LG Electronics says it plans to sell a DVD player that will play both warring high-definition DVD formats. The first dual-format high-definition player will play discs in the HD DVD format, which is backed by a consortium headed by Toshiba, as well as the rival Blu-ray format, backed by a group led by Sony.
No image available
/ 31 December 2006
Amid all the changes in store for the US PGA Tour in 2007, expect one thing to stay the same: Tiger Woods will again reign supreme. The season starting with the Mercedes-Benz Championships at Kapalua, Hawaii, on Thursday is being touted by US tour officials as a ”new era” in golf.
No image available
/ 19 December 2006
Web surfers may soon be able to explore the canyons of Mars and experience a virtual flight over the surface of the moon thanks to a deal announced on Monday between web search company Google and the Nasa Ames Research Centre. Nasa and Google said they will work together on a range of technical problems and will make Nasa’s space exploration work more accessible to the public.
No image available
/ 19 December 2006
”Macaca” you are number one. The word macaca, used by outgoing Republican Senator George Allen of Virginia to describe a Democratic activist of Indian descent who was trailing his campaign, was named the most politically incorrect word of the year on Friday by Global Language Monitor.
No image available
/ 18 December 2006
Astronauts aboard the International Space Station readied for a fourth spacewalk on Monday to unstick a jammed solar array in an extra excursion that extended the space shuttle Discovery‘s mission at the orbiting outpost by a day. Astronauts Robert Curbeam and Christer Fuglesang will try to clear snarled guidewires that are preventing the 33m panel from retracting.
No image available
/ 8 December 2006
You’ve booked your seat on the spaceship and passed the medical — but what to wear for that flight into the final frontier?. Orbital Outfitters has the answer. The new Los Angeles-based company on Thursday promised to dress the first space tourists and crew members in style.
No image available
/ 8 December 2006
”Heeere’s Johnny!” — the introduction for United States talk-show host Johnny Carson for 30 years — has been ranked the most memorable TV catchphrase in a top 100 list covering 60 years of US television shows, cartoons, commercials and quotes from news programmes.
No image available
/ 5 December 2006
Tributes poured in at the end of November following the death of Bernard Rimland, considered the godfather of modern autism research. Rimland (78) died at a southern California care facility in the second-last week of November after losing a fight against cancer, said the director of the Autism Research Institute founded by the late doctor.
No image available
/ 4 December 2006
Kim Jong Il enjoys the fine things in life. Unlike his repressed subjects, the diminutive North Korean leader has a well-developed taste for fine wines, gourmet foods and Western electronic goods. But now the United States administration, showing a previously unappreciated subtlety in its determination to bring rogue nations to book, has decided to take away the Dear Leader’s toys.
No image available
/ 21 November 2006
Robert Altman, the caustic and irreverent satirist behind M*A*S*H, Nashville and The Player, who made a career out of bucking Hollywood management and story conventions, died at a Los Angeles hospital, his Sandcastle 5 production company said on Tuesday. He was 81.
No image available
/ 20 November 2006
Ruth Brown’s recordings of Teardrops in My Eyes and (Mama) He Treats Your Daughter Mean dominated the R&B charts in the 1950s and earned her the nickname ”Miss Rhythm”. But her other nickname might as well be ”Miss Survivor” for persevering through the highs and lows of a career spanning six decades.
No image available
/ 20 November 2006
Twenty years after Mike Tyson battered Trevor Berbick to become the youngest heavyweight world champion in history, the ”Baddest Man on the Planet” is aging as badly as any boxing cautionary tale. Tyson was 20 years old on November 22 1986 when he pummelled Berbick into submission in two rounds, seizing the World Boxing Council crown.
No image available
/ 11 November 2006
Jack Palance, one of Hollywood’s best-known screen villains who personified evil as a cold-blooded gunslinger in the classic western Shane, died on Friday at the age of 87. Palance, who won an Oscar for the comedy City Slickers and famously brought down the house by performing one-armed push-ups on the stage, died of natural causes, spokesperson Dick Guttman said.
No image available
/ 10 November 2006
Veteran CBS newsman Ed Bradley, a pioneering black American journalist who won acclaim as a Vietnam War correspondent and later as a reporter for ”60 Minutes,” died on Thursday of complications from leukemia. He was 65. Bradley, whose illness was not widely known, had just begun his 26th year as one of the team of reporters featured on the landmark CBS News magazine show.
No image available
/ 7 November 2006
As the intrepid Kazakhstan journalist Borat Sagdiyev might say, Borat make glorious entrance at Hollywood office of movies. Indeed, Borat — the acclaimed comedy tracing the Jew-fearing title character’s road trip across the United States — stunned observers by opening at number one on Sunday with ticket sales of ,4-million.
No image available
/ 1 November 2006
The music publishing industry reached a tentative deal with operators of the Kazaa file-sharing network over claims of copyright infringement, an industry group said. Publishers pursuing a class-action suit against Kazaa informed a United States District Court on Monday that the peer-to-peer network had agreed to pay ”a substantial sum”.
No image available
/ 28 October 2006
No one was buying hell on Friday — or at least its red-hot web address. Hell.com was among hundreds of internet domain names up for auction in Hollywood, Florida, by domain asset management provider Moniker.com, a unit of marketing services firm Seevast.
No image available
/ 25 October 2006
Sony said on Tuesday its digital projection system is ready to go to market after tests conducted by an entertainment industry advisory board, and the company expects to announce new deals to install the systems in movie theatres in coming weeks.
No image available
/ 25 October 2006
Showman PT Barnum never said ”There’s a sucker born every minute” although he wished he had. And Civil War Admiral David Farragut probably never said ”Damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead” — words that have inspired generations of fighting men.
No image available
/ 24 October 2006
Talk about a hard sell: this movie stars unknown actors speaking an obscure language and is directed by a man whose off-screen behavior has outraged many. Figuring out a way to market Mel Gibson’s latest movie, Apocalypto, has many experts scratching their heads.
No image available
/ 19 October 2006
Lance Armstrong has blasted a new book, going on sale on Thursday, that claims to include fresh doping allegations against the seven-time Tour de France champion. LA Officiel has already caused a stir in Armstrong’s camp, which tried to debunk the book before it even hit the store shelves.
No image available
/ 19 October 2006
Visa and MasterCard have stopped accepting credit card transactions for purchases of online music made on a Russian website accused of selling music illegally, officials for both payment systems said. San Francisco-based Visa asked member banks not to process purchases from AllofMP3.com from September 1, said Simon Barker, a spokesperson for the company.
No image available
/ 18 October 2006
The dirty dancing of teenagers at school functions and prom nights is getting educators across the United States hot and bothered, the <i>Los Angeles Times</i> reported on Tuesday. The teenage dance craze of "freaking" — where couples rub and grind against each other — has been branded as simulated sex by school officials and has led to concern across the nation, the paper reported.
No image available
/ 14 October 2006
Irish rock star Bono went on a shopping spree and appeared on the influential Oprah Winfrey TV chat show on Friday to launch his latest campaign to fight HIV/Aids in Africa. Saying he was convinced that ”this generation can be the generation that says ‘no’ to extreme poverty” in Africa, the U2 singer and activist urged Americans to buy ”Red”-branded clothes, cell phones, shoes and iPods.
No image available
/ 13 October 2006
Walt Disney on Thursday said it took ”appropriate action” against employees at its Paris theme park who were caught simulating sex while dressed as Disney characters in a digital video that has received wide attention on the internet. Disney would not say whether it had dismissed any of the costumed employees featured in the grainy video, which appears to have been shot with a hidden camera.
No image available
/ 10 October 2006
Floyd Landis, who could become the first Tour de France champion to be stripped of the title over a doping charge, will release an online presentation outlining his defence, USA Today has reported. Landis told the newspaper he would post the presentation and documentation from his case on his personal website this week.
A spokesperson for Madonna on Wednesday denied claims by officials in Malawi that the pop star had adopted a one-year-old orphan boy there. Spokesperson Liz Rosenberg called the report ”completely inaccurate” but said Madonna was not bothered by it because it would draw attention to the problems of children in the impoverished African nation.
No image available
/ 25 September 2006
An authoritative United States intelligence report pooling the views of 16 government agencies concludes the US’s campaign in Iraq has increased the threat of terrorism. Its conclusions contradict assertions made by President George Bush and White House officials during the fifth anniversary of the September 11 attacks.
No image available
/ 18 September 2006
Four decades after Captain Kirk and crew zoomed off at warp speed to ”the final frontier”, the iconic sci-fi series Star Trek returns to broadcast television this week with an extensive digital face-lift. CBS Paramount Domestic Television is digitally remastering all 79 episodes of the original series to enhance the show’s 1960s-era visual effects with 21st-century computer-generated graphics.
Turns out finding money to make movies was an easy mission for Tom Cruise. Only days after the Mission: Impossible movie star effectively was fired by Paramount Pictures, Cruise, his film partner Paula Wagner and an investment fund run by professional football team owner Daniel Snyder agreed on Monday to a financing package that puts Cruise back in business.
Not long after puny Pluto was stripped of its planethood, Janis Robinson started selling ”Pluto is a planet” T-shirts on the internet. Robinson, who said she ”rolled her eyes” after Pluto got the boot, hopes her buyers will send a message that kicking out the far-out rock is downright goofy.
A day after one of Hollywood’s most powerful men publicly scolded actor Tom Cruise, the film capital began to think cost-conscious studios may finally be fed up with giving stars the star treatment. But some industry insiders believe Viacom chairperson Sumner Redstone’s rebuke of Cruise was more a sign that a great money-making career was on the wane.