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Freepers, if you are a fan of "24" I have a question. I watched the first two seaons. At the end of season 2, President David Palmer shook hands with a terrorist who had some bio/chem agent on his "hand" (a glove, really). Palmer fell in the last scene, his hand all red and blistered. I just got season 3 on DVD, and while they have him "recovered" and make a passing reference to this, I can't see anywhere that they explained it. Am I dense? Did I just miss it? Are they guilty of a huge plot loophole? As...

BEIJING : China's foreign reserves in 2004 soared to a record 609.9 billion dollars from 403.3 billion dollars in 2003 on the back of strong fund inflows and a burgeoning trade surplus, state press reported. The official National Business Daily, a newspaper owned by party mouthpiece the Liberation Daily, reported the record 206.6-billion-dollar increase, citing unnamed officials at China's central bank. In 2003, China's reserves rose by a then-record 160 billion dollars. The mainland holds the world's second highest foreign currency reserves after Japan, which in December hit a record 844.54 billion dollars.

LOS ANGELES - Veteran producer Steven Bochco will begin production next month on Over There, a television drama inspired by the war in Iraq. The series will focus on one sergeant and his platoon, as well as the loved ones they left behind on the home front. It will air on FX, a U.S. cable channel. John Landgraf, the president of FX, said the show will not take a pro- or anti-war stance. "There's likely to be some controversy because the war is such a partisan football from both sides," he told the Hollywood Reporter trade paper. Many of Bochco's...

<p>Wed Aug 4, 7:58 AM ET Add Entertainment - USATODAY.com to My Yahoo!</p> <p>Cable networks' summer bet on scripted dramas - once the exclusive province of their broadcast rivals - is paying off big.</p> <p>Many have won fan buzz, critical acclaim, Emmy nominations and, most important, viewership that nearly matches fare on the larger networks. With their help, basic cable is drawing an average 49.8 million viewers in prime time, up 10% from last year; 30.5 million are tuned in to the six broadcast networks, down 8%.</p>

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - A former television executive was charged on Friday with wiretapping staff meetings at Fox's FX cable network after the company fired him and he went to work at competing networks, prosecutors said. Randolph Steve Webster, 38, is accused of wiretapping a conference room via telephone at FX between July 31, 2001 and Jan. 20, 2004, prosecutors said. Webster surrendered on Friday, and was charged with one count of felony wiretapping. If convicted, he faces up to three years in prison. Webster served as vice president of publicity at FX starting in 1999 but was fired in...

NEW YORK (Hollywood Reporter) - FX is developing a film exploring a possible Middle Eastern terrorist link to the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. The film would be based on the book "The Third Terrorist," by Jayna Davis, a former reporter for an NBC-affiliated station in Oklahoma City. In "Terrorist," Davis investigates the connection between convicted bomber Timothy McVeigh and a group of Iraqi expatriates living in Oklahoma City in 1995. However, the FBI has not lent credence to her findings. "The film asks, why did everyone ignore what this woman was saying again and again?" said producer Rob Scheidlinger...

<p>LOS ANGELES - FX is dropping plans for the reality series "American Candidate" because, it turns out, money is the mother's milk of television as well as politics.</p> <p>The series, intended to let viewers pick a 2004 grass-roots presidential candidate, proved too expensive for the cable channel, FX Entertainment President Kevin Reilly said Friday.</p>

The Matrix Makers One year, two sequels—and a revolution in moviemaking. An exclusive look behind the scenes of 2003’s hottest flicks Jan. 6 issue — The Warner Brothers studio lot in Burbank, Calif., is frenetic on most days, but on a Thursday in early November it was really humming. The company’s box-office Bigfoot for 2002, “Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets,” was set to open in eight days, and nearly every division of the studio was working furiously to get it ready. Until 2:30 p.m. That’s when everything stopped. For the next half hour, the boy wizard had to...

Last night I watched RFK on the cable channel FX (to be repeated many times) and could not help but think that the reason this TV movie was produced and broadcast was because some "Kennedy" (probably RFK's daughter in Maryland) is running for political office. The obvious message of the movie was that the Kennedys were/are the saviours of all depressed peoples including muslims and that they are/were against war. Actually, the movie was offensive to me for its disinformation and spirituality (not religious), my age is 64 and I remember the events. Campaign Finance came to mind as I...