Revolt

Ask Michael Cera, the star of "Youth in Revolt," if he has lost his virginity, and he answers "Yes" before adding that good, if dusty, chestnut: "Now, I'm trying to get it back." Recycled jokes about lost virginity are a lot like movies that mine the humor of the same subject: Depending on the execution, they veer wildly between trite and funny. In the case of Cera's quip -- spoken with his halting, thoughtful, almost squeaky voice -- it falls solidly on the humorous side. With "Youth in Revolt," in theaters Friday, director Miguel Arteta ("The Good Girl")

The cigarette smoke hovers dense inside the neighborhood cafe. Young patrons knock back beers at greasy wooden tables. A heated debate rages about Syria's revolt. The rotund bar owner labels the rebels baltajiya , or bandits, who are ravaging towns and villages. Demonstrators want only change and freedom, replies a young man in a hooded sweat shirt. Others wrangle over the president and the uncertain future. It is a striking scene for a tightly controlled police state.

Recap: "Youth in Revolt" starring Michael Sera captures the misdeeds of a dweeb and his alter-ego in an effort to win the heart of his first love. Review: "There's not much here, but at least Michael Cera and company deliver some laughs in this long-on-the-shelf comedy." -- Michael Phillips, Los Angeles Times film critic

"Pink slime," a food additive made from spare beef trimmings that's treated with ammonium hydroxide to kill off E. coli , salmonella and other possible bacteria, continues to rear its slimy head. Last month, as KTLA reported , McDonald's decided to cease using the additive in its hamburgers.  This decision came after prodding by TV chef Jamie Oliver. On his "Food Revolution," the disgusted food activist says the additive is made of " all of the bits that no one wants . " The USDA, however, says the additive is safe to eat. The department is so satisfied with the stuff that it plans to buy 7 million pounds of ground beef containing "pink slime" in coming months for the national school lunch program, the Daily reported on Monday.  And that's created a whole new stink.

"I'm more androgynous," says Portia Doubleday, "because men are supposed to be more spatial, women more literal -- I'm a tomboy." The 21-year-old actress is speaking of her academic pursuits -- she's studying psychology and considering pre-med because "I've always had a more spatial mind, mathematical, than literal." But it's not likely anyone is going to mistake the athletic young woman with the blue saucer eyes and flowing blond tresses for a boy. She looks like a cross between Natasha Lyonne and Lily Cole.

Conservatives are calling it their August Revolt -- a surprising upsurge of activism against President Obama's proposed healthcare overhaul. Spurred on by the success of their efforts to dominate the news at Democratic town hall meetings, conservative groups are reporting increases in membership lists and are joining forces to plan at least one mass demonstration in Washington next month. But the conservative mobilization has also created an unusual dilemma for Republican leaders, who want to turn the enthusiasm into election victories next year but find themselves the target of ire from many of the same activists.

I'm not Egyptian. I don't have any Egyptian friends. I've never had more than a passing interest in the shifting politics of the Middle East. So why was I so obsessively bound to the images of Egypt's grass-roots rebellion? I watched the protests on my kitchen television while I cooked dinner, and on my laptop in bed until I fell asleep. I kept my car radio tuned to NPR, so I could keep up on my commute. I bombarded my daughters with such frequent updates, they began avoiding me. It wasn't just my "news junkie" hunger, and I wasn't the only one enthralled.

When he was a boy, the blind sheik was forced to read Moammar Kadafi's Green Book manifesto in Braille, his fingers trying to decipher the erratic mind of a leader who brutalized a nation. "It was nonsense, the work of a madman," said Yosry Alhadar, one of the most prominent clerics in rebel-held territory in eastern Libya. "There was absolutely no value in it. He wanted the world to know that Libya is Kadafi and Kadafi is Libya. That they were indivisible. But the world is now watching the whole facade collapse.

Marek Edelman, the last surviving leader of the ill-fated 1943 Warsaw ghetto revolt against the Nazis, died Friday in Warsaw. He was 90. Edelman died of old age at the family home of his friend Paula Sawicka, where he had lived for the last two years. "He died at home, among friends, among his close people," Sawicka said. Most of Edelman's adult life was dedicated to the defense of human life, dignity and freedom. He fought the Nazis in the doomed Warsaw ghetto revolt and later in the Warsaw Uprising.

The cigarette smoke hovers dense inside the neighborhood cafe. Young patrons knock back beers at greasy wooden tables. A heated debate rages about Syria's revolt. The rotund bar owner labels the rebels baltajiya , or bandits, who are ravaging towns and villages. Demonstrators want only change and freedom, replies a young man in a hooded sweat shirt. Others wrangle over the president and the uncertain future. It is a striking scene for a tightly controlled police state.

Syrian President Bashar Assad's condemnation of fellow Arab leaders exposes the power struggle running through a region where he, and his father before him, helped lead the cause of Arab nationalism. In his first address to his country since June, a defiant Assad vowed to crush a 10-month-old popular revolt against him. But he also raged at what he regards as the Arab League's betrayal of Damascus, singling out the Persian Gulf nations that have risen in stature as traditional powers Syria and Egypt have faded.

In the Democratic Republic of Congo's second stab at democracy since the end of a ruinous civil war, President Joseph Kabila is likely to cling to power. But Monday's election is already so flawed that the result will probably be contested, and the odds of violence or even a return to war are high, analysts and human rights activists warn. After the last poll in 2006, security forces killed hundreds of opposition protesters in the capital, Kinshasa. And that was when Kabila was still popular.

As deadly clashes intensified Monday between thousands of protesters and riot police, Egypt's interim government offered to resign in an attempt to calm three consecutive days of unrest that have shaken the country ahead of next week's parliamentary elections. It was unclear whether the ruling Supreme Council of the Armed Forces would accept the Cabinet's offer to step aside, which would severely undermine the military's legitimacy. It was unlikely that resignations would appease protesters whose main target of derision has been the ruling generals and their refusal to hand power over to a new democracy.

  The rebel commander arrives as night falls, his escorts a cadre of young men on motorbikes, Arab scarves concealing their faces. He's always on the move: Syrian spies are everywhere amid the rugged borderlands of remote northern Lebanon. "We stand with the protesters," declares Ahmed al-Arabi, nom de guerre of a self-described senior officer with the Free Syrian Army, a group of military defectors who say they have taken up arms against the government of Syrian President Bashar Assad.

Its principal commercial drag, Tripoli Street, could be the Hollywood set for an urban warfare action thriller: Charred tanks and pulverized shipping containers sit in front of blackened buildings pockmarked with rounds from bullets, rockets and sundry other lethal ordnance. But the hellish scene in the western port city of Misurata has nothing to do with fiction. More than a thousand people were killed here and many more injured in a months-long series of street battles that ousted the forces of Moammar Kadafi from the city and eventually, its environs.

Artillery shells and airstrikes, not placards and peaceful protests, sent Moammar Kadafi fleeing from his fortress: The Libyan uprising has made it clear that even the most brutal leaders may be endangered icons in a region reshaped since the first stirrings of revolt late last year. The 6-month-old Libyan revolt tapped into the spirit of revolutions that swept Egypt and Tunisia, but its darker narrative sobered the early euphoria of the so-called Arab Spring. Libyan protesters began peacefully but were quickly confronted with the tactics of a leader who bombed hospitals and unleashed tanks on mosques.

As the blows and electric shocks, the taunts and degradations rained down on him, Khaled Abou el Fadl never imagined that the perpetrator of his torture ? the government of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak ? could ever be shaken. Now, more than 25 years later, the UCLA law professor is awestruck and incredulous that the people of his native land have risen up in the biggest demonstrations ever against Mubarak and a government that seemed, for three long decades, all powerful and all pervasive.

Raed Habbal was not a particularly devout Muslim, a relative recalls. The 19-year-old college student and scion of a socialist family in the city of Hama even occasionally took a swig of alcohol with friends, the relative says. But during the 1982 uprising in Hama, the young man was snatched up by security forces aiming to crush what they called an armed Islamist revolt. By the time the government crackdown ended, then-Syrian leader Hafez Assad's forces had flattened swaths of Hama, the country's fourth-largest city, and killed tens of thousands of civilians.

Two days before black smoke left a pall over Hama, a bloodied symbol of the uprising against the government of Syria, the country's second-largest city, Aleppo, held a cultural festival featuring a 3,600-foot-long Syrian flag wrapped around its ancient citadel. On one of the city's main streets, families have still gathered every night on the sidewalks and in the medians for nighttime picnics. Vendors crowd around selling hookahs, popcorn, sandwiches and coffee. Traffic moves slowly as people park cars by the sidewalk and open doors and windows to let music stream out to entertain the crowds.