Actor Paul Shah sentenced to two-and-a-half years in jail, gets clean chit on rape case
The Nawalpur District Court sentenced actor Paul Shah to two-and-a-half years in jail for sexually abusing a minor girl. The court also slapped him with a fine of Rs 2, 5000. Actor Shah, however, got clean chit on the rape case. A single bench of Justice Yagya Prasad Acharya ordered Shah to pay Rs 1 million to the victim. Lal Bahadur Chhetri, Information Officer at the court, said that the parents have also been altered. Earlier, the high court had upheld the decision of the Tanahun District Court and Nawalparasi District Court to keep him in custody. Actor Shah had surrendered himself at the District Police Office, Tanahun on February 27 after a minor singer filed a rape case against him. Shah was sent to custody for seven days for the first time on February 27 and the remand was extended by 12 days on March 5 for the second time for investigation. Based on the complaint filed by a 17-year-old singer, the District Attorney’s Office had filed a case against Shah at Tanahun District Court seeking 14 years of imprisonment.
Later, the issue took a twist after the minor singer, who had filed a complaint accusing Shah of raping her, changed her statement at the Tanahun District Court.
The girl said that she had not been raped as claimed by her earlier. She said that the information she stated while filing the complaint was false.
R. Kelly trial: Witness testifies she was sexually abused by the singer
A woman at the heart of R. Kelly's second federal trial has testified that the R&B singer had sex with her "hundreds" of times before she turned 18, BBC reported.
The 37-year-old woman, known as "Jane", said that improper contact with Kelly began when she was just 13.
The singer is on trial in Chicago for child pornography, obstruction of justice and other charges.
His lawyers have insisted he is not "a monster" and deserves a fair trial.
Kelly, whose full name is Robert Sylvester Kelly, is facing 13 criminal charges including creating and receiving child pornography, obstruction of justice and enticing minors into sexual activity.
Sacheen Littlefeather: Oscars apologises to actress after 50 years
The Oscars has apologised to Sacheen Littlefeather, a Native American woman booed off stage nearly 50 years ago, BBC reported.
The activist and actress appeared on live TV in 1973 to refuse an Oscar that Marlon Brando won for The Godfather.
Brando rejected the best actor award because of misrepresentation of Native Americans by the US film industry - and sent Littlefeather in his place.
The Academy said Littlefeather endured "unwarranted and unjustified" abuse following her brief speech.
"I never thought I'd live to see the day I would be hearing this," she told the Hollywood Reporter.
Littlefeather, then 26, was heckled and shunned by the entertainment industry following her speech at the awards.
Introducing herself on behalf of Brando - who wrote "a very long speech" - she briefly told the audience "that he very regretfully cannot accept this very generous award".
"And the reasons for this being the treatment of American Indians today by the film industry and on television in movie re-runs, and also with recent happenings at Wounded Knee," she said - in reference to a violent stand-off with federal agents at a site of significant importance to the Sioux people.
In 2020, Littlefeather told the BBC that straight after the speech she had to leave the stage with two security guards. But, she added, it "was a very good thing" as actor John Wayne was backstage (secured by six security men); she said he was "furious with Marlon and furious with me" and wanted to pull her off stage himself.
Some people used the "Tomahawk chop" - seen as a demeaning gesture to Native Americans - as she was walking by.
It was televised to 85 million people. Some media reports after the event claimed Littlefeather was not truly a Native American, but rather that she agreed to the speech to help her acting career. Some speculated she might be Brando's mistress.
She told the BBC all those claims were untrue.
"The abuse you endured... was unwarranted and unjustified," David Rubin, former president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, wrote in a letter to Littlefeather made public on Monday.
Mr Rubin said the speech at the 45th Academy Awards "continues to remind us of the necessity of respect and the importance of human dignity".
The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures will host an event in September, in which Littlefeather will talk about her appearance at the 1973 Oscars and the future of indigenous representation on screen, BBC reported.
She added that keeping a sense of humour is "our method of survival".
Anne Heche, star with troubled life, dies of crash injuries
Anne Heche, the Emmy-winning film and television actor whose dramatic Hollywood rise in the 1990s and accomplished career contrasted with personal chapters of turmoil, died of injuries from a fiery car crash. She was 53, Associated Press reported.
Heche was “peacefully taken off life support,” spokeswoman Holly Baird said in a statement Sunday night..
Heche had been on life support at a Los Angeles burn center after suffering a “severe anoxic brain injury,” caused by a lack of oxygen, when her car crashed into a home Aug. 5, according to a statement released Thursday by a representative on behalf of her family and friends.
She was declared brain-dead Friday, but was kept on life support in case her organs could be donated, an assessment that took nine days. In the US, most organ transplants are done after such a determination.
A native of Ohio whose family moved around the country, Heche endured an abusive and tragic childhood, one that helped push her into acting as a way of escaping her own life. She showed enough early promise to be offered professional work in high school and first came to prominence on the NBC soap opera “Another World” from 1987 to 1991, winning a Daytime Emmy Award for the role of twins Marley and Vicky Hudson, who on the show sustained injuries that anticipated Heche’s: Vicky falls into a coma for months after a car crash.
By the late 1990s Heche was one of the hottest actors in Hollywood, a constant on magazine covers and in big-budget films. In 1997 alone, she played opposite Johnny Depp as his wife in “Donnie Brasco” and Tommy Lee Jones in “Volcano” and was part of the ensemble cast in the original “I Know What You Did Last Summer.”
The following year, she starred with Ford in “Six Days, Seven Nights” and appeared with Vince Vaughn and Joaquin Phoenix in “Return to Paradise.” She also played one of cinema’s most famous murder victims, Marion Crane of “Psycho,” in Gus Van Sant’s remake of the Alfred Hitchcock classic, and co-starred in the indie favorite “Walking and Talking.”
Around the same time, her personal life led to even greater fame, and both personal and professional upheaval. She met Ellen DeGeneres at a the 1997 Vanity Fair Oscar party, fell in love and began a 3-year relationship that made one of Hollywood’s first openly gay couples. But Heche later said her career was damaged by an industry wary of casting her in leading roles. She would remember advisers opposing her decision to have DeGeneres accompany her to the premiere of “Volcano.”
“We were tapped on the shoulder, put into her limo in the third act and told that we couldn’t have pictures of us taken at the press junket,” Heche said in 2018 on the podcast Irish Goodbye.m, according to Associated Press.
After she and DeGeneres parted, Heche had a public breakdown and would speak candidly of her mental health struggles.
Heche’s delicately elfin look belied her strength on screen. When she won the National Board of Review’s 1997 best supporting actress award, the board cited the one-two punch of “Donnie Brasco” and the political satire “Wag the Dog,” in which Heche portrayed a cynical White House aide and held her own against film great Robert De Niro.
Heche also called effectively on her apparent fragility. In 2002 she starred on Broadway in the play “Proof” as a woman fearful of losing her sanity just like her father, a brilliant mathematics professor. An Associated Press review praised her “touching performance, vulnerable yet funny, particularly when Catherine mocks the suspicions about her mental stability.”
In the fall of 2000, soon after her break-up with DeGeneres, Heche was hospitalized after knocking on the door of a stranger in a rural area near Fresno, California. Authorities said she had appeared shaken and disoriented and spoke incoherently to the residents.
In a memoir released the following year, “Call Me Crazy,” Heche talked about her lifelong battles. During a 2001 interview with TV journalist Barbara Walters, Heche recounted in painful detail alleged sexual abuse by her father, Donald Heche, who professed to be devoutly religious and died in 1983 from complications of AIDS. Heche described her suffering as so extreme she developed a separate personality and imagined herself descended from another planet, Associated Press reported.
