Taiwan’s paparazzi outdid themselves this week by portraying actress Annie Yi (伊能靜) as a partying harlot who doesn’t want anything to do with her husband, Harlem Yu (庾澄慶), and their son, Harry (哈利), after the Liberty Times (自由時報) (the Taipei Times’ sister newspaper) and Next Magazine (壹週刊) published photos of the singer and movie star walking hand-in-hand with fellow Taiwanese actor Laurence Huang (黃維德).
Rumors of the former soap stars’ affair have been doing the rounds for a while, even before they both moved to Beijing to pursue acting careers in China. Reports claim that the two once lived in the same apartment building and currently have flats in the same complex.
The incriminating snaps, which clearly show the two holding hands while crossing a Beijing street, seem to put the matter to bed, as it were. When asked for comment, Yu denied that he and his wife were separating.
The images, incidentally, eclipse earlier rumors that Yi was involved with Liu Tao (劉韜), the former owner of a talent agency, which emerged when the pair were photographed eating dinner together and singing at a KTV. Liu’s associates promptly stopped tongues wagging by revealing he bats for the other team.
With so much rumor and innuendo surrounding Yi, perhaps Yu should have listened to his mother, who reportedly advised him against marrying the actress.
Yu’s mother — who, in the picture published in Next, bears a striking resemblance to North Korean dictator Kim Jong-il — has also complained that she is now the primary female caregiver for Harry.
Fortunetellers couldn’t help but weigh in on the whole affair. After studying Huang’s nose, the geomancers determined that he must be good in bed. That’s right, in Taiwan its not big hands or big feet, but a sharp nose that reveals sexual prowess.
The subtext of the whole “scandal,” it seems to Pop Stop’s feminist take, is this: Men, you may leave your family back in Taiwan and have a second wife (or girlfriend) and live it up in China, but Yi is blazing new ground and proving that what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.
Although nothing compared to Vivi Wang’s (王婉霏) infamous “black forest incident” or Liu Zhen’s (劉真) nipple slip, punters got more than their fare share of skin this week when Shatina Chen (陳思璇) showed off a considerable amount of her leggy assets. The former “queen of the catwalk” had been laying low since she was caught last year in a late-night rendezvous with a married man on Yanmingshan. She returned to the spotlight this week in high style after performing a sexy number at a press conference during which she wore a skimpy black skirt that provided a clear view of her white knickers. Is there nothing models won’t expose for a little exposure?
If gossip rags are to be believed, Chen’s long legs were alluring enough to enrapture David Tao (陶吉吉), who sweated through her performance and drooled over her afterwards — an amazing feat, really, because Tao is notorious for pursuing sweet young thangs.
Yesterday’s United Evening News reported the suicide of Ivy Li (黎礎寧), runner-up in the talent show One Million Star’s (超級星光大道) third series.
Li reportedly took her own life by burning charcoal in her car in Taichung City.
Google unveiled an artificial intelligence tool Wednesday that its scientists said would help unravel the mysteries of the human genome — and could one day lead to new treatments for diseases. The deep learning model AlphaGenome was hailed by outside researchers as a “breakthrough” that would let scientists study and even simulate the roots of difficult-to-treat genetic diseases. While the first complete map of the human genome in 2003 “gave us the book of life, reading it remained a challenge,” Pushmeet Kohli, vice president of research at Google DeepMind, told journalists. “We have the text,” he said, which is a sequence of
On a harsh winter afternoon last month, 2,000 protesters marched and chanted slogans such as “CCP out” and “Korea for Koreans” in Seoul’s popular Gangnam District. Participants — mostly students — wore caps printed with the Chinese characters for “exterminate communism” (滅共) and held banners reading “Heaven will destroy the Chinese Communist Party” (天滅中共). During the march, Park Jun-young, the leader of the protest organizer “Free University,” a conservative youth movement, who was on a hunger strike, collapsed after delivering a speech in sub-zero temperatures and was later hospitalized. Several protesters shaved their heads at the end of the demonstration. A
Every now and then, even hardcore hikers like to sleep in, leave the heavy gear at home and just enjoy a relaxed half-day stroll in the mountains: no cold, no steep uphills, no pressure to walk a certain distance in a day. In the winter, the mild climate and lower elevations of the forests in Taiwan’s far south offer a number of easy escapes like this. A prime example is the river above Mudan Reservoir (牡丹水庫): with shallow water, gentle current, abundant wildlife and a complete lack of tourists, this walk is accessible to nearly everyone but still feels quite remote.
In August of 1949 American journalist Darrell Berrigan toured occupied Formosa and on Aug. 13 published “Should We Grab Formosa?” in the Saturday Evening Post. Berrigan, cataloguing the numerous horrors of corruption and looting the occupying Republic of China (ROC) was inflicting on the locals, advocated outright annexation of Taiwan by the US. He contended the islanders would welcome that. Berrigan also observed that the islanders were planning another revolt, and wrote of their “island nationalism.” The US position on Taiwan was well known there, and islanders, he said, had told him of US official statements that Taiwan had not