Since its inception in 1984, Cirque du Soleil has taken its intoxicating mix of acrobatics and theatrics around the world. The Montreal-based troupe has staged tent shows in every major North American city, traveled Europe and Asia, and built permanent shows — all-time marvels like O and K — in Las Vegas, Orlando, Tokyo and Macao. This week, with the official premiere of its new show Zarkana, Cirque finally found its ideal home: New York's Radio City ...

The critics reacted like heartbroken suitors, but Pixar's Cars 2 got its motor running at about the same pace of the 2006 original. The G-rated sequel earned $68 million, according to early estimates, to win the weekend at the North American box office, while the R-rated Bad Teacher stormed into second place with $31 million. After 11 consecutive animated features that scored as both popular hits and reviewers' sweethearts, Pixar was bound at some point to produce ...

The raw figures say that X-Men: First Class, Marvel's latest extension of its mutant-superhero franchise, won the weekend with $56 million at the North American box office, according to early studio estimates. The film-long flashback — in which young Charles Xavier opens his school for the gift-abled and first locks wills with his turbulent future rival Magneto — launches what Marvel hopes will be a series as profitable as the first three X-Men films, from ...

As big as a football field and nearly as empty, Barack Obama's re-election headquarters looks like a start-up gone wrong. Wires sprout like weeds from the carpeting, legions of bookshelves stand empty, and the swing-state maps hastily pinned to the wall are freebies from the AAA auto club down the street. In one room that could fit hundreds of people, just a few dozen sit at long desks. Most don't look old enough to buy a beer. ...

By a mother's standards, Andrea De Cruz didn't need to lose weight. But show business imposes strict requirements on appearance, and when the dial on the Singaporean TV actress's bathroom scales spun to more than 48 kilos, De Cruz started taking a Chinese diet pill named Slim 10 that she purchased from a colleague. Two months later, De Cruz, 28, was near death, unconscious in a hospital in Singapore. Doctors at first were baffled. But they came to suspect that ...

Iran may have had a political boost from the Arab Spring in North Africa and the Middle East — with some new regimes apparently more sympathetic toward Tehran while others brace themselves against the Iranian regime's influence among opposition movements in the region. But there is no attendant economic windfall to all the change. Indeed, the Islamic Republic, the second largest oil producer in OPEC, has come to be very concerned about petroleum. Iranian oil ministry officials are ...

Sunday night, on the eve of the fifth 9/11 anniversary, docudrama was dynamite in North America. As millions in the U.S. watched the Clinton Administration botch snuffing out al-Qaeda on the first of ABC TV's two-part miniseries The Path to 9/11, hundreds of Canadians crowded into a Paramount multiplex theater to see the Toronto International Film Festival's world premiere of Death of a President, a sober fakeumentary from Britain's Channel 4 that imagines the assassination of the ...

When France temporarily blocked trains from Italy headed to French coastal destinations over the weekend, the move marked a dramatic escalation in the two countries' spat over how to handle migrants fleeing unrest in North Africa — and raised legal questions about fundamental travel accords long embraced many European Union member states. But the clashes over the trains carrying Tunisian passengers from Italy in to France — and E.U. points beyond — are even more significant in ...

For most countries, the existence of a massive fossil-fuel deposit within its sovereign territory would be gratefully welcomed as an economic windfall. But the delight in Israel at the recent giant gas discovery off its northern coastline is tempered by the knowledge that it could provide the spark to ignite the next war between the Jewish state and its mortal foe to the north, Lebanon's militant Shi'ite Hizballah. The stakes are enormous. Both Lebanon and Israel currently have ...

Facing reductions in state funding, public universities from Michigan to Arizona to North Carolina have slashed budgets and hiked tuition. The most extreme case is California where University of California regents voted this week to increase tuition a whopping 32% to more than $10,000 annually — a three-fold increase in a decade. The move was greeted by student demonstrations. During two days of protests at UCLA, where the UC regents met to vote on the fee increase, about 2,000 students from the 10-campus system confronted riot ...