LAURA Kaeppeler of Wisconsin won the 2012 Miss America crown yesterday at a Las Vegas pageant that was updated with a reality TV format including a surprise “save” for one contestant and on camera eliminations for others.

Kaeppeler won in a two-hour, on-air competition in which she showed her talent singing opera, strutted on stage in a bikini and dazzled the audience in a flowing black gown she compared to the wedding dress worn by Duchess of Cambridge Kate Middleton.

But the pivotal moment came with the key, final question in which she was asked to discuss the current state of divisive partisan politics in Washington. She deftly said Miss America represents all people and in these difficult economic times, politicians should look to what all of America needs.

Tears flowed when the crown was placed on her head, and Kaeppeler mouthed the words “thank you, thank you so much” to the audience as the other contestants circled around her.

Miss Oklahoma, Betty Thompson, was the first runner-up, followed by Miss New York Kaitlin Monte, Miss Arizona Jennifer Sedler and Miss California Noelle Freeman, in that order.

The pageant, which aired on the ABC television network, is put on by the Miss America Organization which helps young women with personal and career growth. In 2011, the group and affiliates offered more than US$45 million in cash and scholarship aid.

Contestants compete in local and state pageants before going on to the national competition. In all, 53 women were vying for this year’s title, Miss America.

The competition has been televised since 1954, making it the fourth-longest live US TV event, and for the 2012 version the producers updated the format to look as much like a modern reality TV contest as a beauty and talent pageant.

After 15 finalists were narrowed to 12, the remaining contestants onstage were told to line up behind one of the three finalists left unchosen. The woman with the greatest support among her peers — Miss Alabama Courtney Porter — advanced to the ballroom gown competition.

Similarly, during the talent portion, several contestants were dressed and ready to perform only to be told they were eliminated by the judges who included TV personalities Lara Spencer, Kris Jenner and dancer Mark Ballas.

But some traditions remained the same. Last year’s Miss America Teresa Scanlan of Nebraska walked the stage for the last time, waving to the audience and talking about her year of representing the United States traveling around the world and volunteering time to charitable projects.

Company’s Former Use Of Criminal Background Checks

Discriminated Based On Race, Agency Found

MINNEAPOLIS – Pepsi Beverages (Pepsi), formerly known as Pepsi Bottling Group, has agreed to pay $3.13 million and provide job offers and training to resolve a charge of race discrimination filed in the Minneapolis Area Office of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC).  The monetary settlement will primarily be divided among black applicants for positions at Pepsi, with a portion of the sum being allocated for the administration of the claims process. Based on the investigation, the EEOC found reasonable cause to believe that the criminal background check policy formerly used by Pepsi discriminated against African Americans in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

The EEOC’s investigation revealed that more than 300 African Americans were adversely affected when Pepsi applied a criminal background check policy that disproportionately excluded black applicants from permanent employment.  Under Pepsi’s former policy, job applicants who had been arrested were not hired for a permanent job even if they had never been convicted of any offense.

Pepsi’s former policy also denied employment to applicants from employment who had been arrested or convicted of certain minor offenses. The use of arrest and conviction records to deny employment can be illegal under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, when it is not relevant for the job, because it can limit the employment opportunities of applicants or workers based on their race or ethnicity.

“The EEOC has long standing guidance and policy statements on the use of arrest and conviction records in employment,” said EEOC Chair Jacqueline A. Berrien.  “I commend Pepsi’s willingness to re-examine its policy and modify it to ensure that unwarranted roadblocks to employment are removed.”

During the course of the EEOC’s investigation, Pepsi adopted a new criminal background check policy.  In addition to the monetary relief, Pepsi will offer employment opportunities to victims of the former criminal background check policy who still want jobs at Pepsi and are qualified for the jobs for which they apply.  The company will supply the EEOC with regular reports on its hiring practices under its new criminal background check policy.  Pepsi will conduct Title VII training for its hiring personnel and all of its managers.

“When employers contemplate instituting a background check policy, the EEOC recommends that they take into consideration the nature and gravity of the offense, the time that has passed since the conviction and/or completion of the sentence, and the nature of the job sought in order to be sure that the exclusion is important for the particular position.  Such exclusions can create an adverse impact based on race in violation of Title VII,” said Julie Schmid, Acting Director of the EEOC’s Minneapolis Area Office. “We hope that employers with unnecessarily broad criminal background check policies take note of this agreement and reassess their policies to ensure compliance with Title VII.”

“We obtained significant financial relief for a large number of victims of discrimination, got them job opportunities that they were previously denied, and eradicated an unlawful barrier for future applicants,” said EEOC Chicago District Director John Rowe. “We are pleased that Pepsi chose to work with us to reach this conciliation agreement and that through our joint efforts, we have been able to bring about real change at Pepsi without resorting to litigation.”

The EEOC enforces federal laws against employment discrimination.  The EEOC issued its first written policy guidance regarding the use of arrest and conviction records in employment in the 1980s..  The Commission also considered this issue in 2008 and held a meeting on the use of arrest and conviction records in employment last summer.  The EEOC is a member of the federal interagency Reentry Council, a Cabinet-level interagency group convened to examine all aspects of reentry of individuals with criminal records.

The Minneapolis Area Office is part of the EEOC’s Chicago District.  The Chicago District   is responsible for investigating charges of discrimination in Minnesota, Illinois, Wisconsin, Iowa and North and South Dakota.  Further information is available at www.eeoc.gov.

The writer, journalist and contrarian Christopher Hitchens has died at the age of 62 after crossing the border into the “land of malady” on being diagnosed with an oesophageal cancer in June 2010. Vanity Fair, for which he had written since 1992 and was made contributing editor, marked his death in a memorial article posted late on Thursday night.

The reactions to Hitchens’s illness from his intellectual opponents – which ranged from undisguised glee to offers of prayers – testified to his stature as one of the leading voices of secularism since the publication in 2007 of his anti-religious polemic God is Not Great. The reaction from the author himself, who after a lifetime of “burning the candle of both ends” described his illness as “something so predictable and banal that it bores even me”, testified to the sharpness of his wit and the clarity of his thinking under fire, as he dissected the discourse of “struggle” that surrounds cancer, paid tribute to the medical staff who looked after him and resolved to “resist bodily as best I can, even if only passively, and to seek the most advanced advice”.

Born in 1949, Hitchens was sent to boarding school at the age of eight, his mother deciding: “If there is going to be an upper class in this country, then Christopher is going to be in it.” This resolution pursued him to his time at Oxford, where he confessed to leading a “double life” as both an “ally of the working class” and as a guest at cocktail parties where he could meet “near-legendary members of the establishment’s firmament on nearly equal terms”.

After he graduated in 1970 with a third-class degree, the doors of Fleet Street opened wide for Hitchens, who followed his friend James Fenton into a job at the New Statesman. He began a lifelong friendship with Martin Amis and quickly gained a reputation as a pugnacious leftwing commentator, excoriating targets such as the Roman Catholic church, the Vietnam war and Henry Kissinger in dazzling essays, news reports and book reviews.

A resolution to spend time at least once a year in “a country less fortunate than [his] own” spurred him to witness the stirrings of revolution in Portugal and Poland, as well as counter-revolution in Argentina. His mother’s death in Athens, killing herself in a suicide pact with her lover, saw him reporting on the overthrow of the Greek junta in 1973.

Expeditions followed to Romania, Nicaragua, Malaysia and beyond. Hitchens travelled to post-war Iraq in 2006, Uganda in 2007 and Venezuela in 2008. A report for the New Statesman from Beirut brought rare praise from his father, a former navy officer who telephoned to say the piece was “very good”, and that he “thought it rather brave … to go there”. This validation was all the sweeter for a son who believed he’d always disappointed his father “by not being good at cricket or rugger”.

New York offered an escape from the contradictions of the British class system that Hitchens grabbed with both hands, when the offer of a job on the left-leaning weekly magazine the Nation came in 1981. Columns for Slate.com and Vanity Fair followed, with Hitchens consummating his love affair with American life when he took US citizenship in 2007.

Meanwhile he maintained an intense rivalry with his younger brother Peter, who followed him into journalism but found his place on the opposite side of the political spectrum, working first for the Daily Express and then the Mail on Sunday. Both downplayed talk of a rift, but Peter confessed in 2009 that they were “not close”. “If we weren’t brothers we wouldn’t know each other,” he said.

One of the many issues that divided the brothers was the 2003 Iraq war, with Peter arguing that the war was “against Britain’s interests”, while Christopher supported a war that he suggested would stop Saddam Hussein using the country as “his own personal torture chamber”.

His advocacy for the Iraq war was only the latest of Hitchens’s positions that many on the left found uncomfortable, and led to a chill in his relations with Gore Vidal, who had once nominated him a “successor, an inheritor, a dauphin or delphino”. But Hitchens’s opposition to what he called “fascism with an Islamic face” began long before 9/11, with the fatwa on his friend Salman Rushdie, imposed by the Ayatollah Khomeini, whom Hitchens accused of “using religion to mount a contract killing”, after the publication of The Satanic Verses.

Religion, or at least a fierce aversion to it, fuelled Hitchens’s ascent towards celebrity, particularly in his adopted homeland, after the publication of God is Not Great in 2007. In it he argued that religion is “violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism and tribalism and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry”, notching up sales of more than 500,000 copies.

Hitchens gave short shrift to the “insulting” suggestion that cancer might persuade him to change his position where reason had not, arguing that to ditch principles “held for a lifetime, in the hope of gaining favour at the last minute” would be a “hucksterish choice”, and urging those who had taken it upon themselves to pray for him not to “trouble deaf heaven with your bootless cries”.

Writing in his 2010 memoir, Hitch-22, Hitchens said that he hoped and believed his “advancing age has not quite shamed my youth”, disavowing the “’simple’ ordinary propositions” of his younger days in favour of the maxim that “it is an absolute certainty that there are no certainties”.

“One reason, then, that I would not relive my life,” he continued, “is that one cannot be born knowing such things, but must find them out, even when they then seem bloody obvious, for oneself.”

For most of his career, Christopher Hitchens, who has died aged 62, was the left’s biggest journalistic star, writing and broadcasting with wit, style and originality in a period when such qualities were in short supply among those of similar political persuasion. Nobody else spoke with such confidence and passion for what Americans called “liberalism” and Hitchens (regarding “liberal” as too “evasive”) called “socialism”.

His targets were the abusers of power, particularly Henry Kissinger (whom he tried to bring to trial for his role in bombing Cambodia and overthrowing the Allende regime in Chile) and Bill Clinton. He was unrelenting in his support for the Palestinian cause and his excoriation of America’s projections of power in Asia and Latin America. He was a polemicist rather than an analyst or political thinker – his headmaster at the Leys School in Cambridge presciently forecast a future as a pamphleteer – and, like all the best polemicists, brought to his work outstanding skills of reporting and observation.

To these, he added wide reading, not always worn lightly, an extraordinary memory – he seemed, his friend Ian McEwan observed, to enjoy “instant neurological recall” of anything he had ever read or heard – and a vigorous, if sometimes pompous writing style, heavily laden with adjectives, elegantly looping sub-clauses and archaic phrases such as “allow me to inform you”.

His socialism was always essentially internationalist, particularly since the English working-classes responded sluggishly to literature he handed out at factory gates for the International Socialists, a Trotskyist group he joined from 1966 to 1976. He had little interest in social or economic policy and, in later life, seemed somewhat bemused at questions about his three children being privately educated.

He travelled widely as a young man, often at his own expense, visiting, for example Poland, Portugal, Czechoslovakia and Argentina at crucial moments in their anti-totalitarian struggles, offering fraternal solidarity and parcels of blue jeans. Later, he rarely wrote at length about any country without visiting it, sometimes at risk of arrest or physical attack. His loathing of tyranny was consistent: unlike many of the 1960s generation, he never harboured illusions about Mao or Castro. His concerns grew about the left’s selective tolerance for totalitarian regimes – as early as 1983, he ruffled “comrades” by supporting Margaret Thatcher’s war against General Galtieri’s Argentina – but they did not initially threaten a rupture in his political loyalties.

After the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington in 2001, however, he announced he was no longer “on the left” – while denying he had become “any kind of conservative” – and “swore a sort of oath to remain coldly furious” until “fascism with an Islamic face” was “brought to a most strict and merciless account”.

To the horror of former allies, he accepted invitations to the George W Bush White House; embraced the Deputy Defence Secretary and Iraq war hawk Paul Wolfowitz as a friend (”they were finishing each other’s sentences,” was one account of an early meeting); and resigned from The Nation, America’s foremost left-wing weekly. In 2007, after living in the US for more than 25 years, he took out American citizenship in a ceremony presided over by Bush’s head of homeland security. Long friendships with the aristocracy of the Anglo-American left – Noam Chomsky, Tariq Ali, Alexander Cockburn, Edward Said – ended in harsh exchanges. Gore Vidal once named Hitchens as his inheritor or dauphin. The relevant quotation appeared on the dustjacket of Hitch-22, Hitchens’s memoir published in 2010, but was overlain by a red cross with “no, CH” inscribed beside it.

Hitchens was born in Portsmouth to parents of humble origins who progressed to the fringes of what George Orwell (a Hitchens role-model) would have termed the lower-upper-middle-classes. His father was a naval commander of “flinty and adamant” Tory views who became a school bursar. Father and son were never close, nor were Christopher and his younger brother Peter. The first love of Hitchens’s life was his mother, “the cream in the coffee, the gin in the campari”. She insisted (at least according to Hitchens) he should go to private boarding school because “if there is going to be an upper class in this country, then Christopher is going to be in it”.

He was already a Labour supporter at school, organising the party’s “campaign” in a mock election, and joining a CND march from Aldermaston. At Balliol College, Oxford, where he read PPE, he “rehearsed”, as he put it, for 1968. But he led a curiously dualistic life. By day, “Chris” addressed car workers through a bullhorn on an upturned milk crate while by night “Christopher” wore a dinner jacket to address the Oxford Union or dine with the Warden of All Souls. (He did not, in fact, like being called “Chris” – his mother would not, he explained, wish her firstborn to be addressed “as if he were a taxi-driver or pothole-filler” – and found “Hitch”, which most friends used, more acceptable.) While not exactly a social climber, Hitchens wished to be on intimate terms with important people.

Equally dualistic was his sex life. He was almost expelled from school for homosexuality and later boasted that at Oxford he slept with two future (male) Tory cabinet ministers. But also at Oxford, he lost his virginity to a girl who had pictures of him plastered over her bedroom wall and he eventually became a dedicated heterosexual because, he said, his looks deteriorated to the point where no man would have him.

The “double life”, as he called it, continued after he left university with a third-class degree – he was too busy with politics to bother much with studying – and found, partly through his Oxford friend James Fenton, a berth at the New Statesman. He supplemented his income by writing for several Fleet Street papers, but also contributed gratis to the Socialist Worker.

It was while working for the Statesman that he experienced a “howling, lacerating moment in my life”: the death of his adored mother in Athens, apparently in a suicide pact with her lover, a lapsed priest. Only years later did he learn what she never told him or perhaps anyone else: that she came from a family of East European Jews. Though his brother – who first discovered their mother’s origins – said this made them only one 32nd Jewish, Hitchens declared himself a Jew according to the custom of matrilineal descent.

Later in the 1970s, he became a familiar Fleet Street figure, disporting himself in bars and restaurants and settling into a literary set that included Fenton, Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, Clive James and others. It specialised in long lunches and what (to others) seemed puerile and frequently obscene word games. But he was hooked on America as a 21-year-old when he visited on a student visa and tried unsuccessfully to get a work permit. In October 1981, on a half-promise of work from the Nation, he left for the US. It was the making of his career: Americans have always had a weakness for plummy voiced, somewhat raffish Englishmen who pepper their writing and conversation with literary and historical allusions.

He became the Nation’s Washington correspondent, contributing editor of Vanity Fair from 1982, literary essayist for Atlantic Monthly, a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books and a talking head on innumerable cable TV shows. He authored 11 books, co-authored six more, and had five collections of essays published. The targets included Kissinger, Clinton and Mother Teresa (”a thieving fanatical Albanian dwarf”); his books on Orwell, Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine were more positive, and less widely noticed. His most successful book, which brought him international fame beyond what Susan Sontag called “the small world of those who till the field of ideas”, was God Is Not Great, a mocking indictment of religion which put him alongside Richard Dawkins as a leading enemy of the devout.

He was also, to his great pleasure, a liberal studies professor at the New School in New York and, for a time, visiting professor at Berkeley in California, as well as a regular on the public lecture and debate circuit. Hitchens loved what he called “disputation” – there was little difference between his public and private speaking styles – and America, a more oral culture than Britain’s, offered ample opportunity.When his final break with the left came, it seemed to some as though the Pope had announced he was no longer a Catholic. His support for Bush’s war in Iraq – which he never retracted – and his vote for the president in 2004, were even bigger shocks, and some suspected a psychological need, as the first male Hitchens never to wear uniform, to prove his manhood. But Hitchens, in many respects a traditionalist, was never a straightforward lefty. He abstained in the UK’s 1979 election, admitting he secretly favoured Thatcher and hoped for an end to “mediocrity and torpor”.

The Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa, issued in 1989 against his friend Salman Rushdie, was, in Hitchens’s mind, as important in exposing the left’s “bad faith” as 9/11. He supported, albeit belatedly, the first Gulf War, demanded Nato intervention in Bosnia, and refused to sign petitions against sanctions on Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.Hitchens, though, did not deny he had changed. He became, if truth be told, a bit of a blimp and ruefully remarked – with the quiet self-irony that often underlay his bombastic style – that he sometimes felt he should carry “some sort of rectal thermometer, with which to test the rate at which I am becoming an old fart”.

But, he insisted, he wasn’t making a complete about-turn. Though no longer a socialist, he was still a Marxist, and an admirer of Lenin, Trotsky and Che Guevera; capitalism, the transforming powers of which Marx recognised, had proved the more revolutionary economic system and, politically, the American revolution was the only one left in town. He remained committed to civil liberties. After voluntarily undergoing waterboarding, he denounced it as torture, and he was a plaintiff in a lawsuit against Bush’s domestic spying programme. He never let up in his “cold, steady hatred. . . as sustaining to me as any love” of all religions.

Other things were unchanging. Hitchens’s life was full of feuds with old friends. He broke with the Clinton aide Sidney Blumenthal who, before a congressional committee, denied spreading calumnies about Monica Lewinsky. Hitchens, earning himself the sobriquet “Snitchens”, signed affidavits testifying that Blumenthal had, in his hearing, indeed smeared the president’s lover. His right-wing brother Peter, also a journalist, was put on non-speakers for several years after revealing a pro-red joke that Christopher once made in private. But his friendship with Amis never wavered. “Martin. . . means everything to me,” he once said, while “more or less” acquitting himself of carnal desire. Amis, in turn, spoke of “a love whose month is ever May” and described his friend as a rhetorician of such distinction that “in debate, no matter what the motion, I would back him against Cicero, against Demosthenes”.

Hitchens’s love affairs with alcohol and tobacco were equally constant. He smoked heavily, even on public occasions and even on TV, long after the habit – for everyone else – became unacceptable. Despite reports in 2008 that he had given up, a reporter found him getting through two cigarette packets in a morning in May 2010. As for alcohol, he drank daily, on his own admission, enough “to kill or stun the average mule”. Technically, he was probably an alcoholic but, he pointed out, he never missed deadlines or appointments. Regardless of condition, he wrote fast and fluently, if with erratic punctuation. Only rarely did alcohol make him a bore, blunt his wit or cloud his arguments: the journalist Lynn Barber rated him “one of the greatest conversationalists of our age”. Inebriated or sober, he could charm almost anybody; he could also, with what the New Yorker’s Ian Parker called “the sudden, cutthroat withdrawal of charm”, wound deeply and unnecessarily.

In the summer of 2010, during a promotional tour for Hitch-22, he was diagnosed with terminal oesophageal cancer, a disease that had killed his father at a much more advanced age. He inhabited “Tumourville”, as he called it, with rueful wit and little self-pity. “In whatever kind of a ‘race’ life may be,” he wrote, “I have abruptly become a finalist.” In the same Vanity Fair article, he observed that “I have been taunting the Reaper into taking a free scythe in my direction and have now succumbed to something so predictable and banal that it bores even me”. But he never repented of his convivial lifestyle – on the contrary, he continued to take his beloved whisky, having received no medical instructions to the contrary – and nor did he turn his rhetorical skills to persuading others to eschew his example, confining himself, in a TV interview, to the observation that “if you can hold it down on the smokes and cocktails, you may be well advised to do so”.

He continued, as well as giving valedictory newspaper and magazine interviews, to write, broadcast and participate in public debates with no discernible diminution of vigour or passion. He confronted the Catholic convert Tony Blair before an audience of 2,700 in Toronto and, by general consent, won with ease. He gave early notice that there would be no deathbed conversion to religion; if we ever heard of such a thing, he advised, we should attribute it to sickness, dementia or drugs. When believers prayed for him, he politely declared himself touched, but resolute in his atheism. He was as severe with the conventional clichés of terminal illness as he was, throughout his life, with any other form of convention.

“To the dumb question ‘Why me?’,” he wrote, “the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply, Why not?” All the same, his many friends and admirers, who do not, as one of them put it, “relish a world without Hitchens”, will be asking “why him?” today.

Hitchens was married, first, to Eleni Meleagrou, a Greek Cypriot, and then, after they divorced, to Carol Blue, an American screenwriter. Both survive him as do one son and two daughters.

One of the oldest planes the United States Air Force still flies is used to carry out some of America’s most sensitive and critical missions. Whether it’s aiding NATO troops in Afghanistan, providing surveillance over North Korea or examining Japan’s hurricane ravaged coast, the high altitude U-2 keeps flying despite initial plans to retire it by the end of this year.

It requires a lot of skill and technology to get a pilot above 21,000 meters where the U-2 snaps critical images and gathers intelligence.

One hour prior to takeoff, the pilot begins inhaling pure oxygen to cut the risk of decompression sickness.

Major Colby Kuhns of the U.S. Air Force 5th Reconnaissance “Blackcats” squadron said it is like being atop Mount Everest.

“I haven’t had any decompression problems, so that’s good. But we are susceptible to it. Guys who start getting those symptoms will feel pain in their joints and it could get worse than that,” said Kuhns.

Landing the spy plane, nicknamed Dragon Lady, also requires unique abilities.

The pilot, sometimes finishing a grueling flight of up to 12 hours, has poor forward visibility in the cockpit. Because the wide-winged jet has an unusual bicycle-type landing gear, a second pilot in a very fast car on the runway chases each landing, radioing observations to his colleague in the cockpit to help him maintain a full stall at precisely 60 centimeters off the ground.

VOA - S.L. Herman

A closeup view of the U-2 cockpit instrumentation, Osan Air Base, South Korea, Dec. 7, 2011

When the U-2s return from flights, the Blackcats’ maintenance team, overseen by Lieutenant Danielle Rogowski, tracks about 150 items on the jet that need to be replaced at certain intervals.

“Flying at that high an altitude, you do a significant amount of wear and tear on the aircraft and, a lot of these components, with the temperature changes and temperature extremes, puts a lot of pressure on them,” said Rogowski.

The first U-2 took to the skies in 1955. Originally, the Air Force provided the squadron commanders and logistical support while the Central Intelligence Agency supplied operations officers, pilots and mission planners. A newer version, 40 percent larger than the original U-2, was produced in the 1980s. In the 1990s, U-2s were outfitted with new engines.

Major Carl Maymi, sitting in the cockpit prior to a low altitude training session in a relatively new U-2 built in the 1980s, points out the U.S. Air Force also still has bombers from the 1950s.

“So by other Air Force weapons systems standards it is relatively new. You can take a look at the inside of the cockpit and the wiring throughout the jet, the motor and especially the sensors we have on board. hat stuff is all state of the art. It’s advanced. So I feel real comfortable with an aircraft that is technically 50-plus years old,” said Maymi.

One reason the U-2 was designed to fly very high was to avoid being shot down. But that is precisely what happened in 1960 when a Soviet missile struck one of the spy planes.

USAF 5th Reconnaissance Squadron

A high-altitude view from the U-2 cockpit (Undated)

Pilot Francis Gary Powers, whose CIA U-2 was recovered nearly intact, was captured. He was put on trial in Moscow and convicted of espionage.

In addition to the traditional Cold War era intelligence missions, U-2s also now provide real-time assistance to troops in combat zones, such as Afghanistan.

“It’s evolved as it’s needed to evolve. It is cutting edge right now and very well could go out into the future, if necessary,” said Kuhns.

Its future has been questionable for some time. The Defense Department, five years ago, intended to begin retiring the fleet. But Congress insisted the spy plane stay aloft until unmanned reconnaissance aircraft are capable of taking over its critical missions.

The Air Force now says that will happen in 2015 when the Global Hawk RQ-4 drones can assume the U-2s missions - some 60 years after the venerable spy plane first took to the skies.

A French film that pays tribute to the silent movie era leads in nominations for the Golden Globes, a high-profile Hollywood award that recognizes the year’s best achievements in film and television.

The Artist, a silent movie shot in black and white, received six nominations.  They are Best Comedy or Musical, Best Actor for a Comedy or Musical, Best Supporting Actress, Best Director, Best Screenplay and Best Original Score.

Two other movies, The Help and The Descendants, tied for second with five nominations, including Best Drama.  The Help tells the story of African-American servants in the pre-civil rights era in the U.S. South, and The Descendants is about a land baron who struggles to keep his family together.

American actor George Clooney, who stars in The Descendants, is up for Best Actor.  Fellow American Leonardo DiCaprio, who played the title role in J. Edgar, a film about longtime FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, is also nominated for Best Actor.

For television, Downton Abbey leads with four nominations, including Best Mini-Series or Motion Picture Made for Television.

The Golden Globes, presented each year by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, are considered second in prestige to the Academy Awards and are often viewed as a barometer for movies and actors who will be favored to win Oscars.

The 68th annual Golden Globe nominations were announced Thursday in Los Angeles.  The awards will be presented January 15 during an event that will be broadcast live in more than 160 countries.

The non-profit Hollywood Foreign Press Association is made up of 90 members who cover the entertainment industry throughout the world.

The organization uses the awards as a fundraising event for entertainment-related charities.  Last year, the awards allowed the association to donate $1.2 million dollars to fund scholarships and other programs.

Some information for this report was provided by AP, AFP and Reuters.

In less than three weeks, Republican voters in the Midwestern state of Iowa will attend caucus meetings to express their preference in the race for the Republican Party’s presidential nomination.  Iowa will be the first test in what could be a lengthy battle for the party nomination that at the moment appears to be between two top contenders, former U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Newt Gingrich and former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney.

The latest batch of public opinion surveys gives Newt Gingrich a lead over Mitt Romney by margins ranging from 6 to 17 points.

Gingrich is also running well in some of the early-voting states like Iowa, South Carolina and Florida that play a major role in the presidential nominating process.

Romney and some of the other Republican presidential contenders have stepped up their attacks on Gingrich in hopes of slowing his momentum.

Gingrich says he wants to remain positive. “When I was down at the very bottom of the polls, I stayed positive.  Now that I’m the frontrunner, I’m staying positive,” said Gingrich.

Romney is attacking Gingrich, saying the former speaker has a history of being an unreliable conservative and that he will not hesitate to point out how he differs with Gingrich.

“This is, after all, politics.  There is no whining in politics,” said Romney.

Gingrich is also trying to fend off criticism of his personal life, especially previous admissions that he was not faithful in his two prior marriages.

Texas Governor Rick Perry noted that in a recent debate.

“I’ve always kind of been of the opinion that if you cheat on your wife, you’ll cheat on your business partner,” said Perry.

Gingrich has admitted personal failings and sought forgiveness, something that could appeal to evangelical Christian voters who are a major force in the Republican Party.

“And I think people have to render judgment.  In my case, I’ve said up-front openly that I have made mistakes at times.  I’ve had to go to God for forgiveness.  I’ve had to seek reconciliation,” said Gingrich.

But even some Republicans say that Gingrich had a divisive and difficult tenure as Speaker of the House in the 1990s.

New York Republican Representative Peter King is among those who question whether Gingrich has the right temperament to be president.

“I saw the damage he did to the Republican Party and to the Congress.  And I think I owe it to my constituents and to my country not to allow that to happen again,” said King.

Gingrich is the latest candidate to gain favor in the polls with conservative Republicans, says Quinnipiac University pollster Peter Brown.

“There are a large number of Republican voters, many who describe themselves as Tea Party supporters who are conservative Republicans, and they have been shopping for a candidate,” said Brown.

Brown adds that conservatives seem to be looking for an alternative to Romney, the man long considered the favorite to win the Republican Party nomination.

“For some reason, this group of conservative voters is not at this stage embracing Mr. Romney.  Perhaps they don’t think he is sufficiently conservative.  Whatever the reason, Mr. Romney does have a problem with this group,” added Brown.

The nominating process begins January 3 in Iowa with its presidential caucuses.  That begins a series of primaries and caucus votes that will run into June.  The process will conclude with the formal selection of a Republican nominee at the party’s national convention in Tampa, Florida, in early September.

Burma’s military-backed, but nominally civilian, government has surprised critics with its political and economic reforms this past year. The liberal moves resulted in a visit by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in December. During her trip, VOA’s Daniel Schearf spoke with residents of the main city, Rangoon, about what they think of the changes, so far.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s December visit to Burma was both a reward and encouragement for authorities after a year of unexpected reforms.

President Thein Sein, despite being a former general, is slowly moving away from decades of military rule and economic problems.

Although still made up of former officers, his government ordered the release of hundreds of political prisoners, relaxed media censorship and held separate talks with ethnic rebel groups and pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi.

The Nobel Prize winner was released from 15 years of house arrest in 2010 and plans to run for parliament in next year’s by-election.

Meeting with Clinton at the home where she was detained, Aung San Suu Kyi sounded optimistic about the direction of the country.

“This will be the beginning of a new future for all of us, provided we can maintain it. And, we hope to be able to do so,” she said.

Related video story

Burma was once the star of Southeast Asia but, much like Rangoon’s British colonial-era buildings, crumbled under military rule. Just months ago most people in Burma were too afraid to talk openly about politics, especially to journalists, who are rarely allowed into the country.

But, since March, the new government’s moves toward reform are encouraging some to speak up.

Riding past Rangoon’s colonial Customs House, trishaw driver Maung Than Zaw says, despite reform efforts, he can barely make ends meet. Things have not gotten better for ordinary people like him;  it is getting worse, he says, adding that is difficult to earn four or five dollars per day.

Rangoon fruit vendor Mi Mi Aye says she worries about being arrested, but still wants to criticize the so-called civilian government. She says nothing has changed, the new government is just the same people as before.

There are others who say the economy and the government are improving.

At the Golden Palace jewelry store, in Rangoon’s Chinatown, a crowd of shoppers press against a long glass display case, clamoring for attention from sales staff.

Owner Aung Kyaw Win has one of Burma’s most famous chains of gold and gem stores.  He says business is good and would be even better if European Union and U.S. sanctions were lifted.

“I think our government, economically, they are trying to change a lot. We are sincerely hoping, because we heard from the newspaper and we can able to see they are changing.”

The government is slowly reducing cumbersome regulations and monopolies that crippled the economy. One key step is unifying the exchange rate to curb corruption. The official rate is seven kyat to the dollar. The actual market rate is 100 times higher.

A money counting machine flips through a stack of Burma’s currency.  At this currency exchange center in Rangoon, U.S. dollars are traded for bricks of kyat.

Many in Burma, like Lwin Aung Zaw, are paid in American dollars, but they are not legally allowed to possess foreign currency without a permit and have to exchange their salaries every month or risk jail.

He says they can exchange foreign currency at these counters. But, according to the law, they are not legally allowed to have foreign money.  He believes it would be better if authorities changed this rule.

At a tea shop in Rangoon a young man rolls dough balls into thin pancakes, called roti, and fries them in oil.

Tea shops are a center of Rangoon social life, where people meet for a snack, but also to talk business and about how Burma is changing. Taxi driver Tint Lwin says, like most people, he is focused more on earning a living than politics.

He says he sees a lot of developments.  Because he is a taxi driver he can only comment from a driver’s point of view. The roads are getting better, he says, but they still have heavy traffic jams.

Retired civil servant Thaung Htwe says he hopes Clinton’s visit will spur more reforms. He hopes that Burma will be developed more in the future.  And he  says by having good relations with the United States, they might see development in all sectors; economy, society, politics and so on.

Despite a more open environment, not everyone welcomes foreign journalists asking questions.

In a Rangoon market, an older man approaches VOA and demands we stop video taping, saying we need permission from local authorities.

“I don’t like it.  We don’t like it…Yeah, this [is] the poor area.  Not for news,” he says.  He recommends we go to a wealthier area to show how rich Burma is.

But locals in the market argue back that they are poor.

Although hopes are raised that Burma’s economy may revive and the country may finally turn the corner to democracy the road ahead is still uncertain. Rights groups point out military abuses continue in ethnic areas, including murder and rape.

And, despite reforms so far, there are still hundreds of political prisoners behind bars which authorities have yet to acknowledge.

InTurkey’s largest city, a revolution is occurring in its mosques. A project has been launched to make the mosques female friendly. But the initiative is not without controversy.

Kadriye Avci Erdemli is talking with one of Istanbul’s Imams over the state of the women’s section of his mosque. The small area is filthy and cramped. Erdemli is Istanbul’s deputy muftu, the city’s second most senior official responsible for administering the Islamic faith. She is in charge of a radical program to make mosques female friendly.

“This is the first project of its kind in the Muslim world.”  she said. “When a woman steps into a mosque she is entering the house of God and she should experience the same sacred treatment. In front of God, men and women are equal.”

Since March, Erdemli has sent out scores of teams to visit some 3,000 mosques in Istanbul to assess the facilities for women. Erdemli says the discoveries are shocking. “Many mosques had no toilets for women or indeed any place for them to wash,” she says. “The areas for women were either filthy or used as storage depots,” she said.

But it’s not just about cleaning up the mosques. Partitions separating men and women, whether it’s a wall or a curtain, are also meant to come down, although women will not be praying side-by-side with men, but behind them. The mosques have until February to implement the changes.  

But change isn’t always easy, especially in the realm of religion. And for the past couple of months Erdemli has held almost 40 meetings with imams and religious officials across the city to explain the reforms are in compliance with the Koran.

On the streets of Istanbul there appears to be broad support for the changes among religious women. Thirty-year-old Ayse Gul is typical. “The women’s sections are much smaller than the men’s - they’re almost like spaces left over, at the back or in the corner. It’s time women got more and cleaner areas to pray in,” she said.

Ayse Gul is part of Turkey’s rapidly growing Islamic middle class which emerged under the decade long rule of the pro Islamic AK party.

The AK party has also lifted or eased restrictions in education and employment for women wearing islamic headscarves.

Professor Istar Gozaydin an expert on religious affairs at Istanbul’s Dogus University says the opening up of mosques to women is being fueled by the growing number of professional women. “We see more and more (Islamic) women are getting educated in the universities women are attending work place and they’ve been able to become more visible in the society. Previously they were more in their homes previously took their traditional roles taking care of the kids. Now more and more women are participating in the professional lives. And they want to be part of the mosque system,” he said.

But not all are happy with such developments. Islamic newspaper columnists have strongly criticized the initiative accusing it of encouraging women to leave the home and adopting western lifestyles. And their criticism is being echoed by the male faithful.

The call to prayer at Istanbul’s Suleymania mosque summons worshippers. Many here have misgivings about the initiative. Fifty-year-old Mehmet Gul is a local shopkeeper who says, “I think the place for women is their home. They should practice their prayers at home. The mosques are not big enough even for men,” he says. “Especially on Friday prayers and during religious festivities there is not enough room for men. It’s not good for women to come.”

But even some women have reservations, especially over removing curtains and walls separating the male and female worshippers.

“Women must be separated from the men. There has to be a curtain. This is the  religious code of conduct,” said one woman. “The women are “mahrem”, [or] forbidden, and the men should not be able to see them.”

Deputy Muftu Erdemli acknowledges there is still much work to do in winning over the hearts and minds of the faithful, even among some women. But she’s also convinced there can be no turning back.

South Sudan became an independent nation in July, and it’s looking for business.  An international conference in Washington Wednesday and Thursday is focusing on the new country in Africa and featuring speeches from President Salva Kiir and U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.  But a South Sudanese American living in Washington says there’s much more to be done before economic development succeeds. 

The South Sudanese president greeted Washington, wearing his trademark American cowboy hat.  International investors welcomed him as a celebrity.

“I want to invite you today to come with me to South Sudan after this conference to help develop our potential in oil, gas and mineral resources,” Kiir stated.

The oil is a boon for the world’s newest country, but it’s also a strain.  South Sudan ended up with 70 percent of the oilfields in its independence break up.  But South Sudan is landlocked.  So it relies on Sudan to the north for pipelines.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said oil can lift South Sudan out of poverty.  But she warned of the prospect of poor management.

“You will fall prey to the natural resource curse which will enrich a small elite, outside interests, corporations, and countries and leave your people hardly better off than when you started,” Clinton said.

South Sudan became a new country after decades of war.  Continuing border violence has displaced hundreds of thousands. The Sudan People’s Liberation Army fought for the south’s independence.  Angelos Agok was one of them.  Now, he’s an American citizen,  

He’s proud he helped South Sudan win its freedom. And proud of his old boss who became president.  Still, he’s worried about how international companies do business in South Sudan.

“These companies bring these people from their country and employ them 100 percent. I will tell you, including those who clean the floor are not South Sudanese.   And so, it doesn’t create any economy,” Agok noted. “And doesn’t create job security for the people whom we fought for.”

To the South Sudanese, independence means more than a separate country, separate government. Agok says his countrymen have basic needs like food and jobs.  And, only then will they have true peace.