Rodrigo Duterte, the mayor of Davao City, is sitting in his favorite bar, After Dark, a glass of brandy in front of him, a .38 pistol tucked in his waistband. He's wearing jeans and a short-sleeved shirt loudly adorned with wine bottles and bunches of red and green grapes — the same outfit he wore to work. While other guests take turns singing along with the piano player, Duterte tells a strange and disturbing story. In 1993, Davao's San Pedro ...

What does Mattel know about the movie business? More than you might think. Toy companies are so intertwined with the Hollywood creative process these days that studios often bring in big names like Mattel for feedback early in the development process of big blockbuster films. Why? Because toy makers and film makers are a match made in marketing heaven. Studios get access via manufacturers like Mattel, to the prime audience for some of their big ...

How many comic-book "origins" movies will audiences pay to see in seven weeks? For North American moviegoers, apparently, three's a crowd. Green Lantern, the first movie to be based on the trans-galactic hero introduced by DC comics in 1941, won the weekend with $52.7 million, according to early studio estimates — but that was the lowest take for the summer season's preternatural dudes. In early May, audiences bought into Thor, giving the Marvel thunder god $65.7 million in ...

TITLE: A MURDER IN WARTIME AUTHOR: JEFF STEIN PUBLISHER: ST. MARTIN'S PRESS; 414 PAGES; $22.95 THE BOTTOM LINE: This is the best military morality tale since The Caine Mutiny. CAPTAIN ROBERT MARASCO, WHO pulled the trigger, said the bullet that killed Thai Khac Chuyen made the sound of a "tire puncture" and splattered "blood, skull and bits of brain" on him and the other two Green Berets in the boat. Undaunted, the trio rolled the body of the alleged North ...

Green technology has no history — which isn't to say that it has no past. For many Americans the subject sprang into being a few years ago, maybe around the time the Al Gore documentary An Inconvenient Truth hit theaters, or when they first saw

Frank Lampard and Steven Gerrard both scored twice as England booked their place at the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, with an emphatic 5-1 victory over Croatia in their Group Six clash at Wembley Stadium. Chelsea midfielder Lampard converted a penalty in the eighth minute after Aaron Lennon was brought down inside the box following a clumsy challenge from Josip Simunic. Gerrard added a second for Fabio Capello's side in the 18th minute when he headed home an excellent ...

After Hurricane Katrina flattened New Orleans exactly four years ago, on Aug. 29, 2005, the city emerged as an inadvertent symbol of global warming, the first American victim of climate change. Over 200,000 homes were destroyed during the Category 5 hurricane. But in the years since, the Crescent City has quietly embraced a new and unexpected role as a laboratory for green building. Sustainable development groups that range from the international nonprofit Global Green to earth-friendly celebrities like Brad ...

Three years ago many would have dismissed the notion that a significant supply of the world's automotive fuel could come from algae. But today the idea, while still an adventurous one, is getting much harder to ignore. Back then there were only a handful of companies seriously focused on producing algae fuel. Now there are well over 50, according to Samhitha Udupa, a research associate with Lux Research. The number should double within the next year or two, ...

The Iraqi government implemented new security measures a day after a string of bombings in Baghdad killed at least 100 people and wounded hundreds more, an interior ministry official told CNN on Thursday. The measures, ordered by Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, include additional security checkpoints across the capital, more stringent vehicle searches and random security stops. The stepped-up security followed a late-night meeting that included al-Maliki and Iraq's defense, interior and national security ministers, along with senior representatives ...

The term "dirty money" is for real. In the course of its average 20 months in circulation, U.S. currency gets whisked into ATMs, clutched, touched and traded perhaps thousands of times at coffee shops, convenience stores and newsstands. And every touch to every bill brings specks of dirt, food, germs or even drug residue. Research presented this weekend reinforced previous findings that 90 percent of paper money circulating in U.S. cities contains traces of cocaine. "When I was ...