The debate over whether new mothers should breast-feed entered the top Philippine court recently, with health officials claiming that aggressive advertising has many women believing that formula is better than their own milk.

With breast-feeding rates declining across Asia - just 35 per cent of mothers breast-feed exclusively for their baby's first six months - the Philippine Health Department last year proposed regulations to strengthen its national milk code.

The goal was to make it harder for formula companies to target parents of children under the age of two with advertising of products that claim to foster smarter, stronger babies. The earlier regulations banned companies from promoting products for infants younger than one year old.

With the release of the final Harry Potter book just days away, fans are getting their fix of the boy wizard at the movies.

The latest film, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, grossed $12.8 million at the Australian box office on its opening weekend.

The fifth film opened nationally last Wednesday, and took more than $4 million on its opening day.

The result makes Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix the fourth biggest opening weekend of all time in Australia, and the best Harry Potter opening weekend yet.

In an extraordinary turn as France's ''little sparrow'', Marion Cotillard's Edith Piaf is almost better than the original, writes Stephanie Bunbury.

All the time she was shooting La Vie en Rose, says Marion Cotillard, she barely slept at night. Edith Piaf, the peerless French chanteuse whose life was being brought to the screen, had always slept badly. Now she did the same. "One hour, two - three was huge!" she recalls in her careful, glamorously accented English. "And, after two weeks, I started to be afraid because that never happens to me before. I can sleep 10 hours without waking up. Really!"

Luciano Pavarotti is "fighting like a lion" against his pancreatic cancer and is reacting well to radiotherapy, his wife told an Italian newspaper.

"I can now say he is doing well," Nicoletta Mantovani said in an interview published today in the Italian daily La Stampa.

The 71-year-old Italian opera star underwent surgery after doctors discovered a malignant pancreatic mass last year.

X Files star David Duchovny has confirmed that a second film based on the popular TV series is in the works.

Speaking on Saturday at the Television Critics Association press tour, Duchovny said original cast and crew members are signed up for the sequel to the film made in 1998.

"I'm supposed to see a script next week," said Duchovny, who also was promoting the Showtime comedy Californication in which he plays a self-destructive novelist.