US singer Lisa Marie Presley, daughter of Elvis Presley, is suing Britain's Daily Mail newspaper for an article alleging she was "piling on the pounds" and which forced her to announce that she was pregnant.
"My client is deeply upset and offended by this article, especially as it was widely published just as she and her family were meant to be celebrating her happy news," she said. The Mail last week reported that Ms Presley was gaining weight. Ms Presley, 40, wrote last week that she had been forced to "show my cards and announce under the gun and under vicious personal attack that I am in fact pregnant.
"Once they got a glimpse of my expanding physique a few days ago, they have been like a pack of coyotes circling their prey while eerily howling with delight," she wrote on her blog at MySpace.com.
Ms Presley has an 18-year-old daughter and a 15-year-old son from her first marriage to musician Danny Keough. After that union ended in 1994, she briefly married Michael Jackson and then actor Nicolas Cage.
Celebrating Mass for dogs
Hundreds of dogs, many dressed as babies or clowns, were taken to celebrate mass in the Nicaraguan town of Masaya on Sunday, an annual ritual where the owners pray for their pets to be cured or avoid falling ill.
A long queue of Catholics, carrying their pets or leading them on leashes, waited their turn to pass by an image of a saint in a tiny church in this town 30 kilometres to the south of the Nicaraguan capital, Managua.
The faithful thank the saint for curing their pets or ask for the dogs to be protected from illness. The town's priest always conducts a special canine Mass.
Memories fading fast
China trotted out its hand-picked delegates to represent Taiwan at the annual session of Parliament yesterday, but for many of them memories of the island are fading fast, if indeed they have ever even been there.
Despite not governing Taiwan, the ruling Communist Party appoints its own officials to China's Parliament to represent Taiwan, to enforce its claim the island is just a wayward province and should rightfully be run from Beijing. The representatives are mainly Taiwanese Communists who went to China just before or after the civil war, their descendents, or defectors who abandoned Taiwan in the years following 1949, when the defeated Chinese Nationalist fled to the island.
Name to blame for abused
An Australian mortgage firm has received threatening phone calls, abuse and even a letter containing a white powder in recent weeks - all because its name is similar to a much bigger troubled finance company.
Australian Finance Group, a privately-held mortgage broker in the western city of Perth, trades as AFG, the same letters as the stock symbol for Allco Finance Group, whose market value has shrunk almost 90 per cent amid a global credit crunch on concerns over its ability to repay debt.
"While we really do sympathise with Allco investors, we're having to cope with a lot of internal disruption and unpleasantness from misdirected hate-calls," AFG director Kevin Matthews said in a statement.
'Survivors staircase' moved
A portion of staircase from the World Trade Centre that provided an escape route for some survivors of the September 11 attacks was moved from its original site on Sunday ahead of its installation in a memorial museum.
The so-called survivors staircase, which had stood amid the rubble of the trade centre and the later construction site as rebuilding commenced, was lifted intact with a giant crane onto a flatbed truck and moved some 60 meters away. It will later be installed in the World Trade Centre Memorial Museum, where the intact fragment roughly one story high and consisting of about 35 steps will serve as the centrepiece.
School offers 'cute English'
For a GR8 opportunity to brush up your Moeng, visit Japan's first Cosplish course. A Japanese entrepreneur has set up a language school targeting fans of "cos-play", or "costume-play", which involves dressing up as a favourite character from "manga" comic books or animation movie characters. Teachers at the school wear fantasy costumes and give lessons in "Cosplish" - a mix of English and "cos-play" slang.
This month, Cosplish's schedule includes a "Broken English" course and an "Otaku Eiken" ("Geeks' English") class, centred on the comic books loved by geeks, who are known in Japan as Otaku. There is also "Moeng" - a combination of moe, which is geeky Japanese slang for "cute", and "English".