The killing of the son of veteran Afghan guerrilla commander Jalaluddin Haqqani came days after the arrest of the Afghan Taliban’s top military strategist, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, in a joint Pakistani-U.S. operation in the city of Karachi.

A pilotless U.S. drone fired two missiles into a Haqqani network compound on Thursday in Pakistan’s North Waziristan ethnic Pashtun tribal region on the Afghan border, killing three people.

Mohammad Haqqani, a son of Jalaluddin Haqqani whose network is linked to al Qaeda and has carried out several high-profile attacks in Afghanistan, was among the dead, Pakistani security officials said.

But another son of the elder Haqqani, Sirajuddin Haqqani, is a much more high-profile target of the U.S. drones.

“Mohammad Haqqani is a younger brother of Sirajuddin. He (Mohammad) was killed in the attack,” a security official who declined to be identified told Reuters.

Jalaluddin Haqqani, who is in his 70s, has passed on the leadership of his militant faction to Sirajuddin.

U.S. forces in Afghanistan describe Sirajuddin as one of their biggest enemies and the United States has posted a bounty of up to $5 million for him.

Thursday’s drone strike was in Dandi Darpakhel village near North Waziristan’s main town of Miranshah where many members of Haqqani’s extended family have been living since the U.S.-backed Afghan jihad, or holy war, against Soviet forces in the 1980s.

Sirajuddin Haqqani was known to visit the village but another Pakistani intelligence agency official said he was not there at the time of the attack.

Residents and government officials also confirmed the death of Mohammad Haqqani.

U.S. drones have targeted the village several times and 23 people, many of the members of the Haqqani family, were killed in a strike there in September 2008.

“HIGH-WATER MARK”

Jalaluddin Haqqani has had close links with Pakistani intelligence, notably the military’s main Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency.

U.S. ally Pakistan officially objects to the drone strikes, saying they are a violation of its sovereignty and fuel anti-U.S. feeling which complicates Pakistan’s efforts against militancy.

But at least some strikes are carried out with the consent of Islamabad, in particular those on Pakistani Taliban militants fighting the state.

U.S. envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard Holbrooke on Thursday hailed the arrest of Baradar, the Afghan Taliban’s number two man, as a high-water mark for Pakistani-U.S. collaboration.

But Interior Minster Rehman Malik suggested Baradar might not be handed over to the United States. Asked by a reporter about the fate of Afghans arrested in Pakistan, Malik said they would be investigated for any crime in Pakistan.

If found innocent, they would be returned to their country and not the United States, he said.

Pakistani cooperation against militants is a sensitive issue for the government of a country where many people are suspicious of the U.S.-led campaign against militancy.

Despite that, Pakistan has arrested hundreds of al Qaeda members since the September 11 attacks on the United States and handed many of them over to the United States.

The Haqqani faction does not launch attacks in Pakistan but sends fighters across the border into Afghanistan from its stronghold in lawless North Waziristan.

Separately, two pro-Taliban militants suspected of involvement in several high-profiles attacks in Pakistan were killed in a shootout with police in the central city of Faisalabad after they refused to surrender, police said.

In the southwestern province of Baluchistan, unidentified gunmen kidnapped four Pakistani aid workers employed by a Western relief agency.

Taliban operate in the gas-rich province as well as separatists not linked to the Taliban who have been waging a low-level insurgency for decades.

Separatists kidnapped an American working for the United Nations in Baluchistan last year and held him for more than two months before releasing him.

The 67th Golden Globe Awards was telecast live from the Beverly Hilton Hotel in Beverly Hills, California on Sunday, January 17, 2010 by NBC, from 5:00 PM - 8:00 PM (PST) and 8:00PM - 11:00 PM (EST) (01:00-04:00 Monday January 18 UTC). The ceremonies were hosted by Ricky Gervais,and were broadcast live for the first time.

Nominations were announced on December 15, 2009. Among films, Up in the Air led with six nominations, followed by Nine with five and Avatar and Inglourious Basterds with four each.Matt Damon, Sandra Bullock, Meryl Streep, and Anna Paquin were each nominated twice, Damon as Best Actor in the comedy category and as Best Supporting Actor in a Motion Picture, Bullock as Best Actress in both the comedy and drama categories, Streep competing against herself as Best Actress in the comedy category, and Paquin as Best Actress in a TV Drama Series and as Best Actress in a Television Film or Miniseries.

Television programs receiving multiple nominations include Glee, Dexter, Damages, Mad Men, House, and 30 Rock.

Martin Scorsese was presented with the Cecil B. DeMille Award for lifetime achievement in motion pictures.

Schedule

As of January 17 2009:

Nominations and winners

Winners in bold.

Cecil B. DeMille Award

Martin Scorsese

Film

^[6]

Television

Awards breakdown

Number of nominations

Actors

• 2: Sandra Bullock (The Blind Side, The Proposal)
• 2: Matt Damon (The Informant!, Invictus)
• 2: Anna Paquin (The Courageous Heart of Irena Sendler, True Blood)
• 2: Meryl Streep (It’s Complicated, Julie & Julia)

Films

• 6: Up in the Air
• 5: Nine
• 4: Avatar, Inglourious Basterds
• 3: The Hurt Locker, It’s Complicated, Invictus, Precious, A Single Man
• 2: (500) Days of Summer, Brothers, Crazy Heart, The Informant!, Julie & Julia, The Last Station, Up

Television

• 4: Glee
• 3: 30 Rock, Big Love, Lost, Damages, Dexter, Georgia O’Keeffe, Grey Gardens, Into the Storm, Mad Men
• 2: Entourage, House, Hung, The Office, Taking Chance, True Blood

Number of wins

Films

• 2: Avatar, Up, Crazy Heart

• 1: Up In The Air, The Hangover, Precious, Julie & Julia, The Blind Side, Inglourious Basterds, Sherlock Holmes, The White Ribbon

Television

• 2: Dexter, Grey Gardens
• 1: Big Love, Taking Chance, 30 Rock, Glee, Mad Men, The Good Wife, The United States of Tara

Presenters

• Amy Adams
• Christina Aguilera
• Jennifer Aniston
• Justin Bartha
• Kristen Bell
• Halle Berry
• Josh Brolin
• Gerard Butler
• Cher
• Bradley Cooper
• Chace Crawford
• Robert De Niro
• Cameron Diaz
• Leonardo DiCaprio
• Colin Farrell
• Harrison Ford
• Jodie Foster
• Matthew Fox
• Jennifer Garner
• Mel Gibson
• Lauren Graham
• Tom Hanks
• Neil Patrick Harris
• Sally Hawkins
• Ed Helms
• Kate Hudson
• Felicity Huffman
• Samuel L. Jackson
• Nicole Kidman
• Jane Krakowski
• Ashton Kutcher
• Taylor Lautner
• Zachary Levi
• Sophia Loren
• Paul McCartney
• Helen Mirren
• Jim Parsons
• Amy Poehler
• Julia Roberts
• Mickey Rourke
• Zoe Saldana
• Arnold Schwarzenegger
• Steven Spielberg
• Kiefer Sutherland
• Mike Tyson
• Sofia Vergara
• Olivia Wilde
• Kate Winslet
• Reese Witherspoon
• Sam Worthington

ISLAMABAD: Various cultural organisations have got together to organise a festival ‘Umeed-e-Nau’ due to start from today (Friday), Lok Virsa Executive Director Khalid Javaid told Daily Times on Thursday.

Lok Virsa, National Institute of Folk and Traditional Heritage, National Institute of Cultural Studies (NICS), National Commission for Human Development (NCHD), Nomad Art Gallery and Society of Asian Civilizations Pakistan are moving spirits behind the event being staged to welcome the New Year, he elaborated.

He said major activities included four-day ‘Swat Cultural Festival’ at Lok Virsa Heritage Museum. “The festival is meant for finding ways to speed up rehabilitation of the internally displaced people (IDPs) particularly craftsmen, folk singers and musicians from Swat, Malakand and Mansehra,” Lok Virsa ED informed DT.

Javaid said that ‘Artisans at Work Exhibition’, folkloric performances, traditional cuisines, a ‘Children Art Exhibition’ and other attractions are highlights of the festival.

“Besides this, a book titled ‘Pariyoun Ka Des - Uzbekistan’ authored by Dr Syed Akhtar Jaffri from Lahore would also be launched to mark beginning of the New Year,” he added.

“The launching ceremony will be held today (Friday) at Lok Virsa. National Language Authority Chairman Iftikhar Arif and Ambassador of Uzbekistan H E Oybek Arif Usman will grace the ceremony,” he explained.

“The festival will continue till Sunday January 3, 2010 at the Lok Virsa Complex,” he said.

International airports were scrambling yesterday to tighten security on U.S. flights, causing passenger chaos on the busiest travel day of the year, in the wake of Christmas Day’s foiled attempt to blow up a Detroit-bound airplane.

U.S. President Barack Obama, on vacation in Hawaii, ordered a review of security protocols and the no-fly list to determine how a man with explosives strapped to his body boarded a flight weeks after the man’s father contacted U.S. authorities to warn them of his son’s growing radicalism.

Jammed airports were a scene of bedlam yesterday as travellers were left waiting in line for hours and rushing to make alternative plans as a slate of ramped-up security measures disrupted connecting flights and slowed departures to a crawl.

But nothing better demonstrated the heightened anxiety in the skies than a case of airsickness that became a national security incident.

When a Nigerian man locked himself in the airplane’s bathroom for about an hour yesterday on the same Amsterdam-Detroit flight that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab allegedly tried to blow up on Friday, staff on board asked for emergency assistance.

As it turned out, the “disruptive passenger” was a sick businessman who needed to use the washroom. Authorities said yesterday he posed no threat.

In the meantime, travellers in and out of the U.S. are facing stringent security screenings, pat-downs and restrictions on their on-board movement for the foreseeable future, after Friday’s close call was averted only by the adrenaline-driven bravery of passengers on the 278-person flight.

Although a Vancouver Airport spokeswoman said the new security measures, put in place this weekend, will last at least until 2 a.m. Dec. 30, neither Transport Canada nor the U.S. Transportation Security Administration would speculate on how long these new measures would be in place or what would replace them.

In the meantime, the emergency measures were causing pandemonium at airports across Canada yesterday. Passengers faced waits as long as seven hours as they went through lengthy body searches and painstaking checks of slimmed-down carry-on bags.

Reports from Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport that security protocol had been followed correctly raised further concerns that would-be terrorists are moving to exploit an overlooked gap in passenger-screening measures.

It’s reminiscent of Richard Reid’s attempt in 2001 to blow up a plane with the same explosives hidden in his shoes, and, more recently, of a 2006 transatlantic plot to blow up 10 flights from Britain to the U.S. and Canada using liquid explosives. Many of the heightened restrictions prompted by that incident have since been relaxed. But terrorism experts say this latest near-miss could force security authorities to re-examine the way they evaluate threats posed by passengers, and prompt even stricter incarnations of no-fly lists previously criticized for grounding innocent travellers.To simplify airport chaos yesterday, personnel were asking passengers to refrain from bringing carry-on bags with them at all, although few complied and departure lounges were scenes of chaos as harried travellers packed and re-packed their luggage.

A Canadian Air Transport Security Authority screener at Toronto’s Pearson airport said yesterday CATSA staff in the U.S. departures lounge was almost doubled yesterday, and staff were being paid overtime to go through hands-on screenings of tens of thousands of frustrated passengers.

Despite staffing increases to accommodate the confusion, dozens of flights were delayed and several airlines had to cancel flights simply because the new screenings meant travellers weren’t getting through the airport fast enough.

At 5 p.m. yesterday, American Airlines had cancelled 16 of its 36 flights scheduled for that day - largely due to the security measures that a spokesman said was forcing them to “thin out” the schedule.

Air Canada and its affiliate Air Canada Jazz cancelled several short-haul U.S. flights, most of them out of Toronto, due to security delays.

Mark Hansen, a Berkeley professor specializing in aviation security, said the pat-downs now being implemented are helpful but are likely a stop-gap measure, to be replaced with better high-tech ways of detecting non-metal weapons like the plastic explosive pentaerythritol tetranitrate (PETN) that Mr. Abdulmutallab allegedly attempted to detonate on Friday.

But he noted it’s also possible this will prove a temporary flare-up in airport-security paranoia.

“The history is that these things do subside - there’s an immediate reaction and then, as time goes on, the memory fades and the reality of the invasiveness and the inconvenience of strict screening persists. And so we eventually move toward a system that is less stringent.”

The football player and TV personality were eliminated Tuesday from “Dancing with the Stars.” Irvin failed to capture enough viewer votes to keep him in the competition, while Dacascos lost his spot during a last-ditch dance-off.

Former Dallas Cowboys receiver Irwin finished his run on the hit ABC show with his highest score of the season: He earned 23 points out of 30 for his fox-trot with professional partner Anna Demidova on Monday’s episode.

Judges’ scores are combined with viewer votes to determine which contestants are eliminated each week.

“Last night was a great night, and to see the audience here standing up, it’s their way of saying they appreciate the hard work,” Irwin said after learning his fate.

Dacascos collected a paltry 19 points for his misguided samba on Monday with a substitute partner after his usual pro, Lacey Schwimmer, fell to the flu. She was back for Tuesday’s episode, when the couple danced-off against Aaron Carter and Karina Smirnoff.

The “Iron Chef America” host’s trick-filled cha-cha earned praise from the judges, but Carter’s jive was more impressive.

Dacascos said being on the show was “one of the greatest experiences of my life.”

“It’s certainly much harder than it looks on television,” he said. “The bond you create with the pro dancers, my dancer, the other celebrities, it’s really special.”

Tuesday’s results show also featured performances by Rod Stewart, country singer Colbie Caillat and Ballas Hough, the rock band created by pro dancers Mark Ballas and Derek Hough. Ballas and his partner, actress Melissa Joan Hart, were eliminated from the competition last week.

Hough is still in the running for the mirrorball trophy with his partner, model Joanna Krupa.

Besides Carter and Krupa, remaining contestants include reality TV star Kelly Osbourne, singer Mya and entertainer Donny Osmond. Each will perform two dances on Monday’s episode.

SHE might be considered one of Hollywood’s sexiest stars, but Salma Hayek hates her body.

The actress - who is married to French billionaire François-Henri Pinault - has revealed how she won a “Best Body Award” - but was too embarrassed to accept it.

“I won a ‘Best Body Award’ from Fitness Magazine and I was too embarrassed to accept it,” Salma said. “I actually don’t have a good body, but if everybody thinks so, I guess it means I’m a good actress.

“I have acted the part of the girl who has a very good body. If you know how to dress, there’s some tricks you can pull.”

Salma, 43, also revealed what she’d be doing if she didn’t make a success of her acting career.

“Growing up, I thought about wanting to be a contortionist or maybe a trapeze artist,” she said. “I would have loved to do something gymnastic. I had another fantasy. Have you ever heard of the group ‘Up With People?’ They’re not a circus troupe, but they came to our city in Mexico when I was a kid doing motivational performances and singing songs about the power we have to change things.

“I had a dream of going away with them - just going from town to town and being in their show to help promote world peace. That was my real secret fantasy.”

Hayek - who got wed earlier this year - recently revealed that she’s still struggling to adjust to married life, especially her husband’s traditions.

“Eating oysters for Christmas is a weird one I didn’t know about,” she said. “I had no idea that would be happening. I’m used to turkey. It takes some getting used to.”

NEW YORK - Irving Penn, whose photographs revealed a taste for stark simplicity whether he was shooting celebrity portraits, fashion, still life or remote places of the world, died Wednesday at his Manhattan home. He was 92.

The death was announced by his photo assistant, Roger Krueger.

“He never stopped working,” said Peter MacGill, a longtime friend whose Pace-MacGill Galleries in Manhattan represented Penn’s work. “He would go back to similar subjects and never see them the same way twice.”

Penn, who constantly explored the photographic medium and its boundaries, typically preferred to isolate his subjects _ from fashion models to Aborigine tribesmen _ from their natural settings to photograph them in a studio against a stark background. He believed the studio could most closely capture their true natures.

Between 1964 and 1971, he completed seven such projects, his subjects ranging from New Guinea mud men to San Francisco hippies.

Penn also had a fascination with still life and produced a dramatic range of images that challenged the traditional idea of beauty, giving dignity to such subjects as cigarette butts, decaying fruit and discarded clothing. A 1977 show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art presented prints of trash rescued from Manhattan streets and photographed, lovingly, against plain backgrounds.

“Photographing a cake can be art,” he said at the 1953 opening of his studio, where he continued to produce commercial and gallery work into the 21st century.

Penn’s most recent work was a series of still-life photos made of ceramics that he and his wife had collected in Europe. “They were as dynamic and as powerful as anything he had done in his 70-year career,” MacGill said.

Thirteen of Penn’s photographs are being auctioned Thursday at Christie’s, including “Guedras in the Wind,” a 1971 image of two Moroccan women, with an estimated pre-sale price of $40,000 to $60,000. A Penn photo, “Cuzco Children,” sold for $529,000 last year, including an auction house premium of 20 percent.

Penn’s career began in the 1940s as a fashion photographer for Vogue, and he continued to contribute to the magazine for decades thereafter.

He stumbled into the job almost by accident, when he abandoned his early ambition to become a painter and took a position as a designer in the magazine’s art department in 1943. Staff photographers balked at his unorthodox layout ideas, and a supervisor asked him to photograph a cover design.

The resulting image, on the Oct. 1, 1943, cover of Vogue, was a striking still-life showing a brown leather bag, a beige scarf, gloves, oranges and lemons arranged in the shape of a pyramid.

In subsequent photographs for the magazine, Penn further developed his austere style that placed models and fashion accessories against clean backdrops. It was a radical departure at a time when most fashion photographers posed their subjects with props and in busy settings that tended to draw attention from the clothes themselves.

The approach made him a star at the magazine, where his work eventually appeared on as many as 300 pages annually. Penn believed his success depended on keeping the reader _ rather than the model _ in mind.

“Many photographers feel their client is the subject,” he explained in a 1991 interview in The New York Times. “My client is a woman in Kansas who reads Vogue. I’m trying to intrigue, stimulate, feed her. … The severe portrait that is not the greatest joy in the world to the subject may be enormously interesting to the reader.”

He left the magazine in 1944 to join the military _ serving with the American Field Service in Italy and then as a photographer in India _ but returned to Vogue in 1946, taking travel assignments in addition to his fashion work.

Penn relished the chance to work in foreign locales, recalling in his 1974 book, “Worlds in a Small Room,” that he had often daydreamed “of being mysteriously deposited (with my ideal north-light studio) among the Aborigines in remote parts of the earth.”

In the 1950s, Penn moved into portraiture. He photographed not only the famous _ actors, musicians and politicians _ but also ordinary people. He published a series of pictures in 1950-1951 featuring plumbers, salesmen and cleaning women in New York City, Paris and London. The Getty Center in Los Angeles currently is exhibiting some of the photos.

His celebrity portraits included closely cropped images of Miles Davis, Spencer Tracy, Georgia O’Keeffe and Pablo Picasso, the last peering apprehensively from beneath a wide-brimmed hat. He once said that his formula for capturing meaningful portraits was to photograph his subjects relentlessly, often over a period of several hours, until they were forced to let down their guard.

A 2000 exhibit organized by the Art Institute of Chicago on his portraiture work said, “Penn’s manipulation of formal design elements such as light and shadow, and his ability to capture a significant gesture, expression, or mood, ultimately reveal something intriguing about his subjects.”

An exhibit of 14 large prints of cigarette and cigar butts at the Museum of Modern Art in 1975 was more controversial. It was lauded by some critics as a powerful elevation of the banal to the monumental, but criticized by others as self-indulgent.

“A beautiful print is a thing in itself, not just a halfway house on the way to the page,” he once said.

Accordingly, he spent countless hours in his studio creating prints with costly platinum salts _ a process that had been mostly abandoned at the turn of the 20th century, but favored by Penn because of its glowing results. (Most photographic prints use a solution of silver on the paper rather than platinum.) He would paint the platinum solution on the paper himself to create the effects he sought.

“Over the years I must have spent thousands of hours silently brushing on the liquid coatings, preparing each sheet in anticipation of reaching the perfect print,” Penn wrote in his 1991 book “Passage: A Work Record.”

Penn donated photographs to the National Portrait Gallery and the National Museum of American Art in Washington, and his archives are at the Art Institute of Chicago.

Born in Plainfield, N.J., in 1917, Penn studied at the Philadelphia Museum School of Industrial Art from 1934 to 1938, and worked as an assistant at Harper’s Bazaar in 1939.

Penn married fashion model Lisa Fonssagrives in 1950, and for decades afterward she remained one of his favorite subjects. She died in 1992. One of his 1950 photos of her sold at auction in 2004 for more than $57,000.

Penn was the older brother of filmmaker Arthur Penn, who directed “The Miracle Worker,” “Bonnie and Clyde” and “Night Moves.”

He had a son, Tom, with Fonssagrives. His wife also had a daughter, Mia, from a previous marriage.

The attacks of September 11, 2001, are still vivid and painful to many. After eight years our losses, loved ones and friends and fellow citizens, and icons we thought would stand long after we were gone, still leave empty spaces in our lives and our hearts and our city’s skyline.

Staten Island Advance weblogger Michael W. Dominowski looks back on that terrible day, and the Advance presents a gallery of historic photos from the attacks. Looking at them may be painful, but it also may be necessary.

SACRAMENTO, Calif. - Mike Duvall’s second term as a member of the California Assembly was progressing pretty much like his first - in relative obscurity, with few notable legislative accomplishments.

The Orange County Republican is now a YouTube hit after KCAL-TV aired his racy comments about sexual conquests that were caught by an open microphone in a Capitol hearing room. Several media outlets said the comments referred to Duvall’s affairs with a female lobbyist and another woman. He resigned Wednesday.

California’s legislative leaders have been trying to focus on a number high-profile issues - from water policy to prisons to renewable energy - during the waning days of their legislative session. On Wednesday, they instead found themselves answering questions about a lawmaker who bragged about a spanking fetish, the type of underwear worn by a mistress and his apparent ability to carry on two extramarital affairs at once.

Assembly Speaker Karen Bass, D-Los Angeles, called it “a very sad day.”

“We have such big issues before the Legislature and to have this become a distraction, he felt his responsibility was to step aside,” she said.

Duvall, 54, lives in Yorba Linda with his wife when he is not in Sacramento, and has two adult children.

He made the comments about the affairs to Assemblyman Jeff Miller during a break in a committee meeting inside the Capitol on July 8, apparently unaware that the microphone at the desk was on.

“I’m getting into spanking her,” Duvall is heard saying on the videotape, which was made as a matter of routine by a legislative office.

Miller asks if she likes it too. Duvall responds: “She goes, ‘I know you like spanking me.’ I said, ‘Yeah, that’s ’cause you’re such a bad girl.’”

Duvall also describes the woman’s “eye-patch underwear” and the age difference between himself and his mistress, identified in some media reports as a lobbyist for an energy company. He tells Miller, a fellow Republican from Corona, that the woman’s birthday was two days earlier.

Duvall said he joked with the woman that she was getting old after turning 36 and told her, “I am going to have to trade you in.”

The lawmaker then brags about an affair he is having with another woman.

“Oh, she is hot! I talked to her yesterday. She goes, ‘So are we finished?’ I go, ‘No, we’re not finished.’ I go, ‘You know about the other one, but she doesn’t know about you!’” Duvall can be heard saying in an apparent reference to his affair with the lobbyist.

The unseemly remarks also raise questions about the relationship between lawmakers and lobbyists. The Assembly Ethics Committee is investigating Duvall’s comments, in part to determine whether the affair might have influenced his votes.

He was vice chairman of the Assembly Utilities Committee.

Several media outlets reported the woman Duvall refers to in his comments works as a lobbyist for Sempra Energy, a San Diego-based energy services company that operates San Diego Gas & Electric Co. and Southern California Gas Co. Sempra issued an e-mail statement saying it was investigating the claims.

“The employee has denied the speculative media reports. Our investigation will be conducted to ensure not only that our policies on employee conduct are strictly adhered to, but also that our employee is treated fairly,” the company said.

Duvall was elected in 2006 to represent an Orange County district that includes Fullerton, Anaheim, Placentia, Orange, Brea and Yorba Linda. Before that, he served six years on the Yorba Linda City Council. He also owns an insurance agency.

In stepping down, Duvall said it would not be fair to his family, constituents or friends to remain in office.

“I am deeply saddened that my inappropriate comments have become a major distraction for my colleagues in the Assembly, who are working hard on the very serious problems facing our state,” he said. “Therefore, I have decided to resign my office, effective immediately, so that the Assembly can get back to work.”

The lawmaker had received a 100 percent rating from Capitol Resource Institute, a conservative advocacy group, for his votes on legislation considered pro-family during the 2007-08 legislative session.

BOSTON - Hundreds of mourners lined the sidewalks near Boston’s Mission Church where a funeral Mass was held Saturday for Sen. Edward Kennedy, with some holding signs urging lawmakers to approve health care legislation in his honor, and other saying they just wanted to witness a moment in history.

Lillian Bennett, 59, of the city’s Dorchester neighborhood said she was a longtime Kennedy supporter and was determined to get as close as she could to the invitation-only funeral, despite the driving rain.

“I said to myself this morning, ‘no matter what the weather, I’m going. I don’t care if I have to swim,” she said, calling Kennedy “irreplaceable.”

American flags, old campaign signs and photographs of Kennedy dotted the street and storefronts leading up to the church, formally named Our Lady of Perpetual Help Basilica. The church is located in one of Boston’s most culturally diverse neighborhoods, and serves a mix of lifelong residents, students from nearby colleges and the more than 20 medical facilities in the area. Kennedy often prayed at the church while his daughter, Kara, was being treated for cancer.

The public was not allowed close to the church, where Kennedy relatives and friends and dozens of former and current members of Congress gathered for a funeral Mass. Kennedy died late Tuesday night at age 77, after battling brain cancer for more than a year.

The invited included a broad mix, from foreign dignitaries to Boston Celtics great Bill Russell, singer Tony Bennett and actor Jack Nicholson. President Barack Obama and three of the four living presidents also attended - prompting what Boston Police Commissioner Ed Davis described as the largest security event he’d ever seen in Boston.

“The closet thing we could compare this to is the Democratic National Convention … but that was 18 months of planning,” he said.

Still, there were few problems, and even residents who were restricted from coming and going from their home were without complaint, Davis said. One protester was arrested during the three days of motorcades and memorials, said Davis, who did not have details.

After the Mass, Kennedy’s body was whisked away in another motorcade including family and friends traveling in charter buses, to nearby Hanscom Air Force Base, to be flown for burial in Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia. A line of cars stretched more than a mile along the highway, as motorists pulled over to watch the motorcade. Others huddled under umbrellas and tightened hoods around their faces as they held American flags and waves from overpasses and near the entrance to the base.

Karen Spence, 45, also of Dorchester, came dressed in a bedazzled T-shirt with American flags and red flip-flops, and called her opportunity to be near the church for his funeral “the chance of a lifetime.”

As Kennedy friends, family and dignitaries arrived, the crowds were respectful and largely silent, in contrast to the applause and cheers that greeted the sun-soaked motorcade Thursday, when the hearse carried Kennedy’s body from his home on Cape Cod and then through the streets of Boston past sites significant to Kennedy’s family and career.

On Saturday, police motorcycles led a solemn procession of the hearse and limousines carrying the immediate family from where the body had been lying in repose at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library to the church. A handful of people outside the church cheered and yelled “God Bless” and “Thank you, Teddy!” as the hearse approached.

A far-off trumpet could be heard playing a mournful melody.

Cinde Warmington, of Gilford, N.H., cradled an umbrella in the nook of her shoulder as she wrote on a fluorescent green poster, using her 19-year-old son’s back as a table.

“Health care, do it for Ted,” she wrote. “Keep the dream alive. Health care 4 all,” the reverse side read.

“I always said I’d be there for him,” Warmington said. “He spent his whole life fighting for people.”