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.
May 26 to June 1 When the Qing Dynasty first took control over many parts of Taiwan in 1684, it roughly continued the Kingdom of Tungning’s administrative borders (see below), setting up one prefecture and three counties. The actual area of control covered today’s Chiayi, Tainan and Kaohsiung. The administrative center was in Taiwan Prefecture, in today’s Tainan. But as Han settlement expanded and due to rebellions and other international incidents, the administrative units became more complex. By the time Taiwan became a province of the Qing in 1887, there were three prefectures, eleven counties, three subprefectures and one directly-administered prefecture, with
It’s an enormous dome of colorful glass, something between the Sistine Chapel and a Marc Chagall fresco. And yet, it’s just a subway station. Formosa Boulevard is the heart of Kaohsiung’s mass transit system. In metro terms, it’s modest: the only transfer station in a network with just two lines. But it’s a landmark nonetheless: a civic space that serves as much more than a point of transit. On a hot Sunday, the corridors and vast halls are filled with a market selling everything from second-hand clothes to toys and house decorations. It’s just one of the many events the station hosts,
Among Thailand’s Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) villages, a certain rivalry exists between Arunothai, the largest of these villages, and Mae Salong, which is currently the most prosperous. Historically, the rivalry stems from a split in KMT military factions in the early 1960s, which divided command and opium territories after Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) cut off open support in 1961 due to international pressure (see part two, “The KMT opium lords of the Golden Triangle,” on May 20). But today this rivalry manifests as a different kind of split, with Arunothai leading a pro-China faction and Mae Salong staunchly aligned to Taiwan.
Two moves show Taichung Mayor Lu Shiow-yen (盧秀燕) is gunning for Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) party chair and the 2028 presidential election. Technically, these are not yet “officially” official, but by the rules of Taiwan politics, she is now on the dance floor. Earlier this month Lu confirmed in an interview in Japan’s Nikkei that she was considering running for KMT chair. This is not new news, but according to reports from her camp she previously was still considering the case for and against running. By choosing a respected, international news outlet, she declared it to the world. While the outside world