Tonight is the 17th annual Webby Awards, which are almost as famous for their five-word acceptance speeches as they are for the websites rewarded for their excellence.

Search and rescue operations following a typhoon that killed nearly 600 people in the southern Philippines have been hampered because many residents of this ravaged farming community are too stunned to help. With an estimated 600 people still missing after Typhoon Bopha struck on Tuesday, soldiers, police and volunteers from outside New Bataan have formed the bulk of the teams searching for bodies or signs of life under tons of fallen trees and boulders that were swept down from steep hills surrounding the town.

One of the world's most picturesque paeans to sailing nostalgia was claimed by the sea as giant waves off the Carolinas sunk HMS Bounty, a replica tall ship which was built for the 1962 film Mutiny On The Bounty and, more recently, took a supporting role in Pirates Of The Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest.

Buñuel's The Discreet Charm Of The Bourgeoisie has been newly restored. It's still unsettling, says Geoffrey Macnab

The actor Ben Gazzara, who starred in the original Broadway production of Tennessee Williams's play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, died of pancreatic cancer on Friday. He was 81.

My parents were... always on the road. They were actors, so I was raised predominantly by grandparents in Minnesota. I spent holidays with my mother and stepfather but lived in my grandparents' house.

One of this year's most interesting, elitist and curiously anti-theatrical events on the fringe is served up by a pair of Aussies in their mid-twenties who arrive in your lounge and spin a few bizarre yarns. That's right: you don't go to them, they come to you, as long as you've convened a quorum of 10 or more. We feasted on a DIY buffet in an apartment near the Meadows before the knock on the door.

Hollywood director's move to reinvigorate Napa Valley estate a 'dream come true'

Chase Insteadman, the narrator of Jonathan Lethem's new novel, is a former child actor who lives on residuals from a long ago sitcom. His life as an Upper East side dilettante, however, is set to change when he meets Perkus Tooth, a paranoid counter-cultural critic who takes to lecturing him on Marlon Brando, Chet Baker and unseen forces from a booth at a coffee shop.

R.E.M., by bookending the album with the ringing guitar drone of "Discoverer", are suggesting Collapse Into Now has a conceptual unity absent from their recent albums; and certainly, the recurrent themes of conclusion, starting over and rebuilding do lend it a muscular sense of purpose. That muscularity finds its musical equivalent in the rock heft of tracks like "Alligator_Aviator_ Autopilot_Antimatter" and "All the Best", although it's the more tender songs, such as "Überlin" and "Oh My Heart", which are the standouts, recalling Automatic for the People. The latter track, with its waltzing accordion, has a distinctly European flavour, while elsewhere the presence of mandolin/bouzouki folk-rockers like "It Happened Today" and "Me, Marlon Brando, Marlon Brando and I" marks a welcome return to a more varied textural palette.

The Italian film director Bernardo Bertolucci has expressed his regret for never apologising to Maria Schneider for making her do the taboo-busting sex scenes with Marlon Brando in his 1972 arthouse film, Last Tango in Paris.

The French actress Maria Schneider became famous over-night when she starred opposite Marlon Brando in Bernardo Bertolucci's controversial film Last Tango in Paris (1972), which featured perhaps the most famous sex scene in cinemahistory, in which Brando, with the aid of a slab of butter, appears to have anal intercourse with his co-star.The sequence caused a world-wide furore, and the film was banned in several countries (including parts of the UK). Schneider and Brando, along with Bertolucci, were idicted by an Italian court on charges of obscenity for participating in the making of an erotic movie, and it was banned in Italy until 1987.

Maria Schneider, the French actress best-known for her controversial steamy sex scenes in the 1972 film Last Tango in Paris, has died at the age of 58.