It's no secret that Hong Kong singer/actress Anita Mui (梅艷芳) has had some health problems of late, but Next Magazine (壹週刊) seems to be wandering onto thin legal ice in its latest issue by announcing that Mui is suffering from cervical cancer.
Mui has tried to silence the reports in the Hong Kong media about her health problems, to no avail, and threatened to sue anyone who writes erroneous stories on the subject. Never one to fear a lawsuit, Next references unnamed sources to back its claim that Mui has come down with the deadly disease. As evidence, the report says her family allegedly has been burning a lot of ghost money and carrying out various prayer rituals. Also, she's wearing black-bead bracelets that carry religious significance, and spent a night in hospital two weeks ago, where she received numerous mid-night hospital visits from famous friends like William So (蘇永康) and Nicholas Tse (謝霆鋒).
Mui said, however, that her hospital stay was not to treat anything as serious as the tabloids were suggesting. But so far, she hasn't clearly stated what ailment she is suffering from. The ominous element in the story is the fact that her sister died of cervical cancer three years ago at the age of 41.
Leaving the serious stuff behind and diving into the inane news that Pop Stop enjoys most, the gloves have come off and the claws are out in the battle between Sun Yanzi (孫燕姿) fans and S.H.E. fans after the g-music billboard chart was released last week. The chart showed that Yanzi had edged out the cutesy trio of Selina (S), Hebe (H) and Ella (E) to grab first place in sales and since then S.H.E. fans have been going for the jugular in online chat rooms. In the first week of its release on Aug. 22, Yanzi's album The Moment sold over 250,000 copies, just a few thousand more than S.H.E.
Selina and Hebe may have fed the flames of their fans' ire by telling media after the results came out that no matter what the chart says, "S.H.E.'s album will always be number one in our hearts and in the hearts of our fans."
The messages posted by rabid fans were so vitriolic, top executives for Yanzi and S.H.E.'s respective record labels tried to urge restraint from fans and praised their competitors. The calls for harmony are nice, but Pop Stop is really hoping for a rumble in Hsimenting between the two camps.
Leaving the pettiness of Taiwan teenie bopper fans behind, doe-eyed singer Jolin Tsai (蔡依林) took her show to Las Vegas, of all places, for a one-off concert last weekend at the Mandalay Bay resort and casino. It's not certain how many Chinese music fans made the trek to Las Vegas for the show, but she probably doesn't care, the one-hour show earned her a cool NT$2.5 million.
Also earning a quick American buck recently is Lee Hom Wang (王力宏), who signed up with McDonald's for the company's new international ad campaign. Lee Hom will be the voice in Chinese-speaking areas for the four-minute ditty composed by McDonald's headquarters. Just for recording the song, Lee Hom is reportedly raking in over seven figures, albeit in NT dollars.
Lee Hom will be performing in Taipei on Oct. 11 so if you haven't seen the ad on TV by then, you can probably hear the song at the show.
If we're to believe the Liberty Times (自由時報), the past week has seen an invasion of foreign stars looking to run off with Taiwanese people's money.
"If Taiwan's entertainment industry can't improve itself and create a larger space for the arts, then sooner or later, foreign artists will run away with our money," said the paper's column "Scissors" (剪刀) in its edition last Thursday. The column followed up on Tuesday in a piece titled "Korean stars aren't gods" by pillorying Korean TV star Han Jae-seok (韓在石) for failing to show up at a press conference. According to the column, the actor, who was reported to have had to attend an urgent meeting at the time, was not showing the proper respect to the Taiwanese press.
Pop Stop will be curious to see if "Scissors" has anything to say about Japanese E-cup porn star Asakawa Ran coming to Taiwan to launch a new career. Whatever she does, it won't be porn, because that's illegal here, and anyway, the market was cornered by that Taiwan Plumber (台灣水電工) movie that's all over the Web.
Taiwan has next to no political engagement in Myanmar, either with the ruling military junta nor the dozens of armed groups who’ve in the last five years taken over around two-thirds of the nation’s territory in a sprawling, patchwork civil war. But early last month, the leader of one relatively minor Burmese revolutionary faction, General Nerdah Bomya, who is also an alleged war criminal, made a low key visit to Taipei, where he met with a member of President William Lai’s (賴清德) staff, a retired Taiwanese military official and several academics. “I feel like Taiwan is a good example of
March 2 to March 8 Gunfire rang out along the shore of the frontline island of Lieyu (烈嶼) on a foggy afternoon on March 7, 1987. By the time it was over, about 20 unarmed Vietnamese refugees — men, women, elderly and children — were dead. They were hastily buried, followed by decades of silence. Months later, opposition politicians and journalists tried to uncover what had happened, but conflicting accounts only deepened the confusion. One version suggested that government troops had mistakenly killed their own operatives attempting to return home from Vietnam. The military maintained that the
“M yeolgong jajangmyeon (anti-communism zhajiangmian, 滅共炸醬麵), let’s all shout together — myeolgong!” a chef at a Chinese restaurant in Dongtan, located about 35km south of Seoul, South Korea, calls out before serving a bowl of Korean-style zhajiangmian —black bean noodles. Diners repeat the phrase before tucking in. This political-themed restaurant, named Myeolgong Banjeom (滅共飯館, “anti-communism restaurant”), is operated by a single person and does not take reservations; therefore long queues form regularly outside, and most customers appear sympathetic to its political theme. Photos of conservative public figures hang on the walls, alongside political slogans and poems written in Chinese characters; South
Taipei Mayor Chiang Wan-an (蔣萬安) announced last week a city policy to get businesses to reduce working hours to seven hours per day for employees with children 12 and under at home. The city promised to subsidize 80 percent of the employees’ wage loss. Taipei can do this, since the Celestial Dragon Kingdom (天龍國), as it is sardonically known to the denizens of Taiwan’s less fortunate regions, has an outsize grip on the government budget. Like most subsidies, this will likely have little effect on Taiwan’s catastrophic birth rates, though it may be a relief to the shrinking number of
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