'Angel' Star Andy Hallett dead

'Angel' Star Andy Hallett Dies at 33.

Andy Hallett, the actor who portrayed the cheerful green-skinned demon Lorne on the TV series 'Angel,' has died from heart failure following a five-year battle against heart disease, according to E! Online. His friend and agent Pat Brady confirmed that the actor passed away at the age of 33 on Sunday night at Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles with his father Dave Hallett by his side.

The actor and musician appeared in more than 70 episodes of Joss Whedon's series 'Angel' between 2000 and 2004 and contributed two songs to the 'Angel: Live Fast, Die Never' soundtrack, released in 2005.

Andy Hallett was born 4 August 1975 in the tiny Cape Cod village of Osterville, part of the town of Barnstable. He attended Barnstable High School and then Assumption College in Worcester. Always shy, he didn't begin singing until Patti LaBelle invited him onstage at a concert. After moving to Los Angeles he worked as a runner for an agency and then as a property manager and personal assistant. When "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" (1997) creator Joss Whedon saw Hallett singing in a Universal City blues revue, Whedon conceived the character of The Host, an anagogic demon who reads people when they open up through singing karaoke. Hallett was invited to try out and got the part, his first job ever as an actor.

Gremlins

A gremlin is an English folkloric creature, commonly depicted as mischievous and mechanically oriented, with a specific interest in aircraft.

The word "gremlin" originated in Royal Air Force (RAF) aviators' slang in Malta, the Middle East and India, with the earliest recorded printed use being in a poem published in the journal Aeroplane, in Malta on April 10, 1929.

The concept of gremlins responsible for sabotaging aircraft was popularised during World War II among airmen of the UK's RAF, in particular the men of the high-altitude Photographic Reconnaissance Units. The creatures were responsible for otherwise inexplicable accidents which sometimes occurred during their flights.

Gremlins were also thought at one point to have enemy sympathies, but investigations revealed that enemy planes had similar and equally inexplicable mechanical problems. As such, gremlins were portrayed as being equal opportunity tricksters, taking no sides in the conflict, and acting out their mischief from their own self-interests.

In reality, the gremlins were a form of "buck passing" or deflecting blame. This led the folklorist John Hazen to note, "Heretofore, the gremlin has been looked on as new phenomenon, a product of the machine age — the age of air."

Author Roald Dahl is credited with getting the gremlins known outside of the air force. In January, 1942 he was transferred to Washington, D.C. as Assistant Air attaché. There he eventually authored his novel The Gremlins, in which he described male gremlins as "widgets" and females as "fifinellas". Dahl showed the finished manuscript to Sidney Bernstein, the head of the British Information Service. Sidney reportedly came up with the idea to send it to Walt Disney.

Thanks mainly to Disney, the story had its share of publicity which helped in introducing the concept to a wider audience.

A famous example of the more modern gremlins is the 1984 movie Gremlins and its 1990 sequel Gremlins 2: The New Batch. The gremlins in these movies had nothing obvious to do with aircraft in particular, although they were portrayed as adept at subverting or sabotaging mechanical systems; more explicit connections between the films' Gremlins and those of folklore were drawn in the novelizations however.

Strangely, the gremlins in these movies look nothing like the ones of folkloric mythology as they appear as monsters with large ears that are similar to a bat's, sharp teeth and claws, red eyes, and dark reptilian skin; however they are very mischievous.

42-piece dinner set made from cocaine

BARCELONA, Spain, March 20 -- Authorities in Spain said they have seized a 42-piece dinner set made from 45 pounds (20 kg) of cocaine and arrested the intended recipient.

It was an entire 42-piece crockery set, with plates, bowls, cups and saucers fit to honour any group of diners – especially if they had a serious drug habit.

Police said a 35-year-old Spanish man, identified only as JVLL, was arrested and charged with an offense against public health after police seized the package in an international operation coordinated with Venezuela, where the package originated, The Times of London reported Friday.

Investigators said they believe JVLL was forced into the deal by Venezuelan drug lords. The cocaine was intercepted after a tip-off about a suspicious package that had been sent by recorded delivery last month from Maracaibo. Police said that the drugs were meant to have been reprocessed and sold in Catalonia, northeast Spain.

Two weeks ago Spanish police arrested a Chilean man aged 66 with a broken leg whose “plaster cast” was made with cocaine. The man, who was arrested at Barcelona airport, also carried six cans of beer and two hollowed-out stools that contained the drug. Altogether, he was in possession of 4.85kg of cocaine.

Bin Laden urges Somalis to topple new president

Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden urged Somalis in a new audio tape today to topple the new President, Sheikh Sharif Ahmed.

"The war which has been taking place on your soil these past years is a war between Islam and the international crusade," bin Laden said, according to the group's own English translation of the tape.

"These sorts of presidents are the surrogates of our enemies and their authority is null and void in the first place, and as Sheikh Sharif is one of them, he must be dethroned and fought,"

The 11-and-a half minute recording was released by al-Qaeda's media arm As-Sahab and posted on militant websites known as clearing houses for Islamic messaging.

Focused entirely on Somalia and entitled "Fight on, champions of Somalia," it carried an often seen bin Laden photograph with a map of Somalia in the background. The Arabic audio had English subtitles.

Somalia, a nation of about 8 million people, has not had a functioning government since warlords overthrew a dictator in 1991 and then turned on each other.

Obama outraged with AIG

Speaking before a group of small business owners, armed with a new plan to help struggling American employers keep their doors open, President Barack Obama first expressed his anger with insurance giant AIG.

Late last week it was reported that American International Group would issue 165 million dollars to its executives in the form of bonuses. But AIG is not a normal company, it’s only surviving because of government infusions. So far it’s received almost 170 billion dollars in federal rescue funds, tax payer money, to keep the company afloat and financial markets falling further. Bailout funds apparently have not been helping to sure up AIG’s bottom line. In early March AIG records show the company lost 61.7 billion dollars in the fourth quarter of last year; the greatest loss in history for a large corporation.

"It's hard to understand how derivative traders at AIG warranted any bonuses, much less $165 million in extra pay," Obama said.
"How do they justify this outrage to the taxpayers who are keeping the company afloat."
"All across the country, there are people who work hard and meet their responsibilities every day, without the benefit of government bailouts or multimillion-dollar bonuses. And all they ask is that everyone, from Main Street to Wall Street to Washington, play by the same rules."

During the tongue lashing of AIG, Mr. Obama choked up, explaining his anger was getting the best of him. The President reassured today’s audience that his administration “will pursue every legal avenue to block these bonuses.” He noted that Secretary of Treasury Timothy Geithner was already in talks with AIG chairman Edward Liddy. Obama says the two men will rectify the situation. “Everybody involved needs to know this is not just about dollars and cents, it’s about values,” said the President.

Russian Professor Panarin Predicts End of U.S.

For a decade, Russian academic Igor Panarin has been predicting the U.S. will fall apart in 2010. For most of that time, he admits, few took his argument -- that an economic and moral collapse will trigger a civil war and the eventual breakup of the U.S. -- very seriously.

Prof. Panarin, 50 years old, is not a fringe figure. A former KGB analyst, he is dean of the Russian Foreign Ministry's academy for future diplomats. He is invited to Kremlin receptions, lectures students, publishes books, and appears in the media as an expert on U.S.-Russia relations.

A polite and cheerful man with a buzz cut, Mr. Panarin insists he does not dislike Americans. But he warns that the outlook for them is dire.

"There's a 55-45% chance right now that disintegration will occur," he says. "One could rejoice in that process," he adds, poker-faced. "But if we're talking reasonably, it's not the best scenario -- for Russia." Though Russia would become more powerful on the global stage, he says, its economy would suffer because it currently depends heavily on the dollar and on trade with the U.S.

Mr. Panarin posits, in brief, that mass immigration, economic decline, and moral degradation will trigger a civil war next fall and the collapse of the dollar. Around the end of June 2010, or early July, he says, the U.S. will break into six pieces -- with Alaska reverting to Russian control.


The professor says he's convinced that people are taking his theory more seriously. People like him have forecast similar cataclysms before, he says, and been right. He cites French political scientist Emmanuel Todd. Mr. Todd is famous for having rightly forecast the demise of the Soviet Union -- 15 years beforehand. "When he forecast the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1976, people laughed at him," says Prof. Panarin.

Iron Chef Cat Cora and her wife are both pregnant

One pregnant lady can be a lot to handle - the cravings, the hormones, the nerves, the excitement - but two pregnant ladies? At the same time? Living under the same roof?

That could either be the perfect solution...or the perfect storm. Iron Chef Cat Cora and her wife, Jennifer Cora, are about to find out.

Together for nearly ten years, the Cora’s share a unique family story in which both women have carried the other’s biological child.

Cat’s pregnancy is a result of in-vitro fertilization with Jennifer’s embryo. The couple’s sons, Zoran (5 years old) and Caje (23 months), were both carried by Jennifer. She was artificially inseminated for her first pregnancy, but the second she carried to term using Cat’s embryo.

Way To Go! I say!

2009 DD45

Close call.

An asteroid about the size of one that leveled more than 800 square miles of forest in Siberia a century ago just buzzed the Earth. The asteroid named 2009 DD45 was about 48,500 miles (74,800 km, 0.000482 AU) from Earth when it zipped past early Monday, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory reported. That is just twice as high as the orbits of some telecommunications satellites and about a fifth of the distance to the Moon.

"This was pretty darn close," astronomer Timothy Spahr of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics said last Wednesday.

The space rock measured between 69 feet and 154 feet (20-50 meters) in diameter. The Planetary Society said that made it about the same size as the asteroid that exploded over Siberia in 1908.

NASA's orbital diagram of 2009 DD45 is found HERE.

The asteroid was only discovered three days before by the prolific asteroid hunter Robert McNaught at Siding Spring Observatory in Australia, when the space rock was already within 2,414,016 km (1½ million miles) of Earth and closing fast.

McNaught pointed out that the 2009 DD45 asteroid circles the sun every 18 months, but its path will not threaten this planet until the next century at the earliest.

Bill Gates - The House

The latest issue of Vogue takes us inside the house of Bill Gates. Apparently the article in found Melinda Gates saying that iPods and iPhones are a no-no in the Gates household.

Mrs. Gates says:

“There are very few things that are on the banned list in our household. But iPods and iPhones are two things we don’t get for our kids.”

The house is a modern design in the Pacific lodge style, with classic features such as a large private library with a dome shaped roof and oculus (light well). The house also features an estate-wide server system running Windows, heated floors and driveways, and a pin worn by guests that upon entrance of a room automatically adjust temperature, music, and lighting based on the guest's preferences.

The 5 acres are planted in native alder, maple, and Douglas fir, kept as natural in appearance as possible. Most walkways are covered with slate. Concrete retaining walls are faced with sandstone and granite.

The Gates family's 11,500-square-foot inner sanctum is surprisingly modest, with four bedrooms and quarters for a nanny. A four-car garage is attached. The lower levels include a techno-playland family room and an exercise facility that is better appointed than many health clubs.

Take a virtual tour inside the Gates estate.