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Joan Marcus Nearly perfect: Matthew Morrison and Li Jun Li in South Pacific.  By Joan MarcusIn the spotlight: Katie Holmes, with John Lithgow in All My Sons, was tabloid fodder. By Elysa Gardner, USA TODAY Even a cockeyed optimist would have trouble arguing that Broadway became more daring in 2008.

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As this holiday’s video game sales are tallied up, one thing is already clear: Sony’s PlayStation 3 remains in a fairly distant third place, still eclipsed by Microsoft’s Xbox 360 and Nintendo’s Wii. While it’s probably too drastic for Sony to walk away from the PS3, I definitely think they need some bold and creative changes to make their console competitive, namely to acquiesce to market realities while leveraging two underutilized assets.

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Four more people linked to the scandal have gone on trial on Monday, the official Xinhua news agency said.

This brings the number before the courts to 10, state media said.

On Friday, six people suspected of involvement in the scandal went on trial, and face sentences of at least 10 years, lawyers said.

Hundreds of thousands of infants fell ill and at least six died this year after melamine was added to baby milk products.

Those on trial are accused of adding melamine to raw milk to make it appear high in protein.

The company at the centre of the scandal, Sanlu, has already been declared bankrupt.

When the scandal broke in September, a chain of melamine producers and middlemen was found to have been supplying milk dealers with the product.

The dealers added melamine to boost the apparent protein content of milk, which had often been watered down to spread the raw product further.

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(CNN) — The final death toll from a Christmas Eve explosion in a five-story apartment building in southern Ukraine has increased to 27 people, including three children, Ukrainian officials said Friday.

Twenty-one people were rescued from the remains of the building, located in the Black Sea resort town of Yevpatoria.

Rescue workers were still combing through the site Friday, but are expected to finish their work soon, according to Ukraine’s Emergency Situations Ministry.

Government officials said oxygen canisters stored in the basement of the building are the most probable cause of the blasts, which reduced the apartment complex to rubble.

Television footage showed rescuers trying to free people buried underneath fallen debris, while others scrabbled through wires, construction rods and boulders.

“As I was walking by, I heard a bang, and then I saw this building crumble,” one eyewitness was quoted by Reuters.com as saying.

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(CNN) — At the time of his death, Heath Ledger had just concluded his work as the Joker in “The Dark Knight,” the sequel to 2005’s “Batman Begins.”

The buzz surrounding his performance was electrifying. He was remaking the Joker; he wasn’t a camp comedian like Cesar Romero or a malevolent clown like Jack Nicholson. He was pure nihilism, with his jagged makeup and ragged hair. Even glimpses of his smile on the “Dark Knight” movie posters were thrilling.

And then he was gone. “We have concluded that the manner of death is accident, resulting from the abuse of prescription medications,” read the New York City medical examiner’s office report, affectlessly.

Who knows what could have happened? The hype surrounding “The Dark Knight,” partly fueled by Ledger’s death, turned out to have been warranted; the film earned critical praise and planeloads of money. Ledger has been posthumously nominated for a Golden Globe and a Screen Actors Guild award and is expected to receive an Oscar nomination, as well. Had he lived, he could have named his price.

We’ll never know. “Prediction is very difficult, especially of the future,” the physicist Niels Bohr is credited with saying.

Ledger’s movie, “The Dark Knight” — with its uncertain, bleak Gotham City –seemed symbolic of the year in entertainment. A writers’ strike cast a pall over awards season. The paparazzi’s favorite target, Britney Spears, was institutionalized for a time. Pixar’s brilliant “Wall-E” depicted an Earth abandoned to the waste of consumerism. See some of the year’s top entertainment stories »

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GAZA CITY (CNN) — Israeli airstrikes pounded Hamas-ruled Gaza on Saturday, killing at least 205 people, and Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak said the military aimed to inflict a “major blow” on militants in Gaza because of escalating rocket attacks against Israel.

“In the last few weeks … ground missiles and mortars have been directed at our community in the south of our country. We have no intention of allowing these attacks to continue,” Barak said at a news conference.

The Israeli attacks would continue through the night, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said. Hamas vowed to retaliate.

“We will stand up, we will defend our own people, we will defend our land and we will not give up,” said senior Hamas spokesman Osama Hamden.

A statement from the IDF said Israeli aircraft were attacking “a series of Hamas targets and infrastructure facilities,” including headquarters, training camps and weaponry storage warehouses.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert called for patience.

“The operation in Gaza intends primarily to change the situation in the south part of our country. It may take some time, and all of us are prepared to carry the burden and the pains that are [an] inseparable part of this situation,” he said at a news conference with Barak and Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni.

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WASHINGTON (AFP) – CIA agents are offering the potency drug Viagra and other gifts to win over Afghan warlords in the US-led war against Taliban insurgents, the Washington Post reported on Friday.

Paying for information is nothing new for the Central Intelligence Agency, but officers have started employing unusual incentives to persuade Afghan local leaders to share intelligence about the Taliban’s movements, the Post wrote, citing unnamed sources in the spy service.

“Whatever it takes to make friends and influence people — whether it’s building a school or handing out Viagra,” one CIA operative who has worked in Afghanistan was quoted as saying.

CIA agents have offered pocket knives and tools, toys and school equipment, travel visas, medical services including surgeries and sometimes the erectile dysfunction drug Viagra for Afghan chieftains, the paper said.

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SAN FRANCISCO – The Apple computer was invented in a garage. Same with the Google search engine. Now, tinkerers are working at home with the basic building blocks of life itself.

Using homemade lab equipment and the wealth of scientific knowledge available online, these hobbyists are trying to create new life forms through genetic engineering — a field long dominated by Ph.D.s toiling in university and corporate laboratories.

In her San Francisco dining room lab, for example, 31-year-old computer programmer Meredith L. Patterson is trying to develop genetically altered yogurt bacteria that will glow green to signal the presence of melamine, the chemical that turned Chinese-made baby formula and pet food deadly.

“People can really work on projects for the good of humanity while learning about something they want to learn about in the process,” she said.

So far, no major gene-splicing discoveries have come out anybody’s kitchen or garage.

But critics of the movement worry that these amateurs could one day unleash an environmental or medical disaster. Defenders say the future Bill Gates of biotech could be developing a cure for cancer in the garage.

Many of these amateurs may have studied biology in college but have no advanced degrees and are not earning a living in the biotechnology field. Some proudly call themselves “biohackers” — innovators who push technological boundaries and put the spread of knowledge before profits.

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CRAWFORD, Texas – White House spokesman Gordon Johndroe urged Hamas to cease its rocket attacks on Israel while expressing concern about getting humanitarian supplies to Palestianians living in the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip.

Johndroe said Saturday that President-elect Barack Obama, who is vacationing in Hawaii, will receive a security briefing later in the day on the escalation in hostilities between Israel and Hamas.

Israeli warplanes, retaliating for rocket fire from the Gaza Strip, pounded dozens of security compounds across the territory in unprecedented waves of airstrikes Saturday, killing more than 200 people.

Sursa: yahoo.com

WARDAK PROVINCE, Afghanistan – Two months ago, Mohammad Anwar recalls, the Taliban paraded accused thieves through his village, tarred their faces with oil and threw them in jail.

The public punishment was a clear sign to villagers that the Taliban are now in charge. And the province they took over lies just 30 miles from the Afghan capital of Kabul, right on the main highway.

The Taliban has long operated its own shadow government in the most dangerous parts of Afghanistan, but its power is now spreading north to the doorstep of Kabul, according to Associated Press interviews with a dozen government officials, analysts, Taliban commanders and Afghan villagers. More than seven years after the U.S.-led invasion, the Islamic militia is attempting — at least in name — to reconstitute the government by which it ruled Afghanistan in the late 1990s.

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