Rapper Lil' Kim struck back Monday at a trial witness who helped to secure her false-statements conviction and yearlong prison sentence, filing a lawsuit accusing the witness of unlawfully using her name and image to promote a DVD.
In a lawsuit filed in US District Court in Manhattan, she accuses James ``Lil' Cease'' Lloyd of preparing to release a DVD entitled, The Chronicles of Junior M.A.F.I.A. Part II: Reloaded.
She says the DVD, like a predecessor, was unauthorized and improperly uses her name, image and likeness, amounting to false advertising and false endorsement. She's seeking US$6 million in damages.
Lil' Kim, whose real name is Kimberly Jones, was convicted after she told a grand jury that she didn't see her manager and a friend at the scene of a 2001 gunfight outside WQHT, the Manhattan rap station known as HOT 97. A man was injured in the shootout.
Lloyd and Antoine ``Banger'' Spain, Brooklyn rappers who once teamed with Lil' Kim in the Junior M.A.F.I.A., testified they saw her manager and the friend she denied seeing at the radio station with her.
Lil' Kim, 30, was the sidekick and mistress of the late Notorious B.I.G. As a solo artist, she has become known for her revealing outfits and suggestive lyrics. She won a Grammy in 2001 for her part in the hit remake of Lady Marmalade.
In closely related news, it's alleged that in the 1990s Damion ``World'' Hardy controlled the crack trade in a Brooklyn housing project with kidnappings, shootings and murder, prosecutors said.
By 2003 he was dating rapper Lil' Kim and was suspected of trading shots outside a New Jersey hotel with a bo-dyguard for rival artist 50 Cent.
The next year Hardy made a four-month religious pilgrimage to the Middle East and was arrested when he told customs agents on his return that he was ready to fight in a jihad, prosecutors said.
Hardy's bizarre, twisting and violent past led Tuesday to a 22-count
indictment charging him and a dozen
associates with a string of attacks that killed rival drug dealers and, in one case, resulted in the death of a well-known Swedish commercial director who was standing nearby.
The indictment describes Hardy as the founder and head of the Cash Money Brothers, a violent drug crew that controlled the cocaine trade in the Lafayette Gardens housing projects in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn.
Prosecutors rested their case Tuesday in the trial of a photographer accused of forging Hollywood star Cameron Diaz's signature on a document allowing the sale of topless pictures of the actress.
Snapper John Rutter's defense got its chance to rebut the allegations against him a day after experts testified that the Charlie's Angels star's autograph on a model release form was faked.
The photographer is accused of using the bare-breasted pictures of Diaz he snapped when she was an unknown model in 1992 in an attempt to blackmail the top Hollywood movie actress out of more than US$3 million.
A media watchdog group said on Tuesday it has demanded Take-Two Interactive Software Inc unit Rockstar Games recall Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, the blockbuster title at the center of a swarm over a hack that helps players unlock a sexually explicit mini-game. The move added the Parents Television Council's voice to a growing chorus of critics of the game -- one of the most popular ever sold and one of the most controversial for what critics see as its gratuitous violence.
Motown Records producer Norman Whitfield, who co-wrote such classics as I Heard It Through the Grapevine and Papa Was a Rolling Stone, was sentenced on Monday to six months of home detention for failure to file US income tax returns. Whitfield, 65, admitted in a guilty plea in January that he had deliberately neglected to report to the Internal Revenue Service more than US$4 million in songwriting royalties he earned from 1995 through 1999.
Crop damage from Typhoon Danas “had covered 9,822 hectares of farmland, more than 1.5 percent of Taiwan’s arable land, with an average loss rate of 30 percent, equivalent to 2,977 hectares of total crop failure,” this paper reported on Thursday last week. Costs were expected to exceed NT$1 billion. The disaster triggered clashes in the legislature last week between members of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and China-aligned lawmakers from the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP). DPP caucus chief executive Rosalia Wu (吳思瑤) argued that opposition lawmakers should take responsibility for slashing the Ministry of Agriculture’s (MOA)
Asked to define sex, most people will say it means penetration and anything else is just “foreplay,” says Kate Moyle, a psychosexual and relationship therapist, and author of The Science of Sex. “This pedestals intercourse as ‘real sex’ and other sexual acts as something done before penetration rather than as deserving credit in their own right,” she says. Lesbian, bisexual and gay people tend to have a broader definition. Sex education historically revolved around reproduction (therefore penetration), which is just one of hundreds of reasons people have sex. If you think of penetration as the sex you “should” be having, you might
When life gives you trees, make paper. That was one of the first thoughts to cross my mind as I explored what’s now called Chung Hsing Cultural and Creative Park (中興文化創意園區, CHCCP) in Yilan County’s Wujie Township (五結). Northeast Taiwan boasts an abundance of forest resources. Yilan County is home to both Taipingshan National Forest Recreation Area (太平山國家森林遊樂區) — by far the largest reserve of its kind in the country — and Makauy Ecological Park (馬告生態園區, see “Towering trees and a tranquil lake” in the May 13, 2022 edition of this newspaper). So it was inevitable that industrial-scale paper making would
As the world has raced to understand how Taiwan can be both the world’s most important producer of semiconductors while also the pin in the grenade of World War III, a reasonable shelf of “Taiwan books” has been published in the last few years. Most describe Taiwan according to a power triangle dominated by the US and China. But what of the actual Taiwanese themselves? Who are they? And should they have any say in the matter? Chris Horton’s Ghost Nation: The Story of Taiwan and Its Struggle for Survival is perhaps the first general history of Taiwan to answer
RSS