Celebrity Gossip News | Hollywood Celebrities Videos Photos

Larry Birkhead, the man who is claiming paternity for Anna Nicole Smith’s 5-month old baby daughter Danielynne Hope has posted this tribute online, even though their recent relationship was anything but friendly.

An autopsy is being carried out on Anna Nicole Smith’s body and a judge has ordered that her body be preserved and cannot be buried pending a hearing in the court-ordered paternity test legal battle on February 20. The ruling came as new information surfaced about Smith’s last days, during which she fell ill, according to sources.

Hollywood celebrity gossip news rumors

It was a tragic end to a troubled life. She suffered the loss of her 19 year old son Daniel who died from an apparent drug overdose, and now, not quite 5 months later, she has gone down the same path. She was found unconscious in her room at Hard Rock Hotel & Casino in Hollywood, Florida.

WFOR-TV in Miami reported that Anna was found unresponsive in her hotel room. Paramedics were called and performed CPR on the tragic blonde, in addition to inserting a tube in her mouth and pumping her chest as she was taken from the hotel. Local streets were closed off to rush Smith to the hospital, three miles away. Smith was dead by the time she arrived at the emergency room and her body was already covered.

Conspiracy theorists have speculated that her husband, Howard K.Stern as being responsible since he would stand to inherit the millions from Anna’s fortune. Formerly her lawyer, he was the one likely responsible for orchestrating the million-dollar interviews with Entertainment Tonight and the sale of all their personal photos to People magazine and other publications. Many people have also speculated that Stern gave Daniel the Methadone [prescription heroin substitute] that killed him.

Anna’s daughter, Dannielynn, five months old, remained in the Bahamas, where she had been residing. Smith has been in a protracted legal battle with photojournalist and former boyfriend, Larry Birkhead, who claims he is the true father of Anna’s baby. Smith’s lawyer and “boyfriend” Howard K. Stern is listed on the birth certificate as the father.

Hollywood celebrity gossip news rumors

The surreal case of astronaut Lisa Nowak being charged with attempted first degree murder seems like some bizarre Hollywood movie plot. Apparently still working for NASA at the time of the crime, Nowak, a Navy captain became an astronaut in 1996 and flew her first shuttle mission in July, serving as a mission specialist aboard the Discovery.

Nowak who recently separated from her husband of 19 years, is accused of accosting Air Force Capt. Colleen Shipman, 30, in the parking lot of Orlando International Airport early Monday and attacking her with pepper spray. Both women were “in a relationship” with Navy Cmdr. Bill Oefelein, another astronaut, according to a police report of the incident.

NASA will review psychological screening assessments of astronauts and will determine if there are “lessons to be learned” from the incident involving Nowak and if modifications need to be made, according to NASA deputy administrator Shana Dale.

An example of requirements to become a Mission Specialist Astronaut Candidate
1. Bachelor’s degree from an accredited institution in engineering, biological science, physical science, or mathematics. Degree must be followed by at least three years of related, progressively responsible, professional experience. An advanced degree is desirable and may be substituted for part or all of the experience requirement (master’s degree = 1 year of experience, doctoral degree = 3 years of experience). Quality of academic preparation is important.

2. Ability to pass a NASA space physical, which is similar to a military or civilian flight physical and includes the following specific standards:
- Distance visual acuity: 20/200 or better uncorrected, correctable to 20/20, each eye.
- Blood pressure: 140/90 measured in a sitting position.
- Height between 58.5 and 76 inches.

Other general requirements
Complete military water survival training where the candidate must swim 3 lengths of a 25M pool without stopping, and then swim 3 lengths of the pool in a flightsuit and tennis shoes. The strokes allowed are freestyle, breast, and sidestroke. There is no time limit. They must also tread water continuously for 10 minutes.

Michael Coats, director of NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, issued a statement saying Nowak “is officially on 30-day leave and has been removed from flight status and all mission-related activities.”

This film is one of the Best Film Oscar nominees – others being The Departed, Letters From Iwo Jima, Little Miss Sunshine and The Queen. The trailer for Letters From Iwo Jima ran before Babel came on and 2-minutes of hearing Japanese hurtling from THX made my ears hurt, so I won’t be seeing Clint’s movie.

DANGER! DANGER! WILL ROBINSON…SPOILERS AHEAD!

Wow..what can I say about Babel. You either love or hate it. You either get it or you regret spending two and a half hours getting leg cramps. Babel is about not being able to communicate on different levels, in different cultures and circumstances. So we have four stories in Mexico/US, Japan and Morocco where the characters are somehow linked.

There is an American couple (Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett) who is in Morocco trying to save their marriage while their two children are being looked after by a Mexican nanny who brings them across the border because she has to return home for her son’s wedding but couldn’t find anyone to look after the kids. Cate Blanchett’s character gets shot by a Moroccan boy who was fooling around with a rifle which his father traded from another herdsman to protect his goats from jackals. That herdsman received the rife as a gift from a Japanese tourist for whom he acted as a local guide. The Japanese tourist has a problematic teenage deaf-mute daughter whose mother killed herself.

So there are relationship troubles where the American couple are trying to communicate with each other in an effort to save their marriage, there are language barrier problems in trying to get help in a foreign land when the American woman gets shot. Even fellow Americans in the tour bus are unwilling to wait around till help arrives – they want to get to get out of the desert heat and to an aircon hotel – they drive off leaving the American couple in the small village in the middle of nowhere.

The Mexican nanny is unwittingly thrown into circumstances where she loses the two children in the desert and gets deported even though she built a life for herself in the US for 16 years. The Japanese teenager who presumably is traumatised by her mother’s suicide could not communicate with her father, not only because she is deaf-mute, pours her heart out in a note to the policeman investigating the origins of the rifle involved in the Morocco shooting is perhaps the most powerful story in Babel.

There are many implausible scenarios which leaves one flabbergasted at the sheer stupidity of people and situations but apparently the people who nominated this film for an Oscar did not have any issues. Some of the more glaring ones:
1. An American couple chooses to go to a faraway land to try and save their marriage while leaving their two small children in the care of a nanny who is an illegal alien.
2. Moroccan police open fire at 2 young boys without any attempt to speak to them first.
3. The nephew of the Mexican nanny leaves his aunt and 2 small children in the middle of the desert in pitch black darkness with just a torch. He says he would come back for them – how would he even know where he left them?
4. The Japanese girl is really quite annoying and it’s hard to empathise with her.

Ok…so that last one was just something personal but I did feel the movie was a tad draggy although it kept my attention pretty much. Overall, if you liked Borat, don’t see Babel.

In the west, there is the Big Mac Index which tracks prices of Big Macs to compare currencies worldwide. Here in Singapore, Bloomberg has invented the Bak Kwa Index. Prices of the sliced barbequed pork are compared between the 4 major Bak Kwa stores.

There was a short queue of about 15 people today at the crowd favourite Lim Chee Guan in Chinatown. Prices are $38 per kilo for “loose” pieces and $40 per kilo for whole pieces. As Chinese New Year draws nearer, queues are expected to grow longer in the annual affair where people can expect to stand in line for a few hours even as prices are jacked up to $50 or more from the usual $35 per kilo. The “loose” pieces taste better in my opinion.

So humans are not totally to blame for global warming then.

A group of international scientists meeting in Paris, France belong to the “Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change”. Its 21-page report for policy makers linked the increase of average global temperatures since the mid-20th century to the increase of manmade greenhouse gases in the atmosphere – with “90% certainty”.

The report noted that 11 of the last 12 years have ranked among the 12 warmest years on record with the oceans absorbing more than 80 percent of the heat added to the climate system. Add in the melt-off of glaciers and sea ice and sea levels are rising. Scientists predict global temperature increases of 3.2-7.1 degrees F by 2100 and sea levels could rise between 7 and 23 inches by the end of the century. This means coastal cities like San Francisco could be submerged.