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HOLLYWOOD: The Oscar winning star of Chicago is to play the Egyptian queen in the upcoming $30 million 3D Hollywood epic Cleo.Hugh Jackman, the Australian actor who starred in the X Men, is in talks to play her Roman lover Mark Antony. The film, which is Hollywood's first attempt at a musical based on the life of two of history's most famous lovers, will be directed by Steven Soderbergh, who made his debut with Sex, Lies and Videotapes, and will feature a soundtrack by the punk band Guided by Voices.Zeta-Jones, 39, astounded fans and critics when she revealed her musical skills in the Oscar winning 2002 big screen adaptation of Chicago. The Welsh born actress, who co-starred in the musical film opposite Richard Gere and Renee Zellweger, won the best supporting actress Oscar for her performance as the gun-toting Velma Kelly.The definitive film of Cleopatra's life remains the 1963 version starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton.

Saturday, October 25, 2008 KABUL: International film star and Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations refugee agency Angelina Jolie has appealed for greater support for Afghan returnees, particularly as the harsh winter approaches, as she wrapped up her first visit to the strife-torn nation.Jolie’s three-day visit, which ended yesterday, was aimed at raising awareness of the refugee issue ahead of an international conference on return and reintegration to be held in the Afghan capital Kabul in December.Although this was her first visit to the country, she is familiar with the Afghan repatriation operation – one of the biggest carried out by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) – having met with Afghan refugees in neighbouring Pakistan twice in recent years. The courage, resilience and quiet dignity of returnee families rebuilding their lives against the kind of adversity few of us can imagine shows the human spirit at its best.During her trip, Ms. Jolie visited recent retur...

WASHINGTON: The International Monetary Fund is revising its loan programs to make them better suited to members facing financial difficulties, but no decision has been made on what form any emergency loan program would take, IMF sources said Friday.Among ideas under discussion is to provide a credit line in hard currency to countries that otherwise would have no access to foreign capital, said the sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity because discussions among IMF member nations including the United States have produced nothing definite. The IMF's 24-member executive board is expected to meet next week to examine the various proposals under consideration. The immediate beneficiaries would be developing countries with good economic records such as Turkey, Brazil, and South Korea who normally have no difficulty borrowing but have seen access to money dry up as Western banks stopped lending amid a credit crisis.Another idea under consideration is to allow member countries to bo...

Saturday, October 25, 2008 BERLIN: Two foreigners killed in a shoot-out in central Kabul Saturday worked for the international courier company DHL, a spokesman for the German post office, which owns DHL, said."The two victims were DHL employees. They were not German," the spokesman told a foreign news agency. He was unable to give their nationalities or say what job they did.The two foreigners and an Afghan were killed during an exchange of fire outside DHL's offices in the Afghan capital.

Saturday, October 25, 2008 SANAA: At least 14 people have drowned and around 35 are missing in Yemen after torrential rain left swathes of the impoverished country underwater, officials said on Saturday.At least 500 homes have been damaged and hundreds of families displaced by the floods that swept the south-eastern provinces of Hadramout and Mahra following 30 hours of heavy rainfall, they said.Yemeni authorities have declared the eastern provinces to be a disaster area and President Ali Abdullah Saleh visited some of the worst hit areas on Friday.

KABUL: Two Turkish engineers, while working on Afghanistan’s communication project, were kidnapped.Unidentified armed persons had abducted them two days ago from the Afghan province Khost. Turkish foreign minister said that he had discussed matters relating to the kidnapping of the Turkish engineers yesterday with the Afghan officials during his visit here. At least 800 Turkish soldiers are deployed here and in the surrounding areas under Nato International Security Assistance Force.

NEW YORK (AP) _ Usage of newspaper Web sites grew nearly 16 percent in the third quarter, an industry group said Thursday.Together, newspapers averaged more than 68 million monthly unique visitors during the June-September period, compared with 59 million in the same quarter last year, the Newspaper Association of America said, citing a custom analysis by Nielsen Online.The visitors generated more than 3.5 billion page views each month, up 25 percent from the 2.8 billion in the third quarter of 2007."As news surrounding the economy and the presidential campaign rivets the nation, record audiences are trusting newspaper Web sites for comprehensive, up-to-the-minute reporting and analysis on the events that impact their lives," NAA President and CEO John F. Sturm said in a statement. Despite the growth in online traffic, newspapers continue to struggle as growth in online revenue still isn't large enough to offset steeper declines in print.

HONG KONG (AP) _ Excessive levels of the industrial chemical melamine in Chinese eggs might be traced to feed given to chickens, the Hong Kong government said late Saturday.The government said in a statement it found 4.7 parts per million of melamine in the eggs produced by a division of China's Dalian Hanwei Enterprise Group based in the northeastern port city Dalian. The legal limit of melamine in Hong Kong is 2.5 ppm.Hong Kong Secretary for Food and Health York Chow said the melamine may have come from feed given to the chickens that laid the eggs."The preliminary opinion experts have given us is that there is a problem with the feed," Chow told reporters. The new results have prompted officials to expand food testing to meat imports from China, Chow told reporters Sunday.In an earlier egg-related food safety scare, the banned cancer-causing industrial dye, Sudan Red, was used to color egg yolks.China is currently caught in a food safety scandal over dairy products tai...