Women Affairs

Speculation that Kylie Minogue may have cancelled a planned tour because of health concerns has been put to rest with the poppette announcing a European tour next year. The tour, to promote her new album, X, was described by Minogue on her website as "a new and exciting experience for both the audience and myself … After two celebratory tours, X will be a look to the future but will definitely include favourites alongside the new." Starting in Paris on May 6, three weeks before Minogue's 40th birthday, the tour will travel across continental Europe, Scandinavia and Northern Ireland before finishing in London on July 27. The former Neighbours star had to suspend her Showgirl tour in 2005 when she was diagnosed with breast cancer, but returned last November with the Showgirl Homecoming Tour. RED CARPET She may not be getting an award, but our tip is that an Armani-clad Cate Blanchett will be the star attraction at the Australian Film Institute Awards in Melbourne next Thurs...

As far as unaccomplished celebrities go, Tila Tequila, the most popular person on MySpace, makes Paris Hilton look like a Nobel laureate. Discovered in a US mall by a Playboy scout eight years ago, Tequila, whose real surname is Nguyen, sits among the new breed of do-it-yourself celebrities who shot to fame using little more than provocative photos and a flashy MySpace page. She boasts around 2.4 million MySpace "friends" and claims she personally attends to 10,000-20,000 friend requests a day, in between posting blogs and making video diaries. "It's like being the most popular girl at school," Nguyen said in an interview. "Everywhere I go I get recognised from all my [MySpace] friends because they feel like we're really friends and they're not just like fans. We have this deeper connection." Named Playboy's first Asian Cyber Girl of the Week, Nguyen, 26, has modelled in all states of undress for Stuff, Maxim, Penthouse and impor...

The singer was reportedly granted custody of two-year-old Sean Preston and 14-month-old Jayden James for Christmas Day during a closed Los Angeles court hearing yesterday, according to TMZ.com. It is believed the 25-year-old singer was granted custody of the boys by Superior Court Commissioner Scott M. Gordon for the holiday because her ex-husband Kevin Federline, 29, had the boys for Thanksgiving last Thursday. Britney currently has three weekly visits with her sons, including one overnight stay, all supervised by a court-appointed parenting coach, while Kevin has been awarded temporary full custody. The couple's next hearing has been scheduled for January 23. Also discussed at yesterday's hearing, which was attended by Britney's lawyer Anne Kiley and Kevin's attorney Mark Vincent Kaplan, was the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services' request for access to the former couple's case file - in particular documents, which have been sealed. A...

Tom Cruise, Katie Holmes and their daughter Suri were treated to a private performance by the Spice Girls at the weekend. The Cruise family stopped by the girls' Los Angeles rehearsal rooms and watched an exclusive impromptu performance by close friend Victoria Beckham and her bandmates. The Spice Girls were also on hand to cheer on Mel B at the final of the US version of Dancing With the Stars last night. The girls looked delighted with Mel's performances, which saw her take on the other remaining contestants, Marie Osmond and Helio Castroneves. According to People the girls sat in the girls sat in the front row next to Mel B's husband, Stephen Belafonte and hooted and hollered after she finished the cha-cha, which was the first dance of the night. After the show, Geri Halliwell told People that she was "so proud of Melanie ....We have come as her sisters to support her." Mel B will find out if her sassy moves were enough to take the title on the results show ton...

A documentary about Kylie Minogue's battle with breast cancer has gone to air in Britain, showing dramatic footage of the pop star's collapse during a show in Manchester. Footage from the concert, filmed before her diagnosis, shows a distressed Minogue trying desperately not to cry as she walks the stage trying to make it through one more song. But the diminutive singer is forced backstage, where she collapses, crying, as her team try to comfort her and cool her as she lies crumpled on the floor. "I hate to let you all down but I'm just going to do one more song," Minogue, wearing a skin-tight catsuit, tells the audience. But she simply could not go on. "I was really weak, dizzy and couldn't sing," she says in the documentary White Diamond: A Personal Portrait of Kylie Minogue , which aired last night on Britain's Channel 4. "I was hyperventilating and panicking and in tears and then we stopped and there was this gap that seemed like i...

Another day, another photographic flame for Paul McCartney? Rosanna Arquette is the latest woman to be photographed with the 65-year-old ex-Beatle. The News of the World published pictures of McCartney and the 48-year-old actress walking together outside of what it said was McCartney's north London home. The paper's website could not resist highlighting the likeness between Arquette and McCartney's ex-wfie Heather Mills, going so far as to include a picture of Arquette that rolls over to show a similar looking picture of Mills. The encounter took place last week, the British tabloid said — only a month after McCartney was photographed embracing Nancy Shevell, a New Jersey trucking heiress and member of New York's Metropolitan Transportation Authority board. McCartney's love life has been the subject of intense scrutiny amid his messy, multimillion-dollar divorce from Mills. The rock legend has previously been spotted with Renee Zellweger and Christie Brinkley. ...

The widow of opera star Luciano Pavarotti has sued two friends of the late tenor for 30 million euro ($50 million), claiming their comments about her marriage were defamatory, her lawyer said. Nicoletta Mantovani filed the lawsuit last month after warning that speculation about the state of her marriage to Pavarotti would not be tolerated, her lawyer said. Pavarotti died on September 6 of pancreatic cancer at age 71. Soon after, friends close to the tenor told Italian media he had been unhappy in the marriage, and Mantovani was fighting his grown daughters from an earlier marriage over his estate. "Since the comments did not cease - and were, in fact, reiterated - Mantovani had no choice but to file the lawsuit," lawyer Anna Maria Bernini said, confirming weekend reports in the small daily L'Informazione, based in Pavarotti's hometown of Modena. "She is doing it to protect her sense of respectability - privately for the sake of her daughter and the memory of the ...

Troubled soul-singer Amy Winehouse today announced she is cancelling all her remaining planned concerts this year, saying she could not perform while her husband was in custody. Blake Fielder-Civil, 25, is being held on remand accused of inflicting grievous bodily harm on a pub landlord in an incident in June last year. Winehouse, 24, who has struggled with drugs and alcohol, has been criticised by critics for some of her recent performances and a statement on her Web site said her doctor had advised her to cancel all live appearances scheduled this year. "I can't give it my all onstage without my Blake," her statement said. "I'm so sorry but I don't want to do the shows half-heartedly; I love singing. My husband is everything to me and without him it's just not the same." She had been due to perform a number of concerts across Britain and in Ireland, but these have now been called off. The notice said Winehouse had been under intense emotional strai...

A lawyer for Britney Spears today asked a court commissioner to keep Los Angeles County authorities from reviewing court filings in the pop star's child custody dispute. It would be best for her two young sons that the case remain sealed, Thomas Paine Dunlap argued. The Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS) and its representative, the county counsel's office, are a "large bureaucracy with thousands of employees" where the details of the case could easily leak out, he said. Kevin Federline's lawyer, Mark Vincent Kaplan, argued that if the court was going to turn files over it should identify and only release relevant issues in the case that are connected to the county investigation of Spears' parenting skills. A county lawyer representing DCFS asked for the hearing to be closed and Superior Court Commissioner Scott Gordon's decision on the matter was not disclosed. Spears, 25, and Federline, 29, were married in October 2004. T...

Minna and Fariba are neighbours and good friends. They support one another. Both have to live under the pervasive curtailment of women's rights and the double standards of today's Iranian society. They make a living walking the streets looking for men. They have a choice between leaving their small children at home alone or bringing them along when they have sex with men. The film is a sympathetic portrait of the two women, exploring their day-to-day life and the workings of prostitution in a country that bans it and prosecutes adulterers, sometimes with the penalty of capital punishment. Many of the clients find a way to buy sex and still comply with Muslim law: they marry the women in what is called 'Sighe', a temporary marriage sanctioned in Shia Islam. Sighe can last from two hours up to 99 years. Both Minna and Fariba enter into Sighe with clients, and Fariba is in a Sighe marriage with a neighbour, Habib, that lasts six months. Giving his perspective on temporary ...

Deepak Mahaan In a new twist to the outsourcing for which India has become renowned, poor Indian women are renting out their wombs to foreigners. Surrogate motherhood -- carrying to term and giving birth to another woman's baby - once was limited in India to helping close relatives who couldn't complete a pregnancy due to medical difficulties. But leading gynecologist Dr. Kamla Selvaraj says it's now becoming a regular "profession" in India, with more and more women willing to carry babies for others, for a fee. India has for years been providing foreigners with in-vitro fertilization (IVF) treatment at a cheaper rate than the equivalent services in Western countries. Surrogacy comes in when the biological mother is unable to carry the child. Alternatively, a surrogate also provide eggs when the woman wanting a child is unable to do so herself. Apart from low-cost IVF treatment, India also is offering surrogate mothers at a considerably lower price than couples wo...

A Kathu Police investigations unit early Tuesday morning arrested an Indonesian adult-film producer in his hotel room after he was caught conducting a photo shoot with one of his starlets - a Thai ladyboy. Pol Sub Lt Nitikorn Rawang, duty officer of Kathu Police Station, said the bust took place at 4:20 am. After receiving a tip-off that a video shoot was taking place in room 314 of the Sup Inn on Soi Patong Resort, the police entered the room to find it had been converted into a makeshift studio with everything needed for the production of pornography and its distribution around the world via the Internet. Police arrested Indonesian Farisa Riyadi, 35, and took 32-year-old Thai ladyboy Phinit "Nong Ning" Lakharn, 32, for questioning at Kathu Police headquarters. Nong Ning, from Yasothorn, who has already undergone complete gender "re-assignment" surgery, told police that she agreed to pose for the Indonesian in return for 1,000 baht cash. Mr Riyadi offered the same ...

Somaly Mam doesn't know her birthday. She has no clue what her real name might be, or if she even has one. Somaly also doesn't know what her age was - though she reckons she was 8 or 9 - on the day she was sold into sexual slavery. She does remember, with complete clarity, the moment she vowed to murder her pimp. It was the night the guy gathered all his little girl prostitutes into a room and told them to tie up one of his slaves. Then, he shot her in the head. She was Somaly's best friend. "I'm the only one not crying," Somaly told me, and her gaze became stern, as if she can see the man's face. "I just looked at him. I decided that I would marry a rich man, get a gun and kill him." But Somaly didn't kill the pimp. Instead, she dedicated her life to saving little girls, like her, forced into the sex trade. Some are as young as 4 years old. That's how she's getting her vengeance. I met Somaly Mam last week at a Midtown restaurant to...

After drugs and rock 'n' roll, sex has caught the eye of the police in Pune. The Crime Branch last week unearthed a major Internet-based sex racket of countrywide proportions involving models -turned-television actresses - three were arrested. The action followed last month's arrest of two Mumbai-based models and a tout from the film industry, and the detention earlier in the year of over 150 young people in a rave party that had set off a chain of narcotics seizures, all of which the police said were signs of lifestyle crimes coming to booming Pune, some 170 km from Mumbai. The latest arrests came after a complaint against a website, chamadi.com, by Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha city chief Sandeep Khardekar. The police said models from various cities across the country had posted their cellular phone numbers to offer "escort" services to "discerning gentlemen". The website invites successful men who were pressed for time, and could not manage long-term r...

Fei Fei, a 22-year-old from China's Guangdong province, has a souvenir of her eight months in Dubai: burns on her back and arms from cigarette butts crushed against her skin when she refused to work as a prostitute. She eventually submitted when a criminal gang threatened to send nude photos of her to family members. That indignity, she said, would have been worse than selling her body. "They take pictures of me naked in shower," Fei Fei said in broken English as she pulled up her shirt to reveal the dark red circular marks. Soon afterward, she adopted the English name "Lucy," and sold sex in Dubai bars for 500 dirhams (USD $130) a trick to claw back her freedom. Fei Fei's story symbolizes the dark side of Dubai, better known for its skyscrapers, sail-shaped hotel and man-made islands built in the shape of palm trees. The United Arab Emirates, of which Dubai is the second-largest member, is on a US State Department watch-list for failing to take "meani...

The Malawi Government has applauded pop diva Madonna's efforts to put the plight of the country's Aids orphans on the global stage and raising money to support them. The American singer pledged last week to work with luxury goods maker Gucci to raise at least US$2 million ($2.68) million for Malawi's orphans - numbering more than a million. Madonna and the Italian firm will host a fundraising event with dinner, musical performance and a party in February to mark the opening of Gucci's largest store in the world, on New York's Fifth Avenue. Malawi's Information Minister, Patricia Kaliati, said: "What she is doing for the orphans of this country, very few superstars like her can do that - she has managed to raise their plight on the world stage. "Madonna has built clinics in rural areas where the government has failed to reach. Because of that, she has saved many lives of pregnant mothers who could have died." The bid by the pop star and her movie d...

Mary-Kate Olsen is being treated in a Manhattan hospital for a kidney infection. The 21-year-old actress checked into the hospital Monday night, her publicist, Nicole Caruso, said in an email to The Associated Press. She didn't identify where Olsen was admitted. "She has a kidney infection," Caruso said. "She is resting comfortably and will be released in the next day or so." Olsen rose to fame on TV's Full House in a shared role with her twin sister, Ashley. She recently starred on Showtime's Weeds . She co-stars with Ben Kingsley in The Wackness , slated for release next year.

Kate Moss has warned Sienna Miller she will "have an enemy for life" if she hurts her good friend Rhys Ifans. The catwalk beauty had a dramatic showdown with rival Sienna over the actress' relationship with the Welsh actor at soap star Davinia Taylor's 30th birthday party at The Colour Rooms, in east London, on Saturday. Kate, 33, was overheard saying: "If you hurt Rhys, you'll have made an enemy for life. Treat him right and we'll leave you alone. But don't hurt him because we love him - and we always stick together." Kate - who organised the bash for Davinia - had begrudgingly invited 25-year-old Sienna, telling Rhys she would have to behave herself. However, after a few drinks Kate couldn't contain her feelings and confronted the Factory Girl star. One partygoer told Britain's Daily Mirror newspaper: "Sienna was shocked by what Kate had said. She turned on her heel and took to the dancefloor. She just couldn't believe it....

Yuko Narushima The paparazzo photographer Jamie Fawcett was yesterday accused of making up stories after he told the NSW Supreme Court he had touched but not planted a bug outside Nicole Kidman's house. The photographer also agreed it was his view that celebrities such as Kidman only had a right to privacy if they were concealed behind the walls of a house, and said that the actress had sworn at him. Fawcett said he was waiting outside Kidman's Darling Point home on January 23, 2005, when he saw her security guard, Malcolm Carter, behaving strangely. Mr Carter turned around 360 degrees before crouching near a small wall, Fawcett said. "I thought it was odd and I went up to the place where he had done this and had a look," he said. Fawcett said he picked up what appeared to be a listening device before putting it back and walking to his car. "I sat there and pondered about what had happened," he said, worrying later that his prints would be on the bug, wh...

Luxury goods maker Louis Vuitton has won a lawsuit accusing Britney Spears of violating counterfeit laws by showcasing a pink Vuitton-upholstered dashboard in a music video. A Paris civil court ordered Sony BMG and MTV Online to stop broadcasting or marketing the video for Do Something in any form, and fined them 80,000 euros apiece, a spokeswoman for Paris-based Louis Vuitton said today. The ruling was handed down last week. In the opening scenes of the clip, Spears appears in the driver's seat of a hot pink Hummer floating on make-believe clouds. One multi-second shot shows fingers drumming on a dashboard covered with what looks like Vuitton's "Cherry Blossoms" design: dark pink blossoms on a pale pink, weblike background, embossed with the "LV" logo.

Actress Lindsay Lohan checked in and out of jail today, spending just 84 minutes behind bars for a drunken driving and cocaine-possession conviction, Los Angeles police said. Lohan, 21, had been sentenced in August to one day in jail after admitting guilt to drink and drug charges and was told by the court to serve her time before January. The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department Web site showed that Lohan checked into jail at 10:30am on Thursday (7.30am Fri NZT) and was released at 11:54am. The charges stemmed from a July car chase and an arrest in May after she wrecked her car in Beverly Hills. After her July arrest, the star of the hit movie Mean Girls checked into a rehabilitation centre in Utah and spent more than two months there. It was Lohan's second stint in rehab this year after admitting she had been attending meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous. Lohan was also sentenced to 10 days of community service, three years probation and 18 months of an alcohol-education prog...

An arrest warrant has been issued for actress Hayden Panettiere in Japan as a result of her Save the Whales protest in the country according to E! News. "I learned today that I have an arrest warrant out for me in Japan because of what I did for Save the Whales," Heroes star Panettiere told E!. Panettiere was part of a group who tried to prevent the slaughter of a group of whales and dolphins by fisherman near Taiji in southwestern Japan. The group of activists was involved in a confrontation with the fishermen after they paddled on surfboards to try and reach a pod of dolphins before it was driven into a nearby cove and massacred. Video footage of the clash shows the fisherman using the boat's propellers to halt the surfers' progress and even lashing out at them with a boat hook, eventually forcing them to return to shore. Panettiere said she did not know what repercussions the arrest warrant would bring, but said it would not put her off doing something similar agai...

David Beckham can't stop laughing at wife Victoria when she practises her Spice Girls tour dance routines. Victoria - also known as Posh - has been listening to the band's hits on her iPod in a bid to learn the group's complex dance routines before their tour starts. She wrote on the Spice Girls' official blog: "David and the boys have been laughing at me because I've been wandering around the house listening to my iPod and practising the routines. We are including some parts of the old routines but bringing them up to date a bit." Victoria also admitted she is nervous about the tour, which starts in Vancouver, Canada, on December 2, because it will be the first time her sons have seen their mother perform. The singer - who has three boys, eight-year-old Brooklyn, five-year-old Romeo, and Cruz, two, with David - said: "My boys are so excited about the tour, they can't wait and I'm really looking forward to them seeing me up on stage. I'm j...

Madonna is joining forces with luxury goods-maker Gucci to raise funds for orphans in Malawi, the impoverished southern African nation where she has been trying to adopt a child since last year. The American pop star and Gucci will host a fund-raising event with dinner, a musical performance and a party on February 6 next year to mark the opening of Gucci's largest store in the world, on New York's Fifth Avenue. Madonna said the event will benefit UNICEF and the charity she co-founded in 2006, Raising Malawi, which focuses on trying to end the poverty and hardship suffered by Malawi's 1 million orphans, many of whose parents died of AIDS. "I am grateful that Gucci is joining forces with me to bring attention to a country with millions of children in desperate need of our help," Madonna said in a statement. "Raising Malawi has already done tremendous work in helping these children. But we have much more to do and this event will surely bring us closer to our g...

A New York woman is suing Olympic boxer Oscar de la Hoya for $100 million, saying she was coerced into agreeing not to sell photographs of him dancing around a hotel room in women's clothing. Milana Dravnel, who the New York Post and New York Daily News reported had met de la Hoya at a strip club where she worked, said the agreement was made after she had already sold some of the images to a Hollywood photo agency for US$70,000. The lawsuit, filed in New York State Court, said that amount was "below market value" for the photos, which were widely disseminated. In one of the images, de la Hoya appears in a black fishnet bodysuit and black heels. In another, he is wearing a white tutu. It is not known whether the photos, apparently taken at the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Philadelphia, were doctored. Representatives for de la Hoya, the Mexican-American multiple world champion known as "Golden Boy," were not immediately available for comment. Dravnel, 22, said a represen...

Angelina Jolie's adoption of an Ethiopian baby was legal, the agency involved said today, rejecting reports that the child's relatives want her back. Newspapers have reported this week that relatives of two-year-old Zahara, including a woman who says she is her birth mother, want the child returned to Ethiopia. Jolie adopted Zahara in July, 2005. "The court in Addis Ababa approved the adoption after studying the document her grandmother wrote ... saying her daughter, the mother of Zahara, had died and she was too poor to bring her up," Tsegaye Berhe, the head of Wide Horizons for Children, which conducted the adoption, told Reuters. "The grandmother brought three witnesses to court who testified that Zahara's mother had died and that her father was unknown ... The court also investigated the social status of Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt before approving the adoption." Tsegaye said the adoption was "legal and irrevocable", and he blamed reporter...

Oscar winner Nicole Kidman is one of Hollywood's top actresses, but she says for the moment her marriage to country music star Keith Urban takes priority over her career. Kidman, who says she "spontaneously" chooses most of her roles, has had some recent high-profile flops, like 2004s The Stepford Wives, 2005s Bewitched and 2007s The Invasion, since winning an Oscar in 2003 for playing novelist Virginia Woolf in the The Hours. While promoting her latest movie, Margot at the Wedding in New York, the Australian actress, 40, said her main concern was her relationship with Urban, whom she married in June 2006 in Sydney. Grammy-winning Urban spent two months in a rehab centre last year, but did not disclose the nature of his treatment. He has acknowledged an addiction to cocaine in the past and credits Kidman with seeing him through his crisis. As for Kidman she told a group of reporters: "I just recently married so that's my priority. I love my work but at the same t...

Spice Girl Mel C claims the Spice Girls all still live up to their famous nicknames. The singer, who was christened Sporty in the band's heyday, says while she and the rest of the girls - Victoria 'Posh' Beckham, Emma 'Baby' Bunton, Mel 'Scary' B and Geri 'Ginger' Halliwell' - have matured in the past nine years they still have their distinctive personalities. Mel C said: "Mel B isn't as scary as she used to be, she's definitely mellowed somewhat. But she's still very feisty. Ginger is a little bit lighter now, her hair is a little bit more golden. Baby's always going to be the baby, she's the youngest. And Victoria is very posh." Mel C, who was initially reluctant to reform the band, is now looking forward to the girls' reunion tour, which starts in Vancouver, Canada, on December 2. But she said it was not the beginning of a new chapter, but rather "our final bow" to celebrate a career that has seen th...

Eva Longoria is planning to quit Desperate Housewives to have a baby. The actress, who is married to basketball star Tony Parker, is ready to walk away from Wisteria Lane and start a family. She said: "I've always loved the idea of having lots of children. If I'm around any baby, I'm like, 'Aaaaahhhh, babies!' "I was pretty ambitions when I moved to Hollywood and I succeeded. But now I've found new ambitions - I want to work, I want to be a great wife and I want to have children. This is a new chapter in my life. I will be very sad to go but I'll have more time to do movies." Eva, 32, has also revealed she is such a dedicated housewife she flies to Texas just to cook Tony breakfast. The actress works in Los Angeles, while Tony plies his trade in Texas, where Eva was raised. But if she has any spare time she hops on a plane and surprises him with some unexpected home cooking. She said: "Texas is home, Los Angeles is where I work. If Desper...

Oscar-winning Australian actress Nicole Kidman screamed and feared for her life during an incident involving a Sydney paparazzo, a judge has been told. Giving evidence in the NSW Supreme Court today, John Manning said he was driving Kidman to her parents' Sydney home on January 23, 2005. He said their car was followed by a jeep driven by photographer Jamie Fawcett. Mr Manning said he had to swerve his car at one stage when Fawcett's car drove over a median strip. He said Kidman was "screaming" and saying things such as: "This has to stop. Call the police." "She was fearing for her life and she said someone is going to get killed," he told the court. He was giving evidence at a defamation hearing Fawcett brought over an article published in The Sun-Herald newspaper in January 2005. A jury has already found the article defamed Fawcett, and Justice Carolyn Simpson is now considering any defences brought forward by the paper's publishers Fairfax Me...

Angelina Jolie signed autographs and chatted with fans today in London's Leicester Square during the British premiere of the movie Beowulf . Jolie, wearing black leather trousers and a tight sweater over her slender frame, brought along her boyfriend Brad Pitt. "It's so, so nice to see all these fans here, it always is," she told reporters as hundreds of people lined up outside the brightly lit runway to the theatre. "I haven't been here for a little bit. I lived here for a few years, and I do plan to come back more often." Pitt, dressed in a grey flat-cap, stood back. "I'm off duty tonight," he told reporters before heading into the theatre with Jolie to watch the film. Director Robert Zemeckis brings the Norse legend of Beowulf to life with technology similar to what he used on The Polar Express to capture live actors whose performances are then digitally animated. Jolie plays Beowulf's vile foe, Grendel's mother. Co-star S...

Network Ten's fragile anchor Charmaine Dragun was renowned for her humour, inner strength and courage, her memorial service in Perth was told today. The highly popular 29-year-old fell to her death at The Gap, in Sydney last week, after struggling with depression. Hundreds of people packed the All Saints Church in suburban Greenwood today to celebrate the life of Ms Dragun who was known for her beautiful smile, humour, laughter, inner strength and courage. Father Vincent Conroy said an excerpt from the Corinthians, read at today's service, would have been read at Ms Dragun's marriage to Simon Struthers next year. She and her long-term partner had been secretly planning to marry at their joint birthday celebrations in March. Ms Dragun's parents Michael and Estelle had been aware of their daughter's fragility as she struggled with depression, Father Conroy said. They have previously said while her death was defined by depression her life was defined by love. Fr...

Actress Angelina Jolie was joined by her boyfriend Brad Pitt as she signed autographs in London's Leicester Square before the British premiere of her new movie Beowulf . Jolie, whose thin frame was covered by black leather trousers and a tight sweater, signed autographs and chatted with some of the hundreds of fans outside the theatre. It's so, so nice to see all these fans here, it always is," she told reporters. "I haven't been here for a little bit. I lived here for a few years, and I do plan to come back more often." Jolie appeared relaxed and happy, despite getting one of her black Christian Louboutin stilleto heels stuck in chewing gum on the red carpet. Pitt, dressed in a grey flat-cap, refused to steal the limelight, telling reporters "I'm off duty tonight." Beowulf co-stars Sir Anthony Hopkins and Ray Winstone also showed up for the premiere.

Rap superstar Kanye West's mother has died at the age of 58. Dr Donda West passed away on Saturday in a Los Angeles hospital. A spokesperson for West confirmed the death saying "The family respectfully asks for privacy during this time of grief." There was no word on the cause of her death. Kanye had just landed in London when he learned of his mother's death. He immediately flew to Los Angeles to join fellow family members. The rapper had a close relationship with his mother, who raised him as a single mother in Chicago after divorcing his father Ray, a former Black Panther, when Kanye was 3. Kanye recorded a tribute to Donda called Hey Mama which appeared on his 2005 album Late Registration. The song included the words "Hey Mama, I wanna scream so loud for you/ 'Cause I'm so proud of you/ Let me tell you what I'm about to do ... I appreciate what you allowed for me, I just want you to be proud of me. "You're unbreakable, unmistakable/ Highl...

Samantha Brett Kate Moss lurches from Pete Doherty into the arms of another unsuitable man. Sienna Miller falls for confirmed cheater Jude Law. Britney Spears marries white trash poster boy K-Fed. And Simone continues to return to Shane Warne, despite shenanigans with blow-up dolls, X-rated video footage and way too many text-sex affairs. So why does this happen? Why is it that so many girls wax lyrical over dating some bloke who refuses to return their calls, won't be caught dead meeting her folks, never buys her gifts (unless he wants something in return) and hardly remembers her name? Introducing the bad boy - aka the blokes beautiful women tend to fall hopelessly in love with. But why? There's a brilliant line in the recent Hollywood flick Perfect Stranger, starring Halle Berry, that poses that very same question. "What is it about powerful women and shitty men?" a character asks. Perhaps Kate Moss would know the answer. The waifish supermodel seems as addicted to...