Ian Markham-Smith's blog

     A perfume company is kicking up a stick, accusing pop star Prince of reneging on a business deal.
     The diminutive rocker is embroiled in a right royal row involving a fragrance named after his album 3121.
     Revelations Perfume and Cosmetics Inc. allege that Prince and his music publishers, Universal, failed to honour a contract to help market the fragrance.
     The company, which filed the breach-of-contract lawsuit in New York on Monday, says it licenced Prince's name, likeness and the album title 3121 to market its fragrance.

    Anuna are hoping for a very merry Christmas in the United States.
    The popular Irish choir have their sights set on chart success there this year.
    Anuna have a new TV special Christmas Memories being aired in America to kick of the holiday season.
    The television show will have an accompanying DVD and CD album release and a tour starting on November 29 that will take them all over the United States.

     The shellfish industry is out to keep "cockles and mussels, alive, alive, O."
     The 11th International Conference on Shellfish Restoration begins tomorrow in Charleston, South Carolina.
     The focus is to keep the world's shellfish alive and thriving.
     Fishing industry executives and other interested parties will exchange ideas and information to help restore mollusc and shellfish populations.
     During the three day conference, there will be scientific sessions focussing on such things as restoring shellfish habitat, water quality as if affects shellfish and improving coastal environments.

      Hollywood beauty Linda Lohan was showered with flour at a Paris nightclub by an anti-fur activist in the early hours of Saturday.
     The 22-year-old actress was pelted with the flour bomb because of her love of pelts.
     The American-based animal-rights group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals said they had targeted the Mean Girls movie star because of her love of wearing fur.
     Furious Lohan was visit  the French capital with her lesbian girlfriend, British born Samantha Ronson, who was dee-jaying at the club.

      The latest action packed James Bond movie was on track today to becoming a massive blockbuster hit in the United States - the most successful 007 film ever.
     Quantum Of Solace, which has shot to the top of the box office in every country where it has opened, was released in America on Friday and looks set to earn as much as a massive US$71 million over its first weekend.
     The flick, which has received mixed reviews at best, earned a phenomenal US$27 million on Friday night alone, according to early industry tracking reports.

     Pop heartthrob Justin Timberlake is being sued by a worker at a restaurant the singer owns, claiming the stingy star has short-changed him on his wages.
     Felipe Ramales, who cleared tables at Timberlake's trendy New York barbecue restaurant, alleges the fabulously wealthy star has violated the law and stiffed him over tips and overtime pay.
     Ramales alleges his tips went Bye Bye Bye while he worked at the restaurant, which specialises in serving ribs and such delicacies as haystack onion strings and deep fried pickles.

     American President-elect Barack Obama will call his brief career as a U.S. Senator a day tomorrow.
     Obama will formally close the books on being an Illinois Senator as he continues his transition from freshman federal lawmaker to the nation's chief executive.
     Announcing his decision, Obama called his four years in the Senate "one of the highest privileges" of his life.
     Obama's decision to leave the Senate early, as it faces difficult votes on the country's fiscal crisis, officially begins a scramble to replace him for the remaining two years of his term.
     But it allows him to focus on taking the reins of the presidency.

     U.S. President-elect Barack Obama is a real renegade - well at least the country's Secret Service think so.
     The federal musclemen have let it be known  - through channels to America's press - that the new president has been code-named "Renegade," according to reports in the United States.
     His wife Michelle is to go by the name "Renaissance" with their two daughters referred to by agents as "Radiance" and "Rosebud."
     It appears that all members of the family must begin with the same first letter.
 

     A Roman Catholic priest has warned his parishioners not to receive Holy Communion if they voted for President-elect Barack Obama.
     The Rev. Jay Scott Newman has told his congregation they should refrain from receiving the Eucharist because the Democratic President-in-waiting supports abortion and supporting him "constitutes material cooperation with intrinsic evil."
     Father Newman said in a letter distributed to parishioners at St. Mary's Catholic Church in Greenville, South Carolina, that they are putting their souls at risk if they take the Sacrament  before doing penance for their vote.

     The credit crunch has hit wealthy Hollywood stars and movie moguls so hard that they are cutting back on their usually lavish Christmas parties.
     Extravagant bashes where celebrities fete each other and are given expensive have become normal practice in Tinseltown for many years.
     But this year party planners have begun to scale back soirees as part of the showbusiness industry-wide belt-tightening.
     Several studios and talent management agencies have cancelled their holiday bashes, while others are simply toning down the revelry, the well-informed, Los Angeles-based bible of the showbusiness industry Daily Variety has reported.

     Controversial "pregnant man" Thomas Beatie, who gave birth to a daughter earlier this year, has reveal he is expecting a second child.
     He made the astonishing revelation to top American TV interviewer Barbara Walters in his first televised chat.
     Beatie, who has had a part sex change and dresses as a man, welcomed a baby girl, Susan, on June 29.
     But since talking about Susan's birth, Beatie  and his wife, Nancy Beatie, had not spoken to the media until they sat down with American television star Walters.

     Hardly a week went by in the late 1980s and through the mid-1990s when American photographer Harry Siskind was not involved in supplying a sensational splash or spread for such Fleet Street newspapers as the Sunday Mirror, the People and the News of the World.
     Siskind, an over-energetic, brash workaholic, was a constant source of exclusive material for such picture editors as Russell Cox and Paul Bennett.
     The flamboyant dresser, with a taste for loud ties, was much admired by the three notable female national newspaper editors of the time, Eve Pollard, Bridget Rowe and Patsy Chapman.

     Hollywood beauty Demi Moore's toyboy husband is nursing a black eye - but she has nothing to do with it.
     Dude, Where's My Car? movie star Ashton Kutcher, 30, got his shiner during an American football game - and he couldn't be prouder of his battle scar.
     He has discovered that coaching a sports team can be a lot more hazardous than performing movie stunts.
     The actor, who wed 46-year-old Moore in 2005, is the stand-in coach for the Harvard-Westlake High School's Wolverines team in California. Now he has learned the jobcomes with a little danger.

     Hollywood actress Daryl Hannah, who found fame playing a mermaid in the 1984 hit movie Splash, is going to war against whaling.
     The 47-year-old star is the latest celebrity to join the fight against Japan's whale hunters.
     She will travel on board an anti-whaling group ship to confront Japan's whalers in the Antarctic.
     Japanese fishermen have been criticised for exploiting a controversial loophole in a 1986 whaling ban that allows "lethal research" to kill up to 1,000 whales every summer.

     X-Men movie star Hugh Jackman has admitted to some beastly behaviour while appearing in a hit stage play.
     Embarrassed Jackman, who plays Wolverine in the sc-fi film franchise based on the comic book superheros series, was left red faced during a stage stint as Gaston - the prince trapped in a monster's body because of a spell who finds love thanks to lovely Belle - in Beauty and the Beast when he wet himself in front of a packed theatre audience.
     The Australian actor, whose films include The Prestige, Van Helsing and Kate & Leopold, started guzzling water before performances to fight dehydration headaches.

     Hollywood director Gus Van Sant has relieved that he found making a movie with Sean Penn was a haunting experience - thanks to an on-set ghost.
     Van Sant insists that the ghost of the character Penn plays in the controversial flick made a personal appearance.
     Penn plays Harvey Milk, the first openly-gay elected San Francisco official who was assassinated in 1978.
     According to the Oscar-nominated movie maker the ghost of murdered City Supervisor Milk haunts the site of the camera shop he once owned.

     The father of Oscar-nominated actress Michelle Williams has flown back to the United States to face tax evasion charges after being extradited from Australia.
     Prominent stock market trader Larry Williams, who is the grandfather of the late Dark Knight star Heath Ledger's daughter, left Sydney after accepting a court-enforced exit for allegedly evading $US1.9 million in taxes.
     Williams had been fighting extradition since he was arrested by Australian police in 2006 after flying to Sydney for a speaking tour in Australia and New Zealand. He has been free on bail.

     The Caped Crusader has a new adversary - called Batman.
     The mayor of Batman, an oil-producing city in southeastern Turkey, is suing Hollywood director Christopher Nolan and the Warner Bros. movie studios for royalties from the box office blockbuster The Dark Knight.
     Huseyin Kalkan, the pro-Kurdish Democratic Society Party mayor, has accused The Dark Knight producers of using the city's name without permission.
     He said: "There is only one Batman in the world. The American producers used the name of our city without informing us."

     Veteran Hollywood actor James Cromwell, who played the kind-hearted farmer who helped his little pig lean to herd sheep in the Babe movies, is recovering from a serious cycling accident.
     The 68-year-old star was rushed to hospital after suffering multiple injuries when he fell from his bicycle over the weekend.
     He suffered a broken collarbone and a partially deflated lung, according to a statement from his publicist Nancy Seltzer.

     An IRA Maze prison escapee who has lived in immigration limbo in California for 25 years was today waiting to learn whether he is to be deported back to Northern Ireland.
     Pol Brennan was on Thursday testifying before a US federal immigration hearing in Raymondville Texas, that will decide his fate.
     Brennan, who was sentenced to 16 years for carrying a bomb and firearms in his car, has claimed bias is behind American officials' attempts to get him belatedly kicked out and that he has become the US government's latest immigration patsy.