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To stand at 14th Street and Park Road in Northwest Washington is to behold a new world created at whiplash speed.Real Madrid manager José Mourinho says some who voted for him as coach of the year claim their votes showed up as supporting other candidates instead MOSCOW — How hard is it to adopt a child? “People either think we’re crazy or we’re heroes,” said Gulnara Panina, a Moscow mother who, with her husband, Pavel Panin, has adopted two children, Denis and Yanna, both 6. Read full article >>     As an antiques dealer, I am used to going through the treasures of the dead, but this time I was confronted with details that resonated with my life.     A light festooned with crystals takes

up residence near the palace of

Versailles.     The British

are embracing a weight-loss plan that involves five days of eating and drinking whatever you want, and fasting for two days

a week. A new seed promises to flower in more climates, improving freshness and taste for many.    
Almost one in three U.S.
airline flights failed to arrive on time in August, the second-worst performance ever for the month, as 2007 stayed on a record pace for delays. Director Craig Zobel talks about Compliance, his new film based on a real-life hoax caller who preyed on fast-food chainsIt's a busy Friday night in a branch of the US fast-food chain ChickWich. A harassed, middle-aged manager takes a call from a police officer, who

informs her that

there is a thief on the premises: a female employee has stolen money from a customer's purse, and it is up to her to detain the teenage miscreant until the police arrive. As a law-abiding member of the public, the manager is eager to help. Eager to a fault, in fact.
"I'll do everything you need," she says, as she prepares to carry out his first task: a strip-search of the employee. There's just one problem. The voice belongs not to a policeman but to a hoax-caller determined to test the limits of

human subservience to authority.Although this is the premise for the cringingly suspenseful new film Compliance, it also actually happened. And not just once: over the course of 10 years starting in the mid-1990s, 70 such cases of prank callers tricking staff into performing humiliating acts on their workmates were reported across 30 US states. A suspect – David Stewart, a married father of five – was arrested and tried in relation to one of these prank calls, but was acquitted.
McDonald's, Taco Bell and Wendy's were among those targeted but, as this is a

fictional film rather than a documentary, the name of the chain – ChickWich – has been fabricated."When


I first heard about the case, it threw up questions I didn't have the answers to," explains Craig Zobel, the 36-year-old American writer and director of the film.
"I was thinking: 'Who is wrong in the situation and exactly how wrong are they?' What amount of blame can you place on the manager, for instance? Some, certainly, but how much? She was very skilfully manipulated."Many
audiences, he concedes, have been incredulous about the behaviour of characters in Compliance. It isn't only the manager who takes leave of her senses in the presence of this perceived authority figure.
On her say-so, junior staff members and even her own fiance collude in the incremental abuse of this young woman, some by active participation and others through simply doing nothing. Meanwhile, the victim clutches an apron to her naked body while the voice on the phone demands ever-more degrading punishments.Zobel's previous works include the award-winning 2007 comedy The Great World of Sound, about record industry talent scouts. Real people performed in its audition scenes without knowing it was actually a film shoot.
Compliance reflects Zobel's belief that most of us have a tendency, however faint, to acquiesce to authority. "I've had experience of that, and not only with cops.
Sometimes, I'll do what a security guard tells me. Then you think, 'Wait – I didn't have to obey you!' And yet we do.
We trust that they are there to protect us and that they won't abuse that. It's a social contract.
I hesitate to say the film is about one thing, but to my mind it deals with how people use authority, how people respond to it, and how it's baked into all the decisions we make."Compliance

has already been acclaimed by other directors including William Friedkin (who called it "brave, important and chilling"), Paul Schrader, Todd Solondz and John Waters (who chose it as one of his 2012 favourites). And it has all the makings of a provocative, must-see talking-point, along the lines of last year's The Imposter, a documentary about French conman Frédéric Bourdin. As unpleasant as it is to sit through, Compliance is expansive and illuminating; its metaphorical reach is so vast it takes only the smallest of mental leaps to get google sniper review ChickWich store room

to the horrors of Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo Bay, and even Nazi Germany. "I hope it generates discussion," says Zobel. "That's what it was made for. I didn't want to impose my perspective on the film.
It was more like, 'This happened and it seems outlandish and crazy to me – what about you?'"It also feels appropriate that the entire ghastly horror story should happen in a fast-food joint, the sort of place few enter without entering a zone

of denial about what exactly they're consuming. "It's like Oz, isn't it?" says Zobel.
"'Don't look behind the curtain.
I don't want to know how many calories are in this!' I think the same story could have happened in, say, a financial institution, but the fast-food environment is one where

authority is so structured that it seems to lend itself to this abuse. And when you think about it, what's the first thing they say to you when you walk up to the counter?" He pauses. "'Can I take your order?'"Compliance is released on Friday.DramaRyan Gilbeyguardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies.
All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds Renée Green. Renée Green: Endless Dreams and Time-Based Streams. (Yerba Buena Center for the Arts) Jason Collins decision to come out as an openly gay male athlete will serve as a test case for U.S. sports leagues, his future teammates and fans.     England was stunned in Ashes action on Thursday as an Australia debutant, Ashton

Agar, made the highest score by a No. 11 batsman in a record last-wicket stand.     Mark Sanchez intends to treat Geno Smith much as he did Tim Tebow — professionally, respectfully, but without any extra favors.    
Filed under: Cellular, SoftwareWant your mobile TV, mon? Digicel will be giving mobile television service over its network to its Jamaican customers via technology from Vimio.The service will offer local live programs, soap operas, news and music videos.
The thing is this -- how on

earth can this work with Digicel's GSM/GPRS network? Buggy and slow would be my guess.Read | Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments The last time the court allowed such access was a year ago, when it heard three days of arguments over the constitutionality of President Obama’s health care law.
MIT senior Arfa Aijazi might say that her path to the Institute started with the yeast-powered fuel cell she made for a high-school science fair — a project that led her to the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair.
“The fact that I could model a natural phenomenon using things I found around the house was really exciting,” Aijazi says.Or maybe it started before that, when a routine frog dissection in ninth-grade biology class took an unexpected turn, and Aijazi found out what a pregnant frog looks like on the inside. “You don’t always get what you expect,” Aijazi says.
“That uncertainty and sense of discovery with science” fascinated her.Or perhaps it started years earlier, when Aijazi — now a materials science and engineering major and an applied international studies minor — peered through a microscope in her father’s pathology lab and tried on his much-too-large lab coat.In any case, when Aijazi was accepted to MIT, in her words: “That was it. I didn’t need to apply anywhere else.”New people and placesBut Aijazi, who hails from northern Virginia, didn’t feel completely at home right away.
Now vice president of MIT’s Muslim Students’ Association, she says the group helped her adjust and has been an important part of her time at the Institute. “When you come from a Muslim upbringing, there are a lot of social things that aren’t in sync with the stereotypical college

social scene,” she explains.
“I think coming to college and finding Muslim friends really helped me adjust to being away from home and being at MIT.”
Not only has she adjusted, Aijazi has taken full advantage of MIT’s opportunities. Since she first walked through the doors of the Institute, Aijazi has done research on polymeric molecules in varying magnetic fields, materials for fuel-cell cathodes, and most recently, bamboo as a structural material.
She has studied and conducted research at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, traveled to Tanzania to develop a hand-powered grain mill, and helped improve housing in Brazilian slums.
And between her adventures abroad and in the lab, Aijazi has pursued her

love of photography at MIT’s student newspaper, The Tech, where she has

also written for the campus life section.Aijazi says her first two research experiences taught her a lot, but a course through MIT’s D-Lab convinced her to turn toward low-cost innovations for impoverished and underserved

populations. “I wanted to do something that had a more direct impact on improving someone’s standard of living,” she says.She got the chance to connect face to face with the people she hoped to help on a D-Lab trip to Tanzania during her sophomore year.
Her team worked on a hand-powered grain mill to grind corn kernels into flour, a crucial component of the local micro-niche-finder saw firsthand the distance people have to travel in order to have their flour milled, and how hard it is to crush the corn by hand,” Aijazi says.The group visited a rural village, where they were invited to join a weekly meeting to present their ideas to the villagers and their chief. In the middle of the circle of villagers, Aijazi introduced herself in their native language, Swahili. “We had all learned a little bit of Swahili, but for some reason I felt like I was bold enough to practice,” she laughs. “They were so excited that we were doing something that was meaningful to their lives,” she says. “It was really touching to see how interested they were in our work.”The
bamboo solutionWhen she returned to school, Aijazi found a way to combine her materials science interests with her desire to help underserved populations: researching bamboo with Lorna Gibson, the Matoula S. Salapatas Professor of Materials Science and Engineering.“One
of the main applications of bamboo is as a structural

material, particularly in developing countries where there are huge problems with urbanization and poverty,” Aijazi explains. “Bamboo is seen as a … construction material that could potentially alleviate these problems, because it grows quickly, is inexpensive, and is readily available in many countries where they have housing shortages, like

India, Brazil and China.”A
bamboo culm, or stem, is composed of strong fibers embedded in a foam-like matrix.
The fibers have more desirable mechanical properties than the matrix, Aijazi says. “If you use bamboo in its natural form, you are getting a mixture of both material properties,” she explains. “But by extracting the bamboo fibers and gluing them together with an epoxy or adhesive, as is done with plywood, the engineered composite can be lighter, more durable, and up to 2.5
times stronger than the raw culm.”As
it turns out, all bamboos are not all alike. Aijazi investigated different types of bamboo fiber composites while participating in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering’s exchange program in England last spring, where she took classes at Oxford and did bamboo research at Cambridge.
She found that although many people were making bamboo composites, most were not reporting variables such as bamboo species and age — so the properties

of their composites varied greatly. “I was trying to determine if there was any correlation between the composites’ mechanical properties and the volume percent of fiber, the type of glue or epoxy, or the bamboo species used,” Aijazi says.
Though her findings were inconclusive, Aijazi

noted that better documentation could help nail down what is causing the “huge spread in mechanical properties” of bamboo composites.Architect
of the futureWhile she was at Cambridge, Aijazi joined a student group called the Eco-House Initiative, a joint engineering and architecture project that partners with Techo, a Latin American organization, to improve housing in impoverished areas.
The students evaluated Techo’s design for a temporary shelter, giving feedback on its structure, heating, ventilation, electrical wiring and durability. Last summer, MIT’s Public Service Center funded Aijazi’s travel to Brazil to implement some of the Eco-House Initiative’s design ideas. In the slums of Brazil, Aijazi saw how tricky development work can be: One project worker explained that recipients of new permanent houses would sell

them for a profit and go back to living in the slum.
“You can’t just design in isolation,” Aijazi says.
“You have to really be attuned to the social context of where you’re working.”Inspired in part by her work with housing in Brazil, Aijazi is currently applying for jobs

where she might be able to work to reduce the environmental impact of buildings — since, she says, about 40 percent of carbon emissions come from the built environment.
“Buildings were designed for aesthetics and function and not necessarily

for minimizing their environmental impact,” Aijazi says. “It’s something that I don’t think people really think about; we put a lot of focus on transportation and cleaner energy for cars.”Energy, development, architecture, materials science: Aijazi’s interests are many and varied.
But if she’s learned one thing from MIT, she says, it’s that they’re not as scattered as they seem.
“There are so many different things you can pursue, and then eventually you realize that all these divisions are arbitrary,” she says. “They all come together in the end.” The determined Texan who wore a back brace 18 hours a day for six years as a teen has fought her way to the top of women's golf. Steve Carell may be known as the nicest man in Hollywood, but his reprise of Gru, the bald-headed villain in Despicable Me 2, is just a warmup for the baddies the actor is about to unleashSteve Carell has, on average, one despicable thought every six months. "Yes," he says, nodding beatifically. "Yes.
That's how pure I am." His most recent involved parking.
"There's always that lag time when somebody sits in their car and

is like: 'Oh, I know somebody's waiting – I think I'll do my makeup.' Or I think: 'I'm going to

check my phone. Because forex growth bot download this spot right now.'
There's

a weird psychology to that. And then they pull out and somebody backs in from across the other way."
He clenches his fists, eyeballs bulging at the heavens, white teeth bared.
Did he kill them? "I didn't, no. No.
I meekly drove away."Carell has a reputation – seeded by colleagues, confirmed by press – as the nicest, most normal man in Hollywood. A man of scruples (he balked at mocking the unwitting on news revue The Daily Show), but not of smugness.
Immensely successful (he was paid $15m for Crazy, Stupid, Love) but not raveningly ambitious (he quit The Office when it was still a big fat cash cow).This
is not a reputation he seems eager – or able – to debunk today. You can try, of course. He looks as if he's having an evil thought right now, I prod at one point.
"No! No! Not at all!" His face pops and crumples. "It's just jetlag. Why would I …? What?" I feel as if I've slapped a puppy.And
yet Carell has also just begun a six-month run of promo duties for movies in which he is, variously, an evil maniac, an absolute tool and a real-life murderer. Sure, the maniac is in a cartoon sequel, but, still, he's got to be channelling something as Gru, bald-headed baddie extraordinaire.
He is, he is. "I can relate to the way in which Gru is willing to go to great lengths to make his children happy and loved and secure and content."Despicable
Me 2, the followup to 2010 smash animation, is a Silence of the Lambs-style story (his comparison) of an arch criminal employed for his insights by a federal body. This is the Anti-Villain League, which coaxes Gru from his new life of jam-making and

raising the three orphan girls he adopted in the original.That
first film, he thinks, spoke to the turmoil in any new parent's life. The sequel pushes it further.
"I responded to the character in part because he's at a career impasse. He's trying to

do what's right for his children, but at the same time he's losing his own identity.
Parents' lives become about their children and they lose part of themselves in the process. It's counterintuitive because when you lose your own passion you are inherently a less productive parent."Carell


has two children – Annie, 12, and Johnny, nine – with his wife, Nancy, a former Saturday Night Live player he met while teaching improvisation at Second City in Chicago. During our conversation, he brings them up every five minutes or so. "I think at the end of my life I'm not going to think: 'Oh, I achieved this, or I did that TV show or that movie.'
It will really have to do with how I raised my kids."Their births coincided with Carell's career jumpstart. Off the back of landing that Daily Show job in 1998, he cameoed in Bruce Almighty (2003), shone as lamp-loving weatherman Brick in Anchorman (2004). That same year he was cast in the Ricky Gervais role in the US transfer of The Office.
The first series didn't take off,

but the network renewed in the hope that Carell's first film lead would fly. The 40-Year-Old Virgin, which Carell co-wrote with Judd Apatow, took $177m (£116m), changed the face of comedy, and made Carell famous the world over. He

then displayed dramatic muscle as a gay suicidal academic in Little Miss Sunshine, and a widower who falls for his brother's girlfriend in Dan in Real Life, before settling into the mainstream for Get Smart, Date Night, Crazy, Stupid, Love, Horton Hears a Hoo, Dinner for Schmucks, Seeking a Friend for the End of the World, Hope Springs and The Incredible Burt Wonderstone.Despicable
Me 2 is no anomaly; in fact, its love-interest subplot means Carell again

plays a man belatedly groping his way round the dating scene, fluffing his lines when he finally gets the courage to call the girl. His back catalogue is full of women chucking him in cars, of childish pleasures offering refuge from the roughhouse of romance. What can make this odd in live action is that Carell is actually catalogue handsome, almost Jon Hamm, a credible opposite to Juliette Binoche and Julianne Moore, Olivia Wilde and Keira Knightley. The schlub you love is a neat

paradox

to peddle, yet Carell has made a habit of it. He's the dreamboat dressed as Everyman: flinching at Mark Wahlberg's omnipresent pecs in Date Night; getting tutored by alpha male Ryan Gosling in Crazy, Stupid, Love.Such
broad-church appeal relies on an innate niceness, bordering on the blank. His backstory is PG-rated. The youngest of four brothers born to an electrical engineer and a psychiatric nurse who are still together, Carell was raised Catholic, played hockey and woodwind at school, studied history at college, nearly became a lawyer but moved to acting after his father asked

what he actually enjoyed. He and Nancy own a general store near their house in Massachusetts, purchased to preserve its function as a fat burning furnace Twitter (two million followers, 71 tweets), Carell scrupulously sticks to the middle of the road; today, too, he's allergic to controversy.
"Oh my gosh," he chuckles, good-natured always, asked about the ethics of the Anti Villain League's surveillance programme. "I will make no political correlation between the movie and anything." Likewise, the minions – those jabbering slaves who coo round Gru – remind him most of the Marx brothers.
"They're vaguely familial, violent, but also benign.
So full of soul and love."
He didn't find them frightening en masse? Especially when they're fed a sort of orgiastic poison and revert to hedonistic monsters. "It is a little dark," he concedes.
"A little sinister. It doesn't condescend to children. It's not just all puppy dogs and ice-creams and rainbows."It really isn't. In fact, scratch the surface and it seems choka with hidden Dantesque depths and fallen worlds. And so it is possible to see Gru as a warmup for the baddies Carell is about to unleash.
He's pitch-perfect insufferable as Toni Collete's new boyfriend in coming-of-age-tale The Way, Way Back. And this winter he'll get an Oscar push for Foxcatcher, the new film from Bennett (Moneyball) Miller, in which he plays John DuPont, the eccentric sports enthusiast and philanthropist who shot an Olympic gold-winning wrestler in 1996, before himself dying in prison in 2010. An early still shows him rake-thin, much aged, deeply creepy. Though he concedes both DuPont and Gru requested their houses be painted black, he's resistant to any connection.
"That's a

different press junket," he laughs, ever

professional.A
month ago, Carell went on Ellen DeGeneres's chatshow dressed as Gru: hulking torso, smooth scalp, pelican schnoz. The plan had been for her to try to get him to break character. "But I thought it would be funnier if

there wasn't a self-awareness to it.
I'm never winking at the audience."And
 it is this consistency that may be key to Carell's genius.
He never, ever cracks – indeed he has said he considers doing so to be impolite. He does not blunder nor break. At the Golden Globes in 2008, the whole room fell apart as host Gervais demanded back his Emmy; all except the man himself, who stayed totally poker. His Anchorman audition, in which Brick laughs wildly between chokes on an imaginary falafel, shows the converse – so brilliantly realised it's unnerving.
And, in the flesh, Carell turns out to be one of the most wholly controlled people you'll meet: so zen and level it can make you feel jittery by comparison.In a New Yorker profile from 2010, Carell compared improvisational comedy to chess: a thousand different gambits, all kept bubbling in the brain.
Face to face, such hypersensitivity feels acute.
He thinks this kind of pre-meditation is universal; I think that's less modesty than simple underestimation of his own skills."Everybody
does those sort of things to a certain extent.
Whether they're cognisant of it or not. I

think it's just the human mind.
When someone walks in the room you're constantly interpreting what's being said and how it's being said.
You're reading someone's face, trying to estimate what lies behind the words. That's just personal intuition. I think everybody naturally has that. You have escape plans, different scenarios that are worked out or working out in your head as to where you're going to go."What's especially curious about Foxcatcher, then, is that its conclusion is pre-cooked.
"You don't know exactly what happened and you just sort of estimate what their reasonings were and what made them up psychologically.
So you

just do your best with something like that."
He smiles, warm and poised. "I don't know.
We'll see."He
does know. Everybody knows. Carell is the nicest, most normal guy in Hollywood. His playing an actual killer will be absolutely terrifying.• Despicable Me 2 is released in the UK on 28 June and in the US on 3 JulySteve CarellJudd ApatowCatherine Shoardguardian.co.uk
© 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies.
All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds France’s highest court ruled Tuesday that a French Muslim woman was unjustly fired in 2008

for wearing a head scarf at work in a private child-care center in a Paris suburb.
A group of protesters gathered around the Los Angeles County Museum of Art yesterday to oppose the H[...] "Every day I wake up thinking, what can I do next and what more can I do?" she tells the show. "With my husband by my side, and now Skyler, my son, and the team that I have, I feel like anything is possible." American Airlines' chief executive apologized yesterday for stranding tens of thousands of passengers this week as his carrier continued to reinspect hundreds of jets for wiring that failed to meet federal safety standards. After President Obama signed the nation's

health-care overhaul into law, Wisconsin made more headway than virtually anywhere else in the country at preparing to carry the statute out.
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