Hollywood actress Angelina Jolie has given birth to twins, the hospital where she was staying in southern France said yesterday.
Oscar winner Jolie, 33, had the twins by caesarean section on Saturday evening at the Lenval hospital in Nice, said spokeswoman Nadine Bauer.
The girl has been named Vivienne Marcheline and the boy Knox Leon. Both babies weighed around 2.27kg.
PHOTO: AFP
“The parents and the babies are in excellent health. Everything is fine,” Jolie’s doctor, Michel Sussmann, said. He said the c-section had been planned for a long time but the date was brought forward “for medical reasons.”
Marcheline was the name of Jolie’s mother, also an actress, who died of cancer last year. Marcheline Bertrand raised Jolie and her brother, James Haven, after divorcing their father, actor Jon Voight, when Jolie was a toddler.
US representatives for the couple could not immediately be reached for comment, but Sussmann told People magazine that Jolie’s partner Brad Pitt was at her side.
PHOTO: AP
Jolie and Pitt, 44, already have four children — Maddox, Pax, Zahara and Shiloh.
The A-list celebrity couple, known in the media as “Brangelina,” moved into a 17th-century villa in Provence, France, earlier this year.
CNN’s Richard Quest has returned to the cable news channel after a hiatus stemming from his drug arrest and court-ordered counseling, a spokesman for the Atlanta-based network said on Friday.
The British reporter, known for his boisterous and quirky reporting, returned to CNN International in late June and has been producing general news segments and working on the August edition of CNN Business Traveler, the show he hosted before his arrest, said Nigel Pritchard, a spokesman for CNN.
“We’re very pleased to have him back,” Pritchard said.
Police stopped Quest, 46, in April for being in New York’s Central Park past curfew, and they discovered a bag of methamphetamines on Quest.
A judge ordered him to undergo six months of counseling in exchange for having the case dismissed.
Australian two-time Oscar nominee Judy Davis on Friday won US$133,000 plus costs in a defamation suit against local media company News Ltd, controlled by media mogul Rupert Murdoch.
Davis, 53, best known for roles in Woody Allen’s Husbands and Wives and David Lean’s A Passage to India, sued the mass-selling Daily Telegraph newspaper over 2006 articles claiming she acted selfishly at a Sydney council meeting.
The newspaper, the judge said, “seriously misrepresented” Davis by describing her objection to new floodlights at a sporting park near her waterfront home as unreasonable.
The jury found the newspaper’s publisher Nationwide News was motivated by malice towards Davis.
Former supermodel Christie Brinkley’s sensational divorce to her fourth husband ended abruptly on Thursday with a settlement, a spokeswoman for Brinkley said.
“After five days of trial and for the sake of their children, Christie Brinkley and Peter Cook have reached an agreement,” spokeswoman Amy Jacobs said in a statement.
Cook revealed during testimony he had an affair with his 18-year-old assistant and spent US$3,000 a month on Internet pornography. Brinkley, who asked for full custody of the couple’s two children, said that her “perfect life” had been shattered by the revelations.
The settlement was reached at 6:15am after all-night negotiations, Jacobs said.
“I didn’t want this trial. It’s humiliating for all of us,” Brinkley had said on the witness stand in New York family court in Central Islip, Long Island.
The agreement awarded Brinkley, 54, full custody of the children, aged 10 and 13, and gave Cook, 49, a financial settlement of US$2.1 million as well as “parenting time.”
Brinkley will retain all of the couple’s properties, including 18 in the Hamptons, which were at dispute because Cook had advised the former Sports Illustrated swimsuit model to buy them during their 10-year marriage.
Brinkley was previously married to artist Jean-Francois Allaux, pop singer Billy Joel and developer Richard Taubman.
Pop singer Olivia Newton-John has married fellow Australian John Easterling at a private ceremony at her home in Malibu, California, Melbourne’s Herald Sun reported on Friday.
The singer, best known for her role in Grease, married 49-year-old Easterling in front of guests, including Grease co-star John Travolta, who had thought they were attending a Fourth of July barbecue.
In the March 9 edition of the Taipei Times a piece by Ninon Godefroy ran with the headine “The quiet, gentle rhythm of Taiwan.” It started with the line “Taiwan is a small, humble place. There is no Eiffel Tower, no pyramids — no singular attraction that draws the world’s attention.” I laughed out loud at that. This was out of no disrespect for the author or the piece, which made some interesting analogies and good points about how both Din Tai Fung’s and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co’s (TSMC, 台積電) meticulous attention to detail and quality are not quite up to
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