CANNES, France (AP) — Rounding up a lot of the usual suspects, the Cannes Film Festival presents a lineup from an illustrious if somewhat predictable gang of regulars, including Clint Eastwood, Steven Soderbergh, Woody Allen, Atom Egoyan and Wim Wenders.

Then there’s Steven Spielberg — who’s not quite a newcomer, since he’s been at Cannes before.

But the festival’s centerpiece, "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull," marks the director’s first trip back since the 1980s, when he showed "The Color Purple" and "E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial" here.

The new "Indiana Jones" flick opens worldwide May 22, four days after its Cannes premiere, giving the movie a similar global rollout that preceded blockbuster "E.T."

"That’s our benchmark. This is the same kind of movie in that (Cannes is) kind of the perfect launching pad, because we can bring the whole world there," said Frank Marshall, producer on the "Indiana Jones" movies.

"It’s perfectly timed for our release worldwide."

In its 61st year, the world’s most-prestigious film festival sometimes catches heat for including too many glossy Hollywood productions, such as past opening-night film "The Da Vinci Code" or action spectacles such as "Matrix Reloaded" and "X-Men: The Last Stand."

While this year’s festival, which opens Wednesday, also includes the cute and cuddly animated comedy "Kung Fu Panda," featuring the voices of Jack Black, Angelina Jolie and Dustin Hoffman, the rest of the schedule is mostly serious cinema, much of it from past Cannes luminaries.

Eastwood returns with "Changeling," a child-abduction drama starring Jolie, while Soderbergh is showing "Che," his two-part epic on revolutionary Che Guevara, featuring Benicio Del Toro.

Wenders offers "Palermo Shooting," a thriller about a photographer pursued by a mysterious gunman, and Egoyan presents "Adoration," centered on a youth who reinvents himself in cyberspace.

Also back are Belgian siblings Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, whose stark drama "L’Enfant" won the Palme d’Or, the top honor at Cannes, two years ago. This time, the Dardennes present "Lorna’s Silence," the tale of an Albanian woman caught up in an elaborate underworld crime plot in Belgium.

With international press mobbing the French Riviera resort, there is no better spotlight than Cannes for a film to gain global attention, said Harvey Weinstein, whose Weinstein Co. is premiering Allen’s romantic drama "Vicky Cristina Barcelona" with Scarlett Johansson, Javier Bardem and Penelope Cruz.

"Cannes is a grand stage," said Weinstein, whose past top prize winners at the festival include "Pulp Fiction," "Fahrenheit 9/11" and Soderbergh’s "sex, lies and videotape."

"You have the Oscars, which are American-centric, and the world-centric place is Cannes. It’s the most far-reaching, important festival in the world and creates a worldwide image for films you’re launching there."

Among other Cannes highlights: James Gray’s romance "Two Lovers," with Joaquin Phoenix, Gwyneth Paltrow and Isabella Rossellini; James Toback’s "Tyson," a documentary on the rise and fall of heavyweight boxing champ Mike Tyson; and "Synecdoche, New York," the directing debut of "Being John Malkovich" screenwriter Charlie Kaufman.

Then there’s the parties, fashion and stargazing. With a red carpet that swoops up the broad stairs of the Palais, the festival’s headquarters along the Mediterranean, Cannes puts celebrities under a glamour microscope like no other.

"It’s a carnival, it’s a spectacle. It’s fun," said David Koepp, who wrote "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" and came to Cannes twice previously as a young assistant to a film sales agent.

"There’s a lot of crazy people. What you get to see at Cannes is all the crazy, rich foreigners who want to get into Hollywood, having parties on their yachts."

The festival presents two major premieres most nights during its 12-day run, with stars preening and posing in front of an endless throng of shouting, gesticulating photographers.

Karen Allen, who reprises her "Raiders of the Lost Ark" role in a reunion with Spielberg, executive producer George Lucas and "Indiana Jones" star Harrison Ford, recalled her first trip to Cannes.

"It was one of the most surreal moments of my life, standing at the bottom of those stairs at the Palais," Allen said. "So many flashbulbs are going off, you’re blind."

The new "Indiana Jones" movie has been kept under tight wraps, with Spielberg and his collaborators playing coy on key plot points.

This much is known: The story is set in 1957, 19 years after the action of 1989’s "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade," and archaeologist-adventurer Indy is battling Cate Blanchett’s Soviet operative over ancient crystal skulls that may possess immeasurable power.

However the movie turns out, fans are happy at the return of Allen as Indy’s old flame Marion Ravenwood, whose stormy relationship with Jones promises to pick up where it left off more than two decades ago.

"It’s just like `Raiders of the Lost Ark,"’ Lucas said. "It’s like you just said, `We’ll wait 20 years, and we’ll do the reunion movie.’"

Source: CNN

written by Andrew

LONDON, England (CNN) — A picture of an overweight woman lying naked on a couch, painted by the British artist Lucian Freud, set a record Tuesday night for the most money paid for any work by a living artist.

The 1995 life-size painting — "Benefits Supervisor Sleeping" — fetched $33.6 million during bidding at Christie’s auction house in New York. The previous record was for "Hanging Heart," a painting by Jeff Koons that sold for $23.5 million, said Rik Pike, a spokesman for Christie’s.

Freud’s painting depicts Sue Tilley, a manager of a government-run job center in London, lying on her side on a worn-out couch with nothing to hide her folds of flesh.

Christie’s calls it a "bold and imposing example of the stark power of Lucian Freud’s realism," depicting "the forceful and undeniable physical presence of people and things."

Tilley, now 51, told CNN she was initially embarrassed to pose naked for the artist but soon grew comfortable in the studio — so comfortable, in fact, that she confessed to falling asleep while posing.

"I didn’t mind if he noticed," she said.

The painting challenges modern notions of beauty and elicits a reaction from everyone who sees it. That may have been precisely the aim of Freud, who told London’s Tate Gallery in 2002 that he wanted his paintings to "astonish, disturb, seduce, convince."

Though some regard the painting as shocking — ugly, even — that is also the appeal for collectors, said Michael Hall, editor of Apollo Magazine in London.

"There’s a reaction against art that’s regarded as too pretty," he said.

Hall said a more conventionally beautiful painting would not be able to fetch such a large amount.

"It’s the sort of thing that everyone immediately wants to voice an opinion about," he said of the painting. "It challenges conventional taste … and people do find that rather exciting and interesting to talk about."

Collectors may also view this as a rare chance to buy something by a prolific artist painted at the peak of his work, he said.

Freud, 85, has been described as Britain’s greatest living realist painter. He is the grandson of psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud and came to London from Germany when he was a child.

With Tilley, Freud said he was "very aware of all kinds of spectacular things to do with her size, like amazing craters and things one’s never seen before," according to the 2002 interview with the Tate. He added: "I have perhaps a predilection towards people of unusual or strange proportions, which I don’t want to over-indulge."

Freud painted the portrait of Tilley over nine months in 1995. Tilley said she posed for eight hours a day, two or three days a week.

Tilley said Freud initially paid her £20 ($31) a day for posing, and the fee later went up to £33 ($51) a day.

She had been introduced to the artist through a mutual friend, Australian performance artist Leigh Bowery, who also posed for Freud. It was Bowery’s idea for Tilley to work with Freud, so he arranged a meeting.

Tilley knew the meeting was more of an interview for the job of Freud’s muse, and she didn’t find out until later — through Bowery — that she’d gotten the job, she said.

"Lucian just said to Leigh, ‘Oh, tell Sue she can start next week," Tilley said.

Tilley still works full-time at the job center in London’s West End and calls her new-found fame "a bit bizarre." She laughs as she describes how she now has to arrange her schedule to accommodate media interviews.

She said she was excited to find out how much the painting sold for, but knowing it could set a record was "a bit scary."

"It’s hard to put your head around it, really," she said. "But it’s all good."

Source: CNN

written by Andrew

LILONGWE (Reuters) - U.S. pop diva Madonna plans to start building a multi-million-dollar girls’ school in Malawi for underprivileged children this year, her local lawyer said on Wednesday.

"A task force of four prominent Malawians has already been formed to head the project which will be on the scale of what Oprah Winfrey has in South Africa," Madonna’s lawyer Alan Chinula told Reuters.

"It is a multi-million dollar project and we will get the real costs in the next two weeks."

Billionaire U.S. television magnate Winfrey has built a $40 million all-girl leadership academy in South Africa which boasts state-of-the-art facilities including laboratories, a yoga studio and beauty salon.

Malawi’s High Court is expected to approve Madonna’s bid to adopt two-year-old Malawian David Banda on Thursday. Malawi’s government and David’s father — his only surviving parent — have endorsed the adoption.

Madonna will not attend the final court ruling on her adoption bid because she is busy with other engagements, Chinula said on Tuesday.

The adoption has been controversial, with critics accusing the government of skirting laws that ban non-residents from adopting children in Malawi, which has been ravaged by an AIDS epidemic that has produced more than one million orphans.

(Reporting by Mabvuto Banda; Editing by Jon Boyle)

Source: yahoo

written by Andrew

LOS ANGELES - Jennifer Lopez has children on her mind — and not just her infant twins with husband Marc Anthony.

The 39-year-old singer/actress/entrepreneur is also thinking about the 93,000 sick and seriously injured children treated annually by Childrens Hospital Los Angeles — and how she can help.

Lopez announced Wednesday that she’ll host and help coordinate the third Noche de Ninos benefit gala. This year’s star-studded party, to be held Oct. 11 at the Nokia Center, will feature performances by Lopez, Anthony, Alejandro Sanz and Latin rockers Juanes and Mana.

Lopez, who was Noche de Ninos’ first honoree in 2004, said her twin son and daughter inspired her to get more involved.

"Doing something where I was proactive … where I was the one pushing and making something happen, that just became very important to me," Lopez told The Associated Press. "I don’t know if it was because I was pregnant and thinking about children, thinking about the world. Definitely my children inspire me very much in so many ways, even just in the past two and a half months of their little lives."

"They inspire me to want to be better, to be a better person, to do something for the world, to set an example for them, to make them proud of me and to know that there’s a certain way that you should live," she said. "I’ve been very fortunate over the years, but I’ve also worked very hard, and that’s the example I want to set for my children."

Lopez said she was looking for ways to contribute more to the charity.

"I kind of fell in love with the kids," she said, "and it’s just magnified now that I have my own children."

Working with her sister Lynda and Noche de Ninos founder Giselle Fernandez, Lopez came up with the idea of a concert and started asking friends for help.

"They’ve been very forthcoming with their time and, in this case, their talent to make this really a one-of-a-kind concert," she said, adding that she rarely calls to ask for favors. ("I don’t ask for a glass of water when I’m on the set. It’s just not my style.")

Source: yahoo

written by Andrew

The anti-impotence drug Viagra may help save people with muscular dystrophy from an early death, a study suggests.

Researchers found the way the drug works to combat impotence may also help ward off heart failure in muscular dystrophy patients.

Tests on mice with a version of the disease showed the drug helped keep their hearts working well.

The Montreal Heart Institute study appears in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Muscular dystrophy is a genetic condition causing wasting of the muscles.

The first signs of muscular weakness appear at roughly age five, leading to a progressive loss in the ability to walk by the age of 13.

People with the condition are also at a higher risk of heart failure due to a weakening of the muscles which keep the organ pumping strongly.

For this reason, many people with Duchenne muscular dystrophy - the most common form of the condition - die in early life, often in their 20s or 30s.

Blood flow

The Montreal team found that Viagra - known technically as sildenafil - prevents the loss of a molecule, cGMP, which plays a key role in keeping blood vessels dilated.

In the penis, this increases blood flow, and helps to combat impotence.

But in the heart it helps to ensure the organ itself receives a proper supply of blood, and remains healthy and strong.

With the heart in a strong condition, it is more able to withstand the impact of weakening muscle cells caused by muscular dystrophy.

Viagra works by blocking an enzyme, PDE5, which breaks down cGMP.

Professor Jean-Claude Tardif, director of the Montreal Heart Institute Research Centre, said: "These experimental results give us hope that one day it will be possible to treat with this approach cardiac problems in patients with muscular dystrophy, and perhaps even treat other heart diseases."

The researchers also inserted a gene that increased cGMP production in the mice’s heart cells, and found that this helped the animals to maintain normal cardiac function.

Dr Marita Pohlschmidt, director of research at the Muscular Dystrophy Campaign, said the research was interesting.

However, she added: "It is important to remember that benefits seen in animals do not always translate into human medicine.

"Although this is promising, it is still very early days and we look forward to further research that will demonstrate the impact it might have for people with muscular dystrophy."

Source: BBC NEWS

written by Andrew

written by Andrew

DELHI, India (CNN) – India is on high alert after a series of near-simultaneous explosions killed at least 60 people and wounded 150 others in a top tourist spot, government and local officials told CNN-IBN.

Bicycles and rickshaws were strewn about the streets, with pools of blood nearby, in the northwestern city of Jaipur.

Motorcycles, pieces of which were found at nearly every bomb site, appear to have been used in the attacks, said Rajasthan Home Minister Gulab Chand Kataria.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility, but Indian government officials — including Minister of State for Home Affairs Shriprakash Jaiswal — were quick to label it a terrorist attack.

The eight explosions started at about 7:30 p.m. (1400 GMT) and detonated within 12 minutes of each other, police said.

The bombs exploded within about 500 meters (0.3 mile) of each other in Jaipur’s old city, which is frequented by tourists.

An ninth bomb was defused, according to H.G. Raghavendra, a Jaipur city official. He described all the bombs as "medium intensity."

"There is no reason to panic," he told CNN-IBN. "Everything is under control."

One blast struck near Hanuman Temple, which was crowded with Hindus worshipping Hanuman, the religion’s monkey god.

Another struck near a market area inside Jaipur’s walled city where tourists and locals frequent restaurants and shops.

Jaipur, known as the "pink city," is about 260 kilometers (160 miles) southwest of India’s capital, New Delhi.

Many of the casualties were taken to SMS Hospital, the largest government hospital in Jaipur.

People gathered outside the hospital to hear news about friends and relatives; the hospital issued an urgent appeal for blood donations.

The state of Rajasthan, where Jaipur is located, was placed on alert, local officials said. Delhi police officials said they too were on high alert after the blasts and were receiving regular updates from Jaipur on developments in the investigation.

The Deputy Chief Minister for the state of Maharashtra, R.R. Patil, said the entire state was also on high alert. Mumbai is in the state of Maharashtra.

The attack was immediately condemned by the United States. U.S. State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said the attacks were "quite clearly an act intended to take innocent lives."

He told reporters at his daily briefing that Washington was still collecting information, and could not "offer insight into who may be responsible."

According to the U.S. State Department, India ranks among the countries where terrorism is most common.

"The conflict in Jammu and Kashmir, attacks by extreme leftist Naxalites and Maoists in eastern and central India, assaults by ethno-linguistic nationalists in the northeastern states, and terrorist strikes nationwide by Islamic extremists took more than 2,300 lives this year," the agency said.

It said India’s counterterrorism efforts "are hampered by outdated and overburdened law enforcement and legal systems," and described the country’s court system as "slow, laborious, and prone to corruption."

Source: CNN

written by Andrew

MADRID, Spain (CNN) — A car bomb explosion at a civil guard barracks in northern Spain killed a guard member and wounded four others Wednesday, a Basque regional police spokeswoman told CNN.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility, but authorities blamed the Basque separatist group ETA, said the spokeswoman.

No warning preceded the blast around 3 a.m. local time in Legutiano, a town in the Basque region of Spain, the spokeswoman said.

The wounded paramilitary guards included two men and two women.

Parliamentary leaders in Madrid were to meet later Wednesday to issue a statement of condemnation.

We want to make it clear to the ETA terrorist group that all of the democratic parties are closing ranks to finish off the ETA terrorist group. I express my condolences to the families of the victims," Jose Antonio Alonso, the Socialist majority leader in Parliament, told Spanish radio network SER.

The guardsman who died — a 41-year-old married father — was the sixth person to die as a result of ETA violence since the group ended a unilateral cease-fire with a bombing that killed two people at Madrid’s airport in December 2006, according to authorities.

ETA is blamed for more than 800 deaths since beginning its fight for Basque independence in 1968. The U.S. and EU list ETA as a terrorist organization.

Source: CNN

written by Andrew

VIENNA, Austria (AP) — Investigators discovered the bodies of five people Wednesday after a man turned up at a Vienna police station and calmly explained that he had killed his family to spare them the shame of his financial ruin, authorities said.

Police officers found the bodies of the man’s wife and 7-year-old daughter in his home in an affluent part of the Austrian capital and determined both had been killed with an ax, police said.

The daughter’s body was found in a walk-in closet, they said.

Authorities also discovered the bodies of his parents and father-in-law in Upper Austria province, in the cities of Ansfelden and Linz.

Investigators told reporters in Vienna that the man turned himself in early Wednesday morning and told police what had happened.

The man, identified only as a 39-year-old public relations consultant, said he wanted to spare his family the shame of financial ruin he caused through speculative financial dealings, criminal investigator Thomas Stecher said. His wife worked in the Finance Ministry.

Police said the man told them he began by killing his 42-year-old wife and daughter early Tuesday morning, before driving to Ansfelden where he beat his parents — ages 72 and 69 — to death.

He said he then drove to Linz, where he murdered his 80-year-old father-in-law in the early evening, according to police.

The man is currently undergoing further questioning in Vienna.

“He is completely matter of fact … without emotion,” Stecher said.

Police said they are awaiting autopsy results to determine exactly how the victims died, adding that the ax the man used is currently being examined.

The man could face a life sentence if convicted, said Gerhard Jarosch, spokesman for the Vienna public prosecutor’s office.

Source: CNN

written by Andrew

WASHINGTON (AP) – New research shows exercise during the teen years — starting as young as age 12 — can help protect girls from breast cancer when they are grown.

Middle-aged women have long been advised to get active to lower their risk of breast cancer after menopause.

What’s new: That starting so young pays off, too.

"This really points to the benefit of sustained physical activity from adolescence through the adult years, to get the maximum benefit," said Dr. Graham Colditz of Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, the study’s lead author.

Researchers tracked nearly 65,000 nurses ages 24 to 42 who enrolled in a major health study. They answered detailed questionnaires about their physical activity dating back to age 12. Within six years of enrolling, 550 were found to have breast cancer before menopause. A quarter of all breast cancer is diagnosed at these younger ages, when it is typically more aggressive.

Women who were physically active as teens and young adults were 23 percent less likely to develop premenopausal breast cancer than women who grew up sedentary, researchers report Wednesday in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.

The biggest impact was regular exercise from ages 12 to 22.

"This is not the extreme athlete," Colditz cautioned.

The women at lowest risk reported doing 3 hours and 15 minutes of running or other vigorous activity a week — or, for the less athletic, 13 hours a week of walking. Typically, the teens reported more strenuous exercise while during adulthood, walking was most common.

Why would it help? A big point of exercise in middle age and beyond is to keep off the pounds. After menopause, fat tissue is a chief source of estrogen.

In youth, however, the theory is that physical activity itself lowers estrogen levels. Studies of teen athletes show that very intense exercise can delay onset of menstrual cycles and cause irregular periods.

The moderate exercise reported in this study was nowhere near enough for those big changes. But it probably was enough to cause slight yet still helpful hormone changes, said Dr. Alpa Patel, a cancer prevention specialist at the American Cancer Society, who praised the new research.

And while the study examined only premenopausal breast cancer, "it’s certainly likely and possible" that the protection from youthful exercise will last long enough to affect more common postmenopausal breast cancer, too, Colditz added.

If you were a bookworm as a teen, it’s not too late, Patel said. Other research on the middle-age benefits of exercise shows mom should join her daughters for that bike ride or game of tennis or at least a daily walk around the block.

Many breast cancer risks a woman cannot change: How early she starts menstruating, how late menopause hits, family history of the disease.

Even though the exercise benefit is modest, physical activity and body weight are risk factors that women can control, Patel stressed.

"I’d say you and your daughter are getting off the couch," she said. "Women who engage in physical activity not only during adolescence but during adulthood lower their risk."

Source: CNN

written by Andrew