Showbiz News, Celebrity Gossip, Movie News and Showbiz Political Views

George Michael was arrested in a London public bathroom for alleged drug possesion according to theBBC.
“A 45-year-old man was arrested on 19 September on suspicion of possession of drugs in the Hampstead Heath area,” a Metropolitan Police spokesman said.
The singer was taken to a police station and given the caution for possessing class A and class C drugs.
You would think by now that George Michael would have learned that public bathrooms and him don’t go well together!
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Lil Chris Baker and Charles “Che” Still, who were killed by impact-related injuries in the plane crash that injured Travis Barker and DJ AM, are being honored with a memorial fund.
“With heavy hearts we offer our deepest condolences to their family and friends,” Barker’s clothing line, the Famous Family, said in a statement Monday that expressed “utmost sympathy and regret.
“They will always remain in our thoughts and prayers,” the statement added.
A coroner in South Carolina, where the crash of the Learjet occurred, determined Monday that the pilot and co-pilot died from smoke inhalation and burns while Baker and Still were killed by impact-related injuries.
Barker, the former drummer for Blink 182, and DJ AM, suffered second and third degree burns from the incident but are expected to make full recoveries. Barker has burns on his torso and lower body and DJ AM has burns on his arm and part of his head.
Shanna Moakler, who is now back with Barker, released this statement Monday:
“There are not enough words to express how thankful we are for the outpouring of love and support we have received during this very difficult time. We can only ask for prayers as we heal and mourn the loss of our dear friends who we considered part of our family. Our lives will be changed forever.”
The National Transportation Safety Board has said the Learjet’s black box recording device showed the crew were aware of a blown tire before the private plane crashed into an embankment on takeoff.
Donations may be made to the funds below, for the benefit of Baker and Still’s families.
Chris Baker Memorial Fund
1840 South Milliken
Ontario, CA 91761
Charles Still Memorial Fund
1840 South Milliken
Ontario, CA 91761
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Shortly before midnight, in a plane carrying six people, four were killed and Travis Barker and DJ AM were critically injured. Both are in a burn unit of of a Georgia hospital.
When the plane was attempting to takeoff, it went off the end of the runway and crashed into a nearby road.
Two of the four people killed were crew members of the Lear Jet. The remaining two were passengers, but as I write this, their identities have not been released. The plane was headed back to Los Angeles.
I have certainly given both of these guys a hard time in the past, but now is not time for snark, it is time for prayers and best wishes, for them, their families, and the families of those killed.
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Richard Wright, a founding member of the rock group Pink Floyd, died Monday. He was 65. Pink Floyd’s spokesman, Doug Wright, who is not related to the artist, said Wright died after a battle with cancer at his home in Britain. He says the band member’s family did not want to give more details about his death.
Wright met Pink Floyd members Roger Waters and Nick Mason in college and joined their early band, Sigma 6. Along with the late Syd Barrett, the four formed Pink Floyd in 1965.
The group’s jazz-infused rock and drug-laced multimedia “happenings” made them darlings of the London psychedelic scene, and their 1967 album, “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn,” was a hit.
In the early days of Pink Floyd, Wright, along with Barrett, was seen as the group’s dominant musical force. The London-born musician and son of a biochemist wrote songs and played the keyboard.
“Rick’s keyboards were an integral park of the Pink Floyd sound,” said Joe Boyd, a prominent record producer who worked with Pink Floyd early in its career.
The band released a series of commercially and critically successful albums including 1973’s “Dark Side of the Moon,” which has sold more than 40 million copies. Wright wrote “The Great Gig in the Sky” and “Us and Them” for that album, and later worked on the group’s epic compositions such as “Atom Heart Mother,” “Echoes” and “Shine on You Crazy Diamond.”
But tensions grew among Waters, Wright and fellow band member David Gilmour. The tensions came to a head during the making of “The Wall” when Waters insisted Wright be fired. As a result, Wright was relegated to the status of session musician on the tour of “The Wall,” and did not perform on Pink Floyd’s 1983 album, “The Final Cut.”
Wright formed a new band Zee with Dave Harris, from the band Fashion, and released one album, “Identity,” with Atlantic Records.
Waters left Pink Floyd in 1985 and Wright began recording with Mason and Gilmour again, releasing the albums “The Division Bell” and “A Momentary Lapse of Reason” as Pink Floyd. Wright also released the solo albums “Wet Dream” (1978) and “Broken China” (1996).
In July 2005, Wright, Waters, Mason and Gilmour reunited to perform at the “Live 8″ charity concert in London - the first time in 25 years they had been onstage together.
Wright also worked on Gilmour’s solo projects, most recently playing on the 2006 album “On an Island” and the accompanying world tour.
Gilmour paid tribute to Wright on Monday, saying his input was often forgotten.
“He was gentle, unassuming and private but his soulful voice and playing were vital, magical components of our most recognized Pink Floyd sound,” he said. “I have never played with anyone quite like him.”
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Jerry Reed, a singer who became a good ol’ boy actor in car chase movies like “Smokey and the Bandit,” has died of complications from emphysema at 71.
His longtime booking agent, Carrie Moore-Reed, no relation to the star, said Reed died early Monday.
“He’s one of the greatest entertainers in the world. That’s the way I feel about him,” Moore-Reed said.
Sony BMG Nashville Chairman Joe Galante called Reed a larger-than-life personality.
“Everything about Jerry was distinctive: his guitar playing, writing, voice and especially his sense of humor,” Galante said. “I was honored to have worked with him.”
Reed’s catalog of country chart hits, from 1967 through 1983, were released under the label group’s RCA imprint.
As a singer in the 1970s and early 1980s, Reed had a string of hits that included “Amos Moses,” “When You’re Hot, You’re Hot,” “East Bound and Down,” “She Got the Goldmine (I Got the Shaft)” and “The Bird.”
In the mid-1970s, he began acting in movies such as “Smokey and the Bandit” with Burt Reynolds, usually as a good ol’ boy. But he was an ornery heavy in “Gator,” directed by Reynolds, and a hateful coach in 1998’s “The Waterboy,” starring Adam Sandler.
Reynolds gave him a shiny black 1980 Trans Am like the one they used in “Smokey and the Bandit.”
Reed and Kris Kristofferson paved the way for Nashville music personalities to make inroads into films. Dolly Parton, Willie Nelson and Kenny Rogers (TV movies) followed their lead.
“I went around the corner to motion pictures,” he said in a 1992 AP interview.
Reed had quadruple bypass surgery in June 1999.
Born in Atlanta, Reed learned to play guitar at age 8 when his mother bought him a $2 guitar and showed him how to play a G-chord.
He dropped out of high school to tour with Ernest Tubb and Faron Young.
At 17, he signed his first recording contract, with Capitol Records.
He moved to Nashville in the mid-1960s where he caught the eye of Chet Atkins.
He first established himself as a songwriter. Elvis Presley recorded two of his songs, “U.S. Male” and “Guitar Man” (both in 1968). He also wrote the hit “A Thing Called Love,” which was recorded in 1972 by Johnny Cash. He also wrote songs for Brenda Lee, Tom Jones, Dean Martin, Nat King Cole and the Oak Ridge Boys.
Reed was voted instrumentalist of the year in 1970 by the Country Music Association.
He won a Grammy Award for “When You’re Hot, You’re Hot” in 1971. A year earlier, he shared a Grammy with Chet Atkins for their collaboration, “Me and Jerry.” In 1992, Atkins and Reed won a Grammy for “Sneakin’ Around.”
Singer-guitarist Brad Paisley said Reed was one of country music’s most influential players.
“Anyone who picks a country guitar knows of his mastery of the instrument - one of the most inspirational stylists in the history of country music, a complete master,” Paisley said. “I’m in debt to him for paving the way for myself and the other guitarists of today.”
Reed continued performing on the road into the late 1990s, doing about 80 shows a year.
“I’m proud of the songs, I’m proud of things that I did with Chet (Atkins), I’m proud that I played guitar and was accepted by musicians and guitar players,” he told the AP in 1992.
In a 1998 interview with The Tennessean, he admitted that his acting ability was questionable.
“I used to watch people like Richard Burton and Mel Gibson and think, `I could never do that.’
“When people ask me what my motivation is, I have a simple answer: money.”
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Fans of Kurt Cobain continue to mourn the Nirvana rocker. But Cobain’s 1994 suicide did have one upside: he didn’t have to listen to loathsome Axl Rose anymore.
Cobain was willing to do a few things in the interest of rock stardom, record business eminence Danny Goldberg recalls in his poignant and funny memoir, “Bumping Into Geniuses.” In fact, when MTV chief Judy McGrath was so insistent on Nirvana appearing on the MTV Awards, Cobain left rehab, according to Goldberg.
But Cobain “detested” Rose, says Goldberg, who served as president of Atlantic Records, Warner Bros. Records and Mercury Records. When the Guns N’ Roses frontman asked to meet Cobain backstage after a show, Kurt refused. “Rose had the kind of macho rock persona that Kurt detested,” Goldberg writes.
Nor was Cobain’s wife, Courtney Love, keen on getting to know Rose’s then-girlfriend, Victoria’s Secret stunner Stephanie Seymour. After another show, Seymour asked Love, “Are you a model?” Snapped Courtney: “Are you a brain surgeon?”
Promoters tried to launch a tour with Nirvana, Metallica and Guns N’ Roses. “There was a lot of money on the table,” says Goldberg. “Kurt really liked Metallica.” But there wasn’t enough money in the world to get him to share a stage with that other band. Cobain passed.
Goldberg, who became a renowned leftie politico, learned how to look after temperamental, drug-using rock stars early on as publicist for Led Zeppelin. He recalls Robert Plant grumbling enviously about “all the publicity that the Stones got on their last tour!” Yet the band hated doing press. When a young rock critic told drummer John Bonham, often blasted for his 30-minute solos, that he thought he was the “greatest drummer in rock,” Bonham grabbed the reviewer’s lapels and yelled, “Look, I’ve had about enough of you people!”
Bonham was “an angry and mean drunk,” Goldberg writes, and the atmosphere around the band in 1973 “was one of tension, exacerbated by huge quantities of cocaine. Violence was one bad mood away.”
Bonham would try to get into Goldberg’s hotel room in the middle of the night to yell at him. The band’s legendary 300-pound road manager Peter Grant suggested Goldberg do as he did: book two rooms far apart and sleep in the secret one.
Goldberg recalls that Grant once had “to settle up with a hotel manager after the band had thrown several TVs out of the windows.” Surprising, the manager admitted the hotel’s rooms were so sterile, he wouldn’t mind throwing a TV himself. “[Grant] peeled off another $500 in cash and told the guy, ‘Have one on me,’” says Goldberg.
He first met Patti Smith at Max’s Kansas City when she was a poet with a day job at Scribner’s bookstore on Fifth Ave. “What book do you want me to steal for you?” she asked sincerely.
Sticky fingers aside, “I knew even then she was a genius,” he recalls.
The Gotham Book is out next month.
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LeRoi Moore, the versatile saxophonist whose signature staccato fused jazz and funk overtones onto the eclectic sound of the Dave Matthews Band, died Tuesday of complications from injuries he suffered in an all-terrain vehicle accident, the band said. He was 46.
Moore died at Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center, where he was admitted with complications that arose weeks after the June 30 wreck, according to a statement on the band’s Web site. It did not specify what led to his death, and nursing supervisor Galina Shinder said the hospital could not release details.
On June 30, Moore crashed his ATV on his farm outside Charlottesville, Va., but was discharged and returned to his Los Angeles home to begin physical therapy. Complications forced him back to the hospital on July 17, the band said.
The band went on with its show Tuesday night at the Staples Center in Los Angeles, where lead singer Dave Matthews dedicated the entire show to Moore.
“It’s always easier to leave than be left,” Matthews told the crowd, according to Ambrosia Healy, the band’s publicist. “We appreciate you all being here.”
Saxophonist Jeff Coffin, who played with Bela Fleck and the Flecktones, had been sitting in for Moore during the band’s summer tour.
Moore, who wore dark sunglasses at the bands’ many live concerts, had classical training but said jazz was his main musical influence, according to a biography on the band’s Web site.
“But at this stage I don’t really consider myself a jazz musician,” Moore said in the biography. Playing with the Dave Matthews Band was “almost better than a jazz gig,” he said. “I have plenty of space to improvise, to try new ideas.”
Lead singer Dave Matthews credited Moore with arranging many of his songs, which combine Cajun fiddle-playing, African-influenced rhythms and Matthews’ playful but haunting voice.
The band formed in 1991 in Charlottesville, Va., when Matthews was working as a bartender. He gave a demo tape of his songs to Moore, who liked what he heard and recruited his friend and fellow jazzman Carter Beauford to play drums, and other musicians.
The group broke out of the local music scene with the album “Under the Table and Dreaming.” The band won a Grammy Award in 1997 for its hit song “So Much to Say” off its second album “Crash.” Other hits include “What Would You Say,” “Crash Into Me” and “Satellite.”
Fans who attended Tuesday’s concert expressed sadness over Moore’s death and concern about the band’s future without him. “LeRoi was just super important to the band,” Shawn Harrington said before the concert. “That’s how the band came to be.”
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Can you tell which one is the real Jonas Brothers and which ones are the wax one? The wax one are better looking and have more personality, the ones on the right of the statues are the real ones.
Can you believe that the Jonas Brothers already have wax figures made of them? You better see them fast because a year from now they will melted down to make way for the next Disney sensation.
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Hardcore fans of 30 Seconds to Mars aren’t the only ones who want more of the band’s music. Virgin Records has sued the group for $30 million, saying it has failed to deliver.
Virgin Records sued the band and front man Jared Leto in Los Angeles on Friday, claiming they refused to deliver three albums as required by its contract.
The band’s last album, “A Beautiful Lie,” was released in 2005.
A publicist for Leto, an actor who starred in the film “Requiem for a Dream” and the TV show “My So-Called Life,” did not return a message Friday.
According to the lawsuit, the band “repudiated” a 1999 contract in July.
Despite the absence of a new album, the band’s hit “From Yesterday” was deemed one of 2007’s Top 10 “Hot Modern Rock Songs” by Billboard magazine.
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Rihanna gave fellow sunbathers a treat when she stripped down to a bikini to canoodle with lover CHRIS BROWN in the warm Barbados sea.
Rihanna touched down in her Barbados homeland with Chris earlier this week, despite consistently scoffing at rumours they’re romantically linked.

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Eighties heartthrob Rick Springfield is back on the music scene with his highest charting album debut in more than 20 years.
Springfield’s 17th CD, Venus in Overdrive, came in at No. 28 on the Billboard charts this week. The Australian native, who found fame on General Hospital in 1980 and then followed withhis song hit “Jessie’s Girl” in 1981, has sold more than 19 million albums over his career.
“I haven’t been this excited about a new record since the ’80s,” Springfield tells PEOPLE. “I’m a loner in my private life, so the party animal only comes out on stage. That’s really my connection to people.”
Last year, the actor returned to General Hospital as Dr. Noah Drake, as well as Drake’s alter-ego, a rocker named Eli Love. Springfield performed his new single, “What’s Victoria’s Secret?” in character on the popular daytime daytime drama last week (See video below).
Springfield, 58, still tours on the weekends and says he hasn’t grown weary of his ’80s hits. “I liken them to favorite children. You never get tired of trotting out your kids. When they do well at something, you’re really proud of it,” says the rocker, who lives in Malibu with his wife Barbara. (His son Liam, 23, is a budding musician and actor, and son Josh, 19, attends the University of Southern California).
With his original fan base growing older, Springfield’s thrilled that he’s developing a new audience. “There are a lot of people who were fans when they were little kids. They’ve grown up and are bringing their kids, and women are bringing their husbands,” he says.
But the women still make their presence known. Thanks to the new single (whose title was inspired by the Victoria’s Secret lingerie chain), “I’m seeing more underwear on stage,” says Springfield.
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It’s official: Lisa Marie Presley is expecting twins!
A week after Us Weekly broke the news, her mom Priscilla has confirmed it to Entertainment Tonight.
“She wanted it really to be kept a secret for a long time, you know, and I think women should, because they should be able to announce what they’re having and when it’s time to make the announcement,” Priscilla tells ET.
Turns out, Lisa Marie’s dad, Elvis, was a twin, and her mother, Priscilla, has younger brothers who are twins.
A source tells Us the singer, 40, and her husband, rocker Michael Lockwood, 47, will greet their babies in the fall.
A source close to Presley tells Us, “She’s never been so happy!”
Lisa Marie — who wed Lockwood in 2006 — has two children from a previous marriage to Danny Keough.
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The out-of-shape Queen of Soul was “out of it” as she was helped out of the event at Russell Simmons’ East Hampton estate a few days back. “It took five people,” said our witness. “She was dressed in an off-white, low-cut shirt and pantsuit with jacket and pearls. She was just oblivious to what was going on.” A rep for Franklin said, “You are completely misinformed.”
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Beyonce’s dad, Matthew Knowles is spilling the beans that Destiny’s Child might perform a reunion show next month, but according to ITN that is all he is saying. I guess we can tell how their careers are going if they are reuniting already.
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Rapper DMX has been arrested at a Phoenix mall on a felony charge of taking the identity of another.
Phoenix police Sgt. Andy Hill did not have details of the charge, as it stemmed from a Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office case.
The sheriff’s office did not immediately return a request for comment.
Hill says DMX, whose real name is Earl Simmons, was being taken Saturday for booking into the Maricopa County jail.
The musician/actor has had a recent string of run-ins with the law, including an arrest at Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport earlier this month on outstanding warrants after he failed to appear in court.
The week before, he was arrested in Miami on charges of attempting to purchase cocaine and marijuana.
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