Paris Hilton does not want to be known as a reality star.
The 35-year-old heiress gets candid about growing up and leaving her reality TV days behind her in a new interview with Harper's Bazaar, revealing that her focus these days is on growing her business.
"I want to be known as a businesswoman," she says. "I don't want to be known as a reality TV star, I don't like the way that sounds."
"I have really grown past that," she explains. "Now I mostly focus on my empire and my brand, rather than everything else that comes with the reality star kind of life. I spend my time working rather than just enjoying myself and being on vacation."
"I am very focused on my business and when you live in that mind frame, you can stay away from the trashy tabloids," she adds.
Though Hilton says she's moved on from her former life in the spotlight, she does take credit for blazing a trail for those who are famous for being famous.
"When I moved to New York as a teenager I would just party all the time, but now people think I am actually smart because I have parlayed that into a very lucrative business," she admits.
"With partying, no one had ever been paid to go to a party. I was the first one to kind of invent that in Las Vegas at 20 years old," Hilton says. "Back in the day, a DJ would maybe get $200 and they would be hidden in a DJ booth. Now they are headliners, making millions of dollars -- the whole attraction is them. I saw that coming before it was actually happening."
Something she didn't see coming was the dress Kendall Jenner wore on her 21st birthday, which the model confessed was inspired by Hilton's own 21st birthday look.
"[Kendall] was like, 'I saw the pictures of you and I was obsessed, it was so beautiful so I had another designer recreate it,'" Hilton reveals. "It's like when I was little, I wanted to copy Madonna and wear what she wore in the '80s, so the fact that I'm seeing these beautiful girls -- who are the new style icons right now -- reminds me of when I wanted to look like Madonna. It's flattering."
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Former French Prime Minister Francois Fillon, center, arrives for an
EPP meeting ahead of an EU Summit in Brussels on Thursday, Dec. 15,
2016. European Union leaders meet Thursday in Brussels to discuss
defense, migration, the conflict in Syria and Britain's plans to leave
the bloc.
The EU's executive Commission announced Thursday that it would provide Niger with 610 million euros ($640 million) in development aid, and a further 140 million euros ($147 million) for nine projects under the bloc's fund for Africa.
The EU is developing other deals to manage migration with Ethiopia, Mali, Nigeria and Senegal. Debate has swirled about setting up similar arrangements with Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Egypt and Pakistan but the deals are extremely expensive.
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People walking among damaged buildings on a street filled with debris
near the ancient Umayyad Mosque, in the Old City of Aleppo, Syria. A
cease-fire deal between rebels and the Syrian government in the city of
Aleppo has effectively collapsed, Wednesday, Dec. 14, 2016, with fighter
jets resuming their devastating air raids over the opposition's densely
crowded enclave in the east of the city. The attacks threaten plans to
evacuate the rebels and tens of thousands of civilians out of harm's
way, in what would seal the opposition's surrender of the city.
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group says ambulances and municipal buses crossed from the government territory and arrived shortly after noon on Thursday in the last rebel area in Aleppo.
Syrian state TV has broadcast footage showing a convoy of green-colored municipal buses rumbling toward the agreed-on evacuation point inside the opposition-held area. The spokeswoman for the International Committee of the Red Cross, Ingy Sedky said their staff has arrived with Syrian Arab Red Crescent ambulances and workers to evacuate the wounded. The ICRC says it's preparing to evacuate 200 wounded people, some in critical condition.
12:15 p.m.
A Palestinian-born Danish volunteer helping out with evacuations in rebel-held parts of Aleppo says he is part of a six-vehicle ambulance convoy that will head to a nearby hospital with "about 2,000 of those wounded."
Khalid Alsubeihi spoke to Denmark's TV2 channel on Thursday from the besieged city where the pullout of rebels and civilians from the eastern enclave is expected to start later in the day.
Alsubeihi says the convoy "will be one of the first groups that are being evacuated" and expressed hope that everything will go smoothly and that the Syrian government and the Russians will abide by their pledges "this time."
11:05 a.m.
Syrian activists say pro-government forces have shot at ambulances trying to leave eastern Aleppo, wounding at least 3 evacuees.
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights says the ambulances were still in opposition territory when they came under small-arms fire from the government side on Thursday. It says three people were wounded.
Local hospital director and opposition activist Hamza Khatib says no ambulances or buses have been able to leave eastern Aleppo yet.
The Syrian Civil Defense responders posted on social media that two of its members were wounded when government forces fired on ambulances leaving the opposition's remaining sliver of land in Aleppo.
The activist-run group says they were evacuating wounded civilians and rebels as part of an agreement to return the city to government control. The group says one person died and two were wounded but the fatality could not immediately be confirmed.
9:40 a.m.
A Pan-Arab TV station is broadcasting live from a crossing point in eastern Aleppo, where ambulances are on hand to evacuate the wounded and sick Syrians out of remaining rebel area of the city.
The Al-Mayadeen TV footage shows the Ramouseh crossing point on the southern edge of the rebel enclave and ambulances belonging to the Syrian Arab Red Crescent parked and waiting on Thursday. A green-colored government bus is also seen in the footage.
The evacuation is part of an agreement between rebels and the Syrian government for the pullout from opposition-held neighborhoods of fighters and civilians in what is effectively Aleppo's surrender to the government.
The rebels have held to the eastern part of the city for four years but their enclave rapidly evaporated in the past days in the face of a fierce Syrian government onslaught.
9:20 a.m.
The Russian military says it's preparing for the rebels' withdrawal from Aleppo.
The military's Center for Reconciliation in Syria says that 20 buses and 10 ambulances are prepared to carry the rebels to Idlib on Thursday.
The center says it's preparing for the rebels' exit together with the Syrian government. It says Syrian authorities have given security guarantees to all rebels willing to leave Aleppo.
The Russian military also says it's monitoring the situation using drones.
A previous attempt to arrange a rebel withdrawal failed Wednesday when a cease-fire deal between the rebels and the Syrian government collapsed, with the government and the rebels blaming each other for its failure.
8:55 a.m.
A Syrian army official confirms that all is ready for rebels and civilians to start leaving Aleppo "at any moment."
The army official, who spoke by telephone to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media, said all preparations are ready for the operation to begin on Thursday.
His comments came after the cease-fire deal, mediated by Ankara and Moscow, unraveled amid fighting the previous day.
An opposition monitoring group says the operation has already begun but that could not immediately be independently confirmed. —Bassem Mroue in Beirut
8:25 a.m.
The media arm of Lebanon's militant Hezbollah group says overnight negotiations have reinforced a cease-fire deal to allow Syrian rebels and tens of thousands of civilians to leave the besieged eastern city of Aleppo.
It says Syrian rebels will likely begin leaving their last holdout in Aleppo "in the coming hours."
Thursday's announcement by Hezbollah's Military Media came after the cease-fire deal, mediated by Ankara and Moscow, unraveled amid fighting the previous day. Shiite Hezbollah militiamen are fighting in the Syrian civil war on the side of President Bashar Assad's forces.
Damascus and its allies have not commented on the cease-fire being back on. The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights says the fighting stopped in the city around 4 a.m.
DENVER – A rural Colorado school district decided Wednesday night to allow its teachers and other school staff to carry guns on campus to protect students.
The Hanover School District 28 board voted 3-2 to allow school employees to volunteer to be armed on the job after undergoing training.
The district's two schools serve about 270 students about 30 miles southeast of Colorado Springs, and it takes law enforcement an average of 20 minutes to get there. The district currently shares an armed school resource officer with four other school districts.
Board member Michael Lawson backed the idea not only as way to protect students from a mass shooting, but also as protection against possible violence connected with nearby marijuana grows, which he believes are connected with foreign cartels, the Gazette of Colorado Springs reported.
School board President Mark McPherson said a survey showed the community was split on the issue. While staffers would get some training, the retired Army officer said he didn't think it would be enough to help them respond effectively to an active shooter. He worries what would happen if they fired and missed in a classroom.
"We need to leave that to the professionals," said McPherson, who also worries about the risk posed by just having the guns in the school building and how they would be stored.
He said he is only aware of one marijuana growing operation within about 5 miles of the schools. McPherson said he thinks comments about cartel involvement in the area are just rumors at this point.
Some other school districts in Colorado as well as in Texas, Oklahoma and California have also backed allowing teachers to carry weapons following the attack on Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut in 2012.
An undisclosed number of teachers and other employees at a one-school district in Colorado's sparsely populated Eastern Plains are currently being trained after the school board approved the move in July largely out of concern for how long it would take law enforcement to respond.
All had concealed weapons permits and volunteered for the duty, Fleming School superintendent Steve McCracken said. They all must undergo an initial 46 hours of training, including live fire training, plus yearly training and undergo a psychological examination. The firearm training costs a total of $3,000, and the district will also have to spend an unknown amount of money to buy firearms and ammunition. But McCracken said that it still makes more financial sense than trying to hire an outside security officer to protect the school.
The latest Colorado vote came on the fourth anniversary of the Sandy Hook massacre. McPherson said the proposal has been in the works since June and the timing of the final vote was coincidental.
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A young migrants girl from Central American newly released after
processing by the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol is fitted shoes at the
Sacred Heart Community Center in the Rio Grande Valley border city of
McAllen, Texas, Sunday, Nov. 13, 2016.
Erecting a concrete barrier across the entire 1,954-mile frontier with Mexico, they know, collides head-on with multiple realities: the geology of the river valley, fierce local resistance and the immense cost.
An electronically fortified "virtual wall" with surveillance technology that includes night-and-day video cameras, tethered observation balloons and high-flying drones makes a lot more sense to people here. It's already in wide use and expanding.
If a 30- to 40-foot concrete wall is a panacea for illegal immigration, as Trump insisted during the campaign, the locals are not convinced. And few were surprised when the president-elect seemed to soften his position five days after the election, saying that the wall could include some fencing.
"The wall is not going to stop anyone," said Jorge Garcia, who expected to lose access to most of his 30-acre riverside ranch after the U.S. Border Fence Act was enacted a decade ago. Under the law, 652 miles of border barrier were built, mostly in Arizona. The 110 miles of fences and fortified levees that went up in Texas are not contiguous but broken lines, some as much as a mile and a half from the river.
Eight years after government surveyors marked Garcia's land, he and his wife, Aleida, are still waiting to see if the Border Patrol will splice their property. "This lets me know that whenever they want to build the wall, they can," said Aleida, holding up a tax bill that shows the nominally expropriated sliver of property.
If a fence or wall goes up, the couple will be paid $8,300. So far, the Garcias and the rest of the village of Los Ebanos have been spared because the erosion-prone clay soil is simply too unstable, she believes.
Geology conspires against wall-building up and down the Rio Grande Valley. So does a boundary water treaty with Mexico and endangered-species laws. Catwalks and tunnels had to be built into existing fences to accommodate endangered ocelots and jaguarundi, two species of wild cat.
The gaps in the border barrier include an entire flank of the River Bend golf club and resort in Brownsville. University of Texas-Rio Grande Valley political scientist Terence Garrett calls them "gaps of privilege" because many landowners were politically connected.
Other landowners fought the Border Patrol in court. "The wall might make mid-America feel safer, but for those of us that live on the border, it's not making us feel any safer when we know that people can go over it, around it, under it and through it," said Monica Weisberg-Stewart, security expert for the Texas Border Coalition, a consortium of regional leaders.
The coalition wants federal dollars to go instead to bolstering security at border crossings, where heroin, cocaine and methamphetamine are smuggled in. A poll conducted in Southwest border cities in May found 72 percent of residents opposed to building a wall. The Cronkite News-Univision-Dallas Morning News poll had a 2.6 percent error margin.
The wall is popular in distant cities "because you can see, feel and touch it. But politically it just doesn't make sense," said J.D. Salinas, the coalition's chairman. As commissioner of the border county of Hidalgo from 2007 to 2009, Salinas won public backing for 20 miles of border barrier by reinforcing an existing levee with concrete and topping it with a fence. In 2010, the project paid off. The levee held back flooding from Hurricane Alex. The cost was about $10 million a mile, though.
In the Nov. 8 election, only three Texas border counties — all sparsely populated — went for Trump. The rest are solidly Democratic, at odds with the Republicans who control most state capitals and have been demanding more border barriers.
Rural ranchers worried about drug traffickers and other criminals are less likely to benefit from border walls and fences than city-dwellers, said Adam Isacson, a security expert with the nonprofit advocacy group Washington Office on Latin America.
"What a wall ultimately does is slow a border crosser for 10 to 15 minutes," Isacson said. "In an urban area, that 15 minutes is crucial." Border patrol agents can arrive quickly. In rural areas, they may be an hour or more away.
The U.S. side of the border is quite safe, said Weisberg-Stewart. "We are not in a war zone." In fact, cross-border trade has been booming. In 2014, more than $246 billion worth of goods and 3.7 million trucks crossed the Texas-Mexico border, according to coalition figures.
Trump needs to remember that Mexico is the second-largest U.S. export market, said Rep. Filemon Vela, a Texas Democrat whose district includes most of the valley. Only Canada buys more American goods.
"There's no way in hell he's going to see his great wall," Vela said. The region bears the usual hallmarks of American prosperity: strip malls, well-maintained interstates, prosperous gated communities with hacienda-style McMansions. Cold-storage warehouses proliferate for northbound Mexican okra, avocados and tomatoes while other warehouses brim with southbound used clothing. Cotton, grapefruit and corn fields abound.
Much of the Mexican side of the border has been afflicted by drug cartel-related violence, but crime in the Rio Grande Valley, which is home to 1.3 million people, has been consistently lower than other Texas cities.
If lots of "bad hombres" are crossing the border, as Trump has claimed, they are mostly taking their lawbreaking elsewhere. Further, there's no record of anyone sneaking across the border to commit acts of terrorism.
The Border Patrol's buildup after 9-11 is one reason, argues David Aguilar, who was named to the agency's top job in 2004 by a fellow Texan, then-President George W. Bush, and is now a private consultant. Since then, the number of agents has climbed from 9,500 on the southwest border to 17,500 in 2015.
Meanwhile, the number of apprehensions along the border is down from a peak of 1.6 million in 2000 — when Aguilar said at least as many got away — to 409,000 in the year ended in September. Nearly half were caught in the Rio Grande Valley.
Many analysts believe the Great Recession was a bigger factor than Border Patrol enforcement in making the U.S. less attractive to Mexican migrants in particular. Since tower-mounted video surveillance cameras began going up in 1999 in the Brownsville area, illegal cross-border traffic in the area "dried up by 85 to 90 percent," said Johnny Meadors, the sector's assistant chief for technology. He said the traffic moved west, where there were no cameras.
Seventy-two more of the towers, which are 80 to 120 feet tall, are to be installed in the valley by 2021, and could include motion sensors and laser pointers, Meadors said. Since 2013, the Border Patrol has also had five blimp-like aerostats that float from 1,000 to 5,000 feet above the valley on tethers. High-flying Predator drones have patrolled vast areas of southwest borderlands since 2011. The agency also has underground sensors along the border. How many, Meadors wouldn't say.
All the gadgetry has been a bonanza for defense contractors. The government spent $450 million last fiscal year on border security fencing, infrastructure and technology. "If you had a sensible immigration policy, there would be no need for all this," said Garrett, the political scientist.
What Trump's policy will be remains a mystery. During the campaign, he said he would deport all the estimated 11 million immigrants living illegally in the United States. Days after the election, he appeared to back down somewhat, saying he would expel the criminals among them.
Whether fear of a Trump victory has anything to do with a recent spike in arrivals from violence-wracked Central America isn't clear. They account for more than half of Border Patrol apprehensions in the Rio Grande Valley, where many migrants turn themselves in at frontier bridges.
After processing, released migrants are given court dates in destination cities where relatives typically await. Others are sent to detention centers. An average of 350 migrants, some adults wearing ankle monitors, now arrive daily at the Sacred Heart parish community center in the border city of McAllen, up from 100 a day in August, said Gaby Lopez, a volunteer at the makeshift shelter that opened in June 2014.
New arrivals get a shower, a hot meal and can pick through donated clothing. Ingrid Guerra, 21, a Guatemalan who is eight months' pregnant and bound for Kansas, said she was fleeing an abusive relationship and didn't tell the father. The father of her other child, a 2-year-old who stayed behind with Guerra's mother, was killed in a drunken brawl, she said.
Sitting with her is Erika Machuca, a 19-year-old Salvadoran. Machuca, also eight months' pregnant, is bound for Dallas, where her husband lives. She says two of her brothers and three uncles were killed in El Salvador in violence she did not understand.
Both women said they merely want to earn a living and raise families in peace. "Back there," Guerra said of Guatemala, "they kill at the drop of a hat."
