In case you just came out of hibernation and don’t yet know – Brangelina is no more and the Internet is freaking out.
So far, social media users seem to be having three types of reactions – the emotional, who have declared that true love is now dead; the nonchalant, who have gone into hiding to avoid reading about anything #Brangelina; and Team Aniston, who have flooded social media with their “I told you so” memes.
The drama started in 2005, when Brad Pitt allegedly cheated on Jennifer Aniston and left her for his Mr & Mrs Smith co-star Angelina Jolie. Fans quickly took sides and even celebrities like Paris Hilton and Nicky Hilton donned tee-shirts labelled “Team Aniston” and “Team Jolie”.
When Jolie and Pitt decided to get married in 2014, their love story became #relationshipgoals for many, especially when it was revealed that Jolie featured their children’s doodles on her wedding dress.
Now that Jolie and Pitt have decided to go their separate ways after 12 years of being together, Team Aniston is breaking the Internet with memes making fun of the situation.
“If he left his previous marriage for you, chances are he’ll leave your marriage too,” one Twitter user posted along with an animated photo of Aniston breaking out into a smile.
“Took 12 years but karma has no deadline,” another Twitter user wrote.
And while the divorce proceedings have not yet been finalised, tabloids are already discussing how much the divorce could be worth.
Pitt is estimated to be worth US$240 million (S$323 million), while Jolie’s net worth is estimated at U$160 million. They also own a string of properties around the world, including a lavish mansion near Los Feliz in Hollywood.
They also own the Chateau Miravel vineyard estate in France, which they purchased in 2012 with 41 million pounds (approximately S$78 million to S$82 million at the time). The estate is also where the couple’s critically-acclaimed Miraval Rose wine is produced.
At this point, it is unclear how their assets will be split.
Jolie is reportedly seeking full physical custody of their six children, but is not seeking spousal support, TMZ reported.
According to Heavy.com, Aniston took US$29 million and the Beverly Hills mansion she and Pitt owned when they divorced in 2005. Pitt, on the other hand, ended up with US$31 million and took control over Plan B Production, a film company they both owned.
In the next two days, her loved ones must make what could be a life-or-death decision – whether to take her off life support.
The last time they saw her conscious was last Saturday when she left their Pasir Ris home with her bicycle to shop for groceries.
It was her Saturday routine, but on this fateful day, Madam Ang Liu Kiow, a 53-year-old housewife, met with an accident involving a 17-year-old on an electric scooter.
She was still awake after the accident but lost consciousness in the ambulance while being taken to Changi General Hospital (CGH), where she underwent two operations on her brain.
Not only has she not woken up, but her condition has since worsened. Her husband and children – two sons and a daughter – are bracing themselves for the worst.
The circumstances surrounding the accident, which happened around 10am on a pavement in Pasir Ris Drive 1, remain unclear.
But Madam Ang’s son, Mr Wilson Leong, believes the e-scooter crashed into her.
The 22-year-old student told The New Paper on Monday: “My mother rides her bicycle to buy groceries every Saturday, so I think the accident must have happened then.”
TNP understands that Madam Ang was not on her bicycle when the accident happened.
Mr Leong said his father received a call from the hospital around noon telling him about Madam Ang.
“We rushed over and were told that there was a blood clot at the back of her brain that required immediate surgery,” he said.
“The surgery was supposed to take three hours but because of complications, it took almost six. She used up about two bags of blood.”
Just when the family thought the worst was over, they were told on Sunday morning that there were further problems.
“We were told that they needed to do another operation to drain out brain fluid that was building up,” he said.
“They put a tube into her brain. She was heavily sedated, and I haven’t been able to speak to her.”
Madam Ang Liu Kiow. Photo: Courtesy of TNP reader
APPEAL
Mr Leong said that when he posted an appeal on Facebook for witnesses to the accident, a woman told him that she had seen five youths tending to Madam Ang. The e-scooterist was believed to be among them.
He understands the e-scooterist called for an ambulance for his mother, but his family have yet to hear from the teen, who did not give them his contact number.
“My mother never did anything to hurt anyone,” said Mr Leong.
The e-scooterist was arrested yesterday. The police have classified the case as a rash act causing grievous hurt and are investigating.
Mr James Bay, 73, a retiree who lives in the area, told TNP that he was cycling when he saw the aftermath of the accident on Saturday morning.
“I saw a woman sitting at the bus stop with five young guys around her,” he said.
“There was also a dark-coloured e-scooter on the ground nearby. It was a big scooter.”
Mr Bay added that many youngsters ride e-scooters, bikes and skates, some of them at fast speeds, in the area.
“There are a lot of old people here, so it can be quite dangerous.”
Lawyers said that it might be difficult to get compensation in accidents involving personal mobility devices (PMDs), such as e-scooters, e-skates and hoverboards.
PMDs are currently not allowed on pavements, roads and park connectors, only on private premises.
This is set to change by year end when new rules kick in. (See graphics above.)
Member of Parliament for Pasir Ris-Punggol Zainal Sapari was shocked to learn of the accident.
“We need to look into legislation to make it compulsory for riders of personal mobility devices to have third-party insurance,” he said.
“Despite our best efforts at education, there are still users who do not adhere to guidelines that have been prescribed.
REVIEW
“I hope this incident will trigger the relevant authority to review its position with regard to making third-party insurance mandatory.”
He will be alerting Deputy Prime Minister Teo Chee Hean, who is the MP for that area, and they will be reaching out to the family to provide assistance.
He added that enforcement must also continue to ensure the safety of pedestrians.
But any new measure may come too late for Madam Ang and her family.
Mr Leong said: “I cannot describe the feeling in words. My father has been crying often and hasn’t been eating since the accident.”
“The doctor told us my mother has had multiple strokes in the brain due to a lack of oxygen. We have to decide whether to take (her) off life support and see if she comes to,” he said.
“But when the time comes, if needed, we want to let her go peacefully. We can’t bear to see her suffer any more.”
An e-scooter. Photo: The New Paper
15kmh too fast for the elderly to react: Expert
The 17-year-old rider of the e-scooter was arrested yesterday for a rash act causing grievous hurt.
Criminal lawyer Ravinderpal Singh of Kalco Law said the penalty for this offence is a jail term of up to four years, a fine of up to $10,000, or both.
Lawyer Raphael Louis of Ray Louis Law said it could be hard for Madam Ang’s family to seek compensation because “e-scooters are usually not insured, unlike cars”.
He added: “Even if the person responsible is prosecuted, the compensation paid will be minimal. The criminal aspect doesn’t help the victim much in terms of compensation.”
For compensation cases, the victim or the victim’s family must take up a civil suit against the alleged culprit.
Mr Louis said that the plaintiff must engage a lawyer, which may be expensive, to handle the suit.
But if the defendant has no assets, it may not be useful to sue, because it will be difficult to get payment even if the suit is successful.
There are new rules and a code of conduct for the safe use of footpaths, cycling paths and shared paths, which will come into effect by the end of the year.
Road safety expert Gerard Pereira, a manager at Singapore Safety Driving Centre, felt that the 15kmh speed limit for personal mobility devices, which include e-scooters, on footpaths is still too fast for the elderly to react in time,
He felt more measures need to be put in place.
“Especially around bus stops, there should be more ‘Stop and push’ signs,” he said.
“When the equipment is sold, there should be some form of rules to follow. Riders should also have to undergo training and know how to handle the vehicle in order to get it.”
Similar previous incidents
In March, Transport Minister Khaw Boon Wan said the number of power-assisted bike accidents increased from six in 2013 to 27 last year, five of which were fatal.
Previous cases of accidents involving personal mobility devices and electric bicycles include:
JUNE 2016
A stall helper riding an e-bike lost the lower half of his right leg after colliding with a car in Bendemeer Road. He was on his way to pick up his step-grandsons from school.
MARCH 2016
A man riding an e-scooter suffered serious head injuries after he fell at East Coast Park Service Road. He was taken to hospital where he died without regaining consciousness.
FEBRUARY 2016
Two boys were flung onto the bonnet of a car in Ang Mo Kio after their e-bike crashed into the car. They were taken to Khoo Teck Puat Hospital for treatment and later discharged.
DECEMBER 2015
An odd-job labourer died two days after his e-bike collided with a lorry at Jurong West.
NOVEMBER 2015
A French national died five days after falling from his electric skateboard at East Coast Park Service Road. His death was ruled a misadventure.
APRIL 2015
A coffee shop helper riding an e-bike knocked down and injured a pedestrian near Paya Lebar Way. He was jailed for five weeks.
tnp@sph.com.sg
This article was first published on September 21, 2016. Get The New Paper for more stories.
As Angelina Jolie files for divorce from Brad Pitt, here’s a look at some of the other off-screen Hollywood romances that have kept audiences enthralled: The sultry Bacall made her debut aged just 19 opposite Bogart, 44, in “To Have and Have Not” in 1944.
They got married a year later; the age gap did not stop them from becoming one of Hollywood’s most mythical couples.
Bacall cemented her status as a film noir icon with appearances alongside Bogart in “The Big Sleep” (1946), “Dark Passage” (1947), and “Key Largo” in 1948. They were married until Bogart’s death from cancer in 1957.
Taylor and Burton’s famously turbulent romance began in 1963 when the pair were filming “Cleopatra”, she in the title role and he as her Mark Antony.
Both were married to other people at the time but their instant chemistry was plain to see. They were married twice: for ten years from 1964, and another year from 1975-76.
Both unions were marred by alcoholism and furious arguments, though they remained close into their later years.
They starred in eleven films together, including “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” (1966) and “The Taming of the Shrew” (1967).
Married for more than a decade from 1987, Moore and Willis were one of the most prominent Hollywood power couples of the late 80s and early 90s.
Both blamed the collapse of their relationship on not having enough time together as their careers took off, with Moore the best-paid actress in Hollywood by 1990 and Willis working on the “Die Hard” series.
They remained friends after their split, even spending holidays together to give stability to their three daughters.
The pair met on the set of “Days of Thunder”, a high-adrenaline racing movie starring Cruise as an ambitious young driver and Kidman as his neurosurgeon love interest. It was released in 1990; they were married by the end of the year.
“I was a baby when I married Tom, but I don’t regret any of it,” Kidman later said. The couple adopted two children and starred in two other films together – “Far and Away” and “Eyes Wide Shut” – but divorced in 2001.
Peek into the early family life of Pitt-Jolie family
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Cruise later married actress Katie Holmes, gaining the celebrity moniker “TomKat”. Their six-year relationship, ending in 2012, was heavily scrutinised by the press, largely because of Cruise’s growing involvement in the Church of Scientology.
Spanish actress Cruz – another former lover of Tom Cruise – began dating her Oscar-winning “Vicky Cristina Barcelona” co-star Bardem in 2007.
Married in 2010, the couple have two children together and are fiercely private.
They sparked a Hollywood row in 2014 when they signed an open letter blasting Israel’s bombardment of Gaza.
But both released follow-up statements clarifying their comments, amid rumours that Israel-supporting Hollywood executives were furious over the move.
Happily married with two young children, actress Emily Blunt relished the opportunity to play a divorced, alcoholic, damaged protagonist in her latest thriller, “The Girl on the Train.” Blunt, married to actor John Krasinski and known for embracing comedy in “The Devil Wears Prada,” “The Five-Year Engagement” and “Into the Woods” told Reuters that she wanted the challenge of portraying something darker. “It’s just to do something else and something incredibly damaged and unsettling,” the actress said on the train track-themed carpet at the film’s London premiere on Tuesday.
In “The Girl on the Train,” based on Paula Hawkins’ novel of the same name and out in theatres on Oct. 7, Blunt plays Rachel Watson, a lonely woman devastated by divorce and battling alcohol addiction.
Infatuated by the seemingly perfect couple (Luke Evans and Haley Bennett) she sees from her daily commuter train that runs past their house, Rachel sees something shocking one day and becomes enraged.
Driven by intrigue, passion and suspense, Rachel has a chance to engage in the lives she has only watched from afar, but the lengths she goes to uncover the truth could lead her to a dangerous situation. “It’s a story full of broken people suffering with their own demons and addictions and betrayal and loss and love,” Evans said.
Director Tate Taylor, best known for 2011’s “The Help,” said he was drawn to the exploration of “humanity and the human condition at its worst,” and wanted to portray an accurate representation of addiction. “I felt like I had a duty to represent (addiction) properly for all those affected by it,” he said.
LOS ANGELES – The lawyer for a woman accusing Bill Cosby of sexual abuse in a California civil suit said on Tuesday she has cancelled plans to take a sworn deposition from another woman listed as a potential witness against the comedian in a Pennsylvania criminal case.
Attorney Gloria Allred said the criminal sexual assault case Cosby faces in suburban Philadelphia takes precedence over the lawsuit her client, Judy Huth, has brought against the 78-year-old entertainer in Los Angeles and could be undermined by the deposition in question.
Former donut shop employee Margie Shapiro, one of dozens of women who have come forward publicly in recent years to accuse Cosby of sexual wrongdoing, had been subpoenaed by Allred to give a deposition this coming Friday in Huth’s civil case.
But Allred said she decided to withdraw the subpoena after prosecutors included Shapiro in a list of 13 women they have asked the Pennsylvania judge for permission to call as witnesses in Cosby’s criminal trial next June.
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AFP, Reuters
Allred also asked the judge in Huth’s civil suit to freeze any further discovery in the case, including a separate deposition of Shapiro sought by Cosby’s lawyers, until the criminal case is resolved. Cosby attorney Angela Agrusa opposed that move, and the judge set a hearing for Nov. 4 on the issue.
Allowing Shapiro to be deposed in the civil case would give Cosby’s criminal defence team a glimpse of what Shapiro might say under oath at his criminal trial and a chance to find inconsistencies they could later exploit under cross-examination. “We think that they are attempting to use civil discovery to get around the limits on criminal discovery in the criminal case,” Allred told reporters after Tuesday’s status conference on the lawsuit in Los Angeles County Superior Court.
Agrusa suggested Allred had something to hide and accused her of trying to “have it both ways.” “Ms. Allred can’t go around saying these women’s stories are critical to her client’s case and then just because they might be called in a criminal case now claim we can’t depose them,”Agrusa told Reuters. “To take the position that … their allegations can’t be challenged denies Mr. Cosby his fundamental right to ask questions of his accuser.” Cosby, who built a long career on family friendly comedy, including his long-running NBC sitcom “The Cosby Show,” has steadfastly denied ever assaulting anyone and insisted that all his sexual encounters were consensual.
He is charged in Pennsylvania with drugging and sexually assaulting a former Temple University employee, Andrea Constand, at his home in 2004.
Huth, now in her 50s, alleges in her lawsuit that Cosby plied her with alcohol and molested her in 1974 at the Playboy Mansion when she was aged 15.
LOS ANGELES – US actress Kathy Bates, best known for her portrayal of an obsessed fan in “Misery,” accepted a star on Tuesday on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and dedicated the honour to a young girl battling an illness.
The 68-year-old actress spoke emotionally at the ceremony, recounting how she believed her career was over several years ago until she was offered a role on the series “American Horror Story.
” She said the award-winning show created by Ryan Murphy had “literally brought me back to life,” coming at a time when she was dealing with health issues and the cancellation of her NBC show “Harry’s Law.”
She also recalled her big breakout in Hollywood at age 42 thanks to her memorable Oscar-winning performance as a deranged nurse obsessed with an author played by James Caan in the 1990 film “Misery,” based on the Stephen King novel.
“Sixty years ago I stood not far from this very spot with my beloved aunt Lee,” she recalled, speaking in front of the TLC Chinese Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard.
“We were going to see ‘The King and I.’ And then 34 years later I came back to this very theatre with another king by the name of Stephen with a movie called ‘Misery’ that changed my life.”
Shirley MacLaine and Billy Bob Thornton – who will share the screen with Bates in the upcoming “Bad Santa 2” – also spoke at the ceremony praising Bates for her talent and charity work.
“She is the type of actor who is not only loved by the public, the fans and the critics but also actors who know how good she is and what she can do,” Thornton said.
“I’m gonna keep this short and tell you that if I could be a woman, I’d be Kathy Bates.”
The actress who has survived both ovarian and breast cancer dedicated her star on Tuesday to an eight-year-old girl named Emma, whom she said was like her battling lymphedema, a condition often associated with cancer patients and which causes swelling of the limbs.
JAKARTA – Ten people have been killed in flash flooding and landslides in Indonesia, an official said Wednesday, with a search ongoing for three others still missing in the disasters on Java island.
Torrential downpours triggered flash flooding in Garut in West Java early Wednesday, which quickly rose to around 2 metres (6.5 feet), national disaster agency spokesman Sutopo Purwo Nugroho said in a statement.
He said preliminary data from the local disaster agency in Garut showed “eight people died and one person is still missing” after a river burst its banks.
Thirty others were injured in the district, four seriously, while hundreds were forced to abandon their homes as the water rose, he added.
Emergency shelters and temporary kitchens have been set up to assist those made homeless by the disaster.
Elsewhere in West Java heavy downpours caused landslides in Sumedang regency, killing two people and burying a suspected two others under an avalanche of mud and rock.
“The search for them continues,” Sutopo said.
Landslides and flooding are common in Indonesia, a vast tropical archipelago prone to natural disasters and torrential downpours.
The country’s disaster agency has warned people to be alert for disasters this wet season as a La Nina weather phenomenon threatens unseasonably heavy rain.
In June nearly 50 people died when heavy downpours sent torrents of water, mud and rock surging into villages in Central Java, another densely-populated province on Indonesia’s main island.
PARIS – The end of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie’s marriage Tuesday provoked a worldwide media storm because this “socially engaged” couple had given the impression that theirs was a partnership which worked both publicly and privately, according to a leading celebrity magazine editor.
Like legendary Hollywood couples before them including Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, and Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart, love blossomed on set, the actors falling for each other in 2004 while filming “Mr and Mrs Smith” – a movie about marriage.
In an ironic final twist given how many celebrity unions ends in tears, the two married assassins were tasked with killing each other.
With such a backstory, the public’s obsession with the couple was inevitable, said Laurence Pieau, editor of the French edition of Closer magazine.
“This was a couple that was born under the eyes of the cameras in the most dramatic of circumstances,” said Pieau.
Peek into the early family life of Pitt-Jolie family
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“Brad Pitt was then married to the actress Jennifer Aniston, who was very much America’s sweetheart. Angelina Jolie had two failed marriages behind her. But being together seemed to strengthen both of them.
“She hugely increased her range and began to get involved in humanitarian causes and began directing films. He also took more risks and abandoned his image as a pretty boy.
“Then their family began to grow, we saw them all going to toy stores together and playing the game of promoting each other’s work on the red carpet. They were a couple who looked established, and it seemed they were capable (of) doing it all.
“It was a real alliance of beauty and talent, a family that seemed at ease wherever in the world they were together,” she told AFP.
“They had a status that made them stand out from other actors because they were so socially engaged, and they also had a real aura about them,” she said.
“Jolie’s very brave decision to make public her double mastectomy was widely praised. Afterwards there was a rise in breast cancer detection as her revelation inspired other woman to have themselves checked.
“We all got very attached to her because she seemed to have problems just like the rest of us. There was also a real intelligence at work in the way they chose not just their films but in what they revealed about themselves.
“It was a very American way of sharing their life, their hopes and their struggles. That is why it is all the more stunning that in separating she is demanding custody of the children.
“That shows that it can happen to everyone, that trying to juggle work and home and different opinions on how children should be brought up (can lead to conflict for everybody).”
“The future will tell. The fact that she wants custody of the six children (with visiting rights for Pitt) possibly means that there is something behind this break-up. Maybe in the next few days we will learn there is another story,” she said.
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