Different Funerals and outfits,,,

Without James Brown, the Show Will Go On

James Brown’s band will go on, just as he always wanted.

Bassist Fred Thomas, 61, said he expects to practice with his bandmates within days as they ready themselves to tour in 2007.

Brown’s agent, Frank Copsidas, said it was more likely that the first date for the 11-member band would be sometime in February, perhaps in Los Angeles. He said there was significant interest in the band.

Brown, who died Christmas Day, had always told Copsidas the show must go on, even without him. As for the band members, Copsidas said that Brown told him: “Gotta take care of them. They’re family. They’re like my kids.”

Meetings are planned for late next week to consider whether the band should bring in a new lead vocal or share the singing duties among the remaining band members, most of whom sing anyway.

“I told people to write down all their ideas,” Copsidas said. “I love to get all the ideas and hear them.”

Thomas said he thinks the remaining band members can put together an impressive show, even without the man who brought them fame.

Brown’s death shocked the public because the singer still toured so regularly, even at 73, but Thomas said it was not so surprising to some like himself who had watched Brown’s health deteriorate as he fought the effects of heart disease and diabetes.

In the past year, Thomas said, he had pleaded with Brown to pace himself on stage – to show flashes of his flamboyant dance style, but just enough to get the crowd excited.

“He’d say, ‘You’re right,'” Thomas said.

But then he’d go on stage and dance like he was 16 again, Thomas recalled with a chuckle. “To the last show to see how hard he worked was incredible,” he said. “That was his heart. You couldn’t stop him.”

In the same way, he said, the band can’t be stopped either. The group consists of three guitarists, two bass players, two drummers, three horns and a percussionist.

“We are the only true James Brown funk band in the world and the funk of this band is in demand,” Thomas said.

No one knows that better than Thomas Hart, a Washington lawyer who sometimes represented Brown in business deals. He noted that trade publications said the value of the Ray Charles catalog grew 10 fold after his death.

Hart had no doubt that Brown’s death had significantly boosted the value of his work and life story. But he said, “We would gladly trade the value for his presence for one more day.”

Jonelle Procope, president of the Apollo Theater Foundation, said the famed music hall would be interested in staging a tribute to Brown and having his band perform there.

“Sure would, absolutely,” she said in an interview at the conclusion of Thursday’s public viewing of Brown’s body on the Apollo stage where he debuted 50 years ago. “I would very much hope it would be at the Apollo.”

She said other vocalists will emerge, allowing the band to go on.

“Funk is funk,” she said. “It still would be infectious.”

End of the Road…

Iraqis grieve beside the grave of the former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein in Ouja, 130 kilometers (80 miles) north of Baghdad, Iraq, Sunday, Dec. 31, 2006. Saddam was buried shortly before dawn Sunday inside a compound for religious ceremonies in the center of Ouja, the town of his birth.

Flying like a bird at 5,000ft

Man has dreamt of flight ever since our ancestors first saw birds soaring into the sky.

And even after the dream was realised, first with hot-air balloons and later with heavier-than-air aeroplanes, the dream remained unfulfilled.

Because being truly at one with the air, able to swoop and soar like a falcon or an albatross, remained an impossibility. And in legends where the dream became real, as in the myth of the Ancient Greek birdman Icarus, the price was a heavy one; an ignominious crashing to Earth.

But for one brave Swiss pioneer, a former military pilot called Yves Rossy, the dream has become reality.

For as these amazing pictures show, Rossy, 45, has managed to come as close as it is possible to get to the feeling of being truly like a bird.

Back in 2003 Rossy, now a commercial airliner captain, began his Flying Man project, when he strapped a pair of stubby wings to his back and leapt out of a plane, swooping eight miles in freefall for the loss of just 1000ft in altitude.

Strapping on the contraption, which is made of various metals, fibreglass, Kevlar and carbon fibre, Rossy climbs into the small aircraft which is to launch him into his flight.

At an altitude of some 7750ft, he leaps out, just like a skydiver. But unlike a skydiver, he does not plummet to the Alps below.

There is just enough lift generated by the 10ft aerofoil strapped to his back to negate the effects of gravity. At first, after the wings are unfolded electrically, he becomes a glider then, when the four kerosene-powered engines are turned on, he becomes a jetplane.

Thanks to the engines, each of which develops 22kg of thrust, he can not only maintain altitude but actually gain height, he says, at a rate of several hundred feet a minute – until the fuel runs out six minutes later. He lands with a conventional parachute.

“There have been no proper aerodynamic studies of how to simulate this sort of flying,” he says. “All simulations involve a rigid aircraft. My wings are rigid, but of course I am not.” He steers the contraption, he says, ‘purely by intuition’.

Like a bird, he can adjust his ‘trim’ with incredible precision with the flick of a foot or by simply leaning his body one way or the other.

“It is like how a child would fly,” he says. He says his ultimate goal is to take off and land just using his Jetwing without an aircraft to take him into the air.

Now he has gone one better, strapping four, small kerosene-fuelled turbojet engines (mini-versions of the engines used to power airliners designed to power model aircraft) to his wings to create what is effectively the first rocket-propelled hang-glider: the ultimate microlight, jet-powered flight at its most minimalist.

His passion to fly like a bird began at the age of 30 when he began learning how to do free-fall parachute jumping. He has completed 1,200 free-fall jumps.

He said: “I had tried sky-surfing, but that didn’t last long enough either, so I decided to create my own wings to enable me to fly for longer.”

Rossy’s flights have taken place from the Yverdon airfield in western Switzerland. Last week, after opening the wings, he glided to 7750ft, ignited the engines and waited 30 seconds for them to be able to stabilize and began to open the throttle.

At 5000ft, he achieved horizontal flight for more than 4 minutes at 115 mph, faster than the small aircraft which took him into the air.

He steers simply by shifting the weight of his body, and lands with the aid of a parachute once the fuel is exhausted.

“It was an amazingly good feeling, like in a dream. When you are in an aircraft you have to steer by a stick. You have no contact with the elements,” Rossy told the Daily Mail.

His extraordinary flight can be seen on Rossy’s website, http://www.jet-man.com.

Like the semi-mythical flying jet-backpack (which was actually tested by the US military in the 1960s) Rossy’s £150,000 flying machine, which with engines, wings and fuel weighs only 110lbs, sounds like something out of science fiction.

“It would be a great device for James Bond so he can go behind enemy lines,” he says. “I want to fly, not to steer.”

“Up there in my invention, I am as free as a bird.”

Best not let the health and safety brigade hear about this.

THE EXECUTION OF SADDAM HUSSEIN

See Video HERE.

See CELL Phone camera video footage HERE.

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) – Saddam Hussein struggled briefly after American military guards handed him over to Iraqi executioners. But as his final moments approached, he grew calm.

He clutched a Quran as he was led to the gallows, and in one final moment of defiance, refused to have a hood pulled over his head before facing the same fate he was accused of inflicting on countless thousands during a quarter-century of ruthless power.

A man whose testimony helped lead to Saddam’s conviction and execution before sunrise said he was shown the body because “everybody wanted to make sure that he was really executed.”

“Now, he is in the garbage of history,” said Jawad Abdul-Aziz, who lost his father, three brothers and 22 cousins in the reprisal killings that followed a botched 1982 assassination attempt against Saddam in the Shiite town of Dujail.

Iraqi television showed what it said was Saddam’s body, his head uncovered and the neck twisted at a sharp angle.

The footage showed the man identified as Saddam lying on a stretcher, covered in a white shroud. His neck and part of the shroud have what appear to be bloodstains. His eyes are closed.

In Baghdad’s Shiite enclave of Sadr City, hundreds of people danced in the streets while others fired guns in the air to celebrate. The government did not impose a round-the-clock curfew as it did last month when Saddam was convicted to thwart any surge in retaliatory violence.

It was a grim end for the 69-year-old leader who had vexed three U.S. presidents. Despite his ouster, Washington, its allies and the new Iraqi leaders remain mired in a fight to quell a stubborn insurgency by Saddam loyalists and a vicious sectarian conflict.

The execution took place during the year’s deadliest month for U.S. troops, with the toll reaching 108.

President Bush said in a statement issued from his ranch in Texas that bringing Saddam to justice “is an important milestone on Iraq’s course to becoming a democracy that can govern, sustain and defend itself, and be an ally in the war on terror.”

He said that the execution marks the “end of a difficult year for the Iraqi people and for our troops” and cautioned that Saddam’s death will not halt the violence in Iraq.

Within hours of his death, at least 46 people died and more than 80 were wounded in two bombings – 31 in one attack south of the capital and 15 in a Baghdad blast.

Ali Hamza, a 30-year-old university professor, said he went outside to shoot his gun into the air after he learned of Saddam’s death.

“Now all the victims’ families will be happy because Saddam got his just sentence,” said Hamza, who lives in Diwaniyah, a Shiite town 80 miles south of Baghdad.

But people in the Sunni-dominated city of Tikrit, once a power base of Saddam, lamented his death.

“The president, the leader Saddam Hussein is a martyr and God will put him along with other martyrs. Do not be sad nor complain because he has died the death of a holy warrior,” said Sheik Yahya al-Attawi, a cleric at the Saddam Big Mosque.

Police blocked the entrances to Tikrit and said nobody was allowed to leave or enter the city for four days. Despite the security precaution, gunmen took to the streets of Tikrit, carrying pictures of Saddam, shooting into the air, and calling for vengeance.

Security forces also set up roadblocks at the entrance to another Sunni stronghold, Samarra, and a curfew was imposed after about 500 people took to the streets protesting the execution of Saddam.

A couple hundred people also protested the execution just outside the Anbar capital of Ramadi, and more than 2,000 people demonstrated in Adwar, the village south of Tikrit where Saddam was captured by U.S. troops hiding in an underground bunker.

In a statement, Saddam’s lawyers said that in the aftermath of his death, “the world will know that Saddam Hussein lived honestly, died honestly, and maintained his principles.”

“He did not lie when he declared his trial null,” they said.

Saddam’s half-brother Barzan Ibrahim and Awad Hamed al-Bandar, the former chief justice of the Revolutionary Court, were not hanged along with their former leader as originally planned. Officials wanted to reserve the occasion for Saddam alone.

“We wanted him to be executed on a special day,” National Security adviser Mouwafak al-Rubaie told state-run al-Iraqiya television.

Sami al-Askari, the political adviser of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, told The Associated Press that Saddam initially resisted when he was taken by Iraqi guards but was composed in his final moments.

He said Saddam was clad in a black suit, hat and shoes, rather than prison garb. His hat was removed and his hands tied shortly before the noose was slipped around his neck.

Saddam repeated a prayer after a Sunni Muslim cleric who was present.

“Saddam later was taken to the gallows and refused to have his head covered with a hood,” al-Askari said. “Before the rope was put around his neck, Saddam shouted: ‘God is great. The nation will be victorious and Palestine is Arab.'”

Iraqi state television showed footage of guards in ski masks placing a noose around Saddam’s neck. Saddam appeared calm as he stood on the metal framework of the gallows. The footage cuts off just before the execution.

Saddam was executed at a former military intelligence headquarters in Baghdad’s Shiite neighborhood of Kazimiyah, al-Askari said. During his regime, Saddam had numerous dissidents executed in the facility, located in a neighborhood that is home to the Iraqi capital’s most important Shiite shrine – the Imam Kazim shrine.

Al-Askari said the government had not decided what to do with Saddam’s body.

The Iraqi prime minister’s office released a statement that said Saddam’s execution was a “strong lesson” to ruthless leaders who commit crimes against their own people.

“We strongly reject considering Saddam as a representative of any sect in Iraq because the tyrant only represented his evil soul,” the statement said. “The door is still open for those whose hands are not tainted with the blood of innocent people to take part in the political process and work on rebuilding Iraq.”

The execution came 56 days after a court convicted Saddam and sentenced him to death for his role in the killings of 148 Shiite Muslims from Dujail. Iraq’s highest court rejected Saddam’s appeal Monday and ordered him executed within 30 days.

A U.S. judge on Friday refused to stop Saddam’s execution, rejecting a last-minute court challenge.

U.S. troops cheered as news of Saddam’s execution appeared on television at the mess hall at Forward Operating Base Loyalty in eastern Baghdad. But some soldiers expressed doubt that Saddam’s death would be a significant turning point for Iraq.

“First it was weapons of mass destruction. Then when there were none, it was that we had to find Saddam. We did that, but then it was that we had to put him on trial,” said Spc. Thomas Sheck, 25, who is on his second tour in Iraq. “So now, what will be the next story they tell us to keep us over here?”

At his death, he was in the midst of a second trial, charged with genocide and other crimes for a 1987-88 military crackdown that killed an estimated 180,000 Kurds in northern Iraq. Experts said the trial of his co-defendants was likely to continue despite his execution.

Many people in Iraq’s Shiite majority were eager to see the execution of a man whose Sunni Arab-dominated regime oppressed them and Kurds. Before the hanging, a mosque preacher in the Shiite holy city of Najaf on Friday called Saddam’s execution “God’s gift to Iraqis.”

In a farewell message to Iraqis posted Wednesday on the Internet, Saddam said he was giving his life for his country as part of the struggle against the U.S. “Here, I offer my soul to God as a sacrifice, and if he wants, he will send it to heaven with the martyrs,” he said.

One of Saddam’s lawyers, Issam Ghazzawi, said the letter was written by Saddam on Nov. 5, the day he was convicted by an Iraqi tribunal in the Dujail killings.

Najeeb al-Nauimi, a member of Saddam’s legal team, said U.S. authorities maintained physical custody of Saddam until the execution to prevent him being humiliated publicly or his corpse being mutilated, as has happened to previous Iraqi leaders deposed by force. He said they didn’t want anything to happen to further inflame Sunni Arabs.

“This is the end of an era in Iraq,” al-Nauimi said from Doha, Qatar. “The Baath regime ruled for 35 years. Saddam was vice president or president of Iraq during those years. For Iraqis, he will be very well remembered. Like a martyr, he died for the sake of his country.”

Iraq’s death penalty was suspended by the U.S. military after it toppled Saddam in 2003, but the new Iraqi government reinstated it two years later, saying executions would deter criminals.

Saddam’s own regime used executions and extrajudicial killings as a tool of political repression, both to eliminate real or suspected political opponents and to maintain a reign of terror.

In the months after he seized power on July 16, 1979, he had hundreds of members of his own party and army officers slain. In 1996, he ordered the slaying of two sons-in-law who had defected to Jordan but returned to Baghdad after receiving guarantees of safety.

Saddam built Iraq into a one of the Arab world’s most modern societies, but then plunged the country into an eight-year war with neighboring Iran that killed hundreds of thousands of people on both sides and wrecked Iraq’s economy.

When the U.S. invaded in 2003, Iraqis had been transformed from among the region’s most prosperous people to some of its most impoverished.

Al Iraqiya television footage

A combination photo of frames grabs taken from Al Iraqiya television shows masked executioners preparing to hang former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein in Baghdad December 30, 2006.

Typo takes tourist 13,000 km out of his way

BERLIN, Germany (Reuters) — A 21-year-old German tourist who wanted to visit his girlfriend in the Australian metropolis Sydney landed 13,000 kilometers (8,077 miles) away near Sidney, Montana, after mistyping his destination on a flight booking Web site.

Dressed for the Australian summer in T-shirt and shorts, Tobi Gutt left Germany on Saturday for a four-week holiday.

Instead of arriving “down under”, Gutt found himself on a different continent and bound for the chilly state of Montana.

“I did wonder but I didn’t want to say anything,” Gutt told the Bild newspaper. “I thought to myself, you can fly to Australia via the United States.”

Gutt’s airline ticket routed him via the U.S. city of Portland, Oregon, to Billings, Montana. Only as he was about to board a commuter flight to Sidney — an oil town of about 5,000 people — did he realize his mistake.

The hapless tourist, who had only a thin jacket to keep out the winter cold, spent three days in Billings airport before he was able to buy a new ticket to Australia with 600 euros in cash that his parents and friends sent over from Germany.

“I didn’t notice the mistake as my son is usually good with computers,” his mother, Sabine, told Reuters.

Katie Rees Ex-Miss Nevada

I forget, why isn’t she qualified to be Miss Nevada USA?, oh wait, it wasn’t the Miss USA “i’m a drunk whore” contest….whew…really had me puzzled for a minute….oh well…

I wonder what her solution for world peace is?….

Dead at the Apollo

Jobs stock options ‘not approved by board’

Steve Jobs, chief executive of Apple Computer, was handed 7.5m stock options in 2001 without the required authorization from the company’s board of directors, according to people familiar with the matter.

Records that purported to show a full board meeting had taken place to approve Mr Jobs’ remuneration, as required by Apple’s procedures, were later falsified. These are now among the pieces of evidence being weighed by the Securities and Exchange Commission as it decides whether to pursue a case against the company or any individuals over the affair, according to these people.

News of the irregularities, which is expected to be revealed in a regulatory filing by Apple before the end of this week, will add to pressure that has been growing on one of Silicon Valley’s most highly-regarded companies since the middle of 2005.

Apple is among more than 160 companies that have owned up to stock option backdating – handing options to executives and other employees at exercise prices that were set in hindsight at favourable levels – a scandal which has led to the departure of a number of chief executives.

The latest revelation is likely to add to questions about Apple’s disclosures about its internal investigation into the backdating issue. In October, the company largely exonerated Mr Jobs over the matter, saying that while he had been “aware” of the backdating “in a few instances”, he “did not receive or otherwise benefit from these grants and was unaware of the accounting implications”.

According to an Apple filing in 2002, the options under review were handed to Mr Jobs in October 2001, at an exercise price of $18.30 a share. However, the purported board authorisation was dated near the end of the year, suggesting that the benefits were both not properly authorised and were backdated. Mr Jobs later surrendered his options before they were exercised, implying that he did not gain any direct benefit from them. He was later given a grant of restricted stock by the company instead.

Apple’s lawyers have briefed people involved in the case on the findings of the company’s internal review of the matter, though it remains unclear how much detail will be included in the filing.

Under Apple’s rules, the chief executive’s remuneration must be set by a compensation committee of independent directors and later authorised by the full board.

An Apple spokesman refused to comment on the matter on Wednesday, but said the company had handed the findings of its internal enquiry to the SEC. The company said in October that it had found “no misconduct by any member of Apple’s current management team” but that its investigation “raised serious concerns regarding the actions of two former officers”. At the same time, it also announced the resignation from its board of Fred Andersen, a former chief financial officer. Mr Andersen had not been a director at the time of the 2001 options grant.