Wednesday, September 3, 2014

Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie Married, things that you didnt know about it.



PHOTO: Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie attend a private reception as costumes and props from Disneys "Maleficent" are exhibited in support of Great Ormond Street Hospital held at Kensington Palace, May 8, 2014 in London.
The latest issue of People magazine is out on stands now and it includes the full interview withBrad Pitt and Angelina Jolie on their wedding in France that took place a couple weeks back.


The pictures from the family affair show just how involved Pitt and Jolie's six children -- Maddox, 13, Pax, 10, Zahara, 9, Shiloh, 8, and twins Vivienne and Knox, 6 -- got for the nuptials.
PHOTO: Angelina Jolie is pictured on the Sept. 15, 2014 cover of People.
People
PHOTO: Angelina Jolie is pictured on the Sept. 15, 2014 cover of People.
"It was such a special day to share with our children and a very happy time for our family," Jolie told the magazine.
Here are the 5 sweetest moments from the Pitt-Jolie wedding, according to the cover story:
1 - The Cake and the Relaxed Reception
Pax took the lead on baking the homemade wedding cake that included frosting flowers and several layers of what looks like chocolate and vanilla.
The alfresco reception had BBQ for the kids and dessert, which included chocolate and vanilla sorbet.
2 - The Children Wrote the Vows and Chose Their Own Clothes
The couples tells People that they exchanged a few words written by their children.
"The children wrote vows and asked us to make promises to each other. It was very sweet what they came up with," Jolie said.
The kids also wore items like top hats and other festive attire that they picked out themselves.
3 - Here Comes the Bride, by Brad Pitt
Instead of hiring a full-on band or having music playing when Jolie walked down the aisle, 20 guests and Pitt himself hummed "Here Comes the Bride" when the actress walked to be with her husband.
"There was no music, so family and friends hummed," Jolie said.
4 - Jolie's Dedication to Her Late Mother
Jolie lost her mother Marcheline Bertrand to ovarian cancer in 2007, so to honor her, the bride wore "a little flower ring that was hers," she said. And her brother James "wore an angel pin from her jewelry box."
Pitt also engraved a dedication to Bertrand in the chapel where they were wed.
5 - The Guests
The 20 people in attendance included the kids, Pitt's parents, Bill and Jane, his siblings Doug and Julie, and Jolie's brother James.
Source: ABC news.









Beheaded US hostage Steven Sotloff

Still from video of purported beheading
An Islamic State video has appeared which purports to show the beheading of Steven Sotloff, a US journalist being held hostage by the militants.
Mr Sotloff, 31, was abducted in Syria in 2013. He appeared at the end of a video last month which showed fellow US journalist James Foley being killed.
A militant in the latest video also threatens to kill a British hostage.
Mr Sotloff's family said they were aware of the video and were "grieving privately".
After Mr Foley's death, Mr Sotloff's mother appealed to IS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi to save her son's life.
White House spokesman Josh Earnest said US officials were checking the reports.
The US has recently carried out dozens of air strikes against IS targets in Iraq.
President Barack Obama has ordered the deployment of another 350 troops to Baghdad to protect US diplomatic facilities, the White house has said.
line
Analysis: BBC security correspondent Frank Gardner
This second hostage killing video from IS is significant, even though it was largely expected and dreaded. It shows that the recent US air strikes which have halted IS's lightning advance across northern Iraq are causing the organisation real damage, upsetting its plans to extend by force its rule into Kurdistan.
Unable to hit back militarily against America's jets, Islamic State has responded with a form of information warfare that it knows will horrify most people in the West.
Secondly, by threatening to murder a British hostage, IS shows it makes little or no distinction between the US and Britain as its enemy. This is despite Britain so far restricting itself to dropping aid to refugees and flying in supplies to the Kurdish military, leaving air strikes to the Americans.
'Arrogant policy'
The video, entitled "A second message to America", is about two-and-a-half minutes long and was apparently recorded in a desert.
It appears to have been filmed after Mr Foley's, though it is impossible to determine the exact timing.
It shows a masked figure together with Mr Sotloff, who is dressed in an orange gown.
Mr Sotloff reads out a text addressed to Mr Obama saying: "You've spent billions of US taxpayers' dollars and we have lost thousands of our troops in our previous fighting against the Islamic State, so where is the people's interest in reigniting this war?"
White House spokesman Josh Earnest: "Our thoughts and prayers are with Mr Sotloff and his family"
The masked man, whose voice is similar to that of the man who appeared to carry out the beheading of James Foley, then describes the act he is about to commit as retribution for the US air strikes.
"I'm back, Obama, and I'm back because of your arrogant foreign policy towards the Islamic State... despite our serious warnings," the man says.
"We take this opportunity to warn those governments that enter this evil alliance of America against the Islamic State to back off and leave our people alone."
The video ends with the militant threatening to kill the British captive.
'Absolutely disgusting'
US state department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said: "If the video is genuine, we are sickened by this brutal act."
She said it was believed that "a few" other Americans were still being held by Islamic State.
Mr Earnest urged caution about the veracity of the video.
"Our thoughts and prayers, first and foremost, are with Mr Sotloff and Mr Sotloff's family and those who worked with him," he said.
James Foley, Aleppo 2012Last month a video was released showing the beheading of journalist James Foley
"I'm not in a position to confirm the authenticity of that video or the reports.
"It's something that will be analysed very carefully by the US government and our intelligence officials to establish its authenticity."
UK Prime Minister David Cameron described the apparent beheading as an "absolutely disgusting, despicable act".
Mr Cameron's office said he has known for months that a Briton was among the hostages taken by Islamic State and has chaired meetings with high-level officials to discuss the situation.
But British officials say they have deliberately not commented on this while there has been what they call "strong family liaison" with relatives of the hostage.
'Unbiased observer'
A friend of Mr Sotloff, US film maker Matthew Van Dyke, told the BBC: "He was a complete professional and there was no reason for this to happen to him."
Mr Sotloff was abducted near Aleppo in northern Syria in August 2013.
He had worked for Time magazine, Foreign Policy and the Christian Science Monitor, and reported from Egypt, Libya and Syria.
Time Magazine editor Nancy Gibbs said in a statement that she was "shocked and deeply saddened by reports of Steven Sotloff's death".
"He gave his life so readers would have access to information from some of the most dangerous places in the world," she said.
Friends said he had lived in Yemen for many years and spoke good Arabic.
Last month a video was released showing the beheading of Mr Foley.
Mr Sotloff was shown at the end, as a militant gave a warning that his fate depended on President Obama's next move.
The US has launched more than 120 air strikes in Iraq in the last month, in an attempt to help Kurdish forces curb the advance of Islamic State militants and protect minorities threatened by them.
Source : http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-29038217

Jennifer Lawrence's nude photos: to click or not to click?

From private photos to violent videos, the internet is full of degrading material intended to tempt viewers. Can we learn not to gawp?

Jennifer Lawrence


A few years ago, the late American film critic Roger Ebert illustrated an article about the pornographer Hugh Hefner with a nude photograph of Playboy magazine’s June 1975 Playmate of the Month. It went online on a Sunday, but it was only the following day, a work day, that a reader asked him if he’d thought about warning unsuspecting readers that the photo made the article NSFW – Not Safe For Work. “They explained,” recalled Ebert, “that they read the column at work (“during lunch break”, of course) and were afraid a supervisor or co-worker might see a nude on their monitor. I asked one of these readers if his co-workers were adults.”
Ebert was conflicted – it offended him to preface his article with such a warning, not least because the NSFW label was, as he put it, an “unsightly typographical offence”, but mostly because it “would contradict the point I was making”, namely that he was opposed to American puritanism, preferring Europe’s supposed festive nudearama. “Having grown up in an America of repression and fanatic sin-mongering, he wrote, “I believe that Hefner’s influence was largely healthy and positive. In Europe, billboards and advertisements heedlessly show nipples. There are not ‘topless beaches’ so much as beaches everywhere where bathers remove swimsuits to get an even tan.” Not at Skegness, Mr Ebert, not at Skegness. No matter: rise up, repressed Americans, he seemed to be suggesting, you have nothing to lose but your tan lines.
But other readers contacted Ebert telling him of strict corporate rules at their workplaces. “They faced discipline or dismissal. Co-workers seeing an offensive picture on their monitor might complain of sexual harassment, and so on. But what about the context of the photo, I wondered. Context didn’t matter. A nude was a nude.”
So Ebert reduced the image to postage-stamp size, hoping that would make it SFW. But it didn’t: clicking on the resized photo, he realised, would enlarge it to fill the whole screen, making it once more NSFW unless – presumably – you work for Playboy or, you’d think, 4chan. So he disabled that command.
I thought about Ebert angrily resizing nude photos of Aziz Johari (the “playmate” he didn’t deign to name) earlier this week when the media storm broke about the publication on image-sharing websites such as 4chan of private naked photographs of about 100 celebrities, including Jennifer Lawrence, Scarlett Johansson, Rihanna and Mary Elizabeth Winstead. Suddenly we were being told to avert our gaze, not because the images involved were merely NSFW, but because they were a form of abuse.
What has happened in the four years since Ebert made his article SFW is a proliferation of warnings and cues that enjoin us not to click. And while the NSFW warning might often have served as pragmatic advice (behind which, admittedly, were ethical norms about workplace behaviour), the later injunctions not to click have a moral force that – just possibly – suggests something counterintuitive: the spread of ethical compunction across the basest, most sexually commodifying and amoral of all human inventions, the internet. Just possibly.
For instance, in a Guardian piece this week Van Badham argued that the images of stars including Jennifer Lawrence and Scarlett Johansson naked were intimate photographs taken by or for their lovers which the likes of me should not see. It would be worse than NSFW to click on them: it would be immoral, a violation of those women’s right to privacy.
Quite so. Absolutely. That said, the article did raise questions for me other than those pertaining to JLaw’s violation. Important lifestyle questions. Is it just me who doesn’t have naked photos on my phone that can be stolen by hackers? Would my relationship with my wife be better if I was sending her naked pictures of myself rather than nudging her to make a move in our online Scrabble marathons? Celebrities: they’re just better than us. Face it.
But set aside my manifold inadequacies as lover and human being for a moment. Badham’s central point was that by clicking on stolen naked images of Lawrence we were invading the actor’s privacy and perpetuating her abuse, becoming – although she didn’t quite put it this way – akin to Jimmy Savile, Stuart Hall and Gary Glitter. “It’s an act of sexual violation, and it deserves the same social and legal punishment as meted out to stalkers and other sexual predators.” Certainly, I take Van Badham’s point: ethically, if not (I suspect) legally, those who click on stolen private images depicting naked celebrities are violating Lawrence’s right to try to perform one of the most difficult balancing acts imaginable, namely to be a Hollywood star whose work involves displaying her body before photographers in poses that don’t strike only me as sexualised and playing a virtuoso archer of a role model (Katniss Everdeen in the vaguely feminist Hunger Games franchise) to young girlsand retaining her right to privacy. Tough gig, Ms Lawrence.
But there are several paradoxes that the call not to click on these images raise. One: I could readily click on lots of other highly sexualised images of some of the women stars who have been thus violated, images that they, or their people, have allowed to be posted online in order to facilitate their celebrity brand. Two: that while we write objecting to the violation of Hollywood stars’ image rights and the abuse of their privacy, the internet carries on regardless making life more miserable for women and more degrading for men.
There’s something Canutish about Badham’s injunction not to click. It does little to address the herd of elephants in the room – the objectification of women’s bodies, the spread of misogyny that the internet has facilitated, the poison of online porn beyond Hugh Hefner’s wettest dreams, the real-world consequences for human relationships of the endless parade of naked bodies beyond Roger Ebert’s anti-puritanical hopes across computer screens.

No matter. The call not to click is spreading as, perhaps, we belatedly learn that the freedom to surf confers a responsibility. We saw an argument for that responsibility to be exercised recently when Isis posted a video of its murder of American journalist James Foley. Entitled “A Message to America”, the video was taken down shortly after it was posted on YouTube, but later appeared on sites such as LiveLeak and Vimeo.
Among those who urged people not to click links to the video was Kelly Foley, James’s cousin, who posted a message to Twitter that was retweeted more than 1,000 times: “Please honor James Foley and respect my family’s privacy. Don’t watch the video. Don’t share it. That’s not how life should be.” The hashtag #ISISMediaBlackout was used to urge people not to spread the images in order to deprive the jihadist group of the oxygen of publicity. “Amputate their reach. Pour water on their flame,” tweeted one supporter of the hashtag campaign. Others argued otherwise. “There are those who see the video as proof of the militants’ barbarity and of the tragedy of Foley’s death,” wrote Bill Chappell of National Public Radio in the US. “Some see the restriction of images as censorship. Others question why the killing of an innocent American should be treated differently from other cases.” The apparent execution of Steven Sotloff is likely to provoke a similar debate.
To click or not to click: the issue becomes intriguing because of the phenomenon of click-baiting, which Facebook recently defined as “when a publisher posts a link with a headline that encourages people to click to see more, without telling them much information about what they will see. Posts like these tend to get a lot of clicks, which means that these posts get shown to more people, and get shown higher up in News Feed.”
You know the kind of thing Facebook means. The headline reads: “You’ll NEVER believe which two celebrities got into a fight on the red carpet last night!!” And when you click, oh dear, what a disappointment – there’s no substance to the story but so many pop-up ads that you want to lie down and have a good cry. What happened? “You’ve been misled, you’ve been had, you’ve been took,” as Malcolm X used to say.
Facebook last month announced it was clamping down on such worthless clickbait stories and links. But how would they decide what was clickbait? If Facebook users clicked through to a link and then came quickly back to Facebook, that would suggest that they didn’t find the story valuable, as would data showing the ratio of people clicking on the content compared with people discussing and sharing it with their friends – the more comments and shares, Facebook reasoned, the less likely it was to be clickbait. “If a lot of people click on the link, but relatively few people click Like, or comment on the story when they return to Facebook, this also suggests that people didn’t click through to something that was valuable to them.”
But clickbait has come to mean more than that which skews Facebook news feeds. It has come to mean, according to news analyst Sally Kohn, who gave a TED talk on the subject, the kind of non-story or degrading nonsense that proliferates online when we abnegate our ethical codes as we turn on our computers. “We gotta stop clicking on the lowest common denominator, bottom feeding link bait,” Kohn said. (And this was before 4chan got even more grubby by urging ordinary women to post naked pictures of themselves in “solidarity” with Jennifer Lawrence.) “If you don’t like the 24/7, all-Kardashian all-the-time programming, you gotta stop clicking on the stories about Kim Kardashian’s side boob.
“Clicking on a train wreck just pours gasoline on it and makes it worse. Our whole culture gets burned. The incentive is to make more noise to be heard and that tyranny of the loud encourages the tyranny of the nasty. It does not have to be that way.” Click responsibly, Kohn concluded: “If what gets the most clicks wins, we have to start shaping the world we want with our clicks. Because clicking is a public act.”
Of course, it’s easy to get too pious about this. The bloody-minded antinomian in all of us is more likely to transgressively click in response to being enjoined not to click. When the Guardian’s George Monbiot tweeted yesterday: “Please sign a twitter pledge not to look at stolen photos of nude celebrities. Do so by using the hashtag #NoGawping”, part of me wanted to do nothing so much as gawp. Reader, I didn’t: I went and read a New Yorker profile of Professor Mary Beard’s travails with misogynistic trolls instead. That set me right.
In Truffaut’s 1968 film Baisers volés, Delphine Seyrig explains to her young lover the difference between politeness and tact. “Imagine you inadvertently enter a bathroom where a woman is standing naked under the shower,” she says. “Politeness requires that you quickly close the door and say, ‘Pardon, Madame!’, whereas tact would be to quickly close the door and say: ‘Pardon, Monsieur!’” “It is only in the second case,”explained philosopher Slavoj Žižek recently, “by pretending not to have seen enough even to make out the sex of the person under the shower, that one displays true tact.”
Our task today is not quite the same. Sure, we must learn anew to respect others’ privacy, especially the privacy of women who don’t want us to be looking at their naked bodies. But we need to learn more than tact if tact involves that Žižekian lie of pretending to have averted our eyes. We must learn, truly, not to gawp, rather than incessantly indulging the gaze. “We are the new editors. We decide what gets attention,” says Sally Kohn of what we do online. She’s right, but for too long we haven’t used those new powers responsibly, as we sit, day in day out, looking at screens, too shameless to look away.
source : http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/sep/02/naked-photos-jennifer-lawrence-violent-videos-internet

Samsung Galaxy Note 4 release date, news and features

The all-new Samsung Galaxy Note 4 has now been officially unveiled, but what does the successor to theSamsung Galaxy Note 3 actually bring?
Well there's no change to the size of the screen, which still comes in at the whopping 5.7 inches that we have come to know and love, but Samsung has made some significant changes to that killer feature.
That 5.7-incher is now a Quad HD Super AMOLED (2,560 x 1,440 resolution) technology that stretches to 500 pixels per inch.
You can check out our hands on: Samsung Galaxy Note 4 review for our first impressions of just what has changed in this latest generation.

Samsung Galaxy Note 4 release date and price


The Galaxy note was announced at IFA 2014 on September 3. Samsung had sent invites for an event advising people to 'Note the date', which was a bit of a give away, and so it proved.

Earlier in the year Samsung mobile chief Lee Young Hee told Bloomberg that it would be launched in the second half of 2014, while the Korea Times claimed it had been told the Note 4 will arrive at the IFA show in Berlin. Android Geek's sources got even more specific, claiming it will arrive on September 3, as did The Korea Times.
There's been very little said about the price yet, but a listing on Indonesian site erafone puts it at IDR 9,499,000 (or roughly £490 / $810 / AU$870) which seems believable, especially since those conversions don't include local taxes. Better start saving.

Samsung Galaxy Note 4 screen


First up, screen size. The original Note rocked 5.3 inches, the Note 2 showed up with a 5.5-inch display and the Note 3 pushed things to 5.7 inches.
Going by this logic the Galaxy Note 4 should have come with a 5.9-inch display, which would see it match the HTC One Max and LG G Pro 2, while still falling short of the 6.4-inch Sony Xperia Z Ultra.
But actually Samsung showed admirable restraint, keeping the Note 4 to the 5.7 inches of its predecessor, but throwing a boat-load more quality into its killer feature.

The screen now boasts Quad HD Super AMOLED (2,560 x 1,440 resolution) technology that stretches to 500 pixels per inch.
Plus, Samsung is throwing in what it is calling an adaptive display - one that changes depending on the light of the place you are viewing the screen - and on paper you have the optimum viewing no matter what situation you are in.

Samsung Galaxy Note 4 power and storage

We're still digging into the Samsung Galaxy Note 4 - but while we update this article here's what was rumoured to be the specs of the Note 4.
The Galaxy Note 4 bring with it a pretty impressive 2.7GHz quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 805 processor, which certainly won't be struggling to keep things moving despite the screen.
Also worthy of, ahem, note, is the 3GB RAM that the phone is packing - there are still plenty of people with PCs that don't rock that kind of memory.
The internal memory of the Galaxy Note 4 is a not insignificant 64GB, which should mean you don't have to choose between your collection of Jean Claude van Damme movies and your lovingly put together eclectic music.


Samsung Galaxy Note 4 camera

The Galaxy Note 4 came in for quite the camera upgrade, but not the 20MP sensor that a report from ET News suggested was due for release in the second half of the year.

Note 4

Instead, it's gone from 13MP to 16MP but camera-philes will be more impressed with the f stop, which now clocks in at f1.9. That lets in 60% more light and makes for better quality images.
You can also use the camera in unison with the S Pen. A new feature called Snap Note allows you to take a picture of a piece of paper (or whiteboard) and change what's in the picture.