pop star Kate Perry was given the international song of the year award for I Kissed a Girl at a French music award, but it turns out her song wasn’t the best after all.
The host of the NRJ Music Award in the Riviera resort of Cannes announced at the end of the show Saturday that there had been a mistake in vote-counting and that Perry was not the winner.
The award instead went to Barbados-born singer Rihanna for Disturbia.
The trophies were handed out based on results of audience votes on NRJ’s Web site in the weeks leading up to the awards ceremony.
Perry, who had stepped up to the podium to pick up the award for international song of the year, did however win in another category — best international album for One of the Boys.
The international female artist of the year award went to Britney Spears who was not present to receive the honor. The Pussycat Dolls won for best international group and Enrique Iglesias was named top international male artist.
Actor Patrick Swayze, the Dirty Dancing star who is battling pancreatic cancer, has been released from a weeklong stay at a hospital where he was treated for pneumonia, People magazine reported on Friday. Swayze, 56, was hospitalized in Los Angeles on Jan. 9, hours before he was scheduled to appear at a gathering of television critics to promote his new TV crime drama, The Beast, which premiered on the A&E cable network on Thursday.
Tom Cruise, who fails to assassinate Adolph Hitler in his new movie Valkyrie, said he grew up really wanting to kill the Nazi leader.
In the World War II thriller based on a true story of the unsuccessful attempt by German soldiers to kill Hitler, Cruise plays Colonel Claus von Stauffenber who plants a briefcase bomb under a table at Hitler’s military headquarters.
A heavy wooden table saves Hitler and Stauffenberg is executed with his co-conspirators.
“I always wanted to kill Hitler, I hated him,” the Hollywood star of such major blockbusters as Top Gun and Mission Impossible, told the press during a visit to Seoul to promote his latest film.
“As a child studying history and looking at documents, I wondered, why didn’t someone stand up and try to stop it? When I read the script, it was entertaining and informative to know what the challenges were and what it was like to be in the environment.”
Stauffenberg’s legacy helped ease the burden of guilt about World War II and the Holocaust Germans still endure. But Germans had balked at the prospect of Cruise playing Stauffenberg as they objected to the actor’s ties to Scientology, the movement founded in the 1950s by science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard.
Germany, which does not recognize Scientology as a religion and regards it as a cult, made it difficult for the crew to film in the Bendlerblock building and courtyard where Stauffenberg was shot dead.
“I’ve never heard of this story before ... It turned out to be an incredible adventure, just to be there and shoot at these locations that Stauffenberg was. It was a very powerful experience and hopefully it will communicate with the audience,” the actor said.
“It has certainly influenced my life, just knowing that there were people who tried to stop him (Hitler).”
Valkyrie, directed by Bryan Singer, opened in the US on Dec. 25 and fared better than skeptics had predicted, reaching No. 4 in the North American box office ratings for the three-day weekend starting Dec. 26. It opens on Thursday in Seoul for the first time in Asia.
Veteran British writer and leftwing lawyer John Mortimer whose most famous creation was curmudgeonly old London barrister Rumpole of The Bailey died Friday aged 85, his family said.
Mortimer — also known for defending Lady Chatterley’s Lover and the underground magazine Oz against obscenity charges — died peacefully at his home in the Chiltern Hills northwest of London, they said.
“His wife and family were at his side,” they said in a statement.
Mortimer’s prolific literary output often poked fun at the legal profession.
Starting out in the 1940s, he was a prodigious author of plays, novels and television and movie scripts, including the 1999 Tea with Mussolini directed by Italian film and opera legend Franco Zeffirelli.
A vociferous supporter of the Labour Party, he was a sharp-tongued critic of prime minister Margaret Thatcher before her ouster in 1990 and the election of a Labour government in 1997.
As a lawyer he successfully defended Penguin in the 1960s over obscenity charges against D.H. Lawrence’s steamy book Lady Chatterley’s Lover, doing the same for the publishers of the magazine Oz in 1971.
Rumpole of The Bailey was turned into a long-running television series and string of radio programs.
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
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