The civil trial against South Korean pop star and actor Rain is scheduled to begin tomorrow in US District Court.
Rain — whose real name is Jung Ji-hoon — and his producers are being sued over the performer’s abrupt cancellation of a June 2007 concert in Honolulu. Jury selection is scheduled to begin tomorrow and Rain could be called to testify as early as Wednesday.
Click Entertainment Inc alleges in the suit that Rain and his producers defrauded it of more than US$500,000 paid in licensing fees. Also, it is seeking additional damages for the cost of staging the event.
The concert was canceled just days before the scheduled June 15, 2007, performance, disappointing many fans who paid as much as US$300 for a ticket and flew from as far as away as Japan and South Korea. It was the first stop on the “Rain’s Coming” US tour.
Performances in San Francisco, Atlanta, New York and Los Angeles were also canceled. The Los Angeles show was canceled less than two hours before show time.
Concert organizers at the time said they called off the performances because of a copyright challenge from record company Rain Corp. A court later dismissed the case.
Michael Jackson, on the other hand, is certainly making it rain.
The Gloved One’s run of 50 comeback concerts in London starting on July 8 sold out around five hours after tickets went on sale, the promoters said on Friday.
The 50-year-old announced last week that he would return to the stage 12 years after his last series of concerts, although the original commitment was to 10 gigs at London’s O2 Arena.
That has now expanded to 50, ending on Feb. 24, 2010.
Hundreds of thousands of tickets went on sale to registered fans earlier in the week, and ahead of Friday’s general release hundreds of people queued at the O2 Arena to ensure they made it to the eagerly awaited shows. Many had camped out overnight.
Also on Friday came news that an arrest warrant had been issued for Lindsay Lohan. The US$50,000 warrant issued by the Beverly Hills Superior Court stems from her 2007 conviction for drunken driving, police said.
The 22-year-old Mean Girls star was arrested in May 2007 after crashing her Mercedes in Beverly Hills. She was arrested again last July after the mother of her former personal assistant reported that her car was being chased by a sport utility vehicle. Police said Lohan was at the wheel of the SUV and she was arrested in Santa Monica.
In connection with those cases, Lohan pleaded guilty to two counts of being under the influence of cocaine, and no contest to two counts of driving with a blood-alcohol level above 0.08 percent and one count of reckless driving.
A cool US$28 million dollars could get you living right next door to the Playboy Mansion, known for Playboy sex empire founder Hugh Hefner’s extravagant parties.
Hefner has put his family home up for sale, the Los Angeles Times has reported.
The two-story, 700m² English manor-style residence was built in 1929 and has five bedrooms, seven bathrooms, a library and commons for staff. Some of the walls are hand-painted, and there is a hand-carved staircase.
The home sits on one hectare, borders the Los Angeles Country Club and has a pool. Hefner, who turns 83 next month, owns the house with his second wife, 1989’s Playmate of the Year. The couple are separated but have two sons, who are soon to head to college. Hefner has lived at the neighboring Playboy Mansion with three young women for the past several years.
A sexier sex symbol, Robert Pattinson, says he wasn’t prepared to film his first graphic scenes for the upcoming period drama Little Ashes. The Twilight actor portrays Spanish artist Salvador Dali as a young man. He tells GQ magazine’s April issue that he was uncomfortable as crew members watched and giggled during his steamy interlude with a male co-star.
“In a lot of ways, I was kind of crossing lines of what I thought I was comfortable doing,” he said. “I had to do all this naked stuff.” The British heartthrob says he wanted to try “something weird,” but the part was more difficult than he’d anticipated. Pattinson has found a way to take the edge off before: he took a quarter of a Valium pill before his Twilight audition.
Alan Livingston, an entertainment industry executive who brought “Beatlemania” to the US, died of age-related causes at his Beverly Hills home, the Los Angeles Times reported on Saturday. He was 91.
Livingston signed the Beatles in the 1960s while president of Capitol Records and also created the popular children’s character Bozo the Clown in the 1940s.
Nov. 11 to Nov. 17 People may call Taipei a “living hell for pedestrians,” but back in the 1960s and 1970s, citizens were even discouraged from crossing major roads on foot. And there weren’t crosswalks or pedestrian signals at busy intersections. A 1978 editorial in the China Times (中國時報) reflected the government’s car-centric attitude: “Pedestrians too often risk their lives to compete with vehicles over road use instead of using an overpass. If they get hit by a car, who can they blame?” Taipei’s car traffic was growing exponentially during the 1960s, and along with it the frequency of accidents. The policy
Hourglass-shaped sex toys casually glide along a conveyor belt through an airy new store in Tokyo, the latest attempt by Japanese manufacturer Tenga to sell adult products without the shame that is often attached. At first glance it’s not even obvious that the sleek, colorful products on display are Japan’s favorite sex toys for men, but the store has drawn a stream of couples and tourists since opening this year. “Its openness surprised me,” said customer Masafumi Kawasaki, 45, “and made me a bit embarrassed that I’d had a ‘naughty’ image” of the company. I might have thought this was some kind
What first caught my eye when I entered the 921 Earthquake Museum was a yellow band running at an angle across the floor toward a pile of exposed soil. This marks the line where, in the early morning hours of Sept. 21, 1999, a massive magnitude 7.3 earthquake raised the earth over two meters along one side of the Chelungpu Fault (車籠埔斷層). The museum’s first gallery, named after this fault, takes visitors on a journey along its length, from the spot right in front of them, where the uplift is visible in the exposed soil, all the way to the farthest
The room glows vibrant pink, the floor flooded with hundreds of tiny pink marbles. As I approach the two chairs and a plush baroque sofa of matching fuchsia, what at first appears to be a scene of domestic bliss reveals itself to be anything but as gnarled metal nails and sharp spikes protrude from the cushions. An eerie cutout of a woman recoils into the armrest. This mixed-media installation captures generations of female anguish in Yun Suknam’s native South Korea, reflecting her observations and lived experience of the subjugated and serviceable housewife. The marbles are the mother’s sweat and tears,
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