Poor old KMT presidential hopeful Lien Chan (
The DPP also proved itself prone to being lampooned over the past week with its latest series of newspaper and billboard advertisements that are trying to boost the vote rate for the referendum set to take place at the same time as the presidential election. Pop Stop was waiting for the MRT and noticed people giggling and pointing at a DPP billboard, which features an attractive model of about 30 dressed in a school uniform that makes her look suspiciously like someone out of a Japanese fetish magazine with a slogan that reads: "My first time. The whole world is watching." The same ad ran as a full front-page on Sunday's The Great Daily News
PHOTO: TAIPEI TIMES
The DPP has also jumped on the Infernal Affairs
PHOTO: TAIPEI TIMES
And in non-political news, two weeks ago, Pop Stop reported that Taiwan's boy band 5566 had ripped off the cover of Japanese band SMAP album for their own album. This week, Next Magazine (壹週刊) has uncovered yet another case of blatant cover-art copying, this time by the boy band R&B. The picture in question shows the five boys showering together at a sauna and is almost a photocopy of a photo used by Japanese boy band V6 for their own photo collection. This shouldn't be a surprise to anyone, though. When planning Mando-pop albums, it's standard practice for producers to hand songwriters Western pop music CDs and essentially tell them to copy certain songs for local singers. It seems logical that this practice would spill over into the cover art.
Chinese business news Web site icxo.com and the World Human Resources Laboratory released a list last week of the top stars in China, Hong Kong and Taiwan, according to personal worth. Among the men, Jackie Chan
On the women's side, Zhang Ziyi
Most heroes are remembered for the battles they fought. Taiwan’s Black Bat Squadron is remembered for flying into Chinese airspace 838 times between 1953 and 1967, and for the 148 men whose sacrifice bought the intelligence that kept Taiwan secure. Two-thirds of the squadron died carrying out missions most people wouldn’t learn about for another 40 years. The squadron lost 15 aircraft and 148 crew members over those 14 years, making it the deadliest unit in Taiwan’s military history by casualty rate. They flew at night, often at low altitudes, straight into some of the most heavily defended airspace in Asia.
This month the government ordered a one-year block of Xiaohongshu (小紅書) or Rednote, a Chinese social media platform with more than 3 million users in Taiwan. The government pointed to widespread fraud activity on the platform, along with cybersecurity failures. Officials said that they had reached out to the company and asked it to change. However, they received no response. The pro-China parties, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), immediately swung into action, denouncing the ban as an attack on free speech. This “free speech” claim was then echoed by the People’s Republic of China (PRC),
Many people in Taiwan first learned about universal basic income (UBI) — the idea that the government should provide regular, no-strings-attached payments to each citizen — in 2019. While seeking the Democratic nomination for the 2020 US presidential election, Andrew Yang, a politician of Taiwanese descent, said that, if elected, he’d institute a UBI of US$1,000 per month to “get the economic boot off of people’s throats, allowing them to lift their heads up, breathe, and get excited for the future.” His campaign petered out, but the concept of UBI hasn’t gone away. Throughout the industrialized world, there are fears that
Like much in the world today, theater has experienced major disruptions over the six years since COVID-19. The pandemic, the war in Ukraine and social media have created a new normal of geopolitical and information uncertainty, and the performing arts are not immune to these effects. “Ten years ago people wanted to come to the theater to engage with important issues, but now the Internet allows them to engage with those issues powerfully and immediately,” said Faith Tan, programming director of the Esplanade in Singapore, speaking last week in Japan. “One reaction to unpredictability has been a renewed emphasis on
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