Three things have happened in recent months that promise to change the nature of human relationships forever. A recent report indicates that the marriage rate in the United States is lower than its ever been and the birth rate continues to decline as well.

The fact that the marriage rate continues to fall is proof that men and women today are making up their own minds about who to marry and when rather than letting those things be determined by family or finances as they have been in the past. With women continuing to take a more prominent role in the work-force, they no longer have to be economically dependent on their husbands as they have been throughout history. This frees them up to choose who they want to be with, rather than who they have to be with and thats a crucial change in marital relationships.

On top of that, two inventions promise to change the nature of romantic relationships even more. In last weeks edition of Time magazine that featured the years 50 best inventions, the one that promises to change us more than anything else is the development of mind reading software. This will allow people to not only know what somebody else is thinking but to actually see it. Its a process called quantitative modeling and when it becomes available to the general public, and it will as all things that work eventually are, we will no longer have to wonder if that special person in our life is lying to us or not, well be able to see it with our own eyes.

Ive written before about a love detector machine that works much like the lie detector machine except that it would tell us whether or not someone actually loved us or not. I thought that would always remain in the science fiction category but I was wrong. Quantitative modeling IS the love detector machine because it will tell us what a person is thinking that goes far beyond what theyre saying. A lot of people think one thing and say another and up until now, weve had no ability to tell the difference. We place some emphasis on the things they do but a lot of people are very good at covering up their lies so, in the end, we have to just believe they mean what they say until they prove to us they dont. That proof often comes with a sudden shock that we didnt anticipate. Numerous people have had the sky fall on their heads when their loved one leaves them without any indication beforehand that was going to happen. When quantitative modeling becomes mass produced, that will put an end to the lies and deceit some people run their lives by and that will be a good thing.

The other invention is even more mind-boggling. We all know that robots are becoming more of a norm than an exception and there are now robots that do a lot of the work humans used to do. But thats just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what theyll do in the future. Work is already being done on robots that will, in effect, replace our life partners. Within the next 20 to 30 years, we will be able to have robots built for us according to our specifications and requirements. Well be able to design their physical features, which will include their skin color, hair fiber, eye color and everything else that has to do with the way they look. Well be able to give them not only the voice we want them to have but the emotions as well. They can be programmed to be loyal only to us, to love only us and to have any emotion we want them to have. So, if we choose, they will always be true, they will always act the way we want them to act, and they will never lie to us or betray us. And if you get tired of it, you can simply redesign a different model. Its suspected that when a person has the option to choose a robot that has all the human qualities of a person with none of the imperfections, marriage may become a thing of the past.

These things arent the mental ramblings of mad scientists anymore. Theyre real today and will become more advanced and perfected as time goes by. There have been more life-changing inventions in the past century than there were in all the years man has lived on this planet before and that geometric progression of ideas will continue.

Progress is not always good but its always progress. We will continue to progress as a civilization rather than regress and that means life 50 years from now will bear little resemblance to life today. But we will adapt, adjust and move forward, because progress and advancement wont allow anything else.

Actress Asin is making her debut on TV. Asin will host a TV show ?Superstar Santa? on UTV.

Participating in Superstar Santa on UTV Star allows me to interact with the audience directly. The programme is on friendship issues and I value true friendship, Asin said.

The show deals with human relationships and its complexities. Spanning over 10 episodes, the show will feature one celebrity each week giving it all to solve the issue at hand. Each of these cases would deal with issues relating to friends, families and even romantic relationships. The show is a weekly, one hour episode wherein every celebrity gets to choose between 2 or 3 cases.

More than a hundred years ago, when the telephone was introduced, there was some hand-wringing over the social dangers that this new technology posed: increased sexual aggression and damaged human relationships. “It was going to bring down our society,” said Dr. Megan Moreno, a specialist in adolescent medicine at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Men would be calling women and making lascivious comments, and women would be so vulnerable, and we’d never have civilized conversations again.”

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In other words, the telephone provoked many of the same worries that more recently have been expressed about online social media. “When a new technology comes out that is something so important, there is this initial alarmist reaction,” Dr. Moreno said.

Indeed, much of the early research — and many of the early pronouncements — on social media seemed calculated to make parents terrified of an emerging technology that many of them did not understand as well as their children did.

Whether about sexting or online bullying or the specter of Internet addiction, “much social media research has been on what people call the danger paradigm,” said Dr. Michael Rich, a pediatrician and the director of the Center on Media and Child Health at Children’s Hospital Boston.

Though there are certainly real dangers, and though some adolescents appear to be particularly vulnerable, scientists are now turning to a more nuanced understanding of this new world. Many have started to approach social media as an integral, if risky, part of adolescence, perhaps not unlike driving.

Researchers are also looking to Facebook, Twitter and the rest for opportunities to identify problems, to hear cries for help and to provide information and support. Dr. Rich, who sees many teenagers who struggle with Internet-related issues, feels strongly that it is important to avoid blanket judgments about the dangers of going online.

“We should not view social media as either positive or negative, but as essentially neutral,” he said. “It’s what we do with the tools that decides how they affect us and those around us.”

Dr. Moreno’s early research looked at adolescents who displayed evidence of risky behaviors on public MySpace profiles, posting photos or statements that referred to sexual activity or substance abuse. E-mails were sent to those adolescents suggesting that they modify their profiles or make them private.

Girls were more likely to respond than boys, Dr. Moreno found, and sexual material was more likely than alcohol-related material to be removed.

Her current research, by contrast, approaches social media as a window, an opportunity to understand and improve both physical and mental health. In a study of the ways college students describe sadness in status updates on their Facebook profiles, she showed that some such expressions were associated with depression in students who completed clinical screening tests.

Since freshman year is a high-risk time for depression, many college resident advisers already try to use Facebook to monitor students, Dr. Moreno said. Perhaps it will be possible to help R.A.’s recognize red flags in the online profiles of their charges.

Still, she acknowledged that this new strategy raised privacy concerns, asking, “How do you think about extending this to other at-risk groups in a way that still doesn’t feel like an invasion of privacy?” For example, can we help people in support groups take care of one another better through social media?

Going back and forth, as I do these days, between the worlds of academic pediatrics and academic journalism, I am struck by the focus in both settings on the potential — and the risks — of social media and on the importance of understanding how communication is changing.

Our children are using social media to accomplish the eternal goals of adolescent development, which include socializing with peers, investigating the world, trying on identities and establishing independence.

In 2011, the American Academy of Pediatrics Council on Communications and Media issued a clinical report, “The Impact of Social Media on Children, Adolescents and Families.” It began by emphasizing the benefits of social media for children and adolescents, including enhanced communication skills and opportunities for social connections.

“A large part of this generation’s social and emotional development is occurring while on the Internet and on cellphones,” the report noted.

Our job as parents is to help them manage all this wisely, to understand — and avoid — some of the special dangers and consequences of making mistakes in these media. (We can expect the same kind of gratitude that we get for all of our guidance: mixed, of course, with an extra helping of contempt if our technical skills are not up to theirs.)

“Rather than taking a one-size-fits-all harm model, one of the questions parents need to ask is, ‘How is this going to interact with my child’s personality?’ ” said Clay Shirky, who teaches about social media at New York University. “Digital media is an amplifier. It tends to make extroverts more extroverted and introverts more introverted.”

And both parents and researchers need to be sure they understand the subtleties of the ways teenagers interpret social media.

At a 2011 symposium on the Internet and society, two researchers presented information on how teenagers understand negative talk on the Internet. What adults interpret as bullying is often read by teenagers as “drama,” a related but distinct phenomenon.

By understanding how teenagers think about harsh rhetoric, the researchers suggested, we may find ways to help them defend themselves against the real dangers of online aggression.

The problems of cyberbullying and Internet overuse are serious, and the risks of making mistakes online are very real. But even those who treat adolescents with these problems are now committed to the idea that there are other important perspectives for researchers — or parents, or teachers — looking at the brave new universe in which adolescence is taking place.

Social media, said Dr. Rich, “are the new landscape, the new environment in which kids are sorting through the process of becoming autonomous adults — the same things that have been going on since the earth cooled.”

The Eugene home of Andy Traisman and his partner, Lola, is a study in relationships and transformation.

The same might be said for anything that is purposefully altered to better satisfy its users.

But this house, built in 1922 and subjected to a hodgepodge of alterations over the decades, ascended to its new, truly harmonious state only after relationships between spaces and uses were defined; problematic structural relationships solved; and human relationships nurtured during a major renovation fraught with stressful potential.

Human, structural relationships

Traisman, a middle-school teacher, bought the house eight years ago. Lola moved in earlier this year after the addition of a 350-square-foot master suite atop the once flat-roofed garage and a total renovation of the other 2,000 square feet of living space.

“Remodels in and of themselves can be hellacious, but we were also turning this from ‘my’ house to ‘our’ house,” Traisman reflects. “Because we were just moving in together, the scope of the project kept metamorphosing.”

One goal was clear from the outset: to build the bed and bath above the garage, which itself had been added to the two-story house — along with an upper-story bedroom and unfinished utility room below — by previous owners in the early 2000s.

“On top of the garage was just empty space,” Traisman says. “In the summer we’d put lawn furniture out there” to talk while enjoying sunrise-sunset views toward Hendricks Park on one side, the Coast Range on the other. “When I was buying the house, I wondered if it was plausible to put an addition on top. Nir thought about it and said, ‘yep.’”

“The main challenge was structural; the roof wasn’t going to carry it,” says architect and longtime friend Nir Pearlson, who was privy to some of those rooftop gatherings.

Pearlson signed on to design the project despite Traisman’s initial hesitation.

“Nir is like family, so I had reservations because I felt it might be too hard on the relationship,” Traisman says. “But he really wanted the job because of his relationship to us and to this house.”

Pearlson, working with general contractor Paul Allen (of Allen Co. Design It! Build It!) and structural designer Craig Lawrence, devised a solution that involved strategically placing new footings and posts with beams beneath the floor of the suite.

They also puzzled over ways to eke out usable space for the bed-bath unit, which is offset between the first and second levels of the house. For example, the corner formed by the upper wall and ceiling of the first-floor pantry is just below countertop level of the new bathroom. The vanity’s cabinet doors offer no clues to this space-saving configuration, though inside are shallow storage spaces that extend just a matter of inches before ending at the pantry’s outer wall.

“We mined space out of this house wherever we could,” Pearlson says. “One of the reasons we were limited in space is that Andy and Lola were adamant about having a deck here and a deck there,” he says, indicating the railed terraces on either side of the elevated suite. “I think it worked great.”

Relationships of space, color, light

Just as human and structural relationships required careful navigation throughout this project, relationships of the occupants to their environment were fully considered.

“We touched every corner of the house,” Pearlson says. “There were so many additions that were done in the past, so the whole notion was to unify everything and make it all work.”

Fixes, he says, included replacing a previously removed wall to turn an open dining room into an office; adding a door off the living room and new windows for light and indoor-outdoor connections; opening up a “funky” entryway vestibule and creating an obvious artery from there to the back of the house through the kitchen.

“The kitchen always bugged me,” says Pearlson, who lamented the awkwardly placed refrigerator along a partial wall that hemmed in the room. “I wanted to figure the kitchen out because it’s so central to the life of the house. I felt it was important to create this passage very clearly here,” he says, pointing along the line that now extends from the front door through to the stairway at the rear of the house, carried visually by the alignment of a new butcher-block kitchen island and row of hanging pendant lights.

Copious windows and vibrant, varied colors brighten the refreshed home. Twenty-seven different hues coat the interior and exterior in a rainbow of warm tones. At the junction between the dining room, kitchen and living room, rich red, yellow and orange shades converge harmoniously at wall corners — successful relationships made possible by Traisman’s countless paint-sampling trips to The Home Depot and consultations with painter Steve Derminer.

The once light-gray/sage-green interior now radiates color not only from the walls, but from artful accents including Leonie Daniels’ multi-hued mosaic backsplashes of recycled tile in the kitchen and master bath.

“I just lived with the previous owners’ taste for seven years,” Traisman says. “I wouldn’t have done all this if we weren’t moving in together. But Lola was coming into a new home …”

“And I needed color and light,” she interjects. “Part of the reason I didn’t want to move in earlier was because it felt so dark and cold.”

She and Traisman had to overcome some dark times during construction, too, including her unanticipated back surgery and the death of two older dogs. They say they’re thankful for how much Allen and his crews mitigated disruptions during the nine-month, $150,000-plus job, but still, Traisman says, “the project took on a different gravity after a while. There was nothing light about it.”

The lightness came afterward.

“Sometimes I’ll just sit in different places and watch how the light plays across the colors,” Lila ponders. “My favorite part is the light.”

“Depending on the leaves on the trees, the angle of the sun and the light dappling on the walls,” Traisman adds, “nothing ever looks the same twice.”

And that would seem to portend well for a long, happy and interesting relationship with this well-evolved home.

Staff writer Joel Gorthy can be contacted at sp.feedback@registerguard.com.

Hey, nerd! Yeah, you with the glasses and the twenty-sided die and theother things a nerd likes. If you admire the sensitive portrayal of human relationships seen on The Jersey Shore and wish there was a show like that for you, youre in luck. The Jersey Shores producers are casting for a new reality show, and they are looking for the nerdliest nerds they can find.

The casting notice reads as follows:

Doron Ofir Casting and 495 Productions is proud to launch the search for the most passionately obsessed, proudly self-identified pop culture fanatics from the worlds of comics, graphic novels, sci-fi, anime, manga, video games, toys, movies, and television.

FANDOM RISING will boldly go where no fanboy or fangirl has gone before! If you are a guy or girl who gets all the references in “The Big Bang Theory,” quotes the Original Trilogy, revels in spotting Cylons among us, joins the horde, wishes to attend Hogwarts, Starfleet Academy, or Xavier’s School for the Gifted, and reveres masters of science fiction and fantasy — this is the show for you!!!.

You are officially being summoned for an experimental documentary series that takes a deeper look at the lives and relationships of people who love fantasy, fiction, cosplay, comics, gaming and science.

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away… men and women were free to create their own universes, passionately collect their obsessions, and proudly celebrate their eccentricities without any persecution from their peers. Now it’s time for the nerds to once again have their revenge, and show just why it’s the geeks who shall inherit the Earth,” Doron Ofir, President.

FANDOM RISING is currently looking for those who value brains over brawn, substance over status quo, and march to the beat of their own cantina band. If your life is filled with the exquisite, the extraordinary and the exceptional, you are officially being summoned to join the Fandom Rising!

And heres my favorite part:

You may live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of the universe, within a wrinkle in time, playing out a game of thrones and living within the romance of love with the undead, but you make the most out of it. Your life is filled with the exquisite, the extraordinary, the exceptional whether youre ridiculed or respected for it, your time has come.

Its like they played Mad Libs with a random nerd buzzword generator. They forgot to reference Lord Of The Rings!

Im morbidly curious as to how they will sex this show uptheyre going to have to plant some serious agent provocateurs to keep each episode from being an hour of watching people eat chips and play Dungeons and Dragons. Where will they have the nerds live? And will they replace the hot tub with a tub of liquid space plasma? So many questions.

Anyway, if this sounds like your thing, heres the online application. Go forth and famewhore.

(Via Blastr)

Last month gave us a first look at the spectacular trailer for swords and sandals sequel Wrath Of The Titans, and now newly-mulleted star Sam Worthington is doing his bit to build hype for the upcoming blockbuster.

I saw [the film] the other day and I love it, Worthington told Comingsoon.net. I think it did exactly what I wanted. There were things about the first one that I felt that I, personally, could improve myself on and work a bit harder on.

One of those things was presumably the depth of the human relationships on display, an aspect of the plot Worthington claims has been remedied for the sequel.

Even though weve got big-ass monsters and its set in a Greek mythological world and its a fucking huge blockbuster, he explains, its about a father and a son.

And speaking of sequels, theres another rather significant one hovering on Worthingtons radar in the shape of Avatar 2hellip;

Im talking to Jim [Cameron] next week, reveals Worthington with regards to the prospective sequel. Im going to visit him and were going to see whats going on. Wrath Of The Titans opens in the UK on 30 March 2012.

Source: Comingsoon.net

Who comes to mind in your family, church, community or work life who has a knack for bridging differences?  The Coronado Peacemaker Awards is our annual opportunity to honor seven individuals who live or work in Coronado who do just that.  What better time than right now to recognize them as a positive role model?

The Peacemaker Awards serves as the highlight of Coronado schools’ “Take My Hand, Coronado! – a Weeklong Celebration of Peace in Human Relationships.” During the week of February 6-10, students will be focusing on this years theme of Random Acts of Kindness. 

This is an opportunity for you to participate with your own Random Act.  Please take a moment to complete the attached nomination before the deadline of Friday, January 17 for one of six categories and/or pass this on to friends and family! (PDF FORM: Coronado%20Peacemaker%20Nomination%20Form%202012.pdf)

The SAFE Peacemaker Awards Committee will select the winners from among the nominees.  Recipients will be honored at a ceremony on Wednesday, February 8^th2012 with a reception at 6:30 PM; followed by the awards program 7:00 – 8:30 PM; in the Nautilus Room, Coronado Community Center, 1845 Strand Way, Coronado, California 92118.

For more information, please call Madison Webb at 619-422-6884 or email  Carole.Tessicini@CoronadoSAFE.org.

Thank you,

Carole

Carole Tessicini

Special Projects Coordinator

Coronado SAFE

Student And Family Enrichment

1009 C Avenue

Coronado, CA 92118

Just about every year since the 1960s infectious disease has been
on the rise globally. This has proven true in both developed and
developing countries and both new or emerging diseases and
re-emerging diseases.

There are many factors that must fit together to make conditions
right to cause a disease and have an outbreak. These factors
include the environment, host and pathogen.

It takes much more than a microbe to cause a disease, she
says.

Diseases re-emerge for several reasons including politics,
catastrophes and resistance, explains Jacques.

Resistance to drugs has allowed diseases such as Tuberculosis and
Malaria to re-emerge. In addition, environmental changes are
happening all too often, allowing pathogens to arise or find a new
breeding ground.

It is said that every time we build a major dam that a new disease
comes with it, she says, generally, one that is transmitted by
mosquitoes, because we change water patterns.

Emerging diseases sometimes scare us the most and they are popping
out of everywhere, she says.

Emerging diseases tend to be zoonotic, diseases transferred from
animals to humans. Currently, 61 percent of all human pathogens
counted are zoonotic, but when it comes to the new pathogens 75
percent are transferred from animals.

Zoonoses is nothing new, humans have been getting diseases from
animals for as long as there has been a human race. However,
humans relationships with animals have changed from
hunter-gatherer to animals domestication. As humans live in larger
and larger concentrations they are much more likely to pass
diseases to one another.

Zoonotic diseases have risen for several reasons.

Our population has absolutely exploded, says Jacques, from 1900
to 2000, we went from 1.6 to 6.1 billion people, which is the
biggest demographic change in time.

As that happened, human and wildlife ecology have collided, plus it
takes a lot of food to feed that many people.

Consequently, we are growing a lot more animals and we are crowding
ourselves into sprawling urban environments. Also, there is
increasing contact with other species through travel, trade and
migration.

Therefore, travel, trade and migration are at an all-time high,
aiding in the spread of diseases, specifically viruses. Viruses
make up 44 percent of diseases as a whole, making them a big
problem for human health, as well as animal health.

Selenium, an essential micronutrient in human and food animal
diets, may be particularly important with regard to viral diseases.
Many selenium functions have to do with protection against
oxidative stress and the balance of pro- and antioxidative
conditions in cells.

This trace element is key to many aspects of the immune defense
against viral infection, she says, therefore, deficiencies leave
the host less able to resist disease.

In addition, several viruses, including an influenza strain and
HIV, replicate more quickly when selenium status of the host is
low. Therefore, the selenium status of food animals and humans, as
well as where selenium comes from is being researched
thoroughly.

Humans get dietary selenium by eating plants that can take up and
store selenium. In the US, wheat grown in the upper Midwest is an
excellent source. In addition, plant proteins are consumed by our
food animals, meaning there is selenium in meat, milk and eggs, so
humans can get it that way as well.

Unfortunately, not all soils in crop-producing regions contain
available selenium, says Jacques. There is a problem with
selenium distribution around the world. It is not a problem in the
center of the US, but raw materials for feeds and human food tend
to be low in selenium. The reason is that even if it is present in
soils if the soil pH is acidic the plants dont pick it up.

Therefore, selenium status has to do with location. In areas that
have low selenium in the soil it will translate to low amounts in
the milk, meat, and eggs.

The selenium deficient soil translates throughout the food chain.
For example, cows in these areas are fed forage that is low in
selenium and consequently produce milk that is also low in
selenium. The same is true for other species involved in
agricultural production.

To prevent selenium deficiency, some producers are adding a
selenium yeast supplement to their rations created by Alltech
called Sel-Plex. Sel-Plex moves selenium supplementation forward by
providing the mineral in the natural form in which it occurs in
forages, grains and oilseeds. Putting a selenium supplement like
Sel-Plex in the diet of cattle translates to the mineral being
available in food produced from supplemented animals, which means
consumers get the nutrient naturally and are better able to fight
off disease.

Looking at Moscows Manezhnaya Square in the 1950s, few people
would recognize what has now become a must-see destination for foreign
visitors. Hardly anyone remembers the double-decker trolleybuses, the first
Soviet car, the Russo-Balt, or childrens sandboxes located right in the middle
of Tverskoi Boulevard.

The Moscow of the first half of the 20th century, glorified in
hundreds of Soviet-era films and songs, was incredibly different from
contemporary Moscow. What did the Soviet capital look like at the time? Moscow
Stories: A Twentieth Century Photo Album, a recent exhibit in the Lumiegrave;re
Brothers Photo Gallery located in the Central House of Artists, showed it to
those who never knew, and reminded those who have forgotten. The work of the
best Soviet photographers Boris Ignatovich, Naum Granovsky, Alexei Gostev, Emmanuil
Evzerikhin and Vladimir Stepanov were featured in this exhibit.

I was 17 when I took my first photos. It was 1957, said Stepanov.
We were taught to take pictures in Young Pioneers hobby groups, and there
were many of those groups in the Soviet Union at the time. My camera was dirt-cheap,
but the photos were very good. And you know, that was when I adopted a motto
for myself: lsquo;Photograph what no one else photographs.

Natalya Ponomaryova, the curator of the exhibit, discussed the
challenges faced by amateur photographers in the mid-century:

Not everyone could take photos of Moscow in the 1950s, and very
often security officials approached photographers and ruined the film by
exposing it to light, or even confiscated their cameras. As a result,
photographers started taking pictures of Moscow through car windows. You can
see these photos in the exhibit.

The show covers the 1934 meeting of the rescued members of the
Chelyuskin Arctic expedition and the 1953 farewell ceremony at Joseph Stalins
funeral, attended by thousands of people for three days and three nights. Most
of the big events are all shown: Russian revolutions, the opening of the
All-Russian Agricultural Exhibition, World War II, the construction of Moscow
State University in Sparrow Hills, the opening of Luzhniki Stadium and the
Fourth World Festival of Youth and Students.

But Soviet photographers trained their lenses on other things as
well.

Along with major public events, we also sought to show the
everyday life of Muscovites: leisure time in our beloved citys parks and
boulevards, an elephant walking near the Red Army Theater, children playing in
sandboxes on Tverskoi Boulevard, residents of the Maslovka and Zamoskvorechye
districts, said Ponomaryova.

Moscow life is also shown through human relationships. Photos of
amorous couples embracing near monuments or cinema box-offices, a picture of a
boy sitting near a monument reading a bookeach photo tells its own little
story.

The life of the city from the early 20th century through the 1960s
was displayed in 300 photos displayed in three rooms. Some people found that
that was not enough, however. The guest book features many emotional entries,
some worth noting:

Thank you for bringing me back to my childhood,
and thank you for letting our children know what our Moscow was like.

This is how Moscow history should be taught in
schools.

Its a pity that these are all just photos,
that everything is gone forever, like old movies. This exhibit is truly a
breath of fresh air amidst the urban jungle!

During its last days, the exhibition attracted a great number of
visitors. This exhibit has closed, but locals and tourists will have another
opportunity to cast a nostalgic glance over the Russian capital during the
second half of the Moscow Stories exhibition, which will cover the period from
the 1960s to the 1990s.

The Gorky Street (now the Tverskaya street) after the reconsruction, 1934. Source:the Lumiegrave;re
Brothers Photo Gallery / Naum Granovski

Join the Examiner.com and me, Dennis St. Pierre, for a live Qamp;A session Thursday (6:00 pm EST, 5:00 pm PT) with the always edgy and sultry Angelina Jolie. Angelina will talk about her acclaimed new movie, In The Land of Blood and Honey, and will answer your blog questions live!

The movie is Angelinas directorial debut and features an entirely local Bosnian cast, most of whom were children during the horrors and injustices of that 1990s war. Ms. Jolie also wrote the screenplay for the film.

Angelina states, The film is specific to the Bosnian War, but its also universal. I wanted to tell a story of how human relationships and behavior are deeply affected by living inside a war. One production release adds, The movie graphically illustrates the consequences of the lack of political will to intervene in a society stricken with conflict.

The film has already provoked both widespread controversy and accolades. My review will follow as soon as advance prints are available. In The Land of Blood and Honey is scheduled for release in the United States on December 23.