Chinese-Japanese actor Takeshi Kaneshiro is justly famous for maintaining a low profile when he is not on set or publicizing a film. However, reporters caught him out recently when they snapped him driving around Taipei with a pretty young woman.

They tried to hide, by covering their faces, she even dived into the back seat, but it wasn't enough. Kaneshiro is so secretive - and so admired by his legions of female fans - that any news about his love life is front-page material.

The woman wore a ring that looked suspiciously like the double of a ring the actor has been wearing over the past year, so everyone's wondering whether this is the beginning of the end of Kaneshiro's single life at the grand old age of 37.

Understandably, soap opera star Nicholas Tse emerged smelling of roses when his wife Cecilia Cheung was caught out having "relations" with the singer Edison Chen in 2008. Saint Nicholas stuck by his erring wife (and young son) and in doing so became more popular than ever.

So, it is somewhat of a surprise to find that he is losing the media battle this time around, after his wife again romantically compromised him, once more with Edison Chen. A Sina Weibo (micro blog) survey of 1,000 netizens found that just 20 percent believed Tse's version of events, while twice as many people believed Cheung. The rest were content to admit they didn't believe either of them.

The reason for Tse's dissatisfaction rating, apparently, is that fans have bought into Cheung's claim that Tse hates kids, wears sunglasses so people can't see his eyes when he's lying, and because he's an actor (which he is, of course). This should remind us all how fickle the public can be.

Finally, in the past seven days there have been not one but four cases of models losing their phones - which naturally enough are full of X-rated pics and info.

Mainland model Elin Lu scored a hat trick of missing phones, which makes you think, well, one might be an accident, two is unfortunate, but three? The former flame of heir to a fortune Wang Xiaofei (now married to Barbie Hsu) "mislaid" her 70,000 yuan ($10,830) mobile at a night club and shortly after, her assistant lost her second mobile. She went to the police to report the losses and admitted there was a lot of "private information" on the phones. Cynical journalists later asked her whether this was in fact a cry for publicity, at which point she went ballistic and threw away her replacement phone.

Finally, Hong Kong model Phoebe Hui lost her phone and soon after, inevitably it would appear, nude photos of her started gracing the Internet.

"My cell phone was password protected so I never thought these photos would be released," she was quoted as saying. When asked why she had naked pics on her mobile in the first place she replied. "Many foreign stars do this."

That's right, blame foreigners for your actions and everything should be fine. Classy.

China Daily