Now that Cecilia Cheung (張柏芝) and Nicholas Tse (謝霆鋒) have ended weeks of rumors by formally announcing plans for a divorce, mentions of the former couple in gossip columns have fallen off precipitously. This must come as a relief to other attention-hungry celebrities.
Model and actor Mike He (賀軍翔) seized the opportunity for more exposure by releasing naked snaps from a recent shoot in the south of France. One photograph shows He, who has modeled for Club Monaco, Dior and Puma, on his knees looking demurely over his shoulder into the camera lens, wearing just a pair of tight gray underpants that leave nothing to the imagination. Another is a profile shot of He naked on a bed, holding a paperback novel and gazing pensively into the distance with only a rumpled sheet covering what the Apple Daily called “the third point” (第三點).
(Pop Stop readers will remember that Taiwanese media sometimes rate revealing photographs by “exposure points” (露點): one for a breast, two for both breasts, and three for a crotch shot.)
Photo courtesy of KATE book
The pictures are for a photo book that He’s publisher has reportedly spent NT$5 million preparing. It will be released just before He starts serving his compulsory military service, which gossip rags have previously accused him of dodging.
The Apple Daily reported that He had originally planned to bare just his torso. After arriving in France and having a long heart-to-heart discussion with his manager, however, He decided to mark his eight sexy years in show business by revealing the full glory of his well-muscled limbs, taut buttocks and ripped six-pack.
“I felt shy at first, but I want to create something that will let me remember being 28 years old and in my prime,” He said. “Also, I want to create a book worthy of collecting, that will get people really excited.”
But He still suffered stage fright. On the day of the naked photo shoot, he requested a closed set with just his photographer and manager present. His stylist forgot to prepare a fresh pair of briefs, so, as the Apple Daily put it, “He wore his own underpants into battle.” As the photographer gently nudged him into slipping off that final article of clothing, He was heard muttering “let’s do it!” while taking deep breaths.
Not all photos in the book will show He disporting in the altogether. One shoot features him wearing a striped Breton shirt and a scarf for that extra Gallic touch. In another set of pics, Ha frolics in a field of lavender and sensuously blows the seeds off a dandelion puff.
Despite the bucolic location, the shoot was not without its challenges. Video footage showed He grabbing his leg after stepping on a nettle. “Hey, help me!” he called out. “I don’t want to,” responded a cheeky off-camera crewmember.
Also paying extra attention to her body these days is Barbie Hsu (徐熙媛, aka Big S, 大S), who was rushed to the hospital last month after fainting. At the time, her mother blamed the collapse on Hsu’s vegetarian diet, though gossip rags speculated that she had been weakened by a rumored miscarriage.
Last week, however, Hsu let slip during the Beijing premiere of her new film My Kingdom (大武生) that she and her husband Wang Xiaofei (汪小菲) hope to become parents during the Year of the Dragon.
“I want to have a baby very soon and focus on my family,” Hsu said.
She also dismissed her fainting spell as the result of overwork and poor nutrition, adding that she has been taking traditional Chinese medicine to build up her strength.
Hsu told reporters that she hopes My Kingdom will be a “comma” in her film career, not a “period,” even though she is crossing her fingers that her menstrual periods will stop soon. If she does get knocked up, Big S plans to take a break from making movies, but says she will return to work as long as her figure snaps back into shape.
Ajay Verma, a consultant gastroenterologist at Kettering general hospital in Northamptonshire, says our gut is a “complex machine.” “It is constantly providing us with the nutrition we need, initially to grow and develop, and then for us to survive, thrive and repair from injury and illness.” How can we keep it functioning well? Put simply: “Make sure what you put into it is balanced, and that you clear out its waste products adequately,” Verma says. “In a general gastroenterology clinic, the most common conditions we see are irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), gastroesophageal reflux disease, inflammatory bowel disease and constipation,” says Nisha
And so, in the wake of US President Donald Trump’s trip to the People’s Republic of China (PRC), all the experts on the Strait of Hormuz suddenly became experts on US-China-Taiwan relations. The Internet has certainly expanded human knowledge. Lots of these sudden experts made noise this week about Trump’s words after the meeting with PRC dictator Xi Jin-ping (習近平). Trump is going to sell out Taiwan! Longtime Taiwan commentator J. Michael Cole summed the situation up neatly in the Guardian: “We need to keep in mind that he has a tendency to say many things — sometimes contradicting himself within
Last week US President Donald Trump was asked by a reporter whether he would speak on the phone to the President of Taiwan. “l’ll speak to him. I speak to everybody. We have that situation very well in hand,” Trump said. This marked the second time in a couple of weeks he had said he would talk to the President of Taiwan. In 2016 he famously took a call from then-president Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文), when he was president-elect. Despite warnings that the apocalypse was nigh because of a phone call, the world quickly forgot about the conversation between two democratically-elected presidents.
The arithmetic is straightforward and uncomfortable. By the end of 2025, Taiwan had committed itself to a 50-30-20 electricity mix — half natural gas, 30 per cent coal, 20 per cent renewables. The Ministry of Economic Affairs’s (MOEA) own monthly energy reports tell a different story. Natural gas reached 47.8 per cent of generation last year. Coal stood at 35.4 per cent, comfortably above its target ceiling. Renewables came in at 13.1 per cent, well short of the 20 per cent Taipei had pledged a decade earlier. Installed renewable capacity reached roughly half of the 12 gigawatts (GW) the government
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