Talk of the town: SuBo's showing eastern promise

IT'S a meteoric rise to stardom that's taken her from Blackburn to Beijing.

Singing sensation Susan Boyle is limbering up her vocal chords for her biggest performance yet – in front of 400 million people on the set of China's Got Talent.

She even recorded a commercial for the show in Cantonese Chinese.

SuBo, 50, will sing a Chinese version of the opera classic Nessum Dorma to a colossal crowd on July 10, with the event being screened across Asia.

In a reversal of current manufacturing trends, it's comforting to see a Chinese appetite for a British export.

MSPs given their five-minute warning

UNSURPRISINGLY, there were lots of MSPs wanting their say in yesterday's debate on the new anti-sectarianism law, so deputy presiding officer John Scott announced speeches would be restricted to five minutes each.

First up was Midlothian South SNP MSP Christine Grahame. "I mustn't take it personally," she began. "But every time I stand up there is a warning."

Stephen's great escapes

IS there something TV presenter-turned-communications guru Stephen Jardine isn't telling us?

"When I left the Paris bureau of GMTV they closed it down six months later. I left GMTV and then it went," he confessed as he announced he was quitting STV's teatime show, The Hour.

He was adamant at the time that the show had a bright future, but just weeks later it too is being axed from its daily slot, although it will return as a weekly show after a summer break.

So, the question has to be asked, is the man just born lucky or is he blessed with visions of the future?

Any tips on who is going to win Wimbledon, Stephen?

Racy reads revealed

THEY were the novels nobody was ever supposed to read. Now, the National Library of Scotland (NLS) is hosting a Banned Books exhibition on some of the most controversial material ever written.

Lady Chatterley's Lover and Lolita are among the books featured. The scandals surrounding the DH Lawrence and Vladimir Nabokov classics will be explored in the NLS exhibition.

Lawrence's sexually explicit 1928 tale of an upper-class woman's affair with a gamekeeper was banned in the UK until 1960.

Nabokov's 1955 work Lolita, depicting a man's infatuation with a young teenage girl, was temporarily banned in several countries including Britain and France.