Mao Zedong, Founder of Communist China, to Get Animated Film Treatment

A silkscreen from Andy Warhol's famous Mao series

Mao Zedong's face already adorns every bank note, and a portrait of "the Great Helmsman" continues to grace the gates of the Forbidden City in the heart of the country's capital, Beijing. Now China's founding father is set to feature in an animated film about his teenage years.

The cartoon is being made to help propaganda efforts to boost Mao's image. China has an ambiguous attitude towards Mao. While he is revered for leading the revolution that brought about China's foundation in 1949, he is also resented because of the disastrous agricultural program known as the Great Leap Forward, which caused a famine that killed tens of millions of rural Chinese, and the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), which is often referred to as “the 10-year catastrophe.” In today's China, the Great Helmsman is commonly described as 70 percent good, 30 percent bad.

PHOTOS: Inside Hollywood's Surprise Trip to 'China's Oscars'

The idea behind the cartoon When Mao Zedong Was Young is to show Mao in a positive light. It is being made by the movie and TV production subsidiary of propaganda flagship Qiushi Journal and two filmmaking companies based in Hunan, the South China Morning Post reported.

The movie poster shows Mao as a skinny teenager, sporting a braid, a typical hairdo during the Qing dynasty (1644-1911), looking cheerful and assured.

Lu Huasheng, art director at Qiushi's film and TV centre, told the newspaper that the cartoon was meant to reach out to young people who know little about revolutionary heroes.

"Children like to watch cartoons. The old and stereotypical style [of presenting leaders] can't engage them anymore. This is the 21st century. We can't be stuck in the old ways. We need to be innovative," said Mr Lu.

STORY: China Censors Andy Warhol's Mao Zedong Works in Major Exhibition

The plan is to the have the 30 million yuan ($4.9 million) project ready for Dec. 26, the 120th anniversary of Mao's birth in 1893.

The movie is a departure, as normally it is not permitted to show Chinese leaders in cartoons. Mao has been sympathetically depicted in several high-profile movies recently.

Lu said Qiushi was also planning a series of animations about the teenage years of other revolutionary heroes. The next one will be Mao's right-hand man, late premier Zhou Enlai, and toons dedicated to former president Liu Shaoqi and Marshal Zhu De are also in the works.

"We can't use the old and dull methods to cultivate [young people's] patriotism," Lu added.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/thr/international/~3/i9rKZcp5-NY/story01.htm
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Four Things To Know About Cory Booker's Election

Mayor Cory Booker talks to supporters during a Senate election night victory party Wednesday in Newark, N.J.

Julio Cortez/AP

Cory Booker's victory Wednesday in New Jersey's special Senate election didn't surprise anyone.

From the moment he captured the Democratic nomination in the reliably blue state, the Newark mayor was the heavy favorite to defeat Republican Steve Lonegan.

With his media savvy and national celebrity, the senator-elect is already a recognizable figure outside his home state.

But here are a few things you might not have known about Booker's election:

An Historic Election

When Booker is officially sworn in, he will become the ninth African-American in history to serve in the U.S. Senate, and just the fourth to have been popularly elected.

The last African-American elected to the Senate? Barack Obama, out of Illinois in 2004. The other two were Massachusetts Republican Edward Brooke in 1966 and Illinois Democrat Carol Moseley Braun in 1992.

The only current African-American senator is Tim Scott, the South Carolina Republican appointed by Gov. Nikki Haley last December after Jim DeMint resigned to head the Heritage Foundation.

New Jersey, A Republican-Free Zone

Counting Booker's victory, Democrats have now won 14 straight U.S. Senate races in New Jersey — the party's third-longest winning streak in the nation.

The last Republican Senate victory in the Garden State came in 1972, when Sen. Clifford Case won his third term (other Republicans were appointed to the Senate during this period, but not elected).

Hawaii and West Virginia are the only states with a longer GOP drought. A Republican Senate candidate hasn't won in Hawaii since 1970 or in West Virginia since 1956.

Booker vs. Obama

Booker won fairly comfortably Wednesday night, earning about 55 percent of the vote to Lonegan's 44 percent. Still, the score was closer than many expected — and Booker even lagged behind President Obama's state performance in 2012 when he won 58 percent to Mitt Romney's 41 percent.

Of course, it isn't a perfect comparison. Off-year or special Senate races garner far less attention than presidential contests, meaning dramatically lower turnout. And on top that, the election occurred on a Wednesday, rather than the traditional Tuesday.

The Never-Ending Campaign

Booker supporters shouldn't even bother to take down their yard signs: He's back on the ballot again in about a year.

While senators typically have a six-year respite between elections, Booker only gets a short breather — he won a special election to serve out the remainder of the late Sen. Frank Lautenberg's term, which ends in January 2015.

That means Booker will be back on the campaign trail in no time, and that Democrats can expect more fundraising pleas from him in the coming weeks.

Source: http://www.npr.org/blogs/itsallpolitics/2013/10/17/236335402/four-things-to-know-about-cory-bookers-election?ft=1&f=1014
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Shoeless Mexico Indian kids win at basketball

MEXICO CITY (AP) — A team of Trique Indian boys swept through a youth basketball tournament despite their generally short stature and the fact that most play barefoot, earning acclaim in Mexico and abroad.

The team from the southern Mexico state of Oaxaca won all six of its games to become this year's champions at the International Festival of Mini-Basketball held recently in Argentina.

Other teams in the tournament dubbed the boys the "the barefoot mice from Mexico" because they are smaller than the other competitors, said Ernesto Merino, one of the team's coaches and a Trique Indian. He said they compensate for their short stature with "strength, speed and resistance."

Children are given tennis shoes when they join the team, but many don't wear the sneakers because they are accustomed to going barefoot, Merino said.

Merino said they grow up in large, poor families who struggle to find the money to buy clothes and shoes.

"For them it's normal to not have shoes, to walk barefoot," he said.

The team's performance won it a minute of applause Wednesday on the floor of Mexico's Chamber of Deputies, as well as accolades from Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto and basketball experts.

"The victories of the Trique Indian team from Oaxaca's Academy of Indigenous Basketball make Mexicans proud," Pena Nieto said in a tweet.

Horacio Muratore, president of the International Basketball Federation-Americas, which organizes the annual tournament, said the boys were the best players.

"These boys deserved (the championship) more than anyone," Muratore wrote on the organization's website.

The boys' achievement has come at a particularly sensitive time for Mexico, which is agonizing over the poor performance of its once well-regarded national soccer team. The Tri, as it's known, has barely kept its hopes alive for qualifying for next year's World Cup in Brazil.

Merino said the boys who played at the tournament held in Cordoba, Argentina, are part of a basketball program designed to help poor children in Oaxaca, which is one of Mexico's poorest and most marginalized areas. The Oaxaca state government gives them tennis shoes, uniforms and a monthly $46 stipend.

"We see a basketball as an opportunity to grow in life," Merino said.

The program was started three years ago and it currently has 40 children enrolled, including five girls.

To enter the program, children must have good grades in school, speak their native tongue and help with chores at home.

"We want them to be prepared in life," Merino said.

Associated PressSource: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/cae69a7523db45408eeb2b3a98c0c9c5/Article_2013-10-16-Mexico-Indian%20Basketball/id-69ea0b637cb4449780c3f7e3fd8b6d1a
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Adventures In Commenting: How We're Improving The Community On NPR.org

iStockphoto.com

iStockphoto.com

Here at NPR, we want to encourage discussion around all of our coverage - from the latest news on U.S. troops in Afghanistan to a review of the new Tom Hanks film. We know that discussion takes place organically on many different platforms (like Facebook and Twitter and Reddit). However, we also believe that it is important to host that discussion on our site as well.

So when we opened up NPR.org to comments in 2008, we set a high bar for ourselves and for you: "We hope the conversations will be smart and generous of spirit. We hope the adventure is exciting, fun, helpful and informative."

Since then we've kept our eyes on that bar, always looking for opportunities to make your experience better, and today, we're taking the next step in that process. We're excited to roll out the latest changes to our community that will make things faster, clearer, more relevant and more consistent for you. We're enlisting a digital system to review and categorize comments on NPR.org that will increase our quality control over each of our moderators and give us a more comprehensive view of the conversation on NPR.org.

Fostering a "Smart and Generous" Community Conversation

With this community that we help build on our site, we want to encourage great conversation - a place for high-quality, relevant discussion with the NPR community, our staff and even our critics on NPR.org.

• More comments will be published


• Comments will go up faster (many in less than 60 seconds!)


• Better consistency in moderation

Fulfilling our responsibility to create that healthy place for discussion includes agreeing on discussion rules with everyone who leaves a comment and also finding the best ways to moderate the conversation fairly. Over time, we've highlighted great comments floating among a hostile conversation, acknowledged the problem of trolls on our site (and asked people not to feed them). We've partnered with outside community managers to help moderate comments, widened our moderation to more individuals on the site, surveyed you for feedback and moved commenting systems.

We know that this moderation is important to keeping the conversation on track and on focus, and we know that we can have great conversation about even a hot button issue with good moderation.

At the same time, we've acknowledged (ironically, in our comments section) that human moderators are human, and therefore may make different judgments than other humans, even when faced with the same objective rules, and may make mistakes too. We also know that quality control among our moderation team is a really high priority.

“ We know that we can have a great conversation about even a hot button issue with good moderation.

What's New: Computer Assisted Moderation

So we are happy to announce that we have invited in our new robot overlords. We are making the change to what we are calling "computer assisted moderation."

NPR has partnered with a company called Keepcon, which beginning today will review every comment submitted on the site. Keepcon's robots then classifiy the language in our comments into categories (defined by our discussion rules) and flags comments that may violate NPR's established guidelines. Those categories (and some other technology in the back end) should help us increase the quality control of each of our moderators and see more about each of the comments that are deleted by our moderators.

With this system, we'll be able to allow more comments to be published immediately without the 15-minute delay of human moderation. So when you post a comment, it will be posted immediately. The algorithm review should take under 60 seconds, so our moderation delays should be ameliorated quite a bit. We also think this will lead to some additional consistency in moderation, and hopefully an even better conversation on NPR.org.

Let us know what you think!

Source: http://www.npr.org/blogs/thisisnpr/2013/10/18/236259616/adventures-in-commenting-how-were-improving-the-community-on-npr-org?ft=1&f=
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'The Fifth Estate': What Critics Are Saying About Benedict Cumberbatch

'Star Trek Into Darkness' star does 'a commanding impersonation' of WikiLeaks' Julian Assange, critics say.


By Kevin P. Sullivan

Source:
http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1715796/fifth-estate-benedict-cumberbatch-reviews.jhtml

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Windows 8 apps might sync and run on Xbox One, Dell website claims

The disparate ecosystems of Windows Phone, Microsoft's traditional desktop and the Xbox 360 left a generation of Redmond loyals aching for a more unified front. Now Dell seems convinced that one is on the way: according to a blurb on the company's online store, Windows 8 apps will be capable of ...

Source: http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/BvULI-3E-Pc/
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Why We'll Keep Fighting ObamaCare

Now that the government shutdown has ended and the president has preserved ObamaCare for the time being, it's worth explaining why my organization, the Heritage Foundation, and other conservatives chose this moment to fight—and why we will continue to fight. The reason is simple: to protect the American people from the harmful effects of this law.

Source: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/2013/10/17/why_we039ll_keep_fighting_obamacare_318096.html
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