Rugby stars visit to promote the sport ahead of New Zealand World CupIt seems like ages ago that the world’s attention was focused on the destructive effects of a 6.3-magnitude earthquake that caused widespread damage and multiple fatalities in Christchurch.In Korea, the Kiwi Chamber and Australian Chamber of Commerce will host a Rugby Charity Dinner at the Grand Hyatt Hotel on April 13 with proce

Foreign Affairs April 3, 2011

People who love raw milk cheeses and those who make them say what sets the cheeses apart is the distinctive flavors and the way they can change from season to season.Whether the taste is tangy, sweet, grassy or creamy, aficionados say, it’s almost always memorable.The flavor develops through a required 60-day aging process designed to kill harmful bacteria. Now, that process faces possible reregul

Food April 1, 2011

MOSCOW (AP) ― The American Ballet Theatre has returned to Moscow for the first time since the 1960s and the first time since the defection of Mikhail Baryshnikov, who left Russia’s famed Bolshoi Theatre to bring his luminous star power to the U.S. ballet company.ABT opened a three-night run Tuesday on the new stage of the Bolshoi Theatre, whose company was touring Canada when Baryshnikov defected

Performance March 31, 2011

LAS VEGAS (AP) ― Johnny Depp’s tour guide on his “Pirates of the Caribbean” voyages is plotting the course for a fifth installment even before the fourth movie sails into theaters.Producer Jerry Bruckheimer says he has a screenplay in the works for a fifth “Pirates” tale after May’s “Pirates of the Caribbean:On Stranger Tides” comes out.Based on the Disney theme-park ride, the original three “Pira

Film March 31, 2011

LOS ANGELES (AP) ― A website that sold Beatles songs online for 25 cents apiece before they became legally available has agreed to pay record companies nearly $1 million to settle a federal lawsuit.U.S. District Judge Josephine Staton Tucker signed off on the settlement between BlueBeat.com and music companies EMI Group PLC, Capitol Records and Virgin Records America on Friday. The judge ruled in

Performance March 29, 2011

CONCORD, New Hampshire (AP) ― Before becoming a bride eight times over, Elizabeth Taylor was a 17-year-old starlet scribbling letters to her first fiance, charting on pale pink stationery his progression from her one-and-only to the one who got away.“I’ve never known this kind of love before ― it’s so perfect and complete ― and mature,” Taylor wrote to William Pawley on May 6, 1949. “I’ve never lo

People March 29, 2011

LOS ANGELES ― If the music to the Season 9, Episode 5 installment of Fox’s animated sitcom “Family Guy” had a relaxed feel, maybe it was because of the 104-degree mineral water.Glenn Morrissette helped orchestrate the score after a leisurely soak last October in the natural hot springs in the tiny northwestern Wyoming town of Thermopolis.Morrissette did his work from his recording studio on wheels

Performance March 28, 2011

WARSAW (AFP) ― Six letters written by 19th century composer and pianist Frederic Chopin, thought to have been lost since World War II, were Thursday revealed by the Polish museum dedicated to the musical icon.Warsaw’s Chopin Museum said that it spent almost a decade trying to obtain the letters and dozens of other documents related to the composer after getting wind of them in 2003.The paper trial

Performance March 27, 2011

IN THE SERENGETI, Tanzania ― The lion isn’t sleeping tonight, and neither are most of the people around him.The eerie calls of male lions echo throughout the Serengeti at night.In a tent, even a luxury one, it is an unsettling sound, but the workers at the comfortable Kirawira Lodge in the western Serengeti smile reassuringly and insist that lions can’t work the zippers on the tent flaps. But even

Travel March 25, 2011