Al-Qaida-Linked Militants Free 2 Filipino Hostages

MANILA, Philippines (AP) — Abu Sayyaf gunmen have freed two Filipino members of a Jordanian TV journalist's crew who were kidnapped by the al-Qaida-linked militants last year as they set out to interview the extremists in their jungle lairs in the southern Philippines, police said Sunday.

Policemen found frail-looking cameraman Ramel Vela and audio technician Roland Letriro late Saturday and brought them to a hospital in southern Sulu province, where they were kidnapped in June along with Jordanian Baker Abdulla Atyani, provincial police chief Senior Superintendent Antonio Freyra said.

Atyani is believed to still be held by the gunmen in the jungles of Sulu's mountainous Patikul town, about 950 kilometers (590 miles) south of Manila.

"We're so happy. We never thought we'd make it out alive," a teary-eyed Vela said at his hospital bed, adding that he and Letriro have not seen Atyani since the Jordanian was separated from them by their kidnappers five days after they were taken hostage.

Visibly thinner, shocked and with overgrown hair and beard, the two were examined by doctors and given bread and water in the Sulu hospital, which was guarded by police and marines.

"They really lost weight because they were constantly under stress each day," Freyra told The Associated Press.

An unspecified amount was paid to secure the freedom of the two captives, according to three security officials who have been closely monitoring the kidnappings. The three spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to reporters.

Military officials have said Abu Sayyaf militants have demanded 130 million pesos ($3.1 million) for the release of Atyani and his two crew members.

Hundreds of rebels from the larger Moro National Liberation Front, which signed a 1996 autonomy deal with the government, have also been negotiating with the Abu Sayyaf for the release of Atyani and other foreign hostages, including two European bird watchers who were abducted last year.

Moro commander Khabir Malik said his group had taken the initiative to seek the freedom of the hostages to help the government clean up the image of Sulu, a predominantly Muslim province where the Abu Sayyaf has carried out deadly bombings, kidnappings for ransom and beheadings, primarily in the early 2000s.

U.S.-backed military offensives have crippled the Abu Sayyaf in recent years, but it remains a national security threat. Washington has listed the group as a terrorist organization.

Malik said last week that he met with an Abu Sayyaf commander, Jul-Asman Sawadjaan, to seek the release of Atyani and his two crew members, who were believed being held in the jungles of Sulu's mountainous Patikul town. But the extremists refused to release their captives to the Moro rebels, Malik said.

Malik had suggested that his armed group could consider other options, including a rescue, to secure the captives' freedom from the smaller Abu Sayyaf group.

Abu Sayyaf gunmen handed the two Filipinos to still-unknown negotiators, but not to Malik's group, angering the Moro rebels, according to the three security officials.

A gunbattle erupted between Malik's forces and the Abu Sayyaf militants Sunday in Patikul's jungles, Freyra said. There were no immediate reports of casualties, and police and the military went on alert amid the fighting.

Sulu Governor Abdusakur Tan has said he will not allow Malik's group to take any drastic action like a rescue that could harm the Abu Sayyaf's hostages.

Atyani was working for the Arabic satellite channel Middle East Broadcasting Corp. when he interviewed Osama bin Laden and his aides in Afghanistan about three months before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. He said they told him that the coming weeks would hold "important surprises that will target American and Israeli interests in the world."

He later moved to Dubai-based Al-Arabiya TV as its Asia bureau chief. He traveled to Sulu to work on a documentary about the country's volatile south and possibly interview Abu Sayyaf militants in the impoverished province, Freyra and other officials said.

The other hostages being held by the Abu Sayyaf include the two European men, who were seized from nearby Tawi Tawi province in February last year and are believed to have been taken to Sulu, a Japanese treasure hunter, a Malaysian national and a Filipino resident of Sulu, officials say.

On Friday, Washington renewed a longstanding warning to Americans not to travel to Sulu "due to the high threat of kidnapping ... and violence linked to insurgency and terrorism there."

The Abu Sayyaf, which has about 380 armed fighters in Sulu and nearby islands, is an extremist offshoot of a Muslim rebellion that has been raging in the predominantly Catholic nation's south for decades. The violence has been fueled by abject poverty, corruption, proliferation of illegal weapons and weak law enforcement.

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Meet the Man Who Designed BlackBerry’s New Phones

When BlackBerry set out to design the phones that would take the company into the next decade, it faced a big challenge. The flagship device of the new BlackBerry 10 platform needed to simultaneously satisfy what today’s customers want in a smartphone while at the same time stay true to the essence of BlackBerry — which, if the company’s market over the last few years is any indication, customers didn’t want.

The man tasked with redesigning BlackBerry phones was Todd Wood, the company’s senior vice president of design. Leading industrial design at BlackBerry since 2006, Wood is a veteran of industrial design, previously doing design work for Nokia and, before that, Nortel. Mashable sat down with Wood this week while he was in town for the BlackBerry 10 launch.

[More from Mashable: Here’s a Mysterious Image From BlackBerry’s Super Bowl Ad]

Wood speaks with the same thoughtfulness of other design leaders, such as Apple’s Jony Ive, but with none of the showiness. He’s been with BlackBerry (formerly Research In Motion) for long enough to see its fortunes rise and fall. As he describes the Z10, you feel that he’s heard enough praise and criticism about BlackBerry’s products that it all just bounces off.

[More from Mashable: Don’t Hold Your Breath for More BlackBerry Tablets]

When I bring up the BlackBerry Storm — the company’s previous (failed) attempt to create a touchscreen phone — Wood doesn’t bristle or even acknowledge the disaster it was. He simply describes certain design elements that a similar to the BlackBerry Z10, BlackBerry’s new flagship phone. And he makes them sound kind of cool.

“There’s still the ‘waterfall’ that was pronounced on Storm — these flowing surfaces,” Wood says as he points to the top and bottom of the Z10, which are ever-so-slightly sloped. “We’ve brought that with the margins [on the Z10], but it’s very subtle. There are some principles that we carry forward, but nothing’s been cut and pasted.”

As CEO Thorsten Heins described at the launch, BlackBerry faced a decision three years ago: adopt someone else’s mobile OS or go it alone. It opted for the latter, acquiring QNX software in 2010 and adapting it to build first the PlayBook, then BlackBerry 10.

Completely switching mobile platforms was risky and extremely challenging, but it was also a huge design opportunity, says Wood.

“We were starting the platform from scratch. We wanted to build on the design DNA [BlackBerry] had, and we wanted to keep certain attributes — the fit to face, fit to hand — the general comfort of the device, the build quality of the device.”

No Home Button

Key decisions about the device itself depended on how the software worked. There’s no home button on the Z10, for example — a user controls basic functions (like switching between apps) via gestures, such as swiping up from the edge of the screen.

Much of the design was influenced by the need for easy, one-handed operation.

“How can you design a system where you could multitask more elegantly?” Wood asks, rhetorically. “It’s not unlike shuffling cards. And we started to realize you can really do that with one hand and one thumb.

“Almost every phone has a UI paradigm of ‘You go home to go somewhere else.’ Here you can flow from app to app.”

Soft Touch Backside

The phone has a semi-rubberized back, a material that BlackBerry refers to as “soft touch.” The company has used it before — in the trim of the latest Bold smartphone, for example. But in the Z10, Wood’s team added a perforated pattern.

“Soft touch is a special coating that we use,” he explains. “It provides grip, and it’s very silky. What we did was add some microtexture to it, which is something that you don’t notice until you pick the phone up and run your hand across it. It’s a nice subtlety.”

Button Shapes

If you’ve ever thought the physical buttons on Samsung’s phones felt cheap, or the iPhone’s too bland, you’ll appreciate RIM’s contoured buttons for volume and media playback. The volume buttons have a slight notch on one side, and the play/pause button has a small upraised piece — all detectable by touch.

“We wanted to keep them really precise and clean,” says Wood. “We sculpted the keys so it’s always really apparent without looking, almost like braille, exactly where you are.”

Font

Wood also played a role in choosing the system font for BlackBerry 10, which is called Slate. Designed by Canadian Rod McDonald (who also designed the font for Maclean’s, one of Canada’s top national news magazines), BlackBerry chose Slate for its legibility, Wood says.

“Slate really works for screen and print, so we decided to adopt it. When you have such a high-res display, you get really accurate letterforms. When you have a really great font design, that improves productivity. You’re not squinting, and letters are not misinterpreted.”

The Q10

Of course, Wood also led the team that designed the Q10, the BlackBerry 10 phone with a physical QWERTY keyboard, coming about a month after the Z10 debuts. Although the Q10 borrows more design DNA from the BlackBerry of old, BB10 afforded some big departures as well.

For starters, the Q10′s keyboard is straight whereas most previous BlackBerry phone keyboards had a curve to them — which even led to the company calling one of its product lines the Curve.

“That is a big change,” Wood says of straightening out the keyboard for the Q10. “It was very logical, but also it signals ‘This is different.’ And there’s no performance tradeoff with it being straight — we’ve measured it.”

Besides being straight, the keyboard is larger than the ones on previous BlackBerry phones.

“What allows us to get that extra size is we’ve replaced the home key, the back key and the send/end keys, since everything in BB10 is controlled by gestures and direct manipulation of the data. Without the curve, each key is the same size, and they’re 3% larger.”

The Red LED

No BlackBerry phone would be complete without the trademark — and at times notorious — blinking red LED that indicates a message is waiting. Wood says the attribute is hard-wired into BlackBerry design at this point and at no point did the company consider ditching it.

“That’s probably the strongest, most iconic element of the DNA we carry forward,” he says. “It’s origins were ‘Let’s save on battery life,’ and it continues today. For us, we call it the spark, or the splat. It’s a hallmark of BlackBerry it makes some people excited, and it makes some people neurotic, but it’s up to end users to manage that.”

How do you like the design of BlackBerry’s new phones? Let us know in the comments.

BONUS: BlackBerry Z10 Review

Click here to view the gallery: BlackBerry Z10 Review

Lead image by Nina Frazier, Mashable

Images by Nina Frazier, Christina Warren and Pete Pachal, Mashable

This story originally published on Mashable here.

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Jenna Miscavige Hill Pens Revealing Scientology Book

02/01/2013 at 08:00 PM EST

Jenna Miscavige and her uncle David inset

Michael Murphree; Inset: Polaris

What was it like to grow up inside Sea Org, the Church of Scientology's most elite body?

In her memoir Beyond Belief, excerpted exclusively below, Jenna Miscavige Hill describes her experiences at the Ranch, a San Jacinto, Calif., boarding school for children of Scientology execs. The niece of church head David Miscavige, she was raised away from her parents, then worked within Sea Org until leaving Scientology in 2005.

Now living near San Diego, married to Dallas Hill and mom to their children Archie, 3, and Winnie, 10 months, she's telling her story, she says, to increase awareness about Scientology: "I realize every day how lucky I am to have gotten out." (When asked to comment on the book's portrayal of its members, the church stated they had not read the book but that "any allegations of neglect are blatantly false.")

Jenna's parents, Ron and Blythe Miscavige, high-ranking members of Sea Org, sent both Jenna and her older brother Justin to the Ranch. There, at age 7, in accordance with Scientologists' belief that they are "Thetans," or immortal spirits, Jenna signed a billion-year contract.

I tried to write my name in my best cursive, the way I'd been learning. I had goose bumps. Just like that, I committed my soul to a billion years of servitude to the Church of Scientology.

Sea Org was run like the Navy: Members wore uniforms and managed all aspects of the church. Married members couldn't have kids; those who already did sent them to be raised communally.

A Sea Org member was required to be on duty for at least 14 hours a day, seven days a week, with a break for an hour of 'family time.' I was too young to understand that seeing your parents only one hour a day was highly unusual.

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"Great Rotation"- A Wall Street fairy tale?

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Wall Street's current jubilant narrative is that a rush into stocks by small investors has sparked a "great rotation" out of bonds and into equities that will power the bull market to new heights.

That sounds good, but there's a snag: The evidence for this is a few weeks of bullish fund flows that are hardly unusual for January.

Late-stage bull markets are typically marked by an influx of small investors coming late to the party - such as when your waiter starts giving you stock tips. For that to happen you need a good story. The "great rotation," with its monumental tone, is the perfect narrative to make you feel like you're missing out.

Even if something approaching a "great rotation" has begun, it is not necessarily bullish for markets. Those who think they are coming early to the party may actually be arriving late.

Investors pumped $20.7 billion into stocks in the first four weeks of the year, the strongest four-week run since April 2000, according to Lipper. But that pales in comparison with the $410 billion yanked from those funds since the start of 2008.

"I'm not sure you want to take a couple of weeks and extrapolate it into whatever trend you want," said Tobias Levkovich, chief U.S. equity strategist at Citigroup. "We have had instances where equity flows have picked up in the last two, three, four years when markets have picked up. They've generally not been signals of a continuation of that trend."

The S&P 500 rose 5 percent in January, its best month since October 2011 and its best January since 1997, driving speculation that retail investors were flooding back into the stock market.

Heading into another busy week of earnings, the equity market is knocking on the door of all-time highs due to positive sentiment in stocks, and that can't be ignored entirely. The Standard & Poor's 500 Index <.spx> ended the week about 4 percent from an all-time high touched in October 2007.

Next week will bring results from insurers Allstate and The Hartford , as well as from Walt Disney , Coca-Cola Enterprises and Visa .

But a comparison of flows in January, a seasonal strong month for the stock market, shows that this January, while strong, is not that unusual. In January 2011 investors moved $23.9 billion into stock funds and $28.6 billion in 2006, but neither foreshadowed massive inflows the rest of that year. Furthermore, in 2006 the market gained more than 13 percent while in 2011 it was flat.

Strong inflows in January can happen for a number of reasons. There were a lot of special dividends issued in December that need reinvesting, and some of the funds raised in December tax-selling also find their way back into the market.

During the height of the tech bubble in 2000, when retail investors were really embracing stocks, a staggering $42.7 billion flowed into equities in January of that year, double the amount that flowed in this January. That didn't end well, as stocks peaked in March of that year before dropping over the next two-plus years.

MOM AND POP STILL WARY

Arguing against a 'great rotation' is not necessarily a bearish argument against stocks. The stock market has done well since the crisis. Despite the huge outflows, the S&P 500 has risen more than 120 percent since March 2009 on a slowly improving economy and corporate earnings.

This earnings season, a majority of S&P 500 companies are beating earnings forecast. That's also the case for revenue, which is a departure from the previous two reporting periods where less than 50 percent of companies beat revenue expectations, according to Thomson Reuters data.

Meanwhile, those on the front lines say mom and pop investors are still wary of equities after the financial crisis.

"A lot of people I talk to are very reluctant to make an emotional commitment to the stock market and regardless of income activity in January, I think that's still the case," said David Joy, chief market strategist at Columbia Management Advisors in Boston, where he helps oversee $571 billion.

Joy, speaking from a conference in Phoenix, says most of the people asking him about the "great rotation" are fund management industry insiders who are interested in the extra business a flood of stock investors would bring.

He also pointed out that flows into bond funds were positive in the month of January, hardly an indication of a rotation.

Citi's Levkovich also argues that bond investors are unlikely to give up a 30-year rally in bonds so quickly. He said stocks only began to see consistent outflows 26 months after the tech bubble burst in March 2000. By that reading it could be another year before a serious rotation begins.

On top of that, substantial flows continue to make their way into bonds, even if it isn't low-yielding government debt. January 2013 was the second best January on record for the issuance of U.S. high-grade debt, with $111.725 billion issued during the month, according to International Finance Review.

Bill Gross, who runs the $285 billion Pimco Total Return Fund, the world's largest bond fund, commented on Twitter on Thursday that "January flows at Pimco show few signs of bond/stock rotation," adding that cash and money markets may be the source of inflows into stocks.

Indeed, the evidence suggests some of the money that went into stock funds in January came from money markets after a period in December when investors, worried about the budget uncertainty in Washington, started parking money in late 2012.

Data from iMoneyNet shows investors placed $123 billion in money market funds in the last two months of the year. In two weeks in January investors withdrew $31.45 billion of that, the most since March 2012. But later in the month money actually started flowing back.

(Additional reporting by Caroline Valetkevitch; Editing by Kenneth Barry)

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India Ink: Selling ‘Midnight’s Children’ in India

“Am I allowed to mention the Rushdie word?” quipped the historian and author Tom Holland at the recently concluded Jaipur Literature Festival. Mr. Holland was speaking of Salman Rushdie’s 1981 novel, “Midnight’s Children,” a book he called a contemporary classic.

His comment alluded to the political baggage attached to Mr. Rushdie in India, the country of his birth, because of his novel “The Satanic Verses,” which is banned in India and sparked a death threat against him from Iran in 1989. Last year, Mr. Rushdie canceled a scheduled appearance at the Jaipur Literary Festival because of an assassination threat against him in connection with the book.

Controversy over Mr. Rushdie flared up again this week, as he came to India to promote the film “Midnight’s Children,” directed by the award-winning filmmaker Deepa Mehta and based upon Mr. Rushdie’s acclaimed novel by the same name. Beginning on the eve of India’s independence from British rule, “Midnight’s Children” follows the country through its early years as a new nation through the lives of the children born at the stroke of midnight on Aug. 15, 1947.

On Wednesday, Mr. Rushdie was scheduled to attend a publicity event in Kolkata for the movie, along with Ms. Mehta. However, the visit was called off at the last minute, giving rise to speculation that the state government had canceled the visit because of pressure from Muslim groups.

On Friday, Mr. Rushdie said as much on Twitter. “The simple fact is that the Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee ordered the police to block my arrival,” he said. In a statement issued Friday, he clarified that he had been planning to take part in a session at the Kolkata Literary Meet, where he had been invited by the organizers to appear as “a surprise guest.” He also said that a police source had shared his itinerary with the press, thereby inciting trouble.

“What is happening in India nowadays is an accumulating scandal and a growing disgrace to this great nation,” said Mr. Rushdie in the statement. “I can only hope that the people of India have the will to demand that such assaults on freedom cease once and for all.”

However, Mr. Rushdie was able to attend the premiere of the film at Mumbai’s PVR Cinema in Phoenix Mills on Thursday. The theater was lined with nearly 50 police officers standing guard, and two truckloads of officers sat outside the gates of the mall complex.

The premiere was well attended by the actors in the movie, including Shriya Saran, Shahana Goswami, Kulbhushan Kharbanda and Rahul Bose, and they were in a celebratory mood.

“I think that this is a bit of good news that in the middle of dark times for our creative freedom that this film is releasing here,” Mr. Bose said at the premiere. “I am sentimentally invested in the movie because it’s a movie I was supposed to be part of in a production 15 years ago. That one was stymied at the last moment, but this one wasn’t. And I’m playing a small role, but it’s nice to be part of it.”

As the crowd vied to get a view of Mr. Rushdie as he entered, he gamely posed for photographs with fans and greeted friends and well-wishers. Also in attendance were the actress Nandita Das, the director and screenwriter Dev Benegal, the film director and screenwriter Sudhir Mishra, the cricketer Yuvraj Singh, the columnist Anil Dharker and the actor Arunoday Singh.

While film adaptations of books, particularly those considered classics, are always tricky, “Midnight’s Children” elicited a largely positive response. “I think Midnight’s Children is a pretty impossible book to make a film of, and this one is a fantastic effort,” said the Indian stage and film actor Gerson da Cunha after the screening. “I just hope that it works in India because, well, it is a difficult film.”

The performances by each of the actors drew wide praise from the audience, who clapped enthusiastically at the end of the film. “The search for identity as depicted by the actors was very touching,” said Dolly Thakore, a veteran theater actress.

“Midnight’s Children,” which had its worldwide premiere at the Toronto Film Festival in September, is opening in India in 250 theaters and 15 cities, a wider rollout than in Canada in November (120 screens) and in Britain in late December (180 screens). A release in the United States is slated for April.

Distributed in India by PVR Pictures, the film is opening across a “good number of screens,” said the company’s vice president of marketing, Arun Nair.

“As a nondubbed, nonaction film, it’s a big opening for an English film,” Mr. Nair added, noting in comparison that other similar English-language films, like last year’s “Killing Them Softly,” starring Brad Pitt, opened in only 75 screens. (Big-budget Hollywood movies, typically dubbed in local languages, open to much larger audiences. “The Amazing Spider-Man,” for example, opened in 1,250 screens while “The Avengers” opened in 1,100.)

While there was initially some uncertainty about the film finding a distributor in India, when PVR purchased the movie rights in October, Kamal Gianchandani, the company’s president, told Reuters that he was not expecting any trouble. “We don’t think the film is controversial,” he said.

Apart from the canceled Kolkata event, “Midnight’s Children” seems to have elicited a muted response from the public so far, which is surprising, considering Mr. Rushdie’s involvement and the book’s criticism of Indira Gandhi and her imposition of emergency powers in India between 1975 and 1977. Three years after the book was published, Mrs. Gandhi sued for defamation in Britain, over a single sentence that implied she was responsible for her husband’s death. The case was settled out of court, with Mr. Rushdie deleting the sentence.

The Congress Party, which reveres Mrs. Gandhi as an icon, has said nothing publicly. The film passed the censors without any cuts.

The movie was shot in Sri Lanka, somewhat secretly, said Ms. Mehta, who has been the target of protests by Hindu fundamentalists. “He’s got the Muslims, and I’ve got the Hindus,” she told the The Globe and Mail two years ago. Production was briefly interrupted because the Iranians protested, but was allowed to go ahead after the intervention of the Sri Lankan president. The filmmakers changed the title to “Winds of Change” for the remainder of the shoot.

A somewhat stealthy marketing strategy by PVR Pictures appears to have paid off for “Midnight’s Children,” which opened throughout the country Friday with little incident. “With Salman Rushdie, we did not want a repeat of Jaipur 2012,” said Mr. Nair.

“Controversies only create awareness for a film. What we were aiming for was ‘intent to watch,’ ” he said. “We avoided all controversy by keeping his plans in India under wraps. We targeted specific media, the six news channels and English-language press and specific cities.”

In Mumbai earlier this week, the venue for a promotional event for the movie was shifted from the Landmark bookstore at Infiniti Mall, in suburban Andheri, to south Mumbai’s National Center for the Performing Arts. Ashutosh Pandey, the chief operating officer of Landmark, said in a press release that the move was due to “security concerns.”

The new venue was the Little Theater, a 114-seater tucked inside the center’s compound, with plenty of police personnel and plainclothes officers in attendance. Anil Dharker, who heads Literature Live, a local literary festival, later said that he was asked to organize a new venue four days before the scheduled promotional gig. “I knew the N.C.P.A. would support it. I said, ‘We will keep it for people only I know.’ We sent out no invites.”

Mr. Rushdie may be the sharpest assessor of why “Midnight’s Children” appears to have avoided attracting the screaming hordes. Last March, he told a spellbound audience at a conclave organized by the news magazine India Today: “I have this theory that the Indian electorate is smarter than the politicians and sees through them. Yes, people can sometimes be whipped up, as they were by the religious extremists in Jaipur. But how many people? How big are these mobs? How representative are they? These attacks, whether upon my book or people’s films or plays or paintings or whatever, these are not things that come from the bottom up.”

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BlackBerry 10 installed base to reach 20 million in 2013, Windows Phone to reach 45 million

Despite showing clear promise and being a tremendous upgrade compared to earlier BlackBerry software, BlackBerry 10 didn’t receive the warmest welcome when it was unveiled earlier this week. At least one leading market research firm thinks BlackBerry (RIMM) has done enough to gain some good traction in 2013, however. ABI Research released new estimates this week projecting that the BlackBerry 10 installed base will reach 20 million by the end of 2013. The firm also says Microsoft’s (MSFT) Windows Phone platform, which struggled to garner interest in its early days, will see its installed base climb to 45 million by the end of the year.

[More from BGR: BlackBerry doesn’t need to catch up with Android and iOS overnight, it needs to live to fight another day]

“2013 should be seen as relative success for both Microsoft and BlackBerry,” ABI analyst Aapo Markkanen said. ”For the end of the year, we expect there to be 45 million Windows Phone handsets in use, with BlackBerry 10 holding an installed base of close to 20 million. Microsoft will also have 5.5 million Windows-powered tablets to show for it.”

[More from BGR: GS: Ignore the chatter, BlackBerry rebound is coming]

According to ABI, these figures will be “enough to keep developers interested” as the two companies battle for the No.3 spot in the smartphone war.

“The greatest fear for both Microsoft and BlackBerry is that the initial sales of their smartphones will disappoint and thereby kill off the developer interest, which then would effectively close the window of opportunity on further sales success. Our view is that the installed bases of this scale would be large enough to keep these two in the game,” Markkanen noted. ”It will definitely also help that both firms have actively kept the developers’ interest in mind while designing and rolling out their platforms.”

This article was originally published on BGR.com

Gadgets News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Steven Tyler Auditions in Drag for American Idol

TV Watch

American Idol

By Steve Helling

01/31/2013 at 10:35 PM EST

Steven Tyler sings before the AFC Championship NFL football game, Jan, 22, 2012

Elise Amendola/AP

Former judge Steven Tyler made a surprise cameo on American Idol Thursday night – dressed as a woman. Calling himself Pepper LaBeija after the famous drag queen featured in the 1990 documentary Paris Is Burning, Tyler wore a blonde wig, snakeskin miniskirt and fake breasts that honked when squeezed. (There will be no "Dude Looks Like a Lady" jokes because, frankly, he didn't.) Looking eerily like Joan Rivers, Tyler blew kisses at the camera and reduced judge Keith Urban to hysterical laughter.

But Tyler's appearance was actually not the most over-the-top performance on Thursday's show. That distinction belonged to Zoanette Johnson, a 19-year-old Tulsa resident who performed an overblown version of "The Star Spangled Banner." It was unclear whether her audition, which featured exaggerated gestures throughout, was elaborate performance art or an authentic effort at singing. The judges looked ambivalent, too, but then unanimously (though reluctantly?) voted for her to advance to the Hollywood round.

Other odd auditions included Halie Hillburn a 26-year-old singing ventriloquist with a puppet named Oscar. He was either a bear or a dog. Whatever he was, the judges told her to lose Oscar and showcase her strong voice instead. Karl Skinner from Joplin, Mo., performed a fitful version of James Brown's "I Feel Good." His voice was pleasant, but he may be a contestant better in small doses.

There was none of the earlier drama between the judges during the show. Mariah Carey and Nicki Minaj no longer interact, not even to roll their eyes when the other one speaks. It doesn't feel like polite indifference – it feels like a calculated decision to ignore each other. Either way, their lack of drama has allowed for sweeter moments to shine through.

For example: Sign language teacher Nate Tao, who was raised by deaf parents, performed a version of Stevie Wonder's "For Once in My Life" that impressed he judges. "You're unassuming," said Randy Jackson before the panel unanimously put him through. "You looked like you were going to do my taxes."

The last contestant of the night was Kayden Stephenson, a 16-year-old battling cystic fibrosis. Looking years younger than his age – with looks reminiscent of a young Aaron Carter – he performed a nice version of Stevie Wonder's "I Wish." Minaj compared him to a "baby Michael [Jackson]," which may have been an overstatement.

In total, 45 singers from the Oklahoma auditions advanced to the next round. We only got to see five of them – which means there are surely some surprises in store when the show heads to Hollywood next week.

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Hedgehog Alert! Prickly pets can carry salmonella

NEW YORK (AP) — Add those cute little hedgehogs to the list of pets that can make you sick.

In the last year, 20 people were infected by a rare but dangerous form of salmonella bacteria, and one person died in January. The illnesses were linked to contact with hedgehogs kept as pets, according to a report released Thursday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Health officials on Thursday say such cases seem to be increasing.

The CDC recommends thoroughly washing your hands after handling hedgehogs and cleaning pet cages and other equipment outside.

Other pets that carry the salmonella bug are frogs, toads, turtles, snakes, lizards, chicks and ducklings.

Seven of the hedgehog illnesses were in Washington state, including the death — an elderly man from Spokane County who died in January. The other cases were in Alabama, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio and Oregon.

In years past, only one or two illnesses from this salmonella strain have been reported annually, but the numbers rose to 14 in 2011, 18 last year, and two so far this year.

Children younger than five and the elderly are considered at highest risk for severe illness, CDC officials said.

Hedgehogs are small, insect-eating mammals with a coat of stiff quills. In nature, they sometimes live under hedges and defend themselves by rolling up into a spiky ball.

The critters linked to recent illnesses were purchased from various breeders, many of them licensed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, CDC officials said. Hedgehogs are native to Western Europe, New Zealand and some other parts of the world, but are bred in the United States.

___

Online:

CDC report: http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr

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Asian shares retreat after China PMI, U.S. payrolls eyed

TOKYO (Reuters) - Asian shares wiped earlier gains on Friday as a tepid Chinese manufacturing report dented sentiment, leaving investors on tenterhooks ahead of U.S. nonfarm payroll data due at 1330 GMT.

China's official purchasing managers' index (PMI) eased to 50.4 in January, the National Bureau of Statistics said on Friday, missing market expectations for a rise and underscoring the fragility of the recovery from the economy's weakest year since 1999.

But a separate private survey showed that growth in China's giant manufacturing sector hit a two-year high in January as domestic demand strengthened, underlining hopes the nation's economic recovery is slowly gaining momentum.

"It seems new orders for exports have declined even when new orders overall rose, suggesting that infrastructure spending and other investment to spur domestic demand is needed to keep (China's) economy growing," said Naohiro Niimura, a partner at research and consulting firm Market Risk Advisory.

"But it's not going to change the view about the Chinese economy recovering. The official data was just neither good nor bad."

The MSCI's broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan <.miapj0000pus> slipped 0.2 percent from the morning's 0.2 percent gain.

Australian shares <.axjo> were up 0.6 percent, little changed from before the data came out, drawing support from major mining stocks which gained on a jump in iron ore prices.

But the resources-linked Australian dollar fell 0.2 percent to session lows around $1.040.

With Chinese data news done for the day, investors turned to the U.S. nonfarm payrolls report, which is forecast to show a rise of 160,000 jobs and the unemployment rate to remain steady at 7.8 percent.

U.S. stocks edged lower on Thursday on caution ahead of the jobs report, but the benchmark Standard & Poor's 500 Index <.spx> posted its best monthly gain since October 2011 with a 5.1 percent rise and the best January showing since 1997.

Japan's benchmark Nikkei stock average <.n225> outperformed its Asian peers with a 0.2 percent rise, supported by the yen's decline earlier to fresh lows against major currencies.<.t/>

The dollar steadied around 91.75 yen, having earlier risen as high as 91.87, a level not seen since June 2010. The euro touched 125.05, its highest since May 2010. In January alone, the common currency surged nearly 9 percent on the yen, while the dollar was up more than 5 percent.

Oil and copper prices were higher and the euro remained bid against the dollar, reflecting that jitters was not spreading beyond Asian equities as sentiment has recently been underpinned by falling stress in the euro zone and generally improved data globally.

The euro added 0.3 percent to $1.3613 to the dollar, after earlier reaching a fresh 14-month high of $1.3624. The common currency's strength has pushed the dollar index to a one-month low of 79.107 <.dxy> on Friday.

"The euro revival looks set to continue for some time, as investors return to euro zone bond markets, content with the combination of the European Central Bank backstop for sovereign risk and low inflation danger due to lack of economic growth. The dollar bloc looks to be a key loser in the portfolio reallocation back into EUR," Westpac bank said in a note.

U.S. crude futures inched up 0.1 percent to $97.56 a barrel while Brent rose 0.3 percent to $115.90.

London copper added 0.5 percent to $8,203 a tonne.

Earlier, a private survey showed South Korea's manufacturing sector activity marginally shrank in January after a small rise in December but new export orders grew for the first time in eight months.

Manufacturing purchasing managers' indexes from the United States and the euro zone, as well as the Institute for Supply Management's manufacturing index, are also due later in the session.

(Editing by Eric Meijer)

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India Ink: At Jaipur Lit Fest, Delhi Gang Rape Dominated Conversations

The recently concluded Jaipur Literature Festival was the scene of some dissent during free-wheeling debates, but one thing virtually everyone agreed on was the need to pay more attention to women’s rights.

The national outrage over the gang rape of a young woman in Delhi reverberated through many of the events during the five-day festival, which ended Monday, as participants discussed gender issues through the lens of theology, philosophy, cinema and, of course, literature. Disagreements on the definition of rape and the punishment for rape mirrored conversations happening around the country.

The tone was set by the rousing opening speech by Mahasweta Devi, the octogenarian Bengali writer and social activist, in which she reflected upon her life and her struggle to create an identity in a patriarchal society.

During a question-and-answer session, an audience member asked Ms. Devi if the rape of a tribal or a low-caste woman would have garnered the same degree of national attention. She dismissed the question, saying, “I don’t know why have you asked this question at all” because the issue surpassed the issue of caste or religion.

“We should protest against all inhuman action,” she said.

Michael Sandel, a political philosopher at Harvard University, led an interactive audience session about philosophical questions raised by sexual violence. He posed a range of questions, exploring the moral status of rape as opposed to other forms of violent physical assault, and asking whether couples should have the right to prenatal sex selection and whether that led to violence against women.

During this session, one male audience member said that he puts the women in his life on pedestals. A young woman responded, “I’m not a child; I don’t need to be taken care of. The protection is demeaning to me.”

The Delhi rape case featured repeatedly in discussions even in sessions that weren’t specifically addressing the subject of sexual violence.

For instance, at a session titled “’The Vanishing Present: Post Colonial Critiques,” Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, a postmodern and postcolonial theorist from Columbia University, spoke about how class-based education had caused people to internalize the culture of rape and corruption. When asked how one can imagine a victim or perpetrator of a crime in human terms, she stressed the importance of reading and learning new languages in order to create understanding.

“Reading – that is hanging out in someone else’s space – makes you move out of yourself, and that is practice for the ethical,” Ms. Spivak said.

In an interview with India Ink, she also said that along the Indian frontiers in the states of Kashmir or Assam, rape was not unusual. “It comes to the metropolis, and we started jumping — that is also a question.”

Pointing to the youth protests that were held across India in the wake of the gang rape, she said that those demonstrations were an urban phenomenon and that “urban radicals are not the only young” in the country.

There was “no outrage, but panic,” among people, she said, noting how women were being asked not to stay out late. “What is that — blaming the victim?” she exclaimed.

In a session that discussed the role of women in cinema, Shabana Azmi, a veteran Bollywood actress, urged the film fraternity to practice some introspection. Lewd language and voyeuristic scenes in contemporary movies had reduced a woman’s body to an object of a man’s gaze, she said.

She advised young actresses to make informed choices about the roles they selected and to take small steps like asking movie directors to depict them as working women.

There was a resounding consensus among the festival’s participants that women themselves had to be the agents of the change they wanted in society.

During the session “Women on the Path,” which explored the role of women in Buddhism, panelists said that even Buddha was hesitant to ordain women at first. It is said that he lamented the presence of women, saying that without women, his dharma would have lasted a 1,000 years.

Citing her own experiences, Ani Choying, a Tibetan Buddhist nun who is also a singer and writer, said that women were treated as subordinate and were not allowed to lead religious ceremonies. And it was only after she voiced dissent against the practice was she allowed to lead. Her message to the audience was: “Ask for your rights.”

A more vociferous iteration of that advice came during a panel discussion in Hindi that challenged the notion of suppressing a woman’s right to raise questions in the Indian society. Moderated by a man, the session was led by female writers and poets, including Preeta Bhargava, who earned the distinction of being the first female jail officer of Rajasthan state.

“Women need to aggressively demand their rights if they are not given to them,” said Lata Sharma, a lecturer who has published extensively in Hindi.

The feminist debate at the literary festival culminated in the session titled “Imagine: Resistance, Protest, Assertion.” Female authors read aloud selected portions of published works, in some cases their own and in others that of other writers, with each narrative highlighting the struggle of women in society.

Aminatta Forna, a Commonwealth prize winner from Sierra Leone, quoted from the Canadian author Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale,” which explores the theme of women’s subjugation. Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, the Pakistani documentary filmmaker who won an Oscar for “Saving Face,” read poetry written by an Afghan woman who was beaten to death by her husband. Nirupama Dutt, who writes in Punjabi and English, recited her own poem, written during the days of militancy in Punjab, about a group of women enjoying an evening drink.

Urvashi Butalia, a writer and co-publisher of India’s first feminist publishing house, read a poignant first-person account by Sohaila Abdulali, a gang rape survivor. Ambai, a Tamil feminist writer also on the panel, read an excerpt from her novel that described protests in Mumbai after the rape of a woman.

A concluding performance by the artist Maya Krishna Rao numbed the audience. Through a powerful monologue, she urged that women be given their basic rights: freedom to walk the streets without being harassed and access to police officers who will listen and politicians who will act.

“I want to walk the streets, sit on a bus, lie in a park,” she chanted. “I try not to be afraid of the dark.”

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