Category: 5. Entertainment

Actress Jaime King has been ordered to appear in court after allegedly failing to pay more than $100,000 in attorney fees related to her divorce from ex-husband Kyle Newman.

According to court documents obtained by the Daily Mail, King owes $98,441.16 to Newman’s former law firm, Wasser, Cooperman & Mandles, where high-profile divorce attorney Laura Wasser is a partner. The firm also claims she owes an additional $2,000 in interest.

A judge previously ruled in May 2024 that King — described as the “high earner” in the marriage — must pay the fees within 30 days, noting she had already agreed to do so. However, the law firm says she has yet to comply.

Judge Shelley Kaufman has now ordered King, 46, to appear in court on September 16 to disclose her assets and bank account balances. If she fails to show, she could face arrest.

This latest legal battle comes amid ongoing financial and personal challenges for the Sin City star. In March 2025, King lost physical custody of her sons, James, 11, and Leo, 10, after failing to complete a court-ordered six-month drug and alcohol program. She was also sued in January for $42,580 in unpaid rent, though she later claimed the matter was settled.

In a statement to Us Weekly, King’s representative said this was the first time she or her legal team had been informed of the filing, adding that she has faced “unrelenting pressure” and “legal intimidation” throughout the divorce.

King recently announced her engagement to investment banker Austin Sosa in July.

Meghan Markle’s family battles are set to pose a problem Prince Harry.

The Duchess of Sussex, who has been accused of defamation by her half-sister, Samantha Markle, is turning into a negative factor in Harry’s success.

Royal commentator Ian Pelham Turner told Fox News: “More legal disputes between Meghan and Samantha could break the fragile links between Prince Harry and Meghan, trying to establish a way forward.”

Meanwhile, Branding analyst Doug Eldridge added: “When someone is seen as the negative variable… it intensifies that polarisation to near-acerbic levels.”  

This comes as Samantha is set to start another lawsuit against her sister after her 2024 case was dismissed. 

Back in 2023, Samantha also took a swipe at Prince Harry, linking him to his ex-girlfriend, Chelsy Davy.

According to a report by the Royal Observer, she said: “In my opinion, clearly, he’s still in love with [Chelsy Davy]. It seems like she’s the one that got away.”

And to Samantha, “from what I’ve been seeing on social media, maybe she’s lucky and that’s a good thing.”

Actress Gina Carano has settled her lawsuit against Disney and Lucasfilm after she was fired from Star Wars franchise spin-off The Mandalorian.

She was dropped from the cast in 2021 following comments she made comparing being a Republican in the US to being a Jew during the Holocaust.

Ms Carano, a former MMA fighter who played Cara Dune in the Disney+ series, shared the news of the settlement on X, writing “I hope this brings some healing to the force.”

The agreement, which has not been made public, comes after her case gained support and funding from Elon Musk.

Ms Carano described the settlement as the “best outcome for all parties involved,” adding she was “excited to flip the page and move onto the next chapter”.

She also thanked Musk, saying she’d never met the tech billionaire but he stepped in to do this “Good Samaritan deed for me in funding my lawsuit”.

“Yes, I’m smiling”, she signed off.

The actress originally sued for wrongful termination and sexual discrimination, claiming that two of her male co-stars had made similar posts and faced no penalty.

She had sought $75,000 (£60,000) in damages and to be recast in the popular series.

Lucasfilm had condemned her comments in 2021 for “denigrating people based on their cultural and religious identities”.

In a statement released since the settlement, the production company said that it looks forward to “identifying opportunities to work together”.

The company described Ms Carano as someone who “was always well respected by her directors, co-stars, and staff. She worked hard to perfect her craft while treating her colleagues with kindness and respect,” it added.

Ms Carano is a former mixed martial arts fighter and has faced pushback in the past for deriding mask-wearing policies during the Covid pandemic and making false claims of voter fraud in the 2020 US presidential election, which Donald Trump lost to Joe Biden.

Santino Marella Reveals Five More Blockbuster Bouts for Emergence, Including Three Championship Matches

News / August 7, 2025 / by TNA Wrestling Staff

Watch on TNA+

Get tickets

Get 1 month FREE of TNA+ with code EMERGENCE25

On Friday, August 15, TNA Wrestling presents Emergence streaming LIVE on TNA+ from the Chesapeake Employers Insurance Arena in Baltimore, MD. Tickets are on-sale now at Ticketmaster.com.

After recapturing the TNA World Tag Team Championship in an awe-inspiring Ladder match at Slammiversary, The Hardys are looking to immortalize their legacy as one of the greatest tag teams of all time. Now they must put their titles on the line against another fan-favorite duo, Zachary Wentz and Myron Reed of The Rascalz, who are coming off a victory over the former champions, The Nemeths.

The competition is more fierce than ever in the Knockouts tag team division. After chaos ensued in the aftermath of the Knockouts World Title match between Jacy Jayne and Ash By Elegance, reigning Knockouts World Tag Team Champions The Elegance Brand will now defend against Fatal Influence, The IInspiration and the team of Léi Yǐng Lee and Xia Brookside in a four-way matchup.

Steve Maclin and Jake Something have been embroiled in a highly intense rivalry for the TNA International Title. Recently on iMPACT!, their one-on-one championship encounter ended in a no contest after both men were counted out. Now the two are set to face off once again with the TNA International Championship up for grabs but this time, there will be no disqualifications and no countouts.

During an emotional interview with Tom Hannifan, Sami Callihan contemplated his retirement from in-ring competition. But the “Death Machine” wants to give himself one final opportunity to prove that he still has what it takes. That opportunity will come at Emergence when Callihan goes head to head with the surging Mike Santana.

After coming up short against The Rascalz, The Nemeths took out their frustrations on the fans in Rhode Island, members of TNA staff, and even The Home Town Man himself. While Santino Marella has suspended Nic for his actions, Ryan must now lock up with The Home Town Man in singles competition, without the help of his big brother.

“Short fiction” rather than “short stories” is an apt descriptor of the varied works I have before me.

I have one collection of stories, Wait Here by Lucy Nelson. I have a collection of satires, Playing Nice Was Getting Me Nowhere by Alex Cothren, which is a mix of short stories and what could be called “experimental fiction”. And I have a collection of a few short stories and a lot of experimental fiction, The Victoria Principle by Michael Farrell.

---

Review: Wait Here – Lucy Nelson (Summit Books); Playing Nice was Getting Me Nowhere – Alex Cothren (Pink Shorts Press); The Victoria Principle – Michael Farrell (Giramondo)

---

“Short stories” and “short fiction” are both, of course, short. But one has the qualities of a story (characterisation, plot, narrative) and can be fiction or non-fiction, while the other is simply fiction – it didn’t exactly happen – and does not need the structure, or coherence, of a story.

These collections contain texts that could be variously classified as stories or fiction, or both – and they aren’t poetry, which is (usually) short, or novels, which are (usually) longer.

Wait Here is Nelson’s debut collection. These stories are about motherhood – or rather, the absence of motherhood. The characters do not have children for various reasons, yet motherhood looms large in their lives. Except in a few places, it’s a very traditional set of short stories. Nelson’s ability to successfully interpret and illustrate so many different voices across the collection is impressive.

Cothren’s satires are sharp and well-constructed, with some great insights. While I have some doubts about the political utility of satire in 2025, I appreciate the wit in Playing Nice Was Getting Me Nowhere. And I enjoy those simple emotions elicited by good satire: satisfaction at the fleeting moments of comeuppance and dread at the frequent flashes of reality.

The Victoria Principle is another literary debut of sorts. It is not Farrell’s first book – he has eight poetry collections to his credit – but it is his first collection of texts that he has not called poetry. There are a few fairly traditional short stories among some thoroughly experimental bits of fiction. Farrell jumps around in themes and style, and his breathless, sometimes painfully poetic voice is as good as ever, albeit exhausting in places.

Wait Here

Wait Here begins with Chances Are, We Were High as Kites, a story of twin sisters, Shippy and Fern, who are planning Shippy’s suicide. They plan a lunch with friends and wine with a movie. Then they will change into their favourite pyjamas before administering the suicide drug. Shippy is sick and does not want to be a burden on her sister; she does not know that Fern is planning on taking the drug too.

It is a story of the close, non-maternal bonds, in the first instance between siblings and, in a general sense, between friends. The sisters have lived full lives without children.

Other characters in the collection are similarly childless, with lives as childless but not necessarily better or worse. A teenager wonders if her deceased mother’s head has replaced her uterus. Another woman feels useless until she mercifully kills an injured chicken. Another meets her doppelganger – almost identical save for the childlessness. They grapple with their identity as people and the choice of parenthood.

There is little explicit or implicit hope or doom in these stories. Nelson is comfortable with this ambiguity. The decisions to have or not have children are neither good nor bad – they just are. But they are decisions other people are intensely interested in.

In All the World Loves a Baby, a young woman’s child dies on arrival at the premature baby clinic on Coney Island. She stays on at the clinic as a milk maid, still useful in a maternal sense, nursing other premature babies. When she stops producing milk, she works at a nearby diner. She imagines her baby at different stages of life, like a ghost following her around.

She eventually leaves Coney Island, and the ghost of her premature baby disappears. It is a story of women’s perceived utility; as mothers, and, if not, as milk maids. If women can’t be mothers for whatever reason, they are haunted by the spectre of children.

The collection’s title story is brilliant. Nelson’s thesis on motherhood is clearest here. A woman visits a therapist. She arrives early and is unsure of where to wait. She calls the doctor from the office and is invited in. She goes into his office, which is revealed to have a waiting room.

We are not privy at length to the conversations between her and the doctor. Instead, we are given lengthy descriptions of her home life, where she waits for her husband to arrive, making sure to look busy when he does. We are given brief glimpses into conversations with her husband, where he insists she use the time at the doctor’s to “talk about the baby”.

She becomes fixated on the waiting room, where she is allowed to simply wait. Finally, the doctor brings up the topic of “the baby” after she mentions that her husband has been calling. The doctor assures her that her husband has not seen the doctor’s notes. As they share a meaningful silence, she ponders to herself:

There is nothing else to say. The truth is we must be done with it. The lie is that we must talk about it. They think that by talking instead of waiting, I can dissolve all thoughts of a baby whose butter-soft hands might have clutched at my lapels.

The nature of her loss is uncertain. She either lost the child in miscarriage or she or her husband are infertile. What is clear is that, for many women, motherhood is not a simple choice. It can’t be talked through or justified or not or rationalised or not. It is simply a question whose answer is too complex to be answered in the affirmative or the negative. Waiting, rather than answering, seems to be preferable – in this instance, at least.

Nelson’s varied situations across such a diverse set of characters seems to be the best, or even only, way to discuss motherhood. This collection is as complex as the questions that spurred it.

Playing Nice Was Getting Me Nowhere

There is a sense of tragedy to satire in 2025. The form should make the people it targets feel shame, but our post-shame world, where the powerful act with impunity, makes that ambition seem silly.

Does anyone expect Mark Zuckerberg, after viewing a few episodes of Black Mirror, to rewrite the algorithm so that young men aren’t served an AI slurry of Andrew Tate bulldozing Gaza in a furry suit draped in a Kekistani flag? Of course not, but it is fun to see the excesses of the powerful taken to the extreme.

I don’t think Cothren had any grand political ambitions when he wrote this collection. I don’t think he expects the Australian government to read the opening story, Dirk Champion, RFL Talent Scout, and reassess its approaches to refugees.

This story contrasts Australia’s apparently laid back and welcoming nature with our inhumanity to refugees. It imagines a future where refugees compete in an Australian football league for citizenship, deftly melding the larrikinism of Dirk Champion, a classic Australian bloke, with the brutality of our policies toward those seeking asylum.

I also doubt Cothren sought to spur action on global warming when writing Desiree Marley, Coral Restoration Artist, which is told from the perspective of an artist whose job is to repaint bleached coral. The coral has died, but the government has decided to have it painted so it remains a tourist attraction. While it is fun to laugh at the absurdity of such an initiative, it seems a bit obvious at this point: we know our leaders only act when it’s too late.

Cothren’s collection gets interesting when he plays with form, as in Where’s a Good Place for an Adult to Hide?, which is in the form of a Reddit thread, and Royal Commission into the Koala Repopulation Scheme, which is in the form of a transcript of the commission’s proceedings.

In Where’s a Good Place for an Adult to Hide?, a Reddit user posts that question regarding a game of hide and seek. He is inundated with replies from users who have hidden from their family for years. The detachment of Reddit is useful here – parents proudly declare their abandonment of their children and families behind the anonymity of the internet. Just as they want to hide from their responsibilities in real life, they hide their identities online.

Royal Commission into the Koala Repopulation Scheme is surely a nod to Jonathan Swift’s most famous bit of satire, A Modest Proposal. In this story, a senior policy advisor sits before a Royal Commission into a failed scheme. Children under the protection of social services were stitched into Koala costumes to lessen the burden on those social services while seeming to repopulate Koalas, who are about to be declared extinct – in the story and I’m sure in our reality.

It is revealed that the scheme was created under pressure, on a Friday, in a rush because “the boss” (the Minister for the Environment) had a luau and needed a plan by COB.

To read the advisor’s squirming responses to the commissioner’s terse questions is satisfying – and it draws out the detached, lazy, even flippant decision-making process that drives so many policy choices. As in the Reddit thread, Cothren has chosen an apt form to make his point.

I would usually ignore the political claims of satire, which have been assuredly dismissed as serious critique. But in this instance the book’s publisher has written, in the accompanying media release: “Stories like these are particularly important given the rise in hateful rhetoric around the world and in the US especially.”

What do they suppose satire will do to combat hateful rhetoric? If anything, the prevalence and even reliance on satire has led to the sublimation of political energy, so much so that a worrying amount of dissenting political discourse has become either ironic or sarcastic – painfully unserious in a climate that requires serious dissent.

Perhaps they think Zuckerberg simply hasn’t watched enough Black Mirror? I wonder what they think about the recent cancellation of Stephen Colbert’s satirical show in a display of actual political power?

The Victoria Principle

The first three stories in The Victoria Principle are “experiments in autofiction”, according to the author.

Thinking About Ornithophobia and The Invisible Paddocks both focus on the creative process. The former concerns a writer, who is unsure of his feeling toward birds, grappling with a request to edit an issue of a journal, which he has decided should be about a fear of birds. The latter recounts attempts to recall a fractured childhood memory, framed through a conversation between the protagonist and his sister, and an internal attempt to remember and retell the memory at a local library “story telling gig”.

In the collection’s third story, Relational Jesus, the protagonist, Viv, recounts a series of dreams, ponderings and incidents that centre on his struggles with mental health. The stream of consciousness employed blurs the boundaries between dreams and reality.

All three stories are clearly based on aspects of Farrell’s life, with some fiction sprinkled throughout.

These initial works are the only ones in The Victoria Principle with paragraph breaks. The rest are set as justified walls of text that are rarely paragraphed. The way this amplifies the text’s almost-extreme density is my least favourite feature of this collection. Farrell’s semantically saturated writing is dense enough.

The book is divided into three parts. The first contains those first three short stories. The other two parts contain various bits of thoroughly experimental fiction. There’s a mix of stream of consciousness and loose narratives. There’s also a lot of talk of poetry.

In Real Estate Agents Wish Government Would Do More, for example, three real estate agents, one representing “talk poet” David Antin, another “musician poet” John Cage, and the third poetry critic Marjorie Perloff, discuss the housing market, which might be metaphor for poetic practice. I’m not sure where they end up on the topic.

Sadgirl Rereads America, about a manga creation of a PhD student, continues the theme. Sadgirl, who is herself a PhD student, obsesses over her chosen subject:

could she really read poetry, and could she really exert a coherent methodology through an original conceptual framework? Or was it the other way around?

She wonders how much the classification and study of poetry really matter to the poetry itself, or if that’s even a valid question that she is qualified to ask.

Smells Like Nirvana follows the narrator’s inner turmoil at a proposed art project: to boil an egg for the track length of Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit. He ties himself in mental knots trying to remember the track length – which version? The live version or the studio one? He decides he could use a different track altogether. And what about the size of the egg? Would that matter?

It seems like the narrator is asking after the material facts of the art, while barely asking about the art itself.

“Experimental” is the operative term here. Often this descriptor is wheeled out to describe anything that isn’t a poem, novel or short story – although it is usually used to describe shorter fiction. It’s a term applied to texts that resist categorisation – such as those in Playing Nice Was Getting Me Nowhere – rather than those that are “experimental” in a strict sense.

In contrast, Farrell seems to be conducting a series of actual literary experiments. I think by writing outside his chosen form but maintaining his powerfully poetic voice, he has ended up testing the limits of that voice – intentionally or not.

In addition to the thematic focus on poetry, specifically, and art in general, the prose makes extensive use of poetic techniques: literary references, assonance, consonance, half-rhymes, metaphors, symbolism, even some alliteration – all combined with Farrell’s signature humour.

Farrell has taken these concentrated poetic techniques and injected them in great volume into longer forms to see if, when stretched out, they can maintain some coherence. The kind of semantic saturation that works in poetry can exhaust in longer texts. It is admirable that Farrell has been able to sustain his onslaught of technique for the length of the collection, but it is likely to overwhelm anyone except well-read scholars or dedicated Farrell fans (and there are many). I can’t tell if the experiment has succeeded or failed – I suspect it’s a success, but I’m clearly unqualified to make that call.

King Charles is advised to stay away from Prince Andrew and family.

His Majesty, who is currently suffering from cancer, is iterated it is not in his benefit to rub shoulders with his scandalous brother.

Andrew Lownie tells Daily Mail: “I would keep the whole York family at a distance.”

Speaking about Andrew’s ex-wife and the Duchess of York, Sarah Ferguson, the expert continued: “Fergie should not be invited to events and the daughters should not be made working royals. I believe there are more scandals to emerge.”

This comes as former staff police officer, Paul Page, claimed Andrew had an intimate relationship with sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell.

“From the way she was allowed to enter and exit the palace at will, we suspected that she may have had an intimate relationship with Prince Andrew,” he told ITV

“She was allowed to enter and exit the Palace night and day at will,” Page claimed.

Lindsay Lohan talked about the tough time she went through during the making of 2004’s hit film Mean Girls.

The Parent Trap star compared her bonding with teen-romance film with the young co-stars of Freakier Friday.

In an interview with The New York Times, while speaking with her Freakier Friday teammates Julia Butters and Sophia Hammons, she said: “You’re lucky because you’re close in age.”

Looking back on her time of shooting Mark Waters-directed and Tina Fey-written projects, she added, “It was hard because Rachel McAdams was so much older.”

McAdams, who played head mean girl Regina George, was 25 years old, while Lohan was 17 and fellow stars, Amanda Seyfried and Lacey Chabert were 17 and 21, respectively.

“I was in school,” recalled the Just My Luck actress. “Amanda and Lacey were all hanging out. It was hard for me to find where I fit in.”

In contrast to her young age struggles, Butters and Hammons, who are aged 16 and 18, respectively, “didn’t know each other” before Freakier Friday but have grown close, Hammons told the outlet.

“She’s my best friend in the entire world,” she said of Butters. “We see each other every single day. That’s not even an exaggeration.”

The sequel sees Anna, now a mom to her own teen daughter named Harper (Butters), while Curtis returns as Anna’s mother.

Anna has swapped places with Harper, while Tess has swapped with Harper’s soon-to-be step sister Lily (Hammons), who is the daughter of Anna’s fiancé Eric, played by Manny Jacinto.

Freakier Friday is set to release on August 8.

PICTORIAL

Artist Me Kyeoung Lee has spent the last two decades documenting the tiny convenience stores and corner shops that are now quickly disappearing, with a dedication to the small details that make each unique. Mismatched chairs can be seen lined up out front, while tall cherry blossoms or persimmon trees shade the buildings’ entrances.

Tucked into mountainsides and among bustling streets, small corner stores are often a central point in a community. For Lee Me Kyeoung, these local shops provide endless inspiration for an ongoing series of drawings. The Korean artist documents the tiny markets she encounters around the world, utilizing pen and acrylic to create exquisite visual odes from Australia to Turkey.