Re-Reading Rainbow: an interview with LeVar Burton

LeVar Burton has to take a moment. He pauses, dabs his eyes with a tissue, taking it all in: the washed-out white room, over-exposed by the sun, filled with journalists, industry reps and friends in rows of folding chairs, red, orange, yellow, green and blue. Large balloons hang from the corners of the room, dressed up like hot air balloons, carrying small, empty baskets. A guitar sits next to an amp off the corner of the stage while the Reading Rainbow logo beams on a flatscreen monitor, largely unchanged since its heyday a quarter-century ago. Burton, too, appears mostly unchanged since those days, aside from closer-cropped hair, more neatly manicured facial hair and a smart, mustard suit jacket.

There's plenty to be emotional about, of course, hitting the stage on the tail of an introduction by producer Mark Wolfe, who calls Burton, "my best friend." The return of Reading Rainbow - now in the form of an iPad app - has been a long time coming, the beloved children's series having been largely MIA since being pulled from the airwaves in 2009, after a 26-year run. "This is two years in the making," Burton begins in his familiarly gentle cadence as we sit down for an interview roughly an hour later, "and I'm really just overwhelmed with the response. It's like making a movie. You're just so close to it and you sometimes lose perspective, you can't see the forest for the trees, that sort of thing. There's so much that's gone into it, so much work, so much sweat, so much blood."

A lot, certainly, has gone into the launch, Burton singling out theme song composer Steve Horelick and singer Tina Fabrique in the audience. "It's my first time meeting her in-person," he explains, extending a hand to bring her up on stage. "Butterfly in the sky," she begins, as though not a single day had passed in the last two and a half decades that she didn't wake up singing that line. "I can go twice as high," Burton joins in. By "take a look, it's in a book," nearly everyone in attendance adds to the chorus. It's a surreal sight placed up against the standard fare of tech press conferences, where bloggers elbow one another to shoot tablets on stands behind bulletproof plexiglass, and before the crowd finishes singing "a Reading Rainbow," Burton's eyes aren't the only misty ones in the house.

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Pentagon sends carrier to the Middle East early

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Source: http://news.yahoo.com/pentagon-sends-carrier-middle-east-early-220927601--abc-news-politics.html

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Gay Couple's Picture Misused in Anti-Gay Political Attack Ad; Legal Action Possible


Brian Edwards and Tom Privitere, a New Jersey couple married in 2010, were stunned - and irate - to find themselves on an anti-gay political ad campaign.

The photo of the two men had been posted innocuously on Edwards' personal blog and was originally set against the backdrop of the N.Y. City skyline.

A doctored version shows the gay couple standing in a Colorado setting and was used in a political ad to attack a Republican who supported civil unions:

Gay Couple Ad

The tagline for the attack ad, which was sponsored by Public Advocate of the United States, was: "State Sen. Jean White's Idea of 'Family Values?'"

White later lost the primary.

Now, with the help of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), the duo and photographer Kristina Hill are all threatening to sue the organization behind the ad and its president, Eugene Delgaudio, if they do not stop using the photo.

"Our initial reaction was complete shock," said Privitere, 37, who lives with Edwards in Montclair, N.J. The couple has been together for 12 years.

"We were heartbroken to see that our picture that was taken to represent love and family, and our values, and to share with other LGBT couples, was used for complete opposite purposes to induce fear and spread hate and bigotry," he said.

Public Advocate, based in Falls Church, Va., is on the SPLC's 2011 hate group list. It never had permission to use the photo, unsurprisingly.

Delgaudio, who is head of the board of supervisors for Loudon County in Virginia, told ABC News that he has not yet received SPLC's letter.

He is "looking into the matter" and searching whether or not we have the photo," he said. "I have not commented on this ever and I have no statements on it ... Someone could do this without my permission, but I am working on it."

Source: http://www.thehollywoodgossip.com/2012/07/new-jersey-gay-couples-personal-photo-used-in-anti-gay-political/

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Liz Gorman Sexual Assault: Blog Post About Attack Unleashes Torrent Of Women's Stories

The Washington Post:

Liz Gorman did what the others didn?t. After she was sexually assaulted on a D.C. street in the middle of the day, she not only called police, she also wrote a blog post about the way she was violated. The response was incredible.

Read the whole story at The Washington Post

Contribute to this Story:

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Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/15/liz-gorman-sexual-assault-blog-post_n_1675074.html

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American wife of Tetra Pak heir found dead in London

LONDON (Reuters) - London murder detectives are investigating the death of the American wife of an heir to the Tetra Pak drinks carton fortune and have arrested a man reported to be her husband.

Eva Rausing, 48, daughter of U.S. businessman Tom Kemeny, led a gilded life marred by drug addiction and had a host of connections with royal patrons of anti-drug charities to which she and her husband, Hans Kristian Rausing, 49, devoted millions from the fortune his Swedish grandfather made from packaging.

Police said on Tuesday they were holding a 49-year-old man in connection with the death of Eva Rausing, who was found dead on Monday in her home in the capital's wealthy Belgravia district. He was also being investigated for drug possession. But they declined to confirm British media reports that he was Hans Kristian Rausing.

Statements from both spouses' parents made no mention of him in expressing sadness, shock and admiration for the mother of his four children, and for her charity work to curb drug abuse.

The couple, who were reported to have met while undergoing rehab in the United States, hit headlines in 2008 when Eva Rausing was found carrying heroin and the "ghetto drug" crack cocaine into the U.S. embassy in London. Charges against her and her husband were later dropped.

Her father-in-law, Hans Rausing, 86, is one of the world's wealthiest men, ranked 88th in the Forbes rich list with a fortune estimated at $10 billion. Based in Britain since quitting high-tax Sweden 30 years ago, he sold his interest in the private Tetra Pak business to his brother in the 1990s.

Police declined to comment on newspaper reports that the mystery of Eva Rausing's death began with her husband's arrest after driving erratically in London on Monday.

When police went to the couple's white-stuccoed townhouse in Cadogan Place they found his wife dead in an upstairs bedroom, several newspapers said, adding that a post mortem on Monday had been inconclusive but that a drug overdose was suspected.

'WRONG TURN'

Eva Rausing's parents, Tom and Nancy Kemeny of Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, said in a statement that they were "deeply saddened by the death of their beloved daughter".

"Eva was a devoted wife for 20 years and mother of four much loved and wonderful children," they said.

"During her short lifetime she made a huge philanthropic impact, supporting a large number of charitable causes, not only financially, but using her own personal experiences. She bravely fought her health issues for many years."

In 2008, after the embassy drugs incident, their daughter told reporters: "I have made a grave error and consider myself to have taken a wrong turn in the course of my life."

She was a patron of the British branch of the Mentor Foundation, a worldwide drug abuse prevention group whose president is Queen Silvia of Sweden, and was also a trustee of a community development charity founded by Britain's Prince Charles, The Prince's Foundation for Building Community.

At another organization which benefited from the Rausings' generosity, Nick Barton, chief executive of Action on Addiction, said: "Everyone involved with Action on Addiction is devastated to hear the news of Eva Rausing's untimely death.

"Without any desire for public recognition, Eva has, through her wonderfully generous support of this and other charities helped so many people for over 20 years."

Her husband, often referred to as simply Hans K, was born into billions in 1963, as his father, uncle and grandfather were turning their local packaging firm into a global empire with their innovative cardboard bricks. Media reports describe him as having lapsed into drug abuse while travelling in India in his 20s, a young man with vast means and little sense of purpose.

His father Hans Rausing, whose own father founded Tetra Laval in Lund, Sweden, in 1944, also has two daughters with his wife Marit. Praised by, among others, Prince Charles for his philanthropy, Hans Rausing has an honorary British knighthood.

"Hans and Marit Rausing and their family are deeply shocked and saddened to hear of the tragic death of their daughter-in-law Eva Louise Rausing," the family said in a statement. "They ask that their privacy be respected at this sad time."

Police said the man they had detained was receiving medical attention. Officers had sealed off the couple's house in an area, near Sloane Square, which is home to some of Britain's - and increasingly the world's - wealthiest people seeking the lifestyle, relatively low taxes, security and anonymity that London offers.

(Additional reporting by Alastair Macdonald in London and Niklas Pollard in Stockholm; writing by Alastair Macdonald; editing by Mohammad Zargham)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/american-wife-tetra-pak-heir-found-dead-london-014324513.html

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Protesters converge on Romney fundraisers

Garrett Haake / NBC

Protesters marched down the beach in New York's Hamptons to demonstrate against the power of deep-pocketed donors over the political process.

By NBC's Garrett Haake

SOUTHAMPTON, N.Y. ? In one of the most sizable shows of force from protestors seen on the campaign trail in weeks, a group of more than 60 demonstrators ? backed by air support in the form of a banner plane ? staged a protest of Mitt Romney's third and final fundraiser here on Sunday.

The fundraiser, at the beachside home of billionaire industrialist David Koch, was to cap a day of fundraising in New York's tony Hamptons communities that could bring in millions of dollars for the campaign's "Victory" fund. It marked Romney's return to the campaign trail after a week of vacation at his summer home in New Hampshire.

Romney and his guests received a loud ? and at times profane ? welcome from dozens of protesters representing organizations from Occupy Long Island to Greenpeace, which largely blocked a section of Meadow Lane to shout, "Shame on You!" (and unprintable variants thereof). The protesters waved signs at those who attended the back-to-back fundraisers hosted by Clifford Sobel, the former U.S. ambassador to Brazil, and later, by Koch.


It was Koch, whose net worth Forbes magazine pegs at $25 billion, who drew most of the protesters? ire. Holding signs that compared the fundraiser's reported ticket price of $50,000 to their annual salaries or even life savings, the protesters decried the power of donors like Koch and his allies over American politics.

When local law enforcement officially cleared the protest, the demonstrators decamped from the street and ? in one of the strangest visual moments of the campaign ? marched nearly a mile down the beach to Koch's house.

Accompanied by a bass drum, horns and even a tenor saxophone, the ragtag band arrived at the stretch of beach behind Koch's house after a 20-minute walk, where roughly a dozen police, Secret Service and Romney staffers stood on the dunes that marked the line of demarcation between the public beach and Koch's private land, and told the protesters they could go no further.

And so they stayed - chanting, singing, and waving signs as a plane buzzed overhead, pulling a banner that read, "Romney has a Koch Problem. MoveOn.Org." While some protestors shouted obscenities as the security watching them from the dunes above (and from a Coast Guard vessel off the coast), this reporter saw no direct confrontations between protestors and authorities.

The climax of the protest event came when the saxophonist, David Intrator, 55, of New York City, led the protesters in a spotty rendition of "The Star-Spangled Banner," which most of the group joined, though some continued to chant slogans as they sang.

Source: http://firstread.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/07/08/12630094-in-hamptons-protesters-converge-on-romney-fundraisers-by-air-and-land?lite

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HISTORY: Early view of St. Anthony?s Church

By Timmins Museum: National Exhibition Centre

Posted 3 hours ago

This undated photograph, taken sometime before 1936, offers a view of the original St. Anthony?s Church, on the corner of Pine Street and Fifth Avenue in Timmins.

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Topic guidelines: We welcome your thoughts, stories and information related to this article. Please stay on topic and be respectful of others. Keep the conversation appropriate for interested readers.

Source: http://www.thedailypress.ca/ArticleDisplay.aspx?e=3592671

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