Pop star Kylie Minogue has been voted the most inspirational breast cancer star for her willingness to speak openly and honestly about dealing with the disease. The Australian singer, 42, was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2005 and underwent surgery and hair-losing chemotherapy.
But Minogue, whose career began on the TV soap opera Neighbors, returned to the stage within a year and continues to perform. She toured 21 countries last year, and just released her 11th studio album, Aphrodite.
Minogue topped an online poll of 1,000 participants by British-based mastectomy-wear specialist Amoena, coming ahead of other celebrities affected by breast cancer like the late Linda McCartney and singer Olivia Newton-John.
“Kylie inspired many women to be more direct about their own fears, encouraging them to believe they would get through their ordeal,” Amoena spokeswoman Rhoda White said.
Other celebrities to publicly battle breast cancer include singer Sheryl Crow who campaigns for women to have regular mammograms, and British actress Lynn Redgrave who died of the disease earlier this year after writing a book about her battle.
The list also includes actresses Maggie Smith, Christine Applegate, Maura Tierney, Cynthia Nixon, Edie Falco, Jaclyn Smith, Kate Jackson, Sally Whittaker, singers Melissa Etheridge and Carly Simon.
Hip-hop star Kanye West is facing another kind of pain: embarrassment over his ambush of Taylor Swift last year — and he’s expressing his pain all over Twitter.
West unleashed a torrent of emotions on his official Twitter account Saturday, acknowledging once again that he was wrong for jumping on stage, grabbing the microphone from Swift at the MTV Video Music Awards and saying her trophy should have gone to Beyonce.
But the rapper-producer said that he has experienced enormous pain, been the subject of death wishes and suffered tremendous setback to his career. “How deep is the scar ... I bled hard ... cancelled [a] tour with the number one pop star in the world ... closed the doors of my clothing office,’’ he tweeted.
The multi-platinum, Grammy-winning superstar had been one of the decade’s most successful and critically acclaimed stars, despite sometimes boorish behavior and meltdowns at other awards shows when things did not go his way.
A recent member of Twitter, West has been an active user, posting not only his feelings, but new songs and other updates. He has over 900,000 followers since he joined earlier this summer.
“Man I love Twitter ... I’ve always been at the mercy of the press but no more ... The media tried to demonize me,’’ he tweeted Saturday.
Actress Maggie Cheung, in Venice on Saturday to promote a new film, said one reason she has pulled back from acting for now is the industry’s focus on youthful beauty.
In the meantime, she is pursuing a new passion, music, and allowing the aging process to take hold so she can in the future consider roles that don’t require the kind of youthful beauty she displayed in In the Mood for Love. Cheung said she has had no problem playing unglamorous roles, noting she has played a cat and a snake.
Cheung regrets she doesn’t play any instruments. Instead, she works with musicians to write music, which she then takes home and listens to over and over again until she is ready to write lyrics, and then sings over the tracks. She collaborates with the musicians by e-mail until it is time to record.
So far, none of the projects are for release. But Cheung said she would one day love to score a film, and is working on learning to edit images.
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
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby