Ashlee Simpson and husband Pete Wentz have welcomed their first child, a boy.
Bronx Mowgli Wentz - who weighed 7 lbs, 11 oz, and was 20.5 inches long - was born Thursday night, a spokesperson for the couple confirms to Usmagazine.com.
“Proud new parents Pete Wentz and Ashlee Simpson-Wentz welcomed new son, Bronx Mowgli Wentz, late this evening,” the rep tells Us. “Ashlee, Pete and baby Bronx are all healthy and happy, and thank everyone for their well wishes!”
Look back at Ashlee Simpson’s baby bump.
Us Weekly first broke the news that Simpson, 24, and Wentz, 29, were expecting in April.
“Carrying a child is the most inspiring, emotional, amazing experience of my life,” Simpson wrote on her MySpace page. “My weight and my pant size are the absolute last thing I am concerned about. I am only concerned with having a healthy pregnancy and a healthy baby.”
During her pregnancy, Wentz — whom she wed in May — doted on her, often fetching her No. 1 craving: green olives.
He said she wanted “green olives on everything! You always have to be ready.”
See what other pregnant stars snacked on.
As her due date neared, Wentz said Simpson couldn’t wait to give birth.
“She’s excited, she’s anxious… I think she wants it to be over,” he recently said on Ryan Seacrest’s KIIS-FM radio show. “She just wants to not be pregnant any more. She wants to have it because it’s, like, a struggle to go up and down the stairs … going out in public’s insane.”
(As for the baby’s name, Bronx, Wentz said his goal was to make sure his kid would have a moniker that would work as either “a rock star or a senator.” What do these famous baby names mean?)
No doubt Ashlee’s sister Jessica Simpson is thrilled: In September, she said she couldn’t wait to be an aunt.
Play Us’ Guess the Simpson Sister quiz.
“I’m going to spoil the kid rotten, that’s for sure,” she said. “I think my sister’s going to be pretty strict, actually, because she’s been so good throughout her pregnancy.”
MIAMI - D’Zhana Simmons says she felt like a “fake person” for 118 days when she had no heart beating in her chest. “But I know that I really was here,” the 14-year-old said, “and I did live without a heart.”
As she was being released Wednesday from a Miami hospital, the shy teen seemed in awe of what she’s endured. Since July, she’s had two heart transplants and survived with artificial heart pumps - but no heart - for four months between the transplants.
Last spring D’Zhana and her parents learned she had an enlarged heart that was too weak to sufficiently pump blood. They traveled from their home in Clinton, S.C. to Holtz Children’s Hospital in Miami for a heart transplant.
But her new heart didn’t work properly and could have ruptured so surgeons removed it two days later.
And they did something unusual, especially for a young patient: They replaced the heart with a pair of artificial pumping devices that kept blood flowing through her body until she could have a second transplant.
Dr. Peter Wearden, a cardiothoracic surgeon at Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh who works with the kind of pumps used in this case, said what the Miami medical team managed to do “is a big deal.”
“For (more than) 100 days, there was no heart in this girl’s body? That is pretty amazing,” Wearden said.
The pumps, ventricular assist devices, are typically used with a heart still in place to help the chambers circulate blood. With D’Zhana’s heart removed, doctors at Holtz Children’s Hospital crafted substitute heart chambers using a fabric and connected these to the two pumps.
Although artificial hearts have been approved for adults, none has been federally approved for use in children. In general, there are fewer options for pediatric patients. That’s because it’s rarer for them to have these life-threatening conditions, so companies don’t invest as much into technology that could help them, said Dr. Marco Ricci, director of pediatric cardiac surgery at the University of Miami.
He said this case demonstrates that doctors now have one more option.
“In the past, this situation could have been lethal,” Ricci said.
And it nearly was. During the almost four months between her two transplants, D’Zhana wasn’t able to breathe on her own half the time. She also had kidney and liver failure and gastrointestinal bleeding.
Taking a short stroll - when she felt up for it - required the help of four people, at least one of whom would steer the photocopier-sized machine that was the external part of the pumping devices.
When D’Zhana was stable enough for another operation, doctors did the second transplant on Oct. 29.
“I truly believe it’s a miracle,” said her mother, Twolla Anderson.
D’Zhana said now she’s grateful for small things: She’ll see her five siblings soon, and she can spend time outdoors.
“I’m glad I can walk without the machine,” she said, her turquoise princess top covering most of the scars on her chest. After thanking the surgeons for helping her, D’Zhana began weeping.
Doctors say she’ll be able to do most things that teens do, like attending school and going out with friends. She will be on lifelong medication to keep her body from rejecting the donated heart, and there’s a 50-50 chance she’ll need another transplant before she turns 30.
For now, though, D’Zhana is looking forward to celebrating another milestone. On Saturday, she turns 15 and plans to spend the day riding in a boat off Miami’s coast.
Source:Yahoo
Blake Christina Lively (born August 25, 1987) is an American actress. She stars in the book-based TV series Gossip Girl as Serena van der Woodsen. She has also appeared in several films including Accepted and The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants as well as its sequel, The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2.
Early life
Lively, the youngest of five children, was born in Tarzana, California, the daughter of actors Ernie and Elaine Lively. Lively has two sisters, Lori and Robyn, and two brothers, Jason and Eric. Both of her parents and all four of her siblings are, or have been, in the entertainment industry. “My mom and dad always taught acting, so instead of getting me babysitters, they would just bring me to class,” Lively recalls.Her brother-in-law is Bart Johnson.
As a child, Lively was homeschooled (one of her homeschool classmates was actor and future boyfriend Penn Badgley).Lively attended Burbank High School in Burbank where she participated in Burbank High School’s show choir, In Sync, and was a cheerleader.[3] Lively stated in a interview for the August 2008 Seventeen magazine that she attended thirteen schools. She wanted to attend Stanford University.Lively was not at all interested in acting but during the summer between her junior and senior year of high school, her brother made his agent send her out on a few auditions. Of the two auditions, she got the role of Bridget for The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants.
Career
Lively started out in film with a bit role in Sandman in 1998. In 2005, Lively played Bridget in The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, for which she received a Teen Choice Award nomination for “Choice Movie Breakout - Female.” She reprised the role in 2008 in the sequel, The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2. She starred in Accepted, Simon Says, and Elvis and Anabelle in 2006. She received the Breakthrough Award from Hollywood Life for her role in Accepted in December 2006.
Lively was cast in the CW’s series Gossip Girl which premiered in September 2007. She plays Serena van der Woodsen in the teen drama.While rumors of infighting among the Gossip Girl co-stars have circulated in the tabloids, Lively denies that there is any unfriendly competition on-set. “The media is always trying to pit us against each other,” she said in an interview, “I guess because it’s just not interesting to say, ‘Everyone gets along; everybody just works 18-hour days and goes home to sleep.’ That’s not fun to read, I guess.” Her first magazine cover was the November 2007 issue of Cosmo Girl, where she discussed her time in high school and her career prior to Gossip Girl.She has since appeared on the January 2008 cover of shopping magazine Lucky. She has more recently appeared on the March 2008 cover of Teen Vogue, as well as the May 2008 cover of NYLON with her Gossip Girl co-star Leighton Meester. She appeared on the cover of “Seventeen”’s August 2008 issue. The star also was on the cover of “Girls’ Life”’s August 2008 issue, along with The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants costars Amber Tamblyn, Alexis Bledel, and America Ferrera. More recently Lively also appeared on the cover of “Cosmopolitan”’s September 2008 issue. Lively was also featured in a Saturday Night Live skit entitled “Murray Hill” alongside James Franco.
Personal life
Lively dated actor Kelly Blatz from 2004 to 2007; the two had been friends since childhood.In late 2007, rumors circulated that Lively was dating her Gossip Girl costar and former childhood classmate Penn Badgley.In May 2008, People magazine published photos of the two kissing while on vacation in Mexico.Lively and Badgley have since become more open about their relationship. The relationship is a favorite topic of the tabloids.
In October 2008, Lively appeared alongside Badgley in a MoveOn.org campaign ad in support of Presidential candidate Barack Obama.
Lively is also something of a clothes horse, and she admits to owning an impressive amount of handbags. “I probably have, like, 60 gorgeous bags,” she told a reporter
It is of course sad that Madonna and Guy Ritchie’s relationship should end in divorce after 7½ years - the couple have three children: her daughter Lourdes, 12, their son Rocco, 8, and David, 3, who was adopted from Malawi in 2006. But it also goes to show that Madonna, despite being a glo-bal superstar worth £300m, remains a perfect mirror for her female fan base - by which I mean those of us who have liked her since she sprang on the scene in the mid1980s in cheap lace and rosary beads, with a wink in one eye and a steely glint in the other.
(Quick recap for our younger readers: pre-Madonna, being a young woman who was explicit about what she wanted, and being seen to work hard to get there, was simply not done. You had to shrug and little-me and self-deprecate, preferably while wearing a scrubbed face, giant specs and some sort of hideous sackcloth. PostMadonna, no girl is embarrassed about voicing ambition, or about going haring after it with all guns blazing. Her influence and achievements are hard to overstate.)
Unusually for a celebrity, Madonna’s private life seems real, and thus provokes empathy rather than derision. This may be because it so closely echoes that of lesser mortals. She does what we do, for the reasons we do it. She did it two decades ago, by being pert and batting her eye-lashes at anything that moved, and - rather remarkably - she’s still doing it now, by getting divorced.
Unlike her male counterparts, whose entire life trajectory seems to involve going from badly behaved, priapic rock star to really old, slightly tragic badly behaved, priapic rock star, Madonna has evolved in a recognisably human and very female fashion.
Times Archive, 1985: Madonna’s flirt rock phenomenon comes under fire
American feminists accuse the brazen 26-year-old superstar of setting the cause of women back years
Despite the millions and the sold-out stadiums and the awards and the deification, she remains one of us, buffeted in similar ways by the vagaries of children and relationships, finding it hard to juggle work and home and ambition and wifehood despite being a squillionaire superstar.
Compare and contrast with, say, Victoria Beckham: even though Madonna is considerably older, richer, more successful and more globally famous, her tribulations are resonant in a way that Posh’s could never be.
Never mind the enduring brilliance of Madonna’s self-created “brand” or the many reinventions of her stage persona, fabulous though they are. The real appeal is in the twists her life has taken, and the way they always seem to echo the experiences of “ordinary” women.
Take this latest instal-ment. The divorce rate may be falling nationally, but the number of older people - especially women - seeking an end to their unhappy marriage is on the up. Madonna is in the same boat as many of the women who cheered her first Top of the Pops appearance in 1984.
The soon-to-be-former Mrs Ritchie remains the zeitgeist queen, a one-woman barometer of where women are at. To mix metaphors, it’s as if she’s the digital image and we’re the pixels.
We may not prance around on stage aged 50, looking freakishly toned and wearing tiny leotards, but, like Madonna, many of us were bad girls in our twenties, good girls (and mothers) in our thirties and divorced at some point in the following decade or two.
Madonna did all of this with knobs on, as befitted her status. She was thrillingly bad, like when she took off all her clothes and hung out in lesbian leather bars for her brilliantly subversive book Sex - brilliant because, having made a career out of cheerfully inclusive, equal-opportunities sluttishness, so that every lardy middle American thought he was in with a chance, she suddenly revealed herself to be so comprehensively and terrifyingly sexually knowing that every male commentator in the US and Europe felt she’d “gone too far”.
Really, all she’d done was show her enormous fan base what a woman in control of her sexuality looked like, and shocked them to the core by suggesting it perhaps wasn’t quite as cute as Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman - a heroic act for which we should all be thankful, and which is still a welcome corrective to the hundreds of little wan-nabe starlets writhing on a TV screen near you in a depressing, male-scripted parody of sexiness.
Having scared men into anxious detumescence for a little while, Madonna then became reassuringly “normal”. She had her first child, Lourdes, by a man with whom she didn’t stay, Carlos Leon, adding single motherhood to her bow (though she and Leon remained on good terms). Eventually she got married, like you do.
The party was at Skibo castle, which is a pop star’s grand version of a marquee in your parents’ back garden - that is to say, traditional and old-fashioned, with stiff flower arrangements and linen napkins.
She became a devoted Anglophile, claiming to like bitter and sprinkling her speech with bits of cockney: again, she was doing what women do, especially in the first flush of a new relationship, which is to love everything about their boyfriend and adopt it as their own - see sudden newfound passions for West Ham or random bands or hiking.
She had another baby, Rocco, and took to hosting shoots and weekend house parties at her Wiltshire country house, Ashcombe, which had once belonged to Cecil Beaton. Granted, she probably had armies of staff and three nannies on call 24/7 and perhaps never knew the drudgey exhaustion that comes from caring for young children, but still. Her fans from back in the 1980s were going through similar motions, relatively new to both marriage and motherhood, not entirely comfortable yet with hanging up their clubbing clothes, feeling as though they were playing at being grown-up.
Madonna, with her wholesome, moralistic children’s books and demure little dresses, made all of us feel a bit better about domesticity: she seemed awfully keen on it, ‘‘which gave the rest of us hope.
Aside from anything else, she made it seem glamorous and satisfying.
It was comforting to us to see that just as we were asking ourselves all of those tricky questions about trading in a fun-filled youth for motherhood and fidelity and early nights, Madonna had already embraced them all. Nigella Lawson is, rightly, credited for glamorising domestic life, but Madonna has arguably played an equally large part for women of my generation.
Now, aged 50 and with little left to prove, she’s readying herself to go solo - like so many women for whom domestic bliss left a great deal to be desired, and who, postchildren, postproperty and financially secure, get the distinct feeling that marriage is overrated and that they’d be happier baling out and pottering about on their own.As is often the case, divorce at a later age, for Madonna, isn’t theimpromptu version of divorce from one’s youth: by all accounts, the Ritchies have tried hard to make their marriage work, to reach compromises and to come up with solutions that would be least damaging to their family life. However, their attempts - which are rumoured to have included mouthing “empowering”, loving words at each other, such as “macho” and “goddess” (a technique that seems so demented and juvenile that I very much hope the rumour is baseless) - have failed.
Madonna has reputedly hired the redoubtable Fiona Shackleton, who has represented the Prince of Wales and, more recently, Sir Paul McCart-ney. Friends of the couple say the split is as amicable as splits can be, and that Ritchie is expected to behave in a gentlemanly fashion: the antiHeather Mills, if you like.
The separation, long rumoured, was confirmed last Wednesday in a joint statement issued through Madonna’s spokeswoman, Liz Rosenberg. “Madonna and Guy Ritchie have agreed to divorce after 7½ years of marriage, their representatives confirmed today. They have both requested that the media maintain respect for their family at this difficult time.”
The gossip mill had been in overdrive since last summer. Guy found his wife too controlling, apparently (which is a bit like Mrs Khan suddenly noticing that Genghis had a wee aggressive streak); she was said to be keen on adopting more children, unlike him; he allegedly found it hard to deal with her continuing success while his own star had been on the wane for years; he wasn’t as devoted to Kabbalah, a bonkers-seeming celebrity offshoot of Judaism, as she was; etc etc. And he wasn’t as famous as her: he would always be Mr Madonna, which can hardly have come as a massive surprise, but which must still have rankled.
According to reports, the point at which the Ritchie marriage became irredeemably doomed was three years ago, on Madonna’s 47th birthday, when she fell off her horse and sustained serious injuries - shebroke four ribs, her collarbone, her scapula and a knuckle in her left hand, and later called the accident “the most painful event of my life”.
A “family friend” quoted last week said Madonna expected her husband to drop everything to be by her side. Ritchie, though, “approached the whole thing in what [Madonna] called ‘a very British way’: instead of smothering her with sympathy, he said, ‘Come on, darling, you’re a tough bird - you’ll be back on the horse in no time’”.
Americans aren’t good at being told to buck up at the best of times; a spoilt American pop star was never going to take well to being asked to grin and bear it.
Ritchie is British enough to cringe at the idea of making an unnecessary fuss about anything; his wife is American enough to see brisk, British admonitions about pulling oneself together as signs of monstrous cal-lousness and disengagement. Madonna was apparently so incensed by Ritchie’s apparent lack of sympathy that she told him their marriage was a mistake, and that he was not her “soulmate” after all.
Horses aside, what it boils down to, if you believe the rumours - which I do, because some of them come from close to the source - is that Madonna, and Madonna’s needs and Madonna’s desires, had an emasculating effect on her husband; that she noticed, didn’t find it especially attractive and agreed that enough was enough.
This is the story of many a modern divorce: forget infidelity or arguments over money - what kills many marriages today is the erosion of roles that had been clearly demarcated for centuries. It’s not just that Madonna is perfectly in tune with the zeitgeist when it comes to middle-aged women. It’s more that, in an Everywoman double whammy, her relationship has failed for particularly zeitgeisty and resonant reasons, which will be familiar to many “ordinary” couples.
It goes like this. Youmeet each other. You’re doing well; things are going swimmingly at work for both of you; you feel like equals (when Ritchie met Madonna, he was a hot young director, whose film Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels was a worldwide success, and of whom great things were expected).
Fast forward a few years and add children, and sooner or later one of you will get to the point where they can’t shake off the feeling that their star is on the wane while their spouse’s continues to rise. (Ritchie’s subsequent movies were increasingly poorly received; Swept Away, starring Madonna as a rich, spoilt social-ite “tamed” and humiliated by a sailor, came in for particular ridicule, though Ritchie probably rather liked the plot.)
Worse, the wife knows who she is (she’s Madonna!), she’s good at her job, she knows what she wants and she’s not really in the business of playing doormats to soothe wounded male egos. Aside from anything else, she’s busy.
As the months and years pass, her husband’s lack of success - and,sure as eggs is eggs, growing self-pity - do not elicit cooing sympathy, but irritation. The more irritation she displays, the more emasculated he becomes. And the more emasculated he becomes, the more irritated she feels.
It’s an unoriginal vicious circle, one that is played out in tens of thousands of homes every day, because this whole scenario is one of the side effects of the whole working-women debate - never mind what going out to work does to children: it also does extraordinary, and underreported, things to marriages. Even if you’re Madonna.
Ritchie, meanwhile, is a geezer - an artificially created, public-school-educated geezer, but a geezer none the less, if only by osmosis. (Though I wonder what his wife thought when she first realised that he wasn’t really some East End sexy gangster type but the stepson of a baronet. She may have felt a bit swizzed.)
He is a bloke. The thing about blokes is that blokeishness is all they can do: they operate in really only one register. Their requirements arefew and not complex: respect, which is to say admiration, tops the list, not just from colleagues or the world at large, but also from the missus.
For men, respect is usually measured by professional success: lose professional success and respect becomes thin on the ground. People may really like the way you’re so sweet with your children, but in Geezer World, sweetness doesn’t really boost self-esteem.
The second requisite for blokes is feeling desirable, in every sense: a geezer is nothing if he can’t pull birds (wife included). But the wife who no longer especially respects him may find it hard to muster up urgent sexual desire, especially if he’s wandering about looking all Eeyorish and glum and exudingfailure; and, of course, if his wife is Madonna, I expect the prospect of other birds is more trouble than it’s worth.
The third necessity is food and drink - geezers are a bit like plants. The food needs to be normal, unfortunately for Ritchie, who strikes one as a cottage-pie man whose wife follows a strict macrobiotic diet. The drink needs to be plentiful, and the drinking should preferably be carried out in all-male group sessions. (Perhaps this is why Madonna and Ritchie bought their local pub, the Punchbowl, in the spring.)
As I say, simple requirements - but ones that are, for the Ritchies as for many modern couples, almost wholly incompatible with the realities of everyday life. Women no longer have the time - or the inclination, necessarily - to soothe the troubled, self-pitying male brow. It sounds a callous thing to say, but for working women there isn’t much incentive: it’s not as if you want them to chuck you a tenner or take you out for a slap-up dinner or buy you a pretty dress, because you can do all of those things for yourself.
As love fades, the realisation that it might be an awful lot easier to do it for yourself becomes overwhelming; the gloomy, slightly broken husband becomes surplus to requirements. And then you call your lawyer.
Women equate sexiness with success, unless they are especially charitable. The lure of the alpha male is still strong: marrying an alpha, packed to the gills with confidence and self-belief as Ritchie used to be, and watching him turn into a beta, and then a gamma, and then go plummeting towards omega-hood, is more than many women can take.
Madonna’s marriage has gone wrong for all the modern reasons, which is apt, because she is all the aspects of modern womanhood rolled into one. You do slightly get the feeling that there is no hope for modern marriage, because if she, with all her determination and resourcefulness and loathing of failure, can’t manage to make hers work, then there is little hope for the rest of us.
But then perhaps modern marriage is old-fashioned already and needs reinventing. Celebrity divorces certainly do, and I have opti-mistically high hopes about the Ritchies on this front: they seem real enough, human enough, to understand that the three-ring circus, with incredible flying insults and paparazzi dangling from trapezes, is not especially edifying or indeed healthy.
It would be nice if, as has been suggested, the dissolution of the Ritchie union didn’t make it to court and a settlement was privately agreed. Neither Madonna nor Ritchie seems a hysterical type, and they must both have mourned the demise of their marriage over the past few months: the wailing-and-gnashing-of-teeth part is presumably over already.
All that remains is for them to go forward, in as elegant a fashion as possible, and for Madonna to begin to incarnate the mantra by which so many women now live: I have children, I have a house, I have work and I am free. She’s going to be a great ambassadress.
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After being treated at the Lilavati hospital in Mumbai for a week, Bollywood megastar Big B was discharged on Friday. While thousands of fans thronged to catch a glimpse of the star and to wish him well, Big B himself appeared miffed with the media. The latest entrant to the blogging world, Bachchan wrote about his fans. “Your love overwhelms me. Your concern for my well being humbles me. I owe so much to you,” said Big B.
But Big B took a dig at the media as well and said: “There is a muted silence outside. No one says a word, except the media. They clamour and scream for that exclusive shot, invading the sanctity of the ambulance. They would never understand the sensitivity of the situation.” He added: “Media is an added hindrance to a smooth, quick emergent ride to Nanavati. If they had their way they would ideally want to be seated on the stretcher with me and have me answering questions - ‘What would be the celebrations sir and will you be inviting Shah Rukh’?”
The Big B also explained his ailment and said it was intestinal obstruction. Either twisted or stuck or compressed and not functional.He said he was admitted in the same room 1101 where his mother was in for almost two years before she died in December last year. In pain, he shut his eyes and recalled his letter to her in 1948, ma..aap jaldi wapas aa jao. Mujhe aap ki bahut yaad aati hai. Mere pet mein dard ho raha hai! (Ma..come back soon. I remember you a lot. I have pain in my stomach).
Describing what happened to him in the early hours of his birthday last week, he said he woke up in pain at around 2.30 am and thought it was due to generous eats over dinner. “But, when the discomfort persisted, I tried to walk it over and not disturb the family. Since there was no relief, I called in my doctor and the medication administered had no effect. There was concern on the doctor’s face and a look of ‘I knew it’ on Jaya’s face. For the past few months, she has had instincts that something will go wrong with my health,” Bachchan wrote.
Bachchan said a painting in his office reflects the image of when he lay in the ICU during his Coolie accident and on occasion he has joked about it to visitors as a moment in his second home. “May be I should stop saying that. It’s turning out to be true!!” he added.
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Volumes on personal stereos are likely to be restricted by regulators because of fears that MP3 players and “in-ear” phones are damaging hearing.
Up to a tenth of users are listening to music at levels that could cause permanent hearing loss after five years, an influential scientific commission has found.
Personal music players are allowed to reach 100 decibels. But with “in-ear” headphones the actual sound at the eardrum can reach 120dB.
A report from the European Union’s Scientific Committee on Emerging and Newly Identified Health Risks said that there was a danger from long-term exposure to music pumped into the ears above 89dB.
The committee said that rising numbers of people were plugging themselves into loud music every day for journeys to and from school or work.
It found that MP3 devices were a greater risk to hearing than cassette players because of their ability to reproduce sounds at very high volumes without loss of quality. Last year MP3 devices accounted for 83 per cent of all personal music players sold, and about a fifth of new mobile telephones also feature a digital music player.
The committee said: “In the last few years, leisure noise has become a significant threat to hearing because it can reach very high volumes and because an increasing proportion of the population is exposed to it, particularly young people.”
A British study found that 6.9 per cent of people aged 18 to 25 played their personal stereos louder than 90dB. The Royal National Institute for Deaf People has calculated that more than two thirds of young people who regularly use MP3 players face premature hearing damage.
As well as hearing loss and tinnitus, loud noise can also affect the memory, attention, school performance and may even lead to higher blood pressure, according to some studies.
Apple, which makes the iPod, the most popular personal music player, has already introduced software that allows users to set volume limits, after being ordered to remove them from sale in France. In 2006 an American legal action claimed that Apple had failed to take adequate steps to prevent hearing loss because the iPod could produce up to 115dB.
Personal music players are used daily by up to 100 million people across Europe. Add up the hours and the decibels, and the number in the EU risking permanent hearing loss is put at between 2.5 million and ten million people.
The scientific committee has concluded that the hearing loss is negligible at sound levels below 80dB - a feasible new maximum limit for portable stereos.
The study did not, however, address the other risk to the personal music generation - a thump from their neighbours on trains and in streets from irritating noise “leakage” from their high-volume music.
The commission simply observed: “Environmental sounds to which the general public is exposed - such as noise from traffic, construction, aircraft or from the neighbourhood - can be very irritating but are in most cases not loud enough to harm hearing.”
Meglena Kuneva, the EU Consumer Affairs Commissioner, said: “I am concerned that so many young people, in particular, who are frequent users of personal music players and mobile phones at high acoustic levels, may be unknowingly damaging their hearing irrevocably.
“We need to look again at the controls in place, in the light of this scientific advice, to make sure they are fully effective and keep pace with new technology.”
The European Commission is organising a conference to discuss the findings and is expected to recommend a reduction in the maximum legal volume of portable players.
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ROUND 1
Hopkins came to the ring at his intimidating best. He was wearing a black rope with a black executioner’s mask. The near-sellout crowd of 11,332 seems very pro-Pavlik, roaring every mention of his name. Pavlik flicks a jab as the round opens. Hook by Pavlik is short. Hopkins lands a left hook to the body. Jab and a right to the body by Hopkins. Pavlik lands a right to the body. Right to the jaw by Hopkins. Left to the body by Hopkins. Right to the body by Hopkins, who is very energetic. They battle inside and referee Benjy Esteves warns Hopkins about holding the head. Short left by Pavlik.
Iole scores it 10-9, Hopkins
ROUND 2
Left hook by Hopkins connects hard, then a hook to the body and a right to the head by Hopkins. Jab by Pavlik connects. Hard jab by Hopkins. Three-punch combination to the head shakes Pavlik. Right hand and a jab by Hopkins lands. Pavlik is confused at this stage and crowd is cheering Hopkins on. Hard hook to the body by Hopkins.
Iole scores it 10-9, Hopkins
ROUND 3
Pavlik has swelling under his right eye. Right hand-jab by Hopkins. He’s picking Pavlik apart. Double jab and a right for Hopkins again connects. Pavlik has to find a way to counteract that and begin to deliver some offense. Double left hook by Hopkins. Right hand by Pavlik is short. Hard left hook by Hopkins. Straight right by Hopkins lands.
Iole scores it 10-9, Hopkins
ROUND 4
Pavlik flicks a jab. They’re grappling inside. They exchange low blows and Esteves warns them. There is more wrestling in this round. Right-left combination by Hopkins. Left to the body by Hopkins. Right by Pavlik.
Iole scores it 10-9, Hopkins
ROUND 5
Good right to the head by Hopkins. Right by Pavlik and a right-left by Hopkins. They grapple inside. Hopkins’ defense is superb. Right by Hopkins lands and then a jab snaps Pavlik’s head back. Pavlik warned for hitting behind the head. Pavlik lands a jab and a right hand. Pavlik misses badly on a right.
Iole scores it 10-9, Hopkins
ROUND 6
Pavlik lands a right to the body. Hopkins lands a hard body shot. They’re wrestling on the ropes. Counter right by Hopkins connects. Lead right by Hopkins. Counter right by Hopkins. Shot to body and then to head by Hopkins. Pavlik is befuddled. He has no attack, no sense of plan. Left hook by Hopkins. Right by Pavlik lands. Two big rights near the bell by Hopkins.
Iole scores it 10-9, Hopkins
ROUND 7
Hopkins warned by Esteves. Pavlik on his toes. Big right by Hopkins. Another short right by Hopkins. Masterful effort so far by Hopkins. It is complete domination. Pavlik is flicking a jab, but not throwing it with conviction. Right hand and a jab by Hopkins. Right hand and a jab again by Hopkins. Hopkins is teeing off. Big right by Hopkins wobbles Pavlik.
Iole scores it 10-9, Hopkins
ROUND 8
It’s a familiar refrain: Big right and a left from Hopkins. Pavlik goes to the body and takes a left to the head. They’re tied up on the ropes. Pavlik has a point deducted for hitting behind the head. Big right by Hopkins. Another good right and then a strong left from Hopkins.
Iole scores it 10-8, Hopkins
ROUND 9
Lead right by Hopkins. Right hand and a jab by Hopkins. Hard left to the solar plexus by Hopkins. Hard right by Hopkins. Big right by Hopkins. Overhand right by Hopkins. Lead right by Hopkins. The Pavlik corner needs to start to consider when is the right time to stop the fight. He’s being outclassed by a mile at this stage. He has no shot to win. Hard left uppercut by Hopkins. Point from Hopkins taken for holding.
Iole scores it 9-9
ROUND 10
Pavlik lands a shot to the body but Hopkins counters with a hard left to the head. Right over the top by Hopkins. Pavlik lands a right, but Hopkins lands a right-left-right. They clinch in the center of the ring. Right to the body. Big right by Pavlik connects. Short right by Hopkins inside snaps Pavlik’s head. Hard combination inside by Hopkins connects.
Iole scores it 10-9, Pavlik
ROUND 11
They’re battling on the inside and Esteves pries them apart. Short right by Hopkins. They’re inside again. The pace has slowed a bit. Good right by Hopkins. Hard combination to the head by Hopkins wobbles Pavlik and sends him back into the ropes. Hopkins pounds the ribcage.
Iole scores it 10-9, Hopkins
ROUND 12
Two big rights from Hopkins hurt Pavlik badly. Left hook by Hopkins. Right by Pavlik. Hopkins grimaces, as if angry he was hit. Left hook and a right to the head. Pavlik’s face is a swollen and bloody mess. Two big rights from Hopkins. Crowd on its feet. It’s an amazing performance by Hopkins. They’re barking at each other at the final bell. Hopkins’ round, 10-9
Iole scores it 10-9, Hopkins
Paulina Mary Jean Gretzky (born 19 December 1988 in Los Angeles, California) is an American model and pop singer.
Gretzky was born five months after her parents former NHL player Wayne Gretzky and actress Janet Jones - married in a lavish ceremony broadcast live throughout Canada.
She sang Sarah McLachlan’s “I Will Remember You” at the Edmonton Oilers-Montreal Canadiens Heritage Classic game at Commonwealth Stadium before 57,167 fans. She performed for the first time in public the night before the Oilers-Canadiens outdoor game. Ron MacLean reported that Gretzky sent a tape of the performance to the producer of the event.
She made her modelling debut on the August 2005 cover of Flare. She and Janet appear in the movie Alpha Dog.
Her song “Collecting Dust” was featured on MTV’s Laguna Beach: The Real Orange County. It has since been released on iTunes.
Ingredients
1 box (18.25 oz.) favorite cake mix
1 can (16 oz.) plus 1/2 cup vanilla frosting
Yellow and orange paste food coloring
1/2 cup dark chocolate frosting
Start Cooking
Step 1
Preheat the oven to 350°F. Line 24 cupcake cups with paper liners. Kids can help prepare the cake mix according to the package directions and fill the cupcake liners. Bake until golden and a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean; 22 to 25 minutes. Transfer to a wire rack and cool completely.
Step 2
Tint 1/2 cup of the frosting yellow and spoon into a resealable bag; set aside. Tint the remaining vanilla frosting orange. Frost the tops of the cupcakes with the orange frosting. Pipe the outline of the jack-o’-lantern faces with the chocolate frosting. (Parents may want to do this part.)
Step 3
Heat the yellow frosting, in the bag, in the microwave for 2 to 3 seconds to soften slightly. Snip a small corner from the bag and fill in the outlines with the yellow frosting. Repeat with the remaining cupcakes.
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