Jolie visits Haiti as goodwill ambassador
GENEVA, Feb 9, 2010 (AFP) — Movie star Angelina Jolie is due to arrive in quake-struck Haiti on Tuesday, the UN refugee agency said, a day after she visited Haitian children being treated in the neighbouring Dominican Republic.
Oscar-winning Jolie serves as a goodwill ambassador for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees.
UNHCR spokeswoman Sybella Wilkes in Geneva confirmed Jolie’s visit to Haiti, where some 200,000 people were killed and one million left homeless in the earthquake nearly a month ago.
But Wilkes declined to give details of the actress’s programme while in Haiti.
On Monday Jolie toured the pediatric wing of Dario Contreras Hospital, a leading trauma hospital in the Dominican capital Santo Domingo, with its director Hector Quezada, the hospital said.
Jolie was also joined by Gonzalo Vargas Llosa, the head of the UNHCR team for Haiti and the Dominican Republic and a son of Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa.
The actress and her partner, actor Brad Pitt, donated one million dollars to Doctors without Borders (Medecins sans Frontieres) in Haiti following the January 12 quake, the worst natural disaster on record in the Americas.
Meanwhile, in other Jolie related news, the actress and her companion, Brad Pitt, are suing a British newspaper over claims they were considering a multi-million-pound split, their lawyers said in a statement received Tuesday.
The weekly News of the World tabloid reported last month that the unmarried stars had visited a lawyer in December, and had agreed a deal on dividing their assets and access to their children.
“The publication of these false allegations is being treated as a serious misuse of private information and accordingly a claim form has… been issued in the High Court of Justice in London,” said Schillings lawyers.
The British paper’s story was picked up by a number of international news outlets, some of which cited US divorce lawyer Sorrell Trope as representing the couple, dubbed “Brangelina” by the press.
But Trope denied any links with them, according to comments cited by Schillings.
Lawyer Keith Schilling said the newspaper had rebuffed efforts to resolve the matter without going to court.
“The News of the World has failed to meet our clients reasonable demands for a retraction of and apology for these false and intrusive allegations which have now been widely republished by mainstream news outlets,” he said.
“We have advised them to bring proceedings which they have now done.”
The News of the World, part of Rupert Murdoch’s News International group and one of Britain’s biggest-selling papers which reguarly publishes scoops about celebrities, made no comment on the legal action.