Hugo Chavez's death draws sympathy, anger

(CNN) -- Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez died Tuesday after a long battle with cancer. News of his death drew impassioned reactions from around the world, as leaders and other public figures weighed in on his legacy. Here are some of the comments:

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon

"President Chavez spoke to the challenges and aspirations of the most vulnerable Venezuelans. He provided decisive impetus for new regional integration movements, based on an eminently Latin American vision, while showing solidarity toward other nations in the hemisphere. His contribution to the current peace talks in Colombia between the Government of President Juan Manuel Santos and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) has been of vital importance.

"The secretary-general renews the commitment of the United Nations to work alongside the Government and the people of Venezuela in support of its development and prosperity."

U.S. President Barack Obama

"At this challenging time of President Hugo Chavez's passing, the United States reaffirms its support for the Venezuelan people and its interest in developing a constructive relationship with the Venezuelan government. As Venezuela begins a new chapter in its history, the United States remains committed to policies that promote democratic principles, the rule of law and respect for human rights."

Chinese foreign ministry

"President Chavez has been an outstanding leader of Venezuela and a good friend of the Chinese people. He has made great contributions to consolidate the relations of our two countries. President Hu Jintao and Chief Secretary Xi Jinping have sent messages to Vice President Maduro to express our deep condolences. Our party, government and people treasure the long-lasting friendship with Venezuela. The two countries will keep working together to deepen this strategic partnership we've been enjoying, which we believe benefits both countries and their people."

Russian President Vladimir Putin

"Vladimir Putin praised the personal efforts of the Venezuelan leader, through which a solid foundation for the Russian-Venezuelan partnership was laid and strong political ties have developed, large-scale humanitarian and development projects were launched, and expressed his confidence to continue on this path, strengthening and developing the relationship between Russia and Venezuela," the Kremlin said.

Former Venezuelan presidential candidate Henrique Capriles

"In this difficult moment, we should demonstrate our profound love and respect to Venezuela! Unity of the Venezuelan family!"

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

Ahmadinejad "expressed his heartfelt condolences to the Venezuelan government and nation on the sad demise of the late President Hugo Chavez," the official Islamic Republic News Agency reported. Ahmadinejad also "paid homage to Chavez and referred to him as the symbol of fighters in Latin American history and the forerunner of the establishment of friendship among nations," the agency said.

Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos

"It's a great loss for Venezuela and for the region.

"For Colombia, and for me in particular, the loss of President Chavez has a special significance.

"Everyone knows we had many differences ... But from the first days of my administration, we decided to put aside those differences to concentrate on the best interests of the people of Venezuela and the people of Colombia."

Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper

"Canada looks forward to working with (Chavez's) successor and other leaders in the region to build a hemisphere that is more prosperous, secure and democratic.

"At this key juncture, I hope the people of Venezuela can now build for themselves a better, brighter future based on the principles of freedom, democracy, the rule of law and respect for human rights."

Ecuadorian foreign ministry

"The national government expresses its solidarity in light of this irreparable loss that puts the Venezuelan people and all the region in mourning and at the same time sends its heartfelt condolences to the family of the late champion of Latin America."

British Foreign Secretary William Hague

"I was saddened to learn of the death of President Hugo Chavez today. As President of Venezuela for 14 years, he has left a lasting impression on the country and more widely. I would like to offer my condolences to his family and to the Venezuelan people at this time."

Nabil Sha'ath, senior Palestinian official

"The death of President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela caused a lot of sadness here in Palestine and in my heart as well as for President (Mahmoud) Abbas, who had a long meeting with him in Caracas that he always remembers. President Chavez stood by Palestine and supported the rights of the Palestinian people all along."

Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter

"President Chavez will be remembered for his bold assertion of autonomy and independence for Latin American governments and for his formidable communication skills and personal connection with supporters in his country and abroad to whom he gave hope and empowerment. During his 14-year tenure, Chavez joined other leaders in Latin America and the Caribbean to create new forms of integration. Venezuelan poverty rates were cut in half, and millions received identification documents for the first time, allowing them to participate more effectively in their country's economic and political life.

"At the same time, we recognize the divisions created in the drive towards change in Venezuela and the need for national healing. We hope that as Venezuelans mourn the passing of President Chavez and recall his positive legacies -- especially the gains made for the poor and vulnerable -- the political leaders will move the country forward by building a new consensus that ensures equal opportunities for all Venezuelans to participate in every aspect of national life."

U.S. Sen. Robert Menendez, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee

"Hugo Chavez ruled Venezuela with an iron hand and his passing has left a political void that we hope will be filled peacefully and through a constitutional and democratic process, grounded in the Venezuelan constitution and adhering to the Inter-American Democratic Charter. With free and fair elections, Venezuela can begin to restore its once robust democracy and ensure respect for the human, political and civil rights of its people."

U.S. Rep. Ed Royce, chairman of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs

"Hugo Chavez was a tyrant who forced the people of Venezuela to live in fear. His death dents the alliance of anti-U.S. leftist leaders in South America. Good riddance to this dictator.

"Venezuela once had a strong democratic tradition and was close to the United States. Chavez's death sets the stage for fresh elections. While not guaranteed, closer U.S. relations with (this) key country in our Hemisphere are now possible."

Actor Sean Penn

"Venezuela and its revolution will endure under the proven leadership of Vice President (Nicolas) Maduro. Today the United States lost a friend it never knew it had. And poor people around the world lost a champion. I lost a friend I was blessed to have. My thoughts are with the family of President Chavez and the people of Venezuela."

Hugo Chávez: Nine Unlikely Facts about Venezuela’s Unusual Late Leader

Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez died Mar. 5 at 58, bringing to an end the adventurous life of one of Latin America’s most confounding personalities. Here are nine of our favorite facts about El Comandante:

1. Chávez banned Coke Zero in Jun. 2009, claiming the low-calorie cola was unhealthy — but he didn’t elaborate on why. ”The product should be withdrawn from circulation to preserve the health of Venezuelans,” he told a government news agency as reported by Reuters.

2. He also vowed to ban Halloween during his weekly TV and radio show, Aló Presidente, in October 2005 — calling the holiday an “imperialist terror” and part of the American tradition of ”putting fear into other nations, putting fear into their own people.”

3. A lifelong baseball fan, he threw the ceremonial first pitch at a Mets game at Shea Stadium during a Jun. 1999 visit to the U.S. a few months after being elected president. The staunch Socialist also rang the closing bell at the New York Stock Exchange on the same trip.

4. But he didn’t like golf. On Aló Presidente in Jul. 2009, he called the game “a bourgeois sport” and cited golf carts as proof of players’ laziness. Chávez loyalists had called for the country’s two major golf courses to be shut down, arguing that too many poor people were living in slums while the golf courses were being impeccably maintained.

5. In 2005,Chávez visited the South Bronx and, in a speech at an evangelical church, promised to send discounted oil to the neighborhood’s low-income residents. Through Citgo Petroleum, the American subsidiary of Venezuela’s state-owned oil company, he arranged to provide heating oil at a 40% discount. The company also pledged $3.6 million over three years to create jobs and rehabilitate the area.

6. He argued that capitalism was responsible for ending life on Mars in a 2011 speech on World Water Day.

7. While he wasn’t a fan of capitalism, he was a fan of Twitter. At the time of his death he had more than 4 million followers on the social networking service; he gave his three millionth follower a new apartment.

8. He was also a big fan of fellow Latin American lefty Fidel Castro. He joined a quartet to sing “Happy Birthday” to the Cuban revolutionary on his 75th birthday in 2001.

9. Chávez had an artistic side: in Dec. 2011, he gave the President of Argentina Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner a painting of himself with Néstor Kirchner, her late husband and the former Argentinian president. “People cannot believe that I painted the picture,” Chávez said. “I had to use color theory and everything.”

Read more: http://newsfeed.time.com/2013/03/06/hugo-chavez-nine-unusual-facts-about-venezuelas-late-leader/#ixzz2MlYJFjz6

'He Ain't Bad': Zayn Malik Cheered On By Girlfriend Perrie Edwards At One Direction Cardiff Gig

Couple have put cheating scandal behind them

Proud girlfriend Perrie Edwards proved her romance with Zayn Malik is back on track as the Little Mix star watched her One Direction boyfriend as her performed in Cardiff this weekend, claiming he “he ain't bad,” when asked about the babe by a fan.

Earlier this year the couple were rocked by allegations the 'Kiss You' singer had cheated with Australian waitress Courtney CJ Webb, but clearly the pair have chosen to stay together with the X Factor winner smiling happily as she watched her beau.

The 'DNA' singer wrapped her own tour last week after a month on the road and with Malik coming to a string of gigs she clearly wanted to return the favour. Spotted by excited fans, one wrote on Twitter: “guess who down Cardiff again tonight supporting Zayn !! Perrie Edwards !! Aaahhhh”

While, according to Unreality TV, another fan told the Geordie beauty: “Zayn looks good tonight!”

To which she replied:“He ain’t bad, eh?”

Since the cheating accusations, Zayn has made a big effort to make it up to his girlfriend, with insiders claiming he's planning a romantic getaway.

“They both decided they needed some quality time away from everyone,” a source told Heat magazine. “Zayn organised the whole thing by himself as a way of making things up to her, and it seems to have worked – she's thrilled and things seem to be really good between them.”

The luxury holiday will reportedly be in the South of France, where the couple will sun themselves on an expensive yacht

The source went on: “They're going to take a week out and got to St Tropez in the South of France. Zayn's record company have offered them a boat and Perrie's shifted her work commitments around it.”

Lets hope Zayn's busy schedule doesn't get in the way! He kicked off One Direction's eight month 'Take Me Home' world tour last week and with 117 dates to get through, that doesn't leave much time for a holiday!

Michael Jackson Family Moves One Step Closer In Lawsuit Against Gig Promoters

Judge ruled there is enough evidence for wrongful-death case against AEG

Michael Jackson's family are one step closer in their fight for justice over the pop superstar's death after a judge ruled today that their lawyers have enough evidence to go after concert promoter AEG.

The famous family are suing AEG Live claiming that the company is responsible for hiring Conrad Murray, the doctor convicted of involuntary manslaughter and therefore partially-responsible for Jackson's death.

A judge in Los Angeles has ruled that the family's lawyers have enough evidence for the wrongful-death suit after Jackson legal team presented an email showing that AEG has supervised Murray, who, in November 2011, was found guilty of administering a fatal dose of the hospital anesthetic propofol and sedatives to the singer, which played a key role in his death and he is currently serving a four-year prison sentence.

The Jackson clan are claiming that AEG put pressure on Murray to make sure the star was concert ready and able to

 perform for his This Is It comeback tour at London's O2 Arena in 2009, despite his exhausted condition.

AEG said it should not be held responsible for Jackson's passing, arguing that Murray did not work for the company but was rather hired by the entertainer, and that AEG could not have foreseen Murray's administering of propofol, among other dangerous drugs.

But the "smoking gun" email being presented as evidence, between AEG Live's co-CEO Paul Gongaware to This Is It's concert director Kenny Ortega, appears to suggest that Murray could have lost his £99,000 ($150,000) -a-month job if he failed to make sure Jackson was ready for rehearsals.

It allegedly said: "We want to remind [Murray] that it is AEG, not MJ, who is paying his salary. We want to remind him what is expected of him."

AEG is also accused of not doing a proper background check on Murray and therefore had overlooked his large debts that made him susceptible to financial pressure.

Ortega reportedly wrote to AEG asking for "professional guidance" to deal with Jackson's "weakened and troubled state", company president Randy Phillips replied: "This doctor is extremely successful (we check everyone out) and does not need this gig so he is totally unbiased and ethical."

Los Angeles County superior court judge Yvette Palazuelo ruled that the case will go to jury trial next month and if found liable, AEG Live could be ordered to pay more than the company is worth – estimated at £5.3bn ($8bn).

 "The truth about what happened to Michael, which AEG has tried to keep hidden from the public since the day Michael died, is finally emerging," Jackson attorney Kevin Boyle told CNN. "We look forward to the trial where the rest of the story will come to light."

American nightmare: the art of the Civil War

A show in Washington DC illustrates how the Civil War spawned a new breed of artists who were unafraid to depict the horror of battle, says Adrian Hamilton

War has been the defining challenge for artists, as for society, for virtually all of history. And for most of the last century and a half the painting and sculpture have vied with photography as the means of best expressing its reality and its consequences. Nowhere more so than in the American Civil War.

Before then it was possible to picture a battle within the frame of a painting. It was not that artists ignored the horrors of war. Goya depicted the ravages of the decade-long Peninsular War in a series of engraving that have never been equalled for their honesty and their anger at what it was doing to victim and perpetrator alike. Turner took a particularly mournful view of the dead and dying that remained on the field of Waterloo the day after. But the portrayal of war was largely left in the hands of the celebrators of the victorious: Benjamin West, Jacques Louis-David and others. War was terrible but it was also heroic.

The American Civil War, from 1861 to 1865, changed all that. It was the first full-out conflict in which the mechanics and destruction overwhelmed the individual actions of men, the first to be fought in prolonged and unremitting trench warfare. It was also the first to be covered by the new art of photography. Roger Fenton had been out in the Crimea a decade earlier, in a conflict that had seen the first signs of machine over man, but his pictures were largely traditional in composition, capturing the landscape, the encampments and the troops but not the destruction. The American Civil War was different. As many as 200 photographers are thought to have taken pictures and, in the hands of the best of them, the full reality of what it did to body and place was brought home to the public.

The impact of the photographers and the efforts of the painters to find a way of responding to the cataclysm that had fallen on their country is the subject of a quite remarkable and searching exhibition, The Civil War and American Art, at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington DC. It is not a grand show. It is certainly not a comprehensive one. But what it does is to give a sense of the actuality that was now being shown by the photographers and the struggle traditional painters had in trying to respond in their own way to the conflict about them.

The photographs – new to me – taken by George Barnard of the devastation wreaked by Sherman's famous March to the Sea are stark evocations of the ruination of war. Alexander Gardner's shots of the dead after the battles of Antietam and Gettysburg are as great and as grim as any photographer achieved in the European world wars or Vietnam.

Painters couldn't compete with that, nor did they try. There were those, such as Thomas Buchanan Read and Fabrino Julio, who attempted to crown the conflict with works that glorified the heroism and the generals. But the Smithsonian, which eschews them, makes the point that these seemed archaic even then. By the time war broke out, American artists had moved away from painting in the European Grand Manner. Instead, they preferred landscape painting as a means of expressing the unique character of American "nature" and a folksy genre painting to describe its people. That hopefulness and fondness couldn't survive the war, for all the first belief that it would all be over in few weeks or months.

The skies of the painters became darker, the clouds more threatening, the mood more melancholy. Our Banner in the Sky painted by Frederic Edwin Church, the finest landscape artist of the day, as war broke out in 1861, has the sky violently streaked in red show. His pictures from a visit to the far north of the same period show nature, majestic but remorseless in its solitude, with man's presence puny and perished. Sanford Robinson Gifford's Twilight in the Catskills from the same year paints a picture of eerie silence, the sky dark red and the trees in the foreground bare of leaves and branches. A haunting pairing of two views of precisely the same spot, Paradise Rocks, Newport, painted by John Frederick Kensett in 1859 and then in 1865, has the former peopled with ducks and aglow with the sunrise while the latter is without life and only a dim light coming from behind lowering clouds.

The genre painters, in the meantime did their best, picking out the odd skirmish, the ruined house and the fleeing civilians, particularly the slaves trying to escape to freedom in the northern lines. But they found it difficult to express the sheer magnitude of the horror about them, not least because the battles took place over such a wide area and there was no market for painted pictures of mortality. They could capture the human face of the military camp or the battered fort but not the facelessness of the hundreds of thousands of the dead.

Where they came into their own was in the aftermath of war, when minds turned to the problems of reconciliation, Reconstruction and the place of the emancipated slaves in the new world. It might have been a cause for sentimentality. And there is certainly that in some of the pictures. But in the hands of Eastman Johnson and, above all, Winslow Homer, the pictures are far more ambiguous and unsettled. In a deeply disquieting work, A Visit from the Old Mistress, painted by Homer a decade after the war, the artist portrays the grey-haired white lady, taut and still imperious, staring uneasily at a group of equally uncomfortable former slaves.

American painting never quite recovered its old optimism, at least not until French Impressionism and Modernism gave it a new life in colour. Ironically, it was the photographers, taking their cumbersome cameras into the wilderness, who sustained the sense of awe in nature. The scars left by civil war and a botched Reconstruction ran deep. An exhibition anyone interested in the soul of the United States should visit. And if you can't, there's an excellent, and heavy, catalogue that accompanies it.