By not seeking the consent of the director whose name on the movie reflects the fact that the

“By not seeking the consent of the director, whose name on the movie reflects the fact that the film comprises his or her work, or of the studio as copyright holder, they can and do change the very meaning and intent of films.”The machines will be pre-programmed to edit about 500 titles. They will be pre-programmed to spare viewers segments of films that feature offensive language, excessive violence or sexual content, by muting the sound or skipping ahead.Several leading Hollywood figures, however, including Steven Spielberg and Steven Soderbergh, are backing a lawsuit, arguing that the technology will violate the rights of directors who expect their works to be viewed in their entirety, without censorship.”In the guise of making films ‘family-friendly’, ClearPlay seeks to make whatever ‘edits’ they see fit to any material they don’t like,” said the Directors Guild of America. The family-values brigade is already applauding, while the Hollywood community is pursuing a lawsuit to have them banned.The players, which will sell for $79 (£45), are equipped with technology by a Salt Lake City-based company called ClearPlay. Like some kind of electronic air freshener, a new generation of DVD players is poised to clear the smut, violence and bad language out of living rooms all across America.
Thomson Inc is preparing to ship the revolutionary machines to both Wal-Mart and Kmart in the United States in the next few weeks. It is a new shaft, opened in 1998, on long-established coal workings, but television pictures showed dilapidated buildings at the site.. A suspected methane blast ripped through a coal mine in Siberia early yesterday, killing up to 30 miners and trapping at least 20 others more than 700 metres underground.
Thirteen miners were rescued or made it to the surface on their own, said Valery Korchagin, an emergency department spokesman in the Kemerovo region.Kemerovo governor Aman Tuleyev, who was overseeing the rescue operation, said that the shortest path to the blast site was blocked by what appeared to be impassable rubble, and that rescuers were attempting to reach the area by a longer route from an adjacent mine. Their efforts were also being hampered because the mine shaft was reported to be filled with poisonous gases.One television channel reported that voices could be heard from the rubble, but state television reported that there was no communication with the trapped men.Rescuers stopped work occasionally to allow them to hear any signs of life, the ITAR-Tass news agency reported.Accidents are common in the Russian coal industry, and miners stage frequent protests over wage delays and declining safety standards.

The business is believed to be worth some €7bn (more than £4.5bn) a year and to involve 22 criminal gangs.But despite investigations and a few dozen arrests, the Ecomafia continue to defy the law. If he was happy with the results, the man said, he could buy more.It was not fertiliser but toxic waste, as the farmer discovered when his pond turned black and his fish swelled and died. The owner of Ecoverde and 57 others were arrested and charged with offences under Italy’s recently tightened laws against waste-trafficking.A three-year police investigation into the waste racket revealed more than 4,000 illegal dumps sited across the southern half of the country. Last year it emerged that middlemen were selling toxic waste to farmers in the central Italian countryside of Umbria in the guise of fertiliser. A salesman from a company with the name of Ecoverde (Ecogreen) approached a farmer in the village of Montona and offered him 20 truckloads of a new type of fertiliser for nothing. “Under the stimulus of the announcement of the amnesty, 40,000 new illegal constructions got under way, reversing the previous downward trend,” the organisation said last week.Illegal rubbish-disposal has likewise enjoyed a bumper year, with the gangs offering manufacturing firms in the north unbeatable rates to truck their hazardous waste away.

Corrupt civil servants then doctor paperwork to make the waste appear innocuous, and it is buried in national parks in the south, where the gangs are mostly based, or dumped in abandoned quarries, posing a menace to ground water.There are other, more ingenious ways of disposing of the stuff. This fiscal wheeze is one of the notorious one-off tax measures, much criticised in Brussels, to which Italian govern- ments resort when they need to plug holes in their budgets.Mr Berlusconi announced another such amnesty in 2003, and according to Legambiente it stimulated a dramatic increase in illegal building. “Waste management” is a notorious front for mafia families – witness television’s supposedly fictitious Sopranos. This extensive, secret network of criminal clans and gangs – precisely 169 of them, it is claimed – makes its money by despoiling the Italian environment.The Ecomafia has two major activities, both of them going full steam ahead: illegal construction, and illegal disposal of waste, particularly hazardous waste. The Italian economy has stalled, with industrial output and consumer spending flat, and Silvio Berlusconi’s government is groping for ways to get it going again before European elections in June which could deliver them a sound drubbing.
But there is one industry that seems always to prosper – the “Ecomafia”, as it has been dubbed. Mr Ecclestone purchased the property for £50m in 2001, reportedly as a surprise gift for his wife Slavica.