Material trouble

Jerusalem, Oct. 9 (Reuters): Word that Madonna’s upcoming album includes a paean to a 16th-century Jewish mystic has prompted the rabbis who guard his legacy to accuse the pop idol of sacrilege and hint at divine punishment.

The Confessions on a Dance Floor collection includes a song titled Isaac ? in reference, entertainment media say, to Rabbi Isaac Luria, founder of the Kabbalah school of mysticism which counts Madonna, 47, as one of its devotees.

The custodians of Luria’s tomb in the Israeli town of Safed accused her of breaking a taboo. “There is a prohibition in Jewish law against using the holy name of our master, the Sage Isaac, for profit,” the seminary’s director, Rabbi Rafael Cohen, told the Israeli newspaper Maariv today.

Puff show

Ottawa (Reuters): Gruesome Canadian images of tobacco-damaged gums, lungs and hearts will form part of an exhibit at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, Canada’s health ministry said. The graphic images appear as health warnings on Canadian cigarette packs, and they will be part of an exhibition on objects designed to protect the mind and body from dangerous or stressful influences.

JLo border

Nogales (Mexico) (Reuters): Pop diva and actor Jennifer Lopez has put aside her usual glamour and is filming in a hilltop shantytown for a gritty movie about murders of hundreds of women on the US-Mexico border. Directed by Gregory Nava and co-starring Antonio Banderas, Bordertown is being shot in Nogales.