Asia Weekly

Asian Celebrities

Celebrity gossip

Hoop dreams - The world's tallest man is set to become a dad after revealing that his wife is pregnant. The 2.36-metre-tall Bao Xishun, a herdsman from Inner Mongolia, has high hopes for his unborn child. "I hope [the baby] can be about two metres tall," he said, "then [the child] can play basketball," reports The Daily Mail (UK). His wife Xia Shujuan, who comes from Bao's hometown, is 1.65 metres.

No show - Edison Chen, the bad boy actor and pop singer at the centre of the sex photo saga that rocked Hong Kong's entertainment world in February, is refusing to testify in a trial connected to the scandal. Chen's refusal to return from the US, where he has been in self-imposed exile since the intimate pictures of him with a whole host of nubile starlets were splashed across the Internet, has lead to the stalling of the trial of a man allegedly linked to the Internet distribution of the pictures, reports the South China Morning Post.

Singing Leon Lai's praises - The son of Beijing opera great Mei Lanfang is thrilled with Leon Lai's portrayal of the man in the new eponymously titled film, reports Ming Pao. Or was it a backhanded compliment when Mei Baojiu said the actor's rendition was "so much better than expected"?  In any case, the family has said it won't give permission for any more Mei biopics for 50 years. 

Stammering beauty - Tongue-tied beauty queen Janina San Miguel has resigned as the Philippines' official representative to the 2008 Miss World beauty pageant after becoming an instant celebrity on video Internet site YouTube thanks to her stumbling answer to a question, reports ABS-CBNnews.com. The stunning - but easily stumped  - 17-year-old said, in broken English, on national television that: "Well, my family's role for me is so important b'coz there was the wa...they're, they was the one who's...very...hahahaha...oh I'm so sorry, ahhmm...my pamily...my family...oh my God...I'm...ok, ahhmm, wait...hahahaha, ahmmm."