Jennifer Hudson - Biography and Personal life (+video +photo)

Jennifer Kate Hudson (born September 12, 1981) is an American singer, actress and spokesperson. She rose to fame in 2004 as a finalist on the third season of American Idol, coming in seventh place.

As an actress, she made her film debut portraying Effie White in Dreamgirls (2006), for which she gained worldwide acclaim and won theAcademy Award for Best Supporting Actress, a Golden Globe Award, a BAFTA Award, and a Screen Actors Guild Award. She has also appeared in such films as Sex and the City (2008), The Secret Life of Bees (2008) and Winnie Mandela (2013). As a singer, Hudson won a Grammy Award for her debut album, Jennifer Hudson, released in 2008. The album spawned the hit single "Spotlight" and was certified gold by the RIAA, with sales exceeding a million copies worldwide. Her second album, I Remember Me, was released 2011 and was certified gold by the RIAA, producing the hit "Where You At".

In October 2008, after Hudson's mother, brother and nephew were killed in a shooting, Hudson stepped out of the public eye for three months. Hudson resumed her public appearances in 2009 and has since performed at the Super Bowl XLIII, the Grammy Awards, American Idol, andThe Oprah Winfrey Show. Hudson has been described as a friend of President Barack Obama, who invited her to appear with him at a fundraiser in Beverly Hills in May 2009. She also performed at the White House at the "Celebration of Music from the Civil Rights Movement" event. Hudson has sold 1,280,000 albums and 2,237,000 singles in the United States as of February 2012. In 2013, she received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. She is a dramatic soprano, with the ability to sing from C3 to C#6.

Naomi Campbell: Biography and Personal life

Naomi Elaine Campbell (born 22 May 1970) is an English model, actress, singer, and author. Recruited at the age of 15, she established herself among the top three most recognizable and in-demand models of the late 1980s and the 1990s, and was one of six models of her generation declared "supermodels" by the fashion industry.

In addition to her modelling career, Campbell has embarked on other ventures, which include a novel, an R&B-pop studio album, and several acting appearances in film and television, such as the modelling competition reality show The Face and its international offshoots. Campbell is also involved in charity work for various causes. Her personal life is widely reported, particularly her relationships with prominent men, including boxer Mike Tyson and actor Robert De Niro, and four highly publicised convictions for assault.

Early life

Campbell was born in Streatham, South London, the daughter of Jamaican-born dancer Valerie Morris. In accordance with her mother's wishes, Campbell has never met her father, who abandoned her mother when she was four months pregnant and was unnamed on her birth certificate. She took on the surname Campbell from her mother's second marriage. Her half-brother, Pierre, was born in 1985. Campbell is of African-Jamaican descent, as well as of Chinese Jamaican ancestry through her paternal grandmother, who carried the family name Ming.

During her early years, Campbell lived in Rome, where her mother worked as a modern dancer. Following their return to London, she was left in the care of relatives while her mother travelled across Europe with the dance troupe Fantastica. From the age of three, Campbell attended the Barbara Speake Stage School, and at ten years old, she was accepted into theItalia Conti Academy of Theatre Arts, where she studied ballet.

Career

1978–86: Career beginnings

Campbell's first public appearance came at the age of seven, in 1978, when she was featured in the music video for Bob Marley's "Is This Love". At the age of twelve, she tap-danced in the music video for Culture Club's "I'll Tumble 4 Ya". In 1986, while still a student of the Italia Conti Academy of Theatre Arts, Campbell was scouted by Beth Boldt, head of the Synchro model agency, while window-shopping in Covent Garden. Her career quickly took off—in April, just before her sixteenth birthday, she appeared on the cover of British Elle.

Eleven Quebec locations to be renamed to remove racial slur

Canada

File photo of the Gatineau River. The Quebec Toponomy Commission states Nigger Rapids, a part of the Gatineau River, is to be renamed.
Image: Nickclose.

The Quebec Toponomy Commission, a Quebec public body which is responsible for naming places, cataloguing place names, and suggesting changes to their names, has announced in a press release on Friday that eleven locations in Quebec, whose names contain a racial slur, are to be renamed. The organization said they have yet to decide on the locations' future names.

All of the places which are to be renamed include the racial slur nigger, or its French counterpart negre, in their names. Among the list of places to be renamed is Nigger Rapids, a section of the Gatineau River where a black couple drowned.

Although Nigger Rapids was named after the Black couple, the Commission believed the name was no longer an appropriate way to remember them.

The press release notes "Some of these place names, over time, testify to historical events"^((fr)), but adds that even though the racial slurs are "of ancient usage"^((fr)), they still "violate the dignity of the members of the black community."^((fr))

The name changes came after Rachael Zellars, PhD candidate from McGill University, started a petition to rename the places. "Finally, importantly, we are insisting that the Rapids currently named, 'Nigger Rapids' in Bouchette, be renamed to memorialize the dead — that is, to honor the memory of the Black couple who struggled in this body of water and tragically died there in 1912. We want to know their names, just as we know Cartier, Champlain, etc. as markers for real human beings who lived and died in Quebec, rather than as racial or ethnic slurs", the petition said. 1,980 people have signed Zellars' petition.

Zellars said the petition was her way of saying "let me show you some disagreement".

The Commission has de-officialized the names in question.

NASA announces water on Mars

Space

Mars from the Viking Orbiter, 1980.
Image: NASA/USGS.

Warm season flows on slope in Newton Crater
Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Arizona.

On Monday, NASA announced that signs of liquid water have been found on Mars. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft found evidence of the liquid on the Martian surface, in long dark spots on the Red Planet thought to be formed because of water flow.

In a news conference, NASA's planetary science director, Jim Green said, "We now know Mars was once a planet very much like Earth with warm salty seas and fresh water lakes [...] but something has happened to Mars, it lost its water."

Water is thought to flow down slopes in the warm summer months and dry up as the temperature drops seasonally. Scientists have different theories about the water's origin, as perhaps from the Martian atmosphere or from ice below the surface.

In 2011, Lujendra Ojha proposed the theory of water on the Martian surface, after studying salt samples from Martian soil. The temperature of Mars is close to the freezing point of water, but the presence of salt lowers the freezing point. Alfred McEwen, professor of planetary geology at the University of Arizona, described the water as "briny". Moreover, the recurring slope lineae (RSL) on the surface of Mars are found to slide down the slope in the hotter season indicating the presence of water.

NASA's associate administrator John Grunsfeld said those observations gave a better picture about the planet's resources that could be helpful in the future. Grunsfeld tweeted Water on Mars, not just frozen. Is anything drinking it? Someday we wil find out on our #JourneyToMars.

To mark this discovery