A flight attendant offering to cuddle a prosecutor and a stand-up comic making fun of the lead defence attorney have helped to lighten a serious court case. The judge himself said he did not mind a bit of humour in his courtroom, and admitted that between the comedians and the lawyers, he preferred the comedians.
After their application to the federal appeals court in Atlanta, Georgia, was again declined on Thursday, Terri Schiavo’s parents filed another appeal to the US Supreme Court. The court can deny the stay, grant it or refer it to the entire court for a decision. Meanwhile, actor Mel Gibson called the situation a dark day for the United States.
A United States federal appeals court agreed early on Wednesday to consider a petition by Terri Schiavo’s parents for a new hearing on whether to reconnect their severely brain-damaged daughter’s feeding tube. The 11th US Circuit Court of Appeals ruled without comment on Schiavo’s 12th day without nourishment.
Prosecutors in the Michael Jackson trial on Tuesday inflicted new setbacks on a defence team already reeling from a decision to allow testimony about the star’s alleged history of child abuse. The prosecution boost came after Judge Rodney Melville ruled that jurors at the child sex trial could hear about five more boys the embattled ”King of Pop” is alleged to have molested in the past.
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.
Roger Federer recovered from a wobble 24 hours earlier when he missed a chance for a straight-sets win, but made sure mistakes were not repeated on Tuesday as he reached the quarterfinals of the ,5-million Miami Masters. The world number one was joined in the last eight by six-time winner Andre Agassi, the evergreen ninth seed.
Venus Williams ended her sister Serena’s three-year reign at Key Biscayne on Tuesday with a 6-1, 7-6 (10/8) quarterfinal victory in the WTA Tour tier-one event.
It was the 13th meeting between the sisters and their first since Serena’s triumph in the 2003 Wimbledon final. Venus now trails in their career head-to-head 7-6.
Tennis superman Roger Federer looked like a mere mortal on Monday, but Switzerland’s world number one still found a way to claim a three-set victory over Mariano Zabaleta in the third round of the ATP Masters Series tournament at Key Biscayne. Federer won his 18th straight match but looked far from invincible.
A horrified diner bit into part of a human finger, complete with its nail, when she tucked into a bowl of chilli in a California fast-food restaurant, health officials said on Thursday. The woman was so sickened by the grisly discovery on Tuesday that she began vomiting. Police were summoned to take the offending digit into custody.
The bitter and public family feud over the fate of a severely brain-damaged woman appeared to enter its final stages on Wednesday after the White House said it has done all it can to prolong the life of Terri Schiavo. A three-judge panel of the federal appeals court in Atlanta has refused to order reconnection of Schiavo’s feeding tube.
In a case that could set limits on internet search engines, the French news agency AFP is suing Google for pulling together photos and story excerpts from thousands of news websites. Agence France-Presse said the Google News service infringes on AFP’s copyrights by reproducing information from the websites of subscribers of the Paris-based news wholesaler.
Media-entertainment giant Time Warner has agreed to pay -million to settle charges that its America Online (AOL) division fraudulently overstated ad revenues and internet subscribers from 2000 to 2002, regulators said on Monday. The penalty of -million will be distributed to ”harmed investors” of the company.
Media mogul Barry Diller has expanded his internet holdings with a ,85-billion purchase of the Ask Jeeves internet search engine, according to a statement on Monday by Diller’s holding company IAC/InterActiveCorp. Ask Jeeves allows users to ask questions in natural language and is the fifth most-popular search engine in the United States.
They are the epitome of safe family entertainment, renowned for lavish animations, exquisitely filmed scenes of natural grandeur and utterly tame scripts. But Imax films have suddenly found themselves catapulted into controversy, thanks to their occasional use of the dreaded E-word: evolution.
Cheerleaders and band majorettes in Texas could soon be barred from performing bump-and-grind routines in an effort to make Friday-night football games more "family friendly," according to a Bill working its way through the state legislature. Representative Al Edwards proposed last week to bar "sexually oriented" performances.
At the same time that Sergeant Kevin Benderman’s unit was called up for a second tour in Iraq with the Third Infantry Division, two soldiers tried to kill themselves and another had a relative shoot him in the leg. Seventeen went awol or ran off to Canada, and Benderman defied nine years of military training and followed his conscience.
Washington’s nomination of Paul Wolfowitz as the World Bank’s next president has triggered an outcry among the bank’s staff, who have demanded the right to have a say in his confirmation, it emerged on Friday. The staff association has met with the bank’s executives to voice its concerns after it was swamped with complaints.
”You’re innocent until proven broke,” said celebrity lawyer Johnnie Cochrane who managed to secure football star OJ Simpson an acquittal in his celebrated double-murder case a decade ago. That case, followed breathlessly by television cameras from around the world, set off an obsession with celebrity trials, which seemed to reach its peak last Tuesday when three separate cases dominated the news in the United States.
Walt Disney said on Sunday its president, Robert Iger, will succeed Michael Eisner as chief executive and that Eisner will leave his post one year earlier than previously announced. Iger, who is credited with reversing the fortunes of its ABC television network, was considered a front-runner from the start.
A South African woman whose arrest heightened fears that terrorists were slipping across the United States-Mexico border has been deported. Farida Goolam Mahomed Ahmed (49) was turned over to authorities in South Africa on Tuesday, Immigration and customs enforcement officials said. She is barred from returning to the United States for 10 years.
After 24 years at the frontlines of journalism in the United States, CBS News anchor Dan Rather will deliver the evening news for the last time on Wednesday, six months after apologising for an error-riddled report critical of US President George Bush’s military service. His five-decade career will effectively end under the cloud of the September report.
A woman has filed a lawsuit against the United States city of Norwalk for exposure to her colleagues’ perfumes and colognes, alleging officials have failed to lessen her exposure to such scents in the town clerk’s office and that she is being harrassed. She is also seeking an unspecified amount of monetary damages and attorney’s fees.
A Florida man got a rude awakening when he found a 2m-long python in his potty, rearing its diamond-shaped head out of the toilet bowl, the <i>St Petersburg Times</i> reported on Thursday. Shannon Scavotto immediately grabbed his camera phone, snapped a few shots and called for help.
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/ 27 February 2005
The Odyssey youth centre is hidden behind an unmarked door on an anonymous site near downtown Spokane. Nothing betrays its purpose to the outside world. Inside, gay teenagers lounge on sofas, shoot pool, flirt and surf the internet. But now activists have embarked on a radical plan to create a gay business district in the heart of the city.
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/ 26 February 2005
As United States coast-to-coast crime waves go, it is not in the league of Bonnie and Clyde. It lacks both violence and avarice and is further hindered by an overabundance of pre-publicity. A couple of students from Cornwall are intent on making American criminal history by spending their summer breaking as many US laws as possible.
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/ 25 February 2005
Nobel Peace Prize winner Desmond Tutu said he hopes South Africa’s experience in coming to terms with apartheid will be an inspiration for a new peace centre bearing his name to be built later this year. The centre has collected -million in donations, and another -million is needed to complete the facility.
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/ 24 February 2005
International Olympic Committee (IOC) members received finance and security assurances for New York’s 2012 Olympic bid on Wednesday, as well as a videotaped pledge of support from United States President George Bush. A 13-person IOC evaluation committee heard Bush vow full backing for the ,6-billion bid in the third day of private meetings.
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/ 23 February 2005
Archbishop Desmond Tutu launched a global campaign on Tuesday to record the birth of every child, saying nearly 50-million babies born every year are not registered and thus have no official identity and are often barred from education or health care.
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/ 23 February 2005
The United States State Department on Tuesday accused Zimbabwe of a ”pattern of intimidation” of journalists amid reports some foreign newsmen had fled the country after being questioned by the authorities. Spokesperson Richard Boucher also said the the forthcoming parliamentary elections needed to be ”free and fair”.
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/ 22 February 2005
New York officials on Monday began their pitch to host the 2012 summer Olympic Games in a series of meetings with the International Olympic Committee (IOC). Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his deputy, Daniel Doctoroff, led a team of experts in the field of sports to meet with the IOC’s 13-member evaluation commission.
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/ 22 February 2005
Australia’s Adam Scott rolled home a three-footer on the first play-off hole to defeat Chad Campbell Monday at the PGA Tour’s rain-shortened Los Angeles event. Because inclement weather forced organisers to shorten the event to 36 holes, it won’t count as an official victory, although Scott did earn the full first prize of 000.
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/ 22 February 2005
In the annals of utterly shameless wartime propaganda, Britain’s casting of the Kenyan Mau Mau as bloodthirsty savages, and its own colonial administrators as heroic benefactors, is pretty much the gold standard. Now an Oxford scholar has unearthed new evidence of Britain’s ruthless response to the Mau Mau rebellion.