Last week was an exciting time for music fans. American rapper Snoop Dogg made his debut appearance in Taiwan, where he performed with Dr Dre at Luxy, music legend Lo Ta-yu (羅大佑) led groupies to relive his 1980s heyday, and current idol Hebe Tien (田馥甄) of S.H.E crooned to a full-house audience at the National Taiwan University Sports Center.
But no one was as hardworking as Hong Kong’s Eason Chen (陳奕迅), who broke multiple records with a six-concert tour in Taiwan and still felt the urge to let off some steam.
The tour saw Chen become the first Hong Kong singer to make it to Taichung Stadium (台中體育場) and Kaohsiung Arena (高雄巨蛋). He also became the new title-holder for most shows by a Hong Kong performer during one tour in Taiwan, and attracted a record-breaking 72,000 concertgoers.
Photo: Taipei Times
At the afterparty in Kaohsiung on Saturday last week, the usually mellow star suddenly lost his cool when the Apple Daily asked him about a Hong Kong gossip media story that reported he and his wife of five years are heading for a divorce.
“Screw you. You [the Hong Kong press] are full of crap,” he snapped.
To be fair, Chen might have fueled the rumors about his deteriorating marriage when he recently appeared on Here Comes Kang and Xi (康熙來了) to promote his concerts. The star told the program’s hosts, Dee Hsu (徐熙娣, aka Little S) and Kevin Tsai (蔡康永), that he and his wife Hilary Tsui (徐濠縈) rarely talk at home and sometimes rely on text messages to communicate.
Meanwhile, things are getting hot between Jay Chou (周杰倫) and his teenage sweetheart Hannah Quinlivan (昆凌). After trying to keep their romance as low profile as possible, the barely legal model was spotted cruising around Taipei in one of Chou’s sports cars last week. According to tailing paparazzi from the Apple Daily and the Liberty Times (the Taipei Time’s sister newspaper), Quinlivan’s itinerary included lunch at the Breeze Center (微風廣場) and a look-see around Chou’s restaurant at Huashan 1914 Creative Park (華山1914), before returning to her home just one block away from the Mando-pop king’s apartment.
What surprised the paparazzi more was that Quinlivan neither denied nor admitted anything when reporters from the Liberty Times questioned her about whether or not the vehicle was a gift from Chou.
Gossip observers are saying it’s a sign that the 18-year-old model’s status as “J-wife” (J嫂) is cemented and official.
In film-related news, a pirated copy of You Are the Apple of My Eye (那些年，我們一起追的女孩) went viral online and received some 140,000 hits on YouTube within a couple of days before it was blocked on Sunday. It is said that the leak is likely to affect the film’s box-office takings when it opens in China next month.
Usually self-assured in public, the film’s director and noted writer Giddens Ko (柯景騰), better known as Jiubadao (九把刀 or “Nine Knives”), made the rare gesture of pleading to fans on his blog by saying the film is his “baby blessed with lots of love and prayers.”
Love or no love, Jiubadao’s baby is raking in a lot of dough for its creator. The romantic comedy has grossed more than NT$400 million at the box office in Taiwan and broken the NT$200 million mark at the Hong Kong box office since its release in October.
The latest military exercises conducted by the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) last week did not follow the standard Chinese Communist Party (CCP) formula. The US and Taiwan also had different explanations for the war games. Previously the CCP would plan out their large-scale military exercises and wait for an opportunity to dupe the gullible into pinning the blame on someone else for “provoking” Beijing, the most famous being former house speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan in August 2022. Those military exercises could not possibly have been organized in the short lead time that it was known she was coming.
From an anonymous office in a New Delhi mall, matrimonial detective Bhavna Paliwal runs the rule over prospective husbands and wives — a booming industry in India, where younger generations are increasingly choosing love matches over arranged marriage. The tradition of partners being carefully selected by the two families remains hugely popular, but in a country where social customs are changing rapidly, more and more couples are making their own matches. So for some families, the first step when young lovers want to get married is not to call a priest or party planner but a sleuth like Paliwal with high-tech spy
When Portugal returned its colony Macao to China in 1999, coffee shop owner Daniel Chao was a first grader living in a different world. Since then his sleepy hometown has transformed into a bustling gaming hub lined with glittering casinos. Its once quiet streets are now jammed with tourist buses. But the growing wealth of the city dubbed the “Las Vegas of the East” has not brought qualities of sustainable development such as economic diversity and high civic participation. “What was once a relaxed, free place in my childhood has become a place that is crowded and highly commercialized,” said Chao. Macao yesterday
The world has been getting hotter for decades but a sudden and extraordinary surge in heat has sent the climate deeper into uncharted territory — and scientists are still trying to figure out why. Over the past two years, temperature records have been repeatedly shattered by a streak so persistent and puzzling it has tested the best-available scientific predictions about how the climate functions. Scientists are unanimous that burning fossil fuels has largely driven long-term global warming, and that natural climate variability can also influence temperatures one year to the next. But they are still debating what might have contributed to this
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