"Nappy-headed hos," the phrase that cost radio shock jock Don Imus his job and triggered a debate on how far free speech can go, was named on Thursday as the most egregious politically incorrect turn of phrase of last year. Trailing behind that phrase in the annual survey by Global Language Monitor (www.LanguageMonitor.com), a word usage group, were "Ho-Ho-Ho" and "Carbon Footprint Stomping," said the group's president Paul JJ Payack.
A puppet show version of Harry Potter featuring a naked Dumbledore and an enigmatic song called Chocolate Rain by a Minnesota graduate student were among the winners of YouTube's second annual video awards, the Web site said on Friday. Tay Zonday, a 25-year-old baritone PhD student in American Studies, won best music with his original song Chocolate Rain, a rhythmic electric keyboard-backed number whose curious lyrics could be a political statement - or humorous nonsense.
Hollywood power couple Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt donated more than US$8 million dollars to charity in 2006 according to tax records, it was reported on Friday.
PHOTO :AP
Fox News reported on its Web site that the actors funneled more than US$4 million dollars each to the Jolie Pitt Foundation, which was set up two years ago to aid humanitarian causes around the world.
According to federal tax records, the foundation handed out around US$2.4 million dollars in donations in 2006, including US$1 million dollars each to both Doctors without Borders and the Global AIDS Alliance.
Pitt, 44, and Jolie, 32, are reportedly expecting their second child. Pitt and Jolie met on the set of their 2005 film Mr and Mrs Smith and later began a romantic relationship.
PHOTO :AP
Britney Spears' father has been given the green light by a court to start selling off some of the fancy car fleet owned by his daughter as he tries to cut her astronomical living expenses.
A court granted the singer's father on Monday the power to "sell or dispose of" an undisclosed number of her seven cars, documents show.
Lawyers for Spears' father, Jamie, stated that the cost of maintaining the fleet of vehicles was too expensive and that the sale of a "certain number of" her cars "will save substantial expense to the conservatorship estate."
Among the singer's cars are two white Mercedes (a SL65 and a CLK350), a white Mini Cooper convertible and a black Audi, according to the court filing.
According to OK magazine, Spears has a fortune of around US$40 million dollars, which her father wants to conserve to enable her and her two children to live comfortably even if she never works again.
To that end, Jamie Spears has ordered Britney's budget of US$100,000 dollars a month for entertainment and vacations to be cut by 90 percent. Her US$16,000 dollar monthly clothing allowance has been halved and she is also giving up a US$30,000-dollar per month rental house in Malibu that she never used.
Legendary Cuban musician Israel Lopez, known to the world as Cachao and credited with being one of the originators of the mambo musical style, died on Saturday in Miami, his spokesman announced. He was 89.
A gifted bassist and an innovative composer, Cachao was born in Havana in 1918 and began his career playing music for silent movies.
By the 1930s he was well known as a Latin jazz virtuoso along with his brother Orestes Lopez. The two had a prolific musical output, recording scores of records.
In this period he wrote songs in the style that became known as mambo.
Mambo became popular around the world in the 1940s when Cuban band leader and composer Damaso Perez Prado - known as the King of Mambo - came up with a special dance for the music and it began to be treated as a separate genre.
Cachao and his brother Orestes won Grammy record awards in 1995 and 2005, as well as a Latino Grammy in 2003.
Cachao died early on Saturday from to kidney failure, spokesman Nelson Albareda told local media.
British actor Paul Scofield, who won an Oscar for his role in A Man For All Seasons and was one of his country's greatest Shakespearean actors, has died at the age of 86, his agent said on Thursday.
Scofield died peacefully in a hospital near his home in the county of Sussex in southeast England, where he was being treated for leukemia.
Considered one of the leading classical actors of a generation that included Richard Burton and Laurence Olivier, he won an Oscar in 1966 for portraying the Roman Catholic statesman Sir Thomas More in the film of Robert Bolt's play.
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
Approaching her mid-30s, Xiong Yidan reckons that most of her friends are on to their second or even third babies. But Xiong has more than a dozen. There is Lucky, the street dog from Bangkok who jumped into a taxi with her and never left. There is Sophie and Ben, sibling geese, who honk from morning to night. Boop and Pan, both goats, are romantically involved. Dumpling the hedgehog enjoys a belly rub from time to time. The list goes on. Xiong nurtures her brood from her 8,000 square meter farm in Chiang Dao, a mountainous district in northern Thailand’s
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
April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist