King's sequel novel to The Shining, Doctor Sleep

King's sequel novel to The Shining...Doctor Sleep... ..out in 2013

 

Jack Nicholson played Jack Torrance in Stanley Kubrick's film of The Shining

 

Stephen King's sequel to his horror novel The Shining is to be released on 24 September 2013, 36 years after the original was published. Doctor Sleep will follow Danny Torrance, the young boy who survived the horrific events of The Shining.

According to King's official website, Dan meets a "very special 12-year-old girl" who he must "save from a tribe of murderous paranormals". Now a middle-aged man and aided by a prescient cat, he becomes Doctor Sleep.

One of King's most loved works, The Shining was adapted into a 1980 film produced and directed by Stanley Kubrick. As in the book, the movie followed the Torrance family as they move to the Overlook Hotel in the Colorado mountains. Jack, a writer, takes a job as a hotel caretaker for a year but becomes possessed by the evil spirits in the building and attacks his family. The young Danny, who has psychic abilities, eventually manages to escape with his mother Wendy.
Doctor Sleep returns to the "characters and territory" of The Shining. The book takes up the story of Dan who has been "drifting for decades, desperate to shed his father's legacy of despair, alcoholism, and violence". The book opens with him settling in a New Hampshire town and taking a job at a nursing home where his "shining" power helps him comfort the dying.

Known by the local people as "Doctor Sleep", Dan comes into contact with Abra Stone, a 12-year-old who has "the brightest shining ever seen". Hodder and Stoughton said the story was "an epic war between good and evil" that would "thrill the millions of hyper-devoted readers of The Shining".

Fans posting on the official King website expressed excitement at the news of the follow-up, with one writing that he "can't wait to be scared all over again".

Actress Cindy Lee Garcia sues over Innocence of Muslims

 

 

Nakoula Basseley Nakoula has gone into hiding since his name was linked with the film

 

A US actress who appeared in an amateur anti-Islam video that sparked protests across the Muslim world is suing the film's suspected director. Cindy Lee Garcia accused Nakoula Basseley Nakoula of duping her into a "hateful" film that she was led to believe was a desert adventure movie.

She is also asking a judge to order YouTube to remove the film.

A clip dubbed into Arabic provoked widespread anger for its mocking portrayal of the Prophet Muhammad. The film, Innocence of Muslims, which was made in the United States, has sparked protests across the Middle East, North Africa and as far away as Sri Lanka, with some demonstrations turning into destructive and violent riots. Four Americans, including Ambassador Chris Stephens, were killed during an attack on the US consulate in Benghazi, Libya.

According to Ms Garcia, the script she received had made no mention of the Prophet Muhammad or made references to religion. She claims she has received death threats since the video was posted to YouTube, and says the changes in dialogue during post-production cast her in a false light. Association with the film has harmed her reputation.

In a court filing lodged with Los Angeles Superior Court on Wednesday, Ms Garcia alleged fraud, slander and intentional infliction of emotional distress.

 

 

"[Garcia] had a legally protected interest in her privacy and the right to be free from having hateful words put in her mouth or being depicted as a bigot," the lawsuit says. "There was no mention of 'Mohammed' during filming or on set. There were no references made to religion nor was there any sexual content of which Ms Garcia was aware," it adds.

Mr Bakoula denies being "Sam Bacile", a pseudonym used by the person who posted the video online. He has gone into hiding after telling US media he was the manager of a company that helped produce the film, but US officials believe him to be the director.

Mr Bakoula was convicted of fraud in 2010 and ordered to pay more than $790,000 in restitution. He was released in June 2011 with the provision that he did not access the internet or use any aliases without permission. Authorities questioned him last week over whether he had violated any of those conditions.

YouTube has so far refused Ms Garcia's requests to remove the film, according to the lawsuit, although it has blocked it in Saudi Arabia, Libya and Egypt.

"This lawsuit is not an attack on the First Amendment nor on the right of Americans to say what they think, but does request that the offending content be removed from the Internet," the complaint states.

Google, which owns YouTube, has blocked the film in Saudi Arabia, Libya and Egypt. A spokesman for YouTube said they were reviewing the complaint and would be in court on Thursday.

 

 

  

 

  



Arctic Ice Record Low

  

 
* Weather impact expected in U.S. and elsewhere
* Environmentalists, advocates call for policy change
By Deborah Zabarenko

WASHINGTON, Sept 19 (Reuters) - Arctic sea ice, a key indicator of climate change, melted to its lowest level on record this year before beginning its autumnal freeze, researchers at the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center said on Wednesday.

The extent of ice probably hit its low point on Sept. 16, when it covered 1.32 million square miles (3.42 million square km) of the Arctic Ocean, the smallest amount since satellite records began 33 years ago. Changing weather conditions could further shrink the extent, the center said. A final analysis is expected next month.

 

The record was broken on Aug. 26, when the ice shrank below the record set in 2007. After that, it kept melting for three more weeks, bringing the ice extent -  to nearly half of the 1979-2000 average.

"We are now in uncharted territory," Mark Serreze, the center's director, said in a statement. "While we've long known that as the planet warms up, changes would be seen first and be most pronounced in the Arctic, few of us were prepared for how rapidly the changes would actually occur."

 

The summer ice isn't just dwindling. It is also thin, relatively fragile seasonal ice instead of the hardier multi-year ice that can better withstand bright sunlight.

"The strong late-season decline is indicative of how thin the ice cover is," said NSIDC's Walt Meier. "Ice has to be quite thin to continue melting away as the sun goes down and fall approaches."

The Arctic is a potent weather-maker for the temperate zone, and is sometimes dubbed Earth's air conditioner for its cooling effects. However, as ice wanes and temperatures rise in the far north, the Arctic could add more heat and moisture to the climate system.

MORE EXTREME WEATHER?

"What happens in the Arctic doesn't stay in the Arctic," said Dan Lashof, a climate scientist at the nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council. "This has a real impact on Americans where they live and work."

 

Melting Arctic ice changes the shape and position of the jetstream, allowing tropical air to penetrate further north and Arctic air to penetrate further south, Lashof said in a telephone interview, leading to more extreme weather.

"That is a truly staggering rate of melting, far beyond what scientists thought would happen a few years ago," Bob Ward of the London School of Economics and Political Science said in a statement. "Policy-makers need to wake up to the scale and pace of the impacts from climate change."

 

Recent climate models suggest the Arctic could be free of ice before 2050. But the observed rate of melting is faster than what is shown in many of the models, according to NSIDC scientist Julienne Stroeve. Both the Northwest Passage along Canada's coast and the Northern Sea Route along Russia were open to traffic this summer, and investors gathered in Alaska last month to discuss commercial and transportation opportunities for the Arctic.

 

The environmental group Greenpeace International took issue with that approach.

"Rather than dealing with the root causes of climate change, the current response from our leaders is to watch the ice melt and then divide up the spoils," the group's executive director, Kumi Naidoo said in a statement.

 



Incredible Roman mosaic unearthed in Turkey

Archaeologists from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln have discovered what they believe is the largest Roman mosaic ever found inTurkey.

 

 

 

 

“It’s believed to be the biggest mosaic of its type and demonstrates the reach and cultural influence of the Roman Empire in the area in the third and fourth centuries CE,” said Prof Michael Hoff, the director of the excavation.

“This is very possibly the largest Roman mosaic found in the region,” Prof Hoff said. “And its large size also signals, in no small part, that the outward signs of the Roman Empire were, in fact, very strong in this far-flung area of the Empire.”

 

Since 2005, Prof Hoff’s team has been excavating the remains of the ancient city of Antiochia ad Cragum on the southern Turkish coast. Antiochus of Commagene, a client-king of Rome, founded the ancient city in the middle of the first century.

“The mosaic is a quintessential Roman artistic element. This hammers home how Roman this city truly is,” Prof Hoff said. “We always thought this was a peripheral Roman city, but it’s becoming more and more clear that it’s weighted more on the Roman side than the native side. The mosaic really emphasizes the pure Roman nature of this city and should answer a lot of questions regarding the interaction between the indigenous locals and the Roman Empire.”

 

“Antiochia ad Cragum was a modest city by Roman standards and outfitted with many of the typical trappings one would expect from a Roman provincial city – temples, baths, markets and colonnaded streets,” Prof Hoff said. “The city thrived during the Empire from an economy that focused on agricultural products, especially wine and lumber.”

 

Excavation work has focused on a third-century temple dedicated to the Roman imperial cult, and also a colonnaded street lined with commercial shops. In July, the team began to explore the mosaic, which was part of a Roman bath. The decoration consists of large squares, each filled with different colored geometric designs and ornamentation.

“This would have been a very formal associated pavement attached to the bath,” Prof Hoff said. “This is a gorgeous mosaic, and the size of it is unprecedented” – so large, in fact, that work crews have uncovered only an estimated 40 percent of its total area.

“It appears the mosaic served as a forecourt for the adjacent large bath, and that at least on one side, evidence shows there was a roof covering the geometric squares that would have been supported by piers. Those piers’ remains are preserved,” he said.

“Meanwhile, the middle of the mosaic was outfitted with a marble-lined, 25-foot-long pool, which would have been uncovered and open to the Sun. The other half of the mosaic, adjacent to the bath, has yet to be revealed but is expected to contain the same type of decoration,” Hoff said.

Crews expect to unearth the entire work next summer. “It should be pretty extraordinary,” Prof Hoff concluded.

Crater full of diamonds in Russia

‘Trillions of carats’ lie below a 35-million-year-old, 62-mile-diameter asteroid crater in eastern Siberia known as Popigai Astroblem. The Russians have known about the site since the 1970s.

Russia has just declassified news that will shake world gem markets to their core: the discovery of a vast new diamond field containing “trillions of carats,” enough to supply global markets for another 3,000 years. The Soviets discovered the bonanza back in the 1970s beneath a 35-million-year-old, 62-mile diameter asteroid crater in eastern Siberia known as Popigai Astroblem.

They decided to keep it secret, and not to exploit it, apparently because the USSR‘s huge diamond operations at Mirny, in Yakutia, were already producing immense profits in what was then a tightly controlled world market. The Soviets were also producing a range of artificial diamonds for industry, into which they had invested heavily.
The veil of secrecy was finally lifted over the weekend, and Moscow permitted scientists from the nearby Novosibirsk Institute of Geology and Mineralogy to talk about it with Russian journalists.

Ancient text reveals Jesus may have been Married

  

 

A Harvard professor has identified what appears to be a scrap of fourth century Egyptian papyrus that contains the first known explicit reference to Jesus as married, a discovery that could fuel the millennia-old debate about priestly celibacy in the Catholic church.

The fragment, which has been preliminarily authenticated but still must undergo further testing, portrays Jesus as referring to a woman as his legitimate disciple -- most likely his wife, whom the text's author probably believed to be Mary Magdalene.

The text is not evidence Jesus was married, said the professor, Karen L. King, a historian of early Christianity at Harvard Divinity School, who is scheduled to discuss her discovery at an international gathering of Coptic scholars in Rome on Tuesday. But she said it may cast new light on the history of early Christianity, including the formation of Christian views of celibacy and whether women were members of Jesus's inner circle, issues still intensely relevant to the Catholic church, which allows only celibate men to be priests.

"The issue has far from gone away," King said.

The fragment is smaller than a business card, and appears to have been torn from the middle of a page of a codex, or primitive book, written in a southern Egyptian dialect. Its owner, who declines to be identified publicly, does not know where it was found.

It contains just eight broken lines, scrawled in a crude Coptic hand.

The fourth says: "... Jesus said to them, 'My wife...."

The next line reads: "...she will be able to be my disciple."

The text does not prove that Jesus had a wife, King emphasized. Even if it is actually a translation of a second century Greek text, as King theorizes, it would have been composed more than a century after the death of Jesus. The earliest and most reliable information about the historical Jesus is silent on the question of his marital status, King said.

"It's not saying we've got the smoking gun that Jesus is married," she said.

But the fragment -- which King provocatively calls "The Gospel of Jesus's wife" -- does show that some early Christians believed Jesus was married, probably to Mary Magdalene, a follower of Jesus who the gospels say was the first person to see him after his resurrection .

Why So Much Anger ?...A controversial Film Just a Trigger ?

 The Arab Spring is not an adequate explanation for this upswell of anger

Nakoula Basseley Nakoula -- who produced the low-budget movie -- is seen here with Anna Gurji, one of the actresses in the film. The photo was shot this year, during production.
 

More than three years ago, President Obama famously told a Cairo audience that "we meet at a time of great tension between the United States and Muslims around the world". His speech, titled A New Beginning, sought to transcend the acrimony of the Bush era.

This week, as violent protests rage across the Middle East and beyond, the president might ask himself: What went wrong? The truth is that there is no single explanation.One answer is that last year's wave of political uprisings, the so-called Arab Spring, is responsible.

After all, protests began in Egypt, which last year became the most populous Arab democracy, and spread to Libya, which became the largest by area. The Arab Spring did indeed invigorate a range of Islamist movements and weakened the law enforcement capabilities of the affected states.

In that febrile political environment, protests might have been easier to start, simpler for violent extremists to exploit, and harder for confused security forces to manage. The second argument is that we are witnessing profound anti-Americanism, dormant for much of last year, fused with religious extremism - with the controversial 'Innocence of Muslims' film merely a trigger.

According to a June 2012 Pew survey, just 15% of those in Muslim countries held a favourable opinion of the United States, compared to 25% in 2009. Polls indicate that anti-Americanism stems from a variety of grievances, including US policy towards the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, American wars in the Middle East, and US backing for friendly dictators.

The irony is that, whereas President Obama is sometimes pilloried by critics in the West for naively supporting the revolutions, most Arabs see his actions as too late and too little. In Tunisia, for instance, only a third believe that the US response to their revolution had a positive impact. We should, however, distinguish anti-Americanism from religious extremism.

Although Arab ideas about freedom of expression are fundamentally different from Western ones - (84% of Egyptians want the death penalty for those who leave the Muslim religion) - there are big generational gaps. Those under 35 - the generation widely held up as the engine of the Arab Spring - are far less likely to pray several times a day, attend the mosque regularly, or read the Koran daily. They are being catalysed less by religion, and more by politics.

 

Anti-Americanism is not universal.

Despite the widespread xenophobia evident in Egypt, 35% of Egyptians actually want Egypt-US relations to remain as strong as they were before the revolution, and a surprisingly high 20% want them to get even better. Sixty percent of Tunisians say that they like American ideas about democracy.
A Gallup poll this year showed that 54% of Libyans approve of American leadership, near the highest approval ever seen in the region. Indeed, Libya has seen a series of protests supportive of the US, and against the attack on the US consulate in Benghazi.

Perhaps the most important fact is that the crowds ransacking embassies this week are negligibly small when compared to the popular mobilizations that swept away dictators. Even where it is widespread, anti-Americanism is simply not a sufficient explanation for outbreaks of violence. In many cases, protests might have had little energy if local religious and political entrepreneurs, eager to bolster their following and create disorder, had not exploited them. In Khartoum, for instance, local buses were offered free to transport prayer-goers to protest sites.

 The assault in which US Ambassador Chris Stevens died was not a protest but probably a co-ordinated, complex undertaking by an organized militant group, perhaps in concert with al-Qaeda's North African affiliate. It does not represent the broader Libyan opinion of America. This wave of violence will have longer-term repercussions. The US has no legal mechanism to censor the provocative film and, with eight weeks to go before a national election, President Obama will be careful not to appear unduly willing to appease mob violence.

In Egypt, American faith in President Mohammed Mursi has been badly shaken. Despite Egypt's continued military and financial dependence on Washington, Mr Mursi hesitated in condemning the protests. President Obama's admission that "I don't think that we would consider [Egypt] an ally, but we don't consider them an enemy" highlights how the political sands are shifting.

There will now be new pressures for the US to disengage from the Middle East, revert to fortress-style embassies, and accelerate the refocusing of American attention to Asia. Some will argue that Mr Obama's efforts to temper anti-Americanism were exercises in naivety; others that he went nowhere near far enough.  Either way, the irony is that fragile post-revolutionary governments are in need of assistance to build institutions and their own  populations are making that task harder.