outh Korean pop star Rain faced off last week against Manchester United midfielder Park Ji-sung in what was billed as a “dream match” in Seoul.
Running side by side, Rain, also known as Jung Ji-hoon, joined Park and Seoul Mayor Oh Se-hoon in kicking off a charity match during Manchester United’s visit to South Korea, designed to capitalize on the club’s popularity in South Korea.
Each demonstrated his dribbling and passing skills. “I think the world star is better,” Park joked when asked to compare the mayor and the singer.
Team MU Rain — comprised of young aspiring South Korean soccer players — then battled Team Manchester United — teenagers selected from a worldwide YouTube competition.
Manchester United forward Dimitar Berbatov and defender Gary Neville led Team MU, while defender John O’Shea and defender Jonny Evans joined the mayor and Rain in leading Team MU Rain. Team MU Rain won the match 6-4.
Manchester United plays FC Seoul on Friday, the third match of its Asian tour.
Over in the US, the mother of octuplets born in Los Angeles last January has signed a US$250,000 agreement for her children to star in a reality television show, the Los Angeles Times reported Saturday.
The newspaper said European production company Eyeworks has inked the deal with Nadya Suleman, the mother of the children. Eyeworks lists Breaking Bonaduce and The Biggest Loser among its television credits.
Filming is scheduled to start on Sept. 1, the report said. The toddlers will collectively earn US$125,for 36 days of shooting in the first year of production, US$75,000 for 21 days in the second year and US$50,000 for 14 days in the third year, the paper said.
The contract also states that 15 percent of the gross compensation will be deposited by Eyeworks into a trust account, and the money will not be touched until the children turn 18.
Bono and U2 rocked more than 80,000 fans in Dublin as the Irish supergroup’s latest world tour hit new emotional highs Friday night on home soil.
A deafening roar welcomed the Dubliners as they launched their three-concert homestand at Croke Park, Ireland’s biggest stadium and a cathedral to Irish nationalism. The band’s “360” tour — featuring its underselling 12th studio album, No Line on the Horizon — switches from Europe to North America in September.
“We are so young — as a nation!” shouted the 49-year-old lead singer Bono.
Before taking the stage, Bono joked that the band’s performances in Barcelona, Milan, Paris, Nice, Berlin and Amsterdam were just “rehearsals” for the Dublin concerts.
The U2 gigs are delivering an estimated US$70 million boost to Ireland’s recession-ravaged economy, with most Dublin hotels booked solid for weeks. Even the Dublin Criminal Court shut down jury deliberations for the weekend because too many jurors had U2 tickets.
Also on Friday, singer Amy Winehouse was found not guilty of assaulting a dancer at a charity ball in London last year.
The ruling came at the end of a two-day trial at the City of Westminster Magistrates’ Court, according to the Press Association. Winehouse, 25, had been accused on punching dancer Sherene Flash in the face. The singer denied the charge, saying she had been intimidated when Flash put her arm around her and so pushed her away.
“Five foot seven [1.7m] in burlesque heels places you at quite an advantage over five foot two [1.57m] in ballet pumps,” Winehouse’s lawyer Patrick Gibbs told Flash in court on Friday, explaining why the singer had felt threatened.
Angelina Jolie on Thursday visited a settlement for displaced Iraqis in northwest Baghdad in her role as a goodwill ambassador for UNHCR, the UN’s relief agency.
The actor met four families whose members said their children could not go to school and they could not afford to pay for medical treatment.
The UNHCR estimates that 1.6 million Iraqis were displaced within the country by sectarian violence, and that 300,000 have returned home amid improving security.
In a separate humanitarian mission, the Palestinian movement Hamas said on Thursday that Egypt prevented Syrian actor Dureid Laham from crossing into the Gaza Strip through the Rafah border.
Laham was scheduled to arrive in Gaza on Thursday with the Egyptian actress Fardous Abdel-Hamid in a solidarity visit to the impoverished enclave that has been under Israeli blockade for more than two years.
Laham was also scheduled to inaugurate a local Palestinian play called The Women of Gaza and the Patience of Jacob that talks about how people in Gaza are suffering due to the siege.
It would have been the first time that a play was performed in the enclave since the end of the Israeli incursion into Gaza in January.
Dec. 16 to Dec. 22 Growing up in the 1930s, Huang Lin Yu-feng (黃林玉鳳) often used the “fragrance machine” at Ximen Market (西門市場) so that she could go shopping while smelling nice. The contraption, about the size of a photo booth, sprayed perfume for a coin or two and was one of the trendy bazaar’s cutting-edge features. Known today as the Red House (西門紅樓), the market also boasted the coldest fridges, and offered delivery service late into the night during peak summer hours. The most fashionable goods from Japan, Europe and the US were found here, and it buzzed with activity
During the Japanese colonial era, remote mountain villages were almost exclusively populated by indigenous residents. Deep in the mountains of Chiayi County, however, was a settlement of Hakka families who braved the harsh living conditions and relative isolation to eke out a living processing camphor. As the industry declined, the village’s homes and offices were abandoned one by one, leaving us with a glimpse of a lifestyle that no longer exists. Even today, it takes between four and six hours to walk in to Baisyue Village (白雪村), and the village is so far up in the Chiayi mountains that it’s actually
These days, CJ Chen (陳崇仁) can be found driving a taxi in and around Hualien. As a way to earn a living, it’s not his first choice. He’d rather be taking tourists to the region’s attractions, but after a 7.4-magnitude earthquake struck the region on April 3, demand for driver-guides collapsed. In the eight months since the quake, the number of overseas tourists visiting Hualien has declined by “at least 90 percent, because most of them come for Taroko Gorge, not for the east coast or the East Longitudinal Valley,” he says. Chen estimates the drop in domestic sightseers after the
US Indo-Pacific Commander Admiral Samuel Paparo, speaking at the Reagan Defense Forum last week, said the US is confident it can defeat the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in the Pacific, though its advantage is shrinking. Paparo warned that the PRC might launch a “war of necessity” even if it thinks it could not win, a wise observation. As I write, the PRC is carrying out naval and air exercises off its coast that are aimed at Taiwan and other nations threatened by PRC expansionism. A local defense official said that China’s military activity on Monday formed two “walls” east
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