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.
Last Thursday, the Ministry of National Defense (MND) detected 41 sorties of Chinese aircraft and nine navy vessels around Taiwan over a 24-hour period. “Thirty out of 41 sorties crossed the median line and entered Taiwan’s northern, central, southwestern and eastern ADIZ (air defense identification zones),” it reported. Local media noted that the exercises coincided with the annual Han Kuang military exercises in Taiwan. During the visit of then-US Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi to Taiwan in August 2022, the largest number of sorties was on Aug. 5, “involving a total of 47 fighter aircraft and two supporting reconnaissance/patrol aircraft.
July 7 to July 13 Even though the Japanese colonizers declared Taiwan “pacified” on Nov. 18, 1895, unrest was still brewing in Pingtung County. The Japanese had completed their march of conquest down the west coast of Taiwan, stamping out local resistance. But in their haste to conquer the Republic of Formosa’s last stronghold of Tainan, they largely ignored the highly-militarized Liudui (六堆, six garrisons) Hakka living by the foothills in Kaohsiung and Pingtung. They were organized as their name suggested, and commanders such as Chiu Feng-hsiang (邱鳳祥) and Chung Fa-chun (鍾發春) still wanted to fight. Clashes broke out in today’s
Xu Pengcheng looks over his shoulder and, after confirming the coast is clear, helps his crew of urban adventurers climb through the broken window of an abandoned building. Long popular in the West, urban exploration, or “urbex” for short, sees city-dwelling thrill-seekers explore dilapidated, closed-off buildings and areas — often skirting the law in the process. And it is growing in popularity in China, where a years-long property sector crisis has left many cities dotted with empty buildings. Xu, a 29-year-old tech worker from the eastern city of Qingdao, has amassed hundreds of thousands of followers for his photos of rundown schools and
At times, it almost seems that former president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) is out to sabotage the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT). As if on cue, with the recall campaigns against KMT lawmakers in full swing, Ma thought it would be a good time to lead a delegation of students to China and attend the 17th Straits Forum (海峽論壇) and meet with Wang Huning (王滬寧), the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Politburo member entrusted by Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to be his second in command on Taiwan policy and to run the United Front Work Department (UFWD) in charge of subverting enemies,
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