Washington: The White House is honouring actor and director Clint Eastwood and singer Bob Dylan with arts and humanities awards. The White House calls Dylan “an icon of youthful rebellion and poetic sensitivity” and says Eastwood’s films and performances are “essays in individuality, hard truths, and the essence of what it means to be American.”
Eastwood and Dylan did not go to the White House to receive their awards, but several others were expected at a ceremony on Thursday night in the East Room with President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama.
—AP

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Douglas son denied bail in drug case
New York: A New York federal judge has denied bail to the son of actor Michael Douglas in a drug dealing case. Cameron Douglas pleaded guilty in January to dealing large quantities of methamphetamine and cocaine while holed up in a trendy Manhattan hotel.
The 31-year-old Douglas was arrested in July 2009 at the Hotel Gansevoort in downtown Manhattan. Prosecutors said at the time Douglas had signed a plea agreement. He faces a minimum 10-year prison term at his sentencing in April. He has acted in movies like It Runs in the Family starring his father and grandfather Kirk Douglas.    —AP

Paris: An iceberg the size of Luxembourg knocked loose from the Antarctic continent earlier in February could disrupt the ocean currents driving weather patterns around the globe, researchers said on Thursday.
While the impact would not be felt for decades or longer, a slowdown in the production of colder, dense water could result in less temperate winters in the north Atlantic, they said.
The 2,550 square-kilometre block broke off on February 12 or 13 from the Mertz Glacier Tongue, a 160-kilometre spit of floating ice protruding into the Southern Ocean from East Antarctica due south of Melbourne, researchers said. Some 400 metres thick, the iceberg could fill Sydney Harbour more than 100 times over. It could also disturb the area’s exceptionally rich biodiversity, including a major colony of emperor penguins near Dumont d’Urville, site of a French scientific station, according to the scientists.
“The ice tongue was almost broken already. It was hanging like a loose tooth,” said Benoit Legresy, a French glaciologist who has been monitoring the Metz Glacier via satellite images and on the ground for a decade in cooperation with Australian scientists.
The billion-tonne mass, 78 kilometres long and half-again as wide, was dislodged by another, older iceberg, known as B9B, which split off in 1987.     —AFP

London: The battle of the sexes is finally over — and it’s bad news for the guys. According to the results of an unscientific experiment of a game of Trivial Pursuit, women are smarter than men.
Five months ago, makers of the game had organised an online version that took place on a global scale, in nine languages and saw some 15,121,731 questions asked and answered.

ATLANTA ,NOVELIST SALMAN Rushdie said he plans to write a book about his decade in hiding under a death threat from the Iranian government.
Rushdie discussed the planned book on Tuesday at Emory University, where an exhibit of the author’s personal papers opens on Friday.

New Delhi ,RENOWNED FASHION designer Rohit Bal suffered a massive heart attack and underwent an angioplasty in a private hospital in Gurgaon on Tuesday.
The designer was initially rushed to Aashlok Hospital in the national capital and was later shifted to Gurgaon-based Medanta Medicity in the evening, where he is admitted under cardiovascular and cardiothoracic surgeon Dr Naresh Trehan. An angioplasty was conducted on him, a technique used for mechanically widening a narrowed or obstructed blood vessel.