Dull Dinner Ideas Authored By A Fast Eu Politician

After years of living away from the lights and cameras of Hollywood , Lisa Marie Presley is back with the new, emotionally raw album ?Storm and Grace? ? and she?s having to learn to trust all over again.

?I went through a huge transition in my life where everything and everyone I knew and trusted didn’t turn out to be that way. People that were in my life for a long time turned sinister and tried to control me and all kinds of weird stuff happened. But there was no conscience involved, that threw me more than anything,? she told FOX411?s Pop Tarts column. ? After that experience I had a really bad view of humans and I didn’t want to feel that way so I moved to the middle of nowhere, to the countryside in England ? I enjoy coming back to L.A now because I’m not living in it. I have tons of fun, because I know I can leave.?

Presley?s true home, she says, will always be that sprawling estate in Memphis, Tenn. ? otherwise known as Graceland. 

?It’s really comforting to go there, and familiar. I feel like I can exhale, it’s safe and it?s very grounding. It just feels like it is my home,? she continued. ?And my kids love it. The big ones love it because the food is incredible and the people are so sweet, they love eating dinner at Graceland. The little ones are all over it too; they say their favorite place is Memphis.?

The songstress shot her mystical, black and white album cover for ?Storm and Grace,? which hits stands this week, on her father?s famous property ? and even that was a walk on the wild side.

?We shot it in the forest next door to Graceland which I was never allowed into as a child, it was open public property and people would always be lurking around and looking over the fence and it was always dangerous,? Presley recalled. ?Now that it is part of the actual property it was fun for us to go out there and blow smoke and walk through the trees and be free in the forbidden forest.?

Speaking of her childhood, growing up Lisa Marie never really understood her father Elvis?s level of fame and unfathomable influence on the music industry.

?I don?t think I ever really processed what was happening, I just knew that he did that, that?s what my father did. I didn?t think of it as a business or how any of that would work,? she explained. ?I have loved music so much from when I was little and I don?t know whether it was because I saw my dad doing it and then I got the idea, I don?t know what came first? But I always had a hairbrush in the mirror singing. I was always with him backstage; I would go out and be pulled in for the last song.?

Presley released two pop-esque albums in 2003 and 2005, but she said the much darker ?Storm and Grace? epitomizes who she really is and what she really stands for. And laying herself bare is absolutely worth it, she adds.

?I was a little over-saturated and tapped out creatively after the last two records. I have always been a singer/songwriter and I was pushed in places I didn?t want to do, like pop or top forty. I don?t belong there. I don?t want to dress like a sex pot to try to get attention and sing on-stage, that is not who I am,? she added. ?I am proud of this record. It is raw and vulnerable. It is nerve-wracking, it is a bit like putting a target on your head and saying ?go ahead and shoot me,? but music is important in this world and I am willing to do whatever it takes.

WASHINGTON ?  Chuck Brown, who styled a unique mix of funk, soul and Latin party sounds to create go-go music in the nation’s capital, has died after suffering from pneumonia. He was 75.

Brown died Wednesday at Johns Hopkins University Hospital in Baltimore. Hospital spokesman Gary Stephenson confirmed Brown had died after a hospital stay that began April 18.

Thanks to Brown and his deep, gravelly voice, go-go music was uniquely identified with Washington. That’s where he continued to play the city’s club circuit to a loyal audience late in life.

Mayor Vincent Gray said the city will be a different place without him.

“Go-go is D.C.’s very own unique contribution to the world of pop music,” he said. “Today is a very sad day for music lovers the world over.”

In 2007 Brown told The Associated Press that go-go was influenced by sounds and fast beats he heard early in life, growing up in North Carolina and Virginia, combined with his experience later, playing with a Latin band.

“Go-go is a music that continues on and on, and on and it’s a call and response communication with the audience,” Brown said.

Go-go was heavy on percussion with drummers as lead players, accented by guitar riffs, keyboards and horns. Sometimes they would play for two or three hours without stopping. In between tunes, Brown would keep the thunk of percussion going and talk to the crowd.

Brown’s hit “Bustin’ Loose” with his group, the Soul Searchers, helped define go-go’s sound. It spent several weeks atop the R&B chart in 1979. Rapper Nelly later sampled Brown’s “Bustin’ Loose” in 2002 for his massive hit “Hot in Herre,” which won Nelly a Grammy.

Brown didn’t get credit at first, though, and “had to go through some legalities to get it right, but we knew, once we heard the song, that’s Chuck Brown,” said Gregory “Sugar Bear” Elliott, lead singer of the go-go band EU (Experience Unlimited.)

In 2007, rapper Eve sampled Brown’s song, “Blow Your Whistle,” in her hit single “Tambourine.”

Brown told the AP he admired such artists.

“Go-Go had some influence on rap because a lot of rap musicians come to my shows,” he said. “Some of them were students at Howard University. People like Puff Daddy, he’s been to see us when he was a young Howard University student.”

Spike Lee, a fan of Brown’s, used go-go for his movie “School Daze.”

“Chuck Brown Will Always Be `Bustin’ Loose’ — the Godfather of Go-Go,” Lee said through a spokeswoman.

Elliot said Brown had been a father figure since he was a teen when he aspired to be a rocker like Jimmy Hendrix but realized he wouldn’t make it that way as a young black man. When he saw Brown perform, he said he “instantly knew” what he wanted to do.

“Chuck Brown is going to live on forever. I’m going to make sure of that,” Elliott said. “When they see me, I want them to see a reflection of Chuck because he inspired me so much.”

He added: “The go-go sound is still going strong.”

When Brown was younger, he spent some time in jail. While behind bars, he traded five cartons of cigarettes for his first guitar. After he was freed in 1962, Brown played with several bands and then formed the Soul Searchers. To comply with terms of his parole, they couldn’t play where alcohol was served, so they went to churches, recreation halls and youth centers.

Brown’s daughter, Cherita Whiting, said he had died from complications with pneumonia and was gone too soon.

“I just want to tell all his fans, thank you, for lovin’ our dad,” she said. “He had the best fans in the world.”

During the crack epidemic of the 1980s, violence in some clubs affected go-go’s reputation. Brown said “we can’t blame the go-go for that,” though.

More recently, he said he had seen more grandparents at his shows, with an audience ranging in age from 18 to 60.

In 2005, he was named a National Heritage Fellow by the National Endowment for the Arts.

Washington was always his most loyal fan base, Brown told the AP, and he was happy to play here the rest of his life.

Not bad for government work. 

A new in-depth database of federal worker salaries shows the government paid out a whopping $105 billion in salaries last year for most of its civilian workforce — to boot, the workers got $439 million in bonuses. 

The information, which was obtained and number-crunched by The Asbury Park Press through a Freedom of Information Act request, challenges the old notion that government workers trade high salaries for job security and benefits. 

In fact, many workers get all those things. 

“They get better pay and they especially get better benefits,” said James Sherk, senior policy analyst with the conservative Heritage Foundation. 

The database, which is now online, allows users to enter a federal worker’s name and their department, and then look up their salary information. The trove covers about 70 percent of federal workers, with some eye-opening results. 

The average salary, for instance, for New Jersey’s federal employees was $83,749. Many senior executives throughout the federal government make a six-figure salary. 

Attorney General Eric Holder makes $199,700 – like other Cabinet-level officials. And Jeff Neely, the suspended General Services Administration employee at the heart of the Las Vegas convention scandal, was pulling in $172,000. 

The database also shows the government has been liberally handing out bonuses, with many in the ten-of-thousands-of-dollars range. The top bonus in the Justice Department was $37,505. 

In the Agriculture Department, it was $62,895. Some of the biggest bonuses, though, were the product of a special presidential award program. 

Moira Mack, a spokeswoman for the Office of Management and Budget, told the Asbury Park Press that the administration has “eliminated bonuses for all political appointees.” The administration, she said, has also “directed agencies to adopt more rigorous personnel management processes, and set a cap to reduce spending on awards for career staff, saving taxpayers an estimated $200 million this year alone.” 

In addition, the Office of Personnel Management says that it continues to improve its pay-for-performance systems. 

But Sherk said that while some of these bonuses and pay raises are being handed out on merit, the “vast majority” are automatic, “just for sitting in their seat.” 

“They could be playing solitaire all day and still get the same pay increase as the best and most productive workers,” he said. 

Fox News’ Doug McKelway contributed to this report.

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti ?  In a country where the news is typically bad, if not catastrophic, many people in Haiti look at the past year under a musician-turned-president with guarded surprise.

Yes, parliament and President Michel Martelly were in a standoff that hobbled government much of the past 12 months. Yes, less than a quarter of the population has a formal job. And yes, cholera and many other problems still haunt the country.

Yet six of the most visible displaced-persons camps that sprang up after the 2010 earthquake have been cleared and several are back to being public plazas; renovations are far along at the international airport; a sprinkling of new hotels and shops have begun to emerge across the capital’s otherwise ruined landscape; and in a country where free education is rare, the government, for the first time, has covered school tuition for 1 million children .

It’s hardly a Golden Age. But it’s not bad either for a leader who had never held political office and was best known for often-raunchy musical performances before he took office a year ago Monday. The achievements have come with a parliament so dominated by the party of the man Martelly defeated in his run for president that lawmakers stonewalled his attempts to appoint a prime minister and Cabinet for three-quarters of the year.

“Things with Martelly are working for the most part,” said Yrinen Jean-Baptiste, a 34-year-old mother of two children who voted for the musician and says that, so far, she would be willing do so again. “I hope he can do more.”

Asked to grade himself on a 1-10 scale, the president, who isn’t known for modesty, grades himself high.

“I would give myself an eight, eight-and-half, a nine, because everything I did I did without a government,” Martelly said in an interview with The Associated Press. “Everything I did, I did at a time when I had so many problems, when so many people tried to stop me. Everything I did, I did whether the money was there or not.”

Asked to name his accomplishments, the president pointed out the school-tuition program, to be paid for with a tax on incoming international phone calls, as well as the clearing of major camps, largely achieved through rental subsidies, the repair of damaged homes and, most controversially, outright evictions from the flimsy shelters of the overcrowded temporary settlements.

In the interview on Friday, he also noted the construction of a public hospital in Mirebalais, north of the capital, and start of construction of an industrial park near Cap Haitien that will host textile factories and other enterprises, bringing badly needed jobs to the northern part of the country.

“I’m not saying that I’m doing miracles, but I’m surely sending signals that things are being done in another manner now,” Martelly said from his office on the grounds of the ruined National Palace. “The state wants to serve. We want to be close to the people.”

Still known to many by his stage name “Sweet Micky,” Martelly said governing was easier than he had thought and he has no regrets from the first year.

But it’s clear there were some major blunders.

Police ignored a law granting legislative immunity by arresting a lawmaker who had escaped from jail. The justice minister took the blame and resigned, but the episode infuriated parliament and lawmakers became bent on thwarting him at every turn, opening an investigation into Martelly’s eligibility for office. Instead of dispelling rumors that he was a citizen of another country, which would have barred him from office, he let the allegations fester. It took him several months to put the matter to rest. When he did, he held aloft eight old passports in a performer-like flourish.

“He could have done a lot better if he wanted people to rally around him, gotten consensus and not go his own way as an artist,” Sen. Francois Anick Joseph said by telephone. “He caused (a lot of problems) by his way of doing things and his way of doing things is not a democratic way.”

Added Joseph: “He wasn’t able to look for consensus because he’s an artist. The lights must be on him.”

Martelly also has struggled to disband a group of military veterans who have tried to hold him to his campaign pledge of restoring the army. They had been training before he took office, but his victory emboldened them and they have paraded throughout the capital and countryside, toting side arms and sporting military uniforms, despite government orders for them to stop. Their paramilitary-like presence has embarrassed not just the government but also the United Nations peacekeeping mission.

Martelly also suffered for the lack of a strong political party. Only three members of his party hold seats in the 99-member Chamber of Deputies and none in the 30-member Senate, though he’s found allies in both chambers.

His political base remains tiny and he counts a tight-knit circle of longtime friends as his advisers, many of them fellow alumni of an elite Catholic high school and many of them foreign to politics. Even then, infighting has been a hallmark of the administration.

“They are too close and they don’t open up,” said Claude Beauboeuf, an economist and radio talk show host. “Even those on the inside are crushed sometimes.”

Despite the clashes with parliament, anger seldom spilled into the street as it has in past administrations. There have been no major signs of disgust with Martelly aside from a few demonstrations.

Disappointment might seem justified for someone like Jean-Baptiste, the mother of two. She voted for Martelly to get her out of a park-turned-encampment. But her forced removal at the hands of city officials was not what she had in mind.

Martelly condemned evictions, but they happened anyway. Yet Jean-Baptiste still holds out hope for the candidate who promised change. She offered this unsolicited message to the president: “I hope he can bring down the price of tap-taps,” the brightly colored pickups that transport people for about 40 cents.

The signature project of the Martelly administration has been the school program that aims to double the number of children in school. His plan to fund it through a tax on incoming international phone calls and wire transfers upset Haitians abroad who use such services. The $22 million collected is on hold with the Central Bank until Parliament approves its release. The government paid for this year’s tuition by taking money from other parts of the budget, said Miloody Vincent, director of the education ministry’s press bureau

Vincent acknowledges that the quality of the education may not have improved yet. “The most important thing is to put the kids in school,” he said. “We’re working later to improve the quality of the education.”

There are no independent studies of the program so far, but education specialist Mohamed Fall of UNICEF said he believed at least 70 percent of the targeted children had received their aid.

While ever-inefficient Haitian government has still not completely funded the schools, the aid is a significant sum for many in Haiti, where about half the children didn’t go to school before the quake

Take Dania Nerius, the 38-year-old mother of four children, ages 6 to 17. Her husband lost his right leg in the earthquake, and his job as a mechanic. They nearly had to pull their children from the school. But the tuition program helped her save $360 a year ? a lot in a country where most get by on $2 a day ? so she can pay rent and invest money in her business as a roadside peddler of minutes for a cellphone company.

“That helped me,” Nerius said one afternoon, “because the money would’ve otherwise come out of my pocket.”

Baltimore native Chris Bilal was walking through his adopted Brooklyn neighborhood when he was stopped by a police officer. The NYPD officer peppered the 24-year-old with questions about where he lived, requested Bilal?s ID and rummaged through his bag.

?I was coming home from the Laundromat and I was stopped by the police officer. Asking me, ?Let me see your ID. ?Where are you from??  ?Do you live around here?? ?

The officer then proceeded to rummage through Bilal?s bag of freshly cleaned and folded laundry to see if he was carrying anything illegal. The search produced nothing, and the officer sent Bilal on his way.

?They were searching for drugs. The funny thing was that it was a mesh laundry bag. I?m not sure what I could hide,? Bilal said.

Bilal, who is African-American, came to New York to follow his dreams of being an artist, but has felt more suspicion than inspiration since arriving a little over a year ago. He is repeatedly stopped on the street, being asked what he?s doing, where he?s going and even, on occasion, being frisked.

?I feel guilty all the time,? said Bilal, an artist and writer. ?I feel like I?m being watched and targeted all the time.?

Bilal has been affected by the NYPD?s policy of Stop, Question and Frisk, in which officers randomly stop a person to determine if they are up to any wrongdoing or possess weapons and contraband items. 

His experience is all too common, especially among minorities in low-income neighborhoods. In 2011, the New York City Police Department stopped 685,724 people of whom an overwhelming 88 percent were deemed innocent. Backers of the policy say it is an effective tool for deterring crime, which has dropped nearly 80 percent since the Giuliani administration enacted Stop, Question and Frisk in the mid-’90s.

But critics say the price of living in what they consider a police state is too high.

?[NYPD] Commissioner Kelly says he believes that the large number of Stop and Frisk prevents crime, but the data really doesn?t support that,? said Dr. Delores Jones-Brown, professor and director of the Center on Race, Crime and Justice at John Jay College in New York. ?The overwhelming problem with Stop and Frisk is that many of the people stopped are innocent.?

Jones-Brown has extensively studied the NYPD?s Stop, Question and Frisk practice and co-authored a 2010 report on the matter.

The findings of ?Stop, Question and Frisk policing practices in New York City: A primer,? concluded that the number of stops tripled between 2003 and 2009, and a majority of the people stopped were either black or Hispanic.

Those in favor of the practice at City Hall and One Police Plaza say the Stop and Frisk policy is especially effective at getting guns off the streets. And while statistics do show a steady decline in gun violence stretching back several years, an updated version of the primer expected to be released in the coming months shows that in 2011 only 0.4 percent of all arrests during Stop and Frisk were for gun possession. A majority of arrests were due to contraband items, such as drugs and paraphernalia.

A separate detailed report released by the New York Civil Liberties Union on Wednesday shows that of 56 percent of the stops that resulted in a search, only 1.9 percent were found with a weapon.

The study also concludes that while young black and Latino men account for only 4.7 percent of New York City?s population, they accounted for more than 40 percent of all stops in the city.

While this demographic is more likely to be frisked than a young white male, they were less likely to be found with a weapon.

Jones-Brown believes complaints have only made the NYPD more stubborn in its embrace of the policy.

?The requests from the communities where these stops occur have caused him [Kelly] and his supporters to stand behind it more and more. I think it says something bad about police and community relations,? said Jones-Brown.

Local reports also surfaced on Thursday that commanders from every precinct have been ordered by top officials to carefully review all stop, question, and frisk reports to ensure that proper protocol is being used by officers.

Representatives for the NYPD did not respond to requests for comment on this story. But the policy has plenty of support.

?Stop and Frisks are a necessary evil,? said Ed Mullins, president of the Sergeants Benevolent Association, an NYPD union. ?A lot of times it?s hard for the general public to understand.?

He said subjects targeted for stops are not merely victims of racial profiling.

?I understand how people may feel the way they do about Stop and Frisk, but what?s always left out of the equation is that we target those that fit a description,? Mullins said. ?Our role of stopping someone is based on an incident report from someone in that particular neighborhood.?

Still, Mullins recognizes the policy can have a negative effect on community relations, especially if it is overused.

?The issue shouldn?t be people being stopped,? Mullins said. ?It should be the frequency in which it happens.?

Nearly 30 advocacy groups within the city?s five boroughs formed Communities United for Police Reform, with the goal of ending what they consider discriminatory practices by the NYPD.

?It?s not ?Stop and Frisk? that?s happening, and it?s not in that order,? said Jose Lopez, who works as a community outreach leader for Make the Road NY, a Brooklyn-based community advocacy group that is part of the coalition. ?We are not getting stopped, questioned and frisked. We are getting searched. There?s a difference.?

?Every time I get stopped, I?m not getting questioned first. I?m usually stopped, then searched. I?m usually questioned after they find nothing,? he added.

Lopez, who works with many of the city?s youth, says that the main issue among those stopped is the after-effects and that a stigma among others in their neighborhood that sticks with them.

?It?s that part of being put on display. That looms in the head of all the community members watching, wondering if these kids did something,? he said. ?So when that?s not addressed in that moment, it?s left up to an individual to decide on their own without enough information.?

Also a part of Communities United is City Councilman Jumaane Williams, who has been vocal about changing Stop/Frisk policies since he experienced it firsthand while attending the West Indian Day Parade in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, this past September during Labor Day.

?Stop and frisk is a good police tool that should be used for the purposes that it was intended,? said Williams, who represents the 45th District in Brooklyn. ?What I think is happening now is that it?s being abused in specific communities, specifically black and Latino communities.

?If there is some sort of probable cause, there is reason to stop someone,? Williams said. ?But being black or Latino is not a probable cause. ?

This past February, Williams introduced three bills before the City Council to try to regulate the rampant use of Stop, Question and Frisk, by increasing police accountability and reducing racial profiling.

Proposed in the three bills are:

• Forbidding police officers to use race, gender, ethnicity or sexual identity as just cause to stop someone on the street.
• Officers would have to make clear to people that they stop, that they do not need consent to a search.
• Officers not on undercover assignments must provide personal business cards to those that they Stop, Question and Frisk.

A council vote on the bills is still pending.

Getting guns off the street and saving lives trumps many of the concerns of the policy?s critics, said City Councilman Peter Vallone.

?I think Commissioner Kelly summed it up best at our last committee hearing. What alternative do you propose?,? said Vallone, who represents Astoria, Queens, and also serves as the chair of the Council?s Public Safety Committee. ?No one has an alternative on how to get guns off our streets. What do we do? Wait until a shooting happens or do we try to prevent it?

?We had 800 guns removed from the streets last year. Do you know how many lives that saves??

The councilman said the fact that black males are being stopped at about twice the rate that they exist in the census is not necessarily cause for criticism. Police should base their decisions on professional observation, not mere census data, he said.

?Doing so would necessitate quotas to make sure everyone was getting stopped at the same rate,? said Vallone, who also co-sponsored a law that banned racial profiling by law enforcement in New York. ?What the stops should be compared to is civil observations.?

Vallone also dismisses claims that an arrest rate of 12 percent is too low to consider the practice of Stop, Question and Frisk effective.

?That rate makes absolute sense when it comes to stop and frisk. The stops are based on reasonable suspicion, not probable cause. It would be impossible to get higher numbers based on this,? Vallone said.

While the debate continues, many other American cities have dropped or modified their stop, question and frisk techniques.

In 2011, Philadelphia settled a lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union, agreeing to collect more data on Stop and Frisk incidents and to ease up on the practice, refraining from questionable methods.

In 2008, Baltimore settled a suit brought by the NAACP on similar terms. In the consent decree, the Baltimore Police Department agreed to end its policy of Zero Tolerance Policing and to require officers to provide their names and badge numbers to those who make a request while stopped. The proposed measures are similar to Williams? bill in New York City.

Cincinnati has also agreed to terms for a similar decree filed in Ohio.

In California, the cities of San Diego and East Palo Alto have done away with Stop, Question and Frisk entirely, focusing on more direct engagement with the community and focusing on suspects with probable cause.

While the debate continues in New York as to whether Stop and Frisk infringes on people?s civil liberties, Bilal, and countless others like him, will have to endure suspicion while walking on the street or going to the store.

?I think it?s a big hindrance on a lot of people?s lives and it happens to a lot of people in the community,? said Bilal. ?I?m just looked at as a possible criminal. It kind of sucks.?

Bilal, who always admired police officers while growing up in Baltimore, said the feeling of always being under suspicion has left him disillusioned about the Big Apple.

?New York is an idealistic place for me in my mind,? Bilal says. ?I kind of aspired to always come here and when I did, I was like, ?Yes! I?ve finally come here. I can be free. I can write and I can do my art, but it really hasn?t turned out that way.?

This article was written by the author as part of the Henry Frank Guggenheim Fellowship program at the Center on Media, Crime and Justice at John Jay College in New York.

Valeria Lukyanova is becoming famous on the Internet as a real-life Barbie doll. She actually does look just like the famous toy, with Barbie?s almost-impossibly thin waist, big breasts, perfect bottom and blonde hair. But Lukyanova and Barbie share even more than that; they both have a blank stare, flawless (almost-Geisha-like) complexion and rather stiff, plasticine posture.

Valeria is, therefore, perhaps an iconic symbol of things to come. 

It hasn?t been enough that women by the millions implant silicone or saline bags in their chests to alter their appearances. 

It hasn?t been enough that men and women flock for facelifts and nose jobs and liposuction. 

It hasn?t been enough that we fashion contrived biographies on Facebook that turn us into mini-reality-TV versions of ourselves that aren?t real at all. 

Now, it seems, a la Valeria/Barbie, our selves may become entirely dispensable and disposable, in favor of becoming a living duplicate of a famous product, or a dead ringer for a celebrity, or (and, trust me, this will happen, too) a would-be tiger, tattooed orange, with stripes, wearing a tail at all times.

I don?t know the particulars of Valeria?s psyche. One could theorize, however, that a woman moved to imitate a doll?a woman who looks, in fact, lifeless in many of her pictures?may have become so estranged from her real thoughts and feelings and real life history that she has cut herself free from them and is floating in a synthetic world of gawkers who treat her much as she seems to treat herself?an entertainment phenomenon, an ?item,? not a human being.

Millions of us now, of course, are on that same spectrum, just not quite so far gone. 

It has become absolutely commonplace for young people to be high on marijuana most days of their lives. 

It is clearly commonplace for most people to present themselves as ?stories? for public consumption on Facebook. 

Reality TV shows in which people pretend to be living out what are clearly scripted scenarios, requiring them to be anything but real, are big hits. And it is also clearly true that many of the tens of millions of people on Prozac and Klonopin and Percocet (all of which can be Godsends when truly needed) are being medicated as an alternative to being fully alive?to fully feeling.

Elements of Valeria/Barbie are nothing new. She?s just the end of the line?a wakeup call about where we could be headed. 

There have always been folks who felt like Rambo, maybe even saw the movie a few dozen times, got jacked at the gym and took on that nickname. 

There have always been people who enjoyed wearing designer labels, as though the style of Louis Vuitton would ?make them? fashion icons, too. 

There are people who legitimately enjoy a nip or a tuck or a tattoo and who seem to suffer no ill effects from it and look better, as well.

The trouble is with the new momentum behind the abdication of self and the fashioning of alternate identities. This is something new because it’s fueled by information technology and medical technology and designer drugs and psychiatric medications and a political climate that, in the hands of some ?leaders? supports the setting aside of one?s own self and thoughts and actions, in favor of a collective, non-individual, non-independent mind.

Back in 1964, the great writer and social commentator Marshall McLuhan, in his groundbreaking book Understanding Media, warned that ?cool media??those that beckon the user to participate?would dramatically alter the psychological makeup of human beings. ?First we build the tools,? he said. ?Then they build us.?

The living Barbie, if a sign of things to come, predicts a time when people flee from their real emotions and real capacity to change their lives and empathize with those of others. It predicts a time when what passes for ?happiness? is being anethetized, when living this ?life? requires one?s psychological death, when ?self-expression? requires mimicry of others, even of inanimate objects or fictional characters.

This loss of human potential would be tragedy enough, but it is also the case that those who are the living dead?these Barbie and Ken dolls and all the other posers and panderers to illusion?cannot empathize with the suffering of others. They are, therefore, capable of causing enormous pain in the world, possibly even enjoying it, unconsciously. This is, by the way, how despots are created?when people stop being autonomous, cede their impulses to a central authority and project their buried rage about being dehumanized onto a group of victims (think Holocaust).

I know. I know. Many will say I am being alarmist, expanding irrationally from one plastic woman to a people. 

Well, let the alarm here be sounded. We are losing ourselves. We must reclaim ourselves.

Everything depends on it.

Dr. Keith Ablow is a psychiatrist and member of the Fox News Medical A-Team. Dr. Ablow can be reached at info@keithablow.com.

Starting your baby on solids is an exciting time for both baby and you, but did you know that how you introduce foods to them now can actually influence the how well they?ll feed themselves later? Laying the ground work for lifetime of healthy eating begins at an early age, and for new parents there can be a higher priority.

Before you start your baby on solid foods check with your pediatrician first.  Typically, 4-6 months is a good time to introduce new foods, textures and modes of feeding because this is when an infant?s digestive system is more developed and their appetite and nutritional requirements are no longer met with breast milk or infant formula alone. Though breast milk and formula remains your baby?s primary source of nutrition, at this stage solids are supplemental and therefore they can be added gradually.

How can you tell if your baby is ready for solids? Here?s what to look for:

- Is your baby’s tongue-thrust reflex gone or diminished? This reflex (which looks like your baby is sticking his or her tongue out at you) prevents infants from choking on foreign objects, and it enables them to push food out of their mouths.

- Baby?s feeding behavior has progressed from sucking to biting to chewing.

- Your baby can support his or her own head. To safely eat solid food an infant needs good head and neck control and should be able to sit up.

- Baby demonstrates greater interest in food. A 6-month-old baby who stares and grabs at your food is ready for some food variety themselves.

What types of foods should be introduced first?

Begin with iron-enriched rice cereal, which is gluten free and the least likely to cause an allergic reaction. Also, because it is bland it is a simple way to introduce solids for the first time.

Introduce vegetables next. As a new parent, your natural inclination might be to go from rice cereal to fruits because they are sweet and your baby will probably love the taste of a sweet fruit. However, this is a definite ?no-no.? Instead, first start with vegetables that tend to be on the bitter side, such as broccoli, summer squash and green beans. Expect that it may take time for baby to warm up to broccoli, and that?s okay. But if you start off with sweet foods such as bananas, you?ll have even more difficulty introducing the bitter vegetables your baby needs. Think about it: if you had a choice between something sweet or something bitter which would you go for? Remember, a baby who learns to love vegetables is much more likely to grow up enjoying vegetables. That?s why you?ll want to introduce vegetables before fruits.

Once you have successfully introduced vegetables your baby is ready for fruits and then meats. By 12 months your baby should be eating from all of the food groups and be ready for foods that are chopped rather than pureed.

Tips

Try, try again. If at first you don?t succeed, try and try again! Remember every new taste is exciting and intense for your baby. Just because your baby spits something out or makes a yucky face doesn?t mean he or she doesn?t like it. You may need more than a few tries before your baby gets used to a taste.

Keep it simple. Introduce one new food at a time and do it early in the day.  That way if your baby has diarrhea, vomiting, or develops a rash after eating, you?ll pretty much know which food caused it.

Hungry babies make for cranky feedings! Feed your baby first either with breast milk or formula and then try a spoonful of rice cereal. Why?  Delivering a mouthful of completely new food will probably confuse and even frustrate your baby. Let them fill up first on what they are used to and then introduce a spoonful of rice cereal.

Sanitation is a must!

SAFE- Always spoon baby food into a separate bowl and refrigerate the unused portion in the baby food jar.  Discard whatever is left uneaten in the bowl and then properly sanitize the bowl and spoon.

UNSAFE- Never feed your baby directly from the baby food jar. A baby?s mouth has germs and dipping the spoon back into the jar will contaminate what?s left for the next feeding.

Thinking about making your own baby food, but worried that it will be messy and a hassle? Check out the Beaba Babycook BPA Free Baby Food Maker – an all-in-one steamer, blender, warmer and defroster that makes it easy to prepare fresh, healthy meals for baby.  

Tanya Zuckerbrot MS, RD, is a nationally known registered dietitian based in New York and the creator of a proprietary high-fiber nutrition program for weight loss, wellness and for treating various medical conditions. Tanya authored the bestselling weight loss book The F-Factor Diet, and she is the first dietitian with a national line of high-fiber foods, which are sold under the F-Factor name. Become a fan of Tanya on Facebook, follow her on Twitter and LinkedIn, and visit her website Ffactor.com.

Occasionally, even George Soros steps out of the shadows. He did so in 2004 when he spent at least $32 million trying to prevent George W. Bush?s reelection. Now he?s come off the sidelines and is throwing his millions at Democratic grassroots groups to bail President Obama out of a jam.

Soros, the moneybags of the left, has spent $38 million in the last several years funding politicians and the left?s political machine. He also gave $550 million to liberal causes in 2000 through 2009 ? covering a wide range of issues from abortion to gay rights to immigration. It’s safe to say that pretty much anything conservatives support has an opposition group or several funded by Soros.

While he had made noises about not getting involved this election, no one really believed him. According to the May 8, New York Times, ?Soros will contribute $1 million each to America Votes, a group that coordinates political activity for left-leaning environmental, abortion rights and civil rights groups, and American Bridge 21st Century, a super PAC that focuses on election-oriented research.?

This isn?t much of a shock. 

Though Soros is disappointed in Obama, there?s no politician he likes better than our commander in chief. 

The Democratic president has received more money from Soros and his kin than any other political candidate in the last 11 years ? $16,000 and counting. They also gave an additional $250,000 to the inauguration fund, with five members of the family each giving the maximum contribution of $50,000.

Given the financial limits on donations, that?s an impressive amount of support. 

Obama leads a list of the most doctrinaire liberals running for office ? all funded by Soros and his family. Those include former comic-turned Sen. Al Franken, lefty Calif. Sen. Barbara Boxer and new ?progressive? darling and Massachusetts Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren.

Admitting Soros is an election power broker, of course, messes with the liberal ballot propaganda. 

The Nation?s Katrina vanden Heuvel delivered one recent rant complaining about the power of ?the Koch brothers, Citizens United, and a right-wing activist Supreme Court ready to roll back decades of New Deal jurisprudence.? 

That?s only one of an endless stream of such lunacy.

The Kochs aren?t an election problem, no matter how much the left tries to demonize them. If anyone?s money is impacting American politics, it?s George Soros?s. 

Forget the $38 million that is directly going into politics. That other $550 million is heading the same place, just with a tiny bit more subtlety.

Soros?s Open Society Foundations have a lengthy list of groups they support with his cash and it reads like a Who?s Who of liberal groups that bash conservatives and promote libs. There?s the Center for American Progress, Economic Policy Institute, National Council of La Raza and more.

Ironically, Soros has claimed he tried to stay out of domestic political turmoil, but his political donations show otherwise. 

Soros said as much in his opening essay to Chuck Sudetic?s book ?The Philanthropy of George Soros.? Soros wrote, he learned, ?to keep a greater distance from the internal politics of the countries where I have foundations.? Normal people would stay they?d stay out. Soros just wanted to give the appearance of distance.

This latest $2 million is a reminder he hasn?t stayed out of U.S. politics at all.

Through an extensive network of non-profits, media properties and activist organizations, Soros has become increasingly influential in American elections. His hold over the American political left is especially strong. 

He and his family gave more than $38 million to politicians and political groups through the past two decades. 

Soros?s 2004 attempt to oust President Bush enlisted such lefty staples as MoveOn.org, Joint Victory Campaign 2004, and America Coming Together.

To put all that in perspective, he vastly outspent the libertarian Koch Brothers in individual political donations 8 to 1. Promoting left-wing ideology to include everything from electing judges to immigration reform, Soros has exerted his power over the nation?s liberal political elite.

The Kochs have been labeled as everything from ?Tea Party puppeteers? by New York Times columnists Charles M. Blow to industrialists that ?help keep the Tea Party movement well-caffeinated,? and vilified for their extensive giving to conservatives. 

But Soros has fondly been described as a “philanthropist.” The media fail to note that Soros has outspent the Kochs in individual-funded political activity.

An analysis by the Center for Responsive Politics?s Oopensecrets.org compared contributions by the Koch brothers and George Soros. This review from Sept. 21, 2010, showed ?Soros rules this category? by an 8-to-1 margin ? $34 million to $4 million.

And, in case you doubt the numbers, Opensecrets.org received $500,000 in grants from the Open Society Foundation since 2000.

Soros has shown he wants to push his own agenda on America and he?s about to do so in another election. And it’s important to remember this fact: the last time he got this involved, he spent $32 million not $2 million trying to help Democrats win.

– Iris Somberg contributed to this column.

Dan Gainor is the Boone Pickens Fellow and the Media Research Center?s Vice President for Business and Culture. His column appears each week on The Fox Forum. He can also be contacted on Facebook and Twitter as dangainor.

DALLAS ?  Carroll Shelby, the legendary auto racer and car designer who built the fabled Shelby Cobra sports car and injected testosterone into Ford’s Mustang and Chrysler’s Viper, has died. He was 89.

Shelby’s company, Carroll Shelby International, said Friday that Shelby died a day earlier at a Dallas hospital. He had received a heart transplant in 1990 and a kidney transplant in 1996.

He was one of the nation’s longest-living heart transplant recipients, having received a heart on June 7, 1990, from a 34-year-old man who died of an aneurism. Shelby also received a kidney transplant in 1996 from his son, Michael.

The 1992 inductee into the Automobile Hall of Fame had homes in Los Angeles and his native east Texas.

The one-time chicken farmer had more than a half-dozen successful careers during his long life. Among them: champion race car driver, racing team owner, automobile manufacturer, automotive consultant, safari tour operator, raconteur, chili entrepreneur and philanthropist.

“He’s an icon in the medical world and an icon in the automotive world,” his longtime friend, Dick Messer, executive director of Los Angeles’ Petersen Automotive Museum, once said of Shelby.

“His legacy is the diversity of his life,” Messer said. “He’s incredibly innovative. His life has always been the reinvention of Carroll Shelby.”

Shelby first made his name behind the wheel of a car, winning France’s grueling 24 Hours of Le Mans sports car race with teammate Ray Salvadori in 1959. He already was suffering serious heart problems and ran the race “with nitroglycerin pills under his tongue,” Messer once noted.

He had turned to the race-car circuit in the 1950s after his chicken ranch failed. He won dozens of races in various classes throughout the 1950s and was twice named Sports Illustrated’s Driver of the Year.

Soon after his win at Le Mans, he gave up racing and turned his attention to designing high-powered “muscle cars” that eventually became the Shelby Cobra and the Mustang Shelby GT500.

The Cobra, which used Ford engines and a British sport car chassis, was the fastest production model ever made when it was displayed at the New York Auto Show in 1962.

A year later, Cobras were winning races over Corvettes, and in 1964 the Rip Chords had a Top 5 hit on the Billboard pop chart with “Hey, Little Cobra.” (“Spring, little Cobra, getting ready to strike, spring, little Cobra, with all of your might. Hey, little Cobra, don’t you know you’re gonna shut ‘em down?”)

In 2007, an 800-horsepower model of the Cobra made in 1966, once Shelby’s personal car, sold for $5.5 million at auction, a record for an American car.

“It’s a special car. It would do just over three seconds to 60 (mph), 40 years ago,” Shelby told the crowd before the sale, held in Scottsdale, Ariz.

It was Lee Iacocca, then head of Ford Motor Co., who had assigned Shelby the task of designing a fastback model of Ford’s Mustang that could compete against the Corvette for young male buyers.

Turning a vehicle he had once dismissed as “a secretary car” into a rumbling, high-performance model was “the hardest thing I’ve done in my life,” Shelby recalled in a 2000 interview with The Associated Press.

That car and the Shelby Cobra made his name a household word in the 1960s.

When the energy crisis of the 1970s limited the market for gas-guzzling high-performance cars, Shelby weathered the downturn by heading to Africa, where he operated a safari company for a dozen years.

By the time he had returned to the United States, Iacocca was running Chrysler Motors and he hired him to design the supercharged Viper sports car.

In the meantime, Shelby had also inaugurated the World Chili Cookoff competition and he began marketing Carroll Shelby Original Texas Chili.

In recent years, Shelby worked as a technical adviser on the Ford GT project and designed the Shelby Series 1 two-seat muscle car, a 21st century clone of his 1965 Cobra.

“I just wanted to see if I could do it one more time after a heart transplant and a kidney transplant,” he once told the AP.

In 1990 he had marketed the Can-Am Spec Racer, an affordable racing car for entry-level drivers.

He created the Carroll Shelby Children’s Foundation in 1991 to provide assistance for children and young people needing acute coronary and kidney care. According to its Web site, the foundation has helped numerous children received needed surgery, as well as provided money for research.

Carroll Hall Shelby was born Jan. 11, 1923, in Leesburg, Texas.

During World War II he was an Army Air Corps flight instructor who corresponded with his fiancee by dropping love letters stuck into his flying boots onto her farm.

After leaving the military in 1945, he started a dump truck business, then decided to raise chickens. The poultry business initially flourished, with Shelby earning a $5,000 profit on the first batch of broilers he delivered. He went broke, however, when his second flock died of disease.

A friend then invited him to become an amateur racer and his success led to his joining the Aston-Martin team and competing in races all over the world.

Even Tim Burton himself has given up trying to figure out what goes on in his crazy and creative, yet occasionally nonsensical mind.

?It is best not to analyze it, I had my years of psychotherapy and I just decided to stop. There is no point anymore,? Burton told FOX411?s Pop Tarts column while promoting ?Dark Shadows.? ?It’s more about the joy of doing it, seeing where something goes … You have an idea and seeing organically where it takes you.?

And the famed director tells us each character he creates becomes a permanent part of his ever-evolving persona.

?I try to personalize every character that I deal with ? you have to find something,? Burton continued. ?I have some Scissorhands, Sweeney Todd and Beetlejuice, they are all in there unfortunately.?

Based on the gothic soap opera of the same name, ?Dark Shadows? stars his long-time collaborator Johnny Depp as 200-year-old vampire Barnabas Collins, and Michelle Pfeiffer as his reclusive cousin, Elizabeth Collins Stoddard.

But unlike his director, Depp is at least able to transform into all these wacky and wild characters, and happily walk away as himself when filming is over for the day and not scare his kids.

?I step in and out of the guy,? he assured us.

And although twenty years has passed since Pfeiffer took the role as Catwoman in Burton?s ?Batman Returns,? she said her dynamic with the director remains unchanged.

?I just have memories of it being effortless to work with him and it really being a lot of fun, he likes to work hard but so do I. He is meticulous, but what is amazing is that he hasn’t lost any of his attention to detail or any of his enthusiasm, and he just keeps getting better and better,? she enthused. ?So when I heard about ?Dark Shadows? I shamelessly called him, I don’t even think there was a script at that point. I thought, I’m not going to let this pass me by without throwing my hat in the ring. Just like when I did ?Batman,? I would have played any part in that movie.?

Burton said that while he hadn?t spoken to the still stunning blonde in almost two decades, working with her again was ?easy? and reminded him of what he ?loved so much about her as Catwoman.??

But it seems that even the cast thinks ?Dark Shadows? won?t be earning any Oscar nods.

?It was a challenge, it is a heightened melodrama as if melodrama isn’t heightened enough,? Pfeiffer explained. ?We were walking a very fine line of going into really, really bad acting, which we probably fell into a number of times.? 

And apparently, there is at least one thing we don?t know about Pfeiffer?s co-star: the highly sought-after tabloid target, Mr. Depp.

?I try to protect the privacy of the actors,? Burton added. ?But (maybe something you don?t know) is that he likes ice-skating shows.?

Work it, Captain Jack.

The family of the late classmate whom Mitt Romney allegedly bullied in high school said Friday the portrayal of their brother in new media reports is “factually incorrect” and that they are “aggrieved that he would be used to further a political agenda.”

The family also in the public statement that they would make no further public comment on the matter.

A Washington Post story Thursday states Romney and at least one other high school classmate had held down John Lauber, who was presumed to be gay, and cut off his long, bleached-blond hair.

Christine Lauber, his older sister, later told ABC News she was at college when the incident was said to have occurred, while her brother and Romney attended high school at the Cranbrook School in Bloomfield, Mich.

Romney, the likely GOP presidential nominee, has apologized for what he described as “hijinks and pranks during high school.”

Romney told Fox News Radio that he doesn’t recall that specific incident, which was said to have occurred in 1965, and that he certainly did not know the student was gay.

“I don’t remember that incident,” he said. “And I’ll tell you I certainly don’t believe that I … thought the fellow was homosexual. That was the furthest thing from our minds back in the 1960s, so that was not the case.” 

Lauber reportedly died of liver cancer in 2004.

Christine Lauber of South Bend, Ind., said earlier that if her brother were alive ?he would be furious? about the story.

She told ABC her brother was a ?very unusual person.?

?He didn?t care about running with the peer group,? she said. ?What?s wrong with that?”

 ?Even if it did happen, John probably wouldn?t have said anything,? she Lauber added.

NEW ORLEANS ?  Cash, coins and credit cards are so Twentieth Century.

At least, that’s the opinion of the electronics manufacturers, phone companies, banks and credit card issuers that expect cellphones to be the main way consumers pay for purchases in the not-so-distant future.

The trouble is, that vision-of-tomorrow is somewhat blurry, as evidenced at the U.S. cellphone industry trade show held this week in New Orleans. There are a lot of ideas, but little agreement.

The stakes, however, are high.

“Eighty-five percent of the world’s transactions are still made with cash and checks. We have a wonderful opportunity to convert those,” said Gary Flood, MasterCard’s president of global products and solutions, in a keynote speech at the show.

One concept that gets a lot of attention is the “digital wallet” — a virtual repository for our credit card numbers, receipts, coupons. It’s not much different from a PayPal account, which can be linked to different cards. A lot of companies see the wallet as the key to influence in the world of mobile payments, especially if it sits on a cellphone, not just on a PC. Google introduced its Wallet last year. It’s available on a few phones that can be tapped against certain payment terminals to complete a payment.

Andrew Lorentz, a lawyer at Davis Wright Tremaine LLP who works with the payments industry, said at the show that if he had a dime for every digital wallet that’s been announced, he’d be rich.

“I can have more wallets than cards,” he said.

At the show, MasterCard announced a service that could speed up wallet proliferation even more. The company’s idea is to let any company that wants to set up its own wallet.

“The idea behind this is: How do we get more wallets and more innovation?” said Ed Olebe, MasterCard’s senior vice president of e-commerce development.

Consumers trust their banks, he said, and might want to keep their cards in a bank-branded wallet. Banks, meanwhile, want to extend their relationships with customers, tying them closer. Stores may also want their own wallets, taking the step up from issuing loyalty and credit cards.

MasterCard’s wallet, revealed at the show, will be live this fall and ready for purchases on Barnes & Noble’s website and through the American Airlines phone app. Instead of entering credit card numbers, users on those sites will be able to tap a button, jump to their wallets, pick a card and check out.

A crucial question is what information the wallet issuer will be able to see about a consumer’s transactions. There’s valuable information there that could be used to target marketing offers or for loyalty programs. MasterCard is still working out those details, Olebe said.

“There’s a myriad of laws and rules we have to apply,” he said. “We don’t want to push the envelope on that.”

There’s no guarantee that MasterCard’s wallets will work on phones for tap-to-pay transactions at the register, either. MasterCard is taking a “wait and see” approach to that, Olebe said.

MasterCard competitor Visa is more bullish about tap-to-pay phones. It has an online wallet like MasterCard, but also a wallet application designed to work on smartphones with built-in Near-Field Communications, which enables tap-to-pay transactions. But so far, the few smartphones in U.S. stores that have NFC chips work only with Google’s Wallet. What’s holding Visa and others back, said John Partridge, the president of Visa, is that the U.S. phone companies have to allow the banks to load cards for use on phones.

Naturally, the phone companies have their own ideas about how digital payments will look in the future. Sprint Nextel Corp. is collaborating with Google and its Wallet, while the rest of the Big 4 national wireless carriers, Verizon Wireless, AT&T and T-Mobile USA, have formed a consortium to create their own wallet.

The phone companies are “earnestly trying to adapt to the new ecosystem,” said Bill Greenwell, the CEO of BilltoMobile. “”But there’s certainly friction on the legal side and the business side.”

His company lets people pay for things through their phones and have the charges appear on their phone bills.

Visa is getting a break at the Summer Olympics in London, where athletes and VIPs will be using the NFC-equipped Samsung Galaxy S III phones with prepaid Visa cards already loaded to make payments.

While paying for things with phones is still in its infancy, accepting payments with phones is already easy. VeriFone Systems Inc., the largest maker of credit-card terminals in the U.S., announced “Sail” at the show. It’s a thumbs-sized card reader that plugs into a smartphone, letting anyone who sets up an account accept credit-card payments. It’s VeriFone’s answer to similar products from financial software-maker Intuit Inc. and startup Square, already in use in New Orleans taxi cabs.

Much like its competitors, VeriFone will send the card readers out for free by mail to anyone who signs up, and will charge 2.7 percent of the amount of any transaction, or less if the user pays monthly fees.

VeriFone’s unique advantage is that its phone-based card readers can be combined with more full-featured smartphone jackets that accept chip-based cards, or full-blown payment terminals, said Dave Talach, VeriFone’s vice president of strategic development.

VeriFone’s latest terminals are by default capable of accept tap-to-pay transactions, unlike the previous generation. But it will take time for these terminals to replace the old ones. Stores switch them out after three to five years, Talach estimates. That’s down from a five-to-seven year cycle earlier, but ponderous compared to the pace of the cellphone world, where a phone is outdated after a year.

“The industry doesn’t move as fast as I’d like it to,” Talach said.

MADRID ?  The Spanish government was expected to unveil a new reform package for its troubled banks Friday in a desperate bid to convince investors that the sector is solvent and the country has a strategy to avoid the bailout fate of Greece, Ireland and Portugal.

The package, the second by the new conservative government in three months and Spain’s fourth in three years, is expected to include measures obliging banks to increase provisions against bad loans. Plans for the creation of a new entity that would act as a “bad bank” and allow troubled banks to set aside their most problematic assets are also expected to be announced.

The government in February told banks to set aside ?50 billion ($64.8 billion) in rainy-day funds to protect them against losses in the property market and elsewhere. Analysts say this could be raised to ?80 billion. It is believed the government might also oblige banks to increase provisions even for healthy real estate loans.

The government is expected to disclose details on its nationalization this week of Bankia SA, the country’s fourth-largest bank and the one with the highest exposure to bad property loans and other assets following a crash in the construction sector that started in 2008.

The Bank of Spain estimates that Spanish banks are sitting on some ?184 billion in ‘problematic” assets, either loans or foreclosed property. Bankia alone is estimated to hold ?32 billion ($41.4 billion) of these assets.

The government Wednesday said it was taking control of Bankia by converting into shares the ?4.5 billion ($5.9 billion) in loans it gave the entity in 2011 to fund its creation through a merger of regional savings banks. On Friday, the government is expected to announce a further injection of up to ?10 billion to help keep the bank operating. That move could stir popular anger against the government, which has been making painful austerity cuts in key areas such as education and health.

Analysts welcome the measures but accuse the government of reacting too late to a problem that was diagnosed years ago.

Eduardo Martinez-Abascal, professor of Financial Management at IESE Business School said the Bankia move was a necessary step but one that should have been taken several years ago as other countries had done. He said “less money would have been needed and the confidence generated could have generated growth.”

Spain, the eurozone’s fourth-largest economy, is in its second recession in three years and is battling to reduce a swollen deficit and 24.4 percent unemployment.

Its stocks have been battered in recent months on growing worries that banks’ bad real estate assets will hurt their earnings for a long time or even cause some of the weaker lenders ? such as the regional savings banks, or cajas ? to collapse.

On Friday, the benchmark Ibex index was down 1.7 percent. The index has fallen almost every day for more than a week.

Meanwhile, the yield on the country’s 10-year bond remained near the dangerously high level of 6 percent. Yields are a direct measure of investor wariness of a country’s finances. Rates of above 7 percent are seen as unsustainable in the long-run.

The giant asteroid Vesta got clobbered not once but twice, and it has the scars to prove it.

Ever since the Hubble Space Telescope spied a huge depression in the asteroid’s south pole, scientists surmised it was carved by a collision with a celestial object, most likely a smaller asteroid.

But a recent closer inspection revealed a surprise: There are actually two massive overlapping craters.

“Vesta got whacked twice with large impacts,” said Christopher Russell of the University of California, Los Angeles, who heads a team of scientists exploring the asteroid.

The double strikes occurred relatively recently — 1 to 2 billion years ago — and came to light only after researchers pored over high-resolution images snapped by the NASA Dawn spacecraft, which slipped into orbit around Vesta last year. The finding is reported in Friday’s issue of Science, which published a series of papers on the $466 million mission.

Vesta’s surface is pockmarked with pits caused by crashes. Scientists zeroed in on the southern hemisphere, which is dominated by a 310-mile-wide crater. Soon after arriving at Vesta, Dawn spotted a nearby feature that looked like a rim.

“It looked kind of weird. We thought, `What the heck is that?”‘ recalled Paul Schenk of the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston who is part of the mission.

Scientists determined the rim belonged to a smaller, older crater gouged by an impact 2 billion years ago. It had been obscured by the larger crater, created by an impact a billion years later.

The back-to-back pounding likely would have shattered any other asteroid, but Vesta somehow survived. Even so, the blows scooped out loads of material from Vesta’s surface — enough to fill 400 Grand Canyons, estimated team member David O’Brien of the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Ariz.

Some of the debris was hurled into space and fell to Earth as meteorites. About 1 out of every 20 meteorites found on our planet came from Vesta.

Located in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, Vesta is not your garden-variety asteroid. Many of the space rocks in the zone resemble potatoes, but Vesta is shaped more like an avocado with its iron core and differentiated layers. Measuring 330 miles across, it’s the second largest object in the asteroid belt.

Scientists are intrigued by asteroids because they’re leftovers from the solar system’s birth some 4.5 billion years ago and studying them can offer clues about how Earth and rocky planets emerged.

Dawn will depart Vesta in late August, firing its ion propulsion engines to cruise on to a bigger target — an asteroid named Ceres where it will arrive in 2015.

The fugitive suspected of killing a Tennessee mother and daughter and kidnapping two younger daughters died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head, authorities say, after police traced him to a town in Mississippi and found the two girls alive and safe.

Adam Mayes, 35, who just Wednesday had been added to the FBI’s Most Wanted Fugitive List, was found based on a tip received after a large reward was offered.

Guntown Police Chief Michael Hall says a SWAT team located Mayes in New Albany, Miss., and when they moved in to apprehend him, he shot himself.

Sheriff Jimmy Edwards said Mayes was still alive — in critical condition — when police took him into custody. He later died from his injury, the FBI confirmed.

Police said the two girls, Alexandria Bain, 12, and Kyliyah Bain, 8, were taken to a hospital for observation. It was not immediately clear if they were with Mayes when he was found.

Mayes had been charged with first-degree murder, along his wife, Teresa Mayes, in the April 27 deaths of Jo Ann Bain, 31, and her daughter, Adrienne, 14. Their bodies were found buried outside the Mayes’ home a week after they were reported missing by Jo Ann Bain’s husband, Gary Bain.

Teresa Mayes told investigators that after she saw her husband kill the two in the garage at the Bain home, she drove him, the younger girls and the bodies to Mississippi, according to affidavits filed in court. She faces six felony counts in the case: two first-degree murder charges and four especially aggravated kidnapping charges.

Mayes’ mother-in-law Josie Tate told The Associated Press that Mayes thought the once-missing sisters might actually be his daughters and it caused problems in his marriage to her daughter, Teresa, who is jailed in the case.

In an earlier interview, Tate’s daughter, Bobbi Booth, said Teresa Mayes suspected her husband was having an affair with Jo Ann Bain.

Mayes was often at the Bain home. Authorities said he was spending the night there before the mother and daughters were reported missing so he could help the family to pack for a planned move to Tucson, Ariz., and then drive their belongings west.

State and local law enforcement agents searched for Mayes on Thursday in a densely wooded area about 10 miles from Mayes’ home near Guntown, Miss. State troopers blocked a road, stopped vehicles and searched their trunks.

Authorities said Mayes had changed his appearance since the mother and children were reported missing. They released surveillance video of him with short hair at a market near Guntown.

Fox News? Garrett Tenney and the Associated Press contributed to this report.

For the first time, archaeologists have uncovered shrines from the time of the early Biblical kings in the Holy Land, providing the earliest evidence of a cult, they say.

Excavation within the remains of the roughly 3,000-year-old fortified city of Khirbet Qeiyafa, located about 19 miles (30 kilometers) southwest of Jerusalem, have revealed three large rooms used as shrines, along with artifacts, including tools, pottery and objects, such as alters associated with worship.

The three shrines were part of larger building complexes, and the artifacts included five standing stones, two basalt altars, two pottery libation vessels and two portable shrines, one made of pottery, the other of stone. The portable shrines are boxes shaped like temples.

The shrines themselves reflect an architectural style dating back as early as the time of King David (of the biblical David and Goliath story), providing the first physical evidence of a cult in the time of King David, according to an announcement by Yosef Garfinkel, an archaeologist at Hebrew University of Jerusalem. [Religious Worship: Top 10 Cults]

The research is presented in the book, “Footsteps of King David in the Valley of Elah” (Yedioth Ahronoth, 2012).

Radiocarbon dating on burnt olive pits found in the ancient city of Khirbet Qeiyafa indicate it existed between 1020 B.C. and 980 B.C., before being violently destroyed.

According to Biblical tradition, the ancient Isrealites’ belief in one God and their ban on human and animal figures set them apart from their neighbors. However, it hasn’t been clear when these distinct practices arose.

The discoveries offer a clue to the timing, since they contain none of the human or animal figurines common at other sites. No bones from pigs showed up here or elsewhere in the city.

“This suggests that the population of Khirbet Qeiyafa observed two Biblical bans ? on pork and on graven images ? and thus practiced a different cult than that of the Canaanites or the Philistines,” Garfinkel said in a press release issued by the university. The discoveries also offer support for the Biblical depiction of King David, he said.

Garfinkel suggests some of the features and styles of the structures appear analogous to those described in the Bible. For instance, one of the shrines, the clay one, is decorated with an elaborate façade that includes two guardian lions, two pillars, folded textile and three birds standing on the roof. The two pillars are suggestive, he said, of Yachin and Boaz described in the Bible as belonging to Solomon’s Temple.

The announcement was met with some skepticism from scientists such as Aren Maeir of Bar-Ilan University, who has studied the ruins of the nearby Philistine city of Gath. Maeir told the Times of Israel the new finds don’t conclusively prove the site was inhabited by Israelites, and that the images of lions and birds also undercut that no animal or human figures were found.

“There’s no question that this is a very important site, but what exactly it was ? there is still disagreement about that,” Maeir said in the Times of Israel, adding that the finding doesn’t add dramatic new evidence to the broader debate over whether the Bible is an historical record of events, largely mythical or a mix between fact and fiction.

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MILAN ?  Amanda Knox’s slander trial in Italy has been postponed until next year because the judge was busy with another trial.

Knox faces a charge of slander in Perugia for publicly accusing police of physically and verbally abusing her during questioning after the 2007 slaying of her British roommate. A court on Thursday suspended the case until Feb. 5.

Knox’s murder conviction was overturned on appeal last year after the court ruled there was no conclusive evidence of her involvement in Meredith Kercher’s murder. The 24-year-old U.S. student was freed after four years in jail and returned home.

The same appeals court upheld a conviction of slander against Knox for falsely accusing a bar owner of involvement in the murder. Knox is appealing that conviction.