British music company EMI reported a loss of US$1.2 billion in its first year as part of the private equity group Terra Firma, news reports said Saturday.
Revenues dropped by 19 percent to US$2.3 billion in the business year ending on March 31, according to earnings data released the previous day in an annual review by Maltby Capital, through which investor Guy Hands’ Terra Firma owns EMI Music.
The loss, which ballooned from US$457 million the previous year, is largely due to financing costs, asset writedowns and restructuring costs, the Financial Times reported.
Jury selection was completed Thursday for the murder retrial of legendary music producer Phil Spector, and main arguments in the case will be heard beginning next Wednesday, court sources said.
Spector, the eccentric musical genius who created the famous Wall of Sound recording technique, was accused of shooting dead an actress in his Los Angeles mansion five years ago.
He avoided conviction after a marathon, six-month trial last year that ended with a jury deadlocked 10 to 2 in favor of finding him guilty, and prosecutors decided to launch a new case against him.
The new jury consists of seven men and five women. Six replacement jurors must be chosen before Wednesday, when the court hears opening statements by the defense and the public prosecutor.
The trial at Los Angeles Superior Court is expected to last between three and four months, and the fabled producer faces a minimum 15 years to life in prison if he is found guilty of second degree murder.
Prosecutors are seeking to convict Spector, 68, of murdering actress Lana Clarkson, who was found dead in the foyer of the fabled producer’s home in the early hours of Feb. 3, 2003.
At his first trial, prosecutors alleged that Spector shot Clarkson as she attempted to leave his home after meeting him for the first time only hours earlier at the Hollywood nightclub where she worked.
Defense lawyers said Clarkson, 40, best-known for her role in Roger Corman’s 1985 cult classic The Barbarian Queen but whose career had stalled at the time of her death, killed herself.
Spector is regarded as one of the most influential figures in pop music history. In the early 1960s he was responsible for hits including Da Doo Ron Ron, Be My Baby and You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin.
US supergroup Guns N’Roses will unveil their first original album in 17 years next month with the release of long-awaited work Chinese Democracy, a statement said Thursday.
The long-delayed album will go on sale in the US on Nov. 23 while the title track Chinese Democracy has already been released to radio, the band’s managers said.
The album is Guns N’ Roses’ first since the 1991 release of Use of Illusion I and Use Your Illusion II.
“The release of Chinese Democracy marks a historic moment in rock ‘n’ roll,” co-managers Irving Azoff and Andy Gould said. “Guns N’ Roses fans have every reason to celebrate, for this is only the beginning.”
Guns N’ Roses frontman Axl Rose is the only member of the band’s 1991 line-up to feature on the new album, which will include 14 tracks.
The band has sold 90 million albums worldwide, with 42 million in the US alone, with the group’s seminal Appetite for Destruction — featuring hits Welcome to the Jungle and Sweet Child o’Mine — its most famous.
Veteran comedian Jerry Lewis is under fire again for making an anti-gay slur on Australian television similar to one he apologized for using on his annual US telethon a year ago.
The 82-year-old King of Comedy dropped the slur when he was asked by a Network Ten national TV reporter following a press conference in Sydney on Friday for his opinion on the Australian nation sport of cricket.
“Oh, cricket? It’s a fag game. What are you, nuts?’’ Lewis replied.
The network broadcast the comment in full on its Friday evening news bulletin along with footage of Lewis handling an imaginary cricket bat with an effeminate gesture.
Lewis apologized in September last year for using the term “illiterate faggot’’ in Las Vegas during his annual Labor Day telethon that raises money for the Muscular Dystrophy Association.
In a statement released a day later, he described the slur as a “bad choice of words.’’ New York-based media discrimination watchdog Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, or GLAAD, called for Lewis to again apologize.
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
Jan. 6 to Jan. 12 Perhaps hoping to gain the blessing of the stone-age hunter-gatherers that dwelt along the east coast 30,000 years ago, visitors to the Baxian Caves (八仙洞) during the 1970s would grab a handful of soil to bring home. In January 1969, the nation was captivated by the excavation of pre-ceramic artifacts and other traces of human habitation in several caves atop a sea cliff in Taitung County. The majority of the unearthed objects were single-faced, unpolished flake tools fashioned from natural pebbles collected by the shore. While archaeologists had found plenty of neolithic (7,000 BC to 1,700
When the weather is too cold to enjoy the white beaches and blue waters of Pingtung County’s Kenting (墾丁), it’s the perfect time to head up into the hills and enjoy a different part of the national park. In the highlands above the bustling beach resorts, a simple set of trails treats visitors to lush forest, rocky peaks, billowing grassland and a spectacular bird’s-eye view of the coast. The rolling hills beyond Hengchun Township (恆春) in Pingtung County offer a two-hour through-hike of sweeping views from the mighty peak of Dajianshih Mountain (大尖石山) to Eluanbi Lighthouse (鵝鑾鼻燈塔) on the coast, or
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