LAPD is investigating the alleged brutal catfight that went down between Sharon Osbourne and a contestant on the VH1 reality show “Rock of Love: Charm School” who ended up in the hospital.

Megan Hauserman claims Sharon Osbourne went ballistic during a taping of the show”s reunion special Saturday night. She says Sharon ran across the stage of the show, grabbed Megan by her hair and would not let go.

Watch Sharon O in TV catfight

Hey let”s keep it real, when that bread stops rolling in from Bad Boy you have to do something to pay the bills and maintain an ounce of relevance.

Didn’t She Pose Nude For Free With Complex? lmao

The mainstream US media has been careful to balance images of Gazan suffering with those of Israelis, leading to accusations it is not reflecting the unequal death toll [EPA]

courtesy of Habib Battah

The images of two women on the front page of an edition of The Washington Post last week illustrates how mainstream US media has been reporting Israel’s war on Gaza.

On the left was a Palestinian mother who had lost five children. On the right was a nearly equally sized picture of an Israeli woman who was distressed by the fighting, according to the caption.

As the Palestinian woman cradled the dead body of one child, another infant son, his face blackened and disfigured with bruises, cried beside her.

The Israeli woman did not appear to be wounded in any way but also wept.

Arab frustration

To understand the frustration often felt in the Arab world over US media coverage, one only needs to imagine the same front page had the situation been reversed.

If an Israeli woman had lost five daughters in a Palestinian attack, would The Washington Post run an equally sized photograph of a relatively unharmed Palestinian woman, who was merely distraught over Israeli missile fire?

When the front page photographs of the two women were published on December 30, over 350 Palestinians had reportedly been killed compared to just four Israelis.

What if 350 Israelis had been killed and only four Palestinians - would the newspaper have run the stories side by side as if equal in news value?

Like many major news organisations in the US, The Washington Post has chosen to cover the conflict from a perspective that reflects the US government’s relationship with Israel. This means prioritising Israel’s version of events while underplaying the views of Palestinian groups.

For example, the newspaper’s lead article on Tuesday, which was published above the mothers’ photographs, quotes Israeli military and civilian sources nine times before quoting a single Palestinian. The first seven paragraphs explain Israel’s military strategy. The ninth paragraph describes the anxiety among Israelis, spending evenings in bomb shelters. Ordinary Palestinians, who generally have no access to bomb shelters, do not make an appearance until the 23rd paragraph.

To balance this top story, The Washington Post published another article on the bottom half of the front page about the Palestinian mother and her children. But would the paper have ever considered balancing a story about a massive attack on Israelis with an in-depth lead piece on the strategy of Palestinian militants?

Context stripped

Major US television channels also adopted the equal time approach, despite the reality that Palestinian casualties exceeded Israeli ones by a hundred fold. However, such comparisons were rare because the scripts read by American correspondents often excluded the overall Palestinian death count.

By stripping the context, American viewers may have easily assumed a level playing field, rather than a case of disproportionate force.

Take the opening lines of a report filed by NBC’s Martin Fletcher on December 30: “In Gaza two little girls were taking out the rubbish and killed by an Israeli rocket - while in Israel, a woman had been driving home and was killed by a Hamas rocket. No let up today on either side on the fourth day of this battle.”

Omitted from the report was the overall Palestinian death toll, dropped continuously in subsequent reports filed by NBC correspondents over the next several days.

When number of deaths did appear - sometimes as a graphic at the bottom of the screen - it was identified as the number of “people killed” rather than being attributed specifically to Palestinians.

No wonder the overwhelmingly asymmetrical bombardment of Gaza has been framed vaguely as “rising tensions in the Middle East” by news anchors.

With the lack of context, the power dynamic on the ground becomes unclear.

ABC news, for example, regularly introduced events in Gaza as “Mideast Violence”. And Like NBC, reporters excluded the Palestinian death toll.

On December 31, when Palestinian deaths stood at almost 400, ABC correspondent Simon McGergor-Wood began a video package by describing damage to an Israeli school by Hamas rockets.

The reporter’s script can be paraphrased as follows: Israel wanted a sustainable ceasefire; Israel needed to prevent Hamas from rearming; Hamas targets were hit; Israel was sending in aid and letting the injured out; Israel was doing “everything they can to alleviate the humanitarian crisis”. And with that McGregor-Wood signed off.

Palestinian perspective missing

There was no parallel telling of the Palestinian perspective, and no mention of any damages to Palestinian lives, although news agencies that day had reported five Palestinians dead.

For the ABC correspondent, it seemed the Palestinian deaths contained less news value than damage to Israeli buildings. His narration of events, meanwhile, amounted to no less than a parroting of the official Israeli line.

In fact, the Israeli government view typically went unchallenged on major US networks.

source:GAZA

It may be a bit early at the moment but I thought I would post this now as I’m out to party soon…its probably 2009 somewhere in the world anyway!

Forget about losing weight, quitting smoking/drinking/spending and every other vice you’ve enjoyed this year  I wish you a happy new year! Hopefully we will get alot better in 2009, I know that we still have much to do to the site, so you should see some exciting new features pop-up early next year.

Cheers for being part of it!

William Holla Esq.

click images above to enlarge

The concept started by Mat Brady. He wanted to get rid of his N95, but couldn’t get himself to buy an iPhone for the same reasons other people don’t like the iPhone. It lacks a good camera, it doesn’t have a physical keyboard, and it doesn’t have enough storage space.

Mat made his concept through photoshop and called it “iPhone Elite”- an iPhone with 60GB of storage, a true 16:9 aspect ratio, a slide-out keyboard, a one megapixel front camera for iChat, and a high quality camera, with optical zoom, and video capability.

Gizmodo expanded his idea and changed the keyboard up a bit, and added a Nintendo D-Pad.

Here is an email to Steve Jobs from Mat Brady

Hi Steve,

As you can see I’ve made a few design suggestions to your iPhone.
I’ve held off getting an iPhone until it gets a better camera. (See pic)

Let me know when I can get rid of my N95.

Cheers,

Mat Brady

SOURCE: [Gizmodo]

President-elect Barack Obama is at the top of everyone’s list this year. First, Barbara Walters picked the 44th president as the “most fascinating person of 2008″, now he has been named Time’s Person of the Year.

“Sorry, Oprah, Michael Phelps and David Cook, but Time’s Person of the Year is Barack Obama,” the magazine’s managing editor, Rick Stengel, announced on Wednesday’s Today show.

“He hit the American scene like a thunderclap, upended our politics, shattered decades of conventional wisdom and overcame centuries of the social pecking order,” Time reports in its cover story.

The president-elect, which was, by most predictions, the likeliest candidate for the publication’s yearly honor, was singled out for being a “transformational figure” in a transformational year, Stengel said on Today. He added that the two other possibilities for the distinction were the American voter or the economy.

Five others spotlighted by Time for their accomplishments in 2008 were, in order: Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, France’s President Nicolas Sarkozy, GOP vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin (”who either alienated or united people,” said Stengel) and Zhang Yimou, who directed the opening ceremony of summer’s Beijing Olympics, as reported by People.

Bush ducked that incoming shoe like Jackie Chan then had the nerve to laugh afterwards.