Lochte: Glad I missed Harry's nude party
NEW YORK, Aug. 23 (UPI) -- U.S. Olympic swimmer Ryan Lochte said Thursday he was glad he didn't stay with Britain's Prince Harry after the two had a swimming race in Las Vegas.
The two raced last weekend at an after-hours pool party at the Wynn Las Vegas resort and casino -- a race the world record-holder in the 200-meter and 400-meter individual medleys easily won.
"We were at the same pool party and his people came over to my table and said Prince Harry wants to meet you," Lochte told NBC's "Today" show.
"I took off my shirt and jumped in, and we started racing," the gold medal winner said, adding swimming against the partying prince was "the coolest thing."
But Lochte, 28, told the program he was "kinda happy" he missed out on the prince's late-night naked party.
"After our race, we went our separate ways," he said.
The gossip Web site TMZ said Thursday the British royal family was "furious" over the photos the site published Tuesday night -- photos that quickly spread globally. The New York Daily News said the 27-year-old Harry, who returned to England Thursday, faced the "wrath" of Queen Elizabeth II.
The royal family moved to block British publication of the naked photos Wednesday, and no British newspaper published them.
The family wrote to the Press Complaints Commission, Britain's voluntary newspaper and magazine regulatory body, drawing attention to the privacy clause in the commission's Code of Practice, which the family said should ensure "reasonable expectations of privacy in a hotel room," a spokesman said.
The family also reminded individual newspapers of their own editorial codes of conduct and to respect the prince's privacy, the spokesman said.
Buckingham Palace and Prince Charles, Harry's father, did not threaten legal action if the photos were published, the spokesman told the British newspaper The Guardian.
An unsigned Guardian blog Thursday suggested Harry, who stripped on the Las Vegas Strip, should be stripped of his royal status -- or at least should abdicate.
"I bet Harry would jump at the chance," the blog said. "He could be like King Edward VIII and abdicate -- not from the throne in his case, but from being third in line to it.
"We'd no longer call him prince, and in return we'd give him back some of his privacy.
"He could get as drunk as he likes and strip of all over the place," the blog said.
King Edward VIII abdicated the British throne in 1936 to marry U.S. divorcee Wallis Simpson.
He famously said, "I have found it impossible to carry the heavy burden of responsibility and to discharge my duties as king as I would wish to do without the help and support of the woman I love."
TMZ reported Thursday when Harry began the party at his VIP suite at the five-star Encore Las Vegas luxury resort, casino and hotel connected to the Wynn, the young women he brought with him were not asked to surrender their cellphones.
And when the party fired up and several women started snapping photos, one of Harry's security guards feebly said, "Aww, come on, no photos."
The security guys were enjoying the party more than protecting the prince, sources told the Web site.
"Harry's team acted like a bunch of amateurs," a source said.
Harvey Weinstein target of extortion plot
CHARLESTON, W.Va., Aug. 23 (UPI) -- An aspiring actor charged with trying to extort $4 million from producer Harvey Weinstein was held without bail Thursday in West Virginia, authorities said.
Vivek Shah, 25, of West Hollywood, Calif., is accused of sending menacing letters not only to Weinstein, who produced Oscar-winning "Shakespeare in Love" and Tony Award-winning "The Producers," but also to four other billionaires, including Groupon co-founder Eric Lefkofsky, coal magnate Christopher Cline, an oil executive and the owner of an NHL team.
"Each of these letters contained a threat to kill named members of the recipient's family unless a large sum of money was wired to an offshore bank account," Postal Inspector Joshua Mehall said in a sworn affidavit.
Only Cline was identified in the affidavit by name because he was the first to alert federal authorities of the threats, Mehall's affidavit said.
Federal agents then learned other "extortion demand letters substantially the same as the one received by Mr. Cline" had been sent to four other targets.
A follow-up letter to Cline included "wiring instructions for a bank in Cyprus," said Mehall's affidavit, first reported by The Smoking Gun Web site.
The other billionaires were identified generically in the affidavit. Weinstein, the 60-year-old co-chairman of Weinstein Co., is described as "a Connecticut resident and co-founder of a film studio." Weinstein lives in Westport, Conn.
The others were identified in similar ways.
The New York Post reported one of the billionaires was Lefkofsky, president of Chicago's Blue Media LLC.
Shah was arrested by federal agents at his parents' home near Chicago Aug. 10 after he was named in a U.S. District Court complaint for allegedly sending threatening interstate communications.
His Internet Movie Database biography says he was born in Akron, Ohio, spent a decade in India and moved back to the United States along with his family.
His IMDb profile says he had bit parts on "Bones," "Outsourced," "Our Family Wedding" and "The Dark Knight," in which he played a bank hostage.
Shah's father told the Post the allegations were "out of character" for his son.
If convicted, Shah faces a maximum 20-year prison term.
Mark David Chapman denied parole, 7th time
ALDEN, N.Y., Aug. 23 (UPI) -- Mark David Chapman, convicted of killing former Beatle John Lennon, was denied parole for a seventh time Thursday, New York state corrections officials said.
His request was denied following a hearing Wednesday, the state Department of Corrections and Community Supervision said in a statement.
Chapman was also denied parole in 2000, '02, '04, '06, '08 and '10.
Chapman, 57, is serving a sentence of 20 years to life after pleading guilty to second-degree murder in Lennon's death. He has received psychological treatment throughout his imprisonment.
He is in protective custody in a single-person cell at the maximum-security Wende Correctional Facility in Alden, N.Y., near Buffalo. He is allowed out of the cell three hours a day.
He was moved to Wende May 15 from New York's super-maximum-security Attica Correctional Facility.
Since his transfer, Chapman reapplied to participate in a state program called "family reunion," which lets inmates spend more time with family members, CNN reported.
Chapman -- who once said he thought of killing Johnny Carson, Elizabeth Taylor and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis before deciding on Lennon -- told a parole board in 2010 his Christian faith deepened while in prison and he hoped to get a job and live with his wife after release from prison.
Chapman married Japanese-American former travel agent Gloria Hiroko Abe, who lives in Hawaii, in June 1979, 18 months before he killed Lennon outside The Dakota apartment building next to New York's Central Park, Dec. 8, 1980.
Chapman pulled a .38-caliber revolver and fired five shots at Lennon after getting the former Beatle to autograph a copy of the "Double Fantasy" album Lennon released with his wife, Yoko Ono, that year.
The New York Daily News reported in 2008 Chapman had conjugal visits with his wife at Attica at least once a year since 1990.The 44-hour visits took place in a special modular "private homelike setting" on the prison grounds, the newspaper quoted prison officials as saying.
The state's three-member Parole Board said after Chapman's 2010 hearing it denied his parole due to the "disregard you displayed for the norms of our society and the sanctity of human life."
Lennon's widow, Yoko Ono, has consistently pleaded with the board not to release Chapman, saying she feared for her own life and those of her two sons, as well as for his.
"There are so many people out there who dislike him," Ono told the News in 2008. "It's safer for him to stay in jail."
'Frankenweenie' premieres: Austin, London
AUSTIN, Texas, Aug. 23 (UPI) -- Tim Burton's "Frankenweenie," a Frankenstein parody, will have its world premiere in Austin, Texas, and its European premiere in London, officials said.
The black-and-white stop-motion animated comedy horror film -- about a boy named Victor Frankenstein who loses his dog and uses the power of science to bring it back to life -- will premiere in Austin on the opening night of Fantastic Fest Sept. 20 and in Europe at the BFI London Film Festival's opening night Oct. 10, the officials said.
Stop motion is an animation technique to make a physically manipulated object appear to move on its own.
"Tim Burton stands as a titan of modern genre cinema," Fantastic Fest co-founder and Creative Director Tim League said in a statement. "To world-premiere the feature adaptation of his early beloved short is a huge honor for me personally and for the festival in general."
The film, backed by the Walt Disney Co., is a remake of Burton's 1984 short film of the same title, although the original was not animated.
BFI head of exhibition and festival Director Clare Stewart said in a statement the "funny, dark and whimsical" film, which "playfully turns the Frankenstein story on its bolted-on head," was a "perfect choice of opener" for the London festival.
"It a film that revels in the magic of movies from one of cinema's great visionaries," she said.
The London opening night screening and red carpet events from the Odeon Leicester Square theater will also be broadcast live onscreen at Odeon's BFI London IMAX theater and on 30 other screens across Britain, the festival said Thursday.
Voices in the new film include Catherine O'Hara, Winona Ryder, Martin Landau, Martin Short, and Conchata Ferrell. Christopher Lee -- who appeared in Burton's "Dark Shadows" and became famous for his role as Count Dracula in a string of gothic horror films in the late 1950s and 1960s -- makes an uncredited cameo as Dracula in an old movie playing on TV.
