The bid by hip-hop star Wyclef Jean to become Haiti’s next president ended on Saturday after the singer’s campaign was disqualified by election officials.
The move brings an end to one of the most bizarre incidents in the island’s troubled political history after several days of speculation about the viability of Jean’s high profile but eccentric attempt to lead his former homeland.
Jean, who was born in Haiti but grew up and rose to fame as a singer with the Fugees in the US, had launched his campaign in a blaze of publicity. But within days he was said to be in hiding because of alleged security concerns and death threats. Haiti’s electoral council gave no reason for not allowing him to run, neither did it make an official announcement on his case. Instead, late on Friday night a council spokesman, Richardson Dumal, read out a list of 19 approved candidates and 15 rejected ones at an election bureau in Port-au-Prince. Jean’s name was on the latter list.
While Jean’s political career has stalled before it began, outspoken radio show host Laura Schlessinger will end her 30-year career on talk radio after coming under attack in recent days for using a racial slur 11 times on the air.
“I made the decision not to do radio anymore,” the most popular US female radio talk show host told Larry King in a CNN interview on Tuesday.
“I want to regain my first amendment rights [of free speech]. I want to be able to say what is on my mind, in my heart, what I think is helpful and useful without somebody getting angry,” Schlessinger, 63, said.
She said her radio show, which is syndicated worldwide, will end in December when her contract expires. But she is not retiring and promised to continue to speak out on her blog, on YouTube, and in her books.
“I’m not retiring,” she told King. “I’m not quitting.”
The conservative talk show host ignited a firestorm last week for her comments to a black female caller
who had complained about her
white husband’s use of “nigger,”
long considered a racial slur against black Americans.
Schlessinger told the caller she was being hyper-sensitive, then repeatedly used the word, raising the ire of some listeners and media watchers.
She later apologized.
Ten years ago, her views on homosexuality, which she termed a “biological error,” and comparison of gay parenting to pedophilia led to the cancelation of a planned TV talk show.
In other celebrity news, actor Michael Douglas has canceled plans to speak at an investor forum in Hong Kong next month, organizers said on Wednesday, as the Hollywood star battles throat cancer.
“It has been confirmed that he canceled his trip to Hong Kong and will not be speaking at our investor forum,” a spokeswoman for Asian brokerage CLSA said.
Douglas, a son of screen legend Kirk Douglas, was set to receive eight weeks of radiation and chemotherapy treatment, his spokesman told People magazine online on Monday.
His doctors expect Douglas to make a full recovery, he added.
Actress Zsa Zsa Gabor has decided to spend her final days at her Bel Air home after declining to undergo any more surgery, her publicist said on Monday.
Gabor, 93, was given the last rites by a priest in hospital at the weekend after undergoing a series of setbacks following hip replacement surgery a month ago.
Doctors wanted to perform surgery on her liver that would give her a 50-50 chance survival rate, but Gabor and her husband, Frederick Prinz von Anhalt, decided “she wanted to spend her final days at home,” publicist John Blanchette said.
“Frederick said he did not want to torture her anymore,” Blanchette added. He said the star, who has been a Hollywood fixture for 60 years, “is in and out of consciousness.”
She left a Los Angeles hospital on Monday and returned home.
Gabor, whose string of movies, television shows and wealthy husbands dates to the 1950s, was released from hospital last week but was taken back on Friday to treat two blood clots.
She broke her hip on July 17 when she fell out of bed while watching the television game show Jeopardy. The actress was partially paralyzed in a 2002 car accident.
“She had a great run,” Blanchette said. “She’s 93. She knew five presidents ... she knew kings and queens, celebrities.”
The Hungarian-born Gabor has appeared in more than 30 movies, and her penchant for calling everyone “dah-ling” in her Hungarian accent made her a well-known Hollywood personality.
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