Lopez will leave for Las Vegas next year
Jenny from the Block is heading to Sin City.
The pop star announced Tuesday night on “American Idol” that she is heading to Las Vegas next year for a residency at the Planet Hollywood Resort & Casino.
Jennifer Lopez’s stint at the AXIS Theater will begin Jan. 20. The first 20 performances go on sale Saturday. She has live shows set for January, February, May and June.
Lopez, 45, follows in the footsteps of contemporary pop stars like Mariah Carey, 45, and Britney Spears, 33, who also launched Vegas residencies.
Lopez once dominated the pop and R&B charts with back-to-back singles, but has struggled musically in the last decade. Her star power, though, has gotten a boost thanks to “Idol.”
Clooney attends Apollo 13 event
George Clooney has joined astronauts Jim Lovell, Tom Stafford and Eugene “Gene” Cernan at a gala in Texas to celebrate the 45th anniversary of the Apollo 13 mission.
The event took place Tuesday night at an airport hangar in the Houston suburb of Sugar Land.
The Apollo 13 mission was the third intended to land on the moon, but after it launched April 11, 1970, an oxygen tank exploded, crippling the spacecraft. The crew was forced to orbit the moon instead of landing and returned safely on April 17. Lovell commanded the mission.
Clooney is a brand ambassador for Omega, which sponsored the event and outfitted the astronauts on the mission with watches.
The event culminated with dinner in a room designed to mimic the surface of the moon.
Soprano suspends space flight plans
A company helping British soprano Sarah Brightman prepare a flight to the International Space Station says she has put off the mission.
Space Adventures said in a statement Wednesday that the 54-year-old singer announced that “for personal family reasons her intentions have had to change and she is postponing her cosmonaut training and flight plans at this time.”
Brightman, who was to blast off to the station in a Russian Soyuz rocket on Sept. 1, said in March that she is working with composer Andrew Lloyd Webber, her ex-husband, to create a song she will sing in space.
Brightman’s decision followed last month’s launch failure of an unmanned Russian cargo spaceship, which was caused by a leak of propellant tanks in the Soyuz rocket carrying it into orbit.
The birthday bunch
Opera singer Patrice Munsel is 90. Movie producer George Lucas is 71. Movie director Robert Zemeckis is 64. Rock singer David Byrne is 63. Actor Tim Roth is 54. Actress Cate Blanchett is 46. Movie writer-director Sofia Coppola is 44. Actress Amber Tamblyn is 32. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is 31.