of those will be sold through Google Play, a digital store. Publishers will have the right to release digital copies of their books in Google Play or remove them from Google’s search index entirely.That’s not a major change in how Google has been handling matters with the lawsuits pending, but publishers now feel comfortable enough with the system to set up an official framework, Tom Allen, president of the publishers’ group, said in an interview.Google, which is based in Mountain View, Calif., will also provide publishers with a digital copy of a scanned book upon request.The settlement “shows that digital services can provide innovative means to discover content while still respecting the rights of copyright holders,” Allen said in a statement.Both Google and the publishers may have been more motivated to figure out a way to work together with so many more people reading books on digital devices than just a few years ago. Google has been playing a more important role in that transition since it started selling a tablet computer, the Nexus 7, in July. The tablet is set up to download books and other digital content from Google Play.Although the sparring over Google’s effort to create the world’s largest digital library appears to be over on one front, a lawsuit filed by the Authors Guild remains in the way of Google’s ambitious plans to digitize more than 130 million of books sitting on library shelves around the world.The authors’ suit, which came before the publishers’ complaint, raises thornier issues and threatens Google with a huge bill. The authors are seeking $750 in damages for every copyrighted book that Google has scanned over the past eight years.Despite the lawsuits, Google has made digital copies of more than 20 million books so far. The copyrights on many of those books have already expired, making them fair game and not part of any infringement damages that might be awarded. Even if just one-quarter of the books scanned so far by Google are protected by copyrights, the company would be liable for nearly $4 billion if a court sides with the authors.“The publishers’ private settlement, whatever its terms, does not resolve the authors’ copyright infringement claims against Google,” the Authors Guild said in a statement Thursday. “Google continues to profit from its use of millions of copyright-protected books without regard to authors’ rights, and our class-action lawsuit on behalf of U.S. authors continues.”In an interview, Authors Guild lawyer Michael Boni said the publishers agreement made him “cautiously optimistic” that a settlement of his case could be reached before it goes to trial.But he also stressed the authors’ issues are much different than the publishers’ concerns. “We’re really on a separate motor at this point,” Boni said.Google, which is based in Mountain View, Calif., declined to comment Thursday on the legal dispute with the authors.In May, U.S. District Judge Denny Chin in New York granted the authors’ lawsuit class certification, meaning the case would cover all authors, even if they are too small to hire their own lawyers to sue Google. Chin also rejected Google’s attempt to get the case thrown out.The authors’ suit is in a holding pattern until an appeals court rules on Google’s attempt to strip the authors of their status as a united class.One of the biggest sticking points in the authors’ case revolves around the rights to millions of out-of-print books that are still protected by copyright but whose writers’ whereabouts are unknown.The prospect that Google could gain a digital monopoly on these so-called “orphan works” was one of the main reasons that the Justice Department and other objectors urged Chin to scotch the earlier $125 million settlement with publishers and authors. Chin rejected the agreement in 2010.Google’s stock rose $5.55 to close Thursday at $768.05.The publishers who brought the lawsuit were The McGraw-Hill Cos.; Pearson PLC’s Penguin Group and Pearson Education; John Wiley & Sons Inc. and CBS Corp.’s Simon & Schuster.BY?MICHAEL LIEDTKE AND LARRY NEUMEISTERNeumeister reported from New York. Liedtke?is an AP Technology Writer.?Black Friday has widely been called “the busiest shopping day of the year.” Often, this just isn’t true?the Saturday before Christmas usually yields the most holiday purchases. Quibbles aside, this year, Black Friday is being called something else by retail analysts: “irrelevant.” Here’s a list of reasons why Black Friday will be less important, if not irrelevant during the course of what’s becoming a longer and longer holiday shopping season:Holiday promotions start long before Black Friday. Consumers may have groaned in exasperation when stores rolled out their ?last year, but “Christmas creep” appears to be here to stay. This year, holiday season .A has coined a phrase for the modern-day holiday shopping season: “OctoNovemCember.” Doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, but it does get the point across that Black Friday?once considered the big kickoff for holiday shopping?now falls somewhere in the middle of shopping season for consumers and retailers. Last year, Amazon launched a series of “Black Friday” sales actually took place.(MORE: )Take note that while retailers are introducing holiday sales and promotions earlier and earlier, they may be deals in name only. Thus far in 2012, the sales have been especially underwhelming. Essentially, they’re the regular old weekly deals rebranded with the words “Black Friday” or “Cyber Monday” to trick shoppers into thinking they’re getting some sort of extra-special deal.Consumers are shopping earlier. “Nearly 4 in 10 parents with children under the age of 18 (39%) are beginning their holiday shopping prior to November,” the RetailMeNot report states. The agrees that, regardless of when the best deals are available, shoppers are starting to tackle their holiday lists earlier, which encourages stores to extend the holiday period:Consumers are increasingly viewing Black Friday as irrelevant: They start looking earlier and buying later, and are moving online. As a result, retailers are discounting even earlier, seeking to convert these early shoppers.(MORE: )Showrooming cannot be stopped. It’s widely expected that during the 2012 holidays, with sales increases that far surpass brick-and-mortar growth. There will also be a sharp rise in smartphone-enabled shopping, with consumers using their devices for researching, browsing, and price-comparing anywhere and everywhere. And everywhere includes in physical stores, of course. the term for inspecting merchandise in person in a store before purchasing it from an online competitor, will be more popular than ever?especially on Black Friday, says Booz & Co. . “We’re not going to see a huge increase in sales growth for Black Friday this year,” says Blischok. “What we do expect is a lot of ‘showcasing’ on Black Friday. Shoppers will check things out in stores, electronics especially, but then purchase online on the Monday after. Cyber Monday sales will explode this year.”The economy’s still in bad shape. In its , SOASTA, a cloud and mobile testing firm, pointed out one big reason why many of us are hitting the web to shop:A majority (51%) of Americans will be shopping online this year because of the bad economy.(MORE: )It’s assumed that it’s easier to find the cheapest prices online, and since the economy is still struggling and most Americans aren’t swimming in disposable income, saving a few dollars here and there remains important. “The reality is that half of Americans do not know where they’re going to come up with the money for Christmas this year,” says Booz’s Blischok, who notes a “significant rise” in what he calls “value-seeking households” due to uncertainty and weakness in the economy.Black Friday doesn’t have the best prices. Oh yeah, there’s this: While the main supposed draw for Black Friday is good deals and ultra-low priced “door busters,” the consensus increasingly points out that there isn’t a compelling economic reason to set your alarm clock for 3 a.m. and hit the mall to battle crowds first thing the day after Thanksgiving. In its first clarifies that it expects that the best prices “will occur during ‘Black Friday Season,’ a dealnews euphemism for mid-November to Cyber Monday.” In other words, the lowest prices won’t necessarily appear on Black Friday itself, and they also won’t necessarily be in-store only?they just as easily could be available online.Pricing studies that also highlighted the fact that Black Friday didn’t offer the best value for shoppers, especially when it comes to popular holiday purchases like electronics and toys. Newly released data from likewise indicates that the Black Friday period hasn’t been tops for saving.(MORE: )“Of the 6 biggest saving shopping days in 2011, none fell on Black Friday or Cyber Monday,” ShopAdvisor reported. Instead, most of the biggest days for discounts took place just after the Thanksgiving weekend?before December 13 of last year. Another monster day for saving occurred just after Christmas, on December 29, which was a Thursday in 2011.Brad Tuttle is a reporter at TIME. Find him on Twitter at . You can also continue the discussion on TIME’s and on Twitter at .?How Does “Skyfall” Measure Up to 50 Years of Theme Songs?A?James Bond?theme song has two purposes ? to lead the marketing charge that drives folks to the box office and to be a sonic backdrop while nude women dance in silhouette over the opening credits. This may explain why the Bond songbook is not overstuffed with examples of subtlety.?Bond tunes are commercials, but often they’re very good ones.(MORE:?)Here’s TIME’s list of the five best ? and worst ? of the genre. On which end do you think the Adele’s new “” theme lands?? Daniel Kiviat is a courteous and fastidious gentleman who designs clothing for the so-called forgotten woman. His specialty is comfortable garments, immune to the tastes of the day, that in his words "cover you everywhere you want to be covered." They're exactly the kind of ensembles one might expect to find on a home-shopping network. That was why Kiviat was one of the first people fired when Mindy Grossman took over HSN. Grossman, now 55, became CEO of the TV station cum mall in 2006. She was the eighth boss in 10 years and--despite the fact that the home-shopping customer base...?We all have those days when we’re sitting around thinking,?Man, I really want to launch my entire home into space; I wonder how much that costs.O.K., maybe those days are rare (or nonexistent), but once you start thinking about it, it?would be pretty cool to blast your whole house to infinity and beyond. Unfortunately, it would also be just a bit pricey. The folks over at the??have apparently been giving this quite a bit of thought ? and have come up with an answer. It would cost around $640 million to launch a house into space.(PHOTOS:?)Inspired by space-transport company SpaceX ? which on Sunday night? toward the International Space Station ? the real estate firm created a formula to calculate just how much it would really cost to launch a house into space. Curious about the price tag on a spaceflight for your own house? Just visit Movoto’s and plug in your home’s square footage.Some serious math went into the development of this algorithm. These space-travel wizards first selected a specific rocket ? in this case, SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy. They then found a formula to determine how much a house weighs based on its square footage and number of stories. Next, they plugged that information into SpaceX’s guidelines, based on weight, for the cost of Falcon Heavy’s commercial missions. And voila. But really, why worry about math and logistics? What you really need to worry about is how you’re going to raise $640 million for this important project.VIDEO:??Since the XCOM: Enemy Unknown demo arrived, I’ve noticed (or as a longtime PC strategy gaming wonk, I should say reappear) in response to the way Firaxis’s turn-based tactics puzzler handles shoot results, i.e. the relationship between the pre-shot percentile displayed to help you estimate whether to take a shot, toss a grenade, etc. and the actual result after you pull the trigger.While it’s valid and even important to ask questions like this, there about the way games like XCOM: Enemy Unknown?are supposed to work. No, XCOM isn’t chess, but then X-COM?never was.(MORE:?)As it stands in 2K’s XCOM reboot, when a squad member has line of sight on an enemy, you’re shown a percent chance to hit. It might be 10%, it might be 45%, it might be 90%. Things that matter include distance, cover, height, the number of potentially intervening objects and of course any skill-related perks as well as buffs/debuffs.So if my Heavy Corporal whips out her assault rifle and draws a 10% chance on an alien, there’s a one in 10 chance she’ll hit. Or if she’s drawing 90% — say she’s standing on the other side of a tree, where she can step around and fire almost point blank — a one in 10 chance she’ll miss. In instances where percent-to-hit is that skewed, the results follow projections, high percentiles yielding hits, low ones resulting in misses, exactly as it should be.But occasionally I’ll nail an enemy when all I had was a faint 5% chance to hit, or completely fumble a 95% “sure thing.” It’s these nigh miraculous hits and “oh come on!” misses that seem to drive some folks nuts. As they say — not with admiration — “That’s XCOM, baby!”And yet that’s also how reality works, isn’t it??Qualifying game metrics by what transpires beyond our windows?gets tricky — there’s XCOM‘s nonsense “defeating wildly superior aliens with their own technology” premise, after all — but in this case, I think it’s instructive.Take bowling. I’ve never been a very good bowler, certainly not someone who takes the sport seriously. But sometimes, after not playing for years, I’ll show up at a family tenpin outing and inexplicably hit strike after strike or bowl an over 200 game. A half-hour later? I’m lucky to bowl above 100, or nail so much as a spare.A rookie bowling over 200? “That’s XCOM, baby!”Those who put in the time and effort — studying, testing, fine-tuning — are much more likely to pull stuff like that off consistently, e.g. bowl that perfect 300.But every now and then, a rookie’s going to play?, under par. Once in awhile, an amateur’s going to kick a field goal from beyond the 50 yard line. I was at a high school basketball game in the late 1980s where, as the timer struck zero in the final period, one of the guys on our team alley-ooped the ball clear across the court, swished it through the basket, and?scored the winning point. Even in games of skill, anomalies (or, as we used to say, “slop”) happen.And of course the inverse applies. Look at all the pro football or baseball players who’ve had inexplicably poor seasons (where the issue isn’t physical injury-related, that is). Look at Tiger Woods’ 2010 and 2011 PGA Tours. Even pros like , considered by some to be the greatest bowler of all time,?.Practice doesn’t make perfect, but it can make you a more accurate or deadly shot. The zillions of other factors that go into playing this sort of game well (say, flanking effectively) notwithstanding, in XCOM, as you’d expect, your experience is reflected in stat boosts and special abilities as you gradually promote and augment your soldiers.Improvements like: the Sniper skill “Damn Good Ground,” which bolsters aim and defense by 10 points each at lower elevations, or the Assault skill “Close and Personal,” which adds a 30%-to-critical chance if you’re standing next to your target, or the Heavy skill “Holo-Targeting,” which boosts fellow soldiers’ aim by 10 points when they fire on a target the Heavy’s shot at or suppressed.Your percent-to-hit odds can?get better over time.Even so, they’re never guaranteed. A 95% chance to hit is still a 5% chance to miss. Take solace from the fact that with a 95% chance to hit, 95 times out of 100 you’re going to (hit). And the five times out of 100 you don’t? Well…“That’s LIFE, baby!”MORE:?? Yemen Fights Back I am amazed by your cover story's headline, "The End of al-Qaeda?" [Sept. 17]. If this were the title following Osama bin Laden's death, it would have made more sense. But eliminating an odd leader in Yemen means nothing at all. Al-Qaeda is more of a cult, and we in Pakistan are suffering directly because it helps any organization that can further its expansion. A. Rahim Yousefzai, IslamabadUpon seeing "The End of al-Qaeda?" it struck me that TIME had a similar headline on its Dec....? MAIL Glass Half Full Bill Clinton has a masterly way of making an issue clear without making it simplistic ["The Case for Optimism," Oct. 1]. I appreciated the information as well as the positive tone. Yes, we have much work to do, but it's not all gloom and doom. Ann Johnson, OAKLAND, CALIF. There was a great deal of talk in Bill Clinton's cover story about green energy, middle-class expansion and the empowerment of women. Nowhere was birth control mentioned. President Clinton's optimism may be unrealistic without significant advancement in third-world birth control. Andrew Colyer, BEL AIR, MD. Big Coal Fights...? In 2009, shortly before the release of the xx's self-titled debut album, its management called the band in for a chat. It was a conversation aimed at preparing the painfully shy, strikingly young London trio for the reception that awaited its hip-yet-seemingly-uncommercial brand of understated electronic indie rock."They said, 'It's only your debut album,'" remembers singer-bassist Oliver Sim. "'Don't be disheartened if this record doesn't take you to a huge place.' "Three years and over 1 million worldwide record sales later, such pessimism...? MOST VIRTUOUS 1 Andrew Weil TRUE FOOD: SEASONAL, SUSTAINABLE, SIMPLE, PURE Weil, the M.D. and best-selling health expert, is part owner of True Food Kitchen, which bills itself as one of the healthiest restaurants in America. Its namesake cookbook features global cuisine (citrusy tabbouleh, garlicky soup fortified with a medicinal herb) that derives flavor from spices, not fat. 2 Magnus Nilsson FAVIKEN Just 28, Nilsson is routinely counted among the world's greatest chefs. He opened Faviken on a remote Swedish farm near the Arctic Circle in 2008. Primarily interested in vegetables, Nilsson creates recipes that are as strange, intricate and wonderful...?(TEHRAN, Iran) — An Iranian oil official says the country has successfully blocked a cyberattack on the computer network of its offshore drilling platforms.The Monday report by semiofficial ISNA news agency quotes Mohammad Reza Golshani, IT head of Iran’s state offshore oil company, as blaming Israel for the attack.He said the attack occurred over the past two weeks, was routed through China, and affected only the communications systems of the network. He did not provide further details.Iran periodically reports attacks on government, nuclear, oil and industrial targets, blaming Israel and the United States. Israel has done little to deflect suspicion that it uses viruses against Iran.Iran is odds with the West over its nuclear program. The West suspects the program is aimed at developing weapons, a charge Tehran denies.MORE: ?() ? Israeli warplanes swooped low over Lebanese villages Sunday in a menacing show of force apparently aimed at the Hezbollah guerrilla group after a mysterious raid by an unmanned aircraft that was shot out of Israeli skies over the weekend. was still investigating Saturday’s incident, but Hezbollah quickly emerged as the leading suspect because it has an arsenal of sophisticated Iranian weapons and a history of trying to deploy similar aircraft.The Israeli military said the drone approached Israel’s southern Mediterranean coast and flew deep into Israeli airspace before warplanes shot it down about 20 minutes later. Israeli news reports said the drone was not carrying explosives and appeared to be on a reconnaissance mission.Military officials would not say where the drone originated or who produced it, but they ruled out the Gaza Strip, which is ruled by , a group not known to possess drones. That left Hezbollah as the most likely culprit and suggested the drone may have flown with the blessing of Iran. Tensions are high between Israel and Iran over Tehran’s suspect nuclear program.(VIDEO:?)“It is an Iranian drone that was launched by Hezbollah,” Israeli lawmaker Miri Regev, a former chief spokeswoman for the Israeli military, wrote on her Twitter feed. “Hezbollah and Iran continue to try to collect information in every possible way in order to harm Israel.”She did not offer any further evidence and was not immediately available for comment.Hezbollah officials would not comment on speculation that the group had launched the drone.The Israeli dailies Yediot Ahronot and Maariv published maps based on military “estimates” that claimed to show the route taken by the drone.The maps said the aircraft took off south of the Lebanese coastal city of Sidon, headed south and then turned east over the Gaza Strip and into Israel. Yediot also claimed the drone was made in Iran.The Israeli military said it began tracking the aircraft over the Mediterranean but waited until it was over an empty, desert area to bring it down in order to avoid casualties on the ground.Sunday’s Israeli air raids, buzzing over pro-Hezbollah villages in southern Lebanon, appeared to be aimed at reminding the guerrilla group of Israel’s air superiority.At times of heightened tensions, the Israeli air force often carries out mock raids over Lebanese territory. Israel has U.S.-made F-15 and F-16 warplanes, but it was not clear exactly what type of planes were flown Sunday.Lebanon’s national news agency said the planes flew low over the market town of Nabatiyeh and nearby villages.(PHOTOS:?)With a formidable arsenal that rivals that of the Lebanese army, Hezbollah is already under pressure in Lebanon from rivals who accuse it of putting Lebanon at risk of getting sucked into regional turmoil. Confirmation that Hezbollah was behind the drone would put the group under further strain internally.Hezbollah, a powerful Shiite group committed to Israel’s destruction, has long served as an Iranian proxy along Israel’s northern border. The two sides fought a brutal, monthlong war in mid-2006. Hundreds of people were killed, and Hezbollah fired several thousand rockets and missiles into Israel before the conflict ended in a stalemate.Hezbollah has attempted to send unmanned aerial vehicles into Israel on several occasions dating back to 2004. Its leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, has claimed that the group’s pilotless aircraft were capable of carrying explosives and striking deep into Israel. The last known attempt by Hezbollah to use a drone took place during the 2006 war, when Israel shot down an Iranian-made pilotless aircraft that entered Israeli airspace.Since the fighting ended, the sides have been locked in a covert battle against one another.“The war between Hezbollah and Israel was not extinguished at any moment, be it in the media or at the intelligence level,” said Ibrahim Bayram, an expert on Shiite affairs who often writes about Hezbollah for Lebanon’s An-Nahar newspaper.“Israel is always trying to breach Hezbollah’s security and in return Hezbollah is also working day and night to breach Israel’s security,” he added.Hezbollah has accused Israel of assassinating a top Hezbollah operative in 2008 in Syria. The group and Lebanese officials say they have broken up several Israeli spy rings inside Lebanon over the past few years.Israel, meanwhile, believes Hezbollah, with Iranian backing, is behind a string of attempted attacks on Israeli diplomatic targets in India, Thailand and the former Soviet republic of Georgia, plus a deadly bombing earlier this year that killed five Israeli tourists in a Bulgarian resort. Last week, Israel announced the arrest of an Arab citizen it accused of spying for Hezbollah, the latest in a string of such cases.Many speculated that the aircraft was trying to gather intelligence on Israel’s secretive nuclear reactor in the southern desert town of Dimona. Foreign experts believe the facility houses an arsenal of nuclear weapons, a claim that Israel neither confirms nor denies.(MORE: )“It’s quite a long distance, indicating a high level of sophistication,” said Shlomo Brom, a retired Israeli general who is now an analyst at the Institute for National Security Studies, an Israeli think tank.The drone flight also came against the broader backdrop of rising tensions between Israel and Iran.Israel accuses Iran of trying to develop nuclear weapons, which it believes would threaten its existence, given the repeated calls by Iranian leaders for the destruction of Israel. Iran insists its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes only.Israeli leaders have repeatedly held out the possibility of attacking Iranian nuclear facilities if they conclude that international sanctions and diplomacy have failed to curb the Iranian program.Iran, in turn, has threatened to retaliate if it is attacked, raising the possibility of Hezbollah unleashing more rockets and missiles into Israel. Hezbollah has not said how it will react to an Israeli attack on its benefactor.Iran recently claimed it now has drones capable of carrying missiles as far as 2,000 kilometers, or 1,250 miles, putting much of the Middle East, including Israel, within distance. The aircraft appeared to be similar to the American RQ-170 Sentinel, one of which went down in Iranian territory last year. Iran said it was building a copy of the RQ-170 in April.Iran frequently makes announcements about its strides in military technology, but it is virtually impossible to independently determine the capabilities of its weapons.Yiftah Shapir, another analyst at the INSS, said Saturday’s incident may have been meant as a warning to Israel.“The drone could be a message that they have the capability to pull this off, and do so perhaps with weapons,” he said.He said Israel likely allowed the drone to fly so far into its airspace, instead of shooting it over the sea, in order to analyze its capabilities before taking it down.By?JOSEF FEDERMAN and?ZEINA KARAM?(JERUSALEM) ? Israeli jets scrambled to intercept a drone that crossed into Israeli airspace Saturday from the Mediterranean Sea, bringing it down without incident in the south of the country, a military spokeswoman said.Lt. Col. Avital Leibovich said Israeli systems on the ground alerted the air force to the drone Saturday morning. She said it flew over the Gaza Strip but did not originate from the Palestinian territory. She said Israel didn’t know the drone’s starting point and an investigation was under way. Nobody was hurt in the incident.Leibovich did not give more details, but Israel media reported that it might have been an intelligence gathering drone and was not carrying explosives.(VIDEO:?)Leibovich said the operation was successful and the military was in control throughout.“We had monitoring contact from the ground and from the air. We alerted jet planes that escorted the unmanned aerial vehicle and due to some operational considerations we decided to intercept the unmanned aerial vehicle in the northern Negev area, which has no population, Leibovich said.It’s not the first time that Israel has shot down drones entering its airspace. The Iran-backed Lebanese militia Hezbollah has launched several into Israel over the past few years.In the 2006 war, Hezbollah launched an Iranian-made drone capable of carrying explosives into Israel that was shot down. Another one launched two years earlier crashed in the Mediterranean.(PHOTOS:?)Israel and Iran are bitter enemies and tensions are high over Tehran’s nuclear program, which the West believes is intended for atomic weapons. Tehran insists its atomic program is for peaceful purposes only.Israel has hinted that military action should be taken to prevent Iran from getting nuclear bombs.Leibovich would not elaborate how the unmanned vehicle was brought down. She said troops were searching for debris from the drone.Defense Minister Ehud Barak congratulated the military.“We view this incident of attempting to enter Israeli airspace very severely and we will consider our response later,” he said in a statement.By IAN DEITCH?Has anything really changed in the labor market? That’s the question I’ve been asking myself since last Friday’s jobs figures, the most positive in three and a half years, came out. Unemployment is finally below 8%, and there was pick up in surprising areas, like public sector employment. No, that had nothing to do with the Obama administration manipulating BLS data, as . The improvements were at the state and local level, rather than the federal, in areas like education and healthcare, and they probably had a lot more to do with seasonal adjustments than anything else, at least according to the smart folks in JP Morgan’s economic research division. What’s more, if the President actually had the ability to tweak the figures, he probably would have focused on manufacturing, an area that was still shedding jobs thanks to the slowdown of Europe and many emerging markets, which is hitting U.S. exporters.It’s that last bit that worries me. The Obama administration and everyone has been counting on the nascent manufacturing resurgence in the U.S. to create some of those better paying middle class jobs that we’ve lost so many of over the last few decades. And indeed, the forces that have been fueling the manufacturing resurgence in this country aren’t gone ? energy prices are high and may get higher if Iran tries any funny business in the Straight of Hormuz. Higher energy means more risk and higher shipping costs, which makes companies more inclined to source parts and jobs closer to home. What’s more, American workers are getting cheaper ? the Boston Consulting Group estimates that by 2016, the labor/productivity gap between the U.S. and China will have narrowed to just 7 cents an hour. Yes, we’re getting more globally competitive. But that’s partly because a lot of us are not making any more money than we did in 1968.(MORE: )That’s the thing about today’s labor market that’s perhaps most troubling: Income growth is still basically flat. More people have jobs, but almost nobody outside of the very top tier is getting a raise. Paul Ashworth at Capital Economics told me recently that he believes that unemployment would have to get below 7% for there to be any real increase in wages in this country. Many others agree with him. That’s a problem when the bulk of your economy is still based on consumer spending: No raise, no real spending bump.So, what’s to be done? That is becoming a very interesting question, economically and politically. Classical economics would have us believe that the market simply sets the wages we all deserve. Supply, demand, and the relative productivity of each worker get thrown into a pot, and the most productive, in-demand people get paid more. But as the last week, that’s not the only way to think about wages. In the complicated world of modern work, where a lot gets done in large teams across many divisions and time zones, it’s very, very difficult to determine exactly who should be getting credit for what. Contacts, connections, and lobbying power (both at the personal and industry level) have a lot to do with how much people get paid, too.(MORE: )If you buy the idea that the market isn’t actually quite as fair as we’ve always thought, that opens up a whole host of possibilities, like government intervention in wage setting — and I’m talking about more than just raising the minimum wage. Sure, it’s still possible to work up a lot of Americans by crying “redistribution,” as the Romney camp, desperate to deflect attention from Mitt’s 47% gaffe, tried to do a couple of weeks ago by releasing an old video of Barack Obama arguing for just that.But those cries don’t have the power that they would have even a few years ago, before the Great Recession made it clear just how bifurcated our labor markets have become. And I suspect we may be headed towards an era in which there’s at least some government push-back against laissez faire labor markets. Peter Atwater, the head of the?market research firm?Financial Insights and a behavioral economist whose work I very much admire, recently told me he thinks we may in the next few years see the U.S. government start to charge multinational firms for laying off American workers. After all, why should the state have to pick up all the downside of globalization (in the form of more benefit payouts) while companies get to keep a record share of the upside, in the form of the largest profit margins in history? It could be just a hop, step, and jump to more government intervention in wages, particularly if the current system doesn’t evolve in such a way that the proceeds of the pie are shared more fairly. I’m talking to you, Jack Welch.MORE: ?It’s been a wild few months for Community, the cult NBC comedy about a ragtag bunch of community-college students. First, show runner Dan Harmon was fired. then Chevy Chase said doing the show was “a big mistake.” Now, in advance of the fourth season premiere (Oct. 19 at 8:30 p.m. E.T.), star Joel McHale breaks it all down with TIME.TIME: This is the first season of Community without Dan? Joel McHale: It is. Unless he’s there secretly.Hiding under a couch? Monitoring from afar? You never know.So what’s changed? Boy, let’s see. Well, we don’t have to wear the uniforms anymore. And the lobster buffets are gone, because it’s the only meat he’s not allergic to. Very convenient, a weird allergy.Oh, yeah?All right, I’m just making stuff up. Really, not much has changed. A lot of writers stayed, so they know the spirit and tone of the show. And it’s our fourth year, so we have a good sense of our characters. The main difference is he’s not physically there.I only ask because after he got fired, you and your castmates were pretty vocal about what a comic genius he is, and how he’s such an integral part of the show. Are you worried it’ll suffer creatively?What is so genius about Dan is that these characters are incredibly well-drawn. They’re very much based in real people, but the world is fantastical a lot of the time. I always end up comparing it to something like Shaun of the Dead. In that Simon, what’s his name, the lead in that movie?what’s his name?Hang on, I can Google it.No, now I’m pissed. I can’t believe myself. Simon Pegg! You know, he’s crying real tears in that bar when his girlfriend’s dumping him. But around him is a zombie world. That’s like Community. So in that sense, I think people were worried the show would become normal or something, or subdued. I don’t know if you’ve seen the photos of my character and The Dean [Jim Rash] in a dress, doing the tango, with two men dressed as unicorns behind us…That’s actually my desktop background. Well, as far as the story and the fantasticalism?wow, don’t print that, find out what the word for that is?it’s all still there. if we lost our uniqueness, we’d lose the show.(MORE:?)So your co-star Chevy Chase has been sharing a lot of opinions recently…No! What?He called sitcoms like Community “the lowest form of television.” What’s the deal? I will tease Chevy about that stuff, and then he always goes, Oh, I was just joking! and then I’ll say, a) Hilarious, hilarious! and b) You should soak your dentures. It’s like, Chevy, why are you here? This is not a tour of duty. You are not going to be sued. And then he’s like, well you know, I like it here, I do. And I’m like, alright, well then stop saying stuff. Or, I guess, say whatever you want, but I’m gonna make fun. It gives the whole cast fodder to make fun of him.That seems fair.I would love to do a group interview with us doing Chevy and Chevy doing us. And we’re all just like [alters voice to mock Chase], Raaaaahh, I’m just here for the money! I love it! I love the money!Sounds like you guys have a fun dynamic on set.Yeah, if we’re putting in that many hours, I can’t imagine what it would be like to be on a set where people hate each other. We get along really well. I mean, other than when Chevy’s raving about how he just wants the money.Let’s talk about your other job, hosting E!’s TV clip round-up The Soup. Do you actually watch any of the shows you mock?Uh, no. I mean, yes, but no, I can’t watch them all. In our first season it was me and four other guys and a gal and we watched all of television. And it got downright depressing. I remember getting to the end of watching six hours of television and then I had two more hours of Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, and I was just like, I’m gonna kill myself. But thankfully, they have hired more and more people, so I can choose the shows I like to watch.Which ones do you choose?Honey Boo Boo. I know everyone’s saying it’s the end of everything, but I don’t think it’s as bad as Jersey Shore. It’s definitely not as scripted. I also like The Ultimate Fighter. In a singing competition, contestants get criticized for being off-key. In this one, if you mess up, your face is bashed in. So that is an honest show.Which show gives you guys the most fodder?I cannot stand stuff like Bad Girls Club, where people are put together and plied with alcohol so they fight. Or Big Brother, where it’s just conspiring and whispering, conspiring and whispering. I truly believe that’s like a glimpse of hell. But one show that’s giving us a lot of clips right now is the flameless candle show on HSN.The flameless candle show?It’s on Home Shopping Network out of Tampa. They do an hour of this thing on the flameless candle, which is just a light shaped like a candle. But they will spend the whole time telling you why they’re better than regular candles, and how classy they are. We love it.(MORE:?)Anything else you can share about the new season of Community?We have our Halloween special, where we go to?I don’t know if I can say this, but I’m gonna say it?Pierce’s mansion.? And it is haunted, basically. Something has happened. Also, Chang is back. But it is not what you would expect.Dun dun dun.Dun dun dun! He’s a Komodo dragon. He’s turned into a dragom. Into a huge lizard! No, really, it’s great to be back with the cast. We only have 13 episodes this season, so we have to swing for the fences and make them as good as we can.Well, good luck. And thanks for the interview!Sure. And please, when you write this?every single critic writes, “the ratings-challenged Community.” And I always go, well, yes we were, but we beat American Idol in the demo when we came back after our forced hiatus [in March].You did?No one remembers that! And we were the number one comedy on NBC for that month. So whenever I hear that, I’m like, addendum to your claim! Or at least many critics. Not Time magazine critics. You know, you write for something reputable.Consider it noted.Thanks!VIDEO: ?Even ‘s mother thought he was sick. After the first televised presidential debate in American history on Monday, Sept. 26, 1960 ? a contest in which a legendarily tanned and cool appeared to best a legendarily wan and perspiring Richard M. Nixon ? many observers called it even on points. Stylistically, however, Nixon lost so badly that Hannah Nixon reached out to her son.“It is a devastating commentary on the nature of television as a political medium that what hurt me the most in the first debate was not the substance of the encounter between Kennedy and me, but the disadvantageous contrast in our physical appearances,” Nixon wrote in his 1978 memoir. “After the program ended, callers, including my mother, wanted to know if anything was wrong, because I did not look well.”(PHOTOS: )In roughly the same way, even President Obama’s closest allies were left wondering what had happened to their man last week in , and worrying about what he’ll do to recover through the rest of October. At least Nixon had the comfort of having fought Kennedy fairly even on the substance ? a comfort that Obama does not have as the President prepares for his second and third rounds with a victorious Mitt Romney.In political lore, the Kennedy-Nixon showdown decided the race for JFK. A closer look at the history of the fall of 1960 suggests to me, however, that the central lesson of the whole story of the Kennedy-Nixon debates is that such evenings tend to affirm, not transform, the trajectory of a presidential campaign. Which means the campaign is still Obama’s to lose.This is in no way to take anything away from Romney’s brilliant performance. But I have long believed that the Republican ticket is running closer to the Democratic one than polls show. The effect of the Romney victory in Denver was to make his strengths as a candidate clearer to a greater number of people, and I continue to think that this election will be close to the very end.(MORE: )So any Republicans who believe that their man just pulled a JFK and will now march to the White House should pause, if briefly, to consider the details of the fall of 1960. Before the first debate, Kennedy led Nixon 51% to 49% in the Gallup survey. Three debates followed. In the second, Nixon, in the words of the New York Times that he quoted in his memoirs, “clearly made a comeback, came out ahead.” By the end of the series, Nixon believed that the debates “had little significant effect on the outcome of the election,” and indeed the final popular vote percentage, 49.7% to 49.6%, was not much changed from where the numbers had been before the two faced off.This shouldn’t be read as a dismissal or a minimization of Romney’s resurgence. Quite the opposite: if I’m right that this race has been evenly divided despite the preponderance of the polls after the two conventions, then the Denver performance may come to be seen as the first public manifestation of a stronger-than-expected Republican challenge to the President. If Obama wins re-election, then the polls were more accurate than my private opinion. As in 1960, we are a divided country whose presidency is being sought by two ferociously competitive men ? and that ferocious competition will, I think, grow only more so.MORE: ?’Tis debate season, a time for cross-examination, tie-color analysis and ? in the case of and Bill O’Reilly ? lengthy discussion about how height affects a man’s ability to win arguments. The frenemy media personalities took to podiums Saturday night for the so-called Rumble in the Air-Conditioned Auditorium, a live-streamed, 90-minute debate in , D.C. The Daily Show host and the Fox News pundit had promised to engage in a substantive discussion about the state of the union, and they certainly did ? in front of an enormous sign that read, “Yum, this banner tastes like freedom.”In the days before Saturday’s unscripted showdown, reporters pondered their motives for holding the event, which people could pay $4.95 to watch online. Was it a foofaraw masking self-promotion, an elaborate scheme to get O’Reilly’s new book off the shelves or merely a means to secure free publicity for their shows? Was it being promoted as a night of satirical entertainment but in actuality designed to get people engaged in important civic discussion? Or was the whole thing just for funsies? By the end of the evening, it was clear that the answer to all of these was an emphatic yes.(WATCH: )Tickets for the auditorium at George Washington University, priced between $25 and $100, had quickly sold out. In the days leading up to the Rumble, people listed the hot commodities on resale sites like StubHub for up to $1,395. Those assembled booed the warm-up guy when they were told there could be no heckling. But by the time the moderator, CNN anchor E.D. Hill, started the show, the hall was awash in screams of delight.The central disagreement between O’Reilly and Stewart ? who served as essentially tacit surrogates for and President Obama, respectively ? was made clear in their opening arguments. “About 20% of us are slackers, and it’s a growing industry,” O’Reilly said, echoing Romney’s infamous remark that 47% of Americans won’t take responsibility for their lives. Stewart responded: “My friend Bill O’Reilly is completely full of s—.” Stewart said that this deep divide, between exploited makers and parasitic takers, is a dangerous, reductive fantasy seen through the ideological equivalent of an empty toilet-paper roll. He called people who promote it “denizens of Bulls— Mountain” and said O’Reilly was the mountain’s mayor.(WATCH: )While many of the topics were the same as Romney and Obama’s first presidential bout ??deficit, health care, government spending ??Stewart and O’Reilly’s?debate was more enjoyable, partly because the debaters weren’t busy dodging questions. The conversation was organic. They shouted over each other like a bickering couple, both scoring cheers from the audience as they made the points people had wanted to see the candidates make. “Why is it that if you take advantage of a tax break and you’re a corporation, you’re a smart businessman,” Stewart said when they were arguing about food stamps, “but if you take advantage of something that you need to not be hungry, you’re a moocher?” The crowd roared in catharsis.Their debate was also more enjoyable because it was, of course, hilarious ??and goofy. Stewart, standing a “hobbit-like” 5 ft. 7 in.,?looked strikingly short when he shook hands with O’Reilly, described as “yeti”-esque at 6 ft. 4 in. But that disadvantage was not to last: producers installed a mechanical platform behind Stewart’s podium that he could raise and lower like an elevator. “I can see why Obama did badly in the debate,” he said after going up. “The altitude really is rough up here.” During a sit-down portion, the two were asked about why they were able to come together when Congress couldn’t; Stewart moved to sit in O’Reilly’s giant lap. “And what would you like for Christmas, little boy?” the yeti said, to great guffaws. And when O’Reilly made the requisite Clint Eastwood joke, Stewart got up again and did an empty chair bit. “What?” Stewart said. “Tell them to do what?” It was good television, even if it technically wasn’t on TV.(LIST:?)If the debate were scored on points well made, Stewart would have taken home the gold. He used a larger range ? from dropping F-bombs to waxing poetic about the greatness of the U.S. ? to outfox O’Reilly’s classic news-show style. But from a p.r. perspective, O’Reilly was the real winner. His willingness to engage and be ridiculous with Stewart serves as proof that the employees at Fox News aren’t all humorless conservative zombies, as Stewart and other liberals often paint them. He also likely reached many more new audience members. (The Daily Show host, unofficially, had top billing.) Half the proceeds are going to charities, which makes for more winners. And in a press conference after the showdown, Stewart cheekily said there was another: “America.”During the Q&A with reporters, Stewart resisted attempts to analyze the meaning and influence of the event. As after another D.C. venture, the Rally to Restore Sanity, he became almost humorlessly adamant that what they did was really just for entertainment. But the example they set by talking to someone they disagree with is a valuable one in these uberdivided times, even if they joked that nothing was accomplished. When Hill asked them, at the end of the debate, what the two had learned, O’Reilly quipped, “Now I know I’m right.” Stewart returned to the trope that he opened with. “I have learned that Bulls— Mountain is tall,” he said, “and it’s deep.”PHOTOS:?PHOTOS:??Remember when the culture war was about obscenity in rap music, protecting the flag from match-wielding protesters, and spanking in schools? Not all so-called cultural issues have faded away ? gay marriage and abortion are still quite divisive ? but after the 2008 financial collapse and the rise of the libertarian-influenced Tea Party, both armies in the American culture war shifted their crack brigades over to the so-called economic issues of taxes and entitlement spending. The front line in this new culture war is fairness. Both sides claim to own the territory, because they draw the map of American morality differently.The two major gaffes of the campaign were failed attempts to rally the troops with arguments about outrageous unfairness of the other side. President Obama’s “you didn’t build that” speech in Roanoke, Va., last July and about the 47% of Americans who pay no income taxes are political Freudian slips ? careless words that resonate because they seem to reveal deeper motives and values. The kinder, gentler Romney that we all saw in the first presidential debate has finally disavowed the “47%” comments, but people disavow Freudian slips all the time.(VIDEO:?)So let’s take a closer look at the two speeches. They begin in uncannily similar ways. Both men start off by describing their grandfathers, whose hard work, persistence and devotion to family gave their children a shot at a better life. Both men then describe their wives’ fathers or grandfathers, who worked in blue-collar jobs but sent their children to college. So guess which man said, “At the heart of this country, its central idea is the idea that in this country, if you’re willing to work hard, if you’re willing to take responsibility, you can make it if you try.”The answer happens to be Obama, but it could just as well have been Romney. Both men establish their credibility by showing that their own family embodies the American Dream. Both men extol the same virtues of hard work, self-sacrifice and devoted parenting. The only difference is that for Obama, the government was a crucial partner at every step, giving his grandfather the GI bill to pay for college and an FHA (Federal Housing Administration) loan to buy a house, and giving his mother a variety of grants and scholarships to pay for her education. For Obama, the government offers a helping hand, making the American Dream accessible to anyone willing to work for it. For Romney, a good government hangs back and lets people succeed or fail on their own merits.(MORE: )But as in most grand political narratives, a villain comes along to ruin everything. For Romney, America’s vitality was sapped by the social programs Obama had extolled. By shoveling money and new rights around indiscriminately, the Democrats created an entitlement society, where 47% of the people “are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe that government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it.” If you accept Romney’s , the good old days ended with Lyndon Johnson’s great society programs. America’s urgent priority is therefore to undo those programs, roll back the welfare state and restore the vigorous virtues of hard work and self-reliance.Arguing in a parallel way, it was the Republicans who shattered the American Dream: “Now, the reason that I think so many of us came together in 2008 was because we saw that for a decade that dream was fraying, that it was slipping away; that there were too many people who were working hard but not seeing their incomes or wages go up; that we had taken a surplus and turned it into a deficit … There was a sense that those who were in charge didn’t feel responsible.” If you accept Obama’s history, the good old days ended when George W. Bush tilted tax and regulatory policies to favor businesses and the wealthy. America’s urgent priority is therefore to undo the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, roll back the rising inequality and expand federal programs that might help people succeed.(MORE: )Both candidates are essentially saying: “Vote for me because the other side destroyed a fair America, in which hard work paid off. Vote for me because I’ll restore fairness and the American Dream.”?But if we dig a little deeper into what the two sides mean by fairness, the similarities melt away.I’m a social psychologist. I study the moral foundations of politics. With my colleagues at , we’ve collected data from 300,000 people who participated in dozens of studies and experiments, and their responses tell a consistent story. There are three major kinds of fairness, and we find that liberals and conservatives value them to different degrees.(MORE: )1. When Fairness Means Proportionality The most general form of fairness is proportionality, which means that people are getting benefits in proportion to their contributions. Nobody is cheating or getting cheated. If you’ve ever shared a kitchen with roommates, you know how sensitive we all are about who’s doing their fair share, and who’s the slacker who uses the kitchen a lot but doesn’t do proportionally more cleaning and shopping. Everyone ? right, left and center ? values proportionality, but conservatives value it more.You can see that in the accompanying graph, which shows responses from 5,200 American visitors to YourMorals.org. The red line shows how strongly people agreed with the statement “Employees who work the hardest should be paid the most.” If you look at the left edge of the graph, you see that people who described themselves as “very liberal” when they registered at the site slightly agreed with that statement. But as you move to the right ? as people get more conservative ? they agree with it more strongly. The line slopes upward.?() — The author of the book of Vatican secrets that earned the pope’s former butler an 18-month sentence for stealing private papal correspondence has set out to explain his source’s motives and appeal for clemency.Several European newspapers published an op-ed piece by Gianluigi Nuzzi on Monday in which the Italian journalist defended the actions of Paolo Gabriele and sought to put them in a context he said hadn’t been fully explained during Gabriele’s trial. Nuzzi provided an advance copy to The Associated Press.(MORE: )A Vatican tribunal on Saturday convicted Gabriele of aggravated theft for stealing the pope’s private correspondence and passing it onto Nuzzi in the gravest Vatican security breach in recent times. Gabriele was sentenced to an 18-month term, which he is serving under house arrest in his Vatican City apartment awaiting an expected papal pardon.Gabriele confessed to photocopying some of the pope’s private letters and giving them to Nuzzi, saying he wanted to shed light on the “evil and corruption” he saw around him in the Vatican that he believed was being kept from the pope.Nuzzi said he wanted to further explain Gabriele’s motives, which he said he ascertained over the course of several encounters that formed the basis of the book “His Holiness: ‘s Secret Papers,” which was published in May.Gabriele, he said, was at the receiving end of disgruntled Vatican cardinals, bishops and managers who came to him “day after day” with their secrets and concerns “hoping he would bring them to the pope.”The 85-year-old Benedict, Nuzzi wrote, had called for greater transparency in the church and yet was himself the victim of apparent efforts to keep him in the dark.“Surely enjoying a privileged point of view — for six years he was one of the people closest to the Holy Father in the pontifical apartment — Gabriele strongly doubted that Benedict XVI was always aware or received truthful information,” Nuzzi wrote.“He spoke to me about this profound perplexity, his discomfort as evidenced by a filial love for the pope, a veneration for his simplicity, recounting stories of a man in the middle of the wolves.”Many of the issues Gabriele brought to light haven’t yet been explained, “but certainly they explain the frustration of a man who, when confronting these intrigues, perceived the fragility of his pastor in a battle between good and evil,” Nuzzi wrote.Gabriele didn’t elaborate much on the stand during the weeklong trial, saying only at one point that when he would sit down to lunch with the pope, he would realize that Benedict wasn’t being kept informed of certain issues based on the questions he was asking.The three-judge Vatican tribunal reduced Gabriele’s three-year sentence in half, in part because he admitted he had betrayed the pope and thought “albeit erroneously” that he was doing the right thing.The Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, has said a papal pardon is “likely” although there’s no knowing when it might come.Nuzzi appealed for a pardon, noting that Gabriele’s leaks didn’t reveal state or military secrets but merely shed light on events that were damaging the church.Nuzzi was neither charged in the case nor called to testify. The Vatican didn’t investigate him for receiving stolen goods because the handoff of documents occurred on Italian soil, out of the Vatican’s jurisdiction.By NICOLE WINFIELD?Lena Dunham attends the Rachel Antonoff presentation during Spring 2013 Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week at Drive In Studios on Sept. 8, 2012 in New York City. Dunham is rumored to be dating Antonoff's brother, Jack, the guitarist of band Fun.?After she caught flak for sporting yet another “pantless” look to a recent culinary event in Culver City, Calif., Lena Dunham told critics to “get used it,” joking that she planned to live until 105 and would flash her thighs regularly until she died. The Girls?creator, star and executive producer made the remarks during a panel discussion at this year’s New Yorker Festival, which ran from Oct. 5 to 7 in New York City. For the record, Dunham says she wasn’t pantless but had worn short shorts under the teal top. And she intimated that it wasn’t the outfit itself ? but rather her figure ? that seemed to really get critics heated. “I don’t think a girl with tiny thighs would have gotten that response,” she said.Dunham, who sans pants on the set of Girls earlier this year, admits that television isn’t always good about portraying fuller-figured women in the flesh. But she hasn’t had qualms about getting nude on film and even said that her readiness and willingness to get naked could be used as a crutch. Dunham joked that while filming, she sometimes thinks: “This scene is not what it’s supposed to be, so I’m gonna take off my pants!”?(TRIPOLI, Libya) ? Libya’s parliament on Sunday ousted the country’s newly elected prime minister in a no-confidence vote, the latest blow to hopes that the country’s factions could agree on a government charged with restoring stability after last year’s civil war.Mustafa Abushagur was Libya’s first elected prime minister after last year’s overthrow of dictator Moammar Gadhafi. He represented an offshoot of the country’s oldest anti-Gadhafi opposition movement, and was considered a compromise candidate acceptable to both liberals and Islamists.But his proposed Cabinet was struck down by a legislature representing dozens of divided tribes, towns, and regions across the country, many of whom feel they are owed the spoils of victory over Gadhafi. He was forced to withdraw his first ministerial line-up under pressure and his second attempt to submit one resulted in his ouster.In a short statement on Libya al-Wataniya TV after the vote, Abushagur said he respected the decision made by the General National Congress as part of Libya’s democracy but warned of instability if it takes too long to elect his replacement.(MORE:?)“There should be quickness in the election of the prime minister and formation of the government so the country does not slip into a vacuum,” he said.He had 25 days from his Sep. 12 appointment by parliament to form a Cabinet and win the legislature’s approval, but that deadline expired on Sunday. The Congress voted 125 to 44 in favor of removing him as prime minister, with 17 abstaining from voting. He had just put forth 10 names for key ministerial posts Sunday when the no-confidence vote was held.Until a replacement can be elected by the parliament, management of Libya’s government is in the hands of the legislature.The Congress will have to vote on a new prime minister in the coming weeks. The incoming leader will be responsible for rebuilding Libya’s army and police force and removing major pockets of support for the former regime.On Sunday, around 1,000 people protested in the capital Tripoli outside the congressional headquarters to demand that militias operating alongside the army end a partial siege of the town of Bani Walid, considered a major stronghold of former regime loyalists. They called for a peaceful solution to the standoff that has already sent families fleeing from the town in anticipation of a strike.Perhaps the single greatest challenge facing any new Libyan leader is the proliferation of ex-rebel militias. One radical Islamist militia has been linked to the attack last month on the U.S. Consulate in the eastern city of Benghazi that killed the American ambassador and three others.There has been a widespread popular backlash against militias since that attack, and the Libyan government has taken advantage of it to try to put some armed groups under the authority of military officers. But some militias have resisted any attempt to fully control them or disarm them.Any prime minister who wants to impose his authority on the militias will need broad national support for his government ? but such support is hard to get.Some parliamentarians argued that Abushagur’s Cabinet list was not diverse enough and involved too many unknown individuals for key posts. His first proposed Cabinet makeup was also criticized for including too many names from the previous interim government, which was seen by some Libyans as weak and corrupt.After 40 years of Gadhafi’s divide-and-rule tactics and the 2011 war, Libya’s towns, tribes and regions are highly polarized. Many feel entitled to high government positions because of their losses in the war against Gadhafi, and are wary of any power wielded by their rivals.In an indication of the charged atmosphere, Abushagur withdrew the initial line-up for government after the parliamentary chamber was stormed on Thursday by protesters from the city of Zawiya ? one of several cities that took the brunt of Gadhafi’s attacks during the war ? demanding representation. Lawmakers left the General National Congress floor, saying they would not vote under pressure.Before the vote of no-confidence, Abushagur said he was aiming to create a government of national unity that did not appoint ministers according to “quotas.”“The government I proposed is not perfect and was marred by some mistakes, so I changed it for the purpose of national unity,” he said.Independent lawmaker Nizar Kawan, who is aligned with the Muslim Brotherhood in Libya, said the group’s party and a liberal coalition led by former rebel prime minister Mahmoud Jibril had been holding talks about replacing Abushagur with an independent figure who has no political background. The candidate would then be tasked with forming a government that is run by well-known professionals and is politically balanced and geographically representative.Abushagur had taught engineering at the University of Alabama for about 17 years before leaving in 2002. He was active in the opposition abroad against Gadhafi prior to last year’s uprising.According to Libya’s transition plan, after the formation of a government a new constitution is to be written and voted upon in a national referendum.PHOTOS:?? Viraj Puri climbs three floors of a gritty industrial building in Brooklyn to the daily grind of his early-stage start-up--negotiating deals with big customers, keeping up with new technology, meeting with investors and making plans to expand. But Puri's 20 employees aren't trying to build the next big social-media or clean-energy company. Instead, on a rooftop in the Greenpoint neighborhood, they run a small urban farm, Gotham Greens, a sleek and sunny oasis of leafy lettuces and herbs. At the company's 15,000-sq.-ft. hydroponic greenhouse Gotham Greens grows plants in mineral-infused water instead of dirt, using software that closely controls temperature, irrigation...? A year ago, he came home a hero. But that was a year ago. Then, Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian National Authority President, stood at the green marble rostrum of the U.N. General Assembly and asked for something he knew he could not get--full membership in the U.N. for a country, Palestine, that did not yet exist--and the room went wild. A year later, on Sept. 27, Abbas stood in the same place and asked for something he can quite easily get--not full membership but a status packing similar legal power. Yet in downtown Ramallah, the West Bank city where trucks mounted...?Boredom made him do it. At least that’s apparently what started the argument that resulted in a Nebraska man being jailed for five days for allegedly attacking his wife with a sandwich.(MORE: )According to the arrest affidavit, Larry Spurling, 50, of Melbeta, Neb., was angry at his wife for “making him live in the county” and “being bored since there is no place for him to walk,” according to the local ABC affiliate .The woman grew tired of the argument and retired to her bedroom with a sandwich. According to KETV, Spurling ? who was reportedly intoxicated on a malt liquor product called Natty Daddy ? followed her into the bedroom, pulled her hair, pushed her down on the bed and crammed the sandwich in her face. She called 911 to report the assault.The didn’t detail the ingredients of the sandwich, but a sheriff’s deputy found lunch meat and crumbs scattered around the crime scene ? although the woman had washed the rest of the evidence off of her face. Spurling was found by deputies lying face down on grass about 10 feet from the home. He pleaded no contest to a charge of disturbing the peace, a misdemeanor, and was sentenced to five days in jail for the crime.MORE: ?3:10 pm ETMy Take with Andrea Mitchell on her eponymous MSNBC program on Mitt’s calibration:ANDREA MITCHELL: This move to the center, there’s no complaint from conservatives. Is it that they are so eager to defeat President Obama that they, right now, say, anything that works is okay with them?MARK HALPERIN: Well, Romney has had, as you know, a troubled relationship with certain elements of the right. Even after he picked Paul Ryan, there was a brief honeymoon period there, people held their tongue for a while but then the criticism started again. I think, certainly, the conventional wisdom amongst the chattering class now is the debate performance will quiet critics on the right and he can get away with saying things, moving more to the center. I think two things about that. One, I think it’s being overstated how much he’s actually changing positions or even rhetoric from some of the things he’s previously said, for good or for ill. But, I just don’t see the cosmic switch to the center as much as some others do. And the other thing is, I think, if he has a bad debate in two weeks, I’m not sure the right will be silenced all the way through election day. He’s got a tentative hold there, just as he does on the “new Romney” meme that is helping him right now.…MARK HALPERIN: I agree there’s some tonal shift. I’m saying the issue positons I don’t think are changed as starkly. And keep in mind, what did he do yesterday besides a rally in Virginia? He went to a CPAC meeting in Colorado, got the NRA endorsement, which they rolled out, and did an interview with Sean Hannity on Fox. So, if there’s a pivot to the center, it’s not unidirectional.?9:13 am ETMe, on “Morning Joe,” on the political impact of the September jobs data:MIKA BRZEZINSKI: This number, 7.8, good or bad for the President?MARK HALPERIN: It’s great for the President. And if you go just based on Twitter, right now, and the people I follow who are conservative, they’re about to make a huge mistake. They’re going to say BLS numbers are horrible. Some people are already saying the numbers are made up to help the President politically. They have to find a way to talk about the economy and why Governor Romney would be better, not to try to? It’s exactly what they did with the polls for the last two months, to attack the methodology. These numbers are good. They not only are good symbolically. They represent the economy moving in a better direction.MIKA BRZEZINSKI: Does it turn the page from a dismal debate performance?MARK HALPERIN: I think it depends fully on how the two sides handle it today. It certainly is good news for the President and it’s good news for the country.Watch the video above.?2:40 pm ETMy Take on the upcoming town hall format from MSNBC’s “Andrew Mitchell Reports”:ANDREA MITCHELL: What do you anticipate coming up now? Next we’ve got the two vice presidents, the Vice President and his challenger, Paul Ryan there. And how about the town hall format for Barack Obama? The conventional wisdom has been, because everybody has Bill Clinton in their mind, that the Democrat, President Obama, will do better in the town hall at relating, and empathizing, and showing he connects to people. I’m not so sure about this President.MARK HALPERIN: Well, I’m not so sure. Although both of them will be, I think the thing through. I’ll tell you, the strongest Mitt Romney’s been, in my experience, as a presidential candidate, beyond the debate the other night, was the events he did in both cycles ? both the last campaign, 2008, and this one ? his so-called “Ask Mitt Anything” events, where he did take questions from people. He showed humor and the kind of fluidness and personality that he showed in the debate in those events. And I think the people who think this format clearly favors the President, I don’t think are right.? DIED Griffith Edwards, 83, British psychiatrist and addiction specialist who helped pioneer the science of addiction medicine and the treatment of substance abuse. RULED By the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is immune from liability for flood damage from 2005's Hurricane Katrina. OPENED The Barclays Center in Brooklyn, new home of the Brooklyn Nets; its opening week featured shows by hip-hop star (and Nets co-owner) Jay-Z. DIED Henry Champ, 75, Canadian journalist who covered wars and Washington for more than 40 years for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and NBC News. WON The Emmy for...?Students and staff at the University of Texas at Austin have launched protests after four students were allegedly assaulted with bleach-filled balloons while off campus, . Some suspect that the “bleach bomb” incidents, which occurred between June and September, were racially motivated, as all four victims were minority students. The attacks were not reported until the campus police chief started an investigation.“We had heard at UT rumors of incidents that had happened, but no one had ever filed a report,” Cindy Posey, the public information officer for the UT police department, told ABC News. “Our chief of police did his own research, found some things on Facebook, and heard about a couple of people who were hit by balloons.”Four students of color filed reports this week after police approached them about the attacks. Although campus police have not confirmed that the balloons were filled with bleach, Jaysen Runnels, an African American student, said he has been hit twice by the balloons, which were lobbed from high-rise buildings. All four students report that the attacks occurred near West Campus apartments.“It’s very frustrating to know that it’s 2012 and that stuff like this still happens,” Runnels told ABC News affiliate KVUE-TV.(WATCH: )Dozens of people gathered at a campus statue of Martin Luther King, Jr. on Tuesday to address the situation. According to university-based newspaper?The Horn, sophomore Taylor Carr?one of the students who reported a bleach balloon attack?spoke to demonstrators.“It is people of color they are attacking in West Campus,” . “Until we put pressure on the university to [protect] us, these events are going to keep happening.”Police told KVUE that it could prove difficult to confirm that the incidents were hate crimes, but this is not the university’s first experience with allegedly biased behavior. According to The Horn, members of UT’s Greek community recently faced criticism for racially-themed sorority and fraternity parties, including a “Fiesta” themed event during which two attendees wore shirts branded with the words “Illegal” and “Border Patrol.”The Austin Police Department has joined the University of Texas Police Department’s efforts to further investigate.MORE: ? Mormon bishop Robert Nelson of Chevy Chase, Md., isn't exactly sure how to handle the casserole question. You see, his church is run by volunteers, and every member has a calling: teaching Sunday school, managing church finances, organizing food drives, visiting the sick. So when I asked Nelson who would bring the requisite casserole to Ann Romney if she were to get the flu in the White House, he paused and chuckled. "I can imagine wanting to bring the casserole, but then you have to go through security, and at some point you go, The casserole just isn't worth it. Call...?6:00 am ET: “With Biden Up Next to Debate, Obama’s Aides Plot Comeback”: “Congress Members Back Legislation That Could Benefit Themselves, Relatives”: “Bigger Bang Expected From Ryan-Biden Bout”: “Presidential Race Rumbles Into Final Four Weeks”: “A Veep Debate That Could Really Matter”: “Romney Campaign Takes Risk with Focus on Foreign Policy Address”?Asian Slowdown?– The cut its GDP outlook for the East Asia and Pacific region Monday, citing uncertainties and various risk factors in the global and regional economies,??Reuters. The World Bank expects developing economies in East Asia to grow by 7.2% this year and 7.6% in 2013, down from previous forecasts of 7.6% and 8.0%, respectively. Even so, according to Reuters, “the bank said most developing East Asian economies were well positioned to weather troubles in the global economy as they enjoyed current account surpluses or only modest deficits and held high levels of foreign exchange reserves relative to their international payment obligations.”Korean Carmakers?– South Korean automakers posted record sales in last month,? Bloomberg, as sales of Japanese cars declined due to anti-Japan protests over the disputed islands. Korea’s biggest carmaker, Hyundai Motor, and its affiliate Kia Motors sold a total of 127,827 vehicles in the world’s largest auto market in September, which represents a 109% sales increase from the same period last year. Meanwhile, Japan’s largest automaker Motor reported a 50% drop in sales in China from August to September, according to the Yomiuri newspaper.Aging World?– The United Nations is urging countries to accommodate the world’s rapidly aging population,? VOA News. A new U.N. report indicates that populations are aging in all parts of the world, especially in developing countries. Experts point out that the elderly require more income security, stronger social safety nets, better health and long-term medical care, and social security systems that reflect the needs of older people, wrote?VOA. Venezuelan Impact ? President Hugo?Chavez won the election in Venezuela, his third re-election, but what does this mean for the country’s struggling economy? The BBC at the leader’s economic strategy in wake of Venezuela’s “crumbling infrastructure, overvalued currency and underperforming industry.” The article charges that Chavez’s social programs have benefited many poor Venezuelans more than they had under what he has called “the rotten elites that used to be in charge,” but examines whether a lack of transparency in financial records tied to the country’s oil wealth is sustainable.Afghanistan’s Collapse ? The International Crisis Group has issued a report warning that the NATO troop exit in 2014 could be followed by collapse and a civil war, the BBC .? Though the Afghan government dismissed the claims, ICG warns that Afghanistan could be headed towards “a devastating political crisis after 2014.” The group cites the potential for fraud and vote-rigging in the next election, as well as an unprepared police force and army if adequate preparation for the transition is not taken. The report’s release was released a day after the 11th of the war in Afghanistan.Iran Criticizes IAEA ?? Iran’s tone towards the U.N.’s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has sharpened in recent weeks, which many fear will lead to end of the Islamic republic’s cooperation with the nuclear watchdog, the New York Times . Iran has accused inspectors at the IAEA of spying and sabotage. Last month Iran accused the agency of attacking electrical grids at the country’s two uranium-enrichment plants. The Times reports that officials at the U.N. rejected the allegations and now have been unable to confirm whether the attacks happened at all.? In The Signal and the Noise: Why Most Predictions Fail--But Some Don't, the election-forecasting savant (of the New York Times' FiveThirtyEight blog) looks at how to separate good guesses from bad in an information-saturated world. What's the most common misperception about prediction? People sometimes think that when you make a prediction with a percentage attached to it, it means you're hedging your bets--like I'm 80% confident in it, which is not what it means. If 80% were just a euphemism for "Obama's the big favorite, but I don't want to say it's in the bag yet," then I would have the...?(SEOUL, South Korea) ? A North Korean soldier killed two of his superiors Saturday and defected to South Korea across the countries’ heavily armed border in a rare crossing that prompted South Korean troops to immediately beef up their border patrol, officials said.The soldier shot his platoon and squad leaders before crossing the western side of the Demilitarized Zone at around noon, a Defense Ministry official said, citing the soldier’s statement after he was taken into custody by South Korean border guards.The official, who declined to be named because questioning by authorities was ongoing, had earlier said one of the killed North Korean troops was a company commander but later corrected it, saying the information was mishandled in the first couple of hours of the development.(PHOTOS:?)He said South Korean guards heard six gunshots before the North Korean soldier crossed the border. He also said the soldier used a loudspeaker to let South Korean guards know his intention to defect after the killings. The official said the motive behind the defection was unclear.No unusual military movement was detected from the North Korean side of the border after the crossing, but South Korea immediately instructed its border troops to step up their guard, a South Korean Joint Chiefs of Staff official said. He also declined to be named, citing office rules.There was no immediate comment from communist North Korea’s state-run media.Defections across the land border are rare, though North Koreans occasionally come to the South by boat. Last year, a North Korean civilian defected to the South across the land border. The last defection across the Demilitarized Zone by a North Korean soldier occurred in 2010, officials said. Another soldier and an officer also defected to the South across the border in two separate crossings in 2008.(MORE:?)The vast majority of North Koreans fleeing their homeland travel through China and Southeast Asia before arriving in the South.More than 24,000 North Koreans have arrived in the South since the 1950-53 Korean War ended in a cease-fire, not a peace treaty.The area where Saturday’s defection took place is along the route to a South Korean-financed industrial complex in the North Korean border town of Kaesong, officials said.Border security has been tighter than usual along the border in the past few years as military and political tensions between the rival Koreas soared. In 2010, a South Korean naval ship sank and 46 of its sailors died in an incident blamed on North Korea, though Pyongyang denies involvement. Later that year, North Korea bombarded a South Korean front-line island, killing two marines and two civilians.By?HYUNG-JIN KIMMORE:??(STOCKHOLM) — British researcher John Gurdon and Shinya Yamanaka of Japan won this year’s Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine on Monday for discovering that mature, specialized cells of the body can be reprogrammed into stem cells — a discovery that scientists hope to turn into new treatments.Scientists want to harness that reprogramming to create replacement tissues for treating diseases like Parkinson’s, diabetes and for studying the roots of diseases in the laboratory.The prize committee at Stockholm’s Karolinska Institute said the discovery has “revolutionized our understanding of how cells and organisms develop.”Gurdon showed in 1962 — the year Yamanaka was born — that the DNA from specialized cells of frogs, like skin or intestinal cells, could be used to generate new tadpoles. That showed the DNA still had its ability to drive the formation of all cells of the body.In 1997, the cloning of Dolly the sheep by other scientists showed that the same process Gurdon discovered in frogs would work in mammals.More than 40 years after Gurdon’s discovery, in 2006, Yamanaka showed that a surprisingly simple recipe could turn mature cells back into primitive cells, which in turn could be prodded into different kinds of mature cells.Basically, the primitive cells were the equivalent of embryonic stem cells, which had been embroiled in controversy because to get human embryonic cells, human embryos had to be destroyed. Yamanaka’s method provided a way to get such primitive cells without destroying embryos.“The discoveries of Gurdon and Yamanaka have shown that specialized cells can turn back the developmental clock under certain circumstances,” the committee said. “These discoveries have also provided new tools for scientists around the world and led to remarkable progress in many areas of medicine.”Just last week, Japanese scientists reported using Yamanaka’s approach to turn skin cells from mice into eggs that produced baby mice.Gurdon, 79, has served as a professor of cell biology at Cambridge University’s Magdalene College and is currently at the Gurdon Institute in Cambridge, which he founded. Yamanaka, 50, worked at the Gladstone Institute in San Francisco and Nara Institute of Science and Technology in Japan. He is currently at Kyoto University and also affiliated with the Gladstone Institute. Yamanaka is the first Japanese scientist to win the Nobel medicine award since 1987.Prize committee member Juleen Zierath said Gurdon and Yamanaka’s discoveries, which also earned them a Lasker award for basic research in 2009, could hold “immense potential,” including in developing treatments for Parkinson’s disease and in making cells that produce insulin. However, she added that therapeutic implications are still far away.The idea of reprograming cells has also been put to work in basic research on disease, through an approach sometimes called “disease in a dish.”The reprogramming allows scientists to create particular kinds of tissue they want to study, like lung tissue for studying cystic fibrosis, or brain tissue for Huntington’s disease. By reprogramming cells from patients with a genetic disease, they can create new tissue with the same genetic flaws, and study it in the lab. That can give new insights into the roots of the problem.In addition, that approach allows them to screen drugs in the lab for possible new medicines.Goran Hansson, the secretary of the prize committee, said he had reached both winners before the announcement.“I spoke to both laureates on the phone and they’re equally happy and that they look forward to coming to Stockholm.”The medicine award was the first Nobel Prize to be announced this year. The physics award will be announced Tuesday, followed by chemistry on Wednesday, literature on Thursday and the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday.The economics prize, which was not among the original awards, but was established by the Swedish central bank in 1968, will be announced on Oct. 15. All prizes will be handed out on Dec. 10, the anniversary of prize founder Alfred Nobel’s death in 1896.Last year’s medicine award to Canadian-born Ralph Steinman, American Bruce Beutler and French scientist Jules Hoffmann briefly created some confusion when it was announced that Steinman had died a few days earlier. Posthumous prizes are normally not allowed, but the award was left unchanged since the judges were not aware of Steinman’s death when they selected him as a winner._______By KARL RITTER and LOUISE NORDSTROMAssociated Press writer Malcolm Ritter contributed to this report from New York.MORE: ?() ? A month before Election Day, President ‘s campaign and Democrats posted an impressive fundraising haul, easing the party’s concerns that he would face a significant money disadvantage against his well-financed Republican rival in the crucial closing days. Romney shrugged off a drop in unemployment, an issue at the heart of the race, contending it’s “crystal clear” a crisis endures.Bolstered by the Democratic National Convention, Obama and his party Saturday reported a combined take of $181 million for September, their best fundraising month of the campaign and just short of their record of $190 million in the 2008 campaign, also in September. Romney’s campaign has not released its report for the month yet.It was oddly quiet one month out. Obama took time off for a 20th anniversary celebration with his wife, Michelle, postponed from the day of the first presidential debate last week, while Romney devoted time to preparing for the next debate, Oct. 16 in Hempstead, N.Y., before a Saturday evening rally in Apopka, Fla.(MORE: )But the money machine was grinding relentlessly. Republican running mate Paul Ryan scheduled an evening fundraiser in Milwaukee, Wis., and neither party let up in their appeals for cash for the frantic final weeks ahead. Ryan and Vice President Joe Biden go head-to-head in a debate Thursday in Danville, Ky.“There is exactly one month left to go until Election Day,” Obama campaign manager Jim Messina said in an email pitch. “The stakes are too high for us to take our foot off the gas now.” The president was scheduled to launch a lucrative and celebrity-studded fundraising swing to Los Angeles and San Francisco on Sunday and Monday followed by a campaign rally in battleground Ohio.Republicans and Romney himself have seemed invigorated by his spirited leadoff debate performance against a subdued president, which played out for a huge national TV audience, estimated at more than 67 million, just as voters at-large are tuning in to the campaign.But then came the report Friday showing unemployment fell in September from 8.1 percent to 7.8 percent, marking the first time the rate dipped below 8 percent since the start of Obama’s presidency. Obama seized on the good news, “a reminder that this country has come too far to turn back now,” while Romney had little choice but to play down its significance.(MORE:?)“By any rational measure, it’s crystal clear we’re in the middle of a jobs crisis,” Romney said in a fundraising message to supporters. “My priority is jobs. And from Day One of my presidency, I will lead us out of this crisis.”Defensive after the debate, Democrats contended Romney talked a good game but at the expense of the truth. A new TV ad by the Obama campaign, called “Dishonest,” carries on the post-debate theme that Romney grossly misrepresented his own positions as well as Obama’s on taxes. Online videos were posted by the campaign with the mantra, “Romney won’t tell the truth,” about Medicare, energy, taxes and more.The latest fundraising report showed Obama and the Democratic National Committee improving on their take of about $114 million in August, when Obama gained a narrow edge in the money race after trailing Romney and Republicans for three straight months.The Romney campaign has refused to release its September fundraising numbers, which are due Oct. 20, or say if they will make them available early as has become custom.Aides have suggested that fundraising suffered in the final weeks of the month as polls found Romney falling behind Obama. Following Romney’s debate performance, they were privately optimistic the numbers would improve to help fuel a television advertising blitz over the campaign’s final month in as many battleground states as possible.(MORE:?)The president said in a series of messages on Twitter, the online social network, that more than 1.8 million people donated last month, including about 567,000 who had not given money before in 2008 or 2012. About 10 million people have donated to the campaign. Obama’s campaign, the DNC and various fundraising entities supporting the president have now raised about $835 million, putting the campaign in striking distance of raising $1 billion for the season.The Romney campaign was releasing a TV ad featuring a woman who says she voted for Obama in 2008 but is supporting the Republican today. “Why Mitt Romney?” she asks. “Being a woman, you think about your children, and you think about their future. And what I want to think about is a future that has jobs. That our economy’s growing again. That’s important to women and it’s important to me.”Romney argued Friday that the change in the unemployment rate was nothing to celebrate given the millions of people in part-time jobs, those seeking better jobs and those who remain out of work.“This is not what a real recovery looks like,” Romney said shortly after the Labor Department released its report.By KEN THOMAS? A glamorous model clumps down the runway. Photographers snap. Fashion editors applaud. And for a moment, it seems as if all eyes in the couture world are on ... Knoxville, Tenn.? Such is the burgeoning business of smaller-town fashion weeks. For decades, the world's clothing trends stemmed from seasonal spectacles in just four cities: New York, London, Milan and Paris. But in recent years, Dallas, Istanbul, Knoxville and others have launched alternatives to hype local models and retailers--and secure a fraction of the $865 million that New York Fashion Week generates for the Big Apple each year, according to Mayor Michael...? This is going to be a rocky path," Barack Obama told 60 Minutes, referring to the turmoil in the Middle East. "There are going to be bumps in the road." The President was talking about the long-term struggle to move a region of historically repressed and undereducated people toward freedom, but long-term thinking is impermissible in presidential campaigns, and Mitt Romney called him on his bumps: "We had an ambassador assassinated. We had a Muslim Brotherhood member elected to the presidency of Egypt. Iran is that much closer to having the capacity to build a nuclear weapon." For good measure, the Romney campaign chided the President for appearing on The View but not meeting with foreign leaders during U.N. General Assembly week. These pokes, along with a smooth appearance on 60 Minutes, were part of a micro-renaissance Romney was experiencing as a candidate--several days without a goof--that perhaps only the press noticed as the Republican's poll numbers plummeted in crucial states. Obama's response to the Romney jabs came in an address to the General Assembly, one of the better speeches of his presidency. He celebrated the life of Ambassador Chris Stevens, by all accounts an exemplary man whose relentless humanity, as the President said, represented the exact opposite of the values embraced by his murderers. This was a "teachable moment," and Obama used it to explain what free speech--an absolute necessity for democracy--is all about. "As President of our country and Commander in Chief of our military, I accept that people are going to call me awful things every day," he said, to laughter, "and I will always defend their right to do so." He also condemned Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's annual Holocaust-denying clown show and warned the Iranians about their nuclear program in a way that even neoconservatives might consider acceptable. Obama's path through the Arab Spring has indeed been bumpy; any President's would have been. The days when the U.S. could manage events in the region through a network of local autocrats are over. But I found myself thinking that while Romney's nostalgia for a hegemonic past was clearly implausible, the President's patient hope for democracy might be overly optimistic as well. There is another possibility: regional chaos and, ultimately, a redrawing of the national borders that were imagined by Europeans at the end of World War I.?(WASHINGTON) ? There were all the trappings of a high-octane presidential debate: the over-the-top declarations, the pre-practiced zingers and the schmaltzy appeals to America’s truest values. But the presidential candidates were nowhere to be found.In their place Saturday were two celebrity gabbers who have claimed their stakes to the polar opposite ends of the political spectrum: Bill O’Reilly and Jon Stewart. The political odd-couple came to Washington ready to tangle in an event mockingly dubbed “The Rumble in the Air-Conditioned Auditorium.”Choice words not suitable for the faint of heart dotted the 90-minute exchange between the Fox News anchor and the star of Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show,” who bantered aggressively but good-naturedly over birth control, President George W. Bush and the so-called “War on Christmas.”(WATCH:?)Stewart came prepped with a mechanical pedestal he used to elevate himself in the air, making the height-challenged comedian appear taller than the lanky O’Reilly when he wanted to drive a point home.“I like you much better that way,” O’Reilly quipped at one point as he gazed up at his ideological foe.The political feud between the two caffeinated TV personalities dates back more than a decade. Much like family members who just can’t resist pushing each other’s buttons over Thanksgiving stuffing, Stewart and O’Reilly love to disagree, but appear to hold nothing against each other once the latest spat has run its course. The two have appeared on each other’s programs since 2001, but the face-off Saturday at The George Washington University marked their first head-to-head debate.Appearing wholly presidential in dark jackets and face makeup under a sign reading “Yum, this banner tastes like freedom,” the two quickly turned to talk of government spending and the 47 percent of Americans that Republican Mitt Romney said in a video are dependent on government.Stewart, defending government involvement in health care and social programs, said the U.S. has always been an entitlement nation.(WATCH:?)“We are a people that went to another country, saw other people on it and said, ‘Yea, we want that,” Stewart said. “Have you ever seen ‘Oprah’s favorite things’ episode?”Asked who he’d like to see as president, O’Reilly dead-panned: “I’d have to say Clint Eastwood.”“Well why don’t we ask him,” said Stewart, mocking the Hollywood actor’s widely panned speech in August at the Republican National Convention by getting out of his chair and staring at it while the crowd erupted in laughter.In an apparent show of bipartisanship, Stewart even got on O’Reilly lap at one point. “And what would you like for Christmas, little boy?” O’Reilly said slyly.“The display that you saw tonight is why America is America. Robust, creative, no holds barred,” O’Reilly told reporters after the debate. “You can call it whatever you want, but you wouldn’t see this in a lot of other countries. That’s for sure.”Organizers said about 1,500 people attended the event, but the main audience was intended to be online, where the event was live-streamed for $4.95. On Twitter, viewers complained they missed the event when the video servers crashed. Organizers said video will be available for download and that those who experienced errors will be eligible for a refund.?(TANK, ) ? The Pakistani military blocked a convoy carrying thousands of Pakistanis and a small contingent of U.S. anti-war activists from entering a lawless tribal region along the border with Afghanistan on Sunday to protest American drone strikes.The group, led by star turned politician Imran Khan and his political party, was turned back just miles from the border of South Waziristan. After an hour of fruitless negotiations, Khan announced that the caravan would backtrack to the city of Tank, about 15 kilometers (nine miles) away. There, he delivered a speech to the crowd of about 10,000.Khan has harshly criticized the Pakistani government’s cooperation with Washington in the fight against Islamist militants. He has been especially outspoken against U.S. drone strikes targeting militants and has argued that the country’s alliance with Washington is the main reason Pakistan is facing a homegrown insurgency. He has suggested before that militant activity in Pakistan’s tribal areas will dissipate when the U.S. ends the war across the border in Afghanistan.(PHOTOS:?)“We want to give a message to America that the more you carry out drone attacks, the more people will hate you,” Khan told the crowd.The anti-American sentiment, always high in Pakistan, was evident in the crowd that waved banners saying “Down with America,” and “The friend of America is the traitor of the nation.”Pakistan’s tribal regions, such as North and South Waziristan, border Afghanistan and serve as bases for militant groups such as the Taliban to stage raids across the border into Afghanistan.The protest convoy of about 150 cars set out on Saturday from the capital Islamabad, traveled 400 kilometers (250 miles) and then stopped overnight in the city of Dera Ismail Khan. The plan for the second and final day was to travel another 120 kilometers (70 miles) to reach Kotkai in South Waziristan. But the military stopped the convoy in the town of Kawar.Khan told the rally that they wanted to continue their journey to Kotkai, but the army said it was too late, and going inside South Waziristan at night was dangerous. Khan said he didn’t want to put his supporters in danger, so he turned the rally around to Tank.Regardless of whether he was able to enter the tribal region, Khan portrayed the two-day motorcade as a success.(MORE:?)“We have taken the voice of the people of Waziristan to the world,” he said.Thousands of supporters had turned out along the route to cheer on the convoy, which stretched about 15 kilometers (9 miles), including accompanying media. Some of those packed into the vehicles waved flags for Khan’s political group and chanted: “We want peace.”Video on Pakistani media showed barricades with hundreds of police in riot gear, a sign of concerns that the motorcade would be attacked or become unruly.Around three dozen Americans from the U.S.-based anti-war group CODEPINK joined Khan for the march. The American protesters say the U.S. drone strikes, contrary to the claims of American officials, have terrorized peaceful tribes living along the border and killed many innocent civilians ? not just Taliban and al-Qaida fighters.The convoy aimed to throw a spotlight on the drone attacks, which many Pakistanis oppose as violations of the country’s sovereignty that often kill civilians. The U.S. says its drone strikes are necessary to battle militants that Pakistan has been unable or unwilling to control.Critics denounced the rally as a piece of cheap theater designed to drum up votes for Khan’s political party ahead of next year’s elections.“A made-for-TV dog and pony show that will be high on drama and low on substance will resonate with Khan’s base,” wrote Pakistani newspaper columnist Cyril Almeida in the English-language newspaper Dawn Sunday.The rally was originally intended for South Waziristan, a tribal region where the Pakistani military has been battling a violent uprising by the Taliban, and factions of the Taliban threatened to attack the march. On Saturday, a statement from a Taliban faction said to be based in eastern Punjab province warned that militants would target the protesters with suicide bombings.The main faction of the Pakistani Taliban, which is based in South Waziristan, issued a statement Friday calling Khan a “slave of the West” and saying that the militants “don’t need any sympathy” from such “a secular and liberal person.”The former cricket star long had a reputation as a playboy, but in recent years he has said he has grown stronger in his Muslim faith. He also has used attacks on the U.S. drone program as a means of gaining attention and esteem in Pakistan. His popularity surged in recent years in Pakistan, where the government, led by the Pakistan People’s Party of Asif Ali Zardari, has disappointed many.By?ISHTIAQ MAHSUD?The parents of a Rutgers University student who killed himself after his roommate used a webcam to see him kissing another man have decided not to sue the university or anyone else involved in the case, preferring instead to focus their energies on the foundation started in his name.“They’re just in a spot now where they have this opportunity because of the fact that the media has made this case so well known to do some very good things through the foundation,” Paul Mainardi, an attorney for Joseph and Jane Clementi of Ridgewood, N.J., said Friday.The couple had accused New Jersey’s flagship public university of failing to prevent their son’s suicide in 2010, which occurred just days after the webcam spying, and had filed court papers preserving their right to sue.(MORE: )But Mainardi said the Clementis feel Rutgers has been “very responsive” and the school is working with The Tyler Clementi Foundation on a number of projects. “They’ve met with us a number of times at the highest level. They have undertaken a lot within the university system to respond to this voluntarily, responsibly,” the attorney said.Rutgers changed its housing policies after Clementi’s suicide, allowing opposite-sex roommates, with the idea of making gay and lesbian students more comfortable.The Clementis’ foundation has been a co-sponsor of an academic conference at Rutgers on social media.The family has said it wants the foundation to teach responsible use of social media and increase acceptance of gays in schools, communities and even churches.(MORE: )Tyler Clementi jumped to his death from the George Washington Bridge. His roommate, Dharun Ravi, spent 20 days in jail last year after being convicted of bias intimidation, invasion of privacy and witness tampering. He’s appealing.Ravi was not charged with causing Clementi’s death, but his family has said they believe his behavior was a factor, especially in light of tweets he made and which were part of the case against him.One of them read, in part: “I saw him making out with a dude. Yay.”Clementi had told his parents he was gay before leaving college, three weeks before his death. But they believe that learning about the webcam recording in his dorm room humiliated him and made him realize that being out as gay on campus would not be so easy. MORE: ?The long view of history tends to be the judge of a presidency. As we approach what President Obama hopes will be the midpoint of his tenure in the Oval Office, it is too early to draw definite conclusions on his legacy as Commander-in-Chief. What we do know, however, is that Obama’s first term has been a historic one: The first African American to hold the county’s highest office, Obama and his administration have battled economic recession, passed healthcare reform and legislation to end the military’s “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” policy, formally ended the war in Iraq and brought Osama Bin Laden to justice.Through adversity and triumph, public victories and private setbacks, Chief Official White House Photographer Pete Souza and his team of photographers have relentlessly documented the actions of the President, First Lady and Vice President since entering office in early 2009.As the President bids for a second term, LightBox asked Souza to reflect on his time photographing President Obama and share an edit of his favorite images that he and his staff made during the President’s first term in office; the photographs not only offer fascinatingly candid insight into the life of the President, but also paint a portrait of Barack Obama the man, husband and father.“I tried to, in putting together this edit, not only to show some of the high points or low points of his presidency thus far, but pictures that help people understand what he’s like?not only as a President, but as a human being,” Souza tells TIME. “And how he relates to other people?how he relates to his family.”Souza’s process is aided by his longstanding working relationship with Obama?one that precedes the presidency. They first met on Jan. 3, 2005?Obama’s first day in the U.S. Senate. For Souza, a staff photographer at the Chicago Tribune‘s Washington bureau, it was the first day of a year-long assignment to document the new senator’s time in office.As the assignment evolved, Souza?who had previously worked as a White House staff photographer during President Reagan’s second term?began recognizing something special about the Senator. An inkling of things to come, perhaps even a deeper potential for the future. He began looking for moments that would prove valuable in the course of history?photographs that would define the man’s early years to those who only knew his legacy.“I was looking for things that I knew that if he ever became President you would never see again,” he says. “[Obama was] walking down a sidewalk in Moscow in 2005 and no one recognized him?I realized that if he ever became president, you would never, ever see a photograph like that. The odds of becoming president are obviously pretty slim, but I knew he had the potential. And you can’t say that about too many people.”Souza continued to photograph Senator Obama, who quickly became presidential candidate Obama and then Democratic-nominee Obama. With Obama’s 2008 election victory, Souza returned to the White House as Chief Official White House photographer and director of the White House Photography Office.The photographs that Souza has taken extend the lineage of White House photography that began in the 1960s?initially in a somewhat scattered way during John F. Kennedy’s administration and then more officially with?Yoichi Okamoto, Lyndon B. Johnson’s photographer. Okamoto is considered the first photographer who truly photographed the presidency with an eye for history. Souza is quick to acknowledge and praise his work and that of others who have followed, such as David Kennerly (Ford), Bob McNeely (Clinton) and Eric Draper (George W. Bush).An all-digital workflow is one thing that differentiates Souza’s work from the majority of his predecessors. Although he wasn’t the one to move the process to digital?Eric Draper, President Bush’s photographer, made the switch from film to digital?Souza made the first official portrait of the incoming president with a digital camera. Obama’s administration has also understood the insatiable appetite for imagery that the digital age has wrought, .“The administration said [they] want people to see these behind-the-scenes photos now,” he says. “[They wanted] to establish a way to become more transparent than any other administration, so every month, we upload a new batch of behind-the-scenes photos. The response has been overwhelming.”But alongside the ease brought by the digital era came one difficulty: The Presidential Records Act prohibits Souza and his team from deleting any photographs.?”One of our bigger challenges is just the storage of all these images,” he said, noting that immense difficulty the team will experience moving millions of digital files to the National Archives at the end of the term.Souza’s work with the President follows in the golden age of photojournalism’s best traditions?when photographers working for magazines such as LIFE established relationships and spent inordinate amounts of time shooting beautifully crafted images of public figures.“I spend a lot of time with [the President], around him, on vacations, sometimes on weekends, depending on what’s going on?he’s used to me being around.” Souza says. As?his friend P.F. Bentley described it, “When the President is on, I’m on. And when the President’s off, I’m still on.”Souza recalls one meeting that he actually missed because it had been rescheduled a half hour earlier. “I was a little upset with the President’s secretary for not telling me that they had moved the meeting up, and [The President] heard us talking and he said, what are you talking about, you were in that meeting. He’s so used to me being there that he thought that I had been in the meeting that I wasn’t even in. So I took that as a compliment.”His access to Obama’s inner circle and day-to-day routine also stems from the trust he built during their relationship prior to the presidency. “I’m there to seriously document his presidency?I’m not looking for cheap shots and I think that’s the kind of relationship any White House photographer should have with the president they’re covering,” he says. “That they have a level of access and trust that will lead to important photographs for history.”Souza is aware of the significance of the photographs he and his team are taking, but he’s also focused on capturing the small and incidental moments that make Obama’s administration unique.?“There are days that you certainly think about the importance of what’s taking place?you’re serving an important role in visually documenting this period of time for history,” he says. “But at the same time, a lot of the pictures that tell you a lot about a president are not [made] during those times. They’re when he’s having a private moment with one of his daughters, or when something unexpected happens that may not be, you know, important in terms of history’s sake.”“I think that’s what keeps you on your toes?you never know when those moments are gonna occur, because they don’t always occur when big things are happening,” he says. The image of Obama, Sasha and Malia playing in the snow is testament to Souza approach. The photograph is not simply of the President, but of a moment shared between a father and his daughters.These personal images round out Souza’s portrait of the President and give it greater depth. While preparing this edit for LightBox, he acknowledged that it was hard to present what a presidency is all about in just a handful of pictures. “I don’t gravitate toward any singular image right now,” he says. “I try to look at a body of work and so I’m proud of this edit that I submitted. To me, it’s all these photographs together which tell you something about this man, this President, and I guess to a certain extent, about me and what I think is important.”Although Souza’s edit comprises over one hundred images, it is by no means a comprehensive record of President Obama’s time in office. Souza says, “I’m sure that I left out some important moments. I don’t think I included anything from the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony, ?and that’s historic in itself ? he won the Nobel Peace Prize. But it just didn’t fit in with the series of pictures that I wanted to? present.”Souza says of the President: “He has certainly created history just by being the first African-American President. Hopefully in future generations, we’ll soon have a woman President or a Hispanic President and it won’t matter that much. But I think that if you’d ask him, he wants to be remembered for the things that he’s done.”For Souza, it’s difficult at this point in time to reflect on the last four years and the photographs he and his team have made. “One of the difficult things, doing this everyday, is having a chance to really sit back and take it all in. Putting these photos together helped that a little bit,” he says. “You’re a little bit overwhelmed about everything that happened in four years?because a lot of stuff has happened. I hope there will come a time where, when I’m not doing this job any longer, I’ll be able to sit back and reflect on everything that he’s been through, and everything that I’ve been through.”Pete Souza is the Chief Official White House photographer?and director of the White House Photography Office.An Exhibition of Souza’s work,?The Obama White House?Photographs by Pete Souza,?is on view at the?, New York from October 5 to November 10, 2012.?Three things we learned from Week 5 of the :1. Comeback Colts?All those (ahem) luck-y enough to be at Lucas Stadium couldn’t believe what they were witnessing. After Indianapolis trailed 21-3 at halftime, rookie Colts QB Andrew Luck found Reggie Wayne in the end zone with 35 seconds to play as the Colts stunned the Green Bay Packers 30-27. But it has been a week about much more than for the Colts, with coach Chuck Pagano in hospital, undergoing treatment for leukemia. Owner Jim Irsay was able to give the game ball to Pagano, who was somehow still focused on the task at hand for his team. Pagano emailed the players and coaches Friday with a simple message: “Focus on being 500 by 4:30pm on Sunday. Nothing else. That has to be our mind set. 60 minutes, all you got, one play at a time! WIN!” The Colts, and Luck, heeded his words. Luck threw for a career-best 362 yards while Wayne had 13 receptions for 212 yards, which was a career high. The Packers had the chance to take the game into overtime but kicker Mason Crosby’s 51-yard effort went wide with 3 seconds to go. For a team fighting for an ailing coach, it felt like destiny.2. The Saints Go Marching On(e).?After the NFL handed down crippling sanctions to the New Oreleans Saints for the Bountygate scandal, experts figured they were in for a tough season. But nobody expected them to start 0-4. Had New Orleans dropped to 0-5 at home to the San Diego Chargers on Sunday Night Football, the team would have effectively been out of playoff contention by the first weekend of October. And with the Saints down 24-14 in the second half, they were in a world of trouble.Quarterback Drew Brees, however, chose a particularly apt night to rediscover his mojo, and help New Orleans pull out a 31-24 victory. Brees broke the legendary QB Johnny Unitas’ half-century record by throwing a touchdown pass in his 48th straight game (for the record, it was a 40-yard pass to Devery Henderson). What’s more, Unitas’ son, Joe, was in attendance to see the milestone and he can also say that he was there to witness Brees’ 370 passing yards, which put him over 30,000 yards in his 100th game as a Saint.Commissioner Roger Goodell allowed suspended Saints coach Sean Payton, assistant head coach Joe Vitt and general manager Mickey Loomis to attend the game, so they could witness Brees breaking the record. Brees personally requested the favor from Goodell. Though the victory stops the bleeding, Brees and his Saints are tied for last place in the NFC South, four games back of the 5-0 Atlanta Falcons. But with Brees at quarterback, it’s hard to count New Orleans out.3. Three-sy Does It. Two teams with serious playoff credentials enhanced their reps by not only keeping their opponents to three points, but posting more than 40 on the board themselves. Both the San Francisco 49ers and Chicago Bears improved to 4-1, with the 49ers trouncing the Buffalo Bills by a margin of 45-3, and the Bears rolling over Jacksonville 41-3. Ever improving QB Alex Smith led his team to a franchise-record 621 yards, which is a stat that even his sublime predecessors such as Joe Montana, Steve Young or Y.A. Tittle could never manage (“Very cool,” in typically understated fashion. “When you think of the 49ers, you think of great offense”). Smith threw for 303 yards and three touchdowns, Frank Gore ran for 106 yards and a score, Michael Crabtree had seven catches for 113 yards and Vernon Davis caught seven passes for 106 yards. San Francisco became the first team in NFL history to manage 300 yards passing and 300 yards rushing in a single game.In comparision, the Bears put up relatively paltry numbers in their win over Jacksonville, but props must go to their mean defense. While playing their second road game in a space of 6 days, Charles Tillman and Lance Briggs of the Bears became the first teammates in history to return interceptions for touchdowns in consecutive weeks (they got the ball rolling during last Monday night’s 34-18 win at the Dallas Cowboys). In the second half, the Bears gained 309 of their 501 yards, and scored 38 unanswered points.?(MANILA, ) ? Philippine President Benigno Aquino III announced Sunday that his government has reached a preliminary peace deal with the nation’s largest Muslim rebel group in a major breakthrough toward ending a decades-long insurgency.Aquino said the “framework agreement” ? a roadmap for a new autonomous region for minority Muslims in the predominantly Roman Catholic nation’s south ? was an assurance the Moro Islamic Liberation Front insurgents will no longer aim to secede from the country.The agreement, to be signed Oct. 15 in Manila, spells out general principles on major issues, including the extent of power, revenues and territory of the Muslim region. If all goes well, a final peace deal could be reached by 2016, when Aquino’s six-year term ends, officials said.“This framework agreement paves the way for final and enduring peace in Mindanao,” Aquino said, referring to the southern Philippine region and homeland of the country’s Muslims. “This means that the hands that once held rifles will be put to use tilling land, selling produce, manning work stations and opening doorways of opportunity.”(MORE: )He cautioned, however, that “the work does not end here,” and that the two sides still need to work out the accord’s details. Those talks are expected to be tough but doable, officials and rebels said.Rebel vice chairman Ghadzali Jaafar said the agreement provides a huge relief to people who have long suffered from war and are “now hoping the day would come when there will be no need to bear arms.”The deal marks the most significant progress in 15 years of on-and-off negotiations with the 11,000-strong Moro group on ending an uprising that has left more than 120,000 people dead, displaced about 2 million others and held back development in the south. Western governments have long worried that rebel strongholds could become breeding grounds for al-Qaida-affiliated extremists.“The parties agree that the status quo is unacceptable,” the 13-page agreement says. It calls for the creation of a new Muslim autonomous region called “Bangsamoro” to replace an existing one created in 1989 which Aquino characterized as a “failed experiment,” where poverty and corruption have forced many “to articulate their grievances through the barrel of a gun.”The accord also calls for the establishment of a 15-member “Transition Commission” to work out the details of the preliminary agreement and draft a law creating the new Muslim autonomous region in about two years.Rebel forces would be deactivated gradually “beyond use,” the agreement says, without specifying a timetable.The Philippine government would continue to exercise exclusive powers over defense and security, foreign and monetary policy in the new autonomous region, where Muslims would be assured of an “equitable share of taxation, revenues, and the fruits of national patrimony … and equal protection of laws and access to impartial justice,” according to Aquino.Philippine officials said the preliminary accord would be posted on the government’s website for public scrutiny, and would be signed in Manila in the presence of Aquino, Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak and Moro rebel chief Al Haj Murad Ibrahim.“It’s been a long journey and this is an important milestone in our search for lasting peace,” presidential peace talks adviser Teresita Deles told AP.The United States, Britain, and other countries welcomed the accord.(MORE: )“This agreement is a testament to the commitment of all sides for a peaceful resolution to the conflict in the southern Philippines,” U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said in a statement. “The next steps will be to ensure that the framework agreement is fully implemented.”The new Muslim region would be built upon an existing five-province autonomous territory, among the country’s poorest and most violent, with more than 4 million people.The Moro rebels earlier dropped a demand for a separate Muslim state and renounced .Their negotiator, Mohagher Iqbal, earlier said his group would not lay down its weapons until a final peace accord is concluded. He said the insurgents could form a political party and run in democratic elections to get a chance at leading the autonomous region for which they have been fighting.In Kuala Lumpur, Philippine government negotiator Marvic Leonen said both sides face the enormous task of working out the details. “We are not naive to say that there would be no obstacles. But the Philippine government will defend the agreement,” Leonen said.The challenges are many.In 2008, the planned signing of a similar preliminary pact was scuttled when opponents went to the Supreme Court, which declared the agreement unconstitutional. Fighting erupted when three rebel commanders attacked Christian communities, and an ensuing military offensive killed more than 100 people and displaced about 750,000 villagers before a cease-fire ended the violence.One of the hardline rebel commanders, Ameril Umbra Kato, broke off from the Moro rebels last year and formed a new group opposed to the talks. Kato’s forces launched attacks on several army camps and outposts in August, prompting another army offensive that killed more than 50 fighters in the 200-strong rebel faction.The Moro Islamic Liberation Front itself broke away in the 1980s from the Moro National Liberation Front, which signed a 1996 autonomy deal with the government. That peace accord did not lead to disarming of the group and many of the rebels have simply laid low in the south, still demanding that the government fulfill its commitments, including jobs, security and economic development.Some former guerrillas also formed a small but brutal al-Qaida-linked group called the Abu Sayyaf, which became notorious for bombings, ransom kidnappings and beheadings until U.S.-backed Philippine military offensives routed many of its militants. They are mostly based in the southern provinces of Sulu and Basilan, where about 400 gunmen remain.by EILEEN NG and JIM GOMEZNg reported from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Associated Press writer Hrvoje Hranjski in Manila and Matthew Pennington in Washington, D.C., contributed to this report.? When it comes to politics, believing is seeing. Partisan Republicans see Barack Obama as dishonest; partisan Democrats see Mitt Romney the same way. Voters see candidates they support as truth tellers; they regard candidates they oppose as shadier. We are suffering from a national case of confirmation bias, the idea that we lend credence to information that confirms our opinions and ignore evidence that doesn't--even in the face of facts. Michael Scherer's smart and insightful cover story on the fact wars suggests that truth in the 2012 campaign is in the eye of the beholder. To say that the candidates are...? EMMY EDITION GOOD WEEK/BAD WEEK Mandy Patinkin Got a "holla" during Homeland co-star Claire Danes' acceptance speech Jon Hamm Was denied Best Actor honors for Mad Men--for the fifth time BOOKS Food Porn Mustard spanked chicken! Dripping thighs! Holy hell wings! No, we're not talking dirty to you. We're naming actual recipes from Fifty Shades of Chicken, a cookbook parody of E.L. James' hit trilogy (out Nov. 13). Spatula whip, colander chains and cheese-grating handcuffs sold separately. HIDDEN TREASURE At Amsterdam's inaugural Unseen photo fair, low profiles reigned supreme: emerging artists displayed their work alongside lesser-known prints by masters like Edward...?() ? The pope’s butler was convicted Saturday of stealing the pontiff’s private documents and leaking them to a journalist in the gravest Vatican security breach in recent memory. He was sentenced to 18 months in prison, but the Vatican said a papal pardon was likely.Judge Giuseppe Dalla Torre read the verdict aloud two hours after the three-judge Vatican panel began deliberating Paolo Gabriele’s fate. Gabriele stood impassively as it was read out in the tiny wood-paneled tribunal tucked behind St. Peter’s Basilica.The sentence was reduced in half to 18 months from three years because of a series of mitigating circumstances, including that Gabriele had no previous record, had acknowledged that he had betrayed the pope and was convinced, “albeit erroneously” that he was doing the right thing, Dalla Torre said.(MORE: )Gabriele was accused of stealing the pope’s private correspondence and passing it on to journalist Gianluigi Nuzzi, whose book revealed the intrigue, petty infighting and allegations of corruption and homosexual liaisons that plague the leadership of the Roman .He has said he leaked the documents because he felt the pope wasn’t being informed of the “evil and corruption” in the Vatican, and that exposing the problems publicly would put the church back on the right track.In his final appeal to the court Saturday morning, Gabriele insisted he was no thief.“The thing I feel strongly in me is the conviction that I acted out of exclusive love, I would say visceral love, for the church of Christ and its visible head,” Gabriele told the court in a steady voice. “I do not feel like a thief.”Gabriele’s attorney, Cristiana Arru, said the sentence was “good, balanced” and said she was awaiting the judges’ written reasoning before deciding whether to appeal.(MORE: )Nuzzi’s book, “His Holiness: ‘s Secret Papers” convulsed the Vatican for months and prompted an unprecedented response, with the pope naming a commission of cardinals to investigate the origin of the leaks alongside Vatican magistrates.Arru said Gabriele would return to his Vatican City apartment to begin serving his sentence. He has been held on house arrest there since July after spending his first two months in a Vatican detention room.Vatican spokesman the Rev. Federico Lombardi said the possibility of a papal pardon was “concrete, likely” and that the pope would now study the court file and decide. He said there was no way to know when a papal pardon might be announced.Gabriele was also ordered to pay court costs.In something of a novelty in jurisprudence, the pope was both victim and supreme judge in this case. As an absolute monarch of the tiny Vatican City state, Benedict wields full executive, legislative and judicial power. He delegates that power, though, and Lombardi said the trial showed the complete independence of the Vatican judiciary.In reading the sentence, however, in a courtroom decorated with a photograph of Benedict on the wall opposite Gabriele, Dalla Torre began: “In the name of His Holiness Benedict XVI, gloriously reigning, the tribunal invoking the Holy Trinity pronounces the following sentence…”In her closing arguments, Arru insisted that only photocopies, not original documents, were taken from the Apostolic Palace, disputing testimony from the pope’s secretary who said he saw original letters in the evidence seized from Gabriele’s home.She admitted Gabriele’s gesture was “condemnable” but said it was a misappropriation of documents, not theft, and that as a result Gabriele should serve no time for the lesser crime.By NICOLE WINFIELD? Enda Kenny is due to attend the Sept. 20 opening of the new premises of Arvato Finance, a German-owned billing and payment-services company, in Dublin's docklands, but has delayed his convoy to take a call. Conversations with Ireland's Prime Minister are often pleasantly discursive; if words were money, Kenny could have easily cleared the national debt since coming to power in February 2011. And so, at the appointed hour, he finds himself gridlocked in traffic, facing the skeleton of a building that was to have housed the headquarters of Anglo Irish Bank, the country's third largest lender until red...?Ai Weiwei is . As such, he is constantly at odds with the government of his homeland, the People’s Republic of . The contentiousness has been highlighted by Beijing’s refusal to return Ai’s passport to him, making it impossible for him to travel to the U.S. for the Oct. 7 opening of a major retrospective on his art at the Hirshhorn Museum, part of the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C. It was confiscated ? illegally, he says ? after he was during a crackdown on dissent. The government has also rejected his appeals against $2.4 million in back taxes and penalties levied on Ai’s company, Beijing Fake Design Cultural Development. After submitting a $1.33 million deposit, Ai says he won’t pay anything more. The artist spoke to TIME’s Austin Ramzy about his upcoming show, his political activism and how the closely the government is watching him. (PHOTOS:?)What things would you like to do when you get your passport? If a person has any freedom, then freedom to travel is part of it. If you have nothing to charge me with, you have to give it back to me. The police also said we understand this is not legal.If you were given your passport and allowed to travel, do you worry about being able to return? There are so many cases of people being blocked from returning. I always prepare for the worst, but I also try to act according to what is possible. I always think: Why should [the government] do that? It is not good for them, it is not good for anybody. I think maybe they would change. Every decision I make, I always try to say the [government] has the possibility to change. Otherwise, why would you still fight? So that would bring me into many, many difficult circumstance. Because I’m always willing to test and to say: What could happen? Or say: just because it happened last time, does that mean it will happen again? So I can’t say what will or will not happen.There are many cases where there are things that you fought for and that your side ended up having a victory of sorts. There were the Green Dam censorship software that the government wanted to install on Chinese computers and the research into the names of students who died in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. Green Dam was blocked, and eventually, the government was forced to release a total of the student deaths. Looking at that, do you see any potential for, if not exactly change in the system, at least movement or response by the government to the interests of the public? I think so. Gradually, under pressure from not just me but from different points. I think the pressure is getting stronger, you can see it every day. I always jump to the other side, to think about it from the view of the government. You can see the Internet discussion. So far, it is the strongest force to deliver the pressure to the government and make people’s voice be heard. It happens everywhere. Sometimes it doesn’t have an immediate effect. Like the Beijing flood this summer, to name those names [of the dead], it was quite difficult, but they had to do it. If they didn’t do it, people will start to research on their own. That will cause the government much more problems.The government [knows] … many issues need to be faced and answered. And they know the sooner they answer, the less cost and less damage. But who is going to do it? I think the pressure still need to come from the civil movement. After 63 years, [the government] cut out all the possible interests groups or different kind of discussions. They don’t exist. The whole nation becomes very simple. The master gives the order ruthlessly. The civilians just have to obey it. There’s no space for discussion, no structure, etcetera. No way to even to evaluate the damage. There is no true communication.Like my case, it is so politicized. They can just tell you’ve been arrested or you are released or you’re free now or you cannot have the passport. I said: Can I have any communication of what is going on? Can you ask me some questions or I ask you any questions? Most cases in China are handled this way, not just my case. If you look at the case or his wife’s case or the case of Wang Lijun, there are so many holes in the whole procedure, but none of them will be answered. How can they maintain a society with no sense of trust or justice? This is the question, How come in such [a] large civilization and one-fifth of the human population, [there is] no sense of justice, … no clear measurement of right or wrong? It [is] a very primitive … level, nobody can give you a clear definite answer. Nobody can clearly say that they have to protect the constitution of China. According to constitution, these are violations by government, but can anybody openly discuss those?(MORE: )You recently posted some photographs of the anti-Japan demonstrations. You were also a photojournalist for a while in your U.S. days, photographing the Tompkins Square Park riots among other things. I actually never stopped. So many things are worth recording. It’s worth it to see it twice. It’s worth paying attention and looking at something twice. It is an intelligent act. So I think that it is very important, just a simple few seconds. I turned on the video because there was a demonstration in front of the U.S. embassy, which surprised me.The slogans [declared] that the U.S. is behind the Japanese [claim to disputed islands in the East China Sea]. And they said, “Return our money.” The U.S. never borrowed money, China bought the bonds from the U.S. But you can see this kind of hatred. That tells you about the kind of rationality of the [regime] old-timers, who are trying to integrate people’s anger into modern foreign affairs. It is a pity because we all know if [the] government wants, it will not allow you to take one step outside your door. There are so many people still living in detention. To have large demonstrations in 50 cities, you don’t have to say who it is organized by. Then I see the [U.S.] ambassador’s car; it was very obvious, it had the flag in front. I was very surprised because I had been to that area for a year and never seen the ambassador’s car at that gate. The people started to stop the car, [pulling] the flag. That was interesting, so I put it on the Internet.When you say it is clear that the protests were organized, you mean by the government? Oh, yeah. There is nobody in this whole society would question that. This is a society fully surveilled and regulated by the police. Our conversation, whoever comes in here, it will all be recorded. I mean I can’t step out without being noticed.In the catalog for the Hirshhorn exhibition, there are things I had not seen before: the Sichuan rebar piece and also the crabs. Can you tell me a little bit about them? Both works are being shown for the first time to the public. The rebar comes very obviously from [the 2008 Sichuan earthquake]. When I started, we had the investigation [into the number of students who died in collapsed ], there was such frustration. It was such a tragedy and so many lives have disappeared. We never had a moment of explanation or just some regret from the official side. It is always very harsh, very bitter. I was beaten and almost lost my life. The names we found out, you can also see them in the show at the Hirshhorn. When you go up the elevator, the whole wall [is] covered by 5,200 names of students. We have [the] sound of those names pronounced by people [over the] Internet. Over 10,000 people participated in this sound piece.I used that as the beginning of the show and the end of the piece is the Sichuan rebar. The rebar is from the ruins and took us a long time to take back. We bought it secretly, and then we didn’t know what to do with it. It really becomes so [emotionally] heavy because it was from those ruins and there are still so many people under the ruins. They didn’t touch Beichuan [a town buried in the 2008 earthquake]. And we didn’t touch it. I thought, How can I still [raise] the same questions [about the government’s refusal to acknowledge the earthquake victims] but not disturb the form [of the rebar], which reflects or continues the demand for the facts? So we gradually just spread it out and bent it. We made it like the ones [fresh] out of the factory, and it took a lot of people years to clean [the rebar] off because it was all so curved. To make it straight took hundreds of blows to straighten. Then at last it becomes a pile of rebar exactly like what comes out of factory. It has no history to it. You could never tell that it comes from the ruins. Everything has been cleaned up. The effort itself makes that a stronger question.(MORE:?)Can you tell me a little bit about the pattern of the rebar? I had a map, a Chinese map, the borderline, the pattern a little bit reflects that. Because the metal is of different thickness and lengths, so we have to put it in order, otherwise you will not have a pattern. So the pattern automatically come out from the arrangement of the order.That is a last piece of exhibition. Over 40% of the works are new. Another new work is about river crabs. It is about how the Shanghai government destroyed the studio that they invited me to build [for the 2010 Expo]. At last I said it has to be destroyed. For China to destroy a house is not a big deal. You shouldn’t dramatize it, just [accept] it. But I said I would [throw] one party. So many people wanted to see the work; it is [a] beautiful architecture piece. We had over a thousand people register to come from different parts of China, about 20 different provinces. They brought their children or husband or wives or even parents. That was in the season you eat river crabs. And you know [the word for] river crabs is hexie. [NOTE: hexie is a pun on the word harmonious, which has become a synonym for censorship, part of the government’s goal of a “harmonious society.”] That party was forbidden, so I made the crabs for the show.You lived in U.S. for 12 years before returning in 1993. How did the U.S. change you and how did it affect your art? It is very strange. When I was there, I desperately trying just to survive, and of course, I experienced and learned so much through art on the Lower East Side or demonstrations or even the Iran Contra scandal. All those things I watched. I never [thought] there was an influence … until I was in detention and the police asked me the same question. Because they had have to find out why this man relentlessly criticized the government. He’s psycho, why is he doing this? What is the fundamental change? … At the beginning, when I talked with them, they said, ‘Ha ha, you must watch too many Hollywood movies.’ I said, ‘Yes, I love Hollywood movies.’ I still can be touched if I watch movies. I started to realize I have changed. The American experience quite influenced my understanding of individuality, about basic human rights, about the rights of freedom of expression and the rights and responsibility of citizens.Then later I learned everything from the Internet. I learned to discuss, to communicate, to make a point through modern technology. So maybe there are three parts in my life ? earlier background living in exile in Xinjiang in a very political circumstance, then later the United States from 24 to 36 years old. I was quite equipped with liberal thinking. Then the Internet. If there is no Internet, of course, I cannot really exercise my opinion or my ideas.You said that after you arrived in New York, you began to understand the work of Jasper Johns. What did you take from him? When I just started to study art, a very well-known Chinese translator Yang Xianyi, who translated almost every top piece of Chinese literature for the West, gave me a book of Jasper Johns’ paintings and I could not understand it. The painting is about red, yellow and blue and some brushes and some containers. So I threw it away. I gave it to friends and they also [didn’t] want it. Then after I went to Parsons [School of Design], I looked at Andy Warhol, because he is so easy to understand. And then I realized Andy Warhol made some points about Johns and [Robert] Rauschenberg, because he always wanted to be accepted by Johns. He would always pop up and Johns [would be] very cool to him. And he didn’t recognize Warhol that much.So I looked at Johns and realized he is really an artist for the artist. He is really concerned about very essential language and the meaning of interpretation and the way really to look at [Ludwig] Wittgenstein and [Marcel] Duchamp. So Johns allowed me to take another step to look at what Duchamp did, which is the intellectual part of art, concept and language. That is why I do feel quite grateful for what Jasper Johns did, and that is why the title [of the Hirshhorn retrospective] uses one of his one of his works, “According to What.”In the Hirshhorn show, there is a quote: “This so-called contemporary art is not a form but a philosophy of society.” What do you mean by that? I think very often we see art as artwork or art objects but [do not] emphasize the mind of the people or the movement behind it. I think that can very much lead to misunderstanding and it can be misdirected to the commercial side of art. Today we see changes at all levels, politics and economics and culture. We can see a new definition and new possibilities to give a new look to art and a new understanding of why we need art in today’s society.MORE:?MORE:??(LONDON) ? Britain’s High Court is due to rule on whether radical cleric Abu Hamza al-Masri and four other terrorist suspects can be extradited to the United States ? judgments the government hopes will clear the final hurdle to their removal after years of legal wrangling.Judges Duncan Ouseley and John Thomas are handing down judgment Friday in the case of al-Masri, who turned London’s Finsbury Park Mosque into a training ground for radical Islamists and is wanted in the U.S. on charges that include helping set up a terrorist training camp in Oregon.Al Masri and the four other men have been fighting extradition for years, and both British and European courts have ruled that they can be sent to the U.S. to face charges.They applied to the High Court for a last-minute halt, with al-Masri’s lawyers saying his deteriorating health means it would be “oppressive” to send him to a U.S. prison.(MORE: )Lawyers for the preacher, who has one eye and hooks in place of hands he claims to have lost fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan, said he suffers from depression, chronic sleep deprivation, diabetes and other ailments and is in need of medical tests. Al-Masri has been in jail in Britain since 2004.Also learning whether they can be extradited are Babar Ahmad, Khaled al-Fawwaz, Adel Abdul Bary and Syed Ahsan.Ahmad has fought for almost a decade to avoid being sent to the U.S., where he is accused of running terrorist-funding websites. Ahsan faces charges of supporting terrorism and conspiring to kill or injure people in a foreign country.Bary and al-Fawwaz were indicted with others, including Osama bin Laden, for their alleged roles in the bombings of two U.S. embassies in east Africa in 1998. Al-Fawwaz faces more than 269 counts of murder.The various extradition bids have dragged on for as long as 14 years amid wrangles over whether the defendants’ human rights would be respected by U.S. authorities.Government lawyer James Edie said this week that no further appeals would be possible if the High Court judges ruled against the suspects.He said in that case the government would be entitled to “move instantly” to deport the men.by JILL LAWLESS?(AMSTERDAM) — A Dutch newspaper says that Joran van der Sloot, who is serving a 28-year-sentence for murdering a young Peruvian woman, has impregnated a woman while imprisoned in Lima.De Telegraaf newspaper on Monday cited Van der Sloot’s lawyer Maximo Altes as saying the pregnancy is past its third month, and Van der Sloot himself as confirming the news in a telephone call. The woman, identified by the paper only as “Leidi,” was said to have become pregnant during an unsupervised visit with Van der Sloot.Van der Sloot was convicted for robbing and killing Stephany Flores in 2010. He is also wanted in the U.S. in connection with the disappearance of teenager Natalee Holloway in Aruba in 2005. He could resist extradition if he obtains Peruvian nationality.MORE: ?Katie Hopkins and her friends were finishing a buffet lunch late last month at the Red Flower Chinese Restaurant in Williamsburg, Ky., over a playful discussion of gossip circulating about the eatery.“We were actually joking about the, you know, the whole Chinese restaurant. You know some rumors that you hear,” Hopkins told local CBS affiliate?.(MORE:?)So imagine their astonishment, Hopkins told the station, when she noticed a foot, tail and a leg sticking out from a garbage can with a box on top of it that two restaurant workers wheeled into the kitchen.“They were trying to be real quick with it. So that nobody could see it,” said Hopkins, who called health officials about the sighting. “It was very disturbing. There was actually a blood trail that they were mopping up behind the garbage can.”, the area’s NBC affiliate, reported that Paul Lawson, Whitley County’s environmental health inspector, arrived at the Red Flower and found an already-gutted dead deer, which the restaurant owner’s son admitted to picking up on the side of Interstate 75. The owner told the health department he intended to serve the roadkill to his family and not to restaurant patrons, WYMT reported. Following the discovery, the health department immediately closed the restaurant and issued the son a citation for having a white-tailed deer without a tag.(MORE:?)“[The restaurant staff] said they didn’t know they weren’t allowed to [bring in roadkill],” Lawson told WYMT TV. “So that makes me concerned. But maybe they could have before. They didn’t admit to doing it before.”Roadkill cuisine is nothing new. In 1987, Buck Peterson published , and other roadkill recipe books have appeared since. The also found in an informal survey by the National Conference of State Legislatures that at least 14 states, including Illinois, , have laws deeming roadkill salvageable. Even supports the consumption of roadkill over supermarket meat. As the organization notes on its website:“Animals killed on the road were not castrated, dehorned, or debeaked without anesthesia, did not suffer the trauma and misery of transportation in a crowded truck in all weather extremes, and did not hear the screams and smell the fear of the animals ahead of them on the slaughter line.”Despite this, Lawson told WYMT the incident was the craziest thing he’s ever seen. The Red Flower can reopen after passing a health inspection that proves the building underwent cleaning and sanitization.Even if the restaurant reopens, Hopkins told WYMT TV she won’t return. “I don’t think I’ll ever eat Chinese food again,” she said.(MORE:?)?SPOILER ALERT: Before you read this post, turn on your classified satellite-video link and watch last night’s Homeland.“It fucked me up, Saul. Being wrong about Brody… It makes me not trust my own thoughts. Every time I think I see something clearly now, it just disappears.”“I cannot be texting secret messages while I am surrounded by the fucking Joint Chiefs!”“Beirut Is Back” was another tense and gripping episode of Homeland, but because I am what I am, I’m going to begin this review with a concern. Brody’s right: he can’t be texting secret messages and disrupting covert operations one after another, from his perch within the government. Or rather he could, and that would be a way of keeping him involved in the story while he’s in Congress. But that kind of variation on the 24 mole-in-the-government theme, with Carrie coming this close to one bad guy after another and Brody pulling strings, would get uninteresting pretty fast.(MORE: )That said, the fact that the show confronted this issue and had Brody vocalize it this early in the season gives me confidence it won’t go in that direction. On top of its cat-and-mouse story, “Beirut Is Back” suggested a more interesting dual story: Carrie, who’s still torn apart by her failure to catch Brody last season, and Brody, who’s torn apart by the results of his success.For much of this episode, Brody seems at least as tormented as Carrie. Now that he’s made it to Congress, everybody sees him as their inside man. It’s not just Abu Nazir, who casually changed the terms of their arrangement (and whom Brody saved with the aid of a remarkably efficient international texting service). There’s the vice president, who sees Brody as a useful recruit in his efforts to undermine his own administration.And, maybe most painfully, there are his old Marine buddies, who want him to use his access to exonerate, or at least get the truth about, Walker, about whom they’re asking some worrisomely on-point questions: “Walker may have lost his mind, but he did not lose his aim.” It’s a subplot in the larger episode, but it shows us a Brody barely keeping it together amid the stresses, strains and secrets weighing on him. Especially fascinating here, as in so many of Damian Lewis’ scenes, is how Brody’s facades and authentic emotions work with and against each other: here, his calculated need to give his comrades an answer that will quiet them and his genuine anger at being hounded and doubted by them.Back in Beirut, the episode gives us something I’d been waiting for: Carrie and Saul back together, and a more direct reckoning with the fallout of the end of last season. One thing I love about scenes between Saul and Carrie is that we see that neither of them is a people person–they’re not easily friendly, each is a piece of work, and it’s taken time and history to have a rapport with each other. They’re difficult, cranky, bristling with spiny natural defenses. And their little exchanges mean a lot: Saul explaining that he was warned against the “deleterious effect” of visiting Carrie, Carrie admitting that she had hoped she’d be back working with him (“I know. Don’t get used to it”).(LIST: )There are two Carries, at least, coexisting in this episode, just as we saw multiple Brodys. The one who wants to get back in the game and the one who’s terrified of it. The one who’s cocksure and reckless and the one with doubts on top of doubts. The one who runs alone into a terrorist’s house and the one who runs to the roof to have a breakdown.She tells us as much: she doesn’t trust her own instincts around her informant, but “the Carrie who recruited her”–that woman, she trusts. It’s a beautiful little scene, and one that gets to a long-running theme of Homeland, that the price of fighting a secret war is often alienation, even from yourself. Despite Nazir’s escape, Carrie has a triumph?she’s shown to be right?and yet she still feels there’s another, better Carrie, lost to time, and the best she can do now is look for traces of her, doing archaeology on herself.Or so she thinks. For just as the first two episodes of this new season have set us up to expect a new status quo?Brody ascendant, Carrie crawling her way back?the last moments of the episode give us a revelation I’d not expected to see until much later in the series, if at all: Saul discovering Brody’s martyrdom video and, thus, learning that Carrie was right all along. (At least, pending some future twist.)It’s a genuine, out-of-left-field stunner, and a sign that Homeland is not simply going to conservatively husband its story to keep it spinning out as long as possible. Abu Nazir may have gotten away, and Brody’s bomb vest may never have gone off. But two episodes into season two of Homeland, we have our first explosion.?The mural, one of Rothko’s Seagram series, was defaced when a visitor to the Tate applied “a small area of black paint with a brush to the painting,” the gallery said.A photograph posted on Twitter by a gallery visitor showed words, including the name Vladimir, scrawled in the corner of the painting. The gallery, which attracts 5 million visitors a year, was briefly closed Sunday after the incident.Tate Modern said police were investigating.(MORE:?)The graffiti on the painting also appears to read “a potential piece of yellowism.” According to an online manifesto, Yellowism is an artistic movement run by two people named Vladimir Umanets and Marcin Lodyga.This is not the first time an artwork at Tate Modern has been interfered with. In 2000, two Chinese performance artists attempted to urinate on Marcel Duchamp’s urinal sculpture “Fountain.”Rothko, who died in 1970, is renowned for his large abstract paintings featuring bold blocks of color. The defaced painting was one of a series intended to decorate the Four Seasons restaurant in New York. Rothko changed his mind about the commission and gave the works to galleries, including the Tate.Earlier this year, Rothko’s “Orange, Red, Yellow” sold for almost $87 million at auction in New York.MORE:??In his last movie role, Sacha Baron Cohen ridiculed the late Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi. For his next project, he might be portraying Hong Kong’s most notorious, homophobic playboy.Cohen and his production company Four by Two Films have signed an agreement with Paramount Pictures to develop a project inspired by Cecil Chao Sze-tsung, Hong Kong’s version of both Hugh Hefner and Donald Trump, on Thursday. The movie,?tentatively?titled ‘The Lesbian’, would be inspired by Chao’s public refusal to?acknowledge?his daughter’s same-sex partnership and his pledge to give a $65 million dowry to any man who would marry her.Deadline said that the British comedian was tapped to play the 77-year old Hong Kong billionaire. No writers have yet been chosen for the project,?.(MORE:?)Cecil Chao, the son of a shipping magnate, has gained celebrity status in Hong Kong for parading his riches and bedtime partners across the pages of local tabloids for decades. His public boasting of having had 10,000 girlfriends and an alleged, disputed marriage with a model?thirty?years his junior have made him a perennial conversation topic in local cha chaan teng?cafes.Last year, as reported by?the , the real estate tycoon ? who lives in Villa Cecil, uses the car?number-plate?’Cecil’ and shuttles to his yacht by helicopter ? had himself photographed for a local magazine while surrounded?by bikini-clad models in a bid to irk a rival tycoon who had himself published a similar pose in another magazine.Homosexuality, among men, was legalized in Hong Kong in 1991. But the city, autonomous from the Chinese mainland in legal matters, does not allow civil unions or marriages for same-sex couples. Earlier this year, the first member of the Hong Kong parliament?that he was gay, but only after election night. According to a Hong Kong government , 51.7 percent said they considered homosexuality within their own families “unacceptable” or “strongly unacceptable”.“I hate to be the one bursting his daydream bubble, but hello, it’s 2012,” Cecil Chao’s daughter Gigi said in a prominent .?7:10 am ET: “Romney Claims of Bipartisanship as Governor Face Challenge”: “Fall in Jobless Rate Strips Romney of an Argument”: “Romney Gets Post-Debate Jolt”: “Key to Florida Victory Might Be Jacksonville Area”: “How Obama Reset His Campaign”: “Dems Say Romney Lied During Debate ? And It Will Cost Him”? The stories we read to frighten ourselves say a lot about what we want and what we fear. What the big horror books of the moment imply is that we hope for long relationships with fictional characters, especially if they're teenage girls; we prefer evil to be uncomplicated and unspeakably awful in familiar ways; and above all, we long to go to the movies. Two of this season's paranormal novels--Maggie Stiefvater's The Raven Boys (the first of a four-volume series of young-adult books) and Justin Cronin's The Twelve (the second volume of a trilogy, following 2010's The Passage) are built on...?VOICEOVER: “This was dishonest.”MITT ROMNEY: “I’m not in favor of a $5 trillion tax cut.” VOICEOVER: “Romney’s being dishonest here too:”VOICEOVER FROM ROMNEY AD: “According to an Independent, non-partisan study, Barack Obama and the liberals will raise taxes on the middle class…”VOICEOVER: “The Chairman of that so-called independent group is from Romney’s former company. Dick Cheney’s on its board. Newt Gingrich was there too. It’s not independent. It’s just not true.”?VOICEOVER: “Reckless, amateurish ? that’s what news media and fellow Republicans called Mitt Romney’s gaffe-filled July tour of England, Israel and Poland. When our U.S. diplomats were attacked in Libya. The New York Times said Romney’s knee-jerk response ‘showed an extraordinary lack of presidential character.’ And even Republican experts said Romney’s remarks were ‘the worst possible reaction to what happened.’ If this is how he handles the world now just think what Mitt Romney might do as president.”?VOICEOVER: “President Obama continues to distort Mitt Romney’s economic plan. The latest? Not telling the truth about Mitt Romney’s tax plan. The AP says doesn’t add up. ABC News: mostly fiction. Even the Obama campaign admitted it wasn’t true.”STEPHANIE CUTTER: “Well, okay, stipulated, it won’t be near $5 trillion.”VOICEOVER: “Obama’s plan? $4,000 more in taxes on the middle class. We can’t afford four more years.”MITT ROMNEY: “I’m Mitt Romney and I approve this message.”?GREG ANTHONY: “There’s a really soft spot in my heart for Nevada, having been born and raised there. And when you look at unemployment, it’s probably highest in the country, double digits right now. I voted for Barack Obama, thought he’d be a centrist. I really lost faith in him. I’m supporting Mitt Romney?he’s a no-excuse kind of guy. And I think over the last 4 years we’ve heard enough excuses. I just don’t believe we can afford four more years like the last four years.”MITT ROMNEY: “I’m Mitt Romney and I approve this message.”?MELANIE MCNAMARA: “I’m disappointed in Barack Obama as my president. Because he promised to bring us all together and we’re all going to be able to prosper. I don’t see the prospering. In 2008, I voted for Barack Obama. He doesn’t have my vote this time. Why Mitt Romney? Being a woman, you think about your children and you think about their future. And what I want to think about is a future that has jobs. That our economy’s growing again. That’s important to women and it’s important to me.”MITT ROMNEY: “I’m Mitt Romney and I approved this message.”?(ROSWELL, N.M.) — Experienced skydiver and extreme athlete Felix Baumgartner hopes to take the leap of his life on Tuesday, attempting the highest, fastest free fall in history.If he survives, the man dubbed “Fearless Felix” could be the first skydiver to break the sound barrier. If he doesn’t, a tragic fall could be live-streamed on the Internet for the world to see.(WATCH: )Rigged with cameras, the 43-year-old former military parachutist from is scheduled to jump from a balloon-hoisted capsule 23 miles near Roswell on Tuesday morning. He wants to break the record set in 1960 by Joe Kittinger, who jumped from an open gondola at an altitude of 19.5 miles. Kittinger’s speed of 614 mph was just shy of breaking the sound barrier at that height.Baumgartner, who has been preparing for the jump for five years, has made two practice runs from the Roswell area, from 15 miles high in March and 18 miles in July.And while he and his team of experts recognize the worst-case scenarios — including “boiling” blood and exploding lungs — they have confidence in their built-in solutions. Those solutions are something is watching closely. The space agency is interested in the potential for escape systems on future rocket ships.Baumgartner’s top medical man is Dr. Jonathan Clark, a former NASA flight surgeon whose wife, astronaut Laurel Clark, died in the space shuttle Columbia accident in 2003. Clark is dedicated to improving astronauts’ chances of survival in a high-altitude disaster.The No. 1 fear is a breach of Baumgartner’s suit, which could cause potentially lethal bubbles to form in his bodily fluids, a condition known as boiling blood. There are also risks he could spin out of control, causing other problems.This death-defying venture is being sponsored by energy drink maker, Red Bull, which has funded other extreme athletic events. The project’s team of experts has a plan for almost every contingency. The spacesuit and capsule were tested in the early skydiving practice runs. The company won’t say how much the project, called Stratos for stratosphere, is costing.But whether Baumgartner can make what he vows will be his final jump depends on the weather. A cold front that brought winds to the area this weekend prompted the team to move the planned Monday jump to Tuesday. Even the Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta, 200 miles to the north, was forced to cancel its opening mass ascension of more than 500 balloons on Saturday morning because of the high winds. Those balloons took off Sunday, but winds in the 9 mph range and above remain in the forecast for Roswell all week, and the jump can only be made if winds on the ground are less than 2 mph.Still, Baumgartner’s team remained optimistic about getting the mission off the ground.“From what we are looking at so far, we are on schedule (for Tuesday),” meteorologist Don Day said at a media briefing Sunday.Weather permitting, Baumgartner will be lifted into the stratosphere around 7 a.m. MDT by a helium balloon that will stretch 55 stories high. Once he reaches his target altitude, he will open the hatch of his capsule and make a gentle, bunny-style jump. Any contact with the capsule on his exit could break open the pressurized suit that will protect him from temperatures as low as minus 70 and a lack of oxygen. He hopes to reach a speed of 690 mph to break the sound barrier.Baumgartner, who has made more than 2,500 jumps from planes, helicopters, landmarks and skyscrapers over the past 25 years, promises this jump will be his last.He says he plans to settle down with his girlfriend and fly helicopters on mountain rescue and firefighting missions in the U.S. and Austria.By JERI CLAUSING?(HARRISBURG, Pa.) ? should be sent to prison for life when a judge sentences him Tuesday, according to several of the jurors who convicted the former assistant coach of molesting several boys over a period of years.None of the jurors interviewed by The Associated Press said they have had second thoughts about their June verdict, and several plan to attend the sentencing.“There isn’t a sentence that I believe is harsh enough for what he has done and how it has affected the university,” said Joan Andrews, a juror who has worked for Penn State for 41 years and held football season tickets since 1969. “I don’t think there’s been one individual in this entire campus that has not been affected by this.”(LIST: )Four jurors said they plan to be in the courtroom when Sandusky, 68, learns the penalty for sexually abusing boys he met through a charity for at-risk children. Sandusky’s own attorney expects his client to be handed a long sentence from Judge John Cleland after conviction on 45 counts.Although a list of jurors has not been released by Cleland, the AP was able to contact five of them. They said they recently received a letter from the court informing them about the sentencing and offering to have a court official meet them outside the courthouse.A court system spokesman said the jurors are guaranteed a seat but won’t necessarily be sitting together.Only one of the five, retired Penn State soil sciences professor Daniel D. Fritton, said he would not attend.“I’d just like to stay out of the limelight, for one thing,” Fritton said. “I figure I could read in the paper what happens.”Gayle Barnes, a homemaker and former school district employee, said she thinks a lot about the victims, particularly the eight who testified against Sandusky and provided what she considers the critical evidence of guilt. She said he deserves life in prison.“I do still feel good, what we as jurors did,” Barnes said. “I didn’t go there saying off the bat he’s guilty. I needed to listen to every single thing that was said.”(PHOTOS: )Barnes said she has been in touch with a fifth juror and an alternate juror who also plan to attend the sentencing.High school science teacher Joshua Harper, who has bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Penn State, said that he takes pride in having served on the jury, and that the guilty verdict was not a close call. He wants Sandusky “put away for the rest of his life, really.”“This is what prisons are for, you know,” Harper said. “I mean, I don’t think you let a guy loose like that.”He also felt the victim testimony was pivotal.“It was such a consistent pattern of behavior,” Harper said. “It was just so solid. The defense was just so thin. There was no evidence that these kids were lying. Even the minor inconsistencies that the defense tried to bring up ? and did bring up ? that made it more convincing.”Through a relative, juror Ann T. Van Kuren said she also plans to attend.Barnes and Harper both said they hoped to learn more about what Penn State officials did or did not do in 1998 and 2001 after getting complaints about Sandusky showering with boys. That was a major theme of the report issued to Penn State this summer by Louis Freeh, the former FBI director, and is likely also to arise during civil litigation by Sandusky’s victims against the university.(MORE: )“We don’t know the whole story to this whole thing yet,” said Barnes, a Nittany Lions fan who felt so strongly that ‘s statue should remain in place that she went to the scene outside Beaver Stadium the day it was removed in July, about a month after the verdict. “I just felt like they jumped ship, they didn’t do the right thing, that they needed more information. What’s going to happen if Curley and Schultz are found not guilty?”Tim Curley, the school’s athletic director on leave, and Gary Schultz, a retired vice president, are awaiting trial on charges they did not properly report suspected abuse and lied to the grand jury that investigated Sandusky. Paterno, the school’s Hall of Fame coach, was fired after Sandusky was arrested in November and died of lung cancer in January.The names of Curley, Schultz and even Paterno did not come up in deliberations, Andrews said.“I don’t know what to think about Curley and Schultz,” she said. “I think Joe Paterno was and is and has been falsely accused of many things. I don’t think the man was informed of the detail for him to understand how serious this was.”Sandusky’s sentencing on Tuesday will begin with Cleland determining whether he qualifies as a sexually violent predator, a status that would require lifetime registration if he is ever paroled.By MARK SCOLFORO? Fifteen-year-old Taylor Santos let a classmate copy her homework, and she learned the hard way never to do it again. Santos, a student at Springtown High School in Texas, was punished by a vice principal with a swift swat to her bottom using a wooden paddle. The spanking left blisters and forced her to sleep on her side that night. As upset as Santos' mother was, however, it wasn't the spanking, which she had consented to, that led her to complain to the school board. It was the severity of the punishment and the fact that it was delivered by a...?Fall is the season for picking pumpkins, carving pumpkins, and drinking pumpkin spice lattes at Starbucks.? But the coffee chain is having trouble keeping the $4 fall favorite in stock, driving customers out of their gourds, according to an article in today’s .(MORE: )Starbucks that while there is no “widespread scarcity,” the “infrequent deliveries” of the special pumpkin sauce have caused shortages at some locations:“There is an opportunity, in a pumpkin emergency, for them to be able to place an [extra] order,” said spokeswoman Lisa Passe.You can buy the instant packets instead, but apparently many stores are running low on those too.? Media blogger Jim Romenesko’s website has been blowing up with complaints about Via pumpkin spice shortages in Evanston, Illinois, Nashville, Tennessee, and the Denver area.? The Wall Street Journal created .? Some examples of the pandemonium:Oh really Starkbucks? You're "out" of Pumpkin Spice Latte? (laughs nervously) (goes on rampage, destroying everyone and everything)— Paul Chabai (@pchabai) Went to go get my after church pumpkin spice latte and Starbucks was out of it!! Dunkin it is! 😊🍂🍁— Kristin Ashley (@ksal) Starbucks fans, maybe it wouldn’t hurt to take it easy on the pumpkin spice lattes: after all, there are 300 calories in a “tall” size.? Pumpkins on their own are actually very good for you, high in fiber and Vitamin A, as .? So while you are waiting for local stores to get more pumpkin spice lattes, try making yourself a healthy breakfast like pumpkin oatmeal instead. Recipe .MORE: ?Not all entrepreneurs need a business plan. Most start-ups succeed because the founder had an authentic vision and clarity of purpose, not a well-written document. While not all planning is bad, the content that most business plans focus on has little to do with the reality that will actually emerge. Instead of agonizing over a document, focus on identifying exactly why your business should exist. Clearly articulate the bigger goal at hand, whether you call it vision, purpose, or calling. This will guide you and the business. And remember that the team is more important than any plan. It’s worth spending time making sure you are working and partnering with the right people.Adapted from?? The serial Novel--fiction delivered in installments instead of a single volume--harks back to Charles Dickens, who popularized the format in 1836 with The Pickwick Papers. The tradition survives today as the e-serial: a story broken into episodes, downloaded to a digital reader and retailed for usually about $2 per hit. But if you ask e-serial publishers to describe the lure of the format, chances are they'll invoke the likes of Walter White or Tyrion Lannister over Samuel Pickwick. Byliner, a prestigious source of short-format e-books, is publishing Margaret Atwood's dystopian Positron under its Byliner Serials imprint; editor in chief Mark Bryant...?(NEW YORK) ? As the tally from a deadly meningitis outbreak rose Friday, health officials identified the medical clinics across the country that received steroid shots for back pain now linked to the illnesses.Authorities took the step to help identify everyone who may have gotten sick ? or may still get sick ? in the outbreak.“All patients who may have received these medications need to be tracked down immediately,” said Dr. Benjamin Park of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.“It is possible that if patients with infection are identified soon and put on appropriate antifungal therapy, lives may be saved,” he said in a statement.(MORE:?)The CDC said the number of cases of the rare fungal meningitis reached nearly 50 cases, and spread to a seventh state Friday. The number of deaths in the outbreak remained at five.Investigators have focused on a steroid medication made by a specialty pharmacy in Massachusetts. All the outbreak patients had gotten shots of the steroid for back pain, a common treatment, and inspectors found at least one sealed vial contaminated with fungus.On Friday, officials said they have found fungal infections in nine sick patients. They weren’t able to identify what types of fungus in every one of those patients, but did distinguish at least two types ? Aspergillus and Exserohilum.In all, 47 people have contracted fungal meningitis, the CDC said. Michigan became the seventh state to report cases, with four. Tennessee’s cases now total 29; Virginia, six; Indiana, 3; two each in Maryland and Florida and one in North Carolina.Three people have died in Tennessee and one in Virginia and Maryland.The first known case in the meningitis outbreak was diagnosed about two weeks ago in Tennessee, and the steroid was recalled last week by the pharmacy, New England Compounding Center in Framingham, Mass.About 17,700 single-dose vials of the steroid were covered in the recall. On Friday, the government released the names of about 75 facilities in 23 states that got recalled doses between July and September.(Q&A:?)It’s not clear how many were sent to clinics, how many were used, or even whether everyone who got one will get sick. Once infected, it can take as long as a month for symptoms to appear.At the prompting of government officials, clinics are notifying all the patients who got shots from the recalled lots.“There’s a massive effort to contact all the patients,” said Marsha Thiel, the chief executive officer of MAPS, a company that owns surgery center clinics in Minnesota.She added, “If there’s any question at all, they’re being directed to go to their physician.”As a precaution, the Food and Drug Administration urged doctors not to use any of the company’s products, and released a list Friday that included other steroids, anesthetics and a blood pressure medicine. The company, which is now closed, said in a statement Thursday that despite the FDA warning, “there is no indication of any potential issues with other products.”The steroid is known as preservative-free methylprednisolone acetate, which the compounding pharmacy creates by combining a powder with a liquid.There are FDA-approved versions of the drug, sold by the brand name Depo-Medrol, in good supply. So patients who need the medicine should not encounter a shortage, the FDA said Friday.Most of the anxiety now involves patients who got steroid shots for back pain and are worried about becoming seriously ill.“Our phone is ringing off the hook this morning. Patients are calling. Of course, they’re concerned,” said Paulette Fry, practice manager at Wellspring Pain Solutions in Columbus, Ind., about 40 miles south of Indianapolis. She said the clinic was sending out letters to about 300 patients who received spinal injections with the drug.Meningitis is an inflammation of the lining of the brain and spinal cord. Symptoms include severe headache, nausea, dizziness and fever.Fungal meningitis is not contagious like the more common forms. The types of fungus linked to the outbreak are all around, but very rarely causes illness. Fungal meningitis is treated with high-dose antifungal medications, usually given intravenously in a hospital.By MIKE STOBBEMORE:?? Cosmic Comics A quartet of graphic novels explore song craft, soldiers and a sinister future 1 C. Tyler YOU'LL NEVER KNOW, BOOK THREE: SOLDIER'S HEART Soldier's heart is what people used to call PTSD, and the final volume of Tyler's exquisitely painted trilogy explores how her father's World War II experiences have reverberated in her family. The book is as much about empty spaces--in history and on the page--as it is about the details she can fill in. 2 Chris Ware BUILDING STORIES This is more than a book; it's a profusion of printed paper: a box full of pamphlets, comic...?Parents of autistic children say that one of the most stressful behaviors they have to contend with is their child wandering off alone ? so much so that it prevents families from engaging in activities outside the home ? and half of parents with concerns about their child’s straying say they haven’t received any guidance or advice on preventing the behavior.In the first study to gauge how commonly kids with autism spectrum disorders wander, or “elope,” researchers found that half of 1,367 surveyed families with autistic children aged 4 to 17 said their child had wandered away at least once after age 4. Among those families, more than half said their child had disappeared long enough to cause concern.(MORE:?)Forty-three percent of parents whose children had gone missing said their child’s wandering prevented family members from getting a good night’s sleep, and 62% reported that the autistic child’s tendency to elope prevented their family from attending or enjoying activities outside the home.Autistic children who wandered off were also likely to experience “close calls” ? 65% of wandering children were at risk for traffic accidents and 24% were at risk for drowning ? and police were called in a third of cases.“There are an alarming rate of elopements and it is an incredibly common behavior that children with autism engage in,” says lead study?author Dr. Paul Law, senior author and director of the ?at the Kennedy Krieger Institute. “They frequently go missing, and often have?dangerous?encounters.”(MORE:?)On average, children were reported missing for just over 40 minutes and were most likely to elope from their home, a store or school. Kids who wandered off were likely to be older, have more severe autism symptoms and have lower intellect and communication scores, compared with autistic children who did not elope. Missing children were also less likely to respond to their name.The authors said children who wandered often had a specific goal in mind ? they were planning to go somewhere or do something, as opposed to simply being confused or lost, as is common among other people who commonly wander, such as those with Alzheimer’s disease.“Right now this is still an?unfamiliar?issue. People know this happens in the Alzheimer’s community, but no one tells parents that their autistic child may wander from safety or elope,” says Lori McIlwain, executive director of the National Autism Association who pushed for the study. McIlwain’s son Connor has autism and has wandered away from school on a few occasions ? one time almost making it to a nearby highway. “My fear is that parents still do not know this can happen. I would love if all?physicians?were aware of this issue and could communicate and educate caregivers about this.”(MORE:?)Law says he hopes the study will increase awareness among doctors about the?prevalence?of elopement, which he describes as a silent issue. “Additional research will still be needed in order to develop in-depth practices for how to treat individuals at risk for elopement. We know we have locks and doors, but we do not yet know the best approach, and each child with autism is unique.”?The Navy is beginning to the case more openly that the nation needs to get serious about replacing its fleet of Ohio-class ballistic-missile submarines.“We have to have that submarine,” Rear Admiral Barry , the Navy’s director of undersea warfare, the New London Day last week. That’s the hometown paper of General Dynamics’ Electric Boat, the lone U.S. shipyard building Navy subs.The program will refurbish only one of the nuclear triad’s three legs (the other two, both operated by the Air Force, deliver their nukes via land-based missiles and bombers, both of which also need replacing).The nonprofit Ploughshares Fund released a Monday estimating the cost of maintaining, operating and retooling the nuclear triad will cost close to $400 billion over the coming decade.Yet we’re getting less bang for the buck, if you will. The Natural Resources Defense Council has the declining number of warheads per platform since the Cold War’s end:1991: 7.5 warheads per delivery vehicle (9,300 warheads on 1,239 delivery vehicles)2001: 5.8 warheads per delivery vehicle (6,196 warheads on 1,064 delivery vehicles)2009: 2.6 warheads per delivery vehicle (2,200 warheads on 850 delivery vehicles)The military argues that the triad remains necessary to ensure that if an enemy wipes out two legs, the third leg will survive to retaliate (why this doesn’t argue for a quadad or a pentad ? or, for that matter, a — has never been made clear).The Pentagon’s fear of concentrating all of its nuclear eggs in one basket certainly doesn’t apply to its ammo production, according to a 2010 in Army Sustainment, the in-house journal of Army guys who worry about such things:Over 99 percent of all small-arms bullets (5.56-millimeter [mm], 7.62-mm and .50-caliber) consumed by the Army under its Title 10 responsibility to supply and equip its forces are manufactured at the Lake City Army Ammunition Plant…Logisticians will argue that this strategy lacks adequate redundancy and responsiveness…It’s clear that nuclear theology has its own sacraments that don’t apply to bullets, but 20 years after the end of the Cold War it may be time to ask why.The triad remains a trinity to the U.S. nuclear priesthood. Originally created as a way to outfox the Soviet Union ? with a trio of delivery devices, Moscow could never deliver a bolt-out-of-the-blue strike that would destroy all U.S. nuclear weapons. That was the Cold War nuclear theology.But the dogma has changed. Think of it as a kind of atomic Vatican II.Battleland has been asking military officials for years how much the U.S. nuclear arsenal has to shrink before continuing to invest in the triad’s subs, missiles and bombers no longer makes sense.“Good question,” Air Force Secretary Michael Donley said when we asked him in April.“The more complex the global environment becomes,” Donley said, “the more flexibility you want between land, sea, and air-based capabilities.”Battleland: So when we get down to three nukes we’ll still have a triad?Donley: I wouldn’t forecast what levels are the break points here, but I do think it’s important to maintain the flexibility and the options for the President going forward. There’s no doubt in my mind that the international strategic environment is much more complex than it was when we developed this concept and capability back in the ‘50s and ‘60s.So there you have it: the triad was vital in the simple superpower world. It’s even more critical today, in the complex, post-Cold War world.?7:05 am ET: “Error and Fraud at Issue as Absentee Voting Rises”: “Capitol Assets: Congress’s Wealthiest Mostly Shielded from Effects of Deep Recession”: “Romney Shows Softer Side; Obama Raising More Cash”: “Boehner Wary of Lame-Duck Deficit Deal”: “Mitt Romney Seizes Momentum with 30 Days Left Before Election”? The Washington nationals entered the late-September stretch run with the best record in baseball. That means the nation's capital will host postseason play for the first time since 1933, when FDR was tossing first pitches. But in the tradition of Washington's tortured baseball history--the Nationals have struggled since arriving from Montreal in 2005; the old Washington Senators stank for decades before leaving D.C., twice--success comes with a cruel twist. The Nats will enter the playoffs without one of their star players--by choice. Starting-pitching phenom Stephen Strasburg was benched in early September, having neared his preassigned limit of 180 innings of work...?(BEIRUT) — The leader of Syria’s main opposition group says members of President Bashar Assad’s ruling Baath party can play a role in Syria’s political future as long as they did not participate in killings during the country’s uprising and civil war.Abdulbaset Sieda’s comments Monday appear to be a softening of the opposition’s stance that it will accept nothing less than the complete removal of the Assad regime and its inner circle.Sieda is the head of the opposition Syrian National Council, based in Turkey.He told The Associated Press that the SNC will meet next week in Qatar and will discuss, among other things, the possibility that Syria’s current Vice President Farouk al-Sharaa can be an interim leader for Syria if Assad steps down. Ankara has suggested al-Sharaa as an option.By BASSSEM MROUEPHOTOS: ?Taking on the DebatesIn this week’s cold open,?SNL alum Chris Parnell (who you might also know as 30 Rock‘s?Dr. Leo Spaceman)?returns to play PBS’s Jim Lehrer, moderator of Wednesday’s presidential debate.?SNL‘s debate spoof hinges on what seems to have emerged as the general consensus: Lehrer was inarticulate. Obama seemed distracted. Romney won. This sketch, however, delves into the key reasons for Obama’s aloofness: he forgot to get the First Lady a gift for their 20th anniversary, and the slip was seriously stressing him out. Also, the thin Colorado air was making him a bit woozy.While new resident POTUS Jay Pharoah once again nails Obama’s timbre and verbal tics, one could argue that Mitt Romney (played by Jason Sudeikis) quietly overshadows — much like in the real debate. When Pharoah speaks early on — in his perfectly Obama-esque way — Sudeikis’s subtly hilarious facial expressions and eyebrow movements somehow manage to steal the show.?(EL PASO, Texas) ? A former superintendent is scheduled to be sentenced Friday for his part in a scheme to fraudulently improve high-stakes school testing scores in the El Paso Independent School District by getting rid of students likely to fail.Lorenzo Garcia pleaded guilty in federal court in June to two counts of fraud and faces up to 3? years in prison.Garcia admitted to devising a scheme to keep hundreds of low-performing sophomores from taking the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills test. Some students were held back in the ninth grade while others were told to drop out before the 10th grades accountability tests.The district thus gave the appearance of improving academic performance, meaning it was able to qualify for more federal funds. Garcia personally received at least $56,000 in bonuses.Court documents indicate at least six other people helped Garcia organize the scheme. An FBI investigation continues.Garcia, who was hired in 2006, implemented a plan with several other administrators that allowed for pre-testing of 10th-graders to identify those who were likely to fail the standardized tests. He had one employee photograph students crossing the border so they could be forced out on the grounds that they were living in Mexico and not within the school district.In the short term, the strategy worked. Test scores improved in most high schools and the district’s overall rating improved from “academically acceptable” in 2005 to “recognized” in 2010 ? the second-highest rating possible.The Texas Education Agency cleared Garcia in 2010 of allegations brought by then-state Sen. Eliot Shapleigh. But in late 2011, the El Paso Times filed a Freedom of Information Act request for correspondence between the federal Education Department and the school district. When the attorney general ruled that the records must be released, the district acknowledged the scandal.State officials have placed the district on probation, named a monitor to oversee it and said the schools had shown “utter disregard” for the students’ needs.Other large districts have been ensnared in scandals to raise test scores, most recently in Atlanta, where educators gave answers to students or changed answers after tests were completed. But none has been so brazen as to cast off low-scoring students.By Juan Carlos Llorca?Saturday night was our “family dinner” at our suicide-survivors’ in San Diego.TAPS provided us with fried chicken (I was one happy Texan!) and several other comfort foods.We sat at tables with friends both new and old and everyone had the same precious look on their faces- exhausted yet grateful. I was feeling tired, emotionally stretched, excited, comforted, and thrilled to hear our key note speaker Marine Corps Sergeant Major Brian , the senior enlisted adviser to the Chairman of the of Staff. In that role, his mission is to keep the nation’s top military officer — Army General Martin Dempsey — keenly aware of how the nation’s young men and women in uniform are faring and feeling. It’s a vital job after — as of Sunday — 11 straight years of war.I first met Sergeant Major Battaglia in June at the Department of Defense-VA suicide prevention conference. He sat in the front row during our panel of survivors’ stories, and served as a grounding force for me while I my heart out.I had no idea who he was, but was compelled to go thank him for giving me an encouraging smile when I struggled to grasp words. I soon learned that he played a very important within our military, specifically working on suicide prevention. So, you can imagine my delight when I found out he would be speaking at the TAPS Suicide Survivor Seminar.Saturday night, Sergeant Major Battagia spoke to our gathering of survivors, and encouraged us to continue sharing our stories. He honored our loved ones and affirmed what I, too, believe: they all died heroes.He spoke of the love and support we all now have in TAPS and of his personal appreciation and awe of such a passionate and precious organization.Lastly, he addressed the fiercest survivors among us, the children.As a teacher, I was so incredibly moved by what came next. Sergeant Major Battaglia invited the children to come to the stage. He told them that that they were safe among their new TAPS family, and that they had a new family and set of friends who would do anything to help them.Then, the not-so-musically-talented military hero led the group of tiny heroes in song. They sang , and brought the audience to tears.The lyrics to the song ring so true to the heart of TAPS:Keep smilin’, keep shinin’ Knowin’ you can always count on me, for sure, That’s what friends are for. For good times and bad times I’ll be on your side forever more, That’s what friends are for.Hearing this giant of the military community sing to those children and promise his support touched me. It opened my eyes to a new kind of military, one that recognizes the problem and is working to solve it.After I lost my husband, I felt that I had no support within the military — that his death would go unnoticed, and that others would join him.I feared that the only people trying to change the suicide rate among our troops were those on the outside of the military. After tonight, I can testify that this is not true. We have a friend, an ally, and a warrior within the military named Sergeant Major Brian Battaglia.TAPS’ mission was so obvious Saturday night. l and have spent countless days working to build strong links to the military. It would be easy for them to have written off the military, seen it as the problem, and gone on.But that is not how it works in TAPS. This organization constantly works cooperatively with the military to find solutions to frustrating and devastating issues, including — but not limited to — . That is both powerful and amazing.I was encouraged and inspired by the night’s events.I want to speak to those who may be feeling like no one cares about the suicide loss of your loved one. I would like to offer you the promise of hope. You have the TAPS community, ably reinforced by Sergeant Major Battaglia and his team, working unrelentingly on behalf of you and your loved one. That’s what I learned Saturday night.Rebecca Morrison of Texas was one of two widows Time featured in its July cover on the surge in Army suicides. Her husband, Captain Ian Morrison, an AH-64 helicopter pilot, died in March.?A century ago today, the Balkan Wars began.?On Oct. 8, 1912, the tiny Kingdom of Montenegro declared war on the weak Ottoman Empire, launching an invasion of Albania, then under nominal Turkish rule. Three other Balkan states in league with the Montenegrins?Bulgaria, Greece and Serbia?rapidly followed suit, waging war on the old imperial enemy while drawing upon a wellspring of national sentiment in each of their homelands. By March 1913, their blood-soaked campaigns had effectively pushed the enfeebled Ottomans out of Europe. Yet by July, Greece and Serbia would clash with Bulgaria in what’s known as the Second Balkan War?a bitter month-long struggle that saw more territory change hands, more villages razed and more bodies dumped into the earth.The peace that followed was no peace at all. A year later, with Europe’s Great Powers entwined in the fate of the Balkans, a Yugoslav nationalist in the Bosnian city of Sarajevo killed the crown prince of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Europe plunged into World War I.“The Balkans,” goes one of the many witticism attributed to Winston Churchill, “generates more history than it can locally consume.”To Churchill and many Western observers of his era, this rugged stretch of southeastern Europe was a headache, a geo-political mess that had for centuries been at the crossroads of empires and religions, riven by ethnic tribalisms and the meddling of outside powers. Half a century earlier, Prussian Chancellor Otto von Bismarck?the architect of the modern German state?expressed his disgust with this nuisance of a region, scoffing that the whole of the Balkans was “not worth the bones of one Pomeranian grenadier” in his employ.“But while these grand statesmen of the West saw a backward land brimming with ancient hatreds, the Balkans’ turbulent past, and the legacy of the Balkan Wars in particular, perhaps offers a more instructive history lesson for our present than even World War I. This is not just because the Balkan Wars spawned some historic firsts on the battlefield?such as the first instance when aircraft was used to attack an enemy (by the Bulgarians) or some of the first grim scenes of trench warfare in continental Europe (observers recount how, in one trench, the legs of dead Turkish soldiers froze into the ground and had to be hacked off). It’s because, in many ways these battles fought a century ago reflect our world today: one where internecine and sectarian conflicts?in, say, Syria or the Democratic Republic of Congo?are enmeshed in the agendas of outside powers and where the trauma of that violence often augurs more of the same.On the surface, the Balkan Wars were opportunistic land grabs. The Ottoman Empire, at this point very much the “sick man of Europe,” had held sway over a vast swathe of the region since the 15th century, but by the 19th century was steadily hemorrhaging territory. Newly independent states in Bulgaria, Greece and Serbia?at times, egged on, at others, reined in by imperial powers like Russia, Austria-Hungary, Germany and the U.K., who were all jockeying for supremacy?were now possessed by their own fantasies of creating a “Greater Serbia” or “Greater Bulgaria.” The genie of ethnic nationalism was very much out of its bottle, and the Balkans were suffused with anti-Turkish, anti-Muslim feeling. See these popular lines of doggerel, penned by a mid-19th century Montenegrin prince:So tear down minarets and mosques,and the kindle the Serbian yule logs,and let us paint our Easter eggs……our faiths will be submerged in blood.The better of the two will be rise redeemed.[Eid] can never live in peacewith Christmas Day.And there was blood. The joint Balkan invasion of Turkish territory in Albania, Macedonia and Thrace, along the rim of the Aegean Sea, saw brutal, bitter fighting, miserable sieges and myriad atrocities committed on all sides.?A Czech correspondent described the approach to Lozengrad, the Bulgarian name for what’s now Kirklareli, Turkey, as something out of Dante’s Inferno. “Only his dark genius could recreate all the horrors of the cold swamps out of which stick the twisted and mutilated bodies of the fallen,” he wrote in the Czech daily Pravo Lidu, in October 1912.? Another journalist entering the city of Adrianople (now Edirne, Turkey) when it was finally surrendered by the Ottomans to the Bulgarians in March 1913 recounted the utter desolation of the ancient town, now a “ghastly theater of blood”: “Everywhere bodies reduced to mere bones, blue hands ripped from forearms, the bizarre gestures, empty eye-sockets, open mouths as if calling in desperation, the shattered teeth behind the torn and blackened lips.”The capture of Adrianople effectively brought what’s considered the First Balkan War to a close. A treaty brokered in London by Europe’s Great Powers ended hostilities by May, but would soon unravel when, in late June, territorial disputes led to the Greeks and Serbs turning on the Bulgarians? ? the biggest victors of the First Balkan War ? and, even at times with the help of Turkish fighters, stripping the Bulgarians of much of the gains they had made in the earlier conflict. It was a huge source of national humiliation for the Bulgarians, who had mobilized 500,000 troops?a quarter of their entire male population?during the wars.In all, over the course of the Balkan Wars, some 200,000 soldiers died in less than a year with countless numbers of civilians massacred in raids on towns or laid low by starvation and disease. Grisly accounts followed one after the other of pogroms and ethnic cleansing in a dizzyingly complex, diverse part of the world that, for all the inefficiencies and injustices of Ottoman rule, had existed in relative multi-cultural harmony for centuries. A landmark report on the Balkan Wars, issued in 1913 by the then brand new Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, claimed that “there is no clause in international law applicable to land war and to the treatment of the wounded, which was not violated… by all the belligerents.”?The Carnegie report went on to declaim “the megalomania of the national ideal”?the ugly, crude nationalism that fired the expansionist zeal of countries the world over. “Violence carries its own punishment with it and something very different from armed force will be needed to establish order and peace in the Balkans.”But that was a message, like many others made then by dovish liberals and peaceniks, that went unheeded. At a time when the Great Powers were steadily amassing arms and tying themselves into alliances primed for war, the smaller Balkan states could only end up pawns in a much bigger game of chess. Resurgent Serbian nationalism, backed by Russia, put the two ultimately at odds with Austria-Hungary, triggering World War I. “The Balkans were not the powder keg, as is so often believed: the metaphor is inaccurate,” writes journalist and Balkans historian Misha Glenny, in his book, The Balkans: Nationalism, War and the Great Powers. “They were merely the powder trail that the great powers themselves had laid. The powder keg was Europe.”What followed, of course, involved more bloodshed, more seismic upheavals, more redrawing of maps. Decades later, the Balkans tragically convulsed in another round of ethnic warfare following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the fall of Yugoslavia’s own Communist state. As some commentators parroted Churchill and Bismarck’s dismay with the region, Mark Mazower, a noted scholar of Eastern Europe now at Columbia University, wrote in how the relationship of ethnic groups to the power and politics of a nation?not simply its history?can lead to the disintegration of once tolerant, integrated societies:?“It has been war?first as a specter then as a reality?which affected people’s sense of ethnic identity.”Looking at the vicious sectarian fighting taking place now in Syria, one wonders what sort of country can possibly emerge when the shooting stops. The hideous excesses 0f an authoritarian regime, the cash and weaponry supplied to rebels by foreign powers and the unraveling of the delicate political consensus that once existed has led to a grinding, miserable civil war with no end in sight.Prescient for its time, the 1913 Carnegie report opens with an impassioned appeal for peace and an end to the “monstrous business” of the arms race. Otherwise, the legacy of the Balkan Wars was clear:[It will be] only the beginning of other wars, or rather of a continuous war, the worst of all, a war of religion, of reprisals, of race, a war of one people against another, of man against man and brother against brother. It has become a competition, as to who can best dispossess and “denationalize” his neighbor.Violence, as the report says, is its own punishment . A century doesn’t seem so long ago.?Cleveland, OhioBarack Obama’s soggy supporters looked grim as they waited for the President in a cold sideways rain. Many had been huddled for hours without umbrellas, droplets beading on their skimpy ponchos and drenching the astroturf at Cleveland State University’s soccer field. “I know everybody is a little wet,” Obama acknowledged when he took the makeshift stage. “I want to thank everybody who’s up there in the stands. We appreciate you.” The applause was muted. If the crowd arrived fired up and ready to go, the rain had doused some of the enthusiasm. As have four bumpy years and a long, joyless campaign. As the presidential race enters the home stretch, Obama isn’t trying to replicate the poetry of his 2008 run. The President’s re-election bid is all gritty prose, a tactical battle to out-organize and outwork Mitt Romney in the handful of states that matter.(PHOTOS: )Which is why Obama was in Cleveland on a wet and chilly Friday afternoon in October. No Republican has won the White House without carrying Ohio, and it’s unlikely Mitt Romney would be the exception. Obama has clung to here throughout the fall. Now, in the wake of a rocky first debate that has galvanized Romney’s supporters, he is fighting to hang on.The visit to Cleveland State, Obama’s 14th trip to Ohio this year, was the third of four stops Obama will make at Ohio college campuses in the span of two weeks, and arguably the most important. Cuyahoga County is the most populous in Ohio, a Democratic stronghold with the biggest African-American population in the state. For Democrats, winning Ohio requires racking up votes in the state’s northeastern corner, a swath of rusting manufacturing cities like Cleveland and Youngstown with large minority populations and lots of union households, where Obama’s manufacturing message and rescue of the auto industry loom large.Beginning with Bill Clinton in 1992, each of the party’s presidential nominees has amassed at least a 10-point advantage in this corner of Ohio. An Ohio Newspaper Poll in late September showed Obama with a 16-point edge over Romney in northeast Ohio. But both sides are fighting for every vote. In the three weeks ending Sept. 30, the Cleveland area was the recipient of more television advertising than any media market in the country save for Denver and Las Vegas. Obama and Democratic allies were responsible for “This is a pivotal part of the state,” says Jen Psaki, Obama’s campaign spokeswoman. Meanwhile, Republicans are trying to tamp down the President’s advantage by targeting the area’s more conservative suburbs. On Friday, the Romney campaign unveiled a new TV ad that takes aim at Obama’s manufacturing record, and the candidate will make his own stop in northern Ohio on Tuesday.(MORE: )Fresh surveys have yet to reveal whether Romney’s superior debate performance will translate to a shift in the polls, but Ohio is as close to a must-win as it gets for the Republican. Obama’s campaign claims it’s the test of Romney’s entire candidacy. “That’s the measure. Is he going to take the lead in Ohio?” Obama senior adviser David Plouffe told reporters Thursday aboard Air Force One. “If he doesn’t, he’s not going to be President.”The President’s team believes it has an edge in the Buckeye State, where one in eight jobs is linked to the auto industry. After dominating Cuyahoga County in 2008, Obama’s campaign has beefed up its infrastructure here. One of Obama’s four campaign offices situated in the county in 2008 remained open throughout his term, the only one statewide to do so, and the total number countywide has doubled to eight. “We expect to do well there, but we’re not taking anything for granted,” says an Obama campaign staffer based in Ohio.One of the keys will be nudging supporters to the polls for early voting, which began on Oct. 2. In Cuyahoga County, the first day numbers were “phenomenal,” Jessica Kershaw, Obama’s Ohio press secretary, wrote in an email to TIME, with more than three times as many Ohioans voting on the day the polls opened as in 2008. A few even spent the previous night the Board of Elections to be first on line.(MORE: )In Cleveland, Obama’s advance team hung their message in white block letters over the stadium bleachers: V-O-T-E E-A-R-L-Y. If that wasn’t enough, Obama began his remarks with the same exhortation. “Before I begin, Ohio, I just have one question: Are you registered to vote? Because if you’re not … you’ve got four days left.? If you are, you can vote right now.”Clad in a dark overcoat as the rain hammered the crowd, Obama touted the favorable jobs report released Friday morning, which indicated the unemployment rate had fallen to 7.8%, the lowest during his Administration. But unlike a prior stop Friday in Virginia, where a fiery President — jaw set, sleeves rolled, gripping the rostrum hard — rattled off a barrage of one-liners and whipped the crowd into a fervor, in Ohio Obama made a plea for further sacrifice to a rain-soaked crowd.“Here’s the bottom line, Ohio: We’ve got more work to do,” he said. “You’ve got to step up. And I know I’m preaching to the choir here because you all are standing in the rain. But a little rain never hurt anybody. Some of these policies from the other side could hurt a whole lot of folks.”MORE: ?A visitor rings the doorbell to a large gated villa in Benghazi, and a gardener slowly opens the heavy metal door.??He welcomes guests with a big smile, offering them tea before giving them a guided tour of the sprawling grounds with its swimming pool and hefty trees, which obscure the view from prying eyes.??But the villa is not just another secluded house owned by a wealthy Libyan seeking privacy.??It is the most sensitive crime scene in the world.For each day of the past two weeks, TIME has visited the American consulate in Benghazi where the ambassador and three others were killed on Sept. 11th.??And with the passing of every day, people cart off more and more evidence and sensitive information that couldendanger the lives of Americans still in , and impair the investigation into the attack just now getting underway.(MORE:?)After 23 days, Libyan authorities finally cordoned off the consulate Thursday and prohibited people from entering it as American investigators made their first brief visit to the site.??For weeks, has said it was too dangerous to send FBI agents to Benghazi.??But now, they may be too late to piece together the clues to the attack.??A number of Libyans and foreigners have visited the compound, according to the gardener Idris Muhammad Juma’a.??“Every day people come and look around,” Idris told TIME, sitting in a plastic chair under a palm tree on Tuesday.?“The other day some Turks came and took a big painting.”But it is not the disappearance of paintings that should disturb American investigators and intelligence officials.??Large white boards listing names and numbers of U.S. military and diplomatic installations abroad have vanished.??Documents with detailed accounts of previous attacks against the consulate have disappeared as well.??“It’s not our job to stop people from taking things,” Idris says.??“We are just gardeners.”Though Idris and his companion are tending to the grounds, the Americans have not secured the compound.??Idris saysAmerican officials only visited the consulate once around Sept. 24.??“They came with some translators and took some pictures.??They left after 10 minutes.”It is not only the consulate the FBI has neglected.??Libyans guarding the compound the night of the attacknote they have not been contacted by Americans since the incident.??“I thought they would want to speak to us,” says Muhammad, who saw some of the attackers.??“But no one has called us.”In such investigations, it is routine for FBI agents to wait until they can interview people directly, according to Ali Soufan, the lead FBI agent in the inquiry into the 2000 USS Cole attack.??“You don’t collect intelligence over the phone.??It must be face to face, not over Skype.”??Soufan, who detailed his role in the Cole investigation and his part in uncovering the men responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks in his book?The Black Banners, notes that there are several things that have delayed the FBI’s arrival in Benghazi.??“You need a country clearance.??If you don’t have a [local] partner to work with, how are you going to interrogate?”But with a Libyan central government too weak to stabilize the country, it has to rely on local militias to protect the consulate and provide security for the FBI. Since each brigade is led by a different man,??the Libyan government has had to coordinate FBI visits with a number of individuals.??And because the FBI needs a “significant team that includes different specialties ranging from forensics teams to communication specialists” according to Soufan, the group needs a level of security no one in Benghazi can provide.“It’s just not safe for the Americans to come now,” says a leader of one of the brigades in touch with the American embassy in Tripoli.In the interim, evidence at the consulate has been tampered with. It is clear that rubble in the annex where Ambassador Chris Stevens took refuge has been moved. “Securing the crime scene is very important to prevent contamination,” says Soufan.???But with so many people rummaging through the consulate in the past three weeks, ranging from curious visitors to possibly the attackers themselves, the compound is being compromised daily.??And that will make the FBI’s job all the more difficult when it finally pursues its investigation in earnest.MORE:?? Bookish dilemmas, solved in handy chart form [The following text appears within a chart. Please see hardcopy or PDF for actual chart.] START DO YOU OWN A DOG? YES HAS YOUR DOG REACHED HIS GOLDEN YEARS? YES Jessica Pierce's THE LAST WALK is a heart-wrenching yet practical-minded guide to easing your pet's journey to the great dog park in the sky NO The heart of J.R. Ackerley's darkly enchanting WE THINK THE WORLD OF YOU (newly reissued by New York Review Books) is a German shepherd named Evie NO DO YOU OWN A CHILD? YES IS THIS CHILD MYSTERIOUS TO YOU?...?5:05 pm ETIn a total reversal of what prevailed for the entirety of the last six months, now it is clear what message Mitt Romney wants to run on until Election Day, but/and it is not clear what the President wants to say.Romney: Why would anyone expect the next four years to be better than the last four years if Obama wins re-election?Obama: Big Bird? Romney’s a liar? Romney is out of touch? Romney put his dog on the roof of his car?This dynamic could, of course, change again. But one of Chicago’s biggest advantages for months was message clarity, while Romney slipped and slid from one theme to another.Not to overstate the case, but, post-debate, advantage Romney on this vital score.?Tinseltown’s most iconic landmark is having some work done.The legendary, if faded, white Hollywood sign set in the hills of Los Angeles is getting its first makeover in roughly 35 years this week as crews have started an eight to 10 week effort to completely spruce up the most famous nine letters in Southern California.(LIST: )The sign gets repainted periodically ? the last time was in 2005 ? but this project is far more ambitious. Workers will strip off all the old paint and add a protective layer consisting of 110 gallons of acrylic primer and a sparkling coat of 275 gallons of white exterior paint.A local Los Angeles commercial painting crew will handle the job, sponsored by Sherwin-Williams and the Hollywood Sign Trust ? not quite as exciting as when mules hauled the original 43-foot-tall metal letters up Mount Lee as an advertisement for a real estate development called Hollywoodland in 1923.In its initial heyday, 4,000 20-watt bulbs kept the “holly,” “wood” and “land” portions of the sign blinking in true look-at-me-now fashion. In 1949 the “land” portion came down, leaving the “Hollywood” that we know today. The sign sank into disrepair for the next three decades, , losing almost an entire “O” and much of the “D.” Termites gnawed away at the rest.In 1978, Hugh Hefner stepped in and convinced celebrities to sponsor the refurbishment of the sign, at $27,500 per letter, and after three months and 194 tons of concrete, enamel and steel later, the current sign was finished.In the current sprucing up, crews will pressure-wash the corrugated metal, sanding and stripping it of all the weather-beaten paint before a glimmering coat of paint makes the old sign look new again. How fitting.?This is Hollywood, after all.PHOTOS: ? For all of history, humor has been wielded by unattractive, skill-less men in their desperate effort to reproduce. Do you think there were any handsome court jesters who were also really good jousters and lute soloists? To answer that question, try to remember the guys from high school who could juggle. But now everyone has to be funny. The new vocabulary of texts, tweets, Facebook updates, Instagram pictures and YouTube videos--the entire reductive discourse of the information era--seems to require that all information be conveyed in jokes. That's because jokes are the most memorable packet of information we have that doesn't...? On the eve of America's bicentennial in 1976, a leading authority of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints rose to speak at the Mormons' biannual General Conference in Salt Lake City. "Can we maintain our basic freedoms, peace and prosperity for another 200 years?" he asked, rhetorically, before continuing, "The answer to this question is yes, if we shall individually repent and conform to the laws of the God of this land, who is Jesus Christ." The sermon that followed was titled "America's Destiny." Its preacher was Marion G. Romney, a member of the Mormon elite and cousin of...? What appeared to be an almost certain Republican takeover of the U.S. Senate a year ago is now in serious doubt as Democrats in red and purple states, along with suddenly safer incumbents in Ohio and Florida, look to hold their thin majority in the upper chamber. Republicans must net four new seats to gain control if Obama wins or three if Romney prevails. VIRGINIA Former governor TIM KAINE (D.) vs. former governor and Senator George Allen (R.) Two popular men with encyclopedic familiarity with their state face off in the new Old Dominion. The battle to replace retiring Democrat Jim Webb has been as closely fought as it has been expensive, but Kaine's fortunes in state polls have risen of late, along with Obama's. MONTANA Senator JOHN TESTER (D.) vs. Congressman Denny Rehberg (R.) The Democrat was targeted early on as an endangered species--a member of Barack Obama's party in a super-red state. But as the race has gotten nastier, with negative TV ads and barbed rhetoric, Tester has proved to be a survivor who has created enough distance from the Beltway to hold on. MISSOURI Senator CLAIRE MCCASKILL (D.) vs. Congressman Todd Akin (R.) Once given up for dead by many Democrats, McCaskill got 2012's biggest political gift when Akin made inexplicable remarks about rape that sent most national Republicans fleeing. Akin declined to step down and has kept the race closer than expected, but McCaskill remains the solid favorite. WISCONSIN Congresswoman TAMMY BALDWIN (D.) vs. former governor Tommy Thompson (R.) Baldwin's bid to keep the seat now held by retiring Democrat Herb Kohl is infused with history: she would be the nation's first openly gay Senator. Thompson's years away from the campaign trail (and time as a D.C. influence peddler) have equalized a race once regarded as a GOP cinch. NORTH DAKOTA Former state attorney general HEIDI HEITKAMP (D.) vs. Congressman Rick Berg (R.) Berg should be walking away with the race to replace Democratic Senator Kent Conrad, who defied the state's red tilt with a frank and confiding down-home style. But the well-liked Heitkamp has campaigned hard and well and been buttressed by winning TV spots and some Berg missteps. CONNECTICUT Congressman CHRIS MURPHY (D.) vs. businesswoman Linda McMahon (R.) In the rare race that is moving in the GOP's direction this year, pro-wrestling executive McMahon has done well in her second bid to take a Nutmeg State Senate seat. The fight to replace the retiring Joe Lieberman may come down to McMahon's deep pockets vs. the state's deep blue leanings. INDIANA Treasurer RICHARD MOURDOCK (R.) vs. Congressman Joe Donnelly (D.) In a nightmare for Republicans, a once safe seat held by retiring GOP wise man Richard Lugar is very much in play. The disciplined Donnelly has pulled even or ahead in polls, and Republicans are pouring in cash to try to save Tea Party darling Mourdock. MASSACHUSETTS Senator SCOTT BROWN (R.) vs. Harvard professor Elizabeth Warren (D.)?9:55 pm ETMeet the Press ? . .Face the Nation ? . .This Week ? . .Fox News Sunday ? . .State of the Union ? . .? There has never been a shortage of bereaved mothers in the sprawling, violent Caracas barrio known as Catia. But these days the sidewalks seem haunted by legions of women like Luz Marina Morón. In recent years, Morón has seen her brother-in-law, niece and 23-year-old son Roger murdered on Catia's streets the latter shot in the face by a gangbanger who wanted Roger's New Balance tennis shoes. "Have you seen our homicide statistics?" Morón, 53, a nurse, asks me as we sit down for a guayoyo, a Venezuelan-style cup of coffee. "We might as well be in...?Shannon, Tim and John.These names, prior to our trip to the TAPS National Military Survivors Seminar in , D.C., in May were not names I heard spoken in our home. Now, they receive nearly daily mentions and are always accompanied by big grins on my three children’s faces.TAPS provides Good Grief Camps for children who have experienced the loss of a military family member (usually a parent or a sibling). These camps are offered on the same days and at the same times as the children’s parents are receiving support through educational and sharing seminars throughout the day.The organization offers open arms to those affected by : “You are warmly invited to join TAPS for a special program of comfort and support for all those grieving the suicide loss of a loved one who served in the Armed Forces,” it on its website.I decided to ask my daughter, Madeleine, 8, about her experience at the Good Grief Camp last May as we traveled on an airplane to the in San Diego. This is what she shared with me:Before you arrived at the Good Grief Camp last year, how did you feel about going? I was nervous and excited. I was nervous to meet the new kids and the new mentors there to help. I thought we would play games and talk all day.What did you do all day at Camp? Was it just games and talking? No! We made crafts that were about our dreams or about our memories. We took a walk downtown Washington, D.C., got to sit on motorcycles and a had big balloon release sending letters up to our Moms and Dads who had died.One night we had a great big party with bounce houses, laser tag and face painting! Sometimes we talked about Dad. It helped to talk about him because I already missed him a lot. The other kids there understood how I felt.What was it like to meet your mentor, Shannon, and get to know her?It was really exciting to meet her because people told me before she got there “Oh! She is really nice!” Shannon and I got along great! Shannon has her own little girl and I really liked meeting her, too.Shannon taught me what she does when she gets mad or something. She throw a pillow on the floor or lays in her bed and screams into a pillow. I’ve tried it now. It helps a little!What would you tell another kid who is sad because their mom or dad just died?I would say, I know you are sad and I know how you feel. I would comfort her and tell her it is going to be OK. I think TAPS would be a good place for her to go to talk about her feelings and make new friends.What are you excited most about for this new TAPS experience in San Diego?I am excited to meet new friends, see old ones and get a new mentor! Shannon won’t be there, but we are still friends. I like it that I’ll have two mentors now!Leslie McCaddon of Massachusetts was one of two widows?Time?featured in its July cover??on the surge in Army suicides. Her husband, Dr. Michael McCaddon, an Army captain, died in March.?When Enda Kenny became Prime Minister of Ireland in February 2011 he inherited a mess. The country was staggering under an enormous debt load and facing rising unemployment. Kenny took over from Fianna Fail, the party that had been in power for 14 years and was most closely associated with overseeing economic policies that produced what became known as the Celtic Tiger ? a period that saw remarkable economic growth in the previously struggling island country on the westernmost edge of Europe. That growth bubble, which was fueled by increased access to cheap money and an unsustainable property boom, began to burst shortly before the global economic crisis of 2008. The country’s rapid dive toward? caused Ireland to seek a bailout from the ?and the in November 2010.Currently the longest-serving member of Dail Eireann (the House of Representatives), Kenny has pressed on with the sort of cuts in government services that have brought protesters onto the streets of Greece and Spain, countries that are faced with similar debt burdens. Kenny, however, has not had to deal with as many public protests over austerity measures, and that has given him more political room than his Greek and Spanish counterparts. Many voters and commentators have long considered Kenny to be a lightweight figure in the Irish political scene, but with Ireland’s GDP beginning to sneak upward once again Kenny may prove himself anything but the “fool” that his predecessor called him in 2010.(MORE:?)TIME’s Europe editor Catherine Mayer met Kenny that year for the first time. She had encountered him twice more before she spent time with him in Dublin in September while reporting for her magazine story ?on Ireland’s economic fight back. TIME spoke with Mayer to get the story behind the story.Why were you interested in interviewing Enda Kenny in the first place? Enda Kenny is somebody who has a gulf between the way he’s perceived in his home country and the way he is perceived abroad. Also because Ireland, as the second country to ask for a bailout, is quite far along in the process of dealing with the ramifications of what went wrong. I was looking for a way to look at some of the wider European issues, and Ireland’s story seemed to me a good starting place.(MORE: )And why do you think a gulf exists between the Irish and international perceptions of Kenny? Politicians are often more popular abroad than they are in their own countries. That’s partly because familiarity breeds contempt. You could say it’s because the Irish know him better. But it’s also because the Irish focus on the smaller picture, and sometimes you really can see things better from a distance. It’s exactly the same if you think about what goes on in Washington or Westminster.Kenny has a reputation for being very likable in person. Is that reputation deserved? He’s extremely likable, that did not surprise me at all because that is very much part of his image. What I was really trying to see was what was behind that likability.?In small groups he is much more fluent and compelling than he would appear to be were you to judge him from his big media set pieces. When cameras train on him he seems to freeze up, which is an interesting problem for somebody in that position. But when he’s relaxed he’s interesting and has a lot to say.(MORE:?)His predecessor Brian Cowen called him a fool. Did he have any foolish moments when you interviewed him? He didn’t do anything that one would think of as particularly foolish. He’s certainly endearing and has a slightly childlike quality to his enthusiasm. There was a moment, when he was showing me around his office and showing me absolutely everything, including all his photos, where you found yourself thinking that he was sweet. But that is combined with a real sense of shrewdness, and that is the thing that doesn’t come across when you see him at a distance.How genuinely sensitive do you think he is to the financial woes of Irish people? I think all politicians are far too insulated from reality but in Ireland they are actually less so than in other countries. I mention in the piece that Enda Kenny walks to and from work, and he does actually have regular direct contact with people who tell him exactly what they think. You may wonder how much that actually means to him because he has a job and is being paid for his work. I suspect that in Ireland more politicians know people who are themselves directly in trouble than is the case in many of the more featherbed capitals of the world. So he’s not himself directly suffering but I’m pretty sure he does know what’s going on.(MORE:?)What is your experience of reporting from Ireland? I’ve been covering Ireland for years but mostly covering Northern Ireland because that was such a big story for so long. I first visited Dublin in the early 1980s and was absolutely fascinated and slightly shocked to find myself traveling backward in time. It was like a time warp in comparison with London ? a place where everywhere shuts down at night, and young women with small babies sat begging on the pavements. I didn’t really understand at that stage what was holding back Irish development. I then got to know the Republic of Ireland really well, but as I say I spent a huge amount of time north of the border right through the 1990s covering the conflict.Do you think Kenny can stem the emigration of educated young people to countries like Australia? While I was in Dublin I spoke to the ?[Economic and Social Research Institute], and one view they gave on the current outflow of young people is that it’s not necessarily a bad thing for Ireland. These people go abroad and gain experience but the moment the economy begins to recover they’ll come back again like homing pigeons bringing new skills with them. They also bring links from abroad, and given that Ireland’s such an open economy and relies so much on its trading routes, that’s not a bad thing. What worries me about Ireland, and what would circumscribe anything that Enda Kenny or any other politician could do, is that the euro-zone crisis is horribly interconnected. How well things turn out for Ireland will affect all of us and not just the Irish people. We will just have to wait and see what happens unfortunately.MORE:??TIME explains why local fashion weeks in places like Chattanooga matter?Who is Telling the Truth? The Fact Wars Oct. 15, Related Categories:?Who is Telling the Truth? The Fact Wars Oct. 15, Related Categories:?(SANTA CLARITA, Calif.) ? Authorities say a commuter train carrying more than 200 passengers struck a semi that was stalled on the tracks in northern Los Angeles County, leaving three people with minor injuries.The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s department says the crash involving a Metrolink train and the truck hauling automobiles occurred about 9:30 p.m. Saturday in Newhall near Santa Clarita.Sheriff’s spokesman Lt. Bill Weiss says the semi driver was able to get out of the truck before the crash.The department says three of the train’s 220 passengers had minor injuries and were treated at a hospital. No one else was hurt.Weiss wasn’t sure how fast the train was going, but says the truck was heavily damaged and spilled diesel fuel. The train did not derail but remained at the scene.The rail line provided buses for the passengers to continue their journeys.MORE:??(AKCAKALE, Turkey) ? An Associated Press video journalist says Turkish artillery fired toward Syria minutes after a Syrian shell landed on Turkish territory.(PHOTOS:?)The Syrian shell landed some 200 meters (200 yards) inside Turkey, near the border town of Akcakale. A short time later, at least six mortars could be heard fired from Turkey. It was the fifth day in a row that Turkey returned fire.Abdulhakim Ayhan, the mayor of Akcakale, confirmed that Turkish artillery immediately returned fire.The Turks have been returning fire since Wednesday when Syrian shelling killed five civilians in a Turkish border town.?This post is in partnership with Knowledge@Wharton, the online research and business analysis journal of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. The article below was originally published at .James Burke received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2000 and was named one of history’s 10 greatest CEOs by?Fortune?magazine in 2003. But it was for his handling of the Tylenol tragedy back in 1982 that Burke, CEO of Johnson & Johnson from 1976 to 1989, will be remembered most.?Burke died last week at age 87.In 1982, seven people died after taking cyanide-laced extra-strength Tylenol capsules sold in five Chicago stores. Before that happened, Tylenol, sold by J&J’s McNeil Consumer Products division, had 35% of the $1.2 billion analgesic market. After the deaths, J&J’s market share dropped to 7%.Under Burke’s leadership, the company spent $100 million to recall 31 million bottles of Tylenol and re-launched the product two months later in tamper-proof packaging. Burke’s actions have become a legendary example of good crisis management, serving as the basis for case studies in numerous business schools and management books.(MORE: )Burke not only saved the reputation of the company, but he also saved the brand as well. By mid-1983, Tylenol’s share of the analgesic market had climbed to 30%, reaching 35% by the end of the year.In a 2004 Wharton School Publishing Book titled,?, Burke emphasized the value of the J&J credo, dating back to the company’s founding in 1887, which stated that the company is responsible first to its customers, then to its employees, the community and the stockholders, in that order. “The credo is all about the consumer,” Burke said. When those seven deaths occurred, “the credo made it very clear at that point exactly what we were all about. It gave me the ammunition I needed to persuade shareholders and others to spend the $100 million on the recall. The credo helped sell it.”In his interview for?Lasting Leadership, Burke also spoke about trust. “Trust has been an operative word in my life. [It] embodies almost everything you can strive for that will help you to succeed. You tell me any human relationship that works without trust, whether it is a marriage or a friendship or a social interaction; in the long run, the same thing is true about business.”Ironically, Johnson & Johnson has recently experienced??that “have caused many to question whether the firm has lost sight of that credo,” according to a Knowledge@Wharton article earlier this year. The company’s problems with plants in Fort Washington, Pa., Lancaster, Pa., and Puerto Rico ? the sites associated with recalls of over-the-counter products like Benadryl and Children’s Tylenol ? “dragged on for years,” the article notes. Two hip devices were recalled in 2010 for post-surgical complications, and the company agreed to pay $158 million to the state of Texas to settle claims it improperly marketed the anti-psychotic drug Risperdal to some patients. Other suits surrounding the marketing of this drug are ongoing. Recalls of surgical sutures and contact lenses have been announced as well.(MORE: )Years earlier, as?Lasting Leadership?noted, other companies had demonstrated what came to be seen as poor judgment in the way they handled defective product incidents. For example, Coca-Cola had mismanaged the “contaminated can” incident in Europe in 1999; Intel had initially failed to respond quickly to the calculation errors embedded in its Pentium chip in 1994, and Firestone had initially refused to accept responsibility for SUV roll-overs caused by poorly manufactured tires in 2000.Burke’s actions were the opposite. According to media reports at the time, the Tylenol crisis led the news every night on every station for six weeks. Burke, however, met the challenge head on, contacting the chief of each network’s news divisions in order to keep them informed. He also met with the directors of the FBI and the FDA. “There were many people in the company who felt there was no possible way to save the brand, that it was the end of Tylenol,” Burke said. “But the fact is, I had confidence in J&J and its reputation, and also confidence in the public to respond to what was right. It helped turn Tylenol into a billion-dollar business.”The person who placed the cyanide in the Tylenol capsules was never found.?() — American companies should avoid doing business with ‘s two leading technology firms because they pose a national security threat to the United States, the House Intelligence Committee is warning in a report to be issued Monday.The panel says U.S. regulators should block mergers and acquisitions in this country by Huawei Technologies Ltd. and ZTE Corp, among the world’s leading suppliers of telecommunications gear and mobile phones.(PHOTOS: )Reflecting U.S. concern over cyber-attacks traced to China, the report also recommends that U.S. government computer systems not include any components from the two firms because that could pose an espionage risk.“China has the means, opportunity, and motive to use telecommunications companies for malicious purposes,” the report says.The recommendations are the result of a yearlong probe, including a congressional hearing last month in which senior Chinese executives of both companies testified, and denied posing a security threat.A U.S. executive of one of the companies said the firm cooperated with investigators, and defended its business record. Huawei is a “globally trusted and respected company,” said William Plummer, vice president for external affairs.On Monday, ahead of the report’s release, a Chinese foreign ministry spokesman said investment by China’s telecommunications companies in the United States showed the countries have mutually beneficial relations.“We hope the U.S. will do more to benefit the interests of the two countries, not the opposite,” said spokesman Hong Lei at a regular briefing.The bipartisan report is likely to become fodder for a presidential campaign in which the candidates have been competing in their readiness to clamp down on Chinese trade violations. Republican , in particular, has made it a key point to get tougher on China by designating it a currency manipulator and fighting abuses such as intellectual property theft.The committee made the draft available to reporters in advance of public release Monday, but only under the condition that they not publish stories until the broadcast Sunday of a CBS’ “60 Minutes” report on Huawei. In the CBS report, the committee’s chairman, Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Mich., urges American companies not to do business with Huawei.The panel’s recommendations will likely hamper Huawei and ZTE’s ambitions to expand their business in America. Their products are used in scores of countries, including in the West. Both deny being influenced by China’s communist government.“The investigation concludes that the risks associated with Huawei’s and ZTE’s provision of equipment to U.S. critical infrastructure could undermine core U.S. national-security interests,” the report says.The report says the committee received information from industry experts and current and former Huawei employees suggesting that Huawei, in particular, may be violating U.S. laws. It says that the committee will refer the allegations to the U.S. government for further review and possible investigation. The report mentions allegations of immigration violations, bribery and corruption, and of a “pattern and practice” of Huawei using pirated software in its U.S. facilities.Huawei is a private company founded by a former Chinese military engineer, and has grown rapidly to become the world’s second largest supplier of telecommunications network gear, operating in more than 140 countries. ZTE Corp is the world’s fourth largest mobile phone manufacturer, with 90,000 employees worldwide. While their business in selling mobile devices has grown in the U.S., espionage fears have limited the companies from moving into network infrastructure.The report says the companies failed to provide responsive answers about their relationships and support by the Chinese government, and detailed information about their operations in the U.S. It says Huawei, in particular, failed to provide thorough information, including on its corporate structure, history, financial arrangements and management.“The committee finds that the companies failed to provide evidence that would satisfy any fair and full investigation. Although this alone does not prove wrongdoing, it factors into the committee’s conclusions,” it says.In Washington, Huawei executive Plummer said Friday the company cooperated in good faith with the investigation, which he said had not been objective and amounted to a “political distraction” from cyber-security problems facing the entire industry.All major telecommunications firms, including those in the West, develop and manufacture equipment in China and overlapping supply chains require industry-wide solutions, he added. Singling out China-based firms wouldn’t help.Plummer complained that the volume of information sought by the committee was unreasonable, and it had demanded some proprietary business information that “no responsible company” would provide.In justifying its scrutiny of the Chinese companies, the committee contended that Chinese intelligence services, as well as private companies and other entities, often recruit those with direct access to corporate networks to steal trade secrets and other sensitive proprietary data.It warned that malicious hardware or software implants in Chinese-manufactured telecommunications components and systems headed for U.S. customers could allow Beijing to shut down or degrade critical national security systems in a time of crisis or war.The committee concluded that Huawei likely has substantially benefited from the support of the Chinese government.Huawei denies being financed to undertake research and development for the Chinese military, but the committee says it has received internal Huawei documentation from former employees showing the company provides special network services to an entity alleged to be an elite cyber-warfare unit within the People’s Liberation Army.The intelligence committee recommended that the government’s Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, or CFIUS, bar mergers and acquisitions by both Huawei and ZTE. A multi-agency regulatory panel chaired by Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, CFIUS screens foreign investment proposals for potential national security threats.Last year, Huawei had to unwind its purchase of a U.S. computer company, 3Leaf Systems, after it failed to win CFIUS approval. However, Huawei employs 1,700 people in the U.S., and business is expanding. U.S. revenues rose to $1.3 billion in 2011, up from $765 million in 2010.ZTE has also enjoyed growth in its sale of mobile devices, although in recent months it has faced allegations about banned sales of U.S.-sanctioned computer equipment to Iran. The FBI is probing reports that the company obstructed a U.S. Commerce Department investigation into the sales.The intelligence panel says ZTE refused to provide any documents on its activities in Iran, but did provide a list of 19 individuals who serve on the Chinese Communist Party committee within the company. ZTE’s citing of China’s state secrecy laws for limiting information it could release only added to concern over Chinese government influence over its operations, the report says.___By MATTHEW PENNINGTON AP researcher Zhao Liang in Beijing contributed.?(SEOUL, ) ? The United States has agreed to allow South Korea to possess longer-range missiles that could strike all of , officials said Sunday, a development expected to draw an angry response from the North.Under a 2001 accord with , South Korea has been barred from developing and deploying ballistic missiles with a range of more than 300 kilometers (186 miles) and a payload of more than 500 kilograms (1,100 pounds) because of concerns about a regional arms race.The restriction has made South Korea’s missile capability inferior to that of rival North Korea, and some key military installations in the North have been out of South Korea’s missile range.(PHOTOS: )South Korea announced Sunday that the U.S. accord has been altered to allow the South to have ballistic missiles with a range of up to 800 kilometers (500 miles) to better cope with North Korea’s nuclear and missile threats.Under the new agreement, South Korea will continue to limit the payload to 500 kilograms for ballistic missiles with an 800-kilometer range, but it will be able to use heavier payloads for missiles with shorter ranges, senior presidential official Chun Yung-woo told a news conference. The heavier a payload is, the more destructive power it can have.“The most important objective for our government in revising the missile guideline is to contain North Korea’s armed provocation,” Chun said.The Defense Ministry said in a statement that it will greatly increase its missile capability under the new accord, adding that South Korea will be able to “strike all of North Korea, even from southern areas.”(MORE: )U.S. Defense Department press secretary George Little said the agreement resulted from a South Korean-requested discussion on ways to respond to North Korean missile activities.“These revisions are a prudent, proportional, and specific response to the (North Korean) ballistic missile threat,” he said.The deal also will allow South Korea to operate drone aircraft carrying payloads of up to 2,500 kilograms (5,510 pounds) with a range of more than 300 kilometers (186 miles). It places no restriction on payloads for drones with a flying distance of less than 300 kilometers, officials said.South Korea can also possess cruise missiles with an unlimited range as long as their payload is less than 500 kilograms (1,100 pounds). Media reports say the South has deployed cruise missiles with a range of more than 1,000 kilometers (620 miles) but defense officials have refused to confirm that.Cruise missiles fly at a lower altitude and slower speed than ballistic missiles, making them easier to intercept, although they are considered more accurate.North Korean state media didn’t immediately respond to the announcement, but analysts expected they would issue a harsh statement.(MORE: )“North Korea will say South Korea’s missile development is a preparation for war. It will likely warn that South Korea cannot avoid a nuclear disaster if it moves to attack North Korean missile bases,” said analyst Baek Seung-joo of the state-run Korea Institute for Defense Analyses in Seoul.North Korea has missiles that can hit South Korea, Japan and the U.S. Pacific territory of Guam, according to Seoul’s Defense Ministry. In April, the country conducted a long-range rocket test that Washington, Seoul and others called a cover for a test of long-range missile technology. North Korea says the rocket, which broke apart shortly after liftoff, was meant to launch a satellite.North Korea conducted nuclear tests in 2006 and 2009, but experts don’t believe it has yet mastered the technology needed to mount a nuclear weapon on a missile.The Korean Peninsula remains officially at war because the 1950-53 Korean War ended with an armistice, not a peace treaty. The U.S. stations about 28,500 troops in South Korea as deterrence against possible aggression from North Korea.By?HYUNG-JIN KIM?(UNITED NATIONS) ? The U.N. Security Council committee monitoring sanctions against al-Qaeda removed a Saudi businessman from its blacklist Friday.The committee chairman, Germany’s U.N. Ambassador Peter Wittig, said that Yasin al-Qadi had been de-listed, following a recommendation by the blacklist’s ombudsman to remove him.Al-Qadi filed a lawsuit in 2009 in Washington, D.C. to be removed from a U.S. list of people accused of financing al-Qaeda.Al-Qadi’s charitable Muwafaq foundation was identified by the U.S. Treasury department as an al-Qaida front and placed on a terror list in October 2001. Al-Qadi, 57, has denied the accusations and has said that the foundation was closed even before the hijackings.The U.S., European Union, Switzerland and Turkey all took action against al-Qadi. Over the past several years, a team of lawyers has worked successfully to overturn the decisions against al-Qadi in Turkey and Europe.In 2009, the Security Council established an independent ombudsman to deal with requests to get off the U.N. blacklist.Last year, the council strengthened the role of the ombudsman, presently Canadian lawyer Kimberly Prost. If the ombudsman recommends delisting, the person or entity will be taken off the sanctions list in 60 days unless the sanctions committee agrees by consensus to maintain sanctions.PHOTOS:??With the first presidential debate behind us, and the election just a month away, we have come upon that magical time of the year when the media filters each new datum through the lens of the election horse race. And so goes the Employment Situation Report — an estimate the Labor Department issues every month of how many the American economy has added and what percentage of the labor force is unemployed. These estimates come with massive margins of error and are thusly absorbed with an appropriate degree of skepticism by market participants and economists, but the political punditry have no time for such subtlety. Therefore the monthly jobs report — especially in times of economic malaise — has taken on an aura of extreme importance, a hard number by which we can judge the President’s handling of the economy. showed that the economy added an unremarkable 114,000 jobs, but that the unemployment rate actually fell by three-tenths of a percent to 7.8%. The new jobs number was almost exactly in line with economists predictions of 115,000, Dow Jones Newswires, but the drop in the unemployment rate was a surprise.So why are these numbers giving us seemingly contradictory evidence? The first thing one must understand is that these two numbers are drawn from two different surveys. The new jobs number is rendered from the establishment survey, whereby the Labor Department surveys employers to determine how many new jobs they’ve added. The unemployment rate, on the other hand, is determined by a survey of households, in which the government asks individuals whether or not they and those in their household have jobs. So, the first reason why these two numbers appear to be at odds is that they are pulled from different estimates, each with its own margin of error.Second, when the Labor Department releases its estimate for each month, it actually releases revised estimates for the previous two months — and the job market in July and August was apparently healthier than we had previously thought. The Labor Department revised job gains in those months from +96,000 and +142,000 to +141,000 and +181,000, respectively. In addition, a recent yearly revision by the Labor Department showed that job growth between April of 2011 and March of 2012 was much more significant than we thought. With these revisions in mind, the drop in the unemployment rate makes more sense.Another piece of good news found in this month’s numbers is that the labor force participation rate — or the percentage of working age people who are working or actively looking for work — actually grew by 0.1%, representing a growth in the labor force of 418,000 people. For demographic reasons, the participation rate had been steadily declining since before the , but that decline accelerated in its aftermath, reflecting what many argued was a feeling of hopelessness that caused workers to give up looking for work altogether and drop out of the labor force.Though this report is undeniably positive, it’s not a game changer. It doesn’t alter the fact that the American economy remains in a slow growth period that is typical following debt-fueled financial crises. However, it?may very well change the trajectory of the upcoming presidential race as the candidates and their surrogates fall over themselves to spin the numbers as best they can. President Obama will point to the decline in the unemployment rate as evidence that his policies are working, and that America is slowly but surely getting back to work again. and fellow Republicans will have a bit harder time using the report to their advantage, given the large drop in unemployment and the rise in the participation rate. But the fact remains that 115,000 new jobs is nowhere near the pace of job growth needed to bring the country back to full employment anytime soon. And even if that number is revised up in coming months as many of the previous estimates have been, we’re still not seeing anywhere near the kind of rapid job growth that has accompanied past recoveries.I’ll leave it to the to handicap which of these arguments will resonate with the American people, but it seems to me the more important question is which candidate has the better plan to promote future job growth. And in this context, neither candidate is inspiring. President Obama for a further round of economic stimulus, but it is timid in scope and has little chance of overcoming a Republican filibuster. Mitt Romney’s plan — short on details as it is — calls for a simpler tax code and less regulation. But find me anybody in Washington who?doesn’t?want to streamline the tax code. And sure, a simpler tax code would likely promote economic growth, but once the tax debate truly gets underway, special interest lobbyist will descend on Washington like a swarm of locusts, to gut — if not completely scuttle — any proposed reform.Considering Washington’s current aversion to further deficit spending, ?the best case scenario — regardless of who is in the White House — is that the so-called fiscal cliff (a set of spending cuts and tax increases due to go into effect at the end of the year) is averted and a more gradual austerity package is put into place at the same time that the tax code is simplified. And then we have to hope that these gradual tax increases and spending cuts, whatever their magnitude, won’t slow down economic and employment growth.?Paolo Gabriele, the former butler to who was convicted Saturday of leaking the pontiff’s personal papers, has been sentenced to year and half in prison–but he’s unlikely to serve any time. Minutes after prosecutors declared Gabriele guilty of aggravated theft, Father Federico Lombardi, the Vatican spokesperson, told journalists assembled for the trial that a pardon by the Pope was a “likely hypothesis.” He added, “I can say this without fear of being contradicted.”It was a trial in which the pontiff was at the same time the victim, the person in whose name the crime had been committed, the authority under which the proceedings were being held?the judgment was delivered “in the name of His Holiness, Pope Benedict XVI, gloriously reigning” ? and the ultimate arbiter of whether the sentence will be carried out.(MORE: )With Gabriele having confessed, the outcome of the case was never really in doubt; expectations of a conviction followed by a papal pardon were widespread even before the trial began. Dressed in a light suit, the former butler showed little emotion during the last day of the week-long proceedings. “Nobody knows what he’s feeling inside, but externally he was impassive,” said one of the eight journalists who were admitted to courtroom on behalf of the assembled press corps, on the condition that they remain in their personal accounts. At the end of the trial, the president of the court asked the former butler whether he felt innocent or guilty. Gabriele responded, “The thing that I feel strongly inside me is the conviction of having acted out of exclusive?I’d say visceral?love for the church of Christ and its visible head [the Pope]. … I don’t feel like a thief.”In his closing arguments, the Vatican prosecutor Nicola Picardi urged that Gabriele be sentenced to three years in prison and banned for life from employment in any office where he could commit a similar crime. In her response, Gabriele’s attorney Cristiana Arru sought to cast doubt on the rigor of Vatican investigators. The butler, she argued, had only photocopied documents?he hadn’t removed them from the control of their rightful owners?and thus could not be guilty of theft. But the real mitigating factor, she argued, was that Gabriele had been acting in good faith. “You could see that his motivation was to do something positive for the church, not damage it” she said. “He thought that the holy father wasn’t sufficiently informed.” She closed by requesting that the charges be reduced to misappropriation or that failing that, that Gabriele be given the minimum sentence. “What he did is condemnable,” she added.” But he was compelled by the evil that he saw.”(MORE: )Speaking to journalists after the trial, Lombardi twice stressed that despite statements by Gabriele before his arrest that “at least 20 people” were involved in the scandal, Picardi had found no evidence that the butler had acted in concord with others. “The important thing is that there was no proof of accomplices,” said Lombardi. Only one other person is currently facing charges in relation to the case, a computer specialist employed by the Vatican named Claudio Sciarpelletti, who stands accused of harboring documents and giving them to the butler. Lombardi said he expected his trial would take place in November.The judges deliberated for two hours before returning with the sentence: three years in prison, reduced to one and half. Among the mitigating factors cited was Gabriele’s clean record, his years of previous service and his motivation for acting, which “though erroneous,” contributed to the reduction in his sentence. Gabriele was also ordered to pay the court costs.Gabriele is to remain in house arrest during the three days in which his lawyer can appeal the ruling. In closed circuit footage piped into the room in the Vatican where journalists were watching the sentencing, Gabriele could be seen being led from the courtroom. As he passed in front of the camera, there was a moment when he seemed to turn towards the public and smile.MORE:??For nearly a century, the fashion weeks in New York City, London, Milan and Paris have held a monopoly on setting the style agenda each season. But in the last decade, more and more smaller cities are staging their own versions of the event, using the big four as a model, but not necessarily a blueprint. Learn how fashion weeks are going local in the video above, and read more about local fashion weeks in “Off the Runway” from this week’s issue (available to subscribers ).LIST: ?Tensions rose in the bitterly divided country while an undetermined number of voting stations remained open after the official 6 p.m. closing time, with not a single result announced nearly three hours later.Chavez, a socialist who has ruled for nearly 14 years, called on Venezuelans to await results patiently, speaking briefly Sunday night by phone during a news conference held by his campaign chief.Electoral officials gave no indication of when they might begin releasing first returns. Exit polling is forbidden in Venezuela.The electoral council’s president, Tibisay Lucena, said any stations where voters had not cast ballots would remain open. Meanwhile, bands of red-shirted pro-Chavez motorcyclists, honking horns, roved central Caracas ensuring that such stations stayed open.While not accusing the government of an intentional delay, challenger Henrique Capriles complained via Twitter that most voting stations lacked lines and that the government should get on with the vote-counting.(MORE: )Capriles spokesman Armando Briquet demanded that all motorcycle traffic be banned. In the past, gangs of red-shirted motorcyclists chanting pro-Chavez slogans have intimidated people.Chavez’s campaign manager, Jorge Rodriguez, told reporters there were no such plans. “This country has freedom of circulation,” he said at a news conference.Capriles has united the opposition in a contest between two sides that distrust each other so deeply that some expressed concerns whether a close election result would be respected.If Chavez wins, he gets a free hand to push for an even bigger state role in the economy, further limit dissent and continue to befriend rivals of the United States.With a Capriles win, an abrupt foreign policy shift can be expected, including halting preferential deals with allies such as Cuba, along with a loosening of state economic controls and an increase in private investment. A tense transition would likely follow until the January inauguration because Chavez’s political machine thoroughly controls the wheels of government.“We will recognize the results, whatever they are,” Chavez told reporters after casting his vote in Caracas. He said he was pleased by the “massive turnout.”The stakes in the country with the world’s largest known oil reserves couldn’t be higher.(MORE:?)Just as polls closed, one of several dozen young red-shirted Chavistas on motorcycles said they were ready to begin celebrating.“Let them accept defeat,” one of them, Kleiver Gutierrez, said of the opposition.One pro-Chavez voter, private bodyguard Carlos Julio Silva, said that whatever his faults, Chavez deserves to win for spreading the nation’s oil wealth to the poor with free medical care, public housing and other government largess..“There is corruption, there’s plenty of bureaucracy, but the people have never had a leader who cared about this country,” Silva said after voting for Chavez at a school in the Caracas slum of Petare. “That’s why the people are going to re-elect Hugo Rafael Chavez Frias.”At many polling places, voters started lining up hours before polls opened at dawn, some snaking blocks in the baking Caribbean sun. Some shaded themselves with umbrellas. Vendors grilled meat and some people drank beer.Maria Leonis was selling CDs of Chavez’s campaign theme music on a sidewalk next to a polling center. “Today I’ve sold about 100 CDs, just Chavez’s song,” Leonis said, adding that she supported Chavez because “I want to keep seeing change.”(PHOTOS: )Chavez’s critics said the president has inflamed divisions by labeling his opponents “fascists,” ”Yankees” and “neo-Nazis,” while Chavez’s loyalists alleged Capriles would halt generous government programs that assist the poor.“I’m really tired of all this polarization,” said Lissette Garcia, a 39-year-old clothes seller and Capriles supporter who voted in the affluent Caracas district of Las Mercedes. “I want to reconnect with all my friends who are ‘Chavistas.’”Violence flared sporadically during the campaign, including shootings and rock-throwing during rallies and political caravans. Two Capriles supporters were shot to death in the western state of Barinas last weekend.Troops guarded thousands of voting centers across the country.Defense Minister Henry Rangel Silva said as he voted that all had been calm and he hoped that would continue. He said if any groups try to “disturb order, they should know there is an armed force prepared and equipped and trained … to put down any attempt at disturbances.”He didn’t identify the groups to which he was referring.Chavez’s opponents mounted a noisy protest in Caracas and other major cities Saturday night, beating pots and pans from the windows of their homes to show displeasure with the president ? and also their hopes for change. Drivers on downtown streets honked horns, joining the din.The 40-year-old Capriles, a wiry former governor affectionately called “Skinny” by supporters, infused the opposition with new optimism, and opinion polls pointed to him giving Chavez his closest election.Some recent polls gave Chavez a lead of about 10 percentage points, while others put the two candidates about even.Chavez spoke little during the campaign about his fight with cancer, which since June 2011 has included surgery to remove tumors from his pelvic region as well as chemotherapy and radiation treatment. He has said his most recent tests showed no sign of illness.“Chavez is going to fight until his last breath. He doesn’t know how to do anything else,” said Antonio Padron, a bank employee backing the president. Padron expressed optimism that the 58-year-old Chavez would win but predicted a close finish: “It’s a tough fight. The opposition has never been this strong.”Chavez won the last presidential vote in 2006 with 63 percent of the vote.A former army paratroop commander first elected in 1999, Chavez has presided over an oil boom and has spent billions of dollars on social programs ranging from cash benefits for single mothers to free education.But he has suffered declining support due to one of the world’s highest murder rates, 18 percent inflation, a deteriorating electrical grid and a bloated government accused of endemic corruption and mismanagement.(MORE:?)While his support has slipped at home, Chavez has also seen his international influence ebb since he emerged in the mid-2000s as leader of a like-minded club of newly elected Latin American leftist presidents.Chavez accumulated near-absolute power over the past decade thanks to his control of the National Assembly, pliant institutions such as the Central Bank and friendly judges.Capriles said Chavez has stirred up hatred, hobbled the economy by expropriating private businesses and squandered oil wealth. He criticized Chavez’s preferential deals supplying oil to allies, including one that lets Cuba pay with the services of Cuban doctors.At one voting center in western Zulia state, in the municipality of Santa Rita, voters said some people had actually formed two separate lines ? one with Chavez supporters and the other with Capriles supporters. Elsa Gutierrez, a housewife and Capriles supporter, said it was wrong to have two lines and feared it could lead to conflicts.“This situation can’t be permitted,” Gutierrez said, adding that she voted for Capriles “because I want this division in my country to end.”Political analyst Ricardo Sucre said he expected the election to show “two halves, more or less even.” Regardless of the result, he said, Venezuelans are likely to remain deeply divided by politics for years to come.By?FRANK BAJAK,?IAN JAMES Associated Press writers Fabiola Sanchez, Christopher Toothaker, Jorge Rueda and Vivian Sequera contributed to this report.?A San Francisco-area Boy Scout says he has been denied the organization’s most prestigious award because he is gay, ?Seventeen-year-old Ryan Andresen’s troop leader informed him that despite completing the requirements to be an Eagle Scout, he could not earn the honor because of his sexual orientation, Andresen’s mother told Yahoo. Andresen said his troop leader was aware of his orientation before he began applying for the rank.“He had been telling me all along that we’d get by the gay thing,” Andresen told Yahoo. “It was by far the biggest goal of my life. It’s totally devastating.”Andresen joined the Boy Scouts when he was six years old, but on Monday he will turn 18?the cut-off age for receiving the Eagle Scout award.In order to earn the distinction, scouts must reach five ranks, obtain 21 merit badges, maintain a leadership position for six months and complete a service project.? For his project, Andresen worked with students to construct an anti-bullying “Tolerance Wall” at his local middle school, which comprises 288 ceramic tiles depicting acts of kindness, Yahoo notes.(MORE: )Andresen’s mother launched a petition on Change.org to convince her son’s scoutmaster to change his decision before Andresen’s birthday. The petition has over 150,000 signatures as of Friday afternoon.“It hurts me so much to watch Ryan suffer for being who he is, because to me, he’s perfect,” she wrote on the website. “Ryan has worked for nearly 12 years to become an Eagle Scout, and nothing would make him more proud than earning that well-deserved distinction.”Deron Smith, the national spokesman for the Boy Scouts, said on Thursday that Andresen does not abide by the organization’s religious principles.“Recently, a Scout proactively notified his unit leadership and Eagle Scout Counselor that he does not agree to Scouting’s principle of ‘Duty to God’ and does not meet Scouting’s membership standard on sexual orientation,” Smith wrote in a statement to Yahoo News. “While the BSA did not proactively ask for this information, based on his statements and after discussion with his family he is being informed that he is no longer eligible for membership in Scouting.”In July, a committee of BSA leaders concluded unanimously that the organization ?of excluding homosexuals. The policy was upheld by the Supreme Court in 2000, but many companies have cancelled donations in protest.(WATCH: )Andresen came out to his troop in a letter he wrote in July to address a bullying incident because he “thought he could help,” .?Andresen himself had been bullied, and after he left the Boy Scouts for a few months because of the vicious teasing, his scoutmaster, Rainer Del Valle, encouraged him to return and complete his service project. Now, however, Del Valle will not provide the final signature for Andresen’s award, ABC News reports.?The most intriguing product announced at CES 2011 was Motorola’s Atrix, a 4G Android smartphone with an optional laptop dock. The dock looked and worked like a thin laptop with an 11.6″ screen, but didn’t have its own processor or storage. Instead, you stuck the phone in a slot behind the display, and it provided the brains–letting you run Android apps on a (relatively) large screen with a (reasonably) comfy QWERTY keyboard. Motorola called the software that made this possible Webtop.I liked the idea. In fact, I , in a blog post where I called it a dumb clamshell (and referenced Palm’s , an early pass at the concept).But when the , Motorola charged $500 for the dock–the same price you might pay for a basic Windows notebook. Worse, the software was buggy and sluggish. Even when Motorola , Webtop was more appealing in theory than reality.So I wasn’t shocked to learn, via CNET’s Roger Cheng, that Motorola, now part of Google, is .Still, I think that the notion of using a largish screen and a laptop-style keyboard with a phone (and the phone’s data connection) makes sense. It’s just that:I’m not heartbroken by the end of Motorola’s Webtop dream: Even if I’d bought one of the Moto phones in question, I wouldn’t have sprung for the laptop dock. But I’d like to see someone take another shot. Maybe it’s a possible future direction for Google’s own ??When long airport security lines become too much to handle, request a wheelchair.That’s the tactic some fully abled passengers are using to cut through the winding queues at airport security checkpoints, the reported. According to the 1986 Air Carrier Access Act,?airlines are required to accomodate disabled travelers ? who need not show any proof of disability ? free of charge.Airport staffers recognize the deception occurs; they’ve learned to expect a large volume of wheelchair requests during periods when security lags.(PHOTOS: )“When [travelers] see that the line is so long, they just ask for a wheelchair,” Evelyn Danquah, an attendant for Delta Air Lines, told the Times. She said she has seen some wheelchair fakers stand and walk away as soon as they clear security.Wheelchair attendants ? whose salaries range between $9 and $14 an hour, with tips, help?to maintain a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy regarding the line-hopping strategy in hopes of bolstering their paychecks, the Times reported.The practice has even spawned a new term among flight attendants: “miracle flights,” in which passengers use wheelchairs to board but abandon them when their planes land. Kelly Skyles, the national safety and security coordinator for the Association of Professional Flight Attendants, told the Times she believes travelers shed their wheelchairs because passengers in wheelchairs are the last to leave the plane.“Not only do we serve them beverages and ensure their safety ? now we’re healing the sick,” said Skyles, who is also a flight attendant.Peter Greenberg, author and travel editor for CBS News, said he has noticed miracle flights on the rise as security has increased in rigor. He told the Times the scammers will eventually face unpleasant consequences.“I’m a big believer in karma,” he said. “You don’t put on a dress when the Titanic is going down so you can get in the first lifeboat.”Karma wasn’t kind to one wheelchair faker in the past. The reported in late August that Barry Brooks, who had pretended to be disabled in order to secure nearly $2.9 million in grants ? which he then used to buy luxury cars, motorcycles and a penthouse in Spain ? was sentenced to eight years in prison.It’s unclear whether deceitful passengers will suffer any penalties in the future. Jean Medina, spokesperson for industry trade organization Airlines for America, wrote in an email to the Times that her organization hopes travelers would refrain from abusing the law.“We respect our passengers, and we trust their integrity when they seek wheelchair assistance,” Medina said in the email.WATCH: ? At around 3:30 p.m. on Sept. 24, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's bespectacled visage popped up in the Twitter feeds of his 231,902 followers. "In a growing economy, there is enough space for big and small to grow," his missive read. He was touting his government's recent decision to pave the way for more foreign investment in retail, a long-awaited move that its supporters say promises to create millions of jobs, increase farmers' profits and decrease prices for consumers. Minutes later, Singh got his first reply: "@PMOIndia: can we also have clean toilets...?“In recent years, Azerbaijani-Mexican relations have been developing dynamically,” wrote the President of the Republic of Azerbaijan, Ilham Aliyev, in a to Mexican President Felipe Calderon on the occasion of Mexico’s Independence Day on Sept. 16. Many Mexicans however, particularly the residents of Mexico City, might be surprised to realize how warm and fuzzy relations are between the two countries ? and by the arrival of a new statue in Mexico’s Reforma Boulevard.(FROM THE MAGAZINE:?)The life-size bronze statue happens to be of Heydar Aliyev,?the former ruler of the oil-rich, ex-Soviet Republic of Azerbaijan (and the father of Azerbaijan’s current President). It sits in the newly renovated Azerbaijan-Mexico Friendship park in Mexico City ? a renovation that Azerbaijan , to the tune of $5 million in total for two parks and two statues in the city. (The second statue, a memorial to the victims of a 1990s massacre that?Azerbaijanis??as a genocide, sits in?Tlaxcoaque Park in downtown Mexico City.)(MORE:?)But the Soviet-style bronze of Aliyev has raised eyebrows among bewildered Mexicans as well as human rights groups. The monument sits on the City’s Reforma Avenue, home to statues of foreign leaders such as Abraham Lincoln and Gandhi.For human-rights groups, the placement of Aliyev ? who is accused of stifling dissent as the former Soviet republic’s Communist Party boss during the Cold War, and then as President from 1993 to 2003 ? among such company is disconcerting, to say the least.(MORE:?)Human rights group Azerbaijani-Americans for Democracy has written to the Mayor of Mexico City, Marcelo Ebrard expressing their dismay. “Heydar Aliyev was not a noble man that deserves to be honored in public parks and squares,” :“Having his monument erected in Mexico City is an affront to the Azerbaijanis that suffer at the hands of his corrupt dictatorship and it can only be an insult to Mexicans who value their own nation’s long-established traditions of freedom, human rights and dignity, and justice.”Statues of the Order of Lenin recipient have popped up in other countries, although Mexico is the first Latin American nation to receive one. Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty has compiled an??keeping a track of the statues erected in Aliyev’s honor so far, most of which are dotted around Central and Eastern Europe. (Mexico’s special treatment is partially down to the fact that it was one of the first countries to recognize Azerbaijan following its break from the Soviet Union in 1991.)(MORE:?)Many Mexico City residents, however, appeared to be oblivious to the issue,? the BBC. “He who pays, gets to choose,” a?car washer who works near the park??the broadcaster. “I don’t think it’s a particularly good idea but what can we Mexicans say??We have to bite our tongues, as it’s their money which paid for all this.”Mayor Erbrard, who has kept quiet so far in the face of the criticism, did during the unveiling of the statue in August that Mexico City had not received an investment this large from a foreign government before.Azerbaijan’s ambassador to Mexico to the AP that the monument was not “intended to improve anybody’s reputation, because the world’s perception of Heydar Aliyev does not require any rescuing.”PHOTOS: ?Over at CNET, Casey Newton and Roger Cheng have a good story on .Every few months, it seems, we hear a new version of an old story: the maker of an expensive smartphone announces it won’t be upgraded to the latest version of Android, and consumers cry foul.But this one is different. First, Motorola told customers they would upgrade the phones for 18 months after they came out, a statement that drove sales of the devices. Second, Google owns both Android and Motorola, making it all the more puzzling why the business units didn’t work together to make an upgrade happen.Finally, there are signs that for some Android devotees, Motorola’s abandonment of its year-old phones is the last straw.To me, the interesting part of this isn’t Motorola breaking its promise — although I’d be plenty steamed if I’d bought a phone based on it — but the obvious technical difficulty of updating a phone that uses one version of Android to a new version. If it were easy, we wouldn’t have the .Google has gone from saying that to to . But for now, when you buy an Android phone, you shouldn’t assume anything at all about when, or if, you’ll get an upgrade. And most of the time, most new phones aren’t running the latest version of the software. (At the moment, that’s Jelly Bean — if Motorola had gotten its 2011 phones to run Ice Cream Sandwich, they’d still be out of date.)I understand that getting an operating system to run on hundreds of phones from a bevy of manufacturers is far tougher than making it run only on hardware you build yourself. That’s why iPhone buyers know they’ll get updates the moment a new version of iOS is ready, while Android buyers don’t know what to expect. But as I , I don’t think that Google and phone makers have the option of ignoring the problem. The longer it festers, the more often it’ll come back to bite them, and their customers.I mean, it can’t be good for Motorola to tick off customers so badly that they go out of their way to avoid its products in the future, can it?? In the 13 months that Mohammed Abdel-Rahman has been protesting outside the U.S. embassy in Cairo, he has become so familiar to American officials that they sometimes stop at his small open-air sit-in to exchange pleasantries with him. Never mind that he is the son of Omar Abdel-Rahman, better known as the Blind Sheik, jailed in North Carolina for his role in a plot to bomb several targets in the U.S., or that Mohammed himself was captured in Afghanistan 10 years later and imprisoned in Egypt until the fall of 2010, or even that he is a prominent member of the...? Beeshu has issues. the neglected son of a megalomaniacal dictator, trapped in a presidency he never wanted, surrounded by sycophants, loathed by his people, afflicted with attention-deficit/ hyperactivity disorder and a debilitating lisp it's enough to make you feel sorry for the guy. And that's the point. Beeshu, the paranoid finger puppet that stars in the underground online parody series Top Goon: Diaries of a Little Dictator, is a caricature of Bashar Assad, the President of Syria. With his outsize ears, ill-timed giggles and penchant for bad jokes, Beeshu invokes laughter, anger and pity. But never fear. "For so long,...? Can the People Beat the Militias? 1 LIBYA The Sept. 11 assault on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, which led to the death of Ambassador Chris Stevens, exposed the fragile reality of Libya a year after the fall of the dictatorship of Muammar Gaddafi. The fledgling democratic Libyan state is at the mercy of numerous armed militias, many of which subscribe to extremist ideologies at odds with the government. Across the country, both secular and Islamist militias have taken over buildings, confiscated private and public property and routinely clashed with rival brigades. Ten days after the attack, though, the citizens...? To find the origins of Yale university, don't go to New Haven, Conn., the New England city where this hallowed American institution of higher learning sits. Instead, head to the old British redoubt of Fort St. George in Chennai, India. This was where, in the late 17th century, a certain Elihu Yale made his fortune as a top official of the East India Co. His riches enabled him to eventually donate a carton of books and cloth in 1718 to an obscure college across the oceans in colonial Connecticut. Those items, summarily sold for the kingly sum of £562,...? I am amazed by your cover story's headline, "The End of al-Qaeda?" [Sept. 17]. If this were the title following Osama bin Laden's death, it would have made more sense. But eliminating an odd leader in Yemen means nothing at all. Al-Qaeda is more of a cult, and we in Pakistan are suffering directly because it helps any organization that can further its expansion. A. Rahim Yousefzai, ISLAMABAD Upon seeing "The End of al-Qaeda?" it struck me that TIME had a similar headline on its...?If you find it challenging getting your 10-year-old excited about early European art or the Cubist manifesto, you’re in luck. Through March 17, the Louvre is sharing its hallowed halls with a rather unlikely special exhibit, featuring hundreds of toys and memorabilia from the Star Wars franchise.Action figures, Yoda-masks, plastic lightsabers, film posters, Chewbacca coffee mugs and C-3PO tape dispensers are just a few of the items on display, according to the . The three-room exhibit is housed in the Les Arts Decoratifs museum in a wing of the Louvre, and features more than 450 items from the last 35 years of Star Wars history.The collection belongs to Arnaud Grunberg, a toy vendor and collector, who fell in love with Star Wars after seeing the first film at age 11 in 1977. Grunberg tells the he has thousands of toys in his collection, and that while the saga is a youth phenomenon and “an expression of childhood,” it’s an exhibit for everyone.(READ: )Indeed, it may excite those who grew up watching the films (both the 1977-83 trilogy and the later three prequels) even more than young kids today. But there’s no doubt that an exhibit of recreations of famous scenes from the films will probably be more entertaining for youngsters than yet another The recreated scenes (which includes the attack on the Death Star, and Jedis engaged in an arena lightsaber battle) are protected behind glass and are made using action figures and toy vehicles.Naturally a trip to the Louvre calls for just a smidgen of classiness, so if you’d like to keep up the critical discourse during your visit, we recommend checking out to talking about art like a pro. Lexicon! Surrealist! Futurist! CONCEPTUAL!Or, you can just take after 10-year-old George Sykes, who told , “It’s awesome! It’s the best exhibit ever!” That works, too.MORE: )?$50 million worth of moviegoers can’t be wrong. The critics gave Taken 2?a ferocious pummeling ? a 20% score on the Rotten Tomatoes aggregate-review site, meaning that four-fifths of them dumped on the film ? but Liam Neeson rose from the beating to kick beaucoup d’ass where it counts at the box office. The PG-13-rated action film earned a slam-bang $50 million, according to early studio projections, to win the weekend at North American theaters. If that conveniently round number holds, Taken 2 will be the?first movie to hit the $50-million weekend mark since The Dark Knight Rises?opened in July.And what was the first $40-million opener since the caper-capper? That came last week, with Hotel Transylvania. Hollywood has shaken the late-summer blahs and lured audiences back to theaters by offering, what else?, what has worked before: an?animated comedy voiced by brand-name actors (Adam Sandler, Kevin James) and a revenge drama with a 60-year-old Irishman who, for now, is the movies’ top action star. This sequel to Neeson’s 2009 hit, which earned $145 million at the domestic box office and another $82 million abroad, succeeded by attracting a broad swath of moviegoers ? 52% male, 65% over the age of 25 ? who gave the film an OK B-plus rating as polled by the CinemaScore survey firm.(READ: Corliss’s )In the first installment, an ex-CIA?operative (Neeson) came to to track down the white slavers who had kidnapped his daughter (Maggie Grace). The new chapter moves the location to and makes the spy and his ex-wife (Famke Janssen) the captives, while the daughter tosses grenades on Istanbul rooftops and drives madly through the streets. It’s not much of a SPOILER ALERT to mention that Grace has a boyfriend to whom Neeson eventually warms up ? virtually guaranteeing a Taken 3 with the kidnapping of the daughter and her beau. Maybe they’ll have a baby by then, which could make Taken?the Fockers of action-movie franchises.(READ: )As hostile as most reviews for Taken 2?were, that’s how supportive the critical response (85% favorable) was for Frankenweenie, Tim Burton’s stop-motion expansion of a 29-min. live-action film he made in 1984, when he was a young animator at Disney. The brass shelved the movie ? about a boy who brings his dead pit bull terrier back to life, Frankenstein-style ? and fired Burton, who did plenty well on his own. The director returned to the studio a quarter-century later to make?Alice in Wonderland?and earn Disney a billion dollars at the worldwide box office.(READ: Corliss’s ) Frankenweenie?might not rack up a twentieth of that bonanza.?The black-and-white 3-D feature ? Burton’s third stop-motion movie, after The Nightmare Before Christmas and Corpse Bride, and the third set in a cemetery ? opened to a moribund $11.5 million.?That’s?less than half of what?Hotel Transylvania,?another animated comedy about the undead,?grossed in its?second?weekend. Parents and kids chose bright colors and broad humor over artful atmospherics and subtler wit.(READ: Corliss’s )The Frankenweenie opening was weak even for a stop-motion movie ? well below the $19.3 million for Burton’s Corpse Bride in 2005 and the $14.1 million for the recent ParaNorman, and just about even with the $11.1 million cadged this April by Aardman Studio’s The Pirates! Band of Misfits. The CinemaScore rating for Burton’s movie was B-plus ? suitable for an action film like Taken 2 but abysmal for an animated feature, which is usually awarded a more generous A-minus (Transylvania, Ice Age 4, Puss in Boots), a full “A” (Brave, The Lorax, Madagascar 3) or even an A-plus (Tangled). Disney is unlikely to fire Burton again, but they may discourage him from making stop-motion cartoons set in graveyards.(READ: Mary Pols’)Elsewhere, the college musical ? one of this week’s rare top-10 movies in which no human or pet dies or is already dead ? earned a harmonious $14.7 million in its first weekend of wide release. In Indieland, , a lubricious heap o’ Southern grits starring Zac Efron, Matthew McConaughey and Nicole Kidman, snatched a hot $110,000 on 11 screens.?, in which Leighton Meester cuddles up with a man Hugh Laurie) old enough to be her best friend’s father ? in fact, he is ? opened in 10 times as many theaters as The Paperboy but took in just $180,000, for a pathetic $1,636 per-screen average. Andrea Arnold’s rough-hewn version of ?(her Heathcliff is black) found a chilly reception: $8,800 on a single Manhattan screen.Here are the Sunday estimates of this weekend’s top-grossing pictures in North American theaters, as reported by :1. Taken 2, $50 million, first weekend2. Hotel Transylvania, $26.3?million; $76?million, second week3. Pitch Perfect, $14.7?million; $21.6?million, second week4. Looper, $12.2?million; $40.3?million, second week5. Frankenweenie, $11.5?million, first weekend6. End of Watch, $4?million; $32.9?million, third week7. Trouble With the Curve, $3.9?million; $29.7?million, third week8. House at the End of the Street, $3.7?million; $27.5?million, third week9. The Master, $1.8?million; $12.3?million, fourth week10. Finding Nemo, $1.6?million; $39?million, fourth week of rerelease?Today, I am tired of suicide.I ache in my bones and muscles and soul for all the suffering that continues to occur.I am tired of learning about people who reached out for help, sometimes screaming for help, and they were dismissed by the military.I am tired of hearing widows who not only blame themselves unfairly, but are also blamed by the military (in writing) as the trigger for their husband’s suicide.I am tired of an endless problem that seems to have no clear solution.My heart breaks for each of us.The moms, dads, siblings, widows and children. If we aren’t asking why any more (and many of us have learned to stop asking that question) we are asking what can we do?Today, I am tried and frustrated that the number of suicides keeps going up and more and more families are in need of support from .I don’t have the solution. But, I refuse to give up. We all have to refuse to give up.Saturday one of the presenters, Franklin Cook — who is a suicide survivor himself — said: “You can survive anything if you keep showing up.”And so, though at times today I was tempted to retreat to my room to process my fatigue and frustration, I kept showing up. And I will keep showing up until the path is clearer on what we can do to help our men and women in the military, and their families.In the meantime, I’m going to process my grief (and too many others) the best way that I can. As TAPS says, I will Remember the love, Celebrate the life and Share the journey.Thank you for sharing this journey with me for a while. I hope that together we can make it really count.Leslie McCaddon of Massachusetts was one of two widows?Time?featured in its July cover??on the surge in Army suicides. Her husband, Dr. Michael McCaddon, an Army captain, died in March.?Information contained on this page is provided by companies via press release distributed through PR Newswire, an independent third-party content provider. PR Newswire, WorldNow and this Station make no warranties or representations in connection therewith.SOURCE IC Places Inc.In the news release, IC Places Begins Production of EzVip Reality TV Show for Punch Television Networks and International Syndication, issued 12-Jul-2012 by IC Places Inc. over PR Newswire, we are advised by the company that the list of celebrities scheduled to appear in the show was added in error in the previous version of this press release and are not confirmed to appear in show. The complete, corrected release follows:IC Places Begins Production of EzVip Reality TV Show for Punch Television Networks and International SyndicationLOS ANGELES, July 12,?2012 /PRNewswire/ -- IC Places (OTCQB: ICPA) is pleased to announce it has begun production on Punch Television Networks' first Reality TV Show based on the day to day lives of the people that run EzVip.com.? About the ShowNightlife doesn't just begin when the sun goes down. It's a 24/7, 365 job that never sleeps. It requires the resilience?to withstand huge egos and "I don't care" attitudes. No matter what city you're in (Miami, Vegas, LA...), it's all the same. When millions are at stake and your wildest dreams are on the line,?you either step up to the challenge, or collapse under pressure.IC Places Inc. (OTCQB: ICPA) has formed a production partnership to take viewers behind the scenes to see what it really takes to make it in the multi million dollar world of Nightlife Entertainment. Some of the top celebrities from the worlds of entertainment, sports and business have agreed to appear on the show's premier season. Like a fly on the wall, viewers will see what it's really like to be a part of the glitz and glamor of meeting high profile celebrities and VIPs, partying with them into the early hours of the morning, only to return to the office at 8 am and begin the start of another work day. The show will follow the team as they provide their celebrity clients with access and convenience to some of the biggest events in entertainment. In the process showing EzVip.com as a company that is revolutionizing nightlife.?The premier season?is slated for 13 episodes and will begin airing this fall on Punch TV Networks and International Syndication.? Filming for the show kicks off in Miami at the Versace Mansion July 21st with a celebrity filled event celebrating Al Nelson's birthday bash. The show will air this fall on Punch Television Networks in the U.S. and Internationally Via syndication. Segments of the show will run throughout IC Places' extended distribution network. Steven Samblis, CEO of IC Places, said, "Working with Al on the 'Nightlife' sections of , I had a chance to see behind the scenes what it took to run these incredible events and cater to his celebrity clientele.? I knew immediately that this was entertainment magic. That started the conversation about bringing Al's world to TV. Since appearing on ABC's Shark Tank, Season 3 Premiere this year, where both Mark Cuban and Daymond John invested in EzVip.com, Al has been inundated with offers to take his world to Reality TV, pitching his world from all different angles.? When Al saw I had the same vision on how to tell the story of EzVip, we decided to make it happen. This show is going to be a game changer."The Reality Dream TeamSteven Samblis - Executive Producer / Co-CreatorSteven, CEO and Founder of IC Places and the websites, brought together a team of proven production companies and people to create one of the most compelling TV shows airing on network TV this fall.?? Al Nelson - Executive Producer / Co-CreatorNelson, Founder and CEO EzVip.com, the website that allows you to reserve and pay for your bottle service at a nightclub in advance. (Think of it like the popular restaurant application Open Table, but for nightlife.) After three years he decided to pitch his idea on the show that features successful entrepreneurs like Mark Cuban (Dallas Mavericks owner), Daymond John (founder of FUBU clothing line), Kevin O'Leary (educational software), Barbara Corcoran (real estate) and Robert Hejavec (technology security) who try to outbid each other to invest their own money and get a piece of a new business. Al ended up with several offers but in the end accepted the offer from Cuban and John.First J ProductionsJOSHUA MANDEL ? Production Accountant / Executive ProducerBorn in Los Angeles, California. He graduated Landmark West and attended University of Southern California. While in high school, he had an internship at Boss Film Studios where he worked on such films as Starship Troopers, Air Force One, Desperate Measures, and Turbulence. He also assisted the multi Academy Award winner wizard Mr. Richard Edlund. After college, he started working as a production assistant on films such as Rebound, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, Little Miss Sunshine, Heartbreak Kid and the TV show The Loop. After working in production and post-production, he moved to?freelance production accounting. He worked as a production accountant on the films Tropic Thunder, Surrogates and Real Steel. He is currently working as a production supervisor on 21 and Over.?"First J Productions is proud to be a part of this great team. We aim to show the business side of the club scene and what it takes to make it a VIP night."... Joshua Mandel?Manolin VidVilla ?Manolin VidVilla Studios develops and produces a wide range of reality based programming, scripted series, international formats, syndication, talk shows, documentaries, video-on-demand, specials, sitcoms, web based interactive fare and made-for-TV movies, all in an effort to build a leadership position. The company focuses on key market segments outside the realm of the major studios by developing, producing, and delivering cost-effective programming to networks hungry for original programming."We are very excited to be joining the project. We look forward to co-producing a highly compelling docu-series around such a great new company as EzVip. Viewers will be captivated by the inner workings of the exclusive VIP club world, and with a point of view unparalleled by any other television series. With Al at the helm, the show also serves a direct-response for??to further launch their intellectual property for being the premiere online destination spot to book your VIP nightclub reservations."?Cal BoyingtonCAL BOYINGTON ? Executive ProducerCal Boyington launched his media shingle Manolin Studios in early 2008 in a strategic move to develop and produce his own fare. He also serves?as Executive Producer of HD Net's award-winning documentary series "Baker Boys," Comedy Central's much hyped new scripted comedy series "Workaholics," currently airing after "South Park," and "Trapped in Paradise," for VH-1.Boyington is an accomplished executive who, while forming Manolin, jointly served as the President of TV for QED International, a movie production/international sales company. Manolin sold numerous shows including: "Freshman" with Lil Romeo at MTV, "E.S.U." at Discovery, "R5 Sons" a family-docu at TLC, and "That's Rich" hosted by Mo Rocca at the E!. Manolin also produced a ground-breaking web-series for entitled "Sports Explorers."Prior to producing, Boyington was the Head of Paradigm's Alternative Television Division as well as a veteran talent agent at ICM for several years. As an agent, Boyington put together Animal Planet's hit show "Whale Wars" and ABC's "The Next Best Thing." Some of Boyington's other TV sales that debuted included, "Father Hood," the Snoop Dogg family reality sitcom on E! and "6 Months" at A&E, a show chronicling families as they dealt with ailing family members. He sold "Sunday Morning Shootout" to AMC, which ran for over 250 episodes and airs in several territories around the world.Additionally, Boyington participated in the sales of "Intervention" for A&E, "The Osbournes" for MTV, "Anna Nicole Show" for E!, A&E's "Sons of Hollywood," BET's "Baldwin Hills," "TV Land Awards," "US Poker Championship," "Knight School" with Coach Bobby Knight, and "Bound For Glory" for ESPN. He was integral in the success of "The Apprentice," "America's Next Top Model" and the revived "Last Comic Standing."In addition to Television development, Boyington has an indie-film in pre-production through Manolin titled, "The Pure Life," which won the American Zoetrope Award for Best Screenplay.Boyington has had consistent success in producing, packaging, and selling TV shows for Broadcast, and in series format development, acquisition and production. The Hollywood Reporter selected him for "The Next Generation of 2006." Boyington is a member in good standing of The Academy of Television Arts and NATPE. He is experienced in contract negotiations, analyzing market trends and capitalizing on global market opportunities. He has specific experience in leveraging advertising monies as?well as licensing and merchandising platforms for programs. High visibility?in the entertainment community with continued success in deriving partnerships and innovative?media solutions through extensive personal relationships.?JASON BERGENFELD ? Executive ProducerBorn and raised in Southern California, Jason has always had a passion for many aspects of multimedia programming. What started as watching sports and Saturday cartoons has turned into a career in television lasting more than a decade.Jason's creative abilities as well as his business sense have enabled him to become a leader in his field. Known as a go-getter, Jason started his career working for the Oscar Award Winning company Kopelson Entertainment, until moving into the music video space during the boom with FM Rocks.After moving back into television production, Jason produced shows for NBC, FOX, ABC, TruTV, GSN, BET, AOL TV, A & E, MSNBC, CCTV, Phoenix Television, and many more.Before joining forces with Manolin Studios, Jason worked as SVP of Development & Acquisitions with Xonger Global Media/C4 Pictures where they produced such hits has Baldwin Hills (BET), Barbershop 1 & 2 (MGM Studios), Meet Joe Jackson (A & E), and many more films and television programs.GREG GEROSKY ? Executive ProducerPrior to being an Executive Producer and partner of VidVilla LLC and Manolin VidVilla Studios LLC, Greg spent 5 years as a Producer and the Head of Post Production for Reveille Studios, now a division of Shine Group owned by Fox / Newscorp.Greg built a large post division for Reveille with over 50 edit bays including online/finishing in as many as 4 separate locations across Los Angeles.Greg has Produced and Co-Produced many shows including Masterchef USA (FOX), American Gladiators 1 & 2 (NBC), The Biggest Loser 12 (NBC) Tabatha's Takeover 1-4 (BRAVO), Shear Genius 1-4 (BRAVO), The Buried Life 1 & 2 (MTV), Losing It With Jillian Michaels (NBC), One Born Every Minute 1 & 2 (LIFETIME), Gone Too Soon (Documentary for the TV GUIDE CHANNEL), and numerous other TV programs. Greg has also contributed largely to dozens of Web series projects for MSN and Yahoo, and both scripted and non-scripted development.Prior to joining Reveille, Greg owned and operated a small production company based in South Florida producing local programming and commercial spots for local businesses. Greg is also a composer and has achieved several successes including a large national campaign for our nation's Border Patrol and underscore for dozens of Reveille shows.Product PlacementKaren S. Neasi One of the premiere executives in the world of product placement, Karen started off as the Executive Assistant to Kevin S. Bright (Bright/Kauffman/Crane Production), on Dream On, Friends, Veronica's Closet and Jesse. From there Karen moved into product placement for some of the most successful directors in Hollywood on films including: About IC Places:IC Places is a New Media company that produces weekly entertainment content for several different mediums.? In 2012 it hit a milestone of signing partnership agreements to place its content before more then 300 million people a month, giving the company one of the largest distributions foot prints on the planet.? This foot print includes online partnerships with Mevio.com and terrestrial partnerships which delivers its content to Checkout TV Network, HDTV Network, Dining Network, Bright House on demand and two upcoming new networks launching in July of this year. At the core, IC Places is a network of 350 city based entertainment websites. This foundation allows IC Places the unique advantage having a built in fan based for the TV and New Media programs it produces.? Each IC Places City website offers a virtual keyhole view of life in each community. Every unique aspect of a city's social, business, and cultural life is available right at each city's IC Places homepage. IC Places provides the entire community a place to talk, do business and get connected. Businesses are given amazing tools to tell their stories in the best way possible and visitors get unfettered access to businesses, events and people in each city. To see one of the IC Places City sites in action, please visit .About Punch Television NetworksLaunched on Wednesday, October 19, 2011, shortly after Columbus Day, Punch TV is, in many ways, also an explorer. Instead of spending the normal costs of $100 million to launch, Punch TV spent $10 million. Rather than launching by airing re-runs of popular and loved shows, Punch TV offers 70% original programming to its viewers. And now, Punch TV Network extended its originality even further when in May of this year the company introduced its fall lineup of shows to prospective advertisers and/or their representatives. The success of the Up-Front resulted in commitments of twelve million dollars in advertising dollars to Punch TV's fall line-up of shows. At Up-Front, Punch TV Network introduced 17 of its roster of 36 new dramas, comedies, variety shows, talk shows, children's shows, and inspirational entertainment. The event was attended by a number of celebrities including Blair Underwood, Bill Duke, Dawnn Lewis, Obba Babatunde, Omar Gooding, Damian Hall, Fonzworth Bently, Kiki Shephard, Lorraine Toussaint, and many others.Punch TV Network, with a presence this fall in more than 100 cities, does, indeed, personify the spirit of independent television. Punch TV! "Are you thirsty yet?"IC Places Safe Harbor Statement This press release contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. These forward-looking statements are based on the current plans and expectations of management and are subject to a number of uncertainties and risks that could significantly affect the company's current plans and expectations, as well as future results of operations and financial condition. A more extensive listing of risks and factors that may affect the company's business prospects and cause actual results to differ materially from those described in the forward-looking statements can be found in the reports and other documents filed by the company with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The company undertakes no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.Contact Information: IC Places, Inc. Steven Samblis 407-442-0309 Ext. 2 Press Inquiries: ©2012 PR Newswire. All Rights Reserved. ?(NBC) - A 14-year-old Fort Worth girl who was "perfectly healthy" her entire life suddenly died Sunday after being diagnosed with the flu, her mother said.Chloe Lindsey died hours after she was rushed to Cook Children's Medical Center."She was perfectly healthy," said her mother, Tammy Osborne. "I think she had been sick twice since she was 2 years old."She first felt ill on Wednesday and went to the doctor Friday, Osborne said."They did the swab test and it was positive for the flu," she said.On Saturday night, her breathing became labored, and by Sunday morning, she could barely breathe."She was just gasping for air," Osborne said. "I asked her, 'Baby, why are you breathing like that?' And she said, 'Momma, it hurts.'"Her mother rushed her to the emergency room.Doctors tried to put her on a ventilator and another machine to help her breathe. The fluid in her lungs was so thick, it was pressing on her heart, doctors told her mother."Before they could get her hooked up to the machine, she arrested," Osborne said between tears.She counted 24 doctors and nurses working frantically to give her CPR for more than 40 minutes, but they could not save her."It was just like she had the flu, and she was gone," her mother said.The Fort Worth Independent School District released a statement that did not name Chloe's school for privacy reasons, but said custodians had thoroughly cleaned the school with sanitizers.Chloe was in the eighth grade at Leonard Middle School, her mother said. Osborne said school administrators should be more open about flu outbreaks so parents will be informed."It's just like when a kid gets lice," she said. "They send home a letter saying, 'There's a kid in the class that had lice. Please check your kids.' Lice won't kill you, but the flu killed my baby."Counselors were on hand at the school to offer grief support to students and staff Monday, officials said.Chloe's family said she tested positive for Type A influenza, which meant she probably had the swine flu, Osborne said doctors told her. Conclusive results should be available Tuesday after additional testing has been completed, the Tarrant County Public Health department said.Cook Children's Medical Center said two children being treated for flu-like symptoms were in critical condition Monday.Doctors say the H1N1 virus, or swine flu, is no more dangerous than the seasonal flu. Trouble breathing or congestion in the lungs are symptoms that might require immediate medical attention.©2009 NBC. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.?Information contained on this page is provided by companies via press release distributed through PR Newswire, an independent third-party content provider. PR Newswire, WorldNow and this Station make no warranties or representations in connection therewith.SOURCE 5W Public RelationsNEW YORK, Aug. 15, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- 5W Public Relations, one of the 25 largest independent in the U.S., today announced the addition of to its diverse roster of fashion/retail clients. Giutzy.com offers fashion-forward consumers access to luxury designer shoes and handbags online, including hard-to-find and exclusive styles from high-end labels like , Jil Sander, Rochas, Michael Kors, Marc Jacobs, Nina Ricci and Veronique Branquinho. Backed by a team of fashion industry professionals from Italy and New York, Giutzy.com sets the standard for what is "in", never offering anything less than the best in world-class design. The site is a beacon for the chic, modern, well-traveled customer who stays on top of cutting-edge trends and demands new, directional and impossible-to-find styles straight from the runway."5WPR is very excited to be named the PR Agency of Record for Giutzy.com," said , CEO of 5W Public Relations. "With our expertise and expansive network of relationships in the fashion and retail industries, we will successfully build brand equity as well as cultivate a strong awareness of this amazing brand." 5W Public Relations will execute a comprehensive, integrated public relations program in order to promote Giutzy.com to targeted influential fashion media. Key elements will include media relations, celebrity and spokesperson integrations, co-branded partnerships, social media, online events and more.? About Giutzy.com Giutzy.com () is an online retailer that offers high-end, luxury, designer shoes and handbags. The site caters to the stylish, trend-driven men and woman "in-the-know" who seek out hard-to-find, exclusive accessory styles from their favorite fashion designers. Offering the utmost in quality and design, Giutzy.com is the new go-to website for those looking to make a statement by accessorizing their wardrobe with the most select accessories on the market. Designer styles are updated regularly and fully stocked each season in order to offer consumers the most up-to-date merchandise around the clock.About 5W Public Relations 5W Public Relations () is a full-service public relations agency known for implementing cutting-edge, customized campaigns designed to drive our clients' business goals and objectives. 5WPR was founded by Ronn Torossian in 2003, and the energetic and focused culture earned the PR firm a spot on the INC. 500 list and recognition as the nation's "fastest-growing " three years in a row. Our 24/7 approach led the industry's foremost trade magazine to describe 5WPR as "aggressive in a way that clearly resonates with clients looking for a firm staffed with Type A-plus personalities, a BS-free approach, and results from Day One."©2012 PR Newswire. All Rights Reserved. ?Information contained on this page is provided by companies via press release distributed through PR Newswire, an independent third-party content provider. PR Newswire, WorldNow and this Station make no warranties or representations in connection therewith.SOURCE Penske Media CorporationStyle Awards Makes its East Coast Debut at Mercedes Benz Fashion Week, TONIGHT, September 5th, 8pm ETLOS ANGELES, Sept. 5, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- In an unprecedented partnership between leading brands in style, media and events, Penske Media Corporation (PMC), Style Media and IMG Fashion will present the 9th Annual Style Awards on September 5, 2012, kicking off the world's most prestigious fashion event, Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week.? The Style Awards will make its primetime broadcast debut on The Style Network on Friday, September 14th at 8pm ET/PT. Fashion fans will get a never before seen look into the Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week experience. Talents behind the world's most exciting film and TV fashions will come together at The 2012 Style Awards, to celebrate and recognize the artistic accomplishments of the community's top costume designers, stylists, models, photographers, makeup artists, hair stylists and more.? In addition, Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, President and CEO of SWW Creative, brings her extensive fashion background, production expertise, and exceptional relationships to the 9th Annual Style Awards as Executive Producer. The ceremony will be followed by the Official Style Awards After-Party held at Stone Rose Lounge.? "We are tremendously excited to bring the Style Awards to The Style Network viewers and to Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week for the first time," said Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, the Executive Producer of the Show.?Jay Penske Chairman and CEO of PMC, owner of the Style Awards added, "We know this collaboration among three preeminent media and style brands will thrive for years to come."This year's Honorees were chosen by the Style Awards' Nominating Committee, comprised of esteemed individuals in the entertainment and fashion communities.?The Style Award, created exclusively by iconic crystal brand, Lalique, will be awarded to 2012's Style Award winners.? This year's categories, honorees and presenters include:?Celebrities and members of the fashion community scheduled to attend include:Iman, Nicole Richie, Amy Adams, Katharine McPhee, Ed Westwick, Rachel Roy, Carolina Herrera, Brian Atwood, Ivanka Trump, Prabal Gurung, Reed Krakoff, Jeff Gordon, John Demsey, Alexandra Kotur, Robert Verdi, Joe Zee, Waris Ahluwalia, Stacey Bendet, Derek Blasberg, Henrik Lundqvist, Laura Kaeppeler, Joan Smalls, Catherine Malandrino, Rebecca Minkoff, Kristina O'Neill, Lisa Perry, Reem Acra, AmareStoudemire, Alexis Welch andTimo Weiland, among others."As the first official broadcast partner of The 2012 Style Awards, we are excited to join forces with PMC and IMG to recognize those who have contributed to the world's most memorable fashions," said Salaam Coleman Smith, President, Style Media.? "This unprecedented event gives our viewers front-row access to today's biggest style icons.""At IMG Fashion we celebrate style makers year-round through our global fashion platform of events," said Peter Levy, Managing Director and Senior Vice President, IMG Fashion Events and Properties. "We couldn't be more proud to welcome the Style Awards, a program that recognizes the achievements of top creative talent in the industry, to Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week and give their fans an insider look at this industry-only event."Winners and presenters of past Style Awards include: Selena Gomez, David LaChappelle, Monique Lhuillier, Selma Blair, Cindy Crawford, Rachel Zoe, David Duchovny, Nina Dobrev, Eva Longoria, and Emily Blunt. Last year designer Alice Temperley and actress Chloe Moretz were amongst Style Award winners, and for the last eight years, such extraordinary and diverse talents have emphasized the importance of the award in recognizing style talent at every stage in its development and achievement.About Penske Media CorporationPMC, a leading digital media company founded by Jay Penske in 2004, reaches over 80 million unique visitors monthly according to Comscore. PMC owns a unique and growing portfolio of lifestyle brands that provide the web's best original content in categories including entertainment, sports, breaking news, media, finance, tech, health, shopping, fashion, beauty, and automotive. Deadline.com, OnCars, HollywoodLife, India.com, Movieline, TVLine, BGR, Young Hollywood Awards, The Style Awards, and Breakthrough of the Year Awards are all part of the expanding PMC portfolio. For more information on PMC and its brands, please visit: or its digital properties directly.About IMG FashionIMG Fashion is dedicated to facilitating a gateway to the fashion world - from creation to consumer.? We offer solutions that seamlessly connect and associate fashion's key constituents and corporate brands using IMG's global resources, influence and expertise. Within the fashion industry IMG represents the world's top models, leading designers and the most influential photographers, art directors and stylists.? The division produces the leading fashion events around the globe and represents many of the industry's top organizations and federations.About Style MediaStyle Media, a global multimedia company that includes The Style Network and myStyle.com, is the destination for women 18-49 seeking to fuel their insatiable appetite for looking great and living stylishly. Style currently counts nearly 78 million cable and satellite subscribers and is the fastest growing women's network in the U.S.? keeps women up-to-date on all of the latest fashion and beauty news on the web. Style's popular series include "Tia & Tamera," "Jerseylicious," "Giuliana & Bill," "Chicagolicious," "Empire Girls: Julissa & Adrienne" and "Big Rich Texas." Style is a network of NBCUniversal Entertainment & Digital Networks and Integrated Media, a division of NBCUniversal, one of the world's leading media and entertainment companies in the development, production, and marketing of entertainment, news, and information to a global audience. Follow us on Twitter at .About Stone Rose LoungeLocated on the 4th floor of the Time Warner Center (10 Columbus Circle) Stone Rose Lounge ? named for the touches of stone and rosewood used throughout its design ? is the epitome of masculine elegance. Created to echo the posh atmosphere of a classically timeless hotel lounge, the 5,000 sq. ft. venue features candlelit seating areas surrounded by gorgeous views of Manhattan's Central Park and the city's skyline. Stone Rose Lounge offers an extensive selection of wine and beer, as well as a wide range of spirits and liqueurs. Its cocktail menu features an ever-changing selection of libations that highlight market fresh ingredients and seasonal favorites, in addition to signature sips like The Stone Rose. A small bites menu is available from Benchmarc Events by Marc Murphy and features favorites such as Mini Lobster Rolls, Curried Tuna Tartar Crispy Tacos and Mini Grilled Cheese with Gruyere & Parmesan. Brunch offers bites including Escarole & Grilled Asparagus Salad, Spicy Chicken Wings and Chicken Chile Nachos. Stone Rose Lounge is open daily; private event space is also available. For more information and hours of operation, please call 212.823.9769 or visit .©2012 PR Newswire. All Rights Reserved. ? By Joyce Eng, "In five years, we'll all either be working for him ... or be dead by his hand." It's been more than five years since Jack () uttered those foreboding words about Kenneth () on , but now that the NBC comedy is heading into its seventh and final season (Thursday at 8/7c), one of those predictions may just come true. "We certainly have not forgotten about that," co-showrunner and executive producer Robert Carlock tells TVGuide.com. "I think it would be disappointing if one of those didn't happen. There are so many things we want to do before it's over." But there's so little time. The three-time Emmy winner for Best Comedy Series will return for a shortened 13-episode run-- or a "full-out sprint," as Carlock calls it. "When we were doing 22 episodes, there are sort of three phases you go through. One usually takes you through about 10 or 11 episodes. There's a sprint to that with an arc, then there's a wait and you usually do your weirder episodes while you're treading water, and then you have your sprint toward the end. This is just a full-out sprint. We're trying to make sure we carve out room to tell 30 Rock stories and we've got to try to bring down safely every one of the plates we've got spinning. That's fun and a little daunting." The show certainly has a lot of ground to cover in its final episodes, after the end of Season 6 found Jack and Avery () splitting up, Jenna () and Paul () getting engaged, and Liz () deciding to have a child with Criss (). So ? 1. Happily ever after?Things always end up with a big, fat "blerg!" for Liz when she tries to get her life together and/or realize her dreams, but good things come to those who wait, right? "We believe in happy endings. We just like to make them as weird as possible," Carlock says. "Our intention is that Criss is The One." But, he cautions, they haven't decided how the show will end and haven't locked in Marsden for a set number of episodes yet. "We just shot one with him so far and it's largely about Liz's puritan feelings about sex colliding with the practical necessity of trying to have a baby. She makes a big and hopefully unexpected breakthrough on that front. Hopefully that'll be satisfying to see Liz Lemon in her own weird way embrace her sexuality. It's a little frightening, especially for Criss. It's scary, but it's about time. She's growing up." 2. And a baby makes three?Carlock remains coy about exactly whose offspring or what was in that Fey was snapped carrying on set. (Hey, it could be . "He got knocked over, but he was repaired, I'm sure.") But he admits that the writers let Liz's motherhood dreams "fall to the wayside" over the years. "We started [the baby stuff] in Season 2 in part to say, 'Hey, keep us on the air. We've got great emotional stuff coming up!' And we managed to stay on the air for four more years. We as writers felt like we hadn't done our job in showing that aspect of what Liz wants, so we do want to right that." Plus, he adds: "Tina expressly never wanted Liz to have a kid until the end just because it's hard to work with a kid, so now we can." 3. Liz + Jack = No way!Sorry, Liz and Jack, fans. They are unequivocally never getting together. "It just speaks to how well they work together on screen because there's nothing rational about wanting them to be together," Carlock says. "It's great chemistry and we've always tried to find weird ways to get them 'together.' Kathy Geist made them kiss at one point and they were accidentally married on the island. That was our way of saying, 'This is probably as close as we're going to get, folks. But 'ship away as long as you're watching and buying our advertisers' products.' I love the slash fiction. It's all very entertaining." 4. The great escape:Now that Jack is single, he's going to do what he calls "Great Escape-ing," (a la the movie The Great Escape), in which he has a different girlfriend for every need. "You might imagine what those needs are in your own spare time," Carlock says. But Jack will also be plotting an actual escape-- from Kabletown. "GE was always the dream, and Jack is still trying to build some semblance out of that dream," he says. "You will see Jack's most daring business plan yet with his attempt to escape the bondage at Kabletown." And no, it will have nothing to do with the couches. 5. "A-list" wedding:Count on seeing Jenna and Paul tie the knot in a "weird and peculiar" (what else?) ceremony that, if all goes according to Jenna's plan, will be a true celebrity wedding. "Jenna is upset because she discovers that most celebrities have surprise weddings, especially the bigger you are, you have a secret wedding, like Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds just did," Carlock says. "So she becomes a little paralyzed in terms of actually having it happen because she's trying to make sure that it's a surprise and a secret. That leads to her making it hopefully the biggest surprise possible. We haven't quite had the decoy bride discussion yet. She also wants the attention so badly. It's hard for her." As for her maid of honor, Liz, she will throw the lamest bachelorette party ever in hopes of relieving herself of the duty. 6. Tracy Jordan's House of Payne:Tracy will follow through in his season finale epiphany to be the next Tyler Perry, which means he was quite busy during summer hiatus. "He made 12 movies over the summer, just cranking them out-- his Madea run," Carlock says. "We'll see some of them hopefully. But he will likely get in way over his head." 7. Stone Mountain comes to New York:Kenneth will get a visit from his mother () and stepfather Ron ()-- excuse us, his mom's friend. "Kenneth would never say 'stepfather," Carlock says. "They're ultimately part of a Jenna story, but it's about Kenneth coming to grips with Ron as a part of his life. Our version of Stone Mountain and our descriptions of his family are insane. We're pretty sure that Kenneth is some sort of immortal being inhabiting that body." Well, he is more than . 8. Eye candy:The guys are taking it off this year-- or mostly is. The Olympic champ will make a cameo as a "sex idiot" who doesn't wear a shirt underneath his jacket. "Inevitably the man himself understandably doesn't see the need for one. So between takes, he would just take the jacket off and sit around with no shirt on," Carlock says. "[Producer/writer] Jack Burditt was on set that day and he was like, 'It just makes me feel terrible. Ryan Lochte with his shirt off-- why did we write this?!' He won't be the only one showing skin: "Criss' shirt comes off and Tracy takes his shirt off, which is almost better than Ryan. It's going to be a good one for the ladies." 9. Monkey business:No, it's not an ode to Monkey Hospital , but we will see a primate in an episode. "Tracy says a thing that dumb people keep saying, which is women aren't funny. He says to Liz, 'I don't understand what the problem is, I say that all the time," Carlock teases. "Then he gets into an argument about whether monkeys are funnier than women, and Liz finds herself trying to prove that she's funnier than a monkey. !" 10. Old faces:30 Rock has amassed quite the collection of guest stars in the past six years-- and Carlock wants all of them back. "I want the last shot to be everyone who's ever been on the show. I also want to see all of Liz's ex-boyfriends-- Dennis Duffy and Dr. Drew get in a fight," he says. "But they might all have to do it for free. SAG might not let them." If they had to choose though, they're hoping to get Banks, (Devon Banks), (Kaylie Hooper), (Colleen) and (Angie) back for one more go-around. "There are so many people we want back and so much we want to do," Carlock says. "The [planning] board will be covered with dashed dreams. We're in the place of just cramming what we thought were stories into jokes, which we've always kind of done. We just did a passing joke that has nothing to do with the story that had Liz finding out that all of Criss' ex-girlfriends are African-American. We saw that being a story at one point, so there'll be more seemingly throwaway lines like that. The season is going to be a bouillon cube of enjoyment." 30 Rock premieres Thursday at 8/7c on NBC.View original at Related Articles on TVGuide.comOther Links From TVGuide.com? WASHINGTON, Aug. 21 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- AARP, one of the world'slargest membership organizations, today announced it will offer the 25,000expected attendees of its annual Life@50+ National Event & Expo in Boston, MAon September 6-8, 2007, the rare opportunity to preview five major motionpictures before release to the general public. As part of the popular "Moviesfor Grownups" Film Festival at the event, AARP members and show attendees willget a chance to catch screenings of 3:10 to Yuma, In the Shadow of the Moon,The Jane Austen Book Club, King of California, and Feast of Love before theyhit the big screen. Attendees will also get a chance to catch Aurora Borealisand Away from Her, two recently released films with poignant stories aboutmulti-generational issues within families. Cast lineups feature the biggeststars in Hollywood such as Russell Crowe, Christian Bale, Peter Fonda, MorganFreeman, Greg Kinnear, Maria Bello, Lynn Redgrave, Emily Blunt, Selma Blair,Donald Sutherland, Olympia Dukakis, Evan Rachel Wood, Michael Douglas (whowill be kicking of the Life@50+ event) and others. (Logo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20070209/NYF043LOGO ) "AARP The Magazine's 'Movies For Grownups' feature resonates with millionsof readers, and we're thrilled to take it to the next level with a sneak peekof some of some highly anticipated movies," said Steve Slon, editor of AARPThe Magazine. "We're the only film event that focuses on movies catering tothe 50+ crowd and with films that feature veteran actors and actresses as wellas Hollywood's hottest young stars, we know this film festival will bestanding room only!" AARP's Life@50+ National Event & Expo is a national event for AARPmembers, friends and their families that brings the very best exhibits,experts and entertainment to the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center.Attendees get to experience the best AARP has to offer with first-rateentertainment including Earth, Wind & Fire, Rod Stewart, Lily Tomlin, and TonyBennett; lifestyle, education and feature sessions with politicians andentertainers; health and fitness classes; and popular lectures. "Movies for Grownups" Film Festival Schedule 3:10 to Yuma -- Thursday, September 6th -- 1:45 p.m. - 3:45 p.m. 3:10 to Yuma stars Russell Crowe, Christian Bale, Ben Foster, Gretchen Moland Peter Fonda in a modern take on the classic western by Elmore Leonard fromproducing/writing/ directing team Cathy Konrad and James Mangold (Walk TheLine). In Arizona in the late 1800's, infamous outlaw Ben Wade (Crowe) and hisvicious gang of thieves and murderers have plagued the Southern Railroad. WhenWade is captured, Civil War veteran Dan Evans (Christian Bale), struggling tosurvive on his drought-plagued ranch, volunteers to deliver him alive to the"3:10 to Yuma", a train that will take the killer to trial. On the trail,Evans and Wade, each from very different worlds, begin to earn each other'srespect. But with Wade's outfit on their trail - and dangers at every turn -the mission soon becomes a violent, impossible journey toward each man'sdestiny. In the Shadow of the Moon -- Friday, September 7th -- 9:30 a.m. - 11:30a.m. Between 1968 and 1972, nine American spacecraft voyaged to the Moon, and12 men walked upon its surface. They remain the only human beings to havestood on another world. In the Shadow of the Moon brings together for thefirst, and possibly the last, time surviving crewmembers from every singleApollo mission that flew to the Moon, and allows them to tell their story intheir own words. This riveting first-hand testimony is interwoven with visually stunningarchival material which has been re-mastered from the original NASA filmfootage -- much of it never used before. The result is an intimate epic thatvividly communicates the daring, the danger, the pride, and the promise ofthis extraordinary era in history when the whole world literally looked up atAmerica. The Jane Austen Book Club -- Friday, September 7th -- 12:00 p.m. - 2:00p.m. Today's central California may be far removed from Regency England, butsome things never change. We're still every bit as preoccupied with thecomplexities of marriage, friendship, romantic entanglements, position, andsocial manners and mores as was Jane Austen at the turn of the 1800s.Featuring actors Hugh Dancy, Emily Blunt and Jimmy Smits, The Jane Austen BookClub reveals the lives of an ensemble of present-day friends through the wittyprism of their literary heroine. Six book club members, six Austen books, six interwoven story lines oversix months in the busy modern setting of Sacramento, where city and suburbansprawl meet natural beauty. While the contemporary stories never slavishlyparallel the Austen plots, the six characters find echoes, predictions,warnings and wisdom about their own trajectories within Austen's belovednarratives. King of California -- Friday, September 7th -- 2:30 p.m. - 4:30 p.m. At the age of sixteen, Miranda (Evan Rachel Wood) has already had to livewith her share of disappointments. Abandoned by her mother, she's dropped outof school and has been supporting herself as an employee at McDonald's whileher father Charlie (Michael Douglas) resides in a mental institution. When Charlie is released and sent back to their home, Miranda finds therelatively peaceful existence she's built for herself completely disrupted.Charlie has become obsessed with the notion that the long-lost treasure ofSpanish explorer Father Juan Florismarte Garces is buried somewhere near theirsuburban California housing unit. Armed with a metal detector and a stack oftreasure-hunting books, Charlie soon finds reason to believe that the goldresides underneath the local Costco, and encourages Miranda to get a job thereso that they can plan a way to excavate after hours. Initially skeptical, Miranda soon finds herself joining in Charlie'squestionable antics in an effort to give him one last shot at accomplishinghis dreams in this darkly funny, exciting and surprisingly hopeful take on themodern family and the American dream. Feast of Love -- Friday, September 7th -- 4:45 p.m. - 6:45 p.m. From venerable, multiple Academy Award(R) winning director Robert Benton(Kramer vs. Kramer, Places in the Heart), comes a kaleidoscopic ode to lifeand love in all its funny, sad, sexy, crazy, heartbreaking and life sustainingfacets: cause and affection. In a coffee shop in a tight-knit Oregoncommunity, local professor Harry Stevenson (Academy Award(R) winner MorganFreeman) witnesses love and attraction whipping up mischief among the town'sresidents. From the unlucky in love, die-hard romantic coffee shop ownerBradley (Academy Award(R) nominee Greg Kinnear) who has a serial habit oflooking for love in all the wrong places, including with his current wifeKathryn (Selma Blair); to the edgy real estate agent Diana (Radha Mitchell)who is caught up in an affair with a married man (Billy Buke) with whom sheshares an ineffable connection; to the beautiful young newcomer Chloe (AlexaDavolos) who defies fate in romancing the troubled Oscar (Toby Hemmingway); toHarry himself, whose adoring wife (Jane Alexander) is looking to break throughhis wall of grief after the wrenching loss of a beloved ... they allintertwine into one remarkable story in which no one can escape being bent,broken, befuddled, delighted and ultimately redeemed by love's inescapablespell. Aurora Borealis -- Saturday, September 8th -- 1:00 p.m. - 3:00 p.m. Ever since the premature death of his father, 25-year-old Minneapolisslacker Duncan Shorter (Joshua Jackson) is content with shuffling aimlesslythrough life, hanging out with his lifelong friends, and ditching one dead-endjob after another. Duncan takes a job as a handyman in a high-rise thatallows him to be near his gravely ill grandfather Ronald (Donald Sutherland),who's more than a handful for his grandmother Ruth (Louise Fletcher). Thatnewfound sense of purpose leads to a budding romance with Kate (JulietteLewis) that gives Duncan the motivation to take charge of his life. This funny and touching family drama from director James Burke, with asoundtrack featuring music by Minnesota natives Bob Dylan and Paul Westerberg,has something to say to audiences of all ages. Away From Her -- Saturday, September 8th -- 3:30 p.m. - 5:30 p.m. Away From Her is the lyrical screenplay adaptation of celebrated authorAlice Munro's short story, "The Bear Came Over The Mountain," a beautiful yetunconventional story of a couple coming to grips with the onset of memoryloss. Beloved by critics and audiences alike when it premiered at the 2006Toronto International Film Festival, the film marks the arrival of an excitingnew filmmaker in Canadian actress Sarah Polley, who makes her featurescreenwriting and directorial debut. Married for almost 50 years, Grant's (Gordon Pinsent) and Fiona's (JulieChristie) commitment to each other appears unwavering. Their daily life isfilled with tenderness and humor; yet this serenity is broken by Fiona'sincreasingly evident memory loss -- and her restrained references to a pastbetrayal. For a while, the couple is able to casually dismiss these unwelcomechanges. But when neither Fiona nor her husband can deny any longer that sheis being consumed by Alzheimer's disease, the couple is forced to wrenchinglyredefine the limits of their love and loyalty -- and face the complex,inevitable transition from lovers to strangers. Away From Her also stars Olympia Dukakis, Kristen Thomson, with MichaelMurphy and Alberta Watson. The Film Farm and Foundry Films production inassociation with Capri Releasing, HanWay Films and Echo Lake Productions.Executive producer, Atom Egoyan, Doug Mankoff. Co-Producer, Victoria Hirst.Produced by Daniel Iron, Simone Urdl, Jennifer Weiss. About AARP The Magazine With more than 30 million readers nationwide, AARP The Magazine(http://www.aarpmagazine.org) is the world's largest-circulation magazine andthe definitive lifestyle publication for Americans 50+. Reaching more than22.5 million households, AARP The Magazine delivers comprehensive contentthrough in-depth celebrity interviews, health and fitness features, consumerinterest information and tips, book and movie reviews, and financial guidance.Published bimonthly in print and continually online, AARP The Magazine wasfounded in 1958 and is the flagship title of AARP Publications. About AARP AARP is a nonprofit, nonpartisan membership organization that helps people50+ have independence, choice and control in ways that are beneficial andaffordable to them and society as a whole. AARP does not endorse candidatesfor public office or make contributions to either political campaigns orcandidates. We produce AARP The Magazine, published bimonthly; AARP Bulletin,our monthly newspaper; AARP Segunda Juventud, our bimonthly magazine inSpanish and English; NRTA Live & Learn, our quarterly newsletter for 50+educators; and our website, http://www.AARP.org. AARP Foundation is anaffiliated charity that provides security, protection, and empowerment toolder persons in need with support from thousands of volunteers, donors, andsponsors. We have staffed offices in all 50 states, the District of Columbia,Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands.SOURCE AARP?Information contained on this page is provided by companies via press release distributed through PR Newswire, an independent third-party content provider. PR Newswire, WorldNow and this Station make no warranties or representations in connection therewith.SOURCE U.S. Fund for UNICEF Chloe Grace Moretz takes time to encourage others to give back this Halloween NEW YORK, Sept. 10, 2012 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Critically acclaimed actress Chloe Grace Moretz, of films such as Dark Shadows, Hugo, 500 Days of Summer and Let Me In is taking time this Halloween to lend her support for the 62nd annual Trick-or-Treat for UNICEF campaign. One of the longest-running youth engagement campaigns in America, Trick-or-Treat for UNICEF enables kids to make a positive impact on the world by helping other kids in a fun and important way. "Halloween is such a fun time of year. I love dressing up and taking part in festivities," said Moretz. "That's why I can't think of a better way to honor this annual tradition than by supporting UNICEF, an organization that has saved the lives of millions of children across the globe. Trick-or-Treat for UNICEF gives kids the freedom to choose how they'd like to express their support through a variety of activities."For the first time in campaign history, kids will have the chance to design their own collection boxes. Original designs may be submitted online at , and winning designs in three categories will become part of a limited edition collection for next year's campaign. The "Create-a-Character" contest will run from Sept. 1 through Oct. 26. In line with the contest, Moretz will be designing her own Trick-or-Treat for UNICEF collection box and will post her design online at in October.Chloe Grace Moretz joins a long list of celebrity supporters including Heidi Klum, Selena Gomez, Sarah Jessica Parker, Alyssa Milano, Meg Ryan, Katie Couric and other notables who have served as spokespersons for Trick-or-Treat for UNICEF. "We couldn't be more pleased to have Chloe's support for this year's campaign. Not only is she a talented young actress, she is representative of the spirit and ingenuity displayed by generations of Trick-or-Treat for UNICEF supporters," said President and CEO of the U.S. Fund for UNICEF Caryl Stern. "We have been fortunate to receive overwhelming support from some of the country's most talented entertainers. From our very first supporter, comedian Danny Kaye in 1955 to last year's Trick-or-Treat for UNICEF Ambassador Heidi Klum, we're proud to add Chloe to our esteemed roster."???? To date, more than $167 million has been raised in support of UNICEF's lifesaving programs worldwide. This fall a new cast of characters will be featured on individual collection boxes, transforming the iconic orange box in a way that allows children to express themselves while helping to raise funds for those in need around the world. A monster, black cat, princess, pumpkin, vampire and a witch are among the new selection of characters this year. To order Trick-or-Treat for UNICEF collection boxes and fundraising kits which include blank collection boxes, visit or call 1-800-FOR-KIDS through Oct. 26. Supporters can donate $10 to Trick-or-Treat for UNICEF on their smart phone by texting the word "TOT" to UNICEF (864233).About UNICEF The United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) works in 190 countries and territories to save and improve children's lives, providing health care and immunizations, clean water and sanitation, nutrition, education, emergency relief and more. The U.S. Fund for UNICEF supports UNICEF's work through fundraising, advocacy, and education in the United States. Together, we are working toward the day when zero children die from preventable causes and every child has a safe and healthy childhood. For more information, visit .©2012 PR Newswire. All Rights Reserved. ?Information contained on this page is provided by companies via press release distributed through PR Newswire, an independent third-party content provider. PR Newswire, WorldNow and this Station make no warranties or representations in connection therewith.SOURCE CotyNEW YORK, Aug. 14, 2012 /PRNewswire/ --?Celebrate your active lifestyle with the latest products from adidas. Introducing the adidas Personal Care for Men Collection, a range of sleekly packaged Deodorants, Body Washes, Antiperspirants and Body Sprays, available exclusively at Walmart. Are you a powerhouse on the football field? An avid marathon runner? No matter what sport delivers your adrenaline rush, adidas offers a unique lineup of men's grooming products to help you tackle each day, on and off the field, the basketball court or the track. Working with athletes to develop each of these advanced formulas, the experts at adidas have ensured that every personal care product in the collection delivers powerful, refreshing results with each use.To view the multimedia assets associated with this release, please click: (Photo: )The adidas Personal Care for Men Collection is guaranteed to keep up with the modern man's active lifestyle, and is available across four product segments:Body Wash ($3.47) An energizing experience like no other, the adidas Hair & Body 3 provides triple-action results: it cleanses, refreshes and conditions. Available in 3 scents.Deodorant ($3.47)Feel dry and confident no matter what. This long-lasting deodorant promises 24 hours of nonstop freshness. Available in 3 scents.Deodorant Body Spray ($3.47) Stay fresh and cool all day with this stimulating body spray. Available in 3 scents. Antiperspirant ($3.47) Discover your best defense against sweat. This innovative formula features a unique Dry Max System that provides 48 hour protection against perspiration. Available in 3 variants.About Coty Inc.Coty was created in Paris in 1904 by Francois Coty, who is credited with founding the modern fragrance industry. Today, Coty Inc. is the new emerging leader in beauty with annual net sales of $4.5 billion. Driven by an entrepreneurial spirit, passion, innovation and creativity, Coty Inc. has developed a portfolio of notable brands that compete in all key distribution channels across both prestige and mass markets, and in over 130 countries and territories. Coty Inc.'s top 10 brands include such globally recognized brands as adidas, Calvin Klein, Chloe, Davidoff, Marc Jacobs, OPI, philosophy, Playboy, Rimmel and Sally Hansen.For additional information about Coty Inc., please visit .©2012 PR Newswire. All Rights Reserved. ?Information contained on this page is provided by companies via press release distributed through PR Newswire, an independent third-party content provider. PR Newswire, WorldNow and this Station make no warranties or representations in connection therewith.SOURCE Aeropostale, Inc.Brand introduces new fashion layer to teen-favorite staplesNEW YORK, July 9, 2012 /PRNewswire/ --?Aeropostale, Inc. (NYSE: ARO), a mall-based specialty retailer of casual apparel for young women and men, today announced a partnership with film actress Chloe Grace Moretz, who will serve as Aeropostale's celebrity brand ambassador.? The campaign will begin with the 2012 back-to-school season and continue through the spring of 2013.? In this new role, the Dark Shadows star and young fashionista will work with Aeropostale to highlight the brand's exciting new looks, in addition to promoting the company's philanthropic endeavors."We are thrilled to announce Chloe Grace Moretz as our celebrity brand ambassador and welcome her to the Aeropostale family," said Scott Birnbaum, Senior Vice President of Marketing and Ecommerce at Aeropostale.? Mr. Birnbaum continued, "We're introducing exciting new fashion and Chloe is the perfect role model to showcase these great looks.? She has amazing style and has quickly become a fashion icon for today's teens."? The back-to-school collection will be available in all stores beginning July 16, 2012.? New fashion pieces will complement the great product and outstanding value for which Aeropostale is known. The line will include fashion tops, colored and patterned denim and statement pieces such as moto jackets and chunky sweaters.? The campaign, featuring Moretz, was shot by renowned photographers, Rocco Laspata and Charles Decaro. In-store displays, as well as extensive print, online and outdoor advertising will highlight Aeropostale's new partnership with the young actress and feature a variety of looks."I have always been a huge fan of Aeropostale," said Chloe Grace Moretz. "Their looks are fun and easy to wear, making it the perfect brand for my on-the-go lifestyle. Fashion is a huge part of my life, which is why I chose to partner with the brand.? I am so excited to join the Aeropostale team."Aeropostale customers can also shop for 'Chloe's Favorites', a curated collection featuring her personally styled looks and favorite must-have items for each season, available both in-store and online. 'Chloe's Favorites' will be the first of many opportunities for Chloe to communicate her personal style with fans after the collection debuts. For additional information, please visit , become a fan on Facebook at , or follow the brand on Twitter at @Aeropostale.About Aeropostale, Inc.AeropostaleR, Inc. is a primarily mall-based, specialty retailer of casual apparel and accessories, principally targeting 14 to 17 year-old young women and men through its AeropostaleR stores and 4 to 12 year-old kids through its P.S. from AeropostaleR stores. The Company provides customers with a focused selection of high quality fashion and fashion basics at compelling values in an innovative and exciting store environment. AeropostaleR maintains control over its proprietary brands by designing, sourcing, marketing and selling all of its own merchandise. AeropostaleR products can only be purchased in AeropostaleR stores and online at . P.S. from AeropostaleR products can be purchased in P.S. from AeropostaleR stores and online at and . The Company currently operates 916 AeropostaleR stores in 50 states and Puerto Rico, 73 Aeropostale stores in Canada and 90 P.S. from AeropostaleR stores in 21 states. In addition, pursuant to various licensing agreements, our licensees currently operate 21 AeropostaleR and P.S. from AeropostaleR stores in the Middle East, Asia and Europe.Media Contact: Christina Stejskal, DKC- Public Relations (212) 981-5135 or Company Contact: Alexandria DeVillers, Public Relations (646) 485-5415 or ©2012 PR Newswire. All Rights Reserved. ?VASSAR, MI (WEYI/NBC) - A soldier who lost limbs in Afghanistan is coping with his new life to be the best father he can be for his 1-year-old daughter.Army Staff Sgt. Travis Mills is home in Vassar, MI for a month on convalescent leave from Walter Reed Army Medical Center, where he's been undergoing therapy after he lost all of his limbs in Afghanistan in April. His progress in nearly six months astounds his doctors. He can use his prosthetic right hand to scratch his nose and fix his t-shirt. Once a football, baseball and basketball player for the Vassar Vulcans, the 25-year-old now relies on his wife, Kelsey, to help him put on his legs and stand up every day. "It's not fun," Mills admits. "It's definitely not fun, but it's not the end of the world." It's the beginning of this new normal - a challenge Mills said he relishes because he needs to be the best dad for his one-year-old daughter Chloe. "I said look, she's going to learn how to play softball, I'm going to have to learn how to throw and catch. And if she wants to play volleyball, I'm going to learn how to spike, if she wants to do ballet, I'm going to learn how to do a pirouette," Mills said. Perhaps it's his bright outlook on life the community finds so admirable, though Mills himself insists, he's no big hero. "It's important that people know that I was just doing my job, you know? I don't feel like I did anything more special than those guys over there," Mills said. But Thursday night was Travis Mills' night, as hundreds of people lined the streets for Vassar High School's homecoming parade. "That was one of his big goals," said Craig Buck, Mills' father-in-law. "To be able to come home, see all the local people, thank them for the support they've given him, to be able to stand and walk and greet everyone." For a moment, the bashful hero was in the spotlight. He tipped his hat to the cheering crowd, a small gesture to express his gratitude. "I want to help pay it forward and let them know I really do appreciate it," Mills said.Copyright 2012 WEYI via NBC. All rights reserved. ?Information contained on this page is provided by companies via press release distributed through PR Newswire, an independent third-party content provider. PR Newswire, WorldNow and this Station make no warranties or representations in connection therewith.SOURCE The Jones Group Inc.NEW YORK, Sept. 4, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- The Jones Group Inc. (NYSE: JNY) ("Jones" or the "Company") today announced that it has entered into an exclusive, world-wide license agreement with AltairR, a division of? MarchonR Eyewear, Inc. ("Marchon") for the creation, production, marketing and global distribution of ophthalmic eyewear and sunglasses under the Anne Klein brand.? Altair is known as a highly regarded manufacturer and marketer of ophthalmic eyewear and sunwear.? The Anne Klein ophthalmic eyewear and sunglass collections are currently produced and marketed under a world-wide license agreement with Luxottica Group S.p.A., which will expire on December 31, 2012. ?Under the new agreement, the Anne Klein ophthalmic eyewear and sunglass collections will be marketed and sold globally in upscale optical chains and specialty retailers and by individual eye care professionals, beginning in Spring 2013.? ??Richard Dickson, The Jones Group President and Chief Executive Officer of Branded Businesses, stated:? "We are pleased to enter into this agreement with Altair, a best-in-class partner, for Anne Klein eyewear, as we continue to develop Anne Klein as a global fashion iconic brand.? We believe this collaboration with Altair and Marchon will help Anne Klein further extend its powerful heritage and brand message in the global optical and accessories arena." Steve Wright, Altair President, stated:? "The Anne Klein eyewear license is an exciting and proud addition to the Altair portfolio.? We recognize the Anne Klein brand's rich heritage in providing women with evolving modern style and look forward to translating those high-quality, timeless designs into compelling eyewear perfectly suited for the Anne Klein woman." About The Jones Group Inc.The Jones Group Inc. () is a leading global designer, marketer and wholesaler of over 35 brands with product expertise in apparel, footwear, jeanswear, jewelry and handbags.? The Jones Group has a reputation for innovation, excellence in product quality and value, operational execution and talent.? The Company also markets directly to consumers through branded specialty retail and outlet stores and through its e-commerce sites.The Company's internationally recognized brands and licensing agreements (L) include: Nine West, Jones New York, Anne Klein, Kurt Geiger, Rachel Roy (L), Robert Rodriguez, Robbi & Nikki, Stuart Weitzman, Brian Atwood (L), Boutique 9, Easy Spirit, Carvela, Gloria Vanderbilt, l.e.i., Bandolino, Enzo Angiolini, Nine & Co., GLO, Joan & David, Miss KG, Jones Wear, Kasper, Energie, Evan-Picone, Le Suit, Mootsies Tootsies, Grane, Erika, Napier, Jessica Simpson (L), Sam & Libby, Givenchy (L), Judith Jack, Albert Nipon, Pappagallo, Rafe(L) and C&T Costello Tagliapietra (L).? About AltairAltairR supports independent eyecare professionals with advanced eyewear technologies and distinctive brands including bebeR, Tommy BahamaR, Joseph AbboudR, JOE Joseph AbboudR, RevlonR, and Sigrid Olsen. Altair is sold through more than 10,000 independent optical retailers. Altair is a division of MarchonR Eyewear, one of the world's largest manufacturers and distributors of quality eyewear and sunwear, and a subsidiary of VSP GlobalR, a diverse, group of leading companies within the world-wide optical industry. The company markets its products under prestigious brand names including Calvin Klein Collection, ck Calvin Klein, Calvin Klein Jeans, Chloe, Diane von Furstenberg, Dragon, Emilio Pucci, Fendi, Jil Sander, Karl Lagerfeld, Lacoste, Michael Kors, Nautica, Nike, Nine West, Salvatore Ferragamo, Sean John and Valentino. ??Headquartered in New York, with regional offices in Amsterdam, Hong Kong, Tokyo and Venice, Marchon distributes its products through numerous local sales offices serving over 80,000 accounts in more than 100 countries.More at: altaireyewear.com©2012 PR Newswire. All Rights Reserved. ?Information contained on this page is provided by companies via press release distributed through PR Newswire, an independent third-party content provider. PR Newswire, WorldNow and this Station make no warranties or representations in connection therewith.SOURCE Boeing- European training capability expanded with second 787 full-flight simulatorFARNBOROUGH, United Kingdom, July 11, 2012 /PRNewswire/ --?Boeing (NYSE: BA) and the Europe-based TUI Travel PLC have signed a five-year agreement to provide 787 Dreamliner flight, maintenance and cabin safety training. Boeing also announced today at the Farnborough International Airshow it will place a second 787 full-flight simulator at its European training headquarters at London Gatwick to support the training requirements of the TUI Group and European 787 customers. In addition, Boeing will provide training for other airplane types operated by Thomson Airways."We pride ourselves on going beyond the regulatory training to adapt to the individual needs of our pilots," said Captain Stuart Gruber, Head of Flight Operations - Technical and Training for TUI Travel. "With Boeing, we have the perfect partner, right on our doorstep in Europe, to deliver a training program that is as innovative as the 787 aircraft itself."TUI Travel PLC consists of six airlines, of which Arkefly in The Netherlands, Belgium-based Jetairfly, Thomson Airways of the United Kingdom and Sweden-based TUIfly Nordic are scheduled to receive the Boeing 787. Thomson Airways pilots will also train on the Boeing Next-Generation 737, 757 and 767 as well as A320 at the Boeing Flight Services London Gatwick campus."This agreement truly enhances the support Boeing provides to airlines at our regional training campus in the U.K.," said Sherry Carbary, vice president, Boeing Flight Services. "Our European customers now have an outstanding base to centralize their 787 training requirements at one location. It's just one way we are giving airlines a competitive edge by creating and implementing? tailored training solutions so they can focus on what really matters, keeping pilots and planes flying revenue flights."Boeing operates 20 training campuses around the world, supporting more than 400 customers, including eight 787 training suites at five locations around the world.About the Boeing Edge: Boeing offers a comprehensive portfolio of commercial aviation services, collectively known as the Boeing Edge, bringing value and advantages to customers and the industry. Boeing Flight Services provides integrated offerings? to drive optimized performance, efficiency and safety through advanced flight and maintenance training as well as improved air traffic management and 24/7 flight operations support. Flight Services provides digital tools and data to enhance overall operations, airport infrastructure, fuel efficiency, flight planning, navigation and scheduling.Contact: Jim Condelles Communications Manager Boeing Flight Services +1-206-769-6310 Chloe Joint PR Manager Thomson and First Choice +44 7534 728 365 More information: Photo and caption are available here: ©2012 PR Newswire. All Rights Reserved. ?Information contained on this page is provided by companies via press release distributed through PR Newswire, an independent third-party content provider. PR Newswire, WorldNow and this Station make no warranties or representations in connection therewith.SOURCE Kimpton Hotels & RestaurantsTop Chefs Share Scorching Secrets, Offer Recipes to Get Your Grill On, Lead Trail Blazing Demonstrations and More with Latest Installment of Behind the Apron Series: FireSAN FRANCISCO, July 9, 2012 /PRNewswire/ --?Throughout July and August, Kimpton Hotels & Restaurants will embark upon the newest installment of its national series ? Behind the Apron...Dishing with Kimpton Chefs. ?From coast-to-coast, Kimpton chefs are tackling the hot topic of fire and sharing sizzling summertime , hosting demonstrations and at their restaurants and swapping stories through engaging videos ? all found at .? Food lovers can fuel their own fires by entering Kimpton's national or participating in the following Kimpton events throughout the summer: (Photo: )From July 1 ? August 11, all U.S. residents who visits the Kimpton website () can to win the "Cooking Down the House" sweepstakes, which includes a four-course dinner for the winner and seven friends at their home, prepared by a Kimpton chef.? This exclusive event features a custom-designed menu and thoughtfully selected wine pairings.Connect with the chefs of Kimpton's Behind the Apron campaign anytime at , a new culinary hub with recipes, video chats, events and more.? Additionally, visit Kimpton's to check out "Journeys through Flavor," a new blog series that profiles a different chef experience or seasonal dish. To learn more about Kimpton Hotels & Restaurants, visit and .CONTACT: Chloe Crane, , +1-212-982-8300©2012 PR Newswire. All Rights Reserved. ?Information contained on this page is provided by companies via press release distributed through PR Newswire, an independent third-party content provider. PR Newswire, WorldNow and this Station make no warranties or representations in connection therewith.SOURCE CapablueLONDON, August 13, 2012 /PRNewswire/ --Capablue, specialists in connected TV solutions, has joined forces with leading audio watermarking technology provider Intrasonics to create intelligent second screen solutions that meet consumer demand for more interactive experiences and deliver additional revenues to broadcasters.By integrating Intrasonics' technology into its Connected platform, Capablue will enable broadcasters and content owners to drive audiences back to their linear programming by creating a unified viewing experience across all devices. Consumers will be able to engage directly with a programme on the TV using an interactive smartphone or tablet app with automatic content recognition and time sync. Applications include play along game shows, audience participation, loyalty and social TV viewing, interactive advertising and audience measurement."We all know people use companion devices to surf the internet or social network whilst they watch TV so broadcasters are basically competing with these devices for attention," said Capablue CEO Tom Cape. ?"What the market needs is solutions that encourage viewers to engage with what's on the main TV rather than the unrelated content on their mobile or tablet. Intrasonics is delivering some of the most innovative solutions we've seen to date so it's great to be working with them to create solutions that can actually make that happen."Connected will use Intrasonics' patented technology to respond to hidden codes in the audio track of a broadcast to trigger actions on a consumer's companion device and instantly provide them with the opportunity to engage. Viewers will be able to take advantage of these interactive experiences regardless of whether they are watching a programme during the linear schedule or on catch up. Audio watermarking is one of the few reliable ways to overcome variable broadcast delays to ensure that a second screen app synchronises precisely with broadcast content.Capbalue and Intrasonics will demonstrate the next generation of second screen interaction with an exclusive demo at IBC (Stand 4.A61c).Dr Michael Woodley, Intrasonics' Business Development Manager said, "We are delighted to be partnering with Capablue, a dynamic and creative innovator with a wealth of experience in connected TV apps and a clear vision which we share for the new landscape of second screen apps. Together we will be presenting a new demo app to showcase just some of the possibilities for second screen interactivity."Capablue's unique cloud-based platform Connected has been shortlisted for a CSI Product of the year award in the 'best content on demand solution' category.About CapablueCapablue provides solutions for broadcasters, across the entire Connected TV ecosystem, from Video on Demand (VoD) through connected and companion TV apps to advertising and T-commerce. We unify the main TV with the multitude of new TV-enabled devices, so broadcasters can connect with consumers and provide a seamless experience across all screens.Our unique cloud-based platform, Connected, enables the discovery and monetisation of content on multiple internet-connected devices, helping broadcasters to enhance the value of their content and exploit the fact that TV is now connected to the internet.Customers on the Connected platform include M&S TV, Curzon on Demand, Start Trek on Virgin Tivo, Playboy TV and DigiTop's Karaoke Superstar.About IntrasonicsBased in Cambridge, UK, Intrasonics specializes in audio watermarking technologies to enable smartphones and tablets to listen for and to respond to hidden codes embedded in broadcast TV, radio and streamed media.Intrasonics provides its extensively patented technology to brands, agencies, app developers, broadcasters and TV production companies in the form of a Software Development Kit. This allows customers to encode their own content with audio watermark codes and to publish Intrasonics-enabled apps that respond to those watermarks with complete in-house creative freedom and total control over the end user experience.For more see For further information or images please contact: Chloe Sisson Platform PR +44-20-7486-4900©2012 PR Newswire. All Rights Reserved. ?Information contained on this page is provided by companies via press release distributed through PR Newswire, an independent third-party content provider. PR Newswire, WorldNow and this Station make no warranties or representations in connection therewith.SOURCE CapablueLONDON, September 27, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Building on a very successful 2012, Capablue has today announced the completion of a Series A round of funding. The investment, which is set to strengthen the Connected TV specialist's business development and international expansion, comes off the back of a number of major contract wins which include UKTV, Chello Zone and Curzon Cinemas.One of the most significant participants in this first round of funding is advertising entrepreneur Charlie Makin who has joined Capablue as a Director. Makin, who is a veteran of the advertising and marketing industries will play a hands on role in propelling Capablue to the next level and building its profile among brand owners and advertising agencies."The market for the consumption of content and services has changed with the emergence of internet connected devices," said Makin. "People now interact with content and brands over a number of devices and this market is continuing to grow. New technologies like Capablue's are enabling both brands and agencies, regardless of size, to evolve with this changing TV market and reach new audiences worldwide. This is an untapped market for these companies and I'm looking forward to working with Capablue to change that.""Charlie is a really important addition to the Capablue board and will help us with corporate development in those areas with huge growth potential," said Capablue CEO Tom Cape. "His involvement in the company combined with this first round of investment highlights the market's confidence in Capablue and will enable us to help content owners, brands and agencies exploit the value of their content by creating new and interesting commercial solutions for the connected ecosystem." ?The lead advisory role in the financing was performed by?private investor network Envestors which?helped raise the equity funding from its network of private investors, family offices and venture capital sources. Capablue will use the investment to scale the company, improve business development in vertical sectors, and strengthen its cloud based technology platform.Bob Taylor, Founder Director of Envestors said, "Capablue is an exciting business at the forefront of the evolution of media and broadcast industries. I'm not surprised we attracted a lot of investor interest in this business given the rapid change taking place in this sector as well as the strength of the management team."Capablue has also announced that it will move to bigger and better offices in November 2012.About CapablueCapablue provides solutions for broadcasters and brands, across the entire Connected TV ecosystem, from Video on Demand (VoD) through Connected TV and second-screen apps to advertising and T-commerce. We unify the main TV with the multitude of new TV-enabled devices, so brands can connect with consumers and provide a seamless experience across all screens.Our unique cloud-based platform, Connected, enables the discovery and monetisation of content on multiple internet-connected devices, helping brands exploit the fact that TV is now connected to the internet to promote and monetise content and products.Customers on the Connected platform include M&S TV, Curzon on Demand, Start Trek on Virgin Tivo, Playboy TV and DigiTop's Karaoke Superstar.For further information or images please contact: Chloe Pope Platform PR +44(0)20-7486-4900©2012 PR Newswire. All Rights Reserved. ?(NBC) -If you're up for a laugh, there are a couple of new movies to tickle your funny bone in theaters this week.In "She's Out Of My League" actor Jay Baruchel finds his cartoon self overmatched in "How To Train Your Dragon."Baruchel plays Hiccup, a teenage viking out to prove his worth as a dragon slayer on his small island.But his encounter with an injured dragon turns his world upside down.This one's from the studio that brought you Shrek and Kung Fu Panda."How To Train Your Dragon" is rated PG.Four buddies party-hardy in a ski resort hot tub only to wake up in 1986 in "Hot Tub Time Machine."After coming to terms with their time-travel predicament, John Cusack and friends all decide to try to alter that past to try to prevent the dismal future which led them to the guys-only hot tub party in the first place."Hot Tub Time Machine" is rated R.Opening in limited release this week is the infidelity drama "Chloe."Amanda Seyfried is a call girl hired by Julianne Moore to catch her husband in the act.That husband is played by Liam Neeson, who suffered an off-screen loss while filming this role, the death of his wife Natashsha Richardson.Another limited release is the coming-of-middle-age dramedy "Greenberg."Ben Stiller is in full misfit mode as a New Yorker in la, an out-of-work musician house-sitting for his successful brother, all while coming to grips with being single in his 40s.Copyright 2010 NBC. All rights reserved.?Charlotte, NC -From the Big South Conference:CHARLOTTE, NC – Coastal Carolina midfielder Anna Tupy has been selected as the Big South Conference Choice Hotels Women's Soccer Attacking Player of the Week, while Radford goalkeeper Che' Brown has received Defensive Player of the Week honors for games played Oct. 18-24.Tupy had one goal, two assists, four points and one game-winner in the Chanticleers' two wins last week. In the first game of the week vs. UNC Asheville, Tupy assisted on the game-winning goal in the 4-1 victory at home. Later in the week against League-leading Charleston Southern, the senior fired a low lying cross to teammate Kate Wilkinson, for a game-tying goal. Tupy then netted the game-winner with three minutes remaining in the contest, allowing the Chanticleers to hand the Buccaneers a 2-1 defeat and CSU's first Conference loss this season.Brown went 2-0 last week, with two shutouts and nine saves made in 180 minutes of play. The freshman made three saves in the 5-0 win vs. Liberty and six saves against a streaking High Point, helping the Highlanders to a 1-0 victory.Brown made two crucial saves against the Panthers, including an outstretched punch out on a shot headed toward the cross bar. Five minutes later, Brown made a save on a shot five-yards out by the near post. The shutouts were her seventh and eighth of the season.Also nominated for women's soccer Attacking Player of the Week for Week 10: Michelle Dennis (Charleston Southern), Stephanie Benshoof (Gardner-Webb), Sara Rager (High Point), Kathryn Johnston (Radford), Amanda Berrios (VMI) and Tiana Tallant (Winthrop).Nominated for Defensive Player of the Week for Week 10: Chloe Urig (Charleston Southern), Coastal Carolina Backline (Coastal Carolina) Chelsea Hearne (Gardner-Webb), Sarah Strand (VMI) and Kelsy Weavil (Winthrop).?Information contained on this page is provided by companies via press release distributed through PR Newswire, an independent third-party content provider. PR Newswire, WorldNow and this Station make no warranties or representations in connection therewith.SOURCE The American Lamb BoardLocal lamb showcases patriotism and pride this Olympic seasonDENVER, Aug. 7, 2012 /PRNewswire/ --?Over in London, America's star-spangled top athletes are battling to bring home the gold and glory from the Olympic games. ?Country-proud cooks on this side of the Atlantic can seize the spirit and showcase their love for Team USA by grilling up a patriotic twist on an iconic summertime classic: an American lamb burger.Freshly ground American lamb is available all year long, but as grilling season comes to an end, making lamb burgers is an easy, elegant way to combat barbecue boredom and add pep to late summer or Labor Day weekend meals, without relying on the spice rack.The red, white and ewe recipe for this all-American lamb burger highlights flavorful U.S.-raised meat, enhanced by fresh mint and cucumber yogurt sauce and juicy tomatoes.All-American Lamb Burger 4 servings Preparation time:? 10 minutes Cook time:? 10 minutes1 1/4 pounds ground American Lamb 1 small cucumber 1/2 cup plain Greek yogurt 2 tablespoons chopped fresh mint 1/2 garlic clove, minced 1 tablespoon lemon juice Salt and pepper, to taste Sugar, pinch 1 shallot, finely chopped Olive oil, as needed 4 buns 4 tomato slicesGrate cucumber on the large-hole side of a box grater; place in a medium bowl.? Add yogurt, mint, garlic, lemon juice, salt, pepper and sugar; set aside.In a separate bowl, mix lamb, shallot, salt and pepper.? Divide into 4 patties.? In a skillet, grill pan or on a hot grill, cook patties in oil until browned on both sides and pink in the middle, about 8 minutes. Place burger on a toasted bun; top with tomato and yogurt sauce.For more American lamb recipes, cooking time and temperature charts and how-to videos, visit . ?Lamb lovers can follow the American Lamb Board on Facebook or Twitter @FANofLAMB to keep up-to-date on news and events. About the American Lamb BoardThe American Lamb Board is an industry-funded research and promotions commodity board that represents all sectors of the American Lamb industry including producers, feeders, seed stock producers and processors. The Board, appointed by the Secretary of Agriculture, is focused on increasing demand by promoting the freshness, flavor, nutritional benefits, and culinary versatility of American Lamb. The work of the American Lamb Board is overseen by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the board's programs are supported and implemented by the staff in Denver, Colorado.For more information about the American Lamb Board, please contact Chloe Mata Crane () or Laura Shunk () at Baltz & Company--212-982-8300 ©2012 PR Newswire. All Rights Reserved. ? CHICAGO, April 13 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Chicago Foundation forWomen's "What Will It Take?" a year-long anti-violence initiative made it tothe front page of the Chicago Sun-Times Friday. The story came under theheadline, "Nothing to laugh about ... " It was about one of the men whoappears in our public service announcements [PSA] to end abuse against womenand girls -- comedian Jay Parks, whose stage name is Jay Deep. The Foundation thinks the story about Parks clearly illustrates the hugegulf between men and women and what we understand to be offensive. Indeed, itshows that too often even well-meaning men may not understand that abuse isnot just physical or sexual. It is also emotional and verbal. In fact, sexismis so rooted in the fabric of society that sometimes the abuse goes unnoticedand is accepted as the norm by both men and women. Park's line in our 30-second PSA is, "I need to change the way I talk." Weagree. Apparently, in Park's comedy act he uses the words, "bitches" and "hos" todescribe as he told us, "only certain women." We did not know this until afterhe and his 5-year-old daughter, Chloe, filmed our PSAs. Park told theFoundation he believes in this initiative and what we are trying toaccomplish-finding out what it will take to end the cradle-to-grave epidemicof violence against women and girls. He believes in it because he wants a safeworld for his daughter. The Foundation believes that language is important and can be verydestructive. We called Parks after the reporter who had seen Parks' act calledthe Foundation to ask whether we supported his use of this type of language.Our answer was -- we do not. We think those words are offensive and degradingto women. Had we known they were part of his act, we would not have said yes,when the production company we were working with suggested Parks for this PSA.We apologize. And we will not use his image in any further print ads. Still, this all teaches us why it is so important that the "What Will ItTake?" campaign has a Men's Initiative. Too many men, such as Parks who arewell-meaning, do not see that language or holding women up in effigy forso-called humor -- even allowing people to talk in a derogatory and sexistfashion -- is really part of the problem. "What Will It Take?" "I have to change the way I talk" is a great start.But if you have another answer, visit whatwillittake.org and tell us what youthink. CONTACT: Susy Schultz (630) 747-6144SOURCE Chicago Foundation for Women?(NBC) -The hero of "Kick-Ass" is a 17-year-old high school kid named Dave Lizewski, played by Aaron Johnson, who decides to put on a green jumpsuit and become a phantom crime-fighter.Has he taken leave of his senses?Not exactly.Dave, who looks like Harry Potter crossed with the young Steven Spielberg, knows he has no special abilities or physical flair.All he's got going for him, really, is the desire to be a superhero.It's as if he thought that the sheer power of suggestion could fool the bad guys, and himself along with them.Named for its hero, "Kick-Ass" is an enjoyably supercharged and ultraviolent teen comic-book fantasy that might be described, in spirit, at least, as reality-based.Dave quickly learns that fighting evil is no picnic.The movie never makes it too easy for him, but it doesn't mock him, either.Adapting the Mark Millar comic book, director Matthew Vaughn stages the film as a vibrant pop patchwork of kamikaze comic-book wish fullfilment.Playing a mobster's son who becomes a superhero himself, the sports-car-driving Red Mist, Christopher Mintz-Plasse proves great at playing the comedy of aggression off against his spindly, mouth-breathing boyishness.Just when it looks as if Dave's awkward valor is doing to get him killed, along comes an even unlikelier masked do-gooder: Hit Girl, a pint-size, purple-haired martial-arts demon played by Chloe Grace Moretz.The joke is that when she turns villains into cannon fodder, it's really no more preposterous than, say, Bruce Willis doing the same thing.Yet is it a problem that "Kick-Ass" is by far the most graphically violent film ever to feature kids as heroes?Parents should consider themselves warned, though personally, I just wish the movie had ended up a bit less of an over-the-top action ride.It didn't need this much slam-bang when it had us at real-life superheroics.Copyright 2010 NBC. All rights reserved.?Information contained on this page is provided by companies via press release distributed through PR Newswire, an independent third-party content provider. PR Newswire, WorldNow and this Station make no warranties or representations in connection therewith.SOURCE Coty Inc.Partnership Promises Joint Benefits to Coty and LG H&H in Both Companies' Increasing Ambitions to Further Make Their Strategic Mark on Korean Cosmetics MarketNEW YORK, July 25, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Coty Inc., the new emerging leader in beauty, along with Korea's leading cosmetic company, LG Household & Health Care ("LG H&H") are pleased to announce the creation of Coty Korea, a joint venture established to expand the presence of both companies in the Korean cosmetics market. The partnership marks an important move by Coty to further increase its presence in Asia and strategically build its cosmetics and skin care business worldwide. While for LG H&H, the partnership demonstrates further enhancement in LG H&H's leadership in Korean consumer market, which was built on nonstop organic growth and a continuous stream of acquisitions and new ventures. Coty Korea will be led by a Coty executive as CEO of the new venture."Korea is a key emerging market for the beauty industry, and our respective organizations have worked together extensively in our plan for success there," said Michele Scannavini, President, Coty Prestige. "On top of growing Coty's presence in Asia, this partnership represents an important step toward our ambitious goal of expanding our cosmetic business across the globe. Our 'Faster. Further. Freer.' culture, combined with LG H&H's dynamic leadership in the marketplace, will allow us to fulfill the innovative vision we've set forth for the company." "We are very excited to be the strategic partner for Coty Inc., and be a part of Coty's first steps in expanding its cosmetics product portfolio into this growing market. This partnership will also further increase LG H&H's leading presence in Korea," said Suk Cha, CEO of LG H&H. "We look forward to a long and fruitful relationship with Coty, which is also a major global player in beauty. It is a company whose culture and goals are complementary to our own and with whom we can potentially discuss other common projects abroad."This fall, Coty Korea will kick off its efforts by introducing iconic beauty brand philosophy into the Korean marketplace. Best known for its lines of inspirational beauty products, the philosophy brand will play a key role in the expansion of Coty's portfolio of products, particularly its skin-care structure throughout Asia. The importance of skin care products cannot be overestimated in the Asian marketplace?-- particularly in Korea, China and Japan, where skin care is valued over color cosmetics by women who are looking for flawless skin.i Beyond the launch of philosophy, Coty Korea will continue to look for opportunities to further expand and enhance its presence in the market.For complete information on philosophy and all of Coty's brands, please visit . About Coty Inc.Coty was created in Paris in 1904 by Francois Coty, who is credited with founding the modern fragrance industry.Today, Coty Inc. is the new emerging leader in beauty with annual net sales of $4.5 billion. Driven by an entrepreneurial spirit, passion, innovation and creativity, Coty Inc. has developed an unrivaled portfolio of notable brands and delivers its innovative products to consumers in over 130 countries and territories worldwide.The Coty Prestige brand portfolio is distributed in prestige and ultra-prestige stores and includes Balenciaga, Bottega Veneta, Calvin Klein, Cerruti, Chloe, Chopard, Davidoff, Jennifer Lopez, Jil Sander, JOOP!, Karl Lagerfeld, Kenneth Cole, Gwen Stefani, Lancaster, Marc Jacobs, Nikos, philosophy, Roberto Cavalli, Sarah Jessica Parker, Truth or Dare by Madonna, Vera Wang, Vivienne Westwood and Wolfgang Joop.The Coty Beauty brand portfolio is more widely distributed and includes adidas, ASTOR, Beyonce Knowles, Celine Dion, David and Victoria Beckham, Elite Models, Esprit, Exclamation, Faith Hill, GUESS?, Halle Berry, Heidi Klum, Jovan, Kate Moss, Kylie Minogue, Lady Gaga, Manhattan, Manhattan Clearface, Miss Sporty, Nautica, N.Y.C. New York Color, Nicole by OPI, OPI, Pierre Cardin1, Playboy, Rimmel, Sally Hansen, Stetson, Tim McGraw, TJoy and Tonino Lamborghini.Coty and Puig S.L. have a strategic partnership for the distribution of the perfume lines of Antonio Banderas, Carolina Herrera, Nina Ricci, Paco Rabanne, Prada, Shakira and Valentino in the United States and Canada.For additional information about Coty Inc., please visit?.1. Not available in North AmericaAbout LGLG is a global company with annual net sales of $124 billion. The company has a workforce of over 210,000 people around the world and over 70% of total annual sales are generated from overseas operations.For additional information about LG, please visit . About LG H&HLG Household & Health Care, Ltd., founded in 1947, is a subsidiary of LG. The Company is the biggest FMCG company in Korea. For additional information about LG H&H, please visit?.i ©2012 PR Newswire. All Rights Reserved. ?Information contained on this page is provided by companies via press release distributed through PR Newswire, an independent third-party content provider. PR Newswire, WorldNow and this Station make no warranties or representations in connection therewith.SOURCE Coty Inc.Jean Mortier to Lead Beauty Company's Prestige Market BusinessNEW YORK, Sept. 19, 2012 /PRNewswire/ --?, the new emerging leader in beauty, announced the appointment of Jean Mortier as president of the company's Prestige business, effective immediately. Mortier will manage all products within Coty's worldwide selective distribution portfolio.(Photo:? )Mortier has served as senior vice president, Commercial for Coty since 2005. He succeeds Michele Scannavini, who was named chief executive officer of Coty in July after serving as president of Coty Prestige for 10 years. In his new capacity, Mortier will lead the continued development and growth of the Coty Prestige portfolio as well as seek new business ventures and collaborations. Based in Paris, he will also serve on Coty's executive committee."Jean's strong retailer partnerships, his focus on growth and his understanding of the dynamics of consolidated and emerging markets will be key assets in moving Coty toward the next stage of our success," said Scannavini. "He has established fantastic and constructive relationships throughout the entire organization and is a role model of our 'Faster. Further. Freer.' culture."Prior to Coty, Mortier joined Unilever in 1984 and held positions in finance, internal audit, human resources, sales and trade marketing; in 1996, he joined Calvin Klein Cosmetics as senior vice president and chief financial officer. When Coty Inc. purchased Unilever Cosmetics International in July 2005, Mortier was senior vice president there."I'm honored that Coty's leadership has chosen me to take the reins from Michele after his successful leadership of our Prestige business," said Mortier. "I am eager to get started and contribute to this new era at Coty."?? At Unilever Cosmetics, Mortier was responsible for managing all affiliate markets outside North America, distributor markets and global travel retail. Under the Unilever Cosmetics International umbrella, he built a diversified portfolio of designer brands including Calvin Klein Cosmetics, Vera Wang and European designer fragrance brands Cerruti, Chloe and Lagerfeld. Mortier holds a degree in business administration from the prestigious Paris-based ESSEC. Born in Paris, Mortier considers himself a global citizen, having worked in various countries in Europe, North and South Americas, and Japan.About Coty Inc. Coty is the new emerging leader in beauty with net revenues of $4.5 billion for the calendar year 2011. Founded in Paris in 1904, Coty is a pure play beauty company with a portfolio of well-known fragrances, color cosmetics and skin & body care products sold in over 130 countries and territories. Coty's product offerings include such global brands as adidas, Calvin Klein, Chloe, Davidoff, Marc Jacobs, OPI, philosophy, Playboy, Rimmel and Sally Hansen. For additional information about Coty Inc., please visit ©2012 PR Newswire. All Rights Reserved. ?Information contained on this page is provided by companies via press release distributed through PR Newswire, an independent third-party content provider. PR Newswire, WorldNow and this Station make no warranties or representations in connection therewith.SOURCE DFS GroupT Galleria Opens at Hong Kong's Hysan PlaceHONG KONG, Aug. 10, 2012 /PRNewswire/ --?DFS Group (DFS), the world's leading luxury travel retailer, today opened its third downtown Hong Kong Galleria at Hysan Place in Causeway Bay. The new destination is the Group's first on Hong Kong Island.Since 1960, when DFS opened its first store at Hong Kong International Airport, the company has defined the essence of a unique luxury shopping experience dedicated to travelers, successfully operating two large downtown stores in Hong Kong on Mody Road, since 1988, and Canton Road, since 1996. Fifty-two years later, DFS now continues in that tradition, setting?new standards in luxury retail?with this opening on Hong Kong Island.Located in the heart of Causeway Bay - one of Asia's most traveled shopping destinations - the new store will attract a distinctive mix of visitors and travelers from around the world. The Traveler's Galleria - or simply?T Galleria?-?is?an homage to?DFS's?thorough understanding of global travelers' needs and its unique ability to offer them the finest luxury brands, impeccable service and a seamless shopping experience.? Philippe Schaus, Chief Executive Officer of DFS Group, said, "This city is our home, and we have truly come full circle now with the opening of T Galleria on Hong Kong island, only months after also winning back all three core concessions at Hong Kong International Airport."Set to become the curator of the global traveler's luxury lifestyle, T Galleria fulfills the needs of its international clientele through its combination of seamless, award-winning customer service and a holistic shopping experience. Spread over two levels, the first?focuses?on Prestige Beauty, offering a fresh array of 50 of the world's most renowned beauty brands through a complete and elegant selection of cosmetics, skincare and fragrances. Personalized beauty consultations and services?are?also?available?from?highly trained professionals. The second level features?a luxurious boutique environment,?housing?a tailored selection from 15 of the world's most sought-after Watch?& Jewelry brands.?"Now with T Galleria at Hysan Place, we?have taken?luxury to the next?level,?creating a fresh and imaginative new destination where travel meets shopping," said Benjamin Vuchot, DFS Group Managing Director for Asia North.With the opening of T Galleria, DFS - along with Hysan Place- becomes one of the first retailers in Hong Kong to be pre-certified under the international "Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design" (LEED) standard.?Throughout all its interior design,?it?features?high?energy efficiency?matched equally by?dazzling aesthetics.To celebrate the opening of T Galleria in Causeway Bay and further?strengthen?its?commitment to?the?Hong Kong community,?DFS is proud as well to announce?its?partnership with Foodlink Foundation, the leading charity in Hong Kong fighting hunger. From August 17 to 23, DFS will donate five?percent?of T Galleria's?sales to Foodlink in support of its operations throughout Hong Kong.Alongside Hysan Place, T Galleria will also extend?its?opening hours?for its first two weeks, making luxury shopping available until midnight from August 10 to 25.Location of T Galleria : Hysan Place 500 Hennessy Road Causeway Bay, Hong KongOpening Hours:?????????????? Sunday to Thursday 10 am to 10 pm. Friday, Saturday and the eve of Public Holidays 10 am to 11pm.About DFS GroupDFS Group, headquartered in Hong Kong, is the world's largest luxury travel retailer, with more than 200 stores in 15 countries, mostly in cosmopolitan and resort locations throughout Asia-Pacific, North America and the Middle East. DFS Group North America headquarters is based in Los Angeles. DFS Gallerias offer a luxurious shopping experience and incomparable services to discerning clients. The company is majority owned by LVMH Moet Hennessy - Louis Vuitton, with the balance of shares held by companies associated with DFS Group co-founder, Robert Miller.About Foodlink FoundationFoodlink Foundation is Hong Kong's leading hunger relief charity, fighting against hunger and poverty by reducing food wastage. Founded in 2001 and registered in 2010, the non-profit organization has built partnerships with the city's hotels and F&B outlets. Foodlink has generated a sustainable food-recycling system by collecting surplus food and delivering it to shelters and those in need. Their work aims to foster social responsibility in the food and beverage industry.About Hysan PlaceHysan Place at 500 Hennessy Road, Causeway Bay, is a major redevelopment project of Hysan Development Company Limited. It comprises 15 levels of Grade "A" offices and 17 floors of retail outlets, totaling 710,000 square feet. Situated at the heart of bustling Causeway Bay, Hysan Place's shopping mall will be a showcase of modern style, offering a number of international brands new to Hong Kong. The shopping mall is scheduled to open in August 2012. Hysan Place is Hong Kong's first building to be pre-certified at the highest Platinum level of the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) standard by the United States Green Building Council. The building is also pre-certified at the top level in the Hong Kong Building Environmental Assessment Method (BEAM) standard Opening August, 2012.For further information please contact: Ruder Finn Asia Vickie Ho / Sherman Ho Tel: +852 2201 6438 / +852 2201 6416 Email: / For high resolution photos, please visit: User name: media_dfs_hk Folder: T Galleria Opening (Password is not required)Appendix Beauty Beauty Lab Fragrance Watches & Jewelry©2012 PR Newswire. All Rights Reserved. ?There used to be no place like home for a dog when the family went away. But these days, there's a place that might be even better than home. Like so many dog owners, Reba Love, a retired accounting professor from Panama City, Florida, is shunning the old-fashioned kennel when she leaves town. Instead, she is opting to give her pooch a vacation of its own. Love takes her three-year-old Weimaraner, Chloe, to Beaches Pet Resort when she has to travel. The upscale pet boarding facility in Northern Florida offers luxury accommodations including extra playtime with staff. Rooms have tile floors and soft blankets. Love often opts for the larger room with a doggie door so Chloe can go out into the courtyard whenever she pleases."You can pay more for a room with a TV," Love says. "But I have no idea what they watch." While she doesn't want Chloe to be a couch potato, Love has been thinking about treating her beloved pet to a bubble bath the next time she goes out-of-town.Unless you take your dog with you on trips, vacations often mean that man's best friend ends up being boarded. These days, a growing number of facilities nationwide are eschewing the "kennel" label and are donning such nicknames as "Doggie Utopia." Canyon View Ranch (canyonviewdogs.com), in Topanga, California, bills itself as a "Canine Shangri la," where dogs can run on manicured lawns, climb ramps and crawl through tunnels in Disneyland-inspired parks. Camp Bow Wow (campbowwowusa.com), which expects to have 50 franchises open in the U.S. and Canada by the end of 2006, offers all-day romping, while overnight guests get tasty "campfire treats" before being tucked into cots in their own cabins. Camp Web Cams help families monitor pups over the Internet from wherever they are -- the beach, the ski resort, or the Champs Elysees."Our clients typically humanize their pets a bit. They see them as their kids," says Heidi Flammang, CampBowWow founder and CEO. "The thought of leaving their dog alone in a box for 24 hours a day is too much."Here's how to decide if a pet resort is right for your pooch:What to look for Never decide on a boarding facility from a brochure or the Internet. You have to go visit the grounds, meet the staff, and see for yourself how animals are treated. A good kennel is clean, well-ventilated, air conditioned in the summer and heated in the winter. The staff should interact with pets. "When dogs are at home, they're generally with family members being touched and petted. Suddenly, you put them in a kennel with handlers who never touch them and it can be quite traumatic," says Elizabeth Wilmot, owner of Countryside Kennels (countrysidekennels.com), in Owings, Md., and the Mid-Atlantic regional director of the American Boarding Kennels Association. Countryside offers a "Sportsman's Package" for $40-a-night, including a swim in the bone-shaped swimming pool, jogging, Frisbee sessions, and bottled water. Pampered pooch guests receive playtime, moonlit walks, petting sessions, and an orthopedic bed for $35 nightly.Consider your dog's temperament Many of these kennel redux owners shy away from cages and encourage dogs to play in groups by romping, running and chasing. Cage Free K-9 Camp (cagefreecanines.com), of Los Angeles, allows overnight guests to sleep in a 2,000-square-foot, climate-controlled loft on individual dog beds. In the TV lounge, they show Animal Planet. And over at CampBowWow, despite the fact each dog is given a private dining space, all dogs are temperament-tested. "We have an interview process," Flammang says. A dog needs to enjoy the company of other dogs to be boarded in a communal environment. Otherwise, individual rooms are a better bet.How to pack Dogs, like children, sometimes do best on "sleepovers" when they have a comfort item to remind them of home. Check with a facility before bringing a blanket, a towel, or a favorite toy, Wilmot says. This is usually fine if your pet has his or her own "room" or run. It may be more difficult -- or provoke aggressive behavior -- in the group environment. For dogs with sensitive stomachs, or special diets, you may want to bring your own food to the kennel. Many luxury kennels provide top-notch fare for overnight guests, such as the "healthy lamb-and-rice diet with Glucosamine" included in the $50-a-night rate at Canyon View Ranch. Medications will also be administered on site at most pet resorts, although some charge extra. No matter where your dog stays, you'll want to spring for a bath and flea dip before bringing your pet back home.These new-fangled pet resorts may cost a tad more than the old-style kennel, but pup parents say it's worth the price in peace of mind. "This is my baby," Love explains of her dog Chloe. "She's a 70-pound baby, but she's still my baby."Copyright (c) 2007 Studio One Networks. All rights reserved.?Information contained on this page is provided by companies via press release distributed through PR Newswire, an independent third-party content provider. PR Newswire, WorldNow and this Station make no warranties or representations in connection therewith.SOURCE DreamWorks Animation SKG, Inc.Two CG Animated Series Inspired By How to Train Your Dragon and Upcoming Turbo Are Highlights of Comprehensive Television PortfolioGLENDALE, Calif., Oct. 5, 2012 /PRNewswire/ --?DreamWorks Animation SKG, Inc. (Nasdaq: DWA) today announced that DreamWorks Classics will make its debut at MIPCOM 2012, bringing to worldwide telecasters a comprehensive television portfolio highlighted by DreamWorks Dragons: Riders of Berk, which is inspired by DreamWorks Animation's beloved How to Train Your Dragon film franchise, and an all-new television series based on the studio's upcoming animated feature film Turbo. "DreamWorks Classics is now the home of an expansive collection of high-quality properties that will resonate with a worldwide audience, and we are proud to make our MIPCOM debut this year, spearheaded by DreamWorks Dragons: Riders of Berk, one of our premiere television series based on our blockbuster film, together with Turbo, one of our most highly-anticipated future franchises," said Kelley Avery, Worldwide Head of Franchise Strategy and Distribution at DreamWorks Animation."Over the last four years DreamWorks Animation has proven to be a consistently successful producer of CG animated television content with its three series already in existence," said Classic Media Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Eric Ellenbogen. "I believe that our longstanding success in the family market combined with DreamWorks Animation's unparalleled original content will present many exciting growth opportunities for DreamWorks Classics in the future."DreamWorks Dragons: Riders of Berk is inspired by the studio's popular How to Train Your Dragon franchise, of which the second and third feature film installments are due in theaters on June 20, 2014 and June 18, 2016, respectively. The television series debuted in the U.S. on Cartoon Network in September of 2012 airing in 99 million U.S. homes and 178 countries around the world. Since its launch the series has consistently held the #1 timeslot across all television with boys 2-11 and 6-11, according to Nielson Media Research, and features much of the voice cast from the Academy Award-nominated 2010 film, including Jay Baruchel, America Ferrera, Christopher Mintz-Plasse and T. J. Miller.Also highlighting the DreamWorks Classics portfolio at MIPCOM 2012 is the all-new CG animated television series Turbo, based on the upcoming DreamWorks Animation 3D feature film of the same name. The movie tells the story of a garden snail with an impossible dream: to win the Indy 500. When a freak accident gives him extraordinary speed, Turbo sets out to try to make this dream come true. The film stars Ryan Reynolds, Paul Giamatti, Michael Pena, Luis Guzman, Bill Hader, Richard Jenkins, Ken Jeong, Michelle Rodriguez, Maya Rudolph, Ben Schwartz, Kurtwood Smith, Snoop Lion and Samuel L. Jackson. It will be released in theaters on July 19, 2013.Two Emmy Award-winning CG animated television series inspired by other DreamWorks Animation film franchises currently air on Nickelodeon. Kung Fu Panda: Legends of Awesomeness debuted in November of 2011 and Penguins of Madagascar in March 2009. Both highly-rated programs air in approximately 140 countries, reaching over 450 million households worldwide. Nickelodeon will also debut a future Monsters vs. Aliens television series.Beginning with The Croods on March 22, 2013, all feature films from DreamWorks Animation will be distributed by Twentieth Century Fox. Rise of the Guardians, which will be released in theaters on November 21, 2012, will be distributed by Paramount Pictures.This makes DreamWorks Animation the first major film studio to debut at MIPCOM in more than a decade. In addition to the original CG animated television productions from DreamWorks Animation, DreamWorks Classics will represent Classic Media's well-known movies, series and specials. The DreamWorks Classics sales team, headed by London-based Chloe Van Den Berg, will attend MIPCOM on October 8-11, 2012 in Cannes, France along with Avery and Peter Gal, Head of Television Development at DreamWorks Animation. About DreamWorks Animation DreamWorks Animation creates high-quality entertainment, including CG animated feature films, television specials and series and live entertainment properties, meant for audiences around the world. The Company has world-class creative talent, a strong and experienced management team and advanced filmmaking technology and techniques. DreamWorks Animation has been named one of the "100 Best Companies to Work For" by FORTUNER Magazine for four consecutive years. In 2012, DreamWorks Animation ranks #14 on the list and is also designated as one of the 50 Most Innovative Companies by MIT's Technology Review. All of DreamWorks Animation's feature films are now being produced in 3D. The Company has theatrically released a total of 24 animated feature films, including the franchise properties of Shrek, Madagascar, Kung Fu Panda and How to Train Your Dragon. The Company's theatrical releases for the current year are Madagascar 3: Europe's Most Wanted on June 8, 2012 and Rise of the Guardians on November 21, 2012.About DreamWorks Classics DreamWorks Classics was formed from DreamWorks Animation's acquisition earlier this year of Classic Media, owners of one of the most extensive portfolios of long-enduring family entertainment franchises, including Casper the Friendly GhostR, Where's Waldo?R, LassieR, The Lone RangerR, George of the JungleR and Rocky & Bullwinkle?. DreamWorks Classics will represent both the original CG animated television productions from DreamWorks Animation, including DreamWorks Dragons: Riders of Berk and an all-new television series based on the studio's upcoming animated feature film Turbo, along with Classic Media's well-known movies, series and specials. Caution Concerning Forward-Looking Statements This document includes certain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. The Company's expectations regarding the timing and impact of the acquisition on the Company's business and revenues, and the Company's plans, prospects, strategies, proposals and our beliefs and expectations concerning performance of our current and future releases and anticipated talent, directors and storyline for our upcoming films and other projects, constitute forward-looking statements. These statements are based on current expectations, estimates, forecasts and projections about the industry in which we operate and management's beliefs and assumptions. These statements are not guarantees of future performance and involve risks, uncertainties and assumptions which are difficult to predict. Actual results may vary materially from those expressed or implied by the statements herein due to changes in economic, business, competitive, technological and/or regulatory factors, and other risks and uncertainties affecting the operation of the business of DreamWorks Animation SKG, Inc. These risks and uncertainties include: satisfaction of closing conditions in the acquisition agreement, our ability to integrate the operations of Classic Media and exploit its portfolio of properties, audience acceptance of our films, our dependence on the success of a limited number of releases each year, the increasing cost of producing and marketing feature films, piracy of motion pictures, the effect of rapid technological change or alternative forms of entertainment and our need to protect our proprietary technology and enhance or develop new technology. In addition, due to the uncertainties and risks involved in the development and production of animated feature projects, the release dates for the projects described in this document may be delayed. For a further list and description of such risks and uncertainties, see the reports filed by us with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including our most recent annual report on Form 10-K and our most recent quarterly reports on Form 10-Q. DreamWorks Animation is under no obligation to, and expressly disclaims any obligation to, update or alter its forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events, changes in assumptions or otherwise.©2012 PR Newswire. All Rights Reserved. ?Information contained on this page is provided by companies via press release distributed through PR Newswire, an independent third-party content provider. PR Newswire, WorldNow and this Station make no warranties or representations in connection therewith.SOURCE Fleishman-Hillard Inc.Alliance Positions Agency as Industry Leader in Creative Integrated Communications SolutionsST. LOUIS, Oct. 4, 2012 /PRNewswire/ --?Fleishman-Hillard International Communications announced today that it has entered into a broad-based, multiyear strategic partnership with Contagious Communications, a leading U.K.-based marketing trends and insights consultancy.? The partnership ? a first for a firm in the public relations industry ? encompasses a broad range of value-added services. As part of the partnership, Fleishman-Hillard gains access to continual feeds of exclusive original content, bolstering the firm's access to and involvement in creative leadership and innovation. The relationship also positions Fleishman-Hillard at the forefront of a rapidly evolving industry at a time when companies are faced with the conjunction of new and emerging technologies, increased fragmentation of communications and marketing platforms, and dramatic shifts in audience behaviors. "This partnership is further proof of our commitment to creativity, innovation and the use of emerging technologies to meet our clients' needs," said Dave Senay, president and CEO of Fleishman-Hillard. "Our clients' worlds are more complex and demanding than ever before. Contagious will work with us to offer those clients breakthrough information, insights and inspiration that will help us deliver measurable impact on their performance."By delivering exclusive original and curated content ? and through its unique focus on the intersection of marketing, communication, technology and consumer culture ? Contagious equips companies to better understand the multifaceted challenges that face them and translate that knowledge into strategies that create a competitive advantage. "At Contagious, we're dedicated to supporting companies as they infuse creativity and innovative thinking into their business," said Simon Wylie, CEO of Contagious. "It's part of our role as catalysts of change. Therefore, we're delighted to have the opportunity to work closely with Fleishman-Hillard to help it drive innovative thinking across its broad global network."Commenting on the quality of Contagious and its offerings, Chloe Saklow, content and production director, BBC Worldwide said: "We have worked with Contagious on a broad range of projects across genres as diverse as drama, comedy and entertainment. As well as being a joy to work with, what consistently sets Contagious apart is their curiosity, the quality of their thinking and the fact that the team is always brimming over with ideas. Long may the relationship continue!"? In addition to the strategic partnership, Fleishman-Hillard has become the exclusive partner of Contagious' inaugural Most Contagious event, to be held Dec. 12 at Kings Place in London. Most Contagious 2012, "The Year in a Day," will explore and celebrate the key global trends, technologies and brand-funded innovations that were most disruptive during the past year, showcasing them during a full day's program of expert opinion, powerful insight and ground-breaking ideas."For the past five years, the Most Contagious annual report has looked at the most contagious and innovative ideas, trends and technologies of the year," said Paul Kemp-Robertson, editorial director and co-founder of Contagious. "It's highly anticipated and has become one of our strongest properties. We're excited to be working with Fleishman-Hillard to bring this celebration of creative contagiousness to life every year."The multiyear agreement with Contagious will also give Fleishman-Hillard access to consulting services, original sector and industry-specific content generation, trend tracking, and targeted client-centric project work. About Contagious Communications Contagious is a London and New York-based intelligence resource and insight consultancy, focusing on future-facing marketing communications and the impact of emerging technologies and social media channels on brands. Since its founding in 2004, Contagious has become an indispensable strategic resource for brands and communications agencies around the world.Contagious publishes an awarding-winning quarterly digest, offers a bespoke and expertly filtered intelligence and training service called Contagious Feed, and operates Contagious Insider, a dedicated consultancy and advisory service for agencies and brands. For more information, please contact: Simon Wylie, CEO . About Fleishman-Hillard Fleishman-Hillard Inc., one of the world's leading strategic communications firms, has built its reputation on creating that deliver what its clients value most: meaningful, positive and measurable impact on the performance of their organizations. The firm is widely recognized for excellent client service and a strong company culture founded on teamwork, integrity and personal commitment. Based in St. Louis, the firm operates throughout North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Middle East, Africa and Latin America through its 80 owned offices. For more information, visit the Fleishman-Hillard website at . Fleishman-Hillard is a part of Diversified Agency Services, a division of Omnicom Group Inc. About Diversified Agency Services Diversified Agency Services (DAS), a division of Omnicom Group Inc. (NYSE:OMC) (), manages Omnicom's holdings in a variety of marketing communications disciplines. DAS includes over 200 companies, which operate through a combination of networks and regional organizations, serving international and local clients through more than 700 offices in 71 countries.About Omnicom Group Inc. Omnicom Group Inc. () is a leading global marketing and corporate communications company. Omnicom's branded networks and numerous specialty firms provide advertising, strategic media planning and buying, digital and interactive marketing, direct and promotional marketing, public relations and other specialty communications services to over 5,000 clients in more than 100 countries.©2012 PR Newswire. All Rights Reserved. ?Visit comes after victims and their families press Senate to pass legislation to protect the public from foodborne illnessWASHINGTON, Oct. 19 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Sixteen Americans who have been directly affected by foodborne illness gathered at the White House recently to share their personal stories and meet Sam Kass, assistant White House chef, who cooks for the Obama family and is an advisor on food policy; Mariano-Florentino Cuellar, who is the lead staffer for the White House Food Safety Working Group; and David Lazarus, senior advisor to the Secretary of Agriculture, who coordinates with the White House on food safety issues. (Photo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20091019/DC94792-a) (Photo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20091019/DC94792-b)Representing the millions of Americans who fall ill each year from contaminated food, the victims and relatives of victims appealed to the Obama administration to urge congressional lawmakers to pass food safety legislation this year. "Too many Americans are needlessly getting sick and many are dying from eating food that should be safe," said Peter Hurley, who traveled from Oregon to D.C. with his 5-year-old son, Jake. Jake became ill earlier this year after eating peanut butter crackers contaminated with Salmonella. "Congress needs to pass this legislation," continued Hurley. "It makes the common sense changes our food safety system needs. We know the system can and must be improved and the time for action is now."In March of this year President Obama created the White House Food Safety Working Group, which is charged with coordinating federal food safety efforts. At the meeting on Oct. 9 administration officials reaffirmed their commitment to modernizing our food safety system and ensuring that America's food supply is both safe and healthy.Advocates from the Center for Foodborne Illness Research & Prevention, The Pew Charitable Trusts, Safe Tables Our Priority (S.T.O.P.), the Center for Science in the Public Interest, Consumers Union, the Consumer Federation of America, and Food & Water Watch joined the 16 Americans who have personal stories about the impact of foodborne illnesses.While in Washington the victims and relatives of victims also met with U.S. Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Margaret Hamburg, along with senators and Senate staff from their home states. Senators were urged to follow the example set by their colleagues in the House -- who passed a bipartisan food safety bill in July -- and approve companion legislation by Thanksgiving. "We cannot afford to wait for another outbreak. Congress must act now and pass food safety legislation that protects families from facing the same hardships we have," said Maine resident Carol Kintner Gates, who lost a family member to a foodborne illness. "Nobody in America should have to worry about whether the food they eat and feed their family will cause severe illness or death."Thousands of Americans die annually from foodborne illness, and about half of all reported cases of foodborne illness occur in children, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Megan Kowalcyk, a 13-year-old from Ohio, lost her brother to foodborne illness and talked with Obama administration officials at the meeting about her efforts to improve food safety. "I was 5 years old when my brother died," Kowalcyk said. "He was my best friend and I still miss him. It really bothers me that so many kids have been hurt or died because of foodborne illness." Without immediate reform, the preventable outbreaks from contaminated food -- like those that occurred earlier this year -- are likely to continue. The following victims and family members were present at the White House meeting, as well as representatives from the Make Our Food Safe campaign (www.makeourfoodsafe.org):Barbara Kowalcyk, OhioLara Kowalcyk, Ohio Megan Kowalcyk, Ohio Patricia Buck, PennsylvaniaAidan Buck, PennsylvaniaCarol Kintner Gates, Maine/New HampshireJake Hurley, OregonPeter Hurley, OregonTrissi Fair Bennett, VirginiaPaul Bennett, VirginiaChloe Bennett, VirginiaLuke Bennett, VirginiaJohn Christoferson, OregonThomas Christoferson, OregonChrissy Christoferson, OregonKarl Christoferson, OregonABOUT MAKE OUR FOOD SAFE:Major public health, consumer and food safety groups have launched the Make Our Food Safe Campaign (www.makeourfoodsafe.org), including the American Public Health Association, Center for Foodborne Illness Research & Prevention, Center for Science in the Public Interest, the Consumer Federation of America, Consumers Union, Food & Water Watch, National Consumers League, The Pew Charitable Trusts, Safe Tables Our Priority, and Trust for America's Health.SOURCE Make Our Food Safe Campaign?Information contained on this page is provided by companies via press release distributed through PR Newswire, an independent third-party content provider. PR Newswire, WorldNow and this Station make no warranties or representations in connection therewith.SOURCE Maybelline New YorkNEW YORK, Sept. 7, 2012 /PRNewswire/ --?Maybelline New York announced today that fashion runway star Freja Beha Erichsen was signed to the brand. She joins a stellar lineup of spokeswomen that includes Christy Turlington, Julia Stegner, Erin Wasson, Kemp Muhl, Shu-Pei Qin, Emily DiDonato, and Charlotte Free.(Photo: ?)Often described as the "queen of cool," Freja is known in the modeling industry for her edgy, urban looks and for her unparalleled sense of style. "Freja is an incredibly beautiful and confident woman," says Damien Bertrand, Global Brand President, Maybelline New York. "Not only is she a top model for a new generation, but she is also a modern style icon off the runway. She truly captures the catwalk-to-sidewalk spirit of Maybelline New York.""I'm so honored to be representing such a daring, trendsetting brand, and I'm looking forward to this new and exciting chapter in my modeling career," says Freja. Discovered on the streets of her hometown Copenhagen, Denmark, Freja is a natural in front of the camera and on the catwalk. Freja appeared in 64 shows during her breakout runway season, and she has walked the runways for several top designers, including Alexander McQueen, Calvin Klein, Dolce & Gabbana, Gucci, Louis Vuitton, Marc Jacobs, Prada, Yves Saint Laurent, and Zac Posen. Known to be a muse for Karl Lagerfeld, Freja has been in almost every Chanel runway show since 2006.Freja has also starred in major advertising campaigns for Chanel, as well as Balenciaga, Jil Sander, Gucci, Hugo Boss, Emporio Armani, Chloe, Gap, J Brand, H&M, Calvin Klein, Balmain, Gianfranco Ferre, Pringle, Louis Vuitton, Harry Winston, Georg Jensen, Moncler, Max Mara, Velentino, and Roberto Cavalli.Freja will make her debut in advertising campaigns for Maybelline New York later this year. About Maybelline New YorkMaybelline New York is the number one cosmetic brand in the world, available in over 129 countries. By combining technologically advanced formulations with on-trend expertise and New York City edge, Maybelline New York's mission is to offer innovative, accessible and effortless cosmetics for every woman. The brand is currently the official makeup sponsor of Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week in New York City and 9 other fashion weeks worldwide.?For more information, log on to . Maybe she's born with it. Maybe it's Maybelline. ©2012 PR Newswire. All Rights Reserved. ?From the University of South CarolinaDOVER,DE - The fifth-ranked South Carolina equestrian team closed out its regular season with an 11-8 victory over Delaware State at the Gamblers Choice Equestrian Center on Saturday.The Gamecocks finish the regular season with a 6-5 overall record. The Gamecocks won three of four events over the Hornets, including a 7-3 victory for the Hunter Seat team. In equitation, the Gamecocks outscored the Hornets 3-2, on victories by senior Carly Babcock and freshmen Kimberly McCormack and Logan Holler.Babcock improved her record to 8-3, while McCormack improved to 8-3, and Holler is now 1-0 after her first competition in equitation. Holler's overall record improved to 2-0, with her second victory coming in equitation over fences on Nov. 6, 2009 against Tennessee-Martin. In equitation over fences, the Gamecocks picked up a 4-1 victory.Seniors Megan Massaro, Katie Stenberg, and Nicole Bourgeois all scored points for the Gamecocks, while freshman Alex Arute also won her ride. Arute's victory improved her record to 5-1, while Bourgeois is now 6-2 in the event. In horsemanship, sophomore Taylor Singmaster picked up the only Gamecock point. She defeated Amanda Hotz 72.5-65, earning her fourth victory of the season. In reining, the Gamecocks picked up a 3-2 victory with wins coming from junior Chloe Gray and freshmen Audrey Jewell and Amanda Pope. Gray picked up her seventh win of the season on Saturday and leads the reiners with her 7-3 record. South Carolina now turns its attention to the Southern Equestrian Championships, which will be held March 26-27 at Auburn University. Following that, the Gamecocks will compete at the Varsity Equestrian National Championships April 15-17 at Baylor University in Waco, Texas.?By THOMAS ADAMSON AP Fashion Writer PARIS (AP) - True style doesn't try too hard. That was the statement at Paris Fashion Week, alarmingly simple, but proved in a number of ready-to-wear presentations Sunday which heralded a move towards clean, simplified elegance. Celine designer Phoebe Philo - at the top of her game - produced a chic display, effortlessly. Three years after the lauded Briton's Celine debut, she delivered a strong show, which evoked her boho-bourgeois style in soft silhouettes with subtle architecture. Another of Paris' influential designers, Riccardo Tisci of Givenchy, presented a new vision of style Sunday. Again, Tisci channeled a clean look, simplifying the house silhouette in a less elaborate yet sophisticated collection. Hermes - the house of the jet-setting fashion buyer - served up the elegance in its usual cocktail of travel, silk, leather and exotic cultural references. Summing up his show, the house's designer Christophe Lemaire said it represented "a clean, sharp, modernist traveler." Monday's highly anticipated shows include Stella McCartney, Chloe - and the hottest ticket of the week - Hedi Slimane's debut outing as designer for the rebranded Saint Laurent. ___ CELINE Spring is about gentle contradictions, not color, Phoebe Philo seemed to say: Shown through a muted palette of black, white, navy and gray. The real point of the show was the gentle play on contrasting lines, then textures, then form. Loosely hanging silhouettes - often with attention to neck details in high necks, bands and twists - came in column or boxy shapes, with a couple of black A-line tuxedo-dresses for good measure. The gloss of sheeny silks whispered a contrast against matte fabric. Philo has often been noted for her chic "utilitarian tailoring," which she delivers with uncanny ease. Here we saw it used artistically in hemline frays which turned into tassels, and twisted fabric that wrapped round the back sewn crudely together in a lump. It's a style that wouldn't look out of place on Juliette Binoche, for example, who accepted a best-actress award at Cannes in 2010 in custom Celine. The house is right in fancying themselves as Paris calendar's arty side. When fashion insiders asked to see the mandatory program notes, there were wry smiles as they were handed a text-free book of collage pictures. ___ GIVENCHY Trend-setting designer Riccardo Tisci changed the direction of Givenchy's ready-to-wear Sunday. He simplified the silhouette to a more flattened and spread out front-and-shoulder emphasis in 37 black, white and gray looks. A strong voice in the fashion conversation, Tisci's tailoring influences designers far and wide. Last spring, for instance, he brought back the peplum. Now, hardly a collection goes by without one cropping up. The wilder bondage-gear touches that added spice to last season's equestrian-inspired trip, were gone here, in a less elaborate display - but which had its moments of clean elegance. A great feature was the clean, descending ripples in many of the looks which are sure to spread into other collections like wildfire. But for a designer who likes to live dangerously, this more saleable collection- though a departure from last season - felt at times like he was playing-it-safe. ___ HERMES The fashion crowd got their summer holidays early - flown first class across a vibrant mix of Polynesian prints and color-rich baroque foulard motifs. Several of the models carried hang luggage. The mascot of the house, after all, is an airborne messenger. The looks stopped off at every fabric under the sun: in full grain leather woven in silk, washed silk twill, plunged lambskin, satin piping and lovely indigo denim linen. Colors too, were diverse in cappuccino, terracotta, sulphur, emerald, cobalt and -the palette's most beautiful - celadon. The flight this season stopped off at the Netherlands and Germany- with tinges of the geometry and graphics of 1930s. "I'm a modernist at heart," Lemaire said following the show, hosted next to Paris' Tuileries gardens. This idea was worked into the collection's best looks with a feel of famed Dutch painter Piet Mondrian - who used geometric shapes and blocks of colors that could be seen in several of the final looks. Printed geometric floaty silk blouses and slightly jarring assorted pants made bold statements. They also featured the slight play on masculine styles that Lemaire likes to toy with periodically: A cotton wool cravate appeared on most of the looks as a man's tie, tucked into a hoop. The result was pure luxury, air delivered as only Hermes can. ___ KENZO Kenzo headed back to the Southeast Asian jungle Sunday in a vibrant, fun collection that picked up their last menswear theme: A rainforest trek. After just one year at the helm, the hard work of designers Humberto Leon and Carol Lim has paid off: They've managed to re-stamp the brand with a cool, populist edge. But they're serious about their work in other ways too: Fashion insiders had to live the catwalk theme - literally - by trekking to the far-flung venue, the Maison de Judo, on the Paris city limits. In bold - sometimes purposefully garish - orange vermilions and greens, the collection threw up some great wide pants and boxy-shaped jackets as well as a lot of safari-style street wear. Though some of the jungle printed ensembles looked overly busy - a beautiful camouflage print made up for it with images of flowers that looked like leopard. But there was art in the detail too, with the designers showing a flair for tailoring in great utilitarian features. _____ Thomas Adamson can be followed at http:/ /Twitter.com/ThomasAdamsonAP Copyright 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.?HOUSTON, June 14 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Graduating senior Chloe Griffen realizes that good grades and community service are just part of being a college-bound high school student these days. She also knows that learning about global issues and demonstrating outstanding leadership skills can have significant economic benefits. Thanks to a generous matching grant provided by Greater Texas Foundation, the World Affairs Council has awarded Chloe a $2,500 scholarship to be used toward her college education.(Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20090820/WACLOGO) Chloe participated regularly in World Affairs Council events and was part of their Student Diplomat Corps. In programs last year she helped resolve a mock energy crisis and met Condoleezza Rice in the Conversations with History series. The Council was impressed by Chloe's involvement in several other activities including managing the Bellaire boys' basketball team and leading service projects for the Girl Scouts.For the past five years, the World Affairs Council has awarded a scholarship to a student who demonstrates outstanding academic skills, interest in international issues, contributions to the community, and a commitment to pursue a higher education.On the evening of June 16th, the World Affairs Council will recognize Chloe for her exceptional achievements. In the fall, Chloe will attend Grinnell College in Iowa, where she plans to pursue a degree in Anthropology. Chartered in 1990, the World Affairs Council is one of Houston's most prestigious citizen forums. Through varied and substantive programs, the Council presents all sides of current global issues, promotes better understanding of international relations, and contributes to national and international policy debates. The result is a better educated citizenry and the advancement of Houston as an important international center. Recognizing the need to improve the quality of international education, the World Affairs Council of Houston established Education Outreach in 1999. Today it is nationally recognized and is a model for education programs. For more information visit www.wachouston.org Greater Texas Foundation supports efforts to ensure all Texas students are prepared for, have access to, persist in, and complete post-secondary education. For more information visit www.greatertexasfoundation.orgSOURCE World Affairs Council of Houston?Information contained on this page is provided by companies via press release distributed through PR Newswire, an independent third-party content provider. PR Newswire, WorldNow and this Station make no warranties or representations in connection therewith.SOURCE HuaweiNEW YORK, Oct. 3, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Huawei, a leading global information and communications technology (ICT) solutions provider, plans to highlight its U.S. channel and service momentum in addition to demonstrating Advanced ICT capabilities at Interop New York, October 1-5, 2012. Huawei will focus on four key areas at this event:New Distribution Agreement HighlightsFollowing its groundbreaking U.S. distribution agreement with in May 2012, Huawei today announced it has entered into sales and support agreements with two highly-focused, specialty distributors: Communications Test Design Inc. (CTDI) and Condre Storage Inc. Both companies will bring key strengths to bear in forming the new partnerships. CTDI, based in West Chester, Pa., is the communications industry's leading repair and logistics service provider, delivering supply chain solutions to major carriers, MSOs and OEMs worldwide.? CTDI's services include repair, logistics and distribution for enterprise, wireline, wireless and CPE equipment; network deployment services; supply chain management and reuse equipment solutions.? CTDI, which currently has a strong global relationship with Huawei, will leverage its extensive industry expertise and customer base to support the U.S. Enterprise space. "CTDI is a strategic global partner of Huawei, and is proud to be selected as a Huawei Distributor for Enterprise equipment. CTDI's comprehensive portfolio of value added technical, logistics and distribution services compliments Huawei's extensive Enterprise product and services, providing Huawei and CTDI's customers with a robust Enterprise product and services solution," said Eric Miller, Vice President of CTDI Supply. Condre Storage Inc., based in Eden Prairie, Minn., is a leading IT solutions distributor with a strong focus in enterprise data storage. Condre Storage has carefully chosen a combination of product lines in hard drives, tape backup, RAID systems, storage area networking (SAN), and software to provide a wide variety of high quality and cost effective storage solutions. With its deep storage product and service expertise, Condre brings tremendous added credibility to Huawei storage solutions."Huawei will gain access to a broad base of storage resellers, while Condre's customers will have the added benefit of direct access to Huawei's industry-leading, cost-effective enterprise product portfolio. This new partnership is not only a win for both companies but also the customers we serve," said Dennis Maetzold, President of Condre Storage Inc.Customer Assurance Agreement HighlightsHuawei also announced it has entered into an agreement with Essintial Enterprise Solutions Company to provide nationwide support of its enterprise hardware. This agreement adds to Huawei's capabilities to support its customer's requirements for faster hardware replacement and Onsite Field Engineering support. "Essintial is very pleased to provide parts, logistics, field engineers and technical support services for Huawei's U.S. enterprise customers," said Tom York, Essintial Enterprise Solutions CEO and former IBM executive. "The opportunity to participate in Huawei's expansion into the U.S. market is very exciting for Essintial."Tradeshow Floor- Booth HighlightsLocated in Booth 711, Huawei will demonstrate how its customer-centric innovations and capabilities (Data Center, Videoconferencing and Telepresence, Campus/Branch technologies and Customer Assurance solutions) can enable enterprise organizations to improve their business operations. Technology highlights at the booth will include a demonstration of the company's . The CloudEngine series switches provide the industry's largest single-frame switching capacity of up to 48T and support high-density switching of 100GE, 40GE, 10GE and GE interfaces, as well as virtualization and computing.? Tradeshow Floor- Speaking HighlightsHuawei executives will speak on multiple thought leadership topics for Data Center, Cloud and Campus/Branch technologies during Interop:Analyst ranking report HighlightsTwo recently released analyst reports also point to strong progress for Huawei in the U.S. market:Interop New York 2012 will be held October 1-5 at the Jacob Javits Convention Center in New York. For more information on , please see . About Huawei Huawei is a leading global information and communications technology (ICT) solutions provider. Through our dedication to customer-centric innovation and strong partnerships, we have established end-to-end advantages in telecom networks, devices and cloud computing. We are committed to creating maximum value for telecom operators, enterprises and consumers by providing competitive solutions and services. Our products and solutions have been deployed in over 140 countries, serving more than one third of the world's population. For more information, visit Huawei online: . Follow us on Twitter: and YouTube: .About Huawei Enterprise Business Group Huawei Enterprise Business Group ("Huawei Enterprise") is one of the three business groups of Huawei, a leading global information and communications technology (ICT) solutions provider. Leveraging Huawei's strong R&D capabilities and comprehensive technical expertise, Huawei Enterprise provides a wide range of highly efficient customer-centric ICT solutions and services to global vertical industry and enterprise customers across government and public sector, finance, transportation, electric power, energy, commercial businesses, and ISPs. Huawei Enterprise's innovative and leading solutions cover network infrastructure, unified communications and collaboration (UC&C), cloud computing & data center, enterprise information security, and industry application solutions.About Interop InteropR drives the adoption of technology, providing knowledge and insight to help IT and corporate decision-makers achieve business success. Part of UBM TechWeb's family of global brands, Interop is the leading business technology event series. Through in-depth educational programs, workshops, real-world demonstrations and live technology implementations in its unique InteropNet program, Interop provides the forum for the most powerful innovations and solutions the industry has to offer. Interop Las Vegas is the flagship event held each spring, with Interop New York held each fall, with annual international events in Mumbai and Tokyo, all produced by UBM TechWeb and partners. For more information about these events, visit .About CTDI CTDI has provided groundbreaking service solutions to the communications industry since 1975. Today, CTDI is a full-service engineering, repair and logistics company delivering innovative and web-based service models worldwide. CTDI's one-stop service model includes: Wireline Repair and Logistics, Wireless Repair and Logistics, Network Deployment Services, Supply Management Services, Product Engineering and Manufacturing, and most recently, CPE (Set-Top Box, Modems & EMTAs) Repair and Logistics. CTDI's customers include the major Telecom and Cable service providers as well as OEMs from around the world. CTDI maintains its corporate headquarters in West Chester, PA, and supports an expanding customer base with more than 5,200 employees in 47 facilities worldwide.About Condre Storage Inc. Condre Storage Inc. is a leading IT solutions Distributor with a strong focus in enterprise data storage. Condre Storage has carefully chosen a combination of product lines in hard drives, tape backup, RAID systems, storage area networking (SAN), and software to provide value added resellers with a wide variety of high quality and cost effective storage solutions. Condre Storage's management, sales representatives, engineering staff, and support team, all have extensive backgrounds in the data storage market with more than 130 years combined. Additional information is available at or 952-294-4900. About Essintial Enterprise Solutions Essintial Enterprise Solutions provides IT service supply chain infrastructure services specializing in multi-vendor support solutions and a full suite of technology oriented professional services. The company leverages its national infrastructure; custom services management systems, and decades of experience to assist enterprises in maximizing the availability and management of their technology infrastructure at the most efficient cost. Essintial is privately owned by an investor group with offices in Boulder, Colorado and Los Angeles, California. Learn more at . ??About the Magic Quadrant and MarketScope Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner's research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purposeMedia Relations Contact: Jannie Luong, Huawei (214) 415-0815 Analyst Relations Contact: Sarita Kincaid, Huawei (408) 799-110 ©2012 PR Newswire. All Rights Reserved. ?Information contained on this page is provided by companies via press release distributed through PR Newswire, an independent third-party content provider. PR Newswire, WorldNow and this Station make no warranties or representations in connection therewith.SOURCE IC Places Inc.LOS ANGELES, July 12,?2012 /PRNewswire/ -- IC Places (OTCQB: ICPA) is pleased to announce it has begun production on Punch Television Networks' first Reality TV Show based on the day to day lives of the people that run EzVip.com.? About the ShowNightlife doesn't just begin when the sun goes down. It's a 24/7, 365 job that never sleeps. It requires the resilience?to withstand huge egos and "I don't care" attitudes. No matter what city you're in (Miami, Vegas, LA...), it's all the same. When millions are at stake and your wildest dreams are on the line,?you either step up to the challenge, or collapse under pressure.IC Places Inc. (OTCQB: ICPA) has formed a production partnership to take viewers behind the scenes to see what it really takes to make it in the multi million dollar world of Nightlife Entertainment. Some of the top celebrities from the worlds of entertainment, sports and business have agreed to appear on the show's premier season. Like a fly on the wall, viewers will see what it's really like to be a part of the glitz and glamor of meeting high profile celebrities and VIP's, partying with them into the early hours of the morning, only to return to the office at 8 am and begin the start of another work day. The show will follow the team as they provide their celebrity clients with access and convenience to some of the biggest events in entertainment. In the process showing EzVip.com as a company that is revolutionizing nightlife.?Some of the Celebrities Expected to Appear in the ShowThe premier season?is slated for 13 episodes and will begin airing this fall on Punch TV Networks and International Syndication.? Filming for the show kicks off in Miami at the Versace Mansion July 21st with a celebrity filled event celebrating Al Nelson's birthday bash. The show will air this fall on Punch Television Networks in the U.S. and Internationally Via syndication. Segments of the show will run throughout IC Places' extended distribution network. Steven Samblis, CEO of IC Places, said, "Working with Al on the 'Nightlife' sections of , I had a chance to see behind the scenes what it took to run these incredible events and cater to his celebrity cliental.? I knew immediately that this was entertainment magic. That started the conversation about bringing Al's world to TV. Since appearing on ABC's Shark Tank, Season 3 Premiere this year, where both Mark Cuban and Daymond John invested in EzVip.com, Al has been inundated with offers to take his world to Reality TV, pitching his world from all different angles.? When Al saw I had the same vision on how to tell the story of EzVip, we decided to make it happen. This show is going to be a game changer."The Reality Dream TeamSteven Samblis - Executive Producer / Co-CreatorSteven, CEO and Founder of IC Places and the websites, brought together a team of proven production companies and people to create one of the most compelling TV shows airing on network TV this fall.?? Al Nelson - Executive Producer / Co-CreatorNelson, Founder and CEO EzVip.com, the website that allows you to reserve and pay for your bottle service at a nightclub in advance. (Think of it like the popular restaurant application Open Table, but for nightlife.) After three years he decided to pitch his idea on the show that features successful entrepreneurs like Mark Cuban (Dallas Mavericks owner), Daymond John (founder of FUBU clothing line), Kevin O'Leary (educational software), Barbara Corcoran (real estate) and Robert Hejavec (technology security) who try to outbid each other to invest their own money and get a piece of a new business. Al ended up with several offers but in the end accepted the offer from Cuban and John.First J ProductionsJOSHUA MANDEL ? Production Accountant / Executive ProducerBorn in Los Angeles, California. He graduated Landmark West and attended University of Southern California. While in high school, he had an internship at Boss Film Studios where he worked on such films as Starship Troopers, Air Force One, Desperate Measures, and Turbulence. He also assisted the multi Academy Award winner wizard Mr. Richard Edlund. After college, he started working as a production assistant on films such as Rebound, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, Little Miss Sunshine, Heartbreak Kid and the TV show The Loop. After working in production and post-production, he moved to?freelance production accounting. He worked as a production accountant on the films Tropic Thunder, Surrogates and Real Steel. He is currently working as a production supervisor on 21 and Over.?"First J Productions is proud to be a part of this great team. We aim to show the business side of the club scene and what it takes to make it a VIP night."... Joshua Mandel?Manolin VidVilla ?Manolin VidVilla Studios develops and produces a wide range of reality based programming, scripted series, international formats, syndication, talk shows, documentaries, video-on-demand, specials, sitcoms, web based interactive fare and made-for-TV movies, all in an effort to build a leadership position. The company focuses on key market segments outside the realm of the major studios by developing, producing, and delivering cost-effective programming to networks hungry for original programming."We are very excited to be joining the project. We look forward to co-producing a highly compelling docu-series around such a great new company as EzVip. Viewers will be captivated by the inner workings of the exclusive VIP club world, and with a point of view unparalleled by any other television series. With Al at the helm, the show also serves a direct-response for??to further launch their intellectual property for being the premiere online destination spot to book your VIP nightclub reservations."?Cal BoyingtonCAL BOYINGTON ? Executive ProducerCal Boyington launched his media shingle Manolin Studios in early 2008 in a strategic move to develop and produce his own fare. He also serves?as Executive Producer of HD Net's award-winning documentary series "Baker Boys," Comedy Central's much hyped new scripted comedy series "Workaholics," currently airing after "South Park," and "Trapped in Paradise," for VH-1.Boyington is an accomplished executive who, while forming Manolin, jointly served as the President of TV for QED International, a movie production/international sales company. Manolin sold numerous shows including: "Freshman" with Lil Romeo at MTV, "E.S.U." at Discovery, "R5 Sons" a family-docu at TLC, and "That's Rich" hosted by Mo Rocca at the E!. Manolin also produced a ground-breaking web-series for entitled "Sports Explorers."Prior to producing, Boyington was the Head of Paradigm's Alternative Television Division as well as a veteran talent agent at ICM for several years. As an agent, Boyington put together Animal Planet's hit show "Whale Wars" and ABC's "The Next Best Thing." Some of Boyington's other TV sales that debuted included, "Father Hood," the Snoop Dogg family reality sitcom on E! and "6 Months" at A&E, a show chronicling families as they dealt with ailing family members. He sold "Sunday Morning Shootout" to AMC, which ran for over 250 episodes and airs in several territories around the world.Additionally, Boyington participated in the sales of "Intervention" for A&E, "The Osbournes" for MTV, "Anna Nicole Show" for E!, A&E's "Sons of Hollywood," BET's "Baldwin Hills," "TV Land Awards," "US Poker Championship," "Knight School" with Coach Bobby Knight, and "Bound For Glory" for ESPN. He was integral in the success of "The Apprentice," "America's Next Top Model" and the revived "Last Comic Standing."In addition to Television development, Boyington has an indie-film in pre-production through Manolin titled, "The Pure Life," which won the American Zoetrope Award for Best Screenplay.Boyington has had consistent success in producing, packaging, and selling TV shows for Broadcast, and in series format development, acquisition and production. The Hollywood Reporter selected him for "The Next Generation of 2006." Boyington is a member in good standing of The Academy of Television Arts and NATPE. He is experienced in contract negotiations, analyzing market trends and capitalizing on global market opportunities. He has specific experience in leveraging advertising monies as?well as licensing and merchandising platforms for programs. High visibility?in the entertainment community with continued success in deriving partnerships and innovative?media solutions through extensive personal relationships.?JASON BERGENFELD ? Executive ProducerBorn and raised in Southern California, Jason has always had a passion for many aspects of multimedia programming. What started as watching sports and Saturday cartoons has turned into a career in television lasting more than a decade.Jason's creative abilities as well as his business sense have enabled him to become a leader in his field. Known as a go-getter, Jason started his career working for the Oscar Award Winning company Kopelson Entertainment, until moving into the music video space during the boom with FM Rocks.After moving back into television production, Jason produced shows for NBC, FOX, ABC, TruTV, GSN, BET, AOL TV, A & E, MSNBC, CCTV, Phoenix Television, and many more.Before joining forces with Manolin Studios, Jason worked as SVP of Development & Acquisitions with Xonger Global Media/C4 Pictures where they produced such hits has Baldwin Hills (BET), Barbershop 1 & 2 (MGM Studios), Meet Joe Jackson (A & E), and many more films and television programs.GREG GEROSKY ? Executive ProducerPrior to being an Executive Producer and partner of VidVilla LLC and Manolin VidVilla Studios LLC, Greg spent 5 years as a Producer and the Head of Post Production for Reveille Studios, now a division of Shine Group owned by Fox / Newscorp.Greg built a large post division for Reveille with over 50 edit bays including online/finishing in as many as 4 separate locations across Los Angeles.Greg has Produced and Co-Produced many shows including Masterchef USA (FOX), American Gladiators 1 & 2 (NBC), The Biggest Loser 12 (NBC) Tabatha's Takeover 1-4 (BRAVO), Shear Genius 1-4 (BRAVO), The Buried Life 1 & 2 (MTV), Losing It With Jillian Michaels (NBC), One Born Every Minute 1 & 2 (LIFETIME), Gone Too Soon (Documentary for the TV GUIDE CHANNEL), and numerous other TV programs. Greg has also contributed largely to dozens of Web series projects for MSN and Yahoo, and both scripted and non-scripted development.Prior to joining Reveille, Greg owned and operated a small production company based in South Florida producing local programming and commercial spots for local businesses. Greg is also a composer and has achieved several successes including a large national campaign for our nation's Border Patrol and underscore for dozens of Reveille shows.Product PlacementKaren S. Neasi One of the premiere executives in the world of product placement, Karen started off as the Executive Assistant to Kevin S. Bright (Bright/Kauffman/Crane Production), on Dream On, Friends, Veronica's Closet and Jesse. From there Karen moved into product placement for some of the most successful directors in Hollywood on films including: About IC Places:IC Places is a New Media company that produces weekly entertainment content for several different mediums.? In 2012 it hit a milestone of signing partnership agreements to place its content before more then 300 million people a month, giving the company one of the largest distributions foot prints on the planet.? This foot print includes online partnerships with Mevio.com and terrestrial partnerships which delivers its content to Checkout TV Network, HDTV Network, Dining Network, Bright House on demand and two upcoming new networks launching in July of this year. At the core, IC Places is a network of 350 city based entertainment websites. This foundation allows IC Places the unique advantage having a built in fan based for the TV and New Media programs it produces.? Each IC Places City website offers a virtual keyhole view of life in each community. Every unique aspect of a city's social, business, and cultural life is available right at each city's IC Places homepage. IC Places provides the entire community a place to talk, do business and get connected. Businesses are given amazing tools to tell their stories in the best way possible and visitors get unfettered access to businesses, events and people in each city. To see one of the IC Places City sites in action, please visit .About Punch Television NetworksLaunched on Wednesday, October 19, 2011, shortly after Columbus Day, Punch TV is, in many ways, also an explorer. Instead of spending the normal costs of $100 million to launch, Punch TV spent $10 million. Rather than launching by airing re-runs of popular and loved shows, Punch TV offers 70% original programming to its viewers. And now, Punch TV Network extended its originality even further when in May of this year the company introduced its fall lineup of shows to prospective advertisers and/or their representatives. The success of the Up-Front resulted in commitments of twelve million dollars in advertising dollars to Punch TV's fall line-up of shows. At Up-Front, Punch TV Network introduced 17 of its roster of 36 new dramas, comedies, variety shows, talk shows, children's shows, and inspirational entertainment. The event was attended by a number of celebrities including Blair Underwood, Bill Duke, Dawnn Lewis, Obba Babatunde, Omar Gooding, Damian Hall, Fonzworth Bently, Kiki Shephard, Lorraine Toussaint, and many others.Punch TV Network, with a presence this fall in more than 100 cities, does, indeed, personify the spirit of independent television. Punch TV! "Are you thirsty yet?"IC Places Safe Harbor Statement This press release contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. These forward-looking statements are based on the current plans and expectations of management and are subject to a number of uncertainties and risks that could significantly affect the company's current plans and expectations, as well as future results of operations and financial condition. A more extensive listing of risks and factors that may affect the company's business prospects and cause actual results to differ materially from those described in the forward-looking statements can be found in the reports and other documents filed by the company with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The company undertakes no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.Contact Information: IC Places, Inc. Steven Samblis 407-442-0309 Ext. 2 Press Inquiries: ©2012 PR Newswire. All Rights Reserved. ?Information contained on this page is provided by companies via press release distributed through PR Newswire, an independent third-party content provider. PR Newswire, WorldNow and this Station make no warranties or representations in connection therewith.SOURCE IC Places, Inc.LOS ANGELES, July 20, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- IC Places (OTC QB: ICPA) is pleased to announce they have hired?one of the forerunners of Reality TV, Joel Friedman to executive produce/show run their new EzVip series for the Punch Television Network.? A native New Yorker, Joel has written, directed and produced numerous successful television projects for all the major networks covering a vast range of genres. Joel was on the creative team behind the groundbreaking docu-series "The Simple Life with Paris and Nicole" (FOX).He began his career as a writer working on specials for CBS (Sneak Peaks) ABC (Extreme Comedy) and FOX (Ally McBeal Special). He was then hired to write for The Donny and Marie talk show (SONY TELEVISION), where he stayed for two years.Known as someone who "can crack the code" of even the most difficult projects, Joel quickly moved up the ranks. He began producing and directing projects for VH1, NBC, FX?and E!, and series such as Invasion of the Hidden Cameras (FOX) and Adventures in Hollyhood (MTV). From there he went on to executive produce and direct The Nick Cannon Show (NICKELODEON), The Dave Sheridan Show (WB) and Smile You're Under Arrest (FOX).In 2010 Joel decided to move into development and began creating and selling his own projects. He partnered with Bunim/Murray and Authentic Entertainment on two of his original reality show ideas and sold a scripted show to SPIKE TV. Last year he opened his own company Mustered Entertainment and spearheaded the development of a new docu-series that he sold to Bravo. Additionally, he was the creative mind behind the highly successful Carl's Jr./Hardee's national hidden camera campaign.Joel Friedman said, "Up and down the line this is a very impressive group of people that have been assembled and I am excited and honored to be a part of this unique show."The Reality Dream TeamJoel Friedman - Executive produce/Show RunnerSteven Samblis - Executive Producer / Co-CreatorSteven, CEO and Founder of IC Places and the websites, brought together a team of proven production companies and people to create one of the most compelling TV shows airing on network TV this fall.?? Al Nelson - Executive Producer / Co-CreatorNelson, Founder and CEO EzVip.com, the website that allows you to reserve and pay for your bottle service at a nightclub in advance. (Think of it like the popular restaurant application Open Table, but for nightlife.) After three years he decided to pitch his idea on the show that features successful entrepreneurs like Mark Cuban (Dallas Mavericks owner), Daymond John (founder of FUBU clothing line), Kevin O'Leary (educational software), Barbara Corcoran (real estate) and Robert Hejavec (technology security) who try to outbid each other to invest their own money and get a piece of a new business. Al ended up with several offers but in the end accepted the offer from Cuban and John.First J ProductionsJOSHUA MANDEL ? Production Accountant / Executive ProducerBorn in Los Angeles, California. He graduated Landmark West and attended University of Southern California. While in high school, he had an internship at Boss Film Studios where he worked on such films as Starship Troopers, Air Force One, Desperate Measures, and Turbulence. He also assisted the multi Academy Award winner wizard Mr. Richard Edlund. After college, he started working as a production assistant on films such as Rebound, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, Little Miss Sunshine, Heartbreak Kid and the TV show The Loop. After working in production and post-production, he moved to?freelance production accounting. He worked as a production accountant on the films Tropic Thunder, Surrogates and Real Steel. He is currently working as a production supervisor on 21 and Over.?"First J Productions is proud to be a part of this great team. We aim to show the business side of the club scene and what it takes to make it a VIP night."... Joshua Mandel?Manolin VidVilla ?Manolin VidVilla Studios develops and produces a wide range of reality based programming, scripted series, international formats, syndication, talk shows, documentaries, video-on-demand, specials, sitcoms, web based interactive fare and made-for-TV movies, all in an effort to build a leadership position. The company focuses on key market segments outside the realm of the major studios by developing, producing, and delivering cost-effective programming to networks hungry for original programming."We are very excited to be joining the project. We look forward to co-producing a highly compelling docu-series around such a great new company as EzVip. Viewers will be captivated by the inner workings of the exclusive VIP club world, and with a point of view unparalleled by any other television series. With Al at the helm, the show also serves a direct-response for??to further launch their intellectual property for being the premiere online destination spot to book your VIP nightclub reservations."?Cal BoyingtonCAL BOYINGTON ? Executive ProducerCal Boyington launched his media shingle Manolin Studios in early 2008 in a strategic move to develop and produce his own fare. He also serves?as Executive Producer of HD Net's award-winning documentary series "Baker Boys," Comedy Central's much hyped new scripted comedy series "Workaholics," currently airing after "South Park," and "Trapped in Paradise," for VH-1.Boyington is an accomplished executive who, while forming Manolin, jointly served as the President of TV for QED International, a movie production/international sales company. Manolin sold numerous shows including: "Freshman" with Lil Romeo at MTV, "E.S.U." at Discovery, "R5 Sons" a family-docu at TLC, and "That's Rich" hosted by Mo Rocca at the E!. Manolin also produced a ground-breaking web-series for entitled "Sports Explorers."Prior to producing, Boyington was the Head of Paradigm's Alternative Television Division as well as a veteran talent agent at ICM for several years. As an agent, Boyington put together Animal Planet's hit show "Whale Wars" and ABC's "The Next Best Thing." Some of Boyington's other TV sales that debuted included, "Father Hood," the Snoop Dogg family reality sitcom on E! and "6 Months" at A&E, a show chronicling families as they dealt with ailing family members. He sold "Sunday Morning Shootout" to AMC, which ran for over 250 episodes and airs in several territories around the world.Additionally, Boyington participated in the sales of "Intervention" for A&E, "The Osbournes" for MTV, "Anna Nicole Show" for E!, A&E's "Sons of Hollywood," BET's "Baldwin Hills," "TV Land Awards," "US Poker Championship," "Knight School" with Coach Bobby Knight, and "Bound For Glory" for ESPN. He was integral in the success of "The Apprentice," "America's Next Top Model" and the revived "Last Comic Standing."In addition to Television development, Boyington has an indie-film in pre-production through Manolin titled, "The Pure Life," which won the American Zoetrope Award for Best Screenplay.Boyington has had consistent success in producing, packaging, and selling TV shows for Broadcast, and in series format development, acquisition and production. The Hollywood Reporter selected him for "The Next Generation of 2006." Boyington is a member in good standing of The Academy of Television Arts and NATPE. He is experienced in contract negotiations, analyzing market trends and capitalizing on global market opportunities. He has specific experience in leveraging advertising monies as?well as licensing and merchandising platforms for programs. High visibility?in the entertainment community with continued success in deriving partnerships and innovative?media solutions through extensive personal relationships.?JASON BERGENFELD ? Executive ProducerBorn and raised in Southern California, Jason has always had a passion for many aspects of multimedia programming. What started as watching sports and Saturday cartoons has turned into a career in television lasting more than a decade.Jason's creative abilities as well as his business sense have enabled him to become a leader in his field. Known as a go-getter, Jason started his career working for the Oscar Award Winning company Kopelson Entertainment, until moving into the music video space during the boom with FM Rocks.After moving back into television production, Jason produced shows for NBC, FOX, ABC, TruTV, GSN, BET, AOL TV, A & E, MSNBC, CCTV, Phoenix Television, and many more.Before joining forces with Manolin Studios, Jason worked as SVP of Development & Acquisitions with Xonger Global Media/C4 Pictures where they produced such hits has Baldwin Hills (BET), Barbershop 1 & 2 (MGM Studios), Meet Joe Jackson (A & E), and many more films and television programs.GREG GEROSKY ? Executive ProducerPrior to being an Executive Producer and partner of VidVilla LLC and Manolin VidVilla Studios LLC, Greg spent 5 years as a Producer and the Head of Post Production for Reveille Studios, now a division of Shine Group owned by Fox / Newscorp.Greg built a large post division for Reveille with over 50 edit bays including online/finishing in as many as 4 separate locations across Los Angeles.Greg has Produced and Co-Produced many shows including Masterchef USA (FOX), American Gladiators 1 & 2 (NBC), The Biggest Loser 12 (NBC) Tabatha's Takeover 1-4 (BRAVO), Shear Genius 1-4 (BRAVO), The Buried Life 1 & 2 (MTV), Losing It With Jillian Michaels (NBC), One Born Every Minute 1 & 2 (LIFETIME), Gone Too Soon (Documentary for the TV GUIDE CHANNEL), and numerous other TV programs. Greg has also contributed largely to dozens of Web series projects for MSN and Yahoo, and both scripted and non-scripted development.Prior to joining Reveille, Greg owned and operated a small production company based in South Florida producing local programming and commercial spots for local businesses. Greg is also a composer and has achieved several successes including a large national campaign for our nation's Border Patrol and underscore for dozens of Reveille shows.Product PlacementKaren S. Neasi One of the premiere executives in the world of product placement, Karen started off as the Executive Assistant to Kevin S. Bright (Bright/Kauffman/Crane Production), on Dream On, Friends, Veronica's Closet and Jesse. From there Karen moved into product placement for some of the most successful directors in Hollywood on films including; About IC Places:IC Places is a New Media company that produces weekly entertainment content for several different mediums.? In 2012 it hit a milestone of signing partnership agreements to place its content before more then 300 million people a month, giving the company one of the largest distributions foot prints on the planet.? This foot print includes online partnerships with Mevio.com and terrestrial partnerships which delivers its content to Checkout TV Network, HDTV Network, Dining Network, Bright House on demand and two upcoming new networks launching in July of this year. At the core, IC Places is a network of 350 city based entertainment websites. This foundation allows IC Places the unique advantage having a built-in fan based for the TV and New Media programs it produces.? Each IC Places City website offers a virtual keyhole view of life in each community. Every unique aspect of a city's social, business, and cultural life is available right at each city's IC Places homepage. IC Places provides the entire community a place to talk, do business and get connected. Businesses are given amazing tools to tell their stories in the best way possible and visitors get unfettered access to businesses, events and people in each city. To see one of the IC Places City sites in action, please visit .About Punch Television NetworksLaunched on Wednesday, October 19, 2011, shortly after Columbus Day, Punch TV is, in many ways, also an explorer. Instead of spending the normal costs of $100 million to launch, Punch TV spent $10 million. Rather than launching by airing re-runs of popular and loved shows, Punch TV offers 70% original programming to its viewers. And now, Punch TV Network extended its originality even further when in May of this year the company introduced its fall lineup of shows to prospective advertisers and/or their representatives. The success of the Up-Front resulted in commitments of twelve million dollars in advertising dollars to Punch TV's fall line-up of shows. At Up-Front, Punch TV Network introduced 17 of its roster of 36 new dramas, comedies, variety shows, talk shows, children's shows, and inspirational entertainment. The event was attended by a number of celebrities including Blair Underwood, Bill Duke, Dawnn Lewis, Obba Babatunde, Omar Gooding, Damian Hall, Fonzworth Bently, Kiki Shephard, Lorraine Toussaint, and many others.Punch TV Network, with a presence this fall in more than 100 cities, does, indeed, personify the spirit of independent television. Punch TV! "Are you thirsty yet?"IC Places Safe Harbor Statement This press release contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. These forward-looking statements are based on the current plans and expectations of management and are subject to a number of uncertainties and risks that could significantly affect the company's current plans and expectations, as well as future results of operations and financial condition. A more extensive listing of risks and factors that may affect the company's business prospects and cause actual results to differ materially from those described in the forward-looking statements can be found in the reports and other documents filed by the company with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The company undertakes no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.Contact Information: IC Places, Inc. Steven Samblis 407-442-0309 Ext. 2 Press Inquiries: ©2012 PR Newswire. All Rights Reserved. ?(WMBF) - There's a new queen of baby names.Isabella took the crown from last year's winner, Emma, to claim the top girl baby name of 2009.Jacob continued his run by holding onto the top boy name for the 11th year in a row over a new No. 2 for boys, Ethan.New to the top 10 this year for boys are Jayden and Noah, and for girls, Mia.To see all the top baby names for 2009, go to Social Security's website .Here are the top 10 boys and girls names for 2009:BoysGirls1.JacobIsabella2.EthanEmma3.MichaelOlivia4.AlexanderSophia5.WilliamAva6.JoshuaEmily7.DanielMadison8.JaydenAbigail9.NoahChloe10.AnthonyMiaA favorite feature of Social Security's baby names website is the "Change in Name Popularity" page.This year's winner for the biggest jump is Maliyah, which undoubtedly is related to the popularity of the First Family.Malia (the spelling used by the First Daughter), also is one of the top 10 fastest risers among girls names. Isla, the name of popular actress Isla Fisher (and wife of Sacha Baron Cohen - aka Borat) was the second fastest riser among girls.On the boy's side, Cullen had the biggest increase, likely attributable to the popular character Edward Cullen in the "Twilight" novels and movies.King came in as the No. 3 top mover for boys.The girl's name Marely, which interestingly had the third largest increase last year, had the biggest drop this year from No. 334 to 851.Mylee had the second biggest drop; Miley (as in Cyrus) also dropped in popularity.In the wake of controversies surrounding Lindsay Lohan, Lindsay dropped from No. 381 to 524.Brett, Jonas and Alvin are among the boy's names with the largest decreases.And despite the soaring popularity of singing trios - whether human brothers or the chipmunk variety - fewer people apparently are willing to name their sons Jonas or Alvin.With 69 baby Baracks born in 2009, Barack continues to move up the list to No. 1,993 from 2,424 in 2008, and 12,535 in 2007, but still lags well behind First Dog Bo at 782.Many patterns of recent years continued.Religious names continue to be very popular, including the girl names Heaven at No. 275 and Nevaeh (Heaven spelled backwards) at 34.Messiah was No. 663 for boys.An extraordinary 3.7 percent of the Top 1,000 boy names rhymed with the word "maiden" and names associated with cities, states, or countries were popular, particularly for girls.The Social Security website offers lists of baby names for each year since 1880. Social Security started compiling baby name lists in 1997.Check out on May 14 to see the most popular baby names for each state, as well as an exclusive video of Chubby Checker counting down the most popular names of the past decade.Copyright 2010 WMBF News. All rights reserved.?From Coker College: HARTSVILLE, SC - The Coker Lady Cobras soccer team took a hard loss at home on Thursday night, falling 8-0 to the Bulldogs of Wingate University. The loss drops Coker to 0-3 on the season, while Wingate improves to 2-0. Bulldog sophomore forward Liz Kinney (Moore, S.C.) earned a hat trick, while Kerstin Williams (Summerville, S.C.) added two goals. Also adding goals were Jordan Mayer (Williamsburg, Va.) and Chloe' Donaldson (Eagle Springs, N.C.). Kelsey McCormick (Hockessin, Del.), Megan Mastalerz (Elkridge, Md.), Tori Waldron (Elkridge, Md.), Mayer and Donladson all had assists in the match as well for Wingate. Wingate outshot Coker 29-1, including a 23-1 advantage in shots on goal. Wingate goalkeepers Catie Avery (East Hampton, Conn.) and Miriam Boucher (Calgary, Alberta) shared the shutout. Avery faced one shot and recorded one save. Coker junior goalkeeper Margaret McCoy (Columbia, S.C.) went the distance for the Lady Cobras. She allowed eight goals and notched 15 saves in 90 minutes. Coker will now take a break until, Tuesday, Sept. 15, when the Lady Cobras entertain USC Aiken for a 6:00 p.m. match. Related Item: ?By THOMAS ADAMSON AP Fashion Writer PARIS (AP) - Marc Jacobs, more than anyone, knows that it's not what you say but how you say it. The Louis Vuitton showman thus capped an incredibly strong Paris fashion week - with help from artist Daniel Buren - by building a life-size shopping mall inside the Louvre. Understatement is not a word in Jacobs' vocabulary, so a collaboration with the minimalist artist - who made the famed striped columns in Paris' Palais Royal - might have raised eyebrows. But Buren rose to the occasion. "(The Louvre) was already big, all I did was make it bigger," said Buren, with trademark humor. "It was others that called me a minimalist, not me." The sky's the limit when you're backed by Europe's richest man and LVMH-owner Bernard Arnault, with whom he mingled before the show. Meanwhile, Miuccia Prada, who herself presides over a lucrative fashion empire, felled a small forest in aid of her presentation for Miu Miu, one of the final day's other big shows. Fashion insiders clutched wooden invitations as they walked down a wooden "red carpet" and into the auditorium with a 30-meter (yard) wooden runway, and the show's huge wooden-tiered seating. There was some irony that the collection was held at Paris' grand Environmental Council. Paris Fashion Week designers are often described as show-stopping, but none more than Elie Saab. The Lebanese designer threw huge graphic chunks of moon rock down the catwalk as set, to evoke his more geometric theme. Unfortunately, one attendee didn't pick up on the visual props and tripped head over heels - slightly delaying the show. Trends on the ninth exhausting day of the season included prints - both graphic and colored - as well as sheer transparencies and cutouts. LOUIS VUITTON What do you get if you mix up the world's most famous checks and Paris' most famous stripes? The answer: Louis Vuitton, whose 1960s style spring-summer fashion show twinned the iconic checked Damier pattern with a set designed by artist Daniel Buren. Buren created four full-scale escalators, featuring his signature 8.7cm stripes, which wowed spectators inside. "It's exquisite, beautiful," said 29-year-old Christina Malaki. "What a spectacle." In fashion terms it was strong, with most of the 64 retro looks delivered in Mary Quant-style checks that made a bold optical statement in black and white, as well as browns, gray and leaf green. Slightly puffed rounded shoulders, miniskirts, beehives and a few exposed midriffs pointed to one thing: The swinging 60s are back. The silhouettes - often flat and loose- prioritized the Damier above the female form, which rippled nicely in skirts as the models, who walked in pairs, filed by with handbags. Louis Vuitton is a house that is proud of its tradition, but also likes to evolve. The collection saw the ubiquitous monogram banished for the first time. Instead, one recurrent feature was, so say the program notes, "the smallest sequins ever produced." Thousands of microscopic sequins brought a dazzling metallic shimmer to dresses and skirt suits, though when it was used on the blocked Damier pattern it was slightly too much. "It's all about being graphic. (Buren's escalators) are a mathematical equation," Jacobs told journalists after the show. Another math equation will come from the buoyant receipts from this, a highly saleable collection. It's a fair bet that by next year this bold check will be everywhere. MIU MIU Miu Miu's spring-summer 2013 show in Paris had a wintery vibe. Despite the slightly off-kilter season it was a slick display, with lashings of faux fur on coats and stoles with dyed patterning at the brand often seen as Miuccia Prada's baby sister offshoot. It picked up nicely on this season's fascination with prints as contrasting explosions on loose skirt suits - sometimes resembling the negative of a photograph. As ever, it remained demure, but interesting back features graced a few reversed boxy tops. Alongside looks in denim and the prints, it gave the clothes a distinctly cool edge which reached its peak in a few eclectic, asymmetrical pieces. Only a master like Prada can make a tiny strapped cropped camisole work underneath a thick fur coat, accessorized with leather gloves and jeweled Roman sandals. Uber-cool actress - and Miu Miu spokesperson - Chloe Sevigny watched from the front row. ELIE SAAB Elie Saab, master of the va-va-voom silhouette, broke out of his strict mold for his spring-summer 2013 show in Paris. The Lebanese designer must have been feeling in an adventurous mood: He dabbled in graphic details and floral prints in Wednesday's show. But never fear, his bread-and-butter traffic stopping dresses and sequins were still there - in cerulean blue and vermilion. After all, it's what his buyers and celebrity wearers such as singer Taylor Swift on the front row expect and love. But the palette this season was updated to include a beautiful cobalt, which in turn exploded into fluorescent color prints on gowns, some full length, others above the knee, that fluttered by in silk muslin. Saab included the odd peplum and some '90s looks with black-and-white geometric lines. The catwalk set of graphic angular moon rocks signaled to fashion insiders even before the show started that Saab would move in this direction. ______ Thomas Adamson can be followed at http:/ /Twitter.com/ThomasAdamsonAP Copyright 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.?Information contained on this page is provided by companies via press release distributed through PR Newswire, an independent third-party content provider. PR Newswire, WorldNow and this Station make no warranties or representations in connection therewith.SOURCE MiH Jeans LONDON, Aug. 23, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- MiH Jeans announces the launch of its AW12 Collection, available in its entirety exclusively on MiH Jeans' E-commerce site. (Photo: ) Founder and Creative Director Chloe Lonsdale uses directional silhouettes in cool vintage denims to translate the brand's British heritage into something modern and fresh.? Modeled by Eliza Cummings, the campaign celebrates iconic denim in a way that is uniquely MiH ? feminine, simple and effortless. Inspired by the winter sea, its endless horizon, and the sharp cold northern light, the collection captures the essence of the season with its raw colour palette. The elements can be seen in a bleached out colour palette of winter whites, chalks and creams; mixed with dark neutrals - grey, chocolate, navy. Deep hues of hunter green, teal and rose red provide a contrast alongside pale sea greens and soft pinks.Notable new styles include the , and the ? vintage inspired designed to be cool and elegant.? As the brand continues to grow, the MiH Collection expands with the introduction of knitwear for AW12. Notable collection pieces include a wool Poncho designed with the perfect combination of warmth and attitude, a Silver Biker Jacket made from printed leather and a men's inspired wool Blazer tailored for a feminine fit. Sourced from the best of their kind producers in limited runs, the MiH Collection is an evolving selection of Chloe's dream pieces designed with an authenticity that makes them both timeless and cool.Every item will be delivered in a beautiful, exclusive tote bag in a specially designed box. The MiH Jeans website ships worldwide, offers free returns to UK and US customers and has a customer service team on hand to help find the perfect fit.?About MiH creates great fitting, beautifully made, sexy jean jeans?that you'll wear forever. Established in London in 1969, valuing top quality and premium design above all else, we have stayed true to our authentic heritage in everything we do.??Relaunched by Chloe Lonsdale, goddaughter of the original owner and daughter of London's 'Blue Jean King', Jean Machine Founder Tony Lonsdale, the expertise has been passed through the generations, not to mention an incredible archive of images depicting Chloe's Mum, the face of the brand in the 70s.The celebrity following has been constant, from the early days with Jane Birkin photographed wearing them around town, to our modern day style icons including?Claudia Schiffer and Gwyneth Paltrow. ?©2012 PR Newswire. All Rights Reserved. ?Information contained on this page is provided by companies via press release distributed through PR Newswire, an independent third-party content provider. PR Newswire, WorldNow and this Station make no warranties or representations in connection therewith.SOURCE MiH JeansLONDON, July 24, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- MiH Jeans announces the launch of its Pre-AW12 Collection, available in its entirety exclusively on MiH Jeans' E-commerce site. (Photo: ?) This season, designer Chloe Lonsdale finds confidence in simplicity, looking to Judy Linn's photographs of Patti Smith for inspiration.? Smith's innately cool, androgynous, rock n' roll vibe informs a collection of vintage, directional denim that translates 70s edge into something effortlessly chic.?Notable new styles include the Phoebe: a jean in which masculine meets feminine.??A men's , it has a perfectly slouched leg and an unfinished cuff.??Alongside the Phoebe comes the Jane: a distressed cropped jean with a feminine flattering fit; the Casablanca: a flare for flats; and finally, the A-Line Topanga: something entirely new in denim styling.?Masculine inspired are softened with the most feminine of prints: the Fleur de Lys, and sporty separates are made delicate with the finest of fabrics.?Transitional pieces designed to wear with jeans as Summer fades to Autumn complete the collection: a leather jacket, a fringed gilet and a knitted poncho.?Every item will be delivered in a beautiful, exclusive tote bag in a specially designed box: subtle on the outside; heaven on the inside.??The MiH Jeans website shops worldwide, offers free returns to UK and US customers and has a customer service team on hand to help find the perfect fit.?About MiHMiH Jeans creates great fitting, beautifully made, sexy jean ?that you'll wear forever.??Established in London in 1969, valuing top quality and premium design above all else, we have stayed true to our authentic heritage in everything we do. ?Relauched by Chloe Lonsdale, goddaughter of the original owner and daughter of London's 'Blue Jean King', Jean Machine Founder Tony Lonsdale, the expertise has been passed through the generations, not to mention an incredible archive of images depicting Chloe's Mum, the face of the brand in the 70s.The celebrity following has been constant, from the early days with Jane Birkin photographed wearing them around town, to our modern day style icons including?Claudia Schiffer and Gwyneth Paltrow.??©2012 PR Newswire. All Rights Reserved. ?Information contained on this page is provided by companies via press release distributed through PR Newswire, an independent third-party content provider. PR Newswire, WorldNow and this Station make no warranties or representations in connection therewith.SOURCE Digital Cinema Destinations Corp.Exclusive independent films debut at Digiplex Destinations and other select theatersWESTFIELD, N.J., Sept. 12, 2012 /PRNewswire/ --?? (NasdaqCM:DCIN), a fast-growing motion picture exhibitor dedicated to transforming movie theaters into digital entertainment centers, announces the launch of the first of its DigiNext series of diverse curated independent films. The DigiNext series starts on September 21, 2012, with the controversial documentary Cut Poison Burn- a film that illuminates America's "War on Cancer" from the patient's side. It follows the frustrating journeys of critically ill patients and their families as they try to navigate the confusing and dangerous maze of treatment and encounter formidable obstacles posed by the status quo. A compelling critique of the influence of medical monopolies, the power of pharmaceutical companies and government agencies, Cut Poison Burn is essential viewing for anyone concerned about cancer care.The narrative centers on the Navarro's, a family struggling to keep their young son, Thomas, alive. The film ultimately expresses hope for a new paradigm of prevention, medical freedom and acceptance of highly tailored therapies in order to usher in a more enlightened era.Cut Poison Burn's theatrical release coincides with the August introduction of HR 6342, the "Compassionate Freedom of Choice Act" offered by Congressman Ron Paul of Texas and co-Sponsored by Congressmen Paul Brown of Georgia and Richard Hanna of New York. The film has been cited as supporting material for the bill and has been received with serious consideration by the medical community.On September 21, viewers at Digiplex Destinations locations in Bloomfield, Connecticut; Cranford, New Jersey; Bloomsburg, Camp Hill, Reading, Selinsgrove and Williamsport, Pennsylvania will have the opportunity to engage in a post-screening digital forum with the film'sWriter/Producer Lou Cimino; Co-Producer Charlie Sadoff; and subjects Donna and Jim Navarro. Larry Meistrich, Chairman & Founder of Nehst Studios will be moderator (details at ). In addition to seven Digiplex locations, Cut Poison Burn will also be featured at New York metropolitan area locations of Clearview Cinemas in Bergenfield, Hackettstown, Kinnelon, Ocean Township and Parsippany, New Jersey and Port Washington, New York (details at ). The film will also be presented at UltraStar Cinemas locations in Scottsdale and Surprise, Arizona and Anaheim, Cathedral City, Oceanside, San Diego and Temecula, California (details at )."Digiplex recognizes the terrific opportunities that the digital transition is creating for innovative exhibitors. The opportunity for our audiences to view compelling movies fresh from the film festival circuit and engage with the filmmakers after a screening in real time is truly exciting. The DigiNext series also benefits the independent filmmakers who would otherwise find it very difficult to find an outlet for their work at conventional theaters. We especially appreciate partnering with Clearview Cinemas in the Greater New York area and UltraStar Cinemas in Southern California and Arizona on this first DigiNext theatrical release," said Digiplex Chairman and CEO Bud Mayo. Tagged as movies that change you, the DigiNext series showcases a new film every month covering a wide range of subject matter. Other upcoming films currently scheduled in the series include:The Standbys, opening October 19, provides an intimate look behind the Broadway curtain at the lives of Understudies and Standbys - ready, on a moment's notice, to take the lead.Chloe and Keith's Wedding, opening November 9, is a mockumentarythat captures all of the hijinks at a crazy wedding through "found footage" shot by the wedding videographers and the guests. A clip from the film vent viral online and has already been viewed by more than 100 million people.Standing Silent, opening January 25, 2013, presents the groundbreaking work of Phil Jacobs, editor of the Washington Jewish Post and his expose of sexual abuse in the Orthodox Jewish Community.Taiwan Oyster, opening February 22, 2013, is a dark comedy and quixotic road trip that traces the steps of two ex-patriot Americans on a very strange mission to assure the final rest of a person they barely knew. ????About Digital Cinema Destinations Corporation () Digital Cinema Destinations Corp. (NasdaqCM: DCIN) is dedicated to transforming its movie theaters into interactive entertainment centers. The Company provides consumers with uniquely satisfying experiences, combining state-of-the-art digital technology with engaging, dynamic content that far transcends traditional cinematic fare. The Company's customers enjoy live sports events, concerts, conferences, operas, videogames, auctions, fashion shows and the very best major motion pictures. The DigiNext series is a joint venture between the Company and Nehst Studios, an independent motion picture distributor headed by industry veteran Larry Meistrich. Digiplex operates eight cinemas and 73 screens in PA, NJ and CT.? You can connect with Digiplex via , , and .©2012 PR Newswire. All Rights Reserved. ?Information contained on this page is provided by companies via press release distributed through PR Newswire, an independent third-party content provider. PR Newswire, WorldNow and this Station make no warranties or representations in connection therewith.SOURCE KCD Digital NEW YORK, Sept. 6, 2012 /PRNewswire/ --?Three international brands ? SEE BY CHLOE, ICB and PIERRE BALMAIN ? will debut their Spring/Summer 2013 collections to press and buyers in an online-only format during New York Fashion Week, building on the breakthrough trend started by the introduction of KCD's Digital Fashion Shows platform last season."New York now sets the pace for newness between digital and fashion," says Rachna Shah, Managing Director of KCD Digital.? "From business-to-business platforms, like Digital Fashions Shows and Fashion GPS, to live-streaming and runway social media applications, the American industry is pushing the digital envelope further and further each season."Shah explained how the three pre-taped Digital Fashion Shows provide "online shows for the industry without boundaries:" See by Chloe was taped in Paris, ICB in Brooklyn, and Pierre Balmain in Beijing.? All three shows will debut for invite-only press and buyers online during New York Fashion Week. Easily accessible, the ability to watch a Digital Fashion Show is at the tip of the viewer's fingers, by way of computer, iPad, or iPhone.? The shows can be seen in a cab en route to a live show at Lincoln Center; by a newspaper reporter in mid-America without a travel budget to attend New York Fashion Week; or at the desk side of a European retailer. Some may even like to watch it in the quiet comfort of their weekend home, as preferred by a Vogue.com reporter last season."Fashion is embracing all aspects of digital ? the forward movement of technology mirrors fashion at its best," said Shah.*Rachna Shah, Managing Director of KCD Digital, is a spokesperson for Digital Fashion Shows, and is available for interviews regarding the development of digital in the fashion industry.*Please contact Alexandra Crutchfield, 212 590 5119, Schedule and Invite Request Contacts for KCD's Digital Fashion Shows: See by Chloe: September 7, 2012, 9:00 AM Lauren Paris? Pierre Balmain: September 10, 2012, 9:00 AM Elaine Azlin? ICB: September 11, 2012, 10:00 AM Nicky Deam ©2012 PR Newswire. All Rights Reserved. ?- New Specials and Returning Favorites Make PBS the Place to Be forGreat TV for the Whole Family This Holiday Season -ARLINGTON, Va., Nov. 30 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- New holiday specials featuring Wynton Marsalis, Joshua Bell and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir highlight PBSa?? primetime schedule this holiday season, while PBS KIDSAR and PBS KIDS GO!sm celebrate the winter season with episodes featuring Clifford, Arthur and other favorite characters. PBS is a home for the holidays for the whole family this season.(Photo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20071203/DC08414 )Broadcast PremieresLIVE FROM LINCOLN CENTER a??Jazz @ Lincoln Center: Red Hot Holiday Stompa??Monday, December 10, 8:00-10:00 p.m. ETThis annual holiday concert, hosted by trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, is an evening of joyous music and storytelling featuring jazz musicians who bring Big Easy-style holiday cheer to the Big Apple.L.A. HOLIDAY CELEBRATION 2007Monday, December 10, 10:00-11:00 p.m. ET From rhythm and blues, East L.A.-style, to Cambodian court dance, this music and dance special reflects the remarkably varied cultural mosaic of Los Angeles, rarely experienced on national television.CHRISTMAS WITH THE MORMON TABERNACLE CHOIR FEATURING SISSELWednesday, December 19, 9:00-10:00 p.m. ET; rpt. Monday, December 24, 9:00-10:00 p.m. ETEuropean singing sensation Sissel joins the renowned Mormon Tabernacle Choir and the Orchestra at Temple Square in this yeara??s concert.CHRISTMAS AT ST. OLAF: WHERE PEACE AND LOVE AND HOPE ABIDEWednesday, December 19, 10:00-11:00 p.m. ETThis Christmas special features the renowned choirs and orchestra of St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota.CHRISTMAS AT BELMONT (2007)Monday, December 24, 10:00-11:00 p.m. ETa??American Idola?? finalist Melinda Doolittle hosts a program featuring a Christmas repertoire ranging from traditional carols to classical masterworks to lighthearted secular songs, in Nashvillea??s new Schermerhorn Symphony Center.LIVE FROM LINCOLN CENTER a??New York Philharmonic New Yeara??s Eve: Joshua Bella??s Romantic Violina??Monday, December 31, 8:00-10:00 p.m. ETPBS rings in the New Year in style, as acclaimed violinist Joshua Bell joins the New York Philharmonic in a live concert from Avery Fisher Hall. GREAT PERFORMANCES a??From Vienna: The New Yeara??s Celebration 2008a?? Tuesday, January 1, 2:30-4:00 p.m. ET and 8:00-9:30 p.m. ETPBS returns to Viennaa??s Musikverein for its 24th-annual New Yeara??s Day celebration with the Vienna Philharmonic and host Walter Cronkite.WORDS AND MUSIC BY JERRY HERMANTuesday, January 1, 9:30-11:00 p.m. ETThis special chronicles the life and career of one of the American musical theatera??s iconic figures: Jerry Herman, the composer and lyricist of the smash hit shows Hello, Dolly!, Mame and La Cage aux Folles.CELTIC WOMAN: A CHRISTMAS CELEBRATIONDecember 2007 (check local listings)Singers Chloe, Lisa, Meav, Orla and fiddler Mairead perform popular classics such as a??White Christmas,a?? a??Carol of the Bells,a?? a??Little Drummer Boy,a?? a??O Holy Nighta?? and a??Let It Snowa?? in Dublina??s prestigious Helix Centre. NORTHERN LIGHTS: AN EVENING WITH SISSEL AND FRIENDSDecember 2007 (check local listings)This vibrant new PBS special brings together one of the brightest talents of the 21st century a?” the lovely and popular Sissel a?” with acclaimed tenor Jose Carreras in the 17th-century Norwegian village of Roros, where little has changed since 1650.Encore PresentationsNATURE a??Christmas in Yellowstone,a?? (Repeat)Sunday, December 23, 2007, 8:00-9:00 p.m. ETBreathtaking landscapes frame intimate scenes of wolves and coyotes, elk and bison, and bears and otters in this special that takes a look at a holiday season of a different sort a?” in the great winter world of Yellowstone.MR. CHRISTMAS (Repeat)December 2007 (check local listings)This uplifting holiday movie centers around a young father, Joel, who cana??t afford to buy his five-year-old daughter the bicycle shea??s expecting from Santa Claus.ONCE UPON A SLEIGH RIDE (Repeat)December 2007 (check local listings)This film chronicles the life and work of a??Sleigh Ridea?? composer Leroy Anderson (1908-1975) through interviews with colleagues, family members and others who knew him. Find hi-res images and more information about PBS holiday programming on PBS PressRoom at http://pressroom.pbs.org/programs/pbs_holiday_2007.About PBSPBS is a media enterprise that serves 355 public noncommercial television stations and reaches nearly 73 million people each week through on-air and online content. Bringing diverse viewpoints to television and the Internet, PBS provides high-quality documentary and dramatic entertainment, and consistently dominates the most prestigious award competitions. PBS is a leading provider of digital learning content for pre-K-12 educators and offers a broad array of other educational services. PBSa?? premier kidsa?? TV programming and Web site, PBS KIDS Online (www.pbskids.org), continue to be parentsa?? and teachersa?? most trusted learning environments for children. More information about PBS is available at www.pbs.org, one of the leading dot-org Web sites on the Internet. SOURCE PBS?Governor Rendell says National Report Underscores Importance of Continued State Investment in Pennsylvania's StudentsHARRISBURG, Pa., Aug. 19 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Citing a national report that found Pennsylvania is the only state in the nation to make across-the-board academic gains from 2002 through 2008, Governor Edward G. Rendell and actor/education advocate Bill Cosby today joined school leaders from across the state to urge continued state investment in education.The Governor said a new report from the Center for Education Policy, or CEP, a leading national educational research organization, identified Pennsylvania as the only state to see increases in student achievement in elementary, middle and high school from 2002 to 2008."This report confirms that our investments in student achievement are paying off and making us a more competitive state," Governor Rendell said. "We need to continue to make these investments and build on this success, especially in tough economic times, rather than retreat as some would prefer."To recognize the students and educators who made the achievement possible, Governor Rendell and Dr. Cosby took part in a rally in the Capitol Rotunda that featured representatives of many of Pennsylvania's top-performing school districts. They were joined by Jack Jennings, president and chief executive officer of CEP.The CEP report, which examined reading and math performance, found Pennsylvania was the only state to:??In addition, Pennsylvania is one of only eight states with a "moderate to large" increase in the percentage of students performing on grade level in reading and math at the elementary, middle and high school levels.????Governor Rendell noted these gains would not have been possible without an historic funding commitment at the state level."With proof-positive that our strategies are working, it is deeply troubling that Republicans in the General Assembly want to cut more than a billion dollars in state funding for education from our proposed budget," the Governor said. "We simply cannot afford to balance the budget on the backs of our students and local property taxpayers."Robert Falk, superintendent of McKean County's Otto-Eldred School District, credited increased state funding for his district's gains. He said 73 percent of the district's students are on grade level today in reading and math, compared to just 41 percent of students in 2002."It took hard work to make those gains - and it took new state funding," Superintendent Falk said. "We need the state to continue to live up to its commitment so we can continue to increase student achievement. That is why it's so important for the Legislature to pass the right budget, one that provides at least a $300 million increase in the basic education subsidy and does not roll back the state commitment."For more information on the CEP report, visit www.cep-dc.org. For more information on the governor's budget proposal, visit www.pa.gov.The Rendell administration is committed to creating a first-rate public education system, protecting our most vulnerable citizens and continuing economic investment to support our communities and businesses. To find out more about Governor Rendell's initiatives and to sign up for his newsletter, visit www.governor.state.pa.us.EDITOR'S NOTE: The Center on Education Policy's news release on this report follows:Pennsylvania Shows Broad, Consistent Improvement in Test ScoresOnly State with Rising Test Scores Across the BoardHARRISBURG, PA -- August 18, 2009 -- Student achievement has risen across the board in Pennsylvania according to a 50-state study of test results by the Center on Education Policy (CEP), an independent nonprofit organization. From as early as 2002 to 2008, Pennsylvania showed gains on its state reading and mathematics tests at grades 4, 8 and 11, the Washington, D.C.-based group found. Pennsylvania also made improvements at the basic, proficient and advanced levels of student achievement.Pennsylvania was the only state in the CEP study with rising test scores across the board -- at all three grade levels and all three achievement levels in both reading and math. Twenty-five states, including Pennsylvania, had the three or more years of comparable test data needed to analyze trends at all the grades, achievement levels, and subjects covered by the study. The other 25 states did not have as complete a set of trends because they had made changes in their testing programs within the past three years that affected the comparability of their data."Not only is it impressive that Pennsylvania's schools have made such consistent improvement since 2002, but they also show gains at the high school level where nationally there is a serious problem," said Jack Jennings, president and chief executive officer of CEP.While many states showed across-the-board gains at the elementary and middle school levels, Pennsylvania was one of only five states to demonstrate gains in high school at all three achievement levels and both subjects (out of 25 states with necessary data). Among all states, gains were less prevalent at the high school level."The most important point of this analysis is that Pennsylvania has made solid progress in test scores between 2002 and 2008," emphasized Jennings. "Pennsylvania's results look good in our study, and the state is also in the top tier of states in its performance on the National Assessment of Educational Progress." Comparisons with other states have to be done carefully and include information in addition to test results, Jennings noted, because "every state has a different test, different cut scores, different curriculum standards, and different demographics."For three years, CEP has been conducting a unique study of all 50 states' test results in reading/English language arts and math. This multi-year research, supported by charitable foundations and advised by a diverse panel of national experts, is the most comprehensive analysis ever done of state test results. The full report from CEP and profiles of test score trends for all 50 states are available on CEP's Web site at cep-dc.org. The report, the first in a series of CEP publications on achievement trends to be released this year, is titled, State Test Score Trends Through 2007-08, Part 1: Is the Emphasis on "Proficiency" Shortchanging Higher- and Lower-Achieving Students?To request a copy of the report or to speak with Jack Jennings, head of CEP, please contact Chloe Louvouezo at 202-955-9450 ext. 320 or at clouvouezo@communicationworks.com.SOURCE Pennsylvania Office of the Governor?Information contained on this page is provided by companies via press release distributed through PR Newswire, an independent third-party content provider. PR Newswire, WorldNow and this Station make no warranties or representations in connection therewith.SOURCE Tesco EntertainmentLONDON, July 23, 2012 /PRNewswire/ --If your little ones can't get enough Disney in their lives they'll love the latest adventure from Tinker Bell and the gang in Pixie Hollow Games, available exclusively at now for just ￡5.Featuring the voices of Lucy Liu, Anjelica Huston, Megan Hilty, Brenda Song and Jane Horrocks, Pixie Hollow Games is to buy to get your kids excited about sports events taking place around the world this summer and is only available to buy from Tesco Entertainment.Pixie Hollow Games is a story of friendship, perseverance and honesty, focusing on the garden fairies as they prepare for the Pixie Hollow Games: an Olympic-style event that pits all the fairies of Never Land against each other. Over the years the garden fairies have made an unfortunate habit of finishing in last place, but Rosetta (Megan Hilty) and Chloe (Brenda Song) are determined to change that tradition at this year's games.In order to be crowned champions of the games, the fairies will have to overcome not only the other fairies of Never Land, but the determined reigning titleholders, the Storm Fairies, who aren't prepared to let go of the top spot.With the fairies locked in competition and sports that include dragonfly water skiing, mouse polo and leapfrogging, is a hilarious thrill-ride with a moral tale that is sure to capture the hearts of young children and parents alike.Pixie Hollow Games is just one of the many excellent to order from Tesco Entertainment now, where the year's top films are also available to pre-order. Each pre-order is protected by our Pre-Order Price Promise, so that if the price at the point of order changes on the day of release you will pay the lowest price."Tesco Entertainment also know how important it is for our customers to receive their pre-order products promptly and so we strive to have pre-orders with customers on the day of release.Tesco Entertainment is your hub for entertainment shopping online: with one of the largest selections of cheap and competitively priced DVDs, Blu-rays, CDs, MP3s and games around - no one does entertainment like Tesco Entertainment.About Tesco Entertainment:Tesco Entertainment () is the portal for Tesco's wide selection of films, DVDs, Blu-rays, games and CDs. With exclusive deals, great prices, free delivery across the UK, Clubcard points and outstanding service, Tesco Entertainment is the best destination for all your entertainment needs.©2012 PR Newswire. All Rights Reserved. ?Information contained on this page is provided by companies via press release distributed through PR Newswire, an independent third-party content provider. PR Newswire, WorldNow and this Station make no warranties or representations in connection therewith.SOURCE Rebuilding Together WASHINGTON, Aug. 21, 2012 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ --?Rebuilding Together, a national nonprofit who believes in a safe and healthy home for every person, was awarded a grant from the Corporation for National and Community Service (CNCS) to continue the AmeriCorps program Rebuilding Together CapacityCorps.(Logo: )Rebuilding Together CapacityCorps is a National*Direct AmeriCorps program with 65 full-time members serving in 35 local affiliates in 19 states. Rebuilding Together AmeriCorps members build the capacity of grassroots Rebuilding Together programs so that they become sustainable, effective and efficient in helping additional low-income homeowners in need. As developing housing preservation leaders, these AmeriCorps members serve essential roles in building the capacity of their host sites in areas such as recruiting and managing volunteers, performing direct home repairs, building community partnerships, and creating new programs. The 2012-13 CapacityCorps program marks the fifth consecutive year Rebuilding Together has received AmeriCorps Funding. Through the support of CNCS over the past five years, Rebuilding Together AmeriCorps members have helped repair over 14,000 low-income homes with the support of 56,000 volunteers. "I have gained a new understanding of the housing difficulties in our country, but also of the solutions we can provide for these issues," said Chloe Morel, two-term AmeriCorps member at Rebuilding Together Silicon Valley. "To me, CapacityCorps is a life-changing experience in itself. I have connected with other AmeriCorps members, who I am confident will be the next generation of housing leaders."August 15, 2012 marked the first day of service for Rebuilding Together AmeriCorps members at their local affiliates. They will serve more than 1,600 homeowners this year by providing critical repairs and modifications to returning and disabled veterans, low-income families in need, and older Americans needing assistance with aging in place.To learn more about Rebuilding Together CapacityCorps program, visit ABOUT REBUILDING TOGETHERRebuilding Together believes that everyone deserves to live in a safe and healthy home. Our focus provides critical repairs, accessibility modifications and energy efficient upgrades to low-income homes and community centers at no cost to service recipients. Our impact extends beyond the individuals served to revitalize and stabilize vulnerable neighborhoods and communities across the country. Our 200 local affiliates complete 10,000 rebuild projects a year thanks to the efforts of nearly 200,000 volunteers from corporate partners, skilled trades professionals and everyday good citizens. Join us - visit . You can also follow Rebuilding Together on Twitter @rebldgtogthr or become a fan on Facebook at Facebook.com/RebuildingTogether.??©2012 PR Newswire. All Rights Reserved. ?Information contained on this page is provided by companies via press release distributed through PR Newswire, an independent third-party content provider. PR Newswire, WorldNow and this Station make no warranties or representations in connection therewith.SOURCE The JamesRENOWNED STYLIST AND TRAVEL + LEISURE FASHION DIRECTOR TAPPED TO SELECT STYLISH ACCESSORIES FOR GUESTS OF THE JAMES NEW YORK NEW YORK, Aug. 13, 2012 /PRNewswire/ --? The James New York is proud to introduce its newest guest amenity - ? curated by Mimi Lombardo. Building upon The James' design-centric roots, the hotel has developed a new concept bringing fashion stylist-selected pieces directly into guest suites. Partnering with renowned celebrity and editorial stylist darling, Mimi Lombardo, the hotel will provide access to a curated collection of style-driven accessories as well as access to Mimi herself for personalized shopping excursions (by appointment). "I was thrilled to be asked by The James New York to act as their hotel stylist," said Mimi Lombardo. "The James brand is all about refined and elegant style that is also accessible and au courant. The items I selected to represent those traits are ideally-suited to The James guest and to the hotel's overall design aesthetic."Mimi's signature style is highlighted within the travel-centric offerings in this collection, which will consist of seasonally relevant selections including:Guests can purchase the curated items directly from their suite or by consulting with the concierge in the Sky Lobby. These fashion-forward pieces move style beyond the hotel and onto the streets of New York and beyond.Stylist-to-the-stars Mimi Lombardo works with celebrities such as Rachel Weisz, Sheryl Crow and Chloe Sevigny. Additionally, top magazines such as Travel + Leisure and T, The New York Times Style Magazine also turn to Mimi for her expertise.The introduction of the Stylist Collection will be followed by similar fashion-oriented initiatives at The James Chicago and The James Royal Palm (opening in Miami Fall 2012) in the future. It rounds out The James New York's commitment to fashion-forward thinking ? the property opened in August 2010 with uniforms designed by fashion wunderkind Andrew Buckler and, since opening, has hosted fashion events with Philip Lim, Betsy Johnson and Chris Benz, among others. ABOUT THE JAMES NEW YORK The James New York debuted in September 2010 anchoring the southwest corner of Grand and Thompson Streets in SoHo. In continuation of the brand's support for the arts, The James New York features an exclusive, proprietary collection by local emerging artists on each of their 14 guestroom floors. Unique event spaces and impeccable attention to detail are found throughout. The hotel boasts the highly acclaimed restaurant David Burke Kitchen in addition to a rooftop bar and lounge, Jimmy; an Urban Garden designed by horticulturist Rebecca Cole; a rooftop pool; exclusive uniform designs by Andrew Buckler; a Penthouse Loft designed by Piet Boon; and a captivating Sky Lobby accessible by a signature glass elevator. ?Follow The James New York on Twitter, @JameshotelNY and Facebook, ? ABOUT THE JAMES In the realm of hospitality, The James hotels, with ideally situated?locations in Chicago, New York and?The James Royal Palm in Miami (opening late 2012), are authentic, warmly modern, residentially-styled luxury hotels that deliver an artistically inspired blend of exquisitely hand-crafted design surrounded by environmentally thoughtful details. The James defines luxury liberated from tradition; this core philosophy is evident in the properties' residential yet social?environment and personal, intuitive service. .? ??©2012 PR Newswire. All Rights Reserved. ?By MIKE HOUSEHOLDER Associated Press VASSAR, Mich. (AP) - Army Staff Sgt. Travis Mills had been a lot of places since losing his four limbs in Afghanistan. The one place he hadn't been was where people knew him best. He finally returned to his Michigan hometown this week - six months after the explosion that cost him his arms and legs - to serve as the grand marshal of his old high school's homecoming parade. "I didn't come to Vassar yet, because I wasn't ready for people to see me without my legs. ... Because in Vassar, everybody knows everybody," Mills said in an interview hours before the parade Thursday. "Great town, but I just wasn't comfortable with them seeing me in a wheelchair." Mills is still undergoing rehabilitation at Walter Reed Medical Center in Washington, D.C. But he's been able to get out and about. In the past few weeks alone, he took part in a 5K benefit walk in New York and celebrated his daughter's first birthday on the base at Fort Bragg, N.C. His hometown has pulled for him from afar. Hair salons, American Legion posts and many others hosted fundraisers this spring and summer as the small, tight-knit community rallied around him. Hundreds of people waving American flags jammed into Vassar's downtown to catch a glimpse of Mills at the parade Thursday evening. Mills, his wife, Kelsey, and their 1-year-old daughter, Chloe, served as the grand marshals. Mills stood tall in the back of a Jeep, smiling and waving his left prosthetic arm as people screamed his name. He occasionally yelled out the name of someone he recognized. Mills barely suffered a scratch during his first two tours of Afghanistan, but during his third, on April 10, he placed a bag of ammunition down on an improvised explosive device. The resulting blast tore through the athlete's muscular 6-foot-3 frame. Since then, he's undergone a grueling series of medical procedures and been pushed to the limits by medical professionals intent on seeing him pull through his rare injury. A half a year since Mills' life was changed forever, it's difficult to find a tree, lamppost or telephone pole without a yellow or red, white and blue ribbon in this bucolic community of 2,700 that sits 90 miles north of Detroit. A downtown bank proudly displays an electronic sign that welcomes Mills as a "hometown hero," as do dozens of other businesses. "It was a lot to take in," Mills said of the signs of support he saw on the drive from the airport to his parents' home. "Now, I just have to make sure not to let everyone down." At a bonfire after Thursday's parade, Mills those gathered that that his "family was really touched" by the love they've received. "Coming into town was amazing," he said. Paul Wojno, Vassar High's principal, said the turnout for the parade and bonfire was "nothing short of fantastic," noting organizers handed out 1,500 flags and not everyone along the route had one. Mills also plans to address the crowd before Friday night's Vassar High football game. The 25-year-old is one of only a few servicemen to lose all four limbs in combat during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and survive. "This is my new normal, and it's all about how I adjust to it," he said moments after using his prosthetic legs to walk from the living room to the sun room at his childhood home. "There's no good that's gonna come from me sitting there and wondering, 'Why'd this happen? Why me? Now what do I do?' The answer's right in front of you: It happened because it happened." Mills almost didn't come home at all. Within 20 seconds of the IED explosion, a fast-working medic affixed tourniquets to all four of Mills' limbs to ensure he wouldn't bleed to death. The medic was able to save Mills' life but not his limbs. In the days since, Mills has worked out daily at Walter Reed, getting used to the prosthetics, but also strengthening his body for the rigors of what's to come once he leaves. Mills was told quadruple amputees require at least 2? years of recovery and rehabilitation. But his goal is to be out of Walter Reed and back home in less than half that. "I am going to be out of here" in a year, he boldly told his doctor. After that, he isn't sure what the future holds. He might go back to school, or perhaps work as an instructor at Fort Bragg. Before any of that, however, he said he's looking forward to spending an "emotional" two days with hundreds of his closest friends in Vassar. ___ Follow Mike Householder on Twitter at Copyright 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.?Information contained on this page is provided by companies via press release distributed through PR Newswire, an independent third-party content provider. PR Newswire, WorldNow and this Station make no warranties or representations in connection therewith.SOURCE Sony PicturesCAST MEMBERS AND FILMMAKERS FROM BOTH FILMS WILL BE IN ATTENDANCECULVER CITY, Calif., Sept. 19, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Sony Pictures will debut exclusive first looks at the highly anticipated upcoming films Carrie and Evil Dead at New York Comic Con on Saturday, October 13th from the Javits Center.The panel presentations for Carrie and Evil Dead will take place between 3:45pm-4:45pm on October 13th.? The Carrie panel will include the film's stars, Chloe Grace Moretz and Julianne Moore, along with producer Kevin Misher and director Kimberly Peirce.? Evil Dead's panel will include the film's star, Jane Levy ("Suburgatory"), producer (and star of original) Bruce Campbell and director, Fede Alvarez. Carrie is a reimagining of the classic horror tale about Carrie White (Chloe Grace Moretz),?a shy girl outcast by her peers and sheltered by her deeply religious mother (Julianne Moore), who unleashes telekinetic terror on her small town after being pushed too far at her senior prom.?Based on the best-selling novel by Stephen King and directed by Kimberly Peirce with a screenplay by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa.? The film will be released nationwide on March 15, 2013.In the much anticipated remake of the 1981 cult-hit horror film,?Evil Dead finds five twenty-something friends holed up in a remote cabin. ?When they discover a Book of the Dead, they unwittingly summon up dormant demons living in the nearby woods,?which possess the youngsters in succession until only one is left intact to fight for survival.? Directed by?Fede Alvarez, with a screenplay by?Alvarez & Rodo Sayagues Mendez, the film will be released nationwide on April 12, 2013.New York Comic Con is taking place from October 11th-14th at the Javits Center (655 West 34th Street, New York).? More information can be found at: ©2012 PR Newswire. All Rights Reserved. ?From the University of South CarolinaKNOXVILLE, TN–The Gamecocks (14-15, 5-14 SEC) dropped a three-set decision to Tennessee, 25-10, 25-19, 25-14, on Sunday afternoon in Thompson-Boling Arena.Cline got 14 digs, putting her one dig shy of the Gamecocks' career record held by Diane Denton. Megan Laughlin topped South Carolina in kills with nine. Tennessee's Kayla Jeter hit .567 and made 19 kills and seven blocks, while Nikki Fowler posted a double-double with 16 kills and 10 digs. Chloe Goldman led all players with 17 digs, while Kylie Marshall added 12 digs.Tennessee won every team stat category, including a 49-26 advantage in kills. South Carolina closes the 2009 season at No. 13 Florida on Friday afternoon at 4 p.m.?Information contained on this page is provided by companies via press release distributed through PR Newswire, an independent third-party content provider. PR Newswire, WorldNow and this Station make no warranties or representations in connection therewith.SOURCE Sue WongLOS ANGELES, Sept. 25, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Internationally-acclaimed designer SUE WONG delivered an immersive sensory experience of her "Spring Transcendent" 2013 Collection to a packed-to-capacity audience at LA Live. The highly anticipated runway show drew LA's leading fashion, media and entertainment insiders along with some of young Hollywood's hottest actresses including Jadin Gould of Zack Snyder's "Man of Steel," Meital Dohan of Showtime's "Weeds," Jen Lilley and Lindsey Morgan of ABC's "General Hospital," Kearran Giovanni of TNT's "Major Crimes," and Chloe Noelle of HBO's "True Blood." A-list actor Thomas Jane of HBO's "Hung" introduced the show, stating "Tonight, nature and design come alive in gowns…that invoke the beauty and magic of Spring's transcendent dawning."(Photo:? )"I tried to capture that fleeting beauty that exists in the very fibers of both fashion and nature," said designer Sue Wong, whose collection was inspired by ninetieth century Transcendentalist movement's reverence of the natural world. Ravishing dresses came down the runway draped to move effortlessly with a woman's body.?Sensuous in supple fabrics in the warm and vibrant hues of Spring and adorned with couture flourishes including embroidery, hand beadwork and applique, the collection reiterates Sue Wong's unmatched ability to create wearable elegance. The entire event was filmed in 3D, in conjunction with the 5th?3DFF, 3D Film, Music and Interactive Festival, and as a subject of the forthcoming documentary "Fashion and Culture in?Los Angeles," directed by Catherine Bauknight. The film features Sue Wong as among the city's most iconic and influential creative innovators. "Fashion lives by progress and change. This is an exciting way of engaging modern women while celebrating the kind of Hollywood beauty, magic and transformation that has always been so integral to my designs," said the designer. The grandeur of the dresses was complemented by the sleek sophistication of the hair courtesy of Prive Salon and Laurent Dufourg, makeup by Napoleon Perdis and Danielle Hawkes and jewelry by Vilaiwan.ABOUT?SUE WONG For over two decades Sue Wong has been astonishing fashion aficionados with designs distinguished by the impeccable quality of traditional couture dressmaking. Her designs are suffused with Old Hollywood glamour, steeped in romance and mystery while?being utterly modern and accessible to women everywhere.?Sue Wong is available in specialty boutiques, department stores including Neiman Marcus, Saks Fifth Avenue, Nordstrom, and Bloomingdales, and internationally in over 27 countries.Media contact ? (818) 557-7447©2012 PR Newswire. All Rights Reserved. ?Information contained on this page is provided by companies via press release distributed through PR Newswire, an independent third-party content provider. PR Newswire, WorldNow and this Station make no warranties or representations in connection therewith.SOURCE Chameleon ChairsThe Designers of Chameleon Chairs, the Industry's Premier Chair "Stylists," Announce their 2012/2013 Event Decor PredictionsBEVERLY HILLS, Calif., July 23, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- The bridal gown.? The floral arrangement.? The music selection. ?The table centerpiece.? These are important elements to the "look and feel" of any wedding or special event design, but this upcoming season, brides-to-be and event planners will find there's a new style trend taking an important "seat" at the table…The Chair.? That's right, the Chair.? For years, the chair has been overlooked ? a last minute thought for wedding and event planners.? Today, it is taking center stage and making a statement with bold, vibrant colors; breakthrough fabrics and textures; and design "eye candy" that elevates the event presentation to a whole new level. ?Stylists are quickly finding that functionality can be beautiful and create a major impact. When it comes to the Chair, the "must-have" guest for this season's wedding or special event is the coveted Chameleon Chair. ?Chameleons have been seen at A-list weddings, celebrity parties, corporate events and movie premieres, as well as the Academy AwardsR Governor's Ball, and has seated high-profile personalities such as Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, George Clooney and Jennifer Aniston. Living true to its namesake, Chameleon Chairs can literally morph into any design that reflects every bride or host's "individuality." ??Their signature looks couple high-style and affordable pricing creating design masterpieces that reflect trendsetting color palettes with original themes from around the globe. According to Chameleon's Vice-President of Development and leading Stylist, Teri Rudin, chair designing is an inspired art.? "I pull textures and styles from everyday life, but ultimately, it's all about embracing designs that are timeless."? This week the event stylists at Chameleon Chair () released their Design Trends for the 2012/2013 season, reflecting the most contemporary looks sure to be seen in ballrooms, under the event tent, and in hotels and venues across the U.S.? (For correlating photo samples, please visit the Chameleon website ? .)Trend #1:? Nature themes will play prominently throughout the year and into 2013. Laurie Pressman, Pantone's Vice President of Fashion, Home and Interiors, predicts that "blues and browns" ? the color of the natural, especially coastal, landscape ? will dominate next year's color palette. ?In addition, "peaceful neutrals will be strong next year, with greater intensity than in the past" ? giving the landscape tones a more dramatic role to play in the event color scheme. Chameleon integrates these trends into a bohemian vibe of burlap, shells and flora that add an understated simplicity and beauty to even the most elaborate wedding table.??Trend #2:? Vibrant colors will emerge from floral bouquets to blossoms in the 2012/2013 season. Pantone's Pressman adds that there will also be "a growing influence of yellow ? and, along the same line, that orange shades will be happy and bright" making them a stand-out from the crowd.? She also sees "Pink, red's sister, continuing to make itself known" and playing a more visible role in the coming season.??Rudin suggests Chameleon's Classically Elegant Chloe design, which is available in an array of the season's most coveted colors, and is newly available in a pink blush and beige. ?She adds, "For the bride who may feel a bit more daring, a delicate floral lace overlay is the perfect complement for a cushion in passionate fuchsia, lively tangerine or vibrant yellow."Trend #3:? There will be a continued "back to the basics" trend, embracing simple elegance. For the modern bride whose aesthetic is minimalist or more tailored, Rudin offers custom-fitted suede chair covers in a rainbow of colors. To make it "her own," a bride may add a rhinestone-accented belt or floor-length skirt.Trend #4:? This season's wedding table also will welcome more creative looks that reflect individual tastes.Rudin always remembers the less traditional bride, with her own distinctive style, and recommends an edgy patent leather or reptilian chair cover to complete her design story. She also reminds brides to never underestimate the importance of seating. ?Rudin believes that "Chairs should heighten the detail and drama of the event setting."? She adds, "When budgets are limited, remember that the strong silhouette of Chameleon Chairs can infuse a room with bold color or a big dose of glamour and elegance." For more information about the Chameleon Chair Collection, please visit or call (310) 787-9200.? Chameleon Chairs are available for direct sale from the company or rental through the company's exclusive distributor, Classic Party Rentals, the nation's leading full service event rental company.?? About Chameleon Chairs LLC Chameleon Chairs LLC is a respected designer and manufacturer of versatile stacking chairs created to meet the ever-changing demands of the special events market.? The Company does business as the "Chameleon ChairR Collection" and manufactures its proprietary products including its most recognized offering, the Chameleon ChairR.? Chameleon has filed for patents covering its new products and rental methods, including its transportation system.? On November 1, 2011, the United States Patent Office issued U.S. Patent No. 8,047,607, which protects the structure of Chameleon's iconic and novel Chameleon Chair.? The Company has also received federal trademark registration for the names "Chameleon Chair" and "Chameleon Chair Collection."? ©2012 PR Newswire. All Rights Reserved. ?Information contained on this page is provided by companies via press release distributed through PR Newswire, an independent third-party content provider. PR Newswire, WorldNow and this Station make no warranties or representations in connection therewith.SOURCE Chameleon ChairsThe Designers of Chameleon Chairs, the Industry's Premier Chair "Stylists," Announce their 2012/2013 Event Decor PredictionsBEVERLY HILLS, Calif., July 23, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- The bridal gown.? The floral arrangement.? The music selection. ?The table centerpiece.? These are important elements to the "look and feel" of any wedding or special event design, but this upcoming season, brides-to-be and event planners will find there's a new style trend taking an important "seat" at the table…The Chair.? That's right, the Chair.? For years, the chair has been overlooked ? a last minute thought for wedding and event planners.? Today, it is taking center stage and making a statement with bold, vibrant colors; breakthrough fabrics and textures; and design "eye candy" that elevates the event presentation to a whole new level. ?Stylists are quickly finding that functionality can be beautiful and create a major impact. When it comes to the Chair, the "must-have" guest for this season's wedding or special event is the coveted Chameleon Chair. ?Chameleons have been seen at A-list weddings, celebrity parties, corporate events and movie premieres, as well as the Academy AwardsR Governor's Ball, and has seated high-profile personalities such as Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, George Clooney and Jennifer Aniston. Living true to its namesake, Chameleon Chairs can literally morph into any design that reflects every bride or host's "individuality." ??Their signature looks couple high-style and affordable pricing creating design masterpieces that reflect trendsetting color palettes with original themes from around the globe. According to Chameleon's Vice-President of Development and leading Stylist, Teri Rudin, chair designing is an inspired art.? "I pull textures and styles from everyday life, but ultimately, it's all about embracing designs that are timeless."? This week the event stylists at Chameleon Chair () released their Design Trends for the 2012/2013 season, reflecting the most contemporary looks sure to be seen in ballrooms, under the event tent, and in hotels and venues across the U.S.? (For correlating photo samples, please visit the Chameleon website ? .)Trend #1:? Nature themes will play prominently throughout the year and into 2013. Laurie Pressman, Pantone's Vice President of Fashion, Home and Interiors, predicts that "blues and browns" ? the color of the natural, especially coastal, landscape ? will dominate next year's color palette. ?In addition, "peaceful neutrals will be strong next year, with greater intensity than in the past" ? giving the landscape tones a more dramatic role to play in the event color scheme. Chameleon integrates these trends into a bohemian vibe of burlap, shells and flora that add an understated simplicity and beauty to even the most elaborate wedding table.??Trend #2:? Vibrant colors will emerge from floral bouquets to blossoms in the 2012/2013 season. Pantone's Pressman adds that there will also be "a growing influence of yellow ? and, along the same line, that orange shades will be happy and bright" making them a stand-out from the crowd.? She also sees "Pink, red's sister, continuing to make itself known" and playing a more visible role in the coming season.??Rudin suggests Chameleon's Classically Elegant Chloe design, which is available in an array of the season's most coveted colors, and is newly available in a pink blush and beige. ?She adds, "For the bride who may feel a bit more daring, a delicate floral lace overlay is the perfect complement for a cushion in passionate fuchsia, lively tangerine or vibrant yellow."Trend #3:? There will be a continued "back to the basics" trend, embracing simple elegance. For the modern bride whose aesthetic is minimalist or more tailored, Rudin offers custom-fitted suede chair covers in a rainbow of colors. To make it "her own," a bride may add a rhinestone-accented belt or floor-length skirt.Trend #4:? This season's wedding table also will welcome more creative looks that reflect individual tastes.Rudin always remembers the less traditional bride, with her own distinctive style, and recommends an edgy patent leather or reptilian chair cover to complete her design story. She also reminds brides to never underestimate the importance of seating. ?Rudin believes that "Chairs should heighten the detail and drama of the event setting."? She adds, "When budgets are limited, remember that the strong silhouette of Chameleon Chairs can infuse a room with bold color or a big dose of glamour and elegance." For more information about the Chameleon Chair Collection, please visit or call (310) 787-9200.? Chameleon Chairs are available for direct sale from the company or rental through the company's exclusive distributor, Classic Party Rentals, the nation's leading full service event rental company.?? About Chameleon Chairs LLC Chameleon Chairs LLC is a respected designer and manufacturer of versatile stacking chairs created to meet the ever-changing demands of the special events market.? The Company does business as the "Chameleon ChairR Collection" and manufactures its proprietary products including its most recognized offering, the Chameleon ChairR.? Chameleon has filed for patents covering its new products and rental methods, including its transportation system.? On November 1, 2011, the United States Patent Office issued U.S. Patent No. 8,047,607, which protects the structure of Chameleon's iconic and novel Chameleon Chair.? The Company has also received federal trademark registration for the names "Chameleon Chair" and "Chameleon Chair Collection."? ©2012 PR Newswire. All Rights Reserved. ?Information contained on this page is provided by companies via press release distributed through PR Newswire, an independent third-party content provider. PR Newswire, WorldNow and this Station make no warranties or representations in connection therewith.SOURCE HL GroupThe 9th Annual Style Awards, Honoring Fashion and Celebrity Elite, will Make its Television Debut Friday, September 14th at 8pm ET/PT on The Style NetworkLOS ANGELES, Sept. 4, 2012 /PRNewswire/ --?In an unprecedented partnership between leading brands in style, media and events, Penske Media Corporation (PMC), Style Media and IMG Fashion will present the 9th Annual Style Awards on September 5, 2012, kicking off the world's most prestigious fashion event, Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week.? The Style Awards will make their primetime broadcast debut on The Style Network on Friday, September 14th at 8pm ET/PT. Fashion fans will get a never before seen look into the Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week experience. Talents behind the world's most exciting film and TV fashions will come together at The 2012 Style Awards, to celebrate and recognize the artistic accomplishments of the community's top costume designers, stylists, models, photographers, makeup artists, hair stylists and more.? In addition, Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, President and CEO of SWW Creative, brings her extensive fashion background, production expertise, and exceptional relationships to the 9th Annual Style Awards as Executive Producer. The ceremony will be followed by the Official Style Awards After-Party held at Stone Rose Lounge.? "We are tremendously excited to bring the Style Awards to The Style Network viewers and to Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week for the first time," said Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, the Executive Producer of the Show.??Jay Penske Chairman and CEO of PMC, owner of the Style Awards added, "We know this collaboration among three preeminent media and style brands will thrive for years to come."This year's Honorees were chosen by the Style Awards' Nominating Committee, comprised of esteemed individuals in the entertainment and fashion communities.?The Style Award, created? exclusively by iconic crystal brand, Lalique, will be awarded to 2012's Style Award winners.? This year's highlighted categories include: "Designer of the Year," "Breakthrough Designer of the Year," "One to Watch," "Model of the Year," "Celebrity Stylist of the Year" "Accessories Designer of the Year" and "Most Stylish Athlete."Celebrities and members of the fashion community scheduled to attend include: Iman, Katharine McPhee, Rachel Roy, Carolina Herrera, Brian Atwood, Ivanka Trump, Prabal Gurung, Reed Krakoff, Jeff Gordon, John Demsey, Alexandra Kotur, Robert Verdi, Joe Zee, Waris Ahluwalia, Stacey Bendet, Derek Blasberg, Henrik Lundqvist, Joan Smalls, Catherine Malandrino, Rebecca Minkoff, Kristina O'Neill, Lisa Perry, David Perry, Reem Acra and Timo Weiland, among others."As the first official broadcast partner of The 2012 Style Awards, we are excited to join forces with PMC and IMG to recognize those who have contributed to the world's most memorable fashions," said Salaam Coleman Smith, President, Style Media.? "This unprecedented event gives our viewers front-row access to today's biggest style icons.""At IMG Fashion we celebrate style makers year-round through our global fashion platform of events," said Peter Levy, Managing Director and Senior Vice President, IMG Fashion Events and Properties. "We couldn't be more proud to welcome the Style Awards, a program that recognizes the achievements of top creative talent in the industry, to Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week and give their fans an insider look at this industry-only event."Winners and presenters of past Style Awards include: Selena Gomez, David LaChappelle, Monique Lhuillier, Selma Blair, Cindy Crawford, Rachel Zoe, David Duchovny, Nina Dobrev, Eva Longoria, and Emily Blunt. Last year designer Alice Temperley and actress Chloe Moretz were amongst Style Award winners, and for the last eight years, such extraordinary and diverse talents have emphasized the importance of the award in recognizing style talent at every stage in its development and achievement.About Penske Media Corporation PMC, a leading digital media company founded by Jay Penske in 2004, reaches over 80 million unique visitors monthly according to Comscore. PMC owns a unique and growing portfolio of lifestyle brands that provide the web's best original content in categories including entertainment, sports, breaking news, media, finance, tech, health, shopping, fashion, beauty, and automotive. Deadline.com, OnCars, HollywoodLife, India.com, Movieline, TVLine, BGR, Young Hollywood Awards, The Style Awards, and Breakthrough of the Year Awards are all part of the expanding PMC portfolio. For more information on PMC and its brands, please visit: or its digital properties directly.About IMG Fashion IMG Fashion is dedicated to facilitating a gateway to the fashion world - from creation to consumer.? We offer solutions that seamlessly connect and associate fashion's key constituents and corporate brands using IMG's global resources, influence and expertise. Within the fashion industry IMG represents the world's top models, leading designers and the most influential photographers, art directors and stylists.? The division produces the leading fashion events around the globe and represents many of the industry's top organizations and federations.About Style Media Style Media, a global multimedia company that includes The Style Network and myStyle.com, is the destination for women 18-49 seeking to fuel their insatiable appetite for looking great and living stylishly. Style currently counts nearly 78 million cable and satellite subscribers and is the fastest growing women's network in the U.S.? keeps women up-to-date on all of the latest fashion and beauty news on the web. Style's popular series include "Tia & Tamera," "Jerseylicious," "Giuliana & Bill," "Chicagolicious," "Empire Girls: Julissa & Adrienne" and "Big Rich Texas." Style is a network of NBCUniversal Entertainment & Digital Networks and Integrated Media, a division of NBCUniversal, one of the world's leading media and entertainment companies in the development, production, and marketing of entertainment, news, and information to a global audience. Follow us on Twitter at .About Stone Rose Lounge Located on the 4th floor of the Time Warner Center (10 Columbus Circle) Stone Rose Lounge ? named for the touches of stone and rosewood used throughout its design ? is the epitome of masculine elegance. Created to echo the posh atmosphere of a classically timeless hotel lounge, the 5,000 sq. ft. venue features candlelit seating areas surrounded by gorgeous views of Manhattan's Central Park and the city's skyline. Stone Rose Lounge offers an extensive selection of wine and beer, as well as a wide range of spirits and liqueurs. Its cocktail menu features an ever-changing selection of libations that highlight market fresh ingredients and seasonal favorites, in addition to signature sips like The Stone Rose. A small bites menu is available from Benchmarc Events by Marc Murphy and features favorites such as Mini Lobster Rolls, Curried Tuna Tartar Crispy Tacos and Mini Grilled Cheese with Gruyere & Parmesan. Brunch offers bites including Escarole & Grilled Asparagus Salad, Spicy Chicken Wings and Chicken Chile Nachos. Stone Rose Lounge is open daily; private event space is also available. For more information and hours of operation, please call 212.823.9769 or visit .©2012 PR Newswire. All Rights Reserved. ?Information contained on this page is provided by companies via press release distributed through PR Newswire, an independent third-party content provider. PR Newswire, WorldNow and this Station make no warranties or representations in connection therewith.SOURCE The ACTCreators of New York- and London-based The Box to unveil new concept inside The Shoppes at The PalazzoLAS VEGAS, Aug. 22, 2012 /PRNewswire/ --?The ACT, which will usher in a new variety of nightlife, is slated to open in Las Vegas inside The Shoppes at The Palazzo in October 2012. Created by New York City nightlife and theater impresario Simon Hammerstein, The ACT will offer a uniquely decadent experience, presenting over-the-top theatrical performances, nightly rituals and audience involvement in the shows."The ACT is a new variety of nightlife where the audience parties onstage, the shows explode into the club, and everyone gets caught in The ACT," says Hammerstein. The 15,000-square-foot, multi-level space merges aesthetic elements ranging from an Italian opera house to European cathedrals, from New York City's Grand Central Station Post Office to a turn-of-the-century speakeasy. Guests will have the opportunity to experience the action unfold onstage from numerous perspectives, including private balcony boxes, banquettes on the dance floor and a backstage seating area that allows guests to mingle with all the talent. ?The ACT, managed by Variety Worldwide, is the latest venture by Hammerstein, a seasoned theatrical producer and artistic director with nearly two decades of experience and who has been recognized in publications including Vogue, Vanity Fair, The New York Times and New York Magazine. Hammerstein is also president of the widely popular variety theatre, The Box, with locations in New York City and London. The creativity that won The Box international acclaim for award-winning design, exclusive clientele, extraordinary service, innovative live theatrical productions, and attendance by more than a million people since 2007 will be channeled inside The ACT, making it the most exciting addition to the Las Vegas nightlife scene.About The ACT:The ACT is a performance-based nightclub located inside The Shoppes at The Palazzo at 3327 Las Vegas Boulevard South, Las Vegas, Nev. 89109. The ACT is open Wednesday through Saturday from 10:30 p.m. to 4 a.m. For more information, visit or contact 702.792.1164.The ACT is managed by Variety Worldwide LLC ("VWW"), a global entertainment and hospitality company, led by Murtaza Akbar, Randy Weiner and Simon Hammerstein. Variety Worldwide invests in and manages projects that combine non-traditional theater with nightlife. Variety Worldwide partners created and manage successful brands such as The Box London and New York, along with providing entertainment for world-class events. Variety Worldwide manages The ACT brand, opening in Las Vegas and Dubai, as well as other key cities around the world.About The Shoppes at The Palazzo: The 450,000-square-foot retail component of The Palazzo Las Vegas is one of Las Vegas' finest destination luxury retail centers. Anchored by Barneys New York and featuring more than 60 of the world's most exclusive luxury brands, The Shoppes at The Palazzo caters to the trend-setting fashion elite and is home to many fashion "firsts" to Nevada. Signature names like Diane von Furstenberg, Chloe, Christian Louboutin, Michael Kors, Tory Burch, Thomas Pink, Jimmy Choo, Ralph Lauren, Burberry, Van Cleef & Arpels and Piaget are just a few stand-outs in what is the country's most impressive collection of luxury brands under one roof.The Shoppes at The Palazzo is owned and managed by General Growth Properties, Inc. a fully integrated, self-managed and self-administered real estate investment trust (REIT) focused on owning, managing, leasing and redeveloping regional malls throughout the United States and Brazil. The Company currently owns, or has an interest in, 150 regional shopping malls comprising approximately 141.7 million square feet of gross leasable area. The Company is headquartered in Chicago, Illinois, and publicly traded on the NYSE under the symbol GGP. For further information please visit .About The Palazzo Las Vegas:With more than 3,000 spacious suites, luxury shopping, world-class dining and entertainment, the $1.9 billion, Silver LEEDR (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design)-certified Palazzo Las Vegas literally takes luxury to new heights. Ranked as one of the top 25 hotels in the U.S. and Canada in Travel + Leisure "World's Best Awards" for two consecutive years, the AAA Five Diamond and Forbes Travel Guide Four Star-Award winning resort is highlighted by a flagship 85,000-square-foot Barneys New York. The Shoppes at The PalazzoR feature more than 60 luxury boutiques, including 20 remarkable stores and couture brands making their Las Vegas debuts at The Palazzo including Chloe´, Tory Burch, Christian Louboutin, Diane von Furstenberg, and Van Cleef & Arpels. The all-suite resort offers plush and opulent suite accommodations ranging from a Luxury Suite at an unprecedented 720 square feet to the 8,000-square-foot Chairman suite with private terraces and plunge pools. The Palazzo also offers a variety of cuisines from a collection of award-winning chefs such as Carnevino by Mario Batali, CUT by Wolfgang Puck and Table 10 by Emeril Lagasse. Other unique offerings include the chic dining and nightlife hotspot, LAVO; the world's largest Canyon Ranch SpaClubR; the ultimate sports bar, sportsbook and restaurant on the Strip, Lagasse's Stadium; and Prestige at The Palazzo ? an exclusive space designed to offer the sophisticated traveler an elevated level of services and amenities including private champagne check in, packing and unpacking services, exclusive bath and pillow menus, complimentary cocktail reception and more. Guests can earn points while they eat, sleep, shop and play with Grazie, the premiere loyalty program, which rewards guests with the ease and usability of just one card and one program. The Palazzo and its famed sister resort, The Venetian Las Vegas, are the first ever Alliance Resorts in the InterContinental Hotel Group global portfolio. For additional information, visit The Palazzo website at palazzolasvegas.com, follow on Twitter @palazzolasvegas and interact on Facebook at facebook.com/palazzolasvegas. ©2012 PR Newswire. All Rights Reserved. ? By Shelley Levitt From Jennifer Lopez and Fergie are rocking Tom Ford aviator-style sunglasses. Jessica Alba and Julianne Moore sport square gold-tone frames from Chloe. And Jessica Simpson can be spotted running errands in oversized titanium frames from the vintage-inspired Dita Eyewear line.Celebrities can offer inspiration on the season's coolest sunglass styles. And if you identify a star whose face shape is similar to yours -- an oval Julia Roberts, say, or a heart-shaped Reese Witherspoon -- you can glean suggestions on which shades might flatter your own face.UV Damage and Your Eyes Much more than a fashion accessory, sunglasses are an essential tool in protecting your vision. Studies show that exposure to the sun's ultraviolet (UV) rays can harm the lens and cornea of the eye, leading to problems -- like cataracts and macular degeneration -- that can impair vision. And the thin skin around the eye and the eyelid itself are especially vulnerable to skin cancer and to sun-induced signs of aging. Dr. Gail Royal, an ophthalmologist in Myrtle Beach, S.C., admits that she sometimes appeals to her patients' vanity when she discusses the importance of proper sunglass use. "I'll point out that sunglasses will protect not just against basal cell and squamous cell carcinomas and melanoma," she says, "but also against the formation of wrinkles like crow's-feet and the unsightly thickening of the skin that can sometimes be caused by UV exposure."Here's how to choose a pair of sunglasses that will safeguard your eyes.Look for Complete UV Protection Whether you spend $200 for a pair of designer sunglasses or buy one off the drugstore rack for $20, both can do an equally good job of blocking harmful ultraviolet rays. Look for a label or sticker that says the lenses block 99 or 100 percent of UVA and UVB rays. Sunglasses with full protection might also say something like, "Lenses meet ANSI Z80-3 blocking requirements," or "UV 400 protection." Sunglass boutiques sometimes remove these labels or stickers for a more attractive display. Chances are the shades provide full UV protection; just be sure to ask.Color Counts If You're Behind the Wheel It may seem logical that a darker lens would do a better job of blocking the sun's harmful rays than a lighter lens, but that turns out not to be the case. The coating that blocks UV radiation is clear, so shades of any hue are equally effective at filtering those rays. Yellow or rose-tinted lenses can, however, make it difficult to distinguish changes in traffic lights. Gray, green and brown lenses minimize color distortion.Focus on Fit To block the light that hits your eye from the sides, choose wraparound frames. Your next best bet? Sunglasses with large lenses and wide temples, like the iconic oversized frames Audrey Hepburn wore in Breakfast at Tiffany's. Whatever the style, frames should fit snugly on your nose and ears without pinching or rubbing, but not so close that your eyelashes hit the lens.Choose Polarized Lenses If You Water Ski, Surf or Fish Polarized lenses reduce glare by filtering out the reflected light that bounces off water. Polarization, however, has nothing to do with UV light absorption, so check the label to make sure they provide maximum UV protection. Keep in mind that, when you're wearing polarized lenses, it may be difficult to read your cell phone, GPS device or a liquid-crystal display on a dashboard or an ATM machine.Make Sunglasses a Daily Habit Like sunscreen, sunglasses should be worn whenever you're outdoors, year-round. "Just as we've learned that you can get a really nasty sunburn on an overcast, hazy day," says Royal, "you're exposing your eyes to damaging UV rays on these days too." So, keep a pair of sunglasses in your purse, along with a small tube of sunblock, and your favorite new coral, peach or pink lip gloss.Shelley Levitt is the managing editor of The Style Glossy. She has worked as a West Coast editor of SELF magazine and senior writer at People.Copyright © 2011 Studio One Networks. All rights reserved.? LAS VEGAS, April 9 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- The Palazzo Las Vegas, a LasVegas Sands Corp. (NYSE: LVS) property, announced that the U.S. Green BuildingCouncil (USGBC) made its "green" status official with the presentation of aSilver LEED(R) Certificate (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) atan award ceremony held today. Nevada Governor Jim Gibbons and David E.Rodgers, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Energy Efficiency at the U.S.Department of Energy were also on-hand to honor this impressiveaccomplishment. During the ceremony Governor Gibbons issued a proclamation in recognitionof The Palazzo's commitment to energy conservation. The DOE presented ThePalazzo with "The Energy Innovator's Award" which recognizes businesses,individuals, and governmental agencies that have successfully developed ordeployed energy-efficient and/or renewable energy technologies, services, orpolicies. "From the beginning, we were determined to create Las Vegas' first trulyeco-friendly property and we are extremely proud to have achieved it and berecognized for it. There is an increasing necessity to employ 'green'construction principles and we are proud to be a leader in the evolution ofenvironmentally-focused building practices, not only on the Las Vegas Strip,but at Las Vegas Sands' properties throughout the world," stated Sheldon G.Adelson, chairman and chief executive officer of Las Vegas Sands Corp., whowas in attendance to accept the awards on behalf of the company. According to USGBC, The Palazzo is not only the largest LEED-certifiedbuilding in the world, but is over four times bigger than the second-largest."The Palazzo is to be commended for achieving LEED certification. Thisfacility is one that both the community and its guests can be proud of," saidRick Fedrizzi, President, CEO, Founding Chair, U.S. Green Building Council. "Las Vegas Sands' development team worked closely with LEED consultants toestablish an array of strategies and develop a truly 'green' building," saidBrad Stone, executive vice president of Las Vegas Sands Corp. "The totalannual environmental savings generated as a result of our commitment to'green' technology and construction is staggering and we are convinced thatthis will have a positive impact for years to come." The Palazzo employs such effective environmentally-efficient technologiesthat it conserves enough water to provide each Nevada citizen with 266eight-ounce glasses of water for a year and saves enough energy to light a100 watt light bulb for 12,100 years. It even promotes alternative modes oftransportation by offering valet parking-for bicycles. Key features thatcontribute to The Palazzo's tremendous conservation include: The Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Green BuildingRating System(TM) is the nationally accepted benchmark for the design,construction and operation of high-performance green buildings. LEED providesbuilding owners and operators with the tools they need to have an immediateand measurable impact on their buildings' performance. LEED certificationprovides independent, third-party verification that a building project isenvironmentally responsible, energy-efficient, and a healthy place to live andwork. Statements in this press release, which are not historical facts, are"forward looking" statements that are made pursuant to the Safe HarborProvisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995.Forward-looking statements involve a number of risks, uncertainties or otherfactors beyond the Company's control, which may cause material differences inactual results, performance or other expectations. These factors include, butare not limited to general economic conditions, competition, new ventures,government regulation, legalization of gaming, interest rates, futureterrorist acts, insurance, and other factors detailed in the reports filed byLas Vegas Sands Corp. with the Securities and Exchange Commission. ABOUT THE PALAZZO With over 3,000 expansive suites, luxury shopping and world-class diningand entertainment, the $1.9 billion, 50-story Palazzo Las Vegas literallytakes luxury to new heights. Highlighted by a flagship, 85,000-square-footBarneys New York, The Shoppes at The Palazzo features more than 60 luxuryboutiques. In addition, 20 remarkable stores and luxury brands made their LasVegas debuts at The Palazzo, including Chloe, Tory Burch, Christian Louboutin,Diane Von Furstenberg, Van Cleef & Arpels, Catherine Malandrino, AnyaHindmarch, and Michael Kors. Additionally, The Palazzo offers a variety ofcuisines from a collection of award-winning chefs such as CarneVino by MarioBatali, CUT by Wolfgang Puck, Table 10 by Emeril Lagasse and RestaurantCharlie by Charlie Trotter. Other one-of-kind offerings include, Tony Awardwinning Broadway musical, JERSEY BOYS, the world's largest Canyon RanchSpaClub, Jay-Z's signature 40/40 Club and the Strip's first Lamborghinidealership.SOURCE Las Vegas Sands Corp.?Information contained on this page is provided by companies via press release distributed through PR Newswire, an independent third-party content provider. PR Newswire, WorldNow and this Station make no warranties or representations in connection therewith.SOURCE Born GiftedGOSPORT, England, July 24, 2012 /PRNewswire/ --Choosing a name for your baby can be one of the hardest tasks a parent faces, but a new survey from a leading personalised baby gift supplier may be able to help you on your way.The study by Born Gifted, which surveyed almost 3000 baby names during the first half of 2012, revealed that the number one spot for girls was Amelia (7.2%) and the top boy's name was Thomas (7.7%).Interestingly the study found that Olivia and Oliver were the tenth most popular names which is in stark contrast to official figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) which disclosed that Oliver and Olivia were the most popular names in 2010 (most recent data).The shift in naming trends has continued and whereas Sophie was the second most popular name two years ago, it is now in ninth position, with many parents choosing the slightly adapted versions Sophia or Sofia.Names that were popular in the 2010 ONS survey such as Jessica, Ruby, Chloe and Grace have been replaced by Isla, Eva and Phoebe. Further names that have proved popular in the first half of 2012 were Charlotte/Lottie (5.6%), Isabella/Bella (5.2%), Lily/Lilly (4.7%) and Emily, Holly and Olivia (3.4%).In terms of boy's names, the recent study found many contrasting name choices compared to previous results compiled. The popular names this year (after Thomas) included Sam/Samuel (5%), Freddie (4.8%), Liam (4%), and Henry (4%); with classic names such as Jack, William and George not even making the list.The top ten lists for 2012 revealed by the Born Gifted study are as follows (showing the most popular first)Girls: Amelia (7.2%); Charlotte/Lottie?(5.6%); Isabella/Bella (5.2%); Lily/Lilly (4.7%); Isla (4.3%); Eva (4.3%); Phoebe (3.9%); Sophia/Sofia (3.6%); Emily, Holly & Olivia (3.4%)Boys: Thomas?(7.7%); Harry?(6.2%); Joshua (5.3%); Sam/Samuel (5%); Freddie (4.8%); Charlie (4.4%); James (4.2%); Liam & Henry (4%); Alfie & Oliver (3.5%).The study also produced a few slightly unusual names including Rudy Blue, Wynter, Huxley, August, Bleu, Dixon, Jaxon, Tulip and Westly!If you are struggling to find an appropriate name for your child, why not use one of the names highlighted in the study. Remember that naming a child is an important task because they will live with it for the rest of their lifetimes. offers a vast array of toys and gifts for new born babies that can be personalised with your child's chosen name.Media Contact Details: Name: Born Gifted Company Name: Born Gifted Town: Gosport Country: England Website: Telephone Number: +44(0)1329-284-112 Email: Language: English ©2012 PR Newswire. All Rights Reserved. ?Colorado Springs, CO -COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. (AP) - USA Swimming has reached a three-year broadcast deal with Universal Sports to televise four Grand Prix Series events annually leading up to the 2012 London Olympics.The coverage began Thursday with the opening day of the Columbus (Ohio) Grand Prix, which featured U.S. Olympians Eric Shanteau, Chloe Sutton, Cullen Jones and Peter Vanderkaay, along with Brazilian gold medalist Cesar Cielo. The cable network also plans to broadcast events in Charlotte, N.C., and Santa Clara, Calif.The Universal deal coincides with NBC's plans to televise the U.S. Championships, the Pan Pacific Championships and the Short Course Nationals.Universal Sports is a joint venture between NBC Sports and InterMedia Partners that shows Olympic-related sports programming. It is available in 57 million homes. Copyright 2010 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.? By Chris McBeath and Chloe Ernst Ringed by snow-capped, forested mountains dropping down to miles of sandy beaches, Vancouver is a city where you can snowboard and sail on the same day. Against the stunning scenic backdrop, you'll find a medley of sophisticated restaurants, leafy parks, and lively, earthy brew pubs. As Vancouver pulsates with a smug and sassy youthfulness, Victoria, British Columbia's capital city, is more seasoned -- like that of an elder sister whose English beauty is more than skin deep.Things to DoGiant, colorfully carved totem poles tower above an impressive collection of First Nations masks and sculptures at the Museum of Anthropology. Visit the belugas, otters, and dolphins at the Vancouver Aquarium in Stanley Park, before seeing historic and modern art at the downtown Vancouver Art Gallery. To reach Granville Island's plentiful Public Market, hop on a tiny ferry to cross False Creek. In Victoria, stroll the cobblestone streets of Old Town before taking traditional afternoon tea at the Fairmont Empress.Active PursuitsWhen the sun is shining, you'll join a stampede of Vancouverites heading to the city's beaches, hiking trails, and mountain slopes. Biking, running, or walking the Stanley Park Seawall rates highly for its at-your-own-pace vibe and panoramic views. In Victoria, you can take a jeep-safari through farms and vineyards, or spot harbor seals, whales, and dolphins on a whale-watching tour.Eating & DrinkingAmid a rich culinary region, seafood is king in Vancouver and Victoria. Try a six-course seafood medley, paired with a glass of wine from an Okanagan winery, at five-star Yaletown dining rooms. Dining options are plentiful and often cheap, be it delectable Thai in Kitsilano, a raw food menu near Main Street, or inventive Chinese tapas in Chinatown. In Victoria, you'll find a variety of culinary styles downtown.Nightlife & EntertainmentIn Vancouver, you can rub shoulders with the nightclub crowd on funky Granville Street downtown. Hip Yaletown offers up swanky cocktail bars and clubs. For more laid-back surrounds, join the relaxed beach crowd at a variety of watering holes in Kitsilano. In summer, picnic in Stanley Park and watch Theatre Under the Stars. In Victoria, stop for a pint at a convivial waterside brewpub, or visit the cool bar in the Fairmont Express for blue martinis with hot jazz.?All content © Copyright 2000 - 2012 WorldNow and WMBF, a . All Rights Reserved. For more information on this site, please read our and .?By JULIE PACE and KASIE HUNT Associated Press DENVER (AP) - Most voters watched the debate on the television and didn't get to see what happened before and after President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney took the stage. And even then, some of the nonverbal exchanges were lost in broadcast. Here's what those voters missed: ___ OUTSIDE THE HALL Not everyone was a fan of what was happening on the University of Denver campus. About 150 protesters with Occupy Denver marched down Yale Avenue, some eight blocks from the campus. Protesters shouted slogans denouncing a two-party system and the war in Afghanistan and demanding affordable health care. Jason Leher, a 23-year-old Evergreen State College student from Denver, was cutting out paper letters for a large blue sign that read, "The whole world is our free speech zone." Others carried signs reading, "Both parties suck." Others read, "Demand real debates." Just before the debate, police diverted the marchers away from the campus. ___ QUIET, PLEASE Some of the debates leading up to Romney's nomination were a bit on the boisterous side, to understate it. Applause, hollers and boos punctuated some of the GOP primary debates, with now-vanquished contenders Herman Cain and Newt Gingrich playing more to the audience in the hall than the one watching at home. Not this time. Repeatedly, before the candidates entered the hall, organizers chided the audience of 975 - a third each from the Obama campaign, Romney campaign and organizers' picks - to behave. If they didn't, moderator Jim Lehrer warned, he would ask Michelle Obama and Ann Romney to help enforce the rule against audience reaction to answers. The audience sat shrouded in darkness throughout the debate. And they largely followed the guidance of debate officials, interjecting laughter only twice - once when Obama mentioned his 20th wedding anniversary to Michelle and again near the end of the debate when the president mentioned that it would be hard for Romney to work with Democrats at the same time he was repealing the health care law they helped pass. ___ THE PHYSICAL MOVES When Romney all but accused Obama of lying about his tax plan, the president alternated between looking directly at his Republican rival and bowing his head to take notes. At another time, Romney looked to the moderator, waving his hand slightly in the air to indicate that he wanted to jump into the debate. He then insisted that he wanted to have "the last word." To be sure, a lot of the exchanges will not be reflected in the transcript. The president spent much of his time at the podium bowing his head and taking notes, or staring directly at his opponent. He balanced his weight on one foot, crossing his right leg behind his left foot. At one point, a loud thud could be heard coming from backstage. Obama took notice, turning around briefly, though nothing was visible from the stage. At other times, Romney alternated between a forced smile and surprised scowl as the president spoke. ___ THE END After the pair finished their 90 minutes of sparring, each walked across the stage to shake hands. "Good job," the president told his challenger. Soon after, Ann Romney walked up the stairs, making an excited and triumphant gesture toward her husband before embracing him. Following her up on stage? Four of Romney's five sons, one of his daughters-in-law and two of his middle school-age grandchildren. The Obamas both shook hands or chatted briefly with the Romney clan, with Obama at one point bending down to introduce himself to Romney's granddaughter Chloe. The president departed the arena within minutes of the debate ending. There was a sharp chill in the air, a drastic shift from the warm and sunny weather that greeted Obama upon his arrival earlier in the day. Romney lingered on stage longer than the president. He was holding his notes in his hand, the paper folded vertically; he tapped his son Josh on the lapel with the paper and handed it to him. Josh tucked the notes into his suit jacket pocket. Right before he walked off stage - the president already gone - Romney turned to the audience and put his hand over his heart and waved, a wide grin on his face. Many whooped and cheered. ___ TWITTER REPONSE Romney's sons took to Twitter to celebrate their father's performance. "Now that was fun," wrote Tagg Romney, the eldest. Tagg then retweeted his brother, Josh. "Clear eyes, full hearts, can't lose," Josh wrote. The phrase comes from the TV series "Friday Night Lights." A picture attached to Josh's tweet showed Mitt and Ann Romney underneath a sign with that phrase printed on it and overlaid on the "R'' Romney logo. ___ THE PREGAME Romney spent much of debate day surrounded by his family. In the morning, he took time to meet with top advisers to finish debate preparation. But after he returned from a visit to the debate hall in the afternoon, four of his five sons joined him in his hotel room, along with wife Ann and two of his grandchildren. He and Ann had a takeout dinner from The Cheesecake Factory - he had spaghetti and a barbecue sandwich. Even before the debate began, the Romneys huddled together as a family. Mitt and Ann Romney watched their sons play Jenga, a game of stacked wooden pieces where players pull them out one at a time until the wooden tower falls. Sons Craig and Matt Romney were shown in photos playing with Nick, who is Matt's son and Mitt's grandson. Also before the debate, Obama got a visit from his wife, Michelle, who arrived in Denver on Wednesday afternoon following a solo campaign swing. The two rode to the debate together in the president's black armored limousine, eliciting cheers from a crowd gathered outside Obama's hotel on the first couple's 20th wedding anniversary. Copyright 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.?By SAMANTHA CRITCHELL AP Fashion Writer NEW YORK (AP) - When you are a hot young starlet in Hollywood, you often get what you want. For Nikki Reed, that meant goose-bump calfskin, and for Chloe Grace Moretz, it was a menswear-inspired design. They are two of the celebrities to work with footwear designer Stuart Weitzman to craft shoes to their specs to help raise money for ovarian cancer research. Weitzman has a long history of working with stars, and he finds many of them to be "frustrated fashion designers." "It doesn't surprise me when they make requests or have ideas. They have a desire to create what they wear and what they look like," said Weitzman. "It would be surprising to me if they didn't want to have more input and try design." The Young Hollywood Cares collection was co-designed this year by Moretz, Reed, Brooklyn Decker, Julianne Hough and AnnaSophia Robb. Weitzman recalled Moretz's inspiration: "She told me as a kid, she would wear her father's wingtips and oxfords. ... And she wanted to make a shoe like her dad's that was sexy, high and wearable." Other styles include Decker's gold metallic cap-toe black multistrap ankle boots, and Robb's black pony-hair stiletto pumps with burgundy satin piping. This is the second round of collaborations, following last year's successful fundraising effort of $80,000, which was done without much promotion or publicity, Weitzman said. "I want to be more visible," he said. "I have learned it's hard to ask people for money and it's harder to get them to give it, but if you have fun and make some noise, you can rattle it. You'll buy something, even if it costs a little more, but why not for a good cause?" Proceeds from the collection benefit research at the Folkman Institute/Vascular Biology Program at Boston's Children's Hospital. ___ Online: Copyright 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.?CONWAY, SC (WMBF) - Horry County Schools' first ever Technology Fair showcased the work of more than 300 students and teachers in a day-long display.The event, which was sponsored by the Grand Strand Technology Council and was held at the Barefoot Resort Conference Center on April 29, featured 22 schools competing. Winners were honored in 12 categories.Burgess Elementary School students Ajay Patel, Carson Ward, and Kendall Securro took top honors with the Best-In-Show award among all grade levels.Other winners are:Elementary/Middle School DivisionDue to the volume of entries in multimedia applications and video editing/digital imaging, elementary and middle school entries were judged separately. In other categories, elementary school and middle school students were judged together.Multimedia Applications Elementary: First Place: Ajay Patel, Carson Ward, and Kendall Securro, Burgess Elementary School; Second Place: Carly Mitchell, Carolynn Dallas, Riverlee Weaver, Burgess Elementary School; and Third Place: Chris Young and Dylan Fuss, Burgess Elementary School;Multimedia Applications Middle: First Place: Anna Coggeshall, North Myrtle Beach Middle School; Second Place: Lainey Lewis, Black Water Middle School; and Third Place: Lukas Ray, North Myrtle Beach Middle School;Video Editing / Digital Imaging Elementary: First Place: Chandler Webster Whittemore Park Middle School and Marshall Webster, Pee Dee Elementary School; Second Place: Mariah Dozier and Katrina Wohlgemuth, Ocean Bay Elementary School; and Third Place: Andrew Gasperson, Burgess Elementary School;Video Editing / Digital Imaging Middle: First Place: Jose Aveldanes and William Saylor, Loris Middle School; Second Place: Asia Lewis, Jimmy Jackson, Sam Mack, and Will Hardwick, North Myrtle Beach Middle School; and Third Place: Dillion Bowie, Hannah Edge, Taylor Moon, Tripp Schofield, North Myrtle Beach Middle School;3-D Modeling: First Place (3-way tie): Kyle Jordan and Triston Marino, Whittemore Park Middle School; Emily Yarrison, Homewood Elementary School; and Connor Holcombe, Hunter Allison, Kody Ruff, Spencer Rutland, Forestbrook Middle School; Second Place: Jacob Hughey, Homewood Elementary School; and Third Place: Markus McCullough, Homewood Elementary School;Creative / Other: First Place: Bradley Gore, Jake Rowles, and Tyrique Robinson, North Myrtle Beach Middle School; Second Place: Remy DiAngelo, Myrtle Beach Intermediate School; and Third Place: Dylan Howell, Burgess Elementary School;Digital Photography: First Place: Dani Silvestri, Desiree Santos, Jacob Humphreys, and Sophie Spruill, Ocean Bay Elementary School;Non-Animated Graphic Design: First Place: Mikaela Campman, Ocean Bay Elementary School; and Second Place: Alekzander Geng Ocean Bay Elementary School;Non-Multimedia Applications: First Place: Desiree Santos and Katie Campbell, Ocean Bay Elementary School; and Second Place: Bailey Strawn and Kayla Washington, Ocean Bay Elementary School;Project Programming: First Place: Calla Hickeyand and Katrina Wohlgemuth, Ocean Bay Elementary School; Second Place: Jacky Wong and Ross Epstein, Ocean Bay Elementary School; and Third Place: Gabbi Hartnett, Kaleigh Tarabeck, Olivia Gano, and Olivia King, Ocean Bay Elementary School;Robotics: First Place: Gretchen Dunn and Katelyn Altman, Whittemore Park Middle School; Second Place: Ajay Patel, Burgess Elementary School; and Third Place Grey Gatewood, Jacky Wong, Jonathan Leach, and Ross Epstein, Ocean Bay Elementary School;High School DivisionDigital Imaging: First Place (tie): Andrew Kelly, Academy for Technology and Academics; Dennis Merritt, Jonathan Fox, Kyle Arnette, and Tyler Fejes; Loris High School; and Second Place: Brandon Causey, Jordyn Herring, and Kasey Strickland, Loris High School;Video Editing: First Place (tie): Jack Caswell, Julia Citrone, and Zachary Scanlon, Academy for Arts, Science and Technology; Cody Clark, Myrtle Beach High School; Second Place: Brandon Melanson and Sean Kelly, Academy for Arts, Science and Technology; and Third Place: Chesley Foxworth, Rachel Smith, Reagan Christy, and Rebecca Usry, Myrtle Beach High School;3-D Modeling: First Place: Josh Clynes, Frank Morrone, Micha Bero, Academy for Technology and Academics; and Second Place: Micha Bero, Frank Morrone; Academy for Technology and Academics;Animated Graphic Design: First Place: Jacob May and William Bossler, Socastee High School; Second Place: Alex Stacy, Academy for Technology and Academics; and Third Place: Joseph Tennant, Academy for Technology and Academics;Creative / Other: First Place: Alyce Causey, Heather Fleury, JC Crowl, and Timmane Bellamy, Academy for Arts, Science and Technology; Second Place: Ashley Readler, Kenneth Etheridge, Kristin Unrue and Lindsy Morris, Academy for Arts, Science and Technology; and Third Place: Summer Krauel, Academy for Technology and Academics;Digital Photography: First Place: Emilee Vinesett, Emily Howell, and Patterson Huggins, Academy for Arts, Science and Technology; Second Place: Jefferson Monroe; Academy for Arts, Science and Technology; and Third Place: Ashley Stubbs, North Myrtle Beach High School;Graphic Design (general): First Place: Carrie Little, North Myrtle Beach High School; and Second Place: Logan Smith, North Myrtle Beach High School;Multimedia Applications: First Place: Alec McMillen, Fred Elliott Myers, and Ryder Tipton, Myrtle Beach High School; and Second Place: Alli Cargill, Austin Willard, and Holly Averill, Myrtle Beach High School;Non-Animated Graphic Design: First Place: Collin Gallagher and Kalie Smith, Aynor High School; Second Place: Jay Brown and Lauren Rose, Loris High School; and Third Place: Angela Milbourne, Academy for Technology and Academics;Non-Multimedia Applications: First Place: Nikki Worechestor, Academy for Technology and Academics; Second Place: Iunamei Haloningano, Academy for Technology and Academics; and Third Place: Dawon Barrow, Jerimee Jones, Paola Veina, and Gabrielle Gore, Academy for Technology and Academics;Project Programming: First Place: Brittany Butler, Flo Middleton, Isaiah Crawford, and Caleb Andrew Corbin, Academy for Technology and Academics;Robotics: First Place: Alex Reynolds, Kelly Marlowe, Sarah Krzak, Steven White, T.J. Hastie and Craig D'Alessandro, Academy for Arts, Science and Technology; and Second Place: Amber Morris, Chloe Luke, and Drew Adorno, Academy for Technology and Academics;Teacher DivisionTechnology Innovation: First Place: Kelly Gilstrap, Myrtle Beach Intermediate School; Second Place: Ben Coy, Burgess Elementary School; and Third Place: Kay Sellers and Holly Barnes, Conway High School.In addition to the student and teacher entries, parents who attended also had an opportunity to learn more about district-wide technological initiatives such as PowerSchool, Career and Technology Education, the Horry County Virtual School, Compass Learning, and Media Services.Plans are underway to hold a second Technology Fair next school year.Copyright 2010 WMBF News. All rights reserved.?Information contained on this page is provided by companies via press release distributed through PR Newswire, an independent third-party content provider. PR Newswire, WorldNow and this Station make no warranties or representations in connection therewith.SOURCE Wynn Las VegasTimepiece Epicenter Features Top Luxury BrandsLAS VEGAS, Sept. 26, 2012 /PRNewswire/ --? continues to raise the bar for luxurious shopping experiences with the addition of Wynn & Company Watches located in the . The new store is the premier shopping destination for watch aficionados offering renowned timepiece collections from industry leaders such as Patek Phillipe, Vacheron Constantin, Panarei, Breguet, Blancpain, Harry Winston and A. Lange & Sohne.(Photo: )?(Photo: )"Wynn & Company Watches is a unique store in the retail market place as it houses all of the top luxury timepiece brands in one place," said Hedy Woodrow, vice president of retail for Wynn Las Vegas. "In an effort to continuously elevate our guest experience, we have brought in exclusive styles and collections that can only be found in Las Vegas at Wynn." Patek Phillipe, Vacheron Constantin, Panarei, Breguet and Blancpain, each have their own dedicated room within Wynn & Company Watches. Each space is custom designed to reflect the brand's distinctive identity and color pallet so they are recognizable to timepiece enthusiasts. In addition to the five unique spaces and inviting decor throughout the boutique, Wynn & Company Watches also features two private viewing rooms where guests can meet with a personal timepiece expert to select a watch that suits their lifestyle in a comfortable, exclusive setting. ?In addition to the large selection of exquisite timepieces offered at Wynn & Company Watches, it carries limited edition and one-of-a-kind pieces such as the 21 Blackjack and Baccara by Christophe Claret. Wynn & Company Watches is also the exclusive retailer in Las Vegas to carry collections by Franc Vila, Bovet, Delaneau, Carl F. Bucherer, Christophe Claret and A. Lange & Sohne.The Wynn and Encore Esplanades are open Sunday through Thursday 10 a.m. to 11 p.m. and Friday and Saturday 10 a.m. to 12 a.m. For additional information about the incredible array of exclusive and unique shopping boutiques at Wynn and Encore, visit .About the Esplanades at Wynn and Encore:With over 100,000 square feet of luxury retail space, Wynn and Encore offer an incredible array of international, exclusive and unique shopping boutiques. The Esplanades at Wynn and Encore are home to the only U.S. boutique outside of Manhattan from famous footwear designer Manolo Blahnik and America's only Rolex branded store. The repertoire of retailers includes Alexander McQueen, Brioni, Cartier, Chanel, Dior, Chopard, Chloe, Graff, Hermes, Louis Vuitton and Oscar de la Renta. The eponymous Wynn LVNV also features home furnishings and accessories that are hand selected from all over the world by famed interior designer and executive vice president of design for Wynn Design and Development, Roger Thomas, and are inspired by the rooms and restaurants of the resort. ©2012 PR Newswire. All Rights Reserved. ?By THOMAS ADAMSON AP Fashion Writer PARIS (AP) - Everyone loves a high-profile rivalry, but perhaps the fashion world more than most. This might explain why fashion writers have so eagerly pitted the two new influential faces of Paris' ready-to-wear calendar against each other. In the Christian Dior ring, Raf Simons - the house designer appointed in April whose Friday collection wowed journalists - and in Yves Saint Laurent's, Hedi Slimane, the 44-year-old appointed in March, who himself used to work at Dior menswear. Amid incredible pressure to deliver, Paris-born Slimane unveiled his new vision for the rival house Monday, with YSL themselves adding to the buzz through their strict guestlist and restricted invitations. Meanwhile, the front row presence was proof enough of the brand's enduring allure: From French First Lady Valerie Trierweiler, actress Jessica Chastain and a roll call of his designing peers Vivienne Westwood, Alber Elbaz and Marc Jacobs. So who won? YVES SAINT LAURENT When fashion editors put down their pens halfway through a catwalk show, it's always cause for worry. This was the case at Hedi Slimane's disappointing debut at Yves Saint Laurent - a rather confused ode to excess that used fringing, leather, lacing, tassels, feathers, sequins, skinny menswear tailoring, baggy pants, cinching cummerbunds, capes, tribal pendants and almost everything else under the sun. Pierre Berge, Saint Laurent's former partner said: "(Slimane) knows the Saint Laurent DNA, the spirit." There was definitely a nod to that. For example, black silk neckbows, a house signature that was used as a leitmotif. But the collection lacked the empowering sex appeal that made Saint Laurent one of the most famous names in fashion. The bows, rather symbolically, instead of unifying the collection, fought with other busy materials for attention. Unflattering floppy Stetson hats capped it off. Slimane took a gamble on the no-holds-barred approach to impress, but somehow fell short of the mark in his basic silhouette. Many individual garments - like one sumptuous look with side a spread of black feathers - were highly creative. But here the plumes' dynamic horizontal energy was drowned out by the bow. Slimane pulled it off well when he wasn't trying too hard: A classy skinny menswear pant looked great with a sharp shouldered tuxedo - and a spot on merging of YSL and Slimane's own personal style. Had he kept it cleaner, Slimane might not have given the upper hand so easily to his Dior rival. CHLOE The Chloe fashion house is celebrating its 60th birthday during Paris Fashion Week but its spring-summer 2013 show proved it's still as fresh as a daisy. Designer Clare Waight Keller's collection takes its cue from founder Gaby Aghion's mantra: "I lived the life I wanted." Chloe, founded in 1952, practically invented ready-to-wear in the first place and has always confidently led the way. That rebelliousness came out Monday in the clothes - strongly feminine and diaphanous but also structured with laser-cut edges in many large frills and ripples. "I wanted a feminine spirit, but sharp...like a knife," Waight Keller said after the show. This contrasted with the collection's soft side. Transparent organza silks played on volume, giving a layered three-dimensionality to soft, oversized T-shirts and knee-length skirts. The light touches came from hibiscus flower appliques on sheer white tops, or in one instance, in green down a singular pant leg. Features like this can look overly busy if handled poorly. But here the looks were paired with a clean-cut minimalist vest, jacket or Bermuda to tasteful effect. STELLA MCCARTNEY "Palatable, everyday." That's how Stella McCartney, backstage, describes her fresh, optimistic and relaxed spring-summer outing. If she hoped the collection to be everyday, the show itself - in the gilded foyer of the Paris Opera Garnier with ornate, swinging double chandeliers in gold , not to mention the famous faces like Kate Moss, Salma Hayek and McCartney's former Beatle father Paul - was not. It's hard to be casual when you were born with one of the most famous dads on the planet - but she got full marks for trying. Silhouettes ignored the waist, with a cool, low-slung belted vibe, and the big curves of last season were gone. Thinking outside the box, McCartney created some fantastic elliptical curves in vibrant saffron yellow and forest green, sculpting a feminine shape like a geometric hourglass. Black and white camouflage print looked fantastic on a silky jumpsuit, worn by sassy model of the moment Karlie Kloss. This look wasn't exactly everyday, but it's sure going to sell. HAKAAN There's going to be a one-hour hole in the normally tight Paris Fashion Week calendar, after representatives of label Hakaan said its entire collection had been lost. Turkish designer Hakaan Yildirim was set to present his spring-summer 2013 to the media on Tuesday afternoon. But PR company Karlaotto sent out emails Monday to all those with invitations saying the preview was canceled - after all the clothes had mysteriously disappeared. "The whole collection is lost," said Karen Nitsche of Karlaotto. "It was when they were being transported. We don't know how." Last November, Marc Jacobs canceled a London press preview after his collection was stolen during its transfer from Paris. ____ Thomas Adamson can be followed at http:/ /Twitter.com/ThomasAdamsonAP Copyright 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.?Discover Yahoo! With Your FriendsExplore news, videos, and much more based on what your friends are reading and watching. Publish your own activity and retain full control.?Amy Childs has said that The Only Way Is Essex should drop her former co-stars Lauren Pope, Lucy Mecklenburgh and Chloe Sims because they are boring.The reality TV star - who made her name on TOWIE only to quit after the second series - told New! magazine she thinks the show needs a revamp, and that viewers have seen enough of Lauren, Chloe, Lucy and Mario Falcone.Amy said: "I do think the viewers have seen enough of Mario Falcone and Lucy Mecklenburgh."We've seen a lot of this 'he's cheated, she's cheated' stuff and it has become a bit boring."I also think Lauren Pope and Chloe Sims have run out of storylines."But I do hope they keep Sam Faiers, Joey Essex and Jessica Wright - they're my faves!"The original TOWIE production team have apparently left the UK to make an Indian version of the hit structured reality show, and the new team are said to be planning a massive overhaul ahead of the next series.But Amy said: "I don't think new characters are ever a good idea. For example, they thought Georgina Dorsett would be a big character and she was hardly in it!"?There are certain days when one realizes that the best way to see French romanticism is from the vantage point of an English rose. That was very much the case on Monday afternoon, Oct. 1, in Paris on viewing the curling and ruffled and rather determinedly expansive spring 2013 collection designed by the house of Chloe's creative director Claire Waight Keller, an energetic English-born lady. One could not accuse Waight Keller of pulling her punches when it came to volume - from huge culottes, designed for slim ladeis but large enough for a linebacker, to abstract hibiscus print pajamas for day, so large they billowed down the catwalk. Waight Keller's sunny personality was reflected in the setting - a wide white board catwalk reminiscent of a posh seaside terrace illuminated by sun beaming through the lofty panels in the custom built tent in the Tuilleries gardens in Paris. The designer was in harmony with many of the key trends in Paris: a sense of lady-like distinction, metallic fabrics - most memorably iridescent Lurex - and a new twisted silhouette. She cropped and chopped sleeves, added peplums to cocktails dresses, ruffled necklines incessantly and finished pants and skirts in patches of fabric flowers. In a word, Waight Keller determinedly broke new ground rather than referenced the past. Accessorized with some great new Art Deco shoulder bags, this was a charming moment for Chloe. The show celebrated the 60th anniversary of Chloe, and was dedicated to the house's founder, Gaby Aghion. Two days before, Waight Keller feted the opening of Chloe Attitudes, a sleek exhibition that included work from each of Chloe's nine key designers all the way back to Aghion's first show, a charmingly informal affair at the Cafe de Flore on Paris' Left Bank in 1956. Today the brand crossed the Seine, a little like Waight Keller crossed the Chanel, to create a certain casual chic that will forever be Chloe.?Dress Like a Celebrity This Fall with These Must-Know Designer Fashion TipsPRWeb–), premier reseller of upscale clothing and accessories highlights a few celebrity fashion tips while offering some of their own stunning style ideas. (PRWEB) September 11, 2012 With a new season weeks away, Rodeo Drive Resale (), premier reseller of 100% authentic guaranteed bags and fashions including , , and , shares style tips offered by famous fashionistas Chloe Dao and Kelly Osbourne, while contributing a few of their own.1)    REMEMBER THE LITTLE THINGS: Designer accessories, such as a luxury belt or a pearl necklace, are simple ways to make an outfit shine. Have fun experimenting with pieces such as rings, earrings and bracelets to discover the perfect outfit/accessory combination. While accessories are wonderful, Rodeo Drive Resale co-founder Raya Jaffer was careful to point out that, when it comes to the bling, less is more: “A large, blingy necklace with a chunky bracelet is too much. Your accessories should never compete.”2)    LAYER YOUR LOOK: “Cardigans for me are like your BFF, your best friend forever, because they're season-less, they're great when you want to have nice coverage, look stylish and it will always fit because it's made out of knit!” Designer and “Project Runway” winner Chloe Dao said in an interview posted on Livewellnetwork.com. “The classic cardigan can be sexy, stylish and even slimming. There's one for every body type and every occasion.” For those looking for the best deals in designer cardigans, stores such as shopRDR.com give shoppers the option to buy and sell luxury designers with savings on pre-owned Christian Dior, Yves Saint Laurent, and more. 3)    LOVE THY FEET: “Always pack a pair of ballet flats in your handbag because by the end of the night your feet are killing you,” Osbourne, co-host of the E! program “Fashion Police,” told the Associated Press in an August 28 interview. “You want to keep going but you can't. I can't tell you how many times I've had to go home early because my feet hurt and I haven't had a pair of shoes to change into. Don't let your footwear ruin your good time.”4)    GO HOLLYWOOD: Besides protection from the sun, the right pair of shades add to the “cool factor” to even the most basic outfit. Sunglasses come in a variety of styles, so finding the right pair requires a bit of patience and understanding of which frames best compliment your face: Large, round frames work well with a square-shaped face, while those with round or oval faces should opt for shades with a horizontal frame. Rodeo Drive Resale (shopRDR.com) has built a reputation of providing amazing deals on handbags, clothing and accessories from the top designers of upscale fashion. The company offers a 100% guarantee of authenticity on each item sold, and works daily with a network of clients looking to buy, sell, or for consignment of their luxury goods. ShopRDR.com loves high-end fashion, and believes finding a high quality, classic piece should be an easy, enjoyable -- and most importantly -- hassle-free shopping experience. For the finest in Louis Vuitton, Chanel, Prada, Gucci, St. John Knits, Christian Louboutin, Tiffany & Co. and more, visit RDR online at or call 1-888-697-3725.Also find shopRDR at: Facebook: facebook.com/shopRDR Twitter: twitter.com/shopRDR YouTube: youtube.com/ shopRDR Pinterest: pinterest.com/shopRDRRodeo Drive Resale (shopRDR.com) 1-888-697-3725 service(at)shopRDR(dot)comEditorial Dept. Luxury Collections Group, Inc. 713-777-0390 ? Emma Watson would love to team up with Erdem or Valentino.The actress has dipped her toe in the fashion pond in the past, collaborating with ethical clothing brand People Tree. She has also modelled and is the face of Lancome. Emma has now spoken about other companies she would like to work with.“We have so many great up-and-coming British labels, I'd do something fabulous with someone unexpected like Erdem,” she told vogue.co.uk.“I like Valentino a lot - they never use actresses in their campaigns. Chloe's really cool too. I'm probably going to get in trouble for talking about this!"Emma has modelled for Burberry in the past and it’s a label she has a great affinity with. She would have no problem wearing pieces designed by creative director Christopher Bailey for the rest of her life.“If I could wear any label forever it would be Burberry,” she said. “It covers a huge span of stuff. You can't go wrong with a classic trench and a pair of jeans.” c Cover Media?Copyright c 2012 Yahoo! Asia Pacific Pte Ltd (Co. Reg. No. 199700735D). All Rights Reserved. Yahoo! News Network?Pureed frozen fruit probably won't become the next bacon, or even cupcake. It's simply not sexy enough.So-called soft serve fruit is, however, having a moment, recently becoming a darling of the mommy blog set, showing up on ABC's "Good Morning America," inspiring a new countertop kitchen appliance, even spawning a product line and small chain of shops, the New York City-based Soft Serve Fruit Co.And to be clear, we are talking about something that is precisely as it sounds ? frozen fruit that is pureed until it reaches the consistency of soft serve ice cream. That's it.Soft serve fruit is "the answer to an ice cream lover's cravings," says Francesca Borgognone, Entertain Editor at The Daily Meal.com, who adds that the appeal is easy to understand. "A fraction of the calories and mixed with the same type of fixings that frozen yogurt has ? it can be sweet, savory as well as an any-time-of-the-day treat."Soft serve fruit has been quietly building a following online, where recipes abound for turning all manner of frozen fruit into treats. It's hardly complicated. A splash of juice or water, a bag of frozen fruit and a few minutes in a food processor and the result is something that begs for an ice cream cone.Just type "soft serve fruit" into Pinterest and see the multicolored flurry of frozen fancies that pops up. And kitchen supply companies are keeping up with the trend, marketing appliances specifically for making frozen fruit desserts, like the Yonanas machine that costs around $50. Of course, most people just use their food processors or blenders.Tanya Steel, editor-in-chief of Epicurious.com, has been on to this idea for a while, keeping foil-wrapped, frozen over-ripe bananas in the freezer for times when she wants a treat that's tasty without being calorific."I started making them when my kids were little and I was trying to not only curb their constant need and quest for sugar, but also my own," says Steel, coauthor of the cookbook "Real Food for Healthy Kids." Steel says her site has a number of frozen fruit dessert recipes and "we see incredible interest in them," she says.Soft serve fruit "makes so much sense," she says. "It's an almost guilt-free treat and you actually feel good about giving it to your kids and you feel good about giving it to yourself."For Chloe Epstein, a partner in the Soft Serve Fruit Co., the love of soft serve fruit began with bananas. Expecting for the second time (twins, as it turned out), she craved something sweet, but she wanted it to be healthy, too. Up to then her career had been in law, but she was always looking for innovative ways to create healthy alternatives to favorite indulgences so she decided to try to come up with her own solution."We started to experiment with frozen, old, over-ripened bananas in a blender, juicer and Cuisinart and learned, like many who play in the kitchen, that there was a way to create something like the creamy frozen consistency we craved without all the other 'stuff,'" she says. The first few efforts encouraged them to incorporate soft serve machines and learn the steps needed to guarantee consistency and taste.The big challenge was sticking to the goal of keeping the product simple ? minimal ingredients ? wholesome and nutritionally sound. After a lot of trial and error they found that fruit, filtered water and a touch of organic cane sugar ? to keep the machine from "hard-freezing" the mix, not for taste ? did the trick. After perfecting bananas they moved on to mango and apple, working with a food professional to get things right.Today, Epstein, her husband Jason, and business partner Michael Sloan run the company (soon to be renamed Chloe's Soft Serve Fruit Co.) together. They have two stores, one on the Upper East Side and one in Union Square, as well as a seasonal store in Watermill, Long Island, and are carried in several cafes in the region. They're also considering opening a branch "somewhere warm," such as Miami, Atlanta or Los Angeles, and have plans to grow their wholesale business for outlets such as schools and universities.Epstein expects interest in soft serve fruit to grow along with the general emphasis on eating healthier and more wholesome and natural foods. As for the at-home devices, Epstein says her product has been developed to have a creamier, more frozen yogurt-like texture "that we feel is unique. Nonetheless, eating a frozen banana in a home machine or a blender is a fun way to eat fruit and maintain a healthy diet, always a priority for us!"___TROPICAL MANGO BANANA SOFT SERVEStart to finish: 5 minutesServings: 410-ounce bag frozen mango chunks1 very ripe banana1/4 cup sweetened cream of coconutPinch salt1 tablespoon orange juiceIn a food processor, combine the mango, banana, cream of coconut and salt. Pulse several times to roughly chop, then add the orange juice. Process until very smooth, this may take several minutes. You may need to stop the processor several times to scrape down the sides of the bowl or move any chunks of fruit that aren't being pureed. Serve immediately.Nutrition information per serving: 140 calories; 30 calories from fat (21 percent of total calories); 3 g fat (3 g saturated; 0 g trans fats); 0 mg cholesterol; 29 g carbohydrate; 2 g fiber; 24 g sugar; 1 g protein; 45 mg sodium.___CREAMY BLUEBERRY BANANA SOFT SERVEThe bananas provide most of the "creamy" in this soft serve. They combine so wonderfully with the blueberries to create a silky, creamy soft serve. If you want to keep it dairy free, substitute plain rice milk, coconut milk, or apple juice for the regular milk. You also could use water.Start to finish: 5 minutesServings: 612-ounce bag frozen blueberries2 frozen bananas, cut into chunks2 tablespoons honey1/2 teaspoon cinnamonPinch salt2 tablespoons milkIn a food processor, combine the blueberries, bananas, honey, cinnamon and salt. Pulse several times to roughly chop, then add the milk. Process until very smooth, this may take several minutes. You may need to stop the processor several times to scrape down the sides of the bowl or move any chunks of fruit that aren't being pureed. Serve immediately.Nutrition information per serving: 90 calories; 5 calories from fat (6 percent of total calories); 0.5 g fat (0 g saturated; 0 g trans fats); 0 mg cholesterol; 22 g carbohydrate; 3 g fiber; 16 g sugar; 1 g protein; 30 mg sodium.___STRAWBERRY LIME SOFT SERVEStart to finish: 5 minutesServings: 410-ounce bag frozen strawberries1/4 cup agave syrup or honeyJuice of 2 limes (about 1/3 cup)In a food processor, combine all ingredients. Process until very smooth, this may take several minutes. You may need to stop the processor several times to scrape down the sides of the bowl or move any chunks of fruit that aren't being pureed. Serve immediately.Nutrition information per serving: 90 calories; 0 calories from fat (0 percent of total calories); 0 g fat (0 g saturated; 0 g trans fats); 0 mg cholesterol; 25 g carbohydrate; 2 g fiber; 22 g sugar; 1 g protein; 0 mg sodium.?Faye Business Systems Group Achieves SugarCRM Partner of the MonthPRWeb– is known for their extensive experience implementing into small and large organizations alike as well as their industry leading integrations with a variety of ERP, marketing, and credit card processing software solutions. "It's an exciting time to be working with Sugar as they experience such tremendous growth, and we're glad to be a part of it", commented David Faye, FBSG CEO. “Our organization is committed to implementing Sugar and building world-class integrations that streamline business processes enabling users to get the most value out of their software. The Sugar Partner of the Month recognition means a lot to us, and we're looking forward to building even more integrations with SugarCRM that help customers boost productivity and increase their bottom line."The Sugar Partner of the Month recognition was based on the successful implementation of Sugar and subsequent for , a packaging and freight forwarding specialist. The early implementation focused on winning new business via increased pipeline visibility and better opportunity management. Mark McAnlis, General Sales Manager for Paramount added "FBSG was integral throughout the entire implementation, including the training we did for the lead team and the quarterly training we continue to do. They've been a terrific partner to work with."FBSG's implementation of SugarCRM enabled Paramount to: For more information on Paramount Global Services, please visit the .About Paramount Global Services Paramount Global Services is a wholly owned subsidiary of Paramount Can Inc. headquartered in California. Paramount has 5 warehouse locations including; a bonded warehouse in the UK, 3 warehouses in Southern and Northern California, and Arizona. PGS specializes in packaging products of all types, export and import transportation, information systems, as well as personalized supply chain solutions. In addition, PGS is a specialist in handling and packaging hazardous material.About Faye Business Systems Group Faye Business Systems Group is a technology consulting and software company that helps growing companies become more profitable by working with them to optimize their financial and business systems. Faye Business Systems Group has completed hundreds of successful CRM projects and is one of Sugar's leading North American Gold Partners.For more information, call (818) 227-5130, email info(at)fayebsg(dot)com, or visit . Connect with Faye Business Systems Group on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter or YouTube.About SugarCRM SugarCRM democratizes customer engagement, empowering every professional who interacts with the customer to excel at their job. SugarCRM's market leading open Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform delivers the agility, flexibility, and security required to equip each customer facing professional with the relevant information and tools they need to effectively collaborate and engage with their customer, both within and beyond the enterprise. SugarCRM applications have been downloaded more than 11 million times and currently help over 1,000,000 end users across disciplines effectively engage their customers. Over 7,000 organizations have chosen SugarCRM's On-Site and Cloud Computing services over proprietary alternatives. SugarCRM has been recognized for its customer success and product innovation by CRM Magazine, InfoWorld and Customer Interaction Solutions.For more information, call (408) 454-6900 or 1 87 SUGARCRM toll-free in the US, email contact(at)sugarcrm(dot)com, or visit .Chloe Larnach Faye Business Systems Group, Inc. (818) 227-5126 ?Faye Business Systems Group Announces New User Features for their SugarCRM Sage ERP IntegrationPRWeb– (formerly MAS 90 and MAS 200). SugarCRM is the world's fastest growing customer relationship management (CRM) company. Sage is a world-leading supplier of accounting and business management software to start-up, small, and midsized businesses. This integration allows companies to combine both best in class back end and front end software to streamline business processes.The integration permits the two software packages to “talk with each other” by sending customers (accounts), inventory items (products), sales history, and open invoices from Sage 100 ERP to SugarCRM and by sending quotes and sales orders from SugarCRM back to Sage 100. The synchronization between the packages can be set on a scheduler or run manually.New version 2.5 includes a number of user requested enhancements, including the syncing of contacts, sales history by product line, sales history by item category, and detailed invoice history and tracking numbers. The ability to send new customers entered in Sugar back to Sage 100 and functionality to control active and inactive syncs has also been added.In addition, FBSG has introduced a new Enterprise Edition of the integration that allows syncing of multiple Sage 100 ERP companies to one instance of Sugar, has compatibility with Sage 100 Advanced SQL, and includes the ability to map standard and custom fields between Sugar and Sage 100 ERP.“We're really excited to bring these new features to the integration,” said FBSG CEO David Faye. “One of our strengths has been to listen to our users, and we’re happy to be able to incorporate their feedback into this new version. The functionality added has been among the most requested in all our communication with our end user community.” In this updated version, FBSG has also added the Enterprise Edition to accommodate multi-company support, Sage SQL users, and custom mapping. “The custom mapping opens the door to users who want to customize the integration to suit their unique needs,” Faye added.The integration allows users to seamlessly connect data between Sugar and Sage 100 ERP and is immediately available from Faye Business Systems Group. More information can be obtained by contacting them directly.About Faye Business Systems Group Faye Business Systems Group is a that helps growing companies become more profitable by working with them to optimize their financial and business systems. Faye Business Systems Group has completed hundreds of successful CRM projects and is one of Sugar's leading North American Gold Partners.For more information, call (818) 227-5130, email info@fayebsg.com, or visit . Connect with Faye Business Systems Group on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter or YouTube.About SugarCRM SugarCRM democratizes customer engagement, empowering every professional who interacts with the customer to excel at their job. SugarCRM’s market leading open Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform delivers the agility, flexibility, and security required to equip each customer facing professional with the relevant information and tools they need to effectively collaborate and engage with their customer, both within and beyond the enterprise. SugarCRM applications have been downloaded more than 11 million times and currently help over 1,000,000 end users across disciplines effectively engage their customers. Over 7,000 organizations have chosen SugarCRM's On-Site and Cloud Computing services over proprietary alternatives. SugarCRM has been recognized for its customer success and product innovation by CRM Magazine, InfoWorld and Customer Interaction Solutions.For more information, call (408) 454-6900 or 1 87 SUGARCRM toll-free in the US, email contact(at)sugarcrm(dot)com, or visit . You can also connect with SugarCRM on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. About Sage Software Sage North America is part of The Sage Group plc, a leading global supplier of business management software and services. Sage North America employs more than 4,100 people and supports nearly 2.9 million small and medium-size business customers. The Sage Group plc, formed in 1981, was floated on the London Stock Exchange in 1989 and now employs 14,500 people and supports 5.8 million customers worldwide. For more information, please visit the Web site at Chloe Larnach Faye Business Systems Group, Inc. 818 227 5130 ?Ezra Klein in Bloomberg View on Obama and Romney's real differences "It’s kind of boring to think of yourself as having a set of technocratic disagreements with the opposition," Klein writes. "Yet, for the most part, that’s what this U.S. presidential election is about." Obama and Romney mostly agree on the purpose of the government, from redistribution to taxes. It's technicalities where they disagree.RELATED: Five Best Thursday Columns Matt Miller in The Washington Post on Romney's audacity Romney was bold last night on regulation, health care, and taxes, sounding reasonable and principled. "If he wins, of course, Romney and his advisers will be hailed as geniuses for their timing, for bonding the party faithful to the ticket with the choice of Paul Ryan and a conservative-themed convention, and then dashing to the center for the home stretch."RELATED: Five Best Wednesday Columns Karen L. Cox in The New York Times on being gay in the South People assume the South is a hotbed for LGBT hate. But Cox, a lesbian who has lived in the South all her life, writes that "there are gays living in the rural South who don’t all set out for the big city. They lead rich lives and have families, and sometimes even communities, that love them and accept them for who they are."RELATED: Five Best Wednesday Columns Sudhir Venkatesh in The New York Times on guns, gangs, and youth The former FBI violent crime adviser writes about the biggest problem with guns, gangs, and the youth: One, the young men don't know how to use the guns, Two, there is little support for mediation programs rather than arrests. Three, authorities don't understand how guns change hands, and some 40 percent come from family members. RELATED: Five Best Monday Columns Chloe Angyal in The Guardian on the one word missing from the contraception debate When talking contraception and abortion, politicians and activists avoid one word: sex. Democrats and Republicans talk about mothers and rape victims. They don't talk about the women who are looking to have sex for pleasure. "Those millions of women get left out of this crucial conversation: their experiences obscured and stigmatized."?Foundation for Global Scholars’ “Speed Mentoring for International Careers” Program Connects College Students with Business LeadersPRWeb–, a nonprofit organization providing scholarships for U.S. undergraduate and graduate students pursuing academic and internship programs abroad.“While there is a certain allure to international study or international work, there is a lot of work that must be done before that can be realized,” said Anthony Christie, chief marketing officer at and a mentor for the event, which took place Sept. 13 at the Center for Community at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Christie talked with students about the importance of preparation for successful international careers, including language acquisition, understanding of local cultures, and recognition of what it feels like to be a minority. “International experience is rewarding,” he said, “but international experience related to a field of interest is even more rewarding.” Mentors for the event, sponsored by , the , , and , included:Tom Bove, general partner, SV Capital Gaëlle Callnin, chief marketing officer, Virtual Worlds Translations Kai J. Chin, vice president of business banking, Wells Fargo N.A. Anthony Christie, chief marketing officer, Level 3 Communications Justin McComb, external partner relationships and business development, Evolve Megan Prentice, community outreach manager, Project C.U.R.E Barbara E. Schiola, corporate HR manager, Ball Corp. Neal Shah, senior manager of corporate development, Molycorp Meg VanderLaan, vice president of corporate communications, MWH Global Carita Watson, director and global transformation executive, IBM Global Technology Services Sandra Zoratti, speaker, author and vice president of marketing, Ricoh Fittingly, the idea for the speed mentoring event was born from the curiosity of a student who recently studied abroad and wanted to capitalize on that experience to start building her own international career. The student, Chloe Sweem, a senior at the University of Denver and an intern at the foundation, was then charged with conceptualizing, planning and executing the event, which paired students with Colorado business leaders for short networking intervals. “It was fantastic to see those mentorship conversations come alive,” Sweem said. The event also included workshops on personal branding, “going global,” studying abroad, and working for the U.S. Department of State. “The Foundation for Global Scholars is focused on preparing our young, evolving workforce for a global economy,” said Nancy Kepner, executive director. “Since our founding, we’ve given more than $1 million and served more than 1,000 students. This mentoring event is just another way for us to strengthen connections between business leaders with a global perspective and the students who will make up their future workforce.” Carita Watson, director and global transformation executive of , encouraged students not to ask how they can get a job overseas, but to instead ask how they can find a company that fits their interest in an international career. “You need to find a company that fits your desire,” she said,” and make sure it’s right for you culturally, and you’re right for it.” In addition, a study abroad or internship abroad is a plus in a job candidate. “I think that’s key in this global business environment,” she said. “I find cultural differences in the people in each of the countries in which I work. I respect those differences and have learned how to conduct myself when working or socializing with my colleagues.”Students came away from the speed mentoring event with new contacts, reality checks on working abroad, and deeper questions to ask as they launch their careers. Matthew Smith, a junior at CU-Boulder studying business, economics and political science, planned to follow up with several mentors for information or possible interviews, and continue to build his personal brand. From speaking with one mentor, he realized he needed to manage his expectations about the difficulties of working internationally. Even so, he is hopeful about his prospects. “I’ve noticed there are always jobs out there if you are willing to work for it.”For more information on scholarship and networking opportunities, visit the .About the Foundation for Global Scholars – “A million dollars given, 1,000 students served” - The Foundation for Global Scholars is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization located in Westminster, CO, serving U.S. undergraduate and graduate students pursuing academic and internship programs abroad. Through scholarships for international study, the foundation empowers future leaders to become better prepared for the fast-changing global marketplace and interdependent world. For more information, visit or call 303-502-7256.###Nancy Kepner Foundation for Global Scholars 303-502-7256 ?Front Row At London Fashion Week Day Three: Lady Gaga, Daisy Lowe, Olivia PalermoGrazia–, and the city's fashion elite were out FROWing in force. From Lady Gaga rocking up to Philip Treacy in not one, but two outrageous outfits, to all the usual suspects (Daisy Lowe, Pixie Geldof, Chloe Green) making an appearance at the Topshop Unique show, the front rows of LFW were as star-studded as ever. ?James Cameron prepares us for a fourth Avatar movie even though the second and third haven't been made yet, The Hunger Games juggernaut rolls along, and a first look at Lincoln. RELATED: James Cameron, crafter of little curio dreams, tiny delicate objects meant for a few wise people, is still writing the next two sequels to his art film Avatar, which represent Cameron's blue period, but says he has already come up with an idea for the fourth one. Terrific! What is it, great storymaster? Well, it's a prequel. Like what happened when people first showed up to the crazy dragon-rape planet and started fighting with the blue space cats? That's what Cameron thinks would be neat to explore in the fourth film in the series. The fourth. A prequel. Great. Terrific. You know what? James Cameron and George Lucas should really just get on a boat together and sail to a private island somewhere and they can make as many techno prequels to things they made already as much as they want. They can prequel stuff and green screen stuff until they are, well, blue in the face. But we won't have to deal with it, because they'll be alone on an island together, making their prequels. Avatar 4. A prequel. Heavens to Betsy, Jim. Unreal. [, via ]RELATED: Get excited y'allll. Catching Fire, the second movie in the Hungah Gamez movie series, has begun filming in Georgia. They'll film all of the Okie township scenes there, and then they'll pack everyone up in crates and ship them to Hawaii where they'll film the big arena battle segment of the story. So that is exciting! The gears are in motion, things are turning. Of course the movie won't actually come out for over a year, but still. Knowing that everyone's on set now, dressed up like all their characters, like Catfish and Pizza and Jail and all them. Can't wait. []RELATED: MTV has renewed its show Ridiculousness for a third season. Which is great, because what the world needs is a show where some guy points and laughs at YouTube videos. That's just a very valuable television program to have on the air in these American times. Well done, MTV. American patriots. []RELATED: Meanwhile Paramount has named its Star Trek sequel Star Trek Into Darkness. Which, what? There's no colon or anything. It's a sentence, or a phrase a least. A star trek into the darkness. It could be an imperative command, like "You there, go star trek into darkness," or it could be a descriptor. "What are we doing, Spock?" "Sir we're taking a star trek into darkness." It's malleability is what makes it strange, really. What a strange title. []RELATED: Here's a trailer for A Late Quartet, a movie in which Catherine Keener, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Christopher Walken play members of a famous classical string quartet that is experiencing troubles, from jealous to disease. So, just another movie made to appeal to teenage boys and no one else. So sick of all these pandering, lazy, dumbed-down movies that are just meant to get video game-playing pipsqueaks out to the theaters. Can't they make a movie for the rest of us? Just one? But nope, we're going to have to endure a movie theater full of bellowing 15-year-olds, all jostling into the theater, eager to find out if Philip Seymour Hoffman can overcome his professional jealous and Christopher Walken can deal with his Parkinson's and put on a beautiful concert. Ugh. And here's a trailer for a trailer to Steven Spielberg's Lincoln. I think this movie is a little too full of itself. ? Hedi Slimane made his eagerly-anticipated debut for Saint Laurent at Paris Fashion Week last night.The designer took over at the iconic fashion house earlier this month, opting to change its name from Yves Saint Laurent almost immediately.The label’s Spring/Summer show has been one of the most spoken about during the Fashion Week season, with stars and major designers such as Alber Elbaz, Marc Jacobs, Riccardo Tisci and Dame Vivienne Westwood flocking to see it.Hedi presented his take on the ‘70s, which appeared heavily inspired by Los Angeles.The first model strutted the catwalk in super-slim black trousers, paired with a white frilly shirt, biker jacket and a big fedora. From them on, the designer seemed to stick to what he knew.Various takes on the same look were presented. Sometimes the shirt was black, sometimes white, occasionally it boasted lace sleeves and sometimes the pants were made of leather. However, the aesthetic itself didn’t really change.Things were ramped up a notch when it came to dresses, which often fell to the floor and were covered by a chiffon overlay. They were not smart enough to be considered eveningwear, with most coming in black and featuring tight belts around the waist.Some colour appeared in bright red and teal gowns, which were loose-fitting and again teamed with fedoras.Accessories came in the shape of envelope clutches and gold tasselled necklaces, again adding to the ‘70s vibe.Chloe also showed yesterday and kept things simple, opting for a colour palette of muted blush and blue tones, with the occasional splash of black added in. Sportswear was the big look, with models wearing loose-fitting tops over shorts and simple knee-length A-line skirts. Boxy crop-tops added to the relaxed feel, as did loose trousers which were cropped and boasted big pockets.Paris Fashion Week continues today with shows by Chanel, Valentino and Alexander McQueen. c Cover Media?A real hit with Red magazine’s fashion team, the inspired number from Warehouse ticks all the right boxes.From its sheepskin collar, to oversized pockets complete with visible zip detail and contrasting muted tones, it’s so on trend and for under ￡100, a great buy that will stylishly see you through the season.?Maxwell Drew JohnsonMaxwell Drew Johnson, the daughter of Jessica Simpson and former NFL player Eric Johnson, boasted a wardrobe full of designer duds even before she entered the world on May 1."I mean, my baby has garment bags of designer clothes," Simpson said on "Jimmy Kimmel Live!" in March. "It's pretty amazing."The pop star and "The Fashion Star" judge revealed to Elle in March that she's worried about how much her daughter will take after her fiance, Eric Johnson."I swear, I will croak if she asks me for a pair of Nikes instead of Christian Louboutins," she told Elle. "Eric is so athletic. We're going to have this athletic girl and I won't even be able to take her shopping."Even her introduction to earth was a tony event. She was born in a nearly $4,000-a-day birthing suite at Los Angeles' Cedars Sinai Medical Center, which featured manicure/pedicure stations and meals served on linen tablecloths. (Simpson's rep confirmed the star gave birth at Cedars Sinai, but would not comment on the details of the birthing suite).?On the occasion of Paris Fashion Week (September 25 - October 3), Relaxnews got a peek into the inspiration behind the designs?for the label Devastee. The line's new Spring/Summer 2013 collection will hit the runway September 26. A good occasion for fashion fans to find out more about the artistic tastes and influences of the duo of designers formed by Ophelie Kiere and Francois Alary.Relaxnews: Which singer or actress best embodies your Spring/Summer 2013 collection and why?Devastee: Our S/S 2013 collection is not really incarnated by anyone. Our work was focused on landscape imagery. We were interested in how geometry and abstract ideas can affect our perception of landscapes. For our runway, we have therefore created a very specific woman illustrating this idea.R: What do you think will be the essential fashion accessory for Spring/Summer 2013 and why?D: A very rigid black satin cotton canvas shopping bag, with a white satin embroidered square in the center braided like a picture frame.R: Which song do you associate with your latest collection? Why?D: "Hot boys" by Rikslyd.R: Where is the most unexpected place you went to find inspiration for your Spring/Summer 2013 designs? D: The Limogne cemetery (French Southern Midi Pyrenees region).R: What is the biggest backstage disaster you have ever been confronted with before a fashion show? D: Luckily, we have never had to deal with any backstage disaster! But once, we had to call a model and wake her up 30 minutes before the show.R: Which event in your personal life has had the biggest impact on your career as a fashion designer?D: This season perhaps, for we have worked with Chloe Delaume to create a book that was the starting point of our collection. It is a completely new way to approach the creation of a collection.? ?IPPOLITA Personal Appearance Will Include Fall/Winter Collection PreviewPRWeb– or for more information.About Saks Fifth AvenueSaks Fifth Avenue, one of the world’s preeminent specialty retailers, is renowned for its superlative American and international designer collections, its expertly edited assortment of handbags, shoes, jewelry, cosmetics and gifts, and the first-rate fashion expertise and exemplary client service of its Associates. Today, Saks operates 45 full-line stores in 20 states, 2 licensed stores in the Middle East and 2 licensed stores in Mexico City, 61 Saks Fifth Avenue OFF 5TH stores and saks.com, the company’s online store. Saks Fifth Avenue is proud to be named a J.D. Power and Associates 2012 Customer Service Champion and is only one of 50 U.S. companies so named.Chad Carpenter 713-843-5606 ?Jennifer Wilson turns the world of venture capital into art with San Francisco premiere of new play ‘And That’s What Little Girls Are Made Of’Oct 19 - Nov 4, 2012PRWeb–. Tickets can also be purchased at the Theater box office, which opens 30 minutes before each performance. Diane Roby Red Communications (415) 931-5367 ?Copyright c 2012 Yahoo! Asia Pacific Pte Ltd (Co. Reg. No. 199700735D). All Rights Reserved. Yahoo! News Network?The New York runways leave London a hard act to follow. Can British Fashion come up with the creative goods to outdo its predecessor?Offering over 70 fashion shows and presentations from now until September 18 plus an eclectic mix of heritage megabrands and budding ready-to-wear labels, there's no denying the city's ability to deliver. Quirky models, high-street gatecrashers and crowds of eccentric hangers-on are what makes this fashion week. London's reputation for being a fountain of boundless creativity still stands.Staying true to the city's unpretentious spirit, the organizers of LFW are live-streaming all shows on their website .Relaxnews has picked the stand-out shows to look out for:New York may be getting close, but fresh edgy fashion remains London's forte. On Sunday (day 3), Jonathan Saunders -- Scottish designer and winner of Vogue's 2012 Fashion Fund award -- will take to the runway. Stints at Alexander McQueen, Christian Lacroix, Pucci and Chloe prior to setting up his own label enabled him to hone his skills as a colorist and print artist.Also showing on Sunday is rising LFW star Mary Katrantzou. Along with Erdem, the Greek-born designer has helped put London on the map for hypnotizing digital prints and all-over graphics.New kids on the block Louise Gray and David Koma plus heavyweights Vivienne Westwood Red Label, Paul Smith, Temperley London are all part of Sunday's must-see lineup. Also on the day of rest, NYFW followers will be keeping a close eye on Preen led by design duo Thornton Bregazzi as they return to LFW after a six-year absence, and also Matthew Williamson who previously showed in the Big Apple.A cluster of London's most directional brands will share their visions for next Spring on day 4 (Monday 19). These include Burberry, Peter Pilotto, Pringle of Scotland, Giles and Mark Fast whose curvy fashion models never fail to cause a stir.At the close of day 4, in addition to presenting his ready-to-wear vision for Spring, JW Anderson will be celebrating in style. The designer will host a launch party for his first capsule collection for high-street fast fashion brand Topshop. The low-cost designer line will feature pieces with a "sligtly iconic feel" such as hand-knitted bat sweaters, revealed Anderson in a recent with Grazia magazine.Official LFW sponsor Topshop is also set to make a splash as it sends its latest Unique range down the runway. Topshop's new creative director, ex-British Vogue fashion buff Kate Phelan for whom the store remains her ultimate "trolley dash" is making sure the brand is moving in the right direction. This season, Topshop are enabling customers to personalize and buy looks straight from the catwalk online.CJL?PARIS (AP) ? Marc Jacobs, more than anyone, knows that it's not what you say but how you say it. The Louis Vuitton showman thus capped an incredibly strong Paris fashion week ? with help from artist Daniel Buren ? by building a life-size shopping mall inside the Louvre.Understatement is not a word in Jacobs' vocabulary, so a collaboration with the minimalist artist ? who made the famed striped columns in Paris' Palais Royal ? might have raised eyebrows. But Buren rose to the occasion."(The Louvre) was already big, all I did was make it bigger," said Buren, with trademark humor. "It was others that called me a minimalist, not me."The sky's the limit when you're backed by Europe's richest man and LVMH-owner Bernard Arnault, with whom he mingled before the show.Meanwhile, Miuccia Prada, who herself presides over a lucrative fashion empire, felled a small forest in aid of her presentation for Miu Miu, one of the final day's other big shows. Fashion insiders clutched wooden invitations as they walked down a wooden "red carpet" and into the auditorium with a 30-meter (yard) wooden runway, and the show's huge wooden-tiered seating.There was some irony that the collection was held at Paris' grand Environmental Council.Paris Fashion Week designers are often described as show-stopping, but none more than Elie Saab. The Lebanese designer threw huge graphic chunks of moon rock down the catwalk as set, to evoke his more geometric theme. Unfortunately, one attendee didn't pick up on the visual props and tripped head over heels ? slightly delaying the show.Trends on the ninth exhausting day of the season included prints ? both graphic and colored ? as well as sheer transparencies and cutouts.LOUIS VUITTONWhat do you get if you mix up the world's most famous checks and Paris' most famous stripes? The answer: Louis Vuitton, whose 1960s style spring-summer fashion show twinned the iconic checked Damier pattern with a set designed by artist Daniel Buren.Buren created four full-scale escalators, featuring his signature 8.7cm stripes, which wowed spectators inside."It's exquisite, beautiful," said 29-year-old Christina Malaki. "What a spectacle."In fashion terms it was strong, with most of the 64 retro looks delivered in Mary Quant-style checks that made a bold optical statement in black and white, as well as browns, gray and leaf green.Slightly puffed rounded shoulders, miniskirts, beehives and a few exposed midriffs pointed to one thing: The swinging 60s are back.The silhouettes ? often flat and loose? prioritized the Damier above the female form, which rippled nicely in skirts as the models, who walked in pairs, filed by with handbags.Louis Vuitton is a house that is proud of its tradition, but also likes to evolve. The collection saw the ubiquitous monogram banished for the first time.Instead, one recurrent feature was, so say the program notes, "the smallest sequins ever produced."Thousands of microscopic sequins brought a dazzling metallic shimmer to dresses and skirt suits, though when it was used on the blocked Damier pattern it was slightly too much."It's all about being graphic. (Buren's escalators) are a mathematical equation," Jacobs told journalists after the show.Another math equation will come from the buoyant receipts from this, a highly saleable collection.It's a fair bet that by next year this bold check will be everywhere.MIU MIUMiu Miu's spring-summer 2013 show in Paris had a wintery vibe.Despite the slightly off-kilter season it was a slick display, with lashings of faux fur on coats and stoles with dyed patterning at the brand often seen as Miuccia Prada's baby sister offshoot.It picked up nicely on this season's fascination with prints as contrasting explosions on loose skirt suits ? sometimes resembling the negative of a photograph.As ever, it remained demure, but interesting back features graced a few reversed boxy tops. Alongside looks in denim and the prints, it gave the clothes a distinctly cool edge which reached its peak in a few eclectic, asymmetrical pieces.Only a master like Prada can make a tiny strapped cropped camisole work underneath a thick fur coat, accessorized with leather gloves and jeweled Roman sandals.Uber-cool actress ? and Miu Miu spokesperson ? Chloe Sevigny watched from the front row.ELIE SAABElie Saab, master of the va-va-voom silhouette, broke out of his strict mold for his spring-summer 2013 show in Paris.The Lebanese designer must have been feeling in an adventurous mood: He dabbled in graphic details and floral prints in Wednesday's show.But never fear, his bread-and-butter traffic stopping dresses and sequins were still there ? in cerulean blue and vermilion. After all, it's what his buyers and celebrity wearers such as singer Taylor Swift on the front row expect and love.But the palette this season was updated to include a beautiful cobalt, which in turn exploded into fluorescent color prints on gowns, some full length, others above the knee, that fluttered by in silk muslin.Saab included the odd peplum and some '90s looks with black-and-white geometric lines.The catwalk set of graphic angular moon rocks signaled to fashion insiders even before the show started that Saab would move in this direction.______Thomas Adamson can be followed at http:/ /Twitter.com/ThomasAdamsonAP?PARIS - Marc Jacobs, more than anyone, knows that it's not what you say it, but how you say it. The Louis Vuitton showman thus capped an incredibly strong Paris fashion week ? with help from artist Daniel Buren ? by building a life-size shopping mall inside the Louvre.Understatement is not a word in Jacobs' vocabulary, so a collaboration with the minimalist artist ? who made the famed striped columns in Paris' Palais Royal ? might have raised eyebrows. But Buren rose to the occasion."(The Louvre) was already big, all I did was make it bigger," said Buren, with trademark humour. "It was others that called me a minimalist, not me."The sky's the limit when you're backed by Europe's richest man and LVMH-owner Bernard Arnault, with whom he mingled before the show.Meanwhile, Miuccia Prada, who herself presides over a lucrative fashion empire, felled a small forest in aid of her presentation for Miu Miu, one of the final day's other big shows. Fashion insiders clutched wooden invitations as they walked down a wooden "red carpet" and into the auditorium with a 30-meter (yard) wooden runway, and the show's huge wooden-tiered seating.There was some irony that the collection was held at Paris' grand Environmental Council.Paris Fashion Week designers are often described as show-stopping, but none more than Elie Saab. The Lebanese designer threw huge graphic chunks of moon rock down the catwalk as set, to evoke his more geometric theme. Unfortunately, one attendee didn't pick up on the visual props and tripped head over heels ? slightly delaying the show.Trends on the ninth exhausting day of the season included prints ? both graphic and colored ? as well as sheer transparencies and cutouts.LOUIS VUITTONWhat do you get if you mix up the world's most famous checks and Paris' most famous stripes? The answer: Louis Vuitton, whose 1960s style spring-summer fashion show twinned the iconic checked Damier pattern with a set designed by artist Daniel Buren.Buren created four full-scale escalators, featuring his signature 8.7cm stripes, which wowed spectators inside."It's exquisite, beautiful," said 29-year-old Christina Malaki. "What a spectacle."In fashion terms it was strong, with most of the 64 retro looks delivered in Mary Quant-style checks that made a bold optical statement in black and white, as well as browns, grey and leaf green.Slightly puffed rounded shoulders, miniskirts, beehives and a few exposed midriffs pointed to one thing: The swinging 60s are back.The silhouettes ? often flat and loose? prioritized the Damier above the female form, which rippled nicely in skirts as the models, who walked in pairs, filed by with handbags.Louis Vuitton is a house that is proud of its tradition, but also likes to evolve. The collection saw the ubiquitous monogram banished for the first time.Instead, one recurrent feature was, so say the program notes, "the smallest sequins ever produced."Thousands of microscopic sequins brought a dazzling metallic shimmer to dresses and skirt suits, though when it was used on the blocked Damier pattern it was slightly too much."It's all about being graphic. (Buren's escalators) are a mathematical equation," Jacobs told journalists after the show.Another math equation will come from the buoyant receipts from this, a highly saleable collection.It's a fair bet that by next year this bold check will be everywhere.MIU MIUMiu Miu's spring-summer 2013 show in Paris had a wintery vibe.Despite the slightly off-kilter season it was a slick display, with lashings of faux fur on coats and stoles with dyed patterning at the brand often seen as Miuccia Prada's baby sister offshoot.It picked up nicely on this season's fascination with prints as contrasting explosions on loose skirt suits ? sometimes resembling the negative of a photograph.As ever, it remained demure, but interesting back features graced a few reversed boxy tops. Alongside looks in denim and the prints, it gave the clothes a distinctly cool edge which reached its peak in a few eclectic, asymmetrical pieces.Only a master like Prada can make a tiny strapped cropped camisole work underneath a thick fur coat, accessorized with leather gloves and jeweled Roman sandals.Uber-cool actress ? and Miu Miu spokesperson ? Chloe Sevigny watched from the front row.ELIE SAABElie Saab, master of the va-va-voom silhouette, broke out of his strict mould for his spring-summer 2013 show in Paris.The Lebanese designer must have been feeling in an adventurous mood: He dabbled in graphic details and floral prints in Wednesday's show.But never fear, his bread-and-butter traffic stopping dresses and sequins were still there ? in cerulean blue and vermilion. After all, it's what his buyers and celebrity wearers such as singer Taylor Swift on the front row expect and love.But the palette this season was updated to include a beautiful cobalt, which in turn exploded into fluorescent colour prints on gowns, some full length, others above the knee, that fluttered by in silk muslin.Saab included the odd peplum and some '90s looks with black-and-white geometric lines.The catwalk set of graphic angular moon rocks signalled to fashion insiders even before the show started that Saab would move in this direction.______Thomas Adamson can be followed at http:/ /Twitter.com/ThomasAdamsonAP? PARIS (Reuters) - Renault's boxy Logan sedan had rear-view mirrors as an optional extra - or so the joke went after its 2005 launch under the low-cost Dacia brand. Its similarly cheap replacement, unveiled at the Paris auto show, has chrome dashboard finish and other stylistic flourishes worthy of a mid-market rival. Touch-screen GPS and parking radar feature in all but the simplest versions. In a brutal auto sales slump, "crisis cars" are coming of age in Europe, narrowing the gap with mainstream brands in everything from aesthetics to fuel economy. Low-cost autos are a rare growth area in a depressed industry, posing a challenge to mid-range marques - including their own stablemates as well as competitors. "The differences are becoming more subtle," said Renault saleswoman Chloe Gomez as she showed off Dacia's Lodgy minivan at a Paris showroom near Place de la Republique. "We're getting customers who have plenty of money," she said. "They might have owned a (Renault) Scenic, but now they're looking for simplicity, and to save some cash for other things." Dacia's success echoes a recent survey by Britain's AA motoring association, which found that a sizeable majority of drivers would prefer to do without such extras as heated seats, electric parking brakes and rain-sensing wipers. RIVALS' RIPOSTE The back-to-basics trend has lifted other cut-price brands, including Volkswagen's Skoda, General Motors' Chevrolet, Hyundai and affiliate Kia . It has also put the squeeze on Fiat , Ford , PSA Peugeot Citroen and GM's Opel at a time when their compact cars are being challenged by a wave of new rivals from luxury makers. Renault's so-called Entry models were an initial flop in target markets such as India and an accidental hit back home. They have since become the French automaker's biggest earner, with profit margins above 6 percent and heading for 9 percent soon, some analysts say. Wage costs at their assembly plants are 5 euros an hour in Romania and 3 euros in Morocco compared with 30 in France. The factories also use hand-me-down tooling from other Renault plants to save on investment. "There may have been an element of luck in the success of the Entry strategy," Barclays analyst Kristina Church wrote in a recent note. "But management certainly hasn't been slow to capitalise on it." Badged as Dacia in Europe and Renault elsewhere, the Logan family has spawned variants including the Lodgy and bestselling Duster 4x4, drawing ripostes from GM, Peugeot and Volkswagen. Among budget-conscious cars on show in Paris are Chevrolet's Trax compact SUV and refreshed Spark mini, alongside a Peugeot 301 and Citroen C-Elysee - new spartan models from France's larger mass automaker. Pending a promised low-cost range from VW, the Skoda division is wheeling out its own answer to the Logan: the Rapid sedan, aimed squarely at demand for functional four-doors in Central and Eastern Europe and around the Mediterranean. Skoda has returned to its frugal Czech roots after a period in which it threatened to eclipse some pricier VW models - with the Superb beating the Passat in an Auto Bild road test - that hastened brand chief Reinhard Jung's 2010 exit. Renault boss Carlos Ghosn could soon have similar tensions to resolve. In France, where Renault employs about 50,000 workers, the core brand's car sales fell 21 percent in January-August, cutting market share by 1.8 points to 18.4 percent. Imported Dacias claimed 4.4 percent of the market, up half a point. Global Entry range deliveries are set to rise almost a quarter this year to top 1 million vehicles, or 37 percent of the group total, compared with 15 percent five years ago. By 2014, French-built models will dwindle to 20 percent with Renault's "silent metamorphosis into a low-cost automaker", Morgan Stanley analyst Stuart Pearson predicts. The original Logan did, in fact, include mirrors - but no power steering or electric windows. Its engines and fuel-economy were a generation behind, and the Soviet-hangover styling imposed a hard, drab interior and black plastic bumpers of the kind last seen more than a decade earlier on mainstream models. By contrast, the updated Logan and Sandero compact - which debuted in 2008 - share the muscular curves and efficient engines of new Renault models such as the Clio IV. Bumpers wrap harmoniously around matching bodywork, lights and grille. Pricing, not yet disclosed, will be close to the existing models, which begin at 7,700 euros for the Logan and 9,000 for the Sandero in France. That compares with 19,800 euros for a Renault Megane and 13,950 for a Clio. The Lodgy starts at 10,000 euros, less than half the Scenic's entry ticket. CANNIBAL CONCERNS While Ford won't be creating a low-cost marque in Dacia's image, it is considering a stripped-down global compact based on the Fiesta, CEO Alan Mulally said earlier this month. VW's luxury Audi division, BMW and Daimler's Mercedes-Benz are also developing compact sedans priced below current models, but still above mass-market rivals. "Even for brands considered premium, the trend is towards greater volume rather than elitism," said Denis Schemoul of consulting firm IHS Automotive. Automakers rolling out no-frills products can expect their core brands to suffer "a degree of cannibalization", he said. Peugeot is taking a more prudent approach. The 301 and C-Elysee will be pitched for emerging markets and sold in Spain - where they are assembled - but not France or other Western European countries. Rather than design to cost, "Peugeot has basically dumbed down western products and taken out content," UBS analyst Philippe Houchois said. The cars, which share a simpler version of the new Peugeot 208's architecture, fall well short of their Renault rivals' earnings potential, Houchois said. "A lot of people have talked about low-cost, but nobody's done it like Renault," he added. "It's far better to cannibalize yourself than to let someone else do it." (Editing by Helen Massy-Beresford)?London, Sept 29 (ANI): Mario Balotelli has kissed and made up with his pregnant former girlfriend Raffaella Fico, saying he will "try again" with her - six months after dumping the Italian model. The 22-year-old Manchester City footballer, who demanded a DNA test on the unborn child, also apologised to the 24-year-old model."I have decided to try again with Raffaella. The DNA test has not been performed and has nothing to do with my decision," the Sun quoted him, as saying."I would've asked for the test in that situation with anyone, not just Raffaella. I am sorry for everything that has happened," he said.The Italian striker broke up with Fico in April, after it was revealed that he was cheating on her with Chloe Evans and former escort Jenny Thompson. Fico didn't know of her pregnancy at the time of her break up. (ANI)?Discover Yahoo! With Your FriendsExplore news, videos, and much more based on what your friends are reading and watching. Publish your own activity and retain full control.?Two rival teams will face off tonight at a Michigan homecoming football game, but this year fans from both sides will be sporting the same T-shirts with the motto, "Two Teams, One Hero."The "hero" to whom they refer is Army Staff Sgt. Travis Mills, who's since an IED explosion caused him to lose both his arms and legs. Mills, 25, is one of five surviving quadruple amputee servicemen from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.He has been at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., for the past six months and was waiting until he was ready to visit his small hometown of Vassar, Mich. Everyone had known him in the town as a popular football, basketball and baseball player."I decided that I would wait until I was ready to walk and show people the progress I'm making, not that they would ever doubt me or make fun of me," Mills told ABCNews.com. "It was a personal thing."He has been stunned by his welcome home. Mills and wife Kelsey Mills, 23, and their 1-year-old daughter, Chloe, were grand marshals Thursday night at a homecoming parade. He will address the crowds tonight at Vassar High School, his alma mater, before the homecoming game.Mills said his community has welcomed him, "Just arms wide open, big hugs, everybody's cheering, thanking me for my service. It's just wonderful."Mills' life changed in April while he was serving his third tour in Afghanistan. He went out on foot patrol at around 4:30 p.m. A mine-sweeper surveyed the area, but did not pick up on an IED made of plastic and copper wire that was in the exact spot where Mills set down an ammunition bag."As soon as I set it down, five or six seconds later, I woke up on the ground and I looked at my hand and said, 'This isn't good,'" he recalls.A medic rushed over to him and Mills told him, "Get away from me, doc. You go save my men. Let me go. Save my men."Mills laughingly recalled the medic saying, "With all due respect, shut up."The next few weeks were fuzzily spent being transferred from hospital to hospital and town to town under a medically induced coma.When Mills woke up, he was with his brother-in-law, a fellow soldier who had stayed with him. Mills' first question was about his soldiers and whether they were OK. They were. His next question was whether he was paralyzed. He was not, his brother-in-law said.Mills told his brother-in-law that he couldn't feel his fingers and toes and not to lie to him."Travis, you don't have them anymore but you're alive," Mills recalls his saying. "I said OK."His limbs could not be saved and Mills lost most of both arms and both legs."You have a lot of emotions. At first you're upset. Why did it happen? What did I do wrong? Am I a bad person?" he said. "Then you realize it just happened because it happens. There's no reason to dwell on the past or live in the past. I have a beautiful wife and a beautiful, young 1-year-old daughter and I'm never going to give up on them or my family or the people who support me."At Walter Reed, Mills' doctor told him that he would probably spend two years recovering in the hospital. Mills told him he could do it in a year.For the past six months, he has spent every day doing occupational therapy and physical therapy. He works on his therapies from 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. every day. He has received support from his medical team, family friends and the few other surviving quadruple amputees. And he has already begun to pay that support forward."He has got such an unbelievable attitude," Mills' father-in-law, Craig Buck, said. "He takes time out of his week each week to go up to the fourth floor of Walter Reed. That's where the most critically wounded guys that are coming back home are, and he'll put on all of his prosthetics and go visit them to encourage them."Buck, 49, has spent the past six weeks at Walter Reed with Mills and his family and has been amazed by his resilience."Just his spirit, he lifts everyone up around him even though he's had such devastating injuries," Buck said. "Of course there's down times, which is to be expected, where he's not feeling so chipper, but 90 percent of the time he's positive, motivated and just works so hard at getting better."Mills has prosthetics for both legs and both arms. He uses a wheelchair sometimes, but is already walking on his prosthetics. He hopes to be completely out of the wheelchair by November, using it only occasionally."It would be ways if I wanted to get down, but it wouldn't make my marriage very good and it wouldn't make my daughter very happy," Mills said. "She's one of the happiest kids I've ever seen and my marriage has never been stronger."Mills calls his wife "a real hero" for helping him and staying by his side. He says his wedding band is his most prized possession. His brother-in-law pulled it off of his mangled finger after the explosion and Mills marvels that it does not even have a scratch on it. He wears it around his neck.He is confident that his military career is far from over. His goal of being in the military for 20 years is unchanged after his accident. He hopes to be an instructor."I still have plans to stay in the military, if they'll have me," he said. "If I can give anything to the war effort, to the soldiers, to the guys that are signing up, I'm definitely willing to do it and I would love to."He'll get a chance to address his thousands of fans and thank them tonight for their support. His only concern is he hopes he'll be able to get to everyone."I've never stopped wanting to help and I'll never stop training, teaching and pushing guys through what they need to push through," he said. "I'll give inspiration and motivation to anyone because that's my purpose. I don't take life for granted and I'm thankful I get to see my kid grow up and teach her to ride a bike."? Mischa Barton will be wearing “everything by Gucci” this Autumn/Winter.The stunning actress-and-designer is famed for experimenting with her style, donning unique edgy looks amidst pretty boho sartorial choices.Mischa has revealed the items she will be showcasing in the upcoming colder months."Oh my God, everything by Gucci!" she gushed in an interview with British magazine Heat."The shoes, bags and clothes... I was in the store the other day and I just couldn't believe how gorgeous everything was."Mischa has also designed her own range of handbags, from colour pop totes to tassled fringe bags. When it comes to her own arm candy she has a long list of favourites."Besides my own designs? I'd have to say YSL, Vivienne Westwood, Chanel and Chloe, and that's just for starters," she smiled.Mischa recently opened up a clothing boutique in London's trendy East End. The star has also launched a new make-up collection. The 26-year-old beauty makes sure she is there every step of the way when it comes to her designs."I'm 110 per cent involved in the whole process, which I do with a team of girls in Los Angeles,” she explained. “They'll make you anything you want. We've started working on a bodycare range too. "I give my friends loads of my make-up. They love it." c Cover Media?New Xulon Book is a Story of Finding Faith When All Seems LostPRWeb– ($16.99, paperback, 978-1-62230-904-7; $26.99, hardcover, 978-1-62230-905-4; $8.49, e-book, 978-1-62230-906-1) readers will learn of God’s unconditional love. The story follows main character, Kaylee, during a major transition, spurred by tragedy. This teen has lost a parent and more, but will soon gain something completely invaluable.“God's love never fails. We may lose our way or turn away from Him, but He will never forsake us,” states the author. “God doesn't make a decision and then change His mind and say, ‘Well, you've done some really stupid things, so don't bother coming back.’ No, we are His children, and He loves us with a crazy, unfailing kind of love. And with that kind of love, there is no such thing as too far gone.”Of her expertise, the author expresses “Honestly, I am in no way ‘qualified’ to write this book; but I believe that God sometimes uses the least qualified to do things for Him, because then no one can say they did it alone. I didn't write this book by my own hand. I could never have written it without Jesus there to hold the pen.” A 17-year-old Christian, homeschooled student, Chloe lives in Texas with her parents, sister, five dogs, and two cats.Xulon Press, a division of Salem Communications, is the world’s largest , with more than 8,000 titles published to date. Retailers may order Kaylee's Spring Season through Ingram Book Company and/or Spring Arbor Book Distributors. The book is available online through xulonpress.com/bookstore, amazon.com, and barnesandnoble.com.Contest Department Xulon Press 1-866-381-2665 ?On Tuesday, Paris hosts the final leg of international Fashion Week. This season the city boasts a lineup of 94 womenswear shows. Chanel, Louis Vuitton, Givenchy and Dior will unveil their eagerly awaited Spring-Summer 2013 collections alongside fashion-forward labels Stella McCartney, Celine and Viktor & Rolf.In Paris, the old adage that claims leopards don't change their spots rings true. However, this season will see two fashion houses mastermind a change of identity. Yves Saint Laurent has morphed into "Saint Laurent Paris". The 'Yves'-dropping was Hedi Slimane's idea. The designer who retired from fashion five years ago will debut at Saint Laurent on October 1.YSL isn't the only one tweaking its label. A name change was also on the agenda for ready-to-wear label Lutz. The brand will now go by the name of Lutz Huelle. Unlike the (Saint Laurent) competition, the German-born designer's decision has nothing to do with breaking with tradition. The designer added his surname in an anti-counterfeiting attempt to make his creations less copyable. A move which only time will tell...Fashion houses Chloe and Akris are set to steal the show as they celebrate huge milestones this season. Their runway shows will be among the most unmissable events of Paris Fashion Week. Easy-chic label Chloe will toast its 60th birthday. Attitudes, a fashion retrospective at the Palais de Tokyo, in addition to Clare Waight Keller's third runway show for the .Swiss fashion house Akris, which will present its S/S13 collection on Sunday, is marking 90 years of fashion design with a beautifully illustrated book. Akris Fall 2012 by author Valerie Steele showcases the label's minimalist approach to luxury with a look at Albert Kriemler's latest collection for Akris.This season, the prize(s) for the quirkiest show venue goes to Anthony Vaccarello, Alexis Mabille and John Galliano. All three designer labels will unveil their visions for next spring at one of Paris's most up and coming haunts - The Cite de la Mode et du Design. With its eye-catching green steel and glass structure and spacious reception halls, the riverside venue has already been a hit with the likes of Manish Arora and Felipe Oliveira Baptista, but also Balenciaga and Comme des Garcons who are the focus of an there which runs until October 7.CJL?Play by Jennifer Wilson ‘And That’s What Little Girls Are Made Of’ Asks: How much would you invest to shatter a glass ceiling?PRWeb–. Tickets can also be purchased at the Theater box office, which opens 30 minutes before each performance.Whether she's scaling the Himalayas, or the cold heights of corporate skyscrapers, Wilson learns harsh lessons from the top of the economic food chain, a world in which men fiercely guard their privileged domain and women claw their way to the middle. ‘And That’s What Little Girls Are Made Of’ is a comedy that needs few punch lines because the truth is more comical than fiction. The blunt lines Wilson smuggles out of her meetings and brings to the stage reveal the modern-day farce of sexual equality. “I wrote this as a celebration of American innovation and entrepreneurship,” says Jennifer Wilson, “and as an attempt to influence the way people perceive workplace and funding issues for women. Still, twenty years later, these issues continue to be relevant.” Thwarted in her goal to raise seed capital for women’s business ventures, Wilson turned her frustration into art with the assistance of Dramaturge Suze Allen and Director Jennifer Welch. Shifting rapidly through characters and settings, ‘And That’s What Little Girls Are Made Of’ pulls no punches as Wilson shares the impediments placed along the female path to success. "This story confronts the truth like Anna Deavere Smith, with the humor of Lily Tomlin," says director Jennifer Welch. In addition, Welch has enlisted sound designer Jon Bernson and set/lighting designer Alicia Griffiths and Claire Kendrick to integrate music, props and visual projections into the storytelling process to underscore the rapid-fire shifts in emotional tone and physical setting. The daughter of a former Iowa governor, Jennifer Wilson began her career in the world of Chicago advertising, and earned an MBA in International Marketing from Loyola University in 1986. Through her subsequent work in economic development for the State of Iowa, she came to realize the dearth of women-owned businesses, and was determined to make a change. Convinced that funding entrepreneurial women would yield high returns, she pounded the pavement and knocked on doors to attract investors, who gave vocal support but little else, and Sky Venture Capital fell far short of achieving its financial goal of $20 million. The exclusive male culture of high finance and the restrictions placed on women in that world were hard lessons that made Wilson acutely aware of the obstacles that keep women from fulfilling their potential. This commitment to unrealized value also inspired her late husband, Silicon Valley pioneer Jean Hoerni, who founded the Central Asia Institute to enable Greg Mortenson to continue building schools in northern Pakistan. This story reached a mass audience through Mortenson’s book, Three Cups of Tea. Wilson is quoted in both Mortenson’s book and in Jon Krakauer’s expose of Mortenson, Three Cups of Deceit.Director Jennifer Welch is Producing Artistic Director of Tides Theatre and a founding member of the Howells Transmitter Arts Collaborative and contributor to Dramalist.com. Her directing credits include 5 Lesbians Eating A Quiche, Waiting for Godot, The Grapes of Wrath, Glengarry Glen Ross, Buried Child, The Trip To Bountiful, A View From The Bridge, The Rose Tattoo, The Night Of The Iguana, Lysistrata, The Real Inspector Hound, and Killer Joe, as well as a long list of acting credits. Trained at the University of Kansas, The American Conservatory Theater (ACT) and the Jean Shelton Actors Lab, Jennifer has been teaching acting classes and workshops in San Francisco for the last four years. Chloe Bronzan* is the Artistic Director and co-founder of Symmetry Theatre Company, where she recently directed the critically acclaimed production of Emile: La Marquise Du Chatelet Defends Her Life Tonight. She has been working as actor in the Bay Area for over 15 years, and has been a proud member of Actors Equity Association since 2008. Favorite roles include Corey in Show and Tell for Symmetry, Molly in Dusk Rings a Bell for Aluminous Collective, Jane in The Women at Center Rep, and Julia in Lolita Roadtrip, Governess in Turn of the Screw, Laura in The Glass Menagerie, all at San Jose Stage Company. Amber Crane – After working as an actor in NYC and LA, Amber took a hiatus to attain her doctorate in clinical psychology, where her dissertation was entitled Nomads of the Self, and researched identity development in the actor. Amber was recently seen as Janice in Janice, Shelley, and Jo at the SF Fringe Festival and Ross Valley Players, and in staged readings of The Magician's Choice at The Thick House and A Short Way Down to Mount Olympus at SF Playhouse. Favorite past roles include Titania in Midsummer Night's Dream and Melibea in Kushner's adaptation of The Illusion. Amber has also appeared in television shows ranging from Sex in the City to 7th Heaven. Sally Dana* has been performing as an actor, singer, drummer and voiceover artist for over 25 years. She last appeared in the world premiere of William Bivin's The Education of a Rake with Central Works. Some of Sally's other stage performances include the world premiere of Campo Santo’s The Language of Angels for which she won a Dean Goodman’s Choice Award for her performance as Danielle, A Common Vision at the Magic Theatre, Something in the Air at the B Street Theatre, Iphigenia and other Daughters with Mettle Theatre, Queen Marie in the American Citizens Theatre Production of Exit the King, a two-year run in the hit comedy Shear Madness and as an ensemble member in Julie Taymor and Elliot Goldenthal’s Obie Award-winning Juan Darien. She has appeared in the SF Fringe Festival for the past three years: in William Bivin's award-winning comedy Pulp Scripture (2009), George Pfirrmann's Arousal (2010, best new comedy winner) and Heartbeat by Miles Pawski (2011). Sally has performed with several bands including the San Francisco pop combo Action Plus as a singer and percussionist. She is the drummer for the all girl garage rock band The Reform School Girls and a singer and dancer with Pussy Tourette. You can hear Sally as the voice of the Devil in the Mondo Media/Warner Bros. Internet cartoon, The God and Devil Show. Sally is a company member of PlayGround and a proud member of Actors Equity Association.Suze Allen (Dramaturge) is a published author, playwright, teacher, dramaturge and director, and serves as 3GT Dramaturge and Director of Educational Programs. She was the creator of Fresh New Works San Francisco, The Maine Playwrights’ Lab and Short Works Festival, Artistic Director for the SF Writers and Actors Lab, Director for Fertile Ground Writing Studio and the resident Dramaturge and playwrighting instructor at The Playwrights’ Center of San Francisco. Her work and the work she has directed has played the Brava Theatre, 450 Geary, The Marsh, Intersection for the Arts, Noh Space, The Phoenix, OutNorth Contemporary Art House in Anchorage Alaska, and The SF and Edinburgh Fringe Festivals. Her show ‘The Manic Mama Dance’ premiered at the Marsh Café and played Birthfest 2008. Suze co-authored the book, The Time-Starved Woman’s Guide to Emotional Wellbeing with SD Shanti and advises writers through her company Manuscript Mentor. Most recently, Suze directed AJ Baker’s ‘The Right Thing’ and Lee Brady’s ‘What About Ben?’ at 3GT’s inaugural 2012 March Celebration Of Women’s History Month. In 2012, Suze was appointed the San Francisco representative to the Dramatists’ Guild.Jon Bernson (Sound Designer) has scored more than a dozen plays and films. He has released albums under the following names: Ray's Vast Basement, Window Twins, THEMAYS and Exray's, whose music was featured in David Fincher's award winning film, The Social Network.Alicia Griffiths (Set Designer) is a rising star in San Francisco's theater scene. A recent design graduate of SF State, Alicia completed an internship at SF Playhouse and is involved in new and ambitious projects as she constantly explores new modes of visual storytelling in theater. Claire Kendrick (Light Designer) has been a light/scenic/costume designer for theatrical shows, concerts, and events throughout California for the past 10 years. She has worked with theatres such as ACT, PCPA, and the San Francisco Opera as well as served as the Technical Director/Design Teacher at The Thacher School from 2006-10. She graduated with a B.A. in Theatre Design / Directing from Williams College. Diane Roby (415) 931-5367 ?A six-month trial of a smartcard ticketing system for Adelaide public transport is running smoothly, the South Australian Government says.About 10,000 people have been using the new Metrocards ahead of a wide public release in November.The rechargeable cards will be available at more than 100 outlets, with an initial card cost of $5.Transport Services Minister Chloe Fox said a gradual development and roll-out would ensure a smooth transition for commuters."We took our time, we worked on the software, we worked on the technology, we haven't rolled it out in one big bang as they did with Myki in Victoria. I think we all know that that was a fairly disastrous experience," she said."This has been a very gradual roll-out over a year in the public domain and that has been a successful approach."She said the existing ticket system was likely to be phased out by about the end of next year or early 2014.The director of public transport infrastructure Jack Turner said commuters involved in the trial seemed pleased with the new system."The feedback we're getting from the public is that it's much easier to use," he said.They can just walk on board, swipe it (smartcard) and walk by."Our figures suggest it's about half the time to actually board a vehicle."?The fashion-retailing foreign invasion continues in Australia, with British chain Topshop the latest to branch out into the Sydney market.Security was still tight at 9.30am on Thursday, with black-clad bodyguards controlling the queue that still stretched around the corner of the old Gowings building into George Street in the CBD.Media outlets reported faithful fashionistas had begun their vigil the day before, with a small crowd gathered in the early hours.Carly from Hunters Hill was on her way to university when she saw the shop had opened and decided to join the queue."I've always been interested in the brand but never actually purchased," she said.Carly was keen to try on the clothes she'd been looking at online for so long."I was too tentative, wasn't sure if the sizes were correct so I was really excited to know that Topshop was opening here.""I think they're just more ahead on trends than we are in Australia," she said."It's actually really affordable compared to other brands."Also standing patiently in the queue, Kerry from Engadine came into town with her daughter to look at what was on offer."Chloe's being following it on Instagram ... the opening last night and the queue this morning," she said.Mother and daughter had already checked out the prices."Seems reasonable, if you look on the internet ... it's on a par with Zara."Spanish chain Zara's opening in nearby Pitt St Mall in April 2011 also prompted queues, with its similar promises of on-trend fashion delivered quickly and at a reasonable price.The chairman of Topshop Australia, Hilton Seskin, says the response has been gratifying, although it's yet to be determined if the interest has been translated into dollars."The most important thing at the moment is getting people through the registers, getting them through the lines in the fitting rooms," he said."But I think sales will be doing very well considering we've got continual queues and a store full of people."Seskin says Topshop brings affordable catwalk styling to customers faster than other retailers."With products being flown into the the country two to three times a week and with the stores changing almost on a daily basis, you're never going to come in and everything's the same."?Richemont to Acquire Peter Millar from Winona Capital ManagementPRWeb–.About Richemont Richemont owns a portfolio of leading international brands or ‘Maisons’, which are managed independently of one another, recognizing their individuality and uniqueness. The businesses operate in five areas: Jewellery Maisons, being Cartier and Van Cleef & Arpels; Specialist watchmakers, being A. Lange & Söhne, Baume & Mercier, IWC, Jaeger-LeCoultre, Officine Panerai, Piaget, Roger Dubuis and Vacheron Constantin, as well as the Ralph Lauren Watch and Jewelry joint venture; Montblanc Maison; and Other businesses, which include Alfred Dunhill, Chloé and Lancel as well as other smaller Maisons and watch component manufacturing activities for third parties. For more information, please visit .About Winona Capital Winona Capital is a leading investor in consumer and retail brands in the lower middle market. Winona focuses on consumer businesses and brands where Winona sees both passionate executives with a shared focus on growth and an opportunity for Winona to apply its expertise to improve operating performance, create value, and provide investors with superior returns. For more information, please visit or contact Winona Capital at +1 312 334 8800.Kim Demonica Winona Capital Management +1 312 334 8856 ?Downton Abbey star Hugh Bonneville is going from riches to rags after landing a new role in a TV drama - as a tramp.He is taking the title role in Mr Stink, adapted from the hit children's novel by comic David Walliams, which is being brought to life for BBC One.Hugh, known to viewers for his role as the Earl of Grantham, will swap his country pile for a garden shed in the family comedy which begins filming next month.David will also make an appearance playing the Prime Minister after notably playing a fawning aide to the PM in his hit comedy Little Britain.In the story, lonely 12-year-old Chloe befriends local tramp Mr Stink and invites him to hide out at the end of her family's garden. The book by David, who has worked with Men Behaving Badly writer Simon Nye to adapt the tale, has sold more than a quarter of a million copies.Hugh said: "I'm delighted to be adding my own whiff to the odour that emanates from David Walliams, and his very funny, touching and thought-provoking story."David, whose production company is working on the hour-long drama, said: "I am thrilled that Hugh is playing Mr Stink. He is one of the most popular and talented actors around, and is the perfect person to bring out the character's humour and sadness."Executive producer Mark Freeland, the BBC's head of in-house comedy, said: "I fell in love with David's book when I read it to my kids. I fell in love with David 15 years ago."The show is expected to be screened around Christmas.?Sheridan Smith has joined the cast of BBC One's adaptation of David Walliams's book Mr Stink.The popular actress will play wannabe MP Mrs Crumb, the mother of young heroine Chloe who befriends a whiffy tramp in the best-selling children's tale.She will be joined by comedian Johnny Vegas, who has been added to the one-hour film, playing her husband Mr Crumb.Olivier Award-winning Sheridan, 31, has recently been seen in ITV's drama Mrs Biggs, playing the wife of great train robber Ronald Biggs. She is also known for her roles in Gavin And Stacey and Two Pints Of Lager, as well as her stage roles in Legally Blonde and Rattigan's The Flare Path.Downton Abbey star Hugh Bonneville was recently announced in the lead role as the homeless but refined Mr Stink who goes to live in lonely Chloe's shed. Walliams will also make an appearance playing the prime minister after notably playing a fawning aide to the PM in his hit comedy Little Britain.Sheridan said: "David is such a brilliant writer, and the character just jumped off the page when I read it. I can't wait to work with Hugh and Johnny."The book by Walliams, who has worked with Men Behaving Badly writer Simon Nye to adapt the tale, has sold more than a quarter of a million copies.Chloe's "perfect" younger sister Annabelle is being played by Isabella Blake-Thomas, who appeared as Violet-Elizabeth Bott in the BBC's Just William adaptations two years ago.The BBC is working with Walliams's production company on the family story, expected to be screened around Christmas.Mr Stink was Walliams' second children's book and was shortlisted for a Blue Peter award for the best book of the past decade, but lost out to Diary Of A Wimpy Kid.?ShopRDR.com Highlights Timeless Items From Louis Vuitton, St. John Knits And Other DesignersPRWeb–), takes a look at a few timeless clothing and accessory pieces rarely found in the ever-growing market of fast fashion. (PRWEB) September 27, 2012 In the wake of the latest fast fashion items inspired by New York Fashion Week, Rodeo Drive Resale (), premier reseller of , , and Hermes scarves, and other coveted luxury pieces takes a look at a few clothing and accessory pieces that have stood the test of time:1)    THE CARDIGAN: “Cardigans for me are like your BFF, your best friend forever, because they're seasonless, they're great when you want to have nice coverage, look stylish and it will always fit because it's made out of knit!” Designer and “Project Runway” winner Chloe Dao said in an interview posted on Livewellnetwork.com. “The classic cardigan can be sexy, stylish and even slimming. There's one for every body type and every occasion.” For those looking for the best deals in designer cardigans, stores such as shopRDR.com give shoppers the option to buy and sell luxury designers with savings on pre-owned Christian Dior, Yves Saint Laurent, and more.2)    ST. JOHN BASICS: Because items from the St. John Basics label are considered seasonless, they are never given a retail markdown or put on sale. Their classic jackets, skirts, and pants serve as the building blocks of any St. John lover’s wardrobe with pieces that can be dressed up or down and, as mentioned before, work beautifully from one season to the next. ShopRDR.com is the world’s largest reseller of , with many designs and styles for lovers of the iconic brand to choose from. 3)    THE PERFECT PAIR OF DARK JEANS: For a semi-formal event or, say, casual Friday at work, a slim cut, dark pair of jeans can convey a more relaxed style of fashion while remaining tasteful. Steer clear of distressed, torn or overly embellished jeans for these occasions when in a professional setting. Flats or heels work well here, and will give your jeans a dressier feel.4)    A LUXURY BAG BY LOUIS VUITTON: Every luxury bag lover has their preference, but most agree: When it comes to style and status, few brands can match the reputation of this French fashion label. Vintage , wallets and accessories have become the gold standard for sophistication, and as the label looks to maintain its position as the premier fashion brand among China’s growing luxury market, demand for LV, founded in 1854, remains as strong as ever. Because of their uncompromising selling strategy (LV has not had a sale in 154 years), midrange shoppers looking for a deal flock to sites such as ShopRDR.com, which offer buyers the opportunity to buy or sell 100% authentic designer handbags at a fraction of the cost.ShopRDR.com encourages fashion lovers to consider purchasing from its inventory of timeless, gently used clothing and accessories, many of which are still in like-new condition. At Rodeo Drive Resale, buyers can shop online for brands such as St. John Knits, Prada, Jimmy Choo, and more. Depending on the popularity of the site, sellers may range from individual clients, high profile celebrities or even actual boutiques. Items are guaranteed authentic and, unlike many of today’s fast fashion pieces, are designed to last for several seasons.Shoppers hoping to add to their current collection of timeless accessories are cordially invited to explore “Bottega Veneta: Woven to Perfection,” a promotion offering amazing deals on woven handbags and purses from the popular Bottega Veneta fashion house. As with every item available through shopRDR.com, all Bottega Veneta items are backed by a 100% money-back guarantee of authenticity. In addition to their sales, shopRDR.com offers one of the best deals on consignment in the business, paying up to 70% of the final selling price for handbags, shoes, jewelry, accessories and watches on consignment. Rodeo Drive Resale (shopRDR.com) has built a reputation of providing amazing deals on handbags, clothing and accessories from the top designers of upscale fashion. The company offers a 100% guarantee of authenticity on each item sold, and works daily with a network of clients looking to buy, sell, or for consignment of their luxury goods. ShopRDR.com loves high-end fashion, and believes finding a high quality, classic piece should be an easy, enjoyable -- and most importantly -- hassle-free shopping experience. For the finest in Louis Vuitton, Chanel, Prada, Gucci, St. John Knits, Christian Louboutin, Tiffany & Co. and more, visit RDR online at or call 1-888-697-3725. Also find shopRDR.com’s blog at . Also find shopRDR at: Blog: blog.shopRDR.com Facebook: facebook.com/shopRDR Twitter: twitter.com/shopRDR YouTube: youtube.com/ shopRDR Pinterest: pinterest.com/shopRDRRodeo Drive Resale (shopRDR.com) 1-888-697-3725 service(at)shopRDR(dot)comEditorial Dept. Luxury Collections Group, Inc. 713-777-0390 ?Copyright c 2012 Yahoo! Asia Pacific Pte Ltd (Co. Reg. No. 199700735D). All Rights Reserved. Yahoo! News Network?VASSAR, Mich. (AP) ? Army Staff Sgt. Travis Mills had been a lot of places since losing his four limbs in Afghanistan. The one place he hadn't been was where people knew him best.He finally returned to his Michigan hometown this week ? six months after the explosion that cost him his arms and legs ? to serve as the grand marshal of his old high school's homecoming parade."I didn't come to Vassar yet, because I wasn't ready for people to see me without my legs. ... Because in Vassar, everybody knows everybody," Mills said in an interview hours before the parade Thursday. "Great town, but I just wasn't comfortable with them seeing me in a wheelchair."Mills is still undergoing rehabilitation at Walter Reed Medical Center in Washington, D.C. But he's been able to get out and about. In the past few weeks alone, he took part in a 5K benefit walk in New York and celebrated his daughter's first birthday on the base at Fort Bragg, N.C.His hometown has pulled for him from afar. Hair salons, American Legion posts and many others hosted fundraisers this spring and summer as the small, tight-knit community rallied around him.Hundreds of people waving American flags jammed into Vassar's downtown to catch a glimpse of Mills at the parade Thursday evening. Mills, his wife, Kelsey, and their 1-year-old daughter, Chloe, served as the grand marshals.Mills stood tall in the back of a Jeep, smiling and waving his left prosthetic arm as people screamed his name. He occasionally yelled out the name of someone he recognized.Mills barely suffered a scratch during his first two tours of Afghanistan, but during his third, on April 10, he placed a bag of ammunition down on an improvised explosive device. The resulting blast tore through the athlete's muscular 6-foot-3 frame. Since then, he's undergone a grueling series of medical procedures and been pushed to the limits by medical professionals intent on seeing him pull through his rare injury.A half a year since Mills' life was changed forever, it's difficult to find a tree, lamppost or telephone pole without a yellow or red, white and blue ribbon in this bucolic community of 2,700 that sits 90 miles north of Detroit.A downtown bank proudly displays an electronic sign that welcomes Mills as a "hometown hero," as do dozens of other businesses."It was a lot to take in," Mills said of the signs of support he saw on the drive from the airport to his parents' home. "Now, I just have to make sure not to let everyone down."At a bonfire after Thursday's parade, Mills those gathered that that his "family was really touched" by the love they've received. "Coming into town was amazing," he said.Paul Wojno, Vassar High's principal, said the turnout for the parade and bonfire was "nothing short of fantastic," noting organizers handed out 1,500 flags and not everyone along the route had one.Mills also plans to address the crowd before Friday night's Vassar High football game.The 25-year-old is one of only a few servicemen to lose all four limbs in combat during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and survive."This is my new normal, and it's all about how I adjust to it," he said moments after using his prosthetic legs to walk from the living room to the sun room at his childhood home. "There's no good that's gonna come from me sitting there and wondering, 'Why'd this happen? Why me? Now what do I do?' The answer's right in front of you: It happened because it happened."Mills almost didn't come home at all.Within 20 seconds of the IED explosion, a fast-working medic affixed tourniquets to all four of Mills' limbs to ensure he wouldn't bleed to death.The medic was able to save Mills' life but not his limbs.In the days since, Mills has worked out daily at Walter Reed, getting used to the prosthetics, but also strengthening his body for the rigors of what's to come once he leaves.Mills was told quadruple amputees require at least 2? years of recovery and rehabilitation. But his goal is to be out of Walter Reed and back home in less than half that."I am going to be out of here" in a year, he boldly told his doctor.After that, he isn't sure what the future holds. He might go back to school, or perhaps work as an instructor at Fort Bragg.Before any of that, however, he said he's looking forward to spending an "emotional" two days with hundreds of his closest friends in Vassar.___Follow Mike Householder on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/mikehouseholder?Spring 2013 Accessories At Paris Fashion Week: Metallic Shoes and Pinch Bags From Lanvin to Kenzo!Grazia–?Start Blast, LLC, Launches ReviewAlert.com to Aid in Reputation ManagementPRWeb– equips business owners to manage online reviews of their companies with ease. With the growth of Yelp, Foursquare and other sites that allow customers to offer comments from the convenience of their smart phones, online reviews are playing an increasing role in the success or failure of businesses. Some industries can have up to 35 different websites featuring reviews of their business at any given time.That is a lot of information for business owners to deal with effectively. To ease that burden, ReviewAlert.com monitors reviewer websites for businesses. They then provide email alerts to subscribers when their business has been reviewed. A free, ad-based product, will also be available that will send alerts on a limited number of review websites.Coulson “Coul” Mullen, senior project manager for Start Blast, created and developed ReviewAlert.com. “With the growing number of websites reviewing local business, who can keep up with not only the reviews being placed, but also with the new review websites constantly popping up?” he asked. “Thankfully, we live in an era when things are easy. Every once in awhile, we find a tool that dramatically increases our two most valuable resources, time and money. That’s what we want ReviewAlert.com to be for our customers.”ReviewAlert.com monitors websites that provide reviews for local businesses in general as well as websites that provide industry specific reviews. The industry specific aspect of ReviewAlert.com will cater to industries such as restaurants and bars; hotel and travel; medical; home contractors; automotive; and legal services.Mullen said, “Word of mouth, good or bad, can go in one ear and out the other, but negative online reviews are recorded indefinitely for anyone to see,” he said. “The first step in solving any problem is to know it exists.”For more information, please visit Chloe Staffer Start Blast, LLC (469) 420-0222 ?The Artisan Group Perfects the Art of Celebrity Gifting with Array of Handcrafted Goods at Luxury Gift Lounge in Honor of Primetime Emmys Nominees and PresentersPRWeb–) showcases an exclusive assortment of handcrafted goods created by independent artists working in the United States and internationally. The event takes place September 21 – 22 in Hollywood, California. The Artisan Group will gift attending celebrities with an exclusive swag bag full of handcrafted jewelry, bath and body products, hair accessories, fine art photography, designer stationery, journals, and other items, valued at nearly $1,400. Members of the press and media will also receive an assortment of handcrafted products. "I'm blown away by the quality of the Primetime Emmys gift bag this year. The contents truly represent the level of handcrafted excellence that is the hallmark of The Artisan Group," said founder Valerie Guerrero. "Our members put a tremendous amount of thought and creative energy into their products, and that's one reason our gift bags are so popular with celebrities and the press year after year." An overview of the celebrity swag bag contents can be seen in The Artisan Group's . Participating members in GBK's Primetime Emmys Gift Lounge event include Britt Baker, Ideology; Jennifer Brown, Pieceful Design; Kim Brown, Chloe & Maddie; Marie “Wee” Caloggero, javascript:void(0);Wee Bindery; Kirah Campbell, A Pretty Shoppe; Deborah Carducci, Villa Lusso; Sandy and Stevie D’Andrea, Jewels For Hope; Andie Dietz, Java Jane Designs; Beth Engel, Paper Angels Photography; Sandra Geiss, SilverSchells Jewelry Designs; Megan Goldkamp, Megan Goldkamp Jewelry; Ann Gore, Boho-Mojo; Valerie Guerrero, BeezKneez Designs; Susan Harbourt, Susan Harbourt Designs; Angie Howard, Angie’s Jewelry Design; Katie Hughes, Vintage Rose Wraps; Anne Jansen, SureShot Jewelry; Colleen Johnson, 2 Sisters Handcrafted; Jill Jones, Bidwell Botanicals; Fen Li, Bead Flora and Jewels; Maggie Mahboubian, Lalun Seasonal Skincare; Mouna Marini, Beads of Aquarius Art Jewelry; Betty Miller, Magic Senses; Diane Miller, The Shutterbug Eye; Sandra Morrow, Thistle Delight Soapworks; Linda Pizanti, ImaGemation; Tenisha Proctor, Designs By Tenisha; Jennifer Racette, Alison Julien Collection; Lisa Smith, LKS Originals; Katherine Song, Katherine Song Originals; Kimberly Spector, Nair & Bjorn; Shawn Sullentrup, good. clean. soap.; Jessica Taylor, Shaka Soap; Julie Ter Borg, Julie Ellyn Designs; Heather Duby-Tharpe, Beadz and Bloomz; Vicky Topp, Krystal Energy; Maleah Torney, Maleah Torney Photography; Wendy Woodall, Stringing Along; Shawna Ziemer, Wags and Wiggles.To learn more about The Artisan Group and its upcoming celebrity events, visit the , follow the Group on Facebook and Twitter and subscribe to its . Selected products are available to view on The Artisan Group’s boards. Direct press inquiries to press(at)theartisangroup(dot)org.ABOUT THE ARTISAN GROUP The Artisan Group () is an art promotions group representing talented artisans at Hollywood’s best celebrity gift lounges. It provides a sampling of handcrafted products to celebrities and members of the press at major award show gift lounges such as those leading up to The Academy Awards, The Golden Globes, The MTV Movie Awards and The Primetime Emmys. Membership in the Artisan Group is juried and by invitation only. Members showcase a broad range of specialties including jewelry; spa and bath products; designer stationary and paper goods; crocheted apparel; children’s clothing; accessories and toys; ceramics; purses and totes; hand-poured candles; book binding and journals; illustrations and paintings; hand-dyed scarves; fine art photography; hair accessories; pet apparel and toys; woodworking products and more. The Artisan Group also offers its members guidance in the areas of sales, marketing, social media and public relations.The Artisan Group is in no way associated with MTV, The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, The Hollywood Foreign Press Association or The Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.Valerie Guerrero The Artisan Group (408) 203-6727 ?The Artisan Group Spotlights Best in Handcrafted Celebrity Gifting at GBK’s Primetime Emmys Gifting SuitePRWeb–) display were treated to the best in handcrafted. They took home swag bags brimming with artisan goods from jewelry to spa products to stationery to couture pet clothing—all created by independent artisans working in the United States and internationally. The Gifting Suite took place September 21-22 at the W Hotel in Hollywood. The Artisan Group has become a popular destination for celebrities and the press at GBK’s . “Our members’ creativity and dedication to quality shines through,” said The Artisan Group Founder Valerie Guerrero. “Hollywood loves out-of-the-ordinary, high-end handcrafted products, so it’s a perfect fit.” Celebrities stopping by The Artisan Group display at the Suite included Eion Baily, Camille Grammer, Tony Hale, Jason Ritter, Aaron Staton, Ed Weeks, Tamala Jones and Stacy Tookey.Kate Flannery of “The Office,” was gifted earlier in the year at GBK’s and is a fan of The Artisan Group. During a visit with Guerrero on Saturday at the Primetime Emmys Gift Lounge, she said, “You know, I have to tell you, I was absolutely overwhelmed with the amazing quality of gifts I received in your gift bag. Every single gift I unwrapped from your bag was truly incredible. Everything was so nicely packaged, and I enjoyed everything so much. You have some talented members in your group.” The Artisan Group also gifted GBK’s 2012 charity beneficiaries, The Dream Center, Best Friends Animal Society and Somaly Mam Foundation. Photos of the display pieces and contact information for all participants is available in The Artisan Group’s Official “." Participating members in GBK's Primetime Emmys Gift Lounge event include Britt Baker, Ideology; Jennifer Brown, Pieceful Design; Kim Brown, Chloe & Maddie; Marie Caloggero,Wee Bindery; Kirah Campbell, A Pretty Shoppe; Deborah Carducci, Villa Lusso; Sandy and Stevie D’Andrea, Jewels For Hope; Andie Dietz, Java Jane Designs; Beth Engel, Paper Angels Photography; Sandra Geiss, SilverSchells Jewelry Designs; Megan Goldkamp, Megan Goldkamp Jewelry; Ann Gore, Boho-Mojo; Valerie Guerrero, BeezKneez Designs; Susan Harbourt, Susan Harbourt Designs; Angie Howard, Angie’s Jewelry Design; Katie Hughes, Vintage Rose Wraps; Anne Jansen, SureShot Jewelry; Colleen Johnson, 2 Sisters Handcrafted; Jill Jones, Bidwell Botanicals; Fen Li, Bead Flora and Jewels; Maggie Mahboubian, Lalun Seasonal Skincare; Mouna Marini, Beads of Aquarius Art Jewelry; Betty Miller, Magic Senses; Diane Miller, The Shutterbug Eye; Sandra Morrow, Thistle Delight Soapworks; Linda Pizanti, ImaGemation; Tenisha Proctor, Designs By Tenisha; Jennifer Racette, Alison Julien Collection; Lisa Smith, LKS Originals; Katherine Song, Katherine Song Originals; Kimberly Spector, Nair & Bjorn; Shawn Sullentrup, good. clean. soap.; Jessica Taylor, Shaka Soap; Julie Ter Borg, Julie Ellyn Designs; Heather Duby-Tharpe, Beadz and Bloomz; Vicky Topp, Krystal Energy; Maleah Torney, Maleah Torney Photography; Wendy Woodall, Stringing Along; Shawna Ziemer, Wags and Wiggles.To learn more about The Artisan Group and its upcoming celebrity events visit the , follow the Group on and and subscribe to its . Selected products are available to view on The Artisan Group’s . Direct press inquiries to press(at)theartisangroup(dot)org.ABOUT THE ARTISAN GROUP The Artisan Group () is an art promotions group representing talented artisans at Hollywood’s best celebrity gift lounges. It provides a sampling of handcrafted products to celebrities and members of the press at major award show gift lounges such as those leading up to The Academy Awards, The Golden Globes, The MTV Movie Awards and The Primetime Emmys. Membership in the Artisan Group is juried and by invitation only. Members showcase a broad range of specialties including jewelry; spa and bath products; designer stationery and paper goods; crocheted apparel; children’s clothing; accessories and toys; ceramics; purses and totes; hand-poured candles; book binding and journals; illustrations and paintings; hand-dyed scarves; fine art photography; hair accessories; pet apparel and toys; woodworking products and more. The Artisan Group also offers its members guidance in the areas of sales, marketing, social media and public relations.The Artisan Group is in no way associated with MTV, The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, The Hollywood Foreign Press Association or The Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.Valerie Guerrero The Artisan Group (408) 203-6727 ?The Hottest Designer Styles for Fall Have Arrived at SabbyChicPRWeb–. Perfect with either jeans or a skirt, knee length boots can be completely casual or dressed up for a nicer evening out. We feature boots from the hottest designers, including Chloe, Steve Madden, Coach and many more. We also feature a wide array of styles and colors, including the coveted , for up to 50% off retail prices. While our gorgeous brown leather boots are perfect for fall, a pair of black knee length boots are utterly classic, and can easily transition into the colder winter months.As for fashion, this season is all about skinny jeans, eye-catching jackets, and faux fur details. We feature the utmost designers and brands, from Chanel to Burberry to Nanette Lepore. A pair of slim-fitting, asset-enhancing skinny jeans are paired perfectly with a cropped , and is a perfect ensemble for back to school. Faux fur vests and jackets are a great way to add a little flair and flavor to a simple pair of jeans, but is yet casual enough to wear to work or school.If you have a more formal event to attend, you will definitely need a few perfect cocktail dresses on hand. The little black dress is always in style, and thankfully, it is perfect to accessorize with this season's slew of tall boots and cropped jackets. Or, turn heads with a short dress in a rich, gemstone shade, such as ruby or sapphire. Don't be afraid to play with color this fall, especially if you are going out for a fancy night on the town.You won't have to break the bank on these hot new fall styles. SabbyChic offers genuine . However, these definitely aren't cheap knock-offs or used; instead, they are all new with tags, marked down by major department stores and boutiques. SabbyChic was founded by a woman who loved designer fashion, and wanted to share her passion for the most gorgeous new styles at the best possible prices with the masses. Thanks to the founder Sabrina, you are guaranteed access to the most unique and gorgeous styles for fall, without having to pay full retail.Sabbychic Support Sabbychic 1.855.867.9912 ?The Langham Huntington, Pasadena Launches Doggie ProgramPRWeb–.    For additional information or to make a reservation, dial (626) 568-3900. Fans can follow The Langham Huntington, Pasadena on Facebook and Twitter. The hotel is located at 1401 S. Oak Knoll Ave., Pasadena, CA 91106. About The Langham Huntington, Pasadena Capturing the grace and elegance of classic Southern California, The Langham Huntington is an iconic landmark hotel located at the base of the picturesque San Gabriel Mountains, just minutes from downtown Los Angeles in beautiful Pasadena. A renowned Pasadena hotel since 1907, the property features 380 guestrooms including 38 suites, eight cottages, award-winning dining and a luxurious spa featuring treatments based upon Traditional Chinese medicine. For more information, visit About “Beverly Hills Chihuahua 3: Viva La Fiesta!” Available now on Blu-ray Combo Pack, DVD and HD Digital, Papi is back, and he's ready to party! From Walt Disney Studios, everyone’s invited to the ultimate celebration of friendship and family, “Beverly Hills Chihuahua 3: Viva La Feista!” Join Papi (voiced by George Lopez) and his two-and four-legged family as they move into a posh Beverly Hills hotel, complete with a luxurious doggie spa. But there's trouble in puppy paradise when Rosa, the littlest member of the pack, feels smaller and less special than ever. Now it's up to Papi to help Rosa find - and celebrate - her inner strength, which turns out to be bigger than she ever dreamed. Overflowing with laughter, love and excitement, this is tail-wagging fun for the whole family!# # #Susan Williger 626-585-6440 ?London, September 12 (ANI): A college in Cheshire has launched a beauty course to teach teenagers how to achieve the bronzed limbs, backcombed tresses and enhanced eyelashes of a footballer's WAG.The course at West Cheshire College in Ellesmere Port will be teaching girls aged 16 and over how to get adept at wearing false eyelashes, fake tan and clip-on hair extensions, the Daily Mail reported.The course will also teach students how to apply "perfect" and "fashionable" make-up, and accomplish "that perfectly groomed look of big, bouncy hair."Programme leader Karen Bennison said girls who admire pictures of WAGs in magazines and watch British TV show 'The Only Way Is Essex' wanted to achieve the same "hyper-feminine" look as Wayne Rooney'a wife Colleen or 'TOWIE' star Chloe Sims."When we were looking for ideas for commercial courses the teaching staff all agreed that all the girls come in wanting to look like WAGs and have big hair, false eyelashes and full-on make-up," she said."They read glossy magazines, watch The Only Way Is Essex and Desperate Scousewives and want to achieve that same hyper-feminine look."So my colleagues and I agreed we should run a course to help them recreate it at home," she said.Bennison said that the course aimed to teach girls how to emulate the WAG look elegantly and was not just about "churning out clones.""Many of the real-life WAGs are actually very sophisticated and that's the message we're trying to communicate here - that there's nothing wrong with being glamorous, but that it can be done with class and style," she said."We will show them how to apply false tan, fake eyelashes, clip-on hair extensions and make-up, and the techniques involved in achieving that celebrity look."But it's not about churning out clones or encouraging the girls to become a parody of themselves. We want them to feel confident, elegant and self-assured," she added.The two-day 'How to Get the WAG Look' course will be held in October. (ANI)?Discover Yahoo! With Your FriendsExplore news, videos, and much more based on what your friends are reading and watching. Publish your own activity and retain full control.

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