■ United States
Nicole Kidman engaged
Actress Nicole Kidman says she and New Zealand-born country music star Keith Urban are engaged. "He's actually my fiance," Kidman told People magazine on Monday after hosting a weekend gala event in New York. The story was posted on People's Web site on Tuesday. The Oscar winner's announcement comes just weeks after she told the Ladies' Home Journal that she still loved her ex-husband, Tom Cruise. Kidman and Cruise were married 10 years. Urban won a Grammy last year for best male country vocal performance.
■ United States
Elephant refuses workout
Trainers at the Alaska Zoo in Anchorage have made little progress trying to coax an African elephant onto the world's first pachyderm treadmill. For two months, trainers have used 3,600kg Maggie's favorite treats -- watermelon, apples, carrots, peanuts in the shell, banana slices and sweet potatoes -- to try to entice her into exercising on the US$100,000 piece of equipment. Maggie arrived at the zoo in 1983 as a calf. She has been alone since December 1997, when the zoo's other elephant died of a foot infection. The treadmill is part of a US$1 million program the zoo launched two years ago to improve Maggie's life.
■ United States
Souvenir mine destroyed
An Air Force team destroyed a World War II-era land mine in the suburban backyard of a Dallas, Texas, family that said friends had given it to them as a souvenir of an Arizona trip at least 10 years ago. An anonymous phone call alerted authorities to the device, police said. Police arrived on Monday evening to find the land mine with a live fuse. They contacted the bomb squad, which then called in a team from Dyess Air Force Base. The mine did not contain explosives but was still considered dangerous, police said. Feliciano and Lucy Guzman, were unaware the device was a land mine, said their son, Jesse. "I never thought it was a land mine," he said. "It looks like a mousetrap."
■ United States
Springtime for Mussolini?
If one of Hollywood's leading studios had its way, it would have been "Springtime for Mussolini," not Hitler, or so says Mel Brooks. With the DVD of the musical film version of The Producers released on Monday, the veteran writer-director reminisced about the struggle he had to get the original 1968 comedy made when he pitched the idea to Universal Pictures. "They said, `We love this movie but we just want to make one small change' ... instead of making a Broadway play about Adolf Hitler, make it about Mussolini instead because `we couldn't possibly make a movie about Hitler,'" Brooks said in an interview last week.
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