The soulful singer Janiva Magness won entertainer of the year at the 2009 Blues Music Awards in Memphis.
The Michigan native also won best contemporary female artist at Thursday’s show.
Buddy Guy won three awards: contemporary blues album, contemporary male artist and album of the year for Skin Deep. Blues legend B.B. King took home two honors: traditional male artist and best traditional blues album for One Kind Favor. Eden Brent won acoustic artist of the year and best acoustic album for Mississippi Number One. Kenny Neal won song of the year for Let Life Flow.
Actress Mia Farrow, ailing after almost two weeks on a hunger strike, announced on Friday that British billionaire Richard Branson would take over her protest in solidarity with people in Sudan’s Darfur region. A spokesman for Farrow said her health had deteriorated in the past few days and her doctor requested that she end the liquids-only fast she began 12 days ago to protest at Khartoum’s expulsion of more than a dozen aid agencies from Darfur.
Perhaps she could take a lesson from British actor Christian Bale, whose powers of persuasion are legendary. He forced a rewrite of upcoming action movie Terminator Salvation, because his star had grown too big for the small role of John Connor he chose, the filmmakers said on Friday. Director McG, whose real name is Joseph McGinty Nichol, said he had the disconcerting experience of going to England to convince Bale to play central character Marcus Wright in the man versus machines film, only to have Bale tell the director he wanted to play Connor instead.
Fugitive film director Roman Polanski failed to persuade a Los Angeles judge on Thursday to formally reject an attempt to have a 1978 sex case against him dismissed because of misconduct by prosecutors. Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Peter Espinoza said he could not consider the case unless Polanski, who fled the US for France after pleading guilty to rape, showed up in his court.
A civil jury says Snoop Dogg didn’t hit a man who came up
on stage during a 2005 concert near Seattle.
The rapper wasn’t in court Friday when the jury’s verdict cleared him of civil assault and battery claims. The jury did find that Richard Monroe Jr suffered serious injuries during the concert and awarded him US$449,400 in damages to be paid by a record label, another performer and others involved in the concert.
The damages awarded were substantially lower than the US$22 million Monroe sought when he sued the rapper in 2006.
Jurors found that Snoop Dogg, whose real name is Calvin Broadus, doesn’t personally owe Monroe anything.
During two weeks of testimony, jurors were repeatedly shown a video of a melee that Monroe said left him unconscious, badly bruised and nearly naked.
Monroe’s attorney, Brian Watkins, said jurors did believe his client’s contention that Snoop Dogg’s people were involved in a savage beating.
“We’re very pleased that the jury found that this incident was not something to be taken lightly,’’ Watkins said.
Responsibility for paying the judgment falls on Doggystyle Records, which Snoop Dogg founded; rapper Soopafly, whose real name is Priest Brooks; and other unnamed parties.
While Snoop Dogg was not present for the verdict, he attended part of the trial and testified, denying that he struck Monroe.
Monroe’s attorneys contended that Snoop Dogg hit their client with a microphone during the scuffle. But a video shown during the trial didn’t show Snoop Dogg striking Monroe and the performer said he left the stage before the fight was over.
Actor Ryan O’Neal has told People magazine that his companion Farrah Fawcett, who has battled cancer for nearly three years, is now bed-ridden, bereft of her famous blonde hair and near the end of medical treatment. “She stays in bed now. The doctors see that she is comfortable. Farrah is on IVs, but some of that is for nourishment. The treatment has pretty much ended,” O’Neal told People in an interview on the magazine’s Web site on Thursday.
Mickey Carroll, one of the last surviving diminutive Munchkins in the 1939 movie The Wizard of Oz, died of natural causes on Thursday in Missouri at age 89, a newspaper reported. Carroll, who stopped growing at a young age, was an entertainer early in life and befriended actress Judy Garland, leading to a role alongside her in classic The Wizard of Oz, the St Louis Post-Dispatch reported.
A jumbo operation is moving 20 elephants across the breadth of India to the mammoth private zoo set up by the son of Asia’s richest man, adjoining a sprawling oil refinery. The elephants have been “freed from the exploitative logging industry,” according to the Vantara Animal Rescue Centre, run by Anant Ambani, son of the billionaire head of Reliance Industries Mukesh Ambani, a close ally of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The sheer scale of the self-declared “world’s biggest wild animal rescue center” has raised eyebrows — including more than 50 bears, 160 tigers, 200 lions, 250 leopards and 900 crocodiles, according to
They were four years old, 15 or only seven months when they were sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau, Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald and Ravensbruck. Some were born there. Somehow they survived, began their lives again and had children, grandchildren and even great grandchildren themselves. Now in the evening of their lives, some 40 survivors of the Nazi camps tell their story as the world marks the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the most notorious of the death camps. In 15 countries, from Israel to Poland, Russia to Argentina, Canada to South Africa, they spoke of victory over absolute evil. Some spoke publicly for the first
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