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Saturday, December 17, 2011
Royal Dutch Airline's New Seating System Is My High School Cafeteria All Over Again [Airlines]
Friday, December 16, 2011
South Korea's China embassy window shot amid tension (Reuters)
BEIJING/SEOUL (Reuters) ? South Korea said on Wednesday it had asked China for security guarantees at its Beijing embassy after the building was hit by a small projectile as tensions run high after the killing of a South Korean coastguard by a Chinese fisherman.
South Korea's Foreign Ministry said it was unclear what kind of weapon was used to fire the ballbearing-like shot that cracked one of the embassy's windows on Tuesday afternoon, but that no one was injured.
A ministry official, who asked not to be identified, told Reuters in Seoul the incident occurred between 12:30 p.m. and 1:30 p.m. on Tuesday and that an investigation was under way.
"The Korean embassy has sent a letter to authorities requesting them to protect the mission and identify the reason for the incident," the official said.
In a report from Beijing, South Korea's Yonhap news quoted sources as saying the metal ball was likely fired from an air gun, as no one testified to hearing a gunshot.
An embassy official said it was difficult to comment on what kind of weapon, if any, had been used, but as there is another building between the glass and the street outside, "a shot would have to have been fired from an upper floor" of a building.
He declined to provide further details.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Weimin said authorities were taking the embassy incident "very seriously."
"As far as we know, from the initial evaluation and from the onsite inspection, the South Korea Embassy had its window glass broken and has not been attacked," Liu told a news briefing.
"At present, the Chinese side has taken relevant measures and will send more police and enhance the security patrols to increase the protection of the embassy."
South Korean President Lee Myung-bak called on Tuesday for "strong" measures to ensure the safety of coastguard officers cracking down on illegal Chinese fishermen amid a public uproar over the stabbing death of an officer on Monday.
Chinese boats are frequently caught illegally fishing in the Yellow Sea, an area rich with mackerel and crabs, and there have been a number of clashes with South Korean maritime police.
Beijing has expressed regret over the incident, but initially was unapologetic, calling on Seoul to protect the rights of the detained fishermen.
On Tuesday, a few hundred protesters staged a demonstration outside the Chinese embassy in Seoul. About 30 people attempted to enter the mission but were stopped by police, and a man crashed a car into a police bus at the embassy.
It is unclear if the embassy incident in Beijing was related to the protests.
Media reports in South Korea have criticized the government for not taking stiffer action against illegal Chinese fisherman after a similar incident three years ago when a coastguard officer was killed and six were injured.
Yonhap has reported that some 2,600 Chinese fishing boats have been caught illegally fishing in the South Korean exclusive economic zone since 2006 and nearly 800 Chinese fishermen have been arrested.
(Additional reporting by Jack Kim in Seoul and Sui-Lee Wee in Beijing; Editing by Ron Popeski)
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Report Card: Paramount set to grab global box office crown (Reuters)
LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) ? This is the second in TheWrap's series of Studio Report Cards.
PARAMOUNT:
Grade: A-
Paramount has dominated the domestic box office and is poised to capture the worldwide crown from Warner Brothers, but the studio has had more success distributing films via expiring partnerships with Marvel and DreamWorks Animation than it has had building its own in-house franchises.
From "Transformers: Dark of the Moon" to "Paranormal Activity 3," Paramount has had a monster year at the worldwide box office.
In 2011, Paramount has fielded nine films that have crossed the $100 million barrier in domestic ticket sales, including 2010's "True Grit," which logged the bulk of its $250 million worldwide gross in this calendar year.
With $1.73 billion at the domestic box office thus far and two tentpoles slated for the end of the year, "Mission: Impossible -- Ghost Protocol" and Steven Spielberg's "The Adventures of Tintin," Paramount will certainly end Warner Brothers' three-year reign atop the domestic box office.
And with $2.84 billion in foreign revenue and $4.6 billion in global receipts to date, Paramount will also end Warner's international and worldwide No. 1 streaks.
"Going into the summer, we certainly felt like we had a number of big tentpole movies, and on balance, they all delivered," said Don Harris, Paramount's president of domestic theatrical distribution. "They all opened at high numbers."
But there's something scarier on the horizon than the flesh-eating alien in J.J. Abrams' summer hit "Super 8": the imminent departure of partners Marvel and DreamWorks Animation, the team behind such recent winners as "Thor," "Captain America: The First Avenger," "Kung Fu Panda 2" and "Puss in Boots."
Together, those films comprised four of Paramount's top five grossing movies this year.
Paramount gets distribution fees from DreamWorks Animation and Marvel, but it doesn't own the rights to the superhero and family films.
"Their big hits have been with third-party content," Marla Backer, an analyst at Hudson Square Research, told TheWrap. "I don't think it's clear they can maintain their position based on the in-house content that they produce."
Paramount's deal to distribute Marvel films is over, and its pact with DreamWorks Animation expires in 2012. Though Paramount received an 8 percent distribution fee for its efforts with the two studios, the departure of Marvel and DreamWorks Animation will take a big chunk out of the studio's market share.
Emboldened by the moderate success of "Rango" ($245 million), Paramount recently launched its own animation division with an eye toward owning the family films it distributes outright. It expects to release its first film through the unit in 2014.
"The DreamWorks deal was low-risk, easy money, and as Warner Brothers and other places have discovered, it's not so easy to launch an animation division," Backer said.
However, Paramount senses that after a number of years of serving as a distribution house for other companies, it has developed enough of its own intellectual property to move forward without the comic book company and the animation studio.
To that end, it has high hopes that Pixar maestro Brad Bird ("The Incredibles") can reinvigorate its "Mission: Impossible" franchise after 2006's disappointing third installment, and it already successfully rebooted the wilting "Star Trek" franchise. A sequel to its hit 2009 "Trek" film is due out in two years.
Although "Transformers" star Shia LaBeouf has hinted he's done riding shotgun to Optimus Prime, there's still gas left in the robot franchise. After a critically derided second film, "Dark of the Moon" grossed $1.1 billion worldwide and was more enthusiastically received than its predecessor.
"No. 3 was the best of the three, and I think that was the biggest secret for its success, was that it was a better movie than the sequel and the original," Harris said.
Outside of the line of tentpoles that Paramount planted across the summer and Christmas landscape, the studio had a nice string of lower budget successes.
Made for a cost of just $13 million, the studio's Justin Bieber concert film "Never Say Never," took in nearly $100 million worldwide. Likewise, "Paranormal Activity 3" continued the ultra-low budget series' penchant for capacious profit margins. Produced for a mere $5 million, the haunted house flick racked up $201.9 million worldwide.
There were mercifully few bombs. Yes, with a budget of $170 million, the $33 million grossing "Hugo" can safely be certified a flop. However, Paramount merely distributed the film, meaning that producer Graham King has been left holding the bag on the Martin Scorsese family picture.
Likewise, an attempt to give the '80s dance film "Footloose" a 21st century facelift failed to enchant audiences. The $24 million film danced its way to a $62 million worldwide gross, meaning don't hold your breath for those fleet-footed denizens of small town America to hoof it through a sequel.
Looking ahead, Paramount seems unlikely to duplicate its record shattering success next year at the box office. The studio has high hopes for its zombie film "World War Z" with Brad Pitt and "G.I. Joe: Retaliation," but without men in tights or other comic book films, it looks like a less overpowering slate.
"From a longtime strategic vantage point, it's incredibly important to Paramount that 'Mission Impossible' work," Matthew Harrigan, an analyst with Wunderlich Securities, told TheWrap. "If the cupboard was that well stocked at Paramount, I wonder if there'd be another 'G.I. Joe' movie."
Yet, the studio owns more of the films it is releasing, meaning that it stands to bank the bulk of the profits.
Of course, all that reward comes with a lot of risk.
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Thursday, December 15, 2011
Mali arrests kidnap suspects, Al Qaeda releases pictures of victims (The Christian Science Monitor)
Malian police have arrested men suspected of having kidnapped five Westerners on behalf of Al Qaeda, while the terror group has released photos of the kidnap victims and demanded an end to Mali?s cooperation with the French government.
The kidnappings, which took place in two separate incidents on Nov. 24 and 25 near the Malian town of Homburi (see map), are just the latest of a string of attacks on Westerners in Mali by those claiming to be associated with Al Qaeda.
Think you know Africa? Take our geography quiz.
Malian officials paraded three of the four arrested men in front of state TV cameras, and described the men as ?subcontractors? who had kidnapped the Westerners on behalf of Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), a shadowy group that says it is affiliated with the global jihad network. Western security officials say that organized criminal groups, generally associated with the smuggling of drugs and arms through the African Sahel region, have begun to kidnap Westerners and sell them on to radical jihadist groups who then ransom them back to their families.
"We confirm the arrest of four kidnappers," a spokesman for the Malian presidency told Reuters."They are subcontractors for AQIM, to whom they handed over the hostages.?
Many Western governments ??? including the United States -- now issue strong warnings to their citizens to avoid travel in the arid northern regions of Mali, where the rule of the Malian government is weak. Making conditions worse in the region is the recent downfall of the regime of Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi, who funded, trained, and sheltered numerous Saharan militant groups to use against his neighbors. Many of those groups have now fled into the Sahara and Sahel region, spreading instability into an area that already had enough internal disputes.
A looming food crisis, predicted by the US?s Famine Early Warning System for 2012, is only likely to make matters worse.
While Al Qaeda is showing signs of waning in Afghanistan and Pakistan, following the killing or arrest of much of its leadership, Al Qaeda-related groups continue to make their presence felt across the African Sahel region, where Saharan and mainly Muslim communities come into contact with the more arable regions dominated by Christians further south.
In Nigeria?s northern regions, for instance, a radical Islamist movement called Boko Haram has launched a terrorist assault on the Nigerian government, adopting the suicide bomb methods pioneered by Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Further north in Niger, Mali, and Mauritania, Al Qaeda-related groups have taken to kidnapping Westerners for ransom money, and the governments of those countries are struggling to counter the challenge.
To deal with the threat in its north, Mali has begun to work more closely with both France and the US military in training Malian troops in counter-terrorism measures. But as a result, Mali has lost millions of dollars in tourism, as historic cities such as Gao and Timbuktu have effectively been cut off to outsiders.
It is by no means certain what the motives of the kidnappers in Mali may have been, and to date, there has been no public information about whether kidnappers have asked for ransom or issued demands. But on the day that Mali showed off its arrested kidnap suspects, a spokesman for a until-now unknown group called the Unity Movement for Jihad in West Africa, or Jamat Tawhid Wal Jihad Fi Garbi Afriqqiya. The news agency Agence-France Presse reports that this group claims to have broken away from AQIM.
"Repeated attacks on Mujahideen [Islamist fighters] to please America and France is a mistaken and unjust policy that contradicts Islamic sharia law as well as reason and will not pass without retribution," the group said in a statement, quoted by Reuters.
In its travel warning for Mali, the British Foreign Office has posted a list of kidnap incidents throughout the Sahel region. The list includes eight Westerners and one South African kidnapped or killed in the past two months alone.
South Africa, which is following the kidnap of a South African national last month, says it has ?no update? about the status of its citizen, whose name it has not released, but South African officials privately have told reporters they are encouraged that a video released by the kidnappers show the South African alive and apparently healthy.
MONITOR QUIZ: Weekly News Quiz for Dec. 4-9, 2011
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Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/terrorism/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/csm/20111213/wl_csm/435976
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Wednesday, December 7, 2011
Robert Downey Jr. Reveals Unborn Baby Is A Boy! (VIDEO)
Robert Downey Jr. Reveals Unborn Baby Is A Boy! (VIDEO)
Actor Robert Downey Jr. revealed the sex of his unborn baby during his appearance on “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno” last night. Downey Jr. [...]
Robert Downey Jr. Reveals Unborn Baby Is A Boy! (VIDEO) Stupid Celebrities Gossip Stupid Celebrities Gossip News
Source: http://stupidcelebrities.net/2011/12/06/robert-downey-jr-reveals-unborn-baby-is-a-boy-video/
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Tuesday, December 6, 2011
Video: Missing girl's mom: 'We are searching everywhere'
>>> police are searching for a missing 2-year-old girl in detroit. they're questioning her father's version of what happened when the girl disappeared. she was last seen on friday. her father says she was driving with bianca when a man forced him from the car from gunpoint. the car was pound but bianca was not inside. they're helping them search for bianca . at the news conference her 7-year-old sister made a heart-wrenching plea.
>> i want my sister back really, really bad.
>> i'm joined now from detroit by bianca 's mother, banica jones. our heart goes out to you. i don't know any words that i can offer you at this point. i know the volunteers are out looking for your daughter. can you tell me a little bit more about what her father says happened here?
>> i don't really know what his version of events is. i've not been made aware of that. that's the investigative side of things. i'm really focusing all of my concern on finding bianca .
>> part of finding bianca may lie in what deandre has told police regarding what happened. investigators say he told them that a carjacker took his car on friday and she was inside. there are reports that he may have failed a lie detector test . have you had a chance to speak with him about what happened?
>> no, no, i haven't. i haven't spoken to him at all. i've only been in contact with the police department and the fbi. they've given me no information concerning any of the investigation. they've chiefly been helping me to get out and look for my daughter and helping me to organize volunteers and continue to search.
>> where are you looking right now? i know that as a mentioned you said as well the volunteers are trying to help. where are they looking?
>> we are searching everywhere. we are looking in all -- in any place that we can possibly think of. we have tips coming in from everywhere, and so many people are being so very helpful. there are so many volunteers, and we are just attempting to leave no stone unturned in our search.
>> when were you last with your daughter?
>> on her birthday, november 26th .
>> does she live with deandre?
>> no. my daughter lives with me.
>> so she's with you. can you tell me what happened the day and the events again leading up to her leaving with him?
>> my daughter's birthday was saturday, november 26th . her dad had offered to take her to a movie for her birthday, and she was very excited to go. they went out. they say ""the lion king "" in 3d and came back to my home. she was excite. she told me about the movie. we had a small family gathering with cake and ice cream and she blew out her candles. we watched more television at home, and she waived bye-bye and gave me a hug and kiss and left.
>> well, again, the volunteers are out helping to look for her. we hope that she will be brought home to you. looking at this picture, she's absolutely beautiful baby and bianca -- with everything going on we so appreciate you talking with us and hopelefully someone will hear your words or see her little sister who broke down in tears, her 7-year-old sister breaking down just wanting her to be brought back home. thank you, binica.
>> yes, thank you so much. thank you.
Source: http://video.msnbc.msn.com/newsnation/45557577/
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Iran says it shot down unmanned US spy plane
TEHRAN, Iran (AP) ? Iran's armed forces have shot down an unmanned U.S. spy plane that violated Iranian airspace along the country's eastern border, the official IRNA news agency reported Sunday.
An unidentified military official quoted in the report warned of a strong and crushing response to any violations of the country's airspace by American drone aircraft.
"An advanced RQ-170 unmanned American spy plane was shot down by Iran's armed forces. It suffered minor damage and is now in possession of Iran's armed forces," IRNA quoted the official as saying.
No further details were published.
The U.S.-led coalition in Afghanistan said in a statement the aircraft may be an American drone that its operators lost contact with last week while it was flying a mission over neighboring western Afghanistan.
Iran is locked in a dispute with the U.S. and its allies over Tehran's disputed nuclear program, which the West believes is aimed at developing nuclear weapons. Iran denies the accusations, saying its nuclear program is entirely peaceful and that it seeks to generate electricity and produce isotopes to treat medical patients.
The type of aircraft Iran says it downed, an RQ-170 Sentinel, is made by Lockheed Martin and was reportedly used to keep watch on Osama bin Laden's compound in Pakistan as the raid that killed him was taking place earlier this year.
The surveillance aircraft is equipped with stealth technology, but the U.S. Air Force has not made public any specifics about the drone.
Iran said in January that two pilotless spy planes it had shot down over its airspace were operated by the United States and offered to put them on public display. In July, Iranian military officials showed Russian experts several U.S. drones they said were shot down in recent years.
Also in July, Iranian lawmaker Ali Aghazadeh Dafsari said Iran's Revolutionary Guard shot down an unmanned U.S. spy plane that was trying to gather information on an underground uranium enrichment site.
Dafsari said the pilotless plane was flying over the Fordo facility near the holy city of Qom in central Iran but the Guard denied the report, saying its air defenses had only hit a test target.
Iran publicly confirmed for the first time in Feb. 2005 that the United States has been flying surveillance drones over its airspace to spy on its nuclear and military facilities.
The Islamic Republic holds frequent military drills, primarily to assert an ability to defend against a potential U.S. or Israeli attack on its nuclear facilities.
Tehran has focused part of its military strategy on producing drones for reconnaissance and attacking purposes.
Iran announced three years ago it had built an unmanned aircraft with a range of more than 600 miles (1,000 kilometers), far enough to reach Israel.
Ahmadinejad unveiled Iran's first domestically built unmanned bomber aircraft in August 2010, calling it an "ambassador of death" to Iran's enemies.
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