NEWS CLUES: Like An Armed Rampage Of Truth
Monday, March 30th, 2009NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN: Gunman Kills Eight In Nursing Home Rampage
An armed man shot and killed seven patients and a nurse at a Carthage, North Carolina, nursing home Sunday before being wounded during a shootout with a police officer, authorities said. Three other people, including the police officer and a visitor to the nursing home, were wounded in the attack, Carthage Police Chief Chris McKenzie said. The police officer was treated and released, McKenzie said. The slain patients ranged in age from 78 to 98, Moore County District Attorney Maureen Krueger said. The man accused of carrying out the attack, 45-year-old Robert Stewart, was in custody, and his condition was unknown Sunday night, McKenzie said. Stewart was not an employee of the Pinelake Health and Rehab Center, and he did not appear to have been related to any of the patients, she said. “There is still more to be uncovered as far as his purpose in being there,” she said. [via CNN]
SLEAZY DOES IT: Lawyer Quits Biden Daughter Coke Flick Shakedown
The explosive video that purports to show Vice President Joe Biden’s daughter Ashley snorting cocaine was shot with a hidden camera, RadarOnline.com has learned. And as the scandal grows, the lawyer trying to peddle the tape while representing the man who shot it has quit. Tom Dunlap, an attorney for the Washington, D.C. firm Dunlap, Grubb and Weaver has dropped the seller of the tape as a client. Dunlap told RadarOnline.com early Sunday that he is no longer involved in the attempted sale of the video and informed his client he would not continue to represent him. The lawyer said he did not want to be involved due to circumstances surrounding the publicity of the matter. On Saturday, RadarOnline.com broke the story that a video showing a woman who is allegedly Ashley Biden snorting cocaine has been shopped to several media entities. The woman on the tape appears identical to 27-year-old Ashley. [via RADAR]
ANOTHER INCEST-RAPE SHOCKER: Father Forces Daughter To Bear 11 Children
A Colombian man has appeared in court accused of imprisoning his daughter and fathering 11 children with her. Arcedio Alvarez is said to have abused his daughter, now in her 30s, since she was nine years old. The case has shocked Colombia, and the 59-year-old needed police and army protection for his court appearance. Mr Alvarez, who the press have dubbed the “monster of Mariquita” after the area he comes from, denies incest and rape, saying his daughter was adopted. It is not clear whether his claim is true, or whether it would affect the charges he faces, but the woman says she always saw him as her father. “I always respected him as my father and he is my father,” she said. “He never spoke about [incest], about why we were doing it. Sometimes I would ask him and he would say it was God’s will.” The woman told police how her mother died when she was five years old, leaving her in the care of Mr Alvarez. She says she was raped repeatedly and had 11 children – three of whom died. [via BBC]
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BY ADAM BONANNI Easy to pick-up but tough to master, puzzle games straddle the line between casual and hardcore games, and have a kind of universal appeal — because, hey, who doesn’t love a good brain-teaser? I, GAMER’s target in the cross-hair this week is World of Goo, an independently-developed puzzle game by San Francisco-based studio 
stages. The gameplay has you constructing bridges to get the goo balls into the pipes, so it’s easy to get the feeling you aren’t contributing much to the advancement of the game’s story through gameplay, but that quickly passes. Some levels break from the formula of reaching the pipe to solve a puzzle that furthers the story, but these usually appear at the end of a level, so their presence is rare. A certain number of balls must be sucked away for the player to progress to the next level, so the challenge is to create a structurally sound edifice that can reach a pipe. You could be forgiven for thinking that does not sound like much fun on paper, but you would be wrong.
Thayer and Daily News publisher Mark Frisby. PMH board chair Bruce Toll confirmed bonuses of $350,000 for Tierney and $150,000 each for Thayer and Frisby in a phone conversation on Friday. [...] PMH filed for bankruptcy in February. Toll, of the homebuilding Toll Brothers company, confirmed that the PMH board knew the company¹s fiscal situation was dire. “The financial condition of the papers was obviously not good,” said Toll. “We knew what was going to happen sooner or later.” So why give out $650,000 in bonuses? “We thought it was deserved,” he said. “But we can’t get into the details because we’re involved in bankruptcy proceedings.” 
RELATED: The Obama administration asked Rick Wagoner, the chairman and CEO of General Motors, to step down and he agreed, a White House official said. The White House confirmed Wagoner was leaving at the government’s behest after The Associated Press reported his immediate departure, without giving a reason. [...]Obama and his aides may have honed in on Wagoner for two reasons. First, his company is asking for the most in total federal aid: $26 billion, a figure administration officials fear could grow even larger. Second, the GM chief was tied more directly to the ill-fated decisions that that brought much of the American auto industry to the brink of collapse. Wagoner joined GM in 1977, has had a senior role in GM management since 1992, and became CEO of the company in 2000. He is considered responsible for increasing GM’s focus on trucks and SUVs—at the expense of the hybrids and fuel efficient cars that have become more popular in the last couple of years.
president then joked that “I don’t know what this says about the online audience,” prompting laughter from the roughly 100 people gathered in the White House East Room for the event. “…but I just want — I don’t want people to think that — this was a fairly popular question,” he continued. “We want to make sure that it was answered.” And then he answered it in a way that must come as a disappointment to legalization advocates – though they could at least take solace in the fact that he did not flatly state that he opposes legalization. “The answer is, no, I don’t think that is a good strategy to grow our economy,” the president said. His answer prompted applause from the audience. 
SF WEEKLY: Last week, Attorney General Eric Holder 
BY EGINA MANACHOVA If you want the low down on the opening Film Fest night party on the 19th floor of the Bellevue, well, I will be your fly on the wall. In short, you didn’t miss much. It was like hobnobbing with the not so rich and not at all famous. I exaggerate. There were some D-list celebrities there. I think. William Forsythe. I didn’t even know who he was until my friend made him feel very awkward. The catered food reminded me of being at a Bar Mitzvah. So did the middle aged white women dancing to top 40 hip hop songs. I don’t know out of what high school prom they found that DJ. That was probably the biggest break of his life. Unbearable. In my history of partying, there have only been a very select number of dance floors I could not be bothered to stomped across. Last night made it on the list — which is really saying something, believe me.
BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC As you’re thumbing through your festival guide here’s a rundown of some of the entries screening throughout the first weekend of the Philadelphia Film Festival. Among the highlights unavailable for preview were Sam Rockwell lost like Major Tom in the 70′s sci-fi throwback Moon (opening here in June), the IRA hunger strike drama Hunger, the Philly-set cooking school doc Pressure Cooker, James Toback’s Sundance hit documentary on ear-biter Mike Tyson and the two part (of a projected three) Japanese fantasy epic 20th Century Boys. And check back next week as we continue daily coverage of all the ephemeral celluloid wonders.
BLIND LOVES (2008, directed by Juraj Lehotsky, 77 minutes, Slovakia)
again at Warner Bros., and finally at MGM, where Worldwide Motion Picture Group chairman Mary Parent championed the cause and bought the WB-owned scripts and made a deal with Stooges rights holders C3. Production will begin in early fall for a release sometime in 2010. 
NBC PHILADELPHIA: The social networking world is rife with sexual exploitation of young children, but it rarely happens that the exploiters are the children themselves. A 14-year-old girl was arrested Tuesday for allegedly posting nearly 30 naked photos of herself on 
hand to pick up awards (genial everyman Jeff Daniels appearing at the 3/30 screening of the Philly-shot Answer Man and Oscar-nominated Alfre Woodard appearing at the 4/4 screening of American Violet), accolades given to local talent made good (experimental filmmakers The Brothers Quay will emerge on 4/3 from whatever decrepit clock factory they presumably dwell to pick up their Vision Award) as well as slates of films dedicated to documentary, the Muslim World, Latin America, The French, International Comedies, horror thrillers and for the first time the Fade To Black segment, dedicated to the cinema of African Americans.
Otherwise, I’d say the 2009 edition has surprised me by being uniformly strong, with the under card of unheralded entrees full of gems (let me give you an early heads-up for the romantic near-silent comedy Rumba and the worthy-of-it’s-Polanski-comparisons horror mystery Left Bank, yes both from Belgium). Friday, I’ll be back with a bevy of reviews for films screening throughout the weekend and check in daily starting next week with more reports from the Festival. With the Festival splintering into unknown formations next year, this might be Philly’s last chance to belly up to a spread of gourmet cinema this luxuriously large for some time. 
BY DAVE ALLEN Like time, news waits for no man. Keeping up with the funny papers has always been an all-day job, even in the pre-Internets era. These days, however, it’s a two-man job. That’s right, these days you need someone to do your reading for you, or risk falling hopelessly behind and, as a result, increasing your chances of dying lonely and somewhat bitter. That’s why every week, PAPERBOY
mistakes, and can be positively scorching with those who fail to show the proper respect to her or her kitchen. “She has good intentions,” says Erica, one of three students the movie focuses on. “Just sometimes she has bad people skills.”
The film lays out the complicated case in interviews and archival photographs. Payola wasn’t necessarily “Here’s $50—now go play my record.” It was more subtle (and more profitable): Dick Clark and others had their hands in pies running up and down the industry, from publishing companies to the physical record pressing plants. Disc jockeys cooked up deals that could guarantee profitability for years to come. And at the time, it was totally kosher.
BY JONATHAN VALANIA Giant Sand mainman Howe Gelb has always been one of indie rock’s most beautiful losers. Twenty-some albums into a career that’s brought him all the riches and fame of a Wal-Mart stock boy, Gelb just doesn’t know when to quit. And thank God for it, because Chore of Enchantment (originally released in 2000) remains Giant Sand’s finest hour. Gelb’s music — as intimate as a campfire and as expansive as the desert panoramas it evokes — has always clung to the slippery pole of spontaneity. A fly buzzing around the microphone was always just as integral to the song as the lyrics or the chord changes, an approach that lent itself to moments of astonishing accidental grace and a lot of high-plains drifting. Tinkered over for more than a year by three different producers — eons in Giant Sand years – Chore represents Gelb’s perfection of the majestic desert blues and honky-tonk mysticism he’s been kicking around for 20 years. Like any good horse opera, it’s peopled with the good, the bad and the ugly drifting through the ghost town of memory — a richly rendered series of sonic snapshots, yellowed and curling up at the edges under the brutal Tucson sun. It starts with the Second Coming (“Dusted”) and finishes with a hangover (“Way to End the Day”), and in the end everyone gets what they had comin’.
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