You know it’s an odd news week in the United States when the story about an Elvis Presley impersonator from Mississippi plotting to kill the President by mailing letters stuffed with ricin is pretty much ignored.

Paul Kevin Curtis is also an aspiring novelist and was arrested by the FBI last week after envelopes containing ricin were sent to President Obama, a U.S. senator, and a judge. According to his ex-wife, Curtis is “delusional, anti-government”.

She may have had a point. Curtis apparently believed the Feds were using drones to spy on his wife. He wrote on online forums about a government “conspiracy to ruin my reputation in the community as well as an ongoing effort to break down the foundation I worked more than 20 years to build in the country music scene.”

The Curtis case has a humorous/tragic side but what happened in the town of West, Texas, does not. At least 14 people were confirmed dead and 200 injured when a fertilizer plant exploded and wiped out a large part of the town.

SBS may be helping to tell seven Billion Stories every day, but from tomorrow, it will be telling those stories, for the first time, to 23 million Australians.

Australia's population officially hits a milestone on Tuesday at 9:57pm, according to projections by the Bureau of Statistics.

There is one baby born every 1 minute and 44 seconds.

There is one death every 3 minutes and 32 seconds.

Post-production services are doing it tough, hurt by the high dollar and a heavy discounting of fees.

Doron Kipen is one of Australia’s pre-eminent sound editors and mixers. So when he says he’s earning 50 percent less to post-produce the sound on an Australian feature film now than he got 10 years ago, it’s symptomatic of an industry that’s facing critical structural problems.

All sections of the service industry have been hit hard by the downturn in Australian film production and the absence of major offshore productions in light of the strong Oz dollar and the uncompetitive 16.5 percent location offset.

“Our sector is at breaking point. All the top post production facilities are on the edge,” Kipen (pictured), who owns the Melbourne-based sound post production studio Music and Effects, tells SBS Film. The malaise affects the entire post production industry, he says, observing, “All the crafts are being absolutely decimated by competition.”

Andy Schleck (Getty Images)

In Stuart Randall's first foray into the Cycling Central blogosphere he questions whether the narrative of Andy Schleck's fragility is warranted.

It was around 11pm on Sunday night that the info trickled in. And the tweets.

“Andy Schleck abandons Amstel”

“Schleckchute deployed”

No longer at the front. Has our neo-pro disturbed Peter Sagan's mojo? (Getty Images)

I'm worried about Peter Sagan. Not only is he not returning my text messages, but now he's not even winning races.

From dominating the podium in the middle part of the spring, Sagan has barely fired a shot in the past week. These hillier courses were meant to suit him down to the ground but all we're getting is excuses about cramps and hot weather (Amstel Gold) and other riders just being too good (La Fleche Wallonne).

Cramps and heat I can almost accept, but others being too good? From what I have seen first-hand, it's implausible. And I have a theory on the real reasons behind Sagan's mid-spring slump.

It's all about the celebrations.

New breed... Carlos Alberto Betancur lights up the Mur de Huy with an attack that stirred memories of the golden era of Colombia cycling in the 1980s. (Sirotti)

Carlos Betancur's blazing attack on the early part of the Mur de Huy at Fleche Wallone was just the latest chapter in a resurgence in Colombian cycling that looks set to define the next decade, writes Al Hinds.

panache (n)

1. A flamboyant confidence of style or manner. (Oxford)

2. (Alt.) The Colombian style of riding. Gutsy. Beautiful to watch. Epitomised by the feats of Lucho Herrera in the 1980s.

I was lucky enough to go to Colombia for the launch of the Coldeportes (now Colombia) team at the end of 2011. Admittedly at the time my knowledge of the South American country was more shaped by the legacy of cocaina, beautiful women, and great coffee. I wasn't ignorant of the country's cycling legacy, but I was no expert.

The normally serious director returned to his Hamburg roots for his lightest film so far.

It is such a joy to be researching a film for one reason or another and come across a thorough and unfiltered interview with the director on YouTube or a comprehensive Q&A in written form. I had this experience in reference to Fatih Akin’s film Soul Kitchen, which is being shown this Saturday at 9.30pm.

[ SBS ONE Film season: full schedule ]

Four Lions, the debut film from the UK comedian Chris Morris, was going to go in this spot but the SBS programming department yesterday decided to pull it off air because of the deaths and injuries that have resulted from the bomb blasts at the Boston Marathon.

In May 2011, Congressman Anthony Weiner made a technology blunder that many of us would be prone to do. He pressed “send” on what he thought was a private message from his Twitter account to a college student in Seattle.

Ooops.

He had, in fact, sent the message – a photograph – to the main feed of his Twitter account, publishing to his followers and, if anyone were to be interested enough, the general public.

For those of you not familiar with how Twitter operates this would perhaps be the real world equivalent of intending to whisper in someone’s ear in a private room but instead running down the street yelling and screaming.

Baz Luhrmann’s remake seems to be polarising audiences already.

Whether you hated or adored Baz Luhrmann’s film Australia, are you looking forward to his remake of The Great Gatsby?

My sense is that Baz’s fans are eager to embrace his reinterpretation of the classic F. Scott Fitzgerald novel, which was adapted on screen most memorably by director Jack Clayton in the 1974 movie which starred Robert Redford and Mia Farrow.

But will folks who haven’t been enamoured of Luhrmann’s previous, highly theatrical efforts, or those who loved the novel and earlier screen versions accept his transition to a more conventionally-framed romantic drama set in the 1920s, albeit in 3D?

Sundance favourite Lynn Shelton has signed Anne Hathaway for her new film, Laggies.

Actors want to work with American independent director Lynn Shelton. 2011’s Your Sister’s Sister drew great performances from Emily Blunt, Rosemarie DeWitt and Mark DuPlass, and Shelton quickly followed that up with Touchy Feely, which features Ellen Page (Juno), Scoot McNairy (Killing Them Softly) and DeWitt and is still on the festival circuit. Now Shelton is preparing her fourth feature, Laggies, which is the story of a twentysomething woman who panics when her boyfriend proposes and runs away to hang out with a 16-year-old who becomes her new best friend. Shelton has two prominent actors for the lead roles, with recent Academy Award winner Anne Hathaway (Les Misérables) to appear opposite Chloë Grace Moretz (Kick-Ass, Hugo).

Tanovic picks iron-strong story
When the Bosnian filmmaker Danis Tanovic (No Man’s Land, Hell) read a newspaper report about a Romani (or roma gypsy) family where the wife was denied life-saving medical treatment in Bosnia-Herzegovina despite losing a baby due to a miscarriage and the lengths her husband, a collector of scrap metal, had to go to save her, the director knew he had the basis of his next film. But fearing that securing a budget would delay production getting underway, Tanovic instead cast the couple, husband Nazif Mujic and wife Senada Alimovic, as themselves and recreated their ordeal with a small volunteer crew over a 10-day shoot. The no-budget An Episode in the Life of an Iron Picker has already played the Berlin Film Festival and drawn strong reviews for the amateur cast.