Locals plan Veterans Day parade, concerts, thanks

Locals plan Veterans Day parade, concerts, thanks

Feeling gratitude to American troops and veterans should be a year-round thing, but annual Veterans Day celebrations are a meaningful way to make the recognition official.

So said Keith Ellis, a former Air Force sergeant who is disabled.

“This is a way we honor the veterans who sacrificed their lives, or were wounded, or who served to protect our freedoms and rights,” said Ellis, 51 and a Layton resident.

“It makes you feel good for what you did, and that people recognized what we did. And for me, it’s also a way to remember the friends I lost.”

Past Veterans Day in Northern Utah

A number of local events are planned to commemorate Veterans Day. Sheila Scott Simko, a Veteran’s Affairs official who works with Weber State University, is helping plan a ceremony for Tuesday at WSU’s Davis campus.

“Almost every family has a veteran,” Simko said. “Our goal is to honor them and let them know we appreciate their sacrifices.”

Local celebrations begin Saturday, with a parade, and continue through next week.

• The Ogden Veterans Day Parade starts at 11:11 a.m. Saturday. The start time honors the signing of the World War I Armistice, which happened at 11:11 a.m. Nov. 11, 1918. The Ogden parade’s staging begins at 9:30 a.m. at the corner of 31st Street and Washington Boulevard.


The parade will head north on Washington, then turn west on Historic 25th Street. At Grand Avenue, the parade will head south, then disperse.

• A Veterans Day celebration to honor current and past members of the military will be at 11 a.m. Saturday in the commons area of Davis High School, 325 S. Main St., Kaysville. The event will pay special tribute to Kaysville’s local heroes. Lt. Col. David Becker of the Utah Army National Guard will be the speaker.

• The Box Elder Symphonic Choir will offer a patriotic program of music at 7 p.m. Sunday at the Box Elder Tabernacle, 251 S. Main, Brigham City. Admission is free.

• On Monday, Weber State University will sponsor an extensive display of military weaponry and equipment. The all-day exhibit will be at the Shepherd Union Building at WSU, 3848 Harrison Blvd., Ogden.

• On Tuesday, Weber State will sponsor a veteran appreciation event at its Davis Campus, 2750 University Park Blvd, Layton. The event begins at 9 a.m. with the Weber State University ROTC Color Guard. A prayer will be offered by Hill Air Force Base chaplain (retired) Charles Chandler.

A veterans tribute presentation is scheduled for 9:20 a.m.

Art Amos, Sgt. 1st Class in the United States Army and recipient of two Purple Hearts, will speak at 10 a.m. At 11 a.m., the names of nearly 100 fallen heroes, many of them from Utah, will be read. The next speaker, Berni Davis, of the Utah Department of Veterans Affairs, will talk at 1 p.m.

• American Festival Chorus & Orchestra on Tuesday will offer a free Veterans Day concert the Chase Fine Arts Center Kent Concert Hall, at Utah State University, Logan. The music starts at 7 p.m. For more information, visit www.americanfestivalchorus.org.

• The Treehouse Museum on Tuesday will offer free admission for all military families with military ID. The Treehouse is 347 22nd St., Ogden. Tuesday hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. For more information, call 801-394-9663 or visit www.treehousemuseum.org.

• The Brigham City Museum on Tuesday will open a new traveling exhibit, “Our Lives, Our Stories: America’s Greatest Generation.” Art, artifacts and photography will document life from the 1920s through 1950s, and will include a paratrooper helmet, a Tuskegee Airman Congressional Medal, a serviceman’s pocket Bible, and other World War II memorabilia. The exhibit remains through Jan. 7, and admission is free. Museum hours are 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Tuesday-Friday, 1 p.m.-5 p.m. Saturday. For information, call 435-226-1439 or visit www.brighamcitymuseum.org.

• Ogden Nature Center on Wednesday will host “In Honor: A Special Veteran’s Day Program,” as part of its ongoing Wild Wednesday event series. Those who attend can honor veterans and discuss the history of Veterans Day. They also can meet the resident Bald Eagle, Des Ta Te. Free admission will be offered to veterans and current military members and their families.

Admission for others is $4 for adults, $3 for seniors, $2 for children 11 and younger. The center is at 966 W. 12th St., Ogden. For information, call 801-621-7595.

• Weber State on Nov. 15 will offer a Military Appreciation day at its football game. As many as four free tickets will be available to veterans and active duty military. Advance ticket will be available through the Dee Events Center ticket office with proof of military service or veteran status. Tickets also will be available at the stadium on game day. Source

by Nancy Van Valkenburg

CMA Awards Backstage

Everything You Missed Backstage at The CMA Awards

Brad Paisley, in back in hat, and Jennifer Nettles join Michael McDonald and the 

Doobie Brothers for 'Takin' It to the Streets' to conclude the 48th annual CMA Awards.

NASHVILLE — The CMA Awards were held Wednesday, and it was a big night for country stars like Luke Bryan, Miranda Lambert and Blake Shelton. But there was a whole lot more to the show than the awards and the performances that aired on TV.

USA TODAY's Brian Mansfield was backstage, capturing everything you didn't see on TV.

Tim Tebow loves country: "I've been a huge fan of country music since I was a kid," the NFL star said after he presented an award.

Brett Eldredge, daredevil: To celebrate his two No. 1 singles, Don't Ya and Beat of the Music, Eldredge went sky-driving and shark-diving. But he hadn't made a death-defying plan for winning the CMA award for new artist of the year. "I've got to do something really crazy," he said backstage. "If anybody has any ideas, bring it on."

Wardrobe malfunction: Song of the year winner Kacey Musgraves had a wardrobe malfunction right before her performance with Loretta Lynn. "Right before I sang, my panties totally came off," she said backstage. "They were the stick-on kind. They were stuck on, and then they weren't. I had to rip them off and throw them somewhere. If you see them, they're mine."

A song for everyone: Musgraves called her song of the year Follow Your Arrow "an anthem for all kinds of people" that couldn't make her more proud. "For a song that I was told could never and would never be a single, it just blows my mind. It gives me a lot of faith that people still love connecting with a message and spreading something when they love it."

Some assembly required: The light-up outfits top vocal group Little Big Town wore during their medley of Day Drinking and Bang Bang with Ariana Grande required "so many people and so many wires in so many places," says the group's Kimberly Schlapman. "It was a fragile and delicate situation. We couldn't bend over or turn to the side or we would short out." Adds Karen Fairchild, "You don't just sew light that does that into a costume. It takes a lot of planning."

Record breaker: With her fifth consecutive CMA award for female vocalist of the year, Lambert broke a record in the category set by Reba McEntire. Backstage, Lambert paid tribute to the singer. "Whenever I'm around her, I try to just shut up and listen, because I know I can learn from every word she says, every move she makes." Lambert has won 11 CMA awards total, more than any other woman.

Big winning streak: As he sat in the audience before winning his fifth male-vocalist award, Blake Shelton leafed through the CMA Awards program and looked at the names of previous winners. "I was looking through there, and I was seeing names I was excited about – George Jones, Ronnie Milsap. I can't believe this is more than Ronnie Milsap. It seemed like he was on there 20 times. And Vince Gill, George Strait." Both those singers also have won the award five times. "To be in that category, with those two guys, that's beyond a dream come true," Shelton says. "That's stupid."

A little respect: Winning entertainer of the year — his first CMA in any category — made Luke Bryan feel he had earned the respect of the CMA and its voters. "I have longed and sought after many years to get one of these in my hands," he said backstage. He called the win "a ginormous deal, something that I could not express out on stage when I was winning." Source

German Publisher Bows To Google In News Licensing Row

German Publisher Bows To Google In News Licensing Row

Germany's biggest news publisher Axel Springer has scrapped a move to block Google from running snippets of articles from its newspapers, saying that the experiment had caused traffic to its sites to plunge.

Springer said a two-week-old experiment to restrict access by Google to some of its publications had caused web traffic to plunge for these sites, leading it to row back and let Google once again showcase Springer news stories in its search results.

Chief executive Mathias Doepfner said on Wednesday that his company would have "shot ourselves out of the market" if it had continued with its demands for the US firm to pay licensing fees. Springer had sought to restrict Google's use of news from four of its top-selling brands: welt.de, computerbild.de, sportbild.de and autobild.de, the company said.

Springer, which publishes Europe's top-selling daily newspaper Bild, said Google's grip over online audiences was too great to resist, a double-edged compliment meant to ram home the publisher's criticism of what it calls Google's monopoly powers.

Publishers in countries from Germany and France to Spain have pushed to pass new national copyright laws that force Google and other web aggregators to pay licensing fees — dubbed the Google Tax — when they publish snippets of their news articles.

Under German legislation that came into effect last year, publishers can prohibit search engines and similar services from using their news articles beyond headlines. Last week, Spain's upper house passed a similar law giving publishers an "inalienable" right to levy such licensing fees on Google.

Seeking to capitalize on the German law, two weeks ago VG Media — a consortium of around 200 German publishers, including Springer — said that Google could no longer publish snippets of text and images from their publications.

Google complied and ran only headlines of articles to limit their liability. It requires publishers who want their content to continue to show up in Google search results to give it explicit permission to do so and freedom from any liability for licensing fees under such laws.

Call To Regulators

Springer said traffic flowing from clicks on Google search results had fallen by 40 percent and traffic delivered via Google News had plummeted by 80 per cent in the past two weeks.

Doepfner said the resulting dramatic drop in traffic to his company's publications was proof of Google's overwhelming power in the search market. He said he hoped lawmakers, courts and competition regulators would take action to curb its powers.

"Others will have to pick up the ball now," the Springer boss told reporters on a conference call following the publication of the Berlin-based company's quarterly results.

A Google spokesman in Germany praised Springer's decision.

"The decision shows that Google is making a significant contribution to the economic success of news publishers," the spokesman said.

He said Google delivers more than half a billion clicks to German news sites per month. The search company has paid more than one billion euros in online advertising fees to German media publishers in the last three years, the spokesman said.

"Google wants to work in the future with publishers on new models to promote their websites and apps to increase traffic and to support digital publishing," he said.

The German cartel office in August decided not to pursue a complaint against Google by a group of publishers, including Springer, saying that the scope of new legislation was not yet entirely clear.

Google is the target of a European antitrust investigation into the operations of its online search business. The US firm accounts for more than 80 per cent of the European Internet search market and more than 90 percent of that in Germany.

The European Union's new digital commissioner Guenther Oettinger said last month that he was mulling a regional Internet copyright levy, taking aim at Google.

Last year, Google agreed to pay 60 million euros ($75 million) into a special fund to help French media develop their presence on the Internet, but search engines will not pay publishers in France for displaying content. Source

Biopics Caught between banal Bollywood fantasy

Biopics: Caught between the banal and Bollywood fantasy

CHENNAI: The family of Raja Ravi Varma has objected to how the icon painter has been portrayed in the film 'Rang Rasiya' (literal meaning: 'colourful playboy'). The trailer seems to show Varma, instead of being enthralled by divine inspiration, as a voyeuristic womanizer.

'Rang Rasiya' may only be the latest in a series of biopics that have tried to fit that genre in a Bollywood mould — in which artistic licence extends to include maudlin melodrama and even the song-and-dance routine. 'Milkha Singh' and 'Mary Kom' used typical Bollywood gimmicks bordering on absurdity with an eye on the box office. Yet, both the films retained the services of the real-life Milkha Singh and Mary Kom as consultants and so there were no protests regarding the authenticity of the movie.

But in the case of 'Rang Rasiya', Indira Devi Kunjamma, the granddaughter of Varma, has written to Prime Minister Narendra Modi against the film and sent a legal notice to director Ketan Mehta. "The book is a work of fiction and the filmmakers should clearly state it's a dramatized version of a Marathi novel and, therefore, based on a fictional, imaginary story," says C M Prasad, 57, great-grandson of Varma.

The film's problems indicate the difficulty Indian cinema has with the biopic genre, experts say. While the Bollywood fantasy mould is not a great fit for a biopic, the other danger is sanitization that pushes the film to the banal and the boring.

Film-maker Gnana Rajasekaran — who made the Tamil biopic 'Bharathi' about poet Subramaniya Bharathi, as well as two others on political leader Periyar and most recently about maths genius Srinivasa Ramanujan — says he does not believe in trading fact for fiction when making a film on a real-life person. "The farthest I've strayed in terms of 'invention' is perhaps to show the character of the person," says Rajasekaran, who now heads the government of Kerala's KR Narayanan National Institute of Visual Science and Art in Kottayam. "For instance, if the written biography states the person is timid, I make a scene to exhibit that personality trait."

But critics had panned Rajasekaran's 'Periyar', wondering how a film about one of the most interesting personalities of Tamil Nadu could have bored the audience in its attempt to be comprehensive and factual. Rajasekaran couldn't avoid being hagiographic about Periyar who defied convention in all its forms — from attending a nudist camp in his youth and rubbishing idols of Hindu gods to marrying a much younger woman in his ripe old age.

"Remember that biopics are anyway always about heroes and so most of them are hagiographic. There's no way anyone will make a critical biopic in cinema," says film-maker K Hariharan.

Rajasekaran says: "I never make up things about real-life people just to entertain the public because I feel the authenticity of the biopic is lost."  Source

Dollar’s Ride Is About To End

Dollar’s Ride Is About To End

Under the stewardship of Shinzo Abe, the nation of Japan has become a global leader in debt, currency devaluation and inflation. Unfortunately for the Japanese, Abenomics is also leading Japan into a hyper inflationary depression, as the first of his three arrows has shot right through the yen and put a gaping hole in the wallets of every Japanese citizen.

The Bank of Japan (BOJ) has placed all its chips on the bet that inflation will cure all the nation’s economic problems. Making deflation public enemy number one is rather convenient when your country's public debt to GDP is the highest in the world. In order to end deflation, the central bank has purchased 70% of all newly-issued Japanese Government Bonds. All this money printing is intended to get prices rising, and it has been very successful. Japan's consumer prices rose 3.1 percent in August from a year earlier. Prices for fuel, light and water rose 6.4 percent on the year. But as real wages continue to fall, the bull’s eye appears to be directed on destroying the Japanese middle class.

In the nonsensical world of Abenomics--where inflation is viewed to be the progenitor of growth--the 3.1% CPI reading is deemed to be insufficient. This is because the core rate of 1.1 percent was far shy of the 2% read they are aiming for. So, as expected, there are calls coming from the lobotomized economic experts in Japan for yet more money printing from the BOJ.

Japan’s “experiment” with Abenomics would be much more interesting if we didn’t already know how it all ends. This so called experiment of massive debt monetization has already been tried in countries such as Weimar Germany and, more recently, in Zimbabwe; with disastrous results. The misguided policy of using inflation to create growth is predictably causing asset bubbles in JGBs and stocks. The BOJ is tirelessly printing money to monetize nearly all of the Japanese government’s enormous debt load and also to buy stocks. This has ballooned its equity portfolio alone to be an estimated 7 trillion yen ($63.6 billion). However, all this has done nothing to boost real GDP, balance trade or boost real wages. In fact, Industrial production shrank 1.5 percent month-on-month in August and spending among Japanese households fell a steeper-than-expected 4.7 percent. Source