July 6, 2004

US box office 'beats $1bn record' BBC - The North American box office took $1.03bn during June, Hollywood Reporter found - a 14% increase on June 2003's previous monthly record. While  Motion Picture Association of America President Jack Valenti tours the country telling people that "File-sharing is just as bad as walking into Blockbuster, doing "the Wynonna Ryder thing" and slipping a DVD into your jacket". 4:24:45 PM

Marijuana advocates suffer lapse of memory, forget to turn in signatures KRNV, NV -It turns out the leaders of a drive to legalize possession of up to one ounce of marijuana in Nevada forgot to turn in 6,000 petition signatures. Doh! 3:19:13 PM

New Iraq government accuses Iran and Syria of backing insurgents Telegraph - The new Iraqi government will publish damning evidence this week linking foreign powers, including Iran and Syria, to the Muslim extremists and loyalists of the former regime who launched a bloody rebellion after the fall of Saddam Hussein. 3:10:25 PM

Portland Catholic Church Files For Bankruptcy WPBF Channel.com - An attorney says it's the first time a US archdiocese has had to file for bankruptcy because of lawsuits over clergy sexual abuse. 2:42:18 PM

Microsoft Patch Leaves Holes Open PC World - Microsoft's effort last week to fix a vulnerability in the Internet Explorer Web browser and end the latest series of Internet attacks doesn't address another closely related and dangerous vulnerability, according to a security specialist. 2:39:27 PM

Annan calls for peace in Sudan's Darfur Reuters - U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan has urged an African Union summit to back peace in Sudan's vast Darfur area, saying the crisis threatened to destabilise the region if attacks on civilians were not stopped. Sudan reluctantly agreed to about 300 African Union (AU) troops being deployed to protect truce monitors in Darfur, where fighting has driven more than a million people from their homes in what the U.N. says is the world's worst humanitarian crisis. 2:37:07 PM

Custom DVDs & Players For Academy Members Slashdot - In an effort to curtail the piracy and bootlegging of DVD screeners, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has endorsed a plan to distribute about 6,000 special DVD players to members that will play specially encrypted screener discs that would be earmarked for a specific academy voter and would play only on that person's machine. The Associated Press has the full story, while Laurence Roth, VP and co-founder of Cinea, Inc., the company behind the technology, says 'the discs, by themselves, cannot be hacked.' 11:56:26 AM

Iraqi group threatens to kill Jordanian militant al-Zarqawi if he ... Pacific Stars and Stripes - A group of armed, masked Iraqi men threatened Tuesday to kill Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi if he did not immediately leave the country, accusing him of murdering innocent Iraqis and defiling the Muslim religion. Al-Zarqawi, said to be connected to al-Qaida, is believed to be behind a series of coordinated attacks on police and security forces that killed 100 people only days before U.S. forces handed over power to an Iraqi interim government. 10:33:02 AM