Archive for May, 2007
Tuesday, May 29th, 2007
In this handout image provided by the Miss Universe 2007 organization, Riyo Mori, Miss Universe 2007, of Japan, poses with Donald Trump, left, and pageant host Mario Lopez.
MEXICO CITY – A 20-year-old dancer from Japan was crowned Miss Universe 2007 on Monday night, marking only the second time her country has won the world beauty title.
Dressed in a black, red and purple Japanese-style gown, Riyo Mori nervously grabbed the hands of first runner-up, Natalia Guimaraes of Brazil, just before the winner was announced. Then she threw her hands up and covered her mouth, overcome with emotion.
But she gathered herself together enough to catch the diamond-and-pearl-studded headpiece valued at $250,000 as it slipped off her head when Miss Universe 2006 Zuleyka Rivera of Puerto Rico crowned her. Mori immediately placed it back on her head.
The last time Japan won the pageant was in 1959 when Akiko Kojima became the first Miss Universe from Asia.
Hear what Donald Trump and Riyo Mori had to say after the 20-year from Japan was crowned Miss Universe.
“She is an amazing champion, an amazing woman and I hear that they go totally insane in Japan, so that’s good,” said Donald Trump, who co-owns the pageant with NBC.
Mori, from the small town of Shizuoka at the base of Mount Fuji, won the cheers of the Mexico City audience when she opened her interview, saying ‘Hola, Mexico!’
“I learned how to always be happy, be patient and to be positive, and this is what I want to teach to the next generation,” she said during the interview competition.
The daughter of a dance school operator, Mori said her grandmother told her as a child that she wanted her to be Miss Japan before she turned 20.
“From the very beginning, I entered the competition with high hopes and an unswerving determination to make this dream a reality,” she said in a pre-competition interview.
She wants to someday open an international dance school in Tokyo.
“Right now I am only 20 years old, so I’m really excited about what I’m going to be able to do at this age to benefit society,” Mori said after winning.
The winner travels the world for a year on behalf of charities and pageant sponsors.
The 15 finalists from a field of 77 contestants were announced early in Monday’s show. They were picked last week during preliminary judging in the contest’s swimsuit, evening gown and interview categories. Their names were not announced until Monday, allowing all 77 to be introduced to the television audience.
As soon as the final 15 had been selected, they immediately strutted across the stage in animal-print bikinis for the swimsuit competition. After the evening gown competition, five contestants were eliminated, and the judges chose the winner from the five remaining.
Missing from this year’s contest was Miss Sweden, whose country is one of the few to win the crown three times. Isabel Lestapier Winqvist, 20, dropped out because many Swedes say the competition does not represent the modern woman.
Hours before the pageant began, dozens of protesters held a mock ceremony in downtown Mexico City that featured “Miss Marijuana,” “Miss Sexual Health,” “Miss Human Rights” and other candidates with obscenities written across their sashes. The group yelled “Neither ugly nor beautiful, should a woman be considered an object!”
Pageant organizers say the Miss Universe contest carefully selects women who are intelligent, well-mannered and cultured.
The celebrity judges included actor James Kyson Lee, model Lindsay Clubine, Dallas Cowboys quarterback Tony Romo, rocker Dave Navarro, Olympic figure skating champion Michelle Kwan, celebrity hairstylist Ken Paves, fashion designer Marc Bouwer, “Project Runway” judge and Elle magazine fashion director Niña Garcia and former Miss Universe Dayanara Torres.
source : associated press
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Saturday, May 26th, 2007
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Thursday, May 24th, 2007
| A 17-year-old from Arizona yesterday became the youngest ever winner of American Idol, after viewers cast a record 74 million votes.
Jordin Sparks beat Blake Lewis, 25, to the top spot on the US’s most watched television show after the singer captured the hearts of viewers with her bubbly personality and big voice.
The two finalists embraced after host Ryan Seacrest announced the winner of the sixth season of the contest, with Sparks, dressed in a long, flowing gold gown, having difficulty catching her breath.
“Thank you so much for everything — Mom and Dad, I love you!” said the emotional teenager, who along with the American Idol title will receive a recording contract.
“It just turned out pretty cool, I guess,” she said, giggling.
Ms Sparks, who is from Glendale, Arizona, and is the daughter of a former National Football League player, Phillippi Sparks, started singing as a toddler and auditioned for American Idol as soon as she could after becoming eligible at the age of 16.
After the show singer Smokey Robinson said: “She sings so good it’s hard to believe that she’s 17. To sing like that you would have to have lived for a long time.”
Heading into the competition’s final week, many thought the show’s top title was up for grabs, with the British judge, Simon Cowell, saying viewers would have to decide between the better singer, Sparks, and the better entertainer, Lewis.
The show, which has grown from a cheesy summer talent competition into a cultural phenomenon that draws about 30 million viewers twice a week, is a spin off from the British Pop Idol.
In its first five seasons the show has produced a list of successful stars from both its winners and losers.
Kelly Clarkson was a Grammy winner, winner Carrie Underwood became a Country Music Award winner and Jennifer Hudson, who failed to make the finale in 2004, won an Oscar and Golden Globe earlier this year for her performance in the movie Dreamgirls.
In addition to transforming nobodies into stars, the programme has become a coveted forum for established artists to be seen.
The star-studded event included performances by Gwen Stefani, Smokey Robinson, Gladys Knight and Green Day. Prince, Tony Bennett, Stevie Wonder and Mary J. Blige have also appeared on the show.
About 100,000 people auditioned for this year’s show, which puts contestants through auditions and performances that showcase musical genres ranging from country to hard rock.
The programme, on News Corp’s Fox network, first ran in the summer of 2002.
There are three judges, the music producer Randy Jackson, the former pop star Paula Abdul and Cowell. They have contracts for another two seasons.
Revenue from recordings by performers associated with the Idol franchise has exceeded $100 million.
The show is broadcast live or tape-delayed to more than 100 nations outside the United States, including Pakistan, Israel, United Arab Emirates, China, Australia and South Africa.
source : associated press
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Wednesday, May 23rd, 2007
First there was Krishna Bharat who delivered Google News - a grand experiment in news browsing - using computers and the “Hilltop algorithm” he developed for his Ph.D at Georgia Tech.
Bharat’s Krakatoa Chronicle paved the way for Google to organize the world’s news in real time, providing a bird’s eye view of what’s being reported on virtually any topic. Today, Google News is one of the largest and most up-to-date news services online, gathering content from more than 4,500 online news sources around the world, then determining which stories are related and grouping them based on importance
Then there was Anurag Acharya. With a Ph.D from Carnegie Mellon who worked on including scholarly literature by improving Google’s indexing, automatically extracting metadata and ranking for scholarly literature. He then helped weave this information into Google web search - and Google Scholar was born. He predicted that Google Scholar “would be a place that you can go to find all scholarly literature — across all areas, all languages, all the way back in time.”
Now here comes Amit Patel, one of the worlds top search patent inventors and a six year veteran at Google.
A firm believer in Google’s informal corporate motto “Don’t Be Evil,” Patel is the brain behind the mega search company’s newest offering: Hot Trends, a daily list of the 100 hottest topics on its search engine. Google Hot Trends combines elements of Zeitgeist and Trends — two existing Google products that give a glimpse into Web search habits, but only in retrospect based on weeks-old data. Hot Trends, a list of the current top-100 fastest-rising search trends, will be refreshed several times daily, using data from millions of Google Web searches conducted up to an hour before each update, the company said.
Featured as part of an upgrade to Google’s “trends” service, the breakdown will consist of the fastest-rising search requests on any given day, though the list won’t necessarily be an exact reflection of all the top queries since it will be edited to exclude pornography as well as requests about the weather, popular sites like MySpace.com or prominent celebrities that consistently generate lots of searches.
But even so, trying to figure out why certain terms are popping up is sure to be a big part of the fun and according to Amit Patel, a Google software engineer who oversaw the project, that’s the whole point. To help provide context for users, the Mountain View, California-based company will provide links to news stories and blogs containing the search terms.
“It’s very entertaining and it’s very addictive,” Patel said of the trends list.
Besides appealing to the legions of pop culture junkies combing the web daily, Patel believes the rankings will be useful to researchers and reporters looking for story ideas. The improvements will also enable users to analyze search terms within the sub-regions of 79 countries.
With Google Trends, the company says, you can compare the world’s interest in your favorite topics. Enter up to five topics and see how often they’ve been searched for on Google over time. Google Trends also displays how frequently your topics have appeared in Google News stories, and which geographic regions have searched for them most often.
And with Hot Trends, you can see a snapshot of what’s on the public’s collective mind by viewing the fastest-rising searches for different points of time. You can see a list of the current top 100 fastest rising search queries in the U.S. You can also select a recent day in history to see what the top rising searches were and what the search activity looked like over the course of that day. Google updates Hot Trends several times a day.
Google says that Hot Trends are a reflection of what people are searching for on Google today. Rather than showing the most popular searches overall, which would always be generic terms like “weather”, Hot Trends highlights searches that have suddenly gained popularity. “Our algorithm analyzes millions of web searches that have been performed on Google and displays those searches that are deviating the most from their historic traffic pattern.” The algorithm also filters out spam and removes inappropriate material.
For each search, Hot Trends shows related searches, a search volume graph, and the top cities. It also displays news, blog and web results to help give context about why a search may be appearing on the Hot Trends list today. Hot Trends is updated multiple times each day, and you can also choose a date in the past to see what the top Hot Trends for that date were
For years, Google has produced a manually-compiled list of popular searches called the Google Zeitgeist. Hot Trends takes this list to a new level, providing an up-to-date snapshot of what’s on our collective mind – from current events to daily crossword puzzle clues to the latest celebrity gossip. For each Hot Trends result, the associated Google News, blog searches and Google web search results appear, giving users greater context for each result.
For example, today one of the Hot Trends was search for the Indo-American Dhanak family of Anaheim Hills where a crime investigation is ongoing.
source : google news
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Tuesday, May 22nd, 2007
New Delhi: Underworld don Abu Salem, who was brought here from Mumbai in connection with an extortion case, was today remanded to seven days police custody by a Delhi Court.
Salem was produced before the Chief Metropolitan Magistrate Seema Maini at the Tis Hazari courts following a production warrant against him in connection with an alleged extortion call he made to a south Delhi-based businessman.
The gangster, who had been lodged in Mumbai’s Arthur Road Jail after his extradition from Portugal in 2005, had allegedly demanded Rs. one crore from Rajat Nagrath, owner of Allied Communications in East of Kailash six years ago.
Though there are four cases registered against him here in Delhi, he can be tried in only three cases, which were mentioned in the extradition agreement with Portugal. Salem is facing trial in eight cases in the country.
source : press trust of india
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Friday, May 18th, 2007
Don’t hate Aishwarya Rai,because she’s beautiful. Hate her because the Bollywood knockout — a former Miss World and.India’s most prominent celebrity — picked the wrong film to prove she can move an audience to tears.
You would think “Provoked” could do the job. The movie, directed by erotica veteran Jag Mundhra, focuses on the story of Kiranjit Ahluwalia (Rai), a Punjab-born housewife who immigrated to England in 1979. Ten years later, she was imprisoned for setting her abusive husband on fire and killing him. After serving less than four years behind bars, Ahluwalia won an appeal and was set free. Her case paved the way for the rights of mistreated women under British law.
There’s no doubt an emotional story lies in the pain of this tortured woman. But Mundhra’s film — told through hazy flashbacks and spiritless scenes — doesn’t hold a candle to the actual events. How can we possibly care about Kiranjit when we hardly know her? Likewise, her husband, Deepak (Naveen Andrews, “Lost”), is painted as a one-dimensional bad guy without amotive for his sins.
Rai does her best with the material, but the film has issues — from its drawn-out beginning to its over-the-top ending.
Kiranjit’s stint in prison is laughable. Her fellow inmates seem more like sorority sisters rather than a bunch of broads with an edge (Miranda Richardson plays her best bud, Veronica). When Kiranjit finally leaves the slammer, the girls give her a standing ovation.
Thanks to the script by Carl Austin and Rahila Gupta, “Provoked” plays like a cheesy after-school special. This is one time Rai — smiling pretty and batting her infamous blue-green eyes — can’t work her magic to save the day.
source : google news
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Friday, May 18th, 2007
Don’t hate Aishwarya Rai,because she’s beautiful. Hate her because the Bollywood knockout — a former Miss World and.India’s most prominent celebrity — picked the wrong film to prove she can move an audience to tears.
You would think “Provoked” could do the job. The movie, directed by erotica veteran Jag Mundhra, focuses on the story of Kiranjit Ahluwalia (Rai), a Punjab-born housewife who immigrated to England in 1979. Ten years later, she was imprisoned for setting her abusive husband on fire and killing him. After serving less than four years behind bars, Ahluwalia won an appeal and was set free. Her case paved the way for the rights of mistreated women under British law.
There’s no doubt an emotional story lies in the pain of this tortured woman. But Mundhra’s film — told through hazy flashbacks and spiritless scenes — doesn’t hold a candle to the actual events. How can we possibly care about Kiranjit when we hardly know her? Likewise, her husband, Deepak (Naveen Andrews, “Lost”), is painted as a one-dimensional bad guy without amotive for his sins.
Rai does her best with the material, but the film has issues — from its drawn-out beginning to its over-the-top ending.
Kiranjit’s stint in prison is laughable. Her fellow inmates seem more like sorority sisters rather than a bunch of broads with an edge (Miranda Richardson plays her best bud, Veronica). When Kiranjit finally leaves the slammer, the girls give her a standing ovation.
Thanks to the script by Carl Austin and Rahila Gupta, “Provoked” plays like a cheesy after-school special. This is one time Rai — smiling pretty and batting her infamous blue-green eyes — can’t work her magic to save the day.
source : google news
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Wednesday, May 9th, 2007
LOS ANGELES - Firefighters made progress early Wednesday against a wildfire blazing over Dante’s View in the brush-covered hills behind the city’s iconic Griffith Observatory. Animals at the nearby Los Angeles Zoo were moved indoors, and dozens of homes were evacuated.
The 600-acre blaze in sprawling Griffith Park was just one firefighters were battling across the nation. A wildfire in northern Minnesota has already destroyed 40 homes and buildings, and brush fires in Georgia and northern Florida have charred more than 200 square miles.
Overnight, five helicopters flew dangerous water-dropping missions in Los Angeles, helping fire crews get the blaze about 40 percent contained.
Griffith Park is a mix of wilderness, cultural sites, horse and hiking trails and recreational facilities set on more than 4,000 acres in the hills between Hollywood and the San Fernando Valley.
Visitors to its Greek Theatre, Observatory and the Museum of the American West were told to leave. At the Autry National Center, which includes a museum of Western artifacts, staff threw tarps over the collections to protect them in case the sprinkler system went off, said Faith Raiguel, chief operating officer.
The flames forced officials to put most of the Los Angeles Zoo’s 1,200 animals inside holding quarters.
“So far the animals are faring fine,” said Jason Jacobs, director of marketing and public relations for the zoo. “I haven’t heard any reports of anything going wrong.”
About 35 people who live near the park, out of an estimated 300 evacuated from nearby homes, checked in to an evacuation center at a high school.
“I was just able to get a few things,” said Ed Stephan, 83, who helped his wife into their car as ashes fell from the sky. “We’re not too worried but want to get out of here and observe the law.”
Authorities hoped residents would be able to return to their homes by evening.
The fire destroyed Dante’s View, a trailside terraced garden on Mount Hollywood, said City Councilman Tom LaBonge.
“This is a very sad night for Los Angeles,” he said.
Elsewhere in the region, a 300-acre fire near California State University at San Bernardino was 75 percent contained. There were no reports of damages or injuries.
In neighboring Orange County, a 140-acre fire in Featherly Regional Park and a 1,250-acre fire on a training range at Camp Pendleton were at least three-quarters contained.
On the East Coast, authorities evacuated about 300 homes in orange county northern Florida as two fires totaling 130,000 acres — about 203 square miles — continued to rage on the Georgia-Florida line. Florida officials warned that they might soon need help if the blazes grow out of control.
A 107,000-acre blaze in Georgia’s Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge was called the largest blaze in state history and was nearing part of the park that has served as a fire crew command post. Another fire 10 miles away covered 40,000 acres.
The smaller fire crossed into Florida on Tuesday and was threatening Taylor, a small town with one store and no cell phone coverage, said Baker County Sheriff Joey Dobson.
In the Midwest, a wildfire near the Canadian border in northeastern Minnesota had burned 16,266 acres since it was spotted Saturday. It destroyed around 40 buildings, including multimillion-dollar homes, and forced more than 100 people to evacuate.
Authorities said they believe it started at a campsite just outside the Boundary Waters Canoe Area.
“There are some houses up there where all there is left is the foundation,” said Leif Lunde of the Cook County Sheriff’s Department. No injuries were reported, but Lunde said about 30 of the burned buildings were homes or cabins.
In Los Angeles, the cause of the Griffith Park fire was under investigation, though Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa said there were “no facts” to indicate the fire was intentionally set.
Police and fire officials offered differing opinions about a man found badly burned near the origin of the fire.
David Schaefer, a fire department paramedic who treated the man for second- and third-degree burns, said the man had fallen asleep while smoking a cigarette and “woke up with his shirt on fire.”
Fire investigators remained interested in the man as the possible source of the fire, Calvillo said. But police Sgt. Lee Sands said the department was finished questioning the man and did not consider him a “person of interest.”
source : Associated Press
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