Powerful Hurricane Bill, a dangerous Category 4 storm with 135 mph winds, raged across the open Atlantic on Wednesday, days from land but on a path that could menace Canada’s eastern provinces next week.

Sweeping past the Caribbean islands and posing no threat to U.S. oil and gas installations in the Gulf of Mexico, the first hurricane of the 2009 Atlantic season was expected to charge between the U.S. East Coast and Bermuda, well offshore.

Residents of Bermuda, a mid-Atlantic British territory and reinsurance capital, were warned to prepare for the storm. The latest forecast track issued by the U.S. National Hurricane Center would take Bill more than 100 miles to the west.

But Bill’s massive size — tropical storm force winds of 39 to 73 mph extend up to 230 miles from its center — meant Bermuda would get a good dose of heavy weather, forecasters said.

“All (computer) models keep the storm between the United States and Bermuda. Exactly how close it comes to either of those is up for debate,” said National Hurricane Center forecaster Eric Blake. “The average error (in the forecast track) is 200 miles at about 3 days.”

“Bermuda is expected to see large swells and areas of heavy rain and high winds. Hopefully the core of the hurricane will stay offshore,” he said.

The Bermuda Sun newspaper reported that U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, planned to fly to Bermuda on Wednesday for a private vacation of three to four days at a beach resort. The State Department declined to officially confirm where Clinton was.

HEAVY SURF EXPECTED ON U.S. EAST COAST

Forecasters said Bill might get stronger. Its top winds were expected to peak at about 145 mph on Thursday.

Hurricanes of Category 3 or higher on the five-step Saffir-Simpson intensity scale are considered “major” storms and are the most destructive type.

The well-defined eye of Bill was located about 970 miles south-southeast of Bermuda at 5 p.m. EDT (2100 GMT) on Wednesday and the system was moving toward the northwest at 20 mph, the hurricane center said.

Its curving forecast track would take it to a position hundreds of miles (km) east of Miami by early Friday, and well off New York by Sunday.

“How close it gets to the New England coast, there’s still the usual uncertainty in that long time period,” former NHC director Max Mayfield said. “But the core of the hurricane, most of the models indicate it’s going to remain off the coast.”

Forecasters said dangerous swells and life-threatening rip currents could affect the northern Caribbean islands, the Bahamas, Bermuda and the U.S. East Coast in the next few days.

The latest forecast track from the hurricane center would take Bill slightly closer to the U.S. East. It shows the storm just south of Nova Scotia by Sunday afternoon as a Category 2 hurricane and moving directly over Newfoundland after that. But five days in advance, the forecast has an average error of several hundred miles.

From Reuters

2D exploration-focused action adventure games have been a dying breed in the years since Super Metroid reigned supreme. With Shadow Complex, developer Chair Entertainment has released the first major game in this genre on a home console platform for nearly 12 years. The traditional sidescrolling combat is exciting and satisfying, while the addictive exploration elements will draw you deep into the adventure. With the stunning infusion of a third dimension, as well as competitive leaderboards and fun virtual-reality challenge rooms, Shadow Complex is an incredible adventure that won’t be forgotten for a long time.

6215501noneIndy would be proud.

Set in the world of Orson Scott Card’s Empire novel–though you would be hard-pressed to ever discover this unless you happened to read the game’s description while downloading it–Shadow Complex is the story of a couple in the wrong place at the wrong time. When Jason Fleming and his girlfriend, Claire, go on a spelunking trip in the mountains and accidentally discover a secret underground base, they run straight into a radical organization that calls itself the Progressive Restoration. With Claire captured, it’s up to Jason to find a way to storm the Restoration’s stronghold and rescue her. Though the story of Jason’s mission to save his girlfriend is poorly integrated (a shame, considering it builds upon the work of award-winning author), it is really secondary to the action and exploration, both of which are brilliantly blended to create a fun and addictive experience.

Starting out with only a flashlight and his quick wits, Jason must search through the expansive underground facility for weapon and equipment caches to arm himself. Though you’re initially restricted to a small section of the Restoration base, each new ability you obtain expands this area. This, in turn, lets you find even more weapons and power-ups; thus, you are constantly rewarded for your efforts. In addition to illuminating your way through the darkness, your flashlight will reveal the weaknesses of destructible doors, crates, and vent covers, making it easy to tell which areas you’ll need to revisit. And with the map screen and its helpful–yet optional–prompts, you’ll rarely be at a loss as to where you need to go next. Retracing your steps and backtracking is a necessary part of your adventure, and though it’s generally just a minor inconvenience to get from one location to another, Shadow Complex could have benefited from something like the teleport rooms seen in every Castlevania game since Symphony of the Night. This is especially true in the latter parts of the game when a major route is off-limits for story purposes. That said, the constant thrills of finding the dozens of power-ups, exploring every nook and cranny on the map, and pushing your completion percentages all the way to 100 are more than enough to keep you going.

This is going to hurt you a lot more than it hurts me.

As you infiltrate the Restoration’s base, you’ll encounter legions of heavily armed soldiers and do battle with their powerful battle mechs. Though the game is a 2D side-scroller, the graphics and environments are all rendered in 3D, which leads to some unique tricks with perspective where soldiers routinely patrol and attack from inaccessible areas in both the foreground and background. Generally speaking, dealing with such foes is as easy as using the right analog stick to paint your laser sight across them and squeezing off a few rounds because the game usually knows when you’re trying to aim at foes in other planes. However, sometimes it simply isn’t possible to do so without adjusting your position because your laser sight refuses to reach into the background, which can be irksome, especially when you’re taking cover behind crates or a blast shield. Precision targeting can also be used to pull off headshots for maximum damage or to interact with the environment in a variety of ways: You can shoot down overhead power cables to electrify nearby enemies, explode fuel canisters, shoot down the explosive tiny robots that patrol the walls and ceilings, and more. And for added variety (or if you want to keep things quiet), you can sneak up and take out soldiers with an impressive melee attack or use an unlockable powerful ground pound attack to simply vaporize them.

However, the real thrill of combat in Shadow Complex doesn’t come from the small-scale hallway fights but the huge set piece battles. The Restoration knows that you’re loose in their base, and they send everything they’ve got after you, from mobile powered suits to spider mechs. Each of these boss battles is enormously fun and often surprisingly interactive with the environment, such as a mech encounter in which you goad your enemy into blowing open a series of water mains and drowning itself. As you progress deeper into the base, these conflicts intensify, culminating in an epic final battle. Outside of the boss battles, the turret sequences are also a pleasant surprise. While they’re often boring affairs in most games, getting behind a stationary cannon on the Restoration’s base is an absolute treat. The camera shifts, and you can mow down wave after wave of your enemies in an unexpected way–likely cackling to yourself the entire time.

Shadow Complex’s developers found a way of making the single-player game extremely competitive, as if it weren’t fun enough already. Upon completion of the game, which can take as little as an hour (for a highly skilled individual on subsequent play-throughs) or as long as 10, you’re awarded with a numerical score based on a number of factors, which is tracked on a leaderboard. There are also a number of other, more specific leaderboards available for tasks, such as the number of enemies you’ve finished off with melee attacks, the number of headshots you’ve performed, or the number of soldiers you’ve made scream as they die. Thanks to helpful in-game notifications that pop up every so often, you know exactly where you stand with these tasks in comparison to your friends, and working your way to the top and staying there can be difficult but rewarding in its own right. And if you want to compete in ways that are more skill-oriented, you can work on achieving the highest scores and the lowest times in the challenge courses, which are virtual-reality simulations that teach you how to maximize your various abilities and apply them in ways you may never have thought of otherwise.

Enemies can attack from both the background and the foreground.

Constructed using Unreal Engine 3 technology, Shadow Complex looks fantastic, from the wooded surface areas to the rippling water found in underground reservoirs. Enemy rag-doll effects, explosive physics, and fluid dynamics are all on full display, and blasting a guy off a ledge so he falls screaming to his death never ceases to amuse. Each area of the base is sufficiently varied and brilliantly paired with an admirable soundtrack. In one eerily beautiful portion of the game, you traverse a flooded section of the base. As you push past the free-floating corpses within, a somber theme underscores the emotional poignancy as you realize the extent of the destruction.

By focusing on the core themes of exploration and high-intensity combat while treating you to lush graphics and multiplane complexity, Shadow Complex is an excellent current-generation take on a classic gaming genre. There are enough secrets hidden in the Progressive Restoration’s massive underground facility to keep you going for hours on your first play-through, but with the four difficulty settings, competitive leaderboards, challenge rooms, clever achievements and bonus objectives, you won’t want to leave it at that. Ultimately, Shadow Complex is the sort of game that you can come back to again and again, and at 1,200 Microsoft points ($15), it’s a gem that you shouldn’t miss out on.

The first hurricane of the season gathered force far out over the Atlantic Ocean and appeared headed on a track that could take it near Bermuda by this weekend.

The strengthening of Hurricane Bill, along with the arrival of rapidly weakening Tropical Storm Claudette on the Florida coast and the formation of Tropical Storm Ana late last week, signaled that this summer’s Atlantic hurricane season is beginning to heat up after a slow start.

Hurricane Bill was expected to become a major storm in the next couple of days, with winds topping 110 miles per hour. It had become a Category 2 storm Monday with winds whipping at 100 mph. The storm was expected to strengthen, possibly becoming a “major,” or Category Three, hurricane with winds of more than 110 mph in the next few days.

Early Tuesday, Bill was centered about 810 miles east of the Leeward Islands and moving west-northwest near 17 mph. Bill was a large system, about 300 miles across, so Bermuda faces a potential threat even if the Atlantic island avoids a direct hit. But where Bill will go isn’t certain, but meteorologists said they don’t project the storm to reach the U.S. at this point.

Federal forecasters only provide five-day forecasts for hurricanes and have difficulty making reliable projections of the storms’ paths beyond three days. Storms also can change direction at short notice.

Citing warm ocean water and light wind shear, Dennis Feltgen, a National Hurricane Center spokesman, said Bill was “in a very good environment to continue to strengthen.”

The last time a Category Three hurricane hit a U.S. landmass was in 2005, when Hurricane Wilma caused an estimated $20 billion in damage.

A government spokesman in Bermuda said the island’s Emergency Measures Organization will meet Tuesday to review preparedness. The last hurricane to cause significant damage in Bermuda was Hurricane Fabian, which killed four people in 2003.

The NHC meanwhile downgraded Claudette, the first tropical storm to strike the U.S. mainland this year, to a tropical depression after its wind force fell below 39 mph. Claudette formed quickly Sunday in the Gulf of Mexico but dissipated after crossing into Florida’s Panhandle and neighboring Alabama early Monday morning.

Florida received between three and five inches of rain, with only isolated minor cases of flooding, according to Florida’s Division of Emergency Management. “It wasn’t the greatest of beach days yesterday and today,” said Mike Stone, a spokesman.

Alabama also was spared any major damage. “It’s a rain event,” said Yasame Richardson, a spokeswoman at Alabama’s Emergency Management Agency.

By this time last year, six named storms, including two hurricanes, Bertha and Dolly, had already formed. Tropical storms have winds of 39 to 74 mph; storms with higher wind-speeds are upgraded to hurricanes.

The hurricane center also said Monday that Ana had dissipated over the Atlantic and was about 140 miles west-southwest of Puerto Rico as of Monday afternoon. Ana was the first named tropical storm of the season, which begins June 1 and ends November 30.

Federal forecasters predicted earlier this month that the 2009 hurricane season would be “near-to below-normal.”

Write to Mike Esterl at mike.esterl@wsj.com

Miss Universe Dayana Mendoza, who relinquishes her crown August 23 at the Atlantis resort in the Bahamas, is preparing to leave her post with a bang!

The Venezuelan stunner will appear topless in Maxim’s September issue, according to the New York Post. This comes after the minor uproar last year surrounding a controversial Dayana Mendoza nude jewelry ad that was discovered (below).

That’s a no-no for Miss Universe contestants, as beauty queens are clearly the most upstanding, straight-arrow citizens on this planet, as we all know.

But Dayana Mendoza will be free of her Miss Universe shackles soon.

Word is she got pageant owner Donald Trump’s permission before posing naked for Maxim. A good move, but maybe not totally necessary. The Donald didn’t fire Carrie Prejean over her topless pictures … just breaking her contract.

For those of you unfamiliar with the beautiful Miss Universe Dayana Mendoza, here’s a sneak preview of what her Maxim photo spread might look like …

Miss Universe Dayana Mendoza Gallery foto click here

The longtime dissident, who survived three assassination attempts and spent years in prison, was 85. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for engaging North Korea.

Kim Dae-jung, a former dissident who survived three assassination attempts, one death sentence and six years in prison to become South Korea’s president and its first Nobel laureate, died today in Seoul after a long bout of pneumonia.

He was 85.

South Korea’s president from 1998 to 2003, Kim is best known for the moment on June 13, 2000, when he stepped onto the tarmac at Pyongyang’s airport with arms outstretched to embrace North Korean leader Kim Jong Il.

That landmark meeting, which was supposed to end 50 years of enmity between the Koreas, won Kim the Nobel Peace Prize. But Kim lived just long enough to see his “sunshine policy” unraveling as a result of North Korea’s continued nuclear ambitions and the installation last year of a conservative president in South Korea.

The meeting in Pyongyang was only one of many dramatic moments in a most eventful life.

There was the time in 1973 that Kim found himself on a boat — blindfolded and manacled, his limbs encased in concrete — about to be tossed overboard by assassins presumably working for South Korea’s military dictatorship. And then there was his return from exile in the United States in 1985, when he arrived at Seoul’s airport flanked by U.S. congressmen, only to be immediately seized and placed under house arrest.

After four decades as the country’s most famous dissident, Kim (often known by his nickname D.J. to distinguish him from other Kims in public life) became its president in 1998. By daring to meet with Kim Jong Il, he established what many think is an irreversible course of rapprochement between the estranged Koreas. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2000 for his “sunshine policy” of engaging North Korea and his lifelong struggle for democratization.

But his final years were spent in frustration. He was disappointed by Kim Jong Il’s failure to reciprocate for the Pyongyang summit with a visit to Seoul, as well as by the George W. Bush administration’s skeptical attitude toward his efforts.

Just five months after winning the Nobel Prize, Kim was humiliated during a White House visit when newly inaugurated President Bush was publicly dismissive of the idea that one could negotiate with the North Koreans.

“Although I understand fully why the North Korean leadership is not very likable, it is in the interests of global peace to pursue the policy of dialogue,” Kim later recalled, in an interview with the Los Angeles Times, telling Bush.

Kim also had to spend his later years fending off a series of political scandals. His youngest son was arrested on charges of taking bribes from a lobbyist. The revelation that Kim’s aides had secretly ordered the transfer of $500 million to North Korea shortly before the meeting with Kim Jong Il led to charges that he had bought the summit and hence the Nobel Peace Prize.

In 2005, investigators made the ironic discovery that this icon of democracy and human rights had allowed illegal wiretapping during his presidency at a pace unmatched even by South Korea’s former military dictators.

Like former dissidents who became president — Lech Walesa of Poland or Vaclav Havel of the Czech Republic — Kim’s image abroad was always better than at home. He was often likened to a prophet scorned in his own land.

“The Koreans forgot that he was a champion of democracy and saw him just as another political boss. He was always more highly rated overseas than domestically,” said Michael Breen, a Seoul-based biographer of Kim Jong Il who has been researching a biography of Kim Dae-jung as well.

In his later years, with his hair dyed the artificial dark black of many aging Asian politicians and his skin powdered white, Kim appeared as a distant and forbidding figure. He gave only occasional interviews, pleading for continued dialogue with North Korea.

Kim was succeeded as South Korea’s president by Roh Moo-hyun, a similarly left-leaning politician who tried to continue the rapprochement with Pyongyang. But 2007 elections brought conservatives back in power.

A much-heralded resort run by South Korea’s Hyundai Asan group near North Korea’s Mt. Kumgang closed last year, and many businesses pulled out of an industrial park in Kaesong, north of the DMZ. North Korea’s two nuclear tests, one in 2006 and a more recent one in May, have been viewed by many in South Korea as proof that Kim’s policies of conciliation were a failure.

Hahm Sung-deuk, a presidential scholar at Korea University in Seoul, predicts that South Koreans will come to appreciate Kim more, especially when his presidency is stacked up next to the disappointing terms of his successors.

“His legacy will grow with time. Even if he made some mistakes, people appreciate his contributions to democracy and his handling of the economy,” Hahm said today.

Kim was born on tiny Haui island off the southwestern coast of South Korea, in Cholla province, renowned for the anti-authoritarian streak of its people. He has said that his date of birth was Jan. 6, 1924, although various later dates are often cited in official records — discrepancies that his opponents used against him later to claim he was dishonest. (The most likely explanation for the confusion over his birth date was that his family was trying to keep him out of the draft during the 1910-1945 occupation period.)

Another slur leveled against him was that he was the child of a concubine because his mother was not legally married to his father, who had a first wife.

Nonetheless, such arrangements were common at the time and Kim’s parents lived as man and wife, raising three sons. He was the oldest.

In a memoir written while incarcerated, “Prison Writings,” Kim said his family was distinguished in their farming and fishing village by owning a phonograph. As a child, he loved music and animals, protesting vehemently when neighbors slaughtered a dog to eat. (He wrote in the memoirs, however, that he did taste the meat afterward.)

When he was 7 or 8, Kim was sent to study the Chinese classics with a village scholar. His academic abilities proved phenomenal, and the family moved to the mainland port city of Mokpo so that he could further his education. He became involved in anti-Japanese activities, at one point joining an underground group of young communists who read banned Marxist texts.

Despite scoring top grades through high school, Kim’s father did not permit him to attend university, insisting that the family needed him to get a job. Nevertheless, he remained an avid reader and intellectual; his memoirs are rich with references to philosophers from Plato to Friedrich Nietzsche.

His first job was working with a shipping company in Mokpo. In 1947, he bought a ship and started his own company. In that same year, according to Breen, he was arrested by a local detective who claimed he was a communist. He was held briefly — a colleague took the detective out drinking and he was released — but there would soon be many longer stays under lock and key. In 1950, when North Korean troops came swarming across the border, Kim was picked up and held by the invading forces for several months before United Nations forces pushed them back.

After the Korean War, Kim had another setback. His first wife, whom he had married soon after high school, died suddenly, leaving him to care for their two young boys. He converted to Catholicism, remaining devout through the end of his days. (He later married Lee Hi ho, a Christian activist, and had another son.) He caught the attention of John Chang Myon, a prominent Catholic politician, and began showing an interest in politics.

The emphasis in those lean postwar years was in rebuilding the tattered nation out of the ruins of war, but Kim didn’t believe other values should be subsumed by the quest for economic growth.

“A national economy lacking a democratic foundation is a castle built on sand,” Kim would say later during the lecture he delivered upon winning the Nobel Peace Prize.

He won his first election in 1961 as a national assemblyman for the Mokdo district, but before he arrived to take his seat in the National Assembly in Seoul, a general, Park Chung Hee, staged a military coup and closed the parliament.

A decade later, Park held a presidential election and opposition party leaders decided it was time to bring in younger candidates. Kim Dae-jung stunned the power establishment by nearly beating Park.

That brought Kim unwelcome attention. The same year his car was pushed off the road by a truck in what he believed was an assassination attempt. He was left with a limp that gave him a peculiar Charlie Chaplin-like waddle. He left the country the following year.

In 1973, he was kidnapped from a Tokyo hotel room, drugged with ether and dragged onto the boat where he was to be thrown overboard.

“I knew that death was only moments away,” Kim later wrote. “I heard them discussing how to keep my body from floating to the surface if the sharks didn’t get me first.”

While the boat was sailing through the waters, a plane appeared and began circling overhead flashing a red light. Kim was taken back to South Korea. He said later he believed that the CIA had intervened to save his life, but his miraculous rescue has never been fully explained.

But life was hardly peaceful afterward. Over the next 14 years, Kim was either in prison, under house arrest or in exile. He was given the death sentence in 1980 on trumped-up charges of sedition. He fled to the United States for two years, teaching at Georgetown University. It was not until 1987 that he was free to establish a pro-democracy political party.

In 1993, after losing his third race for the presidency — previous tries were in 1971 and 1987 — Kim announced he was retiring from politics. He went to Europe to study Germany reunification, and said he would dedicate the rest of his life to Korean reunification.

It wasn’t long before he was back, this time more determined than ever to win. He cut a deal with the former head of the KCIA, the spy agency that had tried to kill him at least once, in order to give more conservative ballast to his ticket. Kim Jong Pil became his first prime minister.

As president, Kim put reconciliation at the top of his agenda, not just between the North and South, but within South Korea. At his inauguration, among the most notable guests were former strongmen Chung Doo-Hwan and Roh Tae-Woo, who had ordered Kim tried and sentenced death on the sedition charges.

Kim took office on the heels of an economic debacle in which South Korea, by then the 11th largest economy in the world, had been forced to take a $58-billion bailout from the International Monetary Fund. The loan was repaid in 2001 — nearly three years ahead of schedule — and Kim won high markets from the very business executives who had grumbled that he was a leftist who knew nothing about the economy.

Kim came under criticism for being too lax with North Korea, turning a blind eye to human rights violations and propping up the regime of Kim Jong Il with humanitarian aid and cash gifts. Once out of office, Kim was bluntly unrepentant about charges that he had paid for the summit.

“When a rich brother goes to visit a poorer brother, the rich brother should not go empty-handed,” he told the Financial Times in 2004.

But in light of subsequent events, the Nobel Peace Prize that Kim won for his dealings with North Korea has lost much of its luster. As a result, he is likely to be better appreciated for the contributions of his earlier years toward the democratization of modern South Korea.

Source : latimes

DEAN CAIN, COLIN COWIE, GERRY DEVEAUX, FAROUK, HEATHER KERZNER, RICHARD LEFRAK, GEORGE MALOOF JR., VALERIA MAZZA, MATTHEW ROLSTON, ANDRE LEON TALLEY, TAMARA TUNIE AND KEISHA WHITAKER, TO JUDGE THE 2009 MISS UNIVERSE PAGEANT ON NBC AUGUST 23RD

Flo Rida, Heidi Montag, David Guetta and Kelly Rowland Will Perform Their Hit Songs During the Live Telecast from Atlantis, Paradise Island in the Bahamas

New York, NY – August 17, 2009 – NBC, Donald J. Trump and Paula M. Shugart, President, Miss Universe Organization, today announced the celebrity judges for the 2009 Miss Universe® Pageant live on NBC and Telemundo on Sunday, August 23rd (9 PM ET).

The judges are: Dean Cain, actor and producer best known for his TV portrayal of Clark Kent/Superman; Colin Cowie, author/television personality/designer to the stars; Gerry DeVeaux, award-winning producer, songwriter and style guru; Farouk, Founder and Chairman of CHI Hair Care; Heather Kerzner, philanthropist and ambassador for Kerzner International and their resorts, including Atlantis, Paradise Island; Richard LeFrak, Chairman, President and CEO, LeFrak Organization; George Maloof Jr., professional sports mogul and hotelier;  Valeria Mazza, international supermodel; Matthew Rolston, leading photographer and director; Andre Leon Talley, award-winning writer and editor;  Tamara Tunie, actress, “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit”; and Keisha Whitaker,fashion maven and founder of the Kissable Couture lip gloss line.

“Access Hollywood” co-host Billy Bush along with “Celebrity Apprentice” star Claudia Jordan will host the live telecast of the 58th Annual Miss Universe Pageant from Atlantis, Paradise Island in the Bahamas.

As previously announced, international superstar Flo Rida will perform his hugely successful hits, “Right Round” and “Jump” as part of a two song medley during the Swimsuit Competition portion of the telecast. Included in the show will also be a performance by reality star Heidi Montag featuring her single “Body Language.” David Guetta and Kelly Rowland will set the tone for the Evening Gown portion of the pageant as they perform their hit single, “When Love Takes Over.”

Venezuelan native Dayana Mendoza, Miss Universe 2008, will crown her successor at the conclusion of the 2009 Miss Universe telecast. During her reign, she has traveled the globe as an advocate for HIV/AIDS education, research and legislation. The newly crowned Miss Universe will go on to do the same.

Each contestant from more than 80 countries around the world will be judged in three categories: swimsuit, evening gown and interview as they vie for the coveted title of Miss Universe 2009. In recent years, the pageant has been viewed before an estimated worldwide viewing audience of approximately one billion viewers.
Donald J. Trump and Phil Gurin will again serve as Executive Producers for MISS UNIVERSE® 2009.

A new pair of famous faces have fallen victim to a nude scandal – and this time, they aren’t Disney stars.

“Grey’s Anatomy” actor Eric Dane and his actress wife Rebecca Gayheart are featured in a new scandalous video posted on Gawker.com.

The Hollywood couple, who have been married since 2004, appear out of sorts in the 12-minute video shot in former beauty queen Kari Ann Peniche’s Studio City apartment.

In the edited clip posted on the Web site, the threesome appear fully nude and take turns passing around the camera as they discuss what their porn names would be.

Dane, 36, mentions a few of his past pet’s names, however settles on the name of famous bull riding champion Tuff Hedeman.

At one point, Gayheart says she needs to lie down on the bed because she feels “very high.”

The 38-year-old actress also mentions to her female companion that “we need to erase everything [on the camera] before you make your movie.” To which Peniche replies, “We will.”

However Peniche may not have been the best person to trust.

The 25-year-old, who was crowned Miss Teen USA in 2002, was stripped of her crown for posing in Playboy magazine and was briefly engaged to Backstreet Boy Nick Carter.

Most recently, Peniche was being treated for sex addiction on Dr. Drew’s “Celebrity Rehab,” but was kicked off the show after accusations that she punched a cameraman and stole from her roommate, country singer Mindy McCready.

Gawker.com reports Peniche has most recently been working as a madam in Hollywood.

Much to the couple’s dismay, the undated video was never deleted and was eventually confiscated by the Los Angeles Police Department when they searched for Peniche’s client list.

Source : nydailynews

BEIJING – Miniature iPhones, handsets that double as shavers and others shaped like packs of cigarettes are just some of the gray-market devices on sale at Chinese markets.

China is home to a booming, unregulated industry in knock-off mobile phones that is hurting legal handset makers even as it spawns innovation. The low-price handsets have become popular enough to inspire a nickname, “shanzhai,” which translates as “bandit” and includes any phone not licensed for sale by regulatory authorities. Included in the category are look-alike versions of well-known smartphones like the iPhone and the Nokia N97, sometimes so close in appearance to the original handsets that the two can be hard to distinguish.

But despite their resemblance, the knock-off phones sometimes lack functions found in the original handsets and can come with malware pre-installed or have safety hazards like exploding batteries.

Fake iPhones were openly sold beside real iPhones smuggled into China during a recent visit to one of Beijing’s multistory electronics bazaars. The iPhone is not officially sold in China, but merchants buy the handsets unlocked outside China and resell them inside the country. Local carrier China Unicom is in talks with Apple to officially launch the iPhone in the country.

The shanzhai iPhones came with either a standard 3.5-inch screen or a smaller 2.9-inch screen. Applications were displayed in iPhone-style bubble squares, but the phones could be distinguished from real versions partly by the China-specific applications preloaded on them, such as a popular chat client. “iPhone” was misspelled on the back of some of the handsets as well, engraved either as “AIphone” or “iPhne.” Other spelling changes found on knock-off handsets in China include “Nckia” and “Samsang.”

Vendors asked prices from 600 yuan (US$88) to 1,200 yuan for the imitation iPhones, and most made a point of calling them “China-made” rather than “pirated” or “fake.” Real iPhones at the same stands sold for around 4,000 yuan.

Shanzhai phones have performed well with China’s price-conscious consumers. Of the 750 million mobile phones manufactured in China last year, about one in five — or 150 million — were shanzhai phones, according to Chinese research outfit CCID Consulting. Some of those made it to other countries, but most were sent to markets across China.

Shanzhai phones probably took a greater share of China’s handset market this year, cutting into sale opportunities for both foreign and Chinese handset makers, said Karl J. Weaver, China handset business development manager for Newport Technologies.

“The shanzhai not only have affected the traditional tier-one handset manufacturers, they’ve also affected the Chinese companies,” said Weaver. “I anticipate they lost a lot of money.”

The shanzhai industry has defied regulation despite intellectual-property concerns raised by copycat devices. Reasons for low regulation so far could include the large number of people the industry employs and government support for its entrepreneurial side, said Weaver.

Some shanzhai phone vendors have gone on to design and market handsets licensed through the official regulatory process, he said. Knock-off manufacturers have also innovated at times. Novel features that have appeared in shanzhai handsets include dual-SIM card slots, extra-loud speakers and built-in cigarette lighters, sometimes added to phone designs otherwise copied from a major brand.

“There’s creativity in the knock-off,” said Weaver. “Some of the shanzhai products actually have better functions and features than the original product itself.”

Top shanzhai phone makers that become legal could potentially become global vendors, he said.

The shanzhai industry is based in Shenzhen, a freewheeling southern city where factories churn out gadgets for companies including Apple. The presence of established handset makers makes it easy for merchants to find knock-off suppliers in the city, said a stall owner at the Beijing bazaar surnamed Zhang.

“You can go online or go to Shenzhen yourself,” Zhang said at his Apple device booth. “The people there can design a handset that looks just like an iPhone very quickly.”

“But they all keep close cover,” he said.

Source : mis-asia by Owen Fletcher

One is that the USGS log simply missed one or more underwater earthquakes responsible for the breaks. The measurement process is not flawless, especially underwater, and the risk of errors would seem to be higher during bad weather – which Typhoon Morakot clearly represents. The USGS did log a magnitude 5.6 quake around Mindanao, Philippines at 4am today (local time, in the Philippines); if a similar quake a day earlier went unrecorded, this would explain some of the reported outages. Another possibility is that the outages actually stem from terrestrial hardware or fiber network failures; these are less common but not unheard of. Deliberate sabotage of either the undersea cables or the cable terminating stations on shore is another explanation. This is in theory a big risk, as cable stations are not always well secured, and it is impossible to safeguard thousands of kilometers of cable deep underwater. But again, this is unlikely, and – as far as the public knows – this has not happened yet outside of imaginative novels.

Hopefully these issues will resolve themselves over the next few days. Given that there is no single authority managing or monitoring the world’s undersea cable networks, uncertainty is inevitable, and it takes time to learn the hard facts. We would note, though, that the real story here may be how much progress Asia’s international network connectivity has made in just the last few years. With the installation of the Transpacific Express, the Asia America Gateway, several smaller intra-Asia projects and cables linking Europe and Asia through India and the Middle East (not all complete), the region’s cable systems are now much more meshed and resilient, and less prone to catastrophic failures. With progress comes higher expectations, though, so we look forward to learning from this recent outage how to improve performance going forward; after all, undersea cable networks play central, underappreciated roles in global commerce.

Source : mis-asia (Matt Walker)