autopsy is planned in the Bahamas for actor John Travolta’s 16-year-old son, who died suddenly during a vacation at his family’s resort home, authorities said. Police Superintendent Basil Rahming said on Saturday the autopsy, which could determine the cause of death of Jett Travolta, was likely to be performed today.
Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasreen, under threat of death from Islamist extremists who accuse her of blasphemy in her writings, is to take up residence in Paris, the city hall said Saturday.
Municipal authorities will provide her with a large studio in an artists’ residence in the 10th arrondissement, in the east of the French capital, and initially pay her rent.
Nasreen, who was made an honorary citizen of Paris in July of last year, put in an application for housing six weeks ago.
Nasreen was forced to flee her native country in 1994 after her novel Lajja (Shame) about the persecution of a Hindu family by Muslims in Bangladesh drew accusations of blasphemy.
A gynecologist by training, she spent several years moving between Europe and the US before settling in India in 2004. Renewed threats drove her to Sweden in March last year.
Actor Will Smith, star of Hancock and Seven Pounds, was voted the top money-making movie star of last year, dethroning Johnny Depp in an annual poll released on Friday of movie theater owners and film buyers. Smith, 40, is only the second African-American actor to win the Quigley poll in its 76 year history. Sidney Poitier was placed first in 1968 after the success of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner and In the Heat of the Night.
Surviving members of The Grateful Dead say they’ll regroup for a 19-city tour, their first since 2004, beginning April 12 in Greensboro, North Carolina.
The group, which now calls itself The Dead, announced its plans on Thursday.
Original band members Bob Weir, Phil Lesh, Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann have toured sporadically since the 1995 death of guitarist Jerry Garcia, but struggled to get along personally and artistically. They told Rolling Stone in November that they’ve worked out their differences, aided by a successful October benefit concert in Pennsylvania for then-presidential candidate Barack Obama.
Warren Haynes joins The Dead on lead guitar, and Jeff Chimenti will play keyboards.
British actor Edmund Purdom, star of Hollywood blockbusters The Egyptian and The Prodigal in the mid-1950s, has died aged 82 in Rome where he was a longtime resident, his family said on Friday.
Purdom, who died Thursday, began his acting career in theater on both sides of the Atlantic.
He landed the lead role in the MGM musical The Student Prince in 1954, displacing an overweight Mario Lanzo, and moved on to replace Marlon Brando who opted out of The Egyptian the same year.
After settling in Rome in the mid-1960s, Purdom played in “sword-and-sandal” epics and Italian B movies, and then worked for many years as a voice-dubbing actor, mainly from Italian into English.
In a romantic history that included four weddings and three divorces, Purdom was best known for abruptly leaving his first wife Anita Philips and their children to marry Mexican actress Linda Christian, with whom he starred in Athena (1954).
Christian was the ex-wife of heartthrob Tyrone Power.
Mystery writer Donald Westlake, one of the most prolific figures in US literary history, has died after a career that spanned half a century, it was reported Friday. He was 75.
His wife Abigail Westlake said he collapsed of a heart attack while heading to a New Year’s Eve dinner in Mexico where he was vacationing, the New York Times reported.
The versatile writer — who banged out his stories on a manual typewriter — was also nominated for an Academy Award for his screenplay of The Grifters (1990) and received three Edgar awards by the Mystery Writers of America.
Westlake’s Web site lists him as the author of 86 books and five screenplays, beginning in 1960 with his novel The Mercenaries.
In a 2007 interview he said his output was up to 104 books. The latest, Get Real, was due to be published this year.
Fifteen of his novels were made into movies, including The Hot Rock (1972) starring Robert Redford and Payback (1999) with Mel Gibson.
In a May 2007 interview with the publication On Writing, Westlake said he was less interested in historical accuracy than in developing his characters and their actions.
“It’s like quicksand,” he said about doing too much research for a novel. “You can get drowned in research and never be heard from again.”
Last week Joseph Nye, the well-known China scholar, wrote on the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s website about how war over Taiwan might be averted. He noted that years ago he was on a team that met with then-president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), “whose previous ‘unofficial’ visit to the US had caused a crisis in which China fired missiles into the sea and the US deployed carriers off the coast of Taiwan.” Yes, that’s right, mighty Chen caused that crisis all by himself. Neither the US nor the People’s Republic of China (PRC) exercised any agency. Nye then nostalgically invoked the comical specter
Relations between Taiwan and the Czech Republic have flourished in recent years. However, not everyone is pleased about the growing friendship between the two countries. Last month, an incident involving a Chinese diplomat tailing the car of vice president-elect Hsiao Bi-khim (蕭美琴) in Prague, drew public attention to the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) operations to undermine Taiwan overseas. The trip was not Hsiao’s first visit to the Central European country. It was meant to be low-key, a chance to meet with local academics and politicians, until her police escort noticed a car was tailing her through the Czech capital. The
April 15 to April 21 Yang Kui (楊逵) was horrified as he drove past trucks, oxcarts and trolleys loaded with coffins on his way to Tuntzechiao (屯子腳), which he heard had been completely destroyed. The friend he came to check on was safe, but most residents were suffering in the town hit the hardest by the 7.1-magnitude Hsinchu-Taichung Earthquake on April 21, 1935. It remains the deadliest in Taiwan’s recorded history, claiming around 3,300 lives and injuring nearly 12,000. The disaster completely flattened roughly 18,000 houses and damaged countless more. The social activist and
Over the course of former President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) 11-day trip to China that included a meeting with Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader Xi Jinping (習近平) a surprising number of people commented that the former president was now “irrelevant.” Upon reflection, it became apparent that these comments were coming from pro-Taiwan, pan-green supporters and they were expressing what they hoped was the case, rather than the reality. Ma’s ideology is so pro-China (read: deep blue) and controversial that many in his own Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) hope he retires quickly, or at least refrains from speaking on some subjects. Regardless