| Pietersen weds pop star bride
LONDON: England cricket star Kevin Pietersen married pop singer Jessica Taylor in a private ceremony on Saturday, a spokesman said.
Hampshire batsman Pietersen and Taylor, who topped the British singles charts with her former band Liberty X, married at St Andrew�s Church in the picturesque village of Castle Combe in Wiltshire, south-west England. Henry Jacob of The Outside Organisation, which represents both the 27-year-olds, said: �We can confirm that today Kevin Pietersen and Jessica Taylor were married. �The wedding was attended by close family, relatives and friends. They are now going away on their honeymoon and will return to the UK in January.� Former England fast bowler Darren Gough was Pietersen�s best man. England Test captain Michael Vaughan and One Day International skipper Paul Collingwood were among the stars in attendance.
Quirky big bang to start Sydney Festival
An Australian icon, topless nuns, gay Chinese dragons and the best-known Beach Boy will join 200 other performers at the launch of this year's Sydney Festival on Saturday night. The opening night party will see artists, dancers and singers from around the world and across the country perform for free on six separate stages scattered throughout the city centre. There'll also be three real - but very unusual - wedding ceremonies as part of the Festival First Night. Organisers say they want people to be dancing in the street, no matter what the weather. "(We wanted) to get the festival started in a more public way because Sydney Festival is above all a festival of the people," artistic director Fergus Linehan told reporters in Sydney. "We were very conscious that a lot of the artists ...
Definitely, Maybe: the return of the thinking woman's chick flick
Watching a formulaic chick flick is like being told that the entire movie industry thinks you're stupid, credulous and naive; that a pair of artfully dangled shoes or a cute, plump baby is enough to distract you from the fact that the storyline has been recycled a hundred times before; that at the first chime of wedding bells, we start salivating over table decorations and party favours. The chick flick, like its literary equivalent chick lit, has become a pejorative term. Which is why indications that the film world may finally be taking the female audience seriously are so welcome. Working Title's latest romantic comedy Definitely, Maybe - released next week - stands out from the crowd. It pushes all the right romantic buttons but is smart, well-observed and immensely satisfying.
Thinking Right
In his final year in office, George W. Bush could become the president fiscal conservatives wanted. On Tuesday, he'll sign an executive order directing the executive branch to ignore "earmarks" that are not actually written into law. Those are the pork barrel projects that individual members of Congress slip into committee reports or "manager's statements" that accompany the language voted on by both houses. Earmarks gave us Alaska's Bridge to Nowhere and, in Georgia, the Train to Lovejoy. The president clearly has the authority, according to the Congressional Research Service, to ignore earmarks not contained in the text of legislation passed by the House and Senate. His decision would have been all the more admirable had it applied to the 11,735 earmarks amounting to $16.9 billion included in the current year's spending — and had he started earlier and disavowed the practice by the administration, as well.
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