World News Thread & Breaking News!!

[bd popeye]

I understand that there is now not enough money to maintain the highway system.

Depends on how each state spends it's federal highway funds.

In November I took a trip by car from Iowa to New Jersey. New Jersey to Cincinnati OH..then back to Iowa. I did not encounter any unsafe roads.

 

[Equation]

I understand that there is now not enough money to maintain the highway system. I well remember that failed bridge in was it Minneapolis? when several car drivers died a few years ago. Providing for this kind of trouble where fog and/or smoke can endanger the traffic is an extra cost. But letting car drivers pay for safer roads by for example a tax on fuel would for the country as a whole be a saving because of the reduction in accidents. And getting home is surely more important than paying that tax.

That collapsed bridge over in Minnesota has to do with administration not heeding to the word of advice from the civil and structural engineers when they conducted testing on the load capacity of its frames. The structure were design to hold traffic capacity of the old days, NOT today's busy highways as suburban developments sprung all over. Here in the US there are fuel taxes implemented on some states, but not all. In Texas big cities, like Houston and Dallas, there are toll roads to paid for construction cost and maintenance. It was a good idea, until corruptions from both the contractors and state administration made the project even more costly than it should, but that's another story.

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[ToxSic]

The Chinese hostages in Egypt have been freed.

This is certainly good to hear! Now, I wonder what was the deal for their release though. Didn't they demand a release of a certain someone?

 

[bd popeye]

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Whitney Houston, the iconic American singer whose battles with drugs, alcohol and ex-husband Bobby Brown marred her star power, has died. She was 48.

Houston's publicist confirmed the singer's death to ABC News. Her cause and location of death are not yet known. Six police cars were spotted in front of the Beverly Hilton hotel today, where Houston is believed to have been staying.

Houston was last seen publicly on Thursday, when she appeared disheveled and disoriented in front of a Hollywood nightclub. According to the Hollywood Reporter, she got into an altercation with "X Factor" finalist Stacy Francis on Thursday at an event where she was said to be acting "belligerent."

Houston returned to rehab in May of last year seeking treatment for drug and alcohol dependence. "Whitney voluntarily entered the program to support her long-standing recovery process," her publicist said at the time.

The six-time Grammy winner staged a comeback in 2009, but was dogged by rumors that she was using drugs again. That year, she told Oprah Winfrey that marijuana laced with cocaine was her substance of choice during her 1992 to 2006 marriage to R&B singer Bobby Brown. They have a daughter together, Houston's only child, Bobbi Kristina Houston Brown.

Houston's appearance on "Oprah" was her first major television interview since 2002, when she talked to ABC News' Diane Sawyer.

At the time, Sawyer asked Houston about ongoing drug rumors that had started in 2000, when airport security guards found marijuana in Houston and Brown's bags at a Hawaiian airport. The singer alluded to having used cocaine, pills and marijuana -- but drew the line at crack in what turned into an infamous rant.

"First of all, let's get one thing straight," she told Sawyer. "Crack is cheap. I make too much money to ever smoke crack. Let's get that straight. Okay? We don't do crack. We don't do that. Crack is wack."

In August 2009, Houston released "I Look to You," her first studio album in seven years. It sold 304,000 copies in its first seven days on the market, sending Houston back to the top of the charts and giving her the best debut week of her career.

In 2010, Houston launched her "Nothing but Love" world tour. Though some said Houston's signature voice showed the stress of her ups and downs, she soldiered on, putting on shows in Asia, Australia and Europe even though fans and critics panned her performances.

At her peak in the 1990s, Houston was a force to be reckoned with in the music industry. During the '80s and '90s, she was one of the world's best-selling artists, selling out stadiums with powerful, poignant renditions of her greatest hits like "I Wanna Dance With Somebody," "How Will I Know," and "I Will Always Love You."

Her success launched her into the film industry, where she starred in hits like "The Bodyguard" and "Waiting to Exhale." Her struggles with drugs, alcohol, rehab (she went at least three times) and Brown, against whom she filed a charge of domestic abuse in 1993, made her stray from the spotlight.

In 2009, talking to Winfrey about why she took a break from show business, Houston said, "It was too much. So much to try to live up to, to try to be, and I wanted out."

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

 

[Equation]

So long Whitney...RIP! I grew up listening to her music.

 

[bd popeye]

She did a USO show on Diego Garcia in '85 or '86.. I saw her, she was fantastic. She was a great talent.. she will be missed....

 

[escobar]

She did a USO show on Diego Garcia in '85 or '86.

she has been allowed to enter a military base like Diego Garcia?

 

[bd popeye]

she has been allowed to enter a military base like Diego Garcia?

Of course she and her entire entourage. They were on an USO tour. The USO makes all the arrangements.

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When I was on the USS Midway Bob Hope and Frank Sinatra made a USO tour in the far east and Yokosuka including the Midway was one of their destinations.

 

[Schumacher]

English people ignored and stepped on collapsed school boy.

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"9:02AM GMT 12 Feb 2012

Oliver was on his way to school when he fainted and fell to the floor banging his head as he arrived to meet three classmates off a tram.

But despite being dressed in his school uniform and holding his satchell, hundreds of commuters waiting to board a 8.15am tram at Altrincham bus and tram Interchange in Greater Manchester refused to help the teenager.

Instead they walked past and even stepped over the unconscious Oliver as if he wasn't there.

The Metrolink station had a panic button that can be used in an emergency - but no one thought to use it, and eventually Oliver picked himself up off the floor when he came round ten minutes later.

Oliver who attends Blessed Thomas Holford Roman Catholic School in Altrincham was too upset to tell friends who arrived to meet him just moments later and waited until he was at school before informing a teacher, who contacted his mum Susan Tiplady. ............................................................................................"

---------- Post added at 06:51 PM ---------- Previous post was at 06:49 PM ----------

Friend of English prince says Sean Penn is crocodile food.

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"The Hollywood actor claimed on Tuesday that the Duke of Cambridge's deployment to the disputed islands was "unthinkable".

But Ben Fogle, a close friend of Prince William, hit back, tweeting: “I would like to take Sean Penn and place him in the jaws of one of those crocodiles.”

Fogle, who has recently dived with crocodiles for a new television series, challenged Penn to a public debate on the issue of the Falklands: .................................................................................................."

 

[delft]

Was Chaplin borne?

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MI5 files: Was Chaplin really a Frenchman and called Thornstein?
MI5 investigated whether Charlie Chaplin was actually a Frenchman called Israel Thornstein, previously secret files on the Hollywood film star have revealed.
By Tom Whitehead, Security Editor12:01AM GMT 17 Feb 2012

Intelligence officers could find no trace of the actor's birth in Britain despite Chaplin always claiming he was born in London in 1889.
The mystery surrounding his origins emerged when the US authorities asked MI5 to look into the comic actor's background after he left America in 1952 under a cloud of suspicion over his communist links.
But British officers could find no birth certificate and the earliest official record was a passport issued in 1920.
They investigated suggestions he was born in Fontainebleau, near Paris, or nearby Melun, while the Americans claimed his real name was Israel Thornstein and raised the idea he may have been a Russian Jew.
Despite extensive searches, MI5 could find no evidence of any of the claims leaving his true origins a mystery to this day.
However, British intelligence rejected American claims that Chaplin was a high-risk communist, concluding that while he may have been a “sympathiser” he was no more than a “progressive or radical”.
Agents here accepted his name had “been exploited in the interests of communism as one of the victims of 'McCarthyism' – the US anti-communist campaign led by Senator Joe McCarthy – but said he was not a security risk.
It is the first time the files kept by MI5 on Chaplin have been made public and show the extent to which agents went in checking his background.
The star said he was born on April 16 1889 in East Street, Walworth, south London – just four days before the birth of Adolf Hitler, whom he lampooned in his classic 1940 film The Great Dictator.
But after scouring the files at Somerset House in London for his birth certificate, MI5 concluded: "It would seem that Chaplin was either not born in this country or that his name at birth was other than those mentioned."
Scotland Yard's Special Branch added to the intrigue by passing on a tip from a source who claimed the actor was born near Fontainebleau, just south of Paris.
The police memo said: "There may or may not be some truth in this, but in view of the fact that no documentary proof has been obtained that Chaplin was born in the United Kingdom, it may well be that he was in fact born in France."
MI6, Britain's foreign intelligence service, investigated further but found no trace of Chaplin's birth in France either.
John Marriott, then head of MI5's counter-subversion branch, was not convinced that the absence of a birth certificate was a matter of concern for the intelligence services.
He wrote: "It is curious that we can find no record of Chaplin's birth, but I scarcely think that this is of any security significance."
One possible answer to the mystery emerged last year when Chaplin’s family found a letter in a locked drawer suggesting he had been born on a gipsy camp in Smethwick, near Birmingham.
The note was sent to the star in the early 1970s from Jack Hill who said his own aunt was a Gypsy Queen and he had been born in her caravan.
It is known Chaplin’s mother Hannah had the maiden name Hill and descended from travellers.
Having escaped grinding poverty to launch a career in British music-hall, Chaplin moved to the US in 1910 and made a series of hugely successful films in Hollywood in his famous persona of the "Little Tramp".
But in the early 1950s, when Washington was in the grip of McCarthyist paranoia about Soviet infiltration, he was reviled in the US as a communist sympathiser.
There was further controversy about his two marriages to 16-year-old girls, failure to take American citizenship, and claims he fathered an illegitimate child and owed 2 million dollars in back taxes.
Chaplin and his family sailed to Britain in September 1952 to attend the premiere of his new film Limelight.
While they were out of the country, US Attorney General James McGranery announced he would deny the actor a re-entry permit because of his alleged Soviet connections.
Chaplin's MI5 files, released by the National Archives in Kew, west London, show agents here agreed that he had given funds to communist front organisations but that the US could not prove party membership.
And a note sent to the MI5’s East Africa liaison officer ahead of a safari holiday Chaplin took in Kenya in February-March 1958 shows that MI5 were unimpressed by Washington's claims of communist links, which “do not impress us”.
It stated: "We have no substantial information of our own against Chaplin, and we are not satisfied that there are reliable grounds for regarding him as a security risk.
"His name has, of course, been exploited in the interests of communism as one of the victims of 'McCarthyism' ...
"It may be that Chaplin is a communist sympathiser, but on the information before us he would appear to be no more than a 'progressive' or radical."
Files released by The National Archives in 2002 showed that the British Government blocked Chaplin's knighthood for nearly 20 years because of US concern about his colourful private life and political affiliations.
He was eventually knighted in March 1975 and died at his home in Switzerland on Christmas Day 1977, aged 88.

The past is another country. They do things differently there. But how different?
The Telegraph has another four articles about files opened by MI5 yesterday.