The California mother of octuplets, dubbed "Octomom," filed for bankruptcy on Monday, after previously admitting she was on public assistance to support herself and her 14 children.
Nadya Suleman, 36, gave birth to eight babies as a single mother in 2009. But goodwill turned to anger in the media after it was revealed Suleman had undergone fertility treatments when she already had six children, and questions were raised about her ability to provide for her family.
Her children became only the second set of octuplets known to have survived birth in the United States.
Suleman, who lives in the Southern California suburban community of La Habra, has less than $50,000 in assets and owes between $500,000 and $1 million, according to legal papers submitted to U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Central District of California and posted at entertainment website E! Online.
Suleman told ABC News last week that she had received $4,000 to $5,000 a month in public assistance.
Sunday, May 6, 2012
Berlin yodel school revamping alpine sound of music
The distinctive warble of yodeling strikes a dissonant note in the middle of a gritty Berlin district that is home to a thriving Turkish population and peppered with trendy bars.
But if you walk down the street from the kebab shops and anarchist graffiti scrawled on the pavement, you will catch the mellifluous sounds usually heard in Swiss Alps -- a noise that grows louder when you enter Doreen Kutze's hairdressing salon.
Instead of perms and highlights, Kutze rents out the space to offer wannabe yodellers lessons in the art of alpine singing.
"It's good to be able to offer this to people here in Berlin, so they can try it out without having to travel all the way to Switzerland," Kutzke said.
Once used by alpine cattle herders to communicate across the open meadows and deep valleys of the Alps, yodeling is usually associated more with the fusty repertoire of the Sound of Music's von Trapp family than the edgy music scene of Berlin.
But the 37-year-old is coaxing yodeling down from the snow capped peaks and into the urban jungle of the German capital, in the hope of stripping alpine singing of its kitschy image.
"Yodeling used to mean standing in the middle of some marketplace in a dirndl (traditional German woman's dress) during a folk festival," she said.
"I do a lot to try to work against yodeling clichés."
"FILTHY SOUND"
Furnished with an old-fashioned wood burner and decorated with pine cones, the hairdressing salon where Kutzke holds her workshop is reminiscent of a cozy alpine lodge -- save for the barber's chair.
Kutzke draws the curtains across the huge window front to stop local children from staring, before the pre-yodeling warm up of stretches begins, interrupted only briefly by a passer by wanting to make a hair appointment.
There is enough demand from Berliners to learn the technique that her workshop for beginners runs every month, with up to 10 participants, Kutzke said.
"It's not tiring exactly, to yodel, but I feel hoarse," said one participant named Michaela, during one of the regular breaks to allow the budding yodellers to rest their vocal chords. She said she had read about the yodeling school in a newspaper and had always wanted to try it out.
The remainder of the group were unwilling to talk, seemingly embarrassed to be caught yodeling in a hairdressers' for three hours on a sunny Saturday afternoon.
It took a while for the troupe of mostly middle-aged yodellers to overcome their shyness and bellow "yo" and "hee" at the top of their lungs as they slouched awkwardly in a circle.
"Children pick up yodeling a lot faster than adults because they can mimic and are so uninhibited, they have no fear," Kutzke said.
The tricky technique requires quick alternation between shrill falsetto and rough chest voice. A good singing voice can often hamper learning how to yodel, Kutzke said.
"People who sing well can have problems because they are just not used to making those sounds," she said.
"It sounds a bit like a donkey. It's not a pretty sound, it's really quite filthy."
Kutzke, however, can both sing and yodel, and has showcased her talents on German national television and in clubs.
Under the performing name Kutzkelina, the singer experiments with yodeling and dub music - a genre of emphatic bass beats that grew out of reggae.
The result is a brand of yodeling you can dance to and that recasts the trilling song for the warehouses, power plants and concrete basements that house Berlin's club scene.
"The echo element in dub fits well with the echo in yodeling. Single phrases and echoes are used and then sampled," Kutzke said.
"But yodeling can also be sung to jazz and classical music -- there are really no limits to it. I want to show the diversity," she said.
It's a message she tries to impart to her students, whom she guides through the many facets of yodeling, from country music to a yodel-lay-ee-oo-ing rendition of "You Are My Sunshine", a song made famous by Bing Crosby.
EVIL SPIRITS
Aside from its musical versatility, yodeling also serves other purposes, far removed from its alpine form.
The cry is used by African tribes to ward off evil spirits, Kutzke said.
"The idea was that wherever a yodeler was singing there would be no room for demons," she explained.
To hear the hollering of five yodellers in the small hairdressing salon, it is easy to understand why -- it is impossible to yodel quietly.
For the urban yodeler, the volume of the technique can be a stress buster for the strains of modern life.
"Yodeling can get rid of stress and it can really put you in a good mood because adults are rarely so loud," Kutzke said.
"In yodeling there's this 'Aha!' factor, when you realize 'I can sing loudly -- I'm allowed to sing loudly!'"
But this aspect of yodeling can also be a curse - suitable practicing space for yodellers is hard to come by in the crowded city.
Kutzke recommends her students practice in the closed-off space of their car to avoid annoying others with their yodeling endeavors -- if they want, that is.
"Some people just decide they don't care about their neighbors," she said.
But if you walk down the street from the kebab shops and anarchist graffiti scrawled on the pavement, you will catch the mellifluous sounds usually heard in Swiss Alps -- a noise that grows louder when you enter Doreen Kutze's hairdressing salon.
Instead of perms and highlights, Kutze rents out the space to offer wannabe yodellers lessons in the art of alpine singing.
"It's good to be able to offer this to people here in Berlin, so they can try it out without having to travel all the way to Switzerland," Kutzke said.
Once used by alpine cattle herders to communicate across the open meadows and deep valleys of the Alps, yodeling is usually associated more with the fusty repertoire of the Sound of Music's von Trapp family than the edgy music scene of Berlin.
But the 37-year-old is coaxing yodeling down from the snow capped peaks and into the urban jungle of the German capital, in the hope of stripping alpine singing of its kitschy image.
"Yodeling used to mean standing in the middle of some marketplace in a dirndl (traditional German woman's dress) during a folk festival," she said.
"I do a lot to try to work against yodeling clichés."
"FILTHY SOUND"
Furnished with an old-fashioned wood burner and decorated with pine cones, the hairdressing salon where Kutzke holds her workshop is reminiscent of a cozy alpine lodge -- save for the barber's chair.
Kutzke draws the curtains across the huge window front to stop local children from staring, before the pre-yodeling warm up of stretches begins, interrupted only briefly by a passer by wanting to make a hair appointment.
There is enough demand from Berliners to learn the technique that her workshop for beginners runs every month, with up to 10 participants, Kutzke said.
"It's not tiring exactly, to yodel, but I feel hoarse," said one participant named Michaela, during one of the regular breaks to allow the budding yodellers to rest their vocal chords. She said she had read about the yodeling school in a newspaper and had always wanted to try it out.
The remainder of the group were unwilling to talk, seemingly embarrassed to be caught yodeling in a hairdressers' for three hours on a sunny Saturday afternoon.
It took a while for the troupe of mostly middle-aged yodellers to overcome their shyness and bellow "yo" and "hee" at the top of their lungs as they slouched awkwardly in a circle.
"Children pick up yodeling a lot faster than adults because they can mimic and are so uninhibited, they have no fear," Kutzke said.
The tricky technique requires quick alternation between shrill falsetto and rough chest voice. A good singing voice can often hamper learning how to yodel, Kutzke said.
"People who sing well can have problems because they are just not used to making those sounds," she said.
"It sounds a bit like a donkey. It's not a pretty sound, it's really quite filthy."
Kutzke, however, can both sing and yodel, and has showcased her talents on German national television and in clubs.
Under the performing name Kutzkelina, the singer experiments with yodeling and dub music - a genre of emphatic bass beats that grew out of reggae.
The result is a brand of yodeling you can dance to and that recasts the trilling song for the warehouses, power plants and concrete basements that house Berlin's club scene.
"The echo element in dub fits well with the echo in yodeling. Single phrases and echoes are used and then sampled," Kutzke said.
"But yodeling can also be sung to jazz and classical music -- there are really no limits to it. I want to show the diversity," she said.
It's a message she tries to impart to her students, whom she guides through the many facets of yodeling, from country music to a yodel-lay-ee-oo-ing rendition of "You Are My Sunshine", a song made famous by Bing Crosby.
EVIL SPIRITS
Aside from its musical versatility, yodeling also serves other purposes, far removed from its alpine form.
The cry is used by African tribes to ward off evil spirits, Kutzke said.
"The idea was that wherever a yodeler was singing there would be no room for demons," she explained.
To hear the hollering of five yodellers in the small hairdressing salon, it is easy to understand why -- it is impossible to yodel quietly.
For the urban yodeler, the volume of the technique can be a stress buster for the strains of modern life.
"Yodeling can get rid of stress and it can really put you in a good mood because adults are rarely so loud," Kutzke said.
"In yodeling there's this 'Aha!' factor, when you realize 'I can sing loudly -- I'm allowed to sing loudly!'"
But this aspect of yodeling can also be a curse - suitable practicing space for yodellers is hard to come by in the crowded city.
Kutzke recommends her students practice in the closed-off space of their car to avoid annoying others with their yodeling endeavors -- if they want, that is.
"Some people just decide they don't care about their neighbors," she said.
Bomb-sniffing dogs enlisted to stem Florida python invasion
Some bomb-sniffing dogs trained to help fight terrorism are turning their olfactory attention toward a different scourge: Burmese pythons in Florida's Everglades National Park.
The dogs are members of "EcoDogs," a three-year-old collaboration at Alabama's Auburn University between the science departments and the school's Canine Detection Research Institute, which trains dogs to detect explosives.
"The dogs are really, really good," said Christina Romagosa, a biologist at Auburn.
She said in a test of python detection in south Florida, the dogs could cover a search area 2.5 times faster than a person.
"People can only see that the snake is there if they can see the snake. The dogs can smell the snake even if it's not visually apparent to us," she said.
Todd Steury, an Auburn conservation biologist and co-founder of the project, said many of the EcoDogs were found temperamentally unsuitable for indoor explosives work but thrive outdoors searching for ecological targets.
Steury estimated training a new dog to detect a scent takes six to 10 weeks. Training for each additional scent takes "about 10 minutes. You can do it by accident if you're not careful," he said, by inadvertently rewarding the dog for something you weren't looking for, which then becomes part of the dog's repertoire.
Two black Labrador retrievers from EcoDogs, Ivy and Jake, went on assignment in 2010 to demonstrate to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers their potential usefulness in battling the python problem in the 2,358-square-mile (6,100-sq-km) Everglades park.
UPSETTING BALANCE
Environmentalists fear the pythons are upsetting the native ecological balance of South Florida. The invasion is generally attributed to both irresponsible pet owners dumping their snakes and 1992's Hurricane Andrew, which destroyed an adjacent exotic snake warehouse.
In controlled experiments, the EcoDogs success rate in finding pythons at the park was 75-92 percent, Romagosa said. The dogs helped researchers trap 19 pythons, including a pregnant snake with 19 eggs, according to an EcoDog report.
Linda Friar, spokeswoman for the Everglades National Park, said the snakes are so thoroughly adapted to the Everglades, and the park is so wild and inaccessible that there is no expectation of eradicating them, even with the dogs' help. The best hope is to prevent the pythons from spreading and be prepared for future invasions of new exotics, she said.
Romagosa said analysis is underway to determine whether the dogs can play a role in a rapid response team and whether funding their role , in a cost-cutting era is possible.
"The dogs would be useful in a scenario where we might not be sure the python has moved on beyond a certain range. The dogs can give us an idea of whether the species is present or not," she said.
Meanwhile, Ivy retired and was adopted, Steury said. Jake switched to a new project assessing the deer population in Alabama, looking for fawns and deer antlers.
Other EcoDogs are rooting out a tree fungus damaging forests in the state, and locating various skunk, bear and other animal populations based on their scat, or droppings.
"Pretty much a dog can be trained to find anything," Romagosa said.
SMART DOGS NOT THE BEST HUNTERS
Three years of working with the dogs disproved a common misconception that a smart dog is best, added Steury.
"The worst dog is a really smart but kinda lazy dog. Because that dog is always trying to figure out how he can cheat. Once you reward him for cheating, he's done. He'll never work again. The best dogs are the ones that are kind of dumb but just work really hard. We can train those dogs to work all day long and they're the best detection dogs," Steury said.
And the dogs enjoy the work so much that ones like Kasey, who searches for weasel, bobcat and gray fox scat, eventually lose interest in the reward, he said.
"She finds a scat, you'll give her the ball, she plays with it for a really short time, then she's back to the search. She likes the search," Steury said.
The dogs are members of "EcoDogs," a three-year-old collaboration at Alabama's Auburn University between the science departments and the school's Canine Detection Research Institute, which trains dogs to detect explosives.
"The dogs are really, really good," said Christina Romagosa, a biologist at Auburn.
She said in a test of python detection in south Florida, the dogs could cover a search area 2.5 times faster than a person.
"People can only see that the snake is there if they can see the snake. The dogs can smell the snake even if it's not visually apparent to us," she said.
Todd Steury, an Auburn conservation biologist and co-founder of the project, said many of the EcoDogs were found temperamentally unsuitable for indoor explosives work but thrive outdoors searching for ecological targets.
Steury estimated training a new dog to detect a scent takes six to 10 weeks. Training for each additional scent takes "about 10 minutes. You can do it by accident if you're not careful," he said, by inadvertently rewarding the dog for something you weren't looking for, which then becomes part of the dog's repertoire.
Two black Labrador retrievers from EcoDogs, Ivy and Jake, went on assignment in 2010 to demonstrate to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers their potential usefulness in battling the python problem in the 2,358-square-mile (6,100-sq-km) Everglades park.
UPSETTING BALANCE
Environmentalists fear the pythons are upsetting the native ecological balance of South Florida. The invasion is generally attributed to both irresponsible pet owners dumping their snakes and 1992's Hurricane Andrew, which destroyed an adjacent exotic snake warehouse.
In controlled experiments, the EcoDogs success rate in finding pythons at the park was 75-92 percent, Romagosa said. The dogs helped researchers trap 19 pythons, including a pregnant snake with 19 eggs, according to an EcoDog report.
Linda Friar, spokeswoman for the Everglades National Park, said the snakes are so thoroughly adapted to the Everglades, and the park is so wild and inaccessible that there is no expectation of eradicating them, even with the dogs' help. The best hope is to prevent the pythons from spreading and be prepared for future invasions of new exotics, she said.
Romagosa said analysis is underway to determine whether the dogs can play a role in a rapid response team and whether funding their role , in a cost-cutting era is possible.
"The dogs would be useful in a scenario where we might not be sure the python has moved on beyond a certain range. The dogs can give us an idea of whether the species is present or not," she said.
Meanwhile, Ivy retired and was adopted, Steury said. Jake switched to a new project assessing the deer population in Alabama, looking for fawns and deer antlers.
Other EcoDogs are rooting out a tree fungus damaging forests in the state, and locating various skunk, bear and other animal populations based on their scat, or droppings.
"Pretty much a dog can be trained to find anything," Romagosa said.
SMART DOGS NOT THE BEST HUNTERS
Three years of working with the dogs disproved a common misconception that a smart dog is best, added Steury.
"The worst dog is a really smart but kinda lazy dog. Because that dog is always trying to figure out how he can cheat. Once you reward him for cheating, he's done. He'll never work again. The best dogs are the ones that are kind of dumb but just work really hard. We can train those dogs to work all day long and they're the best detection dogs," Steury said.
And the dogs enjoy the work so much that ones like Kasey, who searches for weasel, bobcat and gray fox scat, eventually lose interest in the reward, he said.
"She finds a scat, you'll give her the ball, she plays with it for a really short time, then she's back to the search. She likes the search," Steury said.
Australia billionaire to launch "unsinkable" Titanic
An Australian billionaire announced plans on Monday to build an "unsinkable" version of the Titanic, 100 years after the original sank after hitting an iceberg.
Titanic II is expected to make its maiden voyage from England to North America, the old Titanic route, in late 2016.
"It is going to be designed so it won't sink," mining and tourism tycoon Clive Palmer told reporters. "It will be designed as a modern ship with all the technology to ensure that doesn't happen."
The original Titanic, the largest liner in world when it was launched and dubbed "virtually unsinkable" at the time, sank after hitting an iceberg on April 15, 1912, killing 1,517 passengers and crew.
Palmer said his new shipping company, Blue Star Line Pty Ltd, had signed a memorandum of understanding with the Chinese state-owned company CSC Jinling Shipyard to build Titanic II. The original ship was operated by the White Star Line.
The design work had started for the new Titanic, which will have the same dimension as its old version with 840 rooms and nine decks.
Titanic II is expected to make its maiden voyage from England to North America, the old Titanic route, in late 2016.
"It is going to be designed so it won't sink," mining and tourism tycoon Clive Palmer told reporters. "It will be designed as a modern ship with all the technology to ensure that doesn't happen."
The original Titanic, the largest liner in world when it was launched and dubbed "virtually unsinkable" at the time, sank after hitting an iceberg on April 15, 1912, killing 1,517 passengers and crew.
Palmer said his new shipping company, Blue Star Line Pty Ltd, had signed a memorandum of understanding with the Chinese state-owned company CSC Jinling Shipyard to build Titanic II. The original ship was operated by the White Star Line.
The design work had started for the new Titanic, which will have the same dimension as its old version with 840 rooms and nine decks.
Artist Lucian Freud leaves $156 million in will: paper
Portrait painter Lucian Freud left a record 96 million pounds ($156 million) in his will, the largest sum bequeathed by a British artist, the Mail on Sunday newspaper reported.
Freud died in July last year aged 88, by which time his uncompromising, fleshy portraits had made him one of the world's most revered and coveted artists, whose subjects ranged from England's Queen Elizabeth II to the supermodel Kate Moss.
His "Benefits Supervisor Sleeping", a 1995 portrait of an obese woman asleep in the nude on a sofa, fetched $33.6 million at Christie's in 2008, an auction record for a living artist.
Freud left 2.5 million pounds and a house, the paper said, to his long-term assistant, David Dawson, who is pictured in Freud's last unfinished work "Portrait of the Hound", which also featured the artist's pet whippet Eli.
Representatives of Freud in Britain and the United States were not immediately available for comment on Sunday.
The remainder of the estate was left to his lawyer Diana Rawstron and one of his daughters, Rose Pearce, who are identified as trustees in Freud's will and are instructed to dispose of his personal possessions in line with wishes expressed during the artist's life, the newspaper reported.
Freud, the grandson of psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, married twice and had several children, although he was widely believed to have fathered many more than he acknowledged.
($1 = 0.6159 British pounds)
Freud died in July last year aged 88, by which time his uncompromising, fleshy portraits had made him one of the world's most revered and coveted artists, whose subjects ranged from England's Queen Elizabeth II to the supermodel Kate Moss.
His "Benefits Supervisor Sleeping", a 1995 portrait of an obese woman asleep in the nude on a sofa, fetched $33.6 million at Christie's in 2008, an auction record for a living artist.
Freud left 2.5 million pounds and a house, the paper said, to his long-term assistant, David Dawson, who is pictured in Freud's last unfinished work "Portrait of the Hound", which also featured the artist's pet whippet Eli.
Representatives of Freud in Britain and the United States were not immediately available for comment on Sunday.
The remainder of the estate was left to his lawyer Diana Rawstron and one of his daughters, Rose Pearce, who are identified as trustees in Freud's will and are instructed to dispose of his personal possessions in line with wishes expressed during the artist's life, the newspaper reported.
Freud, the grandson of psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, married twice and had several children, although he was widely believed to have fathered many more than he acknowledged.
($1 = 0.6159 British pounds)
Merkel's old Volkswagen sold at auction, second time lucky
German Chancellor Angela Merkel's old Volkswagen wasn't worth the 130,000 euros ($172,100) bogus online bidders kited it to earlier this month, but the first woman chancellor's 1990 Golf finally went to the highest bidder on Monday for 10,165 euros.
Successful bidder Dirk Fricke, who bought the car for his company Frisch-Licht, told Reuters he was happy with what he saw as a low price tag, though he wasn't a fan of Merkel's.
"We're politically totally neutral," he said by telephone. "It was just about keeping the car in Germany. A car like this can't be lost to Germany, like the Pope's car years ago."
In a similar auction in 2005, a U.S. bidder paid nearly $250,000 for a 21-year-old gray 1990 Volkswagen Golf that once belonged to Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who later became Pope Benedict.
A previous attempt to sell Merkel's car earlier this month failed after online auction platform eBay noticed the offers came from fake bidders, prompting a second auction, in which bidders had to pre-register and identify themselves.
The seller, an anonymous Berlin resident, had advertised the vehicle on eBay with 190,000 km (118,000 miles) on the clock as "Angela's Merkel first Western car: unique collector's item".
The posting included a copy of the registration papers and photographs of it parked in front of the chancellor's office.
Merkel bought the Golf, a white 1990 model worth a few hundred euros today, about a month before German reunification on October 3, 1990.
At the time, she had just shifted from the East German opposition political movement Democratic Awakening to the eastern faction of the Christian Democrats.
She drove her Golf until entering Chancellor Helmut Kohl's cabinet as a minister in 1994. It was eventually sold in 1996.
Nowadays Merkel rides around in an armored Audi but media reports say her husband still drives a Volkswagen, which literally translated means "people's car".
Successful bidder Dirk Fricke, who bought the car for his company Frisch-Licht, told Reuters he was happy with what he saw as a low price tag, though he wasn't a fan of Merkel's.
"We're politically totally neutral," he said by telephone. "It was just about keeping the car in Germany. A car like this can't be lost to Germany, like the Pope's car years ago."
In a similar auction in 2005, a U.S. bidder paid nearly $250,000 for a 21-year-old gray 1990 Volkswagen Golf that once belonged to Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who later became Pope Benedict.
A previous attempt to sell Merkel's car earlier this month failed after online auction platform eBay noticed the offers came from fake bidders, prompting a second auction, in which bidders had to pre-register and identify themselves.
The seller, an anonymous Berlin resident, had advertised the vehicle on eBay with 190,000 km (118,000 miles) on the clock as "Angela's Merkel first Western car: unique collector's item".
The posting included a copy of the registration papers and photographs of it parked in front of the chancellor's office.
Merkel bought the Golf, a white 1990 model worth a few hundred euros today, about a month before German reunification on October 3, 1990.
At the time, she had just shifted from the East German opposition political movement Democratic Awakening to the eastern faction of the Christian Democrats.
She drove her Golf until entering Chancellor Helmut Kohl's cabinet as a minister in 1994. It was eventually sold in 1996.
Nowadays Merkel rides around in an armored Audi but media reports say her husband still drives a Volkswagen, which literally translated means "people's car".
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