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British "Angle of the Beach" named Child of the Year Tilly Smith, the 11-year-old British girl, who was called as "Angle of the Beach", saved 100 tourists from a Thai beach hit by last year's tsunami and has been named Child of the Year by
readers of a French children's newspaper. She came ahead of a South African Aids orphan, a six-year-old girl who survived a kidnapping by paedophiles and a young Parisian pop singer to win the Mon Quotidien award. Tilly had studied tsunamis with her geography teacher, Andrew Kearney, shortly before flying to Thailand for a holiday with her parents and younger sister last year. As she watched the waves suddenly begin to recede, and the sea was bubbling,she warned her mother, Penny, that the beach was about to be struck by a tsunami. Mrs Smith and her husband, Colin, alerted other holidaymakers and hotel staff and scores of people were cleared from Maikhao beach at Phuket. Tilly, now 11, and back in Thailand for anniversary commemorations of the disaster, said: "It's really good, just to know about tsunamis or any natural hazard in case you are in one. "I'm very glad that I was able to say on the beach that a tsunami was coming. And I'm glad that they listened to me." She had earlier said that the state of the sea, which was "sizzling and bubbling" was "exactly the same as in my geography lesson". Tilly read a Thai poem entitled Tsunami at a candle-light vigil(守夜) to commemorate victims of the disaster. She is unaware of her remarkable popularity among French children. Her picture appears on the front page of Mon Quotidien, which is read by 10 to 14-year-olds. "Our readers chose Tilly because they could identify with her," said Fran?ois Dufour, the editor-in-chief. "To be a pop star at 11 seems impossible, and the idea of having Aids or being kidnapped is remote from their lives."
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Born Sofia Scicolone, on Sept. 20, 1934, in Rome. An illegitimate child of Romilda Villani and Riccardo Scicolone, she grew up in dire poverty, in the slums of Pozzuoli, just outside Naples during wartime. Her mother, a frustrated actress, instilled starring aspirations in the skinny little Sofia (she was nicknamed Stechetto--the stick--at the time). Her first taste of glamour came at fourteen when she was crowned one of twelve "Princesses of the Sea" in a beauty contest ---- an honor for which she earned a railroad ticket to Rome, and 23,000 lira (about $35). Sofia met producer and future husband Carlo Ponti while competing in another beauty
contest. Though she placed second, Ponti gave her a screen test and he advanced her career in a succession of low-budget Italian productions. Sofia Lazzaro, as she was then known, became Sophia Loren in 1952. Sophia then came to Hollywood. She signed a contract with Paramount for her first English-speaking role. Once on the set, she fell in love with her co-star Cary Grant. Though she had been involved romantically with Carlo Ponti (he was married with two children) from the age of eighteen, Sophia had suffered through years of frustration while he attempted to obtain an annulment from the church. Loren and Ponti, 24 years her senior, were married in 1957, following his Mexican divorce from his estranged wife. In 1961 she received an Academy Award for "La Ciociara" ("Two Women"). This beautiful lady then became one of the major sex symbol of the sixties, competing with Marilyn Monroe, Brigitte Bardot and Jane Fonda. Unfortunately the Italian law did not recognize the divorce and charged them with bigamy. They were forced to have their marriage annulled in 1962, and after four more years of frustration turned in their Italian passports and became citizens of France, where they were finally legally married in 1966. Sophia gained wider respect with her later movies like "Cassandra Crossing" (1976), "Una Giornata Particolare" (1977) and "Pret a Porter" (1994). A lot of her movies were produced by her husband.
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Ted Turner --the founder of CNN The walls of Ted Turner's international headquarters,14 floors above downtown Atlanta,are lined with Oscar statuettes.If you try to pick one up,for example,the actual best-production award for Casablanca,you will discover that they are all firmly bolted to their glass display shelves,and Turner's aides will break their frowns to laugh at you. Turner is the 63-year-old multibillionaire founder of CNN,former champion sailor,Rhett Butler lookalike and record-breaking philanthropist. Turner has just emerged from the worst two years of his life -- years that he has said left him feeling"suicidal".In spring 2000,he was suddenly sidelined from the broadcasting company he had built from scratch.Then his wife of eight years,the actress Jane Fonda,came home one night and informed him that she was now a born-again Christian;they divorced last year.Two of his grandchildren developed a rare genetic disorder,and one died.Turner's friends said he was inconsolable.Then,just when he felt it could get no worse,he brought the wrath of America upon himself by a speech in Rhode Island saying that the September 11 hijackers had been"brave".
Then he threw himself into his charity work.Turner's UN Foundation,the biggest of his three charities,recently spent $22.2 in one month combating intestinal parasites in Vietnamese children,reducing China's greenhouse-gas emissions and helping women from Burkina Faso start businesses selling nut butter. Nigel Pritchard,CNN's head of international public relations,who is sitting beside me,has prepared a memo outlining some things his boss might like to consider not saying.It politely suggests that he might steer clear of talking about AOL Time Warner,and,specifically,he might like to avoid reference to that Rhode Island speech.Turner is notorious for doing as he pleases.Early in his career,he made a pitch wearing no clothes to advertising executives;later,he went to Cuba to get Fidel Castro to tape a promotional slot for CNN. He has various worldsaving projects:from preventing the extinction of the Chiricahua leopard frog in the wilds of New Mexico to founding an influential nuclear non-proliferation institute.Turner really does seem to see himself as locked in a personal battle against apocalypse.He doesn't just give money:his staff are sometimes taken aback to see him skulking in the streets nearby,picking up litter. When Turner gave his first billion to the UN,he dropped 67 laces on the Forbes 500 rich list,out of the top 10 for ever.(His fortune now stands at$ 3.8 bn.) It isn't hard to see how Turner's childhood might have instilled this sense of permanent crisis,of desperate insecurity,behind the frenzied activity that is his trademark.His father,from whom he inherited an advertising business that he turned into CNN,was prone to fits of rage,and beat him with a coathanger;he committed suicide when Turner was24.Even before that,his younger sister had died from an immune disease when she was 12,and Ted was sent to a boarding school he hated.His father,he has said,not without admiration,believed that instilling insecurity in his son would help him to achieve.All in all,Turner seems to have been a well-qualified candidate for total psychic collapse."But when everything goes wrong,"he says today,"you can either give up or you can try to fight.I tried to fight." After a brief spell in the armed forces,he ploughed his energies into his father's billboard business,purchasing a radio station and using empty billboards to advertise it.His radio empire grew,and expanded to local television.By 1980,he was launching CNN,although it was not until the Gulf war that the often-derided channel came into its own.He created the Cartoon Network,and bought hundreds of old MGM films,which he recycled on another lucrative channel,Turner Classic Movies.His firm eventually merged with Time Warner.But then came AOL,and Gerald Levin,the chief executive of the new giant,decided he didn't need Turner -- or perhaps couldn't tolerate his unpredictability.Levin is gone now,and his replacement,Richard Parsons,has brought Turner back into the fold in a new vice-chairman position.The line from corporate communications is that Turner is back in the saddle.But this is not how Turner sees it.
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George Soros -- the financial crocodile George Soros wants to be the Bono of the financial world. The speculator whose assault on sterling ejected Britain from the European exchange rate mechanism that September of 10 years ago has a mission--to use his esti-mated £5 bn fortune and his fame to help tackle what he sees as the failures of globalisation. The idea that a man who made billions betting on the financial markets sides with the anti-globalisation movement might strike some as ironic. Soros is clearly genuinely appalled at the damage wrought on vulnerable economies by the vast sums of money which flow across national borders every day. "The US governs the international system to protect its own economy. It is not in charge of protecting other economies, "he says. "So when America goes into recession, you have anti-recessionary policies. When other countries are in recession, they don't have the ability to engage in anti-recessionary policies because they can't have a permissive monetary policy, because money would flee. "In person, he has the air of a philosophy professor rather than a gimlet-eyed financier. In a soft voice which bears the traces of his native Hungary, he argues that it is time to rewrite the so-called Washington consensus--the cocktail of liberalisation, privatisation and fiscal rectitude which the IMF has been preaching for 15 years. Developing countries no longer have the freedom to run their own economies, he argues, even when they follow perfectly sound policies. He cites Brazil, which although it has a floating currency and manageable public debt was paying ten times over the odds to borrow from capital markets. Soros, who at one stage after the fall of the Berlin Wall was providing more assistance to Russia than the US government, believes in practising what he preaches.His Open Society Institute has been pivotal in helping eastern European countries develop democratic societies and market economies. Soros has the advantage of an insider's knowledge of the workings of global capitalism, so his criticism is particularly pointed. Last year, the Soros foundation's network spent nearly half a billion dollars on projects in education, public health and promoting democracy, making it one of the world's largest private donors. Soros credits the anti-globalisation movement for having made companies more sensitive to their wider responsibilities."I think [the protesters] have made an important contribution by making people aware of the flaws of the system, "he says."People on the street had an impact on public opinion and corporations which sell to the public responded to that."Because the IMF has abandoned billion dollar bailouts for troubled economies, he thinks a repeat of the Asian crisis is unlikely.The fund's new"tough love"policy--for which Argentina is the guinea pig -- has other consequences. The bailouts were a welfare system for Wall Street, with western taxpayers rescuing the banks from the consequences of unwise lending to emerging economies. Now the IMF has drawn a line in the sand, credit to poor countries is drying up."It has created a new problem--the inadequacy of the flow of capital from centre to the periphery, " he says.
The one economy Soros is not losing any sleep about is the US."I am much more positive about the underlying economy than I am about the market, because we are waging war not only terrorism but also on recession, "he says."Although we don't admit it, we are actually applying Keynesian remedies, and I am a confirmed Keynesian. I have not yet seen an economy in recession when you are gearing up for war."He worries that the world's largest economic power is not living up to its responsibilities."I would like the United States to live up to the responsibilities of its hegemonic power because it is not going to give up its hegemonic power, "he says."The only thing that is realistic is for the United States to become aware that it is in its enlightened self-interest to ensure that the rest of the world benefits from their role."
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Bringing Back Honor When Ensign Andrew Lee Muns suddenly vanished nearly 34 years ago, the U.S. Navy branded him a deserter and a thief. It was 1968; the U.S. was waging an increasingly unpopular war in Vietnam and sailors went missing all the time. Muns was the new paymaster aboard the USS Cacapon, a refueling ship based at Subic Bay in the Philippines. When he dissapeared, the Navy discovered that $8,600 was missing from the ship's safe; since Muns had access to safe, officials decided that he had taken the money and run. Case closed. But Muns' sister, Mary Lou Taylor, couldn't accept the official version of her brother's disappearance. She vowed to uncover the truth and restore her family's honor. "It broke my father's heart … He literally had a heart attack three years later," said Taylor." I'm not blaming the Navy for his heart attack, but it was harder than just losing a son." In the mid-1970s, after years of holding out hope that Muns might return, his family decided to have him declared legally dead. But when they asked the Navy to supply an American flag to present to his family at the memorial service, the Navy refused . Eventually, Taylor decided to change that. She turned to the Internet, posting a message on a Vietnam veterans' message board looking for sailors who served with her brother on the Cacapon. In a stroke of luck, a former member of that crew, Tim Rosaire, had just logged on to the bulletin board for the first time. "I instantly knew what it was," he said. "I wrote her back saying, 'Yes, and I may have been one of the last people to see him." "I knew him well enough to know that he wouldn't have stolen the money," said Rosaire, who supplied Taylor with names and some photographs of other crew members.
Taylor tracked down the ship's captain, only to learn that he had recently died. But his widow told Taylor her husband had been haunted by Muns' disappearance, suspecting that Muns may have been the victim of foul play. Taylor combed through the Navy's original reports of the investigation, and found things that didn't add up. "There were people on the ship who were deliberately lying to create a motive for why Andy would have left," she concluded. And while $8,600 was missing, there was $51,000 left the safe. If her brother had stolen the money, why not all of it? The Muns family wanted the case reopened, but the Navy said substantial new evidence was needed to do so. So in the mid-1990s, Taylor set out to find that evidence. She found the agent who had originally investigated the case for the Naval Investigative Service, Ray McGady. McGady helped Taylor get the attention of Pete Hughes, head of the newly created "cold-case" squad at the Naval Criminal Investigative Service. Hughes soon agreed that there were a number of questions that remained unanswered. Thirty years later, for the first time, the focus now shifted from a theft to a homicide. Hughes assembled a team of homicide investigators, including a criminal profiler. They studied the statements from 1968 and began reinterviewing crew members. Suspicion began to focus on several former crew members, including Michael LeBrun, He had access to the safe and was one of the first to suggest that Muns might have deserted. Eventually, LeBrun's defenses crumbled, and he described in detail how he had strangled Muns. He said that he had stolen the money and that Muns had caught him. LeBrun said he panicked and killed the ensign. Lebrun explained how he dumped the body in one of the ship's huge oil tanks. Muns' body was never found. The interview was recorded on videotape. Lebrun was charged with murder. But he pleaded not guilty and is out on bail. A federal judge has agreed, in part, ruling that prosecutors cannot use the videotaped confession because LeBrun's constitutional rights were violated. Without a legal and reliable confession, the government does not have much of a case. But Taylor said she finally got what she was looking for. 33 years after Muns disappeared aboard the Cacapon, a ceremonial casket covered with an American flag made its way to a gravesite in Arlington National Cemetery. Friends, family and naval criminal investigators came from around the country to watch as Muns was given full honors in recognition of his service to the Navy and his country.