Danny Puff

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Actress Megan Fox has been cast in the new "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" movie, according to filmmaker Michael Bay, who directed the actress in two Transformers films.

The two appear to have resolved their differences after Fox compared Bay to Hitler in a magazine interview. The actress was replaced by British model and actress Rosie Huntington-Whiteley in the third Transformer film after making the comment.

"TMNT: we are bringing Megan Fox back into the family!" Bay wrote on his website.

Fox's agent confirmed that the 26-year-old new mother would play April O'Neil, the crime-fighting turtles' human friend.

In an interview with the British magazine "Wonderland" in 2009 Fox described Bay as nightmare to work with.

"He wants to be like Hitler on his sets, and he is," she said.

Bay responded in a 2011 GQ interview saying executive producer Steven Spielberg had advised him to fire Fox.

"Megan loves to get a response," he said. "And she does it in kind of the wrong way."

Bay has said that one of the original creators of the Ninja Turtles was helping to develop the script for the film that is due to be released in May 2014.

(Reporting by Noreen O'Donnell; editing by Patricia Reaney and Jackie Frank)

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GAUHATI, India (AP) Adolf Hitler is running for election in India. So is Frankenstein.

The tiny northeast Indian state of Meghalaya has a special fascination for interesting and sometimes controversial names, and the ballot for state elections Saturday is proof.

Among the 345 contestants running for the state assembly are Frankenstein Momin, Billykid Sangma, Field Marshal Mawphniang and Romeo Rani. Some, like Kenedy Marak, Kennedy Cornelius Khyriem and Jhim Carter Sangma, are clearly hoping for the electoral success of their namesake American presidents.

Then there is Hitler.

This 54-year-old father of three has won three elections to the state assembly with little controversy over being named after the Nazi dictator.

His father had worked with the British army, but apparently developed enough of a fascination with Great Britain's archenemy to name his son Adolf Hitler though he also gave him the middle name Lu, Hitler said.

"I am aware at one point of time Adolf Hitler was the most hated person on Earth for the genocide of the Jews. But my father added 'Lu' in between, naming me Adolf Lu Hitler, and that's why I am different," Hitler told The Associated Press from the small village of Mansingre, 200 kilometers (125 miles) west of Gauhati, the capital of the nearby state of Assam.

Hitler said his name has not stopped him from traveling the world, including to the United States and Germany.

"I never had problems obtaining a visa but I was asked many times during immigration as to why I should have such a name. I told the immigration staff I possibly didn't have a role in my naming," he said.

India had thousands of troops fighting alongside the allies in World War II, especially in North Africa and Burma, but many Indians view Hitler not as the personification of evil but as a figure of fascination. Hitler's book "Mein Kampf" is prominently displayed at many Indian bookstores. The owner of a menswear shop named his store "Hitler," then expressed puzzlement last year after Israel complained.

Musfika Haq, a teacher in Meghalaya's capital, Shillong, said such names are common in the state.

"Parents obviously get fascinated by names of well-known or great leaders, but must be unaware that some of them, like Hitler, had been highly controversial," he said.

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ATHENS (Reuters) - Fewer Greeks are walking down the aisle as their country's deep economic crisis takes a toll on their famously lavish weddings, an age-old ritual that has become an unbearable cost for those struggling to make ends meet.

Religious wedding ceremonies in bell tower chapels overflowing with flowers, meter-high candles and candy wrapped in tulle, are a deeply ingrained tradition in Greece, where the powerful Orthodox Church plays an influential role in society.

But as recession slides into its sixth year, unemployment rises and poverty spreads, a church wedding is a luxury many couples can no longer afford.

For 28-year-old bride Nafsika Koutrokoi, who works at a butcher shop, fulfilling her dream of marrying her fianc , a cable technician, in church was a difficult decision that required huge sacrifices.

"Things are quite tough right now," she said after the wedding. "We cut down on many things, from invitations to the reception, on everything."

The number of Greek couples who tied the knot in church tumbled to 28,000 in 2011, two years into Europe's debt crisis, compared to the pre-crisis level of 40,000 in 2008, according to the country's statistic service ELSTAT.

In contrast, the number of low-key civil unions skyrocketed to 26,000 in 2011 from about 8,000 a decade earlier.

As Greece's crisis deepens and successive governments are forced to impose wage cuts and tax rises in exchange for the foreign aid keeping the economy afloat, the wedding industry's countless shops and planners are also feeling the pinch.

"They want whatever is cheapest, which often is not possible because the cost of everything is rising," said wedding shop owner Anastasia Theophanopoulou, whose family business has sold wedding supplies for decades. "There is a drastic drop."

The downturn has also had an unexpected effect on another ceremony revered by many Greeks - funerals.

With more and more Greeks having trouble paying for funerals, municipal authorities in Athens have reduced the cost of burial in the capital's cemeteries.

"There was always money for the deceased, but now people are in a very bad state," said Athens City Councillor Nikos Kokkinos, who is responsible for cemeteries.

Some Greeks do not collect their dead loved ones from the hospital to avoid having to pay for the funeral. Others can no longer afford a traditional marble tombstone and so leave plots as simple dirt mounds overgrown by weeds, a cemetery official said.

Funeral home director Vassilis Tranou has been forced to lower prices at his family-run business and sometimes will do a funeral - which costs at least 1,500 euros - for free.

"People don't have the money anymore or they don't spend like they used to, and Greeks are usually people who take great care with the people they have lost," Tranou said.

"It makes your hair stand on end," he said, recounting the story of a man who was only able to bury his mother by selling a family heirloom of four gold coins.

(Writing by Karolina Tagaris; Editing by Roger Atwood)

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WELLINGTON, New Zealand (AP) A royal penguin found stranded on a New Zealand beach has died.

The penguin was found Sunday by hikers. It was emaciated and suffering kidney failure and was taken to the Wellington Zoo.

It was just the fourth time over the past 100 years that a royal penguin has been found on the North Island of New Zealand. They generally live more than 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometers) away around Macquarie Island, about halfway between New Zealand and Antarctica.

Lisa Argilla, the veterinary science manager at the zoo, said Friday that they suspect the penguin suffered multiple organ failure. It was severely underweight, she said, and had no reserves.

She said the zoo did the best it could.

The penguin's arrival has revived memories of another penguin, an emperor nicknamed Happy Feet, that arrived in 2011 and whose recovery at the zoo captured the hearts of many before he was released.

Royal penguins have a yellow crest, eat krill and squid and generally live on and around Macquarie Island, about halfway between New Zealand and Antarctica.

Jenny Boyne, who lives near Tora Beach where the penguin was found, said she drove it to the zoo in a fish crate after staff suggested she bring it in.

"It sat down like a little quiet lamb," she said.

The bird stood up briefly a couple of times and honked but generally lay still for the two-hour journey, she said. She blasted the air conditioning and spritzed the bird with water after zoo staff instructed her to keep it cool. She said she was surprised it had no significant smell.

Argilla said the penguin weighed about 2.7 kilograms (6 pounds) when it arrived.

The penguin was about 1 year old, 50 centimeters (20 inches) long and its sex had not been determined, Argilla said.

Royal penguins can grow to about 75 centimeters (30 inches) and 5.5 kilograms (12 pounds). They are considered a threatened species but not endangered. They shed all their feathers during an annual molt, which the New Zealand penguin had been doing when found.

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NEW YORK (Reuters) - An upstate New York man who died on the way to his late wife's wake was buried in a plot beside her on Wednesday, after a dual funeral service that capped a 66-year marriage, their daughter said on Thursday.

Norman Hendrickson, 94, a retired assistant postmaster in an Albany suburb, stopped breathing in the limousine on the way to a wake on Saturday for his late wife Gwen, who died earlier this month after suffering for years from Parkinson's Disease, daughter Norma said.

Funeral home staffers laid Hendrickson in a casket and placed him beside an urn containing his wife's remains in a viewing room, while daughter Merrilyne posted a light-hearted sign for arriving mourners:

"Surprise - it's a Double-Header - Norman and Gwen Hendrickson - February 16, 2013."

Norma Hendrickson said her parents were buried side by side in the same plot on Wednesday, along with some of the ashes of their late son, who died in 2008, and a watercolour painting her sister Merrilyne had made for them.

Funeral director Elizabeth Nichols-Ross, a family friend, said the couple laughed a lot and would have enjoyed the irony of the situation - especially Norman, who loved jokes.

"I don't blush easily, but he told ones that made you blush," she said.

She joked with the family that their father, who was known to be thrifty, would have loved to save the costs of a second funeral, so she didn't charge the family for two services.

Mourners took the surprise in stride, Nichols-Ross said.

"Oh, that doesn't surprise me," she quoted one mourner as saying. "He wanted to be with Gwen.'"

(Editing by Cynthia Johnston and Todd Eastham)

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NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) Mindy McCready's funeral has been scheduled for Tuesday in her hometown of Fort Myers, Fla.

The funeral for the late country star will be held at Crossroads Church. A Friday news release says a Nashville memorial organized by friends and the music community is tentatively scheduled for March 6 at Cathedral of the Incarnation.

McCready committed suicide Sunday at her home in Heber Springs, Ark., days after leaving a court-ordered substance abuse treatment program. The 37-year-old mother of two died from a single gunshot to the head about a month after her longtime boyfriend David Wilson was believed to have killed himself in the same location.

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NEW YORK (Reuters) - Rapper Jay-Z and Justin Timberlake are teaming up for a 12-city summer stadium tour that will include concerts in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Chicago, music promoter Live Nation said on Friday.

The "Legends of the Summer" tour will kick off at the Roger's Center in Toronto on July 17, and finish on August 16 at the Sun Life Stadium in Miami.

Venues in Boston, Detroit and Baltimore will also be included in the tour.

Earlier this week Live Nation said the duo, who together have won 23 Grammy awards and two Emmys and have sold 67 million albums, will also be performing together in London at the Wireless Festival on July 12-13.

Timberlake's new album, "The 20/20 Experience," which will be released next month, features "Suit & Tie," a collaboration with Jay-Z. The two performed a duet together at the Grammy Awards earlier this month.

(Reporting by Noreen O'Donnell; Editing by Patricia Reaney and Vicki Allen)

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VALLEJO, California (Reuters) - Giant goldfish have mysteriously found their way into the famously crystalline waters of Lake Tahoe, the nation's second-deepest lake, alarming researchers and raising questions about the invasive species' long-term effects.

Goldfish weighing as much as 4 pounds and measuring up to a 1-1/2 feet in length have recently been caught in Tahoe, which straddles the California-Nevada border, and scientists say the influx threatens native species while posing a potential waste pollution problem.

"These fish are competing with the native fish, and that's a big part of the problem," said Heather Segale, spokeswoman for the Tahoe Environmental Research Center at the University of California at Davis.

A group of researchers from Davis, the University of Nevada at Reno, and the fish and wildlife departments of both California and Nevada were the first to study the presence of goldfish in Lake Tahoe, beginning an annual survey in 2006.

In 2011, the group began a project to reduce the number of goldfish and other non-native fish from the lake through "electrofishing," dangling metal wires from the bottom of a boat to stun fish with electrical current, then capturing the fish as they float to the surface.

Researchers then sort the fish, releasing native species and sport fish such as trout, and removing the rest.

The project has rid the lake of 50 to 60 goldfish a year since 2011, but their foraging abilities and potential to multiply means removal efforts must continue to keep populations under control, said Christine Ngai of the University of Nevada.

The influx at Tahoe, at the base of a world-class ski area in the eastern Sierra Nevada mountain range, is believed to have originated from specimens dumped from a fish bowl by pet owners who no longer wanted them.

Some used as bait may also have escaped into the lake over time, Ngai said. Goldfish, members of the carp family, are known to grow in size when they inhabit larger environments.

While their precise numbers are difficult to track, the proliferation of large goldfish in the wild is not unique to Tahoe. James Schardt, an invasive species expert for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, said he has received reports of giant goldfish in lakes from around the country, mostly from the Great Lakes.

"Goldfish are very good at getting what they need," Ngai said. "They can potentially compete with native fish for food, vegetation and bugs."

"Because they eat a lot, they also excrete a lot. They can transfer that into the water and encourage algae growth," she added, saying that could create murky water.

With a maximum depth of 1,645 feet and an average depth of 1,000 feet, the 22-mile-wide lake is the nation's deepest after Crater Lake in Oregon and the 10th deepest on Earth.

It is also one of the clearest in the world, with visibility recently measured to a depth of 70 feet, reduced from 100 feet when clarity readings were first taken in the 1960s, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

(Editing by Steve Gorman, Cynthia Johnston and Todd Eastham)

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RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) It took Ryan Travis Christian four days to fill the paper sheet stretching 6 -by-30 feet and push-pinned to the white museum wall. Spreading charcoal with a chamois and Latex-gloved hand, he conjured a dreamy cloudscape of reclining, mouthless ghosts, zigzag patterns and disembodied duck heads.

Then, on the fifth day of the two-week installation at the Contemporary Art Museum, he began blacking over his original design. By day's end, it was gone swallowed in the undulating coils of a gigantic black and white snake.

"That's how it goes in my studio," the Chicago-based artist said nonchalantly as he stood beside the re-imagined piece. "There's a lot of pieces that I'll work on, become unhappy with, eradicate them, come out with something completely different. It's all very responsive. But yeah. People were nervous about it and surprised."

CAM Executive Director Elysia Borowy-Reeder admits she was initially taken aback when she saw Christian's radical new direction. But that's why she gave the 29-year-old artist this show in the first place.

"It's like the biggest blind date, you know?" says Borowy-Reeder, who first began following Christian's career while working at the Art Institute of Chicago. "I always believe in the artist's intent. ... You want to fuel that creativity and that freedom."

Christian was a tad nervous himself. After all, the installation is his first museum exhibition.

"That's a really frustrating thing to feel when you're kind of in a high-pressure situation which I'd consider this," he says. But it's also exhilarating.

Borowy-Reeder took over CAM Raleigh in May 2011. During a visit to Chicago later that year, she caught Christian's "River Rats" show at the Western Exhibitions gallery and was mesmerized.

"His imagery is inventive. It's memorable," she says. "He has all this new text ... He juxtaposes it against older cartoons from the Dust Bowl era. He has this nice tension between what's old and what's new."

And that is why she gave him free rein in the museum's "emerging artist" gallery, housed on the lower level of this converted downtown warehouse.

Christian, who studied graphic design and painting at Northern Illinois University, says his "all-time biggest inspiration and favorite artist all around" is Ub Iwerks, the Oscar-winning Disney animator who created Mickey Mouse. Christian adapted the sinister, phantom-like figures that populate many of his recent works from the late cartoonist's famous dancing ghosts.

"I just love them, how they're adorable, but they're menacing," Christian says of the characters, which vaguely resemble condoms.

Christian, who normally works in graphite, also integrates '80s pop patterns and video game imagery into his pieces.

He says his works are "a metaphysical diary, plugged in through, like, a throwback cartoon language and patterns. And it's slowly changing always."

In the finished work, the snake stretches in an accordion pattern across the entire wall as a bug-eyed frowny face, grinning banana and one of his ghost heads pop from the black background. In addition to charcoal, Christian used spray paint, car finish and gesso a mixture of white paint, chalk and gypsum.

Christian calls the piece "You Had to Be Here."

The show opened Friday and will run through June 17.

Christian has done several other large-scale works, but they were drawn right on the walls. This is the first that won't be erased when the show is over.

"After the exhibition, it will get rolled up in a massive tube and, who knows after that?" he says. "I may rework it again, as I'm prone to do."

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Online:

CAM Raleigh http://camraleigh.org/

Western Exhibitions http://westernexhibitions.com/christian/

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A. Breed is a national writer, based in Raleigh, N.C. He can be reached at features(at)ap.org. Follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/(hash)!/AllenGBreed

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NEW YORK (AP) Put on your suit and tie: Justin Timberlake and Jay-Z are hitting the road together.

The performers announced Friday that they'll embark on a 12-city stadium tour that will kick off July 17 in Toronto. "Legends of the Summer" will wrap up Aug. 16 in Miami.

Stops on the tour also include New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia and Boston.

Jay-Z is featured on Timberlake's comeback single, "Suit & Tie." Timberlake's new album, "The 20/20 Experience," will be released March 19.

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