Lawyers for Michael Jackson have asked a California judge to conduct behind closed doors a key hearing into accusations of past sex offenses by the singer, along with all other proceedings involving evidence in the case. The unusual request, which came to light in court papers made public on Tuesday, is in keeping with the extraordinary secrecy imposed in the matter by Santa Barbara Superior Court Judge Rodney Melville and sought by attorneys for both sides.
A television benefit show for victims of the Asian tsunami featuring Madonna, Stevie Wonder, Eric Clapton, Elton John and a string of Hollywood celebrities has run into controversy in the US before a note has been played or a dollar pledged. Fox TV conservative commentator Bill O'Reilly started the furor by suggesting that not all the money raised would aid tsunami victims.
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From sad to sadder, patrons in the restaurant where Robert Blake dined with his wife right before she was murdered testified Tuesday that the actor seemed upset, behaved oddly, and threw up his dinner well before anything happened to his wife. A longtime patron of Vitello's restaurant, near the 71-year-old actor's home in the San Fernando Valley section of Los Angeles, said Blake "seemed different from other times" he had been seen at the popular eatery.
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Richard Avedon, who went from a US marine photographer to one of the giants of contemporary arts, spent time shortly before his death in September giving tips to a budding young Army photographer about the craft. Army specialist Rodney Foliente, who joined the military about five months ago to hone his skills as a photographer, and Major Matt Garner were the public-affairs troops who helped Avedon when he photographed US soldiers at Fort Hood for a New Yorker magazine essay. Reuters obtained the final photographs of Avedon taken by the two soldiers on Tuesday.
Arnie's busy, so Terminator 3 star Nick Stahl has signed on to play a private investigator in the big-screen adaptation of A Cool Breeze on the Underground, The Hollywood Reporter said.
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The movie is based on the first of a five-book mystery series by Don Winslow and centers on a young man on the wrong side of the law who's inducted into a secret organization that keeps its wealthy clients happy and trouble-free. As his first mission, he must use his newly learned investigating skills to track down a senator's teenage daughter who has gone underground in London.
Speaking of underground, Osama Bin Laden protege Abdurachman Khadr, who was raised in the arch-terrorist's Afghanistan compound and later became an informant for the US, has sold the film rights to his upcoming biography for an undisclosed sum, the Hollywood Reporter said Monday.
Khadr, 21, was groomed to become a terrorist because his father, a member of bin Laden's inner circle. As Khadr matured, he became disillusioned with bin Laden's al-Qaeda terrorist network, resulting in rebelliousness, attempts to run away and repeated refusals when his father attempted to get him to become a suicide bomber.
Khadr escaped the compound after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington, was captured by US forces in Afghanistan and recruited by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) as an informant at Guantanamo Bay, where he was placed among prisoners in an attempt to gain al-Qaeda secrets. He was due to be sent to Iraq before deciding to blow his cover by contacting a relative in Canada.
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
The following three paragraphs are just some of what the local Chinese-language press is reporting on breathlessly and following every twist and turn with the eagerness of a soap opera fan. For many English-language readers, it probably comes across as incomprehensibly opaque, so bear with me briefly dear reader: To the surprise of many, former pop singer and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) ex-lawmaker Yu Tien (余天) of the Taiwan Normal Country Promotion Association (TNCPA) at the last minute dropped out of the running for committee chair of the DPP’s New Taipei City chapter, paving the way for DPP legislator Su
It’s hard to know where to begin with Mark Tovell’s Taiwan: Roads Above the Clouds. Having published a travelogue myself, as well as having contributed to several guidebooks, at first glance Tovell’s book appears to inhabit a middle ground — the kind of hard-to-sell nowheresville publishers detest. Leaf through the pages and you’ll find them suffuse with the purple prose best associated with travel literature: “When the sun is low on a warm, clear morning, and with the heat already rising, we stand at the riverside bike path leading south from Sanxia’s old cobble streets.” Hardly the stuff of your
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby