BATMAN's Dark Knight Busted !

Batman actor Christian Bale has been released on police bail after being questioned for four hours over allegations of assaulting his mother and his sister at a London hotel.


Sources said that Bale was accused of lashing out at his family members - pushing one of them - in an argument over a long-running family dispute.

Bale was arrested when he attended Belgravia police station in London today after his mother and sister had reported him to police.

He left the back of the station in a blacked out silver Mercedes people carrier and sped past the awaiting paparazzi and heavy security.

Bale gave a statement to detectives of his version of events in what was described by police sources as an allegation of a “minor” common assault.

The 34-year-old was bailed until September and will be allowed to fly back to his home in America.

Jenny Bale, 61, and daughter Sharon, 41, today said an "incident" had taken place but refused to give any details.

Sharon originally denied knowing anything about it but they said: "OK, there was an incident but the police are dealing with it.

"It is an extremely sensitive situation. There is nothing more I can say."

The alleged assault was believed to have taken place on Sunday night at Park Lane's Dorchester Hotel, where Bale was staying ahead of the screening of the new Batman blockbuster The Dark Knight in London's West End on Monday night.

Mrs Bale said: "Yes I was there and yes there was a family situation but the police are handling it and I cannot say anymore at the moment.

"We didn't call the police to the scene. I can't say anymore but we didn't call the police."

Mrs Bale and her daughter are said to have gone to a police station in Hampshire to make the allegation, which was subsequently referred to the Metropolitan Police.

A Scotland Yard spokesman said: "A 34-year-old man attended a London Police Station on Tuesday by appointment and was arrested in connection with an allegation of assault."

Sources said the argument was over a long-running family dispute.

A statement issued through Bale’s lawyers said: “Christian Bale attended a London Police station today, on a voluntary basis, in order to assist with an allegation that had been made against him to the police by his mother and sister.

“Mr Bale, who denies the allegation, co-operated throughout, and left the station without any charge being made against him by police.”

Bale was born in Haverfordwest, Pembrokeshire, South Wales, in 1974. His mother was a circus clown and dancer and the actor grew up in a hippy environment.

In an interview three years ago Jenny said: "I was a dancer in the circus for a while. Christian didn't perform but he often watched me.

"I think he loved all the excitement and acting just happened after that. We were always surrounded by animals too. We'd take in every stray cat and dog, so it was quite mad."

His father, David, grew up in South Africa and ran away to sea, ending up in Britain where he became a pilot stationed in RAF Brawdy near Haverfordwest.

The family moved around via Portugal and Oxfordshire before settling in Bournemouth, where Christian spent his childhood with sisters Louise and Sharon.

Mr Bale was a devoted animal rights and environmental activist. He split from his wife in 1991, when Christian was 13, and four years later the actor moved with him to Los Angeles.

David died, at 62, from a brain tumour in December 2003 and Christian was at his bedside. Since moving to LA he has only been back to Wales once.

Mrs Bale lives in a modest, detached house in Southbourne in nearby Bournemouth.

In a previous interview, Mrs Bale said her famous son had never shunned or snubbed her.

Sharon lives in a semi-detached house near Wimborne, Dorset, which today had the blinds pulled down.

Despite the alleged incident and report, Bale attended the first European screening of The Dark Knight on Monday night.

He was joined on the red carpet by Maggie Gyllenhaal, who plays love interest Rachel Dawes, and Sir Michael Caine who plays Bruce Wayne's faithful butler and father figure Alfred. The film took a record $158.3 million in its opening weekend at the US box office overtaking Spiderman 3, which took $151.1 million.

Interest in the movie has increased because of the death of Heath Ledger. His performance as Batman's arch nemesis The Joker, has been widely tipped by critics, as well as Caine, to receive a posthumous Oscar.

Watch Chrsitian Batman Bale talk about his "dark side"

MAN TRIES TO ROB STORE WITH PALM TREE ?

DELAND, Fla. -- A Central Florida man armed only with a large palm frond robbed a store in a crime described by police as one of the most bizarre they've ever seen.

Police said Gelando Olivieri attempted to rob the V&F Discount Beverage store in DeLand by threatening harm with a spiked Spanish bayonet, a palmetto-like plant with sharp points on its leaves.

"The man came in with the branch. I have never seen anything like this," owner Goutam Sarkar told the DeLand-Deltona Beacon Thursday.

Surveillance video showed Olivieri wildly waving the palm frond in front of a worker's face.

Investigators said Olivieri threatened to use the leaves to stab if he wasn't given $50.

"(The plant) was sharp," Sarkar said.

Before any money was exchanged, Oliveiri was chased out of the store by a man armed with a bar stool.

Oliveri was arrested a short time after the crime and charged with armed robbery.

Some residents called the Oliveri creative after hearing about the crime.

A police official said the leaves of the Spanish bayonet are like knives and that people often plant them under windows to stop break-ins.

Watch Local 6 News for more on this story.

LAPTOP THIEVES BUSTED BY LAPTOP ???

WHITE PLAINS — The thieves were voracious, filching flat-screen televisions and computer games, purloining iPods and DVDs, even making off with a box of liquor and a set of car rims in a burglary two weeks ago at an apartment three young people shared here. Luckily, they also took two laptop computers.
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White Plains Police Department, via Associated Press

One of the laptops was a Macintosh belonging to Kait Duplaga, who works at the Apple store in the Westchester mall and thus knows how to use all its bells and whistles. While the police were coming up dry, Ms. Duplaga exploited the latest software applications installed on her laptop to track down the culprits and even get their photographs.

On Wednesday, the police arrested Edmon Shahikian, 23, of Katonah, and Ian Frias, 20, who lives in the Bronx. Virtually all of the property stolen from the apartment was recovered at the two men’s homes. They face charges of burglary and possession of stolen property; Mr. Shahikian was released on $3,500 bail, while Mr. Frias was at the Westchester County Jail, held in $7,500 bail.

“It doesn’t get much better than their bringing us a picture of the guy actually using the stolen property,” Daniel Jackson, the deputy commissioner of public safety in White Plains, said in a telephone interview on Friday. “It certainly made our job easier. The fact that they knew who these guys were certainly added solvability.”

The high-tech solving of the White Plains burglary, which was reported Friday in The Journal News, is one of several recent cases in which the police and crime victims have turned the keyboards on their adversaries, so to speak, taking advantage of computer software and other high-tech tools.

In March in Modesto, Calif., for example, the police recovered a stolen computer containing vital personal information, including Social Security numbers, belonging to the public school system’s 3,500 employees. Detectives used tracking software on the computer to apprehend a suspect, who had a long criminal record. The police said he had stolen the computer from a data processing firm, perhaps with the intention of committing identity theft.

Here in White Plains, a break in the case came on Tuesday when a friend of Ms. Duplaga’s sent her a congratulatory text message on the return of her stolen computer. “She said, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ and her friend said, ‘Well, you popped up as being online,’ ” Mr. Jackson said.

He said that Ms. Duplaga immediately signed on to another Macintosh computer and, using a feature called “Back to My Mac,” was able to gain access to her missing laptop remotely. She could see that that the person who had her computer was shopping for beds, Mr. Jackson said. Then it occurred to her that she could activate a camera on her laptop and watch the thief live.

At first, the photo application revealed only a smoky room and an empty chair, Mr. Jackson said, but then a man sat down. Ms. Duplaga, again using remote technology, typed in the command to snap a photo. “When you take a picture with that computer, it shows a countdown, and when it does, this guy figures out what’s going on,” Mr. Jackson said. “It all clicks for him, and he puts his hand up to cover the lens, but it was too late. She had already taken the picture.”

Had the suspect been a complete stranger, the photographic evidence would have been a “great lead,” but not the decisive clue, Mr. Jackson said. He said that when Ms. Duplaga described the tattooed subject of the picture to one of her roommates, the roommate replied: “Oh, I know exactly who that is — it’s Ian,” referring to Mr. Frias.

Mr. Frias and Mr. Shahikian, it turns out, had been among the guests at a party at the apartment weeks before, and were friends of friends of the victims, as Mr. Jackson put it. Ms. Duplaga was able to retrieve a photograph of Mr. Shahikian from the laptop as well, but Mr. Jackson was not aware of the circumstances. Mr. Jackson said that Mr. Frias and Mr. Shahikian were arrested last year on a felony marijuana possession charge, but are not career criminals. The disposition of their cases was not known.

Mr. Jackson said that Ms. Duplaga did not wish to be interviewed. On Friday, no one answered the door at the beige colonial-style house on Ridgeview Avenue where she rents an apartment diagonally opposite a church. The neighborhood is on the edge of the city’s downtown; in recent years, many of the prewar homes have been renovated.

An Apple spokesman declined to comment on the case or on the phenomenon of tracking criminals through computer software.

“Back to My Mac” is part of an online service that costs $99 per year and allows users to gain access to their personal computer from any connected Macintosh computer with the operating system Leopard. The software that Ms. Duplaga used to take a picture of the thief, called PhotoBooth, is standard on all newer Apple laptop models, perhaps an unintended new frontier in crime-fighting.

“It’s certainly a great use of what was probably meant as a business product,” Mr. Jackson said. “But if she had taken the picture and didn’t know who he was, we wouldn’t be in the same place as far as the investigation goes.”
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THE MICHAEL VICK STORY

"Obviously there's one element of the excitment of a fight to the death that people are sometimes attracted to," says Ascione, a professor of psychology at Utah State University and the author of several books on animal cruelty. "But then when you look at the people who go to a dog fight, you have other people motivated by other things. Some are there for the gambling, others who want to see the blood, others who are looking to make a drug deal, others trying to build a reputation."

There is no shortage of controversial sports stories, but for sheer breadth of issues, it's hard to match what has fallen out of the Michael Vick saga.

Vick pleaded guilty to his part in a dogfighting ring in court papers filed Friday, saying he funded gambling activities and was complicit in the killing of "six to eight dogs," but said he never gambled or received proceeds from fight purses. Vick will formally enter a plea at the U.S. District Court in Richmond tomorrow, but the NFL moved quickly to suspend him indefinitely on Friday, noting the conneciton to gambling in particular.
THE FULL STORY - NY DAILY NEWS

THE AWESOME MUGSHOT COLLECTION # 1

THIS IS PERFECT ON SO MANY LEVELS

WHEN A FACIAL TATOO IS A BAD IDEA

FULL STORY ON THE SMOKING GUN

BUSH HAS WATCH JACKED BY ALBANIAN ! ! !

HE LOSES IT BETWEEN THE 3:17 AND 3:12 MARK

glumbert.com - Bush's watch stolen in Albania

NOW ITS OKAY TO SAY F*CK & SH*T ON TV ???

Congratulations to Fox Broadcasting for winning a major skirmish in Hollywood's ongoing decency/indecency battle with the FCC! Now First Amendment rights crusaders like Cher and Nicole Richie can say the F-word on TV in prime time!

A New York appeals court said Monday that the FCC's standing rule against "fleeting expletives" on TV doesn't make legal sense and might be unconstitutional. Fox was in hot water because Cher and Nicole Richie both spiced up their comments during the Billboard Music Awards with some naughty words. (U2's Bono later let loose with the F-bomb on a 2004 NBC Broadcast.)

The New York appeals court even said the FCC was acting "arbitrary and capricious" by saying Fox and other networks can't air fleeting expletives. That's about the worst thing you can say about a regulatory agency whose authority over decency issues is questionable to begin with. And believe me, FCC chairman Kevin Martin is p*ssed!

"If ever there was an appropriate time for Commission action, this was it," Martin says in a statement Tuesday. "If we can’t restrict the use of the words 'fuck' and 'shit' during prime time, Hollywood will be able to say anything they want, whenever they want." Pretty salty talk for the normally-mild-mannered Martin.

Fox needs to make hay while the sun shines here. The network should make its court victory the basis of a whole new branding campaign. Here's my suggestion for the network's new tagline: "Fox: Now with Fleeting Expletives!"

But I'm still confused. As it now stands, saying the F-word and the S-word on TV during prime time is OK, as long as its done in a "fleeting" manner. Well, define "fleeting." Oh yeah, I know: "I could never succeed in intelligibly [defining obscenity], but I know it when I see it." Thanks for nothin' Justice Stewart.

Thankfully we're not flying completely blind. Cher and Richie provide instructive examples of how to toss off juicy four-letter words in a "fleeting" manner. Observe.

Here's Cher talking about career ups and downs at the 2003 Billboard Music Awards:

"I’ve also had critics for the last 40 years saying that I was on my way out every year. Right. So fuck ‘em. I still have a job and they don’t."

Nice one.

Here's Richie at the 2003 Music Awards talking about her hit TV show "The Simple Life":

"Why do they even call it 'The Simple Life?' Have you ever tried to get cow shit out of a Prada purse? It's not so fucking simple."

Well done.

Instead of crying to the Supreme Court (as it certainly will), maybe the FCC should really reverse its TV obscenity policy, but just for Fox. The commission should require each lame Fox sit com and reality show to use at least 30 "fleeting" obscenities during each show. For Fox, which has made a business of pushing decency standards, there'd be no more envelope to push.

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