Sundance kicks off with porn-obsessed 'Don Jon

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PARK CITY, Utah — The 2013 Sundance Film Festival got off to a rowdy and wry start Friday with “Don Jon’s Addiction,” written, directed by and starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt and co-starring Scarlett Johansson and Tony Danza.

As a wanna-be womanizer hooked on porn, Gordon-Levitt (“Looper”) lends his charming smile to a role that highlights his offbeat sensibility. Johansson plays the woman who could reroute his libido to the real world.
ohansson — whose current Broadway role in “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” kept her from attending the festival opener at the Eccles Theatre — adds mainstream marketability to “Don’s” indie spirit, still the hallmark of Sundance as it laps its 25th official year.
ScarJo may not have had to endure the frigid Park City temperatures, which struggled to hit the double digits, but Naomi Watts was looking great to promote “Two Mothers,” which also bowed Friday.
The film, about lifelong friends (Watts and Robin Wright) who fall in love with each other’s grown sons, marks the Australian star’s return to edgier material. Female audiences at the Eccles may have been distracted by Watts and Wright’s on-screen objects of affection, newcomers Xavier Samuel and James Frecheville.
Earlier, festival-goers got a look at “Kill Your Darlings,” part of “Harry Potter” star Daniel Radcliffe’s transition from boy wizard to grownup. Playing gay Beat Generation poet Allen Ginsberg, Radcliffe is unrecognizable in dyed black hair and horn-rimmed glasses (on the red carpet, he added some chin scruff).
The film, co-starring Elizabeth Olsen as the Beats’ guardian angel, Edie Parker, is one of two Beat flicks at the fest, sharing space with the Jack Kerouac flick “Big Sur.”
Keri Russell, TV’s former “Felicity,” gives a comic turn in the adaptation of the best-selling novel “Austenland,” as a woman so obsessed with Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice” that she heads to a theme park devoted to the 19th-century author. And Shailene Woodley sparked the high school dramedy treat “The Spectacular Now,” which was met with thunderous applause
Kristen Bell goes from box-office sinker “When in Rome” to the thoughtful indie “The Lifeguard,” about a frazzled New York reporter going back to her Connecticut hometown to take a job at a local pool.
The serious-minded “Mud,” a chewy Southern tale from “Take Shelter” director Jeff Nichols stars Matthew McConaughey as a criminal hiding out in a swamp who is discovered by two Arkansas kids. A de-glammed Reese Witherspoon co-stars as his wild girlfriend.
Another buzz-maker was “Emanuel and the Truth About Fishes,” in which Jessica Biel plays a mysterious neighbor to a troubled girl (Kaya Scodelario).
Finally, one of Saturday’s midnight slots was occupied by the hyperjumpy horror flick “S-V/H/S.” A sequel to a cult hit about videotapes that reveal ghastly happenings, it debuted in the spot that unleashed “The Blair Witch Project” from Sundance nearly 15 years ago. If that kind of success happens again, it’s an example of another thing Sundance does best — create heat even when the temperature is crazy cold.

Swami claims Indian rape victim was 'as guilty' as her attackers

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A so-called “spiritual leader” threw more verbal gasoline on the raging fire over the fatal gang rape of a 23-year-old woman, saying the victim was “as guilty as her rapists” for the Dec. 16 attack.
Self-styled swami Asaram Bapu said Jyoti Singh Pandey should have “taken God’s name and could have held the hand of one of the men and said, ‘I consider you as my brother.’”
Pandey died from her injuries two weeks later — but that apparently wasn’t enough for Bapu.
"The victim is as guilty as her rapists,” he said. “She should have called the culprits brothers and begged before them to stop. ... This could have saved her dignity and life,” the 71-year-old spiritualist said, according to Indian papers.
Bapu, who was speaking at a religious conference, also reportedly said Pandey could have saved herself by praying and chanting.
“The six were drunk. If the girl had chanted hymns to Goddess Saraswati and to Guru Diksha then she wouldn't have entered the bus,” Bapu said.
His remarks stunned political and cultural leaders in India, where the Pandey case has drawn international sympathy and focused national attention on the country’s pervasive sexual violence.
A leading political party condemned Bapu’s comments as “regrettable, deeply disturbing and painful,” local papers reported.
A spokeswoman for Bapu later tried to clarify his mean-spirited talk.
“He was only suggesting that women should try their level based to come out from such situation by using diplomatic ways,” spokeswoman Niam Dubey told Asian News International.
She insisted Bapu’s words had been misinterpreted, even as she admitted he’d made the offensive remarks.
“Yes, he said that the girl had made a mistake by taking an empty bus in night. If she had taken ‘Matra-Diksha,’ the God has might save her anyhow,” Dubey said.
Five of Pandey’s alleged attackers were formally charged with abduction, gang rape and murder Monday. The sixth suspect, 17, was charged in a juvenile court separately.
Reporters and photographers were barred from the courtroom as the charges were read Monday. The attack has triggered weeks of protests and forced the government to address demands for swifter justice, safer streets and heavier sentences in rape cases.

Maldives girl faces flogging after alleged rape

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A 15-year-old in the Maldives whose father is accused of repeatedly raping her and killing the resulting baby risks being flogged for "fornication" with another man under the nation's strict Islamic law, a police source said Monday.


In the course of inquiries into the rape case, investigators say they unearthed evidence of the girl having had consensual sex with another man, which is an offense in the Indian Ocean holiday destination, the source told AFP.
Women, including minors, having consensual sex outside marriage can be charged in the Maldives, where convicts can be publicly flogged. Minors receive the punishment when they reach 18, the age of majority.
The child's step-father is accused by police of repeatedly raping the girl and fathering a child by her which he subsequently murdered. The girl's mother has been charged with helping dispose of the infant's body, police said.
"We completed the investigation (into the murder of the infant) and gave a report to the prosecutor general's office," Maldivian police spokesman Hassan Haneef told AFP by telephone.
He declined to give details saying that Maldivian common law did not allow the discussion of any case involving a minor.
The local Haveeru newspaper quoted an unnamed official from the prosecutor's office saying that the fornication charge was unrelated to the rape which had been separately dealt with.
The legal system of the Maldives, a nation of 330,000 Sunni Muslims known for its coral-fringed islands and sandy beaches, has elements of Islamic Sharia law as well as English common law.
The country carries out the flogging of women despite calls from the UN Human Rights Council to drop the practice.
In September, a Maldivian court ordered a public flogging for a 16-year-old girl who confessed to having pre-marital sex. Her 29-year-old lover was sentenced to 10 years in prison.
The gang-rape last month in the Indian capital of a 23-year-old student who subsequently died has also sparked protests over crime against women in neighbouring South Asian nations including Nepal, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh.

What a body of work! Painted naked ladies

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Bodyspectra body painting festival
Art doesn't get much more lifelike than this! Using the naked body as their canvas, students at the City Varsity School of Media and Creative Arts in Cape Town, South Africa showcased their artistic talents at Bodyspectra 2012, the country's premier body painting event. From the beautiful and whimsical to the downright strange

Petraeus’ extramarital affair unacceptable, but his resignation a loss to the CIA, the country

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It was the late, great Warren Zevon who first wrote and sang about “making out like Charlie Sheen,” long before we met the goddesses. Now we find out that Gen. David Petraeus, a military hero and the head of the CIA, thought he was allowed to make out that way himself.
Petraeus becomes another famous American who thought sitting behind a big desk meant you could act like a slob underneath it. It is rather amazing, historically speaking, that if you give a big guy the slightest opening, he will behave like Charlie Sheen. Sometimes in military khakis.
But does it mean he should have lost his job for exhibiting what even he called “extremely poor judgment”? Why, because he was the first in a position of authority to think that it was all right to have a girl on the side, in the general’s case an extremely frisky, married biographer?
Petraeus first met Paula Broadwell — her book about Petraeus would eventually be called “All In,” go ahead and make up your own joke — when he was still in Afghanistan. It happens to be the place where Petraeus established himself as a star of both the military and counterterrorism. Is his work in Afghanistan, and Iraq before that, now diminished because he clearly — and pathetically — started thinking of Broadwell, herself a West Point grad, as some kind of soul mate?
Petraeus obviously loses here. His wife, who deserves none of this, who has become a hero to military families herself, is humiliated because a man described in The New York Times as the “preeminent military officer of his generation” turned out to have the morals of a drunken cadet on a weekend furlough.
But if he was going to have the body of work with the CIA that he did in Iraq and Afghanistan, the country also loses with the resignation of David Petraeus.
And please spare me the instant yammering from those who now act as if somehow Petraeus was somehow putting national security at risk because of this affair. You can already see the conspiracy nuts lining up and taking numbers, as if Petraeus’ resignation, coming when it does, is a way to hide the real facts of what happened when four Americans were killed in Benghazi, including our ambassador there.
Right away you see and hear the narrative shifting on President Obama, whose opponents and enemies couldn’t defeat him last Tuesday. With congressional hearings about to begin on Benghazi, it is only a matter of time until somebody stands up and starts shouting about impeachment.
The last guy they impeached was William Jefferson Clinton. He not only had an intern on the side, he had her with him in the Oval Office. Maybe it figures that his middle name is what it is, since Thomas Jefferson supposedly had enough free time on his hands while shaping the future of the country to sire out-of-wedlock children with Sally Hemings.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt had an affair, with a woman named Lucy Mercer. The married Dwight Eisenhower, the military hero of Normandy and a future President, had a great and good friend in Kay Summersby. And John F. Kennedy might have been the most noted political philanderer in American history.
If making a mess of marriages and a personal life in general disqualified you from being the mayor of New York, then Rudy Giuliani wouldn’t have even been on the job on Sept. 11, 2001.
This is no defense of David Petraeus or what he has selfishly done to his wife of 38 years, a child of the military herself, a woman who became a powerful voice for financial education for military families.
Eventually Holly Petraeus worked for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, operating the part of that bureau dedicated to consumer complaints from military families. You hope she soldiers on the way her husband does not.
Petraeus chose to resign, the President chose to accept his resignation. The CIA loses, and the country loses, an exceptional leader of men and a truly lousy husband.
Petraeus committed a crime against marriage, absolutely. But he also committed the crime of being this stupid and getting this caught in the modern world. Imagine what it would have been like for JFK in a world like this.
Petraeus now joins a long list — immoral leaders, all-time — that stretches back to the Old Testament, and the affair between King David and Bathsheba. All they did with the big guy in that dirty affair was write a Bible story about him.

Two teenage brothers charged with murdering South Jersey girl Autumn Pasquale; their mother called cops after reading one's Facebook post about the girl's death

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A teenage boy used bike parts to lure a 12-year-old South Jersey girl into his house and then, with his older brother, killed her, police said Tuesday.
The pair then allegedly dumped Autumn Pasquale’s strangled body next door in a recycling bin.
One of the cruel teens even posted something about her murder on Facebook while her parents and dozens of other terrified residents in tiny Clayton, N.J., searched frantically for her, Gloucester County Prosecutor Sean Dalton said.
When the boys’ mother saw the posting, she turned in her 15- and 17—year-old sons, he said. “There’s evil everywhere, even in the small town of Clayton,” Autumn’s uncle, Paul Spadafora, said.
It was a horrific development in a fast-moving tragedy that began Saturday when Autumn rode off on her bike, bound for a nearby park — and vanished without a trace just days before her 13th birthday.
Dalton did not name the teens, but residents said they were neighbors of the freckle-faced victim. They also said the accused teens’ house on East Clayton Ave. was a known hangout for other teenagers.
The girl died of “blunt force trauma, consistent with strangulation,” but there was no sign of sexual assualt. the medical examiner said.
Investigators said it was the younger teenage boy who lured Autumn. A third teen boy also lives in the hell house where the girl died, officials said, and one of the trio traded in BMX bike parts. Autumn was riding a white BMX bike when she disappeared.
The brothers are charged with murder and conspiracy to commit murder, among other counts. The younger brother is also charged with luring.

Teacher attacks teen wearing Romney T-shirt, compares it to KKK, student says

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High school sophomore Samantha Pawlucy says her teacher asked her why she was wearing the pink Romney-Ryan shirt in a 'democratic school,' then asked her to leave class or change. 'She said that's like her wearing a KKK shirt,' the teen said.



A Philadelphia high school student says she was harassed for wearing a Mitt Romney T-shirt her teacher likened to the Klu Klux Klan.

“The teacher told me to get out of the classroom. I said no,” 16-year-old Samantha Pawlucy told NBC Philadelphia.


“She told me to take off my shirt and said that she has another one if I need one. And then the teacher asked me, ‘Are your parents Republican?’ I said, ‘I don’t know.’

“She said that’s like her wearing a KKK shirt.”

Pawlucy, a sophomore at Charles Carroll High School, said she was mortified last Friday when the teacher went into the hallway to urge other students and teachers to check out the shirt.

“I was really embarrassed and shocked,” she told Philly.com. “I didn’t think she’d go into the hallway and scream to everyone.”



The teacher has been moved to another class at Charles Carroll High School, the district says.

Pawlucy wore the pink Ryan-Romney shirt for the school’s “dress-down” day.

The teacher wanted to know why Pawlucy was wearing a “Republican shirt” when “this is a democratic school,” her father Richard Pawlucy told local radio station, WWIQ.

Pawlucy’s parents met with the teacher, who apologized and explained she was only joking.

“If it was a joke between two adults, I can take a joke like that,” Richard Pawlucy told NBC Philadelphia. “But [Samantha] didn’t know how to take it, she doesn’t understand. She actually thinks she did something wrong.”

Pawlucy’s mother Christine said she could “picture her sitting there feeling ashamed for just wearing a T-shirt.”

The Philadelphia school district says the case is under investigation and the teacher, whose name has not been released, has been moved to another classroom.

Buxom blond high school teacher Courtney Speer, 31, busted for having sex with student

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Courtney Speer faces charges stemming from her alleged sexual relationship with a high school teen.

A buxom blond high school teacher from Arkansas is accused of having repeated sex with one of her teen students in the school's parking lot.

English teacher Courtney Speer, 31, is out on $20,000 bail awaiting formal charges after turning herself in to police Tuesday, a spokesman with the Saline County Sheriff's Department said.

"She was very quiet and somber during booking. She didn't say a word. Her lawyer was with her the whole time," Sgt. Phillip Bentley told The News.

Cops said they got a call from Bryant High School on Monday after an unidentified tipster reported her alleged sexual relationship with her former 9th grade student who's now 17 years old.

Speer resigned immediately amid a probe of allegations she had sex with the student at her house in nearby Benton and on school grounds in Bryant.

"In our city, there were four different occasions during which she allegedly had sex with the student in the parking lot. It was in a car," Sgt. Todd Crowson with the Bryant Police Department told The News.

He said Speer is married with two young children.

Police Dept.
Courtney Speer has retained a lawyer and said nothing when she turned herself in to authorities.

She quickly retained a lawyer and has not made any statements, he said.

Speer was booked on suspicion of six counts of felony assault spanning the two jurisdictions and faces six to 30 years in jail if convicted.

She's due back in court Oct. 13.

"You have enough to worry about when you have teens, especially with all the peer pressure out there. The last thing you want to worry about is a teacher taking advantage of your child," Crowson said. "The vast majority of our teachers are good. But you do have a few bad ones out there, and in this case, that's what we have."