wholesale clothes

What is your favorite place in NYC? The Cloisters

Occupation: Hotel Worker

What are the most prominent colors in your wardrobe? Cream and black

What is your current favorite song? “Mouth Full of Diamonds” by Phantogram

Name:Carol

Where is your ring from? This guy on the streets in San Francisco who makes jewelry out of silverware.

What lip color are you wearing? It’s a red liner and magenta lipstick mixed together.

Where are you from originally? San Francisco

What is the last good movie you saw? The Basquiat film [The Radiant Child]

Age: 23

**All photos by Ashley Jahncke.

Ohio and Maryland, touted as two of the nation's best-performing states in terms of their public school systems,Christian Dior, are among the second-round finalists.

In fact, the program has come under fire for effectively creating a grand incentive for reforming the schools without appropriate financial support for longer-term implementation and with only some states benefiting.

He added that 10 to 15 of those states are expected to win money from the federal stimulus-funded program known as "Race to the Top."

The program is President Barack Obama's pet project, offering federal grants to states for improving education and supporting semi-autonomous charter schools - in what Duncan called the "quiet revolution" in education.

Duncan dispelled earlier concerns over Congress possibly taking $500 million away from the program to help pay for a $10 billion schools measure folded into the U.S. House of Representatives' defense spending bill.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The Department of Education has selected 19 states to vie for $3.4 billion in grants aimed at improving their schools, Secretary Arne Duncan said in a speech on Tuesday.

With education funding facing cuts as states grapple with the withering of federal stimulus dollars, the 19 finalists have requested more than $6 billion in their Race to the Top applications - but only half of that money is available.

Part of that original pool, $350 million, has been set aside in another competition between groups of states.

(Reporting by Alina Selyukh)

The 19 states selected as finalists in this round include those that made it to the final round of the program's first phase. Depending on the size of the winners, Duncan said between 10 and 15 states will share what's left of the program's total $4.35 billion fund.

"Education reform faces impossible odds when schools face massive budget cuts,Ankh Royalty," said Randi Weingarten, American Federation of Teachers president, in a statement.

"This money is going to be there for the finalists, and this money will be committed by September," he said.

The finalists are competing for $3.4 billion left in the program fund after $600 million was sent to Delaware and Tennessee in the first round of funding earlier this year.

Also on the list are the financially struggling states of California, Florida, Illinois, New Jersey, New York and Rhode Island.

The money primarily covers adoption of standards and assessments, boosting of low-performing schools, creating teaching jobs and building better data systems.

Applications to refinance home loans climbed 8.6 percent. Applications taken out to purchase homes rose 3.4 percent,Versace, fueled by an 8-percent rise in government purchase applications.

Mortgage rates have fallen since mid-April after investors, concerned over European debt problems and the health of the global economy, have poured money into the safety of U.S. Treasury bonds. That has caused the yields on those bonds to fall. Long-term fixed mortgage rates tend to track those yields.

The average rate for a 30-year fixed loan fell to 4.59 percent last week and the rate for a 15-year fixed loan dropped to 4.05 percent. Both were the lowest rates recorded in the MBA’s survey, which has been conducted since 1990.

The Mortgage Bankers Association’s survey covers more than 50 percent of all applications nationwide.

Refinance applications made up nearly 79.4 percent of total applications,G-Star, the highest since April of last year.

The Mortgage Bankers Association said Wednesday overall applications increased nearly 7.6 percent from a week earlier. That incorporates an adjustment for the Independence Day holiday.

NEW YORK – Applications for home loans rose last week as rates on 30-year and 15-year fixed-rate loans sank to the lowest levels on the survey’s record.

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Soviet Russia's missiles and soldiers snaking through Red Square made for chilling images of a repressed society during the Cold War, but one Russian-American filmmaker is casting a new light on the period to show there was cultural life beneath the communist ice.

"The whole system, communism, was a fraud. It was about suppression and squeezing the life out of people. But even then, under this dictatorship they achieved some positive things." Pinkhasov explained.

"We like to vilify the Soviet Union, but there were many positive aspects of the system. The music club shows a close group of friends getting together. Art mattered then. It was a matter of escape and in it a way to find reality," said Harlow Robinson, professor of history at Northeastern University in Boston.

One film about German fencing legend Helene Meyer, whose half-Jewish heritage provided Adolf Hitler with political cover to stage the 1936 Olympics, won for best screenplay at the 2009 International Festival of Sports Films in Moscow.

Semyon Pinkhasov, an emigre to the United States at the height of the Cold War has made documentary films about prominent Soviet-era artisans and sport figures, who not only survived but thrived during communism's repressive rule.

"Music Made on Thursdays," his first film tells the story of Grigory Fried and his music club that took hold in 1965. Fried tackled taboo subjects when paranoia ruled and Russia's military industrial complex turned out war materiel above all else.

(Watch the video interview with Pinkhasov: http://r.reuters.com/vyb34m)

The club served as an outlet to listen and discuss classical music, something far removed from the overbearing state, the drudgery of work, and the miserable weather.

After having his medical school hopes crushed by Soviet prejudice, he reinvented himself as a physiotherapist, supported a family, trained champion fencers and marched with the U.S. Olympic team as a coach in 1984.

Every topic of discussion was taboo without communist party approval. Fried just never bothered to get advance clearance.

A composer and musicologist, Fried at 94 still runs the club but has never taken a salary, Pinkhasov said.

Self-taught and self-financed, his films have been shown worldwide at festivals, and on Russian and English-language television channels.

All of the films expose the tragicomic truths about cultural life under the grey facade of communism and fascism.

Pinkhasov left in 1976 and believed he would never return, only to see the spectacular collapse of the regime in 1991. But he did return - and often - to see family and friends and found the remnants of his old life still ticking.

Growing up in the aftermath of World War Two, Pinkhasov remembered the propagandist cartoons of Boris Efimov, perhaps Stalin's favorite cartoonist.

His brother Mikhail Koltsov was a journalist and top editor of Pravda before Josef Stalin had him arrested and executed in one of his purges.

Efimov antagonized the Nazis so much during Russia's brutal war against Germany that Hitler issued a standing order to have him arrested and shot once Moscow was captured.

When he died at age 108 in 2008, the diminutive man from Moscow,Juicy Couture, a Jew, was buried in the Russian Orthodox Novodevichy Cemetery, along with Boris Yeltsin and other Russian elite.

"Why wasn't I arrested?. This question people very often ask me, and I don't really know the answer, but I think Stalin liked my cartoons," Efimov said in the film titled "I am not Giordano Bruno."

The film's title is a reference to the 16th Century Italian priest, philosopher and astronomer who died when he refused to sign onto Vatican statements that the earth was the center of the universe.

Another film called "Judge Not…" tells the story of Tikhon Khrennikov, the first and last secretary of the Union of Soviet Composers, whose job was thrust upon him by Stalin in 1948. He held it until the Soviet Union's collapse. He died at 94 in 2007.

His influence in the country was enormous. He was responsible for the music played publicly in Russia, the venues, salaries, and the pecking order of Soviet musicians.

Pinkhasov says that while authors and poets were convicted of anti-Soviet behavior, with many imprisoned, exiled from public life or killed,Louis Vuitton, no musical composer under Khrenikov was believed to have suffered similar fates.

(Editing by Patricia Reaney)

POKING BIG BROTHER

"It didn't work out the way (Fried) wanted. I started to go when I was 20 years-old. Now everyone in the audience is in their 60's. There are no young people and I thought I have to get this all on film before it dies," he said.

"When the temperatures sink and snow is on the ground there is still life under the ice. It is the same for society under a dictatorship," said Pinkhasov.

Then, nearing the time when most people retire, he plunged head first into the world of documentary films.