Does Jay Chou (周杰倫) have a new squeeze? The superstar and his mom were recently spotted dining with a young woman, with tabloids reporting that the pretty lady grabbed food for the King of Mando-pop with her chopsticks.
The Chairman quickly dismissed the rumors, joking at a press conference that it’s been so long since he’s had a girlfriend that the media freaks out if they see an attractive female in his vicinity.
Gossip rags identified the woman in question as model Connie Luo (羅康妮), who quickly found herself under a microscope. The Apple Daily reported that although Luo’s manager says she was born in 1985, Luo herself told the newspaper 1984. The confusion was compounded when a former classmate declared online that not only is Luo practically an old maid at 28, but also wore braces in school. The horror!
Photo: Taipei times
Pop singer Huang Kuo-lun (黃國倫) and wife Nancy Kou (寇乃馨) also found themselves picked over by the media last week when they were accused of turning their wedding banquet into an over-the-top money-making venture.
The Liberty Times (The Taipei Times’ sister newspaper) reported that even before the banquet, Kou had earned the sobriquet “the queen of cash grabbing.” With an “astonishing head for business,” the TV host sent out 900 invitations and “worked her connections” to make sure that 50 of those went to business tycoons like Terry Gou (郭台銘).
But even with Gou’s reported gift of NT$200,000 (US$6,700), the duo finished up in the red — and that doesn’t mean swimming in red envelopes (紅包). The Apple Daily reports that the two expected to reap NT$5,000,000 in gift money, but only received NT$3,500,000. They reportedly spent NT$7,000,000 on the lavish event, which included a concert.
The two married in a quiet ceremony in Jerusalem earlier this year, but the Liberty Times says their greed took off as soon as they started planning their Taiwan banquet. Huang and Kou asked companies to provide them with free xibing (喜餅, traditional wedding treats), gowns, jewelry and transportation.
Perhaps in a bid to deflect attention from the stories that painted them as skinflints, Huang and Kou donated NT$1,000,000 to a child welfare organization immediately after their banquet.
The couple should have brushed the money signs from their eyes and paid more attention to their seating charts. Media reports said that awkwardness ensued when model and TV host Amber Ann (安心亞, real name Liao Ching-ling, 廖婧伶) was seated at the same table as not one, but two men she had been romantically linked with. One was actor Ken Lin (林暐恆) and the other was producer Chen Chih-hung (陳志鴻).
Ann and Lin were spotted on vacation together in Japan this spring, but Lin reportedly dumped Ann in October, breaking her heart and leading her to take a one-month leave of absence from her hosting duties. Ann and Chen were also linked, but she denied the rumors, saying their age difference was too great for a romantic relationship.
The Liberty Times reported that “Ah-Ken” (阿Ken) spent the evening joking loudly while Ann conspicuously ignored him, fiddling with her cellphone and downing red wine.
Actress Barbie Hsu (徐熙媛, otherwise known as Big S) and 29-year-old Chinese restaurateur and multimillionaire Wang Xiaofei (汪小菲) have been bathed in the glow of new love since their own secret wedding last month. Crew members on Hsu’s new film, however, aren’t benefiting from her marital bliss. Hsu has reportedly been showing up late — when she shows up at all — to the set of My Kingdom (大武生), which is currently shooting in Shanghai. Reports say her flakiness has slowed production, but Big S is supposedly too busy “cooking” for Wang in their hotel room.
Director Gao Xiaosong (高曉松) laughed off the gossip as “too gossipy” (太八卦).
“What a story. We rest when we need to and we work when we are supposed to. [Our shooting schedule] has nothing to do with anyone’s cooking or romancing,” he told reporters.
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
RSS