Syria's President Bashar al-Assad used his third televised appearance in the three months since anti-regime protests first erupted to deliver a monotonous, rambling and technocratic speech to a handpicked audience at Damascus University on Monday — and while the autocratic leader promised a national dialogue, the offer is unlikely to damper the violent dissent rocking his country. There was little new in his more than hour-long address. In many ways, it was basically a repeat of his first speech before Parliament on March 30,

On Friday, before an audience of military officers from around the world, Russia's top generals made a startling admission of weakness. After 2015, they said, Russia may no longer be able to launch a nuclear strike against the West, because the planned U.S. missile shield over Europe would by then be advanced enough to blow Russian rockets out of the sky. This eventuality, which Russia's top brass have never admitted before, would finally dislodge the Cold War ...

It is half an hour before showtime, and Oprah Winfrey is a lake of calm amid the gusts of activity around her. While a hairdresser and a makeup man are fussing over her, an Oprah Winfrey Show producer, Dianne Hudson, is giving her a ten-minute prep session for this morning's show. The subject is B.S. -- people who use it, people who hate it -- and the topic is giving the host some trouble. "I'm trying to relate to it," ...

The numbers say Thor won the weekend, again taking moviegoers to that Norse altar in the sky and winning the North American box office with $34.5 million, according to early studio estimates, for its second week at the top of the heap. But the snickering Bridesmaids led by Kristen Wiig may have the last laugh. The R-rated sisterhood comedy pulled in $24.4 million, nearly twice what its home studio, Universal, had cautiously predicted. Asked to pay to ...

To say that Pablo Picasso dominated Western art in the 20th century is, by now, the merest commonplace. Before his 50th birthday, the little Spaniard from Malaga had become the very prototype of the modern artist as public figure. No painter before him had had a mass audience in his own lifetime. The total public for Titian in the 16th century or Velazquez in the 17th was probably no more than a few thousand people--though that included most of the ...

One day when he was 17, Marlon Brando took a bottle of hair tonic to school. When nobody was looking, he dribbled a thin stream of the stuff down a corridor, into an empty study room, and up the front wall. On the wall he scrawled, with the almost invisible liquid, a shocking word. Next period, when the room was full, he set a match to the hair tonic. Blue flame whooshed through the room, and the handwriting on ...

Days before the wedding of His Royal Highness Prince William Arthur Philip Louis and Catherine Elizabeth Middleton, it began: the inexorable buildup of spectators along the ceremonial route, at first a straggle of flag-bedecked diehards, then the crowds and finally hordes, all intent on squeezing into the same small corner of a sprawling city. Some were locals, but many had traveled across countries and continents. Those lucky or determined enough to grab the best vantage points ...

A Manhattan audience, looking unseasonably plushy, last week cooed and clapped its way through the revival of a cockeyed opera—Four Saints in Three Acts. The author of its words, expatriate Gertrude Stein, is still expatriate in Occupied France. The author of its music, Expatriate Virgil Thomson, now repatriated in Manhattan, supervised the second showing. At the original production in Hartford, Conn., people actually wept at the Cellophane scenery, the lovely costumes, the adroit stage business, and Harlem Negroes singing ...

It's just three nights after the premiere of the slick, vivacious new Broadway musical Jersey Boys: The Story of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, but already the audience at the August Wilson Theatre on West 52nd Street dresses like the crowds you'd see in the fifth year of Mamma Mia! Tight-fitting tops, carefully pomaded hair, ostentatious gold neckwear ... and the women look pretty gaudy too. I mention this not because I'm a dress-code martinet , but to indicate that ...

The Movie That Made a Supreme Court Justice Around the time that Justice Sonia M. Sotomayor was entering college, the man who would eventually become her husband took her to see a film by Sidney Lumet. It was “12 Angry Men,” from 1957, about a jury deliberating on the case of a young man accused of murder. That film turned out to be a pivotal moment in the life of Justice Sotomayor, who at the time had been considering a career in ...