Borders "must look at what's right for us going forward," he said. He declined to be more specific. Seattle-based Amazon.com, the world's biggest online retailer, has handled Borders' online business for about five years, he said. Jones, who took over in July, is developing a plan to distinguish Borders from larger rival Barnes & Noble. The Internet will play a large role in the future for Ann Arbor, Mich.-based Borders, Jones said.

"We need to differentiate ourselves so that a customer is willing to drive by our competitor's stores for certain products we carry," Jones said. "We want to focus on certain key categories where we will really stand out." He declined to state the categories. The plan will be unveiled in February or March, Anne Roman, a Borders spokeswoman, said Friday. Information about the Amazon.com relationship will likely be announced at that time, she added.

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Amazon.com handles the inventory, customer service and order fulfillment for Borders under an agreement reached in 2001, Roman said. Borders receives a portion of the proceeds, she said. Barnes & Noble has 15 percent of the book market, Borders has 13 percent and Amazon.com has 10 percent, Daniel said. Earlier this week, Borders said its third-quarter loss widened to $39.1 million as the company spent money to remodel stores and pay for a loyalty-rewards program.

When it comes to power games, some in Hollywood are beginning to learn a basic lesson of digital politics: the Internet plays rough. Such is the case with a growing spat between New Line Cinema and Peter Jackson, the A-list director of the Lord of the Rings movies and a savvy player when it comes to the power of the Web. Last week Mr. Jackson posted a letter on a fan Web site, theonering.net, explaining that he had been dumped by New Line from The Hobbit, a movie based on the book by J. R. R. Tolkien, and still in the planning stages.

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Within hours thousands of other fans weighed in on lordotrings.com, onering.com and other sites, worrying about the future of the Tolkien enterprise and asking New Line, which has an option to produce the film until 2009, to back down. Theonering.net was among those calling for a boycott of any Hobbit film not made by Mr. Jackson.

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On the heels of the protest, reporters and entertainment bloggers called the studio to ask about the film's fate. In what was once an insular club of power brokers and back-stabbers, the voices of outsiders — dancing across the globe at the speed of a modem — have begun to penetrate.

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But anxiety continued to reverberate in cyberspace. Ian McKellen, who played Gandalf in the Rings series, wrote on his Web site, mckellen.com: "I'm very sad as I should have relished revisiting middle Earth with Peter again as team-leader. It's hard to imagine any other director matching his achievement in Tolkien country."

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It was left to another studio entirely, MGM, which owns the distribution rights to The Hobbit, to step in and calm the raging waters — and the Web sites. "We expect to partner with New Line in financing The Hobbit," a spokesman for MGM said. "We support Peter Jackson as a filmmaker, and believe that when the dust settles, he'll be making the movie. We can't imagine any other result."

Tracy admirers have flocked to the Chester Gould-Dick Tracy Museum in this quaint northern Illinois town this month to mark the 75th anniversary of the comic strip hero and remember his creator, Chester Gould.

Gould, who lived for about 50 years in Woodstock, launched the cartoon in October 1931 and drew the strip until 1977. He died in 1985, aged 81, but his creation lives on.

For the "funny pages," the Tracy strip was a departure from the usually upbeat fare. It offered often violent reflections of Prohibition-era lawlessness in a fictional city modeled on Chicago.

Big Boy, the strip's first villain, stood in for legendary gangster Al Capone. Later came memorable grotesques such as Flattop Jones, Pruneface -- and Mrs Pruneface -- and the Brow.

"The success of Dick Tracy is in the characters. Tracy holds up the tent, and the characters act as a three-ring circus down below," said Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Dick Locher, 77, who now draws and writes the strip for Tribune Media Services.

Duran Duran have confirmed Justin Timberlake's involvement on their new album. The pop veterans explained that they have also worked with producer Timbaland on three tracks on the record.

Speaking to the BBC, Simon Le Bon said: "We've got some good stuff happening. We've done three tracks with Timbaland. We've collaborated in a writing and production manner on one of those tracks with Justin Timberlake." The singer also revealed they have a host of other producers keen to work with them.

Le Bon added: "We've got a lot of really hot producers who are hotly interested in working with us at the moment. We are in a very good space." As previously reported by NME.COM, Duran Duran announced they were in talks with Timberlake in September regarding a possible collaboration.

Anita Halpin, 62, a stalwart Left-winger and chairman of the Communist Party of Britain, was given Ernst Ludwig Kirchner's 1913 Berliner Strassenszene (Berlin street scene) by the Berlin state senate in July. The move followed two years of secret negotiations after claims that it was stolen from her Jewish grandparents by the Gestapo in 1936. The painting had hung in Berlin's Brücke Museum for 26 years and formed the cornerstone of its Expressionist collection.

After frenzied bidding at Christie's Manhattan auction room this week, it was sold for £20.5 million to the Neue Galerie in New York. Attempts to keep in it Berlin had failed through lack of money. Mrs Halpin, who is also treasurer of the National Union of Journalists and sits on the TUC general council, was unwilling to discuss the sale yesterday. She also declined to comment on whether she would be pursuing claims for other paintings from the large collection said to have been taken from her grandparents, Alfred and Tekla Hess, the owners of a shoe factory. Asked what she would do with the windfall, Mrs Halpin, of Bow, east London, replied: "It's too early to call, let's leave it at that."

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They [the family's lawyers] say that Alfred Hess, his wife and their son Hans, a once wealthy Jewish family who lived in Erfurt, Germany, built up one of the most comprehensive collections of German Expressionist art, consisting of around 4,000 works, including some 80 paintings by the premier artists of the Expressionist period in Germany. "Alfred Hess died in late 1931. Following the rise of Hitler in 1933, the Hess family was eventually forced to leave Germany," they said when the painting was returned to Mrs Halpin.

Mrs Halpin's father, Hans, lost his job at the Ullstein publishing house in Berlin when it fired its Jewish employees, then fled to Paris and later to London. His mother moved to Bavaria where she was questioned by Gestapo agents about the whereabouts of the Hess collection. The lawyers have produced an affidavit signed by Tekla Hess in 1958 in which she stated that she had been coerced under threat by the Gestapo to return seven pictures in the Hess collection from the Swiss gallery where they were being kept to Germany. The collection was broken up and many other works remain lost. In the 1960s Hans Hess was found to be a Nazi persecutee and awarded 75,000 German marks for the loss of the collection — a mere fraction of its worth but the largest amount that could be awarded at that time.

New Zealand's high school students will be able to use "text-speak" -- the mobile phone text message language beloved of teenagers -- in national exams this year, officials said.

Text-speak, a second language for thousands of teens, uses abbreviated words and phrases such as "txt" for "text", "lol" for "laughing out loud" or "lots of love," and "CU" for "see you."

The move has already divided students and educators who fear it could damage the English language.

New Zealand's Qualifications Authority said Friday that it still strongly discourages students from using anything other than full English, but that credit will be given if the answer "clearly shows the required understanding," even if it contains text-speak.

Critics said the National Certificate of Educational Achievement or NCEA, the main qualification for high school students, would be degraded by the authority allowing text speak use in exams.

Internet blogger Phil Stevens was not amused by the announcement. "nzqa[New Zealand Qualifications Authority]: u mst b joking," Stevens wrote. "or r u smoking sumthg?"

Some parents are writing their college-age kids' resumes. Others are acting as their children's "representatives," hounding college career counselors, showing up at job fairs and sometimes going as far as calling employers to ask why their son or daughter didn't get a job.

It's the next phase in helicopter parenting, a term coined for those who have hovered over their children's lives from kindergarten to college. Now they are inserting themselves into their kids' job search -- and school officials and employers say it's a problem that may be hampering some young people's careers.

"It has now reached epidemic proportions," says Michael Ellis, director of career and life education at Delaware Valley College, a small, private school in Doylestown, Pa.

At the school's annual job fair last year, he says, one father accompanied his daughter, handed out her resume and answered most of the questions the recruiters were asking the young woman. Even more often, he receives calls from parents, only to find out later that their soon-to-be college grad was sitting next to the parent, quietly listening.

That price, if officially confirmed, would be the highest sum ever known to have been paid for a painting, exceeding the $135 million that the cosmetics heir Ronald S. Lauder paid in June for Gustav Klimt's "Adele Bloch-Bauer I." The experts spoke on condition of anonymity, saying they did not want to be perceived as betraying the confidence of the seller or the buyer of the Pollock, "No. 5, 1948," or jeopardize future business.

Reached by telephone, Mr. Geffen declined to comment on whether he sold the painting. Tobias Meyer of Sotheby's is said to have brokered the deal. The art-world experts identified the buyer as David Martinez, the Mexican financier who bought a two-floor apartment in the south building of the Time Warner Center for $54.7 million recently.

Mr. Martinez did not return calls seeking comment. Obsessively private, he has emerged as a megabuyer in modern and contemporary art in recent years, snapping up works by masters like de Kooning and Rothko both privately and at auction. Just last month Mr. Geffen sold two other 20th-century paintings — a Jasper Johns and a Willem de Kooning — for a total of $143.5 million. Given that he is among many business figures who has expressed interest in buying The Los Angeles Times, media industry analysts speculated that he was trying to raise cash for a potential bid.

The Pollock, a densely tangled composition in browns and yellows, is unusually large, measuring about 4 by 8 feet, and was painted on fiberboard. Like much else in Mr. Geffen's collection, it comes with a pristine provenance. Previous owners include the painter Alfonso A. Ossorio, a major Pollock collector from East Hampton, N.Y., and S. I. Newhouse Jr., the publishing magnate, who sold it to Mr. Geffen.