2 Relatives of Jennifer Hudson Reported Slain

The mother and brother of the Academy Award-winning actress Jennifer Hudson were found shot to death inside her mother’s house on the South Side of Chicago on Friday afternoon, and the police were said to be looking for her 7-year-old nephew.
The police confirmed that Ms. Hudson’s mother, Darnell Hudson Donerson, 57, was one of the victims, the ABC affiliate WLS reported on its Web site. A neighbor reportedly told the entertainment Web site TMZ that the other victim had been identified as Ms. Hudson’s brother, Jason S. Hudson, 29.
The police said they were searching for Ms. Hudson’s nephew, Julian King, who had been reported missing on Friday morning.
According to The Chicago Tribune and The Chicago Sun-Times, the police arrested William Balfour late Friday.
According to TMZ, Mr. Balfour reportedly listed the address of Ms. Hudson’s mother in the Englewood neighborhood as his place of residence within the last year. The Web site also reported that according to the Illinois Department of Corrections, Mr. Balfour is on parole after serving time in prison for attempted murder.
WLS reported that neighbors told the police they heard shots fired on Friday morning.
But it was not until Friday afternoon that a family member found Ms. Donerson in the living room and left the house to call the police, the television station reported. When they arrived at the house, they found Mr. Hudson in a bedroom.
The police said that there was no sign of forced entry at the house, and that the shootings were the result of a domestic dispute.
The Rev. Willie Davis, pastor of the Progressive Baptist Church, where Ms. Hudson and her family were members, said that despite her daughter’s celebrity, Ms. Donerson chose to stay and live on the South Side, WLS reported.
“That says a lot about the fact of the kind of family Jennifer comes from,” Mr. Davis was quoted as saying. “They’re a family of faith. They want to be attached to their roots.”
Church leaders said they were told that Ms. Hudson was flying home to Chicago from Tampa, Fla., according to the television station.
In 2007, Ms. Hudson won an Oscar for best supporting actress in her role as Effie White in the film "Dreamgirls."

Sarah Palin: disaster or superstar? Some Republicans want her to run in 2012

To many people, voters and pundits alike, she's a disaster, one of the single worst vice-presidential picks in American history.
To core Republican supporters, there's an alternate Sarah Palin universe where she basks in superstar status and is a strong contender for the Republican presidential nomination in 2012 should John McCain lose on Nov. 4.
"Palin draws large crowds and has energized Reagan Republicans, gun owners, women and people of faith," Grover Norquist, president of the anti-tax lobbying group Americans for Tax Reform, said recently.
"She is an asset and the most consequential VP candidate in a generation."
Others scratch their heads at such assessments, noting even longtime Republicans have turned on Palin, who's currently embroiled in her latest controversies - she's spent US$150,000 of Republican cash on designer clothing since McCain chose her as his running mate in late August, and she's charged the state of Alaska for her children's campaign travelling expenses.
Her addition to the Republican ticket helped convince retired Gen. Colin Powell to swing his support behind Democrat Barack Obama. It was also the tipping point for Ken Adelman, a prominent Republican who once worked for Ronald Reagan. Adelman says he, too, will vote for the Illinois senator.
Independent voters have cited Palin as the reason they're opting for Obama on Nov. 4. And a Wall Street Journal/NBC poll conducted earlier this week suggested Palin's lack of qualifications to be president is voters' No. 1 concern regarding McCain.
"If the Republican party is to survive the next decade or so as a major competitor for control of national politics in the United States, it will have to be a vastly different Republican party in four years," says Cal Jillson, a political science professor at Southern Methodist University and author of "Pursuing the American Dream: Opportunity and Exclusion Over Four Centuries."
"They will have to go into a major period of reassessment. Perhaps if Sarah Palin emerges as an extraordinarily different person than she is today - in other words she has gone to school and has learned all about foreign and domestic policy and has recreated herself as a knowledgeable figure in the Republican party - then it's a possibility she could mount a successful run."
Others say it doesn't matter that Palin has alienated voters, pundits and moderate Republicans. What's important, they say, is that she is beloved by core Republican supporters due to her right-wing views on a wide range of issues such as same-sex marriage, abortion and immigration.
A Washington Post tracking poll released earlier this week indicated that Republicans and conservatives, for the most part, believe Palin's selection demonstrated the strength of McCain's ability to make sound decisions.
More than seven in 10 Republicans, and just under that number of self-identified "conservatives," said McCain's choice of Palin made them more confident in the kind of decisions he'd make as commander in chief.
"In most presidential primaries, the candidate most in line with the conservative or liberal base of their party winds up winning," wrote the Post's Chris Cillizza, noting that McCain was the rare exception to that rule.
"Palin is clearly of the conservative base in a real and meaningful way; they view her as their first real spokesperson on the national stage in recent memory - perhaps since Ronald Reagan. It's hard to imagine those feelings going away because she has not worn well with either moderate and independent-minded voters (or) the conservative media."
But it's not enough to energize the base, Jillson said Thursday, since the base's core ideals are no longer resonating with Americans who are decisively growing more socially progressive. They're no longer excited by the Reagan-era tenets of social and fiscal conservatism and aggressive foreign policy decisions.
"As they consider Sarah Palin, the Republicans will need to ask themselves if the path to plausibility is to look back to the past at Ronald Reagan or to look forward to the 21st century and create a new party for this era," Jillson said.
"It's really a crossroads for the party, and if they misplay it, they will wander in the wilderness for a decade or two."

AC/DC's ANGUS YOUNG Talks To ITN MUSIC; Video Available - Oct. 23, 2008

AC/DC guitarist Angus Young talked with UK's ITN Music about the band's new album, "Black Ice", and the fact that the legendary Australian rockers are going back on tour. "I suppose the one advatage we had over a lot of other bands was that we were the age that we were playing to," the 53-year-old Young said. "We were the age of the audience at the time. I think in hindsight that was kind of who we were aiming at and we still seem to pull in younger ones at that level."Watch the two-minute report below.AC/DC's new album, "Black Ice" — which arrived in the U.S. on Monday (October 20) exclusively at Wal-Mart stores, Walmart.com and ACDC.com — is expected to sell more 800,000 copies in the United States in its first week of release.Wal-Mart has reportedly purchased 2.5 million copies of "Black Ice" on a no-return basis. The band's last effort, 2000's "Stiff Upper Lip", sold 131,000 copies in its first week of release and has shifted more than 900,000 units to date.AC/DC has sold 26.4 million albums since 1991, when SoundScan first began tracking record sales

Britney Spears case ends in mistrial

After three days of deliberations, a dozen citizens threw up their hands Tuesday and said they could not agree on whether the oft-troubled entertainer was guilty of driving without a license during a fender bender last year. Ten jurors wanted to acquit. Two voted for conviction.A prosecutor later said that in light of the jury split, he was dropping the case, but not his belief that Spears was guilty. Voicing a complaint common to those who prosecute famous defendants in matters big and small, Deputy City Atty. Michael Amerian said, "It just goes to show, I think, how difficult it is to convict any celebrity of a crime here in Los Angeles."The grudging dismissal was a fitting conclusion to a 13-month legal battle that featured lofty principles, rock-bottom stakes and the complete absence of the woman at its center.Spears, 26, did not set foot in Superior Court in Van Nuys during the trial. In court papers, her attorney wrote that the singer was "unable to participate meaningfully in this matter." Her father, Jamie, who has controlled her estate, finances and healthcare since shortly after her January hospitalization in a psychiatric ward, testified on her behalf, but he refused a request from her own lawyer that she take the stand.
"Britney doesn't like court," the lawyer, Michael Flanagan, shrugged.The actual implications of the misdemeanor were minimal for both sides. A guilty plea would not have meant jail time or even points on Spears' driving record. And by the time the trial got underway, she had been licensed in California for more than a year."This is not the crime of the century," the prosecutor conceded in his summation.The charge stemmed from an Aug. 6, 2007, accident in which Spears' sedan struck a parked car in Studio City. A hit-and-run charge was dropped after she reached a civil settlement with the other motorist. The license charge -- filed after investigators pulled her DMV records and found she was not licensed in California -- remained.The only issue before jurors was whether Spears considered Los Angeles her true home -- "domicile" under the vehicle code -- and therefore needed a state license. Her defense argued that her native Louisiana was her real home. Her father testified that she carried a Louisiana license at the time of the accident because she planned to return there as soon as child custody arrangements allowed.The city attorney's office routinely prosecutes people for driving without a license -- nearly 3,700 this year alone. In the overwhelming majority of cases, the defendant accepts a guilty plea to the misdemeanor or to a traffic infraction. In other cases, the charge is dropped when a defendant obtains a valid license. A trial is virtually unheard of.The prosecutor said he knew of no other defendants to go before a jury. Spears' attorney was more definitive."Nobody has ever gone to trial on it. Never," Flanagan said.For both sides, the case became a matter of principle. Flanagan, one of the deans of the city's traffic law bar, said the government's treatment of Spears was beyond anything he had seen in his 38 years of practice.Other defendants got a traffic ticket and a fine, not a misdemeanor, he said."It was just wrong," he said.For his part, the prosecutor suggested that it was Spears who sought special treatment. Amerian called her defense "bullying" and said that even public defenders were thanking him for not "caving."He denied that the prosecution had anything to do with his campaign for city attorney.The prosecutor tried to settle the case in exchange for a guilty plea. Initially, he offered her 12 months probation and a $150 fine and when her attorney objected to the probation, he said she could avoid probation by paying the maximum fine -- $1,000.Spears' attorney rejected that, saying that his client did not want "to buy her way out of probation."The upshot was a five-day trial."It was multiple thousands of dollars that was wasted in this case," Flanagan said, adding that his own bill to Spears "is probably a world record" for a driving without a license case.The foreman said that because the jury was in the dark about the events surrounding the charge -- the panelists were told only that Spears had been driving on the day in question -- they doubted the necessity of the trial."It's a natural reaction to feel it's a waste of time," said foreman Gary Moy, 45.He voted for conviction and said others appeared swayed by Spears' fame."Many of the jurors have a celebrity complex," he said.Asked at the close of a news conference if the case would make it hard for him to listen to Spears' music, Amerian said, "You mean harder than it was before?" He then apologized and said he had sympathy for "what she's gone through."