- Comic book adaptations are cinematic gold for Hollywood at this point and a solid opening weekend for Thor continued that trend as the action epic garnered $66 million to top the box office race and more than double up its nearest competitor. While it didn’t match the feat of that film, Fast Five, in earning more in its debut last weekend than the rest of the top 10 movies earned combined, the solid start went a long way toward justifying Thor’s whopping $150 million budget. As for Fast Five, it fell off 62 percent but still made $32.5 million to place second and raise its cumulative total to $139.8 million and counting after just two weeks. The first newcomer of the top 10 was Jumping the Broom, a wedding-themed “comedy” largely lacking in humor that still managed to make $13.7 million in its debut weekend. Fellow newcomer Something Borrowed registered a fourth-place finish with $13.2 million, essentially on par with expectations for the film. Rio slid from second place to fifth in its fourth weekend of release despite a 44 percent drop, adding $8.3 million to its coffers to make its four-week total a robust $114.9 million. As for the rest of the top 10, it consisted of: Water for Elephants (No. 6 with $5.6 million and $41.6 million for three weeks of release), Tyler Perry’s Madea’s Big Happy Family (No. 7 and justifiably plummeting in its third week with $3.9 million for a $46.8 million cumulative total), Prom (living down to expectations at No. 8 with a scant $2.5 million and just $7.9 million through two weeks), Soul Surfer (exceeding expectations by still hanging around at No. 9 after five weeks and adding $2.1 million to raise its running tally to $36.7 million) and Hoodwinked Too! Hood vs. Evil (No. 10 with $1.9 million and an abject failure through two weeks with an awful $6.7 million). Dropping out of last week’s top 10 were Insidious (No. 11) and Source Code (No. 12)………….
- America’s biggest property owner is in a deep hole right now. The bills are piling up, debts are mounting and expenses are soaring. What’s a property owner to do when in this sort of financial pinch? Liquidate assets, of course. That the property owner in question is the federal government makes little difference. Whether it was a wealthy billionaire or the monstrously oversized bureaucracy charged with leading the country, massive debts plus unused assets equals a need to sell. And so, the government is now looking to sell a significant chunk of its real estate portfolio. The Obama administration has compiled a list of 14,000 buildings that agencies can afford to lose along with a new plan on Wednesday that will help move the process along. To help facilitate the massive effort, proposed legislation has been set forth to create a Civilian Property Realignment Board, an independent commission based on the similar panel that was used to close military bases. That group would then recommend buildings to close or demolish and if the plan goes the opposite direction that most government plans do - i.e. actually working - it would save taxpayers will an estimated $15 billion over the next three years. At present, government agencies must meet 20 requirements before unloading property and the process is supervised by the Office of Management and Budget. One truly bizarre condition currently included in the sale process is first offering up unused structures as housing for the homeless, said OMB Deputy Director Jeffrey Zients. That sort of bureaucratic red tape, the typical resistance to any decision on any subject in a political environment and the budget crisis gripping the nation and making everyone’s primary focus surviving in the short term have combined to create an environment where waste via property inertia is a given. In other words, if the government owns a building, it’s going to take an immense and supernatural force to dislodge it from the government’s grip. "For too long, the American people's hard-earned tax dollars have gone to waste," Zients said. "It's simply unacceptable." As part of the process of unloading the thousands of unwanted properties, the government on Wednesday released a map with a partial list of properties that are on the auction block. The properties cover a wide range of real estate options, from office buildings to vacant land. Some of the buildings have so little value that they will simply be destroyed and the government will save millions of dollars on operating costs. The administration estimates that at least $15 billion can be saved by the end of next year if Congress approves the legislation. Zients said 60 percent of the savings would be used to reduce the federal deficit, while the other 40 percent would be used to finance additional property sales. If only this blatantly obvious problem had been realized sooner…………
- Really, Iran? Really? Oppressing your own people isn't enough, now you have to offer your oppression services to other nations seeking to quash uprisings of their own? According to western diplomatic sources in Damascus, that’s exactly what Iranian dictator Mahmoud Ahmadinejad are up to these days. The sources claim Iran is playing an increasingly active role in helping the Syrian regime crack down on pro-democracy protesters in their quest to oust President Bashar al-Assad from power. Syrian forces backed by tanks engaged anti-government groups over the weekend, but it was the notion that Iran is advising al-Assad's government on how to crush dissent that raised more eyebrows. Dissent within Syria is at heightened levels, as evidenced by tanks rolling through three new flashpoint towns on Sunday and confirmation that four women had been shot dead in the first use of force against an all-female demonstration. Senior U.S. officials have noted a "significant" increase in the number of Iranian personnel in the country since protests began in mid-March, during which time door-to-door raids have been carried out and led to multiple arrests of opposition members. The tactic is eerily similar to those used to quash Iran's "green revolution" in 2009. Human rights groups estimate more than 7,000 people have been detained in total since the uprising began and 800 others are said to have died, up to 50 of them during last Friday's "day of defiance.” Iran has interjected itself into someone else’s business because it is concerned about losing its most important ally in the Arab world and a valuable conduit for weapons to Hezbollah in Lebanon. Similar allegations against Iran were lodged last month by senior White House officials, who accused Iran of complicity in intercepting or blocking internet, mobile phone and social media communications between the protesters and with the outside world. For the record, Syria has denied seeking or receiving assistance from Iran to crush the uprising. In fact, Iran is the only party to officially weigh in on the subject, issuing a statement Friday through its foreign ministry stressing Syria's "prime role" in opposing Israel and the U.S. because American policy towards Syria was based on "opportunism in support of the Zionist regime's avarice.” The Sunni-Shiite dynamic is also in play, as Syria’s population is 75 percent Sunni and any help from a heavily Shiite nation (Iran) could cause further anti-government sentiment. Arbitrary arrests and unnecessary shootings can also have that effect, of course. Shooting and killing four women at a demonstration in the village of Merqeb is another guaranteed means of infuriating the populace, and that occurred Sunday as well. Rage and indignation are not in short supply for protestors, but they are being hampered by the lack of a national leader and organization. Assad has labeled them part of a foreign conspiracy to cause sectarian strife, plotted by "armed terrorist groups,” which seems a bit over the top. In truth, it is difficult to know exactly what is going on in Syria on a daily basis and who is winning in the conflict because the government has banned nearly all foreign media. The true picture is probably even uglier than anyone could imagine at this point……….
- For anyone shocked by allegations from six NFL agents that some teams are ignoring the league's mandate banning them from contacting undrafted rookies following the NFL Draft on the weekend of April 28, here’s a bit of advice: Wake the heck up. For the non-diehard NFL fan, the issue is simple to explain. Following the draft each April, teams scramble to sign players who went undrafted and these players often have a significant impact on their new team. With the league in the midst of an ugly lockout, however, teams aren't allowed to contact these undrafted rookies. As much as that hurts teams, the true victims are the undrafted rookies, who are now left to work out on their own, with no football income and unlike their football brethren who have a team, they have no teammates to rely upon. Six agents representing an unspecified number of those undrafted rookies told Pro Football Weekly that teams contacted them about their clients, actions NFL spokesman Greg Aiello said would be considered tampering. Teams cannot talk to any players, signed or unsigned, for any reason for as long as the lockout continues. The scene following the draft is typically described as a feeding frenzy amongst teams seeking quality rookies who somehow managed to slip through the cracks during the draft. One agent who spoke to Pro Football Weekly went so far as to say the days following the draft were almost like a normal, non-lockout year. The best part of the story, however, is three of the agents in question claiming team representatives contacted them from personal cell phones so the records would be harder to trace if the NFL decides to audit teams' phone records in any tampering investigation. What, no calls from pay phones at rest stops along the turnpike? Why not buy some of those wacky fake glasses with the big, plastic nose and bushy eyebrows to disguise yourself and then leave a coded message taped under the lid of a trash can in a local park for the agent to find? Morse code and smoke signals are also hard for the league to trace in a potential tampering investigation, so those could also be viable options. In the meantime, the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals in St. Louis will hear oral arguments June 3 on the NFL's request to keep its lockout in place until a new deal is worked out. Before then, judges Duane Benton, Kermit Bye and Steven Colloton will rule on whether to maintain the temporary stay they issued last Friday. No decision is expected soon, so teams may want to brush up on their covert communication techniques if they’re going to continue cheating while the lockout is in place. Personally, I’ll be training some messenger birds just in case any NFL team decides to go that route and wants to throw some business my way…………
- Dangers for becoming FAT are all around us, especially if that “us” happens to reside in the United States. With so many threats lurking every day and around every corner, what’s a person to do? There is no easy answer, but parents of infants and toddlers now have one more area to focus on when it comes to preventing their child from becoming America’s next obese adult: the baby bottle. A new study suggests that parents who still give their child with a bottle of milk when they're 2 years old may be steering them toward obesity by the time they're in kindergarten. Researchers at Temple University in Philadelphia analyzed data from 6,750 Ohio participants in the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Birth Cohort, all born in 2001. Dr. Robert Whitaker and Rachel Gooze of Temple's Center for Obesity Research and Education in Philadelphia worked with Sarah Anderson, an epidemiologist at the Ohio State University College of Public Health, to examine the data and come up with recommendations on how to address the problem. They recommended that weaning them at the appropriate time might help reduce elevated obesity rates among U.S., with most experts agreeing that appropriate time is by the age of 12 to 14 months. In ripping the bottle from children, parents should instead address their underlying hunger and nutritional needs, Whitaker and Gooze suggested. Additionally, they recommended that pediatricians begin advising patients of the suggested new timeline for weaning children off their bottles. The reason bottles are so harmful to a child’s chances to maintain a healthy weight as they grow is that an 8-ounce bottle of whole milk contains 150 calories, or 12 percent of a healthy 2-year-old's daily dietary needs, the study’s authors wrote. Shoving an extra bottle into junior’s hands to quiet him when he’s hungry and fussy stacks up the calories quickly and a FAT child is too often the result. In the study, 22 percent of children till used a bottle for drinking or took a bottle to bed by the age of two and when they were measured at age 5 1/2, almost 23 percent of the prolonged bottle users were obese, compared with just 16.1 percent of children weaned at a younger age, with obesity defined as being in the 95th percentile or higher for height and weight among children of the same sex. Even after Whitaker and his fellow researchers accounted for factors such as participants’ mother's weight, the child's birth weight, whether the child was breastfed, the age at which the child began eating solid food, and how much time the child spent in front of television or computer screens, the difference remained. Adding it all up, upsetting a child by refusing to cave in and give him or her a bottle doesn’t seem like such a bad option…………
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