Since rumors first emerged in February that Jay Chou (周杰倫) was dating 17-year-old Australian-Taiwanese model Hannah Quinlivan (昆凌), the parties on both sides haven’t confirmed whether the two are romantically attached. Chou famously stonewalled inquisitive reporters by demanding that they produce photographic evidence.
But Next Magazine has finally obtained evidence: a photo of Chou and Quinlivan, who turned 18 on Aug. 12, arm-in-arm on a boat in Marseilles, France. The Chairman set off on a 13-day holiday on Aug. 8, and there was furious speculation that he would meet Quinlivan to celebrate her birthday overseas. Now that the two have been caught together, Chou will have a hard time denying the relationship. The hugely successful musician and producer has had no shortage of romantic relationships in the 12 years in which he has been in the media limelight, so much of the excitement in the press is really about Next media getting one up on Chou, who has not always been as open and up front about his private life as the local media could wish.
With the emergence of one celebrity relationship, another flounders. Media personality Sisy Chen (陳文茜), in another story to break in Next Magazine, has ended her seven-year relationship with the well-known plastic surgeon Sung Cheng-yu (宋正宇). This revelation emerged after three weeks of intense scrutiny from the magazine, who say that in the past, Sung would always pick up Chen after she finished recording her hugely popular television show.
Photo: Taipei Times
Now, Chen has thrown herself into socializing with the rich and famous, and has recently
swapped her Mini Cooper for a BMW Series 7, while Sung gets around town on the MRT, heading home alone after work. Rumors as to why the relationship has hit the rocks abound, with revelations that things started to go wrong after a minor traffic accident when the two where holidaying on the North Coast. Friends have said that Chen felt unwell after the incident and worried that it might be the result of an injury that Sung was unconcerned about and failed to show proper consideration.
There are no doubts anymore about the fact that Cecilia Cheung (張柏芝) and Nicholas Tse (謝霆鋒) are splitting up, with the interminable rumors and squabbling of the past months culminating in a joint statement issued earlier this week saying that the two will be getting divorced. They will retain joint custody of their two children, but no details were provided as to the financial arrangements between the two.
Under Hong Kong law, neither party can remarry in the next five months, but immediately rumors have begun to circulate that Cheung may be getting together with former lover Daniel Chan (陳曉東). Chan was in Taiwan this week, but when approached for comment during a recording session, he retreated to the changing room, his manager insisting that the divorce proceedings did not concern Chan in any way.
According to the Apple Daily, the break up has not harmed either Cheung’s or Tse’s careers. The paper stated that Cheung has already received three offers for film roles that could be worth NT$200 million, and that Tse remains heavily in demand, and will appear with Wang Lee-hom (王力宏) in Yuen Woo-ping’s (袁和平) new martial arts drama Wu Dang (武當), and is currently in negotiations for eight other projects.
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
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
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