FRENCH oceanographer Jacques Yves Cousteau (86) has been in hospital with influenza, his wife Francine said yesterday, denying an earlier report that he had been in hospital for the last two weeks with an undisclosed illness.
A member of the French Academy, Cousteau resigned from the Council for the Rights of Future Generations in September 1995, in protest against President Jacques Chirac's decision to resume nuclear testing in the Pacific.
Elizabeth Taylor has been admitted to hospital in Beverly Hills and has undergone tests before surgery to remove a benign brain tumour. Taylor attended her 65th birthday party in Hollywood on Sunday to benefit AIDS research. Her actual birthday is on February 27th.
British actor Jordan Kiziuk (12) enthralled the Berlin Film Festival yesterday with a cinema debut performance as a small Jewish boy who survives a Polish ghetto during the second World War.
As the star of The Island on Bird Street, Kiziuk plays a bright child whose luck and ingenuity keep him alive despite constant raids on the ghetto by Nazi SS men.
US film director Steven Spielberg has begun shooting Amistad with a cast that includes Morgan Freeman, Nigel Hawthorne, Anthony Hopkins and Matthew McConaughey.
The movie, which is based on a real event - the mutiny aboard the Spanish slave ship, the Amistad, in 1839 - is his first film for DreamWorks, the company he co founded with Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen.