VIEW THIS PAGE Until recently regarded as an A-lister, poor Eddie Peng (彭于晏) looks as if he’s being eclipsed by a younger rival in what could be interpreted as a delicious example of comeuppance, if you suspend disbelief long enough. Lego Li (李國毅), 23, starred alongside Peng in the series Honey and Clover (蜂蜜幸運草) last year and was subject to some light bullying on set, including the forced removal of his shoe, which he was then made to smell, the United Daily News reported last year.
The young upstart seems to have avoided post-traumatic stress disorder and went on to score the lead role in a new drama, Start Game (比賽開始), which as Peng has been put on ice by his agency and hasn’t worked for four months has set tongues wagging, reports the Liberty Times, the Taipei Times’ sister paper.
Peng, who turns 27 on Tuesday, is reportedly in the doghouse for being difficult. And getting caught telling fibs hasn’t helped his cause. After splitting from Mando-pop diva Jolin Tsai (蔡依林) last year, he said the pair hadn’t kept in contact. She now says they do.
A US federal jury has begun deliberations in a civil trial of South Korean pop star and actor Rain and his managers over the cancellation of his scheduled 2007 concert in Honolulu.
Hawaii-based Click Entertainment Inc alleges Rain and his agency breached a contract and defrauded it of US$500,000 in rights fees, plus nearly US$1 million in other expenses to stage the event.
The four-man, three-woman jury began deliberating on Wednesday morning to determine if and how much damages should be awarded.
Rain’s concert was canceled just days before the scheduled June 15, 2007, event at Aloha Stadium. It was supposed to be the first stop on the US segment of the singer’s Rain’s Coming world tour, which saw the icon play Taiwan in March of the same year.
Alt-rock chanteuse Faith Yang (楊乃文), who sang a duet with Jarvis Cocker at December’s Urban Simple Life, revealed in the Liberty Times that she threw her US computer engineer boyfriend to the curb six months ago. He had moved to Taiwan, but it wasn’t to his liking so he upped sticks, and that was the end of that. And now she has a new album out next month, the perfect time to divulge details of her private life.
And girls, if you’re in the marriage market, a very eligible bachelor is under pressure from his parents to get hitched soon. That David Tao (陶吉吉) at 39 has not been married before shouldn’t put you off. There’s probably nothing wrong with him.
“My lips lack the moisture of other people,” the self-declared homebody told the Liberty Times.
His mother says she will arrange a marriage for her son, so time is of the essence.
The singer has a new album out in May, which may go some way to explaining the energized search for a spouse.
All of which segues awkwardly to Edison Chen (陳冠希), whose film The Sniper (神鎗手) hits screens next month in Taiwan and Hong Kong. The flick was originally slated for release last year, but was shelved after photos of the star and eight female celebrities engaged in compromising poses found their way onto the Net.
In the movie, Chen is a supporting actor, but he has outshone his coworkers for all the wrong reasons. Promotional shots of The Sniper feature bare-chested hunks in camouflage slacks.
The press, as cynical as ever, was quick to point out that the bullet Chen received in the post on March 11 may not have been a threat after all, but, would you believe it, a PR stunt for the film. VIEW THIS PAGE
Taiwanese chip-making giant Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) plans to invest a whopping US$100 billion in the US, after US President Donald Trump threatened to slap tariffs on overseas-made chips. TSMC is the world’s biggest maker of the critical technology that has become the lifeblood of the global economy. This week’s announcement takes the total amount TSMC has pledged to invest in the US to US$165 billion, which the company says is the “largest single foreign direct investment in US history.” It follows Trump’s accusations that Taiwan stole the US chip industry and his threats to impose tariffs of up to 100 percent
From censoring “poisonous books” to banning “poisonous languages,” the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) tried hard to stamp out anything that might conflict with its agenda during its almost 40 years of martial law. To mark 228 Peace Memorial Day, which commemorates the anti-government uprising in 1947, which was violently suppressed, I visited two exhibitions detailing censorship in Taiwan: “Silenced Pages” (禁書時代) at the National 228 Memorial Museum and “Mandarin Monopoly?!” (請說國語) at the National Human Rights Museum. In both cases, the authorities framed their targets as “evils that would threaten social mores, national stability and their anti-communist cause, justifying their actions
In the run-up to World War II, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of Abwehr, Nazi Germany’s military intelligence service, began to fear that Hitler would launch a war Germany could not win. Deeply disappointed by the sell-out of the Munich Agreement in 1938, Canaris conducted several clandestine operations that were aimed at getting the UK to wake up, invest in defense and actively support the nations Hitler planned to invade. For example, the “Dutch war scare” of January 1939 saw fake intelligence leaked to the British that suggested that Germany was planning to invade the Netherlands in February and acquire airfields
The launch of DeepSeek-R1 AI by Hangzhou-based High-Flyer and subsequent impact reveals a lot about the state of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) today, both good and bad. It touches on the state of Chinese technology, innovation, intellectual property theft, sanctions busting smuggling, propaganda, geopolitics and as with everything in China, the power politics of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). PLEASING XI JINPING DeepSeek’s creation is almost certainly no accident. In 2015 CCP Secretary General Xi Jinping (習近平) launched his Made in China 2025 program intended to move China away from low-end manufacturing into an innovative technological powerhouse, with Artificial Intelligence
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