In a slow news week, the biggest media splash was made by accusations that TV host and entertainer Pauline Lan (藍心湄) illegally hired a foreign helper. She joins a lineup of major public figures, all of whom are super wealthy, alleged to have misused foreign caregivers as cheap home help.
Matilda Tao (aka Momoko Tao, 陶晶瑩), one of Taiwan’s highest paid female TV hosts, and the country’s richest man, CEO of Foxconn Technology Group (富士康集團) Terry Gou (郭台銘), have both been associated with incidents in which fines were levied for sidestepping legal requirements for such household help.
Lan came under scrutiny after she was shopped to Next Magazine by a reader possibly inspired by a sense of moral righteousness.
Photo: Taipei Times
Indignation has exploded over instances of the inequity of these massively privileged people bypassing regulations that hamper many regular families obtaining much-needed home help.
The issue gained such traction that Taipei City Government’s Department of Labor held a press conference on Wednesday to say that it would investigate the allegations against Lan.
In media reports yesterday, Lan denied any wrongdoing. She said that her application for a caregiver followed the rules and welcomed the department’s investigation.
“If they come visit, I hope that they will inform me first. It would be terrible if they came and I hadn’t put on my makeup,” the veteran TV personality quipped. She added that her father had suffered a stroke in April, and the presence of home help was perfectly legitimate (caring for children, the elderly or disabled is a condition of obtaining such assistance).
In movie news, the film Black and White (痞子英雄), scheduled for release next month, is having woman trouble. The flick, based on the hugely successful police drama of the same name that hit TV screens in 2005, is clearly intended as the big release for the Lunar New Year season, and the production company has been pulling out all the stops in marketing the film.
Unfortunately for the film’s producers, two of its leading female stars are being uncooperative. Taiwanese actress Ivy Chen (陳意涵) was incensed to discover that all the scenes in which she appeared had been left on the cutting-room floor, though she was given an acting credit. In response, she refused to participate in any of the marketing activities.
Meanwhile, Chinese actress Angelababy (aka Yang Ying, 楊穎) made exorbitant demands as a condition of coming to Taiwan to promote the film, including five-star accommodation and expensive spa treatments, but ultimately attended only a single press conference.
While Angelababy’s behavior is regarded as just another example of a wannabe star getting too big for their boots, Chen has received considerable support for her loss of self-esteem from fans, and the film’s director Tsai Yue-hsun (蔡岳勳) has come in for criticism. Chen said Tsai had explained to her that he had no choice but to cut her scenes as the film was
too long.
According to the Apple Daily, Chen has demanded to see the early prints of another film she has recently been working on, Love (愛), just to make sure she actually appears in it.
The precariousness of life as a TV personality and aspiring actress was further underlined this week by news reports that Ivy Shao (邵雨薇), better known as Meng Meng (夢夢), who achieved a degree of celebrity as the spokeswoman for an online game and who had cut a single, was now making ends meet as a betel nut beauty, according to a story in Next Magazine. Intrepid reporters found Meng Meng in a skimpy outfit hawking betel nuts from a stand in Shulin (樹林), New Taipei City.
Meng Meng’s agent responded to questions about her current situation by telling the media that working as a betel nut beauty would be very educational in learning how to handle life’s vicissitudes.
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