Will Smith is bringing the message of his new movie Seven Pounds to the Midwest with a promotional tour that has also turned into a fundraiser.
In the film, which opens across the US this Friday, Smith portrays a suicidal man determined to change the lives of several strangers.
Smith’s appearance last Friday for a local premier at a theater in suburban Edina was also a fundraiser for Minnesota’s largest hunger-relief organization.
“It’s cool to have the goal of being the biggest movie star in the world. But why? It’s been revealed to me that the question is: Whose life is better because you woke up today?”
Smith said he realized he had drifted out of contact with everyday people on Nov. 4.
“I sat there with my children and my 16-year-old son couldn’t understand how I didn’t know [the US presidential election] was over already. He was like ‘You’re out of touch,’” he said.
Another family man, Usher, has gotten an early holiday gift — a second son.
The 29-year-old singer and his wife, Tameka, are celebrating the birth of Naviyd Ely Raymond. The infant arrived early Wednesday, weighing 2.64kg.
This is the second child for the couple, who were married two years ago. Tameka Raymond has three children from a previous marriage.
Not enjoying the holidays this year — or the next, for that matter — is the man who sold a newspaper footage that appeared to show Amy Winehouse taking drugs.
Johnny Blagrove and his girlfriend Cara Burton admitted offering to supply drugs, including cocaine and ecstasy, to the singer and other celebrities.
Judge Tudor Owen ordered Blagrove, 34, jailed for two years.
Burton, 22, received two years’ community service.
Prosecutors say the pair covertly filmed Winehouse at a party and sold the footage to The Sun for £50,000 (US$75,000).
In January the paper published the images, which appeared to show the singer smoking crack cocaine and snorting a substance from a card.
Detectives decided there was not enough evidence to charge Winehouse because it could not be proved what the substances were.
But they charged the couple with offering to supply drugs.
Police who raided Blagrove and Burton’s home found a list of celebrities they planned to film taking drugs, including Winehouse.
The judge said there was no evidence they actually sold the singer drugs — a fact that saved them from longer sentences.
In another court case, a judge has granted Tom Cruise a restraining order against an Iraq war veteran who brandished a gun near a freeway and later tried to hand-deliver a letter to the actor, an attorney said on Thursday.
Edward Van Tassel, 29, wanted to get the letter in Cruise’s hands to enlist him in the cause of helping other veterans, the former soldier’s attorney said.
Van Tassel went to Cruise’s Beverly Hills mansion on Dec. 3 and again on Sunday in an attempt to deliver the letter.
Authorities had earlier arrested Van Tassel last month on weapons charges after an incident in which he stood on a freeway overpass with a gun and a sign in what his attorney described as a protest.
Joe Pantoliano’s first reaction to being told he was clinically depressed was ... euphoria.
Finally, he said, he had an answer to why he’d been so miserable despite having the success and family he always wanted.
The 57-year-old actor, perhaps best known for playing Ralph Cifaretto on HBO’s The Sopranos, was in Buffalo on Thursday to talk about the organization he founded two years ago to help remove the stigma attached to mental illness. It’s called: No Kidding, Me Too!
“Mental disease is the only thing you can be diagnosed with and get yelled at for having,” he said. “Why is that?” Appearing with representatives from pharmaceutical and biomedical research companies, Pantoliano said medication has helped him manage his depression.
“From the moment I was diagnosed there was a certain sense of euphoria and ‘Thank God’ we figured this out,” he said, “because I thought that I’d become such a curmudgeon.”
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
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