“Middletown festival to raise Indonesia relief funds - Coshocton Tribune” plus 4 more

Middletown festival to raise Indonesia relief funds - Coshocton Tribune
The C-J's Sunday College Basketball Notebook - Louisville Courier-Journal
Hollywood Hotels Are Hubs for Deal Making - New York Times
You might never know which flu you have - Cumberland Times-News
TRIBUNE-STAR EDITORIAL: Max Ehrmann statue concept - Tribune-Star

Middletown festival to raise Indonesia relief funds - Coshocton Tribune

Posted: 03 Oct 2009 04:52 AM PDT

MIDDLETOWN -- This southwest Ohio city's annual international festival will raise disaster relief donations for Indonesia, this year's featured country.

The three-day Middfest International, beginning Friday evening, offers educational and cultural activities about a different country each year. Organizers say visitors can also donate to help victims of the devastating earthquake that hit western Indonesia this week, killing at least 715 people.

Some 100 Indonesian officials, businesspeople, artists and vendors are in town for the festival, which has been in the works for months. Government and business representatives have been meeting this week with Ohio, Cincinnati and Middletown-area officials to discuss opportunities for investment and cooperation.

Virginia Ritan, Middfest executive director, said Friday that visitors can make donations at the festival or directly to the Red Cross. Two local authors also have agreed to give proceeds from book sales to earthquake relief.

This is the 28th year for the festival, which features a different country each year.

"We don't have crystal balls," she said. "There are important things going on all over the world, and when we are focusing on a country, we become more aware of that."

The Indonesian government said Friday that nearly 3,000 people still could be trapped under rubble after Wednesday's 7.6-magnitude quake toppled thousands of buildings on Sumatra island. At least 715 people already were confirmed dead.

So far, none of the Indonesian participants has needed to return home because of family impacts, she said.

Stephanus Suwaryanto, acting Indonesia consul general in Chicago, was on his way to the festival Friday even as he followed news from his country. He said he appreciated the condolences and help from Americans.

"The festival has been scheduled since last year," he said. "We have the opportunity to introduce our culture and to seek opportunity to cooperate."

Organizers, who expect thousands of visitors this weekend, already expected interest to be high in the country, the world's fourth-largest nation and with its largest Muslim population. President Barack Obama spent part of his childhood in Indonesia.

The festival has performances and exhibits on Indonesian art, dance, music, dress, the country's religions and geography, including its volcanoes.

The C-J's Sunday College Basketball Notebook - Louisville Courier-Journal

Posted: 03 Oct 2009 08:44 PM PDT

(2 of 2)

We're going to be turning it over, taking bad shots and arguing and learning, he said. There are going to be questions questioning me, questioning them. The point is, things don't happen overnight when you're changing a culture that really usually takes years. But why waste this year? We have a pretty talented group of young men, and we're going to try to force the issue and force this along.

Cats' Cancun schedule set

Game times for UK's games in the Cancun Challenge were announced last week.

The Cats will play Cleveland State at 4:30p.m. on Nov.24 at the Moon Palace Resort in Cancun.

On Nov.25, the winner of the UK-Cleveland State game will play at 9:30p.m. against the winner of Virginia-Stanford. The UK-Cleveland State loser will play at 7p.m. against the loser of Virginia-Stanford.

INDIANA COLLEGES

Iowa transfer Kelly eligible immediately for Sycamores

Jake Kelly, a product of Carmel High in suburban Indianapolis, has been granted eligibility to play immediately at Indiana State, the NCAA said last week.

Kelly, who played the previous two years at Iowa, transferred to Indiana State to be closer to family, according to The Indianapolis Star. His mother, Julia, died in a plane crash on June 7, 2008. Kelly's father, Bob, lives in Terre Haute, where Indiana State is located.

Normally, a player who transfers from one Division I school to another must sit out a year, but the NCAA based its decision on his extraordinary personal circumstances.

Kelly, a 6-foot-6 guard, will be a junior and has two years of eligibility. He averaged 11.6 points per game last season while starting the final 24 games for Iowa.

Florida forward picks Butler

Khyle Marshall told the Star that Butler coach Brad Stevens' visit to his home in Pembroke Pines, Fla., last week helped him determine his college destination.

The 6-7 forward, who will be a 2010 graduate of Flanagan High School, committed to the Bulldogs. His two other finalists were Alabama Birmingham and Old Dominion.

The Bulldogs have been in the Top 25 over the past three seasons without recruits who were nationally ranked, so Marshall represents a breakthrough. He is ranked the No.113 prospect by scout.com and 99th by MaxPreps.

Marshall averaged 26 points and 12.5 rebounds last season and was the South Florida Sun-Sentinel Class 6A-5A-4A Player of the Year.

WOMEN

Cal's Rogers diagnosed with heart condition

Highly touted freshman forward Tierra Rogers will not play for California after being diagnosed with a rare heart condition and having a defibrillator implanted Thursday.

The university said Rogers' condition was discovered after a Sept.21 workout in which she had trouble breathing and later collapsed outside the training room. She was taken by ambulance to a nearby hospital, where she spent a week for testing.

Rogers was a high school All-American from San Francisco whose father was shot to death at halftime of one of her games. She considered giving up basketball after the tragedy.

Rogers led her high school team to state titles from 2006 to '08, including 32-0 seasons in 2007 and '08. Her team lost only three games in her four-year high school career.

Contributing C-J writer this week: Brett Dawson.

Hollywood Hotels Are Hubs for Deal Making - New York Times

Posted: 03 Oct 2009 08:30 PM PDT

LOS ANGELES

THE Sunset Tower Hotel, once a dilapidated dump but now a power-broker capital in Hollywood, recently hired a detective. After all, a crime had been committed — at least in the eyes of its owner, Jeff Klein.

When US Weekly reported in August that Renée Zellweger and her new beau had guzzled Champagne in a Sunset Tower suite, Mr. Klein had a meltdown. The detective was hired and, soon, a room-service waiter was fired.

"He claimed he only told his mother," Mr. Klein says. "I didn't care. Gone!"

A New York society brat turned serious hotelier and restaurateur, Mr. Klein, 39, bought the Sunset Tower in 2004 and has transformed it partly by throwing out the handbook of how entertainment industry haunts are managed, especially in Los Angeles. A ban on media leaks about boldface business deals or celebrity frolicking is strictly enforced. Mr. Klein is also very careful about curating a clientele. Celebrities deemed out of place, including the rapper Sean Combs and Britney Spears, have been — gasp — turned away.

Hollywood hotels have long played a role in how the gears of show business grind. They are where the moguls show off (Harvey Weinstein conducting multiple meetings simultaneously at the Peninsula), where publicists monitor interviews (the bar at the Four Seasons) and where pretty young things are discovered poolside (the plucking of Robert Evans decades ago from obscurity at the Beverly Hills Hotel).

"Hotels have the whole gamut of elements that people use to send signals in this business," says Peter Guber, the former chairman of Sony Pictures, who is now a producer. "You don't want to be seen unless nobody is looking — then you want to be seen."

These deal-making hotbeds exist partly because the business culture of entertainment is transient: Most of the money to make movies comes from somewhere else, and hotels are neutral meeting spots. Or maybe Hollywood hotels became integral for another very simple reason. "It's a casual place," says Mr. Evans, who parlayed his tan into a long career as a producer of films like "Chinatown." If you could do a deal by the pool, he asks, "wouldn't you?"

But the polarity of hotel power is shifting here. Out: the snarly parking valet, the too-cool-to-notice-you hostess and the tipsy-hipster pool scene. That is all so pre-recession. In: old-Hollywood glamour, and an intense focus on privacy and service that warrants the price. Mr. Klein's Sunset Strip hotel and its restaurant, Tower Bar, are popping against this understated backdrop.

"The Sunset Tower has made it impossible for me to ever stay anywhere else in Los Angeles again," says Lauren Zalaznick, an NBC Universal president who is considered a cultural barometer. "Nice is the new mean."

The Creative Artists Agency now holds an ultra-exclusive Golden Globes event at Mr. Klein's hotel, and certain agents use the lounge and bar as a second office. ("They take nothing and no one for granted," says Bryan Lourd, a Creative Artists partner.) Vanity Fair held its lavish Oscar party there in February and will be back next year. The art gallery that Larry Gagosian runs recently wined and dined clients on the terrace.

At the same time, other Hollywood hotels that cater to show-business types are wheezing amid the travel slump. The flashy SLS Hotel, with its Philippe Starck design and cotton candy machine, has posted monthly occupancy levels of about 65 percent — not horrible, but disappointing given its recent $130 million renovation.

Similarly, the Hollywood Roosevelt is struggling to maintain its initial buzz now that the pool party has died down.

One of Mr. Klein's rivals, the Hotel Bel-Air — the grande dame of business-deal breakfasts — closed on Wednesday for a two-year renovation. His closest competition is the Chateau Marmont, famous as the place where John Belushi overdosed in 1982. The hotel, owned since 1990 by André Balazs, is still packed, with the crowd leaning toward music and fashion. Celebrities like the director Sofia Coppola and Arnold Schwarzenegger have been spotted there recently, but it has suffered a string of tabloid humiliations that has soured some of moviedom's A-list. Lindsay Lohan has been a regular.

How has Mr. Klein done it? The Hollywood crowd recites the attention to detail and the privacy, but his New York connections have helped. The designer Tom Ford, for example, insisted that Mr. Klein hire what has become one of the Sunset Tower's secret weapons: a Macedonian maître d' named Dimitri Dimitrov, who formerly worked at a caviar bar, knows the producer pecking order, and is careful not to seat rivals next to one another.

"I was kind of annoyed actually — I don't tell Tom Ford how to hire models — but I put my pride away and listened," says Mr. Klein. "He was right."

Catering to celebrities, including movie moguls, has long been a high-wire act. The mood could shift with one errant paparazzo. Mr. Klein attracts the big titles and the big stars in part by being blunt about the kind of clientele he is not looking for: what he calls celebrity "trash."

In one incident that made Page Six of The New York Post, Mr. Klein blew up when he discovered that Ms. Spears had tried to book three rooms.

"She can't come here with all my chic guests; she'll ruin the place," he was overheard yelling in the lobby. He refused to let Mr. Combs attend a Creative Artists event. (News reports quoted Mr. Combs as yelling "I'll spend the rest of my life hunting you down," but Mr. Klein says the rapper later called to apologize, and is not banned from the hotel. Representatives for Mr. Combs did not respond to requests for comment.)

Would Ms. Lohan receive a reservation? Mr. Klein shuddered and made a sour face, adding that he believes the hotel, to some degree, self-selects its clientele.

"C-list television actors walk into the hotel and see what it is — a classy place — and leave," he says. "They don't understand it. They say, 'Eww, let's go to the Chateau.' And I'm truly fine with that."

THE Sunset Tower, perched on the Sunset Strip, has oscillated between a well-heeled apartment building and a hotel — of various names — since opening in 1929. It was not an immediate hit in its latest form. People didn't quite know how to take its quiet elegance. And by the way, who was this bubbly but neurotic New Yorker running it?

You might never know which flu you have - Cumberland Times-News

Posted: 03 Oct 2009 07:47 PM PDT

Published: October 03, 2009 10:59 pm

You might never know which flu you have

MEGAN E. GUSTAFSON
CNHI News Service

ANNAPOLIS — If you come down with a nasty cough, a fever over 100 and other flu-like symptoms this fall, do you have the new 2009 H1N1 pandemic virus or the regular, get-it-every-year seasonal flu?

Your doctor might take a culture, but, chances are, you might never know the results.

If you're not part of a group that's traditionally considered at high risk for flu complications, such as those with chronic respiratory illness or the immune-compromised, it's unlikely your doctor will need to determine which specific virus is making you sick. Knowing what you have isn't likely to make a difference in how you will be treated, anyway.

The reason for this judicious use of diagnostic testing is two-fold, said Andrew Pekosz, associate professor of molecular microbiology and immunology at The Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health.

One, obtaining a conclusive identification of 2009 H1N1 is labor-intensive and capabilities for doing so are limited. And two, testing priority must be given to high-risk groups and those who are seriously ill because in those cases a definitive diagnosis may help pinpoint the appropriate medication.

A "reasonable turnaround time'' for test results needs to be maintained for those with the most serious cases, Pekosz said.

Not every strain of the flu expected to circulate this fall is sensitive to the commonly used antiviral drug Tamiflu, said Rene Najera, an epidemiologist and the flu surveillance coordinator for Maryland's Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.

For example, a particular strain of seasonal flu, also an H1N1, is expected to circulate this flu season and has for the last couple of seasons. This seasonal H1N1, distinct from the novel 2009 H1N1 commonly known as "swine flu,'' is resistant to Tamiflu, Najera said.

For the high risk or the hospitalized, testing may help inform doctors about how best to fight the virus. Besides Tamiflu, other antiviral drugs are available, said Najera, and some physicians may choose to test patients in those circumstances to help make the best treatment choice.

But most won't need to know the exact cause of their illness, and experts are in agreement that most infected people will recover from 2009 novel H1N1 within days, without medical treatment.

The testing process that definitively isolates the 2009 H1N1 virus is not simple, but rather requires three separate tests to finally distinguish the new virus strain from the various seasonal strains, said Pekosz, a virology specialist who has been studying influenza since 1996.

The first step — a rapid antigen test — determines if the sample is positive for influenza type A, influenza type B or neither. Most seasonal flu cases are influenza type A, Pekosz said.

Next, the sample is tested for the specific proteins typically found in seasonal flu strains. If that test is negative, a third test is used to look for the specific "genetic signature'' encased in the 2009 H1N1 virus, he said.

Every year when flu season hits, The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization collect and test samples and conduct surveillance of flu activity, usually starting in October or November and ending in March or April, Pekosz said.

This year, however, the organizations never ceased doing so, because the novel H1N1 strain hit this spring and has never really left, he said.

"Our surveillance systems are ... designed to help us monitor the pulse of activity, to keep up with what strains are circulating, to what extent are they circulating, are they susceptible to antivirals?'' said Tom Skinner, a CDC spokesman.

The majority of flu cases in the southern hemisphere — which is just now emerging from its flu season — were caused by the novel 2009 H1N1 virus, with only about 10 to 20 percent attributable to seasonal flu strains, Pekosz said.

The CDC's surveillance, which includes data provided by more than 3,000 healthcare providers across the country that test all patients with flu symptoms and submit their samples, shows the same pattern is playing out in the United States, Skinner said.

And thus far, Maryland appears to be following suit as well — over 99 percent of swabs tested at the state health lab have been positive for 2009 H1N1, said Najera.

The CDC will continue to monitor flu activity throughout the flu season, keeping tabs on which flu strains are causing the majority of illness, but Skinner agreed it won't make a difference in how most people are treated.

TRIBUNE-STAR EDITORIAL: Max Ehrmann statue concept - Tribune-Star

Posted: 03 Oct 2009 08:08 PM PDT

Published: October 03, 2009 06:23 pm

TRIBUNE-STAR EDITORIAL: Max Ehrmann statue concept ideal for cultural appeal

The Tribune-Star

TERRE HAUTE — Occasionally, an opportunity comes along that seems ideal.

That's the case with a project to place a life-sized statue of late Terre Haute poet Max Ehrmann, seated on a park bench at the Crossroads of America. The bench would have room for folks to sit down next to Max, pose for pictures and read his iconic poem "Desiderata" on an adjacent bronze plaque. As pedestrians approach the landscaped site on the northwest corner of Seventh Street and Wabash Avenue, they'll see key phrases from "Desiderata" on small plaques embedded in the sidewalk.

The concept is "just perfect," said Pat Martin, chief planner for the city of Terre Haute.

Last weekend, the community showed its enthusiasm for the plan. A sellout crowd of 151 people attended "An Evening with Max Ehrmann" in the ornate lobby of the historic Indiana Theatre. The proceeds from the dinner, where guests paid $55 per plate, helped bring the effort closer to the $67,000 total needed to complete the venture. The crowd also was treated to a performance by a team of actors in a lively skit based on the old "To Tell the Truth" TV show. Four of the actors pretended to be "the real Max Ehrmann" as they answered questions about his life, recited his poetry and even sang an original song about Ehrmann. The script, written by Cultural Trail Coalition member Sherry Dailey, entertained and educated the audience.

The evening provided momentum for the Coalition, comprised of representatives from Wabash Valley Art Spaces, Arts Illiana, Downtown Terre Haute Inc., Vigo County Historical Museum, the city of Terre Haute, Indiana State University, the Tribune-Star and other groups. The Cultural Trail Coalition formed in late 2007, aiming to create outdoor art sites to recognize internationally revered Terre Haute natives such as Ehrmann, activist Eugene V. Debs, author Theodore Dreiser, and songwriter Paul Dresser. Because of broad affection for Ehrmann and his choice to live in his hometown, the coalition chose Max to be the first memorialized in the long-range Trail plan.

Fundraising for "Max at the Crossroads" has surged past the half-way mark. The Coalition, though, is actively seeking more donations to make the site a reality. The contributions — which can be made through the nonprofit Wabash Valley Art Spaces Inc. at (812) 244-4216 — will help create a destination in the heart of the downtown district for admirers of Ehrmann's writing from nearby and afar. The place will familiarize the young, middle-aged and old with the poet who famously urged mankind to "go placidly amid the noise and haste." That is an ideal benefit to Terre Haute's cultural and historical appeal.

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Saturday, October 3, 2009