Prowler at Cruise’s home turns out to be neighbor

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. (AP) — Police say a security guard at actor Tom Cruise‘s house used a stun gun on a would-be prowler, but the man turned out to be an intoxicated neighbor who may have mistakenly entered the property.

Lt. Lincoln Hoshino says the confrontation occurred at Cruise’s Beverly Hills residence about 9:30 p.m. PDT Sunday when the actor and his family weren’t home.

The guard saw a man “climbing a fence to gain access to the property” and he used the stun gun to detain him for police.

The officer tells City News Service that the man was identified as a 41-year-old neighbor who lives in an adjacent property, and was intoxicated at the time.

The man was taken into custody for trespassing and treated at a hospital for any problems stemming from the stun gun.

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More Immigration, Not Less, Will Drive U.S. Growth

For those in favor of immigration reform, it might have been a relief that the presidential candidates spent more time describing how workers overseas are stealing American jobs than they did accusing foreign workers of stealing jobs right here in the U.S.A. But the status quo on immigration apparently supported by the candidates isn’t nearly good enough.

Beyond the huge importance of immigrants to the U.S. economy today, three forces are making immigration reform more urgent: growing crackdowns on undocumented workers at the state level, which are already hurting farming and are likely to spread to other sectors, including construction; the aging of populations in the U.S. and Europe; and increasing opportunities in the developing world, which are luring home skilled immigrants the U.S. needs most.

High-tech industries probably have the most to gain from action on immigration. Carl Lin of Rutgers University looked at the impact on tech stock prices of a doubling of H-1B visas for skilled foreign workers in the U.S., thanks to the 1998 American Competitiveness and Workforce Improvement Act. High-tech industries absorb around 80 percent of H-1B visa applicants. Lin estimates that in the month after the act passed, companies in those industries enjoyed 15 percent and higher cumulative excess returns—a measure of the impact of news on stock prices.

More broadly, a Kauffman Foundation study by researcher Vivek Wadhwa suggested that in 2006, foreign nationals residing in the U.S. were named as inventors or co-inventors of one-quarter of all patent applications filed from the U.S. Wadhwa’s study of foreign-born entrepreneurs found that one-quarter of science and technology companies founded from 1995 to 2005 had a foreign-born lead technologist or chief economist. These businesses employed 450,000 workers.

But it is not just at the level of entrepreneurs and inventors that immigration is playing an increasingly vital role in sustaining Americans’ quality of life. Patricia Cortes and Jessica Pan of Boston University and the National University of Singapore report (PDF) that foreign-educated nurses now account for 20 percent or more of all those taking the U.S. licensure exam—up from 6 percent in the mid-1980s. The considerable proportion of those nurses who were educated in the Philippines ended up earning 4 percent more than the average nursing wage in 2010, and Cortes and Pan suggest the reason for the premium is “quality differences.” One more reason Americans should get serious about immigration: When they get sick, they probably want to get treated by a Filipino nurse.

At the low-education end of the scale, according to a 2011 Brookings Institution analysis of immigrant skills and employment in the U.S., low-skilled immigrants in the country had a higher level of employment and a lower rate of household poverty than native low-skilled populations, despite the fact that employed immigrants earned $ 5,000 less than employed natives.

As the baby boom generation retires, the need for immigrant labor to sustain rich world lifestyles will climb higher. That problem used to look less serious in the U.S. than it did in Europe because, with a historical fertility rate near 2.1 compared with well below 2.0 in Europe, America’s demographic transition looked to be less dramatic. But since the financial crisis, U.S. fertility has also dropped below two children born per woman. Analysis by Moshe Hazan and Hosny Zoabi at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University finds that an important reason for historically large families in the U.S. was cheap child care, much of it provided by undocumented workers. If low-skilled migration stops, the fertility rate could remain permanently depressed, in which case the long-term “crisis” in entitlement programs, from Medicare to Social Security, that rely on a good ratio of workers to retirees will become an urgent problem.

By 2030, nearly 70 percent of Latinos who came to the U.S. during the 1990s are expected to own a home, according to John Pitkin, Julie Park, and Dowell Myers from the University of Southern California. That’s good news, the researchers point out, because the 78 million-strong baby-boom generation in the U.S. will be looking to downsize as their children leave home. Workers from Latin America were central to building the boomer housing stock, and they’ll be central to ensure it is still worth something in 20 years.

Yet despite the growing importance of migrants to the U.S. economy, Vivek Wadhawa reports in a recent update to his Kaufmann study, called “The Immigrant Exodus,” that an unprecedented number of Indian and Chinese students being educated in the U.S. intend to go home rather than try to stay in the U.S. to work. The proportion of high-tech startups founded by Chinese and Indian immigrants in Silicon Valley dropped from 52 percent in 2005 to 44 percent this year. Even the size of the illegal immigrant population has been declining since 2007, by about 200,000 a year, according to the Pew Hispanic Center.

This isn’t just an American problem. Reverse migration is a fact of life across Europe—indeed, around 30,000 Spaniards moved to Argentina between June 2009 and November 2010. An additional 13,200 went to Chile and Uruguay. Just like the U.S., the U.K. is suffering reverse migration to India, with about 300,000 Indians employed overseas expected to return home by 2015.

Over time, the competition for immigrants is going to become more intense. Some countries, including the U.K., Australia, and Canada, have already taken measures to ease the visa process for foreign students and innovators. Given the first-mover advantage (countries that open their doors to migrants from a particular country subsequently attract more migrants from that country), reform is an urgent priority.

What should the U.S. do? Remove the country caps on H-1B visas, which are exhausted almost every year within days of the annual quota of 85,000 places released. Expand the number of H-1Bs. And fix the EB-5 program, designed to give visas to people who invest $ 500,000 and create at least 10 jobs, so that if the jobs aren’t created in exactly the way originally described in the application procedure, that doesn’t lead to a deportation order. Design rigidities are a big reason why, of the 13,719 immigrant investors who tried to take part in the program in the first decade of this century, only 3,127 ended up with green cards.

The U.S. can also adopt the Schumer-Lee Bill, which provides a residency visa for anyone who spends $ 500,000 on a house. It should grant automatic green cards to graduate students from U.S. universities. Passing the Dream Act and raising the numbers on programs from the visa lottery through H-2 unskilled visa programs would boost low-skilled immigration, which is vital to the U.S. economy as well. And it’s time to give permanent status to the 1 million workers and their families on temporary visas waiting for green cards.

Our refusal to let more migrants into America is delaying the recovery. It’s costing Americans jobs. It’s damaging our long-term prospects as a nation of innovation and entrepreneurship, putting at greater risk the sustainability of such programs as Social Security and Medicare, and concentrating the burden of U.S. debt on a declining number of working-age people. It’s time for America’s politicians to do more than merely duck this issue and actually lead on it.

Kenny is a fellow at the Center for Global Development and the New America Foundation.

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Plant compounds tied to less stomach cancer in women: study

(Reuters) – Getting a moderate amount of plant substances called flavonoids through food may be linked to a lower stomach cancer risk in women – but not in men, according to a European study.

The researchers, writing in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, found that women with the highest intake of flavonoids were half as likely to develop the disease as women who had the smallest intake.

“A flavonoid-rich diet is based on plant-based foods (such as) fruits, vegetables, whole grain cereals, nuts, legumes, and their derived products (tea, chocolate, wine),” lead author Raul Zamora-Ros told Reuters Health by email.

“This kind of diet combined with less consumption of red and processed meat can be a good way to reduce the risk of developing stomach cancer,” added Zamora-Ros, a researcher at the Catalan Institute of Oncology in Spain.

The findings don’t prove that flavonoids alone can ward off the disease, because other factors such as a healthier lifestyle may play a role.

The researchers not that past research has hinted that flavonoids may help protect against cancer, but few studies have focused on stomach cancer – the fourth most common, and the second most deadly, according to Zamora-Ros.

For the study, the researchers turned to ongoing research following almost 500,000 men and women in 10 European countries. All of the participants were between 35 and 70 years old, and had been part of the study for about 11 years.

During that time, there were 683 cases of stomach cancer, of which 288 occurred in women.

The researchers analyzed the participants’ food diaries to see how many flavonoids they are on average, then they checked to see whether or not that amount was linked to the participant’s cancer risk.

Green tea contains a large amount of flavonoids, with more than 12,511 milligrams (mg) per 100 grams (g) of leaves. Pinto beans also contain a lot, with about 769 mg per 100 g of beans.

Women who got more than 580 mg of flavonoids per day had a 51-percent-lower risk of developing stomach cancer than women who consumed no more than 200 mg a day.

“If you look at absolute numbers, this risk reduction probably wouldn’t be as significant as if we were talking about colon cancer,” said Richard peek, director of Gastroenterology, Hepatology and Nutrition at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, who was not involved in the study.

Zamora-Ros said a person’s exact risk depends on several factors, including whether they smoke and drink, how much red and processed meat they eat, and whether they are obese.

He added that the absence of a link between flavonoids and stomach cancer in men was a surprise, and might be due to differences in how much they smoke or drink, or to hormonal differences.

Overall, he added, the study adds more evidence that “healthy lifestyles reduce the risk of chronic diseases.” SOURCE: http://bit.ly/UDC3xx

(Reporting from New York by Andrew Seaman at Reuters Health; editing by Elaine Lies)

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Facebook used to kidnap, traffic Indonesian girls

DEPOK, Indonesia (AP) — When a 14-year-old girl received a Facebook friend request from an older man she didn’t know, she accepted it out of curiosity. It’s a click she will forever regret, leading to a brutal story that has repeated itself as sexual predators find new ways to exploit Indonesia’s growing obsession with social media.

The junior high student was quickly smitten by the man’s smooth online flattery. They exchanged phone numbers, and his attention increased with rapid-fire texts. He convinced her to meet in a mall, and she found him just as charming in person.

They agreed to meet again. After telling her mom she was going to visit a sick girlfriend on her way to church choir practice, she climbed into the man’s minivan near her home in Depok, on the outskirts of Jakarta.

The man, a 24-year-old who called himself Yogi, drove her an hour to the town of Bogor, West Java, she told The Associated Press in an interview.

There, he locked her in a small room inside a house with at least five other girls aged 14 to 17. She was drugged and raped repeatedly — losing her virginity in the first violent session.

After one week of torture, her captor told her she was being sold and shipped to the faraway island of Batam, known for its seedy brothels and child sex tourism that caters to men coming by boat from nearby Singapore.

She sobbed hysterically and begged to go home. She was beaten and told to shut up or die.

____

So far this year, 27 of the 129 children reported missing to Indonesia’s National Commission for Child Protection are believed to have been abducted after meeting their captors on Facebook, said the group’s chairman, Arist Merdeka Sirait. One of those befriended on the social media site has been found dead.

In the month since the Depok girl was found near a bus terminal Sept. 30, there have been at least seven reports of young girls in Indonesia being abducted by people they met on Facebook. Although no solid data exists, police and aid groups that work on trafficking issues say it seems to be a particularly big problem in the Southeast Asian archipelago.

“Maybe Indonesia is kind of a unique country so far. Once the reports start coming in, you will know that maybe it’s not one of the countries, maybe it’s one of a hundred countries,” said Anjan Bose, a program officer who works on child online protection issues at ECPAT International, a nonprofit global network that helps children in 70 countries. “The Internet is such a global medium. It doesn’t differentiate between poor and rich. It doesn’t differentiate between the economy of the country or the culture.”

Websites that track social media say Indonesia has nearly 50 million people signed up for Facebook, making it one of the world’s top users after the U.S. The capital, Jakarta, was recently named the most active Twitter city by Paris-based social media monitoring company Semiocast. In addition, networking groups such as BlackBerry and Yahoo Messenger are wildly popular on mobile phones.

Many young Indonesians, and their parents, are unaware of the dangers of allowing strangers to see their personal information online. Teenagers frequently post photos and personal details such as their home address, phone number, school and hangouts without using any privacy settings — allowing anyone trolling the net to find them and learn everything about them.

“We are racing against time, and the technology frenzy over Facebook is a trend among teenagers here,” Sirait said. “Police should move faster, or many more girls will become victims.”

The 27 Facebook-related abductions reported to the commission this year in Indonesia have already exceed 18 similar cases it received in all of 2011. Overall, the National Task Force Against Human Trafficking said 435 children were trafficked last year, mostly for sexual exploitation.

Many who fight child sex crimes in Indonesia believe the real numbers are much higher. Missing children are often not reported to authorities. Stigma and shame surround sexual abuse in the world’s largest Muslim-majority country, and there’s a widespread belief that police will do nothing to help.

An ECPAT International report estimates that each year, 40,000 to 70,000 children are involved in trafficking, pornography or prostitution in Indonesia, a nation of 240 million where many families remain impoverished.

The U.S. State Department has also warned that more Indonesian girls are being recruited using social media networks. In a report last year, it said traffickers have “resorted to outright kidnapping of girls and young women for sex trafficking within the country and abroad.”

Online child sexual abuse and exploitation are common in much of Asia. In the Philippines, kids are being forced to strip or perform sex acts on live webcams — often by their parents, who are using them as a source of income. Western men typically pay to use the sites.

“In the Philippines, this is the tip of the iceberg. It’s not only Facebook and social media, but it’s also through text messages … especially young, vulnerable people are being targeted,” said Leonarda Kling, regional representative for Terre des Hommes Netherlands, a nonprofit working on trafficking issues. “It’s all about promises. Better jobs or maybe even a nice telephone or whatever. Young people now, you see all the glamour and glitter around you and they want to have the latest BlackBerry, the latest fashion, and it’s also a way to get these things.”

Facebook says its investigators regularly review content on the site and work with authorities, including Interpol, to combat illegal activity. It also has employees around the world tasked with cracking down on people who attempt to use the site for human trafficking .

“We take human trafficking very seriously and, while this behavior is not common on Facebook, a number of measures are in place to counter this activity,” spokesman Andrew Noyes said in an email.

He declined to give any details on Facebook’s involvement in trafficking cases reported in Indonesia or elsewhere .

____

The Depok girl, wearing a mask to hide her face as she was interviewed, said she is still shocked that the man she knew for nearly a month turned on her.

“He wanted to buy new clothes for me, and help with school payments. He was different … that’s all,” she said. “I have a lot of contacts through Facebook, and I’ve also exchanged phone numbers. But everything has always gone fine. We were just friends.”

She said that after being kidnapped, she was given sleeping pills and was “mostly unconscious” for her ordeal. She said she could not escape because a man and another girl stood guard over her.

The girl said the man did not have the money for a plane ticket to Batam, and also became aware that her parents and others were relentlessly searching for her. He ended up dumping her at a bus station, where she found help.

“I am angry and cannot accept what he did to me. … I was raped and beaten!” said the lanky girl with shoulder-length black hair. The AP generally does not publish the names of sexual abuse victims.

The girl’s case made headlines this month when she was expelled after she tried to return to school. Officials at the school reportedly claimed she had tarnished its image. She has since been reinstated, but she no longer wishes to attend due to the stigma she faces.

Education Minister Mohammad Nuh also came under fire after making remarks that not all girls who report such crimes are victims: “They do it for fun, and then the girl alleges that it’s rape,” he said. His response to the criticism was that it’s difficult to prove whether sexual assault allegations are “real rapes.”

The publicity surrounding the story encouraged the parents of five other missing girls to come forward this month, saying their daughters also were victimized by people they met on Facebook. Two more girls were freed from their captors in October and are now seeking counseling.

A man who posed as a photographer on Facebook was recently arrested and accused of kidnapping and raping three teenage girls. Authorities say he lured them into meeting him with him by promising to make them models, and then locked them in a house. Police found dozens of photos of naked girls on his camera and laptop.

Another case involved a 15-year-old girl from Bogor. She was recently rescued by police after being kidnapped by her Facebook “friend” and held at a restaurant, waiting for someone to move her to another town where she would be forced into prostitution.

In some incidents, the victims themselves ended up recruiting other young girls after being promised money or luxuries such as mobile phones or new clothes.

Police are trying to get a step ahead of the criminals. Detective Lt. Ruth Yeni Qomariah from the Children and Women’s Protection unit in Surabaya said she posed as a teenager online and busted three men who used Facebook to kidnap and rape underage girls. She’s searching for a fourth suspect.

“It has been getting worse as trafficking rings become more sophisticated and underage children are more easily targeted,” she said.

The man who abducted the Depok girl has not been found, and it’s unclear what happened to the five other girls held at the house where she was raped.

“I saw they were offered by my kidnapper to many guys,” she said. “I don’t know what happened. I don’t want to remember it.”

____

Associated Press writer Niniek Karmini contributed to this report from Jakarta, Indonesia.

On the Net: https://www.facebook.com/help/179468058793941/?q=trafficking&sid=0o4BpvxlcINe4Y6VV

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Follow Mason on Twitter: twitter.com/MargieMasonAP

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More than ever, Barca more than club for Catalans

BARCELONA, Spain (AP) — Nearly 20 minutes into the latest clash between Spain’s most popular football teams, Barcelona‘s 98,000-seat Camp Nou stadium erupted into a deafening roar. Tens of thousands of Catalans in the city at the heart of their separatist movement chanted in unison: “Independence!”

More than ever, FC Barcelona, known affectionately as Barca, is living up to its motto of being “more than a club” for this wealthy northeastern region where Spain’s economic crisis is fueling separatist sentiment.

Lifelong Barca club member Enric Pujol was at Camp Nou for this month’s game against Real Madrid, the team of Spain’s capital. Wearing his burgundy-and-blue Barca jersey, Pujol also held one of the hundreds of pro-independence “estelada” flags, featuring a white star in a blue triangle, which bristled throughout the stands.

“It was a beautiful emotion to see Camp Nou like that,” said Pujol. “Barca is more than a club because of the values it transmits. It is linked to Catalan culture. In this sense it is a club and a social institution that acts like our flag.”

Barca has been seen as a bastion of Catalan identity dating back to the three decades of dictatorship when Catalans could not openly speak, teach or publish in their native Catalan language. Barcelona writer Manuel Vazquez Montalban famously called the football team “Catalonia‘s unarmed symbolic army.”

Barca-Real Madrid matches have a nickname: “el clasico” — the classic — and they are one of the world’s most-watched sporting events, seen by 400 million people in 30 countries. But local passions run high. In Spain, where football has deep political and cultural connotations, many see the clashes of Spain’s most successful teams as a proxy battle between wealthy Catalonia and the central government in Madrid. If Barca is a symbol of Catalan nationalism, Real Madrid is an emblem of a unified Spain.

“Look, the truth is that ever since the Civil War there has always been tension in Spain,” said Pujol. “Having traveled in Spain, they always look at us as Catalans.”

Ahead of kickoff before any “clasico,” Camp Nou traditionally greets Real Madrid players with a huge mosaic of Barcelona’s burgundy-and-blue made up of colored cards. This year, for the first time, they held up cards forming the red-and-yellow striped Catalan “senyera” flag — an explicit nationalist message. (Barca says it can neither confirm nor deny reports that its away uniform next season will be modeled on the senyera.)

Then came the crowd’s collective shout for independence at 1714 hours — in reference to the year 1714 when Barcelona fell to the troops of Philip V in the War of Spanish Succession. It was organized by a pro-independence group through social media.

Barca fan David Fort sees his team as a vehicle to show the world that Catalonia has its own language and culture, which is distinct from what he called the “bulls and flamenco” associated with Spain.

“We have this love for Barca because we have the chance to be represented around the world,” said Fort, a 38-year-old architect from the southern Catalan town of Tarragona. “When we travel and they ask me if I am Spanish, I say not exactly, but when I mention Barca they say ‘Ah! The Catalan team’, and of course since they are champions you feel proud.”

Barca, like every institution in Spain, was marked by the Spanish Civil War of the late 1930s and resulting right-wing dictatorship that ended after Franco’s death in 1975.

Franco’s soldiers killed Barca’s club president in 1936, and the club was forced to change its name from a Catalan to a Spanish version. And while Real Madrid was identified with the regime, Barca, for many, came to represent Catalan anti-fascist resistance.

“Under Franco, people could not shout ‘Long Live Catalonia!,’ but they could shout ‘Long Live Barca!’ (¡Visca Barca!)” in Catalan, said Ernest Folch, a newspaper columnist who writes about Barca for El Periodico. The chant became a kind of code for expressing Catalan pride.

“Barca is an anomaly. There is no other club with its particular history,” said Folch. “It survived the Franco dictatorship, and has always been a focal point for protest and ferment where sport has mixed with politics.”

And politics is a very hot topic these days in Catalonia.

Voters will go to the polls on Nov. 25 in regional elections sure to be judged as a litmus test of the strength of the pro-independence movement that brought 1.5 million people to the streets of Barcelona on Sept. 11 in the largest rally since the 1970s.

Catalonia is heavily in debt and has in fact asked Spain for a euros 5.9 billion ($ 75 billion) bailout. Even so, regional lawmakers voted on Sept. 27 to hold a referendum on self-determination at a date still to be determined. And although it is still unclear that a “Yes” vote would win, Spain’s central government has called such a referendum unconstitutional and will surely try to stop it from taking place.

That all puts Catalonia, and therefore Barca, in the midst of Spain’s struggles to deal with consequences of back-to-back recessions, 25 percent unemployment, and high public debt that has drawn it into the euro crisis along with already bailed-out Greece, Ireland and Portugal.

Barca’s appeal, of course, transcends its regional identity. The team is beloved throughout the world, and a poll last year found that it had displaced Real Madrid as Spain’s most popular team. Barca has 546 fan clubs in Catalonia, and 841 in the rest of Spain. Some of these fans— even in Catalonia — disagree with what they perceive as the political turn the club has taken in recent years.

“It’s surreal to talk to talk about these ideas related to independence,” said fan Jamie Easton, 27, a Spaniard born in Barcelona to a British father and a mother of Catalan descent. “Barca is a Catalan and Spanish club because Barcelona is part of Spain, and fans can feel however they want.”

The upswing in separatist sentiment in Catalonia has forced both the club and its players— many of whom form the backbone of Spain’s world champion national side — to try a difficult balancing act between supporting their most fervent pro-independence fans without alienating the millions of others who are not.

“We are Barca. We represent Catalonia and we will support whatever Catalans want,” said Barca and Spain midfielder Xavi Hernandez. But he added: “We try to isolate ourselves from everything outside the game. We know the political issue is there, and the people have the right to express themselves however they wish, but we are here to play football and make sure people have fun.”

The glaring exception to the moderate tone is former coach Pep Guardiola, a hugely popular figure in Catalonia, who appeared in a video during the Sept. 11 march saying: “Here you have my vote for independence.”

Two weeks after the politically charged “clasico,” Barca president Sandro Rosell made his first official visit to southern Spain to cool tensions at a meeting of Barca fan clubs.

“I don’t know what information you are receiving here, but I preferred to come here and say on behalf of the club that Barca will never get mixed up in political issues,” Rosell told the 1,000 Spanish fans, promising that Barca would never display a mosaic of the separatist “estelada” flag at Camp Nou.

“This doesn’t mean that this isn’t a Catalan club and that of course we will defend our roots and origins, but one thing shouldn’t be mixed with the other. One thing is politics and the other is identity. Barca unites us all.”

___

AP Writer Jorge Sainz contributed to this report from Madrid.

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1960s music hero Riley: “The pendulum will swing”

ARLES, France (Reuters) – American composer Terry Riley, who penned the 1960s piece “In C” that earned him his reputation as “the father of minimalism” in music, thinks the pendulum will swing back to that magical time.

“I don’t really look on it with nostalgia, I just wonder how we didn’t hold onto it longer,” Riley, who has remained in the forefront of innovative music ever since, told Reuters.

“It was a very brief flame that spluttered out.”

The 77-year-old California native who taught at the progressive Mills College in Oakland, Ca. during the 1970s, said he had been dismayed by the number of students who abandoned art and music courses and drifted into business.

“To me that was like a sign of the times that materialism was becoming more important than spirituality and I think we’ve been stuck there, that’s where the pendulum has kind of stayed for awhile,” he said, talking after a performance in the ancient French city of Arles.

“Of course, it swings back and forth, we all know that, and we’re very hopeful that there will be another age of enlightenment,” he added.

Riley, who braids his grey beard and has a beaming smile, was here to create music for a visual art installation by fellow Californian Doug Aitken, incorporating images of salt mines, bull-herding and other features of the Camargue countryside surrounding Arles for a project sponsored by the Luma Foundation. (http://www.doug-aitken-arles.com/alteredearth.html)

Riley’s flowing piece in a darkened hall featured spacey, occasionally Hindi-inspired music on piano and souped-up keyboards accompanied by his guitarist son Gyan and violinist Tracy Silverman.

It was an instant hit with the local residents and invited guests who showed up to see Aitken’s images and hear Riley.

“I thought it was great, it’s not every day you see things like that around here,” said Olivier Cablat, 34, a local photographer. “The music was great, I love experimental things.”

STILL GOING STRONG

Riley is still going strong as he nears the end of his seventh decade, much of that time spent as one of the leaders of a revolutionary movement in American music that sprang up in the second half of the 20th century.

Riley, John Cage, Philip Glass and Steve Reich, to mention just four of the biggest names, stole a march on the European composers who had embraced atonalism, abstruse theories and found almost surefire ways to clear out concert halls.

“We all knew each other,” said Riley, who got into music composition and performance without the conservatory training that his son, whose first name comes from Sanskrit, has had.

“I think what I brought into it was a kind of kinetic energy which was similar to the kinetic energies arising in rock ‘n roll.”

“In C”, released as an LP in 1964, was the classical music piece heard round the world. Its mesmerizing, repetitious and trance-like cadences knocked the stuffing out of European art music and put music on the path to the streamlined, pulsing sounds popularized further by Glass in his opera “Einstein on the Beach” and Reich’s ritualistic “Music for 18 Musicians”.

Riley’s formal training came after he got interested in Indian music in the 1970s and, under the guidance of the Pakistani-born north Indian raga vocalist Pandit Pran Nath, who died in 1996, he spent about a quarter century soaking up and learning the Indian musical tradition and culture.

OLDER CULTURE

“India has a much older culture than we have in the West, it goes back 2,000 years before ours and there was an enormous storehouse of musical knowledge there, about melody and rhythm and also how to connect with each other, because music is transmitted,” Riley said, sipping a coffee in the sunny garden of a stone house adjacent to a spectacular Roman necropolis, that features in a painting by onetime Arles resident Vincent van Gogh.

Riley says he has been coming back to Western music from the vantage point of being steeped in Indian music, with results that have continued to win him followers and praising reviews for pieces ranging from chamber music to concertos to solo piano pieces and, more recently, organ music.

Thanks in part to a close partnership with the ultra-hip Kronos Quartet, a recording of Riley’s rhythmic and engaging five-quartet cycle “Salome Dances for Peace” was chosen as the best classical album of the year by USA Today and was nominated for the record industry’s prestigious Grammy in 1989.

In recent years, Riley, who is of Irish extraction on his father’s side and Italian on his mother’s, has been exploring his Irish roots, especially in work performed by the Irish contemporary music Crash Ensemble.

One of his pieces played by Crash, “Loops for Ancient-Giant-Nude-Hairy Warriors Racing Down the Slopes of Battle”, is on YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikQeZZcxm64) and, Riley maintained, is based on the historic tradition of Irish tribal warriors racing into battle nude and screaming.

“They would freak out the enemy as they raced towards them naked…it was psychological warfare,” Riley said.

His maternal side may have to wait a bit longer, though, to see its embodiment in grand operatic form.

“I am very unfond of bel canto and recitative,” he said.

(Editing by Paul Casciato)

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Thousands join new Spain protest

27 October 2012 Last updated at 19:05 ET

Thousands of people flocked to Spain’s parliament building, chanting anti-austerity slogans

Thousands of people have joined fresh protests in the Spanish capital, Madrid, angered by budget cuts and calling on the government to quit.

Demonstrators held a minute’s silence with their backs to parliament, then shouted “resign” with fists clenched.

Parliament was guarded by hundreds of police officers.

PM Mariano Rajoy’s government plans spending cuts of about 40bn (£32bn) euros for next year as it tries to prevent the need for an EU bailout.

The Spanish government has found itself in financial difficulty since the 2008 global financial crisis caused a big crash in the country’s over-heated property market.

New figures this week showed about a quarter of working-age people in Spain were now unemployed.

‘Taking everything’

Saturday’s protesters came from all over the country and were met by vans of riot police, says the BBC’s Pascale Harter in Spain.

Just hours earlier, she says, 300 police had staged their own protest in the capital, setting off fire crackers and blowing police whistles over the same issue – budget cuts.

One banner read: “The police can’t take it any more.”

Austerity protests also took place in Barcelona, Valencia and other cities.

One protester in Madrid, Sabine Alberdi, told Agence France-Presse: “I came to demonstrate because they’re taking everything away, our health, our education, our houses.”

Mr Rajoy’s programme will require spending cuts of 150bn euros between 2012 and 2014.

Having spent almost a year in office, Mr Rajoy has tried to head off a full-blown EU bailout by introducing tax increases, labour reforms and public sector cuts.

However, output has now contracted for five quarters in a row.

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S.Africa’s Zuma drops suit over rape cartoon: paper

JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) – South African President Jacob Zuma intends to drop a four-year-old lawsuit claiming nearly $ 600,000 in damages from a cartoonist who depicted him poised to rape “Lady Justice“, a newspaper said on Sunday.

The Sunday Times, named as a defendant in the case, said it had reached an agreement with Zuma‘s lawyers for the suit and all claims to be dropped, including the demand for monetary damages and an apology.

Officials for the South African presidency were not immediately available for comment.

The civil case had been due to start on Monday.

Zuma, facing re-election for leader of the ruling African National Congress (ANC) at the end of the year, has been criticised for pushing laws seen as trying to muzzle the media.

If the case went forward, it could have provided ammunition for foes in the party who say he wants to silence his critics through bullying.

Zuma had been seeking 4 million rand for defamation from Avusa media and an additional 1 million rand from a former Sunday Times editor for publishing the 2008 cartoon.

Ray Hartley, the current editor, said in the paper: “A lot of time and taxpayer money has been wasted on an ill-considered effort to curtail free expression.”

The cartoon from award-winning Jonathan Shapiro, better known by his pen name “Zapiro”, shows Zuma’s supporters holding down Lady Justice while Zuma stands over the woman with his trousers unzipped.

It was published when Zuma was facing corruption charges that could have blocked his path to the presidency.

A court in 2006 acquitted Zuma of raping an HIV-positive family friend in a case that garnered widespread public interest in a country with one of the world’s highest recorded rates of sexual violence.

Zuma’s ANC took a Johannesburg gallery to court and led massive street rallies earlier this year to protest a painting called “The Spear” that portrayed Zuma with his penis exposed.

The ANC, which has ruled since apartheid ended in 1994, called the image racist and intended to tarnish Zuma’s dignity.

Zuma’s critics say the image was reflective of his colourful personal life. A Zulu polygamist with four wives and more than 20 children, he has also been caught having extra-marital affairs.

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Play ‘Grand Theft Auto: Vice City’ on Your Phone Very Soon [VIDEO]

Nostalgic for the days of getting home from school or work, firing up the PlayStation 2 and popping Grand Theft Auto: Vice City in the tray? Then get your smartphone ready: Rockstar Games on Friday officially announced the game will be ported to Android and iOS later this fall.

[More from Mashable: Hunky Breast Cancer Screening App Gets a Hot Update [VIDEO]]

Rockstar made the mobile versions, which will have some all-new bonus features and top-notch graphics, to celebrate the game’s 10-year release. That’s right: Vice City, the sixth Grand Theft Auto title, came out way back in 2002.

“Grand Theft Auto: Vice City gave players the freedom of a massive open-world in one of the most iconic and vibrant settings ever realized in a game,” said Sam Houser, founder of Rockstar Games, in a statement. “It was a defining moment in the series and we’re delighted to be celebrating its 10th anniversary this year with a stunning, updated version for phones and tablets.”

[More from Mashable: App Turns Smartphone Into a Sex Toy for Couples]

As part of the anniversary celebration, Grand Theft Auto fans will find new promotional gear for sale at the Rockstar Games Warehouse and through online sweepstakes.

There’s no solid release date for the mobile game yet: Rockstar’s only saying “later this fall.” The company’s silent on any Windows 8 version, too.

Can’t wait for your fix of old-school vehicular carnage? Check out Sega’s mobile port of Dreamcast favorite Crazy Taxi while you’re waiting for Vice City to arrive.

Below, one of the original trailers for the PlayStation 2 version of Vice City. Check it out, then share your favorite Grand Theft Auto memories in the comments!

This story originally published on Mashable here.

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Lithuania opens 2nd round of national election

VILNIUS, Lithuania (AP) — Voting stations have opened in the second round of Lithuania’s parliamentary elections, with the results likely to determine whether the small East European nation continues tough austerity measures in an effort to join the euro zone.

Nearly half of Parliament’s 141 seats are at stake in single-mandate district voting, which takes place two weeks after the party-list round that failed to produce a clear favorite.

Two center-left opposition parties took the most seats and have pledged to form a new coalition government, but the ruling conservative party, which came in third, still has a chance to emerge victorious as it has candidates in over half the 67 districts where voting will be held Sunday.

Opposition parties have vowed to increase social spending and postpone tentative plans to adopt the euro in 2014.

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