Vietnamese police have pressed child molestation charge against British rocker Gary Glitter who faces up to 12 years in a Vietnamese jail if convicted, officials said on Saturday. "The formal charge is engaging in perverse activities with children," an official from Ba Ria Vung Tau province said.
A British comedian who uses a boorish, sexist and racist Kazakh alter ego called "Borat" to poke fun at interviewees has responded to a legal threat from the Kazakh authorities by satirically welcoming the move. Sacha Baron Cohen, who plays the spoof Kazakh television reporter in his Da Ali G Show, incurred the wrath of Kazakhstan's Foreign Ministry this month after appearing as Borat at the annual MTV Europe Music Awards.
A legal battle between rival British pop moguls Simon Fuller and Simon Cowell was postponed indefinitely on Thursday, as lawyers were apparently seeking an out-of-court settlement. Fuller, best known as the manager of the Spice Girls band, has accused Cowell of copying his ideas in the hugely successful television talent show format, a claim dismissed by Cowell as "utterly ridiculous."
PHOTO: AP
British pop star Robbie Williams has entered the famed Guinness Book of World Records by selling more than 1.6 million tickets for his 2006 world tour in just one day, its editor said.
The heartthrob singer takes the five-year-old record from US star Justin Timberlake's former group, NSync.
Britain's biggest boy band Take That announced Friday they were reforming for a tour nearly a decade after splitting -- but without Williams.
PHOTO: EPA
Gary Barlow, Howard Donald, Jason Orange and Mark Owen will reunite for a tour of British and Irish arenas starting in April next year.
Williams quit the five-piece band six months before they split in 1996 and pulled off the unlikely feat of becoming a pop superstar in his own right.
Songwriter and lead singer Barlow, the band member tipped for solo success, has struggled like his other bandmates to match Williams' or Take That's fame.
Take That were a phenomenal success during from 1992 to 1996, clocking up eight British number one hits, including Relight My Fire, How Deep is Your Love and Back For Good, and selling 10 million albums.
Barlow said: "Thank you very much for giving us the last 10 years off, but unfortunately the rumors are true -- Take That are going back on tour."
The group admitted they would love Williams to join them on the 11-date tour.
"I think we can all say we would definitely have loved that. But we do respect that's not going to happen," Barlow said.
Pop star Elton John will marry his longtime partner David Furnish in a small, private ceremony on December 21, the day civil partnerships between gay couples become legal in Britain.
The couple's parents will be the only witnesses at the ceremony, though it will be followed by a party later in the evening, John said in an interview with British gay lifestyle magazine Attitude, on sale Friday.
"The ceremony itself will be very private," he said.
"It'll be a very small family affair and then in the evening there'll be a soiree somewhere, which we have yet to work out. But the ceremony itself will be David's parents and my parents and the two of us."
Pat Morita, the Japanese-American actor who gained fame as the wise Mr. Miyagi in the Karate Kid movies and on the television show Happy Days, has died in Las Vegas at the age of 73. The Las Vegas Palm Mortuary home said Morita died of natural causes on Thursday.
Supermodel Kate Moss has scored a lucrative deal with a mobile phone operator as she swiftly rebuilds her cocaine-shaken career, The Sun newspaper reported Friday.
Moss, 31, is to earn US$2.07 million as the face of the youth-oriented Virgin Mobile network in ads that will be shot in Los Angeles next month, it said.
"She's sorted herself out and is back in business ... She's come out of rehab looking better than ever with a fresh new approach," a source close to Moss was quoted as saying.
Moss was dropped by Swedish fashion retailer H and M and French haute couture house Chanel after fuzzy images of her apparently doing cocaine in a London recording studio in September appeared in the Daily Mirror newspaper.
She reportedly checked into a private clinic in the US state of Arizona for treatment, but was pictured in The Sun on Friday looking fit and bikini-clad in a pedalo in the Caribbean with her three-year-old daughter.
Moss has been romantically linked to Pete Doherty, frontman of the British rock group Babyshambles.
A few weeks ago I found myself at a Family Mart talking with the morning shift worker there, who has become my coffee guy. Both of us were in a funk over the “unseasonable” warm weather, a state of mind known as “solastalgia” — distress produced by environmental change. In fact, the weather was not that out of the ordinary in boiling Central Taiwan, and likely cooler than the temperatures we will experience in the near-future. According to the Taiwan Adaptation Platform, between 1957 and 2006, summer lengthened by 27.8 days, while winter shrunk by 29.7 days. Winter is not
Taiwan’s post-World War II architecture, “practical, cheap and temporary,” not to mention “rather forgettable.” This was a characterization recently given by Taiwan-based historian John Ross on his Formosa Files podcast. Yet the 1960s and 1970s were, in fact, the period of Taiwan’s foundational building boom, which, to a great extent, defined the look of Taiwan’s cities, determining the way denizens live today. During this period, functionalist concrete blocks and Chinese nostalgia gave way to new interpretations of modernism, large planned communities and high-rise skyscrapers. It is currently the subject of a new exhibition at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Modern
March 25 to March 31 A 56-year-old Wu Li Yu-ke (吳李玉哥) was straightening out her artist son’s piles of drawings when she inadvertently flipped one over, revealing the blank backside of the paper. Absent-mindedly, she picked up a pencil and recalled how she used to sketch embroidery designs for her clothing business. Without clients and budget or labor constraints to worry about, Wu Li drew freely whatever image came to her mind. With much more free time now that her son had found a job, she found herself missing her home village in China, where she
In recent years, Slovakia has been seen as a highly democratic and Western-oriented Central European country. This image was reinforced by the election of the country’s first female president in 2019, efforts to provide extensive assistance to Ukraine and the strengthening of relations with Taiwan, all of which strengthened Slovakia’s position within the European Union. However, the latest developments in the country suggest that the situation is changing rapidly. As such, the presidential elections to be held on March 23 will be an indicator of whether Slovakia remains in the Western sphere of influence or moves eastward, notably towards Russia and