Fine artists and crafts-persons interested in showing and selling their work at the Eleventh Annual Indian Wells Arts Festival – where Art is a Happening!  are invited to apply online to participate.

Primary jury deadline is October 13, 2012; and 60 spaces are held for the secondary jury’s January 5, 2013 deadline.  In total 200 artists will be accepted.  This outdoor judged and juried art show will be held Friday, Saturday and Sunday, April 5 – 7, 2013, on the grass plaza of the Indian Wells Tennis Garden, located in Indian Wells – in the heart of the Southern California – Palm Springs Desert Resort Communities.

 The Indian Wells Arts Festival has been selected by subscribers to Sunshine Artist Magazine as one of “The 100 Best Fine Art & Design Shows” in the country for the past 4 years.  It showcases a wide variety of contemporary and traditional fine art and high quality craft selected by jury in categories including painting, drawing, ceramics, weaving, sculpture, jewelry, glass, photography and original hand-crafted wares. Artists are required to be available to explain or demonstrate the techniques that created original pieces of artwork which are available for purchase.

The Festival produced by Dianne Funk Productions.  Details:  Apply online at http://indianwellsartsfestival.com/ and go to the Artist tab.

Email info@IndianWellsArtsFestival.com or call 760-346-0042 for further information.

An American woman shopping at a department store in Florida was put off from continuing her shopping spree after seeing several mannequins she described as “shockingly thin.” She is asking J.C. Penney to reconsider their size and proportions.

“The legs on the mannequin were not just ‘super-skinny,’ they were extraordinarily, shockingly thin. So thin, that the mannequin’s leg was the same size as my arm! So thin, that it made me stop, take a picture, and discuss it with my family, and not one of us could figure out who these pants were for,” Dae Sheridan, a mother of two, wrote in a public letter to the retailer.

Sheridan – a licensed psychotherapist and professor of human sexuality based in Temple Terrace, Florida – has started a petition urging the store to reconsider their mannequin policy. The petition has earned more than 6,000 signatures so far.

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Chi, an Italian gossip magazine owned by former PM Silvio Berlusconi, will publish topless photos of Princess Kate, wife of British Prince William. The cover was unveiled in Italian newspapers and TV with the teaser headline, “The Queen is Nude.”

Chi magazine, which has an estimated weekly circulation of 340,000, announced it plans to publish a 26-page spread on the photos on Monday.

Editor Alfonso Signorini of Chi claimed that the photos “don’t hurt Kate’s image,” and that he does not fear legal action will be taken against the magazine, he said in an interview with the AP.

Chi is part of Berlusconi’s publishing house Mondadori, which also owns the French magazine Closer, where the pictures first appeared on Friday.

The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge responded to the publication with “anger and disbelief,” Royal officials said. They blasted the magazine, saying that “a red line has been crossed.” 

William and Kate reportedly filed a joint lawsuit against Closer for breaching their right to privacy.

The telephoto snapshots of the Duchess were allegedly taken while Kate was sunbathing at a private swimming pool with her husband, during their vacation on France’s Mediterranean coast last week.

A new virus dubbed Gauss has attacked computers in the Middle East spying on financial transactions, emails and picking passwords to all kind of pages. The virus resembles Stuxnet and Flame malware which was used to target Iran, Kaspersky Lab says.

Gauss has infected hundreds of personal computers across the Middle East – most of them in Lebanon, but also in Israel and Palestinian territories. Kaspersky Lab has classified the virus, named after one of its major components, as “a cyber-espionage toolkit”.

The malicious malware spies on transactions in banking systems and steals passwords and credentials to social networks, emails and instant messaging accounts. It can also collect system configurations.

Though Gauss seems to be specifically designed for several Lebanese online banking systems, it can also go after Citibank and PayPal users.

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Hundreds of police barricaded the New York Stock Exchange as Occupy Wall Street protesters swarmed the Financial District for the movement’s one-year anniversary, with over 180 reportedly arrested.

Police made 180 arrests by Monday evening, primarily for “disorderly conduct”  or impeding “vehicular or pedestrian traffic.”

Witnesses had previously  reported on Twitter that demonstrators were being arrested for“blocking pedestrian traffic.” A well known local artist named Molly Crabapple was sitting in a police van when she wrote on her Twitter page that people were being “yanked off of the sidewalk” by police.

The final tally will ultimately be higher, as at least seven people were arrested after falling on the Bank of America building later in the afternoon. Several more arrests were subsequently reported after demonstrators marched to the World Financial Center in lower Manhattan and the adjacent Goldman Sachs Tower. Around half a dozen protesters staged a sit-in protest outside of the Goldman Sachs headquarters and refused orders by police to disperse.

The protesters’ initial plan was to surround the New York Stock Exchange and hold a sit-down protest, though the heavy handed police response redirected protesters to Bowling Green Park where the iconic Charging Bull sculpture is located. Protesters later moved on to Battery Park on the southern tip of Manhattan, where activists reported up to 1,000 peaceful demonstrators had amassed. By early afternoon, union leaders and activists had already begun streaming into Zuccotti Park – the epicenter of the OWS movement – with strident police sirens marking the heavy presence of the NYPD in the area.

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A lone appeals judge bowed down to the Obama administration late Monday and reauthorized the White House’s ability to indefinitely detain American citizens without charge or due process.

Last week, a federal judge ruled that an temporary injunction on section 1021 of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012 must be made permanent, essentially barring the White House from ever enforcing a clause in the NDAA that can let them put any US citizen behind bars indefinitely over mere allegations of terrorist associations. On Monday, the US Justice Department asked for an emergency stay on that order, and hours later US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit Judge Raymond Lohier agreed to intervene and place a hold on the injunction.

The stay will remain in effect until at least September 28, when a three-judge appeals court panel is expected to begin addressing the issue.

On December 31, 2011, US President Barack Obama signed the NDAA into law, even though he insisted on accompanying that authorization with a statement explaining his hesitance to essentially eliminate habeas corpus for the American people.

“The fact that I support this bill as a whole does not mean I agree with everything in it,”President Obama wrote. “In particular, I have signed this bill despite having serious reservations with certain provisions that regulate the detention, interrogation, and prosecution of suspected terrorists.”

A lawsuit against the administration was filed shortly thereafter on behalf of Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges and others, and Judge Forrest agreed with them in district court last week after months of debate. With the stay issued on Monday night, however, that justice’s decision has been destroyed.

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