THIRUVANANTHAPURAM, India (AFP) - An Indian movie director said he hopes to persuade Paris Hilton to play the role of Nobel laureate and prospective Catholic Saint, Mother Teresa, in an upcoming film.
"Her features resemble Mother Teresa," director T. Rajeevnath told AFP from the southwestern coastal state of Kerala.
The filmmaker said Hilton is on his shortlist after a computer-generated image showed a close facial match between the hotel heiress and the Albanian-born nun.
Mother Teresa, who died in 1997, worked among the poor in the teeming slums of Kolkata, formerly Calcutta, with the Missionaries of Charity. She was beatified by Pope John Paul in 2003, a significant step on the road to sainthood in the Catholic church.
"A meeting with Paris Hilton is scheduled for the end of April," Rajeevnath said.
The 54-year-old director is well-known in India for his Malayalam-language films, including "Janani" (Mother) -- the story of seven nuns who care for an abandoned baby, which won a national award.
Hilton's prior movie experience includes appearing in a home-made sex video made by a former boyfriend that appeared on the Internet, and parts in several Hollywood B-films.
The blond socialite, who is often the focus of US celebrity gossip columns, also starred in the US reality television show "The Simple Life".
Dude, didn't she like...meet with you the week after she died? She seems like one of the people you'd want to see.
Also, the director probably doesn't know Paris's history, seeing as he just did a facial comparison. But once he does...I have a feeling that Paris is going to get a beating.
TROIS-RIVIÈRES, QUE. — As Ghyslain Raza recalled, whenever he walked by his high school's common areas, other students would jump on tables and chant, "Star Wars Kid! Star Wars Kid!"
There would be a commotion as they shouted and poked at him, trying to get a reaction. "It was simply unbearable," he said.
An otherwise ordinary teen in this Quebec small town, Mr. Raza had become a worldwide object of ridicule when schoolmates put on the Internet a video of him clumsily pretending to be a Star Wars character.
Three years later, Mr. Raza and his parents this week reached an out-of-court settlement with the families of three former schoolmates they had sued for $351,000 in damages.
The settlement annuls a civil trial set to begin on Monday that would have scrutinized one of the world's first and most-publicized cases of cyber-bullying.
However, documents filed in the case at the Trois-Rivières courthouse give new details about how a mean-spirited high-school prank turned into a global Internet cause célèbre.
Specifics of the settlement remain confidential.
Lawyers for the three schoolmates had suffered a setback after they were not allowed to introduce as evidence a transcript of a phone conversation Mr. Raza had with a blogger, Jishnu Mukerji.
The blogger had posted a transcript of the exchange on the Internet.
Conducted a month after the video and parodies of it began circulating, the conversation has Mr. Raza calling the spoofs "interesting" but not expressing much distress.
However, a judge rejected a bid to table a transcript of the chat and Mr. Mukerji was not available to testify.
The documents include transcripts of examinations under oath of Mr. Raza and of three students accused of circulating the video, Michaël Caron, Jérôme Laflamme and Jean-Michel Rheault.
(Proceedings against a fourth, François Labarre, were dropped after Mr. Raza acknowledged that the allegations against that student were based on hearsay.)
In the transcripts, Mr. Raza said the experience left him unable to attend school.
"It was simply unbearable, totally. It was impossible to attend class," Mr. Raza said.
He said the situation left him feeling drained of energy, and that he let himself go and no longer lifted weights to keep fit.
He said he was diagnosed with depression by a pedopsychiatrist at Montreal's Sainte-Justine Hospital and his lawyers, in their fillings, said they wanted to have a psychiatrist and a psychologist testify, along with producing his medical file.
Under questioning, Mr. Laflamme and Mr. Rheault conceded their role in spreading a video that Mr. Raza, then 15, had made of himself and left on a shelf in the school TV studio.
Mr. Laflamme said he discovered the tape in April of 2003, when he took school equipment to film a varsity football game.
He showed the tape to Mr. Rheault, who made a copy of it.
"I thought it'd be an interesting prank . . . I wanted Ghyslain to know what I knew of him, what I had seen," Mr. Laflamme said.
"All I did was take the cassette, digitize it on the studio computer to pull a joke on Ghyslain. After that, I had nothing to do with it," Mr. Rheault said he later told the school principal after the controversy erupted.
He said that when a school counsellor confronted him about Mr. Raza's misfortunes, he replied, "It's no fun what happened here, but that's the problem with the Internet. Things travel fast."
Mr. Caron, who says he didn't even know the two other pranksters, said in examination that as the tape was being e-mailed among students, he created a website and posted the video on it.
According to court filings, the video first appeared on the Internet on the evening of April 14, 2003.
About a month later, one U.S. Web blog that had posted the video said it had been downloaded 1.1 million times already.
Mr. Raza's lawyer said in a court filing that the video was so widely circulated that one Internet site solely dedicated to the two-minute clip recorded 76 million visits by October, 2004.
Mr. Raza conceded in his examination that he didn't express much anguish when he spoke to Mr. Mukerji in May of 2003 about his sudden fame.
He said he was cautious because "everything I said was textually reported on the Internet. I signalled in more or less subtle fashion my unhappiness."
Mr. Raza -- who appears on the video as a chubby, ungainly young man -- recalled how other students got on tables and chanted taunts at him. "There was about 100 people in those halls. It was total chaos . . . Any opportunity was good enough to shout 'Star Wars!' "
He said in one class, where a document was shown through a projector, other students scrolled the text, mimicking the opening of the movie, as they sang the Star Wars theme.
And whenever he was in a public place, he said, strangers would call to him.
"Hey! It's Ghyslain Raza! Star Wars Kid, hey!"
He left the school and eventually, got a private tutor.
No one would comment yesterday about the settlement, including whether it included monetary compensation.
However, previous proceedings in the case had included discussions about whether the families of the three defendants had liability insurance.
The families of the three defendants have varying financial situations, court documents suggest. Mr. Caron's court filings include a letter from an insurer refusing to provide liability insurance coverage, whereas Mr. Laflamme says in his examination that his father had savings of $500,000 from an inheritance.
Boise police arrested a Boise man Wednesday who reportedly threw naked photos of himself out his car window to children in West Boise neighborhoods late last week.
Franklin J. Arroues, 45, is charged with six counts of disseminating material harmful to minors.
Arroues allegedly slowly drove first through a neighborhood near Edna and Maple Grove last Friday throwing the photos from his vehicle toward three children ages 11 to 16.
The children reportedly picked up the photos when a woman in the neighborhood took the photos from the children and called the police.
While police took a description of the man and his vehicle from the woman and children, a second call of a man passing out obscene photos from his car came in from a neighborhood about a mile away near Edna and Cloverdale came in.
The man had reportedly driven by three children ages 5 to 7 playing in a yard three times before throwing out more naked pictures. The father of one of the children grabbed the photos and gave police a detailed description of the vehicle, including a license plate number.
Patrol officers located a suspect in his home. Follow up by detectives resulted in a warrant for Arroue’s arrest and he was taken into custody Wednesday.
Detectives say the description of the suspect and his vehicle do not match any other reports of suspicious vehicles or suspicious activity.
CRETEIL, France (Reuters) -- A French court sentenced a man to 25 years in prison on Saturday for burning to death a teenage girl in a garbage depot in a Parisian suburb.
Outrage over the death of 17-year-old Sohane Benziane in October 2002 produced a wave of feminist protest across France, with women rallying against an atmosphere of fear and violence haunting many girls in poor suburbs.
In the trial, Jamal Derrar, 22, admitted having led Benziane into the garbage depot, dousing her with petrol and threatening her with a lighter, but he said he only wanted to scare her.
His friend Tony Rocca, 23, was sentenced to eight years for complicity in the crime.
"It's an accident," Derrar said during the trial. "I thought I'd control the situation, having fun threatening her ... I saw the fire starting all of a sudden," he said.
"I'm afraid. I know I'm going to spend my youth in prison, I'm not proud of that. I feel ashamed," he said.
Derrar was charged with acts of torture and barbarity that led to unintentional death.
Derrar said he had wanted to talk to Benziane about restarting their relationship, which she had refused.
But witnesses said the two had never had a relationship. Derrar had argued with Benziane's boyfriend and wanted to unleash his anger on her, they said.
Prosecutors had called for a 25-year prison sentence.
"The image of a woman being burnt alive is sending us several centuries back," prosecutor Jean-Paul Content told the court on Friday. "Her death has become the symbol of the most extreme violence against women."
The tragedy, which left Benziane rolling in agony on a patch of grass to try to extinguish the flames before she later died in hospital, sparked large rallies by women across France.
Living conditions in poor neighbourhoods outside Paris came into the spotlight in riots there last year, when youths angry about discrimination and a bleak future burned thousands of cars.
Unemployment in the suburbs, where many descendants of African immigrants live, is up to 4 or 5 times higher than in the rest of France, and women's organisations say violence and pressure on women is part of daily life in the suburbs.
if you're ever in france and your girlfriend or boyfriend breaks up with you this is what you say "si vous ne revenez pas ainsi que moi que je vais vous mettre sur le feu!"
also, french is not a language i am know very well so please correct me.
The "Gospel of Judas" tells a far different tale from the four gospels in the New Testament. It portrays Judas as a favored disciple who was given special knowledge by Jesus -- and who turned him in at Jesus' request.
"You will be cursed by the other generations -- and you will come to rule over them," Jesus tells Judas in the document made public Thursday. (Watch reaction to writings, then and now -- 1:58)
The text, one of several ancient documents found in the Egyptian desert in 1970, was preserved and translated by a team of scholars. It was made public in an English translation by the National Geographic Society.
Religious and lay readers alike will debate the meaning and truth of the manuscript.
But it does show the diversity of beliefs in early Christianity, said Marvin Meyer, professor of Bible studies at Chapman University in Orange, California.
The text, in the Coptic language, was dated to about the year 300 A.D. and is a copy of an earlier Greek version.
A "Gospel of Judas" was first mentioned around 180 A.D. by Bishop Irenaeus of Lyon, in what is now France. The bishop denounced the manuscript as heresy because it differed from mainstream Christianity. The actual text had been thought lost until this discovery.
Elaine Pagels, a professor of religion at Princeton University, said, "The people who loved, circulated and wrote down these gospels did not think they were heretics."
Added Rev. Donald Senior, president of the Catholic Theological Union of Chicago: "Let a vigorous debate on the significance of this fascinating ancient text begin."
Senior expressed doubt that the new gospel will rival the New Testament, but he allowed that opinions are likely to vary.
Craig Evans, a professor at Acadia Divinity College in Nova Scotia, Canada, said New Testament explanations for Judas' betrayal range from money to the influence of Satan.
"Perhaps more now can be said," he commented. The document "implies that Judas only did what Jesus wanted him to do."
Christianity in the ancient world was much more diverse than it is now, with a number of gospels circulating in addition to the four that were finally collected into the New Testament, noted Bart Ehrman, chairman of religious studies at the University of North Carolina.
Eventually, one point of view prevailed and the others were declared heresy, he said, including the Gnostics who believed that salvation depended on secret knowledge that Jesus imparted, particularly to Judas.
The newly translated document's text begins: "The secret account of the revelation that Jesus spoke in conversation with Judas Iscariot."
In a key passage Jesus tells Judas, "You will exceed all of them. For you will sacrifice the man that clothes me."
This indicates that Judas would help liberate the spiritual self by helping Jesus get rid of his physical flesh, the scholars said.
"Step away from the others and I shall tell you the mysteries of the kingdom," Jesus says to Judas, singling him out for special status. "Look, you have been told everything. Lift up your eyes and look at the cloud and the light within it and the stars surrounding it. The star that leads the way is your star."
The text ends with Judas turning Jesus over to the high priests and does not include any mention of the crucifixion or resurrection.
National Geographic said the author believed that Judas Iscariot alone understood the true significance of Jesus' teachings. The author of the text is not named in the writings.
Discovered in 1970, the papyrus was kept in a safety deposit box for several years and began to deteriorate before conservators restored it. More than 1,000 pieces had to be reassembled.
The material will be donated to the Coptic museum in Cairo, Egypt, so it can be available to all scholars said Ted Waitt of the Waitt Institute for Historical Discovery, which helped finance the restoration.
In addition to radio carbon dating, the manuscript was also authenticated through ink analysis, multispectral imaging, content and linguistic style and handwriting style, National Geographic reported.
i was gonna watch that last night, but we only have one tv with io, and my step dad is obsessed with the sopranos which is on at the same time, and it was also on at the same time as family guy
ORLANDO, Florida (AP) -- Kay Shukwit is still trying to cope with the August 2004 deaths of her daughter and five of the young woman's friends, who prosecutors said were beaten to death with aluminum bats over an Xbox video game system.
"I'm living with the loss. I'm living with the horror, with all the thoughts and everything and I still can't believe what's going on," said Shukwit, whose daughter, Michelle Nathan, was 19 years old.
Jury selection is set for Monday in Deland for three of the four men charged with the beating deaths.
Prosecutors allege Troy Victorino, 29, Robert Cannon and Michael Salas, both 20, and Jerone Hunter, 19, organized the attack to retrieve an Xbox video game system that Victorino lost when he was kicked out of a different house in Deltona.
The victims, some of whom were sleeping, did not resist or try to escape the attack, investigators said.
Salas, Victorino and Hunter are charged with six counts of murder and eight other felonies. Cannon already has pleaded guilty and will receive life in prison in exchange for his testimony. Prosecutors said they will seek the death penalty for the remaining defendants.
"We think it's an appropriate punishment for this case and that's what we hope to end up with," said prosecutor Leah Case. "I'm hoping that the families will get some sense of closure with this trial."
Defense attorneys sought unsuccessfully to move the trial to South Florida, arguing that the media has depicted Victorino as the ringleader.
"He's been sitting here listening to all the other people in the courtroom pounce on him and blame him for everything," Victorino's lawyer, Jeff Dowdey, said Friday.
The victims, who all worked at a local Burger King, also included Erin Belanger, 22, Francisco Ayo-Roman, 30, Anthony Vega, 34, Roberto Gonzalez, 28, and Jonathan Gleason, 17.
Investigators said they had been terrorized for several days over the Xbox, which Victorino had left at another Deltona house where he had been squatting. The game system was taken by Belanger when she cleared Victorino's things out of her grandparents' winter house.
Shukwit said she dreads hearing the gruesome details of the crime in court.
"Granted they're going to be using pretty graphic, gory pictures from the crime scene and that's going to be something that I'm going to have to see," she said.
Comments
I sincerely hope they aren't harshly punished just because people are so damn reactionary these days.
Yeah, that will go over well. >_>
Jesus. Fucking. Christ.
Thats an insult to Mother Teresa. We all know HER porn film was 100x hotter than Paris'!
Now isn't that a nice image.
Seriously though, Paris Hilton is the worst person to play Mother Teresa. I mean, goddamnit, what is he thinking?!
Also, the director probably doesn't know Paris's history, seeing as he just did a facial comparison. But once he does...I have a feeling that Paris is going to get a beating.
Drive-by Nudity
Yeah, because you won't get in any trouble for that.
also, french is not a language i am know very well so please correct me.
Gospel of Judas