There's nothing worse than a wardrobe mishap, especially if you're in the public eye - even more so if you're on stage in front of a live audience.
Sadly for Katherine Heigl, fate struck a cruel blow as she was handed the Female Star Of The Year Award at the ShoWest convention held in Las Vegas.
The actress, who was honoured for her work on films including 27 Dresses and The Ugly Truth, faced an embarrassing situation when one of the straps broke on her stunning red dress right in the middle of her acceptance speech.
With one side of her chest close to being completely exposed Miss Heigl floundered and had difficulty continuing her speech.
That was until host Billy Bush stepped in and saved the day, holding her strap in place and giving the actress the chance to say a few words without worry of showing too much flesh.
After receiving her award, she went backstage and found a pin to secure the strap before heading to the photographers' enclosure to show off her new award.
Robert Sunshine, co-managing director of the event said of Heigl: 'Her ever-present charm and innate talent have made Heigl's transition from TV screen to silver screen seemingly effortless.
'Her comedic timing and flair for acting are showcased in each of her roles and have captivated audiences around the globe. We are pleased to honor Katherine Heigl as the ShoWest 2010 Female Star of the Year.'
Her impressive roster of acting roles includes her five-year stint on Grey's Anatomy, after which she broke onto the big screen with the 2007 summer blockbuster Knocked Up, from director Judd Apatow.
This was followed up by her box office favorite 27 Dresses, which proved to audiences across the country that Heigl has star power. Last year she starred in The Ugly Truth and will be seen later this year in Life As We Know It.
Katherine got dressed up for the second day in a row at the film event, which was held at the Paris hotel in Las Vegas.
Following her first outing, earlier in the day, wearing a tight-fitting black dress, the actress went for a more glamorous look at the final night's awards show combining a knee-length red dress with a pair of gold Christian Louboutin peep-toe heels.
As well as the former Grey's Anatomy actress, the event also saw appearances from Sarah Jessica Parker, Cynthia Nixon and Kristin Davis, High School Musical actress Vanessa Hudgens and Amanda Seyfried.
The Sex And The City girls, who were also at the event earlier in the day, all wore black dresses - SJP's delicate, chiffon-layered, number stealing the limelight from her co-stars.
Miss Seyfried, 24, was handed the Breakthrough Female Star of the Year Award at the show.
She wore an asymmetric grey mini dress with an unusual cut out nude section across the top of her chest.
Meanwhile Hudgens, who won the Female Star Of Tomorrow award, showed off her pins in a glittering gold babydoll dress and beige heels.
Katherine Heigl also promoted her new movie Life As We Know It with co-star Josh Duhamel at the event.
Also starring Christina Hendricks and Josh Lucas, the comedy is about two single adults who become caregivers to an orphaned girl when their mutual best friends die in an acciden
Katherine Heigl Suffers An Embarrassing Wardrobe Malfunction
Jesse James Apologises to Sandra Bullock amid Affair Reports
Sandra Bullock's husband Jesse James has issued an apology amid reports he had an affair with a tattooed model. While the 40-year-old insisted 'the vast majority' of the allegations about him were untrue, he conceded he had 'poor judgement'.
James's apology comes four days after Bullock was reported to have left the couple's Southern Californian house. He said in a statement: 'There is only one person to blame for this whole situation, and that is me.
'It's because of my poor judgement that I deserve everything bad that is coming my way.
'This has caused my wife and kids pain and embarrassment beyond comprehension and I am extremely saddened to have brought this on them.
'I am truly very sorry for the grief I have caused them. I hope one day they can find it in their hearts to forgive me.'
With Bullock apparently in hiding, James was seen bringing his children to school today while still wearing his wedding ring. A source told People magazine Bullock left the family home on Monday.
Bullock pulled out of the British premiere of her new film The Blind Slide on Wednesday as In Touch magazine published an interview with James' alleged lover Michelle 'Bombshell' McGee.
The tattooed lady is even more heavily decorated with ink than James' porn star turned director ex-wife, Janine Lindermulder. She told the magazine that she called 40-year-old James her 'Vanilla Gorilla' and gave salacious details of their alleged 11 month affair.
In a gushing speech at the Oscars earlier this month, 45-year-old Miss Bullock thanked motorbike enthusiast James for his support. His eyes welled with tears as she spoke of her love for him.
Miss Bullock had been due to attend the first London screening of The Blind Side on Tuesday with her co-star, newcomer Quinton Aaron. But in a terse statement, Warner Brothers yesterday announced that the event and its accompanying parties were off because 'unforeseen circumstances' had arisen which meant Miss Bullock was 'no longer available to travel'.
The actress had a string of unsuccessful relationships before meeting James, a former bodyguard to heavy metal groups, when she took her young godson to the set of his now-axed TV show Monster Garage.
She became his third wife almost five years ago. Brunette Miss McGee claims she made email contact with James in April 2009 when she was looking for a modelling job with his company, West Coast Choppers. A week later, they met and had sex on his Los Angeles office couch 'two or three times'.
The model, who is in her 20s, said she thought his marriage was over when the fling started.
The magazine printed lewd texts from James to Miss McGee, in which he called her 'babe' and praised her 'beautiful eyes'.
In one, from as recently as Sunday, he wrote: 'Was just think'n' bout u this morning.'
She said: 'I'm a little more edgy than Sandra, obviously. I like motorcycles and I think we maybe had a lot more in common than she did with him. I think he was lonely.'
Miss McGee said she met and 'bonded with' James's five-year-old daughter Sunny, by his ex, Lindermulder. She claimed that the pair even watched Miss Bullock's appearance at the MTV Awards last May while in bed together. 'In my mind, the reason he wasn't there was because they were separated.'
Although they always met in secret at James's office, Miss McGee said she did not realise he was still married until they ran into mutual friends at a tattoo convention in Long Beach last June. 'It was awkward, he knew he was caught.'
It is not clear if or when Miss Bullock was told of her husband's alleged cheating.
But at the SAG Awards in January, she said: 'To my husband Jesse, who works so hard all day.
'And you get dressed up in monkey suits and you sit at tables with people you don't know and I leave you there and then you come back with, like, Morgan Freeman's email.
'I don't know how you do it. I love you so much and you're really hot and I want you so much.'
At the Golden Globes, she said: 'To my husband - there's no surprise that my work got better when I met you, so thank you.'
And finally, at the Oscars, she thanked her late mother Helga for sending her James. A spokesman for the actress refused to discuss the magazine allegations yesterday. Jesse James was unavailable for comment.
British Islamist Backs al-Qaida on Indonesia Visit
AKARTA, KOMPAS.com — The leader of an Islamist group banned in Britain praised Osama bin Laden while visiting Indonesia on Thursday and said attacks against Western targets in Muslim countries are justified. Anjem Choudary is in Indonesia to promote a book by Omar Bakri Mohammed, the founder of the extremist network Choudary leads that was banned earlier this year. He made the comments in front of around 80 people, many of them Islamist activists, at a discussion on the upcoming visit of U.S. President Barack Obama.
His remarks were radical by Indonesian standards but appeared unlikely to attract the attention of authorities, who are struggling against a resilient network of Muslim militants blamed for a series of bloody bombings in recent years.
“You may not want to hear this, but there are two camps in this world, the camp of Obama ... and the other camp which is led by Sheik Osama bin Laden, and they are the ones who are struggling for our lands to be liberated and defending the life and the honor and the property of the Muslims,” said Choudary, whose remarks were occasionally met with supportive cries of “God is Great!” from the audience.
Choudary said Islamic scriptures justified the bombing of Western targets inside Muslim countries. “I’m not one to argue with the evidence,” he said, citing teachings that bin Laden and other al-Qaida leaders used to justify such attacks.
He also said Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono was an apostate for not imposing Islamic law while arresting militants involved in a string of bombings in recent years.
“He is an enemy of Islam who has allied with the United States,” he said. Choudary was the leader of Islam4UK until it was banned earlier this year by the British government for glorifying al-Qaida. Several people associated with the group have been linked to terrorist acts.
Choudary said the network was still active but declined to say whether it was going to regroup under a new name as it has done in the past.
Viacom, YouTube Air Dirty Laundry in Legal Battle
AN FRANCISCO, KOMPAS.com – Viacom Inc. and Google Inc.'s YouTube site began airing each other's dirty laundry Thursday, providing a tantalizing peek at the wheeling and dealing that triggered a bitter battle over the copyright laws governing the Internet.
The previously confidential information came out as part of the evidence in a copyright lawsuit that Viacom filed against YouTube in 2007 for alleged copyright infringement of "The Colbert Report," "The Daily Show" and other shows.
The sensitive documents were unsealed because Viacom and YouTube are both trying to persuade U.S. District Judge Louis Stanton to decide the case without a trial. Both YouTube and Viacom are getting muddied in the process.
Internal YouTube e-mails depict at least one of the company's founders as a video pirate and suggest the Web site's employees were more interested in getting rich quick than adhering to copyright laws. Other records show Viacom wanted to buy YouTube at least seven months before it filed its lawsuit and often used the Web site to promote the shows on its cable TV stations.
Google bought YouTube for $1.76 billion in November 2006, but not before Viacom made a last-ditch effort to persuade Google to team up in a joint bid for the Web's leading video site, according to the court documents. A few months later, Google offered to pay Viacom $590 million for licensing rights to video, according to the records.
Viacom, the owner of Paramount Pictures and cable TV channels that include Comedy Central, instead sued Google and YouTube in a complaint seeking more than $1 billion in damages.
The media company alleges that YouTube allowed copyright-protected clips to appear on its Web site in its early days to attract a bigger audience. YouTube maintains it has always obeyed online copyright laws, which generally protect service providers from copyright claims as long as they didn't post the infringing material themselves and promptly remove it when notified about a violation. But an e-mail exchange among YouTube co-founders Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim showed there were in-house copyright abuses.
"Jawed, please stop putting stolen videos on the site," Chen wrote in the July 19, 2005, e-mail. "We're going to have a tough time defending the fact that we're not liable for the copyrighted material on the site because we didn't put it up when one of the co-founders is blatantly stealing content from other sites and trying to get everyone to see it."
In a statement after the documents were unsealed, YouTube said Chen's e-mail was referring to some aviation videos that had been making the rounds on the Web. "The exchange has nothing to do with supposed piracy of media content," YouTube said.
Karim left YouTube before Google bought it in 2006. But he kept YouTube e-mail on his personal computer, enabling Viacom to obtain correspondence that Hurley had said he lost, according to court documents. In a July 29, 2005 e-mail, Chen advised Hurley and Karim to "steal it" in an apparent reference to an unidentified movie clip, according to the court documents.
"We have to keep in mind that we need to attract traffic," Chen wrote after Hurley asked if he was talking about movies. "How much traffic will we get from personal videos?"
YouTube was still in a testing, or "beta," phase at the time Chen wrote his e-mails. The site didn't drop the beta tag until December 2005 when the YouTube was processing about 6,000 video clips. It now hosts more than 500 million videos, according to the court documents.
Google had its own copyright reservations about YouTube before it struck a deal. Internal documents obtained by Viacom quote Google executives describing YouTube as "a 'rogue enabler' of content theft" and warning the site "is completely sustained by pirated content."
Viacom was sizing up YouTube as a takeover target before it launched its legal attack against YouTube. MTV Networks, the division overseeing Viacom's cable TV operations, made the case for a YouTube bid in a July 2006 presentation.
"We believe YouTube would make a transformative acquisition for MTV Networks/Viacom that would immediately make us the leading deliverer of video online," Viacom's review said.
Viacom also hailed YouTube as "the dominant platform" for Web video and worried that the site would end up being sold to News Corp.'s MySpace. The documents didn't mention how much Viacom might have been willing to pay for YouTube.
The presentation was drawn up by Adam Cahan, an MTV Networks executive vice president. Cahan had left Google earlier in 2006 to work for Viacom.
Just a few days before Google announced its YouTube deal, Cahan tried to persuade his old employer to make a joint bid. "The idea would be: Viacom and Google buy YouTube," Cahan wrote in an Oct. 6, 2006, e-mail to Susan Wojcicki, Google's vice president of product management and the sister-in-law of Google co-founder Sergey Brin.
Since Google took over, YouTube has struck licensing deals with many media companies, which now get a cut of revenue from ads shown on the video site. YouTube won over much of the professional media by working with another Silicon Valley company, Audible Magic, to develop technology that automatically detects video and audio claimed by its copyright owners.
Obama Scraps Indonesia Trip for Healthcare Push
By Matt Spetalnick
WASHINGTON, KOMPAS.com - Bowing to political pressure at home, President Barack Obama on Thursday scrapped his trip to Indonesia and Australia next week to stay in Washington for a final push for a U.S. healthcare overhaul. The rare cancellation of a presidential trip abroad underscored how Obama’s political challenges at home have begun complicating his life overseas, stirring debate on whether he may have to scale back some of his foreign policy goals.
Obama had intended to use the March 21-26 trip, his first foreign travel this year, to deepen U.S. ties in the Asia-Pacific region in the face of rising Chinese influence. But his travel plans drew criticism from fellow Democrats worried he would be absent for Sunday’s vote on healthcare, his top legislative priority and an issue expected to loom large in U.S. congressional elections in November.
Announcing that the overseas trip was off, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs made clear Obama felt he had no other choice and said the visits would be rescheduled for June. “The president greatly regrets the delay,” Gibbs told reporters. He said Obama called Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono and Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, and that both governments understood the importance of the healthcare bill and the president’s desire to see it through.
But Australian and Indonesian officials were sure to be disappointed, and Obama’s decision drew criticism from conservative foreign policy circles as damaging to U.S. interests. “President Obama has thus far demonstrated a remarkably tin ear for American leadership in Asia,” said Walter Lohman, an Asia expert at the Heritage Foundation.
Ernest Bower, an analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said the two countries would give Obama a “very easy pass” for the postponement but it raises the stakes for following through on a June itinerary. Obama had already put off departure by three days to press wavering lawmakers on healthcare, but the vote expected on Sunday in the House of Representatives will still be close.
While calling international alliances “critical to America’s security and economic progress,” Gibbs maintained that “health insurance reform is of paramount importance.” Mindful that the mid-term elections will be decided on domestic issues like jobs, the economy and healthcare, Obama
has been putting his main focus where the votes are.
Juggling priorities
Aides have insisted Obama is capable of juggling competing agendas and has no intention of skimping on international priorities. These include wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, nuclear standoffs with Iran and North Korea, strains with Russia and China, and elusive Middle East peace.
With Obama’s poll ratings down among voters and legislative battles occupying his attention, many analysts believe he will have less room to maneuver on the global stage. Gibbs dismissed the notion that delaying a major trip would send a negative message overseas about Obama’s commitment.
He said Obama still thinks the Pacific tour will be important but that he “believes that right now this is the place to be.” The trip was intended to build on Obama’s debut Asia tour last November, when he called himself America’s “first Pacific president” and which critics said yielded few tangible gains.
This time, Obama was to have focused on two countries that his aides numbered among a group of “middle powers” wielding growing clout internationally. They are also seen as counterweights to an increasingly assertive China, Washington’s biggest economic rival, at a time when Sino-U.S. tensions are high over Beijing’s currency practices, U.S. arms sales to Taiwan and Obama’s meeting last month with exiled Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama.
Aides framed the trip to the economically dynamic region as crucial to Obama’s vow to double U.S. exports in five years. Obama’s first stop was to have been in the U.S. territory of Guam, a hub of American military power in the Pacific, to underline Washington’s security commitment in the region.
Then he was headed to Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim nation, where he spent four years as a child and where he was to try to build on his outreach to Muslim world. After that, he was to have visited Australia, a linchpin U.S. friend in the Pacific and key military ally in Afghanistan.
Obama Effigy Hung at RI School with Fired Teachers
CENTRAL FALLS, KOMPAS.com – A teacher at a failing school where he and all his colleagues are being fired hung an effigy of President Barack Obama in his classroom, apparently in reaction to Obama's support of extreme measures to ensure accountability in schools.
The teachers union on Thursday condemned the effigy, discovered Monday in the teacher's third-floor classroom at Central Falls High School, saying it was wrong and cannot be condoned under any circumstances.
The effigy was found in the teacher's classroom by Superintendent Frances Gallo, Rhode Island Department of Education spokeswoman Nicole Shaffer told The Associated Press. Shaffer said the department would not have any further comment.
Gallo told the AP on Thursday evening that the foot-tall Obama doll that she saw Monday was hung from its feet from a white board and was holding a sign that said, "Fire Central Falls teachers."
"I was deeply saddened," Gallo said. "It's a horrific — a startling — kind of picture when you walk in and see that."
She said that the teacher had been issued a "strong letter of reprimand" and that she considered it an internal matter.
Obama had called the firings in Central Falls an example of holding failing schools accountable. The White House declined to comment Thursday. U.S. Secret Service spokesman Malcolm Wiley said the agency was aware of the doll but declined to comment further.
The president of the Central Falls Teachers Union, Jane Sessums, said in a written statement that the teacher, whose name wasn't disclosed, hung the doll "as part of what he described as a lesson plan."
A spokesman for the union said he could not immediately explain what that meant. He said he did not know how long the effigy had been in the classroom.
The union has been fighting the firings at Central Falls High School, one of the state's worst-performing schools.
All the school's teachers, administrators and support staff will lose their jobs after the end of the school year. Under a plan approved by the state to improve the school, fewer than half could be rehired next year.
Sessums said the teacher who hung the effigy verbally apologized to his students and asked Gallo if he could also apologize in writing.
"He understands that his actions affect not just his students but all of us," she wrote. "There is no excuse for what he did."
Several students and recent graduates interviewed by the AP on Thursday said they hadn't heard about the effigy, which was hung in an area of the school that's used for the English as a second language program. Those interviewed said they hadn't heard anyone expressing anger about Obama's comments, but many were disappointed.
"A lot of teachers supported Obama," said Karen Zuniga, who graduated last year and started a Facebook group to protest the firings.
"He hasn't even been here," said Jonathan Beltran, another 2009 graduate who opposes the firings. "He doesn't know what's going on."
Senior Valerie Florez said emotions have been running high among the school's teachers, with some telling students the firings are unfair and at least one breaking down in tears during class.
Update Panel in Ajax
Microsoft’s ASP.NET technology brings an object-oriented and event-driven programming model and unites it with the benefits of compiled code. However, its server-side processing model has several drawbacks inherent in the technology: Page updates require a round-trip to the server, which requires a page refresh. Round-trips do not persist any effects generated by Javascript or other client-side technology (such as Adobe Flash) During postback, browsers other than Microsoft Internet Explorer do not support automatically restoring the scroll position. And even in Internet Explorer, there is still a flicker as the page is refreshed. Postbacks may involve a high amount of bandwidth as the __VIEWSTATE form field may grow, especially when dealing with controls such as the GridView control or repeaters. There is no unified model for accessing Web Services through JavaScript or other client- side technology. Enter Microsoft’s ASP.NET AJAX extensions. AJAX, which stands for A synchronous J avaScript A nd X ML, is an integrated framework for providing incremental page updates via cross-platform JavaScript, composed of server-side code comprising the Microsoft AJAX Framework, and a script component called the Microsoft AJAX Script Library. The ASP.NET AJAX extensions also provide cross-platform support for accessing ASP.NET Web Services via JavaScript. This whitepaper examines the partial page updates functionality of the ASP.NET AJAX Extensions, which includes the ScriptManager component, the UpdatePanel control, and the UpdateProgress control, and considers scenarios in which they should or should not be utilized. This whitepaper is based on the Beta 2 release of the Visual Studio 2008 and the .NET Framework 3.5, which integrates the ASP.NET AJAX Extensions into the Base Class Library (where it was previously an add-on component available for ASP.NET 2.0). This whitepaper also assumes that you are using Visual Studio 2008 and not Visual Web Developer Express Edition; some project templates that are referenced may not be available to Visual Web Developer Express users…
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