Danny Puff

By Radu Marinas

VASLUI, Romania (Reuters) - Valentin Boanta, sitting in his jail cell, proudly explains the device he has invented which, he says, could make the world's ATMs impregnable even to tech-savvy criminals like himself.

Boanta, 33, is six months into a five-year sentence for supplying gadgets an organized crime gang used to conceal ATM skimmers, which can copy data from an unsuspecting ATM user's card so a clone can be created.

He said he had started to make the devices for the sheer excitement of it and denies ever planning to use them himself, saying he only sold them to others.

Boanta says his arrest in 2009 and trial brought contrition, as he realized the impact of his actions and felt an urge to make amends. It also brought the former industrial design student a flash of technical inspiration.

"When I got caught I became happy. This liberation opened the way to working for the good side," Boanta said.

"Crime was like a drug for me. After I was caught, I was happy I escaped from this adrenaline addiction," he said. "So that the other part, in which I started to develop security solutions, started to emerge."

It was during his trial that he got down to work. The stage for Boanta's product pitch these days is the book-lined cell in the northeastern Romanian town of Vaslui he shares with five pickpockets and burglars.

"All ATMs have ageing designs so they are prone to vulnerability, they are a very weak side of the banking industry," he said.

"Every ATM can be penetrated through a skimming crime. My security solution, SRS, makes an ATM unbreachable."

Boanta says his "Secure Revolving System-SRS" can be installed in any ATM. It allows the bank card to be inserted longer side first and then rotates it to prevent skimmers being able to lock on to the magnetic data strip. The system returns the card to its user with a reverse rotation.

Outwardly it is a trapezoidal metallic box around 6 inches long with the card slot in the middle.

The SRS, funded and developed by a technology firm near Bucharest called MB Telecom, is patented and won an award this year at the International Exhibition of Inventions in Geneva. The inventor and company are not yet saying how much it will cost, but insist it will be available soon.

"He fully deserves such recognition," said SRS co-inventor and MB Telecom president Mircea Tudor. "He's taking part in improving Romania's image abroad and he'll surely join our team when released."

Romania has a deep well of technical expertise stemming from the time of communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, who backed computer research and technical education.

Digital piracy flourished after his violent overthrow in 1989, as people who could not afford proprietary products bought cheap copies instead.

Romanian hackers stole about $1 billion from U.S. accounts in 2012, according to the U.S. embassy in Bucharest. A report by Verizon said Romania was the world's second-biggest hacking centre after China. The FBI has even set up an office in Romania and helped to train specialist police agents.

(Additional reporting by Ioana Patran in Bucharest; Editing by Andrew Roche and Louise Ireland)

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By Laura Zuckerman

(Reuters) - An Idaho man who admitted to breaking into a Boise zoo last year and killing a monkey was sentenced to seven years in prison on Thursday, court records show.

Michael Watkins, 22, of Weiser, Idaho, in March pleaded guilty to attempted grand theft, a felony, and misdemeanor animal cruelty stemming from the break-in and beating death of the monkey at Zoo Boise in November.

The primate was one of the zoo's two Patas monkeys, ground-dwelling animals from Africa that stand more than 2 feet tall and weigh about 35 pounds. They are rare in zoos but not endangered in the wild.

The case shook officials at the zoo and triggered an outpouring of sympathy and donations from animal lovers worldwide.

Watkins scaled the security fence at Zoo Boise in the pre-dawn hours of November 17 and attempted to steal the monkey, which bit him, police said. Watkins then kicked and hit the animal, severely wounding it, according to police. The monkey later died of blunt force trauma, zoo officials said.

Zoo Boise Director Steve Burns said on Thursday the sentencing of Watkins closed a particularly devastating chapter for the facility.

"We're moving on," he said. "The court has done its job and we're continuing to do our job."

In the days after the death, zoo staff sought to boost the spirits of the companion-less Patas monkey and considered shipping it to another zoo with primates since they are exceedingly social, Burns said.

Instead, Zoo Boise in December gained two female Patas monkeys donated by the Rosamund Gifford Zoo in Syracuse, New York.

News about the monkey's death brought donations from across the United States and overseas, allowing the zoo to begin construction on Monday of a $250,000 exhibit for the three Patas monkeys, Burns said.

(Editing by Dan Whitcomb and Bill Trott)

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CANNES, France (AP) Emma Watson is reveling in her post-"Potter" freedom at the Cannes Film Festival, relishing a Valley Girl role far from her wise-beyond-her-years Hermione.

The 23-year-old "Harry Potter" actress stars in Sofia Coppola's "The Bling Ring," which premiered Thursday at the French Riviera festival. The British actress plays a celebrity-obsessed, thickly accented Los Angeles teenager who, with a group of friends, burgles Hollywood stars such as Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan.

At Cannes, Watson told reporters that while she remains proud of her work on the "Potter" films, they now feel long ago.

"I'm not trying to run away from it," she said. "I've just had an amazing three or four years. I'm really re-enjoying having the chance to transform into new roles and work with new creative people."

"The Bling Ring" is based on a Vanity Fair article about the true story of teenagers who robbed celebrities like Paris Hilton and Orlando Bloom while they were out at premieres and other events. The character Watson plays, Nicki, is modeled on Alexis Neiers, who starred in the reality series "Pretty Wild."

Watson said she watched American TV shows like "The Hills," ''Keeping up With the Kardashians" and "The World According to Paris" to prepare for the role.

"It'd be very easy for Nicki to feel like a parody," Watson said. "Somehow I had to understand and empathize with her and that was really biggest challenge, second to getting the accent down. It's quite a specific dialect."

Since the "Harry Potter" films concluded in 2011 with the second part of "Deathly Hallows," Watson has gravitated to more adult films, including last year's coming-of-age tale "The Perks of Being a Wallflower" and Darren Aronofsky's Biblical epic "Noah," which recently finished shooting. She also makes a cameo as herself in this summer's "This is the End," an apocalyptic comedy.

"For Emma, it was, I think, really interesting to see an actress that you've seen in other things really transform into a completely difficult character," Coppola said.

Young actors often treat Cannes as a coming-out-party, a place to introduce themselves on a more artistically-minded stage. Watson shined with enthusiasm for her experience with the improvisation-friendly Coppola.

"I could work in a way that was a lot more loose than I was used to," said Watson. "I'm used to really having to stick to my lines because a lot of people know them by heart."

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CANNES, France (AP) Sofia Coppola was just 8 years old when she first came to the Cannes Film Festival. Her father, Francis Ford Coppola, was there to premiere a work-in-progress cut of a film he had spent years wrestling with: "Apocalypse Now."

"I have nice memories of Cannes," Coppola said in an interview Thursday on the roof of the Palais, the festival center. "I remember coming here as a kid and then my first movie, 'Virgin Suicides,' had our first screening ever here. I feel like my career started here."

Growing up in such surroundings, one would think, would have heavily informed Coppola's latest film, "The Bling Ring," a deadpan drama about celebrity-obsessed teenagers in Los Angeles who break into the homes of Paris Hilton and other stars. But Coppola says the movie world she grew up in isn't the same as today's star-crazed culture.

"I definitely noticed that people would act different around my dad. It was just part of my growing up," Coppola says. "This world feels unfamiliar to me, this kind of reality-star, tabloid culture."

"The Bling Ring," which opened Cannes' Un Certain Regard section Thursday, is Coppola's third film in a row that deals heavily with the famous. Following her "Marie Antoinette" (her modern-styled take on the French royal) was 2010's "Somewhere," a minimalist drama about a renowned actor and his 11-year-old daughter.

"The Bling Ring" is based on a true story, recounted in a Vanity Fair article, about high-schoolers who, after seeing online when certain stars are expected at a premiere or other event, take the opportunity to steal designer bags, shoes and clothes from their homes, lingering to pretend to live in celebrity opulence.

There's wry irony in premiering such a film at Cannes, the decadent French Riviera resort town of high-end boutiques and luxury hotels.

"It seems like the perfect setting for 'The Bling Ring' when you see people walking around in their heels," says Coppola, who favors a less flashy style. "It's a glamorous place, so it feels appropriate."

Coppola cast mainly newcomers in the lead roles (Israel Broussard, Katie Chang, Claire Julien), with the notable exception of "Harry Potter" star Emma Watson, who assumes a thick Valley Girl accent for her character. Watson praised Coppola for her easy calm; Chang noted her gentle openness with actors.

"The Bling Ring," which will be released in the U.S. on June 14, has already drawn comparisons to the recent, day-glo debauchery of Harmony Korine's "Spring Breakers." The differences between the two films are many, but both feature the thrill of young, attractive girls breaking bad for the sake of glorious superficiality. (The movies also share a new distributor, A24 Films.)

Though Coppola hasn't seen "Spring Breakers," she says, "I can understand that there's this sort of trash culture aspect that's in the air."

And if there's an epicenter of that culture, it may be Paris Hilton's shoe closet. Coppola shot in Hilton's mansion where the teens rummage through her footwear and lounge in her nightclub room. (The hotel heiress appears fleetingly in the film.)

Like "Somewhere," ''Bling Ring" paints a light, hazy portrait of Los Angeles.

"I wasn't trying to do a story about L.A. I just came across this article, and you couldn't set it somewhere else," says Coppola, who lived in L.A. in her 20s but now resides in New York with her husband, Thomas Mars of the band Phoenix, and their two daughters.

"There's something exotic about it, and it's not like anywhere else. To me, it's the center of this aspect our culture."

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SAN FRANCISCO (AP) Google is digging deeper into its technology toolkit to turn its social networking service into a more formidable threat to Facebook, sprucing up its photo features at a time when sharing snapshots online and on mobile gadgets is growing more popular.

Many of the 41 new features being added to Google Plus beginning Wednesday will draw upon the computing power, machine learning, algorithms, semantics analysis and other innovations that established Google's search engine as the most influential force on the Internet.

"All of these features collectively put more of 'the Google' into Google Plus," said Vic Gundotra, Google's senior vice president of engineering, in an interview. "This will give people a powerful reason to come to Google Plus."

But the most compelling new attraction may be a new photo-management tool that promises to test how much control people want to cede to computers. It will also further blur the lines between a real moment in time and augmented reality.

Google promises the feature will pick out the best shots from a wide assortment of photos. The automatic photo selection is done by calling upon Google's knowledge of the elements that make up a visually pleasing picture, coupled with facial recognition technology and a vast database that helps tie together the relationships of people appearing in a photo. Google says its computers will recognize the best photos featuring family members or close friends of a person who uploads a bunch of pictures to Plus.

"You have amazing images of the most precious image of your life," Gundotra told a software developers conference Wednesday as he discussed the additions to Google Plus. "But if we are honest with each other photos are very labor intensive."

If the photos don't look quite right, Google is promising to enhance them, taking over a job that typically requires people to buy and master special photo editing software such as Adobe System Inc.'s Photoshop, Apple's iPhoto or Google's Picasa. Computer-controlled editing tools will automatically remove red eyes, soften skin tones, sharpen colors and adjust contrast. Google offers something similar through an "I'm Feeling Lucky" button on Picasa.

In an effort to get more photos onto the Plus network, Google is offering to back up all pictures taken on a mobile device, as soon as they're snapped. To accommodate the increased volume, Google Plus will now provide each account holder with up to 15 gigabytes of storage for full-resolution photos.

Gundotra believes Plus' management tools will be compelling because they are designed to save people the time and trouble of choosing and editing photos. Google Plus users will be able to compare all original photos with the versions altered by computers. The auto-enhancement tool can also be turned off.

Another new photo feature promises to stitch together a sequence of photos taken of the same group of people or a panoramic scene. This stitching system can be used to create a single photo that pulls the best shots of everyone featured in a series of pictures. It will also produce an animated clip featuring the motions of people captured in a succession of photos taken against the same background.

By appealing to people's photo fondness, Google is hoping to make Plus a more useful and fun place to hang out than Facebook. But Google Plus still hasn't proven it can become as much of a magnet as Facebook, largely because people had already established their online social circles at Facebook.

Google Plus has built up a broad swath of accountholders since its introduction nearly two years ago, mainly because so many people already had set up Google logins while using the company's Gmail or other services. Gundotra announced Wednesday that Google Plus now has 190 million users who interact on the service each month, up from 135 million in late December. About 390 million people log in to Google Plus each month, but that includes a large number who have tied their Gmail accounts to the social networking service. Facebook says it has about 1.1 billion active users.

As such, Google has a long way to go. Facebook has claimed the title of being the world's largest photo-sharing site for years, and with last year's purchase of Instagram only propelled it further ahead. Instagram has 100 million monthly active users, up from 22 million when Facebook agreed to buy it last spring.

Rather than offer powerful editing tools or high-quality pictures, Facebook became the most popular way to share the photos online simply because it is the most popular place to hang out online. Today, users upload more than 350 million photos to Facebook each day.

Over the years, it enhanced the quality of the photos displayed, too, and has recently redesigned its site to make photos more pronounced. Instagram, meanwhile, offers an easy-to-use mobile app and playful filters users can apply to snapshots of friends, quirky buildings or plates of food.

Google Plus is getting a new look just two months after Facebook spruced up its news feed the centerpiece of its service to feature photos more prominently and generally make posts look more like articles in a magazine or newspaper. Unlike Facebook, Google says there are no current plans to show ads on the revamped Plus.

In another change aimed at attracting more traffic, Google Plus will start to display automatic hash tags to identify the main topic being discussed in a post or featured in a photo. Google is using its understanding of semantics and photo-scanning technology to figure out what is going on. Individuals will still have an option of editing or forbidding a hash tag from appearing if they don't agree with Google's automatic selection. Clicking on the hashtag will take Google Plus users to other posts and pictures bearing the same marker. Similar content being shared by family and friend is supposed to show up first, thanks to the same ranking system that Google's search engine uses to pick out the most relevant results.

Facebook doesn't currently use hash tags, though there have been reports that it is working on incorporating them to its site, just as Twitter and Instagram already do.

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AP Technology Writer Barbara Ortutay contributed to this report from New York.

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NEW YORK (AP) CBS on Wednesday revealed a few nips and tucks it is planning next season for what is already network television's most successful schedule, including adding a comedy with Robin Williams playing an unorthodox advertising executive with Sarah Michelle Gellar as his daughter.

It will move "Person of Interest" to Tuesdays, pairing it with "NCIS" and "NCIS: Los Angeles" to have television's three most-watched dramas on the same night and the same network.

Four comedies and one drama will debut on CBS this fall. CBS ordered only eight new series for the season, while rivals ABC, NBC and Fox are introducing a total of 41. CBS will end this season with the widest margin of victory in viewers of any network in 24 years and even win among the advertiser-desired demographic of 18- to 49-year-olds for the first time since the early 1990s, said Leslie Moonves, CBS Corp. CEO.

Moonves took notice of how Jimmy Kimmel called CBS executives smug during ABC's schedule presentation on Tuesday, the late-night comic even adding an unprintable noun. If true, Moonves said, "I guess that means we're winning."

The company's stock just exceeded $50 a share for the first time, said Moonves, who was given a $22 million signing bonus upon extending his contract last year.

The network's annual schedule announcement to advertisers was less of a sales presentation than a celebration. The cast of "NCIS" and "The Big Bang Theory" stood on stage to accept applause for their top-ranked status.

Even David Letterman, who usually avoids these events, appeared at what he called CBS' "little pledge drive." He hugged Moonves, a man he's often mocked on his late-night show, and said the executive was "the man who saved network television."

Dealing with such riches, CBS rejected pilots of a "NCIS: Los Angeles" spinoff and a TV remake of "Beverly Hills Cop" backed by Eddie Murphy. Melissa McCarthy's popular comedy "Mike & Molly" was left off the schedule and stuck in the bullpen, ready to return to plug any holes. CBS ordered 22 episodes of the sitcom.

Williams' comedy is called "The Crazy Ones," a reference to his comic style, and is getting a prime Thursday-night time slot after "The Big Bang Theory," television's most popular comedy. Among its producers is David E. Kelley.

"We think this is going to be the most talked-about show this fall," said Nina Tassler, CBS' entertainment president.

Chuck Lorre, TV's premiere comedy producer, is behind "Mom," a new Monday-night sitcom starring Anna Faris as a newly sober single mom with Allison Janney as her estranged mother. "We Are Men" is about four love-challenged single men living in the same apartment complex, with Tony Shalhoub as one of the stars.

CBS' other new comedy is "The Millers," with Will Arnett playing a recently divorced man whose plans to enjoy the single life are disrupted when his parents move in.

CBS is also trying something new in drama by ordering two limited-run series for its Monday-night schedule. "Hostages," produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, stars Toni Collette as a surgeon who is taken hostage the night before she is to operate on the president. After a 15-episode run, it will be replaced by "Intelligence," about an agent whose smarts are enhanced by a microchip implanted in his brain.

The network is canceling "CSI: N.Y.," ''Vegas," ''Golden Boy" and "Rules of Engagement."

The drama "Hawaii Five-0" will shift from Monday to Friday nights on the schedule. CBS usually runs drama reruns on Saturday, but next year will also air two comedies that night.

Midseason shows include:

"Reckless," a legal drama set in Charleston, S.C., where a Yankee litigator and Southern lawyer have the hots for each other despite being on opposite sides of a long-running case.

"Friends With Better Lives," a romantic comedy. Like its title suggests, it focuses on six friends at different stages of their romantic lives, all wondering if their pals have it better.

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CANNES, France (AP) The Cannes Film Festival got off to a blockbuster, if stormy start, as Baz Luhrmann's "The Great Gatsby" opened on a soggy French Riviera.

Amid heavy rain, dancing flappers flocked down the Cannes red carpet Wednesday night, bringing a touch of the Jazz Age to the Croisette. "Gatsby" stars Leonardo DiCaprio, Carey Mulligan and Tobey Maguire helped give the festival's opening day a strong dose of star power.

At the opening ceremony, DiCaprio, joined by his "Gatsby" co-star, Bollywood actor Amitabh Bachchan, declared the 66th Cannes officially begun.

Over the next 12 days, dozens of the world's most artistically ambitious films will premiere on Cannes' global stage. But Wednesday was a day for blockbusters both the big-budget "Gatsby" and Hollywood's most accomplished director of spectacle: Steven Spielberg.

Spielberg is serving as jury president at this year's Cannes. His presence here is a rarity (he's had films at Cannes before, including "E.T." and "Sugarland Express," but never had a movie in competition), and he was received like a visiting head of state, a king of cinema.

The "Lincoln" director received a standing ovation at the opening ceremony and was serenaded with a performance of "Miss Celie's Blues" from his 1985 film, "The Color Purple."

He heads the jury that will decide the prestigious Palme d'Or, given to one of the 20 competing films, with entries ranging from the Coen brothers ("Llewyn Davis"), Alexander Payne ("Nebraska") and Steven Soderbergh ("Behind the Candelabra").

This year's jury is an intimidating, starry bunch, including Nicole Kidman, Ang Lee and Christoph Waltz.

"Everyone sits in judgment of us," Spielberg said. "So it's our turn."

Luhrmann's 3-D adaption of F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, is this year's festival opener, a choice that surprised many since the film opened last week in North America. Cannes typically takes precedence over release schedules, but "Gatsby" sails to the Croisette after a robust weekend haul of $51.1 million.

After Luhrmann noted in a news conference that the film had pushed Fitzgerald's novel to the top of the bestseller list (selling more copies in a week than in the author's lifetime), DiCaprio added with a grin: "And a little film adaptation is doing quite well at the box office."

But while "Gatsby" is getting a victory lap on the Cannes' red carpet, it comes to the festival with the sting of mixed reviews. Many film critics have taken issue with the movie's stylistic flourishes.

"I knew that would come," said Luhrmann, noting Fitzgerald's 1925 novel was also initially received poorly. "I just care that people are going out and seeing it. I really am so moved by that."

"Gatsby" plays out of competition at the festival, but Spielberg should have his hands full with a slate lacking any obvious favorite. Internationally-respected filmmakers like Roman Polanski ("Venus in Fur"), Asghar Farhadi ("The Past) and Jim Jarmusch ("Only Lovers Left Alive") are to premiere their films in competition.

Every year, the Cannes jury president is psychoanalyzed to help predict the Palme d'Or winner. This year is no different, with onlookers guessing that Spielberg will either gravitate toward the kind of warm-hearted films he's best known for, or seek to deliberately contradict that assumption with a more audacious choice.

The international jury also includes Romanian director Cristian Mungiu, Scottish filmmaker Lynne Ramsay, Japanese director Naomi Kawase, French actor Daniel Auteuil and Bollywood star Vidya Balan.

"I'm going to have to look at the Sidney Lumet film '12 Angry Men,' again as a tutorial to prepare myself for the final day of deliberation," Spielberg said with a smile.

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Associated Press Writer Jill Lawless contributed to this story.

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Follow AP Entertainment Writer Jake Coyle on Twitter at: http://twitter.com/jake_coyle

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By Cameron French

TORONTO (Reuters) - Toronto's main stock index rose on Tuesday, as energy and industrial stocks rose in tandem with gains in U.S. stocks, more than offsetting pullbacks in key stocks such as BlackBerry and Bombardier Inc .

Energy stocks, which suffered steep losses in April, rose 0.67 percent despite a retreat in the price of oil, helped by the continued momentum in U.S. stock indexes.

Husky Energy gained 2.2 percent to C$30.60, while sector heavy weight Suncor Energy rose 1.2 percent to C$32.42.

The smaller industrials subgroup charged ahead 1.83 percent, led by airlines and railroads. Westjet Airlines Ltd surged 4.9 percent to C$21.77, while Canadian Pacific Railway jumped 4.4 percent to C$136.91.

The Toronto Stock Exchange's S&P/TSX composite index rose 47.50 points, or 0.38 percent, to 12,577.05. Seven of the index's 10 main subgroups rose during the session.

U.S. stocks extended gains, and the S&P 500 and Dow Jones Industrial touched new intraday highs .

The TSX has underperformed U.S. stock over the past year due in part to the Canadian index's much higher weighting of commodities. But since mid April, the TSX has followed the U.S. indexes higher.

"I think that there could be a help from the U.S. ... but I think it's also maybe a little bit of a 'enough's enough' in some of these stocks," said John Kinsey, a portfolio manager at Caldwell Securities.

The information technology group sank 0.63 percent, weighed down by BlackBerry. The smartphone maker dropped 3.1 percent to C$15.55 as the company unveiled a new mid-tier smartphone.

Bombardier slid 1.7 percent to C$4.55, falling hard for a second straight day, though the stock had risen 15 percent last week on optimism about the company's new CSeries jetliner.

Rona Inc , Canada's top home improvement retailer and distributor, dropped 4.8 percent to C$10.12 after posting a deeper quarterly loss as it grappled with restructuring charges and difficult market conditions.

(Reporting by Cameron French; Editing by Leslie Adler)

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By Patricia Reaney

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Actor Leonardo DiCaprio and Christie's auction house raised $38.8 million through a charity art auction and donations, Christie's said on Tuesday, with proceeds to benefit environmental and conservation causes.

The 33 works in The 11th Hour Auction organized by the star of the new film "The Great Gatsby" sold for $31.74 million on Monday evening and set 13 records for artists including Carol Bove, Joe Bradley, Mark Grotjahn, Raymond Pettibon and Mark Ryden among others.

A $5 million matching donation for three of the lots and additional gifts from donors brought the overall total to $38.8 million for The Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation, according to Christie's.

"All I can say is thank you, thank you, thank you," DiCaprio told the audience at the end of the auction.

Many of the works, which were created for and donated to the auction by the artists, sold in spirited bidding in a packed auction house. Art collectors from around the globe also placed bids by telephone.

"Christie's is thrilled with the exceptional results of the sale, which realized $38.8 million," said Loic Gouzer, international specialist at Christie's and the head of the sale.

"The works of art were of incredible quality and range, and highlight the generosity of the many artists who donated," he added.

A panel of environmental experts and the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation will decide which conservation projects will benefit from the proceeds of the sale.

At the opening of the auction, DiCaprio, who has supported environmental issues through his foundation since 1988 and also produced and narrated the 2007 documentary "The 11th Hour" about the state of the environment, urged the audience to dig deep into their pockets.

"Bid as if the fate of the planet depended on us," he said.

And they did. All of the 33 works were sold and many fetched prices that were three or four times their pre-sale estimates.

The top lot of the sale was an oil on cardboard mounted on canvas by Mark Grotjahn called "Untitled (Standard Lotus No. II, Bird of Paradise, Tiger Mouth Face 44.01)," which sold for $6.2 million as two determined bidders pushed up the price.

Zeng Fanzhi's "The Tiger," an oil on canvas, fetched nearly double its high estimate with a price of $4.8 million, and Bharti Kher's sculpture "The Skin Speaks a Language Not Its Own" went for $1.7 million.

Each of the three works had a pre-sale estimate of $1.5 million to $2.5 million.

DiCaprio donated "Ocean V" by Andreas Gursky, which sold for $600,000, and he bought an acrylic on canvas by Takashi Murakami for $700,000.

A portrait of DiCaprio painted by Elizabeth Peyton sold for $1 million.

Gouzer and DiCaprio had approached the artists and explained what they had hoped to accomplish with the auction, which they have been planning for a year.

"We explained that we wanted great works and they were very reactive because of the cause. The artists are very sensitive to the fact that we are destroying our planet," Gouzer said in an interview ahead of the sale.

(Reporting by Patricia Reaney; Editing by Vicki Allen)

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NEW YORK (AP) As the Twitterverse expands with millions of users, it can be hard to have a unique voice. Nicole Richie doesn't have that problem.

Some examples:

"'It's 8:30am & I've already gotten into 5 fights' - thugs, and parents of toddlers."

"This therapist is going to be GREAT for me once I stop lying to him."

"I'm gonna dress up as an iPhone so my husband pays attention to me."

Tweets like that earned her not only millions of followers but the attention of production company Telepictures, which was already aware of Richie's popularity and wanted to work with her.

"As soon as we began pursuing her we also began following her on Twitter," recalls Sheila Bouttier, Sr. Vice President of Development of Telepictures. "We were struck by how funny and candid she was and wanted to really showcase that side of her personality, which we haven't seen in a long time."

They teamed up with AOL to create the web series (hash)CandidlyNicole. Each video is about five minutes and a new one is posted every Tuesday morning.

The first webisode, where 31-year-old Richie consults with a doctor about having her "tramp stamp" (or tattoo on her lower back) removed, earned 1 million views in just its first week. (Try not to at least smirk as she keeps referring to the doctor as "Dr. Tatt-off.")

In a recent phone interview, Richie said she's "thrilled" by the response but still has a hard time grasping that she's funny.

"My husband (musician Joel Madden) doesn't think I'm funny at all," she said. "He has not laughed at a joke of mine since 2006. I don't necessarily always just mean to be funny. I just kind of say whatever's on my mind but I do know that I have a very specific way of looking at my life."

Of course, Richie is no stranger to television. She first appeared alongside Paris Hilton on "The Simple Life," where they were filmed working in fish-out-of-water situations as interns or camp counselors. Richie also just wrapped a second season as a mentor on the competition show "Fashion Star" on NBC.

But Richie appreciates the format of the webisode.

"We are living in a world where everything needs to be a little bit shorter to keep people's attention," she said. "Especially the younger audience, which is why I think Twitter is so great."

She gets together once a week to film with a small camera crew. They go over ideas of what to shoot, but each video really is born from a Tweet she has posted. When the video gets posted she says she looks to her little sister for reassurance.

"I have a very hard time watching myself, which is another reason why I'm glad it's only five minutes. I let my sister watch them first. She's 14 (years-old) and the harshest critic so I kind of wait in the other room and see if her and her friends laugh."

Bouttier says even though viewers could see Richie on TV each week on "Fashion Star," it was just a glimpse of who she is and "her fans have been dying to hear from her for a long time."

Now that (hash)CandidlyNicole is a hit online, the next question is, could it be reformatted for television?

Both Telepictures and Richie say they're game. Bouttier says they've already received calls from various networks.

"No matter what, this will be a developmental tool for me to build my brand so whether it's TV or whatever, I think doing it in a digital space is a nice way to experiment," added Richie.

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Online:

http://on.aol.com/show/517742769/episode/517775397

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Alicia Rancilio covers entertainment for The Associated Press. Follow her online at http://www.twitter.com/aliciar

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