R ’n’ B singer Usher’s divorce from his wife is final, according to court documents.
Fulton County Superior Court Judge Bensonetta Tipton Lane issued a final decree in the divorce case on Wednesday.
Usher, 31, whose real name is Usher Raymond IV, filed for divorce from Tameka Raymond on June 12. He said the couple had been separated since July of last year and claimed there was “no reasonable hope of reconciliation”’ and the marriage was “irretrievably broken.”
Tameka Raymond disputed Usher’s claim that the couple had been separated since July 2008. She said in court documents filed June 29 that she “had every reason to believe her marriage was intact” and that the two were “intimately together as husband and wife as recently as June 6.”
Usher’s lawyer, Ivory Brown, said on Friday she couldn’t comment on the case. BJ Bernstein, a lawyer for Tameka Raymond, did not immediately return a phone call seeking comment.
The couple have two young sons, Usher Raymond V, who will turn 2 on Nov. 26, and Naviyd Ely Raymond, who will be 1 on Dec. 11. When he filed for divorce, Usher was seeking joint custody of the boys.
No custody arrangement was detailed in the divorce decree.
The couple married in August 2007 in a lavish ceremony. About 200 people attended their wedding at resort built in the style of a 16th-century-style French chateau outside Atlanta.
Fans of Britney Spears deserted the pop diva just three songs in to her first Australian concert after it became evident she was miming rather than singing, news reports said Saturday.
“People are paying for it and have come here so she should sing,” a fan who walked out of Friday’s sold-out show told television station Nine Network.
A Burswood Entertainment Complex spokesman denied there had been a mass walk-out.
“Early media reports that hundreds of fans left the concert early cannot be substantiated, and Burswood has received no complaints about the concert,” he said.
Spears is playing Perth before taking her circus-themed show to Melbourne and Sydney.
Spears’ management have not denied that the star is lip-synching to recordings on the Circus tour.
But there has been no official response to a call from New South Wales state Trading Minister Virginia Judge that those purchasing tickets should be told not to expect a live show.
“Sydneysiders would not tolerate a Mickey Mouse performance,” she said. “Let’s be clear, live means live. If you’re spending up to US$180, I think you deserve better than a film clip.”
On the other side of the world a different diva has been kicking up a stink of her own.
As Egypt geared for pop diva Beyonce Knowles’ first performance in North Africa, Islamic conservatives branded her show an “insolent sex party” that threatens the Muslim nation’s “social peace and stability.” On giant posters plastered across the Egyptian capital advertising the Friday evening concert, Beyonce sports a revealing, flame-covered outfit and grips a set of motorcycle handlebars extending from her hips — a sharp contrast to Cairo streets, where most women wear the traditional Muslim headscarves.
TV ads promoting the show, part of Beyonce’s “I Am ...” world tour, have run on Egyptian and Arab satellite stations. The tour, which also took Beyonce to the United Arab Emirates last month.
But in Egypt, Islamic lawmakers and their supporters have waged campaigns on social networking Web sites, accusing the government of encouraging debauchery and calling for the concert’s cancellation.
“Why are you encouraging this insolent sex party?” lawmaker Hamdi Hassan from the opposition Muslim Brotherhood wrote in a letter to the government. “You are accused of disturbing social peace and stability, encouraging vice and debauchery.” Another Islamic lawmaker, Ali Laban, called for banning the “nudity concert.” A Facebook campaign against Beyonce’s concert collected nearly 10,000 supporters.
But the war of words did not derail the glitzy concert.
Beyonce canceled her stop in Malaysia last month following opposition from a conservative Islamic party. Malaysia requires female artists to cover up from the shoulders to the knees and bans any showing of cleavage.
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
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
A fossil jawbone found by a British girl and her father on a beach in Somerset, England belongs to a gigantic marine reptile dating to 202 million years ago that appears to have been among the largest animals ever on Earth. Researchers said on Wednesday the bone, called a surangular, was from a type of ocean-going reptile called an ichthyosaur. Based on its dimensions compared to the same bone in closely related ichthyosaurs, the researchers estimated that the Triassic Period creature, which they named Ichthyotitan severnensis, was between 22-26 meters long. That would make it perhaps the largest-known marine reptile and would