While the entertainment industry is best know for sex drugs and rock and roll, Smith serves as an example that if left unchecked a life of excess can have tragic results. An individual does not have to be a beautiful woman gracing the pages of magazines such as Penthouse or Playboy to warrant intervention. There are many celebrities who may be on a dangerous path. A celebrity may need help if:

You Are Driving in Traffic Proceeding In the Wrong Direction

Reportedly, Nicole Richie was using prescription medication while she drove down the Los Angeles in the wrong direction. Richie has a past history of drug use and a possible eating disorder. While most media outlets treated the story in more of a satirical way, no one seemed to be the least bit upset that Ms. Richie would not be punished for her behavior.

Driving intoxicated whether it is alcohol, or drugs, illegal or otherwise puts the general public at risk. When someone is a risk to someone other than themselves perhaps it should not be construed as entertainment.

They Shave Their Heads for No Apparent Reason

A certain former teenage pop idol has reportedly been doing quite a bit of hard partying and rumored drug use. She is said to frequent many clubs and bars and drinking excessively. As of late she has completely shaved her head, reportedly because her estranged husband threatened to have the strands tested to find out what types of drugs are in her system.

Excessive partying and Promiscuity

There plenty of entertainers male and female who are guilty of excessive partying and promiscuity. As of late, it appears that young Hollywood has become quite promiscuous. There is some difficulty in keeping up with who is actually dating who as the stars swap one partner for another.

While most of us find it entertaining there is a great risk involved when there is such a laissez faire attitude about hooking up and changing partners. Sexually transmitted diseases are quite serious and some like HIV or AIDS are not curable. While we like to read magazines like magazines like Star Magazine, and see sexy layouts in magazines like Penthouse it is too easy to forget that they are more than entertainers, they are human as well.

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On September 10, 2006, Anna Nicole’s son died at the age of 20 while visiting his mom and newborn baby sister in the Bahamas. The cause of death was later determined to be a lethal combination of methadone, Zoloft and Lexapro.

http://www.nationalledger.com/artman/publish/article_272612218.shtml

There are so many sites devoting the attention to the promotion of this drug. DrugstoreTM.com is one of the trusted sources of this product. You can now buy soma online. Visit DrugstoreTM.com, your reputable online pharmacy, for more details.

DrugstoreTM.com Online Drug Store provides a wide range of services such as drug information, health care products and prescription medication online.

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She is remembered in many roles: Playboy Playmate of the Year, stripper, waitress, blonde bombshell, cover girl, model, Marilyn Monroe wannabe, reality show actress, diet product guru, mediocre film star . . .

Troubled by a difficult childhood and haunted by the memory of a father who deserted the family, she dropped out of high school and married Billy Smith at the age of 17. Although the marriage did not succeed, it resulted in the birth of her beloved son, Daniel, in 1984.

Perhaps one of Anna Nicole Smith’s greatest claims to fame was her marriage to a wealthy Texas oil tycoon, J. Howard Marshall II, in 1994. At the age of 89, he was 63 years her senior. Marshall died in 1995, leaving Anna to contest his estate in court with son, E. Pierce Marshall. The estate was reported to be worth $474 million. Although many people called Anna Nicole Smith a ‘gold digger’, J. Howard actually courted and chased her for years before she finally agreed to marry him.

Her second child, Dannielynn, was born out of wedlock over 11 years later. This happy event was overshadowed by Daniel’s untimely death due to a drug overdose just 3 days after his sister’s birth.

Anna made many television appearances in the time following Daniel’s death, usually accompanied by her lawyer/boyfriend, Howard K. Stern. She was obviously deeply hurt and troubled by her son’s death.

Unfortunately, she was not fated to mourn in peace. A paternity battle ensued. Howard K. Stern claimed to be Dannielynn’s father, but ex-boyfriend/photographer Larry Birkhead refuted the claim and filed a paternity lawsuit. Meanwhile, speculation over Daniel’s death continued - with many people claiming that Anna Nicole and Howard Stern may have had some deliberate involvement.

February 8, 2007: The media is flooded with reports of Anna Nicole Smith’s death. As this article is written, the exact cause of her death remains unknown.

She wrote a will prior to Daniel’s death, leaving her entire estate to her son. This seemed to leave Dannielynn out of the picture. However, when the legal dust settled, it appeared that Anna Nicole’s baby daughter would actually inherit the estate - which includes the financial settlement from the Marshall inheritance.

More men surfaced, claiming paternity of Dannielynn - including Prince Frederick von Anhalt (husband of Zsa Zsa Gabor).

Late into February, 2007, loved ones and relatives were still fighting about where she should be buried. The numerous court battles will likely be remembered with as much controversy and rumor as the O.J. Simpson case.

February 28, 2007: It is finally determined that Anna Nicole will be buried in the Bahamas, next to her son, Daniel.

From where this writer sits, Anna appears to have been a trusting, tormented, beautiful soul - taken advantage of by the very people she depended on and cared for. Where does it all end? Can she not receive some respite from notoriety and controversy even in death?

Let her rest peacefully now. She deserves respect and solitude. She was a misguided, sweet person who merits some dignity after her journey to the other side. We won’t forget you, Anna Nicole!

©Copyright Kathy Steinemann: This article is free to publish only if this copyright notice, the byline, and the author’s note below (with active links) are included.

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DNA Paternity Testing – Confirming the real father

The controversy first began when Smith announced she was pregnant in 2006, which prompted speculation as to who the father of the child may be. Initially, her legal counsel Howard K Stern said in front of a live TV audience that he had been in a relationship with Anna Nicole Smith immediately prior to conception of the baby, thus proclaiming that he was the most likely father of the child. Indeed on the child’s birth certificate, Howard K Stern was recorded as having been her father.

It was also proposed at one stage that the child might be that of her dead husband, after it was rumoured that Anna Nicole Smith froze a sample of her husband’s sperm for such a purpose prior to his death. However this was later suggested to be untrue, and was discounted as a possibility. There were, however, a number of other contenders that it was thought may be likely to be the father of the child.

Amongst other proposed fathers was one of Smith’s former security guards, as well as the husband of actress Zsa Zsa Gabor, who claimed to have had a long standing secret relationship with Anna Nicole Smith and could make him a potential candidate for biological father. Finally it was also proposed that her ex-boyfriend, photographer Larry Birkhead may be the father of the baby.

DNA Paternity Testing – Giving closure

Ultimately, the DNA testing in the Anna Nicole Smith case supported that Larry Birkhead was the father or her daughter, bringing the months of speculation and media interest to a head. Despite the claims of Howard K Stern made earlier regarding his parentage, the judicial ruling was made on the strength of the DNA evidence presented, thus it can be safely assumed that Larry Birkhead was indeed the true biological father.

This resulted in Birkhead obtaining custody of the child, subsequent to her mother’s death in 2007. Howard K Stern, the other leading party to the case, elected not to appeal against the DNA evidence that was submitted, and thus parentage was settled with Smith’s former lover.

DNA Testing – Extensive media coverage

While the results did come through in the end to provide a conclusive outcome, it was the first time DNA testing reached such media intensity and coverage. Similarly, other celebrities have since been involved in high profile DNA testing cases, usually concerning paternity of a celebrity baby, which never fail to capture the imagination of the general public.

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iphone

badoo

facebook

dailymotion

webkinz

youtube

ebuddy

second life

hi5

club penguin

The fastest rising keywords in US were

iphone

webkinz

tmz

transformers

youtube

club penguin

myspace

heroes

facebook

anna nicole smith

Well, lets face it, trends are created by events or happenings in the world as well as launching of movies or any bigger sports event like olympics and so on.

So what will be the trend for 2008?

It is not easy to prognose as some events comes unpredictable such as deaths of famous persons or any havoc or natural disasters.

However, Olympic games in China will be a safe better to be a keyword that will be popular during 2nd and 3rd quarter of 2008. I will not give you any more tips, but you can read my short text book in www.lulu.com/stig if you want more details of keywords i predict would make it in 2008 and help you create traffic in 2008.

We know that anna nichole smith was the most popular search word in 1st quarter of 2007 in the US, as virginia tech was in the 2nd quarter of 2007. In 3rd quarter of 2007 the keyword vannessa Hudgens were the most rising keyword, and in 4th quarter of 2007 the word pavarotti and red sox had their peaks. All driven by events in the region or globally affected at that time.

Best of luck and we will make a summary in end 2008 and see who was right or wrong. Maybe we both were wrong?

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Now along comes hoodia. Never heard of it? Soon it’ll be tripping off your tongue, because hoodia is a natural substance that literally takes your appetite away.

It’s very different from diet stimulants like Ephedra and Phenfen that are now banned because of dangerous side effects. Hoodia doesn’t stimulate at all. Scientists say it fools the brain by making you think you’re full, even if you’ve eaten just a morsel. Correspondent Lesley Stahl reports.

“Hoodia, a plant that tricks the brain by making the stomach feel full, has been in the diet of South Africa’s Bushmen for thousands of years.”

Because the only place in the world where hoodia grows wild is in the Kalahari Desert of South Africa.

Nigel Crawhall, a linguist and interpreter, hired an experienced tracker named Toppies Kruiper, a local aboriginal Bushman, to help find it. The Bushmen were featured in the movie “The Gods Must Be Crazy.”

Kruiper led 60 Minutes crews out into the desert. Stahl asked him if he ate hoodia. “I really like to eat them when the new rains have come,” says Kruiper, speaking through the interpreter. “Then they’re really quite delicious.”

When we located the plant, Kruiper cut off a stalk that looked like a small spiky pickle, and removed the sharp spines. In the interest of science, Stahl ate it. She described the taste as “a little cucumbery in texture, but not bad.”

So how did it work? Stahl says she had no after effects - no funny taste in her mouth, no queasy stomach, and no racing heart. She also wasn’t hungry all day, even when she would normally have a pang around mealtime. And, she also had no desire to eat or drink the entire day. “I’d have to say it did work,” says Stahl.

Although the West is just discovering hoodia, the Bushmen of the Kalahari have been eating it for a very long time. After all, they have been living off the land in southern Africa for more than 100,000 years.

Some of the Bushmen, like Anna Swartz, still live in old traditional huts, and cook so-called Bush food gathered from the desert the old-fashioned way.

The first scientific investigation of the plant was conducted at South Africa’s national laboratory. Because Bushmen were known to eat hoodia, it was included in a study of indigenous foods.

“What they found was when they fed it to animals, the animals ate it and lost weight,” says Dr. Richard Dixey, who heads an English pharmaceutical company called Phytopharm that is trying to develop weight-loss products based on hoodia.

Was hoodia’s potential application as an appetite suppressant immediately obvious?

“No, it took them a long time. In fact, the original research was done in the mid 1960s,” says Dixey.

It took the South African national laboratory 30 years to isolate and identify the specific appetite-suppressing ingredient in hoodia. When they found it, they applied for a patent and licensed it to Phytopharm.

Phytopharm has spent more than $20 million so far on research, including clinical trials with obese volunteers that have yielded promising results. Subjects given hoodia ended up eating about 1,000 calories a day less than those in the control group. To put that in perspective, the average American man consumes about 2,600 calories a day; a woman about 1,900.

“If you take this compound every day, your wish to eat goes down. And we’ve seen that very, very dramatically,” says Dixey.

But why do you need a patent for a plant? “The patent is on the application of the plant as a weight-loss material. And, of course, the active compounds within the plant. It’s not on the plant itself,” says Dixey.

So no one else can use hoodia for weight loss? “As a weight-management product without infringing the patent, that’s correct,” says Dixey.

But what does that say about all these weight-loss products that claim to have hoodia in it? Trimspa says its X32 pills contain 75 mg of hoodia. The company is pushing its product with an ad campaign featuring Anna Nicole Smith, even though the FDA has notified Trimspa that it hasn’t demonstrated that the product is safe.

Some companies have even used the results of Phytopharm’s clinical tests to market their products.

“This is just straightforward theft. That’s what it is. People are stealing data, which they haven’t done, they’ve got no proper understanding of, and sticking on the bottle,” says Dixey. “When we have assayed these materials, they contain between 0.1 and 0.01 percent of the active ingredient claimed. But they use the term hoodia on the bottle, of course, so they — does nothing at all.”

But Dixey isn’t the only one who’s felt ripped off. The Bushmen first heard the news about the patent when Phytopharm put out a press release. Roger Chennells, a lawyer in South Africa who represents the Bushmen, who are also called “the San,” was appalled.

“The San did not even know about it,” says Chennells. “They had given the information that led directly toward the patent.”

The taking of traditional knowledge without compensation is called “bio-piracy.”

“You have said, and I’m going to quote you, ‘that the San felt as if someone had stolen the family silver,’” says Stahl to Chennells. “So what did you do?”

“I wouldn’t want to go into some of the details as to what kind of letters were written or what kind of threats were made,” says Chennells. “We engaged them. They had done something wrong, and we wanted them to acknowledge it.”

Chennells was determined to help the Bushmen who, he says, have been exploited for centuries. First they were pushed aside by black tribes. Then, when white colonists arrived, they were nearly annihilated.

“About the turn of the century, there were still hunting parties in Namibia and in South Africa that allowed farmers to go and kill Bushmen,” says Chennells. “It’s well documented.”

The Bushmen are still stigmatized in South Africa, and plagued with high unemployment, little education, and lots of alcoholism. And now, it seemed they were about to be cut out of a potential windfall from hoodia. So Chennells threatened to sue the national lab on their behalf.

“We knew that if it was successful, many, many millions of dollars would be coming towards the San,” says Chennells. “Many, many millions. They’ve talked about the market being hundreds and hundreds of millions in America.”

In the end, a settlement was reached. The Bushmen will get a percentage of the profits — if there are profits. But that’s a big if.

The future of hoodia is not yet a sure thing. The project hit a major snag last year. Pharmaceutical giant Pfizer, which had teamed up with Phytopharm, and funded much of the research, dropped out when making a pill out of the active ingredient seemed beyond reach.

Dixey says it can be made synthetically: “We’ve made milligrams of it. But it’s very expensive. It’s not possible to make it synthetically in what’s called a scaleable process. So we couldn’t make a metric ton of it or something that is the sort of quantity you’d need to actually start doing something about obesity in thousands of people.”

Phytopharm decided to market hoodia in its natural form, in diet shakes and bars. That meant it needed the hoodia plant itself.

But given the obesity epidemic in the United States, it became obvious that what was needed was a lot of hoodia - much more than was growing in the wild in the Kalahari. And so they came here.

60 Minutes visited one of Phytopharm’s hoodia plantations in South Africa. They’ll need a lot of these plantations to meet the expected demand.

Agronomist Simon MacWilliam has a tall order: grow a billion portions a year of hoodia, within just a couple of years. He admitted that starting up the plantation has been quite a challenge.

“The problem is we’re dealing with a novel crop. It’s a plant we’ve taken out of the wild and we’re starting to grow it,’ says MacWilliam. “So we have no experience. So it’s different? diseases and pests which we have to deal with.”

How confident are they that they will be able to grow enough? “We’re very confident of that,” he says. “We’ve got an expansion program which is going to be 100s of acres. And we’ll be able - ready to meet the demand.

This could be huge, given the obesity epidemic. Phytopharm says it’s about to announce marketing plans that will have meal-replacement hoodia products on supermarket shelves by 2008.

MacWilliam says these products are a slightly different species from the hoodia Stahl tasted in the Kalahari Desert. “It’s actually a lot more bitter than the plant that you tasted,” says MacWilliam.

The advantage is this species of hoodia will grow a lot faster. But more bitter? How bad could it be? Stahl decided to find out. “Not good,” she says.

Phytopharm says that when its product gets to market, it will be certified safe and effective. They also promise that it’ll taste good.

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Well, judging by Google’s own Zeitgeist for 2007, it was a little bit of all that and much more. Not surprisingly the iphone came out at the very top both in the US and across the globe. Other top searches included facebook, webkinz and of course youtube. What surprised me when I read the list is “club penguin.” What the heck is club penguin? while I go search that at google, I’ll leave you with this fascinating little list:

The Fastest Rising Searches in 2007 (global) were:

iphone

badoo

facebook

dailymotion

webkinz

youtube

ebuddy

second life

hi5

club penguin

The Fastest Rising Searches in 2007 (U.S.) were:

iphone

webkinz

tmz

transformers

youtube

club penguin

myspace

heroes

facebook

anna nicole smith

The Most Popular Google News Searches (global) were:

american idol

youtube

britney spears

2007 cricket world cup

chris benoit

iphone

anna nicole smith

paris hilton

iran

vanessa hudgens

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