Chavez praises Penn for criticism of war

Caracas, Venezuela – Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez praised U.S. actor Sean Penn on Wednesday for his critical stance against the war in Iraq, saying the two chatted by phone and soon plan to meet in person.

Chavez said Penn traveled to Venezuela this week wanting to learn more about the situation in the country and walked around some of Caracas’ poor barrios on his own.

“Welcome to Venezuela, Mr. Penn. What drives him is consciousness, the search for new paths,” Chavez said in a televised speech. “He’s one of the greatest opponents of the Iraq invasion.”

Chavez read aloud from a recent open letter by Penn to President Bush in which the actor condemned the Iraq war and called for Bush to be impeached, saying the president along with Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice are “villainously and criminally obscene people.”

The two met Thursday. Chavez called the actor “well-informed about what is happening in the United States and the world, in spite of being in Hollywood.”

Penn on Wednesday toured Venezuela’s new film studios on the outskirts of Caracas.

Date set for R. Kelly child pornography trial

Chicago – R. Kelly will go on trial next month, more than five years after he was charged with child pornography.

Judge Vincent Gaughan has set a Sept. 17 date for the start of a jury trial, according to the Cook County state’s attorney’s office.

The Chicago Sun-Times reported on its Web site that setting of the date followed a lengthy meeting Wednesday among the judge, the lead prosecutor, the R&B singer and his lawyers.

Kelly, who was born Robert Sylvester Kelly, has pleaded not guilty to 14 counts of child pornography. He was charged in 2002 and is accused of allegedly engaging in videotaped sex acts with an underage girl.

Kelly’s attorneys haven’t conceded that he is on the tape, saying his likeness may have been computer generated. They also have tried to raise doubts about the identity and age of the girl.

The case has been hit with delay after delay. Since being charged, Kelly, 40, has had six best-selling albums and three nationwide tours.

Louis Vuitton label turns to Gorbachev

Paris – Move over Scarlett Johansson! Mikhail Gorbachev is the new face of Louis Vuitton.

The former Soviet leader is to appear in an ad campaign for the French luxury label, along with Steffi Graf and her husband, Andre Agassi, and Catherine Deneuve, according to a statement Thursday from Vuitton, a division of the LVMH group, Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton SA.

Shot by photographer Annie Leibovitz, the ads focus on travel – a “core value” for the company that started in 1854 as a trunk-maker, the statement said.

Gorbachev is featured in a car, a Vuitton bag at his side and the Berlin Wall in the background. Graf and Agassi are shown snuggling in a hotel room bed. A vampy Deneuve sits perched on a Vuitton suitcase in a foggy train station – or is it a movie set?

Vuitton said it was making donations to former Vice President Al Gore’s The Climate Project to fight global warming and Green Cross International, founded by Gorbachev to promote sustained development.

Pulitzer winner Simic named poet laureate

Concord, N.H. – Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Charles Simic, who learned English as a teenage immigrant, will be the new U.S. poet laureate, the Library of Congress announced Thursday.

Simic, who lives in Strafford, will replace another New Hampshire poet, Donald Hall of Wilmot, for the poet laureate program, which promotes poetry across the nation.

“I’m overwhelmed,” he said.

Simic taught at the University of New Hampshire for 34 years before moving to emeritus status. He won the Pulitzer Prize in poetry in 1990 for his book of prose poems, “The World Doesn’t End.” He also is an essayist, translator, editor and professor emeritus of creative writing and literature.

Simic was born in Yugoslavia in 1938, and his childhood was disrupted by World War II. He moved to Paris with his mother when he was 15 and joined his father in New York a year later, in 1954. He has been a U.S. citizen for 36 years.

“I am especially touched and honored to be selected because I am an immigrant boy who didn’t speak English until I was 15,” he said.