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Weather Channel meteorologist Kim Perez was surprised on air recently when her boyfriend showed up to propose.
Perez's boyfriend, Marty Cunningham, appeared as Perez was finishing up a segment on New Year's Eve weather (conveniently titled, "Ringing In The New Year").
"We've been talking about this for a long time, and I love you, and I want to spend the rest of my life with you," Cunningham said as the weather map morphed into a "Will You Marry Me?" graphic. "So I'm asking you today, will you please marry me?"
"Yes, I will," Perez responded. "I love you, I don't believe this. I love you, Marty Cunningham."
Avenged Sevenfold drummer James Owen Sullivan, better known by his stage name "The Rev," was found dead in his Huntington Beach home earlier today on December 28 at approximately 1 p.m., according to the Orange County Register and Blabbermouth. He was 28 years old.
The Orange County Coroner's Office is investigating his death but at this time the SoCal musician is thought to have died of natural causes. However some fans on Blabbermouth are skeptical, claiming the drummer had a history of hard drug use.
JIMMY "THE REV" SULLIVAN[via Celebrity Smack Blog]
It is with great sadness and heavy hearts that we tell you of the passing today of Jimmy “The Rev” Sullivan. Jimmy was not only one of the world's best drummers, but more importantly he was our best friend and brother. Our thoughts and prayers go out to Jimmy's family and we hope that you will respect their privacy during this difficult time.
Jimmy you are forever in our hearts.
We love you.
Vonn, who is a medal favorite in several disciplines for February's Winter Games in Vancouver, damaged her left arm after sliding out on the first run, losing her balance on a bump after a sharp left turn before thumping into a gate.
She received lengthy medical treatment on the slope with initial fears that she had broken the arm.
But scans at a local hospital showed only severe bruising and the 25-year-old may even compete in Tuesday's slalom at the same venue, U.S. team medical director Richard Quincy told reporters.
Vonn's arm has been placed in a splint to speed recovery and she was said to have been in considerable pain.
President Barack Obama abruptly ended his golf outing and sped in his motorcade to his compound Monday after he learned a friend's child was injured while playing on the beach.
Members of the first family were fine, a White House official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of a reluctance to discuss personal matters involving the president.
The injury to a child belonging to Eric and Cheryl Whitaker, friends of the Obamas, was described as relatively minor and that the child did not require stitches.
The president was playing golf with friends from Chicago who joined him on his holiday vacation.
An ambulance raced to the Obamas' rented compound and then left with lights flashing.
After a brief delay, Obama returned to the course.
Part of an explosive device that failed to take down a plane last week was sewn into the underwear of the Nigerian man accused of igniting it, a law enforcement official told CNN Monday.
Umar Farouk AbdulMutallab is being held for allegedly trying to blow up a flight carrying 300 passengers on Christmas Day.
Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula claimed responsibility Monday for the attack, saying it was in retaliation for alleged U.S. strikes on Yemeni soil.
In a message written in Arabic, dated Saturday and published Monday on radical Islamist Web sites, the group hailed the "brother" who carried out the "heroic attack."
The group said it tested a "new kind of explosives" in the attack, and hailed the fact that the explosives "passed through security."
Sezairi Sezali beat hot favourite Sylvia Ratonel to be named the winner of Singapore Idol on Sunday.
"I don't know that to think right now. You have made my dream come true," said a shocked Sezairi.
The 22-year-old, who is waiting to enlist for National Service, dashed audiences' hopes of crowning a female Singapore idol. Taufik Batisah won the singing competition in 2004 and Hady Mirza took the title in 2006.
Along with the title and bragging rights, Sezairi wins a recording contract with Universal Music.
Though Sezairi's laid-back performances did not make much of an impression throughout the third season of the singing competition, he was determined not to go down without a fight.
Sezairi who performed Jamiroquai's "Virtual Insanity", "Crazy" by Aerosmith and "Touched By An Angel", a song penned by Idol judge Ken Lim for this year's winner, sang his way into the hearts of audiences at the Singapore Indoor Stadium.
The only way to contact him, he said, is through his Hotmail address. Naturally, he is the real deal since he was the only one present.
As if realising that wasn't enough proof - after all, someone else could have been checking his e-mails for him - he also brandished what looked to be a steel ring on his left hand.
In his amateur videos, he has a ring on his left hand, he said while rubbing the ring on his finger.
Our interviewee confessed that Gary wasn't his real name.
"GARY is an acronym for 'Girls Always Remember You'. Or 'Guys Always Remember You,'" he clarified, exhibiting a desire to be remembered.
In fact, he is also lying about his age - he is not 29 years old as claimed. But he is in the "oil industrial (sic)." When we probbed him further on what he did for a living, he refused to reveal his actual job scope.
Charlie Sheen spent the better part of Christmas Day in a Colorado jail cell after being arrested on domestic violence allegations.Click here to see photos of Charlie Sheen and Brooke Mueller in happier times.
The 44-year-old actor was taken into custody Friday morning by officers responding to a 911 call from a house in this ski resort town about 200 miles west of Denver.
Sheen, the star of CBS' "Two and a Half Men," was taken to the Pitkin County jail and booked for investigation of second-degree assault and menacing, both felonies, along with criminal mischief, a misdemeanor, Aspen police spokeswoman Stephanie Dasaro said.
He was released in the late afternoon after posting $8,500 bond and being advised by a county judge on the conditions of his release, she said. She didn't know whether a court date had been set.
Dasaro declined to name Sheen's accuser, citing a department policy prohibiting the identification of potential victims in domestic violence cases.
Some travellers among the 278 passengers on board the Northwest Airlines Flight 253 from Amsterdam to Detroit panicked but others sprang into action, overwhelming the man as he lit the device, which reportedly made a popping sound and burst into flames.
The suspect's clothes caught fire and he suffered serious burn wounds. The incident could have been "catastrophic," US Representative Peter King told US media.
White House officials and US lawmakers said the incident was a terror attack and President Barack Obama, on vacation with his family in Hawaii, ordered increased security measures after being briefed on the attempt.
The trial, from which Western diplomats and journalists were barred, followed Mr Liu's co-authorship of a document last year urging political reform.
Several people were apparently hurt at a Hong Kong protest over the sentence.
The human rights group Amnesty International condemned the sentence, saying freedom of speech was at stake.
The US also denounced the sentence. China has accused Washington and the EU of meddling in its affairs.
The BBC's Michael Bristow in Beijing says the sentence shows China does not want anyone to challenge its authority.
Witness video obtained by The Associated Press showed a woman dressed in a red hooded sweat shirt vaulting over the wooden barriers that cordoned off the basilica's main aisle and rushing toward the pope before being swarmed by bodyguards.
The video showed the woman grabbing the pope's vestments as she was taken down by guards, with Benedict then falling on top of her.
The commotion occurred as the pope's procession was making its way toward the main altar and shocked gasps rang out among the thousands who packed the basilica. The procession came to a halt, the music stopped and security rushed to the trouble spot.
A Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Ciro Benedettini said the woman appeared to be mentally unstable and had been taken into custody by Vatican police. He said she also knocked down Cardinal Roger Etchegaray, who was taken to hospital for a checkup.
A source tells us Sarandon, 63, is now in a relationship with the 31 year-old Bricklin. Which, first of all: Holy shit. Second of all: This suggests Sarandon's investment in Bricklin's Ping Pong social club, Spin, was not only motivated by her professed love of the game. Bricklin is a filmmaker whose latest (first?) film is a documentary about his father, the founder of Subaru of America. He's also one of three principals in Spin, which opened this September in the Flatiron and offers unlimited ping pong playing and hobnobbery for a modest $100/month membership fee. (Filmmakers Franck Raharinsoy and Bill Mack are the other two founders.)
According to the Observer, Sarandon and Bricklin first met in 2007 at one of the celebrity-studded "Naked Ping Pong" parties Bricklin and his two filmmaking buddies hosted in their Tribeca loft.
It was a perfectly executed forward roll - even better for the fact that this panda managed it in his sleep.
The animal, called Tai Shan, was sitting in his zoo enclosure when he began to doze off, his eyes flickering open and shut before he succumbed to sleep and slumped forward.
The sleepy panda could have fallen flat on his face. But instead he popped his head between his legs and turned head-over-heels before landing on his back.
Tourists at the National Zoo in Washington DC, who saw the four-and-a-half-year-old panda roll off the kerb only to recline in the grass, were delighted by his impromptu gymnastic skills.
A man in a wheelchair with plastic explosives strapped to his chest is holding five hostages in a post office in a small town in southwestern Virginia, officials and media are reporting.
Three blocks of downtown Wytheville were evacuated this afternoon. Several shots were heard, but there were no immediate reports of injuries.
The Wytheville Enterprise reports that the gunman has five pounds of C-4 plastic explosives, enough to "take out the whole block," a witness said, quoting a police officer.
Virginia State Police sent in a SWAT team and a bomb technician. Officers armed with high-powered rifles have surrounded the post office.
The unidentified man is holding two customers and three employees, a spokesman for the U.S. Postal Inspection Service told the Associated Press. He has made no demands other than to ask for a pizza.
Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins, the lovebirds-turned-Hollywood power couple who met while filming 1988's "Bull Durham," separated over the summer after 23 years together and have called it quits. Today it was made official.
Publicist Teal Cannady confirmed the split and said no further comments are forthcoming.
Sarandon, 63, and Robbins, 51, have two sons together -- Jack, 20, and Miles, 17. Sarandon has a daughter, actress Eva Amurri, from a previous relationship.
Though they were together for more than two decades ...
... the couple never married, attracting attention for that, for the difference in their ages and for their liberal political activism. As a couple, they supported John Edwards' presidential candidacy but then shifted support to Barack Obama -- though you probably won't find Susan playing Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton any time soon.
Sadly BlackBerry outages are becoming a common occurrence these days. This afternoon our tip box was overloaded with users who wanted to know why their BlackBerry Messenger wasn’t working. Then we received more tips that BlackBerry e-mail was down and this outage was also affecting web browsing so we knew something was wrong.[via Mashable]
How do you camouflage a 24-0 deficit? By running the worst play in the history in the NFL.
During Monday's loss to the New York Giants, the Washington Redskins decided to distract their fans from looking at the scoreboard by running a poorly conceived trick play on the final snap of the first half. Unfortunately, the Redskins could devote a season's worth of practices to running this fake field goal and it still wouldn't work.
Wealthy Chinese are apparently crazy about a dog breed. Unlike status-seeking westerners and their pocket pooches, Chinese with big incomes are dropping a lot of money on the Tibetan mastiff, a regal-looking large dog that was originally bred by the nomads of Central Asia.
In September a woman in Xi'an spent some $600,000 on an 18-month-old Tibetan mastiff. That dog's arrival was greeted by a 30-car convoy from the airport and host of events with his owner.
U.S.A. Today also has a report on China's mastiff craze and introduces us to dog breeder Zhao Yanjun, who makes around $400,000 a year breeding dogs and names them after world leaders.
Mr Peek's father Fran said that his son had suffered a major heart attack on Saturday and was pronounced dead at a hospital in Salt Lake City, Utah, the town where he had spent his life.
Mr Peek was probably the world's most famous savant. Described as a confounding mixture of disability and genius, his astonishing ability to retain knowledge inspired the writer Barry Morrow to write Rain Man, the 1988 movie starring Dustin Hoffman that won four Academy Awards.
Born in 1951 in Salt Lake city, Mr Peek was diagnosed as severely mentally retarded and his parents were advised to place him in an institution and forget about him. Thirty years later, he was classified as a "mega-savant," a genius in about 15 different subjects, from history and literature and geography to numbers, sports, music and dates.
Brittany Murphy died early this morning after she went into full cardiac arrest and could not be revived, multiple sources tell TMZ.
She was 32.
A 911 call was made at 8:00 AM from a home in Los Angeles that is listed as belonging to her husband, Simon Monjack, the Los Angeles City Fire Department tells TMZ.
We're told Murphy was taken to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center where she was pronounced dead on arrival. Her time of death was listed as 10:04 AM.
Murphy starred in such films as "Clueless," "8 Mile," and "Don't Say a Word." Murphy was reportedly fired from last film, "The Caller," after reports she was problematic on set.
A teenage Dutch sailor who made headlines when she went to court to fight for the right to sail solo around the world has gone missing, police said Sunday.
Laura Dekker's boat, Guppy, is still moored at its usual berth and the 14-year-old appears to have left her father's home on her own, Utrecht police spokesman Bernhard Jens told The Associated Press in a telephone interview.
There was a buzz at King’s Cross this morning as platform 11b began crawling with police.
Could it be a drug bust, the crowd wondered? Or was a rock star about to board a train?
Then a small lady in a headscarf appeared, a handbag on one arm and a posy on the other.
Fellow passengers on the 10.45 First Capital Connect service to King’s Lynn couldn’t quite believe their eyes as the Queen stepped on board a first class carriage.
INSTEAD of just reading about social and natural sciences, some students of elementary schools in East Java, Indonesia, were studying something else - pornography.
An investigation has been launched to find out how sexually explicit material, both in text and images, made its way into the books of primary and Islamic schools in the Batang and Pekalongan district.
This is the second time it has occurred, reported Jakarta Globe. Months earlier, sexual innuendo was introduced into an exam for elementary school students.
According to news portal detik.com, the textbooks, covering a range of subjects from social sciences to natural sciences and poetry, contained images of a woman in her underwear and another of a woman wearing see-through clothing.
Mr Seto Mulyadi, chairman of the National Commission for Child Protection (Komnas Anak), told Jakarta Globe that he had already received reports about the pornographic textbooks circulating in Pekalongan.
Stripped naked to the waist, she begs for mercy as she is savagely beaten by a lynch mob in the middle of the street.[via No-Name247]
Alejandra Maria Torres was part of an armed gang that tried to rob bus passengers in Guatemala City.
But as she tried to escape the passengers stripped and beat her before dousing her in petrol and setting her alight.
Police put out the flames and arrested her. Her three companions escaped.
Lynchings are common in Guatemala. In the last year, mobs have attacked more than 250 people, leaving at least 40 of them dead.
A large earthquake struck Taiwan on Saturday, rattling buildings in the capital of Taipei.A preliminary report from The U.S. Geological Survey reports the following information:
The U.S. Geological Survey said the 6.4-magnitude quake was centered off the eastern coast of Taiwan, about 16 miles (25 kilometers) from Hua-lien. It struck at a depth of 28 miles (45 kilometers). The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center did not immediately issue any warning.
Local TV reports said four minor casualties were reported in the capital. The reports said Taipei's subways and the island's high speed railroad were suspended.
There was some damage to property in a community near the quake's epicenter.
Earthquakes frequently rattle Taiwan but most are minor and cause little or no damage.
Magnitude 6.4 TAIWAN
Saturday, December 19, 2009 at 13:02:16 UTC
Magnitude 6.4
Location 23.76N 121.69E
Depth 44.6 kilometers
Region TAIWAN
Never a failure, always a lesson
It spun and exploded in the sky. We saw it from the Inner Harbor in Tromsø. It was absolutely fantastic. It almost looked like a rocket that spun around and around and then went diagonally down the heavens. It looked like the moon was coming over the mountain, but then came something completely different.
Photographer Yu Tsai spoke to the NY Post and said:
The three of them were very sensual and provocative, but Lindsay understands this piece was created not for any sensational value other than artistic integrity. There was never a discussion about pushing the boundaries. She was totally comfortable with the nudity as long as it had artistic integrity.
When you see her nipple, it just happened in the moment. She was playing the role of Kate Moss -- you're at a party and you are with a guy you really love and another girl.