The second season of CTV's One Million Star (超級星光大道) "talent" show ended on a high note last Friday when club singer Lai Ming-wei (賴銘偉) beat favorite Liang Wen-yin (梁文音) to walk home with a diamond-studded trophy, an NT$1 million cash prize and a contract with Universal Music Taiwan.
Accused of being a ploy-driven rumor mill in the vernacular media, it is alleged One Million Star insiders unfairly aided Lai to boost ratings. Hostess Momoko Tao (陶子) put Chan Jen-hsiung (詹仁雄), the show's producer, on the spot by promising that he would jump into the ocean if such a nefarious scheme existed. The oath was first made popular by former Democratic Progressive Party legislator Wang Shih-cheng (王世堅), who has yet to honor his pre-election pledge to jump into the big blue if the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) won all eight of Taipei City's legislative districts.
In response to a slip in ratings, the "reality" show will hold preliminaries in Singapore, Japan and the US and raise the cash prize to NT$3 million.
PHOTO: TAIPEI TIMES
According to Apple Daily, the previous two seasons generated an estimated NT$1 billion for CTV and record company HIM.
Malaysian singer Gary Tsao (曹格) is having quite the time with gossip hounds lately. Two weeks after Tsao publicly grumbled that Aska Yang (楊宗緯) received all the limelight for songs he had written, the blabbermouth let loose on Hit FM music show Love DJ (allegedly under the influence of alcohol) and enthralled the audience by revealing a slew of dirty little showbiz secrets.
Tsao insinuated that a well-known local director had conducted affairs with several cast members and several prominent male stars are, allegedly, in the habit of "taking advantage of their fans." Other dalliances Tsao blabbed about included a high-ranking record company manager falling for both a singer and her mom at the same time and another having homoerotic crushes on the company's contracted male stars.
As for his own dirty laundry, the celebrity rat admitted that he once stalked Taiwan's top model, Patina Lin (林嘉綺), at Hong Kong International Airport without arousing her suspicions. How did he do it? "I'm quite good at stalking," Tsao was quoted as saying in the Liberty Times, the Taipei Times' sister newspaper.
Celebrity circles seem to be undergoing a surge of sexual hormones ever since actress and high-society belle Terri Kwan (關穎) ditched male model Jerry Huang (黃志瑋). Bachelors who deem themselves suitable prospects (read: wealthy and upper-class) are vying for the diva's attention.
A China Airlines pilot, a legal consultant and Chen Chu-he V(陳楚河), starlet and son of the late Bamboo Union godfather Chen Chi-li (陳啟禮), are said to be among Kwan's pursuers. Lin Chi-you (林知佑), backed by the assets of family-run Hua Nan Financial Holdings Co, however, is rumored to be in the lead, for now.
The two were caught by paparazzi enjoying a romantic dinner at the Taipei Sheraton Tuesday night, feeding the rumor mill. Lin's number of dates with Kwan, it was surmised, has outstripped his rivals. He also seems to have accumulated the highest points with the man-magnet as he got to first base (hand-holding) last November.
- COMPILED BY HO YI
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
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
RSS