Jan. 17, 1966: H-Bombs Rain Down on a Spanish Fishing Village

By Tony Long 01.17.08 | 12:00 AM


A hydrogen bomb is recovered from the water, 80 days after it fell into the Mediterranean Sea near Palomares, Spain.

1966: A U.S. Air Force B-52 bomber collides with its refueling tanker jet in mid-air over the Spanish coast. Its four hydrogen bombs fall to earth near the fishing village of Palomares.
The bomber collided with the KC-135 tanker at 31,000 feet. Exploding fuel completely destroyed the tanker, killing all four crew members. The B-52 broke apart, spilling its payload -- four Type B28RI hydrogen bombs equipped with 1.45-megaton warheads. Three hit the ground near Palomares while the fourth fell into the Mediterranean Sea.
Three members of the bomber's seven-man crew were killed in what became known as the Palomares hydrogen bombs incident.
Although the conventional explosives contained in two of the four bombs detonated, there was no nuclear holocaust. But there was radioactive contamination around the crash site, with plutonium scattered over 2 square kilometers. Around 1,750 tons of earth was excavated and shipped to the United States for disposal.
The bomb that landed in the sea went missing for 80 days and became the object of an intensive search by the United States, which was afraid the Soviets might try to recover it.
A local fisherman, Francisco Simo Orts, had seen it hit the water and was enlisted to help the U.S. Navy establish the basis for its search operation. When the bomb was finally found, Simo Orts turned up in New York with an attorney, demanding the salvage award he claimed was due him in accordance with maritime law.
The U.S. secretary of defense said the bomb was worth $2 billion. Simo Orts asked for $20 million, or 1 percent of the bomb's value, again in accordance with the custom of maritime law. The Air Force eventually settled out of court for an undisclosed sum.

Read More......

Allen's `Dream' examines life's savagery

By DAVID GERMAIN, AP Movie Writer

TORONTO - Woody Allen's latest film touches on all the things he likes to ponder — that there's no God, that life is savage and fleeting, that anyone potentially can get away with unspeakable acts if they don't have a conscience to bother them.

Obviously, "Cassandra's Dream" is not a throwback to what Allen once called his early, funny films.

Allen's third straight film shot in London after a career based mostly in his beloved New York City, it's as dark and merciless as anything he's ever done.

The 72-year-old filmmaker often has used violence and bloodshed to propel stories, but the films generally are leavened with a good dose of humor.

With "Cassandra's Dream," Allen wanted to craft an all-out tragedy, the film relentlessly tracing the gloomy consequences after two decent, upstanding brothers (Ewan McGregor and Colin Farrell) are drawn into abominable misdeeds.

One finds he can live with his actions, the other cannot.

"I've always felt that the worst kind of crimes and sometimes not the worst crimes often go unpunished. Everyday, from genocide in the political spectrum to street crime, people do terrible things and get away with it," Allen said in an interview at last year's Toronto International Film Festival, where "Cassandra's Dream" played.

"The fact that there is no god and that we're alone in the universe makes it more important than ever to act decently, but people don't, very frequently."

Wicked behavior fueled Allen's first two films in London, the drama "Match Point" and the comedy "Scoop," both featuring Scarlett Johansson and each dealing with murder plots.

Allen had intended to make "Match Point" in New York until he was approached by European backers offering to finance the film with no strings attached if he shot it in London.

Since then, he has been returning to Europe each summer with wife Soon-Yi Previn and their two children to shoot films, among them the upcoming "Vicky Cristina Barcelona," a drama shot in Spain that stars Johansson, Penelope Cruz, Javier Bardem and Rebecca Hall.

"It's a drama, but not heavy Germanic drama. Nobody dies. Nobody does anything terrible," Allen said.

Allen's films are budgeted modestly at about $15 million, compared to big-studio flicks that can cost $100 million to $200 million. Even with his smaller-budgeted projects, though, Allen found his U.S.-backed films prone to meddling.

"The American studios want input. Their basic philosophy is, `We're not just bankers. We want to know who's in the film. Can we read the script?' Whereas in Europe, they are just bankers. They have no studios. They're tax people, bankers, and they don't read my script. They trust me as a filmmaker. I've been around for many years. They trust that I'm not going to suddenly go $20 million over budget, or 20 cents over budget even — that I'm going to give them an acceptable film at worst. Maybe a good film, but it's never going to be a humiliation where they lose their whole $15 million. It'll be a reasonable film, so it's not that much of a risk."

While "Match Point" proved his biggest financial success in years, Allen generally has been on a dry spell, with other recent films such as "Anything Else," "Scoop" and "Melinda and Melinda" not connecting much with audiences.

Still, actors always are eager to work with Allen, who lately has focused on casting younger performers such as Johansson, Cruz, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Hugh Jackman and Christina Ricci.

Allen's style — long takes that let actors burrow into a scene, free rein for performers to play around with his dialogue — hold strong appeal for actors.

"It starts with the writing. You always get a good part, anyway, but he's an actor ... so he knows how to get the best out of you," said Michael Caine, who won an Academy Award for Allen's "Hannah and Her Sisters." "What he does is, he lets you run with it until you screw it up, and then he'll stop you ... You get a lot of directors who are sitting there worried about the lights, the camera, the angle and all that. He's worried about the acting."

"I think he has very, very good taste in terms of judging the reality and pitch of a performance," said Kenneth Branagh, who starred in Allen's "Celebrity." "People are so respectful of him that they really do their homework before they start a Woody Allen film, so I think everybody is just on their mettle when they're working for him."

For all his cynicism about life and his conviction that we live in an indifferent, pitiless universe, Allen remains a passionate and prolific filmmaker, even as he dismisses the meaning or legacy of art or other human endeavors.

"I feel the trick is to try and find, not meaning, because there is no meaning, but to try and find some enjoyment in that context and know that it's meaningless, short, nasty, brutal, and still, you know, find a modicum of enjoyment, get what you can get out of it, which is not a lot," he said.

Allen speaks eloquently of existence as a random accident, the universe eventually giving way to absolute nothingness, the work of Beethoven, Shakespeare and others ultimately leaving no permanent mark.

"People say, `Well, why go on at all?' Camus' question, why choose life?" Allen said. "And the only answer I can ever give to that is we seem to be hard-wired to. The brain asks the questions, but the blood says live. So if a guy comes in here with a gun, you do everything you can to get it away from him. You do whatever you can to live. You bargain, you lie, you jump on top of him.

"You're hard-wired for self-preservation, but when you think about it cerebrally, why, to what end, what am I savoring here? And you can't really think of a good answer, so you give up and say, `I can't think of an answer, but my body fights to live, so I'm not going to resist that. I'm going to go along and trust the impulse toward life.'"

Read More......

George Michael signs big book deal

NEW YORK - In what his publisher calls a record-breaking deal, British pop superstar George Michael is working on a memoir to come out in the fall of 2009.

ADVERTISEMENT
HarperCollins says the book, currently untitled, will be an "access all areas" story, with the 44-year-old Michael writing extensively about his professional and personal life.

A publishing official with knowledge of the negotiations said the deal was worth at least $6 million for British rights alone, among the biggest publishing contracts ever for that market, and at least $7 million overall.

"George has promised HarperCollins a no-holds barred biography, and it's certain to be just that," the singer's manager, Andy Stephens, said in a statement Wednesday. "People aren't stupid, they're beginning to notice that the truth is more interesting than the stories the press come up with!"

Michael, whose many hits include "Careless Whisper," "Faith" and "Father Figure," has had several run-ins with the law, on charges ranging from drug possession to lewd conduct. Elton John, with whom Michael has performed on stage, has spoken of a "deep-rooted unhappiness" in the singer's life.

Read More......

Putting a Guy in His Place

By GUY TREBAY
Published: January 17, 2008

AMONG the many practical elements missing from Miuccia Prada’s latest collection of men’s wear for winter 2008 were coats, scarves, hats or much of anything else to keep out the cold. This was not the only thing to suggest Ms. Prada has some complex sexual issues to work through.

Speaking after Sunday’s show to Suzy Menkes, the fashion critic for The International Herald Tribune, Ms. Prada quipped that the collection was revenge on men for the social and sartorial contortions they impose on women. She laughed when she said it, but she clearly wasn’t kidding around.

It is no stretch to suggest that the Prada collection read like the manifesto of a gender revanchist. The man in Ms. Prada’s current vision was domesticated and so passive as to be a neuter. One notes this not merely because the models looked abnormally robotic and were given nothing to wear outside the house.

Like a flipped version of the Unwomen in Margaret Atwood’s feminist parable “The Handmaid’s Tale,” the Prada Unman was gotten up in humiliating tutu belts, severe high-collar shirts that buttoned up the back and odd cummerbunds that disappeared in a chevron down the front of trousers conspicuously lacking a fly.

As usual with this designer, there were things to admire: a lean clerical silhouette, the severity of a nearly monochrome palette, the way color and its absence were used to mark out the torso in floating zones. But when designers stop conceding to biological function, they move away from the realm of fashion and into that of social engineering. It is one thing to nudge men toward exploring their girly sides and quite another to suggest they sit to urinate.

Still, points to the woman who is without question the most intellectually alert designer to show here for exploiting an idea while most of the competition is content to rummage through a grab bag of shopworn cultural references, slack attitudes and clichés.

There are, in other words, days in the life of a fashion observer when having a nail driven into one’s skull seems preferable to sitting through another evocation of the so-called rock ’n’ roll style. True, there was a time when rock stars dressed with offhand brio and loony extravagance and actually wore leather pants. But Jim Morrison, for the record, died in 1971. Except for style hounds like Rufus Wainwright and Amy Winehouse, most musicians these days dress for the stage in more or less the same crumpled Levi’s corduroy jeans they wear to compose their songs, sitting in a bedroom at a computer screen.

So it seems willfully dated when designers like Frida Giannini at Gucci haul out the paisley scarves, the velvets, the eyeliner, the grommet boots and wraparound Gypsy belts. Her collection was informed by a narrative she titled “Russian Rock.” It was styled after a singer from the group Gogol Bordello named Eugene Hutz.

If you happen to have visited Moscow lately, you are aware that Russian rockers are no more likely to dress this way than are their Western counterparts, at least not without a self-conscious wink. Subdued chic is Russia’s new order of the day, and this extends even to musicians. The coolest, and in some sense the most fashionable, person I saw on a recent visit was a musician walking in Red Square with his head shaved except for a cascade of dreadlocks and with a wide belt cinching blue workman coveralls.

A look like that might be pushing things at Gucci, a multinational whose challenge is to “model” markets — that is, standardize taste and expectation among luxury goods consumers in markets both established and new.

Yet it would be a lot more credible and refreshing than a Gucci collection that seemed like a momentary pause on a style loop that included, as it often does, other rock-inspired designers like Ennio Capasa at Costume National (Pete Doherty still holds sway at this label), or Roberto Cavalli, whose surprisingly subdued show of suits with peaked shoulders, nipped waists and wide-leg trousers also included his more signature ostentations, like outerwear made of snakeskin or patterned to look like leopard or giraffe or even (this closed the show) a PETA-defiant coat that resembled the pelt of King Kong.

“Designing a collection is like producing a record,” the rapper and entrepreneur Jay-Z said at a private dinner Donatella Versace gave after her show. Wearing a Versace suit, with a tie held in place by an emerald Cartier tie bar (a gift from his girlfriend, Beyoncé Knowles), he scooped a bite of creamy lemon mousse from a tuile.

“It’s about telling your story, telling your truth,” said the musician who remains one of the most novelistic artists hip-hop has produced.

He was correct. Narrative drives fashion. Ms. Versace’s is a tale of survival, and in the years since she quit a formidable cocaine habit and dedicated herself to reviving the flagging label, she has moved the company’s story forward shrewdly and with intelligence. The hiring of Alexandre Plokhov, the award-winning designer of Cloak, to assist with Versace’s men’s wear business resulted in a collection that not only looked East for design cues but also seemed to take seriously the idea that the future may be chilling in all kinds of ways.

This was made clear not so much by the snug suits as by the somber long coats that looked suitable for a stroll through Gorky Park. Wearing one, a man might experience a feeling opposite that evoked by the Prada collection. He might feel empowered, as Ms. Versace claimed she is whenever she slips on a 31-carat diamond ring given to her by her late brother, Gianni. At any rate, he might feel fortified against the winds of winter and a rapidly cooling economy.DESPITE an occasional obligatory reference to the failure of the subprime mortgage market, there was little about the shows here to suggest that anyone was suffering the financial jitters. Yet perhaps the sobriety of the Armani show, whose keyword was “regal,” was a cue.

Design surprises were few in an Armani collection built on caution and control. Those are values that made the designer one of Italy’s wealthiest citizens and his brand among the most recognizable in the world. Those are his creative defaults. Thus his show read as the sartorial equivalent of a stop-loss order. The message was risk-averse.

What every guy needs most in his wardrobe in economic times like these, Mr. Armani seemed to be saying, is a solid interview suit. The fellow wearing the clothes Raf Simons presented at Jil Sander, by contrast, had better have a private income, since it is far from likely that anyone wearing one of Mr. Simons’s ingenious suits or coats, needle-punched and printed in a marble pattern with inkjet technology, will ever find a job.

In general, it is considered unchic to bring up gainful employment when the subject is fashion; real-world concerns are not supposed to penetrate this sphere. And while it is exciting to track designers with the kind of scope Mr. Simons has shown in reinventing the Jil Sander brand, sometimes all that ingenuity becomes an end in itself, and the vision goes flat.

And sometimes it seems finely resolved, as in Tomas Maier’s show for Bottega Veneta, perhaps the week’s most satisfying, in which he recast ordinary work gear for the label’s clientele of putative gazillionaires. It is never clear to this observer who the client is for Mr. Maier’s phenomenally costly clothing, but he certainly makes one wish one could afford to join their ranks.

“We were looking at functionality,” the designer explained, as well as the connection between what a man does and what he wears. From the boxy trousers, the taut jackets, the heavy denims and the so-called chore coats, one deduces that Mr. Maier is dressing garage mechanics, albeit those who have hit it big in the lottery.

Mr. Maier’s was a beautiful show and as direct as Alexander McQueen’s was vagrant, and also lyrical. Inspired by a pilgrimage to India, Mr. McQueen said the show was originally intended to have an Argentine pampas theme. Then he decided to embark on a monthlong journey through Kerala and Rajasthan and the remote and lawless state of Bihar — where Mr. McQueen, a Buddhist, visited the place in which Gautama Buddha attained enlightenment — ending up in the isolated mountain kingdom of Bhutan.

The enormous last-minute changes resulted in a collection that wed masterful tailoring to subtle effects created with safety pins and wirework embroidery and that also featured a coat that looked like yeti fur and another that was Mr. McQueen’s rendition of the Bhutanese national costume, the go.

“The design assistants were not too thrilled, I can tell you,” the designer remarked backstage last Saturday evening.

Read More......

Italian Charm for Sale

By ERIC WILSON
Published: January 17, 2008

AFTER the clobbering Italian fashion has taken of late — in some accounts for its inability to produce a new generation of hot designers, in others for using underpaid Chinese immigrants to make overpriced handbags — Isabella Rossellini is making a stand for Milan.

Ms. Rossellini, the actress and model, appears in a new government-financed advertising campaign that urges American consumers to “Let yourself be charmed by an Italian.” And although Ms. Rossellini, is, of course, half Swedish and now lives in America, she was born in Rome, is indeed charming, adores Italian fashion and is disarmingly honest in her sales pitch.

“Quite frankly, I think it is appropriate because I have worked as a model,” she said. “They might have chosen Sophia Loren or Monica Bellucci, but I think I might have worked in fashion more.”

She has, as they say, kicked the tires.

She has been out with Giorgio Armani and been surprised to see crowds treating him as the star. She remembers Max Mara as a coat house and Prada when it sold only purses. She remembers how fashion was perceived when she first came to New York at 19. (She resented “all these stereotypes about spaghetti and meatballs, which we never eat in Italy,” she said.)

Ms. Rossellini, who was once the face of the French cosmetics company Lancôme, is well versed on the intricacies of the American marketplace and how difficult it can be to succeed here. Perhaps this makes her sensitive to the competitiveness among Italian designers trying to do the same.

Deciding what Ms. Rossellini would wear for the campaign was fraught.

“Obviously, everything had to be Italian,” she said. “The great debate was whether I would wear an Armani or a Missoni.”

Ms. Rossellini coyly suggested an outfit by Cristina Bomba, a designer unknown outside of Italy, “because either Armani or Missoni would be such a strong signature that it would make the other one jealous.”

She praised Armani and Missoni, mind you. She once wore a lot of Dolce & Gabbana, too, but this is where Ms. Rossellini went a bit off message.

“I’m not fat,” she said, “or maybe I’m vain and don’t want to think of myself as fat. But now I don’t fit, and that is a mystery to me.”

Read More......

Why Eddie and Tracey Split So Fast

The Eddie Murphy and Tracey Edmonds split apparently involves some name-calling.

And that name in particular is Murphy.

I’m told one of their major—and ongoing—disagreements was whether Edmonds would take Murphy’s last name. “He was insisting she change her name,” a source just told me. “It was a huge issue. They were arguing about it before they left for the wedding.”

People magazine broke the news today that Murphy, 46, and Edmonds, 40, split just 14 days after their New Year's Day wedding on a private island off Bora Bora. Attended by just 25 friends and family, the ceremony wasn’t legally binding. However, the couple insisted they would make it legal with the proper ceremony when they returned to the U.S.

“There was a knockdown, drag-out family fight two days ago,” my source said.

Reps for each released the same statement earlier today. “After much consideration and discussion, we have jointly decided that we will forgo having a legal ceremony as it is not necessary to define our relationship further,” the statement reads. “While the recent symbolic union in Bora Bora was representative of our deep love, friendship and respect that we have for one another on a spiritual level, we have decided to remain friends.”

Read More......