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.
The US war on Iran has illuminated the deep interdependence of Asia on flows of oil and related items as raw materials that become the basis of modern human civilization. Australians and New Zealanders had a wake up call. The crisis also emphasizes how the Philippines is a swatch of islands linked by jet fuel. These revelations have deep implications for an invasion of Taiwan. Much of the commentary on the Taiwan scenario has looked at the disruptions to world trade, which will be in the trillions. However, the Iran war offers additional specific lessons for a Taiwan scenario. An insightful
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!
April 6 to April 13 Few expected a Japanese manga adaptation featuring four tall, long-haired heartthrobs and a plucky heroine to transform Taiwan’s television industry. But Meteor Garden (流星花園) took the nation by storm after premiering on April 12, 2001, single-handedly creating the “idol drama” (偶像劇) craze that captivated young viewers across Asia. The show was so successful that Japan produced its own remake in 2005, followed by South Korea, China and Thailand. Other channels quickly followed suit, with more than 50 such shows appearing over the following two years. Departing from the melodramatic
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
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