Women claimed three of the top five spots in Forbes magazine’s celebrity power list, with singer Lady Gaga making her first entry and Oprah Winfrey retaking her No. 1 position.
Talk show host Winfrey earned an estimated US$315 million, putting her atop the annual Forbes’ Celebrity 100 list for the fourth time. Winfrey reclaimed the No. 1 spot from last year’s winner Angelina Jolie, who fell to 18th in the latest rankings.
Grammy-winning R&B singer Beyonce rose to second with an estimated US$87 million from a tour and album sales, together with deals in fashion, fragrance and other endorsements.
Despite the worldwide recession, Forbes said celebrity earnings remain “remarkably resilient, with this year’s stars having earned a collective US$4.7 billion during the past year, up from US$4.1 billion in 2009.”
Forbes’ ranking is a measurement of entertainment-related earnings over the past 12 months as well as exposure in print, television, radio, online and social media.
Avatar director James Cameron jumped back onto the Forbes list for the first time since 1999, landing at No. 3 after his movie earned a record US$2.7 billion at worldwide box offices.
Glam pop star Lady Gaga made the list for the first time, taking fourth place with estimated earnings of US$62 million.
Golfer Tiger Woods is the world’s fifth most powerful celebrity, despite a sex scandal that took him out of golf for five months and lost him several lucrative endorsements.
“He managed to earn US$105 million during the past year, even as his revenue streams have diminished and his golf course design business struggles in the global economy,” Forbes said.
The top five on this year’s Forbes’ Celebrity 100 list are:
1. Oprah Winfrey, US$315 million
2. Beyonce Knowles, US$87 million
3. James Cameron, US$210 million
4. Lady Gaga, US$62 million
5. Tiger Woods, US$105 million.
AFGHAN CHILD: A court battle is ongoing over if the toddler can stay with Joshua Mast and his wife, who wanted ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ for her Major Joshua Mast, a US Marine whose adoption of an Afghan war orphan has spurred a years-long legal battle, is to remain on active duty after a three-member panel of Marines on Tuesday found that while he acted in a way unbecoming of an officer to bring home the baby girl, it did not warrant his separation from the military. Lawyers for the Marine Corps argued that Mast abused his position, disregarded orders of his superiors, mishandled classified information and improperly used a government computer in his fight over the child who was found orphaned on the battlefield in rural Afghanistan
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack
STOPOVERS: As organized crime groups in Asia and the Americas move drugs via places such as Tonga, methamphetamine use has reached levels called ‘epidemic’ A surge of drugs is engulfing the South Pacific as cartels and triads use far-flung island nations to channel narcotics across the globe, top police and UN officials told reporters. Pacific island nations such as Fiji and Tonga sit at the crossroads of largely unpatrolled ocean trafficking routes used to shift cocaine from Latin America, and methamphetamine and opioids from Asia. This illicit cargo is increasingly spilling over into local hands, feeding drug addiction in communities where serious crime had been rare. “We’re a victim of our geographical location. An ideal transit point for vessels crossing the Pacific,” Tonga Police Commissioner Shane McLennan
RSS