Patient pub

Dublin, Nov. 14 (Reuters): A nursing home in Ireland has hit on a cheering way to keep up the spirits of its elderly patients ? by providing its own pub.

St Mary’s Hospital in County Monaghan, near the Irish border with Northern Ireland, believes ready access to a good pint may help its patients ? average age 85 ? actually live longer.

The pub, which opens at 11 am and closes at 9 pm and charges normal bar prices, had also led to an increase in the number of visitors, she said.

Comic cut

Astana, Kazakhstan (Reuters): Kazakhstan’s foreign ministry threatened legal action on Monday against a British comedian who wins laughs by portraying the central Asian state as a country populated by drunks who enjoy cow-punching as a sport. Sacha Baron Cohen, who portrays a spoof Kazakh television presenter Borat in his Da Ali G Show, has won fame ridiculing Kazakhstan, the world’s ninth largest country yet still little known to many in the West, on British and US channels. Cohen appears to have drawn official Kazakh ire after he hosted the annual MTV Europe Music Awards show in Lisbon earlier this month as Borat as a one-eyed pilot clutching a vodka bottle.

Top toon

Los Angeles (Reuters): Chicken Little ruled the coop at the North American box office for a second weekend, earning almost as much as the three major new releases combined, according to studio estimates issued on Sunday. Walt Disney Co’s first home-grown computer-animated cartoon sold about $32 million worth of tickets in the three days beginning Friday, followed by the sci-fi adventure Zathura with $14 million, the thriller Derailed with $12.8 million, and rapper 50 Cent’s gritty urban drama Get Rich or Die Tryin’ with $12.5 million.

Italy stub

Rome (Reuters): A stunned Italian actor had to stub out the cigarette he had lit up on stage after a spectator complained, forcing the theatre to change the script of an Arthur Miller play to make it smoke-free. “This had never happened to me in more than 300 performances,” the actor, Sebastiano Lo Monaco, was quoted as saying by the website of Italian daily Corriere della Sera. Lo Monaco was smoking when a woman from the audience shouted: “Put out that cigarette”.