Top seed Andre Agassi continued his triumphant return from a two-month injury layoff in Los Angeles on Thursday, defeating fellow American Kevin Kim to book a quarterfinal date with Thailand’s Paradorn Srichaphan. ”This match was much more of a test because he was quicker to hurt me if I left any balls short,” Agassi said.
Five greying anti-war activists from a group dubbed the ”Raging Grannies” face possible jail time after demanding to be enlisted in the United States Army to fight in Iraq, one of them said on Wednesday. The women, aged between 57 and 92, were charged with criminal trespass after turning up at an armed forces recruiting centre.
Andre Agassi made a triumphant return to the court after a two-month injury layoff, routing French lucky loser Jean-Rene Lisnard 6-1, 6-0 in Los Angeles on Tuesday at a  000 ATP hard-court tournament. The 35-year-old American has not played a tour match since an opening-round loss at the French Open in May.
Steven Spielberg’s next film finally has a title: Munich. DreamWorks and Universal, which are co-financing the film, announced the name on Monday for the long-untitled thriller, which focuses on the aftermath of the killings of 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics in Munich.
Thailand’s Paradorn Srichaphan ousted sixth seed Mario Ancic of Croatia 7-6 (7/4), 6-7 (4/7), 6-2 on Monday and seventh seed Sebastien Grosjean also exited from a 000 ATP tournament in Los Angeles. Top seed Andre Agassi could await in the quarterfinals for Paradorn.
Mel Gibson, whose religious film The Passion of Christ became the surprise megahit of 2004, will direct a new action film that will again take him back to ancient times. Gibson will go behind the camera to make Apocalypto, an action and violence-packed movie set in an ancient civilisation around 3 000 years ago.
A photographer accused of threatening to sell topless photos of Cameron Diaz testified that he initially thought the signature on her photo release form was authentic and acknowledged he hadn’t personally asked her to sign it. John Rutter (42) testified on Wednesday that his practice during photo shoots was to have an assistant take care of the forms instead.
United States film director David Lynch said on Wednesday he is seeking to raise -billion to fund a giant programme of transcendental meditation which he says will foster world peace. The Oscar-nominated movie-maker will on Thursday launch the David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness-based Education and World Peace.
The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are set to return to the big screen after a 14-year break in a lavish new computer-generated movie, the industry press said Monday. The new movie that will feature state-of-the-art computer-generated animation (CGI) is set for release in early 2007, industry bible Daily Variety said.
Jamaica and South Africa drew 3-3 on Sunday, joining the United States and Costa Rica in the quarterfinals of the Concacaf Gold Cup while Mexico beat Guatemala 4-0 to recover from its upset loss to the Bafana Bafana two days earlier. Honduras also clinched a quarterfinal berth, beating Colombia 2-1 in Miami to hand the South Americans their second loss.
It was a new kind of story. Not in the sense of what happened, which was thoroughly and depressingly as anticipated, but in the way it was reported and disseminated. The mobile phone photographers, the text messagers and the bloggers – a new advance guard of amateur reporters had the London bomb story in the can before the news crews got anywhere near the scene.
A woman who threatened to kill Catherine Zeta-Jones, cut her up and then feed her to dogs was jailed for three years on Friday after the Oscar-winning actress branded her as ”simply evil”. Dawnette Knight (35) was put behind bars after an angry and withering statement from Zeta-Jones was read to the court.
Two of the most famous props in United States film history — light sabres belonging to Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader of Star Wars fame — will go under the hammer in an auction to be held in late July. The Jedi knight’s light sabre, owned by Star Wars producer Gary Kurtz, is estimated to sell for between 000 and 000.
Nasa hopes to give astronomers their first peek at the inside of a comet by blasting a stadium-sized hole through one of the heavenly bodies. If all goes as planned, the Deep Impact spacecraft will release a wine barrel-sized probe on a suicide journey, hurtling toward the comet Tempel 1 — about 130-million kilometres away from Earth at the time of impact.
Just days after being acquitted on child sex charges, Michael Jackson faced fresh legal woes on Thursday: he is being sued by a woman who claims she was attacked by a dog that escaped from a home he owns. A husky called Flash, who lives at Jackson’s family home in Los Angeles, allegedly bit a woman in Apil.
George Romero lurches among us again, doing what he does best: Creating a combustible microcosm of society, then besieging it with zombies who just can’t get enough of tasty human flesh. The director, whose 1968 chiller Night of the Living Dead established an entire horror subgenre, is back with George Romero’s Land of the Dead.
Thrills and spills are to be expected at United States theme parks, but the Cox family are seeking to push themselves to the absolute limit as they hang by their arms six metres off the ground in a stunt watched by hundreds of onlookers. In each show, park visitors can compete against each other in a progression of eye-popping stunts.
Actress Lorna Thayer, the waitress who memorably refused to let Jack Nicholson order toast in the 1970 movie Five Easy Pieces, died on June 4 at the Motion Picture and Television Fund retirement home after a long battle with Alzheimer’s disease. She was 85.
A Las Vegas museum dedicated to the memory and myth of Elvis Presley has launched a worldwide casting call for impersonators of the "King of Rock", organisers said on Monday. Elvis-a-Rama is a sprawling museum that is home to a collection of more than $6-million-worth of Presley memorabilia.
As a superstar Tom Cruise vaunts his romance with actress Katie Holmes, but Americans are extremely sceptical about whether the feted relationship is true love or an extravagant publicity stunt. An unscientific poll by People magazine indicated that 63% of readers believe the romance is a publicity stunt, while only 37% believe the pair are genuinely in love.
Last week’s Electronic Entertainment Expo Show in Los Angeles offered several exciting glimpses into the future of videogames, not all of which were fuelled by the new consoles on show. Chief among them was Spore, the latest project by Will Wright, who conceived Sim City and The Sims.
A liberal slathering of suntan lotion gave one woman more protection than she bargained for, allowing her to slip out of the grasp of a would-be rapist, police near Los Angeles said on Tuesday. The attack took place while the woman stopped off in a bathroom while jogging in a deserted public park early on Sunday.
A United States man was on Monday sentenced to 600 hours of community service and ordered to pay more than $13 000 (R84 600) for trying to sell an antique Hawaiian skull in an online auction. In the sale notice, Hasson said he had snuck on to the beach with friends and uncovered an entire skeleton, but only kept the skull.
The Force was with the last Star Wars movie when Revenge of the Sith raked in a record R107-million in its first wave of North American midnight screenings, distributors said on Friday. The movie also did what no other movie in history has accomplished — sold R326-million-worth of tickets in a single day.
Star Trek: Enterprise is about to go where it has never gone before: off the air, taking the Star Trek franchise with it. After the two-hour finale airs on Friday, this will be the first time in 18 years that no first-run Trek series is on United States TV.
When Irish actor Jonathan Rhys Meyers was asked to play American icon Elvis Presley, his first instinct was to reject the role. ”In my head I was saying, ‘No, no, no,’ because I wasn’t quite sure, first, about playing rock’n’roll stars and second, somebody who’s so well known to everybody,” said Rhys Meyers.
Pixar Animation Studios more than tripled its earnings in the first quarter on strong DVD sales of its Oscar-winning film The Incredibles. The computer animation company reported net income of ,9-million, or 67 cents a share in the quarter ended April 2, compared to ,7-million, or 23 cents a share in the same period last year.
Nearly six years after Nasa’s Mars Polar Lander vanished during a landing attempt on the Red Planet, a scientist said he has spotted what appears to be wreckage of the spacecraft. The observation came during a re-examination of grainy, black-and-white images taken by the orbiting Mars Global Surveyor.
A United States juror got a rude awakening when an angry judge fined him $1 000 for letting out a loud yawn during an attempted murder trial, a media report said on Wednesday. The juror’s ennui interrupted the selection of the panel ahead of opening arguments in a trial in Los Angeles.
The Los Angeles Times dismissed a reporter after an investigation found that his story about the death of a fraternity pledge at a state university ”fell far short” of standards, the newspaper said. An editor’s note in the Times on Tuesday said the story by Eric Slater on March 29 had numerous inaccuracies and carried quotations from sources that could not be verified.
Star Wars fans will have to find the right theatre before they can leave for the dark side. Seven weeks before its release, Star Wars fanatics started lining up outside Grauman’s Chinese Theatre for the sixth instalment of the movie series. But there’s a problem: the film won’t be showing at the Hollywood landmark.
United States celebrity lawyer Johnnie Cochran, who shot to worldwide fame as head of the legal team that got OJ Simpson acquitted of murder, died on Tuesday at the age of 67, his family said. His wife, Dale, and his family appealed for him to be remembered as more than just the lawyer who got Simpson off murder charges.