Former topless model joins Berlusconi's cabinet as Italy's equalities minister

It is not the sort of appointment Gordon Brown would make to his cabinet.
But then Mr Brown is no Silvio Berlusconi, playboy and man of ostentatious political gestures.
The Italian prime minister, long known for his fondness for pretty women, has named former topless model and beauty queen Mara Carfagna as equal opportunities minister in his new cabinet.
Miss Carfagna, 33, turned to politics after a career on TV following her sixth-place finish in the 1997 Miss Italy contest.
She has also posed topless and semi-naked for photoshoots but has always underlined her family

values and stressed none of the pictures were "erotic".
Mr Berlusconi, 71, named her as one of four women ministers in his cabinet, which was officially installed yesterday.

R. Kelly: child pornography trial !! Will he win??

Brief Info about R. Kelly..

Robert Sylvester Kelly (born January 5, 1967 in Chicago, Illinois) better known by his stage name R. Kelly, is an American R&B and pop singer, songwriter, record producer, and occasional rapper. Debuting in 1992 with the group Public Announcement, Kelly soon left the group within a year for a successful solo career starting with the album, 12 Play (1993). Since then, Kelly has been known for a collection of hit singles including "Bump N' Grind", "I Believe I Can Fly", "Ignition" and the urban hip-hopera "Trapped in the Closet".

Legal cases, lawsuits, and controversies

On the first day of his child pornography trial in Chicago, a suit-clad R. Kelly faced nearly 150 Cook County residents, bowed his head slightly, smiled and said, "Hello."It probably behooved the R&B superstar to make as good a first impression as possible with these particular men and women: A dozen of them are expected to end up on a jury that could find him guilty and send him to prison for up to 15 years.

Known for sexually charged hits like "Bump N' Grind," Kelly, 41, has pleaded not guilty to charges that he videotaped himself having sex with a girl as young as 13.After introducing Kelly to the jurors on Friday, Cook County Circuit Judge Vincent Gaughan read the 14-count indictment against him. The initial session with potential jurors in Gaughan's stately, colonnade courtroom lasted only about 30 minutes, and reporters were not allowed in; one court official said there weren't enough seats.

Some of the potential jurors looked uncomfortable, and at least a few placed their hands over their eyes as the judge read some of the more graphic sections of the indictments, said Verna Sadock, a sketch artist who was in the room.Each count is only a few sentences long and does not go into details about the allegations or possible evidence.Earlier in the day, Kelly, dressed in a silver-blue suit and gold tie, sat expressionless in court. But the Grammy-winning artist looked more relaxed as he addressed the jurors, Sadock said.

The potential jurors — some carrying bags and coats, many looking serious and even glum — later filed out of the fifth-floor courtroom to fill out questionnaires for the next stage of jury selection. The questionnaires were not made public.There was no afternoon session scheduled Friday and jurors were due back in court Monday morning.

Before jury selection began Friday, Gaughan denied a defense motion to again postpone the trial because of intense publicity surrounding the case, appearing to accept arguments from the prosecution that jury selection could weed out any tainted jurors.

But defense attorney Marc Martin said the jury pool had been "irrevocably poisoned" by a front-page story in Friday's Chicago Sun-Times that cited unnamed sources talking about a potential witness.Many of the potential jurors would have read the article on the way to the courthouse, Martin said."There is no escaping the fact that the Sun-Times will be in every news box in Cook County," said Martin, adding that the contents of the story were also broadcast on TV and radio stations. "I heard it when I was putting on my tie this morning."

"Somebody out there is trying to sabotage Mr. Kelly's right to a fair trial," Martin said.

As he arrived at the courthouse Friday morning, Kelly didn't acknowledge the crowd outside as he walked through a special entrance. One raucous onlooker shouted "I love you"; another shouted "R. Kelly's a pedophile."Once a jury's in place, prosecutors will have to surmount several hurdles if they hope to prevail.

Chief among them is that the alleged victim, now 23, says it wasn't her. And Kelly's lawyers — including prominent Chicago attorney Ed Genson — haven't admitted it's Kelly in the video.The centerpiece of the trial is the video footage, which Gaughan ruled may be shown in open court. Prosecutors claim the videotape was made sometime between Jan. 1, 1998, and Nov. 1 2000, and that the girl was born in September 1984. Kelly was indicted on pornography charges June 5, 2002, after the tape surfaced.

Some of the trial proceedings have been kept secret by the judge, and it's unclear whether prosecutors have sought — or been granted — permission to tell jurors about accusations that Kelly allegedly had sexual relations with other minors.

Media outlets, including The Associated Press, have filed a motion seeking to get court records and hearing transcripts unsealed. Gaughan has said he would rule on that motion May 16.

Gaughan, who has imposed a gag order, also said he would later rule on a defense motion to consider appointing a special prosecutor to investigate apparent leaks to the Sun-Times. Reporters complained Friday about being keep out of the courtroom as the judge read the indictment to jurors. One attorney for the news media in their motion to get access to the records and transcripts said it wasn't clear if Gaughan intended to keep reporters out. "It was possibly inadvertent, but the press obviously should have been there," said Damon Dunn. "Criminal trials are constitutionally required to be public. And the public can only attend the trial through the press."

Although Kelly won a Grammy in 1997 for the gospel-like song "I Believe I Can Fly," his biggest hits are bawdy ballads like "Ignition" and his current single, "Hair Braider." He is due to release a new album in July.

Miley Cyrus: Hugh Hefner Wants Miley Cyrus for Playboy

Who is Miley Cyrus???

Miley Ray Cyrus (born Destiny Hope Cyrus on November 23, 1992), is an American actress, singer and songwriter. She is known for starring as Miley Stewart/Hannah Montana on the Disney Channel Original Series, Hannah Montana.
Cyrus became an overnight sensation after she was cast in Hannah Montana. Following the success of the show, in October 2006, a soundtrack CD was released in which she sang eight songs from the show. In December 2007, she was ranked #17 in the list of Forbes Top twenty earners under 25 with an annual earning of US$3.5 million. As of December 2007, she is working on a movie spin-off from Hannah Montana, titled The Hannah Montana Movie which is due to be released on May 1, 2009.

Hugh Hefner wants Miley Cyrus to pose for Playboy.TV Guide reports that the magazine magnate told Extra Cyrus would be perfect for a pictorial -- once she's of legal age, of course.

Says Hef: "Sure, she’d be welcomed in the magazine. Very pretty lady. And I think to make such a big to-do over something as innocent as those [Vanity Fair] photos, I think is a reflection on how schizophrenic America is about sexuality."Cyrus is no stranger to photo controversy. In recent months, pictures of the 15-year-old "Hannah Montana" star in her underwear have surfaced on the Internet. And she recently received a lashing in the media for an alluring Vanity Fair spread that showed her in various racy poses.

Miley Cyrus going to Playboy

Hot News :Liv Tyler, Husband Are Splitting????

After her wedding ring was mysteriously absent during a high profile red carpet event this week, the speculation has become official -- Liv Tyler and her husband are separating.
PEOPLE reports that the two Tyler and her husband, British rocker Royston Langdon, "have confirmed their separation," according to Tyler's rep. Despite their split, Tyler and Langdon "remain good friends and devoted parents to their son Milo and are requesting that their family's privacy be respected at this time."

The couple married in 2003 in a private Caribbean ceremony. Their son, Milo, is three years old.
Earlier this week, Tyler was spotted at the Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute Gala, but sans wedding ring

Gary Dourdan : 'CSI' star charged with felony drug possession

Who is Gary Dourdan??

Dourdan and his family moved to Willingboro, New Jersey when he was in his youth. Robert Durdin, Gary's father, is an agent for jazz musicians. Sandy Durdin, Gary's mother, is a fashion designer. Gary is the youngest of 5 children, and when he was 6, his older brother Darryl, was murdered when he was on a vacation in Haiti. The case is still unsolved.At this time his interests included acting, music and martial arts. Later Dourdan moved to New York City and worked as a doorman at a rehearsal studio where he met some of Manhattan's promising young artists.

He married African-American model Roshumba Williams in 1992; the couple divorced two years later.He has two children, a son, Lyric, and a daughter, Nyla (the daughter of Jennifer Sutton, whom Dourdan dated from 1995 to 2000).

Legal troubles - suspicion of possessing heroin, cocaine, ecstasy

"CSI" co-star Gary Dourdan has been charged with felony possession of heroin, cocaine and ecstasy stemming from his arrest last month, prosecutors said.The 41-year-old actor was arrested after police found him asleep in his car in Palm Springs on April 28. He was allegedly parked on the wrong side of the street with the car's interior light on.Prosecutors said Dourdan is scheduled to appear in court in Indio, about 130 miles east of Los Angeles, on May 28. The criminal complaint was dated Tuesday.A call to Dourdan's attorneys wasn't immediately returned early Thursday.Dourdan has played crime scene investigator Warrick Brown on CBS' "CSI" since 2000.Several celebrities were in Palm Springs for the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in nearby Indio.

Myanmar Cyclone: Safe food and drinking water could push the death toll above 100,000!!

YANGON, Myanmar (May 8) - Myanmar's isolationist regime allowed the first plane of a major international airlift to land Thursday with aid for cyclone survivors, a U.N. official said, amid fears that lack of safe food and drinking water could push the death toll above 100,000.
But the junta was not allowing U.S. military planes to fly in critical relief goods and continued to stall on visas for U.N. teams urgently seeking entry to ensure aid is delivered to the victims.

A U.N. official said one airplane from Italy arrived in Yangon while three more would land later Thursday. The official did not wish to be named because she was not authorized to speak to the media.

Four planes loaded with high-energy biscuits, medicine and other supplies have waited for the last two days while frustrated U.N. officials negotiated with the military regime to allow the material into the Southeast Asian nation.

The U.S. Ambassador to Thailand Eric John told reporters that U.S. and Thai authorities earlier believe they had permission from Myanmar to land U.S. military C-130s. But Myanmar officials later made it clear that this was not the case.

John said it was not clear if they had reversed an earlier decision or if there was a misunderstanding.

Thailand's Prime Minister Samak Sundaravej offered to negotiate on Washington's behalf to persuade the junta to accept U.S. aid.

Myanmar's state media said Cyclone Nargis killed at least 22,980 people and left 42,119 missing, mostly in the hardest-hit Irrawaddy delta. But a top U.S. diplomat said Wednesday the toll could exceed 100,000.

Entire villages in the delta were still submerged from the storm, and bloated corpses could be seen stuck in the mangroves. Some survivors stripped clothes off the dead. People wailed as they described the horror of the torrent swept ashore by the cyclone.

"I don't know what happened to my wife and young children," said Phan Maung, 55, who held onto a coconut tree until the water level dropped. By then his family was gone.

The World Health Organization has received reports of malaria outbreaks in the worst-affected area, and fears of waterborne illnesses surfacing due to dirty water and poor sanitation also remained a concern, said Poonam Khetrapal Singh, deputy director of WHO's Southeast Asia office in New Delhi.

"Safe water, sanitation, safe food. These are things that we feel are priorities at the moment," she said.

Myanmar's generals, traditionally paranoid about foreign influence, issued an appeal for international assistance after the storm struck Saturday. They have since dragged their feet on issuing visas to relief workers even as survivors faced hunger, disease and flooding.

Even near Yangon, the country's largest city, stricken villagers complained that they had received no government assistance and were relying on Buddhist monasteries, which have been helping the public cope with the disaster.

"The government is not helping us. No aid is coming. There is no money, no rice," said Mu Sanda, one of some 50 people huddled in a monastery dining room converted into an evacuation center in Kyauktan, 15 miles southeast of Yangon.

Even China, Myanmar's closest ally, urged the military junta to work with the international community. Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang said China would give $4.3 million in aid in addition to an initial pledge of $1 million.

A U.N. spokesman in Bangkok, Richard Horsey, said between 30 and 40 visas requested by various U.N. agencies and private relief groups are pending with the Myanmar government.

"These are mostly people who have key experience in handling disasters of this scale, and so they can bring lessons from other similar disasters," he said. "The agencies are becoming frustrated."

The London-based human rights group Amnesty International said some donors were delaying aid for fear it would be siphoned off to the army.

WFP's regional director, Anthony Banbury, indicated the United Nations had similar concerns.

"We will not just bring our supplies to an airport, dump it and take off," he said. "This is one reason why there is a hold up now, because we are going to bring in not just supplies but a lot of capacity to go with them to make sure the supplies get to the people."

Myanmar's state television Thursday showed Prime Minister Lt. Gen. Thein Sein distributing food packages to the sick and injured in the delta and soldiers dropping food over villages. The date of the distribution was not given.

Navy vessels from India and planes from Japan, Thailand, Singapore, Laos and Bangladesh had arrived in recent days with medicine, candles, instant noodles, raincoats and other relief supplies, it said.

Although most Yangon residents were preoccupied with trying to restore their lives, activists using the cover of an almost-total power outage have written fresh graffiti on overpasses.

The graffiti include "X'' marks — a symbol for voting "no" in a referendum Saturday on a new military-backed constitution. Voting has been postponed until May 24 in Yangon, some outlying areas and parts of the delta heavily damaged by the storm.

Shari Villarosa, who heads the U.S. Embassy in Yangon, said the number of dead could eventually exceed 100,000 because safe food and water were scarce and unsanitary conditions widespread.

U.N. officials estimated as many as 1 million people were left homeless in Myanmar, which also is known as Burma.

Among them were the villagers in the Kyauktan monastery who said they had nowhere else to seek shelter and lacked food, water and money to rebuild their homes and rehabilitate their ruined rice fields.

Others in Kyauktan sought refuge in a primary school adjacent to the monastery where desks in classrooms were pushed together for makeshift beds.

Monks said they were receiving donations from the public and wealthier shop owners and then distributing them among the victims.

In Yangon, the roof of Myanmar opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi was blown off and she was living in the dark after the electricity connection to her dilapidated lakeside bungalow was snapped in the cyclone, a neighbor said.

The detained Nobel Peace Prize laureate was using candles at night since she had no generator in her home, where she is being held under house arrest, said the neighbor, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject.

State radio said "unscrupulous elements" were spreading rumors of an impending earthquake, a second cyclone and looting in Yangon. Residents say some looting occurred at markets and stores in suburbs of Yangon earlier this week.

The warning about rumors appeared to be an attempt to calm the population as well as stop any gatherings that might turn into political agitation against widely detested military rule.

More hot News?: Hot News

Storm : Corpses Float Through Flooded Myanmar

YANGON, Myanmar (May 7) - Hungry crowds of survivors stormed the few shops that opened in Myanmar's stricken Irrawaddy delta, where food and international aid has been scarce since a devastating cyclone killed more than 22,000 people, the U.N. said Wednesday.
Corpses floated in salty flood waters and witnesses said survivors tried desperately to reach dry ground on boats using blankets as sails. The U.N. said some 1 million people were homeless in the Southeast Asian country, also known as Burma.

"Basically the entire lower delta region is under water," said Richard Horsey, Bangkok-based spokesman for the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Aid.

"Teams are talking about bodies floating around in the water," he said. This is "a major, major disaster we're dealing with."

But a massive international aid effort was being kept on hold by Myanmar's military rulers. Internal U.N. documents obtained by The Associated Press showed growing frustrations at foot-dragging by the junta, which has kept the impoverished nation isolated for five decades to maintain its iron-fisted control.

"Visas are still a problem. It is not clear when it will be sorted out," according to the minutes of a meeting of the U.N. task force coordinating relief for Myanmar in Bangkok, Thailand on Wednesday.

It said U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon "will contact Myanmar" Wednesday to arrange a meeting with high-ranking officials on the issue.

Myanmar cyclone death toll soars

YANGON: Myanmar's military government raised its death toll from Cyclone Nargis yesterday to nearly 22,500 with a further 41,000 missing, nearly all of them from a massive storm surge that swept into the Irrawaddy delta.

Of the dead, only 671 were in the former capital, Yangon, and its outlying districts, state radio said, confirming Nargis as the most devastating cyclone to hit Asia since 1991, when 143,000 people died in Bangladesh.

“More deaths were caused by the tidal wave than the storm itself,” Minister for Relief and Resettlement Maung Maung Swe told a news conference in the rubble-strewn city of five million, where food and water supplies are running low.

“The wave was up to 3.5m high and it swept away and inundated half the houses in low-lying villages,” he said, giving the first detailed description of the weekend cyclone. “They did not have anywhere to flee.”

Information Minister Kyaw Hsan said the military were “doing their best”, but analysts said there could be political fallout for the former Burma's rulers who pride themselves on their ability to cope with any challenge.

The government lifted states of emergency in three of the five states declared official disaster zones and some parts of the worst-hit Yangon and Irrawaddy regions.

The Information Minister also said the government had sufficient stocks of rice despite damage to grain stored in the huge delta, known as the “rice bowl of Asia” 50 years ago when Burma was the world's largest rice exporter.

The total left homeless by the 190km per hour winds and storm surge is in the several hundred thousands, United Nations aid officials say.

Even in delta villages that managed to withstand the worst of the winds, food and water is already running low.

Residents of Yangon itself were queuing up for bottled water and there was still no electricity four days after the cyclone hit.

Prices of food, fuel and construction materials have skyrocketed, and most shops have sold out of candles and batteries. An egg costs three times what it did on Friday.

Asian nations yesterday joined the international community in offering support for victims of the devastating Myanmar cyclone, after a rare appeal for help from the nation's military junta.

Asean appealed for “generous” international aid for member Myanmar, with Surin Pitsuwan, secretary general of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, saying the 10-member bloc has begun to mobilise help through coordination centres in its capitals.

Elsewhere around the world support and offers of assistance were tempered by criticism of Myanmar's rulers for failing to take steps to prevent the horrific death toll.

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