Acclaimed actor Geoffrey Rush has been appointed founding president of the Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts, a new Oscars-inspired honors system for Australian film.

The announcement was made by director George Miller -- best known for the Mad Max series -- on Thursday evening with the new academy created to improve national and international recognition of Australia's movie industry.

Abercrombie & Fitch has offered to pay Michael "The Situation" Sorrentino, a character in hit reality show "Jersey Shore," to stop wearing its clothes, fearing its image is being tarnished.

The offer includes other members of the MTV show's brash, foul-mouthed, spray-tanned Italian-American cast, and A&F is "urgently awaiting a response," the U.S. fashion retailer said in a statement.

France's best-known film star Gerard Depardieu insisted Wednesday he had been trying to urinate discreetly into a bottle when he splashed a plane's carpet and caused a flight delay, friends said.

Earlier, Air France-KLM subsidiary CityJet said the actor had been escorted off a Paris to Dublin service on Tuesday after he relieved himself on the floor of the cabin as it was taxiing towards the runway for take-off.

Tucked away in a nondescript office park in northern Kentucky, Noah's followers are rebuilding his ark.

The biblical wooden ship built to weather a worldwide flood was 500 feet long and about 80 feet high, according to Answers in Genesis, a Christian ministry devoted to a literal telling of the Old Testament.

Coco Chanel: A fashion icon whose name has become shorthand for timeless French chic, a shrewd businesswoman who overcame a childhood of poverty to build a luxury supernova and ... a Nazi spy?

A new book by a Paris-based American historian suggests Chanel not only had a wartime affair with a German aristocrat and spy, but that she herself was also an agent of Germany's Abwehr military intelligence organization and a rabid anti-Semite.

Robert Rodriguez deliberately tried to make his latest "Spy Kids" adventure a bit of a stinker.

Rodriguez, who helped usher in the new age of 3-D movies with the franchise's third installment in 2003, is billing "Spy Kids: All the Time in the World" as a 4-D flick, adding scent cards so audiences can follow along on the action with their noses.

The Man Without Fear has a voice for fans unable to see him.

Marvel Comics' Daredevil — a blind lawyer who protects the streets of Hell's Kitchen in New York — has had his new adventures brought to life as a free digital audiobook.

"Contact" star Jodie Foster was among donors helping to revive the 42 radio telescope dishes at a key California institute searching for extraterrestrial life, the group said Tuesday.

The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute in California, which got a direct hit from federal and California budget cuts, had to halt operations in April for its telescopes pointed toward outer space.

Hundreds of thousands of pilgrims poured into Madrid for a giant open-air mass Tuesday, launching a six-day youth party for Pope Benedict XVI at a time of economic hardship in Spain.

The faithful will pack into the emblematic central Madrid square of Cibeles for the inaugural mass celebrated by Madrid's archbishop, Cardinal Antonio Maria Rouco Varela.

After years, sometimes decades of neglect, Budapest's historic thermal baths are in different stages of renovation to restore crumbling and rotting infrastructure to their heyday state.

The city's 50-odd baths are a major tourist magnet for Budapest, also known as the "world spa capital" -- ranging from 500-year-old Turkish pools with intricate mosaic patterns and high domes supported by massive pillars left by the former Ottoman occupiers to more modern Art Nouveau spa complexes.