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Los Angeles (E! Online) –
So this is what the face of an impressionable lad turned corrupted bloodsucker looks like.
It looks fang-licking good, if you ask us!
Summit Entertainment has tapped Australian newcomer Xavier Samuel to play Riley in The Twilight Saga: Eclipse, the third film in the burgeoning franchise based on Stephenie Meyer's megaselling novels, according to the Hollywood Reporter's Risky Business blog.
As fans of the series know, Riley starts off as a plain old human college student, only to fall under the spell of the increasingly vengeful Victoria and, as a newborn vampire, join her crusade against Bella.
Among the names bandied about for the Riley role were Tom “Draco Malfoy” Felton and Channing Tatum, whom screenwriter Melissa Rosenberg once said would play the part “beautifully.”
Well, we think Samuel's doing beautifully so far…
Eclipse is expected to start shooting sometime next month in Vancouver in time for its June 30, 2010, release, while Twilight fans are expected to go into overdrive any day now as they await the Nov. 20 arrival of New Moon.
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Los Angeles (E! Online) –
Cutting Kara DioGuardi's “No Boundaries” from the American Idol tour was a no-brainer for Kris Allen.
“Taking that out is kind of helping my set a little bit,” Allen explained to us this morning as he and Adam Lambert picked up their new Ford vehicles at Galpin Ford just outside of Los Angeles. “It gave it a little bit more energy…It just felt like a better fit to put something else in.”
Critics and fans have pretty much trashed “No Boundaries,” which DioGuardi cowrote, ever since it debuted as the American Idol victory song during the finale in May. Allen has replaced it with The Killers' “All These Things That I've Done.”
“Everyone knows that song,” Lambert said. “It's really great.”
Our favorite singing bromancers also talked about which Idol alums they'd like to work with…
“I love Kelly Clarkson,” Allen said. “She's incredible, so that's who I'd want to work with.”
Lambert is a big fan, too. “The album Kelly just came out with is fantastic,” he said. “Great writers, great producers. She wrote a bunch of songs on there, and Katy Perry—my girl—wrote songs on there, too. It's great.”
But then Lambert added, “I want to work with Fantasia, just hollerin' back and forth.”
On a more serious note, the openly gay Lambert said he's trying not to think too much about protesters who showed up at one of the recent Idol tour stops. “I don't think I'm going to change their minds,” he said. “I respect their opinion, but they didn't need to come to a concert and spread negativity…Go use your energy for something productive.”
—Reporting by Dahvi Shira
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BAGHDAD – Antique dealer Riyadh al-Khafaf has so few customers he hasn’t bothered to dust his collection of fine metalware from the early 20th century. Other dealers say they can go for days without seeing even a browser.
But while their business may be sparse, the two dozen or so antique shops in the Iraqi capital boast treasures of museum quality. Like Baghdad, a city of mosques with turquoise tiled domes and streets divided by barbed war and blast walls, the shops’ contents speak of both Iraq’s recent dark days and its more gloried past.
“The story of Iraq is here if you care to look closely,” Abdul-Kareem Yahya, a 51-year-old father of five, said from behind a desk at his downtown antique shop. Behind him sat Ottoman-era swords, engraved silver trays and a tea set bearing the image of Iraq’s last king.
The antique dealers themselves — some retired security officers, military veterans or ex-government employees — are also proof of the resilience of Baghdad’s people in surviving decades of hardship from war, U.N. sanctions and occupation by a U.S.-led international force.
Yahya said the lack of business for antique shops reflects Iraq’s isolation from the rest of the world and the still tenuous security situation. While he and other dealers say the pullout of U.S. soldiers from Baghdad last week under an agreement with Iraq’s government removes one magnet for insurgent attacks, they concede they’re not soon likely to see a rush of tourists to buy their wares.
Recent history provides rich sources for Baghdad’s antique market. After Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait, goods from the neighboring country’s wealthy homes and its national museum — famed for Islamic art and Quranic manuscripts — were hauled back here. More treasures came with the looting of Iraq’s own national museum and Saddam Hussein’s palaces in the lawless days after the American-led invasion of 2003.
Antique dealers said some looted items had been sold in Baghdad, but they all denied handling any suspect goods themselves. They said Iraq itself — with a population once among the wealthiest and best educated in the Middle East — provides many early 20th century antiques from families who fell on hard times during 13 years of U.N. sanctions slapped on Iraq for invading Kuwait in 1990.
Some of the best evidence of better days can be found by climbing the shaky stairs to al-Khafaf’s shop on a street along the River Tigris in Baghdad’s old quarter. Sitting under a coat of dust on the shop’s floor are silver-plated brass boxes in which wealthy women kept their toiletries and engraved water pitchers that the rich used to wash guests’ hands after feasts.
Also on offer are floral-shaped silver candlesticks fashioned by Baghdad’s renowned Jewish craftsmen, members of a religious community that went back more than two millennia and numbered upwards of 100,000 in the 1930s. Now it has been reduced to just a few people by the discrimination of ultra-nationalist governments and the lure of living in Israel.
“The Jewish craftsmen of Baghdad were at their best with silver and gold,” said al-Khafaf, explaining a one-time informal division of specialization among artisans of different religious communities. “Muslims, on the other hand, were best with brass,” said the 48-year-old, who has a day job as a veterinarian.
In the downtown antique shops, there also are fine china tea sets bearing images of Faisal II, the last of Iraq’s kings who was murdered along with close family members in a 1958 military coup that heralded the start of years of political instability, genocide and human rights abuses. Complete sets can sell for 1,000.
Among other goods that were in wealthy Iraqi families for generations but went on the market during the years of crippling U.N. sanctions are fine carpets, U.S.-made 19th century clocks, dinner sets and old paintings.
“The antiques sold by families during sanctions were mostly bought by Iraqis who had not been affected by the sanctions,” said Issam Hassan, a dealer in Baghdad’s old quarter.
“Some are coming to buy back what they sold, but they don’t find them and they look for similar items,” said Hassan, who said he had survived by selling canned goods on the sidewalk outside his home while his store was closed for two of the past six years because of security fears.
Hassan, al-Khafaf and Yahya say Baghdad’s “antique reserves” could still grow as the country slowly opens up to its traditional visitors from Iran, the Indian subcontinent and Azerbaijan, an oil-rich Central Asian nation whose majority Shiites once came in large numbers as pilgrims to Iraq’s religious sites.
Many rich items still in the homes of old Baghdad families could eventually reach the market, they said.
But the dealers acknowledge it will be many years before Baghdad can rival the vibrancy of more established Middle Eastern antique markets such as the Syrian capital Damascus and Isfahan in Iran. And, they complained, it is largely because potential visitors are scared off by Iraq’s persistent violence.
“We used to be open for business until midnight before the war,” said Tawfeeq al-Shikhli, a 63-year-old antique dealer. “Now, we close by early afternoon because of security.”
Al-Shikhli, clad in a beige Arab robe, sat outside his vast shop which looked deceptively small from the outside. On the second floor, hundreds of unsold carpets from Iran, India and Afghanistan were piled on shelves nearly ceiling high.
“I can sell all this if tourists were coming to Iraq,” al-Shikhli’s 29-year-old son Waleed said as he gestured toward the rugs. “The prices are very reasonable, but people don’t have money to spare.”

A group of hunters aboard a small boat out of the tiny Alaska village of Wainwright were the first to spot what would eventually be called “the blob.” It was a dark, floating mass stretching for miles through the Chukchi Sea, a frigid and relatively shallow expanse of Arctic Ocean water between Alaska’s northwest coast and the Russian Far East. The goo was fibrous, hairy. When it touched floating ice, it looked almost black.
But what was it? An oil slick? Some sort of immense, amorphous organism adrift in some of the planet’s most remote waters? Maybe a worrisome sign of global climate change? Or, as folks wondered who followed from faraway via the internet, was it something insidious and, perhaps, even carnivorous like the man-eating jello from the old Steve McQueen movie that inspired the Alaska phenomenon’s nickname? (Read Richard Corliss’ review of The Thing, a sci-fi film set in the Arctic.)
The hunters got word to the U.S. Coast Guard, which immediately sent two spill response experts to fly over the mass, which looked sort of rusty from the air. They also approached it by boat. The North Slope Borough, the local government for the vast and sparsely populated cap of Alaska, sent its own people out the main village of Barrow to have a look. They scooped up jars of the stuff for analysis in a state lab in Anchorage.
“We responded as if it were an oil product,” says Coast Guard Petty Officer Terry Hasenauer. “It was described to us as an oil-like substance, thick and lingering below the surface of the water. Those characteristics can indicate heavy, degraded oil, maybe crude oil, or possibly an intermediate fuel oil.” Meanwhile, the story spread over the internet like an oil-spill, giving lots of people a queasy feeling. (Check out a story about the coming battle for the resources of the Arctic.)
Test results released Thursday showed the blob wasn’t oil, but a plant – a massive bloom of algae. While that may seem less dangerous, a lot of people are still uneasy. It’s something the mostly Inupiat Eskimo residents along Alaska’s northern coast say they could never remember seeing before. (See pictures of the Arctic.)
Algal blooms are a common and often menacing event along many U.S. coastlines. Some strains are toxic and can close beaches and poison seafood, posing a hazard to consumers. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration maintains a forecasting system for the Gulf of Mexico to warn of harmful Florida blooms. On Thursday, on the other side of the continent, U.S. Sen. Olympia Snowe, a Maine Republican, urged NOAA to direct at least 500,000 to assess a disastrous red tide – a form of algal bloom. “The state of Maine is currently besieged by the most virulent red tide event ever recorded in the region,” Snowe wrote. “As a result of this outbreak, virtually the entire coast of our state has been closed to the harvest of clams, mussels, ocean quahogs, and other shellfish.”
While Alaskans may find the algal blob unusual if not frightening, scientists say that algal blooms are nothing new in Arctic Ocean waters, though the blob itself might be a little weird. Brenda Konar, a marine biology professor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, said algal outbreaks can and do occur even in icy Arctic waters. It just takes the right combination of nutrients, light and water temperature, she said. “Algae blooms,” she says. “It’s sort of like a swimming pool that hasn’t been cleaned in a while.” The blob, Konar said, is a microalgae made up of “billions and billions of individuals.” “We’ve observed large blooms in the past off Barrow although none of them at all like this,” Barry Sherr, an Oregon State University professor of oceanography, said in an e-mail. “The fact that the locals say they’ve never seen anything like it suggests that it might represent some exotic species which has drifted into the region, perhaps as a result of global change. For the moment that’s just a guess.”
So far in Alaska, nothing suggests the Chukchi Sea blob is toxic, although the Coast Guard’s Hasenauer said toxicity tests were planned. In any case, virtually no commercial seafood production comes from the waters along Alaska’s northern coast, but residents do fish, hunt whales and harvest other animals as part of a traditional subsistence lifestyle. In the meantime, the blob for the most part is staying away from the shoreline and slowly drifting farther and farther away.
View this article on Time.com

SAN FRANCISCO, California Two light rail transit cars collided Saturday in San Francisco, causing multiple injuries, but none appeared life-threatening, a spokesman for the the city’s light rail transit system said.
Passengers board a Muni rail car in San Francisco in 2006. Two cars similar to this one collided Saturday.
“Apparently the conductor for one of the trains miscalculated a turn. It’s still under investigation right now,” a police officer told CNN. He would not provide his name. The cars are part of Muni, the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency. Initial reports are that a one-car train traveling at low speed collided with a stopped one-car train, Muni spokesman Judson True said in a written statement. He said the collision occurred on the outbound platform of West Portal Station. As of 2:57 p.m. (5:57 p.m. ET), all Muni Metro light rail service that travels through West Portal Station in either direction has been halted, he said. “There are reportedly multiple injuries as a result of the collision, but none of the injuries have yet been described as life-threatening,” Judson said. Buses are providing substitute service between West Portal and Castro stations and West Portal Station and western destinations for the K/T, L and M Muni Metro lines. SF Muni is advising major service delays on the K, L and M light rail lines, and said there was no light rail service between the West Portal and Castro stations. Shuttle buses are in service. There was no estimated time for the resumption of normal Muni service.
Source:CNN

UK set to take back Brazil waste
The UK is working with Brazilian authorities to return more than 1,400 tonnes of toxic waste to Britain, the Environment Agency has said.Head of waste Liz Parks said plans were being made to bring back the rubbish, but it could take a number of weeks. An inquiry into how the waste, including syringes, condoms and bags of blood, was sent to three Brazilian ports has been launched by the UK. The Environment Agency says those responsible could face prosecution. Ms Parks told the BBC’s Newshour she understood the waste, found in about 90 shipping containers, was currently being held by the Brazilian authorities. “They haven’t yet released it, as far as I’m aware. But arrangements are being made for that to happen. And it will take a number of weeks for the waste to be returned,” she said. ‘Unlimited fines’She also warned the British courts took the dumping of hazardous waste very seriously. “We do prosecute people. We’ve had a number of successful prosecutions in recent years. “And in fact in the crown court, people can be fined unlimited amounts and prison sentences are imposed.” On Saturday, Brazil demanded the waste be sent back to Britain.
Roberto Messias, president of the Brazilian environment agency, Ibama, declared that Brazil was “not a big rubbish dump of the world”. The agency also said the arrival of the toxic cargo had violated the Basel Convention on the movement of hazardous waste, of which both the UK and Brazil are signatories, which came into force in 1992. Ingrid Oberg, regional chief of Ibama, later told the BBC the cargo mainly consisted of domestic waste. “It’s a lot of food containers and cleaning product containers. We found old clothes, shoes, papers, a lot of old newspapers. “In some of the containers recently found there were also some technological products, like DVDs, pieces of computers, plastic stuff. But mainly it’s domestic garbage.” British companiesAs well as the presence of syringes, condoms and bags of blood, the rubbish was deemed dangerous because the contents of the containers were going rotten. “There were larvae and then there’s a big risk of contamination,” said Ms Oberg. “We are taking care so that it’s not taken out of the containers. So it doesn’t bring any contamination to our soil,” she added. Reports in the UK media say the waste was sent from Felixstowe in England to the port of Santos, near Sao Paulo, and two other ports in the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul. It has also emerged that two companies named by Brazil as suspected exporters of the waste are owned by a Brazilian. The director, who is based in England, told BBC Brazil the containers should have contained plastic for recycling and any other contents were the responsibility of his suppliers.

Source:BBC

BUENOS AIRES (AFP) –
Argentina issued a nationwide alert on Friday after pigs in the country were confirmed to have the swine flu virus, health authorities said.
“We have detected clinical cases of the A(H1N1) influenza in a pig farm in Buenos Aires province, they have been confirmed by laboratory tests,” the national farm and food standards agency Senasa, said.
Thousands of people have contracted the virus in Argentina and 137 people in the country have died.
Senasa said the outbreak announced on Friday was the second time the disease had been found in pigs in Argentina — the first case of infection in pigs was detected in June in the same Argentine province.
Earlier, the World Health Organisation said it would stop providing regular updates on the number of people affected worldwide, as the virus continues its march.
The WHO said in an information note on its website Friday that it would focus on regular updates from newly-affected countries, in order to keep track of the global progress of the A(H1N1) virus.
The influenza pandemic has “spread internationally with unprecedented speed,” according to the Geneva-based UN public health agency.
In the last official figures it provided on July 6, the health agency recorded 94,512 cases in 136 countries and territories since April, including 429 deaths.

FARMINGTON, Conn. – The price of the Connecticut mega-mansion owned by rapper 50 Cent has dropped again — to 10.9 million.
The 50,000-square-foot mansion is in the Hartford metropolitan area suburb Farmington. It was owned by boxer Mike Tyson.
It has 19 bedrooms and 37 bathrooms. It boasts a gym, billiards rooms, racquetball courts and a disco with stripper poles.
The New York City rapper bought it for 4.1 million. He said it had “a ‘Miami Vice’ feel” and spent 6 million on renovations and repairs.
The home was for sale for nearly two years before being pulled off the market in May. The initial 18.5 million price dropped to 14.5 million late last year.
50 Cent says he’s tired of the two-hour commute to New York City and wants to downsize.

Sink or swim in modern China
Chris Hogg heads to the small Chinese village of Zhushanxia, 200km east of Shanghai, to see how lives have been shaped by the economy under communist rule, the recession and the country’s economic recovery.
Huang Jiao Ling lives at the end of a long dusty road. Mobile phone numbers are daubed all over the walls of her home and those of her neighbours. It is like a strange kind of mathematical graffiti, but the numbers are, in fact, advertisements for people offering goods and services. In modern China, it seems everyone has something to sell. Huang Jiao Ling, too, is an entrepreneur. She is in her 50s, but she looks younger. In her front garden, where others might have planted vegetables, she has built a small workshop. Inside, the walls are unfinished and the floor uneven, but there is just about enough room for a work-bench and a handful of basic machine tools. Churning out widgetsOn the floor are cardboard boxes filled with piles of tiny metal widgets. They are simple to make – her husband sits at the bench turning them out rapidly by hand.
A few feet away, his bicycle-taxi is parked just inside the front door of the house. The machine work is a lot less tiring than pedalling passengers around, but he still keeps the bike. It is useful, he says, to supplement their income in leaner times. The Huangs sell the boxes of widgets to the factory where Huang Jiao Ling has a full-time job. For a while this year they had to shut the workshop as demand dropped, but now the machines are humming again. They have two children, because if you live in the country and your first child is a girl, you are allowed to have another one. The girls go to very good schools, the best Huang Jiao Ling can afford. She spends more than half her income on school fees. “We have to think of their future,” she tells me. “It’s a Chinese tradition. Parents always think of their children, and when the parents get old, their children will look after them. It’s the same for every generation.” Yu Feng Guo is Huang Jiao Ling’s brother-in-law. She is doing well for herself in China’s new modern market economy, but he has been left behind. He used to work in a state-owned brick factory. Different lifestylesWhen the economic reforms began 30 years ago he watched as some of his co-workers left their jobs to start up their own small businesses, many of them selling prawns or fish by the side of the road. He decided to do what he thought was the right thing, what the communist party would expect of a loyal worker in a state-owned enterprise – he stayed. Eventually, the brick factory went bust and he was out of a job.
Agriculture provides an income for many rural Chinese
Now, dressed in a shabby khaki jacket, he works as a security guard in an open-air food market. Those early entrepreneurs who had left his factory to try their luck in the fledgling market economy are now much richer than him and to his family this seems unfair. “Thirty years ago everyone in the village was poor,” his son tells me. “Now the difference in lifestyle between the rich and the poor in our village is huge.” There is an implicit bargain in modern Chinese society between the leaders and the led. Beijing tells its people “we will give you opportunities” – to earn more, to enjoy a better standard of living than your parents did. But you, in return, will behave yourself. Back on trackIn Zhushanxia village quite a few cars can be seen bumping along past the fields, something you would not have seen 30 years ago. If you have got used to having more, whether it’s a car, or a bigger house, or a more expensive school for your child, you have more to lose when times get tough. That is why it is so important for the government to get the economy back on track. When it first faltered, when factories started laying off workers, there was a risk that they would start to feel the government was no longer keeping to its side of the deal, so why should they? So in Beijing, of course, there will be relief that a recovery appears to be under way. But the next challenge for the government will be to do more to try to ensure that everyone shares the benefits. Huang Jiao Ling is happy her workshop is busy again, but still nervous about the future. So she, like most other Chinese, is saving as much of her income as she can. Her brother-in-law Yu Feng Guo, has no idea how he will be able to save enough to secure a state pension on his meagre wages from his unstable job. He and others like him will be looking to their leaders for reassurance that they will be cared for as they approach old age. But that will costly and complicated. Fixing the economy may prove to have been the easy part. How to listen to: From our own CorrespondentRadio 4: Saturdays, 1130. Second weekly edition on Thursdays, 1100 (some weeks only) World Service: See programme schedules Download the
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Source:BBC

WASHINGTON – “And that’s the way it is,” he’d say.
It wasn’t, but we wanted that reassurance. The idea that someone could wrangle the world each night and boil it down to a sensible, digestible half hour was so comforting.
Barely a generation has passed since Walter Cronkite disappeared from our evenings. But the notion of one man — a single, authoritative, empathetic man, morally reassuring and mild of temper — wrapping up the world after dinner for America seems incalculably quaint in the technological coliseum that is 21st-century communications.
Many of the network farewells to the CBS anchorman, who died Friday at 92, seemed built around the notion of the father figure. Anchors and reporters who are part of another age — a still-unfolding era of community feedback, viewer outreach and social-media interaction — struggled to summon the idea of anchor as monolith.
“We’d all let him watch our kids when we went out to the supermarket if we had the chance,” NBC anchorman Brian Williams said. Hard to imagine Bill O’Reilly or Keith Olbermann, vigorous though they are, as national baby sitters.
“Uncle Walter,” we called him. But on the Internet, there’s not much use for uncles.
We are now confronted with a rushing, 24-hour river of information, much of it chaotic and raw, with no one to shepherd us through it.
Though network TV news remains popular, its demographic is older and it has struggled, losing about 1 million viewers a year in the years since Cronkite retired as anchor in 1981.
At the end of last year, according to Gallup, 31 percent of Americans considered the Internet to be a daily news source, a 50 percent gain since 2006. That’s almost 100 million people actively reaching out to get their news rather than flipping on the TV and waiting for it to come to them.
At the same time, people now want a stake in their news and direct attention from the people who deliver it. They’re demanding it, and they’re getting it.
NBC’s Williams, for example, does a daily blog. CNN anchor Rick Sanchez has built his midafternoon show around feedback from followers on Twitter and Facebook. News has become a two-way street, something to create community around.
That can be at once productive and perilous.
It gives an exhilarating voice to the voiceless. Yet it also can encourage consensus reality. If enough of us say it loudly enough, it must be true. In the 1960s and 1970s, Cronkite was accepted as the everyday incarnation of empirical truth — “a voice of certainty in an uncertain world,” as President Barack Obama put it Friday night.
Cronkite’s legendary assessment of Vietnam’s quagmire — the one that led Lyndon Johnson to lament, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America” — is often cast as a barometer of the anchor’s power at the time. What shouldn’t be ignored is that, even then, the waning of that kind of power had begun.
“Middle America” then generally meant white and over 30, the very people that the young, energetic game-changers of the late 1960s were insisting shouldn’t be trusted. Power to the people was upending the national hierarchy, and the Age of Many Voices was approaching.
Four decades later, cacophony reigns. What room is there for the conscience of a nation, for history’s anchorman, for the father we all wanted?
In 2009, even trust, at least in the public realm, seems an uneasy notion. It’s something we continue to desire, But in an age of wholesale, instantaneous, unprecedented lying, trust is something that may not be that wise when it comes to evaluating our sources of information.
That’s what has changed since Cronkite’s heyday.
Today’s model works more like this: Everyone vies to get his personalized, customized, agenda-driven version of “that’s the way it is” enshrined in the cultural canon. We shout, cajole, maneuver, horse-trade. We demonize the opposition. We brand ideas as products and send them on their way, ready to do battle in the marketplace.
Our anchors follow suit, riding the rising crest of expectation and anticipation and, sometimes, misusing it. “It’s not the old voice of reassuring honesty that they cultivate, but one of perpetual anxiety,” Los Angeles Times TV critic Robert Lloyd wrote in his Cronkite eulogy.
The coliseum is always open for business. If you’ve got a TV or a laptop, you’re plugged in to the whole planet and can have your say. No one person can speak for us all — we don’t even pretend that’s the case anymore — and those who tried would be put in their places as fast as you can say Edward R. Murrow.
That can be a glorious expression of democracy, or it can lead, as it did Saturday morning, to the most e-mailed story on Yahoo! News being the one about the Oscar Mayer Weinermobile crashing into a house in Wisconsin. Democracy has a way of being quite democratic.
Nightly American comfort, Cronkite style, is a thing of the past, if it ever really existed at all. Perhaps, in the Age of Many Voices, comfort and reassurance is not meant to be our lot. Maybe that’s just the way it is.
___
EDITOR’S NOTE — Ted Anthony covers American culture for The Associated Press.

NEW YORK – Walter Cronkite’s final resting place will be next to his late wife in Missouri.
The iconic newsman’s longtime chief of staff says a private funeral service has been scheduled for Thursday at St. Bartholomew’s Church in Manhattan.
A separate memorial also will be held within the next few weeks at the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts.
Cronkite is to be cremated and his remains buried at a later date next to his wife, Betsy, in the family plot at a cemetery in Kansas City, Mo.
In lieu of flowers, the family is requesting donations to the Walter and Betsy Cronkite Foundation, which will distribute contributions to various charities the couple supported during their lives.

Throughout his career as a television anchorman, Walter Cronkite had a few memorable run-ins with other powerful figures at CBS News, one of his producers told CNN.
Walter Cronkite occasionally butted heads with executives at CBS News, his former producer says.more photos »
Sanford “Sandy” Socolow, who worked at CBS News for 32 years, more than four of them as Cronkite’s producer, said Cronkite ran into trouble soon after he took over for Douglas Edwards in the “CBS Evening News” anchor chair. “The first night up, he ended the show by saying, I’m paraphrasing, ‘That’s the news. Be sure to check your local newspapers tomorrow to get all the details on the headlines we are delivering to you.’” That didn’t fly. “The suitsas we used to call themwent crazy,” Socolow told CNN, referring to CBS executives. “From their perspective, Cronkite was sending people to read newspapers instead of watching the news. There was a storm.” CBS News President Richard Salant met with Cronkite, who initially resisted, then agreed to change his sign-off, Socolow said. Watch friends and admirers weigh in on the death of a giant » “In the absence of anything else, he came up with ‘That’s the way it is.’” But that too ruffled feathers, Socolow said. “Salant’s attitude was, ‘We’re not telling them that’s the way it is. We can’t do that in 15 minutes,’ which was the length of the show in those days. ‘That’s not the way it is.’”
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TIME.com: The Man with America’s Trust
Life.com: Remembering Walter Cronkite
Still, Cronkite persisted and that’s the way it was from then on. Watch what happened the one time Cronkite failed to say it » In 1960, in an attempt to emulate the success of NBC’s “Huntley-Brinkley Report,” CBS tried to make Cronkite and fellow broadcast legend Edward R. Murrow co-anchors at the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles. But “it just didn’t work out,” said Socolow, who was then producing for Cronkite. “There wasn’t a particular chemistry there.” Though the two men were cordial, and it was Murrow who had brought Cronkite to CBS, “they were never drinking buddies,” Socolow said. In 1968, Cronkite returned from a visit to Vietnam disillusioned with America’s role there. He told Salant what he thought but said he did not want to report his personal opinion on air, Socolow said. Only “after much haggling” did he agree to do so, and not on the regular newscast but on a 10 p.m. special. “To say that we are closer to victory today is to believe, in the face of the evidence, the optimists who have been wrong in the past,” Cronkite told his audience. “To suggest we are on the edge of defeat is to yield to unreasonable pessimism. To say that we are mired in stalemate seems the only realistic, yet unsatisfactory conclusion. … It is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could.” Cronkite’s reluctance to reveal his personal opinions about world events during a newscast was matched by his enthusiasm for keeping newscasts free of the influence of commercial interests. Watch the Cronkite Journalism School dean reflect on his legacy » “He was a purist,” Socolow said. “And, a lot of people would say, to a fault, if there can be a fault in such a definition.” For example, he said, around the time of the 1979 Three Mile Island accident, in which a nuclear plant’s core partially melted, the movie “China Syndrome” was released with a similar theme. “I was so knocked out to its proximity to the events of the day, I arranged a screening for the entire staff of the ‘Evening News,’” Socolow said. Though Cronkite did not attend, “the next day, I go into him and say, ‘You know this is really uncanny that this movie should be so close to the bone, and it’s just stunning, a stunning coincidence, and I think we could make a story out of it.’ “He shouted at me, ‘I’m not in the goddamn business of selling movie tickets.’” Cronkite even disliked promoting pieces that were slated to run in the next day’s newscast, Socolow said. “His attitude being, ‘For God’s sake, we don’t know what tomorrow’s news is going to be. How the hell can we take time away from reporting today’s news by promoting a story for tomorrow?’” Watch why Cronkite was “the most important man” » Cronkite departed from the anchor chair voluntarily, Socolow said. “He wanted to retire as undefeated champ, and he made his views known.” But Salant, who was also planning to retire shortly, did not want to be the guy who oversaw Cronkite’s exit. “His ratings on the day he left the ‘Evening News’ were bigger than all three network newscasts together today,” Socolow said. “He had an average rating of 27 million to 29 million viewers.” View images from Cronkite’s career » Salant pleaded with Cronkite to stay so that the decision on how to replace him would fall to someone else. That someone else was Bill Leonard. “On the first day Leonard was in the saddle, Cronkite said, ‘Listen, I want to go out as undefeated champion,’” Socolow said. At the same time, then-correspondent Dan Rather’s contract was ending and he was being courted by ABC News, Socolow said. “The idea of losing Cronkite was enough to make people gag,” he said. “On the other hand, there was the chance they’d lose Rather. What finally happened is Leonard took the opportunity to sign Rather to a contract that was so rich to keep him out of [ABC executive] Roone Arledge’s hands that it had to go up to [CBS founder and Chairman] Bill Paley to get an OK on the contract.” But Cronkite’s departure did not go as he had planned, according to his producer. “The script on his last night said something like, unlike old soldiers who never die, he’ll be back every once in a while on an irregular basis when something strikes his fancya handshake deal he had with Bill Leonard,” Socolow said. “A very loose deal.”
But Leonard left the top job soon after, replaced by Van Gordon Sauter, who”in cahoots, I think you would have to say, with Dan Ratherdecided they did not want Cronkite on the air, for whatever reason.” After he left the anchor chair, Cronkite worked on occasional science and environment pieces on television, but after a few years he rarely appeared on CBS.
Source:CNN

AUCKLAND, New Zealand (Reuters) –
New Zealand cyclist Julian Dean did not know he had been shot during Friday's stage on the Tour de France, thinking instead he had been hit by flying stone chips.
Dean was struck in the index finger and Spain's Oscar Freire was hit in the right thigh by small shots during the 13th stage from Vittel to Colmar. Officials later said they had been shot by a slug gun and police are looking for two teenagers.
“The incident wasn't as bad as it sounds,” Dean said in his column in New Zealand's Sunday Star Times newspaper. “At the time, I didn't realize what had happened; I thought a stone had flicked up off the road and hit my finger.
“It was only when I was talking to Oscar Freire a little further down the road, and he told me he had been shot in the leg, that I realized what had happened.
“Neither of us were seriously hurt and we rode on. Oscar got a piece of metal taken out of his leg after the stage.”
Dean said it was a concern that spectators had managed to get a slug gun so close to the peloton, but not surprising given the closeness of crowds lining the roads of the Tour.
“It's a real worry that someone was able to get a gun anywhere near us but given the way the Tour de France is raced, with spectators turning up freely on the sides of the roads in their millions, it's pretty hard to put security in place.
“It might sound strange but for me it's not really a big drama as I've certainly suffered worse fates when crashing at high speeds, but there's an investigation into the incident, which hopefully is the last of its kind.
“It's just fortunate no one was hit in the face or the eye.”
French police have opened an investigation into a possible crime of voluntary violence with a firearm, which carries a three-year prison sentence and 45,000 euros fine.
(Writing by Greg Stutchbury; Editing by Ken Ferris)

WASHINGTON – The Taliban has released a video of an American soldier who went missing from his base in eastern Afghanistan June 30 and was later confirmed captured.
The soldier, whose identity has not yet been confirmed by the Pentagon pending notification of members of Congress and the soldier’s family, says his name, age and hometown on the video, which was released Saturday on a Web site pointed out by the Taliban. Two U.S. defense officials confirmed to The Associated Press that the man in the video is the captured soldier.
The soldier is shown, dressed in a gray, nondescript outfit, eating and sitting on a bed, and he says the date is July 14. He says he was captured when he lagged behind on a patrol. The military said the soldier was captured July 2.
The 28-minute video shows the soldier being interviewed in English by his captors, where he states his views on the war, Islam and the morale of American soldiers.

BESANCON, France (Reuters) –
The Tour de France was marred by the death of a spectator Saturday as Russian Serguei Ivanov won the 14th stage, a 199-km ride from Colmar.
A gendarmerie officer, who declined to be named, said that according to witnesses 61-year-old Jeannette Stoeffel had been seen crossing the road many times before she was hit by a motorcycle involved with the race.
Two other people were injured when they were hit by the motorcycle but their lives were not in danger, officials said.
It was the first fatal accident on the Tour since a child died in 2002 after being hit by a car from the publicity caravan. There will be a minute silence before Sunday's stage.
The accident near the town of Wittelsheim, 38.5 km into the stage, happened shortly after a 12-man breakaway, featuring American George Hincapie, went past the crowd.
The group built up an advantage of eight minutes 40 seconds as the Astana team set up a leisurely pace in front of the pack.
GREAT WORK
The AG2r-La Mondiale team, defending Italy's Rinaldo Nocentini's yellow jersey, started to work some 50 km from the finish and were able to keep him in the overall lead.
“I want to thank my team mates,” Nocentini, who has been in yellow for eight days, told reporters.
“They have been doing great work.”
Nocentini now leads Hincapie by five seconds with Spain's Alberto Contador in third place, also six seconds off the pace.
Seven-times champion Lance Armstrong slipped to fourth, eight seconds adrift of Nocentini, but the positions are expected to be upset by Sunday's first Alpine stage to the Swiss ski resort of Verbier.
Ivanov attacked the breakaway group with just over 10 km remaining and never looked back, beating Ireland's Nicolas Roche and New Zealand's Hayden Roulston, second and third respectively, by 16 seconds.
“I waited for the right moment (to attack). I surprised some riders and at that point I just gave everything I had,” Ivanov, who won a Tour stage in 2001, told reporters.
“I have been waiting for this one for so long. Today's win is amazing.”
Spain's Oscar Freire and Julian Dean of New Zealand started the stage after they were shot and slightly injured during Friday's ride. Police investigating the incident said they were hunting two teenagers.
(Editing by Clare Fallon and Sonia Oxley)

Los Angeles (E! Online) –
Are the Jackson brothers really performing in Jamaica or what?
We're still not totally sure. Depending on who you listen to, the answers seem to vary.
Yesterday, TMZ reported that Jermaine Jackson would be joining his brothers Tito and Jackie Jackson onstage at the 17th annual Jamaican Reggae Summerfest in Montego Bay, but the performer was singing a different tune when E! News caught up with him on a Friday afternoon shopping spree.
Jackson's choice words for the always accurate gossip hounds? “No. TMZ needs to get their facts straight. We're not going to Jamaica.”
So there you have it. It's a no-go for Jermaine, but does that “we” apply to the rest of the family affair?
Apparently not, because according to Summerfest spokesperson Damian McGann, “Both of the brothers will perform on Saturday night. This is dedicated to the memory of Michael.”
Guess we'll just have to wait and see which Jacksons actually take the Jamaican stage next weekend.
—Additional reporting by Lindsay Miller
··· THEY SAID WHAT? Get today's most commented stories now at www.eonline.com

FAYETTEVILLE, Tenn. – A suspect was in custody in the slayings of six people, five in southern Tennessee and another about 20 miles away in Huntsville, Ala., authorities said Saturday.
Lincoln County, Tenn., Sheriff Murray Blackwelder said at a news conference that his department is investigating three crime scenes, though he did not elaborate. He did not release the victims’ names or that of the suspect and would not confirm the causes of death. He did not release a motive.
Tennessee Bureau of Investigation spokeswoman Kristin Helm said that the five killed in Tennessee were found Saturday morning in two homes in Lincoln County, which includes Fayetteville, and that some of the victims were related.
She says the killings happened Friday night or early Saturday.
Huntsville Police Sgt. Mickey Allen told TV station WAFF that his department has a person in custody who confessed to several homicides in Tennessee and the one in Huntsville. Based on the suspect’s information, police found a body at Huntsville’s Hall Cultured Marble and Granite late Saturday morning, said Allen, who works on the city’s major crimes unit.
He said the information was explicit and led right to the business and victim.
“We have no clue as yet of what unfolded there and how it relates to here,” he said.
Fayetteville is a town of 7,000 people about 90 miles south of Nashville near the Tennessee-Alabama border. Huntsville is the largest city in northern Alabama with more than 170,000 people and is about 20 miles south of Fayetteville.

The Great Economic Recovery Hunt has been underway for about half a year, and the quarry bag is still pretty empty. A few optimists have tried to wring hope from fuzzy statistics showing that retail sales or housing starts or some other indicator aren't as bad as they could be. But with the unemployement rate at 9.5 percent and going higher, that's been unconvincing.
A recovery that will actually feel like one is probably a year away, at best. But we may finally be seeing signs that some parts of the economy are turning the corner. Here are six:
Booming bank profits. Goldman Sachs earned a scorching 3.3 billion in the second quarter. JP Morgan Chase earned 2.7 billion. Citigroup and Bank of American reported less impressive numbers, but each still turned a profit despite mounting losses on consumer loans. To be clear, the banks' profits have been subsidized by the government's TARP program and a bunch of other emergency measures meant to provide very cheap capital to the banks. And it's obviously problematic that a few Wall Street banks are earning a fortune with taxpayer assistance. But the whole financial bailout was intended, first of all, to get the nation's financial system back on its feet. One toe at a time, it's happening. The real test is whether a healthier financial system will help the broader economy recover–or bankers just gorge on the profits, keeping loans as tight as ever.
[See America's most endangered malls.]
CIT's lonesome meltdown. Last fall, the feds were so panicky about the economy that just about any bank in a whiff of trouble got bailout funds. The CIT case suggests that the bailout spigot is finally closing. CIT Group is a nonbank lender that services a lot of small- and medium-sized businesses. It's lost almost 3 billion over the last year and is at risk of declaring bankruptcy. So far, despite company pleas, the government has refused to toss a life preserver. If CIT goes belly-up, it could harm hundreds or thousands of businesses dependent on its loans. But unlike last fall, the government isn't jumping in just to prevent borrowers and investors from worrying. We already have systems designed to deal with failing companies, like the bankruptcy process and FDIC takeovers. Letting those run their course might cause some pain, but it's a sign that the system is once again working the way it's supposed to.
The Federal Reserve's reality check. The Fed has finally joined the mainstream in its outlook for job losses, after months of optimistic projections that seemed out of touch with the real economy. The latest Fed projections are for the unemployment rate to range from 9.8 percent to 10.1 percent for all of 2009, which means it will peak at some number higher than that over the next few months. The Fed's prior forecast was about 0.6 points lower. It's not good news that the Fed sees a worse job outlook than it did a few months ago. But the Fed's rosy numbers were falling behind reality, making its projections seem more like government propaganda than the combined wisdom of the nation's economic cognoscenti. More realistic numbers give the Fed's outlook more credibility–and that is good news, especially since the Fed board members also predict that economic growth for the rest of the year will be a bit stronger than they believed a few months ago. It would be nice to believe that.
[See 8 industries that will sit out a recovery.]
The glacial P-PIP rollout. Relax. You're forgiven if you can't remember–or never knew–what the government's Public-Private Investment Partnership was supposed to do. This is the plan to subsidize the purchase of “toxic assets” (now lovingly known as “legacy assets”) from banks, to get the worst money-losing investments off their books so they'll start lending money again. It's a complicated program funded by–you guessed it–taxpayer money, with dubious prospects that the money will be returned. Anyway, the P-PIP isn't officially dead, but it hasn't kicked off yet either, and it's a couple of months past the original estimated start date. It turns out most banks have been able to raise money on their own, which could eliminate the need for yet another government life-support program. If P-PIP fades away with little notice, few will complain.
500 failed banks. Don't' worry, they haven't failed yet, but FDIC chief Sheila Bair may have told a group of senators that 500 additional banks could close before the financial meltdown is over. That's according to Republican Sen. Jim Bunning of Kentucky. The FDIC typically doesn't predict bank failures, and an FDIC spokesperson has been downplaying the number and saying Bunning got it wrong. But it's plausible. Many more banks than that failed during the S&L bust of the '80s and '90s, and even 500 failures would constitute a small chunk of the 8,000 or so banks in the United States. Here's the important thing: Last fall, a rumor like this would have sent the markets plunging. This time, the markets didn't even notice.
[See 11 places with a worse economy than ours.]
Action at AIG. The disaster-prone insurance giant recently sold a car-insurance division for nearly 2 billion, and it's rumored to be close to selling its valuable American Life Insurance Co., or Alico, to MetLife, for 15 billion or more. This is great news for taxpayers who have lent AIG more than 80 billion so it can wind down its business without triggering a panic. The only way for taxpayers to recoup their money is for AIG to sell off its assets at the best possible price. Since last fall, the only bidders have been bargain-hunters hoping for fire-sale discounts. But a thaw in the credit markets has finally brought out serious deal-seekers. We could even see bidding wars for some AIG assets. Ah, the good ol' days.

China admits Uighur riot killings
A Chinese official says police shot dead 12 Uighur rioters in Urumqi this month, in a rare government admission of deaths inflicted by security forces.Nuer Baikeli, governor of Xinjiang region and himself a Uighur, said those killed had ignored police warning shots and were attacking civilians and shops. He said police had shown restraint and had no choice but to act. Some 200 people – mostly Han Chinese – died in the clashes between Muslim Uighurs and Han Chinese in Urumqi. “The rioters, the criminals, continued to act in an extremely vicious manner, insisted on having their way, and continued to threaten the lives of others,” he told reporters. “It was at this point that our public security forces and military police decisively fired. They shot dead 12 rioters. Of them, three died on site, and nine died as people tried to save them.” The violence in Xinjiang began on 5 July during a protest by Uighurs over a brawl in southern China in late June in which two people were killed. Uighur groups in exile have said hundreds of Uighurs were killed.

Source:BBC

Milan to enforce teen drink ban
By David Willey
BBC News, Rome
Milan has banned the consumption and sale of alcohol to young teenagers in an effort to curb binge-drinking.Parents of children under the age of 16 caught drinking wine or spirits will be liable to heavy fines of up to 500 Euros (700;450). A third of 11-year-olds in the city have alcohol related problems, it says. In a country where for centuries wine has been part of local culture – and prohibition would be unthinkable – the ban has come as a shock. But the authorities are deeply concerned about the increase in consumption of alcohol by children as young as 11 in the country’s industrial and financial capital. So as an experiment, supplying alcohol – either wine or spirits – to youths under the age of 16 in bars, restaurants, pizza shops and liquor stores will be banned. Heavy fines will be imposed on the parents of offending children and on shopkeepers or bar owners who serve them. A national law banning the sale of alcohol to under-16s is only loosely enforced, as Italian families are used to sometimes giving young children a teaspoon of wine as a family party treat. In past centuries, Italian children would sometimes even be given wine to drink in preference to water which was often polluted. There has been a storm of protest by bar owners who refuse to act as alcohol police for young people. But changing social customs mean that old easy-going attitudes towards consumption of alcohol in Italy will have to change.

Source:BBC

DAYTON, Ohio – Edward White, who made America’s first spacewalk and later died in a spacecraft fire, is among the latest aviation and space pioneers scheduled to be inducted into the National Aviation Hall of Fame.
The other enshrinees in Saturday night’s ceremony will be Jimmy Stewart, the late Hollywood actor and bomber pilot during World War II; Eileen Collins, the first woman to command the space shuttle; and Russell Meyer Jr., former head of Cessna Aircraft Co.
On Friday night, the hall presented its “Spirit of Flight” Award to the Apollo astronaut crews for their roles in the moon landing, moon walk, and the safe return to Earth.
White, who flew in the Air Force, was among the second group of astronauts selected. His first mission was as pilot for Gemini IV, the first long-duration flight for the Gemini program. White made America’s first spacewalk on the mission in 1965, a 21-minute event in which he maneuvered on the end of a 25-foot tether using a hand-held gas gun.
White died Jan. 27, 1967, when a flash fire swept through their Apollo I spacecraft during a pre-launch test at Cape Kennedy, Fla. Virgil “Gus” Grissom and Roger Chaffee also perished in the blaze.
Stewart, a private pilot, enlisted in the Army in 1941 at the age of 33. He actively sought posting to a flying unit and was assigned to the U.K.-based 445th Bomb Group, first as a squadron operations officer and then as its commander.
Stewart flew 20 combat missions in B-24s, earning the Distinguished Flying Cross twice, the Croix de Guerre, and the Air Medal with three oak leaf clusters.
Continuing his post-war service with the United States Air Force Reserve, he achieved the rank of brigadier general in 1959, retiring from active duty in 1968. Stewart remained an American airpower advocate until his death in 1997.
Collins, who was the Air Force’s first female flight instructor, was chosen to be an astronaut in 1991. She became the first woman to pilot a space shuttle, in 1995, and flew in a total of four shuttle missions, logging 872 hours before retiring in 2006.
Meyer was a fighter pilot in the Air Force and Marine Reserves from 1955-61. In 1974, he joined the Cessna Aircraft Co. as executive vice president and a year later was named chairman and CEO. He led the development of a program that created more than 50,000 new licensed pilots.
The aviation hall was founded in 1962 in Dayton, hometown of the Wright brothers, and was later chartered by Congress. Wilbur and Orville Wright were the first inductees.
___
On the Net:

http://www.nationalaviation.org

BUENOS AIRES (AFP) –
Argentina issued a nationwide alert on Friday after pigs in the country were confirmed to have the swine flu virus, health authorities said.
“We have detected clinical cases of the A(H1N1) influenza in a pig farm in Buenos Aires province, they have been confirmed by laboratory tests,” the national farm and food standards agency Senasa, said.
Thousands of people have contracted the virus in Argentina and 137 people in the country have died.
Senasa said the outbreak announced on Friday was the second time the disease had been found in pigs in Argentina — the first case of infection in pigs was detected in June in the same Argentine province.
Earlier, the World Health Organisation said it would stop providing regular updates on the number of people affected worldwide, as the virus continues its march.
The WHO said in an information note on its website Friday that it would focus on regular updates from newly-affected countries, in order to keep track of the global progress of the A(H1N1) virus.
The influenza pandemic has “spread internationally with unprecedented speed,” according to the Geneva-based UN public health agency.
In the last official figures it provided on July 6, the health agency recorded 94,512 cases in 136 countries and territories since April, including 429 deaths.

Government agents used tear gas to disperse demonstrators, and beat and kidnapped a human rights lawyer, the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran said Saturday, citing witnesses.
Protesters in Tehran linger after powerful cleric Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani ended his Friday prayers.
The advocacy group said human rights lawyer Shadi Sadr, who was walking with friends to Friday prayers, was confronted by people dressed in civilian clothes. They pushed her into a car and drove off, the group said, citing witnesses. In a subsequent telephone call to her husband, Sadr said she had been arrested and detained in ward 209 of Tehran’s Evin prison, the group said. “Her husband reported that intelligence officers had searched his house and requested the keys to her legal office,” the group said. Sadr suffers from gland and bone problems, needs medication, and was scheduled to undergo an operation next week, the group said. It said several other human rights lawyers, including Abdolfattah Soltani, Kambiz Nourouzi and Mohammed Ali Dadkhah, have been detained in recent days. Friday’s crackdown came as leading cleric and former President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani called for Iranian intelligence and security forces to obey the law and to release detained protesters. Police used tear gas on demonstrators and beat and arrested at least 40 of them, taking them away in the trunks of unmarked cars, a witness told the campaign. Watch CNN’s Reza Sayah report on violence in Iran » The campaign called for the release of more than 2,000 people it said have been arrested since the contested June 12 elections that officially gave incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad a landslide victory. It also called on the United Nations and the Human Rights Council to travel to Iran to investigate.
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Because of government restrictions on international journalists, CNN is not able to confirm the report.
In a separate statement, Amnesty International said arrests in Iran of civil society activists like Shadi Sadr appear to be intensifying. “This was an illegal, arbitrary and violent arrest in which no attempt was made by the authorities to show identification or provide any explanation for their action,” said Malcolm Smart, director of Amnesty International’s Middle East and North Africa Programme.
Source:CNN