[VIDEO] The 411 on poop. Nuff said. — Dr. Oz

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Why Parents May Cause Gender Differences In Kids – Sharon Begley

French drop Polanski release call

Polanski fled to France after pleading guilty to unlawful sex in 1978

The French government has dropped its public support for Roman Polanski, saying the 76-year-old director “is neither above nor beneath the law”.

The move follows a backlash against a campaign for Polanski’s release, with several leading European politicians and cultural figures refusing to join.

He is being held in Switzerland on a US arrest warrant over charges of unlawful sex with a 13-year-old girl.

On Monday, the French foreign minister called for Polanski to be freed.

Polanski, who has dual French and Polish citizenship, was arrested on Saturday when he flew into the country.

He had been due to pick up a lifetime achievement prize at the Zurich film festival.

‘Serious affair’

Speaking to reporters, French government spokesman Luc Chatel said: “We have a judicial procedure under way, for a serious affair, the rape of a minor, on which the American and Swiss legal systems are doing their job.”

Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski and his French counterpart Bernard Kouchner have written to US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton calling for Polanski to be freed.

But the Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk has distanced himself from the move by asking his ministers to show “greater restraint” in defending him.

He added that despite a “leading Polish director” being involved, it is still a “case of rape and of punishment for having sex with a child”.

A member of the British parliament has called on the Council of Europe, of which he is also a member, to support Polanski’s extradition to the US.

Denis MacShane said the film-maker “should be held accountable” for his actions.

French film-maker Luc Besson, who directed the 1994 movie Leon, has also refused to lend his support.

Speaking to French radio station RTL, he said: “I have a lot of affection for him, he is a man that I like very much … but nobody should be above the law.

“I don’t know the details of this case, but I think that when you don’t show up for trial, you are taking a risk.”

Martin Scorsese is supporting his fellow director

Despite that, Mr Polanski has no shortage of supporters, including at least 110 film industry figures who have signed a petition calling for his release.

Among them are Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen and David Lynch, as well as Wim Wenders, Pedro Almodovar, Tilda Swinton and Monica Bellucci.

Actor Peter Fonda said he thought “celebrating the arrest of Osama bin Laden and not the arrest of Polanski” was far more important.

Mr Polanski fled the US in 1978 before he was sentenced on a charge of unlawful sexual intercourse with a 13-year-old girl.

He has never returned and even missed receiving an Oscar for his 2003 film The Pianist.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/entertainment/8283707.stm

Published: 2009/09/30

© BBC MMX

Scientists unveil skeleton of oldest hominid

Probable life appearance in anterior view of Ardipithecus ramidus

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International team of researchers spent 17 years piecing together a detailed picture of 4.4 million-year-old bones

Anne McIlroy

Ottawa — From Friday’s Globe and Mail Published on Thursday, Oct. 01, 2009 10:30AM EDT Last updated on Monday, Oct. 05, 2009 2:53PM EDT

Her bones were so fragile some of them crumbled when they were touched. Her skull had been flattened and parts of her skeleton had been broken into more than 100 pieces.

Still, researchers working in northeastern Ethiopia knew they had made a stunning discovery in 1994 when they uncovered a cranium, lower jaw, teeth, pelvis and leg, ankle and foot bones of a hominid who had lived 4.4 million years ago, more than a million years earlier than the famous Lucy.

After a challenging and painstaking reconstruction, an international team of scientists revealed Thursday why Ardipithecus ramidus, nicknamed Ardi for short, is a far more revolutionary discovery than her younger relative.

The team describe Ardi and her world in 11 papers in Friday’s edition of the journal Science. At a press conference in Washington Thursday, the lead scientists explained how her fragile bones offer evidence to overturn entrenched hypotheses on what our ancestors looked like, how they behaved and where and why early humans first walked upright.

We were never knuckle walkers like chimps and gorillas.

“That kind of locomotion never occurred in the human line,” says C. Owen Lovejoy, an evolutionary biologist at Kent State University in Ohio.

Reconstructed lateral view of the skeleton of ARA-VP-6/500 (Ardi).

It has been assumed for years that early humans looked like chimps, our closest living relatives. Now, scientists have a strange new face to paste in the family album, one with flatter features than a chimp and a more upright head.

Ardi is not a common ancestor between chimps and humans, but because she dates to not long after the two lines diverged the scientists say her fragile bones suggest we never looked like chimps. This also suggests the chimp line has undergone radical changes of its own.

As well, the find challenges current thinking on where early humans began to walk upright, on two legs. It couldn’t have been on African savannas, as has long been hypothesized, because Ardi lived in the forest. Her long, opposable big toes would have grasped branches and helped her climb, but would have made running on the ground awkward.

Lucy, the best known member of the species Australopithecus afarensis, was already a full-time upright walker, so offered no clues as to how early humans moved from the trees to the ground, says Dr. Lovejoy. Ardi’s strange feet and pelvis show how she was able to straddle the two worlds, and live both on the ground and in the trees and find food in both, eating plants, insects and maybe small mammals.

The researchers say they are expecting debate over their conclusions. But the implications for the social history of the human may prove to be the most controversial element of the Ardi story.

She had small canine teeth, and the scientists found other small canines belonging to males of her species.

Typically, says Dr. Lovejoy, apes and monkeys with big canines use them as weapons, but Ardi and her ilk probably had a social structure without strong male-male conflicts.

Frans de Wall, an Atlanta-based primatologist who was not involved in the project, says the discovery challenges the assumption in anthropology that our last common ancestor was a killer.

“The idea in anthropology is that last common ancestor is the chimp, a fighter and killer, so we have been doing it for 6 million years and chimps have been doing it for 6 million years,” Dr. de Waal said in an interview.

“If the last common ancestor was not a chimp, then the story changes and it opens up whole new ways of thinking about the human evolutionary story.”

Gay penguins book is most banned

And Tango Makes Three is the top most controversial book

Authors, artists and musicians are due to gather at a library in San Francisco to protest against the banning of books in schools and libraries in the US.

The event, part of the 27th annual Banned Books Week, has been organised by the American Library Association.

Since 2001 bans on 3,736 books and other materials have been requested.

In recent years, And Tango Makes Three – based on a true story and centring on gay penguins in New York’s Central Park Zoo – has had the most ban requests.

The book’s authors are Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell.

In a statement to the BBC on Friday, Mr Richardson said: “It’s regrettable that some parents believe reading a true story about two male penguins hatching an egg will damage their children’s moral development.

“They are entitled to express their beliefs, but not to inflict them on others.”

Reasons given by organisations and individuals for their requests to get it removed from public shelves, include “anti-ethnic, anti-family, homosexuality, religious viewpoint, and unsuited to age group”.

Other works featuring in the most-challenged books list for 2008 include Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials and Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner.

Parents’ concern

Pullman told Britain’s Guardian newspaper that he was glad to be on the list.

However he added: “Of course it’s a worry when anybody takes it upon themselves to dictate what people should or should not read.”

The association said the aim of the annual awareness week, which ends on Saturday, is to remind US citizens not to take their freedom for granted.

And Tango Makes Three, by Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell His Dark Materials trilogy, by Philip Pullman TTYL; TTFN; L8R, G8R (series), by Lauren Myracle Scary Stories (series), by Alvin Schwartz Bless Me, Ultima, by Rudolfo Anaya The Perks of Being a Wallflower, by Stephen Chbosky Gossip Girl (series), by Cecily von Ziegesar Uncle Bobby’s Wedding, by Sarah S. Brannen The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini Flashcards of My Life, by Charise Mericle Harper

Among those at the San Francisco Public Library event will be authors and musicians Ben Fong-Torres, Richie Unterberger and Roy Zimmerman.

They plan to stage a number of performances and defend controversial books.

In 2008 the American Library Association recorded 517 ban and restriction requests. Seventy-four were successful.

The organisation recorded that the most common reason given was that contents were too “sexually explicit”.

Other classic literature subjected to complaints include JD Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald and To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee.

The Harry Potter series by JK Rowling also feature on the list.

Earlier this week, it was claimed that Harry Potter author JK Rowling missed out on the Presidential Medal of Freedom because some US politicians believed she “encouraged witchcraft”.

WTF COLLECTIVE (Jon Lajoie)

Step aside Wu-Tang, G-Unit, NWA, D-12… There are some new kids on this block.
http://www.jonlajoie.com

[FILM] Oliver Stone’s “U Turn”

U Turn is a 1997 Neo-noir/drama film directed by Oliver Stone, based on the book Stray Dogs by John Ridley. It stars Sean Penn, Billy Bob Thornton, Jennifer Lopez,Jon Voight, Powers Boothe, Joaquin Phoenix, Claire Danes and Nick Nolte.

U Turn was filmed in 1996 on location in Superior, Arizona and other areas of Arizona and California.

Roger Ebert gave the film 1½ stars, deeming it a “repetitive, pointless exercise in genre filmmaking—the kind of film where you distract yourself by making a list of the sources”. Mick LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle wrote that it “demonstrates a filmmaker in complete command of his craft and with little control over his impulses”.

Directed by	Oliver Stone
Produced by	Dan Halsted Clayton Townsend
Written by	John Ridley (book and screenplay) Oliver Stone
Starring	Sean Penn Nick Nolte Jennifer Lopez Joaquin Phoenix Powers Boothe
Music by	Ennio Morricone
Cinematography	Robert Richardson
Editing by	Hank Corwin Thomas J. Nordberg
Distributed by	TriStar Pictures Phoenix Pictures
Release date(s)	August 27, 1997 (Telluride Film Festival)
Running time	125 min.
Country	France United States
Language	English
Budget	$19,000,000 (estimated)

Argentine folk singer Mercedes Sosa dies

Folk singer Mercedes Sosa performs at the Peres Center for Peace in Tel Aviv, Israel, in October 2008. Her latest album is nominated for three Latin Grammys this year. (Pavel Wolberg/Associated Press)

Known as the “voice of Latin America,” Argentine folk singer Mercedes Sosa, whose music inspired opponents of South America’s brutal military regimes and led to her forced exile in Europe, died Sunday. She was 74.

Sosa was best known for signature tunes such as Gracias a la Vida (Thanks to Life) and Si Se Calla el Cantor (If the Singer Is Silenced). She had been in a Buenos Aires hospital for more than two weeks with liver problems and had since been suffering from progressive kidney failure and cardiac issues, according to her family.

Her latest album, Cantora 1, is nominated for three prizes in next month’s Latin Grammy awards in Las Vegas, including album of the year and best folkloric album.

Affectionately dubbed “La Negra” or “the Black One” by fans for her mixed Indian and distant French ancestry, Sosa was born July 9, 1935, to a poor, working-class family in the sugarcane country of northwest Argentina’s Tucuman province.

Early on she felt the allure of popular traditions and became a teacher of folkloric dance.

‘Life chose me to sing’

At age 15, friends impressed by her talent encouraged Sosa to enter a local radio contest under the pseudonym “Gladys Osorio.” She won a two-month contract with the broadcaster.

“I didn’t choose to sing for people,” Sosa said in a recent interview on Argentine television. “Life chose me to sing.”

By the 1970s she was recognized as one of the South American troubadours who gave rise to the “nuevo cancionero” (new songbook) movement — singers including Chile’s Victor Jara and Violeta Parra, Argentina’s Victor Heredia and Uruguay’s Alfredo Zitarrosa, who mixed leftist politics with poetic musings critical of the ruling juntas and their human rights abuses.

In 1972, Sosa released the socially and politically charged album Hasta la Victoria (Till Victory).

Her sympathies with communist movements and support for leftist parties attracted close scrutiny and censorship at a time when blending politics with music was a dangerous occupation — Jara was tortured and shot to death by soldiers following Chile’s 1973 military coup led by Gen. Augusto Pinochet.

In 1979, a year after being widowed from her second husband, Sosa was detained along with an entire audience of about 200 students while singing in La Plata, an Argentine university city hit hard by military rule.

“I remember when they took me prisoner,” she said in late 2007. “I was singing for university kids who were in the last year of veterinary school. It wasn’t political.”

She walked free 18 hours later under international pressure and after paying a $1,000 fine, but was forced to leave her homeland.

Life of exile

“I knew I had to leave,” Sosa recalled. “I was being threatened by the Triple A,” a rightist death squad that terrorized opponents of the 1976-83 military junta in an era known as the Dirty War. “The people from the navy, the secret services were following me.”

With three suitcases and a handbag, she headed to Spain, then France, becoming a wandering minstrel.

Sosa returned home to wide acclaim in 1982 in the final months of the dictatorship, which she would ultimately outlive by a quarter-century.

The following year she released the eponymous album Mercedes Sosa, which contained several tracks considered among her greatest hits, including Un Son para Portinari, Maria Maria and Me Yoy pa’l Mollar, together with Margarita Palacios.

Performed with contemporary stars

Late in life, Sosa remained relevant by tapping powerful, universal emotions, singing about stopping war and ending poverty, about finding love and losing loved ones.

Sosa won Latin Grammy Awards for best folk album for Misa Criolla in 2000, Acustico in 2003 and Corazon Libre in 2006.

Early this decade she took a two-year hiatus to recover from a series of falls — one of which, she said, nearly left her paralyzed. Sosa returned to the stage in 2005 and performed in some of the most prestigious venues of Latin America, the U.S., Canada and Europe.

All told, Sosa recorded more than 70 albums. The latest, a double CD titled Cantora 1 and Cantora 2, is a collection of folkloric classics performed with contemporary Latin American and Spanish stars such as Shakira, Fito Paez, Julieta Venegas, Joaquin Sabina, Lila Downs and Calle 13.

Read more: http://www.cbc.ca/arts/music/story/2009/10/04/sosa-obit-singer.html#ixzz0g6FmwkGy