Movie star dies of heart failure: Elizabeth Taylor, the violet-eyed film goddess whose sultry screen persona, stormy personal life and enduring fame and glamour made her one of the last of the old-fashioned movie stars and a template for the modern celebrity, died today at age 79. She was surrounded by her four children when she died of congestive heart failure at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, where she had been hospitalized for about six weeks, says publicist Sally Morrison. Taylor was the most blessed and cursed of actresses, the toughest and the most vulnerable. She had extraordinary grace, wealth and voluptuous beauty, and won three Academy Awards, including a special one for her humanitarian work. She was the most loyal of friends and a defender of gays in Hollywood when AIDS was still a stigma in the industry and beyond. But she was afflicted by ill health, failed romances (eight marriages, seven husbands) and personal tragedy.
New page in the PlayBook: Research In Motion says its tablet computer, the BlackBerry PlayBook, will start selling in the U.S. and Canada on April 19 for $499 to $699. RIM says that customers can start pre-ordering the gadget—its answer to Apple’s popular iPad devices—through Best Buy. The PlayBook has a 7-inch screen, smaller than the iPad. It runs BlackBerry software and can connect to a BlackBerry, acting as a bigger screen for it. RIM calls it the first “professional-grade tablet.” The iPad 2, which went on sale earlier this month, also starts at $499. The $499 PlayBook comes with 16 gigabytes of memory. For $599, you get 32 gigabytes and for $699, 64 gigabytes. AT&T and Verizon Wireless stores will also sell the Wi-Fi version of the PlayBook.
