Agra (India) (AFP) – Indian police said Thursday they had filed a case against Miss Universe for conducting an unauthorised footwear fashion shoot at the Taj Mahal which was slammed as an “insult” by the monument’s caretaker.

Twenty-one-year-old American Olivia Culpo, wearing a long peach-coloured dress, visited the world-famous “monument to love” in Agra on Sunday during a 10-day tour of India.

“We have registered a case against Ms Culpo and her team members after receiving a complaint,” Sushant Gaur told AFP from the tourism police station in Agra, 180 kilometres (112 miles) south of New Delhi.

“We have booked her under various sections… of India’s Ancient Monuments and Archaeological Sites and Remains Act,” he added.

Gaur said Culpo posed for photographers with branded shoes while sitting on the Diana Seat, a marble ledge in front of the white mausoleum named after the late British princess who visited in 1992.

“There are strict guidelines against any sort of branding and promotion at Taj Mahal and the photo shoot conducted was without any prior permission,” said N.K. Pathak from the Agra unit of Archaeological Survey of India (ASI).

A case has also been registered against Indian-born fashion designer Sanjana Jon who accompanied Miss Universe to the site.

Registering a case is a preliminary step and the issue may not necessarily go to court.

Visitors must take off their shoes while visiting the monument, an Islamic mausoleum built for the late wife of Mughal ruler Shah Jahan and completed in 1648. Footwear is allowed in the garden area where the Diana Seat is located.

Culpo’s office was not immediately available for comment.

The complaint was filed by the monument’s caretaker on behalf of the ASI, an official working for the state-run body told AFP on condition of anonymity.

He said she would face a fine if found guilty.

The Mumbai-based Mid-Day tabloid quoted Taj caretaker Munazzar Ali as saying Culpo’s modelling at the Taj amounted to “disrespect and insult”.

“The sandals from a bag she carried were taken and placed on the Diana Seat for shooting pictures, which is not permitted by the ASI. It also amounts to disrespect and insult,” he told the paper.

The tabloid also suggested that security personnel responsible for frisking at the entrance gates of the monument “were too impressed” with Culpo and allowed her to carry her bag inside.

Culpo, seemingly unaware of any brewing controversy, uploaded a photo of the Taj to an Instagram account on Monday, a day after her Agra visit.

“We made it to the Taj Mahal. One of the most beautiful places I’ve ever seen!!!! So amazing,” she wrote.

The 28-year-old’s third studio album will be out Oct 22, reports contactmusic.com.

“Walking on air” is yet another stylistic change for the singer in relation to her previous two tracks from the album. The new song will take on the elements of club music.

The new song was produced by Klas Ahlund, who has worked with Robyn, Madonna, Vanessa Hudgens and more in the past.

NUSA DUA: Miss Philippines Megan Young was crowned Miss World 2013 amid a glittering ceremony held in the Indonesian island Bali.

Young received the crown amid tears of joy at the contest, which made her the first Philippine to won the prestigious award for her nation.

Miss Nepal Ishani Shrestha, who won the ‘Beauty With A Purpose’ in the pageant, made it to the final 10 but could not make it to the final round.

Miss France, Marine Lorphelin, 20, took second place, while Miss Ghana, Carranzar Naa Okailey Shooter, 22, came in third.

Young, who is studying digital media and also presents TV shows in the Philippines, pledged to “just be myself in everything I do, to share what I know and to educate people”.

“I promise to be the best Miss World ever,” Young said after winning the 63rd annual event, as a large number of Filipino fans who travelled with her celebrated by jumping and waving the country’s flag.

A total of 129 contestants had been due to compete in the final but two pulled out at the last minute, according to organisers.

Young, who took the crown from Wenxia Yu of China, the 2012 winner, was born in the United States. When she was 10 she moved to the Philippines, where she has appeared in films and as a television host.

Other winners

• Beauty with a Purpose: Miss Nepal, Ishani Shrestha

• Beach Fashion: Miss Brazil, Sancler Frantz

• Top Model: Miss Philippines, Megan Young

• Talent: Miss Indonesia, Vania Larissa

• Sports: Miss Netherlands, Jacqueline Steenbeek

• Multimedia Award: Miss India, Navneet Dhillon

LONDON: British singer Adele is reportedly in talks to play the lead role in a biopic on country singer Dusty Springfield. The film, to be penned by David Stenn, will focus on Springfield’s time living in Memphis, Tennessee in the late 1960s during the making of her 1969 album Dusty in Memphis.

“There is a project —and it’s true Adele is attached — but it’s in an early stage of development,” dailymail.co.uk quoted a source as saying.

Adele is reportedly in talks to play the lead role in a biopic on country singer Springfield. Adele’s London-based spokesman offered “no comment on this” when approached by Daily Mail.

LONDON: Best-selling “Harry Potter” author J.K. Rowling will return to the wizarding world for her screenplay debut with a film inspired by one of her fictional boy wizard’s textbooks.

Rowling has agreed to write the screenplay for “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them”, a film from Warner Bros. based on the adventures of Newt Scamander – the fictional author of a Hogwarts textbook of the same name.

“I always said that I would only revisit the wizarding world if I had an idea that I was really excited about and this is it,” Rowling said on Thursday in an emailed statement from Warner Bros. Entertainment, a unit of Time Warner Inc (TWX.N).

“Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them” will be the first in a series of films about the adventures of Scamander and will be familiar to anyone who has read the Harry Potter books or seen the films, the 48-year-old Rowling said.

But the story will start in New York, 70 years before the Potter tale gets under way.

“Although it will be set in the worldwide community of witches and wizards where I was so happy for seventeen years, ‘Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them’ is neither a prequel nor a sequel to the Harry Potter series, but an extension of the wizarding world,” she said.

Warner Bros. has distribution rights outside Britain of the BBC TV adaptation of Rowling’s first adult novel “The Casual Vacancy”, Harry Potter theme parks, websites, videogames and consumer products.

Rowling said that Warner Bros. approached her with the pitch for the film, but she could not stomach the idea of someone else writing one of her own characters.

“I thought it was a fun idea, but the idea of seeing Newt Scamander, the supposed author of ‘Fantastic Beasts’, realised by another writer was difficult,” she said.

“As hard-core Harry Potter fans will know, I liked him so much that I even married his grandson, Rolf, to one of my favourite characters from the Harry Potter series, Luna Lovegood.”

Since her seven Harry Potter novels became a global publishing phenomenon, selling an estimated 450 million copies, Rowling’s every move is followed closely by the industry.

The books, and a hugely successful movie franchise, helped turn her into the world’s first author billionaire.

However, Rowling has repeatedly said that she had no plans to write any more about the world of Harry Potter since her last book in the series “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” came out in 2007.

KATHMANDU: Veteran singer and musician Phatteman Rajbhandari passed away on Monday night in Kathmandu while undergoing treatment for lung cancer.

Phatteman (77) was undergoing treatment at the Om Hospital in Chabahil. His body was kept at the premise of the Elderly at Pashupati till 10 am for paying last repsects.

Born in Devpattan in the Pashupati area on November 28, 1936, Rajbhandari was an accomplished singer and musician. Dedicating five decades for music, he lent his voice to and composed music for more than 400 songs and hymns.

‘Marna baru garho hunna’ ‘Jeewan haru ko geet’, “Banai khayo dadhelo le”, “Yesto pani hundo raichha”, “sannani ko gaalai maa” and “Raat ko sapana” are some of his most acclaimed numbers.

He is survived by his wife, two sons and a daughter.

Bali (AFP):  Miss World began in Indonesia Sunday amid tight security after days of Muslim hardline protests that forced authorities to order the whole beauty pageant be held on the Hindu-majority island of Bali.

As contestants took part in a glittering opening ceremony on the resort island, around 100 police, including some armed with rifles, patrolled around the building where the contest was being held.

The ceremony saw contestants perform a traditional dance using fans, as well as a Balinese “Kecak” dance, in which participants sit in a circle and chant while throwing their hands in the air.

Nana Putra, an official from MNC media group, the local organiser which is also broadcasting Miss World, said organisers hoped the event would “lift Indonesia’s image to the world”.

But the 63rd edition of the pageant has been overshadowed by a snowballing protest movement, and hundreds of police were deployed across Bali as the event got under way.

“So far there is no indication of a security threat,” Bali police spokesman Hariadi, who like many Indonesians goes by one name, said.

“However we are still increasing our alertness and security — all entrances to Bali are guarded by our personnel.”

Thousands of Islamic hardliners have taken to the streets across the country during the past week, denouncing the show as “smut and pornography” and burning effigies of the organisers.

But the anger has not been limited to radicals, with criticism also coming from the country’s most prominent Muslim clerical body, rights groups, and a government minister.

Organisers pledged months ago there would be no bikini round during this year’s pageant in a bid to avoid causing offence.

However, this was not enough to stop street protests, and on Saturday the government bowed to the mounting pressure by deciding to move the final, on September 28, and several other events to Bali.

While organisers always planned to hold the opening of the show on Bali, the final and other events had originally been scheduled to take place in and around the capital Jakarta.

However, radicals threatened to stage huge rallies in the area, where there is considerable hardline influence, to stop the events from going ahead.

Although Bali has been hit by deadly bomb attacks in the past, hardline influence is almost non-existent on the island nowadays and locals are used to seeing hordes of tourists sunbathing in their swimwear.

Announcing the change of venue, coordinating minister for people’s welfare, Agung Laksono, said the government had “listened to what the people wanted”.

The organisers said they were “disappointed” by the decision.

“There is the potential that we will be seen as a country which always bows to pressure from a noisy Muslim minority group,” Arief Suditomo, from the local organising committee, told AFP.

MNC’s Putra said organisers would try to meet the government next week to discuss the decision to move the final to Bali.

While most of Indonesia’s population of more than 240 million practises a moderate form of Islam, the influence of the hardline fringe is growing and they have succeeded in getting events changed or cancelled in the past.

Last year, pop sensation Lady Gaga axed a concert after a series of protests, where radicals dubbed her “the devil”, threatened to burn down the venue and criticised her for wearing only “a bra and panties”

NEW YORK: There will be a different type of Sandman featured at the Apollo next month. Metallica is set to rock the legendary Harlem venue on Sept. 21. They will promote their 3D concert-action film “Metallica Through the Never,” released in IMAX on Sept. 27 and other theaters a week later. It will also air live on a special temporary Metallica channel on SiriusXM.

The Apollo, revered for its place in black entertainment and historic performances from the likes of James Brown to Michael Jackson, has become a venue for rock legends in recent years, including Bruce Springsteen and Paul McCartney.

And while the Apollo is known for its “Sandman” character who boots weak contestants during its famous amateur show, “Enter Sandman” is one of Metallica’s famous songs.

Happy Birthday, Mila Kunis!

The Sexiest Woman Alive turns 30 years old today (can you believe it?!), and in celebration of the stunning star, we’re taking a look back at her impeccable style over the years.

From her days as the snobby Jackie Burkhart on That ’70s Show to her epically wicked performance in Black Swan to her long-running Family Guy gig as the voice of Meg Griffin, there’s no doubt the actress has wowed on both the big and small screen over the course of her highly successful Hollywood career.

Kunis’ personal life also became the subject of public fascination after the brunette beauty began dating her former ’70s Show costar Ashton Kutcher last year.

Although the notoriously private twosome has stayed mum about their relationship, they were most recently spotted packing on the PDA in St. Tropez, as they continue to travel the world together and share endless romantic moments.

While Mila has showed no signs of slowing down (she’s currently filming Jupiter Ascending alongside Channing Tatum), she’s been able to maintain her down-to-earth demeanor, despite being one of the most beautiful and successful A-list stars.

“What I do and who I am are two different things. And they always will be,” she told Esquire magazine in October 2012. “I think that if I bought into the hype, I would lose all sight of who I am, and so much of who I am is what my parents went through and instilled in me. And I never want to lose that. Ever. Because I would be so disappointed if I didn’t make them proud.”

• 
• Zao Wou-ki’s rare triptych, 15.1.82

Sanyu’s Goldfish.Fans of Zao Wou-ki will drool at paintings spanning an incredible five decades of the French-Chinese master’s prolific career. A two-by-four metre triptych, 15.1.82, shows the master at his most lyrical and mature. There is a nod towards a traditional Chinese ink landscape, but the vision demonstrates the poetry of Zao’s unique language.

Sylvie Chen, head of 20th-century Chinese art at Sotheby’s, says the work is rare, as Zao’s prodigious oeuvre of more than 3,000 paintings only features about 20 diptychs and triptychs. “The overlaying of colours and the composition make it an exceptional piece of work. This is likely to top Zao’s auction record of just over HK$68 million,” she says.

Even if the painting is sold at the low end of its HK$68 million to HK$90 million valuation, it would still smash the previous record, set in 2011, which includes a roughly 10 per cent commission fee paid for by the buyer that is excluded from pre-sale estimate figures.

The 2011 sale also made headlines because the Chinese bidder initially refused to pay up, but the record still holds because Sotheby’s says it managed to get the full money in the end.

The bold estimate for 15.1.82 acknowledges the quality of the work and an anticipated appreciation in the value of Zao’s works following his death in April, at the age of 92.

After all, HK$68 million is about HK$10 million lower than the auction records for much younger, living contemporary Chinese artists such as Zhang Xiaogang and Zeng Fanzhi.

The 1982 triptych, which, in Zao’s usual style, just has the date stamp for title, is the work of a confident artist comfortable in exploring his ideas about representing a non-visual experience on a two-dimensional surface, says Zao expert Melissa Walt, who teaches contemporary Chinese art at Colby College in the US. “Some of his works I’d describe as transcendental,” Walt says.

According to Sotheby’s Chen, Zao’s large-format paintings from the 1980s represented a breakthrough for the artist, after a tumultuous time in the 1970s. Chan May Kan, his second wife, who he met in Hong Kong, died of a drug overdose in 1972 after a battle with depression, and his brother also died around the same time.

“For a year-and-a-half he couldn’t paint at all,” Chen says. Shortly afterwards, Zao visited China for the first time since he left home for Paris in 1948. This, some critics say, reunited him with the ink brush tradition of Chinese art.

When Zao emerged from his private torment and resumed work, he created some of the most profound images of his career. They catapulted him into the upper echelon of the Parisian art world in the ’80s.

The Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais commissioned a series of large-format works from him for a 1981 solo exhibition, and this marked the zenith of his career at an age when Chinese artists rarely received such recognition, Chen says.

But he didn’t stop there. 22.8.91 is another work being sold by the Yageo Foundation and that, for Walt, is evidence that the artist certainly still “had it” when he was well into his seventies.

“The 1991 painting has so many of the features that I associate with him, especially a mastery of colour. It looks like it’s glowing,” Walt says.

But the October sale is not all about Zao. Highlights from the Yageo sale all hark back to a generation of Chinese artists who drew inspiration from Western culture, long before style and iconography became blurred across national borders in our globalised age.

The catalogue features a lovely Wu Guanzhong – another nonagenarian who died recently – titled Mountain Lu, which shows Lushan in Jiangxi province looking fantastically un-Chinese (estimate: HK$10 million to HK$20 million).

Other gems come from Sanyu, who was part of the Parisian art scene of the late 1920s. He died in poverty, but found fame posthumously as “the Chinese Matisse”, because of the obvious influence of the French master’s particular style of fauvism.

Painting Goldfish (estimated at HK$50 million to HK$70 million) sometime in the 1930s or ’40s, Sanyu could not possibly have imagined a world where ethnic Chinese collectors would dominate international auctions for his kind of paintings. But this particular work is destined to go down well in such a market. The eight (lucky number) goldfish (lucky fish) is perfectly set against a golden orange (lucky colour) background.

As Chen points out, even the pattern of the tablecloth resembles Louis Vuitton monograms, the now familiar icons of China’s nouveau riche. It is a playful work, but the value of the painting is serious. Sanyu’s works only recently started to attract big-ticket collectors outside of Taiwan. But prices are certainly matching the more famous Zao and Wu Guanzhong. Sotheby’s argues the value of his work lies in his unique position in the history of Chinese art.

As one of the first Chinese artists to settle in France, he marked a major transition between the old and the new in Chinese art, Chen says.

The appreciation of Sanyu’s work is nothing short of incredible. His Virgin Mary and the Infant Jesus, an oil painting showing mother and child in front of a thick, black-framed mirror, was valued at HK$3 million to HK$5 million in 2007, but it went unsold when Yageo put it up for a Sotheby’s auction, despite being featured on the outside back cover of the catalogue.

This time, Yageo is asking for HK$15 million to HK$20 million. The owner of the collection, Pierre Chen is, after all, an astute businessman. Chen is the founder of Yageo, a major Taiwanese electronic components maker, with a market capitalisation of almost HK$6 billion.

His extensive collection, which he started in the mid-1990s, is known as much for works by modern Western artists, such as Francis Bacon, as it is for those by Chinese painters. He was ranked the fourth most important art collector in the world by ARTnews this year.

Sotheby’s is confident more highlights will be added to the October 4-8 sales. It has also gathered an impressive list of contemporary Asian and Southeast Asian art that will get plenty of attention.

A number of works by Takashi Murakami and Zhang Xiaogang will make an inevitable appearance, while there is also growing international interest in Southeast Asian art from Hong Kong and Taiwan, says Mok Kim Chuan, Sotheby’s head of Southeast Asian paintings.

One name that crops up a lot is Walter Spies (1895-1942), a German artist who made Bali his home. Described as a “magical realist fable”, his A View from the Heights will be featured in the evening sale.

There will certainly be a feast for the eyes for everyone this autumn, when all the works