LOS ANGELES: Grammy-winning soul singer Mary J. Blige — who has earned critical acclaim and award nominations for her acting debut in last year’s “Mudbound” — celebrated her 47th birthday Thursday by getting a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
“I am so grateful, and I say that with confidence and not arrogance,” she told the crowd gathered for the star unveiling ceremony.
“I know my work and I understand what this means.”
Blige — the self-proclaimed “queen of hip-hop soul” who is best known for hits such as “No More Drama” and “Reminisce” — is a nine-time Grammy winner with tens of millions of records sold worldwide.
She earned a Golden Globe nomination and a Screen Actors Guild award nod — and is generating Oscars buzz — for her magnetic turn as Florence Jackson, a stoic housewife in Dee Rees’s civil rights drama “Mudbound.”
“Dee Rees called me and gave me a job and put my life back in motion with ‘Mudbound,’” Blige said.
“Dee, I want to thank you for calling me. I don’t think you understand what you did... You really really helped save my life,” the New York native added.
“‘Mudbound’ opened up doors and gave me strength that I didn’t even know I had.”
Rap mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs, who helped launch Blige’s career and produced most of her first album, was on hand to congratulate her.
“We would just dream — we were saying... ‘We want to be somebody, we want to be big,’” Combs said. “And we did that. Singing.”
Blige gushed about Combs, saying he helped keep her going in the hard times.
“I love this man so much,” she told the crowd.
Mary J. Blige gets star on Hollywood Walk of Fame
Mary J. Blige gets star on Hollywood Walk of Fame
Philippine VP Sara Duterte faces new impeachment bids as 1-year reprieve ends
- House voted to remove Duterte last year but process was stopped by Supreme Court
- Daughter of ex-president Rodrigo Duterte is seen as the frontrunner for 2028 vote
MANILA: Philippine Vice President Sara Duterte was hit with new impeachment complaints on Monday, in a relaunch of a political fight she survived last year.
The two complaints were filed to the House of Representatives accusing Duterte of misusing government funds — an accusation she already denied in 2025, when the House voted to remove her from office, but was prevented by a Supreme Court verdict, which stopped it citing constitutional safeguards.
The verdict gave Duterte temporary immunity against the same or similar complaint for one year, which lapsed in mid-January.
The first refiled complaint was endorsed by the three-member Makabayan bloc — a coalition of parties representing labor, peasant, youth, and human rights advocacy groups in the House — while the second was by Tindig Pilipinas, a coalition of pro‑democracy and civil society groups.
Both accused Duterte of betrayal of public trust over her alleged misuse of public funds and corruption, and one revived allegations that she threatened to assassinate her former ally President Ferdinand Marcos.
Representative Leila De Lima from the Mamamayang Liberal Party-list, who endorsed the Makabayan complaint, said in a statement that while last year’s impeachment move was stopped by the Supreme Court “based on a technicality,” now there are “sufficient grounds and impeachable offenses that could be proven during the hearings of the Committee on Justice.”
Duterte is the first sitting vice president to face impeachment in the country’s history. She has been embroiled in a row with Marcos, following the collapse of a powerful alliance between their families that brought them a landslide victory in the 2022 election.
Last year, she faced several impeachment complaints by a number of legislators and activist groups over a range of issues, including an alleged death threat that she publicly made against Marcos, his wife and the House speaker in 2024, and allegedly misusing millions of dollars in public funds.
The daughter of former president Rodrigo Duterte, widely seen as a frontrunner for the 2028 presidential election, has consistently denied wrongdoing, describing the moves against her as a political vendetta.
While last year’s attempts to remove Duterte from office were stopped, this time efforts are wider, according to Ben Cy, a lawyer with experience in political and criminal cases, as another complaint filed last month to the Office of the Ombudsman by former senator Antonio Trillanes — a vocal critic of the Duterte political family — who accused the vice president of plunder, malversation and graft.
“It will go to the impeachment court. There will be a trial based on the information released by Trillanes,” Cy told Arab News. “These I think are the strong cases.”
