- The bizarre saga of the former lover and fortune teller of quirky Hong
Kong billionaire Nina Wang continues. Peter Chan, the former lover and fortune
teller in question, took a judicial b*tch-slap Friday when he was sentenced
Friday to 12 years in prison after a Hong Kong court found him guilty of
forging a will to claim Wang’s multi-billion-dollar estate. High Court
Justice Andrew Macrae denounced Chan's attempt to pass himself off as the
beneficiary of Nina Wang's fortune as "shameless, wicked and borne of
unparalleled greed." Wang died in 2007 at age 69 after battling
cancer and as a former richest woman in Asia, she left behind a lot of wealth.
Chan tried to claim that wealth and as a result, Hong Kong police charged him
after a 2011 court ruling that a will purportedly leaving Wang's Chinachem
Group to him was forged. The ensuing case has included a seedy mix of sex,
money and fraud allegations. That Wang was 20 years older than Chan and was nicknamed
"Little Sweetie" for her girlish outfits and pigtail hairdo made the
entire situation even weirder. Now, Chan has been convicted Thursday of forgery
and using a false instrument and sentenced to 12 years on each count, to be
served concurrently. Like Wang, he’s an absolute oddball who is a former
feng shui master and recently changed his name from Tony after converting to
Christianity. At trial, Chan's defense team showed videos in court last
month of the pair kissing and caressing – with Chan’s wife in the courtroom - in
an awkward and uncomfortable attempt to prove that their relationship was
genuine. Macrae ruled that Chan was not content with the $387 million that Wang
had given to him while she was alive and subsequently tried to thieve her business
empire and estate as well. "I have no doubt you are nothing more than
a clever and, no doubt, beguiling charlatan," Macrae said in sentencing
Chan. The judge noted that Chan's forgery was especially egregious because had
he succeeded, it would have taken money away from the charitable foundation
Wang and her late husband founded and cost it millions in legal fees. In a
slightly vindictive twist, the judge also ordered Chan to repay the estimated
$258,000 cost of a preliminary hearing that he said was a waste of time and
money…………
- The weekend box office champion was truly despicable for
the holiday weekend. “Despicable Me 2” opened with a flourish, banking $82.5
million over the weekend to give itself an opening-week domestic tally of $142
million. That was enough to best its chief competition, the bloated and
ridiculous “The Lone Ranger,” which ranked second with a mere $29.4 million in
its first weekend. That leaves a long way remaining to reach profitability for
a movie with a $215 million budget. A strong start continued for the Sandra
Bullock-led “The Heat,” which banked $25 million in its second weekend and has
earned $86.4 million thus far. It was a precipitous fall for “Monsters
University,” which saw its earnings drop 57 percent for a third-weekend haul of
$19.6 million for fourth place and an overall total of $216.1 million. “World
War Z” dropped two spots to fifth place with $18.2 million and its cumulative
domestic take stands at $158.7 million and counting. “White House Down” lived
down to its title, turning in a lackluster sixth-place weekend of $13.5 million
to make its two-week tally $50.4 million – or $100 million short of its hefty
budget. Seventh place went to “Man of Steel” and its $11.4 million effort,
giving the superhero flick $271.2 million after one month of release. The third
new movie in the top 10 was “Kevin Hart: Let Me Explain.” The comedy concert
film was solid enough to earn $10.1 million for eighth place and get its run
off to a respectable start. “This is the End” registered a ninth-place result
with $5.8 million to inch closer to the $100 million mark in overall domestic
earnings at $85.5 million. “Now You See Me” saw its top 10 run extended by one
week thanks to $2.7 million for the frame. After six weeks, the Morgan
Freeman-led thriller has accrued $110.4 million domestically. “Star Trek Into
Darkness” (No. 11) and “Fast & Furious 6” (No. 12) both lost their spots in
the top 10 from last weekend………
- Soooooo…..Brazil certainly seems ready to host next year’s
World Cup and the 2016 Summer Olympics. There is no way a country where a
simple amateur soccer match led to not one, but two deaths – the latter being a
murderous referee who was tied up, beaten, stoned and quartered by an angry mob. The
match in question took place Sunday in Maranhao, Brazil. The two dead men at
the end of it were referee Otavio Jordao and player Josenir dos Santos Abreu.
Abreu died first and according to eyewitness reports, da Silva fatally stabbed
him after Abreu is believed to have struck the referee while questioning a
decision. Jordao clearly was not a man who reacted well to having his authority
question or his manhood tested because he (allegedl) broke out a knife he just
happened to have with him and stabbed the player. That did not sit well with
the crowd, which went from zero to lethal range in a matter of seconds. The outraged
spectators turned on the referee, first beheading him and then going to town on
what remained of his lifeless body. From there, a truly medieval scene unfolded
as Jordao was drawn and quartered in a scene that lacked only the stone walls,
catapults and boiling oil of the Dark Ages. But wait….there’s more. Because the
headless torso of an amateur referee and his detached head were not gory or
gruesome enough, those who had done the beheading then took Jordao’s dome and
jammed it onto a spike, which they then planted in the middle of the field. So
far, Luiz Moraes de Souza is the only suspect who has been arrested over the
incident and police are searching for two others. Prosecutor Valter Costa is
handling the case and didn’t seem down with the whole idea of vigilantism. "One
crime never justifies another crime. Actions likes this do not collaborate with
the legality of state law,” Costa said………
- While the world’s best high-volume eaters gathered in
Coney Island for the Nathan’s Famous Fourth of July Hot Dog Eating Contest, the
second-tier eaters of the world and a South Carolina bakery looking for some
free publicity tried their best to build a holiday tradition of their own. Croissants Bistro and Bakery in the resort
town of Myrtle Beach wasn’t serving up tubular slabs of mystery meat to be
wolfed down by competitive eating luminaries such as Joey Chestnut and Sonya
Thomas, but rather cupcakes in bulk to be eating by David Hester and Carolina
Forest Elementary School principal Dennis Devorick. Their goal as part of the
bakery’s second-annual Fourth of July Cupcake Eating Contest was to down as
many of the sweet treats as possible in five minutes. Devorick entered the
competition with a bull’s-eye on his back as the defending champion, but he
fell well behind the pace and at just 19 cupcakes in five minutes. With twice as many competitors
taking part this year, there was plenty of new blood and it was Hester who shot
to the front of that crowded field. He plowed through 34 cupcakes in five
minutes, but that was only enough to tie him for first place. Because Croissants
Bistro and Bakery cannot have its signature event of the year end in a tie,
Hester and his challenger had to go into a sudden-death eat-off. Like Indiana
Jones’ old pal Miriam Ravenwood trading shots of tequila with Himalayan
villagers in “Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark,” the two top
eaters downed one cupcake at a time until one of them could not continue.
Hester won out by eating 15 more cupcakes and for that, he received a $2,000
prize pack from various local vendors. The contest was open to anyone over the
age of 18, with a variety of local luminaries taking part……..
- Explaining peculiar blasts of energy out in the cosmos it kind
of science’s thing. Yet typically science’s response to this phenomenon is to
get a confused look on its nerdy face and say, “I don’t know.” After some
digging and loads of research dollars being spent, eventually scientists
present the world with some “stunning” new find. This is how it’s gone down
with quasars, pulsars and even the Big Bang itself. The most recent “big”
discovery began in 2007, which astronomers detected a burst of radio noise of
unknown origin, lasting maybe a second or so. It was believed to have come from
beyond the Milky Way, but it never repeated and no one was sure. A similar
blast occurred four years later and it too did not repeat. Those two instances
may be closer to an explanation after Dan Thornton of the University of
Manchester and three colleagues used the giant Parkes radio telescope in
Australia to take a closer look and discover that as many as 10,000 of these
blasts may be occurring daily. “It’s still a mystery what they are,” Thornton
said. “But at least it’s not a mystery that they exist.” In other words…..we
still don’t know. However, Thornton and his pals did coin the term “new
cosmological population” to describe the energy blasts, so that’s something. Because
radio outbursts generally come in a range of frequencies and electrons slow the
radio waves down a bit, low-frequency waves tend to slow down the most. That
means a radio burst that was emitted in a fraction of a second might be
received over a longer period, depending on how far the burst had been traveling,
and through what part of the Milky Way. The 2007 burst seemed too dispersed to
have originated in our own galaxy, but the 2011 burst was less so. Four blasts
Thornton and his team observed were highly dispersed. “The dispersion is so
high,” says Thornton, “that from what we know, they could not have come from
the Milky Way.” Their resulting theory is that whatever is sending out these
radio bursts is located between 5-10 billion light-years away. The world may be
no closer to knowing what these bursts are, but figuring out where they come
from could possibly be helpful…….
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