Nail down the furniture: Cruise to appear on Oprah Winfrey Show

People

Tom Cruise is scheduled to return to "The Oprah Winfrey Show," nearly three years after a couch-jumping appearance that spawned countless YouTube parodies and late-night jokes. The two-part show will coincide with the 25th anniversary of Cruise's booty-shaking turn in the film "Risky Business." Winfrey will interview Cruise from his home in Telluride, Colo., for the first show on May 2. Then on May 5, Cruise will appear in Winfrey's Chicago studio.

Update

Cuba calling

Cuba's telephone monopoly says 7,400 new cellphone accounts have been contracted in the 10 days since all Cubans were allowed to sign up for service. President Raul Castro's new government lifted the restriction on service April 14.

Oops!

No surfing at work

Spain's Defense Ministry has ordered its staff to stop browsing sports and entertainment Web sites while on duty, an official said Thursday. The newspaper El Mundo said the restrictions stem from recent incidents in which computer systems overloaded and nearly crashed.

Passages

Uranus J. "Bob" Appel, 91, a bacteriologist and entrepreneur who founded the first publicly owned hospital-management company and in the process changed medical care in the United States, died Sunday at his home in Playa del Rey on the west side of Los Angeles.

Today in History

1859: Ground was broken for the Suez Canal.

1898: The United States formally declared war on Spain.

1915: During World War I, Allied soldiers invaded the Gallipoli Peninsula in an unsuccessful attempt to take the Ottoman Empire out of the war.

1945: During World War II, U.S. and Soviet forces linked up on the Elbe River, a meeting that dramatized the collapse of Nazi Germany's defenses.

1945: Delegates from some 50 countries met in San Francisco to organize the United Nations.

Today's Birthdays

Movie director-writer Paul Mazursky, 78. Songwriter Jerry Leiber, 75. Actor Al Pacino, 68. Actress Talia Shire, 62. Actor Hank Azaria, 44. TV personality Jane Clayson, 41. Actress Renée Zellweger, 39. Actor Jason Lee, 38.

P.S.

Another Bond mishap

A stuntman was seriously injured in a car crash while filming an action sequence for the new James Bond movie on a famously winding lakeside road in northern Italy, a local official said Thursday. The London-based production company for "Quantum of Solace" said the accident occurred Wednesday. The accident was the second on the Bond set in four days, after an Aston Martin being delivered to the set skidded off the road in heavy rain and landed in Lake Garda on Saturday.

Seattle Times news services