Sandra Bullock heads home for divorce shoot-out with Jesse James

Now that Jesse James' alleged mistress count is up to four, a source close to Sandra Bullock told Popeater that the actress has come back to California (after going into hiding in Texas) so she can set her divorce in motion.

"It's over," the friend told gossip website Popeater. "After everything that has happened, it is impossible for them to get back together, even though I'm sure she still loves the man she thought he was."

According to Radar Online, the recent Oscar winner has moved back into the Hollywood Hills mansion she lived in before her marriage.

"Sandra has returned home to face the problem head-on. She isn't the sort of woman to bury her head in the sand and hope everything will go away," another Bullock insider said. "As painful as this is going to be, expect Sandra to cut out the cancer very soon."

Meanwhile, the father of alleged mistress No. 1, Michelle McGee, is defending her choice in men, telling Us Weekly that his daughter believed James and Bullock were separated.

"(James said), 'They have a thing now where they kind of live apart and she's on the scene for movies in stuff, and I'm here in San Diego,'" Denny McGee told Us Weekly, adding that his daughter only found out the truth when she saw the couple together at the Academy Awards. "She was under the impression they weren't seeing each other. She felt like she was going to have a relationship and this happened and she was mad."

Mad enough to seek a $30,000 US payday for her story, apparently. But aside from that, and despite those pesky Nazi-themed photographs, Denny insists his daughter is neither anti-Semitic nor a homewrecker.

"She's always been a great kid and a good mom to her kids. She's just a little bit different with the tattoos and stuff," he said. "The truth of the matter is, going into this whole thing with Jesse James, Michelle was single, and she was under the assumption that Jesse was single. As far as I'm concerned, they were two single people going out with each other, and there's nothing wrong with that."

From: The Vancuver Sun

Gadhafi: Nigeria should split along ethnic lines

Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi suggested Monday that Nigeria be split along ethnic lines, like Yugoslavia, into several mini-states as a way of resolving violence in Africa's most populous nation.

Gadhafi drew Nigeria's anger last week by saying the oil-rich nation should be divided into Muslim and Christian nations along the model of the 1947 partitioning of the Indian subcontinent, which led to the independence of India and Pakistan.

In those comments, he told a group of African student leaders in Tripoli that the violence in Nigeria was symptomatic of a "deep-rooted conflict of a religious nature" and required a radical solution.

On Monday, Gadhafi said that wasn't radical enough.

"Actually, the problem of Nigeria won't be solved by dividing it into two Muslim and Christian states. There are other people who, regardless of their religion, also demand independence," Libya's official JANA news agency quoted Gadhafi as saying.

"Therefore, what fits Nigeria in this case is Yugoslavia," he said.

From: AP News

Nigerian Senate vets cabinet nominees

Nigeria's Senate on Monday started screening potential ministers picked by Acting President Goodluck Jonathan who recently sacked an entire cabinet in a move seen to signal his quest for change.

Senate speaker David Mark read out five more names adding to the first list of 33 he submitted by Jonathan last week.

The Senate was planning to comb through a partial list of 14 nominees out of 38 sent in following months of political paralysis in the African oil giant, according to an official Senate agenda.

The exercise is expected to last several days.

I hope they come up with something good for us all...

Everyone wants to smell like Beyonce

Beyonce Knowles at the groundbreaking ceremony for The Barclays Center at Atlantic Yards in New York 

Incredibly, Beyonce's new perfume "Heat" is not a miserable failure. It's had sales of $3 million+ since it's launch last month. From Yahoo!:

Singer Beyonce Knowles has had a whiff of the sweet smell of success - $3 million worth of her Beyonce Heat fragrance has been sold since its launch last month.

The perfume hit the US departmental store Macy's in Feburary. Contactmusic.com reports that fans clamored to purchase the fragrance, which features 'notes of red vanilla orchid, magnolia, neroli and blush peach', and it quickly became America's top-selling beauty counter product.

The fragrance's popularity continues to soar - Macy's CEO Terry Lungren has revealed sales have reached a staggering $3 million in its first few weeks of release.

Celebrity perfumes have to be the dumbest thing out there. Neroli? What the fuck is neroli? Beyonce can't even spell neroli. She didn't develop this. You really want to smell like Beyonce? Fill a kiddie pool with $50k or so in large bills. And then just roll around in it. Or if you want to smell like Lindsay Lohan, fill that same kiddie pool with unpaid credit card bills and "past due" notices.

From: Celebslam

Sandra Bullock says she wouldn't have spared Tiger Woods

New York, March 27 (IANS) This year's Oscar-winning actress Sandra Bullock, who walked out on husband Jesse James two weeks ago after his philandering ways came to light, says she would have given Tiger Woods a tough time if she were in his wife's place.

The remarks by the 45-year-old actress were made in January - much before she won the Oscar and her husband's infidelities came to light - to 'The Insider' magazine at People's Choice Awards but revealed this week.

In the audio Bullock says that had she been in the place of Tiger Woods' wife she would have not stopped using the golf club against the philandering golfer.

Woods' wife Elin Nordegren had reportedly hit him with a golf club on the night he crashed his car into a fire hydrant outside their Florida home in November. The accident led to revelations about his multiple affairs.

"If I were Elin... man, I would have hit a lot more than she did... I would have kept hitting!

"Yeah, she (Elin) stopped. She was respectable. I'd get the baseball bat.

I'd get everything out.''

Bullock had no clues about her own husband's infidelities when she made these remarks.

Her marital life collapsed immediately after her Oscar victory, with porn star Michelle McGee claiming that she had an 11-month affair with Bullock's husband Jesse James.

After the porn star's claim, three more mistresses, including a stripper and a fetish model, have claimed sex with Jesse James.

"She's devastated. She's beyond upset. And she has every right to be. She was on top of the world with her Oscar victory and now this. It's such a difficult thing to deal with,'' reported radaronline Friday.

"She (Bullock) has a tight circle of friends. They won't say much about her. They want to protect her. And that's because she's been nice to everyone along the way. She's not stuck up. She doesn't act like a star. She acts like a normal, sweet person, which is exactly what she is. And that's why everyone is so loyal to her,'' the celebrity website says. 

From: Indian Times

US Commends President Goodluck Jonathan

*Says he has consolidated grip on power

*Believes Yar’Adua’s men won’t engineer political come back

Acting President Goodluck Jonathan’s consolidation of his grip on power is drawing applause from the United States of America which says his efforts are easing a political crisis that once fanned fears of instability in the country.

Assistant Secretary of State Johnnie Carson said Washington was encouraged that Jonathan was moving on electoral reforms, anti-corruption efforts and peace outreach in the restive Niger Delta, the centre of Nigeria’s largest energy industry.

“I think he’s done a very good job of consolidating his authority and reassuring all segments of the community,” Carson, the Obama administration’s top diplomat for Africa, told Reuters in an interview.

Jonathan assumed power in early February to try to end government paralysis in the absence of President Umaru Yar’Adua, who had been in Saudi Arabia receiving treatment for a heart condition for more than two months.

Yar’Adua subsequently returned but remains too sick to govern and is essentially incommunicado – a situation that led U.S. officials to express concern over a potential power struggle among different leadership factions.

Carson said those fears had receded as Jonathan cemented his authority, including taking steps to name a new Cabinet, and that it was unlikely those who back Yar’Adua would try to engineer a political comeback.

“We don’t know whether he will come back. But I think the country is in fact moving on,” Carson said. “We believe those in power in senior positions have clearly opted to support a stable democracy during this period of uncertainty.”

U.S. officials have urged Jonathan to speed preparations for elections due in 2011, saying a repeat of the vote-rigging and intimidation that marred the 2007 vote that brought Yar’Adua to power would be disastrous.

Nigeria’s ruling party has said it wants the next president to be a northerner, in line with a principle that power rotates around the country, effectively ruling Jonathan out of another term.

Carson said the United States supported the rotation principle as a guarantor of stability in Nigeria.
“We hope that the political balance which has given Nigeria its political stability will prevail,” he said
Source: Vanguardngr.com

Hollywood and Bollywood join arms to fight piracy

Hollywood and Bollywood linked arms Thursday to fight piracy, with the announcement of a coalition among the Motion Picture Association of America and seven Indian companies to tackle counterfeiting in one of the world's largest film markets.

 

The alliance comes as Hollywood tries to tap global markets more aggressively and as Indian movie studios grow in size and stature — narrowing the gap between Indian and U.S. filmmakers, who have not always seen eye-to-eye on intellectual property issues.

A year in the making, the coalition to fight film piracy in India will work with movie theaters to crack down on camcorder piracy — the source of 90 percent of all pirated DVDs — with police to tighten enforcement, with Internet service providers to fight Internet piracy and with politicians to create more effective laws.

MPAA, which has similar anti-piracy alliances in the U.S., Europe and Hong Kong, would not disclose the size of the coalition's budget but said funding would come from members.

The Indian film industry has a rich history of copycat productions and traditionally has had less respect for the sanctity of intellectual property than Hollywood would like.

In 2008, for example, Warner Bros. unsuccessfully sued to block the release of an Indian Punjabi film called "Hari Puttar — A Comedy of Terrors" on the grounds that the name was too close to its Harry Potter series.

That friction has started to ease with the rise of corporate studios in India, like UTV Motion Pictures and Reliance Big Pictures, which last year took a 50 percent share in Steven Spielberg's DreamWorks for $325 million.

Over the last two years, a growing number of successful partnerships — like "My Name is Khan," produced by two Indian companies and distributed by Fox in India and the U.S. — as well as successful crossover movies — like "Slumdog Millionaire" and "Avatar," which both did well in India — have also strengthened ties.

"People are becoming more of the same mind," Dan Glickman, the outgoing chairman of the Motion Picture Association of America, told The Associated Press in an interview. "The Indian film industry now understands their product is getting stolen at significant rates."

Piracy cost India's $2.3 billion film industry $959 million and 571,000 jobs in 2008, according to an Ernst & Young study, and pirated DVDs account for 60 percent of the market, according to KPMG.

"Piracy is one of the most pernicious problems facing the entertainment industry, and the Indian industry in particular," said Reliance Big Pictures chief executive Sanjeev Lamba.

Lamba attributed part of the financial success of "3 Idiots," distributed by Reliance Big Pictures last year, to the studio's aggressive anti-piracy efforts.

Round-the-clock work helped prevent 10 million illegal downloads, he said, adding that at one point his staff was finding new illegal digital copies of the film on the Internet every five minutes.

Piracy has gotten worse in India as Internet connection speeds have improved and DVD player usage has increased.

In the last two years, the number of Indian households with DVD players surged from 4 million to 45 million, said Harish Dayani, chief executive of India's Moser Baer, the world's second-largest CD and DVD manufacturer.

He estimates that Indian consumers snap up 700 million illegal DVDs every year, giving them little incentive to go to theaters and generating 15 billion rupees ($330 million) for counterfeiters.

Reducing that leakage is crucial for Hollywood studios as they try to push into India.

"More and more, the growth of film is outside the U.S.," Glickman said. "Hollywood is now looking at the world as their marketplace."

KPMG expects Indian film industry revenues to hit 136.7 billion rupees ($3 billion) by 2014, an average annual growth of 8.9 percent.

"This is a country of 1 billion people who love movies more than anywhere else in the world," Glickman said. "We'd be foolish not to want to come into this market."