Our caring, sharing friends in a candidly cute Paris

It's the 1930s, it's Los Angeles, it's a script by Robert Towne, but it sure as hell isn't Chinatown. Towne has been waiting to direct an adaptation of John Fante's cult novel Ask the Dust for 30 years, but on this evidence you have to ask why. Colin Farrell plays Arturo Bandini, a young novelist scraping by in a flea-pit hotel when he encounters fiery Latina waitress Camilla (Salma Hayek) and suddenly locates his muse. The movie is utterly lacking in narrative urgency, and neither Farrell's voiceover nor the film's heavily stylised dialogue offers any compensating diversion.

Hip-hop and commercial pop music have long dominated the MTV Music Video Awards, but this year it was guitar-led bands including The Killers who were celebrated at the glittering Miami bash.

CSI:NY Sat Five The Stepfather Sun ITV1

Elian Gonzalez is five years old. He watched his mother drown at sea after their boat capsized in an abortive escape from Cuba. He survived two days bobbing on the surface of the Florida straits attached to a piece of rubber tubing. He was rescued by fishermen and picked up by his American relatives on Thanksgiving day. But what should have been a fairytale ending to a tragic story has become a nightmare as two countries squabble over the child's custody

FURIOUS anti-American dem- onstrations continued in Cuba yesterday as the deadline set by the Cuban President, Fidel Castro, for the return of six-year- old Elian Gonzalez to his homeland approached.

Residents of an American anachronism are fighting for survival.

AN AMERICAN Indian archaeological site in the heart of Miami, revealing secrets going back at least 2,000 years, has had an eleventh- hour reprieve.

NOW HAILED as one of the icons of the 20th century and the first world music superstar, the Jamaican singer Bob Marley, who died in 1981, was supported in his endeavours by a huge entourage. At its centre from 1974 to 1979 was his manager Don Taylor.