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Hollywood actor Russell Crowe has reportedly been handed two roles in the film ‘Nottingham’.According to MTV, the star was confirmed to play the Sheriff of Nottingham in the film but will now also play the lead Robin Hood in the epic, reports Hollywood.com.

‘It’s a good old adjustment of characters. One becomes the other. It changes,’ director Ridely Scott told MTV.

Sienna Miller will take on the role of Maid Marion in the new take on the famous Robin Hood tale.

The movie is slated to release November 2009.

He bends spoons and forks with the gaze of his eyes, gets the initials of the name of a stranger he has just met appear magically on his arm, and can even read your mind. Meet street magician Ugesh Sarcar, who is creating waves on UTV’s Bindass channel with his ‘3rd Degree’ show.Sarcar, not related to P.C. Sorcar Sr. who is regarded as the father of modern Indian magic, belongs to North India and is a Punjabi Rajput, born and brought up in Bangalore.

For the UTV show, which has completed 60 episodes and has the TRPs climbing up, Sarcar approaches strangers at restaurants and bends the forks and spoons on their table - with a candid camera capturing the events to be aired later.

Among his other feats are escaping after being buried alive, and also coming out successfully from a wine barrel.

Speaking about his performances, done without any props and in the open, Sarcar says, ‘Street magic is a different ball game altogether. There is no scope for error. In a stage magic show everything, from the setting to the acts, can be planned.’

‘In street magic, it is impromptu and nothing is decided. There is nobody to assist you and no element to help you. You have to perform in a zero error situation with no second chances,’ Sarcar told IANS in an interview.

‘In fact there is no script to my show on TV. It is all spontaneous,’ Sarcar said.

An illusionist, escapologist and a mind reader, Sarcar has emerged on the Indian street magic scene with ‘3rd Degree’, at a time when the only names in magic were those of P.C. Sorcar Jr. from West Bengal, and Gopinath Muthukad from Kerala.

A school dropout, he is the son of Professor M.C. Sarcar - also a magician and the founder of the Karanataka Magic Academy Trust, Bangalore.

‘I have been born and brought up in magic and I was always inclined towards it. I have spent around 13 years of my life doing everything to understand the human psychology. I have taken up various jobs including working in a call centre before taking up magic.

‘It is very important to get into the psyche of the human mind before performing. Although magic is pure science, it is defying logic that defines magic and definitely a part of misdirection too that works in some tricks,’ said Sarcar, whose favourite magicians include his father and David Copperfield, an American magician.

However, excellence at one’s art doesn’t come easy and requires rigorous practice. Sarcar shed light on the training he took before making it big on the small screen.

‘Before being sure that I was completely prepared for the audiences, I practised for around 18 hours a day and completely ostracised myself from any human contact for three years.’

So what’s his favourite trick?

‘Every single trick that I perform is my favourite as I have practised a lot on it.’

Sarcar also has plans to promote the art globally.

‘With my show and public appearances, I am not trying to promote only myself but magic on the whole. I am here to get people shed the wrong notions about magic. In fact, the biggest drawback for magic in India is the lack of investment,’ he said.

‘My father tried to sustain and promote magic and I am going to take it to the next level,’ said Sarcar, who was here to perform at the AIIMS Pulse 2008 college fest as a part of the Bindass ‘Campus Attack’ show.

Asked if he faced any apprehensions before going to the public and shocking them with his stunts, he said: ‘There are no apprehensions. I am always waiting to be out there with people on the streets. However, it’s awkward sometimes when people don’t share the sense of humour I use to keep the show going.’

‘My best is yet to come,’ he promises.

Egypt’s antiquities council says that archaeologists have unearthed a 3,000-year-old red granite head believed to portray the 19th Dynasty pharaoh Ramses II.

The Supreme Council of Antiquities says the discovery was made recently at Tell Basta, about 50 miles northeast of Cairo.

The council’s statement Thursday says the 30-inch high head belonged to a colossal statue of Ramses II that once stood in the area. Its nose is broken and the beard that was once attached to the king’s chin is missing.

The site at Tell Basta was dedicated to the cat-goddess Bastet and was an important center from the Old Kingdom until the end of the Roman Period. Archeologists are still digging on the location for the rest of the statue.

Getting away with Wi-Fi “dead zones” in large wireless networks that cover whole neighborhoods or cities can take a toll on your pocket. But now, thanks to a new technology, the whole procedure can be cheap and easy - without any dead zones.

Usually pre-deployment testing turns out to be so costly that majority of WiFi providers simply build their networks first and fill in the gaps later.

However, it’s still not easy, because of the paucity of inexpensive techniques for mapping out precisely which areas lack coverage.

Now, thanks to an award-winning technique developed at Rice University and Hewlett-Packard Laboratories (HP Labs), Wi-Fi architects can test and refine their layouts using readily available information.

The new technique uses a small number of measurements to predict how well a wireless transmitter will cover a particular portion of a neighborhood. he only information required is basic topography, street locations and general information about land use.

“In the real world there are many things than can interfere with signals and limit coverage,” said lead researcher Edward Knightly, professor in electrical and computer engineering at Rice.

He added: “Our goal was to efficiently characterize the performance of urban-scale deployments, and our techniques can be used to either guide network deployment or to assess whether a deployed network meets its performance requirements.”

The research, won best-paper honors last week at the annual MobiCom ‘08 wireless conference in San Francisco.

A New Zealand man says he fell ill after eating sweets made with tainted Chinese milk, local media reported Friday. Baby formula laced with melamine, an industrial chemical, has been blamed for the deaths of four Chinese infants and sickened about 54,000. The White Rabbit chocolate candies were ordered off shelves Thursday by New Zealand’s Food Safety Authority after it found they contained “unacceptable levels” of melamine. British supermarket chain Tesco has also ordered a recall of the sweets from its stores.

Auckland resident Oliver Li, who grew up in Wuhan in central China where the sweets were a childhood favorite, said he had eaten two packets of them before he developed kidney stones in June. He remembers thinking the sweets tasted unusual, Li told suburban newspaper the “Western Leader” in the northern city of Auckland.

Li believes the sweets might explain his “painful and embarrassing” experience with kidney stones. China’s tainted milk scandal came to light after infant milk formula sold by up to 22 Chinese companies including Sanlu Group Co.

, the Chinese partner of New Zealand dairy giant Fonterra was found to be contaminated with melamine. Melamine used to make plastics and fertilizer can cause kidney stones and lead to kidney failure.

Infants are particularly vulnerable. Food Safety Authority spokesman Geoff Allen has said he expects White Rabbit Creamy Candies to be off shop shelves by the end of the week.

Allen said the food watchdog is testing other products to ensure their safety.

Bomb threats and a flurry of menacing mobile phone messages sparked panic Thursday among students in Finland, as fears grew that copycat attacks would follow the nation’s second school massacre in 10 months.

At least one school was evacuated, police questioned two young men about violent Internet postings and a 15-year-old boy was reportedly detained for sending threats to another school.

In neighboring Sweden, police arrested a 16-year-old-boy after viewing a suspicious clip he had posted on YouTube and urged residents to report any threatening Internet postings to police.

Finnish police said text message threats were being spread around the western town of Kauhajoki, where a masked gunman killed 10 people and himself in a fiery rampage on Tuesday.

“The text messages are threatening in nature and are causing fear and hysteria among young people, and we must stop them,” police spokesman Urpo Lintula said.

He declined to give details on the content of messages, but said Finland saw a similar wave of threats after the previous school shooting at Jokela high school near Helsinki last year.

National Police Commissioner Mikko Paatero told Finnish MTV3 that Finland could face more copycat school shootings. “I really fear it’s possible,” he said.

Finnish media said several schools across the nation had received bomb threats. A school with 500 students in the southern town of Keuruu was evacuated due to suspicious text messages and Internet postings, the STT news agency reported.

In the west coast town of Turku, a 15-year-old boy was arrested for sending threatening messages to a school, STT said, while police in the central town of Kajaani detained two men aged 18 and 23 for over menacing messages they had posted on the Internet.

“They were fairly vague but they mentioned shootings in schools and bomb explosions,” Kajaani police spokesman Arto Lumikari said, adding the men were not believed to be planning any attacks.

Investigators were probing possible links between the Kauhajoki gunman, Matti Saari, 22, and 18-year-old Pekka-Eric Auvinen, who fatally shot eight people and himself at a high school in southern Finland in November.

They said Auvinen and Saari likely bought their guns at the same place and could even have been in contact with each other.

“The cases were similar. They were the same type of person, so it could be possible,” investigation leader Jari Neulaniemi told The Associated Press. “They had the same style of hair, same kind of clothing, same interests and ideals — and their deeds were the same.”

Both gunmen posted violent clips on YouTube before the shootings, both were fascinated by the 1999 Columbine school shootings in Colorado, both attacked their own schools and both died after shooting themselves in the head.

But Neulaniemi stressed that police had not been able to confirm a link between the shooters.

“We have (Saari’s) computer in our possession, but the Jokela case was almost a year ago, and we don’t yet know how far back the data go. We haven’t examined the computer or the telephone records,” he said.

Saari killed eight female students, one male teacher and one male student. A 21-year-old woman that Saari shot in the head is still hospitalized after having two operations.

Sanna Orpana, a Kauhajoki student, said she was in the classroom next door when the shooting started Tuesday at the Kauhajoki School of Hospitality, 180 miles (290 kilometers) northwest of Helsinki.

“We started to hear shooting and a kind of a rumble like tables falling down. We thought someone is playing around, fooling with toy guns,” Orpana told AP Television News. “A couple of us went to have a look in the other room through the door. The guy was there with a gun, and tried to shoot them.”

She said students hid under a table, then grew frightened that the shooter might come into their room and ran upstairs.

The government pledged to tighten Finland’s gun laws and keep mentally unstable people from obtaining firearms after Saari’s rampage. Interior Minister Anne Holmlund said a new proposal would give police greater powers to examine gun applicants’ health records.

But Finland has deeply held hunting traditions and many homes have guns. After the previous massacre, the government had pledged to raise the age for buying a gun from 15 to 18 but never did so.

The government also called for an investigation into police handling of the case. Police on Monday had questioned Saari about YouTube clips showing him firing a handgun, but said they found no reason to hold him.

Police were also searching for a person who appeared to have filmed some of Saari’s YouTube clips but said there was no indication Saari had an accomplice.

In Sweden, police raided the teen’s home in Koping, central Sweden, after seeing the YouTube clip, according to police spokesman Borje Stromberg. The boy was arrested for illegal weapon possession.

In a message Thursday on its Web site, Swedish police urged people to report any Internet postings that could be seen as “warning signals of planned crimes.”

Depressed people will soon be able to fight the blues without paying doctor a visit, all thanks to a self-guided computer-based treatment.Researchers at the National Space Biomedical Research Institute (NSBRI) are developing an interactive, multi-media program that will assist astronauts in recognizing and effectively managing depression and other psychosocial problems.

Such problems usually pose a substantial threat to crew safety and mission operations during long-duration spaceflights.

While the depression treatment is under development for NASA, project leader Dr. James Cartreine claimed that it could also be put to use on Earth.

“This project has great potential as a self-guided treatment for many people. Depression is the number one cause of disability days in the United States, but it’s not only about days lost. Depression also results in presenteeism - showing up for work but not really working,” said Cartreine, a member of NSBRI’s Neurobehavioral and Psychosocial Factors Team.

The depression treatment is part of the Virtual Space Station, a multi-media program that caters to multiple types of potential psychosocial problems and can be used for training before, and for assistance during, missions. Other problems being addressed via the Virtual Space Station include interpersonal conflict, and stress and anxiety.

Accoridng to Cartreine, the Virtual Space Station will make effective therapeutic depression treatment more easily accessible to astronauts aboard the International Space Station and proposed missions to the moon and Mars.

Right now, astronauts do have audio and video access to psychologists but that’s only when communication links are available.

Project co-investigator and former astronaut Dr. Jay Buckey said long-duration spaceflight can be tough on astronauts.

“While astronauts are not particularly prone to psychological problems, the environment is very demanding. On a mission, they face a lot of challenges that could lead to depression. These are unique NSBRI products that did not exist before. The Virtual Space Station is based on proven treatment programs and is a very helpful way to work on problems in general,” said Buckey.

The system’s multi-media approach for depression includes graphics and video featuring a psychologist who leads the user through a straightforward process called Problem-Solving Treatment. The system provides feedback based upon the information provided when answering a series of questions.

The first step of the process is to make a problem list and select a problem on which to work. The second and third steps are setting goals and brainstorming ways to reach them. The final two steps are assessing the pros and cons of possible solutions and making an action plan to implement them.

It will also help users plan and schedule enjoyable activities, which people who have depression often stop doing. Besides, the program provides preventative and educational information on depression.

The researchers received input from 29 current and former astronauts while designing the Virtual Space Station.

They said that some of the system’s other benefits include its portability and privacy.

“It can be delivered to the International Space Station on a flash drive and run directly from that drive, so that the astronaut has complete control over his or her data. The system is private and secure. The user is the only one who can share the information with others,” said Cartreine.

A previous version of the depression treatment system was beta-tested on research stations in Antarctica. According to Cartreine, feedback from that early test run has been positive, and a clinical evaluation of the latest version on 68 Boston-area volunteers would begin soon.

Finally, the researchers want to adapt the system for use in many different settings, giving people access to treatment they may not have now.

For example, people with depression often seek treatment by going to their primary care physician, so the researchers hope to adapt it for use at the doctor’s office or in a person’s home.

The system could also be beneficial in rural areas where clinical help is in short supply or nonexistent. Other possible locations for use include schools, social service offices, places of worship, military bases, prisons, commercial ships, oil rigs and underwater research stations.

The House on Wednesday voted to raise a cap on administrative costs for a government coupon program that helps consumers make the transition to digital television broadcasting.

The National Telecommunications and Information Administration had sought help from Congress with administrative costs, which were capped by law at $160 million. Congress approved an additional $20 million as part of an appropriations bill approved Wednesday.

The coupon program provides two $40 coupons per household to consumers who will need converter boxes when full-power television stations shift to digital-only broadcasting in February.

Federal law allocated $1.5 billion toward the coupon program with a maximum of $160 million to be used toward administrative expenses. So far, the NTIA has committed $157.2 million to IBM, the coupon program’s contractor — nearly $40 million more than the initial contract award, The Associated Press reported last week.

The agency sought approval for the increase to ensure coupons will continue to be distributed throughout the transition.

Hollywood actress Lindsay Lohan has defended lesbian lover Samantha Ronson after her father’s new outburst against the DJ.Michael Lohan had earlier made it clear that he does not intend to see his daughter with Ronson.

Later on his blog, he branded Samantha “dark, hideous” and “disgusting.”

“I don’t believe that the recent blogs posted by ‘Lindsay’ were written by her. There is a lot more to Samantha than meets the eye. Not that what we see is so pleasing anyway… what’s with this ‘person’? Look at the way she ‘dresses’. (Ronson is) dark, hideous and a disgusting representation of humanity,” Michael stated in an Email to X17 online.

“Once more, she uses her middle finger more than she uses words. Have you ever seen her apartment? For God’s sake, when she runs out of toilet paper she tells people to use the cardboard roll. (I was told this firsthand),” he added.

However, Lindsay has made it evident that she is sticking by her partner and has urged her father to take medication in order to get rid of his anger.

“My father obviously needs to be on medication to control his moods. He is out of line and his words show how much anger he has, and it’s dangerous and scary as it reminds me of how he treated my mother and I (sic) my whole childhood. He needs to be stopped. This is yet another reason why we aren’t speaking,” the Daily Express quoted Lindsay, as telling New York gossip column Page 6.

“My past is behind me, and that’s final. There’s nothing more to be said. All the false accusations that people try to make are simply because there’s no story when things are calm and good. But they might as well let it go because their lies don’t affect me anymore. Samantha is not evil, I care for her very much and she’s a wonderful girl. She loves me, as I do her, ” she added.

Oracle is expanding into the computer hardware business in an effort to make its database software run more efficiently.

CEO Larry Ellison unveiled his company’s plans to sell a “database machine” in a Wednesday presentation at an Oracle customer conference that attracted nearly 43,000 people. It marks the first time in Oracle’s 31-year history that the company has added hardware to its product line.

The machine, which is being manufactured and maintained by Hewlett-Packard Co., is designed to enable large companies to fetch information stored on databases more quickly. Oracle is the world’s largest seller of database software.