Write an article based on this summary:

– Marrion P'Udongo is recognized simply as "pastor" by many and has pulled off a laundry list of heroic acts in the war-torn Republic of the Congo, including assisting child soldiers and rape victims and helping manage an orphanage, per NBC News. His other nickname, the "Schindler of Congo," came about after a 2003 massacre of ethnic Hema residents in Bunia by ethnic Lendu militiamen: P'Udongo housed 70 or so frightened Hema for about a week, but militiamen forced their way in and threatened to kill everyone—until P'Udongo successfully pleaded for their lives and they were all brought to safety. But now the people's savior is the one who needs help as he languishes in Uganda hooked up to a dialysis machine, the result of a failing kidney he received in a 2011 transplant. But while a new donor has been secured and a hospital in India with a high success rate for his type of procedure is ready to perform it, the $35,000 price tag is overwhelming for P'Udongo, who makes $200 a month, NBC notes. The people he's touched are doing whatever they can to help him: The same reporter who helped fundraise for the pastor in 2011 is doing it again. "Look at the world right now … you don't see a lot of really good people left," Bryan Mealer says on Generosity.com. "This is one of them." P'Udongo even has a friend in Hollywood: Ben Affleck, who founded advocacy group Eastern Congo Initiative and met P'Udongo in 2008, when the actor visited northeastern Congo. Meanwhile, P'Udongo continues to fight, mostly for his wife, four kids, an orphan he's taken in, and all the others he advocates for. "If I am not there … who will fill that gap?" he says to NBC. "No, I should not die now … There's still a lot to do." (Read what Bryan Mealer wrote about the pastor in 2011 for the Huffington Post.)

These crawls are part of an effort to archive pages as they are created and archive the pages that they refer to. That way, as the pages that are referenced are changed or taken from the web, a link to the version that was live when the page was written will be preserved.Then the Internet Archive hopes that references to these archived pages will be put in place of a link that would be otherwise be broken, or a companion link to allow people to see what was originally intended by a page's authors.The goal is to fix all broken links on the web . Crawls of supported "No More 404" sites. ||||| He's been dubbed the "Schindler of Congo" for acts of heroism, but now he's the one in need of saving.

 Pastor Marrion P'Udongo earned his nickname for saving nearly 100 people from murderous militiamen in 2003 — but that was only one of his many acts of courage.

 He's gone into the bush to coax out child soldiers, helped scores of rape victims secure medical treatment, fed and clothed inmates in Congo's most notorious prison and helps run an orphanage for children impacted by his nation's decades-long war.

 Pastor Marrion P'Udongo is seen ministering to pygmies. Pastor Marrion P’Udongo

 But today, the man also known simply as "pastor" to many spends his days hooked up to a dialysis machine and praying for a miracle.

 "I don't feel in my heart that I should die now," he told NBC News. "I still have a lot to do."

 P'Udongo nearly died in 2011 from kidney failure; a massive fundraising campaign helped cover the cost of a life-saving transplant. But the donor organ was slow to take and this spring he got bad news: his body was rejecting the kidney.

 Suddenly, he was back where he started — and desperately in need of assistance.

 Several people volunteered as new donors. A match was found and paperwork arranged for a transplant at a hospital in India, which reportedly has a higher success rate for such procedures.

 "There are really people who want to help. So many. But the challenge is that we don't have money," P'Udongo said.

 He needs around $35,000 for the procedure. The pastor is currently living off his $200 a month salary and a patchwork of donations to pay for medical care and rent in Uganda's capital, where he gets dialysis three times a week and only goes out for church.

 "It's like a life in a prison," he said. "You can't go far from where there is no dialysis."

 Pastor Marrion P'Udongo in the hospital. Pastor Marrion P’Udongo

 He can't take joy from food anymore — most of the time, he doesn't have an appetite — and says with a trademark giggle that he's lost so much weight he's "like a little boy."

 "I'm not very strong to walk and many times I feel a lot of pain," he said, turning serious. "Sometimes you feel like you will not make it any more."

 P'Udongo's current reality stands in stark contrast to his life in Bunia, where his work made him feel "like I'm doing one of the best things in the world."

 Human-rights workers, journalists and Hollywood stars like Ben Affleck who worked with him there agree — and are fighting to ensure he gets back there to continue his mission.

 “ He’s like a Moses character … Even the most wicked militia guys, they loved him”

 Affleck — founder of the Eastern Congo Initiative — called the pastor a "friend and a hero."

 He said he first met P'Udongo in 2008 on a visit to northeastern Congo, where the pastor helped him understand the "complexity and possibility" of wartorn Bunia along with the "stark realities of life" for those affected by war.

 "Pastor is a genius connector, translator, producer and fixer but he is first and foremost a great humanitarian," Affleck said in an emailed statement to NBC News.

 Bryan Mealer is one of the reporters who relied on P'Udongo as a "fixer," or guide, during Congo's war.

 "Look at the world right now… you don't see a lot of really good people left," Mealer said. "This is one of them."

 Mealer — who has led fundraising efforts for pastor's first and this latest transplant effort — said he was "incredibly moved" from the moment he met P'Udongo.

 "He has kind of a power around him — it's a magic," he explained, adding that what sets P'Udongo apart was his ability to access all sides in the protracted conflict.

 "He's like a Moses character," Mealer said. "You would walk through the bush and people would just run out to him. He was this kind of lighthouse through all these years of war. Even the most wicked militia guys, they loved him."

 The Schindler comparisons started after the siege of Bunia in May 2003. Ethnic Lendu militiamen tore into the town and started butchering members of the Hema ethnic group in the streets.

 Dozens of desperate Hema went to the pastor's house seeking refuge.

 "Hema were being captured by the militias in order to be slaughtered," the pastor explained. He sheltered around 70 people for about a week — with little food or water but plenty of prayer — until fighters kicked down his door.

 "The militia came in and they wanted to kill the people who were there," P'Udongo said. "All Hema — including my wife."

 Pastor Marrion P’Udongo preaches to a large crowd. Pastor Marrion P’Udongo

 He said he thought he might die but felt compelled to act, so he pleaded for mercy.

 "People cannot be killed by dogs," he said. "I was feeling that passion in my heart to ... plead with them."

 The militiamen seemed undeterred, until a fighter came in who'd seen pastor preach.

 "He said, 'we know this pastor, he's a good man so we cannot kill these people here,'" P'Udongo recalled. That stroke of luck — or act of God, as pastor describes it — secured their safety, and the militiamen escorted all of them to a U.N. base.

 When asked about the Schindler nickname, P'Udongo laughs.

 "It's a big name," he said with his giggle. While he acknowledges saving "many people" during the war — he insists he was just doing his job.

 "It's my responsibility as a pastor … not only to preach but also to risk our life for the sake of others," he explained.

 Pastor has carried on his saving since that moment in Bunia, most recently devoting his time to his prison ministry and helping run the St. Kizito orphanage there.

 His colleague there, Elysee Pifwa, volunteered and matched as his kidney donor — a testament to pastor's impact, according to Mealer.

 "When you put it into terms of him being gone … There's no getting him back," Mealer said. "There's no reproducing someone like this who has given, who gives his life for others."

 He said that the 80 kids at the orphanage — many brought in by P'Udongo himself — would be devastated to lose their protector.

 "Those kids need him — they really depend on him," added Mealer, one of the orphanage's founders. "He's the oil that helps that place run."

 Pastor Marrion P'Udongo ministers to pygmies. Pastor Marrion P’Udongo

 P'Udongo was an orphan himself. Early on, he made money smuggling gasoline across the border between Uganda and Congo before finding God in the 90s. He began ministering to refugees from the Rwandan genocide who had come into Congo. Then, fighting hit home.

 "It was like a calling … to help his community," Mealer said.

 He described how P'Udongo would go into the bush to preach about God but also about the developments and how to get help — a phenomenon Mealer witnessed while pastor helped him as a "fixer" navigating coverage of the war.

 "To see someone who is positive and to see someone who had this light shining through them was so good for people," Mealer said. "This was a place where there was absolutely no hope."

 Mealer said small acts of kindness to help save the pastor's life would reverberate and benefit the orphans, prisoners and countless others touched by P'Udongo and those who could be helped in the future.

 "This is a good man doing good work in a place where there isn't a lot of goodness left," he said. "It's a good person working on this earth, helping people without a voice and without a lot of power. If he's gone, that will be lost. The darkness that tries to force itself into every small place will win again."

 P'Udongo said he's more worried about his family — his wife of 16 years, four young biological children and one young orphan he has taken in to raise as his own — and his country.

 "I'm not feeling that I should die now," the pastor said. "I think my presence is doing something there. If I am not there… who will fill that gap?"

 "No, I should not die now… There's still a lot to do." ||||| This past July, I got a call saying that a dear friend had suffered severe kidney failure and wasn't expected to live. Pastor Marrion P'Udongo has been called the "Oskar Schindler of Congo," a man who's helped save and nurture hundreds of lives in a country where war has claimed millions.

 To the people of northeastern Congo, Pastor Marrion was both a saint and a hero, providing shelter to the hunted and hope to a community withered by violence. And to journalists like myself, he was an ace fixer and translator -- one of the few people to offer access into this complicated and often incredibly dangerous conflict. Over the past decade, the pastor has worked for just about every major news organization in the world. Chances are if you've read a story about Congo in recent years, or seen one on television, the pastor probably helped make it happen.

 As colleagues and I scrambled to get the pastor to nearby Kampala, Uganda, for emergency dialysis, I thought about what an immense loss his death would be -- not to us reporters, but to the embattled country itself. For the pastor, working for journalists was just a way to finance his own war against the war, a battle he waged alone and most always at the risk of his own safety.

 In early May 2003, his town of Bunia was invaded by ethnic Lendu militia looking to gain control over area gold mines. This sideshow of Congo's bigger war -- fought largely over the country's vast mineral resources -- pit the Lendu against their rival Hema, who owned many businesses in Bunia and whose militia controlled the mines. As gunboys -- many under the age of 16 -- marched through town, they pulled Hema residents from their homes and executed them in the streets. The Hema, close cousins of the Rwandan Tutsi who were targeted in the 1994 genocide, fled by the hundreds to a nearby United Nations base for refuge, only to be locked out. With no place to turn, many ran to the home of Pastor Marrion, whose own wife Juliette was a Hema. For days, as bodies of neighbors and relatives filled the streets, the pastor sheltered over 70 people in his small living room.

 Gunboys finally discovered them one afternoon and kicked down the door. One by one, the group was stripped naked and marched into the road to be shot, along with the pastor, his wife, and their three children. But before any bullets were fired, one of the lieutenants recognized the pastor. He'd once been a member of his congregation.

 "This pastor can't die," he argued with his commander. "He is too good a man to be killed like this." The commander ordered the gunboys away and looked at the pastor. "I should kill you and everyone here," he said. "But something is telling me no."

 Miraculously, he then ordered the militia to escort the group to the UN headquarters, which had since opened its gates to the displaced. Once they were gone, the militia returned and looted everything in the pastor's house.

 Years later, that same commander was arrested by the Congolese government and put in prison. The first visitor he received was the pastor himself.

 "The reason I am alive is because of him," he said, breaking into one of his signature laughs that caused his eyes to disappear beneath his round cheeks. "My chief, we are living because of the grace of God!"

 In the following years, as fighting caused millions to flee their homes and into the bush, only to be raped and pillaged by soldiers and militia, the pastor became a kind of lighthouse for the multitude of scattered souls. He ministered in the squalid displaced camps throughout northeastern Congo, where spirits were broken and sickness claimed dozens each day. He helped operate St. Kizito Orphanage, started by Catholic nuns in Bunia to house 135 children whose families were killed during the war. With pastor as chief fundraiser, the sisters now fend for themselves.

 Often, the pastor would venture alone into the bush with a megaphone and sacks of food in search of child soldiers -- many orphaned themselves during the fighting and left as easy prey for militia. Despite routine death threats, he convinced many to disarm, and if possible, try and become children once again.

 "We should not just preach that people who believe in God will go to Heaven," he once said. "We should know how to spare their lives when they're still on this earth."

 The pastor is now languishing in a Kampala boarding house, weak and unable to travel, except for his weekly trips for dialysis. His doctors say that in order to live, he desperately needs a kidney transplant. The nearest place for the operation is Johannesburg, South Africa; we're also working with doctors in neighboring Rwanda who may be able to help. The price tag for such a procedure is about $76,000.

 The good news is we found a kidney donor. My colleagues and I have since started a campaign to raise the money. By donating to the Pastor Marrion Fund, you can help.

 In your lifetime, there are few moments when you're given the opportunity to directly save another person's life. And as Schindler said, "Whoever saves one life saves the world entire." In a place like Congo, nothing rings more true. The country needs its hero now more than ever, not just to offer hope to the broken and scattered, but to make sure their stories get told. So I ask you now, who's with me? Who's going to help me save the guy?

 Go to Indiegogo.com/The-Pastor-Marrion-Fund/ to make a contribution.

 For more information, e-mail me at: thepastormarrionfund@gmail.com ||||| The war in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo was one of the most complex conflicts on Earth, even before the defeat of the M23 rebel movement, perhaps the conflict's most powerful combatant, in late 2013.

 Although there are more than 1.6 million people displaced, along with frequent fighting between the Congolese government and the region's constellation of armed groups, the conflict often defies a label as straightforward as "war."

 Even after M23's downfall, the region is home to scores of combatants whose motivations range from plunder and ethnic self-defense to overthrowing the Congolese government and overthrowing the governments of neighboring countries.

 Violence is occasionally aimed at the Congolese state, whose military is one of the region's major human-rights abusers and a primary driver of displacement. But overall, the war in the Congo is more like a web of mutually reinforcing social and political conditions, rather than a confrontation between easily definable ideological or political opponents.

 As a result, mapping the conflict can be incredibly difficult. And the conceptual challenges aren't the only reason that territorial maps, like the ones that have become familiar for followers of the conflicts in Syria and Iraq, are so difficult and time-consuming to produce for the Congo.

 Misinformation travels more easily than people in the DRC's mountainous and underdeveloped eastern edge. And mapping the region's armed groups requires meticulous ground-level fieldwork in a difficult and often dangerous environment.

 The Congo Research Group, a project at New York University's Center on International Cooperation, has now produced a definitive map of one of the world's most severe yet least-covered and -understood conflicts. The map, published in October, shows the areas of influence for 69 armed groups in the eastern Congo, displaying where these groups carry out attacks, impose taxation, or have a notable operational presence.

 It's an invaluable piece of scholarship and reporting — and it shows just how complex the situation has gotten.

 Even with no prior knowledge of the conflict, which has endured in some form since 1996, the map conveys one of the biggest obstacles to normalcy in the region: There are too many active armed groups.

 While most of them field fewer than 200 fighters each, their sheer number reflects the Congolese state's inability to exert its authority over the region, or to incentivize these groups to lay down their arms. It also reveals a lack of cohesion among combatants — and the ease with which local warlords or even political leaders can mobilize their own militias.

 The groups are also constantly splintering and shifting. According to the Congo Research Group report that accompanied the group's map, there were 20 armed groups in the region in 2008, while the map shows the areas of influence of nearly 70 such groups.

 As Christoph Vogel, a senior fellow at the Congo Research Group and one of the creators of the CRG map, told Business Insider, the map is just a snapshot of a highly fluid ground-level situation.

 "The half-life of such a mapping is extremely short as conflict in eastern Congo is constantly evolving," says Vogel, who adds that researchers learned of "two 'new' small militias just days after publishing this map."

 "It is literally impossible — even for the UN mission and the government itself — to have absolutely correct and precise information on each armed group's exact zone of control," Vogel told Business Insider.

 Militias and the national military often operate in the same areas, and the offices of the central government sometimes remain open even in places where antigovernment groups are strongest.

 "In many areas, influence is not monopolized," Vogel said.

 Another built-in challenge of mapping the conflict is that the size of an armed group's area of influence also doesn't necessarily correlate with that group's actual strength.

 "Some stronger groups who traditionally maintain rather tight control in small areas appear 'weaker' on the map than smaller but very mobile groups covering intermittently a much larger area," Vogel said.

 Even with these inherent drawbacks, the map gives a vivid sense of how the conflict in the eastern Congo has persisted for so long — and of why even a seemingly major development like the defeat of a leading rebel movement wasn't enough to solve the region's problems. |||||

 Several weeks ago I wrote about Pastor Marrion P’Udongo, my fixer in the Democratic Republic of Congo who’d suffered kidney failure. Pastor Marrion worked as a fixer with just about every journalist who passed through the region, and spent years guiding photographers through displacement camps, firefights, and into the homes of people who’d been raped and assaulted. And as a result, the world is more informed about this chronically underreported conflict.

 When I wrote the story in April, he was in Nairobi on the verge of dying while we scrambled to find money for a life-saving kidney transplant. Many people responded with such amazing generosity that we managed to pull the funds together for Marrion’s procedure. And on May 26, he received a new kidney, donated by his nephew.

 It was an enormous achievement, but that wasn’t the end. Two days after the transplant, the new kidney went into shock, or as the Pastor’s doctors described, “a state of slumber.” Pastor Marrion suffered excruciating pain and his body became swollen. Then, as we feared, doctors informed us the body was rejecting the new kidney. We feared for the worst, so we began scouring eastern Congo looking for another possible donor, a process that before had taken us months.

 Then one afternoon, Riccardo Gangale, a fellow photographer and close friend of the Pastor, called and said the kidney was starting to show signs of waking up. Pastor Marrion’s body was beginning to heal.

 Two weeks later and Pastor Marrion has recovered well enough to send me an email. Without souls like Riccardo, Bryan Mealer, Taylor Krauss, and the over 500 people who gave anything from $2 to $8,000, this amazing feat would have never taken place – proof that miracles can happen through the power of community. Pastor’s words to you and me were as follows:

 “My health is better, my result from the hospital today was so good.

 My kidney is working well…Thank you so much for saving my life

 God bless you and thank you all.”

 And because of the donations, the pastor can hopefully go home soon. He’ll be returning to the St. Kizito orphanage that he helps manage in the Democratic Republic of Congo, home to over 100 kids whose parents perished during the war. He’ll return to the primary school he started in the Tagba displaced camp, where people who lost everything to violence can at least know their children’s education is secure. He’ll go home to his community, his family, and the journalists who still need his courage and skills to help them tell this story.

 However, Pastor Marrion still needs support. The operation, medication, and hospital bills have drained all of the money raised. In the coming weeks, the pastor will require another surgery to open his urinary tract, which will cost upwards of $5,000. In addition, we need to cover the cost of vital anti-rejection medication for at least several months until the pastor is able to work again.

 And if possible, we’d like to set up a small education fund for Uyer Omaka, Pastor Marrion’s 24-year old nephew who so bravely volunteered as the donor. In a society as broken as Congo, it is encouraging to know there are still young men as noble and selfless as he. Already he’s following a path of service and sacrifice like his uncle. We only hope to help his journey.

 To learn more about Pastor Marrion and to donate to the fund set up to help him, visit Indiegogo.com.

 Marcus Bleasdale, an award-winning photographer based in Oslo, is a member of the VII Photo Agency. Bleasdale has published two books, “One Hundred Years of Darkness” and “The Rape of a Nation“. ||||| This past July, I got a call saying that a dear friend had suffered severe kidney failure and wasn't expected to live. Pastor Marrion P'Udongo has been called the "Oskar Schindler of Congo," a man who's helped save and nurture hundreds of lives in a country where war has claimed millions.

 To the people of northeastern Congo, Pastor Marrion was both a saint and a hero, providing shelter to the hunted and hope to a community withered by violence. And to journalists like myself, he was an ace fixer and translator -- one of the few people to offer access into this complicated and often incredibly dangerous conflict. Over the past decade, the pastor has worked for just about every major news organization in the world. Chances are if you've read a story about Congo in recent years, or seen one on television, the pastor probably helped make it happen.

 As colleagues and I scrambled to get the pastor to nearby Kampala, Uganda, for emergency dialysis, I thought about what an immense loss his death would be -- not to us reporters, but to the embattled country itself. For the pastor, working for journalists was just a way to finance his own war against the war, a battle he waged alone and most always at the risk of his own safety.

 In early May 2003, his town of Bunia was invaded by ethnic Lendu militia looking to gain control over area gold mines. This sideshow of Congo's bigger war -- fought largely over the country's vast mineral resources -- pit the Lendu against their rival Hema, who owned many businesses in Bunia and whose militia controlled the mines. As gunboys -- many under the age of 16 -- marched through town, they pulled Hema residents from their homes and executed them in the streets. The Hema, close cousins of the Rwandan Tutsi who were targeted in the 1994 genocide, fled by the hundreds to a nearby United Nations base for refuge, only to be locked out. With no place to turn, many ran to the home of Pastor Marrion, whose own wife Juliette was a Hema. For days, as bodies of neighbors and relatives filled the streets, the pastor sheltered over 70 people in his small living room.

 Gunboys finally discovered them one afternoon and kicked down the door. One by one, the group was stripped naked and marched into the road to be shot, along with the pastor, his wife, and their three children. But before any bullets were fired, one of the lieutenants recognized the pastor. He'd once been a member of his congregation.

 "This pastor can't die," he argued with his commander. "He is too good a man to be killed like this." The commander ordered the gunboys away and looked at the pastor. "I should kill you and everyone here," he said. "But something is telling me no."

 Miraculously, he then ordered the militia to escort the group to the UN headquarters, which had since opened its gates to the displaced. Once they were gone, the militia returned and looted everything in the pastor's house.

 Years later, that same commander was arrested by the Congolese government and put in prison. The first visitor he received was the pastor himself.

 "The reason I am alive is because of him," he said, breaking into one of his signature laughs that caused his eyes to disappear beneath his round cheeks. "My chief, we are living because of the grace of God!"

 In the following years, as fighting caused millions to flee their homes and into the bush, only to be raped and pillaged by soldiers and militia, the pastor became a kind of lighthouse for the multitude of scattered souls. He ministered in the squalid displaced camps throughout northeastern Congo, where spirits were broken and sickness claimed dozens each day. He helped operate St. Kizito Orphanage, started by Catholic nuns in Bunia to house 135 children whose families were killed during the war. With pastor as chief fundraiser, the sisters now fend for themselves.

 Often, the pastor would venture alone into the bush with a megaphone and sacks of food in search of child soldiers -- many orphaned themselves during the fighting and left as easy prey for militia. Despite routine death threats, he convinced many to disarm, and if possible, try and become children once again.

 "We should not just preach that people who believe in God will go to Heaven," he once said. "We should know how to spare their lives when they're still on this earth."

 The pastor is now languishing in a Kampala boarding house, weak and unable to travel, except for his weekly trips for dialysis. His doctors say that in order to live, he desperately needs a kidney transplant. The nearest place for the operation is Johannesburg, South Africa; we're also working with doctors in neighboring Rwanda who may be able to help. The price tag for such a procedure is about $76,000.

 The good news is we found a kidney donor. My colleagues and I have since started a campaign to raise the money. By donating to the Pastor Marrion Fund, you can help.

 In your lifetime, there are few moments when you're given the opportunity to directly save another person's life. And as Schindler said, "Whoever saves one life saves the world entire." In a place like Congo, nothing rings more true. The country needs its hero now more than ever, not just to offer hope to the broken and scattered, but to make sure their stories get told. So I ask you now, who's with me? Who's going to help me save the guy?

 Go to Indiegogo.com/The-Pastor-Marrion-Fund/ to make a contribution. |||||


A street is cordoned off near the department store Ahlens following Friday's suspected terror attack in central Stockholm, Sweden, Saturday, April 8, 2017. Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Lofven says everything... (Associated Press)

 A street is cordoned off near the department store Ahlens following Friday's suspected terror attack in central Stockholm, Sweden, Saturday, April 8, 2017. Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Lofven says everything indicates a truck that has crashed into a major department store in downtown Stockholm is "a... (Associated Press)

 STOCKHOLM (AP) — The suspect in Stockholm's deadly beer truck attack is a 39-year-old native of Uzbekistan who had been on authorities' radar previously, Swedish authorities said Saturday. The prime minister urged citizens to "get through this" and strolled through the streets of the capital to chat with residents.

 Swedes flew flags at half-staff Saturday to commemorate the four people killed and 15 wounded when the hijacked truck plowed into a crowd of shoppers Friday afternoon in Stockholm. Prime Minister Stefan Lofven declared Monday a national day of mourning, with a minute of silence at noon.

 Sweden's police chief said authorities were confident they had detained the man who carried out the attack.

 "There is nothing that tells us that we have the wrong person," Dan Eliason told a news conference Saturday, but added he did not know whether others were involved in the attack. "We cannot exclude this."

 Eliason also said police found something in the truck that "could be a bomb or an incendiary object, we are still investigating it."

 Prosecutor Hans Ihrman said the suspect has not yet spoken to authorities and could not confirm whether he was a legal resident of Sweden. Anders Thornberg, head of the Swedish Security Service, said security services were working with other nations' security agencies to investigate the attack, but declined to elaborate.

 Police declined to comment on media reports about overnight police raids around Stockholm or if they were hunting any more suspects in the case. They said the suspect had been on their radar before but not recently, and did not explain why authorities apparently had not considered him a serious threat.

 Eliason told reporters the suspect was "a more marginal character."

 Sweden's health service said 10 people were still hospitalized for wounds from the attack and four of them were seriously injured.

 Many in Sweden were shocked by the attack, questioning whether Swedish society — considered democratic and egalitarian — had failed in some way.

 Visiting the attack site at an upscale department store, Sweden's Crown Princess Victoria laid roses on the ground Saturday and wiped away a tear.

 "We must show a huge force, we must go against this," she told reporters.

 The stolen beer truck traveled for more than 500 yards (meters) along Drottninggatan, a main pedestrian street, before smashing into a crowd outside the popular Ahlens department store.

 The crash was near the site of a December 2010 attack in which Taimour Abdulwahab, a Swedish citizen who lived in Britain, detonated a suicide bomb, killing himself and injuring two others. He had rigged a car with explosives but the car bomb never went off. Abdulwahab died when one of his devices exploded among panicked Christmas shoppers.

 Steve Eklund, 35, who works in an office nearby, said "maniacs can't be stopped."

 "It's very simple. Things like this will always happen in an open society," Eklund said. "Sweden is not a totalitarian society."

 In February, U.S. President Donald Trump suggested that Sweden could be the next European country to suffer the kind of extremist attacks that have devastated France, Belgium and Germany. Two days after his remarks, a riot broke out in predominantly immigrant suburb of Stockholm where police opened fire on rioters, a surprise to many Swedes who aren't used to officers using guns.

 "We must get through this. Life must go on," Lofven said Saturday after again laying flowers near the crash site. "We in Sweden want an open society."

 Lofven also made a point of walking around Stockholm, including along the Drottninggatan, chatting with people having coffee outside a cafe.

 The prime minister says said the aim of terrorism is to undermine democracy.

 "But such a goal will never be achieved in Sweden," he said.

 ___

 AP reporters Pietro DeCristofaro in Stockholm, and Jan M. Olsen in Copenhagen, Denmark, contributed. ||||| Image copyright AFP Image caption The lorry was driven into the front of a department store

 Swedish police have confirmed they discovered a suspect device inside the lorry which was driven into a Stockholm department store on Friday.

 The device was found in the driver's seat, National Police Commissioner Dan Eliasson said, but it was not known whether it was a bomb.

 Mr Eliasson also said the suspect in custody was from Uzbekistan, 39, and known to security services.

 The hijacked lorry was driven into Ahlens department store in the capital.

 Four people were killed - 10 remain in hospital, including a child. Two are in intensive care.

 Eyewitnesses: Lorry was 'trying to hit people'

 Late on Saturday, police in the Norwegian capital, Oslo, found a "bomb-like device" in the Groenland district of the city and detained a man.

 The area was cordoned off and a controlled explosion carried out. Police say further investigations are continuing.

 What do we know about the Stockholm suspect?

 The suspect, who was not named, was known to the security services.

 However, he had only been seen as a "marginal character", Mr Eliasson said.

 The head of Swedish security police, Anders Thornberg, said the suspect was "a person who has previously figured in our intelligence flow".

 Image copyright Swedish police Image caption Police wanted to speak to this man - a suspect matching his description was later arrested

 It is not clear if the suspect was resident in Sweden.

 Mr Eliasson said police had reason to believe the suspect was the man behind the attack.

 But he added: "We still cannot rule out that more people are involved."

 On Saturday, there were reports of more police raids in Sweden. However, police told Reuters they had not made any further arrests.

 Was there a bomb in the lorry?

 Police say it is too early to tell what the "technical device" in the lorry was - only that "it should not be there".

 "I cannot say at this stage that this is a bomb or some sort of flammable material," Mr Eliasson said.

 "We are doing a technical investigation."

 Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption What we know about the Stockholm lorry attack

 What is the Swedish government doing?

 Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Lofven has called it a terrorist attack, with borders tightened at his request.

 "Terrorists want us to be afraid, want us to change our behaviour, want us to not live our lives normally, but that is what we're going to do."

 "Terrorists can never defeat Sweden, never," Mr Lofven said.

 "We're also determined to continue to be an open society; a democratic society."

 Image copyright AFP Image caption A memorial has been set up near the site

 The mayor of Stockholm, Karin Wanngard, reiterated that Stockholm was open.

 "This is not an attack that's about the colour of your skin," she said.

 "We can show that with good integration, with an openness and a friendly behaviour, we are stronger together and it doesn't matter where you come from."

 Sweden's king, Carl XVI Gustaf, said: "We are all shaken by what has happened."

 He added that those "who want to help, are more than those who want to hurt us".

 "Unfortunately we've experienced many acts of violence before and we have coped and we will now too."

 There will be a minute's silence in Sweden at midday on Monday to commemorate the dead.

 Has Sweden experienced similar attacks before?

 Sweden has generally low crime rates, and has been ranked as one of the safest countries in the world.

 Image copyright AFP Image caption Forensic police are investigating the site of the lorry attack

 In 2010, two bombs detonated in central Stockholm, killing the attacker - an Iraq-born Swedish man - and injuring two others.

 In October 2015, a masked man who was believed to have far-right sympathies killed a teacher and pupil in a sword attack.

 In February, US President Donald Trump cited a non-existent terror attack in Sweden, and blamed it on the country's asylum policy - baffling many Swedes.

 Sweden has taken in nearly 200,000 refugees and migrants in recent years - more per capita than any other European country.

 However, there was a drop in numbers last year after the country introduced new border checks.

 Separately, Sweden is believed to have the highest number of Islamic State group fighters per capita in Europe.

 About 140 of the 300 who went to Syria and Iraq have since returned, leaving the authorities to grapple with how best to reintegrate them into society.

 Timeline: Vehicle ramming attacks in Europe and the US ||||| STOCKHOLM (Reuters) - A 39-year-old Uzbek man being held in custody is the suspected driver of a hijacked beer delivery truck that plowed into crowds in central Stockholm, killing four people and wounding 15 in an apparent terror attack, police said on Saturday.

 The man, previously known to Swedish intelligence services as a marginal figure with no clear links to extremist groups, is suspected of mowing down pedestrians on a busy shopping street and smashing through a store front on Friday.

 “Nothing indicates that we have the wrong person, on the contrary, suspicions have strengthened as the investigation has progressed,” Dan Eliasson, head of Sweden’s national police, told a news conference on Saturday.

 The man, detained on Friday night on terrorism charges after the attack in the heart of the capital, appeared to have acted alone but “we still cannot rule out that more people are involved,” he said.

 Police raided several addresses in the Stockholm area on Saturday, according to TT news agency and tabloid Aftonbladet, but told Reuters no further arrests in connection with the attack had been made.

 A Reuters witness saw police wearing protective masks carrying out a search at an apartment in a southern Stockholm suburb.

 LAWYER MET WITH SUSPECT

 Court-appointed lawyer Johan Eriksson told Reuters he had met with the suspect on Saturday but declined to give further details about his client.

 Police did not name the detainee, but said he was from the central Asian republic of Uzbekistan and that he had seemed peripheral in intelligence reports.

 “We received intelligence last year, but we did not see any links to extremist circles,” Sapo security police chief Anders Thornberg said.

 Related Coverage Factbox: Deadly attacks in Western Europe since 2014

 Eliasson said there were “clear similarities” to an attack last month in London in which six people died, including the assailant who drove a hired car into pedestrians on a bridge.

 Vehicles have also been used as weapons in Nice and Berlin in the past year in attacks claimed by Islamic State.

 There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attack in Sweden, which until now had been largely immune from major attacks and where many take pride in an open, democratic society.

 “I think it was just a matter of time, but still one doesn’t think it will happen,” Cecilia Hansson, a 25 year-old nurse, said. “It’s still unreal when it happens this close.”

 Police said they had found a suspicious device in the vehicle, which ended up rammed into the Ahlens department store, but said they did not yet know if it was a homemade bomb, as reported by public broadcaster SVT.

 Local authorities in Stockholm, where flags flew at half mast, said 10 people including a child were still being treated in hospital, with two adults in intensive care.

 Sweden will hold a minute’s silence at midday (1000 GMT) on Monday to mourn the dead. Police said they were maintaining a heightened presence, fearing copycat attacks.

 FLOWERS, DEFIANCE

 A gaping hole in the wall of the store showed the force of the impact from the truck, which was removed overnight for examination by forensics experts, and people gathered to pay their respects and leave flowers.

 Ahlens said it would open part of the store on Sunday.

 STOCKHOLM 2017-04-08 Police in central Stockholm near the crime scene on April 08, 2017, the day after a hijacked beer truck plowed into pedestrians on Drottninggatan and crashed into Ahlens department store on Friday, killing four people, injuring 15 others. TT News Agency/Anders Wiklund/via REUTERS

 Prime Minister Stefan Lofven visited the site and struck a defiant tone: “All of us feel anger over what has happened, I also feel the same anger, but we also need to use that anger for something constructive and go forward.”

 “We want - and I am convinced the Swedish people also want - to live a normal life. We are an open, democratic society and that is what we will remain.”

 Sweden’s King Carl Gustaf, who broke off a trip to Brazil and quickly returned home after the attack, addressed the nation in a televised speech from his home at Stockholm’s palace.

 “Those of us who want to help are many more than those who wish to harm us,” said the monarch, wearing a dark suit and black tie. “Sweden is, has long been and will continue to be a safe and peaceful country.”

 The attack was the latest to hit the Nordic region after shootings in the Danish capital Copenhagen killed three people in 2015 and the mass attack in 2011 by far-right extremist Anders Behring Breivik killed 77 people in Norway.

 A failed suicide bombing in December 2010 killed an attacker only a few hundred yards from the site of Friday’s incident.

 IMMIGRATION

 For decades, Sweden has been among the most generous nations to immigrants. But some Swedes are having second thoughts after more than 160,000 people, many from Syria, applied for asylum in 2015 in a nation of just 10 million.

 Sweden has since tightened its borders and asylum numbers have slowed to a trickle. Support for the opposition far-right Sweden Democrat party, which links worries about education, welfare costs and crime with immigration, has continued to rise.

 “We have warned about such incidents ... but we do not want to score any political points today,” Julia Kronlid, vice chairman of the party, told Reuters.

 Islamic State claimed responsibility for an attack in Nice, France, in July 2016, when a truck killed 86 people, and a truck attack on a Christmas market in Berlin in December that killed 12.

 Slideshow (22 Images)

 In last month’s attack in London, a man drove into pedestrians on Westminster Bridge near Britain’s parliament and then stabbed a policeman to death before being killed himself.

 In February U.S. President Donald Trump falsely suggested there had been an immigration-related security incident in Sweden, to the bafflement of Swedes.

 Neutral Sweden has not fought a war in more than 200 years, but its military has taken part in U.N. peacekeeping missions in several conflict zones, including Iraq, Mali and Afghanistan. ||||| Police say 39-year-old man from Uzbekistan detained on Friday is suspected of being driver as explosives reportedly found in cab of vehicle

 The driver of a hijacked beer delivery truck that careered into crowds on Stockholm’s largest shopping street, killing four and injuring many more, is believed to be a 39-year-old man from Uzbekistan previously known to the security services.

 Police in Sweden’s capital confirmed that a man had been arrested “on suspicion of a terrorist crime through murder” after the attack on Friday afternoon, which saw the haulage vehicle drive down a pedestrianised street in the capital before crashing into a department store.

 Karin Rosander, a communications director at the Swedish prosecution authority, said that police suspected the arrested man had carried out the attack. He continued to be detained on Saturday.

 The country’s national police chief, Dan Eliason, confirmed reports that the suspect was aged 39 and from the central Asian country. He added that he had previously been named in security information but was not recently under investigation, describing the suspect as “a more marginal character”.

 Play Video 0:42 Swedish police confirm Stockholm attack suspect is from Uzbekistan – video

 Anders Thornberg, head of the Swedish security service, said: “The suspect didn’t appear in our recent files but he earlier has been in our files.”

 He said the security services were working with other nations’ security agencies on the matter, but declined to elaborate.

 About 15 people were injured and four killed in the attack launched on Drottninggatan, one of the city’s main public thoroughfares. Five of the injured had been released from hospital by Saturday morning but ten remained under care, including a child.

 Police sources reportedly told the Swedish broadcaster SVT that a bag of explosives was found in the truck and a bomb disposal unit was deployed overnight. They added that the devices had not been detonated and it is claimed the suspect had “burned himself”. Officials declined to confirm the reports but added that a device of some kind had been found in the truck.

 Facebook Twitter Pinterest Swedish police released these images of a man suspected of being involved in the attack.

 “The person in question has been arrested as the culprit ... in this case the driver,” police spokesman Lars Bystrom said.

 A police patrol stopped the man on Friday after the attack because he had “behaved in a way that made him interesting”, and he resembled a suspect in photos issued by police shortly after the crash.

 According to a report in the Swedish tabloid Aftonbladet, citing a police source, the arrested man is a 39-year-old from Uzbekistan. He had minor injuries and broken glass on his clothes, which matched those of the man in the photos. He is said to have taken a train north from the city after the attack and was arrested in a suburb near the airport, although he lives elsewhere in Stockholm.

 Police spokesman Lars Bystrom declined to comment on the reports.

 Other media reports said a second man had been detained on suspicion of being connected to the main suspect. The police declined to comment on whether it had arrested any other people.

 If confirmed as a terrorist attack, it would be Sweden’s first such assault using a large vehicle.

 Facebook Twitter Pinterest People stand behind the police cordon around the scene of the attack. Photograph: Odd Andersen/AFP/Getty Images

 The prime minister, Stefan Löfven, said he had strengthened the country’s border controls. “Terrorists want us to be afraid, want us to change our behaviour, want us to not live our lives normally, but that is what we’re going to do. So terrorists can never defeat Sweden, never,” he said.

 Restrictions on local transport imposed after the attack were lifted on Friday evening.

 Fredrik Reinfeldt, the former prime minister of Sweden, said on Saturday that a liberal, open society must accept that its very freedoms make such attacks possible. “The feeling is that the price of the open society is that it’s very tough for us to shelter against these kinds of initiatives taken by a single person,” he told the Today programme on BBC Radio 4.

 Swedes would not reject the principle of free movement across borders, nor accept extreme levels of surveillance to stop future attacks, although there may be a debate over whether greater use of CCTV is warranted, Reinfelt said. “We are preparing, we understand the risks; but we are not willing to close down the openness that is the flare of freedom that we love so much.”

 The attack occurred just before 3pm (1300 GMT) when the stolen truck crashed into the corner of the bustling Åhléns department store having driven at speed down the pedestrianised Drottninggatan, situated above Stockholm’s central subway station.

 Pictures taken at the scene showed a large blue beer truck with a mangled undercarriage smashed into the department store.

 Witnesses described scenes of terror and panic. “A massive truck starts driving ... and mangles everything and just drives over exactly everything,” Rikard Gauffin told Agence France-Presse. “It was so terrible and there were bodies lying everywhere ... it was really terrifying.”

 The truck was towed away in the early hours of Saturday.

 A witness who gave his name as Marko said he and his girlfriend were in a coffee shop near the scene when he saw the truck ram into the store. “He hit a woman first, then he drove over a bunch of other people ... We took care of everyone lying on the ground,” he told Aftonbladet.

 Hasan Sidi, another passerby, told Aftonbladet he saw two elderly women lying on the ground. He said people at the scene urged him to help one of the women who was “bleeding to death”. Sidi said: “One of them died ... I don’t know if the other one made it.”

 Friday’s attack was the latest in a string of similar assaults with vehicles in Europe, including in London, Berlin and Nice.

 The British prime minister, Theresa May, spoke with her Swedish counterpart on Saturday and offered to work together against extremist attacks. A Downing Street statement said May expressed her condolences on behalf of the British people in a telephone call to Löfven.

 The statement said the leaders agreed on the importance of working together to tackle such threats. In a similar attack on Westminster last month, Khalid Masood drove a rented SUV into pedestrians before running into the grounds of parliament where he stabbed a police officer to death. Six people died, including the attacker.

 The deadliest vehicle-based attack came last year in France on the 14 July Bastille Day national holiday, when a man rammed a truck into a crowd in the Mediterranean resort of Nice, killing 86 people.

 Agence France-Presse and Reuters also contributed to this report |||||
What is a one-paragraph summary of the above article?

– The man accused of killing four people with a hijacked beer truck in Stockholm Friday is a 39-year-old from Uzbekistan who was a "marginal character" already known to authorities, officials in Sweden say. Police say they found a "suspect device" in the vehicle and they haven't ruled out the involvement of other people, the BBC reports. Ten people, including a child, are still in hospital after the attack on one of the city's main thoroughfares. Authorities believe the device may have burned the suspect instead of exploding when he drove through crowds on a pedestrianized street and crashed into a department store, the Guardian reports. Police say the suspect fled after the attack and was arrested in a northern suburb. The AP reports that Sweden's Prime Minister Stefan Lofven made a point of walking through the city's streets and stopping to chat to people before laying flowers at the scene Saturday. " We must get through this. Life must go on," Lofven said. "We in Sweden want an open society." "Terrorists want us to be afraid, want us to change our behaviour, want us to not live our lives normally, but that is what we're going to do," Lofven said. "So terrorists can never defeat Sweden, never." There has been no claim of responsibility for the attack, though ISIS claimed similar attacks in cities including London and Nice, reports Reuters.


Summarize this article:

3.5 out of 4 stars Title Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping Written by Andy Samberg, Akiva Schaffer and Jorma Taccone Directed by Akiva Schaffer and Jorma Taccone Starring Andy Samberg, Imogen Poots and Bill Hader Classification 14A Country USA Language English

 History tells us that we can trust Andy Samberg. We can also trust Jorma Taccone and Akiva Schaffer because we have trusted the Lonely Island to make us laugh and to make us sing.

 But can we trust them to make us think?

 According to Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping – the latest vehicle from the Holy Trinity – we can. Especially as it delivers a biting take on the state of top 40 music in the Year of Our Lord, 2016. Which is no easy feat, believe me.

 Story continues below advertisement

 As we saw in the arguably confusing Zoolander 2, parodies (or whatever that movie was) have lost traction in the wake of what comedy's evolved into now. To spoof or to throw shade works for a hot second, but as evidenced by the success of Inside Amy Schumer, Broad City, and even Samberg's Brooklyn Nine-Nine, there has to be more to a premise than one-liners, cheap shots, and OTT performances. There has to be heart. There has to be commentary. And in the case of a movie like Popstar, there has to be something other than mocking the likes of the industry's biggest and brightest. And the Lonely Island understands this.

 Revolving around a Bieber-like superstar named Conner4Real (played by Samberg), the faux documentary follows the release and aftermath of his new album, his struggle for relevance and the effects of a business that prioritizes either youth or nostalgia. And fortunately for Conner, the latter could be played to his favour: having split up with his original band the Style Boyz (Taccone and Schaffer) years earlier, he becomes increasingly encouraged to return to his roots and to get the band back together. Which, of course, is the last thing you'd want to hear as a solo star.

 And Conner's story alone is entertaining. We watch him capitalize on political movements to further his relevance (specifically through a Macklemore-like song about legalizing gay marriage – long after it's been legalized, and laced with "but I'm not gay!" subtext). We see him enlist a Tyler, The Creator-esque rapper (played perfectly by Chris Redd) to up his cultural clout. And we cringe through an engagement to his equally fame-loving girlfriend Ashley (Imogen Poots) right before they – and Seal – are attacked by wolves. All of which is funny, and all of which would make for an easy-to-watch and enjoyable film.

 But Popstar is smarter than that.

 Based heavily on the formulas of documentaries like Bieber's Never Say Never, Backstreet Boys' Show 'Em What You're Made Of, and One Direction's This Is Us, the movie combines straightforward filming with dozens of celebrity cameos-as-interviews, featuring everyone from Questlove to Nas to Mariah Carey to A$AP Rocky to Usher, who offer their takes on Conner4Real as a musician and what the Style Boyz meant to them. So, it's less a spoof than it is a homage. Especially since we're watching such similar scenes play out in music right now. I mean, hi: Zayn's attempting solo stardom, Drake's latest record tackles emotional fulfilment/lack thereof, and Bieber is experiencing an existential crisis on Instagram. The music industry is hard work. And Popstar reflects that, all without punching down.

 Instead, it's a legitimate look at celebrity culture delivered in a way that's as funny as it is thought-provoking. And while it also boasts an array of dick jokes (of which there are many, and they are great), it also holds a magnifying glass up to the culture that we've all had a hand in creating. Conner4Real is the product of all of us. But I liked his story so much that I'm not even sorry, and I'll never stop stopping. ||||| ‘Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping’ an ‘N Sane boy band spoof

 I’m thinking Justin Bieber is going to hate this movie.

 Or maybe he’ll say he loves it even as he secretly hates it.

 Or maybe he WILL love it and he won’t understand why it should give him the chills in the deep of night.

 As was the case with the incomparable “This is Spinal Tap” and the equally sublime “A Mighty Wind,” the Lonely Island Trio’s boy band/pop culture/social media satire “Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping” clearly has a genuine admiration and affection for the very subject it hilariously skews.

 It’s funny because it gets it RIGHT without ever being too mean-spirited. Even the jokes referencing Anne Frank and Osama bin Laden are good-natured and almost sweet.

 Almost.

 Friends since junior high school and zeitgeist favorites online and on TV for the last decade, the Lonely Island guys Andy Samberg, Akiva Schaffer and Jorma Taccone have collaborated on a pitch-perfect take satirizing modern-day pop stardom; the sometimes ridiculous but often infectious music dominating the scene in the 21st century, the voracious celebrity media culture and the vacuous nature of some of our most worshiped showbiz stars.

 Schaffer and Taccone co-directed. Samberg, Schaffer and Taccone wrote the screenplay. And the three star as the boyhood friends who struck boy-band gold as the Style Boyz, who took the world by storm with catchy hits such as “The Donkey Roll” and “Karate Guy.”

 Shot in faux-documentary style, “Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping” introduces us to the Style Boyz through “archival footage,” including YouTube-style video of baby Conner killing it on the drums at the age of 1 (!), and early performances by the boys when they had yet to hit puberty. (These are the first of many, many scenes and jokes with close parallels to Justin Bieber’s career ups and downs, though “Popstar” also has fun poking fun at all-white boy bands such 98 Degrees and ‘N Sync, not to mention more than a dozen celebrities, many of whom appear as themselves, poking fun at themselves. Good for you, Mariah Carey, Adam Levine, Carrie Underwood, Usher, Snoop Dogg, et al.)

 The thing about Samberg and his buddies is they’re talented enough and charismatic enough performers to believably portray pop stars — and while their songs and their videos are deliberately, insanely dopey, the material isn’t all that different from some of the real songs that have hit No. 1 and some of the actual videos and performances that dominate YouTube and the endless parade of music awards shows.

 After the inevitable breakup caused by Conner’s out-of-control ego, Conner strikes out as a solo act billing himself as Conner4Real. He quickly becomes maybe the biggest pop star in the world, surrounded by a huge entourage of sycophants and hangers-on, including a short fellow who poses next to Conner on red carpets so Conner appears tall, a personal assistant who pays no attention to him whatsoever and a guy whose sole purpose is to punch Conner in the groin to remind Conner where he came from.

 Real-life DJs, producers and music stars give talking-head interviews in which they sing Conner’s praises. Brilliant comic actors such as Sarah Silverman, Tim Meadows, Joan Cusack and Bill Hader light it up as supporting players in Conner’s world.

 I loved Chris Redd’s work as “Hunter the Hungry,” a rapper who becomes Conner’s opening act just as Hunter’s star is rising and Conner’s is dropping. Schaffer and Taccone shine as Conner’s former best friends, each of whom has to find his own way as Conner flames out in spectacular fashion.

 The jabs at TMZ, phony “reality shows,” celebrity magazines, superstar DJs, overblown concerts, pop stars who take up causes they know nothing about, Snapchatting fans, fame-hungry young beauties and the E! Channel: all sharp and spot-on. (An “E! exclusive” in which Conner “privately” proposes to his gorgeous idiot of a girlfriend with the paparazzi snapping away, Seal crooning a proposal song and a pack of wolves in attendance — don’t ask — is just fantastic.)

 Front and center, carrying the film, is Samberg in what is easily the most winning film performance of his career. Yes, Conner is a dim-bulb fool with an out-of-control ego, but there’s something endearing and sweet and likably pathetic about the guy — and his heart is in the right place, if only he can remember exactly WHERE he placed it.

 ★★★ 1⁄2

 Universal Pictures presents a film directed by Akiva Schaffer and Jorma Taccone and written by Schaffer, Taccone and Andy Samberg. Running time: 86 minutes. Rated R (for some graphic nudity, language throughout, sexual content and drug use). Opens Friday at local theaters. ||||| It's no shame to laugh your ass off at the crazyass music business. In 1984, This Is Spinal Tap took the art of the send-up all the way to 11. Now the mockumentary takes millennial form in the insanely funny Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping, starring Andy Samberg as Conner4Real, a rap star whose career is tanking. Conner has an idiotboy's understanding of rap. His music video in support of the LGBT community, "Equal Rights," keeps repeating "I'm not gay!" in a panic between verses. His latest CD, Connquest, doesn't even earn a star rating in Rolling Stone — just an emoji depicting a steaming pile of shit. #soharsh.

 Related Watch Andy Samberg Get Bad Review in 'Popstar' Trailer "Out of four possible stars, 'Rolling Stone' has given it the shit emoji," says Samberg's Conner4Real

 Popstar itself is too good-natured to draw blood. It's freestyle fun all the way. The cast, including many celeb cameos (is that you, JT?), is what Conner would call "dope." There's Sarah Silverman, priceless as Conner's publicist; Tim Meadows as his harried manager; Joan Cusack as his mother; Imogen Poots as his cheating girlfriend, and a killer Chris Redd as rap prankster who damn near renders Conner dickless. No spoilers, except to say that Harvey Levin's TMZ gets royally skewered by Will Arnett and that concert films from Katy Perry, One Direction and most especially Justin Bieber's Never Say Never are the source of many teasing taunts.

 Above all, Popstar is nonstop party time for fans of the Lonely Island. Made up of Samberg, Akiva Schaffer and Jorma Taccone, this comedy collective raised the bar on Saturday Night Live with their digital shorts, such as "Dick in a Box," "Jizz in My Pants" and "Lazy Sunday." Their comedy CDs (Incredibad, Turleneck & Chain, The Wack Album) are equally ground-breaking. The Lonely Island wrote Popstar together, with Schaffer and Taccone directing. About a decade ago, the guys created the immortal Hot Road, a daredevil farce unappreciated by critics, including me. I've been converted.

 And, now, in Popstar, everything comes together. In life, Samberg, Schaffer and Taccone went to junior high near Berkeley, shared an apartment in Los Angeles, and created videos that brought early success. As one of the featured players on SNL, Samberg had supernova visibility that his pals did not. Did that cause friction? Schaffer plays Lawrence, a lyricist so tired of Conner taking credit for his work that he retires to a farm. Taccone plays Owen, Conner's personal DJ, who feels demeaned when the star makes him wear a robot head on stage. "I look like the tip of Optimus Prime's dick," he complains. Conner, Lawrence and Owen first hit it big doing the "Donkey Roll" as the Style Boyz. Now they're all in service to the Conner4Real solo brand. Is art imitating life? Probably not. OK, maybe a little. But as we watch relationships break and heal, Popstar mixes the hilarity with a surprising amount of heart. 4Real. |||||

– Perhaps you expected bad reviews. After all, Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping is a mockumentary about a ridiculous Bieber-like rapper whose star is fading. But you're in for a nice surprise. Critics are raving about this spoof on celebrity culture, starring Andy Samberg and a sea of music-industry celebs. Here's what they're saying: It has all the makings of an "easy-to-watch and enjoyable film. But Popstar is smarter than that," writes Anne T. Donahue at the Globe and Mail. "It's a legitimate look at celebrity culture delivered in a way that's as funny as it is thought-provoking." Yes, there are dick jokes—which are "great"—but it effectively "holds a magnifying glass up to the culture that we've all had a hand in creating." Fans of the Lonely Island, the name given to the comedy trio of Samberg, Akiva Schaffer, and Jorma Taccone, are in for a "nonstop party time," writes Peter Travers at Rolling Stone. The flick isn't just funny—it's "insanely funny" and comes "with a surprising amount of heart," he says, noting "everyone from Bieber to Kanye gets ribbed in this hilarious mockumentary." It's "a pitch-perfect take satirizing modern-day pop stardom" and "front and center, carrying the film, is Samberg in what is easily the most winning film performance of his career," writes Richard Roeper at the Chicago Sun-Times. "It's funny because it gets it RIGHT without ever being too mean-spirited. Even the jokes referencing Anne Frank and Osama bin Laden are good-natured and almost sweet. Almost." Ty Burr, however, gives it a 6 or 7 out of 10. He enjoyed the "sneaky wit of its take on celebrity culture" and the "patented Lonely Island music numbers," but he found Popstar to be "genial, silly, and instantly forgettable," he writes at the Boston Globe. He was particularly bummed to see Sarah Silverman, Tim Meadows, and Joan Cusack "get lost in the shuffle."


Here is a news article: When the gunshots started, videos showed, those in front of the stage dropped to their stomachs — often an adequate first measure when under fire. But on Sunday night, the decision potentially put them at greater risk.

 Mr. Paddock’s position overhead gave him a vantage point over objects and obstacles that would typically protect people from bullets flying from a gunman at ground level. It also meant that inaccurate shots — the sort common to rapid or hurried fire, which typically sail high or strike the ground short — could still plunge into areas where people were huddled.

 Audio recordings of the shooting suggest that at least one of Mr. Paddock’s weapons fired automatically, discharging multiple bullets with a single depression of a trigger, in what are commonly called bursts.

 Weapons capable of burst fire have long been federally regulated in the United States and are more difficult to obtain than weapons that fire semiautomatically, for which regulations vary by state.

 It was not clear on Monday evening whether Mr. Paddock possessed such weapons, or used semiautomatic weapons that had been altered. In some videos of the shooting, the rate of fire sounds inconsistent, at times sputtering.

 This suggests the possibility that a weapon could have been modified to fire more quickly, a change to semiautomatic firearms known as bump or slide fire. Such modifications harness the recoil to allow for rapid fire.

 Sheriff Joseph Lombardo of Clark County, Nev., said that at least 16 rifles, ranging from .308 to .223 caliber, and a handgun were retrieved from Mr. Paddock’s hotel room. A federal law enforcement official said that AR-15-style rifles were among them. The authorities did not detail all of the guns, or which weapons Mr. Paddock fired.

 Mr. Paddock had purchased some guns in Arizona, according to a gun seller there who spoke with the authorities. ||||| Share on Google Plus

 Log in to Save

 “Either run and get shot and die, or stay and get shot and die.”

 SHAMI ESPINOZA, a concertgoer from California who was caught in the gunfire at a Las Vegas music festival. ||||| BTW

 Warning: This article contains graphic imagery and language.

 As details steadily come in about the Las Vegas shooting that has left 59 dead and 527 injured, so have videos and images showing the terror concertgoers faced as alleged shooter Stephen Paddock began spraying bullets at the crowd from a Mandalay Bay hotel room.

 This YouTube video below, in particular, is jarring. Around the 1:10 mark, amid a screaming crowd—some running for their lives, others lying on the ground in fear—a man remains standing, his arms wide open, yelling, “Come on, pussy” at the shooter.

 While many are pointing out the absurdity of the man’s hyper-macho response—an extreme version of “come at me, bro” as bullets are heard flying—most of us have never been victim to a mass shooting, so who are we to know what our instincts give way to when we are suddenly confronted with the 273rd mass shooting this year, a number that’s absurd in itself.

 Related video Why did this 24 y/o become an Internet Exhibitionist?

 Instead, I would argue it’s the juxtaposition of the crowd’s reactions—from fear to flight to panic to disillusion—that makes this video so harrowing, so painfully human, and so hard to watch.

 Editor’s note: This post has been updated to reflect the latest death toll in the Las Vegas shooting. |||||
A summary of this is?

– One of the many jarring videos to emerge from the Sunday night mass shooting in Las Vegas shows a defiant man standing and taunting the gunman while most of those around him were on the ground or trying to find cover. You can see the video here, but note that it's disturbing. (The man emerges around the 1:10 mark.) "Come on," he can be heard yelling, while gesturing with his arms in the direction of the source of the shots. As the Daily Dot notes, many commenters have criticized the "hyper-macho response," but is it possible the man inadvertently had the right idea in staying upright? A story at the New York Times that digs into the unusual nature of this attack observes that many people instinctively dropped to their stomachs when the bullets began flying. That's usually wise, "but on Sunday night, the decision potentially put them at greater risk," per the account by CJ Chivers, Thomas Gibbons-Neff, and Adam Goldman. The reason is that the gunman was firing from such a high vantage point, the 32nd floor of the hotel across the street. Any "inaccurate shots—the sort common to rapid or hurried fire, which typically sail high or strike the ground short—could still plunge into areas where people were huddled." Still, the choice was stark for concertgoers in the chaos. One puts it this way to the Times: “Either run and get shot and die, or stay and get shot and die.”


Article:

Crawl of outlinks from wikipedia.org started March, 2016. These files are currently not publicly accessible. Properties of this collection. It has been several years since the last time we did this. For this collection, several things were done: 1. Turned off duplicate detection. This collection will be complete, as there is a good chance we will share the data, and sharing data with pointers to random other collections, is a complex problem. 2. For the first time, did all the different wikis. The original runs were just against the enwiki. This one, the seed list was built from all 865 collections. ||||| Correction: An earlier version of this obituary incorrectly described one of Ephron’s three Academy Award nominations for best original screenplay. In addition to her nominations for “Silkwood” and “When Harry Met Sally,” the nomination she shared with Jeff Arch and David S. Ward was for “Sleepless in Seattle” (1993), not “You’ve Got Mail” (1998). She wrote the latter screenplay with her sister Delia Ephron, not with Arch and Ward. This version has been corrected.

 “Take notes,” Nora Ephron’s mother advised her as a child. “Everything is copy.”

 Her mother, a Broadway playwright and Hollywood screenwriter, imbued Ms. Ephron with a razor-sharp self-awareness and the ambition to transform workaday absurdities, cultural idiosyncrasies, romantic foibles and even marital calamity into essays, novels and films brimming with invitingly mordant wit. She credited her mother with bestowing “this kind of terrific ability, not to avoid pain but to turn it over and recycle it as soon as possible.”

 Nora Ephron, who gained a devoted following for her perceptive, deeply personal essays and parlayed that renown into a screenwriting career of wistful romantic comedies such as “When Harry Met Sally” and “You’ve Got Mail,” the marital exposé“Heartburn” and the whistleblower drama “Silkwood,” died June 26 at a hospital in New York. She was 71.

 The death was confirmed by her friend Richard Cohen, a Washington Post columnist. She died of complications from the blood disorder myelodysplasia, which was diagnosed six years ago.

 As a young woman, Ms. Ephron modeled her self-deprecating and deadpan writing style on Dorothy Parker, part of the Algonquin Round Table of sophisticated New York writers and humorists that also included Robert Benchley and S.J. Perelman. Of the philandering husband in her 1983 novel “Heartburn” — modeled on her marriage to former Washington Post journalist Carl Bernstein — Ms. Ephron wrote he was “capable of having sex with a Venetian blind.”

 In time, Ms. Ephron became a social confederate of New York playwrights, filmmakers and wits, including Mike Nichols, Woody Allen and Calvin Trillin; Washington journalists including former Post executive editor Benjamin Bradlee and his journalist wife, Sally Quinn; and a Hollywood coterie that included Rob Reiner, Tom Hanks, Steve Martin and Steven Spielberg.

 As a woman in the male-dominated movie business, Ms. Ephron was a rare “triple-hyphenate” as writer, director and producer. But making movies for and about women was a battle, at times. She observed how, to male studio moguls, “a movie about a woman’s cure for cancer is less interesting than a movie about a man with a hangnail.”

 From her early years as a journalist for Esquire and New York magazines, Ms. Ephron was regarded as a keen cultural barometer. She repeatedly channeled her interest in the zeitgeist to the screen. Her last film, “Julie & Julia” (2009), starring Meryl Streep as the French-cooking apostle Julia Child and Amy Adams as a modern disciple, explored the trendy fascination with blogging and gourmet cooking.

 In “Silkwood” (1983), a biographical drama directed by Nichols and starring Streep as a plutonium plant employee and union activist, Ms. Ephron tapped into the era’s fear of nuclear meltdowns and corporate coverups. Her novel and 1986 screenplay for “Heartburn” — which starred Streep and Jack Nicholson — reflected what countless other women were experiencing through their disappointing marriages and efforts to balance career ambitions with homemaking obligations.

 The tension between the sexes also played a central role in her sparkling screenplay for “When Harry Met Sally” (1989), which Reiner directed and which starred Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan as yuppies who forgo sex with each other for decades to maintain their friendship. As a writer and director, Ms. Ephron was among the first to chronicle the addictive thrill of romance by e-mail in “You’ve Got Mail” (1998), starring Hanks and Ryan.

 Ms. Ephron received three Oscar nominations for her writing, for “Silkwood” (shared with Alice Arlen), “Sleepless in Seattle” (with David S. Ward and Jeff Arch) and “When Harry Met Sally.”

 The most unforgettable — and oft-quoted — scene from “When Harry Met Sally” showed Ryan faking a loud orgasm in front of Crystal over lunch at a delicatessen. After Ryan’s intense moment, a woman at a nearby booth tells the waiter, “I’ll have what she’s having.”

 Ms. Ephron said it was Ryan’s idea to film the scene in the deli, and it was Crystal who came up with the one-liner. But the core idea came from talks between Ms. Ephron and Reiner.

 “One day, we were sitting around and Rob said to me, ‘You know, we’ve told you all this stuff that you didn’t know about men, now you tell us something we don’t know about women,’ ” Ms. Ephron told an audience at a book reading in 2006. “It was almost like, ‘I dare you.’ And I said, ‘Well, women fake orgasms.’ And he said, ‘Not with me.’ ”

 “And I said, ‘Yes, we do,’ ” she added. “Maybe not all the time, but sometimes. He still didn’t believe me. So we went thundering into the bullpen at Castle Rock Pictures where all the women work, and he asked them, ‘Is it true that women fake orgasms?’ And all these women nodded yes. What a shock that scene was for men.”

 “That’s my career, right there,” Ms. Ephron quipped.

 Nora Louise Ephron was born May 19, 1941, in Manhattan and raised in Beverly Hills, Calif., where she once joked of “loving the smell of mink, the smell of the pavement after it rained and the smell of dollar bills.”

 Her parents were prosperous but heavy-drinking Broadway playwrights, Henry Ephron and the former Phoebe Wolkind, and Nora was the first of their four daughters. The younger Ephron siblings, Amy, Delia and Hallie, also became writers.

 From their earliest years, the Ephron children were trained to come to the dinner table prepared to tell stories. Nora Ephron said that many of the tales — how a younger sister got her head caught in the banister and the fire department came to the rescue — became plot devices in their parents’ films. Years later, Nora Ephron’s letters home from Wellesley College were the source of her parents’ Broadway comedy “Take Her, She’s Mine” (1961), which became a film starring James Stewart and Sandra Dee.

 After graduating in 1962 from Wellesley, Ms. Ephron spent five years as a general assignment reporter at the New York Post before leaving daily journalism in 1968 to freelance for large-circulation magazines such as Good Housekeeping. Many of the pieces, on cultural trends, were published in her first book-length collection, “Wallflower at the Orgy” (1970).

 As the women’s movement gained traction in the decade that followed, Ms. Ephron was often invited to discuss it on television and in articles for Esquire and New York magazines. She brought a strikingly light-hearted touch to her deeply felt belief in women’s rights.

 “I have always thought it was a terrible shame that the women’s movement didn’t realize how much easier it was to reach people by making them laugh than by shaking a fist and saying don’t you see how oppressed you are,” she told Newsday in 1976.

 Her 1975 collection “Crazy Salad: Some Things about Women” included essays on vaginal deodorants, a Pillsbury bake-off, her Wellesley reunion and, one of her most reprinted articles, “A Few Words About Breasts.” She reminisced about how her flat chest made her feel like an outlier in a world that fetishized large breasts. But the trauma began at home.

 “My mother was really hateful about bras,” she wrote, “and by the time my third sister had gotten to the point where she was ready to want one, my mother had worked the whole business into a comedy routine. ‘Why not use a Band-Aid instead?’ she would say.”

 Her next collection, “Scribble, Scribble: Notes on the Media” (1978), was based on her tenure as a media columnist for Esquire in the mid-1970s. At the time, she was married to Bernstein, whose collaboration at The Post with Bob Woodward helped uncover the Watergate scandal that led to President Richard M. Nixon’s resignation.

 Her first marriage, to Dan Greenburg, author of books including “How to Be a Jewish Mother,” ended in divorce. She had married Bernstein in 1976 and was seven months pregnant with her second child when she discovered her husband was having an affair with Margaret Jay, the wife of the British ambassador. She delivered the child prematurely, and the marriage smashed apart in an ugly and public way, garnering coverage in People magazine and other publications.

 Ms. Ephron later said that it was impossible to resist writing about her marriage, telling The Post that “although it was the most awful thing I’ve ever been through . . . it was by far the most interesting.”

 The result was “Heartburn,” a roman a clef about her marriage to Bernstein with the characters changed to a cookbook author married to a randy syndicated columnist; the book also included recipes, including writer Lillian Hellman’s for pot roast. Reviews were mixed, but the notoriety surrounding its publication — one of the nation’s most prominent writers wreaking revenge on another — propelled “Heartburn” to the bestseller lists.

 “Obviously, I wish Nora hadn’t written the book,” Bernstein, then working at ABC News, told The Post at the time. “But I’ve always known she writes about her life. Nora goes to the supermarket and she uses it for material.”

 In 1987, she married Nicholas Pileggi, a journalist, author and screenwriter of such films as the mobster dramas “GoodFellas” (1990) and “Casino” (1995). Besides Pileggi and her three sisters, survivors include two sons from her second marriage, Jacob Bernstein of New York and Max Bernstein of Los Angeles.

 As a filmmaker, Ms. Ephron could be derivative. “You’ve Got Mail” was partly inspired by the pen-pal romance classic “The Shop Around the Corner” (1940). Ms. Ephron also borrowed heavily from the Cary Grant-Deborah Kerr romantic drama “An Affair to Remember” (itself a remake of an earlier film) for her 1993 star-crossed romance “Sleepless in Seattle” with Hanks and Ryan.

 If her career also had its share of movie duds — among them, the witness-protection comedy “My Blue Heaven” (1990) and the sitcom remake “Bewitched” (2005) — Ms. Ephron remained widely admired for a productive career in a field that often marginalized women who didn’t produce blockbusters or Oscar champs.

 “Nora Ephron has quietly been one of the most significant women in film history,” said movie scholar and historian Jeanine D. Basinger.

 Ms. Ephron remained a prolific essayist for publications including the New York Times and O magazine. One of her last collections, “I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman” (2006), was triggered by what she once called “the menopause that some of us remember so unfondly.”

 In keeping with her mother’s admonition, she was candid in sharing her intimate fears of aging. She explored the loss of physical and mental acuity (“I spend time getting into shape; then something breaks”). She expressed astonishment that one of her contemporaries, former White House intern Mimi Fahnestock, had kept silent about her affair with President John F. Kennedy for more than 40 years.

 Ms. Ephron wrote of being a White House press aide at the same time and lamented that she was “probably the only young woman who ever worked in the Kennedy White House whom the president did not make a pass at. Perhaps it was my permanent wave, which was a truly unfortunate mistake. Perhaps it was my wardrobe, which mostly consisted of multicolored dynel dresses that looked like distilled Velveeta cheese.”

 “Perhaps it’s because I’m Jewish,” she added. “Don’t laugh, think about it, think about that long, long list of women J.F.K. slept with. Were any Jewish? I don’t think so.

 “On the other hand, perhaps it’s simply because J.F.K. somehow sensed that discretion was not my middle name. I mean, I assure you if anything had gone on between the two of us, you would not have had to wait this long to find it out.” ||||| Nora Ephron , an essayist and humorist in the Dorothy Parker mold (only smarter and funnier, some said) who became one of her era’s most successful screenwriters and filmmakers, making romantic comedy hits like “Sleepless in Seattle” and “When Harry Met Sally...,” died Tuesday night in Manhattan. She was 71.

 The cause was pneumonia brought on by acute myeloid leukemia, her son Jacob Bernstein said.

 In a commencement address she delivered in 1996 at Wellesley College, her alma mater, Ms. Ephron recalled that women of her generation weren’t expected to do much of anything. But she wound up having several careers, all of them successfully and many of them simultaneously.

 She was a journalist, a blogger, an essayist, a novelist, a playwright, an Oscar-nominated screenwriter and a movie director — a rarity in a film industry whose directorial ranks were and continue to be dominated by men. Her later box-office success included “You’ve Got Mail” and “Julie & Julia.” By the end of her life, though remaining remarkably youthful looking, she had even become something of a philosopher about age and its indignities.

 “Why do people write books that say it’s better to be older than to be younger?” she wrote in “I Feel Bad About My Neck,” her 2006 best-selling collection of essays. “It’s not better. Even if you have all your marbles, you’re constantly reaching for the name of the person you met the day before yesterday.”

 Nora Ephron was born on May 19, 1941, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, the eldest of four sisters, all of whom became writers. That was no surprise; writing was the family business. Her father, Henry, and her mother, the former Phoebe Wolkind, were Hollywood screenwriters who wrote, among other films, “Carousel,” “There’s No Business Like Show Business” and “Captain Newman, M.D.”

 “Everything is copy,” her mother once said, and she and her husband proved it by turning the college-age Nora into a character in a play, later a movie, “Take Her, She’s Mine.” The lesson was not lost on Ms. Ephron, who seldom wrote about her own children but could make sparkling copy out of almost anything else: the wrinkles on her neck, her apartment, cabbage strudel, Teflon pans and the tastelessness of egg-white omelets.

 She turned her painful breakup with her second husband, the Watergate journalist Carl Bernstein, into a best-selling novel, “Heartburn,” which she then recycled into a successful movie starring Jack Nicholson as a philandering husband and Meryl Streep as a quick-witted version of Ms. Ephron herself.

 When Ms. Ephron was 4, her parents moved from New York to Beverly Hills, where she grew up, graduating from Beverly Hills High School in 1958. At Wellesley, she began writing for the school newspaper, and in the summer of 1961 she was a summer intern in the Kennedy White House. She said later that perhaps her greatest accomplishment there was rescuing the speaker of the house, Sam Rayburn, from a men’s room in which he had inadvertently locked himself. In an essay for The New York Times in 2003, she said she was also probably the only intern that President John F. Kennedy had never hit on.

 After graduation from college in 1962, she moved to New York, a city she always adored, intent on becoming a journalist. Her first job was as a mail girl at Newsweek. (There were no mail boys, she later pointed out.) Soon she was contributing to a parody of The New York Post put out during the 1962 newspaper strike. Her piece of it earned her a tryout at The Post, where the publisher, Dorothy Schiff, remarked: “If they can parody The Post, they can write for it. Hire them.”

 Ms. Ephron stayed at The Post for five years, covering stories like the Beatles, the Star of India robbery at the American Museum of Natural History, and a pair of hooded seals at the Coney Island aquarium that refused to mate.

 “The Post was a terrible newspaper in the era I worked there,” she wrote, but added that the experience taught her to write short and to write around a subject, since the kinds of people she was assigned to cover were never going to give her much interview time.

 In the late 1960s Ms. Ephron turned to magazine journalism, at Esquire and New York mostly. She quickly made a name for herself by writing frank, funny personal essays — about the smallness of her breasts, for example — and tart, sharply observed profiles of people like Ayn Rand, Helen Gurley Brown and the composer and best-selling poet Rod McKuen. Some of these articles were controversial. In one, she criticized Betty Friedan for conducting a “thoroughly irrational” feud with Gloria Steinem; in another, she discharged a withering assessment of Women’s Wear Daily.

 But all her articles were characterized by humor and honesty, written in a clear, direct, understated style marked by an impeccable sense of when to deploy the punchline. (Many of her articles were assembled in the collections “Wallflower at the Orgy,” “Crazy Salad” and “Scribble Scribble.”)

 Ms. Ephron made as much fun of herself as of anyone else. She was labeled a practitioner of the New Journalism, with its embrace of novelistic devices in the name of reaching a deeper truth, but she always denied the connection. “I am not a new journalist, whatever that is,” she once wrote. “I just sit here at the typewriter and bang away at the old forms.”

 Ms. Ephron got into the movie business more or less by accident after her marriage to Mr. Bernstein in 1976. He and Bob Woodward, his partner in the Watergate investigation, were unhappy with William Goldman’s script for the movie version of their book “All the President’s Men,” so Mr. Bernstein and Ms. Ephron took a stab at rewriting it. Their version was ultimately not used, but it was a useful learning experience, she later said, and it brought her to the attention of people in Hollywood.

 Her first screenplay, written with her friend Alice Arlen, was for “Silkwood,” a 1983 film based on the life of Karen Silkwood, who died under suspicious circumstances while investigating abuses at a plutonium plant where she had worked. Ms. Arlen was in film school then, and Ms. Ephron had scant experience writing for anything other than the page. But Mike Nichols, who directed the movie (which starred Ms. Streep and Kurt Russell), said that the script made an immediate impression on him. He and Ms. Ephron had become friends when she visited him on the set of “Catch-22.”

 Paul Vitello contributed reporting. ||||| Be the first to know about new stories from PowerPost. Sign up to follow, and we’ll e-mail you free updates as they’re published.

 You’ll receive free e-mail news updates each time a new story is published.

 You’re all set! ||||| Nora Ephron is dead at 71.

 Ephron died of complications from myelodysplasia, a blood disorder she was diagnosed with six years ago, The Washington Post reports.

 The beloved screenwriter, who brought to life award-winning films including "Silkwood," "When Harry Met Sally...," "Sleepless in Seattle," "You've Got Mail" and, most recently "Julie & Julia," belonged to America's top tier of filmmakers, but her talents extended far beyond Hollywood. Ephron was also an accomplished essayist, novelist and reporter, not to mention the Editor-at-Large of The Huffington Post.

 Raised in Beverly Hills, Ephron graduated from Wellesley College before beginning her career as a journalist at the New York Post. She then went on to write about the 1970s women's movement for Esquire.

 "Whatever you choose, however many roads you travel, I hope that you choose not to be a lady," Ephron told Wellesley's Class of 1996 in a commencement speech. "I hope you will find some way to break the rules and make a little trouble out there. And I also hope that you will choose to make some of that trouble on behalf of women."

 Ephron had the wit and the guts to follow her own advice.

 "She was the funniest feminist, or pseudofeminist, depending on whom you ask," Ariel Levy observed in a 2009 profile of Ephron published by The New Yorker.

 In her work and in her life, Ephron refused to settle for predictability. "Every 10 years or so there was a moment when I'd say, even subconsciously, 'Is that all there is?'" she told Ladies' Home Journal in 2009. "You've got to find ways to keep it fresh for yourself. To do the thing, as they say, that is a stretch."

 In 1976, Ephron married Washington Post journalist Carl Bernstein (she was previously married to writer Dan Greenburg for nine years) on the heels of his induction into the journalism hall of fame. Bernstein and his fellow reporter Bob Woodward had chased down the Watergate scandal, which ended the presidency of President Richard Nixon.

 "Carl and Nora were the Brad and Jen of the early eighties," Levy wrote.

 Like many power couples, this one ended in divorce -- after four years.

 Following her second divorce, Ephron wrote the Academy Award-winning screenplay for "Silkwood," starring Kurt Russell and Meryl Streep. Ephron and Streep would collaborate again on 1986's "Heartburn" and 2009's "Julie & Julia."

 "Directing movies is the best job there is, that's all," Ephron told the UK's Independent in 1993. "I can hardly say a word after that. It's just a great job. I just want to go on making movies, and some of them will be completely meaningless, except, of course, to me."

 Ephron is perhaps best known for her 1989 film, "When Harry Met Sally...," which has become a cultural mainstay.

 "'When Harry Met Sally...' is kind of a dark movie," director Nicolas Stoller told The Huffington Post in 2012. "It's sweet and it ends beautifully and romantic, but those are two pretty messed up characters. They're pretty flawed. They do pretty nasty things to each other. It goes to a dark, pretty real place between them. That's why it's a classic. [Screenwriter] Nora Ephron does not pull her punches in that movie."

 Tom Hanks, who starred in not one, but two now-classic Ephron rom-coms -- "Sleepless in Seattle" (1993) and "You've Got Mail" (1998) -- said, "Working on a movie with Nora is kind of like going to a dinner party of hers. There's a lot of great conversation. There's a certain amount of screwing around but, by and large, you wind up talking about what Nora dictates you're going to wind up talking about."

 In recent years, Ephron had grown increasingly aware of her mortality. In her latest book, "I Remember Nothing: And other Reflections" (2010) she writes: "You do get to a certain point in life where you have to realistically, I think, understand that the days are getting shorter, and you can't put things off thinking you'll get to them someday. If you really want to do them, you better do them. There are simply too many people getting sick, and sooner or later you will. So I'm very much a believer in knowing what it is that you love doing so you can do a great deal of it."

 Ephron is survived by her husband, screenwriter Nicholas Pileggi and her two sons, Jacob and Max Bernstein. A memorial has been planned for Thursday, June 28, in New York.

 For more coverage on remembering Nora Ephron:

 Nora Ephron Nora Ephron ||||| Food has brought me joy in times when there wasn’t love or work or sex or money. It’s something that brings you pleasure even when you have little control over the lack of other pleasures. You can bring food into your home; when you’re a single girl who doesn’t have plans in the evening you can make yourself dinner for four.

 And feel that you are not sad, because you’re not eating yogurt. And then if you’re having a good life, it adds something wonderful. I have friends who really do not understand why I would drive 40 miles for this cheese thing that we once drove 40 miles for in Italy, and I just feel terrible for them. What’s wrong with them? Uphill, also. On a winding road.

 What was the cheese thing?

 It was in this little town near Portovenere, this little hill town that has a festival. In the main square is a gigantic copper pan hanging on the side of some building and every year in July they have a fritto misto festival and they heat up the oil in this 16-feet-across pan and they fry fish in it. Meanwhile, in this tiny little bakery off the main street is this cheese and crust thing. It was one of those things where you say, “Oh, I’ve just eaten the greatest thing of my life, which happens to me about five times a year.” I know there are people who would drive that long to see a painting. I would never do that. Never. But I feel bad for the people who wouldn’t drive for the cheese thing. ||||| Crawl of outlinks from wikipedia.org started March, 2016. These files are currently not publicly accessible. Properties of this collection. It has been several years since the last time we did this. For this collection, several things were done: 1. Turned off duplicate detection. This collection will be complete, as there is a good chance we will share the data, and sharing data with pointers to random other collections, is a complex problem. 2. For the first time, did all the different wikis. The original runs were just against the enwiki. This one, the seed list was built from all 865 collections. |||||
What is a summary?

– Filmmaker and writer Nora Ephron has died at age 71, reports TMZ. Ephron, who wrote the screenplays for Sleepless in Seattle and When Harry Met Sally, had "emerged over the past four decades as one of America's warmest and most acute chroniclers of contemporary culture," says the Washington Post in a photo tribute. But she was also, as People notes, "one of the most powerful figures in Hollywood." Other big titles include Silkwood, You've Got Mail, and Julie and Julia, not to mention her novel Heartburn and her best-selling 2006 collection of essays I Feel Bad About My Neck. Ephron died of complications from a blood disorder called myelodysplasia, which was diagnosed six years ago, reports the Post. (Its full obituary is here.) Salon: "Her cultural influence is so elemental ... she's like hydrogen." The site rounds up its interviews with her here. New York Times: "She was a journalist, a blogger, an essayist, a novelist, a playwright, an Oscar-nominated screenwriter and a movie director—a rarity in a film industry whose directorial ranks were and continue to be dominated by men." What's more, she was successful in all those things. Huffington Post: She "belonged to America's top tier of filmmakers, but her talents extended far beyond Hollywood."