| Ledger's Sleeping Hits
Maybe that despised manager at Best Buy, who rushed to display of DVDs starring Heath Ledger, understood us better than we did ourselves. Amazon.com's chart of the most popular DVDs for sale, usually dominated by those recently released, contains three new arrivals: 10 Things I Hate About You, A Knight's Tale and Brokeback Mountain -- in 6th, 11th and 13th place respectively. All three movies on the online retailer's top 25 list star the Australian actor who died, of an apparent overdose, on Tuesday. (Of course more want to remember Ledger as high-school hero, or lusty knight, than as sad gay cowboy, the 28-year-old star's most critically acclaimed role.) After the jump, the chart. .
United States
The very steep gains in America's Chinese import bill were fueled as sharp falls in the dollar cut [American] buying power abroad." Now, British economists are "increasingly concerned over signs that the same price pressures from [more costly] Chinese imports are emerging on this side of the Atlantic." Reacting to this news, a Times reader based in Canada, reflecting the international scope of this development, wrote: "We sold our manufacturing soul to China[;] now we have to pay for it, and now you can't even remortgage your house to get the credit you will need." .
Charting a Creative Path Out of Trouble
HAWTHORNE, Calif. -- Jennifer Murphy knows tough schools. She has been cursed at and threatened, has broken up fights and confiscated weapons. Still, she looks slightly queasy as she sits in her glass-walled principal's office, staring at a huge flat-screen monitor. A videotape is playing. It shows a teenage girl standing outside the main office of Murphy's school. The girl glances around furtively, then hoists herself onto a counter and slides through a pass-through window, into the office. Murphy freezes the image, then rewinds it. The girl goes through the motions in reverse, hopping down, backing away. Murphy does this repeatedly, forwarding, reversing, forwarding again, as if willing the sequence to change. It doesn't. The girl makes the same bad decision each time.
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