Thieves in Argentina have stolen a computer from US film director Francis Ford Coppola, which contained the script for his new production. It was reported that five armed robbers raided Coppola's house in a wealthy neighbourhood of Buenos Aires, and took computers and camera equipment. Saved on one of the computers was the script and pre-production work for his forthcoming film, Tetro.

The Oscar-winning Godfather director was not home at the time. However, the raiders hit and threatened a person who was in the house, in the fashionable Palermo neighbourhood. A spokeswoman for Coppola offered a reward for the return of the computer, which she said was vital to him and his work. Tetro, which will star Matt Dillon, is about the rivalries over the generations in an artistic Italian immigrant family to Buenos Aires. Filming is due to start next February.

Coppola has been living in Buenos Aires for several months Five-time Oscar winner Coppola is reported to be "very sad".

The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary announced this month that it has committed punctuational genocide, eliminating 16,000 hyphens from its pages. Either by combining two words into one or simply uncoupling them-severing the corpus callosum between them-editors of the dictionary's sixth edition have seen fit to knock hyphens from its pages like so many teeth from a hockey goaltender's mouth. So, ice-cream becomes ice cream and chick-pea chickpea.

But wait, how many of us were still hyphenating ice cream anyway? Does this announcement merely remove the fig-leaf (sorry, fig leaf) barely covering the fact that the Shorter OED was in major need of some long overdue updates? "The dictionary reflects the language as it's being used today," concedes Jesse Sheidlower, Editor at Large of the Oxford English Dictionary. "In general you'll find that most dictionary editors are extremely progressive. As with any change like this, there's some point at which you want to be a little conservative. You don't want to change an entry the second there is some change in the language." (The Shorter OED is essentially the OED without its supporting quotations and most obsolete words. It was last updated in 2002; the OED itself has been updated only in part and only online.)

This particular change suggests that British English, which the OED catalogs, is becoming increasingly Americanized. How many Limeys were running scared of bumble-bees in their gardens this summer? Sheidlower stresses that the changes were based on findings made combing through British, not American, published texts. "We would use the most formal, most edited evidence," he says. "We incorporate American evidence, but the dictionary is edited in England and does represent British standards."

George Miller, the Academy Award-owning Aussie auteur behind such diverse flicks as the Mad Max trilogy, Babe: Pig in the City and last year's Best Animated Feature Oscar winner Happy Feet, has signed on to helm Warner Bros.' live-action version of DC Comics' Justice League of America. The 62-year-old Miller has been given the go-ahead to begin shooting the movie in his native Australia for a targeted 2009 release, according to Variety.

Featuring a screenplay by Kieran and Michele Mulroney (the brother and sister-in-law of Dermot Mulroney), Justice League has been shrouded in secrecy, but is expected to feature five superheroes from the original comic: Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Aquaman and the Flash

*****

Per Variety, Warners is taking heat from Batman Begins director Christopher Nolan. The filmmaker is petitioning the studio to postpone JLA until after he's finished with the Caped Crusader projects he has in development, including The Dark Knight, which is wrapping production in Chicago for release July 18, 2008. The director fears that a separate (and possibly campier) film featuring Batman could hurt Nolan's successful reboot of the DC franchise. His star, Christian Bale, has expressed similar sentiments and won't reprise the hero for Justice League.

Then there's the Man of Steel. Industry scuttlebutt suggested Warners would complete its planned sequel to 2006's Superman Returns. But the follow-up is on hold until director Bryan Singer completes work on his World War II drama, Valkyrie, starring Tom Cruise. Like Bale, Supes alter ego Brandon Routh is not attached to JLA.

A Van Gogh masterpiece, which is believed to be the celebrated artist's final piece of work, will be put on the public market for the first time. It is already expected that the painting, known as "The Fields", will become one of the most highly valued paintings ever auctioned. Van Gogh completed "The Fields", also known as "Wheat Fields", on July 10, 1890, just 19 days before his death. The painting hung in his room as he bled to death in his bed, after having shot himself in a field and staggering home.

The Fields remains one of the few Van Gogh works to remain in private hands, and is often celebrated for shedding some light on the emotions that Van Gogh was feeling in his final days. It will be unveiled at Sotheby's in London next month on October 7, and will be sold at auction in New York a month later. The estimated list price is $34 million dollars. However, it is expected to go for much more than the list price, due to its importance and the currently booming art market. The Fields is expected to provoke one of the heaviest bidding wars.

A spokeswoman for Sotheby's said of the painting: "As a unique work of art from the final days of the artist's life, the price will most likely be driven by passion. This is perhaps the last opportunity for a collector to acquire a landscape of this quality by Vincent van Gogh."

Van Gogh's brother, Theo, was extremely emotionally attached to the painting. So much so that he kept it in the family collection for 20 years before his widow Johanna sold it to a private collector, Paul Cassirer, in 1907. Since then the painting has exchanged hands in private collections, but has never entered the public market. Although it has been disputed over the years as to which of Van Gogh's paintings was his last, a number of respected experts strongly believe that The Fields was his final artistic endeavor.

The move is an acknowledgment by The Times that making Web site visitors pay for content would not bring in as much money as making it available for free and supporting it with advertising. "We now believe by opening up all our content and unleashing what will be millions and millions of new documents, combined with phenomenal growth, that that will create a revenue stream that will more than exceed the subscription revenue," Schiller said.

*****

TimesSelect generated about $10 million in revenue a year. Schiller declined to project how much higher the online growth rate would be without charging visitors. The company expects to record a "substantially increased number of unique users referred to and accessing the site" once TimesSelect disappears, it said in a statement.

TimesSelect includes online access to 23 news and opinion columnists as well as several tools to customize the Web site. It also offers access to the Times archives back to 1851. Starting on Wednesday, access to the archives will be available for free back to 1987, and as well as stories before 1923, which are in the public domain, Schiller said. Users can buy articles between 1923 and 1986 on their own or in 10-article packages, the company said. Some stories, such as film reviews, will be free, she said.

In a complaint filed yesterday in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, Hilton alleges that Hallmark has, among other transgressions, misappropriated her image and invaded her privacy with the card, a copy of which you'll find below. According to the lawsuit, the greeting card, which purports to show Hilton's "first day as a waitress," was first distributed earlier this year and remains on sale. Hilton is seeking at least $500,000 in actual damages and a permanent injunction barring Hallmark from further exploitation of her name and likeness.

"I've never gotten a financial award like that in my life," Eggers said Tuesday, calling from an airport in Los Angeles before catching a flight home to San Francisco. Eggers is one of six Americans to receive this year's awards, presented in five categories by the foundation. His category is Arts and Humanities. "Dave Eggers is not only an accomplished and versatile man of letters but the protagonist of a real-life story of generosity and inspiration," said Teresa Heinz in a written statement.

The author of the best-selling memoir "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius" (2000), Eggers found out about a month ago that he'd won the award, which honors the late Sen. John Heinz (R-Penn.). Heinz's widow, Teresa, called to tell him he'd won, which he said was "surreal." Not for a moment, though, did he give even a passing thought to spending the money on himself. The 826 laboratories, which help inner-city youth with writing skills, are now nationwide. The seventh, in Boston, opens this fall and until now, only had $12,000 in start-up funds.

Winning the award is "validation for the work we're doing at 826," Eggers said simply. And, he added, "It's a relief." Eggers said he's been feeling guilty for the last few years because he was unable to personally give money to the 826 Valencia projects. "It's been eating away at me for a couple of years. It's embarrassing. I felt like a father who can't feed his kids."

Fantasy writer Neil Gaiman joins a faculty that includes Kelly Link, James Patrick Kelly and Mary Anne Mohanra for the 2008 Clarion Writers Workshop, the Clarion Foundation announced.

Now in its second year at the University of California, San Diego, the workshop, one of the most highly regarded writing programs in the country, runs for six weeks, from July 29 to Aug. 9. Nalo Hopkinson and Geoff Ryman will team-teach the workshop's final two weeks.

Participants are selected from a pool of applicants who demonstrate the potential for successful writing careers. The Clarion Foundation will begin accepting applications on Jan. 2, 2008.

The honors were announced Monday by the National Book Foundation, a nonprofit organization that presents the National Book Awards, now in their 58th year. "Both women are fearless in their questioning and their insights on the page and on the air have informed our understanding of America and of America's writers for decades," foundation executive director Harold Augenbraum said in a statement.

Gore is working on a new environmental book, The Path to Survival, that will be released as a paperback original on April 22, 2008, Earth Day. According to publisher Rodale Books, Gore will continue where he left off in An Inconvenient Truth and offer "a visionary blueprint for the changes we should make as a world community."

"He (Gore) explains how making bold choices now to protect our environment will also create new jobs, propel sustainable economic improvements, and inspire a new generation to tackle our most challenging issues with moral leadership," according to a statement issued Wednesday by Rodale.

"Part scientific manual, part expose, part visionary call for a new planet-wide political movement, the book will appeal to those who were motivated by the call to action of An Inconvenient Truth and who are now ready to fight for the solutions that were considered politically impossible only a short time ago."

Rodale publisher Liz Perl told The Associated Press that no movie version is currently planned for The Path to Survival. An Inconvenient Truth was released as a feature film in 2006 and won the Academy Award for best documentary. The companion book, also a paperback original, topped The New York Times best-seller list for nonfiction paperbacks.

John Gardner, a prolific British thriller writer who wrote more novels about Bond - James Bond - than Ian Fleming did, died on Aug. 3 after collapsing near his home in Basingstoke, England. He was 80. The cause was heart failure, said his daughter Alexis Walmsley.

A former Anglican priest, Mr. Gardner wrote four dozen books in a career of more than 40 years. He was best known for the 14 Bond novels he wrote in the 1980s and '90s, which officially continued the work of Bond's creator, Fleming. (For his part, Fleming wrote only 12.) In Mr. Gardner's hands, Bond is every inch a late-20th-century man. He smokes low-tar cigarettes (where is the Turkish blend of yesteryear?) and, in an authorial choice that anguished 007 purists, drives a fuel-efficient Saab instead of his Bentley Mark II Continental.

Though the reaction of critics was mixed, the novels were embraced by all but the most orthodox Bondians and appeared regularly on the New York Times best-seller list. Among Mr. Gardner's Bond titles are License Renewed (G. K. Hall, 1981); Win, Lose or Die (Putnam, 1989); Brokenclaw (Putnam, 1990); and, most recently, Cold Fall (Putnam, 1996).

*****

Mr. Gardners recent books include Bottled Spider (Severn House, 2002), the first in a series starring Detective Sergeant Suzie Mountford, a policewoman in wartime London.