Konstantinos Sourmelis, a 56-year-old technician for OSE, Greece's state-owned railway, marched to central Athens on Wednesday to send parliament a simple message: Stop selling out the country. Like the thousands of other demonstrators who protested in the country's latest general strike, Sourmelis accuses the government of scapegoating OSE and public utilities as part of its proposed privatization plan, the next in a string of attempts to raise the billions that Greece owes foreign creditors. "In the long ...

Before the drama Mad Men could return for its third season, AMC and creator Matthew Weiner had to resolve a conflict over — fittingly for a series set on Madison Avenue — advertising. The network wanted to add two minutes of ads; Weiner didn't want to cut the show. The eventual compromise — each episode will run an hour and two minutes — preserves the show's generous run time, 48 minutes or so sans commercials, compared with 42-ish for ...

You want to make a comedy about guys who learn the true meaning of bromance on a horrible weekend in Vegas, but you can't spend a lot of money on talent. Which actors do you cast? The leading role of Phil, the smart, energetic audience surrogate, might have suited Jim Carrey or Vince Vaughn, so go with Bradley Cooper, who was Carrey's pal in Yes Man and Vaughn's preppie torturer in Wedding Crashers. Steve Carell would have been perfect ...

"Get a life!" the old Commander Kirk, William Shatner, angrily told die-hard Trekkies in a famous Saturday Night Live skit. Over the past four days the venerable TV and movie franchise got new life by winning the box-office weekend. The first Trek movie to boldly go without a colon in the title amassed $76.5 million in its first four days, including $4 million from Thursday night shows, according to early industry estimates. That should leave the Paramount executives beaming: they ...

The first frame of the 2009 summer blockbuster season saw nice guys finish first, and second. On Thursday night Hugh Jackman was on The Daily Show, Matthew McConaughey on The Tonight Show, both playing the adoring dad with anecdotes about how cute and flirtatious their young sons are. On Friday moviegoers started clogging the plexes to see these courtly musclemen in their signature roles: Jackman as a lupine superhero, McConaughey as a stud in need of fixing. X-Men Origins: ...

"I am new ... I am new ..." There is indeed something new about Kutiman's approach to making music: all his songs, and the accompanying videos, have been painstakingly -- and brilliantly -- clipped together from YouTube clips of disparate, mostly amateur musicians. The source material for his songs is often rather pedestrian: a sidewalk rapper, a school concert, or a how-to video from some guitarist in his bedroom. But there's considerable talent and creativity in the way ...

When Florida legislators recently struggled to balance the battered state budget, they decided to plug holes with $190 million from a $300 million affordable-housing trust fund. After all, why should a cash-strapped state shell out money for new home construction when there are tons of vacant homes just waiting to be snapped up? One of the few benefits of a housing crash, theoretically at least, is supposed to be that home buyers who were previously priced out of the market ...