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LOS ANGELES - Michael Jackson, the "King of Pop" who once moonwalked above the music world, died Thursday as he prepared for a comeback bid to vanquish nightmare years of sexual scandal and financial calamity. He was 50.
Jackson died at UCLA Medical Center after being stricken at his rented home in Holmby Hills. Paramedics tried to resuscitate him at his home for nearly three-quarters of an hour, then rushed him to the hospital, where doctors continued to work on him.

"It is believed he suffered cardiac arrest in his home. However, the cause of his death is unknown until results of the autopsy are known," his brother Jermaine said. Police said they were investigating, standard procedure in high-profile cases.

Jackson's death brought a tragic end to a long, bizarre, sometimes farcical decline from his peak in the 1980s, when he was popular music's premier all-around performer, a uniter of black and white music who shattered the race barrier on MTV, dominated the charts and dazzled even more on stage.

His 1982 album "Thriller" — which included the blockbuster hits "Beat It," "Billie Jean" and "Thriller" — is the best-selling album of all time, with an estimated 50 million copies sold worldwide.

At the time of his death, Jackson was rehearsing hard for what was to be his greatest comeback: He was scheduled for an unprecedented 50 shows at a London arena, with the first set for July 13.

As word of his death spread, MTV switched its programming to play videos from Jackson's heyday. Radio stations began playing marathons of his hits. Hundreds of people gathered outside the hospital. In New York's Times Square, a low groan went up in the crowd when a screen flashed that Jackson had died, and people began relaying the news to friends by cell phone.

"No joke. King of Pop is no more. Wow," Michael Harris, 36, of New York City, read from a text message a friend had sent him. "It's like when Kennedy was assassinated. I will always remember being in Times Square when Michael Jackson died."


The public first knew him as a boy in the late 1960s, when he was the precocious, spinning lead singer of the Jackson 5, the singing group he formed with his four older brothers out of Gary, Ind. Among their No. 1 hits were "I Want You Back," "ABC" and "I'll Be There."

He was perhaps the most exciting performer of his generation, known for his backward-gliding moonwalk, his feverish, crotch-grabbing dance moves and his high-pitched singing, punctuated with squeals and titters. His single sequined glove, tight, military-style jacket and aviator sunglasses were trademarks, as was his ever-changing, surgically altered appearance.

"For Michael to be taken away from us so suddenly at such a young age, I just don't have the words," said Quincy Jones, who produced "Thriller." "He was the consummate entertainer and his contributions and legacy will be felt upon the world forever. I've lost my little brother today, and part of my soul has gone with him."

Jackson ranked alongside Elvis Presley and the Beatles as the biggest pop sensations of all time. He united two of music's biggest names when he was briefly married to Presley's daughter, Lisa Marie, and Jackson's death immediately evoked comparisons to that of Presley himself, who died at age 42 in 1977.

As years went by, Jackson became an increasingly freakish figure — a middle-aged man-child weirdly out of touch with grown-up life. His skin became lighter, his nose narrower, and he spoke in a breathy, girlish voice. He often wore a germ mask while traveling, kept a pet chimpanzee named Bubbles as one of his closest companions, and surrounded himself with children at his Neverland ranch, a storybook playland filled with toys, rides and animals. The tabloids dubbed him "Wacko Jacko."

"It seemed to me that his internal essence was at war with the norms of the world. It's as if he was trying to defy gravity," said Michael Levine, a Hollywood publicist who represented Jackson in the early 1990s. He called Jackson a "disciple of P.T. Barnum" and said the star appeared fragile at the time but was "much more cunning and shrewd about the industry than anyone knew."

Jackson caused a furor in 2002 when he playfully dangled his infant son, Prince Michael II, over a hotel balcony in Berlin while a throng of fans watched from below.

In 2005, he was cleared of charges he molested a 13-year-old cancer survivor at Neverland in 2003. He had been accused of plying the boy with alcohol and groping him, and of engaging in strange and inappropriate behavior with other children.

The case followed years of rumors about Jackson and young boys. In a TV documentary, he acknowledged sharing his bed with children, a practice he described as sweet and not at all sexual.

Despite the acquittal, the lurid allegations that came out in court took a fearsome toll on his career and image, and he fell into serious financial trouble.

Michael Joseph Jackson was born Aug. 29, 1958, in Gary. He was 4 years old when he began singing with his brothers — Marlon, Jermaine, Jackie and Tito — in the Jackson 5. After his early success with bubblegum soul, he struck out on his own, generating innovative, explosive, unstoppable music.

The album "Thriller" alone mixed the dark, serpentine bass and drums and synthesizer approach of "Billie Jean," the grinding Eddie Van Halen solo on "Beat It," and the hiccups and falsettos on "Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'."

The peak may have come in 1983, when Motown celebrated its 25th anniversary with an all-star televised concert and Jackson moonwalked off with the show, joining his brothers for a medley of old hits and then leaving them behind with a pointing, crouching, high-kicking, splay-footed, crotch-grabbing run through "Billie Jean."

The audience stood and roared. Jackson raised his fist.

By then he had cemented his place in pop culture. He got the plum Scarecrow role in the 1978 movie musical "The Wiz," a pop-R&B version of "The Wizard of Oz," that starred Diana Ross as Dorothy.

During production of a 1984 Pepsi commercial, Jackson's scalp sustains burns when an explosion sets his hair on fire.

He had strong follow-up albums with 1987's "Bad" and 1991's "Dangerous," but his career began to collapse in 1993 after he was accused of molesting a boy who often stayed at his home. The singer denied any wrongdoing, reached a settlement with the boy's family, reported to be $20 million, and criminal charges were never filed.

Jackson's expressed anger over the allegations on the 1995 album "HIStory," which sold more than 2.4 million copies, but by then, the popularity of Jackson's music was clearly waning, even as public fascination with his increasingly erratic behavior was growing.

Jackson married Lisa Marie Presley in 1994, and they divorced in 1996. Later that year, Jackson married Deborah Rowe, a former nurse for his dermatologist. They had two children together: Michael Joseph Jackson Jr., known as Prince Michael, and Paris Michael Katherine Jackson. Rowe filed for divorce in 1999.

Cardiac arrest is an abnormal heart rhythm that stops the heart from pumping blood to the body. It can occur after a heart attack or be caused by other heart problems.

Billboard magazine editorial director Bill Werde said Jackson's star power was unmatched. "The world just lost the biggest pop star in history, no matter how you cut it," Werde said. "He's literally the king of pop."

Jackson's 13 No. 1 one hits on the Billboard charts put him behind only Presley, the Beatles and Mariah Carey, Werde said.

"He was on the eve of potentially redeeming his career a little bit," he said. "People might have started to think of him again in a different light."

___
Associated Press Writers Derrik J. Lang, Solvej Schou and Thomas Watkins in Los Angeles and Virginia Byrne, Hillel Italie, Nekesa Mumbi Moody and Jocelyn Noveck in New York contributed to this report.

Sources : http://omg.yahoo.com/news/michael-jackson-king-of-pop-dead-at-50/24346?nc

This is a film about watching the person you love while they sleep. When the eyes are closed, the “windows to the soul” are shuttered. There is no self-consciousness; in fact, consciousness is by definition absent. There is a surrender of the body to gravity and blankets and pillows that creates a kind of intimate landscape. The only visual evidence of life is breathing. It is the finest of motions; a slow rising and sinking. It’s the the primordial rhythm of life.

To make the film, I painted multiple watercolors of my wife, who has always been my favorite subject. I already had boxes full of paintings to work from, spanning the length of our marriage. They were all painted in the morning because, with its bright golden luminance, that’s the light I find most suited to watercolor. And we are both always quite happy when she can sleep late.

Cross-dissolving through a series of nearly identical duplicated paintings makes the little differences between the paintings create motion as they slowly morph, shimmering into one another. By controlling and keeping constant the length of the dissolves, I hoped to create the feeling of breathing. Shay Lynch took the same rhythm for inspiration, and wrote a restful, elegant score.

Sources : The New York Times

By Michael Scherer / WASHINGTON

As sure as the sun rises, the sitting President of the United States promises to save our fiscal future by reforming entitlement spending. And as sure as the sun sets, each attempt at delivering on that pledge ends in failure. Bill Clinton vowed to change Social Security when he first addressed Congress in 1993, and he was still vowing in his last address in 2000. He promised to "slow the growth of Medicare" in 1994, and 15 years later, that growth is still rocketing up. George W. Bush touted entitlement reform in both of his successful presidential campaigns. Then last month, just a few weeks before he left office, he was asked to name the mistakes he had made. "I believe that running the Social Security [reform] idea right after the '04 elections was a mistake," he said. "I should have argued for immigration reform."

The reasons for those unfulfilled promises are no secret. At bottom, entitlement reform means one of two things: Less spending on things voters like, such as medical treatment or retirement checks, or unpopular higher taxes to pay for those things, and quite possibly both. Blocking each of those routes are powerful lobbies ready to whip supple members of Congress: anti-tax ideologues, liberal New Deal defenders, retiree groups, patient advocates, pharmaceutical companies, and medical providers, to name a few. To make matters worse, while the coming crisis is both real and terrifying, it is not immediately apparent. Even as our fiscal position deteriorates, the world continues to buy U.S. Government debt, allowing for magically low interest rates in spite of enormous deficit spending. (See 25 people to blame for the financial crisis.)

It is on this inhospitable terrain that President Barack Obama now plans to accomplish the impossible: To reverse the trajectory of the political universe and make real progress on reforming Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. The next step in this quest happens Monday afternoon, when Obama convenes a "Fiscal Summit" in the White House's State Dining Room, with about 100 high profile guests, including the chairs of the relevant Congressional Committees. (See pictures of and read about President Obama's White House staff.)

The event will be conducted like a corporate retreat, with better upholstery on the chairs. There will be an address by the President and his vice president, Joe Biden, followed by "breakout discussion groups" on topics like health spending, taxation, Social Security, and the budget. Those groups will then report their results back to the president. (No word yet on whether the Senators will be using Magic Marker, or those easels with the oversized notepads.)

As daunting as the obstacles to actual reform are, Obama is banking on a number of recent developments to allow him to succeed where Bush and Clinton failed. For one, there is significant appetite in the Democratically-controlled Congress for providing more health care to the growing ranks of uninsured, a campaign promise that Obama made, which he now intends to pair with a concurrent demand to reduce long-term health care inflation in what some observers have called a "grand bargain." "We would not do an expansion of health care without a lot of savings," one high-level White House official told me last week.

In practice, this will mean giving uninsured Americans good news, while at the same time telling patients, and health providers, that bad medicine is on the horizon. "Someone is going to have to tell people you are not going to get the care you want," explains Howard Gleckman, a research associate at the Urban Institute. "Covering the uninsured is easy compared to that."

The companies that depend on federal and state health largesse are already mobilizing to fight back against spending reductions that could hurt their balance sheets. One industry front group, called the Partnership to Improve Patient Care, mobilized last month to water down a House plan for more than $1 billion in the stimulus bill to study the relative effectiveness of certain medical treatments, a widely recognized first step in controlling costs. The provision passed, but not before its language was changed to decouple the effort from evaluating the costs of competing treatments.

In the meantime, other provisions of the stimulus bill, like money for new health information technologies and preventative disease spending, have effectively jump started the move to a more cost-contained health care system. Early last week, Obama made no secret of his pride in these measures, declaring at the stimulus bill signing in Denver, "We have done more in 30 days to advance the cause of health reform than this country has done in a decade." The effort to reform Social Security, which is generally seen as a less complex problem, is likely to take a backseat over the coming months to health care efforts. In part, this is due to resistance to the idea of reducing social security benefits from many House liberals, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who was able to take over the reins in Congress thanks in part to the resentment caused by Bush's failed reform effort. Though Administration officials do not like discussing the problem on the record, the White House has not yet ruled out the idea of establishing some sort of independent commission to look at creating a specific reform plan outside the congressional committee structure, an approach supported by many outside experts as the best way to break the political deadlock.

Tennessee Rep. Jim Cooper, a centrist Democrat, recently discussed his proposal for such a commission during a White House meeting with Obama and other moderate, so-called Blue Dog Democrats. "We have to approach the topic very gingerly," Cooper said in a recent interview, noting the concerns of key Congressional leaders that they will lose jurisdiction to such a commission. "The key is going to be a required Congressional vote so we can't duck the problem any longer."

Perhaps the biggest advantage that Obama has as he prepares to tackle entitlement is the financial crisis, which has forced everyone in Washington to focus on the nation's long term fiscal problems. The recent explosion of government spending to handle the banking collapse and housing crisis has been coupled with vocal concern from nations like China, which buy government debt. A drop in international interest in federal debt could lead to a spike in interest rates, which would have a damaging impact on the U.S. economy. On Sunday, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton urged Chinese leaders to continue their investments in U.S. debt. "We are truly going to rise and fall together," she warned.

None of this, however, means that Obama's task will be much easier than the one that bedeviled his predecessors. "This is not walking and chewing gum," joked Robert Reischauer, a former director of the Congressional Budget Office. "It's doing open heart surgery and particle physics at the same time." But the difficulty has not dissuaded Obama. As he pivots to confront the nation's fiscal problems, his aides say he knows exactly what he is getting into.

Sources : Ini Dia

(JAKARTA, Indonesia) —Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton moved Wednesday to boost U.S. ties with the world's most populous Muslim nation and its neighbors, pledging a new American willingness to work with and listen to Indonesia and the rest of Southeast Asia.

Her message was received warmly by officials in Jakarta, the childhood home of President Barack Obama, although small and scattered protests were held in several cities, with some Islamic hard-liners setting tires on fire and others throwing shoes at caricatures of Clinton. (Read "Indonesia's Fatwa Against Yoga.")

She said her choice of Asia for her first overseas trip as Obama's top diplomat was "no accident" and a sign of the new administration's desire for broader and deeper relations with the continent on regional and global issues.

Clinton, who arrived from a stop in Japan and will head Thursday to South Korea and China, was particularly effusive about Indonesia, which she said deserved praise for its hard-won multiethnic democracy and efforts to fight terrorism while respecting human rights. (Read TIME's cover story "Why Indonesia Matters.")

She announced plans to restart Peace Corps programs in Indonesia that were suspended in 1965 when volunteers were expelled after leftists accused them of espionage. And she said the two countries would cooperate on climate change, trade, education, regional security and a host of other issues, while indicating that more development aid was on the way.

"I bring greetings from President Obama, who has himself said and written about the importance of his time here as a young boy," Clinton told reporters at a news conference with Indonesian Foreign Minister Hassan Wirajuda.

"It gave him an insight into not only this diverse and vibrant culture, but also the capacity for people with different backgrounds to live harmoniously together," she said.

Wirajuda said Indonesia could be a powerful bridge to help the United States reconnect with Muslims. "As we have proven, democracy, Islam and modernity can go hand-in-hand," he said. "Indonesia can be a good partner for the U.S. in reaching out to the Muslim world."

Indonesia, a secular nation of 235 million people, has personal ties for Obama, who spent four years here as a child. Among those who turned out at the airport to welcome Clinton were 44 children from Obama's former elementary school, singing traditional folk songs and waving Indonesian and U.S. flags. She smiled and swayed to the music as they sang.

Wirajuda said Indonesia would welcome a presidential visit from Obama, but neither he nor Clinton would say if an invitation had been extended.
Another of Clinton's goals in Indonesia was to show stepped-up U.S. engagement with Southeast Asia in general, stressing the growing importance of a region that often felt slighted by the Bush administration.

She visited the Jakarta-based headquarters of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and said Washington would for the first time begin consideration of signing the bloc's Treaty of Amity and Cooperation, a nonaggression pact.

Clinton said she would attend the group's annual regional security conference — something former Bush administration Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice skipped twice during her four years in office.

"It really shows the seriousness of the United States to end its diplomatic absenteeism in the region," ASEAN Secretary-General Surin Pitsuwan.

Greater U.S. engagement with ASEAN could pave the way for a fresh approach to promote reform in Myanmar, also known as Burma, whose military regime has a dismal human rights record and has failed to hand over power to a democratically elected government.

Clinton lamented that neither U.S. sanctions nor ASEAN prodding has convinced the junta to embrace democracy or release opposition detained leader Aung San Suu Kyi and an estimated 2,100 other political prisoners.

"It is an unfortunate fact that Burma seems impervious to influences from anyone," Clinton said. "The path we have taken in imposing sanctions hasn't influenced the Burmese junta, but...reaching out and trying to engage them has not influenced them either."

"This is a problem not just for Indonesia and the U.S. but for the entire region, so we are going to work closely and we are going to consult with Indonesia for ideas how best to bring about positive change in Burma," she said.

Though most of Indonesia's 190 million Muslims practice a moderate form of the faith, public anger ran high over U.S. policy in the Middle East and the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan during the Bush years, fueling a small but increasingly vocal fundamentalist fringe.

Security was tight for Clinton's visit, with 2,800 police deployed in the capital along with members of the army, according to local police.

Witnesses saw scattered protests and at least five people were detained by police following a rowdy rally by 200 Muslim university students in front of the U.S. Embassy. Some protesters set tires on fire on the capital's outskirts and others screamed "Hillary is terrorist."

Sources : Time Magazine