The Dalai Lama, who has been exiled from his Himalayan homeland for nearly 40 years, says he will not play any political role in a future Tibet if Chinese rulers allow him to return.
"In a democratic system, the people should come forward and govern themselves," he said.
For the past five years, the Dalai Lama said, he has been working through channels to negotiate with Beijing in the hope of restarting direct talks with China to gain "genuine autonomy" for Tibet. He visited the White House yesterday and is contemplating making some conciliatory remarks in response to an overture by China's President Jiang Zemin.
Superman star Christopher Reeve, paralysed from the neck down in a fall from a horse three years ago, is determined to make his Hollywood comeback in the thriller Rear Window as realistic as possible. So he was left on screen literally gasping for breath when his ventilator hose was cut off in a scene from the remake of the Alfred Hitchcock thriller.
"When we did that scene, we did it for real. The poor actress playing the nurse was terrified," the star told Now magazine.
In the original film, James Stewart played the main character with a broken leg. Reeve feels the update makes it much more terrifying and realistic.
"The idea was to raise the stakes. To do this story with a ventilator-dependent quadraplegic puts the lead character in so much more jeopardy."
Thailand film authorities have all but killed the chance of remaking Anna and the King of Siam on location. They say script revisions by 20th Century Fox don't go far enough in changing historical inaccuracies deemed insulting to the Thai monarchy.
Thailand's Film Board yesterday stood by a three-week-old judgment that the movie, starring Oscar winner Jodie Foster and Hong Kong star Chow Yun Fat, would offend Thai sensibilities. Anna and the King is a remake of the 1946 movie starring Rex Harrison and Irene Dunne. It later became a Broadway musical and 1956 film, The King and I, which made Yul Brynner a major star.