NEW YORK: A music journalist who worked on Courtney Love’s long-awaited memoir has sued her, saying that the rock singer failed to compensate him.
Anthony Bozza, known for his articles in Rolling Stone magazine and his biography of rap giant Eminem, said that Love — the widow of Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain — owed him more than $200,000.
In a lawsuit filed in New York last week, Bozza said that Love has received $400,000 out of a $1.2 million advance from publisher HarperCollins for the yet-to-be-released book.
In the lawsuit, Bozza said that he sent drafts of the introduction and first two chapters to Love in 2012 and that she responded by e-mail “that the work was ‘... beautiful!!!!’“
But by mid-2014, Bozza said that Love told him by text message that she had started working with a new writer, who turned out to be “worthless” and had put the project in “even more chaos.”
Bozza said that he was never terminated but charged that new writers were using his work as a base.
Love and HarperCollins did not immediately comment on the lawsuit.
In an interview last year with Britain’s Daily Telegraph newspaper, Love was quoted as saying that she rejected Bozza’s draft because it was too revealing.
Love, who enjoyed success as the frontwoman of alternative rock band Hole, is infamous for her volatile personality and struggles with substance abuse.
But she has recently shown a softer side as she appears at premieres for a new documentary about her late husband, “Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck,” on which she cooperated.
Courtney sued by coauthor of memoir
Courtney sued by coauthor of memoir
Three-year heatwave bleached half the planet’s coral reefs: study
PARIS: A study published on Tuesday showed that more than half of the world’s coral reefs were bleached between 2014-2017 — a record-setting episode now being eclipsed by another series of devastating heatwaves.
The analysis concluded that 51 percent of the world’s reefs endured moderate or worse bleaching while 15 percent experienced significant mortality over the three-year period known as the “Third Global Bleaching Event.”
It was “by far the most severe and widespread coral bleaching event on record,” said Sean Connolly, one the study’s authors and a senior scientist at the Panama-based Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute.
“And yet, reefs are currently experiencing an even more severe Fourth Event, which started in early 2023,” Connolly said in a statement.
When the sea overheats, corals eject the microscopic algae that provides their distinct color and food source.
Unless ocean temperatures return to more tolerable levels, bleached corals are unable to recover and eventually die of starvation.
“Our findings demonstrate that the impacts of ocean warming on coral reefs are accelerating, with the near certainty that ongoing warming will cause large-scale, possibly irreversible, degradation of these essential ecosystems,” said the study in the journal Nature Communications.
An international team of scientists analyzed data from more than 15,000 in-water and aerial surveys of reefs around the world over the 2014-2017 period.
They combined the data with satellite-based heat stress measurements and used statistical models to estimate how much bleaching occurred around the world.
No time to recover
The two previous global bleaching events, in 1998 and 2010, had lasted one year.
“2014-17 was the first record of a global coral bleaching event lasting much beyond a single year,” the study said.
“Ocean warming is increasing the frequency, extent, and severity of tropical-coral bleaching and mortality.”
Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, for instance, saw peak heat stress increase each year between 2014 and 2017.
“We are seeing that reefs don’t have time to recover properly before the next bleaching event occurs,” said Scott Heron, professor of physics at James Cook University in Australia.
A major scientific report last year warned that the world’s tropical coral reefs have likely reached a “tipping point” — a shift that could trigger massive and often permanent changes in the natural world.
The global scientific consensus is that most coral reefs would perish at warming of 1.5C above preindustrial levels — the ambitious, long-term limit countries agreed to pursue under the 2015 Paris climate accord.
Global temperatures exceeded 1.5C on average between 2023-2025, the European Union’s climate monitoring service, Copernicus, said last month.
“We are only just beginning to analyze bleaching and mortality observations from the current bleaching event,” Connolly told AFP.
“However the overall level of heat stress was extraordinarily high, especially in 2023-2024, comparable to or higher than what was observed in 2014-2017, at least in some regions,” he said.
He said the Pacific coastline of Panama experienced “dramatically worse heat stress than they had ever experienced before, and we observed considerable coral mortality.”
