As a superstar Tom Cruise vaunts his romance with actress Katie Holmes, but Americans are extremely sceptical about whether the feted relationship is true love or an extravagant publicity stunt.
As the Top Gun heart-throb, 42, makes a series of giddy public appearances to proclaim his new love for the 26-year-old actress, fans and media suspect the much-publicized affair has more to do with the upcoming release of two new films starring Cruise and Holmes.
An unscientific poll by People magazine indicated that 63 percent of readers believe the romance is a publicity stunt, while only 37 percent believe the pair are genuinely in love.
PHOTO: AP
"Through all the changes that have swept Hollywood over the years, one thing still endures: strategic love," said a columnist in the New York Times this week.
The coupling of stars to create ballyhoo for a movie, burnish an actor's image, create a name or distract attention from other relationships may not be as common as when the movie studios tightly controlled stars' careers through the 1950s, some publicists and film industry experts assert.
As it happens, Cruise is the star of Steven Spielberg's big-budget War of the Worlds, due for release on June 29, while Holmes, coincidentally, is set to make her big-screen debut in Batman Begins,which opens June 15.
The twice-married Cruise, whose
storied marriage to Australian star Nicole Kidman collapsed in 2001, gave an extraordinary performance as a smitten lover on US television queen Oprah Winfrey's show this week.
In the appearance, an uncharacteristically emotive and exuberant Cruise repeatedly jumped up and down on a sofa, laughed uproariously, threw his hands in the air and yelled: "I'm in love! I'm in love!"
Jackson's latest video
A videotape of the first police interview with Michael Jackson's young accuser can be shown to jurors at his child molestation trial, the judge ruled on Thursday, setting the stage for another face-to-face meeting between the pop star and the 15-year-old boy.
Defense lawyers say if prosecutors show the videotape, in which the boy tells of sexual abuse by Jackson, they will call him back to the witness stand for cross-examination -- along with his mother, a psychologist who interviewed him before police, and the family's then-attorney, Larry Feldman.
Jolie and Pitt didn't do it
Movie sex symbol Angelina Jolie poured cold water on the rumors of a romance with leading man Brad Pitt, telling Marie Claire magazine in an upcoming issue that the two are not intimate. "Absolutely not," the star of the upcoming action flick Mr & Mrs Smith, in which Pitt co-stars, told Marie Claire when asked if she had sex with Pitt.
New American idol
Nearly 30 million viewers tuned in to see country singer Carrie Underwood crowned the latest winner on Fox television's American Idol,capping the most watched season yet for the prime-time talent contest.
The two-hour Idol finale topped the last night of the 2004 to 2005 TV season with 29.4 million viewers overall, including about 15.8 million aged 18 to 49 -- the young-adult audience most coveted by advertisers, Nielsen Media Research reported on Thursday.
Paper, Stiller, Rock
They are old friends who normally praise one another, but when Chris Rock and Ben Stiller don animal hides for their new animated movie Madagascar, the gloves come off. "I don't really admire Ben," said Rock, smiling broadly when asked what he likes best about Stiller's comedy.
Motley Crue fights ban
Motley Crue has sued NBC in Los Angeles federal court, accusing the network of banning the heavy metal band from its television programs to curry favor with federal regulators cracking down on indecency.
Motley Crue, best known for 1980s hits like Girls, Girls, Girls,was banned from appearing on NBC after its lead singer, Vince Neil, used a profanity during a New Year's Eve broadcast of last year on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, according to court papers.
Pavarotti
Italian opera star Luciano Pavarotti will bring his tenor voice to a global anti-poverty campaign, using his concerts in Ireland this week to urge his audiences to back the cause, a UN official said Thursday.
Pavarotti has offered to show, during his concerts Thursday and Saturday, several short films on the Millennium Development Goals "to call on his audiences to take action to reach the targets" of the campaign, said Eveline Herfkens, UN chief Kofi Annan's executive coordinator for the campaign.
The films will also be shown at more than 40 concerts during his global farewell tour this year and next. Pavarotti has been a UN "Messenger of Peace" since 1998.
In 2000, UN members agreed to the Millennium Development Goals of slashing poverty in half by 2015.
"We are the first generation that can end poverty," Herfkens said.
`Star wars' and the pirates
US law enforcers said on Wednesday that they have shut down a computer network that distributed illegal copies of Star Wars: Episode III -- Revenge of the Sith before it appeared in movie theaters. Federal agents executed 10 search warrants and seized the main server computer in a network that allowed people to download nearly 18,000 movies and software programs, including many current releases, the FBI and Homeland Security Department said.
May 11 to May 18 The original Taichung Railway Station was long thought to have been completely razed. Opening on May 15, 1905, the one-story wooden structure soon outgrew its purpose and was replaced in 1917 by a grandiose, Western-style station. During construction on the third-generation station in 2017, workers discovered the service pit for the original station’s locomotive depot. A year later, a small wooden building on site was determined by historians to be the first stationmaster’s office, built around 1908. With these findings, the Taichung Railway Station Cultural Park now boasts that it has
Wooden houses wedged between concrete, crumbling brick facades with roofs gaping to the sky, and tiled art deco buildings down narrow alleyways: Taichung Central District’s (中區) aging architecture reveals both the allure and reality of the old downtown. From Indigenous settlement to capital under Qing Dynasty rule through to Japanese colonization, Taichung’s Central District holds a long and layered history. The bygone beauty of its streets once earned it the nickname “Little Kyoto.” Since the late eighties, however, the shifting of economic and government centers westward signaled a gradual decline in the area’s evolving fortunes. With the regeneration of the once
In February of this year the Taipei Times reported on the visit of Lienchiang County Commissioner Wang Chung-ming (王忠銘) of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and a delegation to a lantern festival in Fuzhou’s Mawei District in Fujian Province. “Today, Mawei and Matsu jointly marked the lantern festival,” Wang was quoted as saying, adding that both sides “being of one people,” is a cause for joy. Wang was passing around a common claim of officials of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the PRC’s allies and supporters in Taiwan — KMT and the Taiwan People’s Party — and elsewhere: Taiwan and
Even by the standards of Ukraine’s International Legion, which comprises volunteers from over 55 countries, Han has an unusual backstory. Born in Taichung, he grew up in Costa Rica — then one of Taiwan’s diplomatic allies — where a relative worked for the embassy. After attending an American international high school in San Jose, Costa Rica’s capital, Han — who prefers to use only his given name for OPSEC (operations security) reasons — moved to the US in his teens. He attended Penn State University before returning to Taiwan to work in the semiconductor industry in Kaohsiung, where he
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