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.
Sept.16 to Sept. 22 The “anti-communist train” with then-president Chiang Kai-shek’s (蔣介石) face plastered on the engine puffed along the “sugar railway” (糖業鐵路) in May 1955, drawing enthusiastic crowds at 103 stops covering nearly 1,200km. An estimated 1.58 million spectators were treated to propaganda films, plays and received free sugar products. By this time, the state-run Taiwan Sugar Corporation (台糖, Taisugar) had managed to connect the previously separate east-west lines established by Japanese-era sugar factories, allowing the anti-communist train to travel easily from Taichung to Pingtung’s Donggang Township (東港). Last Sunday’s feature (Taiwan in Time: The sugar express) covered the inauguration of the
The corruption cases surrounding former Taipei Mayor and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) head Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) are just one item in the endless cycle of noise and fuss obscuring Taiwan’s deep and urgent structural and social problems. Even the case itself, as James Baron observed in an excellent piece at the Diplomat last week, is only one manifestation of the greater problem of deep-rooted corruption in land development. Last week the government announced a program to permit 25,000 foreign university students, primarily from the Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysia, to work in Taiwan after graduation for 2-4 years. That number is a
In a stark demonstration of how award-winning breakthroughs can come from the most unlikely directions, researchers have won an Ig Nobel prize for discovering that mammals can breathe through their anuses. After a series of tests on mice, rats and pigs, Japanese scientists found the animals absorb oxygen delivered through the rectum, work that underpins a clinical trial to see whether the procedure can treat respiratory failure. The team is among 10 recognized in this year’s Ig Nobel awards (see below for more), the irreverent accolades given for achievements that “first make people laugh, and then make them think.” They are not
This Qing Dynasty trail takes hikers from renowned hot springs in the East Rift Valley, up to the top of the Coastal Mountain Range, and down to the Pacific Short vacations to eastern Taiwan often require choosing between the Rift Valley with its pineapple fields, rice paddies and broader range of amenities, or the less populated coastal route for its ocean scenery. For those who can’t decide, why not try both? The Antong Traversing Trail (安通越嶺道) provides just such an opportunity. Built 149 years ago, the trail linked up these two formerly isolated parts of the island by crossing over the Coastal Mountain Range. After decades of serving as a convenient path for local Amis, Han settlers, missionaries and smugglers, the trail fell into disuse once modern roadways were built