In what appeared to be a positive and courageous omen for all Pakistanis, Sharmeen Obaid Chinoy has won the first ever Oscar award for Pakistan for her documentary ‘Saving Face’ at the 84th Academy Awards on Sunday.

While receiving the world’s prestigious ward, she observed, “I want to dedicate this award to all the heroes working on the ground in Pakistan and to all the women in the country who are working for a change. Do not give up as this is your dream”.

‘Saving Face’ is a 52-minute documentary which talks about the plight of women subjected to acid attacks, and a doctor who comes to Pakistan to treat them and give them hope.

Due largely to its heart-wrenching subject as well as the facts that its producer is not from a country known for making many quality films, ‘Saving Face’ has been one of the more talked about nominations at the event.

The Daniel Junge and Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy documentary follows British plastic surgeon Dr. Mohammad Jawad, who returns to Pakistan to help victims of acid burns. The documentary follows one woman as she fights to see that the perpetrators of the crime are imprisoned for life.READ MORE

The Fox Star Studios & Rose Movies fresh rom-com, London Paris New York, released on 3rd of March is a delightfully unconventional movie, as acclaimed trade analyst and critic Taran Adarsh puts it. With a steady but encouraging opening, the movie has managed to collect over 7.5 crore in the opening week.

Unlike usual Bollywood rom-coms that have a hotch potch of characters, London Paris New York relies heavily on conversational relationship of two individuals in three meetings. The leading couple of the movie, Ali Zafar & Aditi Rao are the only major characters which makes this movie something more than an average standard rom-com. The film’s deviation from the ordinary, shorter length and refreshingly new concept is already getting thumbs up from fans & critics. Last week Karan Johar, Abhishek Bachchan and Hrithik Roshan tweeted about the film calling it “a movie to fall in love with”. The film’s music, directed and produced by Ali Zafar, is also talk of the town with 3 songs already listed in top 10 charts.READ MORE

Dubai, Mar 8 (ANI): Vidya Balan, who recently received a national award for her performance in 'The Dirty picture', visited the Dubai Foundation For Women And Children on the eve of International Women's Day.

Instead of basking in the glory of her first national awards, the 34-year-old actress chose to shine a light on the needs of abused women with her visit her DFWAC.

Balan, who is in the UAE to premiere her film 'Kahaani', spent the afternoon listening to women who are recovering from abusive relationships and human trafficking at DFWAC, a Dubai government-supported shelter.

"I salute you. You are very courageous and you have shown tremendous strength and maturity far beyond your age," Gulf News quoted her as saying.

During those moments, the 'Guru' star was a woman who was trying to understand and empathise with the difficulties faced by another human being.

While the visit to DFWAC was not part of Balan's promotion for 'Kahaani', the woman-centric film finds the actress playing the role of an abandoned, pregnant woman with only her own conviction for support.

"She is a strong character in the film, she is a woman like you.

"There will be subtitles, so you can also enjoy the movie - you must see it," she said.

Balan, who had earlier revealed that she found her strength in the film industry "because the power lies in making my own choices", saluted the spirit shown by the two girls.

"On the eve of Women's Day, my salute goes to these two girls I interacted with and to millions all over the world who have not let their circumstances become their biggest handicap. It takes a lot of courage to step out of the situation," she added.

Osama bin Laden spent his last weeks in a house divided, amid wives riven by suspicions. On the top floor, sharing his bedroom, was his youngest wife and favorite. The trouble came when his eldest wife showed up and moved into the bedroom on the floor below.

Others in the family, crammed into the three-story villa compound where bin Laden would eventually be killed in a May 2 U.S. raid, were convinced that the eldest wife intended to betray the al-Qaida leader.

The picture of bin Laden's life in the Abbottabad compound comes from Brig. Shaukat Qadir, a retired Pakistani army officer who spent months researching the events and says he was given rare access to transcripts of Pakistani intelligence's interrogation of bin Laden's youngest wife, who was detained in the raid.

Qadir was also given rare entry into the villa, which was sealed after the raid and demolished last month. Pictures he took, which he allowed The Associated Press to see, showed the villa's main staircase, splattered with blood. Other pictures show windows protected by iron grills and the 20-foot high walls around the villa.

Qadir's research gives one of the most extensive descriptions of the arrangements in bin Laden's hideout when U.S. SEAL commandos stormed in, killing bin Laden and four others. His account is based on accounts by an official of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency who escorted him on a tour of the villa, the interrogation transcription he was allowed to read, and interviews with other ISI officials and al-Qaida-linked militants and tribesmen in the Afghan-Pakistan border region.

The compound where bin Laden lived since mid-2005 was a crowded place, with 28 residents — including bin Laden, his three wives, eight of his children and five of his grandchildren. The bin Laden children ranged in age from his 24-year-old son Khaled, who was killed in the raid, to a 3-year-old born during their time in Abbottabad. Bin Laden's courier, the courier's brother and their wives and children also lived in the compound.

The 54-year-old bin Laden himself seemed aged beyond his years, with suspected kidney or stomach diseases, and there were worries over his mental health, Qadir said he was told by ISI officials and an al-Qaida member he interviewed in the border regions.

The ReelzChannel television network says it scheduled a pro-Sarah Palin documentary on the same weekend as HBO's "Game Change" debut strictly for business considerations, not political ones.

"The Undefeated," a Palin documentary by conservative filmmaker Stephen K. Bannon, will have its television premiere on Sunday. It will come 23 hours after HBO opens "Game Change," based on the 2008 campaign book by Mark Halperin and John Heilemann, and starring Julianne Moore as Palin.

Stan Hubbard, ReelzChannel CEO, said he licensed "The Undefeated" for the same reason that his network aired "The Kennedys" miniseries last spring after it was dropped by the History channel – to draw attention to a nearly 6-year-old network with a low public profile. ReelzChannel is in 62 million homes, a little more than half the country.

"For a young network, public relations is important to us, which is why we hunt for opportunistic things," Hubbard said.

Hubbard said he found the former Alaska governor and 2008 GOP vice presidential candidate a fascinating figure, but he wasn't trying to lionize her.

"If HBO wanted to swap movies this weekend, I'd do that in a second," he said.

Palin supporters have attacked "Game Change," although it's unclear whether any of them has seen it in advance. "The Undefeated" maker Bannon called it a "fictionalized hit-piece" and has praised ReelzChannel's "courageous" decision to air his movie.

"Game Change," co-starring Woody Harrelson and Ed Harris, actually strives for a balanced portrait, showing Palin overwhelmed at times after being thrust onto the presidential ticket and lashing out at some McCain aides but connecting with audiences and performing on big stages better than many critics and supporters expected.

"The Undefeated" focuses first on Palin's life as mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, as that state's governor and on the 1998 campaign.

After a very brief countdown, and with the next iPad just days away from its release, Apple recently passed 25 billion apps downloaded on the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch, and as part of the celebration, it has released a list of the 25 most downloaded iOS apps for both the iPad and the iPhone of all time.

You can download all of these super popular apps in iTunes here (if you haven't already!), but if you're just looking to browse, we've got the list right here. Here, for example, are the top 25 free iPhone apps (with download links, for your convenience):

1. Facebook
2. Pandora Radio
3. Words With Friends Free
4. Skype
5. The Weather Channel
6. Google Search
7. Google Earth
8. Angry Birds Free
9. Shazam
10. Netflix
11. Paper Toss
12. Twitter
13. Movies by Flixster
14. Bump
15. PAC-MAN Lite
16. Flashlight.
17. Unblock Me FREE
18. Temple Run
READ MORE

A day after signing a five-year contract extension worth more than $20 million guaranteed, the enormity of that deal and what it means for Arian Foster and his family finally caught up with one of the NFL's best running backs.

When asked about hardships he and his family endured when he was a child during a press conference to formally announce his new, $43.5 million deal with the Houston Texans, Foster became emotional and briefly stopped the press conference as he described what was probably the lowest point of his childhood.

“The straw that broke the camel’s back,” said Foster, “was when I saw my mother . . . she pawned her wedding ring to give us . . . excuse me . . .”

Foster teared up. After a brief pause, he continued. “She pawned her wedding ring to give us some food that night,” he said. “I told myself that I wanted to do something with my life."

"That’s why I don’t complain too much. At the end of the day, we’re all people and we just want to smile. When we were growing up and it was tough, that was one thing my family always had — we smiled.”

Foster then explained why he was never publicly bothered over the past two years despite being obviously underpaid relative to his stature among NFL backs. Foster earned $525,000 last season, which is a bargain for the Texans considering Foster ran for 1,224 yards (fifth in NFL) and 10 touchdowns in 2011.

“When you start comparing yourself to another man’s mirror,” Foster said, “that’s when those negative thoughts start creeping in. My journey isn’t anybody else’s journey.”

"That's amazing," a shocked Rachel Maddow reacted to the news that Dennis Kucinich lost his primary race on Super Tuesday. Kucinich lost his district after Ohio redrew their Congressional lines, leaving him to run in a nearby district against an incumbent Democrat.

"That means that there's not going to be a Dennis Kucinich in Congress anymore, which is almost hard to believe. He has been a singular force for his, not only for his ideological position but he's just been such a character," Maddow lamented.

"He was the dependable guy with the progressive community. He'll be missed," Al Sharpton said.

"He's a guy that you could always count on when it came to a universal healthcare conversation, or when it came to getting out of Iraq and Afghanistan and also middle-class issues and also he was good on labor," Ed Schultz said.

Right off Greenwich Avenue in Greenwich, Connecticut, there’s an old, dilapidated building with a leaky roof that once housed a radio station. The building is an odd sight because Greenwich Avenue isn’t your average Main Street: lined with exorbitantly expensive stores, it’s the center of this famously moneyed enclave for New York’s financial elite. But the old radio station is being completely renovated, no expense spared, and in April it will open its doors as a modern yoga studio—and not the kind with stinky incense and smelly bodies, but rather with space, light, and a stylish boutique. The studio will bear the name Jois Yoga, in honor of Sri Krishna Pattabhi Jois, an eminent yoga teacher whose many students called him Guruji, and whose death on May 18, 2009, occasioned lengthy obituaries in such important newspapers as The New York Times and London’s Guardian.

The money behind the new studio comes from Sonia Tudor Jones, whose husband, 57-year-old Paul Tudor Jones II, runs the multi-billion-dollar hedge-fund empire Tudor Investment Corp. Tudor is one of the oldest and most respected hedge funds—its flagship fund, Tudor BVI Global, has averaged annual gains of 21 percent over its 25-year history, according to The Wall Street Journal—and while very little about it is public, Forbes has estimated Paul Tudor Jones’s net worth at $3.2 billion.

Jones is also a noted philanthropist, the founder of the Robin Hood Foundation, the oh-so-stylish charity for the hedge-fund set. The Joneses live in Greenwich. This will be his wife’s fourth Jois studio, or “shala” in yoga lingo, and that’s only part of her far-flung project. In partnership with Pattabhi Jois’s daughter and grandson and a friend, San Diego-based entrepreneur Salima Ruffin, she’s also launched a Jois line of yoga clothes, and she is setting up charities to bring yoga to everyone, from charter schools in Florida to villages in Africa. Ruffin likes to say that Sonia is the “Mother Teresa of yoga.”
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A bus company in China has launched a new “safe driving” campaign by suspending bowls of water over their drivers. To avoid getting wet, drivers must drive gently. In today’s technology-obsessed world, this solution is elegantly primitive. You might imagine that this simple yet ingenious idea was conjured by someone functioning at their very best, that such “aha insights” come when innovators are at their peak.

Not so. A recent study by Mareike Wieth and Rose Zacks suggests that innovation and creativity are greatest when we are not at our best, at least with respect to our circadian rhythms. Circadian rhythms determine whether you are a “morning-type” person or an “evening-type” person, and are often measured with a short paper-and-pencil test called the Morningness-Eveningness Questionnaire. Circadian rhythms drive daily fluctuations in many physiological processes like alertness, heart rate and body temperature. Recent research indicates that these rhythms affect our intellectual functioning too.

Numerous studieshave demonstrated that our best performance on challenging, attention-demanding tasks - like studying in the midst of distraction - occurs at our peak time of day. When we operate at our optimal time of day, we filter out the distractions in our world and get down to business.

In a study I conducted, for example, participants were given three related cue words (e.g., SHIP OUTER CRAWL), and were required to find their common link (SPACE). When misleading distractors were presented with the cue words (e.g., SHIP-ocean OUTER-inner CRAWL-baby), those tested at non-optimal times were more likely to be misled by the distractors and showed lower solution rates. Those tested at peak times were not affected by the distraction. In this and related studies, peak-time benefits are most robust when distraction would disrupt our thought processes and cause errors.

But distraction is not all bad, and Wieth and Zacks have demonstrated that we can use our increased susceptibility to distraction at off-peak times to our advantage. In their study, they asked participants to solve analytic problems and insight problems at peak or off-peak times. Analytic problems generally require people to “grind out a solution” by systematically working through the problem utilizing a consistent strategy. Here is a classic analytic problem: “Bob’s father is 3 times as old as Bob. They were both born in October. 4 years ago, he was 4 times older. How old are Bob and his father?” No innovation or creativity necessary to solve this problem; one simply has to work it out mathematically.