Stabbing horror in Japan ‘leaves at least 19 dead and 45 injured after knifeman attacks centre for disabled people’ 

Attacker storms into centre for the disabled near Tokyo armed with a knife
Police were called to the scene at around 2.30am local time in Sagamihara
At least 19 people were killed and reports that a further 45 were injured  
Officers arrested a man, 26, after he walked into a station and said 'I did it'
Suspect reportedly said: 'I want to get rid of the disabled from this world' 

A knifeman was arrested when he confessed to killing at least 19 people and injuring 45 in a stabbing frenzy at a centre for the disabled in Japan.
The attacker went into the centre in Sagamihara, outside of Tokyo, brandishing a knife at around 2.30am local time.
Police were called to the scene after residents saw a man armed with a knife in the grounds of the Tsukui Yamayuri Garden.
Asahi Shimbun reported that the suspect was quoted by police as saying 'I want to get rid of the disabled from this world.' 
Source: Daily Mail
Max Amini, born in Tucson Arizona, from an Iranian heritage was raised on the East Coast and graduated from UCLA’s school of Theater, Film and Television in 2004. As an actor, Max has over 50 film and television credits including NBC’s Heroes, regular appearances on Comedy Central’s Mind of Mencia, and a leading role in the upcoming feature film Beyond Paradise.
While in college Max launched his stand up comedy career in 2002. He quickly built a reputation as one of the fastest growing comedians in the Los Angeles comedy circuit. In 2006 the world famous Laugh Factory in Hollywood recognized Max’s brilliant performances, hard work, and dedication to his craft and made him a resident comic. In 2009 Max was chosen as one of the finalists for NBC’s Diversity Showcase. He would later use this experience to develop a stand-up comedy tour in 2010 named “Exotic Imports” featuring second-generation Americans coming from diverse cultural backgrounds. His tour was very successful and sold out across the country.

Max is now headlining his own shows and has taken his tours internationally selling out around the world in Canada, UK, Australia, Germany, Dubai, Sweden, Kula Lumpur… Demanding to see Max in action fanspush Max to add additional shows on his world tours to accommodate his fan base. While his international popularity grows, his online presence also persists with his YouTube channel garnering over 10 million views today.
Through an array of eccentric impressions and novel story telling, Max expresses his comedy by delivering a strong message about family ties, cultural aspects, and social topics. What really sets Max apart from most comedians is his uncanny ability to improvise and create on the spot. This makes him unique as an entertainer that it’s not uncommon for an audience member to sit through two Max Amini shows in one night and find two totally different performances.
Born in Ravenna in 1947, Paolo Roversi’s interest in photography was kindled as a teenager during a family vacation in Spain in 1964. Back home, he set up a darkroom in a convenient cellar with another keen amateur, the local postman Battista Minguzzi, and began developing and printing his own black & white work. The encounter with a local professional photographer Nevio Natali was very important: in Nevio’s studio Paolo spent many many hours realising an important apprenticeship as well as a strong durable friendship.
In 1970 he started collaborating with the Associated Press: on his first assignment, AP sent Paolo to cover Ezra Pound’s funeral in Venice. During the same year Paolo opened, with his friend Giancarlo Gramantieri his first portrait studio, located in Ravenna, via Cavour, 58, photographing local celebrities and their families. In 1971 he met by chance in Ravenna, Peter Knapp, the legendary Art Director of Elle magazine. At Knapp’s invitation, Paolo visited Paris in November 1973 and has never left.

In Paris Paolo started working as a reporter for the Huppert Agency but little by little, through his friends, he began to approach fashion photography. The photographers who really interested him then were reporters. At that moment he didn’t know much about fashion or fashion photography.  Only later he discovered the work of Avedon, Penn, Newton, Bourdin and many others.

The British photographer Lawrence Sackmann took Paolo on as his assistant in 1974. « Sackmann was very difficult. Most assistants only lasted a week before running away. But he taught me everything I needed to know in order to become a professional photographer. Sackmann taught me creativity. He was always trying new things even if he did always use the same camera and flash set-up. He was almost military-like in his approach to preparation for a shoot. But he always used to say ‘your tripod and your camera must be well-fixed but your eyes and mind should be free’”. Paolo endured Sackmann for nine months before starting on his own with small jobs here and there for magazines like Elle and Depeche Mode until Marie Claire published his first major fashion story.
In January of this year the parents of the exiled Iranian actor Golshifteh Farahani took a call at their apartment in Tehran from a man who said he was an official of the supreme court of the Islamic Republic. He began shouting at her father, telling him that his daughter would be punished, that her breasts would be cut off and presented to him on a plate.
A few days earlier, Farahani had appeared in a short black-and-white video with 30 other "young hopes" of the French cinema to promote the Césars, the "French Oscars", where she had been nominated for her role in the winsome immigrant comedy Si Tu Meurs, Je Te Tue (If You Die, I'll Kill You). The promo had each actor take off an item of clothing as they stared into the camera to commit their "body and soul" to their art. Farahani chose to bare her right breast, saying: "I will put flesh to your dreams."

What followed in Iran was little short of a cultural earthquake. "It was a catastrophe," she remembers, her head dropping into her hands. "I don't know exactly how many tens of millions of people typed my name into Google the next day, I don't want to know …" A taboo of unimaginable proportions had been shattered, and not by some publicity-hungry provocateur, but by the most loved and admired actor in the country. Farahani may have only been another 29-year-old hopeful in France, but in Iran she became a star the moment she appeared in Dariush Mehrjui's The Pear Tree at 14. Eighteen films later there is more than a little of Garbo, Jeanne Moreau and Irene Papas about her: a rare beauty and intelligence married to a burning emotional honesty in a country where truth of any kind is hard to come by.

In M for Mother she seared herself into the national consciousness playing a pregnant woman gassed during the Iran-Iraq war, abandoned by her husband and now carrying "a gift from God" in her womb. Both rural and urban Iran embraced her as their down-to-earth hero: Golshifteh, the star without airs. Marjane Satrapi, author of Persepolis who directed her in Chicken with Plums, says: "She was not just Iran, she was the mother of Iran."

The day the video was posted, when what she calls the "fire" started, the official Fars news agency in Tehran issued a communique lacerating her, saying that the pictures showed the "hidden, disgusting face of cinema". This kind of opprobrium had never before been poured on an artist, however much they had upset the regime. Her exile was now a banishment.

Farahani had already been banned from working by the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance for not wearing a headscarf at the New York premiere of Ridley Scott's CIA thriller Body of Lies, where, playing opposite Leonardo DiCaprio, she became the first Iranian actress to appear in a Hollywood film since the 1979 revolution.

Japan, early 20th century. Lieutenant B.F. Pinkerton of the U. S. Navy inspects a house overlooking Nagasaki harbor that he is leasing from Goro, a marriage broker. The house comes with three servants and a geisha wife named Cio-Cio-San, known as Madame Butterfly. The lease runs for 999 years, subject to monthly renewal. The American consul Sharpless arrives breathless from climbing the hill. Pinkerton describes his philosophy of the fearless Yankee roaming the world in search of experience and pleasure. He is not sure whether his feelings for the young girl are love or a whim, but he intends to go through with the marriage ceremony.
Sharpless warns him that the girl may view the marriage differently, but Pinkerton brushes off such concerns and says someday he will take a real, American wife. He offers the consul whiskey and proposes a toast. Butterfly is heard climbing the hill with her friends for the ceremony. In casual conversation after the formal introduction, Butterfly admits her age, 15, and explains that her family was once prominent but lost its position, and she has had to earn her living as a geisha. Her relatives arrive and chatter about the marriage. Cio-Cio-San shows Pinkerton her very few possessions, and quietly tells him she has been to the Christian mission and will embrace her husband’s religion. The Imperial Commissioner reads the marriage agreement, and the relatives congratulate the couple. Suddenly, a threatening voice is heard from afar—it is the Bonze, Butterfly’s uncle, a priest. He curses the girl for going to the Christian mission and rejecting her ancestral religion. Pinkerton orders them to leave and as they go the Bonze and the shocked relatives denounce Cio-Cio-San. Pinkerton tries to console Butterfly with sweet words. She is helped by Suzuki into her wedding kimono, and joins Pinkerton in the garden, where they make love.
Skin-tight leggings popular among Iranian women have sparked an uproar in the Islamic republic's parliament, where the interior minister was dressed down over the female population's fashion choices.
Iranian Interior Minister Abdolreza Rahmani Fazli received a warning from parliamentarians at a June 24 hearing amid accusations that he is not doing enough to stop women from wearing the elastic leggings known as "supports" in Iran.
Fazli was summoned to the conservative-dominated parliament to answer questions regarding the enforcement of Iran's obligatory Islamic dress code, which requires women to cover their hair and bodies.
Lawmakers questioned Fazli specifically about the form-revealing leggings, which hard-liners have criticized as a symbol of decadent Western culture.
"Why is the Interior Ministry indifferent to the phenomenon of women who wear supports in Tehran and other cities?" lawmakers asked the official.
Fazli was also asked why a "small budget" designated for enforcing the dress code had been eliminated.
He responded by saying that the Interior Ministry is just one of 22 entities responsible for enforcing a law requiring women to wear the Islamic hijab, which became obligatory following the 1979 revolution and the creation of the Islamic republic.
During the past three decades, the clerical establishment has used force and cultural measures to compel many women to wear the hijab.


Her Majesty Shahbanou Farah Pahlavi attended an exhibition by painter, Claudio Bravo
At the invitation of Pierre Levai, President, and the Directors of Marlborough Gallery Her Majesty Shahbanou Farah Pahlavi attended an exhibition of recent work by the prominent realist painter, Claudio Bravo *, at Marlborough Chelsea, 545 West 25 Street, on October 21st.    This lively reception celebrated Bravo’s first exhibition in Chelsea and marks his third decade of representation by Marlborough.   The show includes over fifty paintings ranging from intimate still life to monumental triptychs. Over 500 hundred people attended the popular event, with guests including contemporary artists Manolo Valdés, Clive Smith and Steven Charles; David Ebony, Managing Editor of Art in America; Broadway producer Barry Weissler and other patrons and supporters of the arts. 
*Born in Chile in 1936, Bravo lives and works in Marrakech, Taroudant and Tangiers. Claudio Bravo is recognized for using a realist style that recalls the delicacy, formality, and craftsmanship of old master technique while referencing modern and contemporary movements such as Surrealism and Color Field Painting.
His work may be found in the collections of museums around the world including the Baltimore Museum of Art, Maryland; Ludwig Museum, Cologne, Germany; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museo Nacional de Bellas Arte, Santiago, Chile; Museum Boymans-van Beunigen, Rotterdam, the Netherlands; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania; and the Rufino Tamayo Museum of International Contemporary Art, Mexico.
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