By Robert W. Butler, McClatchy NewspapersWatch the skies. They’re coming to get us all.“They,” of course, are aliens.Not from South of the Border. From outer space.Hollywood is in the midst of an alien invasion unequaled since the paranoid Cold War fantasies of the early 1950s.At theaters now you can enjoy “I Am Number Four” (alien teens outwit intergalactic pursuers) and, opening Friday, “Battle:

Waves lap the vast sweep of pristine, palm-lined sands as a sprinkling of Westerners soak up the sun, their breezy peace punctuated only by the creaks of a passing ox-cart.Welcome to a tourist paradise, in one of the world’s most isolated nations.“I’ve been to a lot of beaches and this is just amazing,” said retired Canadian Hugh Minielly, as he and his wife Mary watched the sun set over the azure Bay of Bengal at Myanmar’s coastal resort of Ngapali.Just a dozen or so hotels are hidden amid the

NEW YORK (AP) ― Owen Laster, a literary agent and executive of old-fashioned self-effacement and intregity whose many clients included Judy Blume, Gore Vidal and the estate of Margaret Mitchell, died Wednesday. He was 72.Laster, who retired in 2006, died in his Manhattan apartment after a brief illness, said his friend and attorney Richard Snider.Numerous friends had visited him recently, includin

NEW YORK (AP) ― They do not quite stumble upon them, but high-tech, skin-care researchers and developers sometimes find new ingredients in unexpected places: under a rock, behind a tree, in the garden.The tips to look outside the laboratory can come from traditional medicine, alternative medicine, folklore and history.Just in the world of botanicals, where many beauty ingredients emerge, there is

LOS ANGELES ― A new analysis of survey data compiled by the National Endowment for the Arts since 1982 shows that blacks and Latinos have suffered from a collapse in arts education, and that their young-adult rates of arts attendance have declined far more than for whites.Childhood arts education “has played a vital role ... in developing a potential audience” for the arts, the researchers from th

NEW YORK (AFP) ― Artist Jason Polan won’t be running out of live models any time soon ― in trying to draw every person in New York, he’s got at least eight million more to go.The plan may sound crazy, but Polan, 28, is serious.Every day he’s out there with ink pen and sketch pad, posting the results on www.everypersoninnewyork.blogspot.com. Three years into the project, he’s up to about 14,000.“I

WASHINGTON (AP) ― America’s national and local public broadcast stations are hiring more journalists and pumping millions of dollars into investigative news to make up for what they see as a lack of deep-digging coverage by their for-profit counterparts.Public radio and TV stations, funded by audience contributions, foundations, and some tax funds, have seen the need for reporting that holds gover

BANGKOK (AFP) ― Its past may be a steamy affair, but Playboy’s Rabbit logo, stamped on anything from necklaces to notebooks, is ensuring the firm’s image in Asia is more about trend than titillation.With little exposure to the men’s magazines and the raunchy outfits of founder Hugh Hefner’s famous bunny girls, many Asian consumers are snapping up the company’s products without focusing on the sexu