So has the time come for European museums to look beyond entrance charges, restaurants and gift shops for much-needed extra cash? Is this the moment when corporate sponsorship of major arts institutions finally becomes respectable in Europe? The answers seem obvious. How else can museums remain vigorous?

And yet what is being proposed is not universally welcomed. In fact, in much of Europe, the issue is meshed in ideology. As with health care and education, culture is seen as a public right that governments have a duty to satisfy. Further, corporate sponsorship of the arts motivated by public relations, not altruism, is viewed as somehow tainted, especially to cultural officials raised in a statist tradition.

Yet even in France, where governments have long jealously controlled culture, change is under way. A 2003 law offering tax breaks to companies buying art treasures for national museums is already bringing results. Last month, the Carrefour retail group donated 130 Italian Renaissance drawings, 25 destined for the Louvre. The Louvre's director, Henri Loyrette, noted that the value of recent donations had already exceeded his annual acquisitions budget. He has also begun looking abroad for financial assistance: earlier this year, he created a nonprofit group, American Friends of the Louvre, for this purpose.

The museum and adjoining library will house one of the finest collections of Lincoln documents and memorabilia. There will also be cannons that emit smoke, a theater whose seats will shake when battle scenes are shown on screen, and dozens of life-size figures of Lincoln and his contemporaries.

"The quality of these exhibits is light-years ahead of anything you'll find in other presidential libraries," said Richard Norton Smith, director of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum. "I really don't think there's anything like this anywhere."

Not everyone is pleased with Mr. Smith's plans. Critics fear that in his desire to appeal to children and others who are unfamiliar with Lincoln, he is sacrificing the authenticity and decorum that the Great Emancipator deserves. He is pressing ahead, however, determined to give visitors a dose of what he calls "in-your-face history."[…]

Visitors to the museum will enter a large hall dominated by a replica of Lincoln's humble birthplace on one side and the White House on the other. In front of the White House will stand life-size figures of Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, Gen. George McClellan, Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglass, while a figure of John Wilkes Booth crouches in the nearby bushes.

The episode, called Floater, focused on the husband of a woman whose body is found in the Hudson River.

When the husband's alibi is investigated, police discover a corruption scandal at the courthouse where the wife worked.

Officers uncover a scandal involving her divorce lawyer and a judge who has heard a suspiciously large number of the lawyer's cases.

Mr Batra's case states that he is well-known in Brooklyn, where there have been legal investigations resulting in arrests for the alleged fixing of matrimonial cases by judges and lawyers, and for the alleged sale of appointments to become a judge.

Hammond, of Abington, Mass., was accidentally run over during a parade Thursday in Whitman, Mass. by a van owned by the local Veterans of Foreign Wars chapter and driven by a close friend of his, according to Boston's WBZ radio station.

But the message that followed was a rant against a 17-year-old Sand Springs resident named Michael Shackelford and his mother, Janice, the subjects of a recent Washington Post series examining Michael's struggles as a young gay man in the Bible Belt. The fliers posted a photo of Michael, called him a "doomed teenage fag" and announced that followers of Westboro Baptist in Topeka were on their way from Kansas to stage antigay protests in Sand Springs. […]

After Michael's story was published, competing forces wrestled for his soul. The Human Rights Campaign, the country's largest gay advocacy group, invited Michael to attend its national dinner in Washington last month.

"Oh, great," Janice remembers thinking. A year and a half after discovering her son was gay, Janice still held hope that he would renounce his homosexuality. She worried for his safety, especially after renting a video at Blockbuster about Matthew Shepard, the young gay man who died after being beaten and lashed to a fence in Wyoming. Mostly Janice worried about Michael's salvation. Attending the dinner in Washington might reinforce his belief that he is gay. "I felt like allowing him to go was condoning the lifestyle," she said, "and it would propel him to that even more."

Yet something inside told her to let him go. One factor tipped it: Michael would get to meet Judy Shepard, mother of Matthew, who would be attending the event. Part of Janice wished that she could go, too, to see what her son wanted so desperately to see. But she worked two jobs and could find no one to take her shift at the barbecue restaurant where she is a waitress. It was decided that Michael would be accompanied by his 23-year-old sister, Shelly. […]

When they got back home, Janice listened to their stories. "There's a life out there," Michael said, before racing off to the drugstore to have his film developed. Janice wept when Shelly relayed a story that Judy Shepard told about going to identify her son's body. He was covered in blood except for the clean streaks on his face where tears had washed down. […]

The week before the protest, the pastor announced from the pulpit that they were in the midst of a spiritual battle. He read parts of the flier aloud. "We are family," Eubanks said. "We are going to stand united as a family."

The study entitled CHEERS (Children’s Environmental Exposure Research Study) will look at how chemicals can be ingested, inhaled or absorbed by children ranging from babies to 3 years old.

"We could tell this woman was not right," said church secretary Donna Landolfi. "She said, 'Let's go make the sacrifice."'

Police said Mancini told them that Jesus sacrificed himself for her, so she was going to sacrifice the boys to free her soul.

The Scottish National Party's Holyrood leader, Nicola Sturgeon, welcomed the move but added that the public should be consulted as the clock ticked towards the ban date.

She said: "The time has come for a ban on smoking in public places.

"There is evidence a ban can cut deaths from passive smoking and makes it easier for the 70% of smokers who desperately want to give up the habit.

"But we must also recognise that some people have concerns and reservations - there are people who are yet to be persuaded."

William Hill spokesman Rupert Adams said he fancied McGregor and Scott's chances, adding: "The public love a Scot. In the past Sean Connery has come top in people's favourite Bond and that can only help the chances of Ewan McGregor and Dougray Scott.

"Dougray Scott appears to be Scotland's choice and if he gets the call-up punters will be queuing all over Edinburgh and Glasgow."

What causes these immune chemicals to become active in the first place? That’s the responsibility of bacterium — Propionibacterium acnes — which feeds on the sebum, an oily secretion in the hair follicles. Proteins on its coat are detected by the immune system, which then mount a defensive response.

Dr Kealey found out what was going on by using skin cells taken from women who were having plastic surgery. “Animals don’t get acne so we had to use human skin cells. Face-lifts provided a good supply that allowed us to grow skin in a test tube,” he says. Left alone, the cells produced normal smooth skin. The big discovery was that to produce full-blown acne you just add one of the two immune-system chemicals.

“If we added one called IL-1A you got perfect whiteheads or blackheads,” he says. “If you added another one, TGFA, you got the inflamed pustules. Each works in different ways. One causes the wall of the hair follicle to shed cells much faster, while the other makes the follicle grow oddly so it bursts.” Already there are drugs that can block IL-1A or TGFA, which might be suitable to treat acne.

"It’s still a theory,” Dr Kealey says. “But another distinctive human trait is that we have a much longer period of childhood than any other animal because we have to learn a whole range of social and language skills to fit into the group. Having babies before you’ve got those under your belt could make it less likely your children would survive.” So spots are a cunning way of putting off potential lovers and, therefore, avoiding having children at too young an age. This is because we are hard-wired to fancy only healthy people and spots give people the appearance of illness despite there being none.

If you have purchased a copy of Half-Life 2, we are sorry you are still waiting to play. This is not Valve's choice. Vivendi is insisting that the game has not yet been released, and has threatened that Valve would be in violation of its contract if we activate the Half-Life 2 Steam authentication servers at this time.

Thanks for your patience and we will update you when we have more news to share.

Hey Vivendi...seriously, fuck you.

Performing artists have had the tax status of independent contractors for many years in Canada. In recent years, however, the CRA had changed their interpretations of some statutes and concluded that artists were, in fact, employees.

While such a move would have given artists some immediate benefits such as [Employment Insurance], it also would have deprived them of numerous long-term deductions that allow them to make ends meet.

If performers were employees, they would no longer be able to write off any transportation, housing or other expenses that they incurred while trying to make a living across this geographically vast country.

They would also have been denied the ability to make deductions for physical training or professional coaching.

"We will know about any diseases he had, any kind of injuries and his real age," Egyptian antiquities chief Zahi Hawass told Reuters. "We will know the answer to whether he died normally or was he killed."

The mummy would be moved by the end of November and the CAT scan, which will produce a three-dimensional X-ray of his remains, completed by the end of the year, he said.

Tutankhamun's treasures, including a stunning gold mask which covered the head of his mummy, were removed from the tomb in Luxor's Valley of the Kings by British archaeologist Howard Carter. They are usually on show in the Cairo Museum.

Hawass said he would like Tutankhamun's mummy to go back to its tomb after the completion of the research.

Mystery has surrounded Tutankhamun since the discovery of his tomb. Lord Carnarvon, Carter's sponsor and among the first to enter the tomb, died shortly afterward from an infected mosquito bite.

Newspapers at the time said Carter had unleashed a Pharaonic curse which killed Carnarvon and others linked to the discovery.

Scientists have in the past suggested that a disease lying dormant in the tomb may have killed the British aristocrat.

Principal Maria Mason called 911 after the child broke a picture frame in her office and waved a piece of glass, holding a security guard back.

When two Miami-Dade County police officers and a school officer arrived, the boy had already cut himself under his eye and on his hand.

The officers talked to the boy without success. When the boy cut his own leg, one officer shocked him with a Taser and another grabbed him to prevent him from falling, police said.

The personal computer game enables players to design superheroes' look and abilities and then battle against other players' characters in a virtual city. Like similar so-called massively multiplayer role-playing games where thousands of players can be playing simultaneously at any given time, City of Heroes claims to offer a myriad of combinations so that no two players' characters are exactly the same.

But in its lawsuit, filed Wednesday in U.S. District Court, Marvel argues that the game's character creation engine easily allows players to design characters that are virtual copies of its own superheros, including "The Incredible Hulk."

The New York-based company also took issue with the ability of players to go so far as to name their superhero creations after Marvel comic book characters.

Marvel claims the firms' are responsible because the game is played on servers operated by the companies, raising the question of whether a company is responsible for their customers' actions on its computer server.

Marvel also claims the companies have disrupted its "existing and future" business prospects for licensing its characters in video games similar to City of Heroes.

At DC, Rosemann will report to Ron Perazza. The Creative Services department at the publisher is responsible for a variety of tasks, including maintaining DC’s website, producing and managing custom comics, special projects, advertising inserts, and acting as a liaison between DC’s creative and business departments.

In regards to how the new hire fits relative to any former Marvel/DC animosity, a source at DC said that Rosemann always stayed clear of any of the serious mudslinging, and was a professional through the day he left his position – earning and maintaining the respect of those at DC and around the industry.

Five years ago researchers led by Diana Deutsch of the University of California at San Diego found that native speakers of Mandarin Chinese and Vietnamese frequently [use perfect pitch] during ordinary speech. In these so-called tonal languages, changing pitch can completely alter the meaning of words. For example, the Mandarin word "ma" means "mother" when the vowel is a constant high pitch, but means "hemp" when pronounced with a rising pitch. Until now, it was not known whether this precision in linguistic pitch transferred to musical tones. […]

To address this question, Deutsch and her colleagues compared 115 advanced music students from Rochester, New York, with 88 students from Beijing. In results to be presented at the meeting of the Acoustical Society of America in San Diego on November 17, the scientists found that the Mandarin speakers were much more likely to have absolute pitch than were English speakers who had started musical training at the same age. For example, 60 percent of Beijing students who had begun studying music between the ages of four and five years old passed a test for absolute pitch, whereas only 14 percent of the American students did. In both groups, students who started their musical instruction later were less likely to have absolute pitch, and none of the Rochester students that began training after their eighth birthday had the ability

[The Guide] sold 270,000 copies on Tuesday, the same day the game launched with retail sales of more than $125 million, or more than 2 million units.

Random House set an initial print run of 1.1 million copies for the "Halo" guide, which a spokeswoman said was about five times normal for a strategy guide, and it has already ordered another run of 100,000 units.

WUNC-FM recently informed Ipas, a Chapel Hill-based international women's rights and health organization, that the phrase "reproductive rights" in the group's on-air announcement could be interpreted as advocating a particular political position. The station required Ipas to use "reproductive health" instead. […]

" 'Reproductive rights' is not a euphemism for abortion," Kumar said. "Among other things, it means the right to infertility treatments, the right to contraception, the right to information, the right to live free of rape and violence. In global forums, those meanings are universally understood. And 'reproductive health' doesn't convey all of that. It's important to say that our work is about rights as well as health. […]

"The issue of reproductive rights, like many others, has been cast as an 'either you're with us or you're against us' issue, and so much of the language is assumed to be code for something else."

Patton said Deirdre could accidentally strike another student, or injure herself, and other children could get hurt trying to imitate Deirdre, who has been doing gymnastics for five years.

"Contact sports, apparently, are fine. But this one is so dangerous it requires the cartwheel cops," Faegre said.

"We are seeking unpaid overtime for a good number of [EA] employees who weren't [properly] paid," Schubert told GameSpot this afternoon. "EA contends they were exempt," Schubert said. "We contend otherwise."

The stress is taking its toll. After a certain number of hours spent working the eyes start to lose focus; after a certain number of weeks with only one day off fatigue starts to accrue and accumulate exponentially. There is a reason why there are two days in a weekend -- bad things happen to one's physical, emotional, and mental health if these days are cut short. The team is rapidly beginning to introduce as many flaws as they are removing.

We cannot cope any more and we just want him to get good care,[...] We just cannot cope any longer.

Earlier, officials appealed for relatives to come forward so they could discuss arrangements for his future care.