Tuesday, March 7, 2006

Spotlight
Happy 35th birthday to actress Rachel Weisz. Weisz won this year's Academy and Golden Globe Awards for Best Supporting Actress for her performance as Tessa in The Constant Gardener, which also stars Ralph Fiennes. The British stage and screen actress had her breakthrough movie role in Bernardo Bertolucci's Stealing Beauty (1996). She has also starred in Confidence with Dustin Hoffman and Edward Burns, and Runaway Jury with John Cusack.

Quote
"Most of the time we do nothing, myself included. I think the lesson I learned (from Tessa) is that a lot of drops make up an ocean... Helping one person is better than nothing. Just do something." – Rachel Weisz

Word of the day
trust: a financial arrangement where one person holds money or property to be given under specific circumstances to a beneficiary; Weisz is a patron of the Constant Gardener Trust set up for residents of the Kenyan areas where the film was made. (© )

Today's News

• Dana Reeve: Superman's widow dies at 44 (story)
• Kirby Puckett: baseball Hall of Famer dies at 45 (story)
• Microsoft, Cisco: to collaborate on business communication tools (story)
• soda: fingered as prime obesity culprit (story)
• Dalai Lama: offers plea on behalf of endangered Indian tiger population (story)

Today's History

• Daniel Webster: orator delivered his Seventh of March speech defending the Compromise of 1850 (1850)
• telephone: was patented by Alexander Graham Bell (1876)
• fair use: the US Supreme Court ruled in Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music that parodies are not copyright infringements (1994)

Today's Birthdays

• Maurice Ravel: composer of Boléro (1875-1937)
• Michael Eisner: ex-CEO of Disney (64)
• Laura Prepon: Donna on That 70's Show (26)