Carlos Santana is on tour and has an album coming out, but in an interview with Rolling Stone posted online on Friday the rocker said he sees himself one day heading up a church in Hawaii. Santana also told the magazine about the pain of recently going through a divorce from his wife of 34 years, Deborah.
Brazilian race car driver Helio Castroneves and his sister and lawyer were indicted on Thursday on charges of conspiring to defraud the US of taxes on US$5.55 million of income, prosecutors said. The two-time Indianapolis 500 winner and his sister, Katiucia Castroneves, were also charged with six counts of income tax evasion for the years 1999 through 2004.
Singer Natalie Cole is resting in bed at her Los Angeles home after being hospitalized in New York last month because of a setback in her battle with Hepatitis C, her spokeswoman said on Thursday. The Grammy-award winning singer, 58, canceled her tour dates next month and all other appearances after spending about a week in the hospital last month.
Clint Eastwood spends more time behind the camera these days directing films. But anyone who believed him a few years ago when he said he had given up on acting, can think again. Eastwood has changed his mind. The Academy Award-winning director, who was promoting his latest film Changeling at the New York Film Festival on Thursday, began acting more than 50 years ago and gained fame playing tough-minded cowboys and cops.
More than 60 artists, including Radiohead, Robbie Williams and the Kaiser Chiefs announced Saturday they had banded together to seek more rights over their music and break free of record labels.
The Featured Artists’ Coalition (FAC) aims to “give artists the voice they need to argue for greater control over their music,” amid new opportunities provided by Internet, the group said in a statement.
“It is time for artists to have a strong collective voice to stand up for their interests,” said Brian Message, co-manager of Radiohead and Kate Nash.
“The digital landscape is changing fast and new deals are being struck all the time, but all too often without reference to the people who actually make the music.”
Message said the FAC would “help all artists, young and old, well-known or not, drive overdue change through the industry in their interests and those of fans.”
Thus far, 61 artists have signed up to the coalition, which was officially launched yesterday in the northwest English city of Manchester.
It is fighting for changes to laws that govern business in the music industry so that artists always ultimately own the rights to their music, rather than record labels.
The FAC is also calling for, among other things, artists to receive “fair compensation whenever their business partners receive an economic return from the exploitation of the artists’ work.”
Several groups have recently used the Internet to promote their music directly to fans, often bypassing record labels entirely, including Radiohead, which launched their latest album In Rainbows in October 2007 on the Web.
Last week, Oasis posted its new album Dig Out Your Soul on Internet social networking site MySpace in advance of its commercial release, allowing fans to listen to the whole compilation, but they could not buy it.
Janet Jackson has postponed three more shows because of an undisclosed illness.
Her publicist said in an e-mail late Saturday that Jackson was postponing a Saturday show in Greensboro, North Carolina, one yesterday in Atlanta and a third tomorrow in Fort Lauderdale.
A statement from Jackson said she arrived in Greensboro, North Carolina, hoping to perform there Saturday, but a local doctor advised that she not perform after it became “evident’’ she was not fully recovered.
Representatives for the 42-year-old singer say she became “suddenly ill’’ and was hospitalized Monday night in Montreal shortly after she arrived for a show. She also canceled concerts in Boston and Philadelphia on Wednesday and Thursday.
Jackson’s publicist did not elaborate Saturday, only saying she was “recuperating.’’ The note said Jackson will return home, at her doctor’s direction, for further treatment.
In the note Jackson said the promoter is working to reschedule dates.
Jackson is on her first North American tour in seven years.
In 1990, Amy Chen (陳怡美) was beginning third grade in Calhoun County, Texas, as the youngest of six and the only one in her family of Taiwanese immigrants to be born in the US. She recalls, “my father gave me a stack of typed manuscript pages and a pen and asked me to find typos, missing punctuation, and extra spaces.” The manuscript was for an English-learning book to be sold in Taiwan. “I was copy editing as a child,” she says. Now a 42-year-old freelance writer in Santa Barbara, California, Amy Chen has only recently realized that her father, Chen Po-jung (陳伯榕), who
Famed Chinese demographer Yi Fuxian (易富賢) recently wrote for The Diplomat on the effects of a cross-strait war on demography. He contended that one way to deter the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is by putting the demographic issue front and center — last year total births in the PRC, he said, receded to levels not seen since 1762. Yi observes that Taiwan’s current fertility rate is already lower than Ukraine’s — a nation at war that is refusing to send its young into battle — and that its “demographic crisis suggests that Taiwan’s technological importance will rapidly decline, and
For anyone on board the train looking out the window, it must have been a strange sight. The same foreigner stood outside waving at them four different times within ten minutes, three times on the left and once on the right, his face getting redder and sweatier each time. At this unique location, it’s actually possible to beat the train up the mountain on foot, though only with extreme effort. For the average hiker, the Dulishan Trail is still a great place to get some exercise and see the train — at least once — as it makes its way
When nature calls, Masana Izawa has followed the same routine for more than 50 years: heading out to the woods in Japan, dropping his pants and doing as bears do. “We survive by eating other living things. But you can give faeces back to nature so that organisms in the soil can decompose them,” the 74-year-old said. “This means you are giving life back. What could be a more sublime act?” “Fundo-shi” (“poop-soil master”) Izawa is something of a celebrity in Japan, publishing books, delivering lectures and appearing in a documentary. People flock to his “Poopland” and centuries-old wooden “Fundo-an” (“poop-soil house”) in
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