Sofia Vergara wasted lots of money on accent lessons

IANS. Los Angeles

           

Colombian-American actress Sofia Vergara spent a lot of money on speech lessons when she started out in the film industry.

The "Modern Family" actress says she wasted a ton of money trying to change her accent, reports femalefirst.co.uk.

"I spent so much money when I decided I was going to act. I'm like, 'I'm moving to Los Angeles, I'm gonna hire the best speech coach, I can't understand why Salma Hayek and Penelope Cruz can't learn how to speak perfectly, I'm gonna do it'," Vergara said on Harry Connick Jr's new TV show "Harry".

The 44-year-old says her son Manolo, now 24, grew increasingly frustrated with her as she kept pronouncing words wrong.

"He would run lines with me... And he'd say, 'Mum, I just corrected you, like, two seconds ago and you said the word again wrong'," she added.

Vergara, who is married to filmmaker Joe Manganiello, had earlier shared that she is glad to have had her son when she was young.

"I think it helps when he grows up and you are like friends, as well as mother and son. It's fantastic to have your kids young, because you have so much energy."

"I think my family's really funny. Colombian people need that because we come from times that were tough, and sometimes the only way to survive that was to make fun of ourselves and those situations," she had said.

Protest vote closes AFC congress in just 20 minutes

AFP . Panaji |

           

An Asian football congress to elect representatives to the FIFA Council closed after just 20 minutes on Tuesday after members rejected the agenda in protest at a Qatari official being barred from the poll.
Members voted 42 to one against supporting the agenda at the meeting in India’s Goa, which meant the ballot to elect three new members to the world body’s powerful council was cancelled.
Asian Football Confederation (AFC) president Sheikh Salman bin Ibrahim Al Khalifa said it was “probably the shortest congress” he had ever chaired.
“It has been an eventful morning and the message is clear to us all. Now my final task is to declare the extraordinary congress closed,” said the Bahraini, before heading into an AFC executive committee committee.
Delegates said the agenda was rejected because a senior Qatari official had been banned from standing just 24 hours before the vote was due to take place.
Scandal-plagued FIFA’s ethics committee last month recommended a two-and-a-half-year ban for Saoud Al-Mohannadi, vice-president of the Qatar Football Association, for refusing to cooperate with a corruption investigation.
Mohannadi denies any wrongdoing and had initially been cleared to stand, before the AFC announced late on Sunday that he’d been ruled out by FIFA.
FIFA has not revealed the subject of the corruption inquiry, but it is not connected with allegations related to the 2022 World Cup, which Qatar will host.
Tuesday’s debacle was witnessed by FIFA president Gianni Infantino, who beat Sheikh Salman to the job in an election in February and who was in Goa for the congress.
“It was not the right way to go about things. I wish this process had been done much earlier,” Praful Patel, president of the All India Football Federation, told AFP.
“It’s only fair that elections take place in a way that is fair and just. When people file nominations I think at that stage it’s better if they know whether they are going to be able to contest or not,” he added.
Corruption scandals
Six candidates from Asia, including China and North Korea, had been due to vie for three seats on the FIFA Council, which was set up under anti-corruption reforms earlier this year.
FIFA’s all-powerful executive committee, which had become the epicentre of corruption at the organisation, was rebranded as the FIFA Council at the body’s congress in Mexico earlier this year.
It is meant to operate in a similar way to a company’s board of directors as part of plans to make FIFA more transparent, including in the awarding of World Cup hosting rights, following a string of corruption scandals.
Three male candidates—Zhang Jian of China, Iran’s Ali Kafashian Naeni and Zainudin Nordin of Singapore—were set to compete for two of the seats in Tuesday’s vote.
Former Australian footballer Moya Dodd was favourite to beat Mahfuza Ahkter of Bangladesh and North Korea’s Han Un-Gyong to be the AFC’s designated female representative.
FIFA boss Infantino is undertaking a clean-up of FIFA after a series of corruption scandals and bribery allegations plunged the body into crisis.
Former president Sepp Blatter is serving a six-year ban from football over ethics violations, while former secretary-general Jerome Valcke was banned for 10 years over misconduct regarding television deals and 2014 World Cup ticket sales.
Allegations of vote-buying have also dogged the awarding of the 2018 World Cup to Russia and the 2022 edition to Qatar.

Hillary wins 1st debate over Trump

en.prothom-alo Online Desk

           

Hillary Clinton was deemed the winner of Monday night's debate by 62 percent of voters who tuned in to watch, while just 27 percent said they thought Donald Trump had the better night, according to a CNN/ORC Poll of voters who watched the debate.
That drubbing is similar to Mitt Romney's dominant performance over President Barack Obama in the first 2012 presidential debate, CNN said in its report.
Voters who watched said Clinton expressed her views more clearly than Trump and had a better understanding of the issues by a margin of more than 2-to-1. Clinton also was seen as having done a better job addressing concerns voters might have about her potential presidency by a 57 percent to 35 percent margin, and as the stronger leader by a 56 percent to 39 percent margin.
CNN finds The gap was smaller on which candidate appeared more sincere and authentic, though still broke in Clinton's favor, with 53 percent saying she was more sincere vs. 40 percent who felt Trump did better on that score. Trump topped Clinton 56 percent to 33 percent as the debater who spent more time attacking their opponent.
Although the survey suggested debate watchers were more apt to describe themselves as Democrats than the overall pool of voters, even independents who watched deemed Clinton the winner, 54 percent vs. 33 percent who thought Trump did the best job in the debate.
And the survey suggests Clinton outperformed the expectations of those who watched. While pre-debate interviews indicated, these watchers expected Clinton to win by a 26-point margin that grew to 35 points in the post-debate survey, CNN said.
About half in the poll say the debate did not have an effect on their voting plans, 47 percent said it didn't make a difference, but those who say they were moved by it tilted in Clinton's direction, 34 percent said the debate made them more apt to vote for Clinton, 18 percent more likely to back Trump.
On the issues, voters who watched broadly say Clinton would do a better job handling foreign policy, 62 percent to 35 percent, and most think she would be the better candidate to handle terrorism, 54 percent to 43 percent who prefer Trump. But on the economy, the split is much closer, with 51 percent saying they favor Clinton's approach vs. 47 percent who prefer Trump.
Most debate watchers came away from Monday's face-off with doubts about Trump's ability to handle the presidency. Overall, 55 percent say they didn't think Trump would be able to handle the job of president, 43 percent said they thought he would. Among political independents who watched the debate, it's a near-even split, 50 percent say he can handle it, 49 percent that he can't, the CNN report said.
And voters who watched were more apt to see Trump's attacks on Clinton as unfair as they were to see her critiques that way. About two-thirds of debate viewers, 67 percent, said Clinton's critiques of Trump were fair, while just 51 percent said the same of Trump.
Assessments of Trump's attacks on Clinton were sharply split by gender, with 58 percent of men seeing them as fair compared with 44 percent of women who watched on Monday. There was almost no gender divide in perceptions of whether Clinton's attacks were fair.
The CNN/ORC post-debate poll includes interviews with 521 registered voters who watched the September 26 debate. Results among debate-watchers have a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 4.5 percentage points. Respondents were originally interviewed as part of a September 23-25 telephone survey of a random sample of Americans, and indicated they planned to watch the debate and would be willing to be re-interviewed when it was over.