PYONGYANG, North Korea -- Watch out, Hollywood. North Korean leader Kim Jong-il, a longtime film buff, has ordered his nation's tiny film industry to begin competing in the big leagues.

Mr. Kim, known to his countrymen as "the Dear Leader," recently paid a visit to North Korea's Pyongyang Film Studio to give auteurs the benefit of his "on-the-spot guidance."

His message was combative.

"He said we are not competing with U.S. and European films. We have to beat U.S. films," Kim Man-sok, the head of the studio's foreign sales division, told foreign reporters.

In North Korea, what the Dear Leader wants, the Dear Leader gets. So the first potential international blockbuster already is in the pipeline...

SIOUX FALLS, S.D. - Thousands of spectators gathered Saturday to watch the demolition of the city's tallest building — but the Zip Feed Mill tower was no pushover.

The 202-foot-tall concrete structure dropped slightly, leaned a little — and stopped. Onlookers at viewing spots all over downtown groaned and gasped — with a few jokes mixed in.

"The leaning tower of Zip," one woman said.

"The building won!" yelled another man, to the cheers of onlookers.

The abandoned feed mill elevator, widely considered the tallest building in South Dakota, was being demolished to make way for office and retail space.

The property owners had turned the event into a fundraiser for the Dakota chapter of the National Multiple Sclerosis Society. Residents bought T-shirts and $1 raffle tickets for the chance to trigger the blast, and stood outside with temperatures in the teens to view the tower's demise.

Crews had drilled holes into the tower's supporting columns and stuffed them with explosives, intending to drop the tower like a falling tree.

However, the rear of the tower was so rotten that it wasn't stiff enough to push over, said Jim Redyke, president of blasting specialist Dykon Explosive Demolition of Tulsa, Okla.

"As the weight was transferred to the back side, it crushed the back walls and it crushed the basement wall," Redyke said. The tower collapsed into the structure's basement and got wedged.

Crews planned to return to knock it down with a crane, but that might not occur until Thursday, said Jeff Hanson, spokesman for the site's co-owners, Raven Industries Inc. and Howalt-McDowell Insurance Inc. Officials and the contractor in charge examined the site and determined the tower would hold, but the site remains fenced off and watched by security guards...

"It hasn't taken the adult industry long to figure out how to transform Apple's iPod into the iPorn. Sites from the dark side of the Web are already rushing to buy QuickTime Pro licenses so they can create viral transmissions intended to pounce down the broadband pipe into Apple's new media players," Jonny Evans reports for Macworld UK. "The adult industry is huge. It's no secret that it was adult-oriented sites that helped drive demand and technological advance for the Internet itself. The industry is also not scared to experiment."



Evans reports, "The tech-savvy adult industry understands how to harness the Internet to stimulate audiences, create brand loyalty and drive demand. As expected, it is rushing to embrace this new iPod-driven, portable-video gold rush. The fashionable Suicide Girls adult website last night revealed its own weekly three-minute video podcast, promising: 'The lovely SuicideGirls set to music and showing off their pin-up appeal. Show your friends, your mum, the girl next to you on the bus.' Apple already hosts a Suicide Girls radio show on its own podcast directory. Suicide Girls aren't the only ones. Another adult site (HellHouse Video) began providing iPod-compatible adult video content earlier this week. Yet another adult outfit, Sin City has made a selection of trailers for its movies available in an iPod-compatible format."

TOKYO, Japan (Reuters) -- With Japan under fire for plans to expand its whaling program, a fast food chain is offering a new product aimed at using up stocks from past hunts -- whale burger.

The 380 yen ($3.50) slice of fried minke whale in a bun went on sale on Thursday at Lucky Pierrot, a restaurant chain in the port city of Hakodate on Japan's northern-most island of Hokkaido.

"The taste and texture are somewhere between beef and fish," said chain manager Miku Oh.

"People in Hakodate have a long history of eating whale, so customers are looking forward to trying it."...

LONDON (Reuters) - Married men earn more than bachelors so long as their wives stay at home doing the housework, according to a report Wednesday from Britain's Institute for Social and Economic Research (ISER).

Academics Elena Bardasi and Mark Taylor found that a married man whose wife does not go out to work but is primarily responsible for the cooking and cleaning earns about 3 percent more than comparably employed single men.

But that wage premium disappears if wives go out to work themselves or don't do most of the housework.

"It has been fairly well documented that married men earn more than single men," Taylor, a labor economist, told Reuters.

"However, our research established the wage premium is related to the wife doing the chores," said the academic who teaches at the University of Essex in eastern England.

He said analysis suggests there could be two explanations for the results:

A marriage might allow a husband and wife to focus their activities on tasks to which they are most suited. Traditionally, this would result in the man concentrating on paid work enabling him to increase productivity and in consequence his wages.

Taylor said another explanation could be that marriage may increase the amount of time a man has to hone work-related skills which could trigger higher wages.

Taylor and Bardasi analyzed the hourly wages of 3,500 men who have been interviewed annually since 1991 as part of the British Household Panel Survey.

"We looked at all types of jobs from unskilled up to managers and professionals," Taylor said.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Break out the croquet set and set up the barbecue. Daylight-saving time returns this weekend.

That means push the clocks ahead - spring forward - to gain an hour of light in the evening for warm summer recreation. The official change comes at 2 a.m. Sunday, local time...