Arts

Rolling Stones fans are sure to get some satisfaction from an upcoming auction to benefit a pair of Connecticut charities that help autistic adults.

The Stamford Advocate reports that Stones guitarist Keith Richards and his wife, Patti Hansen, are donating items from their Manhattan apartment to benefit the Prospector Theater and Sphere Inc., both based in Ridgefield, Connecticut. Hansen’s nephew has received services from the organizations.

The couple lives in nearby Weston.

The 73-year-old Richards’ guitars and flamboyant stage costumes aren’t on the auction block. Instead, items for sale include Italian, French and English furniture, Persian carpets, paintings, Waterford crystal and even a skull-motif china tea set.

The auction is being handled by Stair Galleries in Hudson, New York, on June 24. The preview begins June 10.
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The Black Eyed Peas and Robbie Williams will join Ariana Grande, Justin Bieber and other stars at a charity concert Sunday in Manchester, England.

Live Nation said Thursday that girl group Little Mix had also been added to the show being held in response to the Manchester bombing that took place at Grande’s concert in the city last week. Twenty-two people died at the show.

Katy Perry, Coldplay, Miley Cyrus, Pharrell Williams, Take That and Niall Horan also will perform. The event, “One Love Manchester,” will take place at Emirates Old Trafford.

Tickets went on sale Thursday. Proceeds will go to an emergency fund set up by the city of Manchester and the British Red Cross.
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Venus Williams may have revealed the gender of sister Serena Williams’ baby during a post-match interview at the French Open this week.

When asked by Eurosport what the baby will call her, Venus replied, “she’s going to call me favorite aunt.” She added that she and her other sisters are pushing for the child to be named after them.

 

Serena Williams announced her pregnancy with Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian in April, but didn’t hint at the baby’s gender.

 

Venus Williams defeated Kurumi Nara, with Serena looking on from the stands Wednesday. She takes on Elise Mertens in the third round of the French Open on Friday.

 

 
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His speech slow and slurred, Tiger Woods couldn’t follow simple instructions or keep his balance during a dazed and disoriented encounter with police before he was arrested on suspicion of driving under the influence.

 

The video images came from dash-cam footage that Jupiter police released Wednesday night, and they show Woods with little capacity to stand still without swaying, repeat simple instruction or put one foot in front of the other.

 

The footage came from his arrest Monday in the dark of early morning when Jupiter police noticed his Mercedes parked on the side of a six-lane road, part of it in the road and part of it in the bicycle lane.

 

Police found the Woods sound asleep behind the wheel, according to an incident report. The engine was running, the brake lights were on and the right turn signal was blinking. Police also released photos of his car that showed both tires flat with minor damage around the bumpers.

 

When the officer asks Woods where he had been, the 14-time major champion says, “LA.” He says he was headed down to Orange County.

 

The 1 hour, 39-minute video starts with the Jupiter police approaching Woods’ car and ends with the cruiser pulling into the Palm Beach County jail, with Woods in handcuffs behind his back and sitting in the back seat.

 

Woods told the officers he had not been drinking, and two breath tests at the jail registered a 0.0. Woods issued a statement nearly 10 hours after he was released from jail on Monday that alcohol was not involved.

 

“What happened was an unexpected reaction to prescribed medications,” Woods said in his statement. “I didn’t realize the mix of medications had affected me so strongly.”

 

He told police he was taking prescription medicine. When asked what kind, his answer was redacted from the video tape. The arrest affidavit listed four medications, including Vicodin, that Woods reported taking.

 

Woods is to be arraigned July 5 in Palm Beach County court.

 

The video brings to life the troubling images contained in an incident report from the four Jupiter police officers who were at the scene.

 

His speech is slurred from his first words. When the officer points out that Woods shoe is untied, Woods places his right foot on the front of the police car and starts to fiddle with the laces.

 

“It’s your other shoe that’s untied,” the officer says as Woods unties the laces.

 

“Now that one is, too,” the officer adds.

 

When Woods is unable to tie the left shoe, the officer tells him he can take them off. Woods then tells the officer he doesn’t remember what happened or being asleep in his car when police approached.

 

The field sobriety test was a failure from the start.

 

Woods struggled to simply put his feet together. When he did, he leaned forward after losing his balance.

 

He couldn’t follow a red light the officer moved from side to side. When asked to walk a straight line by going heel-to-toe nine times, Woods staggered from the starting position. He never connected heel-to-toe. He often strayed outside the white line and occasionally lost his balance.

 

Woods couldn’t raise one leg 6 inches off the round.

 

On his third try of understanding the alphabet instructions, he made it from A to Z.

 

The next instruction from the officer was to place his hands behind his back as they cuffed him and told him he was being arrested.

 

Woods, who had his fourth back surgery in three years on April 20, has not played since February 2 in Dubai when he withdrew after the first round because of back spasms. The surgery means he is out for the rest of the PGA Tour season.
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Actress Chloe Grace Moretz and the creators of her upcoming animated film apologized Wednesday after promotional materials were criticized of body shaming women.

Moretz, 20, wrote on Twitter that she had talked to producers for the film Red Shoes & the 7 Dwarfs about the marketing choices, including a billboard appearing at the Cannes Film Festival last week. The ad depicted a tall, thin woman in red heels next to a shorter, heavier version of herself holding her heels. The tagline promoted a Snow White who was no longer beautiful.

A trailer posted by South Korea-based Locus Creative Studios showed two dwarfs hiding in Snow White’s bedroom watching her undress after a night out. After kicking off her red heels, the Snow White character is shown as a heavier woman lounging in her underwear.

The company removed the trailer from its YouTube channel after social media users criticized the film’s ads.

Locus apologized for the billboard and trailer in an email. The company will terminate the current promos, saying they had the opposite effect of what was intended.

“Our film, a family comedy, carries a message designed to challenge social prejudices related to standards of physical beauty in society by emphasizing the importance of inner beauty,” the studio said.

Moretz wrote that she stands behind the film’s script, which she says tells a powerful message to young women.

“The actual story is powerful for young women and resonated with me,” Moretz wrote. “I am sorry for the offense that was beyond my creative control.”

The film has no release date.

Moretz has starred in films including Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising and Kick-Ass and its sequel.
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Angkor Wat has triumphed across the centuries to emerge at the world’s top tourism landmark in TripAdvisor’s Traveler’s Choice awards—for the second time since 2015.

The travel website used — what else? — an algorithm to determine the winners, which were determined by taking into account the quantity and quality of reviews and rankings for landmarks worldwide gathered over a 12-month period.

WATCH: Angkor Wat voted top travel site

Angkor Wat scored 33,000 5-star reviews with comments that included “must see,” “magnificent” and “WOW!” along with admonitions to bring comfortable shoes and bottled water to explore the 250 square kilometers of Angkor Archaeological Park, which includes Angkor Wat and hundreds of other temples.

“This is the Khmer nation’s pride, because Angkor is not only part of the prosperous heritage of Cambodia, but it has also become the heart and soul of the nation,” according to Long Kosal,  a spokesman for the government’s Authority for the Protection and Management of Angkor and the Region of Siem Reap (APSARA).

Built between the years 802 and 1431, the city of Angkor was the center of the Khmer empire in what is now Cambodia, until it was toppled by internal power struggles, foreign invasion and climate change.

‘Unique concentration of features’

A complex of temples, basins, dikes, reservoirs and canals, the site “is a unique concentration of features testifying to an exceptional civilization,” according to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).

Angkor was, according to World Archaeology, “the most extensive urban complex in the pre-industrial world.”

Angkor topped the 2015 TripAdvisor landmarks list, and last year Lonely Planet, another travel site, gave the temples of Angkor the top spot.

Ang Kim Eang, founder of the Great Angkor Tour Company, said the most recent award, which was made on May 23, will bolster tourism as more people become aware of the temples. But he cautioned that it was important to educate tourists about how to behave while visiting the sacred site, as visitor numbers continue to rise.

Code of conduct

To prevent damage to the complex, the APSARA provides a code of conduct with video on its site.

“They don’t have any knowledge,” he said. “They did not pay respect to the Buddha statues while they are visiting. We are worried especially when it is crowded.”

Lisa Delpy Neirotti, a George Washington University professor who is director of the masters of tourism administration program, on Wednesday told VOA Cambodia “the way you preserve a cultural heritage site is that you put caps on admission. I did see that they doubled the admission prices in 2016, which is one way to control capacity.”

For foreign tourists, the price of a one-day pass increased from $20 to $37, a three-day ticket from $40 to $62 and a seven-day pass from $60 to $72. Cambodians enter without charge.

Golden Gate Gate Bridge top US landmark

In 1993, when Agkor Wat was added to the UNESCO World Heritage List, there were 7,650 recorded visitors. Last year, 2.2 million tourists visited the temple complex, Kosal said, bringing in more than $62 million to government coffers. So far this year, about 950,000 tourists have visited Angkor Wat. In April, 63,541 Chinese tourists visited the complex, far in excess of the 17,217 South Koreans and 12,660 visitors from the United Kingdom, according to government statistics.

Until November 2015, the complex was leased to a company owned by Sok Kong, a petroleum magnate close to the ruling Cambodian People’s Party. Since then, it has been under government control.

The 2017 TripAdvisor awards honored 706 landmarks in 82 countries, with the Sheikh Zayed mosque in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, the Mezquita Cathedral de Cordoba in Cordoba, Spain, St. Peter’s Basilica at the Vatican, and the Taj Mahal in India occupying the next four positions. The 80-year-old Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco holds 11th place worldwide and is the top-rated U.S. landmark.

 
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The owners of a Mexican hotel using the name Hotel California on Wednesday said a trademark infringement lawsuit by the Eagles, whose song “Hotel California” is arguably the band’s most famous, should be dismissed.

Hotel California Baja LLC, which runs the Todos Santos hotel in Baja California Sur, said the band long ago waived its trademark rights, having waited four decades to assert them since releasing the song “Hotel California” on a 1976 album with the same name.

The owner said it “flatly denies” the Eagles’ “baseless contention” that the 11-room hotel seeks to mislead travelers into thinking the property is associated with the band.

“Any alleged use of plaintiff’s trademarks is not likely to cause confusion, deception or mistake as to association, connection, sponsorship, endorsement, or approval of plaintiff,” the owner said in a filing in Los Angeles federal court.

Lawyers for the Eagles were not immediately available for comment.

In their May 1 lawsuit, the Eagles said the defendant encourages guests to believe their hotel is associated with the band, including piping its music through a sound system, to sell T-shirts and other merchandise.

The hotel is located about 1,000 miles (1,609 km) south of San Diego and 48 miles (77 km) north of Cabo San Lucas.

It was named Hotel California at its 1950 opening, underwent some name changes, and later revived the original name after a Canadian couple, John and Debbie Stewart, bought it in 2001.

U.S. District Judge Gary Klausner scheduled a conference in the case for Aug. 21.

The album “Hotel California,” won the 1977 Grammy Award for record of the year.

The case is Eagles Ltd v Hotel California Baja LLC et al, U.S. District Court, Central District of California, No. 17-03276.
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Some contestants traced letters on their palms, while other word whizzes in the Scripps National Spelling Bee searched the ceiling for inspiration on Wednesday as they edged closer to the $40,000 top prize.

The youngest-ever competitor, Edith Fuller, who turned 6 on April 22, was among the 259 youths still spelling at midday from a starting field of 291.

“It feels really exciting,” Fuller, of Tulsa, Oklahoma, told reporters who asked what it was like to be the youngest speller at the 90th national bee.

Wearing a navy blue dress with a black bow in her wavy blond hair, Fuller said she planned to compete again next year “if I don’t win this time.”

Her mother said she quizzed her daughter on words up to five times a day but limited each session to 20 minutes.

“She does all the work in her mind,” said Annie Fuller, who home-schools her daughter. “The spelling did come as a surprise because we never explicitly tried to teach our children spelling.”

Before the lunch break on Wednesday, Edith Fuller successfully spelled the word nyctinasty, which describes the movement of plants, causing the crowd at the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center to burst into applause.

Others who also moved on to the next round at the Washington-area resort correctly spelled words such as gneiss, brachiopods and dactylology, while some struck out on the words quokka and toile.

The competition for the spelling specialists, ages 6 to 15, concludes with finals Thursday.

More than 11 million youths competed in earlier spelling bees in all 50 U.S. states, U.S. territories from Puerto Rico to Guam, and several nations, from Jamaica to Japan, contest officials said.

New rules this year are aimed at preventing tie endings like last year’s, when joint winners both got $40,000 cash prizes.

Bee officials will administer a Tiebreaker Test to all spellers in the competition at 6 p.m. (2200 GMT) Thursday. It will consist of 12 spelling words, which contestants will handwrite, and 12 multiple-choice vocabulary questions.

If it is mathematically impossible for one champion to emerge through 25 rounds, officials will declare the speller with the highest tiebreaker score the winner. If there is a tie on the test, judges will declare co-champions.
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Aerosmith may be approaching its 50th anniversary, but its members say the band’s not going anywhere.

 

Frontman Steven Tyler and Joe Perry both say the band will keep playing. That’s despite the title of their tour, ‘Aero-Vederci Baby!’ — which seems to play on “arrivederci,” Italian for “goodbye till we meet again.”

 

That appeared to hint it could be a farewell tour for the band after their run of dates in Europe.

 

“From my point of view, I think that we are going to keep going,” Perry said, adding he wanted to see Aerosmith remaining “pretty active over the next few years.”

 

Tyler joked that they simply couldn’t think of another name for the tour and added that “as long as the band is playing the way it is right now, it is going to be for a long time.”

 

Tyler also has joked that he’s taken up smoking.

 

“I started smoking on this tour because the band sounds so good I have to do something wrong,” he said in an interview last week ahead of the band’s Munich date.

 

For now, Perry is looking forward to playing Download Festival in Donington in the U.K. on June 11.

“It is kind of like playing Madison Square Garden in New York City,” he said, adding that “you’ve got to bring your A-game.”

 

Next stop for the tour is Friday in Krakow, Poland.
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Lebanon’s Interior Ministry banned the new “Wonder Woman” film from cinemas on Wednesday because an Israeli actress plays the lead role, a ministry source and a security official said.

Lebanon considers Israel an enemy country and the Ministry of Economy and Trade oversees a boycott of any business transactions concerning Israel.

The movie was set to premiere in most of Beirut’s major cinemas on Wednesday night, after private showings had been held the day before. The distributor for Warner Brothers in the region said the public release screenings were cancelled a few hours in advance.

The ministry source said they had issued an order to ban the movie, which stars former Israeli army soldier Gal Gadot, based on a recommendation from the General Security directorate.

“It’s very frustrating,” said Tony Chacra, managing director of the distributor Joseph Chacra and Sons. “The movie has nothing to do with Israel.”

They had already gained permission to show it in Lebanon, he said. “It cost money and advertising … Everything was going normally until a few days ago when a campaign began.”

Chacra said various Arab countries, including the UAE, Kuwait, and Oman, would screen the movie.

“They are not harming anyone by banning it … except the distributor,” he added. “They are making the movie theaters lose, the employees, the Lebanese economy … What did they get out of this?”

The Israeli actress also appeared in the movie “Batman v Superman” and in sequels of “Fast and Furious”, all of which played in Lebanese theaters.

“Thank God the film was banned, and we pledge to work on banning any similar films,” said Samah Idriss, a founder of the Campaign to Boycott Supporters of Israel-Lebanon that lobbied for barring the movie. The campaigners denounced Gadot on Facebook for serving in the Israeli military.

Idriss, whose group had unsuccessfully campaigned to stop “Batman v Superman” last year, described the ban as “a victory.”

Israel fought a month-long war with its Lebanese foe Hezbollah in 2006, and has targeted the Shi’ite armed group with strikes in Syria in recent years, but there has been no major direct confrontation.

The 2006 war killed around 160 Israelis, most of them troops fighting inside Lebanon, while 1,200 people in Lebanon, mostly civilians, died in Israel’s military barrages.

A U.N.-monitored ceasefire has largely held since the 2006 war, which also displaced a million people in Lebanon and nearly 500,000 in Israel.

The Iranian-backed Hezbollah movement played a major role in ending Israel’s 1982-2000 occupation of Lebanon.
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The marketability of Tiger Woods will suffer following his arrest for driving under the influence, but the former world number one golfer’s current sponsors will likely stay by his side, according to experts.

Woods, who had surgery in April to relieve back pain, blamed the incident on prescription drugs, but that was not enough to keep his droopy-eyed mug shot from being etched in the minds of many who were once captivated by his dominance on the course.

Still, despite his struggles on and off the course, Woods is the greatest golfer of his generation and sponsors like Nike, Bridgestone Golf, Monster Energy and TaylorMade are not likely to rush and cut ties with him, marketing experts told Reuters.

“They have to be very measured in terms of their response to their relation with him,” said David Carter, professor of sports business at the University of Southern California’s Marshal School of Business.

“He may not be delivering value but you could also be doing harm to your own brand if you cut and run on a guy with such global notoriety.”

Has barely played in recent years

Woods is second on the all-time list with 14 major titles but a player whose famous fist pump and beaming smile were once a regular site on the PGA Tour has lost his form and barely played in recent years.

Most of his sponsors, when asked by Reuters if they would review their agreements with Woods in light of Monday’s DUI arrest, either did not respond to requests for comment or said it was inappropriate to do so at this time.

Bridgestone Golf, however, said they “will continue to monitor this situation and gather information from the appropriate sources investigating the matter.”

But details of the arrest report which stated, among other things, that Woods was asleep at the wheel of a parked car with the engine running and was disoriented when woken up by a police officer, cannot be sitting well with sponsors.

Sidelined with back injury

And with Woods expected to miss the rest of the 2016-17 PGA Tour season after back surgery, his level of appeal to companies may be at an all-time low.

“You can overcome a DUI if you are a big enough star and you keep winning,” said Bob Dorfman, creative director of Baker Street Advertising in San Francisco.

“But you can’t overcome not being on the course for months, not winning championships and being pretty much a non entity in the golf world. And that’s what Tiger has become and the prospects don’t look very promising for him.”

This is not the first time Woods has made headlines away from the course. In 2009, a sex scandal turned his previously unblemished life and career upside down.

It also cost Woods a number of endorsement deals, while other sponsors shifted away from using him in marketing but did not end their contracts with him.

‘He has less chips to play with’

Woods could see a similar reaction this time around.

“He’s not playing, he’s not winning and so he has less chips to play with, if you will, in the endorsement game so that clearly makes it even more difficult for him,” said George Belch, marketing professor at San Diego State University.

“But you are still talking about an extremely high profile athlete here who transcended sports in many ways even if his baggage has clearly gotten bigger through the years.”

While the arrest report showed Woods had no alcohol in his system, results of a urine test that have not been released will go a long way in determining Woods’ marketability.

Tell the truth

Andrew Zimbalist, an economics professor at Smith College in Massachusetts, said sponsors will likely cut ties with Woods should the results show he was lying.

“The main issue is whether Tiger’s story is accurate. If indeed he is taking multiple medicines and they interacted with each other and knocked him out and he didn’t anticipate it then I think he fully recovers,” said Zimbalist.

“Another part of his ability to rebound and what happens to his legacy is going to be determined by how he comes back as a golfer and nobody knows the answer to that, probably not even Tiger himself.”
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In a world of only women, there are no phallic structures.

At least that’s how Patty Jenkins imagined the island home of the Amazons and their heroic princess Diana, who grows up to become Wonder Woman.

“Like columns? They didn’t make that much sense to me,” Jenkins said in a recent interview. “They felt like an imposition on landscape, which didn’t feel like something that women are jonesing to do.”

As the director of “Wonder Woman,” Jenkins is creating new worlds for women both onscreen and off. Not only did she help dream up the look of the Amazon island and hire scores of actresses to serve as its resident warriors, she’s the first woman to direct a major superhero movie, and her success could pave the way for others.

 

As a child, she was inspired by Wonder Woman, describing Lynda Carter’s portrayal on TV as “the embodiment of everything that I wanted to be as a woman.”

“When I was playing Wonder Woman, I was able to do incredible things and save the world,” the 45-year-old filmmaker said.

 

That’s the feeling she hopes to evoke with viewers of “Wonder Woman,” in theaters Friday. Gal Gadot plays the title character, who discovers her superpowers and fights for justice alongside humans after following a charming spy (Chris Pine) to London during World War I.

‘An important movie’

The Israeli-born Gadot didn’t grow up with Wonder Woman, but she was always on the lookout for powerful characters to play.

“Usually the women are the damsel in distress or the heartbroken woman or the sidekick, but in real life it’s not the case. In real life, we bring life. We have babies. We have careers. We are so many other things,” said Gadot, a 32-year-old married mother of two.

“Wonder Woman symbolizes the magnificence of a woman and how amazing women are. And I think that it’s an important movie not only for women and girls, but it’s also great for boys and men, Gadot said. “You can’t empower women if you don’t educate the men and you don’t teach the boys, so as much as it’s important for girls to be exposed and see this movie, it’s important for boys to have a strong female figure that they can look up to.”

A first for Wonder Woman

Wonder Woman was created in 1941, yet this is her first solo feature film. Jenkins wanted to bring her to the big screen for more than a decade, but studios doubted the appeal of the lasso-wielding super heroine.

“I don’t understand why somebody who has had zero big blockbuster representation for 75 years still has 15 little girls a minute coming to my door dressed as her every Halloween, like how does that not equal dollar signs?” Jenkins said.

 

Connie Nielsen, who plays Diana’s mother, Amazon queen Hippolyta, also didn’t grow up with Wonder Woman, but had myriad other models of powerful women as a child in Denmark.

“The Denmark I grew up in was a Denmark in which women were, in fact, fully liberated and the whole world had been opened up to us,” she said. “In the magazines in the early ‘80s, it was men who were photographed doing the vacuum cleaning in the ads for vacuum cleaners and women were no longer posing on the Ford Mustang.”

So Nielsen felt entitled to question why, on an island populated by only women, her character would wear high heels. She and Gadot, both statuesque, wear wedges in the film.

“I actually had that conversation several times, and Patty was adamant,” Nielsen said. “She really felt like you stand a different way (in heels), and you do.”

Amazons were best part

The costumes, including the wedges, had to be considered during the physical training, which included horseback riding, archery and swords(wo)manship. For Robin Wright, who was raised on the “Wonder Woman” TV show, training and shooting with the Amazons was the best part.

“I think it was a little daunting for the men because it was very unusual. I think there were like 120 Amazons,” said Wright, who plays the warrior Antiope, Diana’s aunt and teacher. “That’s a different energy on the set, and great for us. We just felt like a team of women that had each other’s backs.”

She called Jenkins “the biggest cheerleader of them all.”

With the film’s arrival this week, Jenkins is thinking about what “Wonder Woman” might mean for a new generation of aspiring superheroes — and filmmakers.

“I am a filmmaker who wants to make successful films, of course. I want my film to be celebrated,” she said. “But there’s a whole other person in me who’s sitting and watching what’s happening right now who so hopes, not for me, that this movie defies expectation. Because I want to see the signal that that will send to the world.”

 
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Three past winners of the Scripps National Spelling Bee say losing was the secret to their success.

Early defeats spurred an inner competitive streak that they used to eventually seize the title, said champions from 1985, 1999 and 2010. The 2017 national spelling bee winner will be crowned on Thursday.

“Those were tough losses but they also made me dig deeper and work harder,” said Balu Natarajan, 45, who flamed out on the national stage in 1983 and 1984. He won the next year at age 13 and is now a sports medicine doctor in Chicago.

Nupur Lala, 32, still remembers the word that tripped her up in 1998: commination, which ironically means the act of threatening divine vengeance. She took the title in 1999 at 14.

“It was one of the really healthy moments in my life. Any hubris that I had was eliminated at that point,” said Lala, headed for a 2018 medical school degree with a focus in neurology after conducting research at University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.

Lesson about challenges

For 2010 winner Anamika Veeramani, losing in front of a worldwide audience on live television in 2009 was a seminal lesson in handling life’s challenges.

“In the spelling bee, you really learn how to deal with failure. And dealing with those things gracefully is really important to living a good life,” said Veeramani, 21.

She graduated last week with a biology degree after just three years at Yale University and is applying to medical school. She envisions treating patients as well as launching a broadcast career covering medical stories.

Defeat has fanned the competitive fires within, all three past winners said in separate interviews.

“The competition is not with other spellers but with yourself,” Lala told Reuters. “I don’t think that besting other people is quite as motivating for me.”

Natarajan, who is chief medical officer at Seasons Hospice & Palliative Care, the nation’s largest privately owned hospice provider, agreed he has been his own fiercest rival.

“Some people love to win. Some people want to keep pushing to be their best. I am the latter,” he said.

Natarajan won the title for correctly spelling milieu, Lala for logorrhea and Veeramani for stromuhr, after their opponents had stumbled.

Others’ errors

And how do the world’s best spellers handle errors in emails, classroom lessons or even romantic love letters? Do they point out corrections or suffer in silence?

“I don’t hesitate,” Natarajan said. “It drives me crazy.”

But Lala and Veeramani hold their tongues.

“I don’t want to be obnoxious. Nobody wants to be that kid,” Veeramani said.

This week, 291 whizzes ages 6 to 15 will descend on a resort in the Washington area to compete in the 90th Scripps National Spelling Bee.

They have made the cut from more than 11 million contenders who faced off in spelling bees in all 50 U.S. states, U.S. territories from Puerto Rico to Guam, and several nations from Jamaica to Japan.

The victor on Thursday takes home a $40,000 cash prize. But second place also has its rewards: a $30,000 prize.

Natarajan, a married father of boys 8 and 11, said his elder child just missed competing in the national bee this year, coming in second in a countywide spelling competition. If losing really is the key to winning, that may be great news.
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Singer, actress Olivia Newton-John has revealed that she has breast cancer again, 25 years after recovering from her original diagnosis.

She has postponed upcoming tour dates after discovering that severe back pain she has been suffering is a result of the disease spreading to her spine.

The 68-year-old was due to perform across the U.S. and Canada next month.

Newton-John  said she will undergo a short course of radiation, as well as natural therapies, upon the advice of specialists at a cancer research center named after her in her adopted home of Melbourne, Australia.

Newton-John has been a chart-topper since the 1970s with songs that stretch into pop, folk and country but she became best-known for starring in the 1978 musical comedy “Grease” alongside John Travolta.

Newton-John was first diagnosed with breast cancer in 1992, forcing her to halt her schedule.

The experience had a major impact on Newton-John who became an advocate for research into cancer and for early detection.

Last week, the four-time Grammy award winner cancelled several events for the upcoming tour dates due to “severe back pain.”

A statement  from her management on Tuesday said: “The back pain that initially caused her to postpone the first half of her concert tour, has turned out to be breast cancer that has metastasized to the sacrum.”
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With retail stores shutting down at the fastest pace since the crash of 2008, the head of the American Booksellers Association is grateful to see business holding steady.

 

After seven straight years of growth, core membership in the independent sellers’ trade group has dropped slightly since May 2016, from 1,775 to 1,757. At the same time, the number of actual locations rose from 2,311 to 2,321, reflecting a trend of owners opening additional stores.

The association’s CEO, Oren Teicher, says sales from reporting outlets are up around 2 1/2 percent in the first four months of 2017 over the same time period last year. Sales increased 5 percent from 2015 to 2016.

 

“We’re pleased that the sales and presence of independent stores continues to grow at a time when thousands of other stores are closing,” he told The Associated Press during a recent interview.

 

Teicher said he was also encouraged by a bump in “provisional members,” those intending to open a store, from 103 to 141. During the association’s prolonged decline, when the rise of superstores and e-books helped cut membership from around 5,000 in the 1980s to just 1,401 in 2008, the market looked so dire that some profitable stores closed because the owner wanted to retire and no buyer could be found. In recent years, independent stores have been helped by a variety of factors, from the fall of Borders and the struggles of Barnes & Noble to the leveling off of e-book sales.

 

Concerns do remain for independent sellers as they prepare to join thousands of publishers, authors, agents and librarians at the industry’s annual national convention, BookExpo, which begins Wednesday at New York’s Jacob Javits Center.

Closed stores of any kind can reduce foot traffic in a shopping district and hurt booksellers among others. And one company expanding on the ground is the online giant Amazon.com, which has been cited as a factor in closings for everyone from J.C. Penney to American Apparel.

 

Amazon just opened its first bookstore in Manhattan and seventh overall. One outlet is within 1 1/2 miles of Third Place Books in Amazon’s hometown Seattle, where Third Place managing partner Robert Sindelar says sales initially dropped after the Amazon store opened in November 2015, but had bounced back by the end of last year.

 

“So it feels that their larger impact on us was short-lived,” said Sindelar, the booksellers association’s new president. “However, any bookstore — Amazon, indie or chain store — that close is going to impact our sales to some degree.”

 

BookExpo runs Wednesday to Friday and will be immediately followed by the fan-based BookCon, which ends Sunday. Profits have long been narrow or nonexistent in publishing and BookExpo/BookCon is one way to limit costs.

For much of its century-plus history, the convention rotated locations, including Los Angeles, Las Vegas and Washington, D.C., in the spirit of fairness and of spotlighting different parts of the country. But since 2008, New York publishers have preferred staying home. The 2016 show in Chicago, once a favorite setting for BookExpo, was notable for a drop in attendance and floor space and a lack of high-profile guests.

 

This year, the names have returned, although floor space continues to decline and side programs have been cut back. Hillary Clinton will speak at an hour-long event billed as “An Evening With Hillary Clinton” and is expected to promote a book of essays coming this September that will touch upon her loss to Donald Trump in 2016. Daughter Chelsea Clinton will be autographing her picture book “She Persisted” and Stephen King will make a joint appearance with son Owen King. Other featured speakers include Dan Brown, Kevin Hart and Sen. Al Franken, promoting his memoir “Al Franken, Giant of the Senate.”

 

Events director Brien McDonald says that the convention will address issues within and beyond book publishing. A First Amendment “resistance” panel organized by PEN America, the literary and human rights organization, will include Scott Turow and Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors. A discussion sponsored by the grassroots organization We Need Diverse Books is called “Real Talk About Real Apologies.”

The panel’s moderator, Laura M. Jimenez, noted that Rick Riordan apologized for inappropriately using the term “spirit animal,” a sacred creature for some American Indians, in his novel “The Sword of Summer.” Little, Brown and Co., publisher of Lemony Snicket’s (aka Daniel Handler’s) picture book “The Bad Mood and the Stick,” promised to remove images of blacks by illustrator Matt Forsythe that were criticized as racist.

 

Jimenez said she wanted the panel to emphasize how “the overwhelming whiteness of publishing makes it extremely difficult, if not impossible for them to see the problematic representations.”

 

“It seems the insular world of children’s literature publishing creates a space where white people are unaware of their own privilege and, historically, have been unwilling to hear us,” said Jimenez, a lecturer at Boston University’s School of Education. “That is changing with Twitter and other social media outlets and blogs. … I think an all-out drive for diversity in publishing is needed.”
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A song labeling Prime Minister Theresa May a liar has shot to the top of music sales charts in Britain, mocking her “strong and stable” motto ahead of the June 8 national election.

“Liar Liar Ge2017” by Captain SKA now tops Amazon’s listing for songs downloaded in Britain, and stands at No. 2 in Apple’s iTunes UK chart, despite receiving no airplay from radio stations.

Hitting out at the austerity policies of Britain’s Conservative Party, the song stitches together samples of May’s speeches with choruses of “She’s a liar liar, no you can’t trust her.”

“We all know politicians like telling lies / Big ones, little ones, porky pies / Saying they’re strong and stable, won’t disguise / We’re still being taken for a ride,” reads one verse.

May is expected to win comfortably on June 8, but her party’s lead in opinion polls has narrowed sharply in the last week, calling into question her decision to call the unscheduled election seeking a strong endorsement of her Brexit strategy.

Captain SKA, a London-based band led by producer Jake Painter, is aiming for the No. 1 spot in Britain’s official Top 40 chart.

“The success of this song shows people are fed up with this government of the rich, for the rich,” the band said in a statement published by Official UK Charts Company, which said “Liar Liar” was on course to be the highest new entrant this week.

A spokesman for May’s Conservative Party said it had no comment on the song.

Political songs are a thorny issue for British broadcasters, which are bound by impartiality regulations, especially around elections.

In April 2013, “Ding-dong the Witch is Dead” from the Wizard of Oz musical rose to No. 2 in the official charts following the death of former Conservative prime minister Margaret Thatcher.

BBC radio refused to play the song in full, but aired five-second clips in news reports instead.
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Tiger Woods, once the top golfer in the world, has been arrested on suspicion of drunk driving in Florida.

Police say Woods was arrested early Monday morning in the city of Jupiter and was released on his own recognizance several hours later.

The greatest player of his generation and one of the best of all time, Woods, 41, has not won a major tournament since 2008. He was the world’s number-one ranked golfer for nearly 700 weeks but is now ranked at number 876.

Woods had been plagued in recent years by multiple back surgeries which have forced him to withdraw from recent tournaments.

Woods has won 14 major golf championships and had been pursuing the record of 18 held by retired U.S. golfer Jack Nicklaus.
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U.S. golfer Tiger Woods said Monday that an “unexpected reaction to prescription medications,” and not alcohol, was what led to his arrest on suspicion of driving under the influence.

Police arrested Woods early Monday morning in the city of Jupiter and released him on his own recognizance several hours later.

In a statement, Woods said he understands the severity of his actions and takes full responsibility.

“I didn’t realize the mix of medications had affected me so strongly,” he said.

Woods added that he fully cooperated with police and thanked them for their professionalism.

The greatest player of his generation and one of the best of all time, Woods, 41, has not won a major tournament since 2008. He was the world’s number-one ranked golfer for nearly 700 weeks but is now ranked at number 876.

Woods had been plagued in recent years by multiple back surgeries which have forced him to withdraw from recent tournaments.

Woods has won 14 major golf championships and had been pursuing the record of 18 held by retired U.S. golfer Jack Nicklaus.
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Takuma Sato on Sunday became the first Japanese driver to win the Indianapolis 500, in a race that featured a horrific crash involving the driver who started from the pole position.

In the 101st running of the iconic U.S. auto race in the midwestern state of Indiana, Sato passed three-time winner Helio Castroneves of Brazil in the closing laps of the 200-lap drive around the oval track, and held on to win by the slim margin of two-tenths of a second.

“Unbelievable feeling!” a jubilant Sato, 40, declared. Five years ago, the Japanese driver had a great chance to win the prestigious event, but on the final lap collided with eventual champion Dario Franchitti of Scotland.

“He drove unbelievable,” said Michael Andretti, head of the team Sato drives for, Andretti Autosport.

“I couldn’t do what he was doing (on the closing laps),” said Castroneves, who barely avoided two crashes.

The most horrific crash involved pole sitter Scott Dixon of New Zealand, the 2008 Indy 500 winner. With just over a quarter of the 500-mile (805 km) race completed, Briton Jay Howard’s car made contact with the outside wall after turn one and slid down into Dixon’s.

Dixon’s car was sent flying and sliding sideways on the inside safety barrier, flames shooting out as the back end of the car was ripped away. Miraculously, Dixon climbed out of the race car and walked away, as did Howard.

“I’m a little beaten up there. It was a bit of a rough ride,” said Dixon.

Sunday’s race featured 35 lead changes among a race record 15 drivers.

Twenty-two-year-old rookie Ed Jones of Britain placed third, and last year’s winner, Alexander Rossi of the United States, ended up seventh.  The only female driver in the annual event, Pippa Mann of Britain, climbed from 28th at the start and overcame a pit stop penalty to finish 17th in the 33-car field.
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The Swedish satire The Square has taken the top honors at the 70th annual Cannes Film Festival.

The art world satire by Swedish writer-director Ruben Ostlund won the Palme d’Or in Cannes, France, Sunday. Dominic West, Elisabeth Moss and Claes Bang star in the movie.  Bang plays the curator of an art museum, who sets up “The Square,” an installation inviting passers-by to acts of altruism. But after he reacts foolishly to the theft of his phone, the father of two finds himself dragged into shameful situations.

Sofia Coppola became only the second woman to win the prize for best director for her film The Beguiled, starring Nicole Kidman and Colin Farrell.  Soviet director Yuliya Ippolitovna Solntseva was the first woman to win the prize in 1961.

Diane Kruger was named best actress for her performance in Fatih Akin’s In the Fade. In the drama, she plays a German woman whose son and Turkish husband are killed in a bomb attack.

Joaquin Phoenix was named best actor for his role in Lynne Ramsay’s thriller You Were Never Really Here, in which he played a tormented war veteran trying to save a teenage girl from a sex trafficking ring.

The French AIDS drama 120 Beats Per Minute won the Grand Prize from the jury. The award recognizes a strong film that missed out on the top prize.

Kidman was awarded a special prize to celebrate the festival’s 70th anniversary.  She wasn’t at the French Rivera ceremony, but sent a video message from Nashville, saying she was “absolutely devastated” to miss the show.

Jury member Will Smith made the best of the situation, pretending to be Kidman. He fake cried and said in halting French, “merci beaucoup, madames et monsieurs.”

Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodovar presided over the competition jury that included Smith, German director Maren Ade, Chinese actress Fan Bingbing, Italian director Paolo Sorrentino, American actress Jessica Chastain and South Korean director Park Chan-wook.
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