Local singer and TV host Luo Zhi-xiang (
The daily's paparazzi team caught Luo spending a night at Selina's place last week. His agent refuted the finding, drawn from an 18-hour-long stakeout, by saying the innocents were playing mahjong with friends.
A few days later, the same team spotted Luo at Room 18 doing a hot dance with a young lady. His agent was called up, again, but insisted that Luo was just practicing dances steps with a professional dancer. It would appear that to be a star's agent, you need to be a quick, resourceful and a chronic liar.
Reproached as the evil vamp responsible for the suicide of local comedian Ni Min-jan (
Zhang Yimou's (
Hong Kong pop star Sammi Cheng (
Remember Ken Yu (
"My son is a simple and sensitive person. So we bought the house as his tropical retreat," his mom is quoted as saying in the Chinese-language dailies. Pop Stop is of course impressed by these touching parental displays of love and is bound to wonder if this is why the prodigal son has turned out the way he has?
Hong Kong superstar-turned-housewife Cherie Chung (鍾楚紅) is one of the few good things that has come out of the self-important celebrity circle, as she has been a diligent volunteer for the environmental group Friends of the Earth. When other high-society dames spend the day having afternoon tea and enjoying a luxurious spa, the retired diva is busy standing on the sidewalks tracking down fume-emitting vehicles and going to remote villages to work with the locals on environmental projects.
It is barely 10am and the queue outside Onigiri Bongo already stretches around the block. Some of the 30 or so early-bird diners sit on stools, sipping green tea and poring over laminated menus. Further back it is standing-room only. “It’s always like this,” says Yumiko Ukon, who has run this modest rice ball shop and restaurant in the Otsuka neighbourhood of Tokyo for almost half a century. “But we never run out of rice,” she adds, seated in her office near a wall clock in the shape of a rice ball with a bite taken out. Bongo, opened in 1960 by
Common sense is not that common: a recent study from the University of Pennsylvania concludes the concept is “somewhat illusory.” Researchers collected statements from various sources that had been described as “common sense” and put them to test subjects. The mixed bag of results suggested there was “little evidence that more than a small fraction of beliefs is common to more than a small fraction of people.” It’s no surprise that there are few universally shared notions of what stands to reason. People took a horse worming drug to cure COVID! They think low-traffic neighborhoods are a communist plot and call
Over the years, whole libraries of pro-People’s Republic of China (PRC) texts have been issued by commentators on “the Taiwan problem,” or the PRC’s desire to annex Taiwan. These documents have a number of features in common. They isolate Taiwan from other areas and issues of PRC expansion. They blame Taiwan’s rhetoric or behavior for PRC actions, particularly pro-Taiwan leadership and behavior. They present the brutal authoritarian state across the Taiwan Strait as conciliatory and rational. Even their historical frames are PRC propaganda. All of this, and more, colors the latest “analysis” and recommendations from the International Crisis Group, “The Widening
The sprawling port city of Kaohsiung seldom wins plaudits for its beauty or architectural history. That said, like any other metropolis of its size, it does have a number of strange or striking buildings. This article describes a few such curiosities, all but one of which I stumbled across by accident. BOMBPROOF HANGARS Just north of Kaohsiung International Airport, hidden among houses and small apartment buildings that look as though they were built between 15 and 30 years ago, are two mysterious bunker-like structures that date from the airport’s establishment as a Japanese base during World War II. Each is just about