MIAMI - Actor Wesley Snipes is headed for jail after losing his appeal of a three-year prison sentence for failing to file income tax returns for 1999 through 2001.
A federal appeals court on Friday upheld the 47-year-old actor's 2008 conviction in an Ocala, Florida, court for three misdemeanors stemming from felony tax charges.
At his sentencing in April 2008, prosecutors said Snipes, a Florida native who has a residence in Windermere, had earned more than $38 million since 1999, but had filed no tax returns or paid any taxes.
In his appeal, the actor claimed that the sentence was unreasonable and he should have been considered for probation.
The star of the "Blade" trilogy who most recently appeared as a former convict in "Brooklyn's Finest," also said the lower court should have allowed him to argue for a change of venue from Florida to New York.
A three-judge panel of the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected his appeal. The ruling did not specify when or where Snipes was due to report to prison.
Julia Gillard has become Australia's first woman prime minister after Kevin Rudd stood down from the position during a Labor Party leadership spill.
Ms Gillard has been elected unopposed to the position and Wayne Swan will become deputy prime minister.
At a media conference in Parliament House, Ms Gillard told the media she was "truly honoured" to become prime minister, after Kevin Rudd stood aside on Thursday.
"Can I say Australians one and all, it's with the greatest, humility, resolve and enthusiasm that I sought the endorsement of my colleagues to be the Labor leader and to be the prime minister for this country," she said.
The spill came after a newspaper report claiming Mr Rudd had instructed his chief of staff Alister Jordan to ring around the caucus to see whether MPs were still behind him.
Ms Gillard was reportedly furious at Mr Rudd's actions and is believed to have told her colleagues that Mr Jordan's sounding out of MPs was disrespectful and disloyal.
At every press conference in recent weeks Ms Gillard reiterated her support of Mr Rudd and last month said there was more chance she would line up at full forward for AFL team the Western Bulldogs than topple the PM.
However, discussions to unseat Kevin Rudd started tentatively about a fortnight ago.
NSW Labor powerbroker Mark Arbib despatched an emissary to see Victorian Senator David Feeney in Melbourne to sound out his thoughts about Julia Gillard as leader.
The discussions started within the Labor Right to swing behind Ms Gillard of the Left.
They thought the Prime Minister had become a liability to Labor's re-election strategy.
The Rudd brand had gone toxic in Western Australia and Queensland and the polls showed immense damage to Labor, with the Nielsen poll showing the party had fallen to a 33 per cent primary vote.
Last night Mr Rudd said he was elected by the people of Australia as prime minister of Australia.
"I was elected to do a job," he said.
After Mr Rudd's 2007 election victory, Ms Gillard was appointed Deputy Prime Minister, Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations and Education Minister, leading to her being dubbed the "minister for everything".
She is credited for putting an end to the infamous Australian workplace agreements under the former Coalition government's WorkChoices laws.
But Ms Gillard has also faced criticism over the Rudd Government's Building the Education Revolution schools building program, with allegations that contractors were seriously overcharging schools for work done and that some projects were wasteful and unnecessary.
She also came under fire for the Government's My School website, which many teachers and principals said failed to give an accurate indication of schools' performances.
Share Motorcycle-riding robbers brazenly struck in broad daylight, holding up and shooting a businessman near a hotel in Manila's Ermita district on Monday afternoon.
Radio dzRH reported the robbers struck shortly after their target got off a sport-utility vehicle at the corner of A. Mabini and Pedro Gil Streets.
"Kumakain dito ng banana cue, pagparada ng Pajero bumaba ang lalaki at ang sabi, holdup (The gunmen bought banana cue from me and were eating it when they saw the sport-utility vehicle park. They then shouted 'Holdup' when the passenger got off)," a banana cue vendor said.
She said the suspects waited for about 30 minutes before striking.
The victim, who was not immediately identified, tried to run towards a nearby hotel but was shot at least four times. The sport-utility vehicle was also hit.
The dzRH report said the suspects took the victim's clutch bag and fled onboard a motorcycle.
Shells recovered from the crime scene indicated the suspects used caliber .45 pistols.
Bystanders rushed the victim to the Manila Doctors' Hospital for treatment. - RJAB Jr/KBK, GMANews.TV
JAKARTA (AFP) - – Three Indonesian celebrities who allegedly appeared in sex videos posted on the Internet will be questioned for possible breaches of a new anti-pornography law, police said Wednesday.
Two explicit clips widely circulated online this week appear to show popular singer Nazril Ariel having sex with models and television presenters Luna Maya, his current girlfriend, and Cut Tari, his ex-girlfriend.
Chief police detective Ito Sumardi said the celebrities would be questioned about how the clips had appeared on the Internet.
"We will question them to find out about the clips and how the videos were circulated in public," Sumardi told reporters.
Maya is a goodwill ambassador for the United Nations World Food Programme and has appeared in advertisements with Ariel for a soap made by Anglo-Dutch food and cosmetics giant Unilever.
Tari meanwhile endorses Sharp air conditioners.
A spokesman for Unilever said the soap ads had been cancelled this week but denied the move was connected to the sex tapes.
Producing or distributing sexually explicit material carries a maximum penalty of 12 years' jail under the tough anti-pornography law passed in the mainly Muslim country in 2008.
Muslim lawmakers have said the videos underline the need for tighter controls of the Internet in the country of 240 million people.
"There should be a heavy punishment for this crime," Communication and Information Minister Tifatul Sembiring said on his Twitter micro-blog account.
A spokesman said Vice President Boediono was concerned about the effect the videos would have on young people.
"He is deeply concerned about the negative impact these porn videos could have on our children," Boediono's spokesman, Yopie Hidayat, told ElShinta radio.
The scandal has been among the top worldwide trending topics on Twitter under the "Peterporn" tag, a reference to Ariel's band, Peterpan. Several pages supporting Ariel have also appeared on social networking site Facebook.
By Angela Lim - Yahoo
Meet Debrahlee Lorenzana, the woman claiming to be “too hot” for Citibank.
The stunning 33-year-old New York banker is suing the U.S banking giant, claiming she was harrassed and then fired for being “too sexy”.
The tall, buxom brunette claims in the lawsuit that her manager told her to “refrain from wearing certain items of clothing, in particular, turtleneck tops, pencil skirts, fitted business suits, or other properly tailored clothing”.
It appears the stunner’s killer bod was deemed a huge distraction by her hot-blooded male colleagues as soon as she sashayed into Citibank’s Chrysler Building branch in September 2008.
Bank supervisors reportedly told Lorenzana, who stands 1.70 metre-tall and weighs 56 kilos, that she should also refrain from wearing classic high-heeled business pumps as they drew attention to her curves.
But the Latina businesswoman claims it was not her wardrobe that was inappropriate; she says she shops at the same stores as her colleagues, citing Zara as an example. It was just the way her body looked in them.
When she protested that her female colleagues were dressed far more provocatively than she was, the bank allegedly told her those women were different because they were ”not as attractive”.
The single mother’s complaints of harrassment to Citibank’s Human Resources department resulted in a transfer to another branch where her circumstances worsened. She was eventually fired by the bank last year on grounds that she failed to recruit new customers.
The lawsuit is making headlines around the world and has catapulted Lorenzana to instant superstardom. Her claims have now also triggered the fierce age-old debate on gender discrimination at the workplace.
After all, according to reports, Lorenzana had won praise and a few customer service awards from her previous employers including Bank of America and Metropolitan Hospital in Queens.
“She was punished because her male colleagues couldn’t handle their libidos,” her New York City lawyer, Jack Tuckner, told The New York Post.
Citibank responded by telling the New York press, ”We believe the lawsuit is without merit and will defend against it vigorously.”
The bank insists that the her dismissal was purely “performance-based”.
If the banker beauty is telling the truth and those outfits really were what she wore to work, her office style is impeccable.
But the lawsuit raises an interesting question – should a woman be fired for being too attractive?
Timothy, 27, an accountant, told Yahoo! Singapore, “If she’s wearing clothes that are too revealing, of course it can be very distracting. But as long as she’s dressed appropriately for work, I don’t see what the big deal is.”
Another 22-year-old female Citibank employee who declined to be named, added, “If she’s not violating the dress code, any distraction caused to the men in the office is really not her problem.”
Valid concerns or outright discrimination? You decide.
A couple in Ireland have discovered they are half-brother and sister after meeting in a nightclub, falling in love and having a child.
Although admitting they would have split if it wasn't for their child, they have vowed to stay together and have more children, the Daily Mail reports.
The young man in the couple was prevented from learning the truth about his parentage due to a family law case.
But the pair discovered they were related after DNA testing last month and are now considering legal action in a civil suit against a judge and a child psychologist.
"We’re not from a bad background and if someone had said to me that they were in a relationship like this, I would have said they were sickos," the young man was quoted as saying.
"When we found out that we were half-brother and half-sister, we were devastated. When I got the phone call with the DNA tests, it was like when you hear about someone you know has died or like when you are in a car crash."
"Before we found out that my girlfriend is my half-sister, we were talking about getting married and we would like more children. But we will get married and we will have more children."
The couple say they're speaking out to help other couples who might find themselves in a similar situation.
CARACAS, Venezuela – Former boxing champion Edwin Valero, who had a spectacular career with 27 straight knockouts and flouted a tattoo of President Hugo Chavez on his chest, hanged himself in his jail cell Monday after being arrested for stabbing his wife to death, police said.
The former lightweight champion used the sweat pants he was wearing to hang himself from a bar in the cell, said his lawyer, Milda Mora.
Valero, 28, had problems with alcohol and cocaine addiction and struggled with depression. He had previously been suspected of assaulting his wife and was charged last month with harassing her and threatening personnel at a hospital where she was treated for injuries.
Valero's 24-year-old wife, Jennifer Carolina Viera, was found dead in a hotel room on Sunday, and police said the fighter emerged telling hotel security he had killed her.
Valero was found hanging in his cell early Monday by another inmate, who alerted authorities in the police lockup in north-central Carabobo state, Federal Police Chief Wilmer Flores told reporters. He said Valero still showed signs of life when they took him down, but they were unable to save him.
The former WBA super featherweight and WBC lightweight champion was a household name in Venezuela and had a huge image of Venezuela's president tattooed on his chest along with the country's yellow, blue and red flag.
A man whose fists carried him from poverty in a small town to fame, Valero's all-action style soon earned him a reputation as a tough, explosive crowd-pleaser, and his last victory in Mexico in February over Antonio DeMarco brought his record to 27-0 — all knockouts. Venezuelans called him "Inca," alluding to an Indian warrior, while elsewhere he was called "Dinamita," or dynamite.
Valero had a turbulent disposition and had been in trouble with the law before, for violent incidents and problems with alcohol and drugs.
Last month, he was charged with harassing his wife and threatening medical personnel who treated her at a hospital in the western city of Merida. Police arrested Valero following an argument with a doctor and nurse at the hospital, where his wife was being treated for injuries including a punctured lung and broken ribs.
The Attorney General's Office said in a statement that Valero was detained March 25 on suspicion of assaulting his wife, but his wife told a police officer her injuries were due to a fall. When the boxer arrived moments later, he forbade Viera from speaking to the police officer and spoke threateningly to the officer, prosecutors said in a statement.
A prosecutor had asked a court to keep Valero in jail, the Attorney General's Office said. But a judge instead allowed him to remain free under certain conditions including that he appear in court every 90 days, said Mora, his lawyer.
Mora told The Associated Press that after the incident Valero was held for nine days in a psychiatric hospital in Merida, where he underwent police-supervised rehabilitation. She said people close to the fighter posted bail on April 7 and he was allowed to go free.
Valero's manager, Jose Castillo, criticized authorities for failing to act more forcefully to prevent the killing.
"I asked the authorities not to let him out. He needed a lot of help. He was very bad in the head," Castillo told reporters. "But they let him out. They were very permissive with him and because of that, we're now in the middle of this tragedy."
Mora, however, said of Valero: "He was the only one responsible."
She said that the Venezuelan government had arranged for the fighter to attend a drug and alcohol rehabilitation program in Cuba. He had missed a flight to Cuba earlier this month and was scheduled to fly there soon, she said.
The fighter had police escorts who were charged with protecting him. But last week he slipped away from those escorts, leaving his house near Merida with his wife and saying they were headed into town, Mora said.
Valero stayed in touch with his manager by phone but it was unclear how he and his wife turned up days later halfway across Venezuela at the hotel in Valencia, Mora said.
While police suspected Valero was battering his wife, "the only person who could report it was her, and she told her family that he never hit her," Mora said. "She wanted help for him."
Valero also "adored his wife," Mora said. "We were very close to him and we knew there could be this sort of outcome because when he became conscious of what he really had done, he wasn't going to be able to bear not being close to Carolina."
Mora described the fighter as hyperactive and said he suffered from depression. She said in jail the authorities took away his jacket and his shoelaces to prevent him from using them for a suicide attempt, and that he used his sweat pants instead.
Before his death, photographs showed Valero being led away in handcuffs, then shielding his face by pulling down his cap.
The fighter's 8-year-old son and 5-year-old daughter have been staying with their maternal grandmother, Mora said.
Valero had fought mainly in Japan and Latin America because he had trouble obtaining a license to fight in the United States. He suffered a cerebral hemorrhage in a motorcycle crash in 2001, and until the law was changed recently, most jurisdictions refused to grant a license to a fighter who had sustained a brain injury.
He was also charged with drunken driving in Texas, and despite efforts of his promoter, Top Rank, to secure a visa for him, the U.S. government denied his application because of the pending charges.
Valero claimed his application was denied because of politics; he was sympathetic of Chavez, a fierce critic of the U.S. government. U.S. officials say they cannot discuss individual visa cases.
Valero appeared as a special guest at events hosted by Chavez and was lionized by some of the president's supporters as a national hero, while some critics accused him of avoiding punishment for past problems due to his links to the government.
Valero's is the third high-profile suicide of a former boxing champion in the past year.
Hall of Famer Alexis Arguello, the mayor of Managua, Nicaragua, was found dead at his home in July of a gunshot wound to the chest. A few weeks later, Italian-born former super featherweight and junior welterweight champion Arturo Gatti, a naturalized Canadian, was found strangled in the Brazilian resort town of Porto de Galinhas. His wife was arrested as the prime suspect in the death, but authorities later ruled that he committed suicide.
The World Boxing Council lamented Valero's death in a statement, saying he had "happy years" in boxing and that his record will go down in boxing history. The council also said it hopes to help create a fund to pay for the education of Valero's two children.
WBC president Jose Sulaiman has said Valero was replaced as WBC lightweight champion in February after he expressed a desire to compete in a higher weight division.
Promoter Bob Arum, the founder of Top Rank who had been promoting Valero, said the fighter had never displayed such behavior and was "very polite, well spoken, sort of funny."
"It's obvious now, in retrospect, that he should have been institutionalized during this period, but it's silly to play the blame game," Arum said. "Now in retrospect, he clearly should have been getting help."
SMOLENSK, Russia/WARSAW (Reuters) - Poland's President Lech Kaczynski, its central bank head and the country's military chief were among 97 people killed when their plane crashed in thick fog near a Russian airport on Saturday.
Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk described the crash as "the most tragic event of the country's post-war history" before flying to the crash site in western Russia where he and Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin met and laid flowers together.
World leaders expressed shock and sorrow. U.S. President Barack Obama praised Kaczynski's role in the pro-democracy Solidarity movement that overthrew communism in 1989. Chancellor Angela Merkel said: "Germany will miss Lech Kaczynski."
Thousands of mourners flocked to the presidential palace in Warsaw and to churches across this staunchly Roman Catholic nation to lay flowers, light candles, sing hymns and pray.
Kaczynski, 60, and his entourage had been heading on board their ageing Tupolev Tu-154 to the nearby Katyn forest to mark the anniversary of the massacre of Polish officers there by Soviet forces in 1940.
Kaczynski's twin brother and close political ally Jaroslaw, head of Poland's main opposition party Law and Justice (PiS), also flew to the crash site on Saturday evening.
The deaths of President Kaczynski, many of his aides and several opposition lawmakers is a heavy blow to Poland's body politic, but analysts said they saw no threat to stability in the NATO ally and EU member state and the crash further bolsters Tusk's domination of the political scene.
"Today in the face of such a drama our nation stays united. There is no division into left and right, differences of views don't matter. We are together in the face of this tragedy," parliamentary speaker and now Poland's acting president, Bronislaw Komorowski, said in a televised address to the nation.
Komorowski said he would set the date of a presidential election which had been due in October after holding talks with Poland's political parties. Under the constitution the election must now be held by late June.
Komorowski is the presidential candidate of Tusk's ruling pro-business, pro-euro Civic Platform (PO). Opinion polls suggest he would have defeated Kaczynski in the election.
PILOT ERROR?
The pilot of the plane ignored several orders not to land from air traffic control, the deputy chief of the Russian Air Force's general staff, Alexander Alyoshin, was quoted as saying by the Interfax news agency.
Local officials said the plane had clipped treetops on its way down.
Kaczynski, a combative nationalist often at odds with Tusk's centrist government and the EU, was a staunch critic of Putin's Russia. Putin had invited Tusk, not Kaczynski, to ceremonies earlier in the week marking the Katyn massacre anniversary.
Russian President Dmitry Medvedev expressed his condolences to the Polish nation in an unprecedented television address. Russia has declared April 12 a day of mourning for the crash.
Poles will hold two minutes of silence at noon (9 a.m. British time) on Sunday. Komorowski has declared a week of mourning in Poland.
Russian television showed the smouldering fuselage and fragments of the plane scattered in a forest. A Reuters reporter saw a broken wing some distance from the rest of the aircraft.
The plane was one of two Tu-154s in the government fleet, both about 20 years old. Government officials had complained about the age of Poland's official aircraft.
Smolensk regional governor Sergei Antufyev said there were no survivors of the crash. The Emergencies Ministry said the bodies of the victims would be transported to Moscow for investigation.
"The pilot was advised to fly to Moscow or Minsk because of heavy fog, but he still decided to land. No one should have been landing in that fog," one Russian official told Reuters, on condition his name was not published.
Polish Justice Minister Krzysztof Kwiatkowski said Warsaw planned an inquiry into the crash. Medvedev said Russian investigators would cooperate with the Polish side.
CENTRAL BANK CONTINUITY
Kaczynski, 60, was a one-time ally of Solidarity hero Lech Walesa and a co-founder of the right-wing PiS with his brother. He resigned from the party when he became president in 2005 but continued to support it.
While the president's role is largely symbolic, the holder can veto government legislation. Kaczynski had infuriated Tusk's government several times by blocking legislation including health sector reform.
Among the other casualties of the crash were Kaczynski's wife Maria, along with Slawomir Skrzypek, 47, who had been central bank governor since 2007, the chief of Poland's military Franciszek Gagor and Deputy Foreign Minister Andrzej Kremer.
Analysts said Polish markets would not be severely jolted. "Although tragic, we do not believe that this event threatens political and financial stability in Poland in any fundamental way," Goldman Sachs said in a research note.
Some relatives of victims of the Katyn massacres also were on board, said a Polish government official in Smolensk.
"I'm all broken up ... it cannot be expressed in words," said Ewa Robaczewska, a mourner outside the presidential palace.
(Additional reporting by Robin Paxton, Guy Faulconbridge, Maria Kiselyova, Dmitry Sergeyev and Conor Humphries in Moscow; Agata Nalecz, Patryk Wasilewski, Chris Borowski and Gareth Jones in Warsaw; Writing by Gareth Jones; Editing by Michael Roddy)
LOS ANGELES - Latin pop star Ricky Martin on Monday announced he was gay in a blog posting, ending years of speculation.
"I am proud to say that I am a fortunate homosexual man," Martin wrote in a blog posting at www.rickymartinmusic.com.
"This is just what I need especially now that I am the father of two beautiful boys that are so full of light and who with their outlook teach me new things every day. To keep living as I did up until today would be to indirectly diminish the glow that my kids were born with," Martin wrote.
Martin, 38, became a father to twin sons via a surrogate in 2008 and at the time no details were given about the birth or the mother.
The Puerto Rican singer of hits such as "Livin' la Vida Loca," has long been the subject of speculation about his sexuality. In 2000, TV journalist Barbara Walters grilled him about whether he was gay, but he refused to disclose it.
In his posting on Monday, Martin said a few months ago he had decided to write a memoir and doing so brought him closer to what he called "an amazing turning point in my life."
"Writing this account of my life, I got very close to my truth. And this is something worth celebrating," he wrote.
The singer began his career with boy band Menudo and broke out as a solo artist and teen idol in the 1990s in Spanish-speaking countries.
He released his first, English-language album in 1999, the self-titled "Ricky Martin," which saw two major hits, "Livin' la Vida Loca" and "She's All I Ever Had." Since then, Martin has been a star in both North America and South America.
Jarrett Barrios, the president of the U.S.-based Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation , welcomed what he called Martin's "openness and honesty."
WASHINGTON (AFP) - – US authorities said Friday they brought charges against nine people over a vast smuggling ring that brought in hundreds of thousands of counterfeit shoes and handbags from China and Malaysia.
The network also extended to Britain, where authorities on Thursday seized another six people in the London area along with 50,000 counterfeit items, US prosecutors said.
A federal grand jury in the eastern US city of Baltimore indicted four Chinese nationals, two Malaysians and three naturalized Americans. Together they face more than 1,000 years in prison and millions of dollars in penalties.
It said the suspects sent 33 shipments of counterfeit goods, mostly made in China or Malaysia, to the Port of Baltimore over a year and a half until December.
The goods included 120,000 pairs of counterfeit Nike shoes, 500,000 fake Coach handbags, 10,000 pairs of counterfeit Coach and Gucci shoes and 500 counterfeit Cartier wrist watches, the indictment said.
"Criminal organizations that smuggle and sell counterfeit goods in the United States endanger our economy and rob legitimate industries of their business," said John Morton, assistant secretary of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, in announcing the arrests.
The prosecutors alleged that the suspects also laundered 122,943.50 dollars for the illegal operations and said that London authorities confiscated 350,000 pounds (530,000 dollars) in cash.
A suspect also sent a sample of fake Viagra pills to an undercover agent, hoping to branch out into sales of the erectile dysfunction drug, prosecutors said.
Prosecutors charged the suspects with 72 counts of smuggling, trafficking in counterfeit goods, conspiracy and money laundering. If convicted on all counts, they together face 1,095 years in prison and 66 million dollars in penalties.
The defendants were identified as Malaysian nationals Wai Hong Yong and Eng Cheng Kee; Chinese nationals Hexing Yang, Chan Hong Xu, Lidan Zhang and Kai T. Jaing; and US citizens Josephine O. Zhou, Kin Yip Ng and Yenn-Kun Hsieh.
One of them, Chan Hong Xu, is at large. The other eight suspects were arrested across the eastern United States and the Pacific territory of Guam and will be brought to Baltimore, officials said.
The United States and other developed nations have frequently voiced concerns about widespread counterfeiting in China, believing it badly hurts companies in their countries.
