LOS ANGELES/VANCOUVER (Reuters) – North America is at little risk of receiving harmful levels of radiation from Japan’s nuclear crisis, officials said on Thursday, but that has not stopped a scramble on the West Coast for items like potassium iodide and Geiger counters.

Low concentrations of radioactive particles from Japan’s stricken nuclear plants are expected to drift over the Pacific Ocean, but nothing has been detected by U.S. or Canadian monitoring stations, officials said.

WASHINGTON, March 11 (Reuters) – There is nothing quite
like a horrific natural disaster to put things into
perspective, and Japan’s 8.9 earthquake and devastating tsunami
Friday were no different. Before getting down to business, we
paused this morning to consider our own fragility, including
President Barack Obama, who said he was “heartbroken” by
Japan’s heavy loss of life.

Against such a stark backdrop, America’s high gas prices
might seem like a frivolous topic. But, in fact, it is serious
– for Americans whose lifestyle dictates heavy gas consumption
and for a president who is under pressure to deliver his people
some relief at the gas pumps.

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – An investigation by U.S. immigration officials into illegal unemployment at Chipotle Mexican Grill Inc (CMG.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) is making some investors nervous and could have implications for the fast food industry as a whole.

Chipotle, based in Denver, Colorado, is one of the highest-profile employers to come under the scrutiny of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in recent years. And the investigation into its hiring practices has served as a wake-up call for the nation’s nearly 580,000 restaurants.

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – “Inside Job,” a film blaming financial institutions for triggering the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, won the Academy Award for best documentary on Sunday.

Director Charles Ferguson started off his acceptance speech lamenting that “not a single financial executive has gone to jail and that is wrong,” drawing applause from the Hollywood celebrity audience.

BEVERLY HILLS, California (Reuters) – Acclaimed Mexican director Alejandro Gonzalez-Inarritu knew he was in a bad way when the film critics who loved his drama “Biutiful” kept calling it bleak, dark and depressing.

Those adjectives scared off distributors, particularly in the United States, where the director said “everyone was really afraid of the film” about a dying man played by Javier Bardem.

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Jazz giant Herbie Hancock played last month for Chinese President Hu Jintao at the White House state dinner and might have done a little something to smooth those tense U.S.-China relations.

While he and other artists performed their program, including Hancock’s famous 1962 piece “Watermelon Man,” the atmosphere warmed up.

LOS ANGELES, Feb 10 (Reuters) – Fast-growing burrito chain
Chipotle Mexican Grill Inc (CMG.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) said on Thursday it was too
early to tell if it would change its hiring practices after a
federal immigration crackdown forced it to fire hundreds of
employees in Minnesota.

But as the company faces a widening probe into restaurants
in Virginia and Washington D.C., executives said they are
trying to head off the kind of disruption that occurred in
Minnesota, where new hiring and training added 20 percent to 30
percent in restaurant crew hours.

LOS ANGELES, Feb 9 (Reuters) – Chipotle Mexican Grill Inc
(CMG.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz), in the midst of a widening federal crackdown on its
its undocumented work force, warned investors a year ago that
it was subject to immigration audits and that it may be
employing workers in the country illegally.

In what may prove to be a prescient statement, the Wall
Street darling also said in its 2009 annual report that the
discovery of a large number of of unauthorized workers could
disrupt operations and harm financial performance.

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Documentary director Charles Ferguson knew he had a great global story in the 2008 financial crisis, but he still worried that “Inside Job” could fall into the category of a boring film if not jazzed up properly.

So he applied tools normally associated with feature films, like expansive cinematography and what he calls “cool music” to help illustrate how America and the world ended up in the deepest financial disaster since the Great Depression.

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – From the backstreet sweatshops of Barcelona to bullying schoolyards in Denmark, this year’s Oscar nominations for best foreign-language film take moviegoers on a world tour of bleak family drama and struggle.

Dramas from Algeria, Canada, Denmark, Greece and Mexico clinched nominations on Tuesday from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, but many of the films’ locations spill over to other countries like Spain, France and Kenya.