Source: http://news.feedzilla.com/en_us/stories/politics/top-stories/334718017?client_source=feed&format=rss
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Sunday, October 20, 2013
'Lion King' Is Broadway's First $1 Billion Show
This story first appeared in the Oct. 25 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine.
The Lion King is about to claim a big crown. The Disney musical that kicked off Broadway's obsession with movies is on pace to become this month the first show to reach $1 billion in cumulative gross. It had collected more than $997 million from its New York shows as of Oct. 6, almost exactly 16 years after its first preview performance on Oct. 15, 1997.
PHOTOS: Broadway Musicals That Have Sung Their Way to the Big Screen
Lion King's success can't solely be attributed to its longevity -- it will soon overtake Les Miserables as just the fifth-longest-running show of all time -- nor to inflated ticket prices. Even with the adoption of premium seating a decade ago, Lion King pricing remains middle-of-the-pack, averaging $130 per seat with a peak price of $199, compared with $171 and $477 for The Book of Mormon.
Instead the family-friendly musical has been rewarded by consistency, playing to packed or standing-room-only houses and dipping below 80 percent capacity fewer than a dozen times in more than 6,600 shows (typical Broadway musical production costs are $600,000 to $700,000 a week). "This humbling milestone is a testament to the vision and artistry of [director] Julie Taymor," says producer and Disney Theatrical Group president Thomas Schumacher. Taymor's Tony-winning direction and the property's worldwide recognition -- the show has grossed $5 billion across 21 global productions -- have made it very good to be King.
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The King Of The Sixties Sidemen Returns, 'Only Slightly Mad'
David Bromberg's new album, Only Slightly Mad, is out now.
Jim McGuire/Courtesy of the artist
David Bromberg's new album, Only Slightly Mad, is out now.
Jim McGuire/Courtesy of the artist
Only Slightly Mad, David Bromberg's new album, marks a substantial return for the multi-instrumentalist. In the late 1960s, Bromberg developed a reputation as a "first-call" guitarist, meaning that when artists — including Bob Dylan, Ringo Starr, Carly Simon, Willie Nelson, Emmylou Harris and John Prine, to name a few — needed someone to record or play live with them, Bromberg was at the top of the shortlist.
The highly sought-after musician enjoyed years of collaborations with many of the music world's biggest players. But after a little over a decade, something changed.
"I got burned out in 1980," Bromberg says. "At one point, I was on the road for two years without being home for as long as two weeks, and I was too dumb to realize that it was burnout. I just felt I had to stop. I decided I was no longer a musician, if I had ever been one. But maybe the intelligent part of it is that I didn't want to be one of these guys who drags himself onto the stage and does a bitter imitation of something he used to love."
NPR's Robert Siegel spoke with Bromberg about his musical influences and how he occupied himself after a self-imposed hiatus from life on the road. Hear more of their conversation at the audio link.
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Saturday, October 19, 2013
EE announces Pay As You Go LTE plans, tiered data speeds
'4GEE Extra' plans and larger mobile broadband allowances coming too
British mobile operator EE has announced some sweeping changes to its range of 4G LTE services today, including new Pay As You Go 4G plans, a new two-tiered approach to LTE speeds and larger allowances for mobile broadband customers.
EE's new prepaid 4G plans for smartphones start from £5 per 30-day period for 100MB of data, increasing through to £30 for 10GB. Anyone with a data bundle greater than 2GB will get EE's fastest "double speed" data rates. Other PAYG customers will get standard speeds of up to 30Mbps. PAYG calls and texts are being charged separately, starting at £3 for 100 minutes and £2 for 400 texts.
The PAYG plans will debut alongside new, cheaper LTE-capable phones, including the £129.99 Alcatel One Touch Idol S, though EE says all its 4G devices will be available to prepaid customers too. To sweeten the deal, anyone signing up from the Oct. 30 launch date through until Jan. 31, 2014 will receive a one-off 10GB data allowance. A Christmas promotion will also give PAYG customers 2014 minutes to use in the new year.
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Money For Dam Project In Shutdown Deal Riles Conservatives
The Olmsted Locks and Dam project is under construction on the Ohio River between Illinois and Kentucky.
U.S. Army Corps of Engineers
The Olmsted Locks and Dam project is under construction on the Ohio River between Illinois and Kentucky.
U.S. Army Corps of Engineers
This week's congressional compromise to end the government shutdown and raise the debt ceiling had a few other provisions as well.
One of them allows additional spending on a lock and dam project on the Ohio River between Kentucky and Illinois.
The amount is $2.1 billion — a rounding error compared with the $16.7 trillion debt ceiling. But it's still enough to rile budget watchdogs, as well as hard-line conservatives who call it pork-barrel spending by Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, the Kentucky Republican.
The Army Corps of Engineers has been working on the new lock and dam on the Ohio River since 1988. It's located between the towns of Olmsted and Monkeys Eyebrow, Ky., a few miles up from where the Ohio meets the Mississippi.
It's just downstream from the old set of locks and dams, which date to the 1920s. Some of the machinery operating the locks still needs to be raised and lowered by hand — "by these crews of men and women that are out on an old steamboat," says James Bruggers, who covers energy and the environment for the Louisville Courier-Journal.
YouTube
In this video, the Army Corps of Engineers demonstrates how the current system works.
"These two old locks and dams that are just upriver from the Olmsted project are a really great example of our nation's crumbling infrastructure," Bruggers says. "They're already sort of a choke point for this commercial barge traffic."
The barges carry coal, grain and other cargo — about 90 million tons per year.
This is one of the biggest construction jobs going right now in the United States, with massive blocks of concrete being lowered into the river.
One of the nearby cities is Metropolis, Ill. Bruggers says it's "sort of appropriate" because the project has "a Superman theme."
"When you go visit the site, you actually see a 14-story-tall crane," he says.
Like a lot of megasize construction projects, Olmsted's cost has gone up. In fact, it's gone up 300 percent since work started.
And it seems only natural that one of Kentucky's senators, the leader of all Senate Republicans, would want to keep the project going, right?
But McConnell says he didn't put the funding provision into this week's spending bill. Two senators on the appropriations committee — Democrat Dianne Feinstein of California, and Republican Lamar Alexander of Tennessee — say they did it.
Still, Steve Ellis at the watchdog group Taxpayers for Common Sense says the legislation is only 35 pages long. McConnell had to have known the Olmsted money was in there.
And Ellis says he had to have decided to leave it in.
"It doesn't take a media professional to recognize that the optics of this look really bad," he says.
More substantively, Ellis says this was the wrong time and place to commit the money, especially for such a troubled project.
"The thing is, there are tons, I mean, scores and scores of projects and programs," he says. "Why this particular project was plucked out of, you know, the hundreds that are available is beyond me."
And conservative groups are blasting McConnell over what's been dubbed the "Kentucky Kickback."
The Tea Party Victory Fund has a fundraising email calling McConnell a "fake conservative" and the provision "the cost of selling out the conservative movement."
The Senate Conservatives Fund issued a statement saying that "this is what's wrong with Washington and it's what wrong with Mitch McConnell."
The Senate Conservatives Fund is already on the air in Kentucky, backing McConnell's primary opponent, Tea Party candidate Matt Bevin.
McConnell has long supported the Olmsted project. The new money was requested by the Obama administration, and McConnell told Politico that it actually saves money — $160 million — by preventing a gap in spending.
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Death toll in Philippines quake jumps to 85
CEBU, Philippines (AP) — The death toll from a 7.2-magnitude earthquake that struck the central Philippines rose to 85, police said Tuesday, as more reports trickled in about toppled buildings and historic churches near the epicenter.
Bohol police chief Dennis Agustin said that 69 of the deaths came from the province, where the quake hit near the town of Carmen. At least 16 others died in nearby Cebu province and another on Siquijor Island.
The quake struck at 8:12 a.m. and was centered about 33 kilometers (20 miles) below Carmen on Bohol Island, where many buildings collapsed, roads cracked up and bridges fell.
Extensive damage also hit densely populated Cebu city, across a narrow strait from Bohol, causing deaths when a building in the port and the roof of a market area collapsed.
The quake set off two stampedes in nearby cities. When it struck, people gathered in a gym in Cebu rushed outside in a panic, crushing five people to death and injuring eight others, said Neil Sanchez, provincial disaster management officer.
"We ran out of the building, and outside, we hugged trees because the tremors were so strong," said Vilma Yorong, a provincial government employee in Bohol.
"When the shaking stopped, I ran to the street and there I saw several injured people. Some were saying their church has collapsed," she told The Associated Press by phone.
As fear set in, Yorong and the others ran up a mountain, afraid a tsunami would follow the quake. "Minutes after the earthquake, people were pushing each other to go up the hill," she said.
But the quake was centered inland and did not cause a tsunami.
Offices and schools were closed for a national holiday — the Muslim festival of Eid al-Adha — which may have saved lives.
The earthquake also was deeper below the surface than the 6.9-magnitude temblor last year in waters near Negros Island, also in the central Philippines, that killed nearly 100 people.
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/death-toll-philippines-quake-jumps-85-100937700.html
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