Facebook Co-Founder Chris Hughes Launches Charity Indexing Site Jumo, Johnny Depp Tells Frightened Disney Executive “All Of My Characters Are Gay,” amFAR Ambassador Cheyenne Jackson Rings New York Stock Exchange Opening Bell

Chris Hughes, one of the founders of Facebook, is launching a new site Tuesday, titled Jumo, it aims, according to the openly gay Hughes, to “do what Yelp did for restaurants” by indexing charities “to help people find and evaluate them.” According to the New York Times “Individual charities, projects like building a school in rural Africa and broad issues like gay rights will all have dedicated pages on Jumo. Relevant news articles, Twitter posts and YouTube videos will be added to the pages, and users can add their own feedback and comments. Users can also find their Facebook friends and follow their adopted projects and issues on the site. The idea is to take the principles that helped Mr. Hughes organize a network of volunteers into a successful political force and apply them to a much broader universe of causes and issues. Mr. Hughes is not the first entrepreneur to venture into this territory. Causes, a Facebook application, and the Web site Global Giving are among the many existing ways to find and support charities online. But Mr. Hughes said Jumo would not be primarily about soliciting donations. Instead, he said, the site would first try to deepen ties between its users and their favourite causes. 'The more connected that individual is to an issue they care about, the higher probability there is they will stay involved over a longer period of time,' Mr. Hughes said."

Johnny Depp, in the January issue of Vanity Fair, interviewed by Patti Smith, says that Disney executives were less than enthusiastic about his now iconic interpretation of the character Capitan Jack Sparrow in the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. “'They couldn’t stand him. They just couldn’t stand him,' Depp says of Disney’s reaction to his controversial interpretation of Sparrow. 'I think it was Michael Eisner, the head of Disney at the time, who was quoted as saying, ‘He’s ruining the movie.’ Depp reveals to Smith, however, that he remained unfazed by the studio’s hysteria. 'Upper-echelon Disney-ites, going, what’s wrong with him? Is he, you know, like some kind of weird simpleton? Is he drunk? By the way, is he gay? And so I actually told this woman who was the Disney-ite… ‘But didn’t you know that all my characters are gay?’ Which really made her nervous.'”

Tuesday morning, a dapper, dashing Cheyenne Jackson rang the bell to open the day’s New York Stock Market Exchange in recognition of December 1st, World AIDS Day. Cheyenne, along with Liza Minnelli, is an amFAR ambassador – amFAR one of the world’s leading AIDS non-profit organisations, founded in 1985, dedicated to the support of AIDS research, HIV prevention, treatment, education, and the advocacy of AIDS-related public policy.