Nepenthe

Tim Roth, Toni Collette and Sophie Okonedo lead the cast in this powerful drama that focuses on the aftermath of the catastrophic Asian tsunami. Tuesday 28 Nov 9pm on BBC2 ( Some previews here ) Also, a heartbreaking article from The Guardian's magazine last Saturday, Back in the Deep , some excerpts: Sasha Pagella, fundraiser (Survived the tsunami in Penang island, Malaysia) There was a blue sky and the sun was shining. I was in the sea and noticed a savage current. I thought, "That's strange," then a man started screaming. I turned to see a grey mass coming towards me. The next thing I knew, I was clinging to a wall in this surging water. There was a tiny girl by me, and I reached out to grab hold of her. Our eyes met and our hands touched, but the wave knocked her away. It still haunts me. In the film, a little girl slips from her dad's grip. Watching that made me cry. Eventually I was hauled out and the water receded. Then the screaming started. There must ha...

Nominated for the International Fantasy Film Award in our very own FANTASPORTO (1987) IMDb

Hoje a minha Cookie tinha uma joaninha no pêlo ;) Foto da joaninha: Ma Boîte à Photos , merci bien :)

Captain Luke Collingwood's voyage was not going well. Poor navigation and strong headwinds meant his ship, the Zong, was taking months, not weeks, to sail from Africa to Jamaica. More worryingly, his cargo was beginning to rot. For shackled beneath the deck, pressed back to face, festering in each others' excrement, blood and sweat, some 440 slaves lay slowly dying. Seeing his profits slip away as the deaths mounted, Collingwood resorted to an insurance scam. With each African covered at £30 apiece (over £2,000 at today's prices), he decided to jettison parts of the cargo to 'save' the rest. The Zong's maritime insurance would cover the cost of each lost slave. Citing a lack of drinking water, the captain had 133 slaves thrown overboard. Some went to their death with arms still shackled; others jumped into the ocean themselves. But the Zong's insurer didn't buy Collingwood's story and in 1783 his damages claim ended up in a London court, not as a mur...

Mapuche Indians in Chile are trying to take Microsoft to court in a legal battle that raises the question of whether anyone can ever "own" the language they speak. The row was sparked by Microsoft's decision last month to launch its Windows software package in Mapuzugun, a Mapuche tongue spoken by around 400,000 indigenous Chileans, mostly in the south of the country. At the launch in the southern town of Los Sauces, Microsoft said it wanted to help Mapuches embrace the digital age and "open a window so that the rest of the world can access the cultural riches of this indigenous people." But Mapuche tribal leaders have accused the U.S. company of violating their cultural and collective heritage by translating the software into Mapuzugun without their permission. They even sent a letter to Microsoft founder Bill Gates accusing his company of "intellectual piracy." "We feel like Microsoft and the Chilean Education Ministry have overlooked us by dec...

Esta imagen de un gorila de las montañas de tan sólo 10 meses de edad, captada en el Parque Nacional de los Volcanes, en Ruanda, ha conseguido una mención especial en la categoría 'Gerald Durell a la Naturaleza Amenazada'. (Foto: Suzi Eszterhas) El noruego Baard Ness ha ganado el segundo puesto en la categoría de Retratos de Animales con esta imagen. Tuvo que esperar durante horas hasta que la foca se asomó en un agujero del hielo en las islas Svalbard. (Foto: Baard Ness) Estos pingüinos retratados por Solvin Zankl han recibido una mención especial en la categoría de Comportamiento animal (Foto: Solvin Zankl) And the winner: El fotógrafo sueco Goran Ehlmé se ha alzado con el premio 'Mejor Fotografía de Naturaleza' del año 2006 con esta imagen de una morsa, captada en Groenlandia, rebuscando en el lecho marino en busca de comida.

Faced with daunting translation problems in war and disaster zones around the world, the U.S. military is refining a handheld voice-translation device that will soon be used by police and emergency-room doctors back home. The palm sized PDA-like Phraselator lets users speak or select from a screen of English phrases and matches them to equivalent pre-recorded phrases in other languages. The device then broadcasts the foreign-language MP3 file and records reply dialog for later translation. Unlike other machine translators, the Phraselator does not require that users train it to recognize their voice, and it produces human rather than synthesized speech. Phraselators have recently been used by the U.S. military in tsunami relief operations. The voice module for humanitarian assistance now offers 2,000 phrases in Hindi, Thai, Indonesian and Sinhala such as: "Are any of your family members missing?" "We have medical supplies." And, "Has anyone tested this water?...

Repeat after me : We humans have screwed up our planet. Feels better, doesn't it? Now that we've accepted this reality, at least we don't have to argue about it anymore. Atmospheric carbon dioxide levels are at the highest they've been in at least 800,000 years. Greenland's ice sheet is melting fast. Some – probably a lot – of the current warming trend is because of us, and so are the consequent threats to ecosystems, food supplies, coastal cities, and all that other stuff from An Inconvenient Truth. Of course, that means we're responsible for repairing the damage, but stopgaps like carbon sequestration just aren't going to cut it. Luckily, a growing number of scientists are thinking more aggressively, developing incredibly ambitious technical fixes to cool the planet. These efforts to remedy the accidental experiment of climate change with intentional, megascale experimentation are called geoengineering. Thus far, ideas include reflecting sunlight with gazi...

Leonard Woolf's marmoset adored him. Mitzy, a black-and-white, squirrel-size creature, originally belonged to a friend of Leonard and Virginia Woolf, but once she climbed onto Leonard's lap, it was love at first sight. She hated to leave him, riding around on his back and threatening to bite anyone who got too close. Kingsley Martin, Leonard's longtime friend and colleague at the New Statesman, observed that his "coat was permanently stained because the marmoset lived on his shoulder and performed [her] natural functions down his back." In 1935, when Leonard insisted on visiting Germany to see Nazism firsthand — defying the British government's warning that Jews should stay away — it was Mitzy, riding around in the Woolfs' car like a mascot, who charmed potentially hostile strangers. The devotion that Leonard Woolf inspired in Mitzy — and in a long series of cats, dogs, and other animals — was shared by nearly all of the humans who knew him well. Turn to a...

Tiny animal kingdom: the elephant foetus at 12 months, when it is 18 inches long and weighs approximately 26 lbs. It can use its trunk, and can curl it right up into its mouth and over its head. Inset, the foetus at 16 weeks, the trunk has developed and it is plumpish toward the rear. Flipping miracle: at 29 weeks the dolphin is moving its eyes and swimming around the womb. At six weeks it can curl its tail fin around its body. Over just 63 days, the domestic dog foetus will be armed with the tools necessary to survive, including a highly acute sense of smell and the ability to hear sounds far beyond our human range of hearing. A National Geographic film, via The Daily Mail

The Creation Museum - motto: "Prepare to Believe!" - will be the first institution in the world whose contents, with the exception of a few turtles swimming in an artificial pond, are entirely fake. It is dedicated to the proposition that the account of the creation of the world in the Book of Genesis is completely correct, and its mission is to convince visitors through a mixture of animatronic models, tableaux and a strangely Disneyfied version of the Bible story. Its designer, Patrick Marsh, used to work at Universal Studios in Los Angeles and then in Japan before he saw the light, opened his soul to Jesus, and was born anew. "The Bible is the only thing that gives you the full picture," he says. "Other religions don't have that, and, as for scientists, so much of what they believe is pretty fuzzy about life and its origins ... oh, this is a great place to work, I will tell you that." So this is the Bible story, as truth. Apart from the dinosaur...

Long-Term Unemployed Meat Consumed HIV Prevalence and many more at

Favorites: Quais de Seine - Gurinder Chadha - the tenderness of Leïla Bekhti and Cyril Descours; Loin du 16ème - Walter Salles - the earthiness of Catalina Sandino Moreno; Bastille - Isabel Coixet - always Miranda Richardson, and there are no words; Place des Victoires - Nobuhiro Suwa - together again, Binoche and Dafoe; Tour Eiffel - Sylvain Chomet - soooo French, so Belleville ;) Place des Fêtes - Oliver Schmitz - the radiant, glistening beauty of Aïssa Maïga and Seydou Boro; Pigalle - Richard LaGravenese - Fanny Ardant pour toujours, mais surtout pour tout de suite; Quartier de la Madeleine - Vincenzo Natali - vampires in a most religiously semantic area, Elijah's wide blue eyes almost drained to red; Père-Lachaise - Wes Craven - the voice of Rufus Sewell; Quartier Latin - Gérard Depardieu - Gena Rowlands and Ben Gazzara, almost on closing night :)

The other dark-horse masterpiece at this year's NYFF, so far, is Manoel de Oliveira's "Belle Toujours," also acquired by New Yorker. Conceived as a sequel to Luis Buñuel's 1967 "Belle de Jour," in which Catherine Deneuve played a middle-class wife turning masochistic tricks on the sly, "Belle Toujours" captures Henri (Michel Piccoli, reprising his original role) and Séverine (this time played by Bulle Ogier, another Buñuel favorite) as they find each other in Paris, 40 years later. It's a tremendously economical film, with not a shot or a second wasted, yet rich with ambiguity, comedy, longing and sadness. I guess it should be economical, given that Oliveira is now 97, a full decade older than Ingmar Bergman (and only eight years younger than Buñuel, who died in 1983). He's not just the last working member of the great Euro-art-film generation; he's almost certainly the oldest filmmaker in the history of the medium. So yeah, thi...

Opening up Fortress Europe Jürgen Habermas on immigration as the key to European unity As a student, I often looked from the other side of the Rhine over here to the seat of the four high commissioners. Today I enter the Petersberg for the first time. The historic surroundings recall the deep roots that the old Bundesrepublik sank into the Rhine and Ruhr landscapes. I was always proud of a homeland characterised by a civil spirit, a certain Rhine-Prussian distance from Berlin, an openness to the West and the liberal influence of republican France. From here, the Bundesrepublik achieved its goal of sovereignty only in conjunction with the political unification of Europe; we only achieved national unity within the European framework.The genius loci invites us to consider the irritating fact that this benedictory European dynamic is flagging today. In many countries, the return of the nation-state has caused an introverted mood; the theme of Europe has been devalued, the national ...

In "La Tempête," the much buzzed about French-language production of "The Tempest" from the Montreal's 4D Art, are 10 actors. Four of them (those playing the roles of Prospero, Miranda, Ferdinand, and an Ariel/Caliban hybrid) appear live. The six others are virtual characters, their video images (with sound) projected onto the back wall; at times, projected off curved mirrored surfaces, they look three dimensional. The high-tech wizardry is as cool as it sounds. Those swirling spirits and creepy, vein-like branches create an eerie backdrop for Prospero's dark sorcery. Especially thrilling is the movie magic that allows the otherworldly Ariel (and others) to materialize out of thin air. Unfortunately, technological conceit is yoked to every moment of this "Tempest." With the house cinemadark and the actors dimly lighted to keep the video legible, watching "La Tempête" is less like theatergoing than like watching a big screen TV in the da...

1. Our good friends and co-evolutionaries Canis familiaris (the domestic dog) show that when in doubt which hole to aim for, thrust wildly. You are bound to land in something good. 2. Shrimps' hearts are in their heads. Men have neither hearts nor heads. 3. The tongue of a giraffe ( Giraffa camelopardalis ) is half a metre in length, long enough to clean its own ears. If you can do the same there may be a career option you had not yet considered... 4. Dolphins engage in group sex. If those squeaky grey-skinned fisheaters can do it, so can you. 5. The females of the bonobo species ( Pan paniscus ), closely related to humans, are known to use sexual favours to gain status and food. A point to remember next time you're short of change at the corner shop. 6. Some ribbon worms will eat themselves if they can’t find food. Unfortunately, men unable to find sex are rarely so talented. 7. The anal glands of cats, genus Felis , are used to mark their territory and identify themselves to...

From The Guardian

What was the significance of Kate's memento of her childhood sweeheart - a toy plane? There was none. The creators use it as an example of plotlines they regret as Lost fans everywhere began speculating what it might signify It had the Oceanic logo on the side, and was thus an omen of the crash that brought Kate to the island There are only six seats inside it - numbered 4, 8, 15, 16, 23, 42 - the unexplained recurring numercial sequence What is Sayid's surname? Iqbal Hussein Jarrah DriveSHA...