Danny Puff

What if you could take up swords against the Lannister family on "Game of Thrones"? Or solve mysteries with the "NCIS" crew? Or pitch an ad campaign to Don Draper on "Mad Men"?

And then: What if you could watch the consequences of your actions on TV the next week?

That's the premise behind "Defiance" (for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, PC, $59.99), a collaboration between the online game studio Trion Worlds and cable TV's Syfy. By the time "Defiance" the TV show debuts Monday, "Defiance" the video game will have been out for a few weeks enough time for players to make their own mark on this new universe.

Both the game and the TV drama are set in 2046, some 30 years after the Votan collective of alien species arrived in the skies over Earth. After a brutal war, the humans and aliens have settled into an uneasy peace, but alien technology that crashed to Earth has drastically changed the landscape.

The "Defiance" game shows the effects of these "arkfalls" on California's Bay Area, now a wasteland packed with bloodthirsty mutants, hostile cyborgs and overgrown, fire-spewing insects. Your character male or female, human or Votan is an ark hunter who makes a living by scavenging from crash sites, and the search for a particular alien artifact brings you to the West Coast.

Soon after your arrival, the game's sprawling map opens up, letting you choose from dozens of missions. You can race dune buggies around the wilderness. You can infiltrate raider strongholds and steal their loot. You can rescue farmers from "hellbug" infestations. Most missions can be handled solo, but if you stumble across a major arkfall you're going to need help from other online players.

You'll also discover "episode missions" that relate to the next week's installment of the "Defiance" TV show. In the first such adventure, you meet military veteran Joshua Nolan and his partner, an alien named Irisa. They ask for your help retrieving a lost Votan doohickey, which turns out to be a significant plot device in the premiere of the Syfy drama.

The titular town of Defiance was built on the ruins of St. Louis, so I don't know how many of its characters will visit us ark hunters out West. But both sides of the "Defiance" team have collaborated on building an impressive world, and I'm eager to see where they go from week to week.

I was able to battle through the initial batch of episode missions in just a few hours, but there's plenty more to do. As with any online shooter, you can engage in raucous death matches with your fellow humans. Or you can enroll in the Shadow War, in which huge teams of up to 64 players each battle for control of sites all over the map.

Such massively multiplayer epics are popular among computer gamers, but we haven't seen many on consoles. I've been playing "Defiance" on the Xbox 360, and I love being able to use an Xbox controller instead of a PC's keyboard and mouse. On the other hand, I was frequently unable to log onto Trion's servers during the first few days after the game went on sale. That problem has eased up, but there are still too many glitches, from unresponsive controls to disappearing inventory items.

There's also a wearying sameness to the bulk of the missions, which typically consist of racing to a location, killing a bunch of monsters and retrieving some object. The action is intense and challenging, often reminiscent of 2K Games' fine "Borderlands." But it's missing that series' twisted sense of humor, and I'm hoping Trion delivers more variety in future episodes. It's a work in progress; for now, I give it two stars out of four.

___

Online:

http://www.defiance.com/en/

___

Follow Lou Kesten on Twitter at http://twitter.com/lkesten

Read More

By Narae Kim and Elaine Lies

SEOUL (Reuters) - South Korean rapper Psy released his much-anticipated new single on Thursday hoping to repeat the success of "Gangnam Style" that made him the biggest star to emerge from the growing K-pop music scene.

The video for "Gangnam Style" has become the most watched item on YouTube with more than 1.5 billion hits and Psy's horse-riding moves sparked an international dance craze.

The details of his latest single, "Gentleman", were kept under wraps until the song was released at midnight in New Zealand (1200 GMT).

The song, with a techno beat, was full of puns in Korean and contained the lines "I am a party mafia!" and the refrain, "I am a mother father gentleman".

Psy, 35, will perform "Gentleman" in public for the first time on Saturday at a concert at Seoul's World Cup stadium but he has been coy about what dance to expect this time, except to hint that it is based on traditional Korean moves.

"All Koreans know this dance but (those in) other countries haven't seen it," Psy told South Korean television last week.

He has asked fans to wear white to Saturday's event and his stylist told Reuters last month that the concept for the new song would again be a formal suit with "an unexpected twist of fun".

In "Gangnam Style", written as a commentary on materialism in the wealthy Seoul suburb of Gangnam, Psy was decked out in sunglasses, a white dress shirt, bow tie and tuxedo jackets.

The song racked up 3.59 million digital sales last year in the United States and Canada, according to Nielsen SoundScan and Nielsen BDS, putting it ninth in the best-selling list. It was third on Amazon's MP3 song bestseller list for 2012.

"Gangnam Style" catapulted Psy to global fame after an rocky career in the music business over the past decade.

Psy, whose real name is Park Jae-sang, graduated from the Berklee College of Music in the United States and made his debut in 2001 with the album "PSY from the Psycho World".

But he ran into trouble with the authorities for "inappropriate" content in the lead song on that album, which was seen as sexually suggestive. He was also charged with possession of marijuana in 2002.

Since then he has released five more albums.

Psy's brash style - at a concert last year he parodied Lady Gaga, complete with fake breasts that he set on fire - stands in stark contrast to the squeaky clean singers that dominate K-pop which is finding an increasingly large international audience.

A Music Industry White Paper published by the Korean Creative Content Agency said sales of K-pop outside Korea surged 135 percent in 2011 from a year earlier to $196 million. In 2006 overseas sales were worth $16.7 million.

Psy acknowledged last month that the stress of following up Gangnam was taking its toll.

He tweeted a picture of himself covering his face at a recording studio, with the caption: "The pain of creation."

(Reporting by Narae Kim, writing by Elaine Lies, Editing by Belinda Goldsmith)

Read More

By Alexandria Sage

PARIS (Reuters) - Right in the heart of Paris, sandwiched between the Champs-Elysees and the River Seine, sits Avenue Winston Churchill.

So why not a Rue Margaret Thatcher, some French politicians are asking.

A conservative city councilor, Jerome Dubus, will propose that the French capital pay homage to Britain's outspoken former prime minister by naming a street after her at the next council meeting this month. Thatcher died on April 8.

But in a country where centuries-long tensions with its neighbor across the Channel linger - the avenue commemorating Britain's role in World War Two notwithstanding - the idea is not without its critics.

The president of the council's communist and far-left party, Ian Brossat, countered with a proposal to rename a square or street for Bobby Sands, the IRA prisoner who died in a 1981 hunger strike in protest over British rule in Northern Island to which Thatcher refused to yield.

"Lacking any personality and a leader, the UMP (conservative party) is looking for its good fairy in the past, and across the Channel," Brossat wrote in a short statement.

The Paris suburb of St. Denis already has a short street named for Sands in a cluster of streets named for former Socialist and Communist politicians, members of the French Resistance and poets. Avenue du President Wilson, in honor of the United States' World War One-era President Woodrow Wilson, is not far away.

Thatcher's death has divided public opinion in Britain, where opponents of her free-market ideology have spoken against the blunt politician dubbed the "Iron Lady.

In London, government ministers have proposed erecting a statue of Thatcher in city landmark Trafalgar Square, whose central column honors the 1805 naval victory of Lord Nelson ... over France.

(Editing by Mark John and Sonya Hepinstall)

Read More

By Vernell Hackett

NASHVILLE, Tennessee (Reuters) - Veteran singers and songwriters Kenny Rogers, Bobby Bare and "Cowboy" Jack Clement will be inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame, organizers said on Wednesday, achieving one of the highest honors in the music industry.

Rogers, 74, the husky-voiced three-time Grammy winner best known for songs like The Gambler" and "Ruby, Don't Take Your Love To Town," will be inducted in the "Modern Era" category, the Country Music Association announced.

"Everything pales in comparison to this," Rogers said, tearing up because the honor came in his lifetime.

"My older sons thought I was already in here. Maybe now I can really impress them," he told Reuters, referring to his 8-year-old twin sons from his fifth marriage.

Rogers, a country-pop crossover artist who scored a big hit with the 1983 duet "Islands in the Stream" with Dolly Parton, has charted hit singles in each of the past six decades, and is due to play at the Glastonbury pop music festival in England in June.

Wednesday's three new inductees will bring membership of the Country Music Hall of Fame to 121 since its creation in 1961, including the likes of Parton, Elvis Presley, Garth Brooks, Reba McEntire, Glen Campbell and Willie Nelson.

Bare, 78, was born in Ohio and moved to California, where he had a hit with "The All American Boy" in the pop field in 1959. He later moved to Nashville, was signed to a record deal by guitar player Chet Atkins, and went on to have hits with "Detroit City," and "500 Miles Away From Home."

"This is real huge," Bare said on Wednesday. "This is the culmination of a 19-year-old boy's dream who left Ohio to be a singer."

Clements, 82, is a producer and songwriter from Texas who moved to Memphis just as Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison and Jerry Lee Lewis, whom he discovered, were breaking into the music scene in the mid-1950s.

He persuaded George Jones to record one of his early hits, "She Thinks I Still Care," and also persuaded a record label to sign Charley Pride, one of the few African-American singers to make it big in the country music scene.

Clement, who also produced tracks in Memphis for U2's "Rattle and Hum" album, will be inducted as a non-performer in the ceremony to be held later this year at the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville.

(Editing by Jill Serjeant and Mohammad Zargham)

Read More

HELSINKI (AP) Vladimir Putin, banned in Finland?

Finnish police say the Russian president's name was mistakenly placed on a secret criminal register that could theoretically have gotten him arrested at the border.

TV station MTV3 reported Wednesday that Putin was placed there for his contact with Russian motorcycle gang Night Wolves, though he wasn't suspected of a crime in Finland. But National Police Board spokesman Robin Lardot told the AP the listing was a mistake and that Putin's name was removed from the list.

"The National Police Board has investigated the case and indeed found that such a mistaken entry was in the register," Lardot told The Associated Press. "We have ordered it to be removed and are investigating the case very thoroughly. We don't know how it got there." He declined further comment.

Putin's inclusion would be a major source of embarrassment in bilateral relations.

Finnish Interior Minister Paivi Rasanen, whose ministry oversees the police, conveyed her "sincerest apologies" to Putin over the mistaken entry.

"The Interior Ministry considers it of grave concern if a member of the police has made such groundless entries into the database of suspects."

MTV3 said the content of the register is known only to a few top officials. But in a statement later Wednesday, police called it a "computerized personal data file intended for nationwide used by the police."

They said it includes information on people who are suspected of offenses punishable by prison "or having contributed to an offence subject to imprisonment of more than six months, or to an unlawful use of narcotics."

The Night Wolves says on its Web site that the club's prototype was born in the 1980s from the desire to protect musicians who were holding illegal concerts during the Soviet era.

The muscle-flexing Russian leader has not been averse to being associated with tough bikers and has described motorcycles as "the most dramatic form of transport."

Three years ago, he leaped onto a Harley Davidson to join about 5,000 bikers at an international convention in southern Ukraine sporting black sunglasses, black jeans and black fingerless gloves.

The head of Finland's national police force, Mikko Paatero, apologized for the "mistaken" inclusion of Putin's name in the database.

"This kind of incident is extremely exceptional and is not acceptable under any circumstances," Paatero said in a statement.

Read More

(Reuters) - Microsoft Corp is developing a new lineup of Surface tablets, including a 7-inch version expected to go into mass production later this year, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing people familiar with the company's plans.

Microsoft executives felt they needed to keep pace with the growing popularity of smaller tablets like Google Inc's 7-inch Nexus and the 7.9-inch iPad Mini introduced by Apple Inc last October, one person told the paper. (http://link.reuters.com/wem37t)

Microsoft declined to comment to the Wall Street Journal. The company could not immediately be reached for comment by Reuters outside of regular U.S. business hours.

(Reporting by Sakthi Prasad in Bangalore; Editing by Daniel Magnowski)

Read More

LOS ANGELES (AP) NBC is keeping Carson Daly's show in its late-night lineup.

The network announced Wednesday that it's renewing "Last Call with Carson Daly" for the show's 13th season.

NBC lauded Daly for creating what the network called "a unique late-night format." His program airs at 1:35 a.m. Eastern time.

Daly says he's proud of "Last Call" and grateful to continue with it. He also hosts the NBC singing contest "The Voice."

NBC previously announced plans to shake up the "Tonight Show," replacing Jay Leno with Jimmy Fallon next year. The network hasn't said who will take Fallon's place as host of "Late Night."

Read More

LOS ANGELES (AP) Ben Affleck took home the best picture Oscar at this year's Academy Awards for his Iran hostage drama "Argo." But what everyone really remembers is that emotional, slightly uncomfortable acceptance speech. Everyone, apparently, except Affleck.

"I barely remember the Oscar speech," the actor-director said when asked about it at Tuesday's premiere of his latest film. "Certainly, the most important thing for me, in a way, was to honor my wife and to let people know how much I love her."

During his speech Affleck choked up while thanking his wife, Jennifer Garner, for working on their "marriage for 10 Christmases."

"I think you can tell what people care about really by their actions by what they invest in, by what they work on," he explained. "It's hard to tell somebody that you care about them when you're never around them and you don't see them and talk to them. So that was what I was trying to get across. Although I don't know how articulate I was."

Affleck was joined by co-stars Olga Kurylenko and Rachel McAdams for the Los Angeles premiere of Terrence Malick's romantic rumination "To the Wonder," which opens Friday.

Affleck, 40, admitted that seeing the celebrated director in action was indeed a wonder to behold.

"I think that you know he's a director who does really unusual stuff, really interesting stuff, and somebody who works outside the typical Hollywood norm. And that's interesting to other directors, certainly to me, because you go like 'wow, what would happen of you experiment with this?'"

The film stars Affleck as an American whose relationship with a woman he met overseas turns cold, leaving him drifting back toward a childhood love.

"To the Wonder" was the last review written by celebrated film critic Roger Ebert, who died Tuesday, and it sent "shivers" down Affleck's spine.

"I thought it was a profound honor," he said. "To have this be the last movie that he reviewed and to have it viewed through this sort of transcendental lens of a man at the end of his life is as important as anything that's ever happened around movies in my career."

____

Associated Press writer Nicole Evatt contributed to this story.

____

Follow Nicole Evatt at www.twitter.com/NicoleEvatt

Follow Natalie Rotman at www.twitter.com/NatalieRotman

Read More

PARIS (Reuters) - The gilded Pont Alexandre III bridge in Paris has lost some of its sparkle after thieves made off with the historic monument's bronze plaques in the latest theft from a Parisian landmark.

Despite the watchful eye of its elaborate statues of nymphs and winged horses high above the Seine River, two plaques proclaiming the name of the monument were seized by thieves this month, officials said.

While the bronze used to make the two stolen plaques sells at about 10 euros ($13.06) per kg, the city of Paris declined to comment on the value of the ornamental pieces stolen.

"We have no idea whether they were taken for their metal or by collectors," a town hall spokeswoman said.

She said they would be replaced as soon as possible with identical copies.

"It's not a question of metallic value but of historic value," she said.

French police have struggled with metal theft in the years since the global economic crisis hit, with 5,800 hours of train delays caused in 2010 by the removal of copper from railways.

General metal theft in Paris dropped by about a quarter between 2011 and 2012, a police official said, meaning that whoever removed the plaques from the bridge were part of a die-hard few left targeting public monuments.

Thieves routinely hack bits of steel off the pedestrian Pont des Arts bridge further down the river, city officials say.

Several bronze busts -- including one of composer Bizet -- were looted in 2006 from Pere-Lachaise, the oldest cemetery in Paris and last resting place of luminaries including poet Oscar Wilde and Doors singer Jim Morrison.

Described by the French capital as its most elegant bridge', the ornate Pont Alexandre III was unveiled for the 1900 World Fair in the Belle poque period that saw the construction of the Eiffel Tower change the Parisian skyline forever.

The name inscribed on the plaques was a nod to contemporary Franco-Russian friendship, cemented by Alexander III's son Tsar Nicolas II's role in laying the bridge's foundation stone.

Historic weight is proving no protection however from thieves looking to pilfer materials or curios.

The skeleton of an elephant once owned by King Louis XIV was attacked in the Paris Natural History Museum in March when a man removed a tusk with a chainsaw and then attempted to flee. The tusk and the man were both found soon after.

"The animal fortunately suffered little in the attack," the Museum said. ($1 = 0.7658 euros)

(Reporting By Tara Oakes, editing by Paul Casciato)

Read More

By Scott Malone

BOSTON (Reuters) - A Maine man who walked into the woods shortly after the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear accident and lived as a hermit for almost three decades, supporting himself by stealing from nearby camps, was arrested last week, police said on Tuesday.

Christopher Knight, 47, had lived nearly without human contact in a tent near a pond outside of Rome, Maine, about 20 miles north of the state capital Augusta, state police said.

They arrested him early on Thursday morning at the Pine Tree Camp, where he was stealing food, police said. They said Knight, now being held at Kennebec County Jail, confessed to burglarizing the camp about 50 times, taking food, clothing, propane tanks and other essentials.

"Everything he owned except for his eyeglasses was stolen," said Stephen McCausland, a spokesman with the Maine State Police.

Knight told the officers who arrested him that he had spoken with only one other person - a lone hiker - during his years of solitude.

The man survived the brutal winters of central Maine, where winter overnight temperatures can drop well below freezing, by sleeping in multiple sleeping bags inside a tent that was covered with a tarp.

He appeared neatly groomed and clean-shaven in a police booking photo. Police also released photos of Knight, wearing a cap and jacket, carrying a large plastic bag inside a walk-in cooler at the Pine Tree Camp where he was apprehended.

Knight had built himself a large camp in the woods near North Pond, his tent covered by a tarp that was carefully tied to the surrounding trees, evidently to provide some shelter from the elements, according to photos released by police. He had painted garbage cans in camouflage patterns, covered shiny tools and made other efforts to conceal his presence, police said.

McCausland said Knight offered police no reason for his decision to go into the woods. The Chernobyl accident was the last major event he remembered before beginning his hermitage, he told police, but the nuclear accident had not prompted his decision.

Knight has been charged with one count of burglary so far, but additional charges are likely to follow, McCausland said. In total Knight is suspected of some 1,000 thefts over his 27 years in the woods.

His presence was long suspected by local residents and camp operators from whom he had stolen, according to local media.

(Reporting by Scott Malone; Editing by Lisa Von Ahn, Cynthia Johnston and Dan Grebler)

Read More