Actress Demi Moore leaves big-budget Hollywood behind as she stars in family comedy Happy Tears, where she plays a woman struggling to provide for her own family while caring for a senile father.
Directed by Mitchell Lichtenstein, Happy Tears had its world premiere at the Berlin film festival yesterday, where it is in the main competition.
Ms Moore, well known for starring roles in high-profile 1990s pictures like Disclosure, Indecent Proposal and G.I. Jane, said she believed independently produced pictures were no more risky than Hollywood studio fare given the economic climate.
"I think every project that you step into has an element of risk," said the 46-year-old. "It's much more important the company that you keep and the story that you get to tell. And I think that in today's world, independent really is no riskier than a studio film."
Police advise Shakespeare director
The director of a production of Romeo and Juliet at Shakespeare's Globe Theatre consulted a police chief yesterday over fears free shows for 10,000 teenagers may unwittingly glamorise knife crime.
Bill Buckhurst discussed the violent plot with Metropolitan Police Commander Steve Allen.
"The play contains scenes where two young men die from rival families and the director wanted to involve police because of comparisons with current real-life situations in terms of knife crime," a theatre spokesman said.
He said the version of the play that runs from March 9-13 will not be altered, but the director will take on board police recommendations around the use of knives to make sure the production is not seen to glorify violence.
EU warns of spy network
The European Commission faces a mounting risk of espionage by spies in many guises including lobbyists, journalists and "pretty trainees" with long legs, a spokesman said yesterday.
"Like any large-scale organisation which deals with sensitive or confidential information, there are always people who endeavour to gain access to this information," European Commission spokesman Valerie Rampi told a regular briefing.
She confirmed media reports of the existence of a note circulated internally by the EU executive warning its staff that "the threat of espionage against the Commission is increasing day by day".
She said intelligence officers or those directly linked to intelligence services had made "repeated attempts to compromise Commission information" using a variety of covers.
"One example of such cover is that of a trainee, the second is that of a member of a national administration who is on secondment, the third is that of a technical expert on IT (information technology) matters," Ms Rampi said.
Nazi hunters want probe on war criminal
Nazi hunters called on the Berlin government yesterday to investigate what they say were failings by German officials in the search for notorious war criminal Aribert Heim, dubbed "Dr. Death".
Mr Heim was wanted for killing hundreds of concentration camp inmates with lethal injections but according to a report by German television station ZDF and the New York Times last week, he died in Cairo in 1992, aged 78.
In the potentially embarrassing allegations against Germany, Efraim Zuroff, director of the Israel office of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, demanded that the German Foreign Ministry conduct an investigation of the role of the Embassy in Cairo. He said officials probably knew Mr Heim was in Cairo as early as 1981 when he extended his residence permit. At the very latest, when Mr Heim died in 1992, Embassy officials should have known about him, the statement said.
If witnesses in the ZDF and New York Times reports were right, an Embassy witness was called to Mr Heim's death bed to register the death, added the Wiesenthal Center.
Mr Heim's son Ruediger told ZDF in a televised interview his father had died of cancer of the rectum on August 10 1992.
Polish police shut pirate CDs plant
Polish police said yesterday they had broken up the largest producer of pirated CDs and DVDs in the European Union, closing factories that turned out films in Poland only a day after their release in western Europe."We have shut down two plants, in Warsaw and in (thesouthern city of) Rybnik which were producing fake CDs and DVDs," said Warsaw police spokesman Marcin Szyndler.
Ms Szyndler said police had seized some 54,000 fake discs that had a value of some 5 million zlotys ($1.43 million). "This was a largest such factory of illegal discs in Europe."