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Hawaii marks 50 years as the 50th state Friday, but there will be no grand parades, no lavish displays of native culture. Organizers of the observation call it simply a “commemoration,” one that is sensitive to a painful history of native Hawaiians.

Convention, conflict
“Instead of state government having huge parties and fireworks, we’re having a convention,” said Manu Boyd, cultural director for the Royal Hawaiian Center, a shopping and entertainment area in Waikiki. “That shows the strength and spiritual power of the Hawaiian people, whose shattered world has not yet been addressed.”

But even the low-key conference is drawing complaints. Hawaiian sovereignty groups are planning protests outside the convention center Friday, and some say the conference’s topics are too focused on tourism, economic development and business opportunities.

One panelist, University of Hawaii Center for Hawaiian Studies professor Jonathan Osorio, said the conference should focus on Hawaiian culture and history.

Kingdom overthrown
After King Kamehameha the Great conquered and united the islands in 1810, the kingdom was overthrown when a group of American businessmen forced Queen Liliuokalani to abdicate while U.S. Marines came ashore in 1893. Hawaii was considered a republic until it became a U.S. territory in 1898.

“This newfangled idea of celebrating statehood shows that people don’t understand Hawaii’s history, or if they do understand, then they’re celebrating a lie, a theft, that essentially stole a people’s right of self-determination,” said Poka Laenui, a Hawaiian and attorney who has worked for independence for 30 years.

‘Statehood!’
Nearly 18 years after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor pulled the U.S. into World War II, Hawaii was admitted into the union on Aug. 21, 1959.

Dodie Brown was a 6-year-old when her father took a picture of her holding a newspaper proclaiming “Statehood!” — an image sent around the world.

“It’s good that the commemoration is quiet,” said Brown, who works for the city of Honolulu. “Something like this should be done with taste and finesse, in respect to everyone’s feelings.”

In recent years, the state’s tourism industry has made strides in ensuring that Hawaiian culture is respected rather than exploited, said Kelii Wilson, Hawaiian cultural coordinator for the Hawaii Tourism Authority.

I sat down with Renée Zellweger this week to talk about her role as a 1950s-era mother in “My One and Only.” In the film, her character embarks on a cross-country road trip with her two sons, Robbie and George. The story is loosely based on the life of actor George Hamilton. Hamilton says he actually cried when he saw Zellweger’s portrayal of this mother on the bigscreen. “I felt like I was there,” he told me, “With my mother.”

Zellweger told me she loved “everything” about working on the period piece. “It was so much fun. The clothes, the styling, the houses, the car. Oh, the car.” Zellweger had much more to say about the Cadillac in the film (and not all of it positive)! Watch the clip below to hear for yourself:
done

As you can see on the clip, Zellweger was very cheerful and full of laughs. She was a joy to interview from the moment I arrived. In fact, here’s a behind-the-scenes moment that you won’t see on TV: She kept complimenting me on my black wrap dress, and asked if it was Diane von Furstenberg. I couldn’t remember the designer, and she kept asking, so finally I turned around so she could peek at the tag. Once that was settled, we started the interview. After we finished discussing the movie, I thanked her and left the room. Just as I walked out the door, I heard her say to her stylist, “White House/Black Market, we have to go there. I liked that dress.” I never, ever thought an Oscar winner would be taking fashion notes from me. She probably knew I was within earshot and was just being nice, but it still made for a memorable moment. Thanks, Renee!

Bradley Cooper, 34, must be a very kind man, indeed. That’s one of the virtues his reported gf and My One and Only costar Renée Zellweger, 40, says she craves in men. But she doesn’t go for dullards, however nice they are.

“I like clever folks,” RZ tells People. “I like people who are concerned with [what] the path they leave behind them looks like.” (Covered in bread crumbs?) RZ wants the whole package: Her potential mate also must be brimming with “empathy, humor, wit, self-reliance and honesty.” Gee, sure you didn’t leave anything out?

Fourteen strikes and you’re thick
Sometimes you’re the last to know.

Suppose you have six kids. And then you have eight more. At once. Months and months later, it occurs to you that it . . . might not have . . . been . . . that . . . good . . . an idea, actually.

This brainstorm has struck Nadya Suleman, “Octomom” to you and the media. She said so in an interview shown on Fox on Wednesday. The title of the two-hour special (whaaa . . . ?) was a hoot and a holler: Octomom: The Incredible Unseen Footage. The heart quails. She said, strangely, that she “resented” herself for having the octs. “I screwed up my life,” she said. “I screwed up my kids’ lives. . . . What was I thinking?” We don’t know, but since she has secured TV contracts for all her kids, in a big reality-TV gig, maybe the raw green will assuage her bruised conscience.

Meanwhile, the mother of all mothers was in court yesterday to fight a bid to appoint an independent guardian to look over her kids’ finances. Former Disney Mouseketeer and now children-in-entertainment advocate Paul Petersen thinks all the TV and international-publicity stuff may hurt the kids.

Sting’s daughter tells no-fun truth

Some myths are too freakily oddball to be busted. Like the one in which Sting and wifey Trudie Styler do Tantric whatever for up to eight hours. Now Sting’s daughter, Coco Sumner, 18, says it’s all a bunch of hooey. (Aw, c’mon!) She tells UK’s Love Magazine it was all a joke started by Bob Geldof, he of Live Aid, the Boomtown Rats, and not much else. Lest people think she’s pretending to be an expert on her ‘rents’ private lives (ewwww . . . ), no: Coco just wants to set the record straight. We join E!Online in applauding the Stings, married 17 years and together for a total of 27. Bucks all sorts of trends. Tantric or not, that’s triffic.

In fact, let’s all get married!
Then we can all be as happy as Alyssa Milano, star of Charmed, who wed Hollywood agent guy David Bugliari Saturday on the Tewksbury estate of Bugliari’s family. All the details appear in this week’s ed of People. It was a modest affair, what somebody side-splittingly called “a traditional country-chic ceremony” (hello?). Guests included Bradley Cooper (see Renée Zellweger, above), who did a reading, and the ever-effervescent Jeremy Piven, who at one point played drums with the dance band.

. . . Or we can all be as happy as the Red Team of the second season of The Biggest Loser: Couples. That’s Nicole Brewer and Damien Gurganious, who married Sunday at the Renaissance of Astoria in Queens. As of the wedding, they had, according to Us Weekly, lost a total of 200 pounds since starting the show. Other Losers were in attendance, but no grand-total tonnage was announced.

Sundered hearts healing
Sean Penn apparently has succeeded in finding solace for whatever emotional wounds he sustained in the breakup of his union with Robin Wright.

TMZ.com, the eye that never sleeps, spotted Penn afield on Tuesday night, chatting with two comely young ladies outside a Malibu bar.

Sean and Robin already have agreed on how to divide the property and on sharing custody of 16-year-old son Hopper Jack.

‘Megan’ nixed; manhunt on
VH1 has pulled its reality TV show Megan Wants a Millionaire, and for good reason. One of the final contestants, Ryan Alexander Jenkins, is now the subject of an international manhunt. Jenkins has been a person of interest since Saturday, when the body of his wife, Jasmine Fiore, was found in a suitcase in a Dumpster in Buena Park, Calif. Jenkins, a big-time real estate honcho, is said to have slipped off to Canada or Honduras or both. Megan was all filmed and in the can, but VH1 has enough sense to hold off. Jenkins is also a contestant on I Love Money 3, also all done, and probably also about to be nixed.

Whitney! And! Oprah! On! The! Couch!
Let the R&B-’n'-New-Age-infused therapy session begin! Her Royal Strangeness, Whitney Houston, troubled with years of bad tabloid publicity, will drop in on Oprah’s show Sept. 14 as part of her gargantuan publicity tour for the Aug. 31 release of her new product, I Look to You. Reps for The Big O say this will be Whitney’s first sit-down chat in seven years. (To plug her seventh album, which also happens to be her first in seven years.) Thus no hyperbole can do it justice: The show, they say, will be “the most anticipated music interview of the decade.” Why not the century?

We imagine it’ll be happier than Whitney’s infamous “Crack is Whack” interview with Diane Sawyer in ‘02.

The pilot of an airliner stranded overnight on an airport tarmac in Minnesota pleaded unsuccessfully for her 47 passengers to be allowed to get off and go inside a terminal. “We just need to work out some way to get them off … We can’t keep them here any longer,” she said.

The Transportation Department on Friday released recordings of the repeated appeals by the pilot and her airline’s dispatchers earlier this month while passengers were kept waiting for about six hours in the cramped plane amid crying babies and a smelly toilet before they were allowed to deplane.

Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood said an investigation by his department found that ExpressJet, the regional carrier which operated Continental Express Flight 2816 for Continental Airlines, wasn’t at fault in the tarmac stranding.

Instead, blame for the incident, which has revived calls for greater consumer protections for airline passengers, belongs with Mesaba Airlines, whose representative declined to let the ExpressJet passengers deplane, LaHood said in a statement.

A Mesaba representative incorrectly told ExpressJet that the passengers couldn’t be allowed inside the terminal because Transportation Security Administration personnel had left for the day, LaHood said.

Actually, security regulations allow for deplaning passengers to be kept in a separate “sterile” area until they are ready to board, he said.

“We have determined that the Express Jet crew was not at fault. In fact, the flight crew repeatedly tried to get permission to deplane the passengers at the airport or obtain a bus for them,” LaHood said.

“There was a complete lack of common sense here,” the secretary added. “It’s no wonder the flying public is so angry and frustrated.”

Mesaba was the only airline with staff still at the airport that Friday night.

The plane left Houston at 9:23 p.m. local time on Aug. 7, but was diverted by thunderstorms to Rochester. Passengers were kept waiting on the tarmac only 50 yards from a terminal. In the morning, they were allowed to deplane. They spent about 2 1/2 hours inside the terminal before reboarding the same plane. They arrived in Minneapolis, their destination, after 11 a.m. CDT.

Mesaba is a subsidiary of Northwest Airlines, which is a subsidiary of Delta Air Lines. A Delta spokeswoman didn’t immediately return a phone message seeking comment.

Continental Chairman and CEO Larry Kellner said in a statement that he was gratified the Transportation Department recognized the ExpressJet crew’s efforts to resolve the situation.

The department released audio tapes of the captain explaining the situation to an ExpressJet dispatcher, and dispatchers trying to persuade Mesaba officials to allow passengers inside. Passengers from an earlier flight diverted to Rochester had been allowed to deplane and were taken by bus to Minneapolis, about 85 miles away.

However, Mesaba officials said there were no more buses available.

“I can’t get her a bus, I can’t do anything,” said a Mesaba representative.

“You can’t do anything for her? OK,” asked the ExpressJet dispatcher.

“No.”

“Because she was saying nobody was letting her off the airplane, letting the people off the airplane and all that,” the dispatcher continued.

“We can’t — I mean we were just able to let these guys off. We can’t get them a bus. If I can’t secure them a bus, I can’t have them in a closed airport,” the Mesaba representative replied.

Link Christin, who was on the flight, said the incident was a clear example of why more safeguards are necessary for passengers.

“To me, the critical issue is not who’s to blame, but to figure out what happened and how it could be prevented in the future,” said Christin, a lecturer at William Mitchell College of Law.

More than a week afterward, Christin said he’s started to think about “the fact that so many variables were at play with 47, 48 people, two babies, and the variety of potential catastrophes that could have happened.”

“In reflection, I think it’s even a more serious matter than I perceived it to be when I was going through it,” he said.

The father of Carol Chu, Andy Lau’s rumoured Malaysian girlfriend, passed away on Tuesday, and the media are eagerly awaiting the publication of the obituary which they hope will reveal the relationship between the pair, according to Ming Pao Daily News.

The names and information about the family of the deceased are usually listed in an obituary.

Lau, 47, has been secretly linked to Chu, 43, for the past 24 years, and the couple are rumoured to have secretly married and even have a child.

According to reports, the couple flew to Kuala Lumpur on Tuesday to visit her father in hospital, and were seen travelling with a little girl.

Chu’s 73-year-old father had fainted at home and was sent to hospital on Monday. It was discovered that he had a brain haemorrhage and he passed away at around 9pm the next day.

Chu’s father was buried on Friday and Lau was expected to be present at the proceedings.

According to reports, Lau is residing at the Chu residence and has managed to maintain a low profile.

Chu’s family have taken measures to block the media and reporters who are gathered at the family home, hoping to catch a glimpse of the Heavenly King.

While Lau has not been spotted at the home nor the mourning hall which is located just outside Chu residence, security personnel have confirmed his presence. One of them revealed that Lau had tipped him to step up security surrounding the premises.

The lingerie label whose runway spectacle led to the breakthrough of models such as Heidi Klum will show its collection in the Big Apple for the first time since 2005.

Word came out on Aug 12 when Victoria’s Secret models Marisa Miller, Alessandra Ambrosio, Emanuela de Paula, and Lindsay Ellingson appeared on The Early Show on CBS. (The runway show, which will be taped in November, will also air on CBS come December.)

The model line-up is yet to be announced but it is already certain that, with four Victoria’s Secret veterans pregnant (Heidi Klum announced her pregnancy in April, followed by Adriana Lima in May, Gisele Bündchen in June, and Karolina Kurkova in July), it will be time for the new generation to take over.

Klum told US celebrity magazine People earlier this year: “The birth will be very, very close to when the show is. I don’t know if I’ll be able to walk in my underwear quite that fast! We’ll see.”
Specific dates and the location are not known at this point

General Motors meets to choose preferred bidder for Vauxhall and Opel - Telegraph

The struggling carmaker faces pressure from the British and German governments, which are at loggerheads over the bids for its European business.

Both proposals will lead to the loss of around 10,000 jobs. Vauxhall employs around 5,000 workers at two sites in Britain but Opel employs 25,000 people in Germany - half of GM Europe’s total workforce.

Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, is said to prefer a bid from Magna International, a Canadian car parts maker backed by Russia’s state-owned Sberbank, because fewer of the cuts would fall in Germany than a rival proposal from Brussels-based investment group RHJ International.

* More GM stories

GM, which only emerged from bankrutpcy last month and is selling its European arm to strengthen its finances, is reported to prefer a bid from RHJ because its plan would be easier to put in place.

Magna is offering €350m (£302m) of its own capital and €150m in credit to Opel; RHJ has pledged €275m of its own money.

On Thursday, the Frankfurter Allgemeine, a German daily newspaper, reported that Jochen Homann, the head of the German government’s “Opel Task Force” as saying he had offered GM a €4.5bn loan.

Previously, the plan was for Germany to participate in the loan with other European countries where Opel has factories, but the Task Force chief said that Berlin decided to go it alone, at least for now.

The newspaper said Germany was willing to shoulder the loan because around half of GM’s 50,000 workers in Europe are employed in the country, but Britain, Spain, Poland and Belgium would still be expected to contribute cash at a later stage.

Lord Mandelson, the British Business Secretary, has urged the GM board to make an “objective, commercial decision” that will secure the long-term viability of both Opel and Vauxhall.

“This decision, above all, needs to secure the long-term viability of both Opel and Vauxhall in the UK and should be not be distorted by political considerations in any one country,” he said in a written statement.

A GM official told AFP that the carmaker’s board would meet by phone to consider the bids, adding: “However, there are still some open issues.”

Ms Merkel’s government is seeking to snare the jobs-saving deal before the September 27 general elections.

A final decision might not come until next week, GM officials indicated.

Weinstein Co. might be getting some much-needed good news this weekend.

The financially beleaguered independent movie studio opens Quentin Tarantino’s World War II action film “Inglourious Basterds” today and all indications are that it will have a solid and potentially very strong opening. It’s the first major release for Weinstein Co., which is attempting to strip away its widespread media interests and focus on movies and television.

According to people with access to pre-release audience polling, “Basterds” should sell more than $25 million worth of tickets in the U.S. and Canada this weekend and could very well top $30 million.

The movie cost about $70 million to produce. Weinstein Co. split that cost with Universal Pictures, which is handling overseas distribution. “Basterds” is opening in 22 foreign countries this weekend, including most of Europe. Weinstein Co. and Universal will split the movie’s worldwide proceeds equally.

It’s likely to be the biggest opening of Tarantino’s career, not accounting for ticket price inflation. His highest domestic launch so far is $25.1 million from “Kill Bill: Vol. 2,” which Bob and Harvey Weinstein’s old studio Miramax released in 2004.

A strong opening, however, won’t guarantee a great overall performance for “Basterds.”

The movie clocks in at more than 2 1/2 hours and may generate some negative reactions given its explicit violence, so word of mouth could be crucial. In addition, movie attendance in late August is typically slow. The biggest-ever opening in the second half of the month is 2007’s “Superbad,” which earned $33.1 million its first weekend.

Reviews for “Basterds” thus far have been largely positive, with some exceptions: Times critic Kenneth Turan called it “unforgivably leisurely, almost glacial, a film that loses its way in the thickets of alternative history and manages to be violent without the start-to-finish energy that violence on screen usually guarantees.”

The movie is tracking strongest with male moviegoers. That could put it in conflict with “District 9,” which opened to a very strong $37.4 million last Friday. Sixty-four percent of its opening-weekend audience was men, although Sony Pictures is hoping to attract more women.

“District 9″ will almost certainly be the No. 2 movie this weekend, as three other low-budget releases are each expected to gross well under $10 million.

Fox has the comedy “Post Grad” from its defunct Fox Atomic youth unit; the Fox Searchlight specialty division has handled the film’s marketing.

Disney is releasing documentary “X Games 3D: The Movie” on 3-D screens only.

Warner Bros. is releasing the family film “Shorts,” directed by Robert Rodriguez, which was financed by Media Rights Capital and Imagenation Abu Dhabi.

With no new film aimed at adult women this weekend, Warner Bros. will probably be watching to see whether “The Time Traveler’s Wife” demonstrates staying power by dropping less than 40% after its mediocre $18.6-million launch last weekend.

API Specification 6D Twenty-second Edition - Introduction

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6.10 Handwheels and wrenches (levers)

Wrenches for valves shall either be of an integral design or consist of a head which fits on the stem and is designed to take an extended handle. The head design shall allow permanent attachment of the extended section if specified by the purchaser.
The maximum force required at the handwheel or wrench to apply the breakaway torque or thrust shall not exceed 360 N.
Wrenches shall not be longer than twice the face-to-face or end-to-end dimension of the valve.
Handwheel diameter(s) shall not exceed the face-to-face or end-to-end length of the valve or 1 000 mm, whichever is the smaller, unless otherwise agreed. Except for valve sizes DN 40 (NPS 11/2) and smaller, spokes shall not extend beyond the perimeter of the handwheel unless otherwise agreed.
When specified by the purchaser, the handwheel of the gearbox input shaft shall be provided with a torque-limiting device, such as a shear pin, to prevent damage to the drive train.

6.11 Locking devices
Valves shall be supplied with locking devices if specified by the purchaser. Locking devices for check valves shall be designed to lock the valve in the open position only.
Locking devices for other types of valve shall be designed to lock the valve in the open and/or closed position.

6.12 Position indicators
Valves fitted with manual or powered actuators shall be furnished with a visible indicator to show the open and the closed position of the obturator.
For plug and ball valves, the wrench and/or the position indicator shall be in line with the pipeline when the valve is open and transverse when the valve is closed. The design shall be such that the component(s) of the indicator and/or wrench cannot be assembled to falsely indicate the valve position.
Valves without position stops shall have provision for the verification of open and close alignment with the operator/actuator removed.

Contents
1Scope…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….1
2 Normative references……………………………………………………………………………………………….. 1

3 Terms and definitions…………………………………………………………………………………………….. 3
4 Symbols and abbreviations……………………………………………………………………………………. 6
4.1Symbols………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 6
4.2 Abbreviations………………………………………………………………………………………………………. 6
5 Valve types and configurations……………………………………………………………….. 7
5.1 Valve types…………………………………………………………………………………. 7
5.2 Valve configurations……………………………………………………………………. 7
6 Design…………………………………………………………………………………………………… 19
6.1 Pressure and temperature rating……………………………………………………………. 19
6.2 Sizes……………………………………………………………………………………….. 20
6.3 Face-to-face and end-to-end dimensions…………………………….. 20
6.4 Minimum-bore full-opening valves………………………………………………………………… 33
6.5 Valve operation……………………………………………………………………………… 33
6.6 Pigging……………………………………………………………………………………. 33
6.7 Valve ends………………………………………………………………. 34
6.8 Pressure relief…………………………………………………………………………………. 34
6.9 Bypass, drain and vent connections………………………………………………………………. 34
6.10 Hand wheels and wrenches (levers)………………………………………… 35
6.11 Locking devices…………………………………………………………. 35

6.12 Position indicators…………………………………………………………. 35
6.13 Operators and stem extensions…………………………………………………….. 36
6.14 Sealant injection……………………………………………………………….. 36
6.15 Lifting lugs …………………………………………………………………………………… 36
6.16 Actuators……………………………………………………………………….. 36
6.17 Drive trains…………………………………………………………………………….. 36
6.18 Stem retention ……………………………………………………………………… 37
6.19 Fire safety……………………………………………………………………………. 37
6.20 Anti-static device……………………………………………………………………………………….. 37
6.21 Design documents ………………………………………………………………………………………. 37
6.22 Design document review……………………………………………………………………………. 37
7 Materials……………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 37
7.1 Material specification………………………………………………………………………………………… 37
7.2 Service compatibility ……………………………………………………………………… 37
7.3 Forged parts ……………………………………………………………………………………………………. 38
7.4 Welding ends……………………………………………………………………………………………… 38
7.5 Toughness test requirements………………………………………………………………… 38
7.6 Bolting …………………………………………………………………………………………………………. 39
7.7 Sour service……………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 39
8 Welding ……………………………………………………………………………………………. 39
8.1 Qualifications…………………………………………………………………………………………. 39
8.2 Impact testing………………………………………………………………………………………………… 39
8.3 Hardness testing ……………………………………………………………………………….. 40
9 Quality control ………………………………………………………………………………………… 41
9.1 General ……………………………………………………………………………………………. 41
9.2 Measuring and test equipment ……………………………………………………………………….. 42
9.3 Qualification of inspection and test personnel ………………………………………………………… 42
9.4 NDE of repair welding…………………………………………………………………….. 42
10 Pressure testing ……………………………………………………………………………. 43
10.1 General ……………………………………………………………………………………… 43

10.2 Stem backseat test……………………………………………………………………………. 43
10.3 Hydrostatic shell test ……………………………………………………………………………… 44
10.4 Hydrostatic seat test …………………………………………………………………………………. 44
10.5 Draining………………………………………………………………………………………………… 46
11 Marking…………………………………………………………………………………………………… 46
11.1 Requirements………………………………………………………………………………………………… 46
11.2 Marking example ……………………………………………………………………………………………… 49
12 Storage and shipping……………………………………………………………………………………………… 50
12.1 Painting …………………………………………………………………………………………………… 50
12.2 Corrosion prevention……………………………………………………………………………………….. 50
12.3 Openings……………………………………………………………………………………………. 50
13 Documentation …………………………………………………………………………………… 50
Annex A (informative) Purchasing guidelines…………………………………………………………. 51
Annex B (normative) Supplementary NDE requirements ………………………………………….. 53
Annex C (normative) Supplementary test requirements ………………………………………………. 57
Annex D (normative) Supplementary documentation requirements……………………………….. 61
Annex E (informative) API Monogram………………………………………………………………………………………………………