News Update Place

After landing a slot on American Idol, Katharine McPhee decided it was time to take control of her destiny.

In a new interview with People magazine, the season five runner-up reveals that she struggled with severe bulimia for five years, bingeing and purging in a destructive cycle that could have permanently ruined her singing voice and caused devastating consequences to her health.
At her worst, McPhee says she was making herself vomit up to seven times each day, which she equates to “putting a sledgehammer to your vocal cords.”
But all that changed once the 22-year-old aspiring singer got the go-ahead from the Idol judges and realized that in order to succeed on the talent search, she would need to rein in her eating disorder.
“When I made it onto American Idol, I knew that food–my eating disorder–was the one thing really holding me back,” McPhee tells People. “I was bingeing my whole life away for days at a time. So, when I got on the show, I said, ‘You know what? I can do well in this competition. Let me give myself a chance and just get a hold of this thing.’ ”
Backed up by her parents, frequent Idol audience members Peisha and Daniel McPhee, the Idol hopeful enrolled in an intensive treatment program at Los Angeles’s Eating Disorder Center of California, where she underwent three months of group and individual therapy, spending 10 hours a day, six days a week at the center.
“I really had to surrender and give up having a free life to do the program, because I’d be there from 9 in the morning until 7 at night,” McPhee says. But she knew the sacrifice was necessary if she wanted to get well.
“I knew I had put off going to a treatment center long enough–I’d been struggling with bulimia since I was 17,” she says.
McPhee attributes some of her problems with food to growing up in a city where tremendous emphasis is placed on celebrity-slim bodies.
“Growing up in Los Angeles and spending all those years in dance class, I’d been conscious of body image at a young age, and I went through phases of exercising compulsively and starving myself,” she says.
By using the intuitive eating approach she learned at the Eating Disorder Center, McPhee was eventually able to redefine her relationship to food.
“I learned that there’s no such thing as a bad food,” she says. “If you look at a doughnut, people think it’s a fattening food–why? Because if you eat it you’ll get fat? No, you’ll get fat if you eat 10 doughnuts.”
As a result, she dropped 30 pounds and broke her cycle of bingeing and purging.
“That’s why I say American Idol saved my life, because if I hadn’t auditioned, I don’t think I would have gotten a handle on food,” she tells the magazine.
By openly talking about her eating disorder, McPhee stands to help fans who may be struggling with similar issues, according to Dr. Thomas Weigel, a psychiatrist at the Klarman Eating Disorders Center at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts.
“Katharine’s portrayal of her eating disorder and its effects on her life would tend toward helping people suffering with eating disorders to seek out treatment,” Weigel said.
“She had a problem, which was affecting her career, and she went through a difficult treatment program to make progress toward recovery. It was hard work, but she fought against the eating disorder to get her life back.”
And what a life it is. After the Idol finale, McPhee went on to sign a record deal with RCA Records in conjunction with 19 Recordings Limited.

Her first single, “My Destiny,” coupled with “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” is scheduled for release on Tuesday. As of Thursday, the tracks were ranked number 52 in music by Amazon.com.

Though the Idol competition is officially over, McPhee still has her work cut out for her if she hopes to catch up to Taylor Hicks, who released his first single last week and instantly rocketed to the top of the charts.

Star magazine has hit a baby bump in the road.
       Reese Witherspoon filed a lawsuit against the publication Wednesday, arguing that a “phony” June 26 cover story headlined “Reese & Julia–Baby #3″ and featuring shots of Witherspoon and        Julia Roberts was a “callous effort to boost the tabloid’s sagging sales,” according to court documents obtained by E! Online.
The Oscar winner is claiming she has suffered significant distress and damage to her good name because of the story.
In a statement, Star’s attorney called the lawsuit “frivolous.”
The magazine cover in question directed readers to check out the inside pages to “get all the happy details,” apparently referring to Witherspoon’s alleged pregnancy. “Going for Baby No. 3!” was the tagline in the issue’s table of contents. The cover photo also appeared front and center on Star’s Website.
The story, on pages 56 and 57 of the June 26 issue, went on to quote a source mulling over “what appeared to be a four-month baby bump” spotted on the 30-year-old actress while she was sunning on the beach in May. The unidentified observer also said that Witherspoon was wearing an “old-fashioned 1920s-style bathing suit that covered her tummy” and that she spotted the Legally Blonde star at another time coming out of a Santa Monica baby boutique “carrying a bag from the store.”
And, according to the article, the source had seen Witherspoon at least three times this past month “always wearing Empire-waist dresses or baggy clothes.”
Witherspoon’s complaint, filed in Los Angeles Superior Court, goes on to cite another large picture of her in the June 26 issue featuring a circle drawn around her stomach with the caption: “Reese went shopping in Beverly Hills June 7 wearing another loose-fitting Empire-waist dress. Hmmm…”
The mother of two has expressly denied everything implied by all of the above: Not pregnant. No baby bump. No weight gain. Hasn’t been shopping for baby-related items. Period.
Her legal camp also referred to what they called a “despicable” line from the article, which stated that Witherspoon has two movies coming up and she “just doesn’t want to break the news to producers just yet,” as equally false.
While the Star article did state that Witherspoon’s reps had denied she was expecting, it quoted the above source saying “she’s a very private person and doesn’t often talk about it when she’s pregnant.”
Court documents state that the defamatory cover story portrayed Witherspoon in a “false and offensive light in violation of her right of privacy,” and that her reps had alerted Star before the issue was published that the so-called scoop it was going ahead with was untrue, making the magazine’s cover a misappropriation of her image.
Aside from Star Editorial, Witherspoon is gunning for parent company American Media Inc.; the writers of the story, Maggie Harbour and Suzy McCoppin; and the as-yet unidentified editor(s) who worked on the piece.
Witherspoon is asking for an unspecified amount of damages and her lawyers noted in the suit that they are demanding a jury trial. The first hearing in the case has been set for Oct. 23.
“It is a frivolous lawsuit.? It has no legal merit and we intend to vigorously defend it and have every confidence that we will prevail,” said Mike Kahane, the general counsel for American Media.
Meanwhile, what we know for sure about Witherspoon’s public-private life is that she has two children with husband        Ryan Phillippe, six-year-old Ava Elizabeth and two-year-old Deacon, and that she’ll appear with        Christina Ricci in the romantic fable Penelope and is signed up to star in Sports Widow, a comedy about a frustrated wife who takes up her husband’s sport of choice–watching football–in order to get back at him for neglecting her.

LOS ANGELES - New earthquake research confirms the southern end of the San Andreas fault near Los Angeles is overdue for a Big One. The lower section of the fault has not produced a major earthquake in more than three centuries.

The new study, which analyzed 20 years of data and is considered one of the most detailed analyses yet, found that stress has been building up since then, and that the fault could rupture at any moment.

“The southern section of the fault is fully loaded for the next big event,” said geophysicist Yuri Fialko of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla.

Predicting exactly when that might happen, however, is beyond scientists’ ability.

The analysis was published in Thursday’s issue of the journal Nature.

Experts have estimated that a quake on the southern San Andreas of magnitude-7.6 or greater could kill thousands of people in the densely populated greater Los Angeles area and cause tens of billions of dollars in damage.

It was the 800-mile San Andreas fault, which runs down California like a scar, that caused the 1906 San Francisco earthquake that led to about 3,000 deaths.

But scientists know very little about the 100-mile dormant southern segment, which slices through Southern California from San Bernardino, east of Los Angeles, to near the Mexican border.

The section last popped in 1690, producing an estimated 7.7-magnitude quake, but caused little injury or damage because hardly anyone lived there at the time.

Using satellite radar and global positioning data, Fialko measured the movement of the southern San Andreas between 1985 and 2005. Small movements along a fault can relieve strain. Calculating those subtle motions allows scientists to figure out how much strain is building up.

Fialko found that the southern end of the fault has shown little movement and that significant strain is building up. The fault’s slip rate, or average annual movement, was measured to be about an inch a year — similar to previous estimates.

Surprisingly, Fialko found the two sides of the southern San Andreas behaved differently, with one side showing more flexibility than the other. This could help scientists understand potential earthquake risks, he said.

Ken Hudnut, a

U.S. Geological Survey geophysicist in Pasadena, who had no role in the study, said the latest research reaffirms the need to study the mysterious southern San Andreas more closely.

In the fall, Hudnut will head a $240,000 project that would conduct tests on the southern segment to get a better idea of the threat it poses.

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On the Net:

U.S. Geological Survey: http://www.usgs.gov

Scripps Institution of Oceanography: http://www.sio.ucsd.edu

NEW YORK - “The Sopranos” will definitely be taken out next year, the show’s creator said, though he can’t say it won’t hit the big screen at some point.
“It may be that in two or three or four years I could be sitting around and get an idea for a really great ‘Sopranos’ movie,” David Chase told The New York Times in a joint interview with James Gandolfini, star of the HBO series. “I don’t think that will happen. But if one morning somebody woke up and said this would make a really good, concise, contained ‘Sopranos’ story, I wouldn’t rule that out.”
Chase, also the series’ executive producer, and Gandolfini reflected on the show and the trajectory of its central character, mobster Tony Soprano, in an article appearing in Sunday’s editions.
Gandolfini’s character never crossed the line into killing family members, except to spare a cousin a worse death by enemies.
“I think there’s a place Tony knows that if he goes to, he’s not coming back, and that’s the place,” Gandolfini said. “If you start killing family members, what’s next?”
The newest 12-episode season will begin March 12. The Emmy-winning show, which began airing in 1999, is to wrap up with eight episodes starting next January.

HONOLULU - The Dog is coming back for more. Duane “Dog” Chapman has signed a $2.6 million contract for a third season of the reality television series “Dog, the Bounty Hunter,” a newspaper reports.

The show is A&E’s highest-rated series ever.

Chapman will earn $100,000 per half-hour episode aired on the cable channel, believed to be about double what he made for each of the first two seasons, the Honolulu Star-Bulletin reported Friday.

“We haven’t gotten to really celebrate yet because we’re filming right out of the chute,” said Beth Smith, Chapman’s partner and companion. “But we got what we wanted.”

Chapman and Smith declined to comment on the salary figures, citing contract confidentiality.