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.
Wooden houses wedged between concrete, crumbling brick facades with roofs gaping to the sky, and tiled art deco buildings down narrow alleyways: Taichung Central District’s (中區) aging architecture reveals both the allure and reality of the old downtown. From Indigenous settlement to capital under Qing Dynasty rule through to Japanese colonization, Taichung’s Central District holds a long and layered history. The bygone beauty of its streets once earned it the nickname “Little Kyoto.” Since the late eighties, however, the shifting of economic and government centers westward signaled a gradual decline in the area’s evolving fortunes. With the regeneration of the once
Even by the standards of Ukraine’s International Legion, which comprises volunteers from over 55 countries, Han has an unusual backstory. Born in Taichung, he grew up in Costa Rica — then one of Taiwan’s diplomatic allies — where a relative worked for the embassy. After attending an American international high school in San Jose, Costa Rica’s capital, Han — who prefers to use only his given name for OPSEC (operations security) reasons — moved to the US in his teens. He attended Penn State University before returning to Taiwan to work in the semiconductor industry in Kaohsiung, where he
In February of this year the Taipei Times reported on the visit of Lienchiang County Commissioner Wang Chung-ming (王忠銘) of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and a delegation to a lantern festival in Fuzhou’s Mawei District in Fujian Province. “Today, Mawei and Matsu jointly marked the lantern festival,” Wang was quoted as saying, adding that both sides “being of one people,” is a cause for joy. Wang was passing around a common claim of officials of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the PRC’s allies and supporters in Taiwan — KMT and the Taiwan People’s Party — and elsewhere: Taiwan and
Perched on Thailand’s border with Myanmar, Arunothai is a dusty crossroads town, a nowheresville that could be the setting of some Southeast Asian spaghetti Western. Its main street is the final, dead-end section of the two-lane highway from Chiang Mai, Thailand’s second largest city 120kms south, and the heart of the kingdom’s mountainous north. At the town boundary, a Chinese-style arch capped with dragons also bears Thai script declaring fealty to Bangkok’s royal family: “Long live the King!” Further on, Chinese lanterns line the main street, and on the hillsides, courtyard homes sit among warrens of narrow, winding alleyways and
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