TARANTINO TAKES ON HITLER

BRANAGH AS WALLANDER

ANGELS AND DEMONS

TERMINATOR SALVATION

Terminator Salvation: The Future Begins will reinvent the cyborg saga with a storyline to be told over a three-movie span. The film is set in the future, in a full-scale war between Skynet and humankind. On January 6th 2008, producer John Middleton had the following to say about the movie: "It's post-apocalyptic. It's set after the events of [Terminator 3: Rise Of The Machines], where we see the nuclear exchange at the end of the movie, and we show what the world is like after this event, and we show how people try to deal in a post-apocalyptic world. And we introduce a new character, who becomes very important to the resistance and to John Connor, a new hero. It's really about the birth of a new hero." About John Conner, he said: "I would look at him as a character that is introduced and that will grow in the second and third movies of the trilogy." On Arnold Schwarzenegger's involvement in the film: "He has been approached, and in the early days of our development of T4, one of our producers, Andy Vajna, who's a good friend of his, spoke to him about doing a cameo. This was even before he was governor. But we know now that he is governor, he's got priorities that are above doing movies."

STAR TREK RETURNS

GODDESS & GENIUS

The Genius and the Goddess: Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe by Jeffrey Meyers A FEW weeks after she wed Arthur Miller, Marilyn Monroe was starring opposite Laurence Olivier in the calamitous The Prince And The Showgirl. The more Miller, who’d accompanied his wife to England, saw of Olivier’s professionalism and dedicated artistry, the more he began to fear for his wife. For though Marilyn was at the height of her fame she was clearly also off her rocker. She couldn’t remember the shortest lines, turned up five hours late on set and was the cause of costly delays. Indifferent generally to what people thought, the actress was cheerfully aware that the seething Olivier deemed her “a troublesome bitch”. Miller was reserved, guarded and intellectual and voluble, myriad-minded Marilyn looked up to him as an authority figure. Consequently he “basked in her unqualified adoration”, in the words of Jeffrey Meyers, who in this book picks apart the relationship with forensic brilliance. It is a story of the tragic illusions people have about each other and what happens when the fantasy wears off. Marilyn, we learn, had always had an unexpected brainy side. She collected the works of Rainer Maria Rilke and James Joyce and had real dreams of playing Grushenka in an adaptation of The Brothers Karamazov. But Marilyn’s problem was that nobody wanted her to be anything more than a dumb blonde with a 36-24-34 figure.

NASA BLASTS OFF TO PREPARE PATH FOR MANNED LUNAR MISSION BY 2020

TROUBLE AT WORLD TRADE CENTER

EXTREME RIGHT BRITISH NATIONALIST PARTY WINS TWO SEATS IN EU PARLIAMENT

Far-Right parties and extremist parties made gains across Europe as protest votes and low turnouts marked the European parliament elections. Anti-immigrantion and far-right groups made significant gains in the Netherlands, Austria, Hungary, Denmark, Slovakia and Finland. Geert Wilders and his far-Right anti-Islamic immigrant party shot to second place behind the ruling Christian Democrats by taking 17 per cent of the vote in the Netherlands. In Austria too, two anti-immigrant far-Right parties took an unprecedented 17.7 per cent of the vote. The far-Right Danish People's Party won two seats and took 14.4 per cent of Denmark's vote. In Slovakia a low turnout of just 19.4 per cent propelled an anti-gipsy extremist ultra-nationalist into the parliament and Hungary's far-Right Jobbik took three seats for the first time.

HANDS ACROSS THE OCEAN AS GORDON LOOKS ON

GOOD NEWS - AT LEAST FOR THIS LUCKY LOTTERY WINNER

OBAMA ADDRESSES MUSLIM WORLD

THIS MAN THREATENS PEACE IN ASIA

NO ITS NOT GHOST BUSTERS - ITS A NEW YORK DISASTER EXERCISE

TAMIL TIGER LEADER SHOT DEAD

Manhattan Declaration on Climate Change

“Global warming” is not a global crisis

We, the scientists and researchers in climate and related fields, economists, policymakers, and business leaders, assembled at Times Square, New York City, participating in the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change,

Resolving that scientific questions should be evaluated solely by the scientific method;

Affirming that global climate has always changed and always will, independent of the actions of humans, and that carbon dioxide (CO2) is not a pollutant but rather a necessity for all life;

Recognising that the causes and extent of recently-observed climatic change are the subject of intense debates in the climate science community and that oft-repeated assertions of a supposed ‘consensus’ among climate experts are false;

Affirming that attempts by governments to legislate costly regulations on industry and individual citizens to encourage CO2 emission reduction will slow development while having no appreciable impact on the future trajectory of global climate change.  Such policies will markedly diminish future prosperity and so reduce the ability of societies to adapt to inevitable climate change, thereby increasing, not decreasing human suffering;

Noting that warmer weather is generally less harmful to life on Earth than colder:

Hereby declare:

That current plans to restrict anthropogenic CO2 emissions are a dangerous misallocation of intellectual capital and resources that should be dedicated to solving humanity’s real and serious problems.

That there is no convincing evidence that CO2 emissions from modern industrial activity has in the past, is now, or will in the future cause catastrophic climate change.

That attempts by governments to inflict taxes and costly regulations on industry and individual citizens with the aim of reducing emissions of CO2 will pointlessly curtail the prosperity of the West and progress of developing nations without affecting climate.

That adaptation as needed is massively more cost-effective than any attempted mitigation, and that a focus on such mitigation will divert the attention and resources of governments away from addressing the real problems of their peoples.

That human-caused climate change is not a global crisis.

Now, therefore, we recommend –

That world leaders reject the views expressed by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as well as popular, but misguided works such as “An Inconvenient Truth”.

That all taxes, regulations, and other interventions intended to reduce emissions of CO2 be abandoned forthwith.

Agreed at New York, 4 March 2008.

GLAMOUR AT CANNES FILM FESTIVAL

POPE  - ONCE A MEMBER OF HITLER YOUTH CONDEMNS ANTI-SEMITISM ON VISIT TO HOLY LAND

PRESIDENT SARKOZY PRAISES AMERICA

FARMER GIVES SWINE FLU TO PIG

BRITONS SEEK SURROGATE MOTHERS IN INDIA

Growing numbers of British couples are going to India to pay surrogate mothers to have their children. One father from Ilford told how he and his wife had spent 13 years trying to have a baby, before succeeding through a surrogate mother in Mumbai at a cost of £50,000. The sperm was donated by Bobby Bains, who is a Sikh, and the eggs by a Hindu woman while the surrogate mother who carried his daughter Daisy for nine months is Muslim. The Indian surrogacy industry has become a multi-million-pound business and has prompted calls for it to be regulated. Bains and his wife Nikki, 44, who are trying for a second surrogate child, said that on a recent trip Bains was shown a seventh-floor flat which housed 12 pregnant surrogate mothers. Each mother is paid between £2,500 and £3,500 for carrying a child - equivalent to as much as 10 years' wages for some of the women on the clinic's books. One report suggests Indian women with fairer skin and higher IQs can charge more for donating eggs, fertilised in a test tube and then implanted in the surrogate mother. Bains said: "There are hundreds of clinics doing this in India. A clinic in Gujarat has 50 pregnancies. There is one baby born every week. Fifty girls are staying in surrogate houses. In one flat I went to there were pregnant women sitting around watching daytime Indian soaps.” The babies born in the Indian clinics also face being effectively stateless and parents can have long battles to get British passports for their children. He estimates that more than half the inquiries are from Europeans and about one third, or 100 a year, are from the UK. Of those about 90 per cent are Caucasians. It is estimated that about 50 pregnant surrogate mothers are being looked after by the clinic at any one time. The clinic charges around £15,000 for each surrogate baby born while it costs about £4,000 for each failed attempt. In all about 140 surrogate mothers give birth through the clinic each year. Dr Gautam Allapadia, a fertility specialist at the Rotunda clinic, said: “The costs are substantially less than they would spend in developed countries like the US and the UK.

MEXICAN FLU PANDEMIC GROUND ZERO

VERACRUZ MEXICO - A series of manure dumps near a small Mexican village could be "ground zero" for the flu pandemic now threatening the world, it emerged today. Reports have linked the outbreak to a series of waste lagoons in the Mexican town of La Gloria, in the Perote municipality of Veracruz State. They are filled with manure and other waste material from a pig farm that raises almost a million animals a year. Today it was claimed the first known case of swine flu emerged in the area a fortnight earlier than previously thought, in a village where residents have long complained about the smell and flies from the nearby pig farm. The Mexican government said it initially thought the victim, Edgar Hernandez, four, was suffering from ordinary influenza, but testing has since shown that he had contracted swine flu. The boy went on to make a full recovery. The facility, Granjas Carroll de Mexico, is partly owned by Smithfield Foods, a Virginia-based American company and the world's largest producer and processor of pork products. The "mega-farm", known in the agriculture business as confined animal feeding operations, is renowned for the clouds of flies drawn to its manure lagoons. According to biosecurity monitoring firm Veratect, residents believe the outbreak has been caused by contamination from the pig-breeding farms in the area. They believe the farms polluted the atmosphere and local water, which in turn led to the crisis. It is also now known that there was a widespread outbreak of a powerful respiratory disease in the La Gloria area earlier this month, with some residents falling ill in February. Health workers soon intervened, sealing off the town and spraying chemicals to kill the flies that were reportedly swarming through people's homes.

NICOLAS SARKOZY AND WIFE CARLA BRUNI-SARKOZY IN SPAIN

MEDIEVAL VAMPIRE

An abandoned car in a parking garage in Dubai. One report said 3,000 cars were sitting abandoned at the Dubai Airport.

London has slipped from its perch as the world's most expensive city for offices, overtaken by Hong Kong and Tokyo for the first time in nine years. Falling rents in the capital and a plunging pound brought occupancy costs for prime West End offices down 23% to €1403 (£1238) a square metre in 2008, property broker Cushman & Wakefield said in a report today. That compares with €1743 in Hong Kong and €1649 in Tokyo. "The fall in rents and weak UK currency mean that for overseas companies, London is now more affordable than it has been in years," Cushman said. London is not alone in seeing lower rental prices. The global financial crisis has pushed them lower in 16% of the world's biggest cities as financial companies fired workers and cut back on the space they lease, Cushman said. Costs fell 4% in Hong Kong and 19% in Tokyo against a year earlier. "There seems little doubt that rents will continue to fall over 2009, perhaps at a faster rate than before," said John Siu, general manager of Cushman & Wakefield Hong Kong.

READING DEATH OF A FINANCIER