Mel Gibson, wife finalize divorce in Los Angeles (AP)

LOS ANGELES ? Mel Gibson's three-decade marriage is officially over.

A judge finalized the actor-director's divorce on Friday from his wife Robyn, who was married to Gibson during his acting heyday and his more recent public downfall.

The judgment entered by Superior Court Judge Mark Juhas keeps virtually all details of the pair's split confidential. Neither Gibson nor his ex-wife, whose name is being restored to Robyn Moore, attended Friday's proceedings.

It does not indicate an official date for the former couple's separation. Robyn Moore did not list a date in her April 2009 divorce filing, although Gibson indicated they had been living apart since 2006.

The former couple have seven children together, but only their 12-year-old son is a minor and subject to a custody agreement.

The Gibsons' divorce has been more dramatically more low-key than Gibson's custody battle with Russian musician Oksana Grigorieva, who the "Braveheart" star agreed in August to pay $750,000 to settle a bitter dispute and split custody of their young daughter.

Recordings that sounded distinctly like the Oscar winning director engaged in a racist and sexist tirade were leaked during the couple's dispute. Grigorieva accused Gibson of domestic violence and he pleaded no contest, although admitted no fault, to a misdemeanor battery count earlier in March.

Robyn Moore came to her estranged husband's defense, filing a brief declaration in the Grigorieva case stating that Gibson had never physically abused her or their children.

Attorneys handling the divorce have worked for months to reach a settlement in the case and records show Robyn Moore signed the final judgment last week. Gibson signed it Wednesday, records show.

___

Follow Anthony McCartney at http://twitter.com/mccartneyAP

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/movies/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20111223/ap_en_mo/us_people_mel_gibson

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GOP: Texas' Rick Perry fails to make Virginia primary ballot; falls short of 10,000 signatures (Star Tribune)

International Man of Mystery: Kim Jong Il's Russian Roots and Travels (Time.com)

During the handful of visits that Kim Jong Il made to Russia throughout his life, he never once stopped by his birthplace, the dirt-road village of Vyatskoye in the Russian Far East. Frozen for much of the year and reduced now to a population of mostly geriatric farmers, the village lies a short train ride from Russia's border with North Korea, the hermit state Kim ruled for 17 years until his death this Saturday, Dec. 17. According to Soviet records, Kim was born there as Yury Irsenovich Kim, the son of a rank and file officer of the Red Army, Kim Il-Sung, whom Stalin later nominated to lead North Korea.

"When we were alone together, of course we talked about the place of his birth," says Konstantin Pulikovsky, the Kremlin's former envoy to the Far East, who would escort Kim during the visits he made to Russia on his armored train. "I told him a bit about it. I told him that his father's house is preserved and that many of the villagers remember him. He listened carefully and never denied a thing. But he asked me never to publicize it, and he never asked to go there," Pulikovsky tells TIME. (See photos: "Mourning the Dear Leader.")

Publicizing Kim's beginnings, especially with a visit from the North Korean tyrant himself, would risk shattering the lie that the Kim family has been telling its subjects for decades. As the official legend has it, Kim was born atop a sacred mountain in Japanese-occupied North Korea, under a double rainbow that rose to greet the infant Kim and a new star that began shining in the sky. "This was all hogwash, of course," says Pulikovsky. "It was meant for internal consumption, and we respected that."

The real story of Kim's birth, however, seemed to be at the root of the personal and political connection he always felt toward Russia, one of the few allies that North Korea kept through its decades of isolation. Kim's last foreign visit, which he made on his armored train this August, just a few months before his death, was to Siberia, where he met with Russian President Dmitri Medvedev. It was seen as Kim's latest effort to balance against China's influence by nuzzling up to Moscow, and at the time, Kim was also busy grooming his youngest son, Kim Jong Un, to succeed him. Many Russian officials expected Kim to bring his heir along to help ensure that the bond between the two countries would not be broken after Kim's death.

But he did not, and the future of that relationship, like so much of North Korea's future, is now up in the air. Pulikovsky, who formed a closer friendship with Kim than any other Russian official in modern times ("We are both Aquarius, so we would always call to say happy birthday and try to meet up."), only met Kim's youngest son once, during a holiday he took with his family to Pyongyang a few years ago. The older Kim introduced him as his heir, Pulikovsky recalls, "But the boy didn't say a word." (See "The Koreas: To Reunify or Not?")

Kim Jong Un's personality, and even his exact birth date, remains a mystery, while Korea watchers have harped on his reported love of American basketball to suggest that he might take a softer line than his father in relations with the West. But this is all guesswork so far, and experts in Moscow are convinced that the younger Kim will stick to Pyongyang's traditional older brothers, Russia and China. "North Korea simply has nowhere else to turn," says Alexander Lukin, the head of the East Asia department at the Russian Foreign Ministry's institute of diplomacy. "Economically it is totally dependent on China, because it doesn't really produce anything of its own," Lukin says. "And in the last years of his life, Kim Jong-Il did his best to cozy up to Russia more and more, mainly to show that his dependence on the Chinese is not so one-sided."

That is the double-game that North Korea will likely continue to play, because it is practically the only one the Kim family knows. Russia, for its part, seems ready to keep playing along. When news of Kim's death broke on Monday, the Kremlin sent its condolences to his heir, and on Tuesday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov visited the North Korean embassy in Moscow to pay his respects. (Tellingly, Russia extended no such gesture to the Czech Republic after that country's former president, Vaclav Havel, died on Sunday. In the late 1980s, Havel led Czechoslovakia's peaceful revolution against Soviet rule. His death did not warrant so much as a word on the Kremlin website.)

But it is far from clear what Russia has to gain from its doting relations with North Korea, which still owes Russia $11 billion in debt from the Soviet era. "In terms of trade, I know they import our celluloid visors to put on their military caps, which tells you something about their industrial relevance," says Georgy Kunadze, Russia's former ambassador to South Korea. "But the fact that we have a paranoid regime on our borders should not make us temper our assessment of North Korea," adds Kunadze, who led a Kremlin mission in 1993 to re-establish relations with Pyongyang after the fall of the Soviet Union. "We need to remember that North Korea has never made good on its agreements with Russia, has never consulted us before jumping into one of its adventures," including its testing of nuclear weapons in 2006 and 2009, or its decision to shell a South Korean island last year. (See TIME's Person of the Year: The Protester.)

So for Russia, North Korea remains almost as much of a nuisance as it is for the West, and in some ways an even more dangerous one, because a nuclear accident in North Korea would inevitably spill radiation onto Russian territory. Yet Moscow shows no sign of toughening its stance. It has long supported United Nations sanctions against North Korea's nuclear program, but has also gone out of its way to make the regime feel loved. In August, when Medvedev flew to Siberia to meet with Kim Jong Il, he again pledged to build a gas pipeline and a railroad to North Korea. The state news agency KCNA described their meeting as "overflowing with friendship." This allowed Pyongyang to send a familiar message to both China and the West: if you cross us, we still have a powerful ally in Moscow. As Pulikovsky recalls, this has long been Kim's favorite diplomatic trick.

Soon after U.S. President George W. Bush branded North Korea a member of the "axis of evil" in 2002, Kim travelled to Russia to meet with then President Vladimir Putin, and he asked Pulikovsky to do him a peculiar favor. "He told me, 'Konstantin, when the official meeting [with Putin] is over, I want to sit down with him in private for ten minutes, with no one in the room, not even interpreters. I need to tell him something." That evening, the private meeting was arranged, and as Pulikovsky escorted Kim back toward the border afterward, his curiosity got to him. "I asked him, 'Comrade Kim, if it's no secret, why did you need these ten minutes?'" Pulikovsky says. "And he smiled at me and said, 'What's the difference? The point is for Bush to wonder what we were talking about.' For me that was classic Kim. He always found some way to get snagged in your thoughts, to make himself into a mystery."

See rare pictures from inside North Korea.

See TIME's top 10 everything of 2011.

View this article on Time.com

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Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/nkorea/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/time/20111223/wl_time/08599210291700

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Hungary tech firm immortalizes Steve Jobs in bronze (Reuters)

BUDAPEST (Reuters) ? A Hungarian software company unveiled what it said was the world's first bronze statue of Apple Inc co-founder Steve Jobs Wednesday, calling him one of the greatest personalities of the modern age.

Jobs died on October 5 of pancreatic cancer at the age of 56.

The bronze work by sculptor Erno Toth stands in the Budapest campus of architectural software maker Graphisoft.

"He was one of the greatest (personalities) in our era, that's what we wanted to express with this sculpture here," Graphisoft Chairman Gabor Bojar told Reuters.

Bojar said Jobs gave cash and computers to Graphisoft, helping it to become a global leader in architecture software from humble roots as a tiny firm in the 1980s in then-communist Hungary.

"In some ways, Apple was a religion," Bojar said at the unveiling ceremony, comparing the experts from Cupertino-based Apple who helped educate Graphisoft's engineers to evangelists.

Steve Jobs represented a technological revolution which can be compared only to the discovery of writing, Bojar said.

"We have felt his spirit every day and now it is embodied," he said. "We hope that we can deserve with our entrepreneurial culture in Hungary what this sculpture expresses as a message."

(Reporting by Sandor Peto, editing by Paul Casciato)

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/oddlyenough/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20111221/od_nm/us_hungary_jobs

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Bill Conlin of Philadelphia Daily News accused of child molestation

Bill Conlin was accused of molesting three girls and a boy in the 1970s. Conlin is a?veteran sportswriter and columnist for the Philadelphia Daily News.

A veteran sportswriter and columnist for the Philadelphia Daily News was accused in a newspaper report Tuesday of molesting three girls and a boy in the 1970s, including his niece, who is now a prosecutor.

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Authorities said no criminal charges would be pursued against?Bill?Conlin?because the allegations of abuse happened too long ago.

Conlin, a Hall of Fame baseball writer and author, retired just ahead of the story's publication online by The Philadelphia Inquirer, his former editor said.?Conlin's?lawyer said his client would not comment about the story?but would fight the claims.

"Mr.?Conlin?is obviously floored by these allegations which supposedly happened 40 years ago. He's engaged me to do everything possible to bring the facts forward to vindicate his name," said attorney George Bochetto.

The newspaper reported that the four accusers claim?Conlin?groped and fondled them in the 1970s, when they were ages 7 to 12.

Kelley Blanchet, a niece of?Conlin's?who is now a prosecutor in Atlantic City, N.J., and others told the newspaper they were speaking out in part because of the child sex abuse allegations being faced by Jerry Sandusky, a former Penn State University assistant football coach. Like in the Sandusky case, people aware of the allegations involving?Conlin?years ago did not go to police, the newspaper said.

"This is a tragedy," Blanchet said. "People have kept his secret. It's not just the victims, it's the victims' families. There were so many people who knew about this and did nothing."

Prosecutors in Gloucester County, N.J., took videotaped statements from the four accusers last year but said no charges would be pursued because assaults that occurred before 1996 fall under the statute of limitations. The alleged victims said they also came forward to highlight the shortcomings of those time limits.

Conlin?had worked at the newspaper for more than four decades, starting in 1965 and becoming the beat writer for the Phillies the next year. He held that job for 21 years and became a columnist in 1987. He also was a commentator on the ESPN program "The Sports Reporters" and wrote two baseball-related books, the "Rutledge Book of Baseball" and "Batting Cleanup,?Bill?Conlin."

He received the 2011 J.G. Taylor Spink Award presented at the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y., and is honored in the hall's "Scribes and Mikemen" exhibit. The Baseball Writers' Association of America said the allegations would not affect his award.

Daily News editor Larry Platt, speaking at a news conference, said he accepted?Conlin's?offer to retire by phone on Tuesday afternoon. Platt would only characterize the conversation as "painful."

Platt said he didn't know about the allegations until Tuesday. He described the emotions in the newsroom as "overwhelmingly a sense of shock, a sense of outrage, a sense of sadness."

The Daily News and Inquirer are owned by the same company, Philadelphia Media Network, and operate out of the same building downtown but compete on stories. Inquirer editor Stan Wischnowski said at the news conference the story had been in the works for about a month.

In one recent column titled "Tough Guys Are Talking About Sandusky,"?Conlin?questioned people who say they would have intervened had they witnessed child sex abuse.

"Everybody says he will do the right thing, get involved, put his own ass on the line before or after the fact. But the moment itself has a cruel way of suspending our fearless intentions," he wrote.

Source: http://rss.csmonitor.com/~r/feeds/csm/~3/Fho8DhMSAK4/Bill-Conlin-of-Philadelphia-Daily-News-accused-of-child-molestation

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Drugs activate dormant gene

Chemotherapy agent may offer hope for treating Angelman syndrome

Web edition : 5:15 pm

By kick-starting a gene that is naturally inactivated, chemotherapy drugs could help reverse a genetic brain disorder that is sometimes mistaken for autism or cerebral palsy. The unexpected finding may also spark a new avenue of research on a type of gene regulation known as imprinting.

The genetic disorder, Angelman syndrome, occurs in about one in 15,000 live births. It is caused when the copy of a gene called UBE3A inherited from the mother goes missing or is damaged by a mutation. That?s a problem because the copy of the gene inherited from the father is already turned off in brain cells, leaving no way to make UBE3A protein.

Genes such as UBE3A that turn off one parent?s copy are called imprinted genes. Until now, researchers knew of no way short of gene therapy to override the imprinting and restore gene activity.

Now, researchers from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have discovered that a type of chemotherapy drug called topoisomerase inhibitors can turn on the father?s inactive copy of the gene in brain cells of mice with a version of Angelman syndrome. The team reports the achievement online December 21 in Nature.

The prospect that a drug could correct the underlying defect responsible for Angelman syndrome is exciting, says Stormy Chamberlain, a geneticist at the University of Connecticut Health Center in Farmington. ?There?s every reason to have hope that it will help our Angelman syndrome kids,? she says.

Angelman syndrome is linked to severe developmental delays that keep people from attaining vocabularies of more than a few words. People with the disorder are apparently always cheerful and may laugh and smile inappropriately and have uncoordinated movements, as well as other physical and behavioral characteristics.

Charles Williams, a University of Florida pediatrician and geneticist who chairs the Angelman Syndrome Foundation?s scientific advisory committee, is also enthusiastic about the finding. ?It?s a seismic shift. It is a really important breakthrough,? he says. ?Having said that, a lot of us in the Angelman syndrome community are really worried that our expectations will not be met.?

Researchers don?t yet know whether the drugs can restore UBE3A production in human brain cells, or if turning the gene back on will reverse abnormalities in Angelman syndrome mice. More work with mice will be needed to determine whether the gene must be activated at some particular time during development, or if restoring gene activity can reverse the disorder at any time. Also, the drugs might inactivate other genes that should remain on in order to maintain health, producing unwanted side effects.

Clinical trials should not be attempted in people with Angelman syndrome, Williams says. Speaking on behalf of the foundation, he says, ?We are very keen at this point that clinical trials not be prematurely started.?

For the new study, University of North Carolina neuroscientist Benjamin Philpot and his colleagues used brain cells from mice genetically engineered so their cells make a fluorescent protein whenever the father?s copy of UBE3A is active. The researchers tested more than 2,000 chemicals to see whether any could turn on the dad?s copy of the gene.

Most imprinted genes are tagged with chemicals either on the DNA or on associated proteins, so the researchers were surprised to find that drugs that affect those chemical tags didn?t restore the gene?s activity. Instead, drugs that inhibit the activity of DNA-unwinding proteins called topoisomerases did the trick.

DNA-unwinding proteins have never been implicated in imprinting before, so the discovery is likely to generate lots of new research on how the proteins are involved in the process, says Yong-hui Jiang, a clinical geneticist and neurobiologist at the Duke University School of Medicine. ?Whether it?s working on resetting imprinting is an open question,? he says.


Found in: Genes & Cells

Source: http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/337083/title/Drugs_activate_dormant_gene

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Egypt's 'Occupy Cabinet' Sit-In Has Turned into a Scary Riot (The Atlantic Wire)

Egypt's three-week long sit in against military rule, known as "Occupy Cabinet" is taking a terrifying turn as the ruling military junta has resorted to throwing rocks and using violence against this set of "Occupiers." Having seen the many different (including jokey) permutations of the Occupy Movement stateside, it's all a bit stark and shocking seeing those same symbols (the picture on the right is from graffiti on the "ministerial cabinet street..."), the same viral touchstones and that moniker translated (and co-opted) by Arab spring protesters who are now one part of a violent fight that transpired on Egyptian streets today. Today's violence comes as voting closed in the latest round of parliamentary elections. Egyptian news site Ahram online reports that the fight erupted early Friday morning and is still unfolding into what sounds like a full on riot .?"Men in plainclothes continues [sic] to throw rocks and glass from the Cabinet building on protesters down below in Qasr El-Aini Street", they report adding that:

Protesters have set a police kiosk by the Cabinet building on fire to disrupt the security forces attacking them from the roof. The dense plumes of smoke forced the assailants to retreat briefly. However, now that smoke has begun to fade, they are back in plain view throwing stones and other projectiles at the protesters in Qasr El-Aini Street.

And not unlike the viral videos that accompanied the Occupy Movement in the U.S. of pepper spray cops and injured protesters, viral evidence of the violence have begun to pop up under the injuries (warning: graphic), and people praying despite the falling bricks are being passed around, as well as video (below) of ?"Army Throwing Rocks At Protesters in Qasr Al Ainy". ?

Related: Estimated Bill for the Arab Spring: $55 Billion

Related: Obama to the British Parliament: 'We Will Not Relent'

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Related: 5,000 Soldiers Will Protect Mubarak on His Way to Court

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Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/africa/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/atlantic/20111216/wl_atlantic/egyptsoccupycabinetsithasturnedscaryriot46313

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