Slumdog...bags four Golden Globes

Mumbai-based drama Slumdog Millionaire has won four Golden Globes including Best Original Score in a Motion Picture for A.R. Rahman.

Slumdog Millionaire also won Golden Globes for Best Motion Picture (Drama), Best Director Award for Danny Boyle and Best Screenplay for Simon Beaufoy.

The success of Slumdog ..., which has received numerous critical awards, was all the more potent since it had originally struggled to find a distributor in the US. "We really weren't expecting to be here in America at all at one time, so it's just amazing to be here," said screenwriter Simon Beaufoy.

There is reason to smile for India as a large part of the cast is either Indian or of Indian origin. Dev Patel and Freida Pinto, the leading pair of the film are both actors of Indian origin. Bollywood made its presence felt in the film with Anil Kapoor playing a supporting role and A R Rahman giving the award winning music score.

Australian actor Heath Ledger earned a posthumous award as Best Supporting Actor (Drama) for The Joker in The Dark Knight. Ledger's prize for his role came almost a year after he died from an accidental drug overdose in New York last January.

The award for Ledger had been widely expected and cements his status as the hot favourite to win the equivalent prize at the Oscars on Feb 22. If Ledger wins an Oscar, he would become only the second ever person to win a posthumous one.

"All of us who worked with Heath on The Dark Knight accept the award with an awful mixture of sadness and incredible pride," said the film's director Chris Nolan. "After Heath passed away, you saw a hole ripped in the future of cinema."

Woody Allen's Vicky Cristina Barcelona starring Penelope Cruz, Scarlett Johansson and Javier Bardem received the Best Motion Picture (Comedy or Musical) award.

The acclaimed animated romance WALL-E was named Best Animated Film, while little-known Sally Hawkins won the prize for Best Actress (Musical or Comedy) for her role as a perky teacher in Happy-Go-Lucky.

Among the other big winners were Kate Winslet, who won a Best Supporting Actress (Drama) prize for her role as a former Nazi in The Reader. Winslet became one of the few actresses who can claim winning two acting awards in one night as she also bagged the Best Actress (Drama) for Revolutionary Road.

Mickey Rourke won Best Actor(Drama) for The Wrestler while Bruce Springsteen won the award for Best Movie Song for the same film.

A drama about Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon Waltz With Bashir, was named Best Foreign Film.

From Lifetime Achievement Award winner Steven Spielberg to Jennifer Lopez who opened the show in a shimmering golden dress, the Beverley Hills Hilton was filled with a roster of the biggest names in the movie and television world.

The leading nominations were Brad Pitt's The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, about a man born old who grows young and Frost/Nixon, about a series of revealing television interviews of the notorious US president, both of which were nominated for Best Drama. Doubt, starring Meryl Streep in a searing tale about the sexual abuse scandal in the Catholic Church, was also a favourite nominee.

Other Best Drama nominees were The Reader, a World War-II based drama about a romance between a young law student and a female SS guard, and Revolutionary Road starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet in a drama about the challenges facing 1950's suburbanites.

The nominees for Best Musical or Comedy were the Abba-based musical Mamma Mia!, Burn After Reading, Happy-Go-Lucky, In Bruges and Vicky Cristina Barcelona.

The Best Foreign Language nominees were Baader Meinhof Complex (Germany), Everlasting Moments (Sweden), Gomorrah (Italy), I've Loved You So Long (France), and Waltz With Bashir (Israel).

Presenters included the Jonas Brothers,Shah Rukh Khan, Hayden Panettiere, Martin Scorsese, Drew Barrymore, Sacha Baron Cohen, Salma Hayek, Jessica Lange, Amy Poehler and Seth Rogen, as well as Ricky Gervais, Johnny Depp, David Duchovny, Megan Fox, Eva Longoria, Sting, Sean Combs and Mark Wahlberg. Shah Rukh Khan became the first Indian actor to be a Golden Globe presenter.

The Golden Globes, sometimes called Hollywood's biggest party, marked a stark contrast to last year's drab affair when a picket threat from the striking screenwriters union reduced the usually lavish affair to a functional press announcement.

Ronaldo wins FIFA World Footballer of the Year

Manchester United and Portugal star Cristiano Ronaldo has been named FIFA World Footballer of the Year for 2008.

Ronaldo, who does also hold the prestigious Ballon d'Or for the European Footballer of the Year, beat off competition from 2007 winner Kaka (Brazil), Lionel Messi (Argentina), Fernando Torres (Spain) and Xavi (Spain), to get the tag announced on Monday.

The 23-year-old, scorer of 42 goals in all competitions in the 2007-08 season, was one of United's architects behind the club's English Premiership and Champions League double.

It was not a perfectly scripted year for Ronaldo, however, as Portugal crashed out 3-2 to Germany in the quarterfinal of Euro 2008 in June.

Ronaldo becomes the second Portuguese player to win the FIFA accolade after Luis Figo in 2001, and the first one playing for a British club.

Brazilian midfielder Marta was unveiled as FIFA World Women's Footballer of the year for 2008, for the third year running.

Obama's inauguration gets a test run at Capitol

Derrick Brooks puts his left hand on the book and raises his right, ready to take the oath of office. Dozens of cameras capture this moment in history, even though Brooks is wearing a name card reading "president-elect Obama."

"It felt great to be famous for one day," Brooks told reporters after spending hours standing in for Barack Obama during Sunday's dress rehearsal for the presidential inaugural on January 20.

Organizers picked the 26-year-old Army staff sergeant from Fayetteville, North Carolina, because he resembles Obama in height, weight and skin colour. But he's not an exact match. When Brooks met Obama last Thursday, "he said my ears weren't as big as his."

Admitted to the exclusive club of stand-ins were military personnel from the area who resembled Obama's wife, Michelle, Vice President-elect Joe Biden and others expected on the inaugural stage. Even a faux President George W Bush showed up as inaugural officials worked out the kinks in their plans for what likely will be the biggest ceremony the nation's capital has ever hosted.

As the sky over the Capitol grew light, cannons boomed, military bands played marching music and stand-ins took their places.

The 6-foot 2-inch Brooks stood stock still as several handlers moved the man facing him, a stand-in for Chief Justice John Roberts, to the right, then left, then right again, before marking the spot with brightly coloured tape.

Small shifts and fixes were all part of a long day.

"It's important to rehearse this so it goes off flawlessly on the inauguration day," said Navy Chief Petty Officer Lucy Quinn, spokeswoman for the Armed Forces Inaugural Committee.

"The president is supposed to take the oath of office as close to noon as can possibly be timed."

Exercise doesn't seem to ease anxiety, depression

Exercise doesn't seem to ease anxiety or depression, says a recent study conducted in the Netherlands among twins, one of whom exercised, while the other didn't.

Marleen HM De Moor of VU University Amsterdam and colleagues studied 5,952 twins from the Netherlands Twin Register, along with 1,357 additional siblings and 1,249 parents.

Participants, aged between 18 and 50, filled out surveys about leisure-time exercise and completed four scales measuring anxious and depressive symptoms.

Associations observed between exercise and anxious and depressive symptoms "were small and were best explained by common genetic factors with opposite effects on exercise behaviour and symptoms of anxiety and depression," the authors note.

"In genetically identical twin pairs, the twin who exercised more did not display fewer anxious and depressive symptoms than the co-twin who exercised less."

Exercise behaviour in one identical twin predicted anxious and depressive symptoms in the other, meaning that if one twin exercised more, the other tended to have fewer symptoms.

However, the same was not true of dizygotic (fraternal) twins or other siblings, who share only part of their genetic material.

In addition, analyses over time showed that individuals who increased their level of exercise did not experience a decrease in anxious and depressive symptoms.

The results do not mean that exercise cannot benefit those with anxiety or depression, the authors noted, only that additional trials would be needed to justify this type of therapy.

US financial crisis: West`s loss is India`s gain

St Petersburg, June 08: The Western financial crisis means the fast-growing economies of Brazil, Russia, India and China will grow their share of the world economy even faster than originally forecast, the founder of the four-nation BRIC concept said.

The term BRIC was coined by Wall Street bank Goldman Sachs to describe how the four rising economies are likely to rival and overtake many of the West`s leading economies over the next half century.

Jim O`Neill, the Goldman Sachs economist who originated the term in 2003, said the financial crisis that began in US mortgage security markets was allowing the BRIC countries to take a bigger share of world gross domestic product.

"On a relative basis it definitely allows the BRICs to develop faster as they are going to take an even bigger share of GDP sooner," O`Neill told a news agency in an interview at an economic forum in Russia`s former imperial capital of St Petersburg.

"This is a financial crisis of the West and we must not forget that of the world`s six billion people most of them are not affected by this," he said. "I was in India four weeks ago and there were no signs of India being affected by all of this."

O`Neill, head of global economic research at Goldman, said China, India and Russia were actually growing faster than originally predicted by his research.

"Of the four BRICs, Russia, China and India have all grown on average two percent more than we suggested," he said. "It is a hell of a lot so they are now collectively 16 percent of global GDP so it is all happening a lot quicker."

The four BRIC countries have been seeking to form a political club to convert their growing economic power into greater geopolitical clout.

Last month in the Russian city of Yekaterinburg, the four sought to formalize their club at the first stand-alone meeting of BRIC Foreign Ministers.

"I would hope that Western leaders take note of that meeting and start to accelerate bringing them into the G8 club and the IMF because the world doesn`t want a separate club just looking after the growing countries the same as it doesn`t need an old club looking after the declining -- it needs a better club involving them both," O`Neill said.

"I think that the lack of progress by the G8 and the Western leaders to change is really bad and is one of the biggest problems in the world today," he said.

O`Neill says the combined GDP of the BRIC countries could overtake the combined economic might of the G7.

Detractors say optimistic predictions about the BRIC economies ignore major hurdles to their development such as future political instability, rampant corruption and decrepit infrastructure.

Economists repeatedly forecast in the 1950s and 1960s that Brazil would become one of the world`s top economic powers, only for its once-rapid growth to stall dramatically in the debt crisis of the 1980s and to stagnate throughout the 1990s.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has said Russia will become one of the top five economies of the world by 2020, but admits the rule of law needs to be strengthened and corruption has to be rooted out.

O`Neill said Russia should speed up some of its infrastructure projects and that corruption could sap Russia`s economic potential.

"At the core of it is a stronger self-confidence in a rule of law that everybody likes," he said. "In some ways Russia enjoys stability almost too much.”

"The Russian people like stability which given Russia`s history is very understandable and admirable but it should not come at the expense of things which are needed for private sector risk-taking, which are stronger property rights and a stronger rule of law."

Search for water in Martian soil

London, June 07: NASA`s Phoenix Mars Lander, which touched down on the surface of the Red Planet on May 2 has begin testing Martian soil for traces of water.

After two test scoops at a site nicknamed ‘Dodo,` the spacecraft successfully grabbed its first real shovelful of Martian soil on June 6.

The new sample, pulled from a neighbouring patch of ground dubbed ‘Baby Bear`, shows signs of a mysterious white substance – thought to be ice or salt – that had been seen in the practice digs.

The lander`s arm is now poised above the Thermal and Evolved-Gas Analyzer (TEGA) compartments, which will heat up the soil and test the resulting vapours for water and other components.

“This is really an important occasion for us, to be poised to make a measurement for the first time of the polar soils that`ll tell us how much water is in the soil,” chief scientist Peter Smith of the University of Arizona in Tucson, US.

TEGA will also test for organic molecules, as well as minerals that might have been shaped by water.

Because TEGA has only eight ovens for analysis, each of which can be used only one time, arm operators wanted to make sure they got just the right amount of soil – enough to guarantee some would fall into the pencil lead-sized opening to the oven, but not so much as to accidentally drop some onto other parts of the instrument.

“We`re ecstatic that we got a third to a quarter of a scoopful, roughly the size of a cup. We couldn`t be happier,” said robotic arm flight software lead Matt Robinson of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, US.

According to Smith, the first results from the TEGA tests will come in over the coming week.

Phoenix will also deliver another sample to the lander`s optical microscope as well as to the wet chemistry lab, which can test for components like salt.

The team may also return the robotic arm to Dodo, where the arm will dig down farther to look for a layer of ice in the soil.

wishng u all happy new year 2008

“Another fresh new year is here . . .Another year to live!To banish worry, doubt, and fear,To love and laugh and give!This bright new year is given usTo live each day with zest . . .To daily grow and try to beOur highest and our best!We have the opportunityOnce more to right some wrongs,To pray for peace, to plant a tree,And sing more joyful songs!”A very Happy new Year to you