Mr Tan Poh Heng, 29, a sles promoter in Singapore was charged with corruption in court for allegedly taking a bribe of $1200 so that he could take the blame for a speeding incident.

Huang Yongjie was caught speeding along Upper Thomson Road on 4 Dec 2007, and the fine was $150.00

Huang didn’t want that on his record, so he looked for someone else to take the rap for the offence. He asked his colleague, Yap, if she knew anyone who might want to take the rap instead, and she recommended that Huang talk to her boyfriend, Tan.

The Corrupt Practices Investigation Bureau said it had conducted an investigation on Tan in August last year.

If he is convicted, he can be fined up to S$100,000 or he could be  jailed for 5 years, or both.

No word on what action or punishment Huang and Yap might receive for their involvement.

Barbara Mandrell, Roy Clark and Charlie McCoy have been inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville.

Now 60-year-old Barbara Ann Mandrell is an American country music singer who is renowned for a 1970s-1980s series of Top 10 hits and TV shows from 1980-1982. Because of these, she became one of country music’s most successful female vocalists of the 1970s and 1980s. Also, she was the first performer and is currently the only female in country music history to win the Country Music Association’s “Entertainer of the Year” award for two times. She has also won the Country Music Association’s “Female Vocalist of the Year” twice.

Roy Linwood Clark, 76, on the other hand, is a versatile and famous country music musician and performer. He is best renowned for hosting Hee Haw, one of the first nationally televised country variety of shows in the United States from 1969 to 1992.

Charles “Charlie” Ray McCoy, on the other, is an American musician noted for his harmonica playing.  In his career, McCoy has backed several notable musicians including Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash and Elvis Presley. He has also recorded eighteen studio albums, including fourteen for Monument Records. Thirteen of his singles have entered the Billboard country charts. He was a member of Area Code 615 and Barefoot Jerry. (Wikipedia)

The hall’s newest member were honored Sunday in a musical salute featuring Garth Brooks, George Jones, Rebe McEntire, Alison Krauss, Josh Turner, Rodney Crowell, Michael McDonald and a lot of more.

“All three of tonight’s inductees looked at the way country music was presented on television and said: ‘We can make this even better. We can present country music to a mainstream audience with respect, love and humor,” said Tammy Genovese, the Country Music Association’s chief executive officer.

With the inductions, the Hall of Fame now has 108 members.

Maureen Dowd has admitted that she indeed borrowed some words from TPM’s Joshn Marshall’s blog post. She said in report that it was inadvertent.

Maureen Dowd is a Washington D.C. based columnist for the New York Times. She was with the Times since 1983. That was the time when she joined as a metropolitan reporter. In 1999, the Pulitzer Prize was awarded to her for her series of columns on the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

The controversy started when the following 45-word passage appeared in Dowd’s column, entitled “Cheney, Master of Pain,” on Sunday:

“More and more the timeline is raising the question of why, if the torture was to prevent terrorist attacks, it seemed to happen mainly during the period when the Bush crowd was looking for what was essentially political information to justify the invasion of Iraq.”

If you take a look at Marshall’s 43-word passage from a Talking Points Memo post on Thursday entitled “Bubbling,” you would find that the the passages are almost exactly the same. The post reads as follows:

“More and more the timeline is raising the question of why, if the torture was to prevent terrorist attacks, it seemed to happen mainly during the period when we were looking for what was essentially political information to justify the invasion of Iraq.”

The similarities were caught by a TPM contributor on Sunday afternoon who pointed out that the only difference between Dowd’s words and Marshall’s words was that Dowd made use of the phrase “we were instead of “the Bush crowd was.”

On the night of Sunday, there were emails to “The Nytpicker,” which is a blog devoted to covering the goings-on at the New York Times and the Huffington Post. Dowd admitted that the similarities weren’t accidental and that she had indeed plagiarized Marshall. However, she blamed the mishap squarely on one of her friends.

Dowd explained: “Josh is right. I didn’t read his blog last week, and didn’t have any idea he had made that point until you informed me just now. I was talking to a friend of mine Friday about what I was writing who suggested I make this point, expressing it in a cogent — and I assumed spontaneous — way and I wanted to weave the idea into my column. But, clearly, my friend must have read josh marshall without mentioning that to me. we’re fixing it on the web, to give josh credit, and will include a note, as well as a formal correction tomorrow.”

Victoria Gotti’s palatial Long Island estate, which she and her sons flaunted in the reality show entitled “Growing Up Gotti,” is now under foreclosure.

Victoria Gotti is a writer, reality television participant and daughter of the late Gambino crime family Mafia boss, John Gotti. She got marrien in 1984 with Carmine Agnello to whom she had four children. The husband got convicted and was sentenced to 9 years for racketeering and arson. In 2003, the couple got divorced.

It was reported by the New York Post that the 46-year-old reality star owes $650,000 on the property to JPMorgan Chase. The debt was secured by a mortgage on the nearly $4.2 million mansion that she won in her divorce with her ex-husband. Since September 2006, she never made a mortgage payment.

“I was awarded full ownership of marital property . . . and all I inherited was a house with millions of dollars’ worth of debt,” Gotti told The Post on Monday. “This should finally put to rest all the government lies and rumors that I have $200 million buried in my back yard,” she continued.

She has been dancing around foreclosure for a couple of years. In 2007, the Nassau County Supreme Court Justice Roy Mahon decided foreclosure proceedings were too early but now, the Brooklyn Appellate Division has granted the lender’s motion for summary judgment on the foreclosure.

As quoted by the NY Post, Ms. Gotti’s mother, also named Victoria, lays the blame at the feet of Victoria Gotti’s ex-husband Carmine Agnello who she says took out a mortgage in the amount of $850,000 behind her back. The listing pics reveal that Ms. Gotti hasn’t spent much money on repairs so I’m not sure how much money the bank will get for this home.

According to the blog The Real Estalker, Gotti and Agnello bought the home for just $175,000 in 1989.

It can be remembered that Gotti tried selling it for $4.8 million but she later lowered the selling price to $3.2 million in January.

60-year-old Mark Landon, is the eldest son of legendary actor Michael Landon, was found dead in his West Hollywood home on Monday. He was found about noon in the 1300 block Sweetzer Avenue.

Michael Landon was an American actor, writer, director and producer who starred in three popular NBC TV series that spanned for decades. He is popularly known as Little Joe Cartwright in Bonanza, as Charles Ingalls in Little House on the Prairie and Jonathan Smith in Highway to Heaven. He died at 54 because of cancer.

Michael adopted Mark Landon after marrying his mother, Dodie Levy-Fraser, in 1956. Mark, among Michael’s nine children, appeared in three movies including a CBS television movie entitled “Us” which written and directed by his father in 1991 just before he died.

Although the cause of death was not immediately clear, according to the spokeswoman of Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department who were conducting the investigation, there was no evidence of foul play.