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Sunday, November 20, 2011

'Breaking Dawn' Scores Fifth-Biggest Box-Office

The fourth of Summit's vampire-and-werewolf movies had the franchise's second best three-day opening ever, behind 2009's "New Moon" ($142.8 million in November 2009).

For a box office that's down about 3.5 percent from last year, "Breaking Dawn" is only the second movie this year, including the summer's final "Harry Potter" film, to open to more than $100 million. (There were four $100 million openers last year.)

And it had the third-best opening Friday ever, grossing $71.4 million -- behind only this year's "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2" and "New Moon."
With the release of the latest and fourth Twilight series movie, Breaking Dawn: Part 1, parents are again asking themselves about the right way to talk about sex with their teenagers.

The Twilight series follows the relationship of Bella, a human teenage girl, and Edward, a vampire who looks 17 but is actually over 100 years old. The Twilight series has been praised for acknowledging teenage sexual desire — now that’s going out on a limb — while wholesomely suggesting to teens that they should save themselves for marriage, or at least the fourth movie, before having rough vampire sex.
'Breaking Dawn' Scores Fifth-Biggest Box-Office Debut
'Twilight' flick's $139.5 million weekend puts it in the record books, with 'Happy Feet Two' at a distant second.
Despite the fact that Bella and Edward, old fashioned couple that they are, wait until marriage to consummate their relationship, others have criticized the series as soft core porn in the guise of abstinence promotion.
"Breaking Dawn's" international numbers were as strong as its domestic ones. The movie grossed $144 million in 54 territories, giving it a worldwide box office total of $283.5 million in just three days. The movie cost about $110 million to make, after tax rebates.

While "Breaking Dawn" almost exactly matched its pre-release predictions, the animated penguins of Warner Bros.' "Happy Feet Two" grossed only $22 million, according to studio estimates -- enough to rank the movie No. 2 this weekend, but still a disappointing performance. The movie was projected to open to about $30 million.

Relativity Media's "Immortals," meanwhile, grossed $12.2 million in its second weekend of release -- a 62 percent drop. It is No. 3 at the box office.
This weekend, "The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 1" will see competition from Jason Segel's spirited and reverential revival of "The Muppets" (which currently boasts a perfect 100 score on film review aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes); iconic filmmaker Martin Scorsese's 3-D adventure "Hugo"; and kids' flick "Arthur Christmas," among others. Horror master David Cronenberg's period drama "A Dangerous Method" and Oscar bait "My Week With Marilyn," which stars Michelle Williams as Marilyn Monroe, open in limited release.
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Justin biebers baby brothers birthday a rumer

When is Justin Bieber's little brother's birthday? he was born November 20th 2009
It's sometime this year. A very happy 1st birthday to Justin Bieber’s little brother  Jaxon Bieber! What a cutie! Here is what Justin Tweeted as a message to his brother (who might be a bit too young to be using Twitter just yet!

The Wanted have got a special relationship with Justin Bieber, what with a US tour under their belts, and also joining him to switch on the Christmas lights at the Westfield shopping centres in London and the teen told them that Mariah Yeater's baby allegations were "bulls*** lies".

Max George has become close buddies with the 17-year-old and he considers Bieber like an "adopted little brother" and reveals that the paternity lawsuit is "the worst time of his life".

Talking to The Mirror, 23-year-old Max said: “He is really cut up by being accused of being a father. He said it’s absolute bulls*** lies and that it didn’t go down like that at all."

He also added: “I told him to keep his head up, we’re right behind him. He knew we’d understand because girls are around us all the time, too.”
Justin's natural mother, Pattie Mallette, became pregnant with him when she herself was 17 during a brief relationship with Jeremy Bieber, a young carpenter and martial arts enthusiast with a criminal record for assault. The Butlers stepped in, along with Pattie's mother, to provide what they describe as 'additional parenting' when Pattie found herself unable to cope.

Bieber has been accused of fathering three-month-old baby Tristyn with Mariah Yeater after the pair met following a gig at the Staples Centre in Los Angles in October 2010.

The Wanted toured with the teen in South America earlier this year, and Max admits that he's impressed with the way that Bieber has addressed the situation.

“He’s had the worst time of his life and handled it so well. Doing the paternity test shows how grown-up he’s being about it," he said.

During the tour, Bieber was like any normal kid and Max insists that he wasn't looking for opportunities to get girls backstage for a quick romp.

Max continued: “Justin is like our adopted little brother, that’s why I believe all this baby stuff is rubbish. Any spare time Justin had on tour, he’d joke around – crawling under seats and grabbing girls’ ankles. It was hilarious.”
justin Faced with a 20-year-old woman's claim that their idol Justin Bieber fathered her baby, they are worried about the potential results of the imminent paternity test.

The 17-year-old singer will visit a laboratory to provide the necessary DNA sample when he returns from a European concert tour this week.
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Immigration law change the factors

In an attempt to invoke the memory and passion of the civil rights movement, a group of Democratic lawmakers will stand Monday in a historic church in Birmingham to help rally opposition to the state's new law that seeks to get tough on illegal immigrants. The 10 Democrats, including Rep. Terri Sewell of Birmingham, will participate in an ad hoc hearing on the immigration law and later help launch a petition to repeal it at the historic 16th St. Baptist Church in Birmingham. The church was the site of the 1963 bombing that killed four little girls during the civil rights movement.

"The history of fighting for justice and fighting for basic rights is still alive in Alabama," said Rep. Luis Gutierrez, D-Ill., who is heading the trip. "Indeed, a lot of what we know about social movements, about social change and fighting for justice, we learned from the people of Alabama less than a generation ago." In an attempt to invoke the memory and passion of the civil rights movement, a group of Democratic lawmakers will stand Monday in a historic church in Birmingham to help rally opposition to the state’s new law that seeks to get tough on illegal immigrants.

The 10 Democrats, including Rep. Terri Sewell of Birmingham, will participate in an ad hoc hearing on the immigration law and later help launch a petition to repeal it at the historic 16th St. Baptist Church in Birmingham. The church was the site of the 1963 bombing that killed four little girls during the civil rights movement.

“The history of fighting for justice and fighting for basic rights is still alive in Alabama,” said Rep. Luis Gutierrez, D-Ill., who is heading the trip. “Indeed, a lot of what we know about social movements, about social change and fighting for justice, we learned from the people of Alabama less than a generation ago.” The deadlock, which shows no sign of ending and could lead to a second Justice Department lawsuit, comes after the administration last year sued Arizona and, weeks ago, filed suit against South Carolina. Government lawyers are also considering challenges to laws in Utah, Georgia and Indiana.

The lawsuits are a key part of the administration's civil-rights efforts on behalf of immigrants, a top priority even as President Barack Obama is under fire from Hispanic groups over his stepped-up deportation policies.

The Alabama law is considered the toughest of six new state immigration statutes, which include provisions giving police new authority to question legal status, among other things. At least 17 other states have considered such measures this year.

The dispute has stirred painful memories of Alabama's segregationist past, with accusations that the law targets Hispanics. A civil-rights group compared Alabama Attorney General Luther Strange to then-Gov. George C. Wallace standing in front of a schoolhouse in 1963 as he resisted federal efforts to enroll Black students at the University of Alabama.

"The intemperate language of (Strange's) letter does remind us of George Wallace in the schoolhouse door," said Richard Cohen, president of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which set up a hotline to monitor discrimination complaints over the immigration law. He said the hotline has received nearly 4,000 calls.

Supporters of the law, considered one of the toughest in the country, welcome the federal lawmakers.

"We live in America. The First Amendment gives them the right to come and say what they want to say," said State Republican Rep. Kerry Rich, a co-sponsor of the measure. "Some of these people are comparing this to 1961 or the civil rights days. Here's the difference - in the 1960s . . . Alabama was wrong for what it was doing. "

Today, he said, the state is right to press for better enforcement of federal immigration laws.

"What we're upset about is they won't enforce the law," Rich said of federal officials. "That's where the breakdown comes."
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UC Davis chief launches probe into pepper-spraying of Occupy protesters

 As some faculty members called for her ouster, the chancellor of UC Davis launched an inquiry Saturday into the pepper-spraying of apparently peaceful Occupy Davis protesters by campus police.

A video of the Friday incident that went viral on the Web showed a police officer dousing the protesters with a canister of pepper spray as they sat huddled on the ground. The police had been attempting to clear the university's Quad of tents and campers.

Faculty and students reacted with outrage. Nathan Brown, an assistant professor of English, said in an interview that the episode was the latest example of "the systematic use by UC chancellors of police brutality" to suppress protests.
In a statement posted on her website on Saturday afternoon, Chancellor Linda Katehi wrote she would be forming a task force of faculty, students and staff to review the incident.

“The events of this intervention have been videotaped and widely distributed. As indicated in various videos, the police used pepper spray against the students who were blocking the way. The use of pepper spray as shown on the video is chilling to us all and raises many questions about how best to handle situations like this,” she wrote.

Katehi also called the video "sad and really very inappropriate" in a press conference on Saturday, but hit back at widespread calls for her resignation.

"I do not think that I have violated the policies of the institution," Katehi said, according to The Associated Press. "I have worked personally very hard to make this campus a safe campus for all."

The demonstrators were participating in the "Occupy UC Davis" movement on Friday when the altercation occured. The video -- first released by NBC's KCRA-TV - was shot by a witness and shows numerous observers watching in horror as a campus police officer douses the students in yellow mist.

"Police came and brutalized them and tore their tents down and all that stuff. It was really scary. It felt like there was anarchy everywhere," student Hisham Alihbob told KCRA.

The nearest I got to Zuccotti Park before it was cleared earlier this week was passing it in a cab one night in New York; it appeared a small and forlorn collection of tents in what was by late October a very cold rain. Visiting McPherson Square in Washington, D.C., for the first time with Atlantic contributor Tina Dupuy earlier this month, I met union members and teenage college students trying to put their Habermas into action and create of a new public square in the form of Occupy DC. It seemed kind of sweetly literal -- building tents as a physical attempt at a structural transformation of the public sphere? -- and largely harmless to anyone but the protesters, because grungy and jerry-rigged and relatively defenseless against the elements or potential criminals. But since McPherson normally is a bit of a dead space in the city -- there are some residential buildings near it, but it's mainly surrounded by office-workers who clear out on evenings and weekends -- it didn't seem to be bothering anyone.

Perhaps Washington's still-intact Occupy encampment has been treated more gently than those in other cities because protests in the nation's capital are as routine and unremarkable as are the city's frequent rains. Between the easy co-existence with protests here, and the fact that the Occupy encampments and demonstrations across the country have been covered as much as regional stories as a national one, it's easy to have missed the truly shocking number of violent confrontations that have taken place as the anti-Wall Street movement has extended its reach.

Last night's video should serve as a wake-up call. Below are some of the other dramatic moments in the ongoing confrontations between Occupy protesters and police. Taken together, they paint a disturbing portrait that should at a bare minimum call into question the standards and practices police officers around the nation have developed for deploying pepper spray, which has only become a universal policing tool within the past 20 years. And they raise real questions about whether disproportionate police responses to the movement's intentional acts of civil disobedience have in some cases increased social disorder rather than restored calm.
Police dressed in riot gear at U.C. Davis on Friday afternoon used pepper spray to clear seated protesters from the university quad where they had set up a small Occupy encampment, pro-actively and repeatedly dousing the passively-resisting students with a chemical agent designed to cause pain and suffering in order to make it easier to remove them.

It is hard to look at this kind of attack and think this is how we do things in America.

And yet it is all too American. America has a very long history of protests that meet with excessive or violent response, most vividly recorded in the second half of the 20th century. It is a common fantasy among people born in the years since the great protests movements -- and even some not so great ones -- that they would have stood on the bold side of history had they been alive at the time and been called to make a choice. But the truth is that American protest movements in real time -- and especially in their early days -- often appear controversial, politically difficult, out-of-the-mainstream, and dangerous. And they are met with fear.

Even decades later, acts of protest can be the subject of heated debate and lead people to question (as well as celebrate) the moral standing of those who put their bodies on the line during moments of historic tumult -- as Sen. John Kerry, Vietnam veteran and former anti-Vietnam protester, learned during his presidential bid in 2004.

This sort of dynamic holds for pretty much any group that aims to upend the existing social order using direct action, because few resort to such tactics if they think they have other, easier ways to petition for redress of grievances or could be heard as loudly through existing channels of expression. The Tea Party movement, for example, has held many protests but with few exceptions has stopped short of civil disobedience, finding early on that its members were by and large not willing to face arrest and that it could gain power relatively quickly through the political system by backing challengers in Republican primaries and allying with experienced party operatives. The Occupy movement is both very new and rather diffuse so far, and appears less interested in gaining power than making power uncomfortable and raising far-reaching questions and public awareness.

Just over two months old, it has succeed in changing the terms of the national debate about income inequality in this country with shocking rapidity. And whether it flames out in a rash of alienating and chaotic street clashes or builds into a goal-oriented and sustainable force in American life -- sustainable as any protest movement, that is, which is to say not very -- it's clear it has already made one of the most significant interventions into the national debate on economic equality in years.

Which brings us back to the video of what happened at U.C. Davis yesterday: Non-violent students passively resisting both university and police directives to clear the area were subjected to acts of brutality that cannot be morally justified by any accounting of the facts on the ground. The raw video of yesterday's pepper-spray incident has rightfully gone viral since hitting the web last night.
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