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/ 28 January 2008
Daniel Day-Lewis and British veteran Julie Christie underscored their status as Oscars frontrunners on Sunday after winning the top prizes at the 14th Screen Actors’ Guild awards. British-born star Day-Lewis was crowned best actor for his performance as a tyrannical oil prospector in There Will Be Blood.
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/ 28 January 2008
Christian Brando, the eldest son of Hollywood icon Marlon Brando who made worldwide news in 1990 by shooting dead his sister’s boyfriend, died on Saturday at the age of 49. Brando, son of of the Oscar-winning screen star and Welsh actress Anna Kashfi, died early on Saturday of complications from pneumonia.
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/ 27 January 2008
The Directors Guild of America on Saturday chose Ethan and Joel Coen as best feature film directors for 2007 for their gritty crime drama No Country for Old Men. ”It’s nice to get the acknowledgment of critics and even audiences, but there is something about being acknowledged by people who do the same thing you do,” said Joel Coen.
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/ 22 January 2008
In the 80 years since the first Oscars were handed out, it has taken a war or a flood or an assassination to delay the celebration surrounding the film industry’s highest honours. Now Hollywood is wringing its hands over whether the strike by screenwriters could, or should, be enough to postpone the Academy Awards.
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/ 17 January 2008
Actor Brad Renfro, former child star of such films as The Client and Tom and Huck who had battled drug abuse in recent years, was found dead in Los Angeles on January 14 at the age of 25. A Los Angeles county coroner’s spokesperson said Renfro’s cause of death was under investigation.
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/ 14 January 2008
If a movie wins a Golden Globe, but there’s no ceremony, does the prize still count? That’s the issue faced by the Hollywood studios behind such films as Atonement and Sweeney Todd, which lost their moments of glory on Sunday to the Hollywood writers strike.
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/ 13 January 2008
No red carpet, no Keira or Angelina, no best-dressed/worst-dressed lists, no goody bags, no limo rides, no parties and no champagne. Sunday’s lacklustre Golden Globe awards will sound an alarm across Los Angeles: the show does not go on.
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/ 12 January 2008
Democratic presidential contender Hillary Clinton on Friday proposed -billion in emergency spending to stave off a possible United States election-year recession, upstaging Republican rivals who clashed over the economy but offered few specifics.
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/ 19 December 2007
After 45 years, 21 films and countless vodka martinis, Hollywood’s longest-running action hero — James Bond — is in rude health, according to the actor who knows 007 best: Roger Moore. Afficionados might argue that nobody did it better than Sean Connery; but where history is concerned, nobody did it more often than Moore.
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/ 18 December 2007
Late-night TV comedians Jay Leno and Conan O’Brien said on Monday they will resume taping their shows on January 2, and cross picket lines if necessary, after nearly two months off the air in support of striking film and television writers. The decision by Leno and O’Brien to go back to work shows that solidarity has its limits.
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/ 15 December 2007
Production on all but two of the last few scripted prime-time television shows shooting in Los Angeles ground to a halt on Friday as a crippling strike by Hollywood writers neared the end of its sixth week. The cost of the strike in terms of lost TV production spending in Southern California alone has reached about -million a week,
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/ 11 December 2007
Oscar-winning actress Charlize Theron has become the latest Hollywood celebrity to suffer a burglary following a break-in at the South African star’s home last week, police confirmed on Monday. The 32-year-old’s house, reportedly in the exclusive Hollywood Hills, was broken into between Thursday and Saturday.
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/ 9 December 2007
The Golden Compass, a costly fantasy starring Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig, got off to a slow start at the North American box office and will likely fall short of opening-weekend expectations. New Line Cinema’s -million film sold an estimated ,8-million worth of tickets during its first day in theatres on Friday.
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/ 8 December 2007
Negotiations between striking Hollywood writers and studios have collapsed, crushing expectations for a settlement of the costly walkout in its fifth week. The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers announced on Friday that the round of talks that started on Tuesday had broken down.
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/ 5 December 2007
Technology and entertainment topped Google’s searches in 2007, with the iPhone grabbing the number one slot on a list of the fastest-rising search terms in the United States. ”iPhone, of course, is a word very few people typed in a search box in 2006,” said Marissa Mayer of Google. ”It didn’t exist.”
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/ 20 November 2007
Neil Diamond held on to the secret for decades, but he has finally revealed that President John Kennedy’s daughter was the inspiration for his smash hit Sweet Caroline. ”I’ve never discussed it with anybody before — intentionally,” the 66-year-old singer-songwriter said on Monday during a break from recording.
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/ 20 November 2007
California on Monday launched a lawsuit against 20 companies, accusing them of manufacturing or selling toys with illegal quantities of lead, a statement said. California attorney general Jerry Brown said the firms — including Mattel and Toys ”R” Us — are being sued for knowingly exposing children to potentially dangerous lead levels.
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/ 20 November 2007
Former heavyweight boxing champion Mike Tyson was sentenced to one day in jail and three years’ probation on Monday for cocaine possession and driving under the influence of alcohol. Tyson (41) pleaded guilty in September to a single felony count of cocaine possession,
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/ 17 November 2007
Striking United States screenwriters and major film and TV studios agreed on Friday to resume formal contract talks on November 26. The announcement of new talks came hours after the strike claimed its first big-screen casualty, with production of the follow-up to the box-office hit The Da Vinci Code.
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/ 17 November 2007
In the first big-screen casualty of the Hollywood writers strike, Columbia Pictures said on Friday it had postponed production on Angels & Demons, a prequel to its box-office hit The Da Vinci Code starring Tom Hanks. The Sony-owned film distributor said the planned release date for the thriller has been pushed back to 2009.
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/ 16 November 2007
As the Hollywood writers’ strike winds through a second week, many American viewers are missing the political satire they’ve come to love on late-night talk shows, but otherwise appear unconcerned. The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, Saturday Night Live are the main casualties of the strike that started on November 5.
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/ 13 November 2007
Marvel is putting some of its older comics online on Tuesday, hoping to reintroduce young people to the X-Men and Fantastic Four by showcasing the original issues in which such characters appeared. It is a tentative move, but it represents perhaps the comics industry’s most aggressive web push yet.
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/ 11 November 2007
A computer security consultant accused of installing malicious software to create an army of up to 250 000 ”zombie” computers so he could steal identities and access bank accounts will plead guilty to four federal charges. He could face up to 60 years in federal prison and a ,75-million fine.
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/ 10 November 2007
”OJ’s in court today and I’m standing here. I don’t want to be here. I want to be in there, doing my job.” Joe Medeiros nods at the hulk of the NBC building in Burbank, Los Angeles, outside which he and a gaggle of fellow red-shirted pickets have been walking in circles for the best part of the morning.
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/ 5 November 2007
United States film and television writers started going on strike on Monday as last-minute talks aimed at averting the Writers Guild of America’s first strike in almost two decades collapsed. The strike is expected to shut down many sitcoms and send popular late-night talk shows immediately into reruns.
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/ 1 November 2007
With hours to go before their contract was set to expire, Hollywood screenwriters and studios deadlocked on Wednesday in talks aimed at averting the first major strike against the film and TV industry in 20 years. It was unclear what would happen next, but leaders of the Writers Guild of America have ruled out declaring an immediate walkout.
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/ 31 October 2007
Singer-actor Robert Goulet, whose rich baritone voice made him an instant success when he played Lancelot in the original 1960 Broadway hit Camelot, died on Tuesday at age 73. The performer, who suffered from the lung disease pulmonary fibrosis, died at Cedars-Sinai Medical Centre.
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/ 27 October 2007
United States biochemist Arthur Kornberg, who won a Nobel Prize for shedding light on the construction of human DNA, died on October 26 at the age of 89, Stanford University said. "Dr Kornberg was one of the most distinguished and remarkable scientists in American medicine," the head of the California university’s medical school, Philip Pizzo, said in a statement.
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/ 25 October 2007
California wildfires that have destroyed 1 300 homes and forced the evacuation of 500 000 people raged into a fifth day on Thursday, but firefighters seized on a break in the weather to largely halt the march of destruction. About 15 fires still blazed across the southern part of the state, lighting up the night sky.
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/ 23 October 2007
A wave of fast-moving wildfires engulfed a massive swath of southern California on Monday, destroying hundreds of homes as more than 250 000 people were told to evacuate. At least 13 fires, whipped by dry, gale-force Santa Ana winds blowing unchecked over the lower half of the state, torching 81 000 hectares.
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/ 22 October 2007
Forty years after two cowboys filmed an unidentified creature ambling through a California forest, hunters of "Bigfoot" say the grainy footage remains the cornerstone of their belief in the legendary ape-like beast’s existence. It has never been successfully duplicated, and it is that fact that Bigfoot devotees say is crucial.
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/ 19 October 2007
FBI agents have seized nearly -million in cash from a Las Vegas warehouse owned by illusionist David Copperfield, local media reports said on Thursday. The agents also took a computer hard drive and a memory chip from a digital camera system during Wednesday’s late-night operation.