Germany's highly profitable auto makers are rolling out important new vehicles in the ferociously competitive small car market at this year's Frankfurt auto show.

The Volkswagen Up subcompact, Mercedes-Benz's streamlined B-Class hatchback and BMW's electric-powered i3, aimed at crowded cities with its zero-emission motor and lightweight, carbon-fiber reinforced body, are all major bets on what will appeal to buyers — and help earnings through an uncertain year ahead in which global demand may slow.

Nissan has developed a charger for electric vehicles that's smaller, about half the price, and easier to install.

Nissan Motor Co., Japan's No. 2 automaker, said Monday the new charger will go on sale in November in Japan and is planned later for the U.S. and Europe, although dates are not set.

A continent away from where the towers fell, the horror of that September morning 10 years ago is being recreated on the stage of the War Memorial Opera House.

The attack on the World Trade Center comes in the climactic scene of "Heart of a Soldier," an earnest and at times compelling work that was given its world premiere by the San Francisco Opera on Saturday night.

Flouting the age-old parental refrain, "Don't play with your food!" comes a zany Irish production called "Cirque de Legume" which is all about playing with food. Specifically, with root vegetables.

The chewing, spewing and other abuse of leafy produce has been raised to an art form by the hilarious, deliberately awkward duo performing "Cirque de Legume," which opened Sunday night off-Broadway at 59E59 Theaters as part of the yearlong 2011 Imagine Ireland festival. It's an animal-vegetable-maniac circus, laden with slapstick and humor at the expense of a basket of vegetables.

The cartoon character SpongeBob SquarePants is in hot water from a study suggesting that watching just nine minutes of that program can cause short-term attention and learning problems in 4-year-olds.

The problems were seen in a study of 60 children randomly assigned to either watch "SpongeBob," or the slower-paced PBS cartoon "Caillou" or assigned to draw pictures. Immediately after these nine-minute assignments, the kids took mental function tests; those who had watched "SpongeBob" did measurably worse than the others.

It's a side of Jacqueline Kennedy only friends and family knew.

Funny and inquisitive, canny and cutting. In "Jacqueline Kennedy: Historic Conversations on Life with John F. Kennedy," the former first lady was not yet the jet setting celebrity of the late 1960s or the literary editor of the 1970s and '80s. But she was also nothing like the soft-spoken fashion icon of the three previous years. She was in her mid-30s, recently widowed, but dry-eyed and determined to set down her thoughts for history.

On the surface it looked like an open-and-shut case: A pair of thieves drop by an art exhibition at the Ritz-Carlton in Los Angeles and, while one distracts a curator, the other snatches a valuable, centuries-old Rembrandt drawing and bolts with it.

Apparently finding the small pen-and-ink work by the Dutch master too hot to fence, the thieves had second thoughts. They abandoned it, undamaged, at a church on the other side of town.

Mel Gibson, who reportedly made anti-Semitic remarks during a drunken driving arrest five years ago, is now producing a film about the life of Jewish hero Judah Maccabee.

Gibson's publicist, Alan Nierob, told The Associated Press Friday that Gibson is working on a deal with Warner Bros. to develop the film through his company, Icon Productions. Nierob said the studio also would like Gibson to direct, but Gibson will decide whether he wants to do that once a script is finished.

After growing tired of watching stereotypes of people of color on U.S. television screens, Issa Rae created her own vision of reality with "The Mis-Adventures of Awkward Black Girl."

The Web-based show follows J, played by Rae, and her mishaps and successes in work and love.

"Boy, this is a great city," says Woody Allen, lounging on a park bench that overlooks Manhattan's East River and the 59th Street Bridge. "I don't care what anybody says. It's really a knockout, you know?"

The scene comes from Allen's 1979 film "Manhattan," an enduring, romantic portrait of the director's hometown, "a town that existed in black and white and pulsated to the great tunes of George Gershwin."