Scottish singer Susan Boyle, one of the biggest stars of the Internet age, seeks to turn global celebrity into record sales this week with the release of her debut album I Dreamed a Dream. Named after the song from the musical Les Miserables that made her famous, the 12-track album is a mix of pop covers like Madonna’s You’ll See and The Monkees’ Daydream Believer and Christian stalwarts like Amazing Grace.
Weeks ahead of the album’s release, it topped Amazon’s pre-sale charts. Boyle is the church mouse who roared on Britain’s Got Talent last spring, turning the tables on judges and audience members disdainful that a woman over 25 blithe to the rigors of Botox should open her mouth in public. A viral pandemic on YouTube made the Scottish 40-something an international star. This is her dream come true, we are told; never mind that the whirlwind taking her from West Lothian to happy ever after has already landed this psychologically delicate woman in a clinic.
This, then, is no mere bunch of songs; it is a commemorative mug of a major national event, rendered as a silver gewgaw that plays music.
Pirates of the Caribbean star Johnny Depp is the sexiest man on the planet, according to People magazine.
Depp, 46, headed a list of 15, catching People’s attention not so much for his swashbuckling antics in the Pirates franchise, or his freakish charm in Edward Scissorhands, but his softer side as a family man.
The “star has had women swooning since his days as a teen detective on 21 Jump Street. Yet it’s his devotion to his family that really makes the actor so endearing,” People gushed.
Depp’s companion is French singer Vanessa Paradis and he is the father of Lily-Rose, 10, and Jack, seven.
The slightly built actor who often sports a whispy goatee beard and floppy hair beat out 33-year-old actor Ryan Reynolds, costar in The Proposal, and Jake Gyllenhaal of Brokeback Mountain.
Depp also won the magazine’s “Sexiest” honor in 2003.
The Swedish soprano Elisabeth Soderstrom has died at the age of 82, the Royal Swedish Opera announced on Saturday.
She died in a Stockholm hospital on Friday morning.
During a career spanning half a century, the singer performed regularly at New York’s Metropolitan Opera and Covent Garden in London, and made numerous appearances at Britain’s Glyndebourne summer festival.
The Royal Swedish Opera said Soderstrom had “a unique ability to move the audience both through her voice and through her acting.”
She would be remembered particularly for her performances as Tatiana in Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin and the Marshallin in Strauss’ Der Rosenkavalier, the Opera said.
Her name would also long be associated with the role of Marguerite in Gounod’s Faust, for which she won great acclaim with performances in the US and in the former Soviet Union.
Born in 1927, in Stockholm to a Russian mother and a Swedish father, Soderstrom made her debut at the city’s Drottningholms Theater.
She continued to appear regularly at the Stockholm opera while pursuing her international career, and made her final stage appearance as the countess in Tchaikovsky’s The Queen of Spades in 1999.
R ’n’ B singer Chris Brown was praised by a Los Angeles judge on Thursday for making “extremely favorable” progress following his sentence for assaulting ex-girlfriend Rihanna.
Brown, 20, must now return to court in February for another hearing before Superior Court Judge Patricia Schnegg, who sentenced the singer to 180 days of community labor in August.
Brown has already completed 100 hours of community labor and undergone seven sessions of a domestic violence counseling program, his lawyer Mark Geragos lawyer told the court.
“It’s an extremely favorable progress report,” Schnegg said after reviewing a document detailing Brown’s case since his Aug. 25 sentencing.
Brown was sentenced to five years probation, a year-long domestic violence program and 180 days of community labor after pleading guilty to assaulting Rihanna on the eve of the Grammy Awards in February this year.
The incident shocked the music world and left Rihanna nursing cuts and bruises to
her face.
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