When it comes to covering Syria, the fog of war is especially thick.

For 17 months, President Bashar al-Assad's regime has severely restricted press access in the country as his soldiers first brutally cracked down on peaceful protests and now battle opposition forces in a war that has claimed more than 19,000 lives.

Western journalists have occasionally snuck into Syria, but on a daily basis primarily rely on information provided by opposition activists, residents, state-controlled media, rebel commanders, social media and anti-regime groups operating outside the country. Meanwhile, each warring side simultaneously fights a public relations war in the media.

Several Beiruit-based correspondents told The Huffington Post that their outlets have gotten better at vetting information throughout the lengthy conflict and have built a large network of reliable sources in the process. Still, news reports on the latest explosion, firefight or alleged massacre routinely acknowledge that key details cannot be independently verified and correspondents say that this is not the ideal way to cover a war.

"It's the most frustrating situation I've ever been in and potentially the most challenging," said Arwa Damon, a Beirut-based correspondent for CNN. "Now you're trying to newsgather via remote."

Damon last reported inside Syria in February, an ordeal chronicled in CNN's documentary "72 Hours Under Fire." After three days, she left the war-ravaged city of Homs, north of Damascus, alongside veteran war correspondent Marie Colvin, who later reversed course and was killed in the city. Colvin is one of 16 journalists killed so far, according to information provided by the Committee to Protect Journalists.

The Only Way Is Essex star Maria Fowler is calling for a campaign to stop internet bullies after she was taunted on Twitter for asking why Parkinson's stricken Muhammad Ali needed help walking during the Olympic Opening Ceremony.

The TOWIE beauty was ridiculed last night by Olympic torchbearer and founder of youth broadcaster SB.TV Jamal Edwards after she posed the Twitter question.

She wrote: "Ahhh wish I was there so bad. Muhammad Ali. No disrespect though but why can't he stand now?"

Edwards quickly voiced his disgust on his Twitter page: " You are so DUMB! If I don't know a question I would go on the net first to find out especially what I'm talking about. Not go to Twitter & ask."

Fowler replied: "I did Google and couldn't know why. Parkinson's is so sad. I lost my granddad to Parkinson's. Ali is a legend."

She then attempted to taunt Edwards, writing: "Had to google u too but not much came up. Goat"

Jamal replied again: "I put in work! What do you do? Your (sic) famous for no reason S***!"

Fowler then wrote: "Hahaha exactly. Sit on my a**e and richer than u probs (sic) Like I said you are a goat internet troll"

Following the Twitter spat, she is now desperate for cyber bullying to stop.

Fowler said: "Right I am seriously going to see what can be done about internet bullies. It's pathetic how people can be filled with such hate. Actually sickens me the vile comments that get written on here. I actually would back any campaign to combat this. I am disgusted."

Friday's Opening Ceremonies mark the official launch of the 2012 London Olympics, and Britain called in a bevy of performances for director Danny Boyle's grand party.

The festivities started with an illustrious trip through England's early years and the industrial revolution. Kenneth Branagh performed an excerpt from Shakespeare's "The Tempest," which Boyle had said inspired the show.

Other characters figuring prominently included Daniel Craig's James Bond, who appeared in a pre-recorded skit with the Queen. A stunt version of the pair parachuted into the stadium as the Bond theme played.

Among the surprises was Mr. Bean himself. Rowan Atkinson appeared among the London Philharmonic, looking annoyed at the dull keyboarding duties he was assigned. He then went joined some athletes for training, though he tired quickly of a beach run and called for a taxi. A cab promptly appeared and took him zooming past the supposed Olympians.

Harry Potter villain Lord Voldemort also appeared during the proceedings, but fear not: He was vanquished by a fleet of Mary Poppinses. The segment included a number of villains from children's books, including Child Catcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.

Dizzee Rascal performed during a musical montage, rapping his 2009 hit, "Bonkers." After the athlete march, the Arctic Monkeys took the stage to perform a medley of their song "You Look Good on the Dance Floor" and The Beatles' "Come Together."

Of course, the biggest music moment of the evening was Paul McCartney's performance. The Beatle sang "Hey Jude," eventually leading a gigantic sing-a-long with the entire crowd in the stadium. It was a special moment, as the beautiful and intricate Olympic torch had just been lit.

McCartney implored "just the men" and then "just the women, just the girl" to sing the song before bringing the entire crowd in for a cathartic final few verses.

It's hard to imagine how expectations for Friday's event could have been higher. London's Olympiad follows Bejing's 2008 masterful ceremonies, during which, for example, over 2,000 drummers worked in unison to create a once in a lifetime light show. Boyle and the Olympic committee repeatedly said they were not trying to mimic the scale of 2008's proceedings.

The renowned "Slumdog Millionaire" filmaker pleaded with those present for dress rehearsals to not tweet or leak details from the show. Though a surprisingly small amount of information has made it out, here's what the Associated Press was able to gather in advance:

    The ceremony will open at 9 p.m. with the sound of a 27-ton bell – the largest harmonically tuned bell in the world – forged at London's 442-year-old Whitechapel Bell Foundry, which made London's Big Ben and Philadelphia's Liberty Bell.

    A pre-recorded segment has been filmed inside Buckingham Palace, reportedly involving Queen Elizabeth II and Daniel Craig as secret agent James Bond. If rumor is to be believed, a stuntman dressed as 007 will parachute into the stadium to start the show.

    The opening sequence will evoke a pastoral idyll, the "green and pleasant land" described in William Blake's poem "Jerusalem," which has been set to music and is regarded as England's unofficial national anthem. There's a meadow, livestock, a farmer plowing his field, a cricket match – and, in a nod to Britain's plethora of rural summer music festivals, a mosh pit.

Matthew McConaughey is the latest A-lister to go NC-17. He plays the title role in "Killer Joe," which carries the Motion Picture Association of America's maximum restriction because of "graphic disturbing content."

Directed by Oscar winner William Friedkin, "Killer Joe" is only the second NC-17 theatrical film to be released in the U.S. this year, because no one under 17 can be admitted no matter who accompanies them and limited audiences mean limited revenues.

Still, more and more of Hollywood's top talent like McConaughey, Friedkin, and co-stars Emile Hirsch, Gina Gershon and Thomas Haden Church are embracing edgy projects that require the stiff rating.

Oscar-winning actress Juliette Binoche starred in the NC-17-rated French film "Elles," released earlier this year. "X-Men: First Class" and "Inglourious Basterds" star Michael Fassbender won raves for his turn as a sex addict in last year's only theatrically released NC-17-rated film, "Shame."

"The NC-17 rating is about to go mainstream," said box-office analyst Paul Dergarabedian of Hollywood.com. "If Matthew McConaughey and Michael Fassbender are giving their stamp of approval to the creative freedom that NC-17 allows, people might go for it. While it may affect the ability to market a film, it brings a whole new cache of subversive marketing, and mainstream actors who give it legitimacy, credibility and raise it to a whole new level."

"Let's wear it as a badge and keep it shined!" McConaughey said of the NC-17 rating for "Killer Joe."

"That's certainly true of "Killer Joe," which opens in New York on Friday and other major cities next week. The MPAA says it contains "graphic disturbing content involving violence and sexuality, and a scene of brutality."

Adapted from the stage by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Tracy Letts, it's a story about a small-time drug dealer (Hirsch) who hires a cop moonlighting as a hit-man (McConaughey) to kill his mother for her life-insurance benefits, and offers his virgin sister as collateral. It's adult material.

Still, Friedkin was prepared to edit the film to potentially qualify for an R-rating, "but they wanted to go so far" with the cuts.

"I often say what (the MPAA) wanted to do is what the generals said we had to do in Vietnam, which was destroy the country in order to save it," said the director, who won an Oscar for 1971's "The French Connection" and an Oscar nomination for 1973's "The Exorcist."

"We're not targeting a teenage audience, so it's the correct rating," Friedkin continued. "But there are other films that I think are far more graphic in every way — language, sex and violence — that are playing with an R, because you won't see an NC-17 — which is an 'X' really — on a major studio film."

McConaughey, who has been breaking out of his broad rom-com appeal with edgier roles, described "Killer Joe" as "a wild, raunchy, cheerfully amoral piece."

With its hilariously quirky Olympic opening ceremony, a wild jumble of the celebratory and the fanciful; the conventional and the eccentric; and the frankly off-the-wall, Britain presented itself to the world Friday night as something it has often struggled to express even to itself: a nation secure in its own post-empire identity, whatever that actually is.

A maypole, still a staple of May Day celebrations in Britain, was part of the opening ceremony, conceived and directed by the filmmaker Danny Boyle. More Photos »

The noisy, busy, witty, dizzying production somehow managed to feature a flock of sheep (plus a busy sheepdog), the Sex Pistols, Lord Voldemort, the engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel, a suggestion that the Olympic rings were forged by British foundries during the Industrial Revolution, the seminal Partridge Family reference from “Four Weddings and a Funeral,” a group of people dressed like so many members of Sgt. Pepper’s band, some rustic hovels tended by rustic peasants, “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” and, in a paean to the National Health Service, a zany bunch of dancing nurses and bouncing sick children on huge hospital beds.

It was neither a nostalgic sweep through the past nor a bold vision of a brave new future. Rather, it was a sometimes slightly insane portrait of a country that has changed almost beyond measure since the last time it hosted the Games, in the grim postwar summer of 1948.

Britain was so poor then that it housed its athletes in old army barracks, made them bring their own towels and erected no buildings for the Games. The Olympics cost less than £750,000, turned a small profit and made the nation proud that it had managed to rise to the occasion in the face of such adversity.

There was that same sense of relief intermingled with self-satisfaction this time. But such was the grandeur of 2012, even in these tough economic times, that 80,000 people sat comfortably in a new Olympic Stadium, having traveled by sleek new bullet trains and special V.I.P. road lanes to a new park that has completely transformed once-derelict east London.

A little rain fell, but it hardly mattered. Queen Elizabeth II was there, after co-starring with a tuxedoed Daniel Craig, also known as James Bond, in a witty video in which she appears to parachute from a helicopter (in fact, she entered the park the usual way). Looking mystified at times — the ceremony was pitched to a generation different from hers — she presided over a bevy of lesser royals and Prime Minister David Cameron.

The first lady, Michelle Obama, was in the audience to cheer on the United States athletes, who, it must be said, did a lot of cheering for themselves anyway during the athletes’ procession. And Mitt Romney, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, was there, too, although he was practically Public Enemy No. 1 around here after he appeared to question the British capacity for enthusiasm, something only Britons are allowed to do.

One of the biggest secrets of the night — who would light the Olympic caldron — was revealed at the end of the 3-hour-45-minute show, when seven teenage athletes took over from the British rower Steve Redgrave, who carried the torch into the stadium.  The ceremony, conceived and directed by the filmmaker Danny Boyle, was two years in the making. As is the case almost every Olympics, much of the speculation around it centered on how Britain could possibly surpass the previous summer host, China. In 2008, Beijing used its awe-inspiring opening extravaganza to proclaim in no uncertain terms that it was here, it was rich, and the world better get used to it.

But outdoing anyone else, particularly the new superpower China, was not the point for a country that can never hope to re-create the glory days of its empire. Mr. Cameron, the prime minister, said this week that London’s are “not a state-run Games — it is a people-run Games,” and Boris Johnson, the London mayor, noted sharply that Britain was not planning to “spend our defense budget” on “pyrotechnics” but would take pride in being “understated but confident.” 

When you've ridden to the Opening Ceremony in a helicopter with James Bond, watching 500 athletes march into a stadium just can't compare.

Queen Elizabeth, who appeared in an amusing short film with actor Daniel Craig during the kickoff to the London Games, wasn't too impressed with Team Great Britain on Friday night. As 80,000 fans roared at the arrival of the nation's athletes into Olympic Stadium, the Queen was shown on television intently picking her nails, seemingly oblivious to the pandemonium around her.


Earlier in the ceremony, Queen Elizabeth and James Bond were shown taking a helicopter away from Buckingham Palace. Director Danny Boyle filmed the scene in March. It culminated with a live shot of two stuntpeople dressed as the Queen and Bond parachuting out of the helicopter into Olympic Stadium.

All that adrenaline must have taken its toll on the 86-year-old monarch. Displaying her usual stoicism, the Queen couldn't have been less interested in the Great Britain delegation marching in last during the parade of nations. The pool television feed cut to her for three seconds as the team walked on.

The moment created a massive buzz on Twitter after it was broadcast live during the BBC's telecast of the Ceremony. A small sampling of the tweets:

The Queen not caring about athletes marching? Not surprising. The Queen picking her nails in public? That's the stunner here. That's an action not befitting royalty. It's downright plebeian. What was she doing when the camera wasn't on her: Sipping on a Budweiser and burping? If Kate Middleton picked her nails on camera, she'd get the Anne Boleyn treatment!

A citizen with a gun stopped a knife wielding man as he began stabbing people Thursday evening at the downtown Salt Lake City Smith's store.

Police say the suspect purchased a knife inside the store and then turned it into a weapon. Smith's employee Dorothy Espinoza says, "He pulled it out and stood outside the Smiths in the foyer. And just started stabbing people and yelling you killed my people. You killed my people."

Espinoza says, the knife wielding man seriously injured two people. "There is blood all over. One got stabbed in the stomach and got stabbed in the head and held his hands and got stabbed all over the arms."

Then, before the suspect could find another victim - a citizen with a gun stopped the madness. "A guy pulled gun on him and told him to drop his weapon or he would shoot him. So, he dropped his weapon and the people from Smith's grabbed him."

By the time officers arrived the suspect had been subdued by employees and shoppers. Police had high praise for gun carrying man who ended the hysteria. Lt. Brian Purvis said, "This was a volatile situation that could have gotten worse. We can only assume from what we saw it could have gotten worse. He was definitely in the right place at the right time."

Dozens of other shoppers, who too could have become victims, are also thankful for the gun carrying man. And many, like Danylle Julian, are still in shock from the experience. "Scary actually. Really scary. Five minutes before I walk out to my car. It could have been me."

Police say right now they have no idea what caused the suspect to go on the dangerous rampage. (We will update as soon as we learn new information.)

Japanese public broadcaster NHK is developing a bleeding edge “Super Hi-Vision” 8K television system, which contains a jaw-dropping 16 times more picture information than today’s HDTV and 22.2 channels of surround sound. At the Olympics, NHK is teaming with the BBC and host broadcasting organization Olympic Broadcast Services to test this format—which is so precise that one could view a shot inside the Olympic Stadium that appears to be three dimensional and contains stunning detail.

VIDEO: Olympic Conversation: THR Talks to 4 Famous Olympians

“It’s exactly like looking through a glass window,” said Tim Plyming, the project executive for the BBC’s Olympics work in digital, live sites and Super Hi-Vision. “The images seem to go around corners and curves. Most people say it is more 3D than 3D. With 3D you are aware that your brain has to work. Here you just sit in front of the screen and relax.

“I think when people see it, they will say this is the next really big format,” he added.

The participants began planning this trial roughly two years ago, and in the coming weeks, they aim to not only dazzle viewers with an early look at Super Hi-Vision, but demonstrate for the first time NHK’s new 8K broadcast camera, as well as the ability to transmit 8K—a staggering amount of picture information—over IP networks.

The introduction of NHK’s new 8K camera is notable because earlier Super Hi-Vision camera models were very large and cumbersome to move. Plyming said that in contrast, the new cameras offer 8K resolution in a body that is “exactly the same size as our normal broadcast cameras.”


At the Olympics, the opening and closing ceremonies, as well as track and field, swimming, cycling and basketball will receive some Super Hi-Vision coverage from four venues, including the Olympic Stadium, Aquatics Centre, Basketball Arena and Velopark. Guests can see these images at public viewing sites in Glasgow, Bradford, and London in the UK; and two sites in Tokyo and one in Fukushima, Japan. The images will be transmitted from the BBC Television Centre in London.
Following this trial, Super Hi-Vision will still not be ready for primetime. Plyming said it might be as far as "10-20 years away." NHK has reported that it aims to begin experimental Super Hi-Vision broadcasting in Japan during 2020.

Eating too much sugar certainly isn't wise for your waistline, but did you know that overindulging in dessert can add years to your face? And even if you do strenuous cardio workouts each week, you'll be missing out on potential anti-aging body benefits if your schedule doesn't include yoga, weight training, and rest. "Good nutrition is a fundamental building block of healthy skin," explains Leslie Baumann, MD, a Miami Beach dermatologist. The natural ingredients in whole foods such as romaine lettuce and strawberries help increase cell turnover, and boost production of collagen fibers to help keep skin smooth and firm. Conversely, foods with little-to-no nutritional benefits, like sugar-packed doughnuts, can actually damage the collagen and elastin that keep skin firm and youthful. These aging effects start at about age 35 and increase rapidly after that, according to a study published in the British Journal of Dermatology. Even if your diet is wholesome, you could be making exercise mistakes that age you as well. For example, if you only do cardio at the expense of other types of exercise, like yoga and strength-training, you could be missing out on skin-protective benefits. Find out if you're making one of these 8 common aging diet and exercise mistakes, and get smart prevention strategies that can keep you slim and youthful for years to come.
The breakdown of sugars, called glycation, damages the collagen that keeps skin smooth and firm. To prevent this natural process from careening out of control, Naila Malik, MD, a derm in Southlake, TX, sticks to low-glycemic carbs like whole grains; they're naturally low in sugar, and the body processes them slowly to limit the loss of collagen. If you want to sweeten up your tea or oatmeal without making your skin look older, try all-natural stevia. It's an easily digested herbal sweetener that doesn't trigger glycation, according to board-certified dermatologist Nicholas Perricone, MD, an adjunct professor of medicine at Michigan State University's College of Human Medicine. Taking your work angst out on the Spinning bike or treadmill might make you feel better for a little while, but incorporating yoga into your fitness routine regularly may help you look younger and prevent breakouts while whittling away stress. Sounds like a winning workout to us! "Yoga moves like Child's Pose, Downward-Facing Dog, and Sun Salutations improve circulation--the boost of oxygen is what gives skin that lovely yoga glow," says Hema Sundaram, MD, a Washington, DC - area dermatologist. New research finds regular yoga practice may reduce the inflammation and stress that speed skin aging. If you need another reason to om away your stress: High levels of tension can spike hormone production that leads to breakouts or aggravates conditions like psoriasis. "Controlling stress keeps your skin calm," says Annie Chiu, MD, a derm in LA.