Chinese pop diva Faye Wong's (王菲) husband, Chinese actor Li Yapeng (李亞鵬), said in his blog yesterday the couple's newborn daughter Li Yan (李嫣) has received surgery for a cleft lip in the US.
"Now our daughter has received treatment and is resting at home. Everything went well," Li Yapeng wrote in response to a story that was first reported in the Chinese-language Liberty Times, the Taipei Times' sister newspaper.
Li said he and his friends plan to set up a charity for children with cleft lips.
"The corrective surgery Yan received in the US doesn't exist in China. We have contacted hospitals in the US and medical groups. We plan to set up a charity with some friends," he said.
Li also wrote that babies with cleft lips are "gods" according to South American mythology, and there are hundreds of thousands like Yan born to parents in China every year.
Li Yan was reportedly born in Beijing on May 27.
Wong, a Beijing native who made her name in Hong Kong, started out in mainstream Chinese pop but branched out into more alternative fare.
She was hugely popular in China and Hong Kong in the mid-1990s but has unofficially retired from the entertainment scene in recent years.
Wong also has another daughter from her previous marriage to Chinese rocker Dou Wei (
Meanwhile, Los Angeles Police said that actor Lou Diamond Phillips, who starred in the 1987 film La Bamba, was jailed early on Friday on suspicion of domestic abuse against his live-in girlfriend.
Officers responding to a domestic violence call in the Los Angeles suburb of Northridge took Phillips, 44, into custody, police spokeswoman Martha Garcia said. She said the actor was held on US$50,000 bail.
"He was involved in a verbal argument with his live-in girlfriend which escalated to physical abuse," Garcia said. "He was arrested on suspicion of co-habitant abuse."
A spokesman for Phillips, best known for his role as teenage rock 'n' roll pioneer Ritchie Valens in La Bamba, said the performer had been released from custody.
"He was released on his own recognizance a little bit before noon," his publicist said. "There have been no charges pressed and it was a misunderstanding."
Phillips was nominated for a Golden Globe award for his work in the 1988 film Stand and Deliver and has since had dozens of film and TV roles.
Paris Hilton got no love this week from her baby, pet kinkajou Baby Luv -- in fact, the racoon-like animal bit her.
The heiress was not badly hurt but did visit a hospital emergency room to receive a tetanus shot, her publicist, Elliot Mintz, said Friday.
Hilton was frolicking with her exotic pet early Tuesday morning "the way some people play with their cats and dogs" when the animal became excited, Mintz said.
"Baby Luv bit her. It's a superficial bite on her left arm," he said.
Hilton, concerned that she was bleeding, called Mintz at 3am, and he took her to the hospital.
"She was seen by a doctor, who treated the wound, gave her a tetanus shot, cleaned the wound and applied something to it," Mintz said.
The 25-year-old star of US reality series Simple Life and Mintz left the hospital around 5:30am.
She also felt well enough to continue promotions for her highly anticipated debut album Paris, set for release on Aug. 22.
Hilton's breathy single Stars Are Blind has already jumped up Billboard's dance music charts.
"Yesterday she did two photo shoots and two magazine covers," Mintz said. "She's fine. Anyone in this situation would do well to have the wound looked at."
Baby Luv was checked out by a veterinarian on Wednesday.
"I don't view kinkajous as aggressive animals. The same kind of thing could have occurred with a German Shepherd," Mintz said.
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
The following three paragraphs are just some of what the local Chinese-language press is reporting on breathlessly and following every twist and turn with the eagerness of a soap opera fan. For many English-language readers, it probably comes across as incomprehensibly opaque, so bear with me briefly dear reader: To the surprise of many, former pop singer and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) ex-lawmaker Yu Tien (余天) of the Taiwan Normal Country Promotion Association (TNCPA) at the last minute dropped out of the running for committee chair of the DPP’s New Taipei City chapter, paving the way for DPP legislator Su
It’s hard to know where to begin with Mark Tovell’s Taiwan: Roads Above the Clouds. Having published a travelogue myself, as well as having contributed to several guidebooks, at first glance Tovell’s book appears to inhabit a middle ground — the kind of hard-to-sell nowheresville publishers detest. Leaf through the pages and you’ll find them suffuse with the purple prose best associated with travel literature: “When the sun is low on a warm, clear morning, and with the heat already rising, we stand at the riverside bike path leading south from Sanxia’s old cobble streets.” Hardly the stuff of your
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