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Harry Potter Author Backs Labour PM Gordon Brown faces his party conference today, after winning the backing of Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling. She's donated £1m to the Labour Party. Sky's Joey Jones reports from Manchester. Harry Potter joins the Labor Party    

For Our Readers we now bring you a welcome Coffee Break from politics as usual. Break away for a few minutes from the grind of work and from this non-stop election; take a few minutes for yourself, spend some extra time with the kids. This we bring you two non-political books for a review. One for you, and one that will spark the imagination of your children and yourself...

LONDON (AP) ― Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling said she contemplated suicide as she suffered from depression before her rise to success, according to an interview with a student journalist. The British writer said she had suicidal thoughts in her mid-20s, when she was a single mother and struggling to establish a literary career. "Mid-20s life circumstances were poor and I really plummeted," Rowling said, according to an interview posted online by student journalist Adeel Amini. Rowling said in the interview, parts of which were published in Edinburgh University's Student magazine, that she sought help from doctors and spent nine...

Potter Author JK Rowling Equates Christians Who Avoid Potter with Islamic Fundamentalists Says "fundamentalists across all the major religions, if you put them in a room, they'd have bags in common! They hate all the same things" By John-Henry Westen EDINBURGH, March 12, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) - The newly released edition of the Edinburgh University Student newspaper, the oldest student newspaper in the UK, includes an interview with Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling.  In the interview Rowling claims to have received death threats from Christians opposed to her novels, calling Christian 'fundamentalists' "dangerous" and comparing them by inference to Islamic fundamentalists....

Nearly a decade ago, Eileen McNally caught an NPR interview with an obscure writer named J.K. Rowling. The book being discussed, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, sounded like fun, so McNally picked it up for her 9-year-old niece. "I bought it for her to read on the plane home to Buffalo," says McNally, now director of the Florida Center for the Book at the Broward County Library. "But Shannon read the entire thing standing in line at Disney World. I was flabbergasted. That's when I knew this was something special." Special, indeed. The six Harry Potter books published since...

The countdown is on! We're all waiting. Let's talk about it while we're waiting. This countdown ticks down the time to both the Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows book and Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix film. Countdown clocks can be found at http://www.the-leaky-cauldron.org/#static:countdowns

The title of the seventh and final Potter book has been revealed - it's Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. The title was revealed on JK Rowling's website, and her spokesperson in Edinburgh confirmed to Newsround that it is the title. JK made her fans work for the title though, because you have to play a game on the website to access it. You have to find a secret door, work out how to open the door and then play a game of hangman to learn the title. At the moment no-one knows exactly what the title means, but that...

(snip) "Phoenix," the fifth book in author J. K. Rowlings's series, is by far the most ideological, and seems allusive to post-9/11 politics. Harry knows that the evil Lord Voldemort has been reborn and is building an army, but the wizarding government, the Ministry of Magic, refuses to believe him. .... "There's a really interesting principle at the heart of this story," says Yates, in an exclusive NEWSWEEK interview. "The ministry is this bureaucratic authoritarian regime trying to impose a fundamental doctrine on this liberal wacky school. The ministry isn't very good at accepting the beauty of differences. Everything has...

Harry Potter author JK Rowling has revealed that New York airport security staff almost stopped her boarding a flight back to Britain, because she wasn't prepared to stow her top secret notes for book seven - the last in the hugely popular series - in her check-in baggage. She wrote to fans on her website: "The heightened security restrictions on the airlines made the journey back interesting, as I refused to be parted from the manuscript.

4 hours ago LONDON - Author J.K. Rowling said two characters will die in the last installment of her boy wizard series, and she hinted Harry Potter might not survive either. "I have never been tempted to kill him off before the final because I've always planned seven books, and I want to finish on seven books," Rowling said on Monday's "Richard and Judy" television show. "I can completely understand, however, the mentality of an author who thinks, `Well, I'm gonna kill them off because that means there can be no non-author written sequels. So it will end with me,...

A former Episcopalian priest claims reading Harry Potter during a mid-life crisis led him to eventually decide to become a Wiccan priest...Haney is now a practicing minister of the Sacred Birch Society, a Wiccan group that meets regularly in the Lapeer Michigan area. Claiming that he does not proselytize, Haney hopes nonetheless to be a resource for enquirers into his new found faith. Wiccans claim that their system of beliefs is compatible with other religions, even while they deny Christian teachings as to the identity of Jesus Christ.   According to the Battle Creek Enquirer, Haney says that it was...

The fourth Harry Potter film, The Goblet of Fire, is confidently expected to break box-office records when it opens in the UK on 18 November. Directed by Mike Newell of Four Weddings and a Funeral fame, it will be the fourth hit in a row for its young stars Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson and Rupert Grint. All three have been signed up for the fifth film, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, due out in summer 2007. By then, however, the series' status as Hollywood's pre-eminent fantasy franchise may be under threat from another blockbuster saga looming on...

The full theatrical trailer for Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire is now available at The Official Harry Potter Website and other download sites.

As well as being extraordinarily popular, the [Harry Potter] books have encouraged millions of children to start reading for the first time.... For those who have a problem with the idea of fantasy and alternative universes alongside ours, we need to recognize that almost all children play imaginative games in their minds starting at a very young age and have no difficulty whatsoever in distinguishing between fantasy and reality.... Additionally, the Harry Potter books send a strong message about moral order. There are beautiful and enjoyable human relationships among the characters, and there is a depth of commitment and service...

Less than 24 hours after the English edition of the latest Harry Potter book went on sale in China's capital on the weekend, the full text of the 672-page tome was available for free on the Internet as an unauthorized e-book, the Beijing News reported on Wednesday. The Shui Mu Tsing Hua bulletin board service posted the full text of "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince" on Sunday, according to the Chinese language daily. Author J.K. Rowling has long warned readers against unauthorized electronic versions of her work. Her fantasy series enjoys vast popularity in China, however, spawning in 2002...

LONDON - Two British men were charged on Saturday with firearms offenses after allegedly trying to sell a stolen copy of the new Harry Potter book to a tabloid newspaper before its release. Police were called to an address in Kettering in central England on Friday after reports of a shot being fired. The Sun newspaper said the incident came as the men tried to sell one of its reporters a stolen copy of “Harry Potter And the Half-Blood Prince” for 50,000 pounds ($90,880). Northamptonshire police confirmed two men from Kettering had been charged in connection with the incident. “A...

The first Goblet of Fire trailer is available on-line. I found it here at the Official Harry Potter website. A quick google search reveals it is available from multiple sites.

Forum: Harry Potter, culture warrior Conservative Christians should not fulminate over J.K. Rowling's creation, says Jerry Bowyer, but embrace her books' core messages Sunday, June 22, 2003 It's a pity that so many conservative Christians have identified Harry Potter as their enemy, because he is probably the most effective proponent of the classical Christian view of the world to have appeared in decades.     Jerry Bowyer hosts a daily radio program on 1360 WPTT-AM and a TV program on Cornerstone TeleVision, "Focus on the Issues" (jerry@bowyermedia.com).       Of course, with the release yesterday of "Harry Potter and...

Shattering news from my homeland England came over the BBC News Online service recently, reporting the theft of 8,000 Harry Potter books despite the "unprecedented security around the launch" of book No. 5 in the seven-part Harry Potter series. The new books, "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix" were stolen on Sunday and "anyone caught trying to sell – or even buy" these books "could face criminal charges" reports Stephen Dowling of the BBC World Edition News. Earlier this month another theft took place when a forklift driver stole pages of the new book and offered them to...

Deconstructing RowlingBy Dave Kopel J.K. Rowling is an Inkling. That's the well-argued thesis of John Granger's fine book The Hidden Key to Harry Potter. Granger demonstrates the absurdity of the claim that Harry Potter is anti-Christian. And even if you've never worried about charges brought by misguided fundamentalists, The Hidden Key will substantially augment your understanding of what's really at stake in Harry's adventures.The Inklings were originally a group of Oxford dons who wrote Christian fiction. The most famous of them are J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis. Lord of the Rings and the Narnia series never mention...

Rome's Chief Exorcist Warns Parents Against Harry Potter NEW YORK, Jan 2, 02 (LSN.ca) - In early December, Rome's official exorcist, Father Gabriele Amorth, warned parents against the Harry Potter book series. The priest, who is also the president of the International Association of Exorcists, said Satan is behind the works. In an interview with the Italian ANSA news agency, Father Amorth said, "Behind Harry Potter hides the signature of the king of the darkness, the devil." The exorcist, with his decades of experience in directly combating evil, explained that J.K. Rowling's books contain innumerable positive references to magic, "the...

The Miami blue butterfly hovers near extinction, a victim of hurricanes, mosquitoes, and troglodyte developers. Environmentalists weep and liberals blame the Bush administrations, presidential and gubernatorial. These same butterfly mourners form a blockade against the teaching of Creationism because evolution is the origin of species. The liberal mind has tangled ganglia and mitochondria that prevent short-circuits for philosophical inconsistencies. They will not acknowledge that evolution, by its very definition, demands extinction. Liberal brains are hotwired so that laws and order don't interfere with desires. With the Lott expulsion, conservatives use megawatt capacity trying to glean the liberal rules of play....