The travel experts predict that this will be a staycation summer, with gas prices over $4 and the economy melting like an Eskimo pie. It's always been a luxury to be able to hop a plane to Paris, to Venice, to the Grand Canyon. But as I read the welcome letter sent to my daughter from her camp director, I decided that she is luckier still. The real luxury travel of the modern age is not through space; it's through ...

The toughest anti-illegal-immigrant measure in a generation passed the Arizona legislature this week. If signed, as expected, by Republican governor Jan Brewer, the law will give local police sweeping new powers in regard to undocumented workers. Currently, immigration offenses are violations of federal, not state, law, and local police officers only can inquire about a person's immigration status if that person is suspected of another crime. Under SB1070, however, Arizona police will have the right to stop ...

TITLE: THE BEST INTENTIONS DIRECTOR: BILLE AUGUST WRITER: INGMAR BERGMAN THE BOTTOM LINE: Bergman's back and Bille's got him, for a handsome soap opera with a radiant star performance. Ingmar Bergman used to say, "I make each film as if it were my last." The < astringent passion he poured into his metaphysical melodramas -- The Seventh Seal, Persona, Autumn Sonata and many others -- testifies to that truth. So no one thought Bergman was kidding when in 1983 he ...

At least four performers were injured doing the technically demanding stunts. Opening night had to be delayed repeatedly as the show was being worked on. The critics slammed the show even before it was finished. Finally, most ignominiously, director Julie Taymor was ousted in March, as a new creative team was brought in to make major revisions in the Broadway musical that had become a late-night TV punch line. When Spider-Man: Turn off the Dark finally opened ...

Surely the most eagerly awaited film of the summer, J.J. Abrams' Super 8 whisks the viewer back to a night in 1979, when some Ohio kids shooting a zombie movie witness a terrible train crash. What escaped from the train, and what the kids do to find it, are just two of the secrets that fans of Abrams's Lost, Alias, Cloverfield and the Star Trek reboot have tried valiantly to unearth. All will be revealed Friday, June ...

To find the happy teacher lately became the scientific quest of Assistant Director Robert Hoppock of National Occupational Conference. He asked groups of teachers if they were happy in their work, why or why not. One-fourth of the unhappy teachers had been so from youth when they had wanted to run away from home. Thirty per cent of them felt that their jobs made them do things that hurt their consciences, and 40% thought there was too much politics in ...

Melinda Amedee was scheduled to have a tumor removed from her kidney at a New Orleans hospital on August 30. She lives far enough away from the city to have missed serious damage from Hurricane Katrina. But when the 17th Street Canal levee broke the day before, she knew she wouldn't be having an operation at the Ochsner Cancer Institute anytime soon. With a 25-year history of kidney problems, Amedee, 39, was worried about the delay, and ...

The spectacular success of Indians in the U.S. smashes old stereotypes and adds a dash of spice to the American melting pot By ANTHONY SPAETH When Manoj Night Shyamalan was growing up in suburban Philadelphia, his parents--both immigrants from India, both physicians--didn't hesitate to pile on the pressure. There was simply an assumption that I'd come in first in my class, he recalls. He was also expected to follow them into medicine. When he ...

Celebrated Turkish filmmaker Nuri Bilge Ceylan was awarded Best Director in Cannes on Sunday. Perhaps now Turks will finally go see his movies. Despite being heralded globally for his movie magic, Ceylan's films — slow-paced, poetic tales of individuals struggling against the bleak backdrop of modern Turkey — routinely flop back home. Distant, a previous Cannes competitor, was seen by just 20,000 people in Turkey — only one-fourth as many as saw it in France. His current ...

Burma has been rendered in journalism, activism and art as a country of plain dichotomies: good vs. evil, liberty vs. suppression, the saintly Aung San Suu Kyi vs. the brutal monolith of the military junta. By its very premise, Burma Soldier, which airs this evening on HBO, muddies this picture. The documentary's subject, Myo Myint, is a former soldier who gave his adolescent years to the regime but came in adulthood to join the democratic opposition against it. ...