Kevin Clash is an Emmy-award-winning performer and producer with dozens of TV and film credits to his name, but he's far better known as a furry red monster. Clash is the puppeteer and the voice behind Elmo, one of the most popular characters on the seminal children's television show Sesame Street, which this week marks its 40th anniversary with a series of special episodes and a two-disc DVD set, Sesame Street: 40 Years of Sunny Days. Clash spoke to ...

With its upcoming PSPgo, Sony is betting that you like "new and shiny" more than you like "money and savings." That's not to say that we dislike it. In fact, the PSPgo is attractive, playable and pleasingly compact. The fourth entry in the PlayStation Portable line is considerably more toteable than its predecessors, with a slick form factor that resembles a slider phone. Measuring in at 5 x 0.6 x 2.7 inches (closed) the PSPgo is about half the ...

Facebook's user base is nearly as large as the U.S. population and, for the first time, the site has turned a profit. That was the double-barreled announcement Tuesday from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who thanked the site's users for helping its online community cross the 300 million threshold. There are about 307 million people living in the United States, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. "We're just getting started on our goal of connecting everyone," Zuckerberg ...

U.S. President Barack Obama announced this week that the "time for bickering is over" and then found out just how wrong he could be. Obama convened a joint session of the Senate and House of Representatives Wednesday for a televised prime-time address, the kind of speech-in-the-spotlight that presidents give only a few times in their entire careers. His goal was to finally convince Congress to pass a healthcare reform plan after months of squabbling. There is a certain ...

With the Boston skyline a sparkling backdrop framed in the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library's enormous windows, 13 of Kennedy's closest friends, colleagues and family members shared their favorite personal, poignant and sometimes bawdy memories of Rose and Joseph's youngest son, Edward M. Kennedy. "Captain Ahab," former Senator John Culver pronounced Kennedy after recounting a college-years tale of the first time Kennedy had taken him sailing — an episode where Culver coughed up two partially digested salmon ...

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez said he is preparing to break off diplomatic relations with Colombia over the neighboring country's plan to allow U.S. troops access to its military bases. "It is going to happen," Chavez said on Tuesday in a state broadcast. "We are going to prepare for this, because the Colombian bourgeoisie hates us. And now, it just isn't possible to make up. No, it is impossible. "The agreement of the seven bases is a declaration of war ...

Britons including Prime Minister Gordon Brown have leapt to the defense of their creaking healthcare service after President Barack Obama's plans for a similar system in the United States were branded "evil" by Republicans. Tens of thousands of people have joined a Twitter group expressing pride in the UK's National Health Service (NHS), which offers free taxpayer-funded medical care to all British residents, while leading politicians have spoken out in support. Republican former vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin earlier this week ...

Christina Cimino was logging onto Twitter on Thursday morning when something happened that she found deeply unsettling. "I got some weird error message, and I'm like, 'What's going on!" the 24-year-old said. That error message was the scourge of online social networkers worldwide on Thursday as cyber-attacks shut down Twitter and caused sustained glitches in other social-media sites like Facebook and the blogging site LiveJournal. Twitter co-founder Biz Stone wrote the sites were the victims of what "appears ...

Meryl Streep remains a wonder. With her voice riding precariously up and down the scales like a tipsy soloist, Streep brings aplomb and gusto to her sympathetic comic take on the august mother hen of TV cooks, Julia Child, in the new "Julie & Julia." The performance goes well beyond caricature in its expressivity and exhilarating idiosyncrasy. It's another feather -- an ostrich plume -- in the actress's bountiful cap. It's too bad that "Julie & Julia," which alternates the ...

In his inauguration speech at the Iranian parliament, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had something to say for almost everyone -- his supporters, his opponents and those he called "enemies" without naming names. He hailed what he called an "epic election" but didn't go into the turmoil of the past two months that ensued. No word on the reformist movement calling the vote rigged or demonstrators who chanted for weeks slogans such as, "Death to Ahmadinejad." No mention of those who demanded ...