How Oscar entry “La Source” launched a campaign for clean water across Haiti
















LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – The documentary “La Source” was originally conceived to be the tale of a single project, the efforts by a Princeton University janitor to bring clean water to a single village in rural Haiti.


Now, the film’s exposure has spawned a soccer field, two schools and 20 more villages with sanitary water.













The Oscar-nominated film, which follows Haiti-born Josue Lajeunesse as he fulfills his dream of bringing bacteria-free water to his native village, launched a regional project by the nonprofit Generosity Water to improve the lives of rural Haitians.


“We’re hoping that we can really continue to build on what this film was about,” producer Jordan Wagner told TheWrap’s Steve Pond at Thursday night showing of “La Source,” which is part of TheWrap’s annual Award Screening Series.


Seated at Los Angeles‘ Landmark Theatre alongside director Patrick Shen, producer Brandon Vedder and Lajeunesse, Wagner, the nonprofit’s director, said his organization has already carved out a spot in the film’s namesake village for a school and soccer field.


“We’re putting a plan together to use the film at screenings to mobilize people,” Wagner said. “We figured out which plot of land we’d buy, we’re going to build a primary school and a secondary school.”


Wagner met Lajeunesse after he was filmed in Shen’s “The Philosopher Kings,” a movie about the stories behind college custodians.


He began raising money after hearing the janitor’s lifelong desire to pipe clean water down from a mountain spring and into his village. Students and faculty at Princeton, where Lajeunesse worked after coming to the United States in 1990, held benefit concerts and donated money to help fund the project.


For Lajeunesse, the plan was decades in the works.


“I was seven or eight years old, but I had in my mind that I have to go to school in order to do something to take the people and the town out of the situation,” Lajeunesse told Landmark Theatre audience. “Day by day, day by day, I save, I save, I save but we didn’t know how we were going to start it.”


Then, in January 2010, a 7.0 magnitude earthquake struck Haiti, killing more than 250,000 people and destroying the impoverished nation’s infrastructure.


“The first time we went was about a month after the earthquake,” Vedder said, adding that the humidity in the Caribbean country nearly destroyed the cinematographers’ cameras. “It was hard to be another camera sticking in these people’s faces, right in their lives.”


The troubles didn’t end there. After the pipeline was built and Lajeunesse and his brother installed the spigots, it was clear how the film would begin and finish, but the meat of the story was harder to pare down.


“We knew where it would end, but the whole kind of middle part of the narrative was what was tricky,” Shen said. “We had to have discussions every night about the strategy for the next day.”


And, with $ 30,000 going toward the actual water project, the filmmakers quickly ran out of cash to support themselves during the months of editing.


“The story was happening whether we decided to make this film or not,” Wagner said. “We were scrambling to make this happen. We have the money for the project and this is happening and now we don’t have money for the film.”


Still, the filmmakers raised enough to keep the film alive after its spring-to-fall shooting schedule in 2010, working through the footage for a year and creating a few different cuts of the film before finding its final shape.


The movie premiered at Washington’s Silverdocs festival – the same festival where Wagner first met Shen at a screening of “The Philosopher Kings,” beginning a relationship that led directly to “La Source.”


The film was also a selection in the International Documentary Association’s annual DocuWeeks showcase, which qualified it for the Academy Awards via week-long engagements in Los Angeles and New York in August.


And though Lajeunesse hasn’t been back to Haiti since July 2010 – his janitorial and taxi jobs, plus four kids, make travel difficult – he said he gets phone calls from his family frequently, updating him on how the town is improving.


“Everyone there is so happy,” he said, drawing applause from the audience. “They have water and they don’t know what to say. All the town, they say, ‘tell everyone thank you for me.’”


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Vatican vows to fight gay marriage after gains in U.S., Europe
















VATICAN CITY (Reuters) – The Vatican, reacting to strong gains for gay marriage in the United States and Europe, on Saturday pledged never to stop fighting attempts to “erase” the privileged role of heterosexual marriage, which it called it “an achievement of civilization”.


For the second consecutive day, Vatican media weighed in with forceful editorials restating the Roman Catholic Church‘s unequivocal opposition.













“It is clear that in Western countries there is a widespread tendency to modify the classic vision of marriage between a man and woman, or rather to try to give it up, erasing its specific and privileged legal recognition compared to other forms of union,” Father Federico Lombardi, said in a tough editorial on Vatican Radio.


Voters in the U.S. states of Maryland, Maine and Washington state approved same-sex marriage on Tuesday, marking the first time marriage rights have been extended to same-sex couples by popular vote.


Same-sex unions have been legalized in six states and the District of Columbia by lawmakers or courts.


Lombardi’s editorial on Vatican Radio, which is broadcast around the world in some 30 languages, called the votes myopic, saying “the logic of it cannot have a far-sighted outlook for the common good”.


Lombardi, who is also the Vatican’s chief spokesman as well as director of Vatican Radio and Vatican Television, said there was “public acknowledgement” that “monogamous marriage between a man and woman is an achievement of civilization”.


WHY NOT POLYGAMY?


“If not, why not contemplate also freely chosen polygamy and, of course, not to discriminate, polyandry?” he said.


Polyandry is when a woman has more than one husband.


The Catholic Church teaches that homosexuality is not a sin but homosexual acts are. It says the rights of homosexuals should be guaranteed but that their unions should not be recognized as equal to heterosexuals and they should not be allowed to adopt children.


The constitutionality of restricting marriage to unions between a man and a woman is widely expected to be taken up by the U.S. Supreme Court soon.


The powerful U.S. Catholic Bishops conference, which is already at odds with the administration of President Barack Obama because its health care law obliges most employers to cover contraception, is expected to take a lead in trying to influence the court’s decision.


Earlier this week, Spain’s highest court upheld a gay marriage law, and in France the socialist government has unveiled a draft law that would allow gay marriage.


An editorial in Friday’s edition of the Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, said local Catholic Churches in many countries around the world were “the sentinels of religious freedom” for opposing gay marriage.


It called support for gay marriage “an ideology founded on political correctness which is invading every culture of the world”.


“The Church is the only institution to say that, while persecuting homosexuals in undoubtedly unjust, opposing marriage between people of the same sex is a point of view that must be respected,” the Vatican newspaper editorial said.


(Reporting By Philip Pullella; Editing by Sophie Hares)


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Exclusive: Ally near $4 billion unit sale, GM in lead – sources
















NEW YORK (Reuters) – Ally Financial Inc is nearing a deal to sell its auto financing operations in Europe and Latin America for around $ 4 billion, with General Motors Co emerging as the lead bidder if the company decides to sell those operations as a whole, two sources familiar with the situation said.


Ally is still considering whether to split the business geographically – Europe and Latin America – and sell it to two different parties, the sources said on Friday. A deal could come as soon as next week, they added.













Details of an agreement have not yet been finalized and the outcome could still change, the sources said. Ally is still talking to a handful of financial institutions that have made separate bids for its European and Latin American assets, they said.


GM declined to comment. An Ally spokeswoman said: “We continue to be focused on maximizing shareholder value and finding the best solutions for the remaining international operations.”


(Reporting By Jessica Toonkel in New York and Rick Rothacker in Charlotte, North Carolina, Editing by Soyoung Kim, Bernard Orr)


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Jimmy Kimmel’s Family Members Are Apparently Fair Game
















We realize there’s only so much time one can spend in a day watching new trailers, viral video clips, and shaky cell phone footage of people arguing on live television. This is why every day The Atlantic Wire highlights the videos that truly earn your five minutes (or less) of attention. Today:


RELATED: The Roots Take on ‘Call Me Maybe’ (and Win)













Watch this video, bookmark it, and watch it the next time you think you’d rather go home than wait in a long line to vote. Seriously, Time‘s look at the Rockaways on the election night hits the matrix where heart-break and optimism meet and it makes you really appreciate a right we shouldn’t take for granted: 


RELATED: Cookie Monster Batman and the Dog You Wish You Had


RELATED: Behold the Power of ‘Gangnam Style’


The best part of Louis C.K.’s SNL appearance was his “Lincoln” skit. Six days later, here we are with a new video: the director’s cut of the Lincoln-Louie parody—it’s funnier, dirtier, and one really awesome look at what NBC think is too offensive for network television. 


RELATED: The Robot That Performs Gangnam Style Better Than You


RELATED: The Uncle You Wish You Had and the Joy of Human Jukeboxes


Children, we’ve learned, are not safe from the pranks of Jimmy Kimmel. Neither is Jimmy Kimmel‘s aunt. 


And finally, the weekend is here. We’re talking like one hour away. This baby elephant video is clear evidence of that: 


Wireless News Headlines – Yahoo! News



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Stradivarius dealer gets six years for embezzlement
















VIENNA (Reuters) – A dealer in rare Stradivarius violins coveted by the world’s top violinists was sentenced on Friday to six years in prison for embezzlement after his glittering global empire crumbled.


Dietmar Machold, 63, built his Bremen-based family business into a juggernaut with branches in Zurich, Vienna, New York and Chicago to serve elite musicians and collectors of the instruments that can command prices of several million dollars.













But the business collapsed in 2010, triggering claims against him worth tens of millions of euros (dollars) from creditors and clients who say they were bilked.


“I am a failure. I have lost everything,” Machold said in a Vienna court as he was sentenced after being convicted of embezzling client funds and hiding assets from creditors.


“You played for high stakes and you lost a lot, but you understand you have to take the responsibility for this,” Judge Claudia Moravec-Loidolt told him.


Prosecutor Herbert Harammer had traced the career of the fifth-generation violin expert who became one of the world’s most influential dealers in instruments crafted by 18th-century masters like Antonio Stradivari, whose workshop in Cremona, Italy produced some of the finest violins and cellos ever made.


“This ascent was built on sand,” Harammer had told the court, accusing Machold of leading a lifestyle that was a facade for a business that had actually been insolvent since mid-2006.


FIXTURE OF HIGH SOCIETY


A fixture of high society, Machold lived in an Austrian castle, had a fleet of expensive cars and collected watches and cameras. His global network of rare instrument dealerships let him move in the highest circles of music, fame and money.


His former wife and her mother got one-year suspended sentences for helping him hide precious musical instruments and a valuable watch collection as his business imploded.


Machold admitted from the start that he embezzled money made from the sale of instruments entrusted to him by his customers, but denied fraud charges that are being handled separately.


“I did what I did and I am to be punished for it. That is the way it has to be,” the German native told the court before sentencing, his voice calm before he teared up and had to pause.


Machold, who told the court he did not deserve a mild sentence given the magnitude of his misdeeds, had faced a sentence of up to 10 years. His lawyer did not say if he would file an appeal.


Machold said he acted in desperation after losing a lawsuit brought by a construction company which meant his Eichbuechl castle was at risk.


The high-profile dealer had at times given contradictory testimony, at one stage saying he built personal relationships with the instruments in his care that he called “my children”.


But later he said he “simply forgot” one expensive violin that he failed to report to administrators.


($ 1 = 0.7857 euros)


(Editing by Michael Roddy)


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Smokers may fare worse after colorectal surgery
















NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – Smoking has long been linked with slower recovery in general from injuries and surgeries, and now a new study finds that smokers face more complications and higher chances of death following major surgery for colorectal cancers and other diseases.


“We wanted to see if smoking has a specific effect on these patients… and really wanted to know if patients who stopped smoking had better results,” said lead author Dr. Abhiram Sharma, who was at the University of Rochester in New York during the study.













Smoking constricts the flow of blood throughout the body and is thought to prevent oxygen from getting to tissues that are trying to heal, according to the authors.


In September, a review of surgeries to repair knee ligaments found that smokers tended to have worse outcomes, including not being able to get back full knee function. (See Reuters Health article of September 26, 2012: http://reut.rs/Xqf6is)


For the new report, published in the Annals of Surgery, Sharma and his colleagues studied patients included in a nationally representative database of U.S. surgeries between 2005 and 2010.


Overall, 47,574 patients were included in the analysis. All had part of their colon or rectum removed, a surgery known as a colorectal resection, either because of cancer, diverticular disease or inflammatory bowel disease.


About 60 percent of the patients had never smoked, 19 percent were former smokers and 20 percent were current smokers.


The researchers looked at the 30 days after surgery to see how many patients in each group suffered either a major complication – such as severe infection, heart or breathing problems or death – or a minor complication, such as an infection at the surgical site or in the urinary tract.


Sharma’s team found that current smokers had a 30 percent greater risk of having a major complication compared to patients who never smoked, and an 11 percent greater risk than ex-smokers.


Among 9,700 current smokers, for example, there were 1,497 major complications and 1,448 minor ones, whereas the 9,136 ex-smokers had 1,374 major and 1,386 minor complications. Never smokers, the largest group numbering 28,738, had 3,316 major complications and 3,462 minor ones.


Current smokers were also 1.5 times as likely to die within 30 days of surgery as never smokers.


In addition, the longer someone had smoked – that is, the greater their number of “pack years” – the stronger their chances of complications, the researchers note.


“We were not completely surprised (by the results). We know smoking is not good and there have been other studies that show smoking is a problem,” Sharma said.


There were, Sharma’s team acknowledges, some limitations in the study.


For example, ex-smokers were defined as patients who had not smoked in at least one year, therefore some more recent ex-smokers may have been included with current smokers, leading the benefits of quitting to be underestimated.


Nonetheless, Sharma told Reuters Health, the results show it’s never too late to stop smoking.


“The sooner the better,” he said.


SOURCE: http://bit.ly/XqnA9h Annals of Surgery, online October 10, 2012.


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Can Ryan and Obama Get Along?
















One of the most fraught and fascinating relationships in Washington over the next few months—and likely the next four years—will be that of Paul Ryan and Barack Obama. Ryan is defeated but unbowed. Obama is triumphant but trying hard not to gloat. The men are archrivals who must find a way to work together to keep the U.S. from plunging off the “fiscal cliff” and then to get the country on the path to balanced budgets.


It won’t be easy for either the House Budget Committee Chairman or the president. Republican strategist Karl Rove told Fox News’ Neil Cavuto in August that Ryan “gets under the president’s skin.” For his part, Ryan let it be known that he was stung when Obama criticized him and his budget proposal last year while Ryan (unbeknownst to the president) was sitting in the audience.













I asked three Washington insiders whether they thought Ryan and Obama would be able to have a constructive relationship after the bitterness of a presidential campaign in which Ryan ran and lost as Mitt Romney’s running mate.


Norman Ornstein, a political scientist, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, and co-author, with Thomas Mann, of It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism:


“Ryan has other ambitions now, and comes at it from a different perspective. … It probably makes him less accommodating. You’ve now got serious jockeying for leadership of the conservative movement of the Republican Party.” To win the Republican nomination for president in 2016, Ryan may choose to stick to a strong conservative message rather than move quickly to compromise with Obama, Ornstein says. “It’s a tricky path, let’s put it that way. A lot of peril in that path. I think it’s his inclination. He’s going to get a lot of advice to do that. But he’s a smart guy. He’s very much an ideologue, but he’s not crazy.”


Steve Bell, senior director of economic policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center, who served on former Republican Senator Pete V. Domenici’s staff from 1974 to 1986 and 1996 to 2009:


“I think he [Ryan] is going to be part and parcel of the negotiations.” Ryan’s staff on the budget committee, led by Austin Smythe, “essentially become the speaker’s staff” in the last session of Congress, Bell says. “They do all the real number-crunching. That worked in the past, and I think that’s how they’ll work it in the future.” Bell says that Obama is a loner who doesn’t bond easily with members of Congress, especially those across the aisle like Ryan. On the other hand, he says, “They’re both athletes. … Males bond this way. There’s a pretty good chance that they’ll be able to get along sufficiently well to make a deal and stick to it. … One thing the president knows about Ryan, he knows he won’t be able to play fast and loose with the assumptions, because he knows that Ryan knows these numbers cold.”


Michael Zolandz, a partner and the practice leader for public policy and regulation at the SNR Denton lobbying firm:


“They were well and truly familiar with one another’s viewpoints and approach before they got into this campaign. … Having been on the same national stage, they have a little bit more, I wouldn’t say admiration, but a better sense of the other’s mojo and capabilities. That kind of familiarity engenders a certain degree of respect. … I don’t think there’s intense hatred. I think there’s significant disagreement on the numbers.” Ryan isn’t the final decision-maker, Zolandz says. “While Paul Ryan’s thoughts were felt [last session] as a matter of politics and leadership, it’s still [House Speaker John] Boehner’s play. He’s still the leader.”


Businessweek.com — Top News



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Myanmar says Obama to visit later this month
















YANGON, Myanmar (AP) — President Barack Obama will make a groundbreaking visit later this month to Myanmar, an official said Thursday, following through with his policy of rapprochement to encourage democracy in the Southeast Asian nation.


The Myanmar official speaking from the capital, Naypyitaw, said Thursday that security for a visit on Nov. 18 or 19 had been prepared, but the schedule was not final. He asked not to be named because he was not authorized to give information to the media.













The official said Obama would meet with opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi as well as government officials including reformist President Thein Sein.


It would be the first-ever visit to Myanmar by an American president. U.S. officials have not yet announced any plans for a visit, which would come less than two weeks after Obama’s election to a second term.


Obama’s administration has sought to encourage the recent democratic progress under Thein Sein by easing sanctions applied against Myanmar’s previous military regime.


Officials in nearby Thailand and Cambodia have already informally announced plans for visits by Obama that same week. Cambodia is hosting a summit meeting of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, and Thailand is a longtime close U.S. ally.


The visit to Myanmar, also known as Burma, would be the culmination of a dramatic turnaround in relations with Washington as the country has shifted from five decades of ruinous military rule and shaken off the pariah status it had earned through its bloody suppression of democracy.


Obama’s ending of the long-standing U.S. isolation of Myanmar’s generals has played a part in coaxing them into political reforms that have unfolded with surprising speed in the past year. The U.S. has appointed a full ambassador and suspended sanctions to reward Myanmar for political prisoner releases and the election of Nobel laureate Suu Kyi to parliament.


From Myanmar’s point of view, the lifting of sanctions is essential for boosting a lagging economy that was hurt not only by sanctions that curbed exports and foreign investment, but also by what had been a protectionist, centralized approach. Thein Sein’s government has initiated major economic reforms in addition to political ones.


A procession of senior diplomats and world leaders have traveled to Myanmar, stopping both in the remote, opulent capital city, which was built by the former ruling junta, and at Suu Kyi’s dilapidated lakeside villa in the main city of Yangon, where she spent 15 years under house arrest. New Zealand announced Thursday that Prime Minister John Key would visit Myanmar after attending the regional meetings in Cambodia.


The most senior U.S. official to visit was Hillary Rodham Clinton, who last December became the first U.S. secretary of state to travel to Myanmar in 56 years.


The Obama administration regards the political changes in Myanmar as a marquee achievement in its foreign policy, and one that could dilute the influence of China in a country that has a strategic location between South and Southeast Asia, regions of growing economic importance.


But exiled Myanmar activists and human rights groups are likely to criticize an Obama visit as premature, rewarding Thein Sein before his political and economic reforms have truly taken root. The military — still dominant and implicated in rights abuses — has failed to prevent vicious outbreaks of communal violence in the west of the country that have left scores dead.


Asia News Headlines – Yahoo! News



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Priceline to buy Kayak Software for $1.8 billion
















(Reuters) – Online travel agency Priceline.com Inc said on Thursday it will buy Kayak Software Corp in a friendly deal that values the company at $ 1.8 billion.


Priceline is offering $ 40 a share for Kayak, a 29 percent premium on the company’s Thursday closing price of $ 31.04.













Kayak shares jumped 27 percent to more than $ 39 in extended trading, while Priceline.com moved lower.


Daniel Kurnos, an analyst at Benchmark Company, said the purchase would let Priceline.com participate more in the travel advertising space.


“Priceline had previously addressed that it was having issues in terms of marketing efficiencies,” he said. “This certainly represents an investment for them in the paid-search, or the advertising channel, which is not an area where they’ve historically had a lot of exposure.”


But Kurnos added the move also exposes Priceline.com more significantly to the volatile air travel market.


Kayak, which uses a website and a mobile site to help consumers compare prices for airlines and hotels, went public in July with shares priced at $ 26.


The deal expected to close late in the first quarter of 2013.


(Reporting by Karen Jacobs in Atlanta and Tej Sapru in Bangalore; Editing by Maju Samuel; and Peter Galloway)


Internet News Headlines – Yahoo! News



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Final “Spartacus” Season to Enter the Arena January 25
















LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – Starz’s “Spartacus” series will engage in one last round of battle in January, the cable network said Tuesday.


“Spartacus: War of the Damned” will premiere January 25, 2013 at 9 p.m., marking the beginning of the end for the blood-and-sex soaked franchise, whose previous installments included “Spartacus: Vengeance” and “Spartacus: Blood and Sand.”













“Spartacus: War of the Damned” sees Liam McIntyre returning as the titular gladiator, and takes place following the defeat of Roman commander Gaius Claudius Glaber. Following successful battles against the Romans after the Battle of Vesuvius, the ranks of the rebellious slaves have swelled, with Rome trembling at Spartacus’ increased threat to the empire.


This season also sees the addition of new cast members Todd Lasance as Gaius Julius Caesar, Simon Merrells as Marcus Crassus and Anna Hutchison as Laeta.


TV News Headlines – Yahoo! News



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