Rescue teams in Peru’s shattered earthquake zone headed home on Monday as search operations were replaced by stepped-up aid efforts and security patrols against looters. Wednesday’s powerful 8,0-magnitude temblor killed at least 503 people, and the final toll "could reach 540", civil defence officials said. About 1 600 people were injured.
George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Matt Damon and other members of the all-star caper Ocean’s Thirteen made off with millions at Cannes ahead of the movie’s red-carpet premiere on Thursday. The A-list cast raised ,2-million at an exclusive charity bash for Sudanese uprooted by the savage conflict in Darfur.
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/ 8 November 2006
James Bond may be the spy who never ages, but over his 44-year film career his adventures have swollen ridiculously with impossible gadgets, implausible plots and implacable supervillains. Well, this is the year Bond trimmed those excesses and got back to basics.
The lights aren’t completely out in Lebanon yet. The bloggers in Beirut are still typing furiously away in front of their computer screens. Although Israeli air strikes have taken out much of the country’s infrastructure and cut electricity to parts of the capital, people are turning to the internet as one of their information sources — and to get their views out.
The co-chief executive of the European aerospace group EADS and the head of its Airbus subsidiary paid with their jobs on Sunday for the crisis that has wiped billions of euros off the value of the company. The two companies issued terse statements announcing EADS’s French co-boss Noel Forgeard and Airbus’s head Gustav Humbert, a German, were stepping down.
Sex — in many forms and, in at least one case, unsimulated — is heating up screens at the Cannes film festival, confirming the event’s reputation for taboo-busting fare. About five films in the official selection alone have already shown enough nudity to mark them for mature audiences only, and one, Shortbus, by United States director John Cameron Mitchell, blurred the boundary between pornography and art with its actors engaged in real intercourse.
Tom Hanks and the other stars of The Da Vinci Code were to arrive in Cannes on Tuesday ahead of an exclusive preview screening of the movie version of the bestselling novel by Dan Brown. This was to effectively raise the curtain on the Cannes film festival a day early this year.
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/ 5 December 2005
Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao was expected to announce an order for Airbus airliners worth about seven billion dollars in Paris on Monday, a day after a deal that could see some Airbus aircraft built in China. According to sources close to the negotiations, the order entails China buying over 100 A320 aircraft, the mid-range, 150-seat workhorse of the Airbus fleet.
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/ 5 November 2005
Nearly 900 vehicles were torched and 250-plus people arrested on Saturday as French police desperately battled the country’s worst rioting for decades, which has now raged for nine consecutive nights. Again, the bulk of the violence hit deprived suburbs with large immigrant populations on the fringes of Paris, although rioting again spread to several cities elsewhere in France.
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/ 4 November 2005
Further serious rioting broke out on the outskirts of Paris early on Friday as gangs of youths challenged authorities’ vow to crack down on urban violence that has plagued the French capital for more than a week. Police said about 400 cars were torched, mostly in the Paris region, while 27 buses went up in flames at a depot.