‘’ community food packaging event, Sunday, June 2, 2013, at the Brevard Community College Gymnasium.

The Children’s Hunger Project, Second Harvest Food Bank, the United Way of Brevard and the Brevard Hunger Alliance, along with ‘Face of Change’ will work together to “help the needy families of Brevard County,” said Dr. Ross Clevens, MD, FACS, Clevens Center for Facial Cosmetic Surgery.

“We believe no child in Brevard should be hungry,” says Bob Barnes of the Children’s Hunger Project. “The need is real, and with our community’s help, we have the ability to make a difference."

Alarming stats show that 2 out of 5 kids in Brevard County live in households that struggle to put food on the table; 43,000 Brevard school kids (45%) received free and reduced price lunches in 2012 (compared to 22% of U.S. school children overall).

The initial idea for the meal packaging initiative was created after Dr. Ross Clevens, who frequently travels abroad on medical mission trips to perform surgical procedures with Outreach Africa International, realized that there was as much of a need for ‘nutritionally sound meals’ in those regions, as there was for health care.

Subsequently, Clevens incepted ‘Face of Change,’ and the first meal packaging event was held in January of 2011, with‘nutritionally complete’ meals shipped via the United Nations, to Tanzania, Africa, to aid starving women and children.

Last October, a record 750 volunteers joined Dr. Clevens, his staff, and family tofor children and families in Brevard County.With that, nearly 1,000 pounds of food was donated to the Women's Center, The Children's Hunger Project, and The Second Harvest Food Bank. Since that first event, more than 400,000 meals have been packaged by the ‘Face of Change’ organization.

For more information on the upcoming ‘Face of Change’ Food Packaging Event, contact Jodie Hernandez at 321-727-3223, or jodieh(at)drclevens(dot)com.

Jodie Hernandez, Marketing ManagerClevens Center for Facial Cosmetic Surgery321.727.3223

Israeli officials on Saturday confirmed the strike, which took place early Friday.

Obama told the Spanish-language network Telemundo in an interview that he will defer to the Israeli government for comment. He also repeated his view that the Israelis justifiably have to guard against the transfer of advanced weapons to organizations like Hezbollah. The U.S. considers Hezbollah a terrorist organization.

Obama conducted the interview on Saturday, and a portion of the president's answer to a question about the airstrike was broadcast on MSNBC.

An agreement to pay compensation could have broad implications for thousands of people who say they were abused by authorities in Britain's former colonies.

Law firm Leigh Day, which represents three elderly Kenyans seeking compensation, confirmed talks were taking place, but gave no other details, "due to the nature of the negotiations."

The Foreign Office declined to comment on an ongoing legal case.

The case involves Kenyans who say they were beaten and sexually assaulted by officers acting for the British administration trying to suppress the "Mau Mau" rebellion, in which groups of Kenyans attacked British officials and white farmers who had settled in some of Kenya's most fertile lands.

In 1952, then-Prime Minister Winston Churchill declared a state of emergency in the country and sent British and African soldiers to help colonial administrators capture the fighters and send them to detention camps.

Thousands of Kenyans were detained, including U.S. President Barack Obama's grandfather, Hussein Onyango Obama.

In October, Britain's High Court ruled that three Kenyans Wambugu Wa Nyingi, Paulo Muoka Nzili and Jane Muthoni Mara could pursue claims for compensation.

The government had sought to have the case dismissed, saying it could not be held legally responsible for long-ago abuses. It argued that the liabilities of the colonial administration passed to the Kenyan government when the country gained independence from Britain in 1963.

The government launched an appeal against the October ruling, although it did not dispute "that each of the claimants in this case suffered torture and other ill treatment at the hands of the colonial administration."

The Guardian newspaper reported Monday that an appeals hearing had been put on hold while negotiations were held.

While not commenting directly on the case, the Foreign Office said in a statement that "it is an enduring feature of our democracy that we are willing to learn from our history."

"Our relationship with Kenya and its people has moved on and is characterized by close co-operation and partnership, building on the many positives from our shared history," it said.

Agreement of compensation could bring payouts to thousands of Kenyans who allege similar abuse, and also could trigger claims from other former British colonies.

It put Carl Edwards on the pole for Sunday's race, followed by Martin Truex Jr. and Marcos Ambrose.

They ran a spirited Friday first practice session because everyone had seen the weather radar and knew the laps might count if qualifying was cancelled.

"It was like a heat race out there," said Edwards. "Everybody was trying to get their fastest lap, and we got ours with like a minute to go. It was pretty exciting."

Ambrose concurred.

"We were all driving like idiots in that first practice knowing it was probably going to rain," he said.

Joey Logano will start fourth, followed by Ryan Newman and Matt Kenseth.

Denny Hamlin will be seventh in his first race since missing four with a compression fracture in a vertebra in his lower back. Hendrick Motorsports drivers Jimmie Johnson, Jeff Gordon and Kasey Kahne round out the top 10 in Sunday's starting lineup.

Hamlin is planning to start the race but get out of his car at some point and let Brian Vickers take over for him. The two practiced the driver exchange on Friday, with Hamlin getting out of the car through a roof hatch and Vickers coming in through a window.

They had the exchange down to just over a minute, which they determined would keep the car on the lead lap if the exchange was made under a caution.

"It took us right at one minute every time that we rehearsed it, so we're going to be plenty fine there," Hamlin said. "Everything is pretty seamless."

Hamlin could get assistance during the race from good friend Michael Waltrip, who will be making just his second start of the season. It's likely that Hamlin will drop to the back of the field at the start of the race to try avoid an early accident, but he could also risk falling out of the draft.

So it wouldn't be a surprise to see Waltrip, a fellow Toyota driver, partner with Hamlin to help him stay in the draft until he gets out of the car.

Waltrip seemed to foreshadow that Saturday when discussing his race plan.

"Quite honestly, for the first 100 miles or so, I won't be aggressive at all because it's just a matter of getting in the flow and getting back to what you know you know how to do so well," Waltrip said.

Waltrip had an opportunity to win Talladega last October until leader Tony Stewart triggered a multi-car accident trying to hold off the field. It collected Waltrip, who turned 50 this week and only runs restrictor-plate races anymore.

His last win was at Talladega in 2003, but he led four laps in the season-opening Daytona 500 and finished 22nd.

Waltrip used Friday's practice to shake off the cobwebs.

"When you take off from Daytona until May, there's so many things you need to orientate yourself with something as simple as just being able to see the water temperature and water pressure gauges in your peripheral without having to pay attention to them, understanding how the cars move when other cars come around you," Waltrip said. "I have to do a whole lot of visualization, like after practice yesterday, this morning, before I race. I visualize what I saw in practice and what I think I'll see during the race. And the other cats, it's repetition; they were racing last weekend side-by-side, bumper-to-bumper all over each other, so theirs just comes natural.

"I have to really focus my mind on the task at hand in order to make sure I'm ready for it."

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) - After the failure of "Rise of the Guardians," DreamWorks Animation desperately needs a hit, so the studio has a lot riding on "The Croods."

The prehistoric animated film features the voices of Nicolas Cage and Emma Stone and lands in theaters on Friday. Most critics enjoyed the film, although a few reviewers groused that it failed to achieve the emotional highpoints of classic children's movies like "Toy Story" and "Up."

"The Croods" received a respectable 61 percent "fresh" rating on critics aggregator Rotten Tomatoes. It may not be as revolutionary as the discovery of fire, but from the sound of most reviews it makes for a perfectly diverting, family friendly hour and a half at the multiplex.

TheWrap's Alonso Duralde hailed the film for applying a light touch to the Stone Age antics and for playfully sending up teenage angst by setting its central father-daughter conflict against an early man backdrop.

"After the dreary 'Ice Age' movies made Pangaea tedious and stridently unfunny, it's a thrill to get a movie that gives tectonic shift a good name," Duralde wrote. "This new effort from writer-directors Chris Sanders (co-director of 'How to Train Your Dragon' and 'Lilo & Stitch') and Kirk De Micco ('Space Chimps') offers genuine comedy and compelling characters with dazzling visuals that feature both imaginary beasts (carnivorous birds, a candy-colored saber-toothed cat) and moments that approach photo-realism."

Neil Genzlinger complained in the New York Times that the film's plot is burdened with cliches, though he enjoyed the animation and the voice cast's work.

"The movie is at its most interesting and amusing when riffing on how cavemen might have reacted to new experiences and ideas, like fire and shoes," Genzlinger wrote. "Whether the kiddies will appreciate that is unclear, but they'll certainly like the voice work done by Emma Stone as Eep. She puts refreshing spunk into a character who otherwise is, alas, doomed to follow the same old story line."

Kyle Smith in the New York Post hated Cage's vocalization almost as much as Genzlinger adored Stone's performance. Though to be fair, that was hardly his only gripe.

"I'd like to take back all those times I said Nicolas Cage was one of the most annoying actors on film. It turns out he's equally terrible when he's only on the soundtrack," Smith wrote in a one-star review. "And yet Cage is the least of the problems with 'The Croods,' an animated comedy about cavemen whose writers took things a little too literally when they were told to write Cro-Magnon humor."

The Associated Press' Christy Lemire found delight in many of the same elements where Smith found disdain. She praised the film as brisk even if the plot is overly familiar. In particular, Lemire was dazzled by the animated picture's use of 3D imagery.

"Much of the lush landscape and vivid details feel as if they were taken directly from 'Avatar,' and a similar sense of wonder propels these stronger segments," Lemire wrote. "The lighting can indeed be magical, so it's no surprise that we are urged over and over again to step into it."

For Keith Staskiewicz of Entertainment Weekly, "The Croods" falls pretty far down the animated film evolutionary ladder.

"A handful of adrenalizing sequences of animated anarchy can't save this story from feeling overly primitive," he wrote.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Top industry groups and a dozen states have asked the Supreme Court to review a lower court decision upholding the Obama administration's plan to limit greenhouse gas emissions generated by power plants and vehicles.

The parties, which had until Friday to submit petitions to the high court, are challenging a 2012 decision by the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals that upheld rules issued by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

The petitioners attacked the rules on various grounds, but all argued that the agency should not use the Clean Air Act to regulate carbon emissions.

"EPA's ill-founded regulations represent a sweeping expansion of its regulatory power under the Clean Air Act and would impose new requirements on potentially millions of stationary sources across the country," the American Chemistry Council (ACC) said on Thursday.

The ACC was joined by other industry associations including the American Petroleum Institute, the National Association of Home Builders and the National Association of Manufacturers.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which ruled in favor of the EPA last year, denied the group's request for a rehearing in December, prompting the ACC and other organizations to turn to the Supreme Court.

The petitioners said the EPA incorrectly used the Prevention of Significant Deterioration (PSD) program of the Clean Air Act to regulate greenhouse gases from power plants. They said the program only applies to six other kinds of air pollutants.

Another association, the Energy-Intensive Manufacturers Working Group on Greenhouse Gas Regulation, also took issue with the EPA's use of the PSD to regulate greenhouse gases.

"(The) petitioner submits it is not possible to find a regulatory structure less compatible with the regulation of carbon," the group wrote, adding that applying the PSD to carbon would result in massive numbers of facilities being regulated.

One petition focused on a core aspect of the EPA's greenhouse gas rules - the scientific "endangerment finding" that underpins its entire greenhouse gas program.

Lawyers with the conservative Pacific Legal Foundation argued that the EPA failed to submit its "endangerment finding" for independent scientific review by the EPA's Science Advisory Board as required by the Clean Air Act.

Other groups that filed petitions include the Utility Air Regulatory Group, an association of electric utilities and electricity-generating companies; 12 states led by Texas; and the conservative Southeastern Legal Foundation, which represents Republican lawmakers Michele Bachmann and Joe Barton, among others.

(Reporting By Valerie Volcovici; editing by Xavier Briand)

Initial reporting indicated there was no enemy activity in the area where the plane went down, the NATO-led coalition said in a statement confirming the crash. Coalition personnel secured the site and were investigating the cause of the crash, NATO said.

The brief statement did not identify the nationalities of the victims, or say exactly where the crash occurred.

However, Mohammad Jan Rasoulyar, deputy governor of the southern province of Zabul, said an aircraft belonging to foreign forces crashed Saturday afternoon in Shah Joy district. He confirmed the site had been surrounded by international forces.

The spring Taliban offensive, which is to begin on Sunday, comes as U.S.-backed efforts to try to reconcile the Islamic militant movement with the Afghan government have so far failed.

Insurgents already have stepped up attacks this spring as they try to position themselves for power ahead of national elections and the planned withdrawal of most U.S. and other foreign combat troops by the end of 2014.

The Afghan Defense Ministry said its security forces are prepared for Taliban's new campaign. "The Afghan National Army is ready to neutralize the offensive," the ministry said, adding that the soldiers now have the support and trust of many Afghans.

The Taliban's leadership vowed on Saturday that "every possible tactic will be utilized in order to detain or inflict heavy casualties on the foreign transgressors" during its spring offensive.

In a sign of Taliban's determination to replace Afghanistan's government with one promoting a stricter interpretation of Islamic law, the insurgents named the new offensive after a legendary Muslim military commander, Khalid ibn al-Walid. Also known as the "Drawn Sword of God," he was a companion of Islam's Prophet Muhammad.

The Taliban threatened to infiltrate the Afghan security forces and conduct more attacks on Afghan policemen and soldiers as well as foreign troops. Such attacks threaten the strength of the Afghan forces as they work to take over responsibility from international troops. The latest one occurred in March, when a member of Afghanistan's government-backed village defense program shot and killed five of his colleagues in Badghis province in northwest Afghanistan

April has already been the worst month for combat deaths so far this year. According to an Associated Press tally, 257 people including civilians, Afghan security forces and foreign troops have been killed in violence around the nation. During that time 217 insurgents have died.

Last year during the month of April, 179 civilians, foreign troops and Afghan security forces were killed and 268 insurgents.

Still, U.S. Marine Gen. Joseph Dunford, the top commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, said Wednesday that the security situation had improved across the country, with Afghan forces now leading 80 percent of all conventional operations.

As the traditional fighting season begins, the insurgents will face a combined Afghan force of 350,000 soldiers and police, he said.

"The insurgency can no longer use the justification that it is fighting foreign occupiers that message rings hollow," Dunford said in a statement.

Elsewhere in Afghanistan, the Taliban late Friday freed nine civilian de-miners it had captured in the southern province of Kandahar after negotiations involving tribal elders, provincial spokesman Javeed Faisal said.

The Afghan men were being driven back from a mine field last Sunday when they were captured. Afghanistan has a legacy of land mines going back decades and remains one of the most heavily mined countries in the world.

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AP writer Rahim Faiez in Kabul contributed to this report.

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Follow Thomas Wagner on Twitter at: www.twitter.com/tjpwagner.

Thats a formidable task for a city where visitors have clashed for centuries, often ravaging the landscape. Suffice to say that city officials are looking to improve on the Crusader model of pilgrimage.

seeks to leverage Jerusalems ancient brand, which for centuries has appealed to pilgrims of the three monotheistic religions. He seeks to triple annual tourism to 10 million by 2020. But to do that in a sustainable way, reducing the environmental impact and boosting local economies, requires the buy-in of a key sector.

Nothing can be done seriously in Jerusalem without engaging the faith communities, because were not just any city, says Deputy Mayor Naomi Tsur. Green pilgrimage is a platform to work with our faith communities but also the best possible platform to work with other cities and faith communities around the world.

Jerusalem was one of 10 founding members of the Green Pilgrimage Network (GPN), established 18 months ago. Among the initial group were Sufi Muslims from Kano, ; Sikhs from , ; and Taoists from Lougang, .

Next year, Shinto followers inplan to join, and Ms. Tsur announced today thatwould form a national chapter as well.

Lougang perhaps best represents the potential scale of the movement. It has poured $1.5 billion into greening the city, building a new green spa complex, teaching organic farming, and initiating water harvesting. Now the city is trying to recruit 15 new cities into the network, says Allison Hilliard of the Alliance of Religions and Conservations, which oversees GPN.

GPN is also working on a chapter for the hajj to , , which draws nearly 3 million Muslims annually who leave behind 100 million plastic bottles. GPN seeks to tap into values of environmental stewardship across all faiths to cut down on such negative side-effects of tourism.

But it can be a tough sell. Despite the fact that Palestinians most of whom are Muslim comprise more than a third of Jerusalems population, very few attended the symposium.

Some of the pilgrimage routes with the greatest potential, like theascent from the , criss-cross numerous political barriers and strong political pressures act against those trying to reach across the divide.

Elsewhere in Israel, projects like thehave demonstrated the potential for Arab-Jewish cooperation.

Prior to the construction of the trail, One million tourists were visiting [the Arab town of] Cana every year, and they only stayed for one hour, says co-founder Maoz Inon. With it came the first guesthouse in Cana,in nearby Ilaniya, and more Christian tourists who arethroughout the struggling rural communities.

The trailhead is in the old city of , one of the most impoverished areas of Israel, at Mr. Inons . Since he established the inn in 2005, five more guesthouses have opened in Nazareth.

If we had 10,000 more of him, wed be much further along in having a truly sustainable product, says Deidre Shurland, a symposium speaker and coordinator of the s Global Partnership for Sustainable Tourism.

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More than a week later, a national dispute is raging as the opposition wages a remarkably successful media counteroffensive showing the claims to be seriously exaggerated and in some cases entirely false. With meticulously dated amateur photos of undamaged clinics, opposition supporters have vividly illustrated how cellphone cameras, Twitter and Facebook can help even the playing field against a government that came to dominate broadcast media during the late Hugo Chavez's 14-year presidency.

The fight is fueling tension in a country that's deeply polarized and almost exactly divided between supporters of the government and an opposition that claims the April 14 election was stolen. The chief of national prisons, Iris Varela, declared Tuesday that she was preparing a cell for opposition candidate Henrique Capriles for allegedly directing the purported clinic attacks and other violence against government buildings and supporters.

Chavez had a history of making claims he never substantiated, denouncing dozens of alleged assassination plots before succumbing to cancer in March. His heir, Nicolas Maduro, has shown himself prone to even more grave accusations, including repeatedly claiming in the week before his election that Salvadoran and Colombian mercenaries had entered Venezuela to wreak havoc. The government hasn't presented any evidence to back up those claims.

Tinedo Guia, president of Venezuela's largest journalists association, said the government does not appear to fully grasp that people distrustful of state-controlled media can increasingly rely on Internet-driven grassroots reporting.

Internet use in Venezuela soared from 4.6 percent of the population in 2001 to 40.2 percent in 2011, according to the World Bank. Mobile phone subscriptions more than doubled from 47 per 100 people to 98 per 100 between 2005 and 2010, and the number of mobile phones with Internet access plans grew from less than 1 per 100 people to more than 25 per 100 people over the same period.

"It's evident they are mistaken in thinking the people are stupid," Guia said of the government.

Health ministry officials did not respond to requests for comment but other government ministers have alleged the clinics were repaired faster than the damage could be documented. Some accused skeptics of questioning the government's claims simply because they opposed the ruling Chavista movement.

Information Minister Ernesto Villegas wrote last week on Twitter that "the media and non-governmental organizations are uniting in complicity with the attacks on doctors and patients."

On April 16, two days after the election, Maduro announced that an unspecified number of Comprehensive Diagnostic Medical Centers had been burned by thugs operating on direct orders from Capriles. Information Minister Ernesto Villegas said eight clinics had been attacked. The number grew in subsequent accountings by government officials, with then-Health Minister Eugenia Sader saying by Saturday that 25 clinics had been burned. She was replaced in a Cabinet shuffle this week.

But no sooner had the first accusations been made than Capriles supporters rushed to at least five of the clinics and took photos of their undamaged facades. Amateur photographers were careful to hold up editions of that morning's newspaper so there would be no doubt the images were captured after the purported attacks. Then they posted the photographs on Twitter and Facebook.

The images spread quickly and were published in opposition newspapers such as El Nacional and El Universal. A website that specializes in political satire, Chiguire Bipolar, posted an article headlined "Maduro denounces the opposition's burning, repair, painting and resupplying of 11 Comprehensive Diagnostic MedicalCenters." It was tweeted at least 4,200 times and posted even more frequently on Facebook.

Despite earlier insistence from some officials that the damage couldn't be documented, a government-linked group published 10 photos Wednesday that it said revealed evidence of the attacks on public buildings, most showing minor damage to the interiors, such as scorch marks on walls or a splintered wooden door. One exterior shot showed several streaks of fire damage above a white building, another revealing minor burns along the bottom of a health clinic sign on an otherwise untouched wall.

The 561 clinics opened by Chavez are a potent symbol of Venezuela's effort to alleviate deep poverty by transforming the country with the world's largest oil reserves into a socialist economy with deep ties to Cuba. Under an agreement between Chavez and Cuba's Fidel Castro, thousands of Cuban doctors have moved to slums and remote villages to attend to the poor. Venezuela, meanwhile, props up Cuba with billions of dollars in oil.

Cuban government officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but Communist Party newspaper Granma reported last week that island doctors would continue their work in Venezuela despite what it called "aggressive protests" at some Cuban-run health facilities. Granma said no one had been hurt, and did not mention any damage.

Cuban state-run news agency AIN later said clinics had taken precautionary security measures due to "provocative actions by some people." AIN added that more than 32,000 medical workers are currently serving in Cuba's medical mission to Venezuela, which observed its 10-year anniversary this year.

During the campaign, Capriles had indicated he wanted to end subsidized oil aid to Cuba, saying he no longer wanted to "give" the resource.

The purported burning of the Cuban-run clinics, in turn, became "the perfect symbolic vehicle for the government's case against the opposition," which officials have attempted to portray as "antidemocratic, inhumane, and as a threat to the social policy gains of recent years," said David Smilde, a Venezuela expert at the University of Georgia.

Provea, an independent group that is one of Venezuela's most prominent human rights organizations, compiled images of the five unharmed clinics and included them in an April 18 report that cast deep doubt on the government claims.

"No clinic in the country showed signs of having been burned or vandalized to the intensity suggested in the allegations so widely distributed by official media and high-ranking government spokesmen," the brief report said.

In an unintended echo of the parody article, Gabriela Ramirez, Venezuela's top official charged with investigating human rights violations, said Saturday that an unspecified number of clinics had indeed been hit by firebombs but were repaired overnight a day after the April 14 election.

Maduro mentioned at least two allegedly burned clinics in the capital's Baruta district by name. Ramirez said on April 20 that one in the southwestern state Barinas had been 90 percent burned.

AP reporters visited one of the Baruta clinics on April 16 and one in Barinas the next day and found no visible signs of fire or smoke damage on their facades. Neighbors of both clinics said they had not seen either damaged.

Villegas, the information minister, accused Provea of calling the government's claims into question solely because the group's director secretly opposes the government and the Chavista movement, a charge director Marino Alvarado denies.

"This type of behavior stimulates the fascists," Villegas said. "I'm very surprised how anti-Chavez sentiment has completely taken hold of him."

Alvarado, the head of Provea, noted how Chavez once accused Provea of lying about rights violations by military personnel following deadly 1999 mudslides that killed thousands in the coastal state of Vargas, then acknowledged weeks later that activists had been right and called for an investigation that found bodies had been tossed into an unmarked grave.

He suggested that authorities should try to regain lost credibility by admitting they were mistaken or misinformed about the purported clinic attacks.

"We hope this government has the capacity to correct its position on the accusations," Alvarado said.

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Associated Press writers Christopher Toothaker, Frank Bajak and Jorge Rueda in Caracas and Peter Orsi in Havana contributed to this report.

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Vivian Sequera on Twitter: http://twitter.com/VivianSequera

Michael Weissenstein on Twitter: http://twitter.com/mweissenstein