Larry Hagman has been diagnosed with cancer.
The 80-year-old actor is famous for playing J.R. Ewing on Dallas. In a statement on Friday, he said: “As J.R. I could get away with anything — bribery, blackmail and adultery. But I got caught by cancer.”
Hagman declined to specify what kind of cancer he has contracted, but the actor said it’s “a very common and treatable form.”
He plans to continue working on a new reboot of Dallas for TNT, which begins production today.
The new Dallas focuses on the Ewing offspring as they clash over the future of the family dynasty. The original prime-time soap opera aired on CBS from 1978 to 1991. Hagman underwent a liver transplant in the mid-1990s.
Said Hagman: “As we all know, you can’t keep J.R. down!”
Meanwhile, Sonic Youth co-founders Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon have separated after 27 years of marriage and the future of the noise-rock band is uncertain, its label’s parent company said on Saturday.
Sonic Youth, including indie rock pioneers Moore and Gordon, will go ahead with its South American tour next month as planned, Catherine Herrick, a spokeswoman for Beggars Group, the owner of the band’s Matador label, said in a statement.
The couple, “married in 1984, are announcing they have separated,” the statement said. “Plans beyond that [November] tour are uncertain. The couple has requested respect for their personal privacy and does not wish to issue further comment.”
Sonic Youth’s tour has five dates, starting with a Nov. 5 show in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and concluding on Nov. 14 in Sao Paulo, Brazil.
Gordon, 58, and Moore, 53, co-founded the quartet in 1980 in New York amid the so-called “no wave” movement.
Moore and Lee Ranaldo were on guitars and Gordon played bass. Drummer Steve Shelley joined later.
The pair first met when Gordon played in a band named CKM.
“I guess it was love at first sight,” she said in the 2001 book Our Band Could Be Your Life.
Moore and Gordon live in Northampton, Massachusetts, with their daughter, Coco, 17, who is a singer with the local band Big Nils.
Sonic Youth’s 16th record was The Eternal in 2009.
From alt pioneers to derivative drivel: Lady Gaga has won an injunction stopping the makers of an online children’s game from promoting an animated character called Lady Goo Goo, the company involved said on Friday.
British company Mind Candy is behind the Moshi Monsters Web site, which allows children to adopt a virtual pet monster.
Its characters include Lady Goo Goo, a sunglasses-wearing blonde baby who appears in The Moshi Dance, a video that became an online hit after it was posted on YouTube in June.
The company had planned to release the song as a single, but this week’s British High Court ruling bars it from “promoting, advertising, selling, distributing or otherwise making available to the public” any work involving Lady Goo Goo.
Law firm Mishcon de Reya confirmed that it had represented Lady Gaga in the case, but did not give further details.
Mind Candy founder Michael Acton Smith said the ruling was “a huge disappointment.”
“It was all done in the name of fun, and we would have thought that Lady Gaga could have seen the humor behind this parody,” he said.
Oliver Smith, an intellectual property lawyer with Keystone Law, said the judgment’s impact on other musical spoofs and tribute acts would likely be limited.
“English trademark law allows parody songs and tribute bands, but not if the names are too similar and one takes unfair advantage of the other’s goodwill,” he said.
In other news about accusations of wrongdoing, actress Hilary Swank is donating her fees for attending a controversial event in Chechnya to charity after criticism from human rights groups.
A spokeswoman for the two-time Oscar winner said on Friday that Swank would give her personal appearance fees to various charitable organizations.
Swank has said she “deeply regrets” taking part in a birthday celebration in the Chechen capital Grozny last week for regional strong Ramzan Kadyrov, who is accused of orchestrating human rights violations.
Human Rights Watch urged Swank and other celebrities who attended the event to return any money or gifts.
Swank said this week she was unaware of Kadyrov’s policies, which human rights group say promote fear, abductions and executions of those involved in Chechnya’s Islamist insurgency.
On the final approach to Lanshan Workstation (嵐山工作站), logging trains crossed one last gully over a dramatic double bridge, taking the left line to enter the locomotive shed or the right line to continue straight through, heading deeper into the Central Mountains. Today, hikers have to scramble down a steep slope into this gully and pass underneath the rails, still hanging eerily in the air even after the bridge’s supports collapsed long ago. It is the final — but not the most dangerous — challenge of a tough two-day hike in. Back when logging was still underway, it was a quick,
From censoring “poisonous books” to banning “poisonous languages,” the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) tried hard to stamp out anything that might conflict with its agenda during its almost 40 years of martial law. To mark 228 Peace Memorial Day, which commemorates the anti-government uprising in 1947, which was violently suppressed, I visited two exhibitions detailing censorship in Taiwan: “Silenced Pages” (禁書時代) at the National 228 Memorial Museum and “Mandarin Monopoly?!” (請說國語) at the National Human Rights Museum. In both cases, the authorities framed their targets as “evils that would threaten social mores, national stability and their anti-communist cause, justifying their actions
In the run-up to World War II, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of Abwehr, Nazi Germany’s military intelligence service, began to fear that Hitler would launch a war Germany could not win. Deeply disappointed by the sell-out of the Munich Agreement in 1938, Canaris conducted several clandestine operations that were aimed at getting the UK to wake up, invest in defense and actively support the nations Hitler planned to invade. For example, the “Dutch war scare” of January 1939 saw fake intelligence leaked to the British that suggested that Germany was planning to invade the Netherlands in February and acquire airfields
The launch of DeepSeek-R1 AI by Hangzhou-based High-Flyer and subsequent impact reveals a lot about the state of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) today, both good and bad. It touches on the state of Chinese technology, innovation, intellectual property theft, sanctions busting smuggling, propaganda, geopolitics and as with everything in China, the power politics of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). PLEASING XI JINPING DeepSeek’s creation is almost certainly no accident. In 2015 CCP Secretary General Xi Jinping (習近平) launched his Made in China 2025 program intended to move China away from low-end manufacturing into an innovative technological powerhouse, with Artificial Intelligence
RSS