Christie's has just sold two iconic works of art by Andy Warhol for record sums.

By far the more expensive was Green Car Crash, which sold for more than £36m; few of the papers reporting the story, however, bothered to reproduce the picture itself.

Instead, the less pricey Lemon Marilyn, a snip at £14m, graced the front pages - because even when she costs less, Marilyn always sells more.

In 1945, when at the age of 19 she was successfully modelling as Norma Jeane Dougherty, an advertising association named her "The Most Advertised Girl in the World!".

Even with a different name, she's still making everyone else rich. Warhol's coloured Marilyns are some of the most recognisable, and valuable, 20th century works of art, each now worth about the same as a Van Gogh.   more »

Gore even evoked chickens becoming paralyzed by fear and repetitive motion and said TV makes people passive.

"Being in the television business& one of the most valuable things you can have is a time slot following a hit show because even with a remote, there [are] millions of us who'll sit and watch a show and be sufficiently immobilized by it that you can't even move a thumb muscle. We're turning into a nation of zombies, lobotomised by the 'Tube'.

"Anybody who has spent time growing up on a farm has probably had that experience [of hypnotizing chickens with repetitive movements], but the point is larger than that.

"The point is that instead of engaging in a free and vigorous discussion that anybody can take part in, instead now candidates for office and those who want to influence public opinion use these sophisticated propagandistic techniques to try to give emotional impressions and sort of, you know, try and herd people this way or that."   more »

The Bush Regime has blown chances to capture or kill Osama bin Laden, to win wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and now to have any chance of maintaining a stable nuclear-armed Pakistan.

Like U.S. policy toward the shah's Iran in the 1960s and 1970s, the Bush Gang, despite a rhetorical commitment to spread democracy around the world, has put all of its eggs in the basket of an autocrat unlikely to survive – in this case, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf.

Although Musharraf uses the U.S. war on terror and desire to get bin Laden to play the United States like a fiddle, the Bush regime's reasoning is that alternatives to Musharraf are worse.

If the United States keeps solidly backing Musharraf, however, things could get much worse than even bin Laden using Pakistan as a haven: a nuclear-armed Pakistan controlled by radical Islamists.   more »

The first conclusion is that I was the darling of the so-called left as long as I limited my protests to George Bush and the Republican Party. Of course, I was slandered and libeled by the right as a "tool" of the Democratic Party.

This label was to marginalize me and my message. How could a woman have an original thought, or be working outside of our "two-party" system?

However, when I started to hold the Democratic Party to the same standards that I held the Republican Party, support for my cause started to erode and the "left" started labeling me with the same slurs that the right used.

I guess no one paid attention to me when I said that the issue of peace and people dying for no reason is not a matter of "right or left", but "right and wrong."   more »

The US News media are only too ready to spin this story into an anti-Chavez propaganda piece.

The 'news' is framed as a simple matter of censorship: Prominent Venezuelan TV station RCTV is being silenced by the authoritarian government of President Hugo Chávez, who is punishing the station for its political criticism of his government.

According to CNN reporter T.J. Holmes, the issues are easy to understand: RCTV "is going to be shut down, is going to get off the air, because of President Hugo Chávez, not a big fan of it."

Dubbing RCTV "a voice of free speech," Holmes explained, "Chavez, in a move that's angered a lot of free-speech groups, is refusing now to renew the license of this television station that has been critical of his government."   more »