A 40-year-old needs to retire his record as America's oldest male virgin. A schlub gets drunk and impregnates a woman he just met. The two films that Judd Apatow has written and directed, not including the 493 other comedies he's produced in the past two years, are relationship pictures. The dialogue may be raunchy, the subsidiary characters beyond rude, but at the movies' core, Apatow wants you to know, there's a real, beating, borderline-mushy heart. That heart ...

At 4 p.m. the Iranian government broke up an attempted memorial service at a cemetery, but very soon after, tens of thousands of protesters poured into the streets of central Tehran the night of July 30, overwhelming Iran's feared security forces. The crowds burned tires, honked horns, waved peace signs and chanted, "Death to the dictators." Because the demonstrators gathered in several neighborhoods throughout the capital as well as at the country's largest cemetery, 20 km south of the ...

Given the magnitude of Japan's recession, it should perhaps come as little surprise that the fantasy-obsessed animation industry has received a hard dose of reality. Yasuo Yamaguchi, executive director of the Association of Japanese Animators, said the industry has been rocked by the country's deepest recession since World War II. "The spread of free Internet downloading is having a deadly effect," he said. Japanese animation is roughly a $2 billion-a-year industry. Revenues peaked in 2006 but have since fallen ...

A verdict is expected Friday morning in the subversion trial of Myanmar opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, court officials said. All lawyers involved in the case finished closing arguments this week. Suu Kyi, 64, and two of her housekeepers are being tried on charges stemming from a May 3 incident in which American John William Yettaw allegedly swam across a lake to her home and stayed for two days. The government said Yettaw's presence in the closely guarded home ...

The United States on Thursday imposed economic sanctions on a North Korean company that the United Nations said is linked to the country's nuclear weapons program. A U.S. Treasury Department statement said Korea Hyoksin Trading Corporation is owned or controlled by Korea Ryonbong General Corporation, which has been designated by the United Nations as a proliferator of weapons of mass destruction. The order freezes any U.S. assets of Hyoksin and prohibits any Americans from dealing with it, the statement said. ...

A diary reported to have come from a top Colombian guerrilla leader killed last year says key officials in Ecuador accepted money from the rebels and had connections with Mexican drug gangs. The money was meant to finance Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa's 2006 election campaign, Marxist rebel Raul Reyes is said to have written in a diary allegedly obtained after his death. Ecuador denies the allegations and has asked the Organization of American States to investigate. "The president of the ...

Brazilian authorities on Thursday ruled the death of former world boxing champion Arturo Gatti a suicide, according to local media reports. Gatti's death initially had been investigated as a murder. The boxer's widow, Amanda Carina Barbosa Rodrigues, who had been arrested as a suspect, was released from jail Thursday, the newspaper O Diario de Pernambuco reported. Gatti was found dead on July 11 in a rented condo in Brazil, where he was taking a vacation with Rodrigues and their young ...

Don't look now, but they're all around you. They're standing by the copy machine, hovering by the printer, and answering the phone. Yes, they're the overworked, underappreciated interns: young, eager, and not always paid. And with just 20% of the graduating class of 2009 gainfully employed, according to the National Association of Colleges and Employers, there are more and more of them each day. The importance of internships for securing full-time work has dramatically increased over the years: ...

Judd Apatow is working much harder on this article than I am. He wants to meet at 8 a.m., suggests six different events I can accompany him to and sends me more e-mails checking on my progress than my editor does. The two-minute video interview that I promised TIME.com turns into Apatow taking my camera, directing me for 15 minutes and editing it himself. It's not entirely surprising — after all, I'm lazy — but it helps explain how ...

One of the most telling, and overlooked, aspects of the brouhaha over the arrest of Henry Louis Gates Jr. is the particular cast of Gates' defenders. There was Deval Patrick, the fresh-faced black governor of Massachusetts, who called the arrest "every black man's nightmare." There was Vernon Jordan, noting that the event "tells us that the election of Barack Obama did not automatically erase racism." There was former Congressman Harold Ford, moderate to a fault, passionately insisting that once ...