Word: scattered
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Jack the butcher (Michael Caine) is dead. His three pals and his adopted son (beautifully played by Tom Courtenay, David Hemmings, Bob Hoskins and Ray Winstone) bibulously set forth to scatter his ashes in the sea. As they drive, flashbacks inform us of a life richer in complexity, coincidence and moral confusion than we might expect from a humble shopkeeper. Schepisi also wrote this patient adaptation of Graham Swift's Booker prizewinning novel, in which wry humor and even a certain sexiness break through the reserve of a rueful, realistic, but finally emotionally rewarding film. --By Richard Schickel
These marquee names say it all. Even companies once considered above suspicion are being subjected to increasing scrutiny. Under current accounting rules, management can essentially do whatever it pleases, says David Dreman of Dreman Asset Management, based in Jersey City, N.J. It can scatter explanations in impenetrable footnotes it is confident no one has the time or capacity to decipher. "There are enormous overstatements of earnings and understatements of expenses," he says...
...Jakarta, hundreds of adherents to one of the most powerful fundamentalist groups, the Islamic Defenders Front (FPI), cram into trucks and minivans and head for a slum on the west side of the city. Men are huddled under a blue tent playing ceki, a kind of poker. They scatter as the squad, brandishing clubs and machetes, marches in. But as FPI members smash tables and chairs and then start pulling down the tents, some locals turn and jeer. A brawl almost erupts, but the vagrants lose their nerve and flee. The militants retreat, but not before setting fire...
Simpler still is the so-called dirty bomb. Detonated in a crowded city, a dirty bomb would pack an explosive punch no greater than ordinary ordnance, but the radioactive debris it would scatter could sicken and kill unknown numbers of people and contaminate an unknown stretch of real estate. Because the bomb would require no special skill to build, it's perhaps the most feared of the terrorists' nuclear choices. "They don't kill as many people," says Morton Bremer Maerli, a nuclear-terror expert at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs, "but as a weapon of terror, they...
...humanitarian disaster in Afghanistan. London's Times gave prominence to a call by The Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Fund for the U.S. and Britain to stop using cluster bombs in Afghanistan, because of the "serious long-term threat to civilians." The bombs, being used against Taliban defensive lines, scatter 200 smaller "bomblets" designed to maximize their kill-ratio. But the bombs sometimes go astray, and also leave dangerous unexploded bomblets that kill civilians days or years later. Diana spent the last years of her life campaigning to ban land mines for the same reason...