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(11/26/07 1:57am)
INDIANAPOLIS – U.S. Rep. Julia Carson told a newspaper she has terminal lung cancer but did not say whether she intends to return to Congress or seek a seventh term.\nCarson, 69, said in a statement published in The Indianapolis Star on Sunday that she had planned to return to Washington after recuperating from a leg infection before a doctor diagnosed her with cancer.\n“It had gone into remission years before, but it was back with a terminal vengeance,” the six-term Indianapolis Democrat said in the statement, which did not disclose the date of her initial diagnosis.\nCarson made no comment beyond the statement she issued to the newspaper. The Associated Press left a phone message at Carson’s Washington office seeking additional comment from her spokesman, Chad Chitwood.\nAnn DeLaney, a former Democratic Party state chairwoman, told The Star that Carson’s health appeared to have been suffering over the past year.\n“Frankly, any of us who had seen her in the last year thought there was something pretty seriously wrong with her,” DeLaney said.\nCarson has been away from Washington since she was admitted to an Indianapolis hospital Sept. 21 for treatment of a deep leg infection. Her office had said Carson intended to return to Congress by mid-December, but that was before “the second shoe fell – heavily,” her statement said.\nCarson has not made her plans for another term clear. She has said she intended to seek re-election. But she also declined to give a yes or no answer when asked during a recent radio interview if she planned to run.\nHer statement did not refer to her political plans, but Carson has been largely undeterred by health problems in the past.\nMost recently, she was hospitalized for more than a week for what her office said was an infection near where a leg vein was removed in January 1997 when she underwent double heart bypass surgery – weeks after she was first elected to Congress.\nCarson also has suffered from high blood pressure, asthma and diabetes and took a one-week leave of absence from her congressional duties in 2003 for what she called routine medical appointments.\nShe missed dozens of House votes in 2004 because of illness and spent the weekend before the 2004 election in the hospital for what she said was a flu shot reaction – but still won re-election by 10 percentage points.\nDespite health problems that have led to missed votes and GOP claims that she was ineffective, Carson has won more than two dozen consecutive elections at the local, state and national levels since 1972.
(11/26/07 1:13am)
NEW YORK – J.K. Rowling’s magical, Midas touch has landed her on the cover of Entertainment Weekly as the magazine’s entertainer of the year.\nThe magazine said the “Harry Potter” author, who has sold nearly 400 million copies of her boy-wizard series that’s been adapted into a mega-successful movie franchise, deserved props for getting “people to tote around her big, old-fashioned printed-on-paper books as if they were the hottest new entertainment devices on the planet.”\nRowling was in a class by herself on the magazine’s list of the year’s top entertainers, which was separated by editors into five other categories that evoke school cliques: prodigies, class clowns, most popular, most buzzed-about and valedictorians.\nThe magazine named George Clooney – actor, director, activist – a valedictorian because he has “deftly balanced box-office viability with personal responsibility.” Will Smith, Angelina Jolie and the cast of “The Sopranos” also made the grade, among others.\nMatt Damon made the list of most popular, as did Carrie Underwood, Katherine Heigl, Johnny Depp and Kanye West.\nThe prodigies: Zac Efron, Shia LaBeouf, Rihanna and Miley Cyrus.\nTina Fey, creator and co-star of “30 Rock,” was recognized as a class clown for her hilariously cringe-inducing portrayal of comedy-show producer Liz Lemon on the NBC sitcom.\n“I love going to those uncomfortable places,” she tells the magazine. “I’ll go down any weird avenue.”\nOther clowns: Vanessa Williams, “The Simpsons” and director Judd Apatow and his gang of actor buddies including Seth Rogen and Paul Rudd. Apatow cast his pals in the acclaimed comedies “The 40 Year Old Virgin” and this year’s “Knocked Up,” which cracked people up with a winning combination of heart and R-rated raunch.
(11/16/07 2:25am)
TAMPA, Fla. – Some people will do anything to make a kid happy.\nJody Powell, 35, hung on to a 12-foot statue of “Hannah Montana” for the better part of six days to win tickets to a sold-out concert by Miley Cyrus, star of the Disney Channel TV show. The concert will be held next week in Tampa.\n“I’m ecstatic. It’s like a dream come true,” Powell said, holding four tickets to the show and a photo of his fiancee with her 7-year-old daughter, also named Hannah.\nTwenty contestants started Nov. 8, placing a hand on the 400-pound statue in the parking lot of radio station WFLZ-FM, the contest’s sponsor. They were allowed 12-minute breaks every three hours and got catered meals, but weren’t allowed books, cell phones \nor iPods.\nPowell was declared the winner Wednesday afternoon when the other remaining contestant, Lara Padgett, became distracted and let go.\n“That sun really got to me today,” Padgett said, who later was checked out at a hospital because she wasn’t feeling well. “I took my hand off the fur-lined boot.”\nBut the two had already made a deal. Powell gets the tickets, and Padgett will use the two backstage passes that are part of the prize package. They’ll split a $5,000 cash prize.
(11/15/07 3:09am)
INDIANAPOLIS – The American Civil Liberties Union of Indiana is asking a federal appeals court to reconsider a decision that would allow the return of sectarian prayers in the state House of Representatives.\nThe agency’s legal director, Ken Falk, said the agency is asking for a hearing before the full U.S. 7th Circuit Court of Appeals. A panel of judges ruled 2-1 last month that the taxpayers who sued over the prayers did not have the legal standing to do so.\nFalk says the ACLU is arguing that the court incorrectly applied a 2007 U.S. Supreme Court decision to the case.\nA federal judge ruled in 2005 that prayers mentioning Jesus Christ or using terms such as savior amounted to state endorsement of a religion.
(11/15/07 3:08am)
BLOOMFIELD, Ind. – Twin 16-year-old sisters have both been sentenced to the Indianapolis Juvenile Correctional Facility and fined after they pleaded guilty to calling in bomb threats to their southern Indiana high school.\nMary and Gracy Stone of Bloomfield pleaded guilty to two counts each of false reporting. Charges of conspiracy to commit false reporting were dropped in the plea agreement.\nThe girls were charged after calling in bomb threats to Bloomfield High School on Aug. 23 and Aug. 31. Classes at the school about 25 miles west of Bloomington were canceled Aug. 31 because of the threat.\nIn court Tuesday, Gracy Stone tearfully testified that they called in the bomb threats in a plot to run away from home.\nShe said they wanted to leave home because of drug use and violence there.\n“I felt like I couldn’t get away,” she said as her sister, Mary Stone, sat crying in the courtroom.\nHer father had no visible reaction to the testimony. When asked by the judge whether he understood what was happening, he said he understood the girls needed to be punished.\nThe twins were ordered to pay $5,442 in restitution to the Bloomfield School District and the two Greene County fire departments that responded.\nGreene Circuit Judge Erik Allen said the girls would be on probation until the age of 18. Their time at the school would be determined by periodic reviews of their progress. If they are allowed to leave, a hearing would determine where they would go.
(11/15/07 3:08am)
INDIANAPOLIS – Attorneys for the state asked the Indiana Supreme Court on Wednesday to overturn a judge’s ruling that an arrest was invalid because the officer had not been sworn in as a member of Indianapolis’ merged police department.\nThat ruling called into question nearly all arrests made by Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department officers since the agency was formed Jan. 1. The agency is a merger of the Indianapolis Police and Marion County Sheriff’s departments.\nAttorneys for a woman arrested on a drunken driving charge in January argued that while Officer William Bueckers had been sworn in as an IPD officer, his status did not automatically carry over to the new department.\nDeputy Attorney General Cynthia Ploughe told the justices that state law requires an oath only of officers who train others at the law enforcement academy.\n“There is no law that requires officers of the IMPD to be sworn,” Ploughe said.\nJustices asked defense attorney James Voyles to explain why he believed officers needed to be sworn in after the merger when the same officers had already taken an oath.\n“Why does the prior oath evaporate?” Justice Brent Dickson asked.\nVoyles said anytime a police officer begins work for a new agency, the oath should be administered.\nVoyles had asked a Marion Superior Court judge to suppress any evidence gathered from his client’s arrest.\n“It’s not a simple matter,” Voyles said. “It’s a matter involving our constitutional protections when we put officers on the street.”\nWhile Marion County Sheriff Frank Anderson and other high-ranking officers attended a swearing-in ceremony the day after the merger became official, most officers did not.\n“We are only saying in this case that Officer Bueckers had already taken the oath under IPD and his employment continued seamlessly from IPD to IMPD,” Ploughe said
(11/15/07 3:07am)
EVANSVILLE – Visitors to attorney Mike Woods’ law practice are greeted with a sight not often found in legal offices: a jail cell.\nThe office for Woods and Woods is located in the old Vanderburgh County Jail – an 1890 downtown building honored Tuesday with a historical marker from the Indiana Historical Bureau.\nThe old jail was modeled after a German castle and in 1903 was the site of a race riot in which 12 people were killed and many more were injured. The jail sat empty from 1967 until 1994, Woods said, and was full of weeds and trash before being renovated. Woods and Woods moved its offices into the building in 2004 and continues to lease the second-floor space from the county.\n“Through the years, the Old Jail has received minor repairs and updates, a few new coats of paint and thousands of visitors, but it hasn’t lost its intrigue,” Woods said. “Preserving this history is important because it allows community members to reflect on the past, to learn from and appreciate those who came before us.”\nThe building still has bars over the windows, which is an interesting atmosphere for the firm’s 30 employees.\n“They are always joking they can’t get away, or saying we’re slave drivers,” Woods said.\nVisitors can see one of the original cramped jail cells, complete with four metal bunk beds, a sink and a toilet.\nThe office’s employee break room is adjacent to a door leading to a tunnel that connects the old jail with the old county courthouse. Woods said the tunnel was used to transport prisoners between the two facilities.\n“Both these buildings were once on the verge of being destroyed,” he said. “Now, they are saved.”
(11/08/07 3:27am)
An 18-year-old student opened fire in a Finnish high school Wednesday, killing seven students and the principal before turning the gun on himself, police said.\nThe teenager, who was not identified, shot himself in the head but survived and was taken to a hospital in “extremely critical condition,” police spokesman Tero Haapala said.\nThe attack at Jokela High School in Tuusula, some 30 miles north of the capital, Helsinki, shocked the Nordic nation, where gun ownership is fairly common by European standards but deadly shootings are rare.\nPolice said at a news conference after the attack that the gunman in Wednesday’s attack shot the victims – five boys, two girls and the female principal – with a .22-caliber pistol. About a dozen other people were injured as they tried to escape the school, police said.\n“He was from an ordinary family,” police chief Matti Tohkanen said about the gunman, who belonged to a gun club and got a license for the pistol Oct. 19. He did not have a previous criminal record, he said.\nFinnish media said the shooter revealed his plans in a YouTube posting before the attack.\nThe video, titled “Jokela High School Massacre,” showed a picture of a building by a lake that appeared to be the high school, along with two photos of a young man holding a handgun. The person who posted the video was identified in the user profile as an 18-year-old man from Finland. The posting was later removed.\nThe profile contained a text calling for a “revolution against the system.”\nPolice said they would investigate any possible connection the gunman might have had to the video.\nTerhi Vayrynen, 17, a student at the school told The Associated Press that her brother Henri Vayrynen, 13, and his classmates had witnessed the shooting of the principal outside the school through the classroom window.\nShe said the gunman then came into Henri Vayrynen’s class shouting: “Revolution! Smash everything!”\nWhen no one did anything, he shot the TV and the windows of the class room but did not fire at the students. The he ran out and down the corridor, Terhi Vayrynen said.\nKim Kiuru, a teacher at the school, said the principal announced over the public address system just before noon that all students should remain in their classrooms.\n“After that I saw the gunman running with what appeared to be a small-caliber handgun in his hand through the doors toward me after which I escaped to the corridor downstairs and ran in the opposite direction,” Kiuru told reporters.\nKiuru said he saw a woman’s body as he fled the building.\n“Then my pupils shouted at me out of the windows to ask what they should do and I told them to jump out of the windows ... and all my pupils were saved,” Kiuru said.\nMore than 400 students, from 12 to 18, were enrolled at Jokela, officials said.\nPrime Minister Matti Vanhanen described the situation as “extremely tragic,” and declared Thursday a day of national mourning with flags to be flown half-staff.
(11/08/07 2:08am)
LOS ANGELES – David Mamet found an immediate outlet for his creativity during the Hollywood writers strike.\nIn a cartoon published Tuesday on the op-ed page of the Los Angeles Times, Mamet played the labor dispute for laughs, appearing to lampoon Writers Guild of America strikers.\nThe cartoon, drawn in a rough scribble, shows two men, each wearing a “WGA on Strike” button. One, with sunglasses and a palm tree-decorated shirt, says: “Whaddaya think, will we end up on the breadline?”\n“I don’t touch carbohydrates,” the other cartoon figure responds.\nMamet, a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright (“Glengarry Glen Ross”) and a screenwriter, also is creator and executive producer of the CBS TV series “The Unit.” \nThe show remained in production Tuesday, the day after the union went on strike against producers, but Mamet was observing the walkout, as was fellow executive producer Shawn Ryan, a show spokesman said.\nA request for comment from Mamet, 59, was made to his agent Tuesday but there was no immediate response.\nRyan, creator of “The Shield,” is a member of the WGA negotiating committee.
(11/07/07 5:02am)
Republican Greg Ballard scored a stunning upset Tuesday night, ending a months-long uphill climb to defeat two-term Indianapolis Mayor Bart Peterson and take leadership of the state’s largest city.\nBallard, who trailed in polling as recently as last month, led the Democratic incumbent by more than 5,000 votes with 93 percent of precincts reporting.\n“This is really unbelievable,” Ballard said in his victory speech. “I told everybody for so long that six months ago I was the only one who believed but now everybody believes.”\nAn Indianapolis Star/WTHR-TV poll of likely voters last month found Peterson with a lead of 43 percent to 39 percent for Ballard, a result within the poll’s margin of error despite Peterson having raised about $4 million and Ballard less than $300,000 by mid-October.\n“The Beatles used to say money can’t buy me love, but it doesn’t buy elections either,” Ballard said.\nBallard, a retired Marine Corps lieutenant colonel, capitalized on public discontent over property tax increases, a hike this year in the Marion County income tax and the city’s crime rate.\nIn the Fort Wayne mayor’s race, Democrat Tom Henry defeated Republican Matt Kelty, who was indicted on campaign finance and perjury charges.\nWith 96 percent of precincts reporting, Henry had 31,659 votes to Kelty’s 21,085.\nKelty’s August indictment dominated the mayoral campaign in the state’s second-largest city. Kelty, an architect who has never held public office, denies any wrongdoing in his reporting of $158,000 in loans to his campaign in which he won the GOP primary over a candidate who had the backing of nearly all elected Republican officials in Allen County.\nRepublicans have looked to retake the Fort Wayne mayor’s office after Democratic Mayor Graham Richard decided to not seek a third term.\nHenry, a former city councilman, said he wants to build upon many of Richard’s initiatives, including a $120 million downtown project that includes a new hotel, a privately built condominium and retail building and a new, city-owned baseball stadium.\nIn Muncie, the mayor’s race remained too close to call with all precincts reporting. Democrat James Mansfield Jr., director of the Muncie Visitors Bureau, led Republican Sharon McShurley by a nine-vote margin.\nRepublican Mayor Dan Canan did not seek re-election after three terms.
(11/02/07 1:26am)
BEDFORD – A coroner has ruled the death of Lawrence Circuit Court Judge Richard D. McIntyre was likely a suicide.\nLawrence County Coroner John Sherrill said an autopsy found that the 51-year-old McIntyre died from carbon monoxide poisoning. McIntyre’s wife found him unresponsive Tuesday evening in a sport utility vehicle parked inside a detached garage at their Bedford home.\nMcIntyre gained national attention during a months-long recount of his 1984 congressional campaign against Democrat Frank McCloskey. The Democrat-controlled House ruled McCloskey won in southern Indiana’s 8th District by four votes, prompting a Republican walkout at the Capitol.\nMcIntyre had been a judge in Lawrence County since 1988.
(11/02/07 12:24am)
NEW YORK – Hilary Swank must really trust Oprah \nWinfrey.\nThe Oscar-winning actress let the talk-show host chop off a little more than 9 inches of her hair during a segment that was to air Friday on “The Oprah Winfrey Show.”\nThe TV shearing was done in the name of charity. Swank, 33, donated her locks to Pantene Beautiful Lengths, which works with the American Cancer Society to provide wigs at no charge to women suffering from hair loss caused by their cancer treatments.\n“Well, it’s taken months to get to this moment,” Winfrey said before getting down to business. “It involves a two-time Academy Award winner, a sharp object and me.”\nSwank, who won Oscars for her roles in “Boys Don’t Cry” and “Million Dollar Baby,” said she “wanted to find a way to give back.”\n“I’ve been growing it for the last six months to donate my hair,” she says. “I’ve been taking a lot of vitamins and taking really good care of it knowing that it would go to a woman \nin need.”
(11/02/07 12:24am)
- From Associated Press reports\nLONDON – J.K. Rowling has completed her first book not to feature teen wizard Harry Potter – an illustrated collection of magical fairy stories titled “The Tales of Beedle the Bard.”\nOnly seven copies of the handwritten book have been made, Rowling said Thursday. One will be auctioned next month to raise money for a children’s charity, while the others have been given away as gifts.\nRowling drew the illustrations herself and provided the handwriting for the five stories that make up the collection of fairy tales.\n“The Tales of Beedle the Bard” is mentioned in the final Potter book, “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” as a gift left by headmaster Albus Dumbledore to Harry’s friend Hermione, and provides clues that help destroy evil Lord Voldemort.\n“The Tales of Beedle the Bard’ is really a distillation of the themes found in the Harry Potter books, and writing it has been the most wonderful way to say goodbye to a world I have loved and lived in for 17 years,” Rowling said in a statement.\nThe volume, bound in brown morocco leather and mounted with silver and semiprecious stones, will be auctioned at Sotheby’s on Dec. 13 with a starting price of $62,000. Proceeds will go to The Children’s Voice, a charity that helps vulnerable children across Europe.\n“Deathly Hallows,” the seventh and final installment in Harry’s adventures, was published in July. The seven books have sold nearly 400 million copies and have been translated into 64 languages.\nRowling told the British Broadcasting Corp. that the book of fairy tales has helped her say goodbye to \nHarry’s world.\n“It’s not about Harry, Ron and Hermione, but it comes from that world,” she told BBC radio in an interview broadcast Thursday. “So it’s been therapeutic in a way.”\nRowling said she was working on a new book, “a half-finished book for children that I think will probably be the next thing I publish.”\nOn Wednesday, Rowling and the makers of the Harry Potter movies filed a lawsuit against RDR Books, a small U.S. publisher that plans to bring out a companion volume based on the Harry Potter Lexicon \nfan Web site.\nRowling has said she plans to produce her own encyclopedia of the wizarding world and says the book would infringe on her intellectual \nproperty rights.
(11/01/07 3:10am)
WASHINGTON – The Supreme Court on Monday refused to consider a dispute involving Elizabeth Taylor over ownership of a Vincent van Gogh painting. The painting is claimed by descendants of a Jewish woman who fled Nazi Germany.\nThe painting, worth millions, may be among the estimated 600,000 works of art that belonged to Jews and wound up in Nazi hands between 1933 and 1945.\nvan Gogh painted “View of the Asylum” less than a year before his suicide.\nMargarete Mauthner, a one-time owner of the van Gogh, left Germany in March 1939, having lost her livelihood and most of her property due to Nazi policies of economic coercion. Relatives of Mauthner, a noted translator and advocate of the arts, say the painting was among the property she lost to the Nazis.\nIn 1963 while living in London, Taylor bought the painting for about $236,000 at a Sotheby’s auction from the estate of a German art collector.\nTaylor’s lawyers say the record shows the painting was sold through two Jewish art dealers to a Jewish art collector, with no evidence of any Nazi coercion or participation in the transactions.\nThe family members say they didn’t discover they had a possible claim to the painting until 2001.\nMauthner’s heirs went to court to recover the artwork, but the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco has ruled that the federal Holocaust Victims Redress Act does not create a private right to sue. Mauthner’s relatives also are trying to recover the painting under California state law, but the appeals court ruled they waited too long to act.\nTaylor, 75, won Oscars for her roles in “BUtterfield 8” and “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” She was nominated for Academy Awards for “Raintree County,” “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” and “Suddenly, Last Summer.”
(11/01/07 1:22am)
INDIANAPOLIS – Nearly every main demographic group of top college athletes exceeds the graduation rate for its student-body counterparts.\nAccording to federal graduation rates released Tuesday by the National Collegiate Athletic Association, 63 percent of Division I athletes who started college as freshmen in 2000 graduated in six years. That beats the graduation rate for all students at Division I schools by 1 percent and equaled last year’s percentage.\nWhite athletes had a 67 percent graduation rate, compared to 64 percent for white students overall. Black athletes also outperformed their student-body counterparts, 53 percent to 46 percent.\n“What these data show are that student-athletes are good students,” said NCAA spokesman Erik Christianson. “There tends to be a myth that student-athletes do not perform well in the classroom. The data simply suggests otherwise.”\nThe NCAA released federal statistics on graduation rates that do not account for transfer students. Earlier this month, it also released data termed “graduation success rates” that counted transfers and resulted in higher overall totals.\nThe federal statistics released Tuesday show that 49 percent of black male athletes graduated in six years, compared to 39 percent of their student-body counterparts. Female black athletes had a 63 percent graduation rate compared to 50 percent overall.\nThe data show that 74 percent of white female athletes graduated, compared to 66 percent overall.\nHispanic male and female athletes also graduated at higher percentages than overall figures for their ethnic groups. But white male and Asian/Pacific Island male students fell short of the overall percentages for their groups.\nThe federal numbers counted 18,346 athletes and 645,215 students overall at Division I schools and also included graduation rates for all Division I schools.\nChristianson said the NCAA is encouraged by the latest statistics but understands “that there’s room for improvement.”\nHe noted that the governing body for college athletics has raised eligibility standards for high school athletes who want to compete in college. It also requires students to earn 20 percent of their degree every year.\nEarlier this month, the NCAA released its graduation success rates, which the organization prefers to focus on because they count transfer students. They showed the overall graduation rate for men and women in all sports at 77 percent.\nThe individual rates for the three poorest-performing groups of athletes – men’s basketball, football and baseball – showed slight improvements for the second consecutive year.\nThis is the third year the NCAA has also released its own data.
(10/31/07 4:06am)
EDGEWOOD, Ind. – A man faces charges that he was drunk when he allowed his 10-year-old son to sit in his lap and drive his truck just before it plowed into a tree.\nPolice said Anthony T. Russell, 35, had a blood-alcohol content of 0.19 percent – more than twice the state’s legal limit to drive of 0.08 percent – when the truck crashed Saturday.\nAfter the crash, the boy was taken to an Anderson hospital and was found to have a broken rib.\nThe force of the truck’s impact into the tree was strong enough to break off the pickup truck’s steering wheel, police said in a probable cause \naffidavit.\nRussell was formally charged Monday with two felony counts of driving while intoxicated, one count of felony neglect and a misdemeanor drunken driving charge. He was being held Tuesday in the Madison County Jail on a $5,000 bond.\nWhen police officers arrived at the scene of the one-vehicle crash in Edgewood, just west of Anderson, they found Russell and his son outside the truck.\nRussell told officers he’d let his son sit on his lap to steer the truck and that it crashed into a tree as they were coming down a hill.
(10/31/07 4:05am)
CRAWFORDSVILLE, Ind. – A Wabash College freshman who fell to his death from a campus building may have slipped on the copper roof while trying to reach the peak, administrators believe.\nAn autopsy Monday showed that 19-year-old Patrick Michael Woehnker of Kendallville, Ind., died of blunt force trauma caused by the fall, said Montgomery County Coroner Darren Forman.\nWoehnker fell Sunday from the top of Goodrich Hall, an academic building that was closed at the time. He was with four other students on the roof when he got separated from them, authorities said.\n“Right now, we’re most likely looking at it as an accident,” said Crawfordsville Assistant Police Chief Hal Utterback. “We’re waiting on toxicology results to see if there was anything further.”\nPreliminary tests showed that Woehnker had a blood-alcohol content of 0.04 percent, he said. Final toxicology results will likely take four to six weeks.\nAdministrators believe the men used underground tunnels to get inside the building. Once they reached the rooftop observation deck, officials suspect Woehnker climbed over safety railings to get to the east side of the roof, where he slipped.\n“They’re extremely dangerous places to be. ... The building itself was secure,” said Wabash College spokesman Jim Amidon.\nWoehnker was a member of the swim team and Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity. Counselors met with members of both groups Sunday, Amidon said. The swim meet Monday was canceled.\n“To be honest, the students are not handling this situation well,” Amidon said. “It’s hard for all of us.”
(10/30/07 1:28am)
CHEMNITZ, Germany – An exhibition of a unique collection of artworks by Bob Dylan, including variations of previously published drawings and sketches, has opened at a museum in this eastern German city.\nVisitors flocked to the Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz museum Sunday to see the 170 colored versions of pictorial motifs by Dylan called “The Drawn Blank Series.”\nThe exhibit consists of drawings that Dylan produced between 1989 and 1992 and published in a book. Curator Ingrid Moessinger had 332 of the works specially reprinted and painted, and Dylan then selected 170 works for display.\n“Bob Dylan selected the works for the exhibit himself,” Moessinger said.\nThe pictures show scenes from daily life: portraits of women and men, still lifes, cityscapes and other places that Dylan, 66, observed during his travels. The exhibit runs through Feb. 3.\nArt historian Frank Zoellner said the works reflect Dylan’s music.\n“The landscapes are very peaceful,” said Zoellner, while noting depictions of interiors often lacked a center, giving them a sense of restlessness.\nA guiding theme in the drawings are variations of the same motives – much in the way Dylan performs his music, Zoellner said.\n“On stage, Dylan never plays any song the same way twice,” Zoellner said.
(10/29/07 2:16am)
SPENCER, Ind. – High school students who created a business plan detailing the market potential they see in the rising demand for goat meat in Indiana will get a $28,000 school district loan to open a goat farm.\nSpencer-Owen school board members voted 5-2 Thursday to finance the seven-acre farm, which will be run by Owen Valley High School students about 15 miles northwest of Bloomington.\nThe students will work together to raise and market Boer goats to Indiana’s growing number of ethnic groups that favor goat meat. They’ll pay back the loan through their meat sales.\n“I was skeptical at first whether we could make it work, but the more we got into it, I realized all the support we had,” said Owen Valley junior Kameron Blake. “We had to convince people it would work.”\nThe students already had taken bids for construction of a 30-by-50-foot barn and a fence around seven acres near McCormick’s Creek Elementary School, where the district owns 83 acres.
(10/25/07 3:52am)
BANGKOK, Thailand – David Copperfield canceled upcoming shows in Southeast Asia following an FBI search of his Las Vegas warehouse and a casino theater where he regularly performs.\n“His management sent an e-mail to organizers Sunday to inform that his shows will be postponed indefinitely,” Kittiyong Achawaphong of RSi Dream Entertainment said Monday. The company organized the 51-year-old magician’s shows in Thailand.\nCopperfield was also scheduled to perform in Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore in the coming weeks. The cancellations came after FBI agents conducted searches in Las Vegas last week following allegations that Copperfield “forced himself” on an unidentified woman.\nCopperfield’s lawyer, David Chesnoff, said the allegations “are false because David Copperfield has never forced himself on anyone.” Neither law enforcement officials nor Chesnoff has provided details about the investigation.\nReached Monday, Chesnoff said the shows were canceled because tour operators in Asia defaulted on their contracts.\n“Those are serious allegations,” Chesnoff said. “But there’s no truth to them.”\nPromoters of some of the Asian shows are trying to negotiate with Copperfield’s management to reschedule the performances or recoup some of their losses.\n“We are told by Copperfield management that David’s show had been canceled by the artist,” said Peter Basuki, whose company was organizing the Jakarta show.\n“They said they would like to find any other available time to perform in Jakarta,” Basuki said. “With this cancellation, we have lost more than $1 million for advertising and other preparations. Business is business. We want to make a profit. But this is making us \nlose money.”
