"The idea behind the slate is to gain more control of our future," said Marvel Studios chairman Avi Arad. "Marvel, by licensing films, left on the table sizable amounts of money."

The Manhattan-based company signed a deal for up to 10 of the films over eight years to be distributed by Paramount Pictures, which will only be paid distribution fees rather than keeping the bulk of the profits as studios did with past Marvel movies. And Marvel will not have to share toy or merchandise royalties with studios.

In addition to Captain America, Marvel is planning to produce films featuring the Avengers as well as Nick Fury, an Army hero and spy who has been given an infinitely long life by an elixir.

Helping clear the way, Marvel also announced a settlement with Stan Lee, the company's chairman emeritus and co-creator of characters including Spider-Man and The Hulk, who had sued for a share of past and future film, TV and merchandise profits. The settlement with Lee, who joined Marvel in 1939, cost Marvel a $10-million first-quarter charge.

"Also headed for the big screen are Ant-Man, Black Panther, Killraven, Silver Surfer and Thor, Marvel said. Plus there are original videos planned for Iron Man and Dr. Strange.

"I like lingerie that's lacy and normally white. But then I also love dressing up in pink lingerie -- and black is hot too. I have everything laid out in colours so I can pick them out quickly."

She added: "It's right off my bathroom so rather than going down to my main closet soaking wet, all dripping and nude, I decided to make a nice lingerie closet. That way I can jump out of my tub, run naked into the next room and put on a nice little number."

Zheng, a prolific Internet writer and poet, has been imprisoned since December 3 after writing articles critical of the Communist Party and Chinese government policy.

Zheng's trial lasted less than three hours and was attended by high-level authorities of northeast China's Liaoning Province, his brother Zheng Xiaochun told CPJ. Prosecutors cited 63 articles written by the journalist, and listed the titles of several essays in which he called for political reform, increased capitalism in China, and an end to the practice of imprisoning writers.

Zheng Yichun's defense lawyer Li Mingchang entered a guilty plea but argued that his client's writings are protected under Article 35 of the Chinese Constitution, which guarantees freedom of the press. Li said that this constitutional protection should outweigh charges of subversion brought under Article 105 of Chinese criminal law. He asked the court to consider the light sentence given last summer to Du Daobin, another Internet journalist who was charged with inciting subversion.

"I am an independent intellectual and my freedom is protected under the Chinese constitution," Zheng Yichun told the court, according to his brother. "If I committed a crime, I was not conscious of it. ... I am a patriot. ... I hope that the government will give me a chance."

"If we don't inspire players to role-play, we haven't done our job. But going along, staying in character is something of a trust the players keep. I understand British theater people call unintentional giggling onstage 'corpsing,' as a skit being performed quickly 'dies' from such misbehavior. Similarly, if players don't buy into being an agent of the Merovingian, say, and say or do things that break the illusion, our collective enterprise falters. Ultimately, though, it's incumbent on us to throw enough engaging conflicts, characters and surprises at players that they are content to dwell within the fiction.

"[T]his is kind of funny. I've found myself in an odd position, politically. The Monolith team [which builds the game from Chadwick's directions] shows me far too much deference, being the 'oracle of the Wachowski brothers' as I am. The brothers, of course, are occupied making new movies, and not actively managing the game. Basically, when I finish a new draft of the year's outline, I run it by them, and they offer 'notes' -- corrections and approvals. But nobody's ever given me a deadline schedule, or even pressured me too much to produce more. So far, my healthy guilt complex has caused me to produce enough content to stay ahead. But I could benefit from a rigorously structured editorial process."

"I think this movie is more true to who I am than my persona, which is not so much glib as sort of ironic," says Duchovny, before heading to the former site of the House of D — the Women's House of Detention, demolished in 1974 — at Sixth Avenue and 10th Street in Greenwich Village.

"Audiences may learn that about me through the movie. [The rest] is sort of a character I created to appear in public. "People will say House of D is a personal film, but what makes it personal is that it's about some of my own experiences. And I think the only way to make a movie that's truly universal to everyone is to actually be very specific. "In Hollywood, they say the phrase 'personal film,' as if you did it for yourself. It's not that way at all. I want to connect with people."

He also helps a mentally challenged co-worker, Pappas (Robin Williams), deliver meat around the city, and deals with a drug-addicted mother (played by Duchovny's wife, Tea Leoni). Duchovny appears at the beginning and end as the adult Tommy, now living in Paris and telling his story to his family. "About 14 percent of the movie is from my own life," says Duchovny. "I figured it out: I did deliver meat as a kid, but my mother did not have a pill problem, so those cancel each other out. ... Oh, and the French wife I have in the movie is fictional."

Batswala Dala, France Amoore and Tom Shane all have published letters to the editor in Bay Area newspapers. Trouble is, none of the men exist.

Under dozens of pseudonyms, Kyle Vallone has orchestrated the publication of scores of letters to the Times, San Francisco Chronicle and the Tri-Valley Herald during the last decade. A Times investigation found that the San Ramon man submitted more than 100 letters under fictitious identities to the three newspapers. Vallone estimated that he has had a hand in 200 bogus letters published in Northern California newspapers.

Vallone said the idea occurred to him while he was working on a Republican campaign in 1994. He and other workers would write letters on behalf of a candidate and send them to a "tree" of supporters who would sign their names and send them to newspapers. It occurred to him that he could skip a step, make up fictitious identities and send the letters via e-mail. He used free e-mail accounts and various voice-mail systems, his cell phone and home phone numbers to pull off his hoax.

Vallone, a three-time state Republican party delegate, said he didn't consider the deception involved. "I thought of it in terms of getting the message out and also, all these campaigns do it. The unions do it. Everybody does it. They all do it. They have trees of people that they use," he said. "OK, does that make it right? I don't know," he said.

Latin language courses at the Papal University are already oversubscribed. Italian schools dropped Latin as a compulsory language many years ago and classics pundits are being called in to explain the terminology on television. Vatican watchers are reaching again for their Latin primers.

Mrs. Landes, the former mother-in-law of screenwriter Anya Kochoff, is under no illusion about the level of ridicule she will have to endure, and she fails to see the funny side. A friend says, "She's p**sed. She is not looking forward to this film coming out."

Kochoff wrote the movie after divorcing designer Rich Landes, and her ex-husband, while aware of tension between the women in his life, had no idea the situation was so awkward. He says, "There were a lot of things that I didn't pick up on at the time. They never really got on."

"I had a great time making this short film, mostly because of the shortness of it," Ellen quips. "We wrote it in three minutes and shot it in two hours. I'm a purist that way. If it's going to be called a short film, it's going to be short for everyone involved. The caterer barely had time to put out the hoagies."

She adds, "I do enjoy working with American Express, although I was disappointed that they passed on my original idea. I wanted to make a feature- length historical drama documenting the rise and fall of the croissant. It's their loss."

Far and away the most colourful is [Joolz] Denby, 50 this year, who went to a private school in Harrogate. She soon rebelled and at the age of 19 married a member of Satan's Slaves bike gang. The marriage lasted four years but left a legacy.

Some 70 per cent of her body is covered with tattoos and she has 25 body piercings in her ears, nose and chin. A punk poet, she has toured with the band New Model Army for the past 25 years.

Billie Morgan, her third book, is published by the small firm Serpent's Tail after she was dropped by HarperCollins - and it is not for the faint-hearted. Replete with details about drugs, a teenage gang rape and an episode when a severed head is put on display at a bikers' party, it is the confessional but fictional story of a "biker chick" involved in a murder.

David Bradley, who bought Atlantic Monthly magazine from Mortimer Zuckerman for $10 million in 1999, said he had to decide between continuing to publish the Atlantic Monthly in Boston and continuing to publish the Atlantic Monthly at all.

The Atlantic Monthly, one of America's most prestigious magazines and a Boston icon since 1857, will move its editorial offices to its parent company in Washington to save money. The magazine, which has published the works of Mark Twain, Virginia Woolf and Martin Luther King Jr. since it was founded 148 years ago, will move in with Atlantic Media, its parent company, in the next year, Atlantic Media said in a statement.

"With a staff of only 37, the Boston office has proved a difficult size to sustain," the statement said, adding that staffers will join 160 editors, reporters, and designers working at the magazine's sister publications in Washington.

American literature has expanded beyond traditional themes and now so has one of the nation's most prestigious writing programs. "Our literary world is larger than it used to be. The fact that I'm the new director is an illustration of that," said Lan Samantha Chang, a first-generation Chinese-American who's taking over as director of the University of Iowa's Writers' Workshop.

Chang, whose books include Hunger: A Novella and Stories (Norton) and last year's novel Inheritance (Norton), has won prizes from the Greensboro Review and the Transatlantic Review. At Iowa, she received an MFA in 1993 and the James Michener-Copernicus Award, a fellowship for Iowa students of exceptional promise.

The chief executive of News Corp. (NWS) cited a recent report commissioned by the Carnegie Corporation, a philanthropic foundation, showing 44 percent of 18-to-34-year-olds say they use Web sites at least once a day for news. News Corp. is the parent company of the Fox News Channel, which operates FOXNews.com.

Murdoch said newspapers must overhaul how they gather and deliver news to collect the readers and advertising revenue shifting to the Web. "The trends are against us. Unless we awaken to these changes which are quite different than those five or six years ago, we will, as an industry, be relegated to the status of also-rans." "We've been slow to react. We've sat by and watched," he said.

"Some in the media liked to picture her as tough and hard and difficult but she was soft and with a lovely voice and a good sense of humor," Markson said. "She’d had knee surgery and she seemed not to have recovered very well from the surgery. She was rather frail of late," Markson said.

As for an analysis of Bush's playlist, Levy of Rolling Stone started out with this: "One thing that's interesting is that the president likes artists who don't like him."

Levy was referring to Fogerty, who was part of the anti-Bush "Vote for Change" concert tour across the United States last fall. McKinnon, who once wrote songs for Kris Kristofferson's music publishing company, responded in an e-mail message that "if any president limited his music selection to pro-establishment musicians, it would be a pretty slim collection."

Spring Wedding

I took your news outdoors, and strolled a while
In silence on my square of garden-ground
Where I could dim the roar of arguments,
Ignore the scandal-flywheel whirring round,

And hear instead the green fuse in the flower
Ignite, the breeze stretch out a shadow-hand

To ruffle blossom on its sticking points,
The blackbirds sing, and singing take their stand.

I took your news outdoors, and found the Spring
Had honoured all its promises to start
Disclosing how the principles of earth
Can make a common purpose with the heart.

The heart which slips and sidles like a stream
Weighed down by winter-wreckage near its source -
But given time, and come the clearing rain,
Breaks loose to revel in its proper course.

Appraising Mr. Motion in The Daily Telegraph, the poet Craig Raine allowed that he had written some "perfectly creditable" laureate poems. But then Mr. Raine branded a Motion poem not only derivative of a work by Wilfred Owen, but also reflecting an "inadvertent, unconscious lift" from one of his, Mr. Raine's, own poems.

Mr. Raine said, though, that he sympathized with the laureate's enforced inoffensiveness. "Good taste is the enemy of literature," he wrote, imagining what might happen if Mr. Motion could let reality, rather than discretion, be his guiding force.

Referring to two of the many royal scandals that seem to cry out for comment by an anti-laureate, Mr. Raine wrote: "It isn't that I'd like laureate poems entitled, "On the Occasion of James Hewitt Visiting Princess Diana for the Purpose of Consolation," or "Imagine Being a Tampax: Intimate Thoughts on the Mobile Phone."

In developing the film's screenplay, Karen noted, "we worked very closely with Clive and made it a point that every writer on the picture met with Clive and kept him up to speed every step of the way. I think it was a bit of a frustrating process (for Cussler) because with most of the scripts there were several writers involved and that was a time consuming process. I think for a writer who is used to sitting down and writing his novels quickly that was a source of some frustration. But ultimately we wound up with a script that is very loyal to his book and that people seem to really be responding well to."

"Matthew....has read every one of the [Dirk Pitt] books. Matthew took the initiative to go visit Clive a couple of times. [My wife] Karen and I were flying back east to Boston. We get on the plane and who else is on the plane but Matthew....So after five hours on the flight and talking about everything, both of us felt very strongly that in fact this guy's absolutely perfect for the role. He is Dirk Pitt. So we flew Clive in and had a dinner so Clive could meet again with Matthew and talk through all the issues. And there he is."

Matthew had gone to Mali (the former Sudanese Republic in western Africa, southwest of Algeria) and into the Sahara and had actually taken the trip that Dirk Pitt takes in the Sahara book. That's how passionate he was about it. I think when Clive heard that, it's pretty hard to discount that kind of passion."

What I learned is that, like anything else, the essay test can be gamed. (For that matter, the test to qualify as a reader can be gamed.) Readers are supposed to score essays based on whether the writing is organized, well reasoned and written with logical and writerly complexity. Readers are supposed to overlook minor errors in grammar and spelling. Varied sentences and vocabulary are good, and smooth transitions help. We're supposed to overlook the kind of examples students use to back up their arguments — personal anecdote is as valid as a riff from Renaissance history. Nor does it matter if there's any truth to the example used. So if kids tell you (and they do) that revealing secrets staves off insanity, just suspend all critical thinking and go with it.

If I had to prepare my children for this test, I'd say: Prepackage some thinking. Get familiar with a couple of Greek myths or literary classics that would work for multiple themes. One of the very few essays to score a "6" - a well-earned one - used Madame Bovary to illustrate the harm secrets can do. But the writer could also have used Flaubert's classic to discuss image versus substance, or ambition versus contentment or almost any of the nostrums test-makers use as essay prompts. (Remember, most of the scorers are former or current English teachers -- suckers for literary stuff.)

Readers who are puzzled about the alternative spellings have plenty of company. Adverbs of time and place have been bothering writers and proofreaders since the 12th century, and the end is not in sight. Obviously, we are dealing in this instance with the adjective "a" and the noun "while." Usually, they're wedded. Sometimes, they're separated. It is not easy to find a pattern of consistent usage, but let us try. The New York Times often seems to be stuck on the melded version: "Maj. Brown warned that it may take awhile to make an arrest."

In his Treasury for Word Lovers," Morton Freeman laid down a workable rule 20 years ago: Spell it as one word after a verb, two words after a preposition. By that rubric, reader Kline had it right -- he was staying awhile in Chicago, and also staying for a while. The rule works for me, but you should be aware that Merriam-Webster characteristically opts for anarchy: "Follow your own feel for the expression and write it as one word when that seems right and as two words when that seems right." The distinction "is not important at all."

At her sickest, she was unable even to lift her hands, so she would lie in bed and dictate the book into a tape recorder. On better days, her husband, photographer Tom Schworer, would carry her to her computer, where she would work for 20 minutes at a time before stopping to rest. On her best days, she could write about four or five hours, less than half of her normal level.

In her bleakest moments, Wells said she drew inspiration from another esteemed Southern author, Flannery O'Connor, who wrote while suffering from lupus, a chronic autoimmune disease that eventually killed her. "If ever there was a model to help me out here, it's Flannery," Wells said.