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 new generation of dotcom punters on Friday discovered a financial fact of life: shares in Google can go down as well as up. The 6% fall that greeted the search engine’s second-quarter earnings was hardly a rout, but was still a broad hint from Wall Street that Google requires perfection every time to maintain the sky-high rating on its shares.
Imagine an Americanised version of sushi: cooked pork or chicken surrounded by a 100% vegetable-based wrapping similar to nori, the seaweed strip traditionally used for sushi. This is but one of the uses that scientist Tara McHugh envisions for the edible food wrappings.
When Nigerian reporter Isioma Daniel heard that a <i>fatwa</i>, or Islamic ruling, had been issued against her, she "felt calm … then realised that there was no going back". "Was I scared? I didn’t sleep too well that night," she wrote in a February 2003 article published by <i>The Guardian</i> about her case.
Traces of magnesium found in household water could be sufficient to cause permanent brain damages to those who take a regular shower, according to a report published in the United States journal Medical Hypotheses. John Spangler and his team suggested that breathing in vapour containing manganese salts could be dangerous over the longer term.
A retired Wall Street investment adviser on Wednesday described in the high court the moment Roman Polanski allegedly made a pass at his Norwegian girlfriend in a Manhattan restaurant by slipping his hand under the table and touching her leg. ”She arose and looked at me and said, ‘Ed, we’re leaving’,” Edward Perlberg told the jury.
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.
Nasa set Tuesday as the tentative launch date for the shuttle Discovery, after saying it was confident the technical glitch that delayed the original July 13 launch has been overcome. ”Right now we think we have eliminated all possible causes” related to the glitch, said shuttle programme director Bill Parson.
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.
Worldwide PC sales grew by about 17% in the second quarter of the year as falling prices spiked demand in Asia and Latin America, research firm IDC said on Tuesday. Total PC shipments during the second quarter grew to 46,57-million compared with 39,94-million in the same period a year earlier, IDC said.
The United States President, George Bush, has agreed to aid India’s civilian nuclear power programme, an unexpected decision that reverses three decades of American policies designed to deter nations from developing nuclear weapons. The agreement is the first exception to the international bar on nuclear assistance to any country that does not accept monitoring of all of its nuclear facilities.
Hewlett-Packard on Tuesday announced plans to cut 14 500 jobs over the next 18 months, representing 10% of the struggling company’s worldwide workforce. The plans were the first significant move by Mark Hurd, who was hired after Carly Fiorina was ousted as chief executive in February.
United States President George Bush on Tuesday night nominated an appeals court judge, John Roberts, as the new member of the supreme court, describing the choice as ”one of the most consequential decisions a president makes”. Democratic senators vowed to question him closely in the coming confirmation hearings.
Microsoft sued one of its former executives and Google on Tuesday, the same day the internet search engine company announced it had hired Kai-Fu Lee to head up a research and development centre in China. The Redmond-based software maker argued that by taking a job with a direct competitor, Lee is breaking contractual promises.
Visa USA and American Express are cutting ties with the payment-processing company that left 40-million credit and debit card accounts vulnerable to hackers in one of the biggest breaches of consumer data security. CardSystems Solutions ”has not corrected, and cannot at this point correct, the failure to provide proper data security for Visa accounts,” said Rosetta Jones, a vice president at Foster City, California-based Visa.
United States prosecutors announced criminal charges on Tuesday against 40 airplane pilots suspected of lying about potentially dangerous illnesses ranging from schizophrenia to drug addiction. The majority of those indicted were only licensed to fly private jets, but some earned their livings shuttling people or cargo through the skies.
Having one type of diabetes is bad enough, but two? Doctors are seeing a new phenomenon dubbed double diabetes that makes it harder to diagnose and treat patients — especially children. The mix can strike at any age, and comes in various forms.
South African Wesley Moodie beat the heat on Monday in a steamy struggle over Jean-Rene Lisnard of France 6-3, 6-3 to reach the second round of the 000 RCA Championships in Indianapolis. Moodie was the surprise winner of the Wimbledon doubles title this month, alongside Australian Stephen Huss.
Nasa has yet to find a glitch that scrubbed the space shuttle Discovery‘s launch six days ago, said officials on Monday who still could not set a new launch date. ”We are still looking for the problem,” shuttle programme manager Bill Parsons said. At the soonest, Nasa said, Discovery could blast off on July 26.
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.
Key political advisers to United States President George Bush and vice-president Dick Cheney were named on Sunday as sources in the leaking of the name of a CIA operative. A Time magazine reporter said that Bush’s chief political adviser, Karl Rove, was the first person to tell him that a critic of the administration’s decision to go to war in Iraq was married to a CIA operative.
An otherworldly, pale-faced man dressed in a frockcoat, sporting lipstick and fake-looking hair throws open his arms to welcome a group of children to his private dreamworld. No, it’s not Michael Jackson at the gates of Neverland, but Willy Wonka, as played by Johnny Depp in the film adaptation of Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which opens on Friday in the United States.
An ambitious plan to reform the United Nations security council by expanding it from 15 members to 25 looks set to fail next week despite one of the most intense diplomatic lobbying exercises ever conducted, according to UN sources.
A partial building collapse spewed tonnes of rubble and timber on to a busy New York City sidewalk on Thursday, injuring at least four people and triggering an urgent search-and-rescue mission. The building was under demolition and surrounded by scaffolding when the collapse occurred.
A new United Nations agreement to track trade in arms is attacked on Thursday as toothless and riddled with loopholes by human rights groups which have seen a copy of the secret deal. The agreement, to be discussed at the UN on Thursday, excludes ammunition, shells and explosives.
A corpse caused a traffic jam on a Dallas, Texas, highway after it fell off a pick-up truck late on Tuesday, local media reported. The body was being transported to a Shreveport, Louisiana, funeral home when it fell off the truck and landed in the fast lane, <i>The Dallas Morning News</i> reported on Wednesday.
An astronomer has identified a planet with three suns far away in the galaxy — the first of a class dubbed ”Tatooine planets” after the home of Luke Skywalker, the young hero of the Star Wars films. The stars are about as close to each other as Saturn is to the sun.
Although Roger Waters dabbled with operatic themes in Pink Floyd’s The Wall, he’s never written a traditional opera — until now. Waters will debut Ca Ira (There Is Hope), his opera about the French Revolution, September 27 with a double-CD and DVD project from Sony Music.
South Africa and Guatemala played to a 1-1 tie in one of the final first-round games of Gold Cup play at Reliant Stadium on Wednesday night. Mexico played Jamaica in the late match. South Africa, playing its second straight tie after a 3-3 stalemate against Jamaica on Sunday, finished first-round play with a 1-0-2 record. Guatemala ended the first round with an 0-2-1 record.
Bernard Ebbers, the former chief executive of WorldCom, was sentenced on Wednesday to 25 years in prison for his role in the -billion fraud that drove the once high-flying American company into the largest bankruptcy in corporate history.
United States workers are goofing off for two hours a day, trawling the internet or jawing with co-workers, costing their employers -billion a year, according to a new survey. Other ways of frittering away time included making personal phone calls, running errands and an activity described as ”spacing out”.
Like millions of Harry Potter fans, Katherine Moss can’t wait to get her fingers on a copy of the sixth entry in JK Rowling’s best-selling series. And for once, the 16-year-old blind student won’t have to wait weeks longer than her sighted friends to dive into Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.