Minister of Education Tu Cheng-sheng (杜正勝) seems to have unwittingly educated Hong Kong's glitterati on personal hygiene and public etiquette. The Apple Daily earlier this week published images of Hong Kong diva and actress Coco Chiang (蔣怡) with her finger up her nose having a good rout at a shopping mall.
Pop Stop readers will recall Tu kicked up a stink when he was "caught" picking his nose and sleeping during a legislative session. Government Information Office (GIO) Minister Shieh Jhy-wey (謝志偉) later claimed Tu's nasal fingering was a protest to poor behavior in the legislature. Hmmm.
At least Chiang wasn't sleeping on the job.
In other Hong Kong showbiz news, Maggie Cheung (張曼玉) reportedly can't get enough of European men. The Cannes Film Festival award-winning actress, who was once married to French director Olivier Assayas, spent five days shacked up in a hotel with a German mystery man. Calling their relationship "love at first sight," the actress seems to have moved on from her other failed love affairs.
Meanwhile, at home, before Taiwanese bombshell Lin Chih-ling (林志玲) came along, there was Stephanie Hsiao (蕭薔). Once described as the prettiest "artist" - whatever that means - in Taiwan, Hsiao has struggled to get back on top of the celebrity pedestal, though she still has considerable drawing power for gossip hounds.
A Chinese blog last week showed images of Hsiao being "forced" to drink at a KTV in China. The shots momentarily shattered the philanthropic image that Hisao had cultivated with stunts such as selling 100 autographed pictures of herself to raise money for wigs to give to chemotherapy patients. The model maintained her good-girl image by telling the media that she couldn't have been forced to drink because children were present.
Suzanne Hsiao (蕭淑慎) is back on the celebrity circuit. Well, sort of. Having recently left a rehabilitation center after testing positive last year for ketamine and cocaine, which she claimed originated from augmentation surgery, the singer's attempted comeback - this time on the big screen - isn't making much headway.
Apple reports that Hsiao agreed to star in a movie in which she removed her clothes for a cool NT$800,000. At the time the straight-to-DVD director Wong Jing (王晶) said the shamed starlet's talent could make her Taiwan's next sex queen. Offers for more movies have dried up, however, as the burgeoning actress' bedroom performance has been likened to that of a dead fish (死魚).
The problem with Marx’s famous remark that history repeats itself, first as tragedy, the second time as farce, is that the first time is usually farce as well. This week Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chair Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) made a pilgrimage to the People’s Republic of China (PRC) “to confer, converse and otherwise hob-nob” with Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officials. The visit was an instant international media hit, with major media reporting almost entirely shorn of context. “Taiwan’s main opposition leader landed in China Tuesday for a rare visit aimed at cross-strait ‘peace’”, crowed Agence-France Presse (AFP) from Shanghai. Rare!
What is the importance within the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) of the meeting between Xi Jinping (習近平), the leader Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文), the leader of the KMT? Local media is an excellent guide to determine how important — or unimportant — a news event is to the public. Taiwan has a vast online media ecosystem, and if a news item is gaining traction among readers, editors shift resources in near real time to boost coverage to meet the demand and drive up traffic. Cheng’s China trip is among the top headlines, but by no means
A recent report from the Environmental Management Administration of the Ministry of Environment highlights a perennial problem: illegal dumping of construction waste. In Taoyuan’s Yangmei District (楊梅) and Hsinchu’s Longtan District (龍潭) criminals leased 10,000 square meters of farmland, saying they were going to engage in horticulture. They then accepted between 40,000 and 50,000 cubic meters of construction waste from sites in northern Taiwan, charging less than the going rate for disposal, and dumped the waste concrete, tile, metal and glass onto the leased land. Taoyuan District prosecutors charged 33 individuals from seven companies with numerous violations of the law. This
Sunflower movement superstar Lin Fei-fan (林飛帆) once quipped that the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) could nominate a watermelon to run for Tainan mayor and win. Conversely, the DPP could run a living saint for mayor in Taipei and still lose. In 2022, the DPP ran with the closest thing to a living saint they could find: former Minister of Health and Welfare Chen Shih-chung (陳時中). During the pandemic, his polling was astronomically high, with the approval of his performance reaching as high as 91 percent in one TVBS poll. He was such a phenomenon that people printed out pop-up cartoon
RSS