The world cannot get enough of Michael!

After just two weeks in theaters, This Is It, the film documenting Michael Jackson’s final tour rehearsals, has taken in $200 million internationally!!

Wowsa!

It takes the cake for highest-grossing concert movie of all time!!

Although the film brought in just $61 million in North America, it has made over $140 million overseas. Japan leads the packs with $27.2 million, followed by the UK with $14.3 million.

Just goes to show how much the King of Pop will be missed and, unfortunately, Joe Jackson is probably plotting his next move!

The house was built with maximum regard for the environment and by reciprocation gives us a unique opportunity to live close to nature. Being your own (have a go) architect is a lot of fun and allows you to create and enjoy something which is part of yourself and the land rather than, at worst, a mass produced box designed for maximum profit and convenience of the construction industry. Building from natural materials does away with producers profits and the cocktail of carcinogenic poisons that fill most modern buildings.

Some key points of the design and construction:

• Dug into hillside for low visual impact and shelter
• Stone and mud from diggings used for retaining walls, foundations etc.
• Frame of oak thinnings (spare wood) from surrounding woodland
• Reciprocal roof rafters are structurally and aesthaetically fantastic and very easy to do
• Straw bales in floor, walls and roof for super-insulation and easy building
• Plastic sheet and mud/turf roof for low impact and ease
• Lime plaster on walls is breathable and low energy to manufacture (compared to cement)
• Reclaimed (scrap) wood for floors and fittings
• Anything you could possibly want is in a rubbish pile somewhere (windows, burner, plumbing, wiring…)
• Woodburner for heating – renewable and locally plentiful
• Flue goes through big stone/plaster lump to retain and slowly release heat
• Fridge is cooled by air coming underground through foundations
• Skylight in roof lets in natural feeling light
• Solar panels for lighting, music and computing
• Water by gravity from nearby spring
• Compost toilet
• Roof water collects in pond for garden etc.

Main tools used: chainsaw, hammer and 1 inch chisel, little else really. Oh and by the way I am not a builder or carpenter, my experience is only having a go at one similar house 2yrs before and a bit of mucking around inbetween. This kind of building is accessible to anyone. My main relevant skills were being able bodied, having self belief and perseverence and a mate or two to give a lift now and again.

This building is one part of a low-impact or permaculture approach to life. This sort of life is about living in harmony with both the natural world and ourselves, doing things simply and using appropriate levels of technology. These sort of low cost, natural buildings have a place not only in their own sustainability, but also in their potential to provide affordable housing which allows people access to land and the opportunity to lead more simple, sustainable lives. For example this house was made to house our family whilst we worked in the woodland surrounding the house doing ecological woodland management and setting up a forest garden, things that would have been impossible had we had to pay a regular rent or mortgage. To read more about why we did it and why this is an important option to meet the challenges of climate change and peak oil, click here.

Would you like to learn more about this sort of building and gain practical experience? Why not join us on another exciting building project. There will be opportunities for everyone of all abilities and areas of interest. Click here for more details.

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The U.S. president, in his first Asia trip since taking office in January, told a packed house at Tokyo’s Suntory Hall that all Americans should know that what happens in Asia “has a direct effect on our lives at home.”

“This is where we engage in much of our commerce and buy many of our goods,” he said. “And this is where we can export more of our own products and create jobs back home in the process.

“This is a place where the risk of a nuclear arms race threatens the security of the wider world, and where extremists who defile a great religion plan attacks on both our continents. And there can be no solution to our energy security and our climate challenge without the rising powers and developing nations of the Asia Pacific.”

Obama met with new Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama Friday after his arrival in Tokyo as well as with the Japanese emperor and empress.

Obama touched on nearly every part of the Asia Pacific region during his speech, and talked about a boyhood visit to Japan with his mother, his birth in Hawaii, a childhood spent partly in Indonesia and the United States’ position as a Pacific nation.

“There must be no doubt: as America’s first Pacific president, I promise you that this Pacific nation will strengthen and sustain our leadership in this vitally important part of the world,” he said.

He stressed that the United States was not interested in containing the emerging economic growth in China.

“The rise of a strong, prosperous China can be a source of strength for the community of nations,” he said. “And so, in Beijing and beyond, we will work to deepen our strategic and economic dialogue.”

Obama also called on Myanmar to make more definitive moves toward democracy, including releasing all political prisoners; urged North Korea to return to the Six-Party Talks so that the reclusive nation could be reintegrated into the world stage and pledged America’s support for eliminating nuclear weapons and efforts to reduce the global effects of climate change.

His trip is to include stops in Singapore, China and South Korea, during which Obama will hold formal talks with Asian leaders as a group and individually.

The president plans to meet with Chinese President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao, Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, South Korean President Lee Myung-bak, Russia President Dmitry Medvedev and Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, and will take part in the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit.

APEC’s 21 member nations represent more than half of the world’s economic output. The forum sees its goal as “facilitating economic growth, cooperation, trade and investment in the Asia-Pacific region.”

During a busy day in Singapore, Obama also will become the first U.S. president to take part in a summit of the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) economic alliance.

cnn.com for more

It’s close to 6 p.m. She’s had a long day.

She collapses on her mat, rolls on her back and closes her eyes. And then sends one finger digging up her nose.

What? C’mon, she’s only 5.

This is yoga for kids. Once an oddity reserved for only the crunchiest communities, downward dog for the grade-school set is now being taught in studios from Minnetonka, Minnesota, to Moscow, Russia. And educators, including Chicago’s Namaste School, which serves mostly poor kids who speak a language other than English, are turning to yoga to connect with a generation that many say has been dismissed as deficit this or hyperactive that.

At Decatur Yoga and Pilates studio, just outside Atlanta, Georgia, Dylan Laakmann, sits quietly next to his mother. The lanky 12-year-old whose fashionably shorn hair hangs in his face, describes himself as a “downer” before he started taking yoga two years ago.

“I wasn’t really that happy a kid, I guess, and my grades, they weren’t that good,” he says, his taut mouth easing as he relaxes in conversation. “I wasn’t that joyful.”

Dylan goes to an Atlanta school known for its highly serious curriculum that offers German to first graders and lessons in “circle games” and “beeswax modeling.” His mother, Hanlie Laakmann, wanted her son to get involved in something and thought his sensitive nature might take to yoga. She’s been especially glad about the move lately since she and her husband told Dylan that they are divorcing.

“Like, it’s hard, with the divorce,” he says, sitting on a yoga mat, replying to a stranger asking him to open up in front of a television camera. He tunes it all out for a moment, crosses his legs and closes his eyes. He begins to breathe deeply and then slowly lifts himself into a headstand. When he comes down, he’s ready to answer more questions.

Dylan’s stoicism is broken for a moment by a dozen miniature yogis who’ve been unleashed in the studio. Kids like Gigi, some as young as 3, can take seven-week long sessions with names such as Charlie and the Chakra Factory and the Wizard of Ohm.
Watching a class is like watching puppies. It’s adorable. They bark in Downward Dog and hiss on their bellies in Snake pose. They imagine aloud what color their gum would be while repeatedly breathing deeply for “Bubble Gum Breath.” They act out “Go To Your Room” by bending over, grabbing their ankles and stomping backward, squatting down and mimicking slamming a door.

Except for a few tears and a brief tug-of-war over a mat, it all seems nothing more than cute until this stunning moment: Many of these first and second-graders remain completely still and quiet, in a meditative pose, for nearly five minutes.

“It’s just incredible,” Al-Yasha Williams said, shaking her head in disbelief when her 6-year-old daughter Sole Williams-Brewer walks out of class much more dialed back than when she bounded in. “My daughter has a lot of energy and this has channeled it.”

Marsha Wenig saw the calming effect yoga breathing gave her young students more 20 years ago when she taught in a California school. “I thought, yoga calms me so why wouldn’t kids get the same thing out of it? Yoga works for people willing to open their minds and you don’t get anymore open-minded than a child,” she said.

“Parents heard about it and wanted to know what I was doing. I just invited them over, shoved the furniture aside and showed them some poses they could do with their kids.”

Though radical at that time, teaching yoga to kids still isn’t entirely free of controversy. A Baptist minister complained a few years ago that a public school in Aspen was teaching a form of Hinduism.

But the objections are rare and don’t appear to be hurting business. Wenig’s company YogaKids has sold millions of how-to flashcards, books, DVDs and board games — think Twister with a Yoga twist — and hosts training seminars ($849 for four days) to certify instructors in its 200-pose practice.

At least 150 U.S. schools follow YogaKids’ extensive lesson plan. For example, “Polar Bear” — sitting on the heels, knees apart, chest to the floor — can lead to discussions about where polar bears live and why they hibernate. The balancing pose “Flamingo” asks children to calculate how the bird’s wingspan in feet and meters.

There are several other entrepreneurial kids yoga endeavors — the Decatur studio teaches a style called Grounded Kids that offers bandanas much like karate belts for students who master increasingly difficult poses. But though styles differ, they stay faithful to one tenet: There is no baby talk in kids yoga. If a pose is meant to stimulate the thymus — like Tarzan’s Thymus Tap, a light tapping on an organ in the chest cavity that regulates immunity — then that anatomy is explained.

Lynda Meeder appreciated that directness. She quit her job as a guidance counselor in the Boston, Massachusetts, area to teach yoga to children and teens in a studio and the classroom.

“The older a kid gets, 13, 14, 15, we all know how hard it is for them to understand their bodies. It’s especially difficult when you have a child that’s been told they have ADHD, they’ve been told they cannot because that’s the way they are,” she said. “I’ve seen yoga give kids their control back. They feel like they’re taking it and they can steer again.”

In Columbia, Missouri, mom Sarah Wells Kohl heard about yoga for kids and enrolled her 9-year-old, Dakota. She had been struggling for months, trying every alternative arts program she could find, to address her son’s exceptionally high energy.

“He couldn’t settle himself, he was just very high-strung and bored with everything,” she said. “But, wow, yoga opened something in him. Pranayama breathing (slow, steady deep yogic breaths) put him in his space. When things get too tight, rough and crazy, do his own little Eagle pose.

“I once found him in his bedroom chanting,” she said. “It almost seems like we put him on a yoga mat instead of putting him on medication.”

Attorney General Eric Holder announced the decision Friday to bring Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four others detained at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to trial at a lower Manhattan courthouse hard by the site of the World Trade Center, whose twin towers they will be charged with destroying.

The case is likely to force the civilian federal court to confront a host of difficult issues, including rough treatment of detainees, sensitive intelligence gathering and the potential spectacle of defiant terrorists disrupting proceedings. U.S. civilian courts prohibit evidence obtained through coercion, and a number of detainees were questioned using harsh methods some call torture.

Holder insisted both the court system and the untainted evidence against the five men are strong enough to deliver a guilty verdict and the penalty he expects to seek: a death sentence for the deaths of nearly 3,000 people who were killed when four hijacked jetliners slammed into the towers, the Pentagon, and a field in western Pennsylvania.

“After eight years of delay, those allegedly responsible for the attacks of September the 11th will finally face justice. They will be brought to New York — to New York,” Holder repeated for emphasis — “to answer for their alleged crimes in a courthouse just blocks away from where the twin towers once stood.”

Holder said he decided to bring Mohammed and the other four before a civilian court rather than a military commission because of the nature of the undisclosed evidence against them, because the 9/11 victims were mostly civilians and because the attacks took place on U.S. soil. Institutionally, the Justice Department, where Holder has spent most of his career, has long wanted to reassert the ability of federal courts to handle terrorism cases.

Lawyers for the accused will almost certainly try to have charges thrown out based on the rough treatment of the detainees at the hands of U.S. interrogators, including the repeated waterboarding, or simulated drowning, of Mohammed.

The question has been raised as to whether the government can make its case without using coerced confessions.

That may not matter, said Pat Rowan, a former Justice Department official.

“When you consider everything that’s come out in the proceedings at Gitmo, either from the mouth of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and others or from their written statements submitted to the court, it seems clear that they won’t need to use any coerced confessions in order to demonstrate their guilt,” said Rowan.

Held at Guantanamo since September 2006, Mohammed said in military proceedings there that he wanted to plead guilty and be executed to achieve what he views as martyrdom. In a letter from him released by the war crimes court, he referred to the attacks as a “noble victory” and urged U.S. authorities to “pass your sentence on me and give me no respite.”

Holder insisted the case is on firm legal footing, but he acknowledged the political ground may be more shaky when it comes to bringing feared al-Qaida terrorists to U.S. soil.

“To the extent that there are political consequences, I’ll just have to take my lumps,” he said. But any political consequences will reach beyond Holder to his boss, Obama.

Bringing such notorious suspects to U.S. soil to face trial is a key step in Obama’s plan to close the detention center in Cuba. Obama initially planned to close the prison by next Jan. 22, but the administration is no longer expected to meet that deadline.

Obama said he is “absolutely convinced that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed will be subject to the most exacting demands of justice. The American people will insist on it and my administration will insist on it.”

After the announcement, political criticism and praise for the decision divided mostly along party lines.

Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky said bringing the terrorism suspects into the U.S. “is a step backwards for the security of our country and puts Americans unnecessarily at risk.”

Former President George W, Bush’s last attorney general, Michael Mukasey, a former federal judge in New York, also objected that federal courts were not well suited to this task. “The plan seems to be to abandon the view that we are at war,” Mukasey told a conference of conservative lawyers. He said trial in open court “creates a cornucopia of intelligence for those still at large and a circus for those being tried,” and he advocated military tribunals instead.

But Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., said the federal courts are capable of trying high-profile terrorism cases.

“By trying them in our federal courts, we demonstrate to the world that the most powerful nation on earth also trusts its judicial system — a system respected around the world,” Leahy said.

Family members of Sept. 11 victims were also divided.

“We have a president who doesn’t know we’re at war,” said Debra Burlingame, whose brother, Charles Burlingame, had been the pilot of the hijacked plane that crashed into the Pentagon. She said she was sickened by “the prospect of these barbarians being turned into victims by their attorneys.”

Valerie Lucznikowska, whose nephew died at the World Trade Center, said she wouldn’t care if the suspects sounded off in court — as long as the victims’ families got to see them put on trial.

“What are words? It was a horrible thing to have 3,000 people killed,” she said.

The five suspects are headed to New York together because they are all accused of conspiring in the 2001 attacks, and are likely to face thousands of counts of murder and conspiracy.

The government also announced five other Guantanamo detainees, including the alleged mastermind of the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, would be sent to military commissions to face charges.

Holder said no decision had been made on where commission-bound detainees would go. A Navy brig in South Carolina has been high on the list of sites under consideration.

The actual transfer of the detainees from Guantanamo to New York isn’t expected to happen for many more weeks because formal charges have not been filed against most of them.

Other trial locations that Holder considered, including Virginia, Washington, D.C., and a different courthouse in New York City, could end up conducting trials of other Guantanamo detainees later.

The administration has already sent one detainee, Ahmed Ghailani, to New York to face trial.

The four other detainees headed to military commissions in the United States are: Omar Khadr, Ahmed Mohammed al Darbi, Ibrahim Ahmed Mahmoud al Qosi and Noor Uthman Muhammed. Their cases are not specifically connected, but two of them are accused of plotting against or attacking U.S. military personnel.

Barry Coburn, a lawyer for Khadr, called the decision about his client “devastating and shocking.”

Khadr “was 15 years old when he was detained in Afghanistan as a child soldier and has been locked away in Guantanamo ever since,” he said.

___

Associated Press Writers Pete Yost, Mark Sherman and Jesse J. Holland in Washington, David B. Caruso in New York and Ben Fox and Mike Melia in San Juan contributed to this story.

Obama said in a major address in Tokyo on Saturday that Pyongyang must learn that its failure to meet international obligations on its nuclear arsenal “will lead only to less security — not more.”

The president said a brighter future for isolated North Korea lay only in its return to six-party talks with the United States, Japan, South Korea, China and Russia.

http://cosmos.bcst.yahoo.com/up/player/popup/?rn=3906861&cl=16626060&ch=4226714&src=news

Watch the Sports Minute with Ashley Russell every weekday morning on Yahoo! Sports

Ashley Greene is on the cover of Maxim magazine again for their December 2009 issue. She was also in the December 2008 issue. I guess that’s a little bit of a coincidence, or something, but I really bring it up because there are only two pictures of her new photoshoot out right now, and I needed to pad this post out a little bit. Good thing those pictures of Ashley from last year’s issue are also really hot.