Jay Chou (
Several years after the peak of F4's popularity in Taiwan, the four-piece boy band has found a new market in Japan, where the release of Meteor Shower (流星雨) took the band into the top 10 on Japan's main pop chart, marking a first for a Taiwanese band. Previously, the only non-Japanese to make it onto the country's pop chart were Jackie Chan (成龍) and three South Korean singers, all of whom sung in Japanese. F4's album is entirely in Mandarin and still squeezed its way into the No. 10 spot. Whatever's hot in Japan eventually makes its way to Taiwan, so could F4's success there portend a strong comeback at home? Watch for it this summer.
China's hottest export, Zhang Ziyi (
PHOTO: TAIPEI TIMES
The entertainment world suffered a grievous loss this week when one of the greatest Taiwanese comedians and actors, Ni Min-jan (
According to Ni's friends, the legendary veteran comedian had been greatly agitated by recent financial and family problems and suffered severe depression without realizing it.
Ni's second wife, Lee Li-hua (
PHOTO: TAIPEI TIMES
Since Ni's 83-year-old mom has been hospitalized for cancer treatment, the family thought the news would be too much for her and decided to lie about Ni's death as long as they could. One of Ni's best friends, Yu Tien (
On a much happier note, Taiwanese beauty Chen Xiao-xuan (陳孝萱) recently confirmed the good news of her pregnancy after dodging rumors and questions for weeks. She and her metrosexual boyfriend Zhan
Ren-xiong (
PHOTO: TAIPEI TIMES
There is a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) plot to put millions at the mercy of the CCP using just released AI technology. This isn’t being overly dramatic. The speed at which AI is improving is exponential as AI improves itself, and we are unprepared for this because we have never experienced anything like this before. For example, a few months ago music videos made on home computers began appearing with AI-generated people and scenes in them that were pretty impressive, but the people would sprout extra arms and fingers, food would inexplicably fly off plates into mouths and text on
On the final approach to Lanshan Workstation (嵐山工作站), logging trains crossed one last gully over a dramatic double bridge, taking the left line to enter the locomotive shed or the right line to continue straight through, heading deeper into the Central Mountains. Today, hikers have to scramble down a steep slope into this gully and pass underneath the rails, still hanging eerily in the air even after the bridge’s supports collapsed long ago. It is the final — but not the most dangerous — challenge of a tough two-day hike in. Back when logging was still underway, it was a quick,
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
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