At least in Hollywood, which saw the apocalyptic thriller 2012 rake in $65 million, according to studio estimates from box office tracking firm Nielsen EDI. The debut was $5 million more than many analysts projected and finished an apocalyptic triumvirate for the master of disaster Roland Emmerich, who also directed Independence Day and The Day After Tomorrow. Though Emmerich has Air Jordan Shoes ever been a critical darling –2012 earned recommendations from just 38% of critics, says RottenTomatoes.com – his latest doomsday flick marked the second highest debut of his career. Tomorrow opened to $69 million and did $187 million. Sony led a canny marketing campaign to whip up interest among young viewers, urging them to research the real Mayan calendar that ends in 2012, which some have taken to mean the world will end. A Christmas Carol enjoyed a strong hold from its debut, dropping just 26% and conjuring up $22.3 million, bringing its 10-day total to $63.3 million. George Clooney's The Men Who Stare at Goats was third with $6.2 million, bringing its total to $23.4 million. The expected Oscar contender Precious cracked the top 10 for the first time, doing $6.1 million on just 174 screens. The film will continue to roll out slowly nationwide. The concert film Michael Jackson's This Is Michael Jordan Shoes rounded out the top 5 with $5.1 million. It has done $67.2 million in three weeks. The only other major newcomer, the Phillip Seymour Hoffman comedy Pirate Radio, did $2.9 million in limited release, meeting its modest expectations. George Clooney's animated film Fantastic Mr. Fox did $260,000 in four theaters for a healthy per-screen average of $65,000. It expands nationwide Nov. 25. Ticket sales were up 21% from last weekend but down 7% from the same weekend last year.
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One product stood out this week amongst the standard flurry of Google product releases. It wasn't a Gmail Labs experiment or a new parameter for search. It was a fairly unassuming new product called Dashboard, which aggregates users' personal information from more than 20 Google services into a Wholesale Watches ngle, password-protected page. Google unveiled the new service with a blog post titled, "Transparency, choice, and control – now complete with a Dashboard." The choice and control parts of the equation are pretty clear – users can update their account information directly from the new Dashboard, which is far handier than being forced to visit each page individually. However, the fact that Google opted to lead its Dashboard blog post with the word "transparency" speaks to a fundamental concern about the company's current position in the world. Some time ago, the company adopted the admirable motto "Don't Be Evil," a slogan pundits have often suggested is a dig at Microsoft. As Google quickly discovered, however, the adherence to such an abstract notion is at times inversely proportional to the size of a company. As a company grows, opportunities for evil become more numerous, and the ability to police them decreases. Things get even trickier when a company's stated objective is to gather and catalog all the world's information. Over the past few years, concerns about the "anti-evil" corporation have grown at nearly the same rate as the Ugg Ultra Short Le ompany itself, from its cooperation with the Chinese government to the cameras it perches atop its Street View vans. The sheer breadth of Google's knowledge base is staggering, something that becomes far more apparent on a personal level when one investigates their own Dashboard. But if Google has always been so devoted to transparency, why are we only seeing this feature rolled out now? The answer is that, ultimately, even the most noble corporation is only as transparent as they have to be. The good news, however, is that in this post-Web 2.0 world, the bare minimum is ever increasing. As personal information becomes more publicly available, the same goes for corporate information. The informational megaphone that is Twitter and the blogosphere makes protests all the more powerful. Remember Amazonfail, the Twitter protest against a seemingly homophobic move on the part of the online retailer? What about the online kerfuffle surrounding Facebook's new Terms of Service? When information moves at the speed of the Web, corporations must operate at a similar pace. This means more than just creating a corporate Twitter account, it means offering information in anticipation of complaints, which is where the concept of transparency comes into play. Companies that make information publicly available have less to hide, and it therefore becomes more difficult to bandy about words like "evil." Sunlight, as the saying goes, is the best disinfectant. While the advent of Dashboard can be seen as a response to past criticism and an attempt to avoid future accusations, the availability of information like our Web history does have the effect of bringing to light even more questions — such as what exactly does Google plan to do with our information? It's a UGG Australia Tall Classic Women's Boots beva 5818 eminder that, as we hand more and more of our own personal information over to a company like Google, we need to keep asking questions. Fortunately, the Internet is history's most powerful suggestion box, and if corporations want to operate in that world, they have to listen.
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A Hammond justice of the peace said he would not sign a marriage license for an interracial couple because he is concerned about the children of such marriages. The couple involved in the Ugg Boots incident said they plan to consult the U.S. Justice Department about the matter, which occurred last week. Justice of the Peace Keith Bardwell, who is white, told The Advocate on Thursday that whenever a couple calls him to do a marriage, he always asks if they are of the same race. If they aren’t, he said, he directs them to another justice of the peace. He said that in this case, he spoke later to another justice of the peace who did perform the ceremony for the couple. The American Civil Liberties Union of Louisiana is preparing a letter to the Louisiana Supreme Court, which oversees the Louisiana Justices of the Peace and Constables Association, asking that group to investigate Bardwell and see if he Panodra Jewelry can be removed from office, said attorney Katie Schwartzman of the ACLU. “It is really astonishing and disappointing to see this come up in 2009,” she said. “The Supreme Court ruled as far back as 1963 that the government cannot tell people who they can and cannot marry. “He knew he was breaking the law, but continued to do it,” Schwartzman said. The Advocate could not reach the couple for comment. Beth Humphrey, 30, and Terence McKay, 32, both of Hammond, told the Daily Star of Hammond that they would consult the U.S. Justice Department about filing a discrimination complaint regarding the Oct. 6 incident. Bardwell said late Thursday that he had not received any complaint from state or federal Wholesale Watches officials. “A justice of the peace does not have to marry anybody,” Bardwell said.
French Culture Minister Frederic Mitterrand defended the film director detained over old charges of sex with a Jewelry minor. Mitterrand is now under fire for his account of sex with male Thai prostitutes. Reporting from Paris - France's minister of culture, whose forceful defense of film director Roman Polanski brought scrutiny to his own life, denied in a television interview Thursday that he had slept with underage boys and said his 2005 book about his experiences should not be taken as a literal memoir. Tilting his head to the side and occasionally glancing at his folded hands on the table, Frederic Mitterrand Pandora Jewelry sought to explain passages he wrote in "The Bad Life" about having sex with young male prostitutes in Thailand. "Yes, I had [sexual] relations with young men, but one cannot confuse pedophilia with homosexuality," the 62-year-old politician said, insisting that he had only had sex with adults. "It is neither a novel nor my memoirs. I preferred to leave things vague," he said. "Nothing is true, nothing is false," he added. "It was a way to tell a life story that resembles mine a lot." The book, which was widely perceived as autobiographical, raised some questions when it was published but did Panodra Beads not cause a scandal and sold well. It resurfaced after Mitterrand made a much criticized and emotional appeal in support of Polanski after the Polish American film director's arrest Sept. 26. Polanski was jailed in Switzerland on a warrant stemming from his guilty plea three decades ago to charges of having illegal sex with a 13-year-old girl in Los Angeles. He fled the U.S. in 1978 before sentencing and had lived in Paris ever since. Polanski remains in custody while he awaits a decision on a U.S. extradition request. Mitterrand, a nephew of late French President Francois Mitterrand, has been under fire since his defense of the Oscar-winning director in which he lashed out at what he called the "scary" side of American justice. The far-right National Front party has called for his resignation, and party member Marine Le Pen read excerpts of his book on French television Monday. Socialist Party spokesman Benoit Hamon said he was "violently shocked" by the book and that "the question is to know whether Mr. Frederic Mitterrand should resign or not." French President Nicolas Sarkozy has not spoken out on Polanski's arrest, nor has he explicitly come to the Wholesale Watches defense of Mitterrand, who told French reporters that he was the victim of "gutter" attacks from opposing politicians. The minister's book struck an especially sensitive nerve throughout France. The nation is still reacting to vocal support for Polanski among the political and artistic communities, which many viewed as a sign of a legal double standard. "These guys all think they are above the law," said one man in his 40s, who requested anonymity while discussing the sensitive topic as he watched Mitterrand's interview Thursday night. "He wrote this book, then defends Polanski. . . . There is such a gap between politicians and regular people." He added that he "didn't believe for one second" that the minister's book was more fiction than fact. In one of the excerpts from the book published in the French dailies Le Monde and Le Parisien, the narrator describes torn feelings of repulsion and attraction concerning nights he spends at a Thai brothel, where he writes that garçons [boys or young men] wearing tight T-shirts sold their bodies. "Money and sex -- I am at the heart of my system," the narrator says, adding that it "after all works, because I know Ugg Boots that they won't refuse me." During his appearance on French television network TF1, Mitterrand insisted: "I never hurt anyone." And he noted: "The Polanski affair has become the Mitterrand affair." Mens Watches
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