His father Joe Jackson was quoted in the German press recently saying the singer was
His father, Joe Jackson, was quoted in the German press recently, saying the singer was thinking of abandoning his Neverland ranch and moving to Berlin – scene of the baby-dangling episode in which he suspended his five-month-old son from a fourth-floor balcony to the horror of the fans arrayed below.. According to his lawyers and representatives, he has made slow physical recovery from the ordeal of his criminal trial in Santa Maria, California, and has been back to hospital at least once.Despite acquittal, his financial and professional future remain precarious. Mr Bartucci has pinpointed the dates of the alleged limo abduction, in the latter part of May 1984, but seems unable to provide any corroborating evidence.Mr Jackson’s lawyers, however, say they can prove he could not have been doing what Mr Bartucci alleges on at least one of the days in question because he was photographed in the company of Ronald and Nancy Reagan, then the President and First Lady of the US.Case dismissed? Not quite. We are talking about Michael Jackson, epitome of celebrity dysfunction. He has managed to fall out with the team of New Orleans lawyers he hired to make Mr Bartucci go away, and they are now suing him for $47,000 in claimedunpaid bills.The pop star forgot to send a legal representative to a mandatory court appearance in New Orleans earlier this month, exposing him to the risk of civil contempt charges or, worse, a default judgement in Mr Bartucci’s favour.A new hearing has now been set for 17 August, at which Mr Jackson’s lawyers hope to beg the court’s forgiveness for their oversight and move swiftly to a dismissal of the suit The singer himself is unlikely to make an appearance. He dates the onset of his vision problems to his alleged encounter with the superstar. For this and other reasons, he is also asking for punitive damages.Barring some new revelation yet to be made public, it is hard to see how Mr Jackson could possibly be troubled by so outlandish a case.
He is seeking compensation for problems he alleges were provoked by the events of 21 years ago: depression, suicidal tendencies, marital difficulties, eating disorders and post-traumatic stress disorder.Mr Bartucci recently liquidated his insurance and teaching businesses because, he said, his eyesight was deteriorating and he could not see well enough to keep working. Mr Bartucci was so traumatised he forgot everything about the ordeal, keeping the experience completely repressed until 2003, when a television documentary about Mr Jackson’s legal woes with the Santa Barbara County district attorney’s office magically reawakened his memory.Mr Bartucci’s claims have been investigated by the New Orleans police, the Los Angeles police and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, none of whom found grounds to go ahead with a criminal complaint.With the state unwilling to do battle on his behalf, Mr Bartucci went ahead and filed a civil suit against Mr Jackson last November. Six weeks after the end of the child molestation trial in which the erstwhile King of Pop went through a public wringer before being acquitted on all counts, he is back in the legal crosshairs all over again for his behaviour around tender-aged boys. This time, however, not even his worst enemy is likely to believe the allegations against him.
A Louisiana man called Joseph Thomas Bartucci Jr claims that, in 1984, he was lured into a limousine at the World’s Fair in New Orleans and taken on a nine-day ride to California in which the world’s most famous pop star supposedly performed oral sex against his will, tried unsuccessfully to get him to return the favour, forced him to consume mood-altering drugs, threatened him, cut him with a razor blade and plunged a steel wire into his chest.According to Mr Bartucci, who was 18 at the time but apparently looked quite a bit younger, the limo then dropped him back off in New Orleans, with a melodramatic warning from Mr Jackson’s staff not to breathe a word of what had happened. When Karl Marx wrote that history repeats itself first as tragedy, then as farce, he wasn’t, of course, thinking of Michael Jackson But he might as well have been. Their walk was carefully timed to coincide with the least extreme temperatures of the day.
When the sun is shining on the outside of the shuttle, temperatures can reach 121C. In the dark, astronauts would be working at about minus 157C. Emerging from the shuttle’s airlock and looking down on central Asia, Noguchi remarked: “What a view.” Robinson responded: “There are just no words to describe how cool this is.”The astronauts had previously worked side by side in Discovery’s open cargo bay, applying the experimental material to sample tiles. The methods, involving an oversized putty knife and a huge sealant gun, have been developed in the past two years to repair cracks in the delicate carbon panels that line shuttles’ wings.
The astronauts stepped out yesterday morning as the shuttle floated 222 miles above the Earth. The Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi and his American colleague Stephen Robinson left the relative safety of the space shuttle Discovery at 11am GMT to test new repair techniques on a six-and-a-half-hour space walk. But the two astronauts who carried out this spot of extra-terrestrial DIY yesterday declared the exercise a success.
It was the space equivalent of applying bathroom sealant with boxing gloves on, in zero gravity and temperatures that can drop to minus 157C. It was finally made available for broadcast through the efforts of Ms Kandic, who has campaigned tirelessly for the victims of war crimes.. Mr Seselj at the time conferred on him the Order of Chetnik Knights, citing his henchman’s “personal courage in defending the fatherland”.The Radical film, said Vreme “showed that Serbs were killed, and that if they killed it was only in response to war crimes against them or in self defence”. The film also was intended as a counterpoint to a video of Serbian paramilitaries shooting unarmed Muslims at Srebrenica that was aired on Serbian television this year.
Mr Nikolic says that he was “just a sentry” when serving with Mr Seselj’s volunteers at Antin and that he arrived there a month after the killings of civilians. Mr Nikolic is the troubled Balkan nation’s most popular politician, just ahead of Boris Tadic, the pro-Western Serbian President.The Patriarch’s hobnobbing with the Radicals not only makes them seem respectable but also apparently lends credibility to Mr Nikolic’s attempts to defend himself against charges that he also was personally involved in war crimes as a member of Serbian units who shot some 50 unarmed, elderly Croatian civilians at the village of Antin in eastern Slavonia in late 1991.He denies the charges, made by Natasa Kandic, head of Belgrade’s Humanitarian Law Fund. But his association with Mr Nikolic evidently means the church wants to curry favour with the Radicals, who are Serbia’s largest party, according to recent opinion polls. Mr Nikolic told the crowd that the bizarre movie was “an attempt to respond to further demonisation of the Serbian people and charges that only Serbs carried out war crimes”.Vreme said the film was edited hurriedly “to help the Serbian public feel better about ceremonies to mark the 10th anniversary of Srebrenica”.Bosnian Serb forces led by Ratko Mladic massacred up to 8,000 Muslim men and boys in July 1995.Patriarch Pavle this month paid lip service to political correctness by sending condolences to the families of the dead at Srebrenica. By attending the film showing, the Patriarch, the highest moral authority in Belgrade, also gave credibility to Mr Nikolic’s insistence that he is innocent of persistent charges that he also took part in atrocities by Serbian forces in Croatia, political sources say.The liberal newspaper Vreme has carried a photograph of Patriarch Pavle seated next to Mr Nikolic at the rally, describing the film shown as “similar to the early work of Leni Riefenstahl”, Hitler’s film-maker. The bearded church leader watched impassively during the gruesome hour-long video, which included shots of the decapitation by Bosnian Muslim forces of Rade Rogic, a Serbian soldier, and footage of the bodies of Serbian civilians allegedly murdered by Croatian forces in Gospic.
The Patriarch ’s acceptance of the Radicals’ invitation represented unprecedented moral support by the Orthodox Church for Tomislav Nikolic, the former municipal undertaker who has led the Radicals since Mr Seselj unexpectedly gave himself up to the International Tribunal for War Crimes in The Hague, to stand trial for ethnic cleansing of Croatian civilians in Vojvodina and other crimes carried out by the Radicals’ chetnik militia men when Yugoslavia disintegrated in the early 1990s.