1. "Former President Ford dies at 93": From CNN.

["Former President Gerald Ford, who became president in 1974 after the resignation of Richard Nixon, died Tuesday at age 93. Ford, the oldest surviving former U.S. president, died peacefully at 6:45 p.m. PT (9:45 p.m. ET) Tuesday at his home in Rancho Mirage, California, according to a statement from his office. The cause of death was not given."]

["No, compared to the florid, sublime expressiveness of Sirk and Fuller's later work, Shockproof is a relatively subdued film. But it's also an object of genuine wonder—in which Fuller's characteristically uncompromising, extreme plotting is given shape and conviction by Sirk's sophisticated mise-en-scene. The film begins with a pair of women's legs, clad in ratty black stockings and shoes, walking amongst the clean, dapper shoes of a mid-day crowd on Hollywood Blvd. A brunette walks into a hair salon and gets her hair dyed blonde. We quickly learn that we're watching Jenny Marsh (Patricia Knight), a beautiful, recent parolee who has just done time for murder. Her parole officer, the tough-as-nails Griff Marat (Cornel Wilde, embodying a typical Fuller character with a typical Fuller name), tells her, in a classic hard-boiled exchange, that she has to change her ways: "You gotta change your brand of men." "Who picks them for me, you?" "You won't have any problem making friends. Just make sure they're friends this time."]

[" Australia's giant prehistoric animals, including three-meter (10-foot) -tall kangaroos, were likely wiped out by aboriginal settlers, not climate change, a researcher said Tuesday. The question of what killed Australia's so-called megafauna—including giant kangaroos and wombat-like creatures as big as a rhinoceros—during the last Ice Age divides paleontologists. The most popular theories are that climate change drove the giants to extinction more than 40,000 years ago or that Aborigines, who arrived in Australia as far back as 60,000 years ago, were responsible because of over hunting or burning the vegetation upon which the creatures fed."]

["The problems of adapting literature to the screen are legion, but few novels are as resistant to cinematic translation as Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, Patrick Süskind's macabre, serious, sometimes self-consciously ridiculous picaresque about a man born with an extraordinary sense of smell and an absent moral compass. Following the fictional Jean-Baptiste Grenouille from pauper to master perfumer to serial killer, Süskind's prose is obstinately unfilmable, being intoxicated with the sensory minutiae of 18th -century France—especially its olfactory squalor and splendor. My first question to Tom Tykwer, director of Perfume's film version—perhaps the holiday season's least digestible entry as it so faithfully hews to the novel's heady mix of solemnity, irony, comedy, and corporeal horror—therefore had to do with issues of adaptation."]

["Founded in November 1996, Film-Philosophy is a 'salon-journal': an international para-academic 24-hour live-event version of specialised academic publishing, dedicated to philosophically reviewing film studies, philosophical aesthetics, and world cinema—with an online readership of over 5000 individual visitors every month, as well as more than 1400 permanent worldwide members of the email discussion salon (join here). Journal texts are published through the email salon, as well as on the website, so that they can be discussed and contested and continued by salon members."]
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