Compiled by MAHADHIR MONIHULDIN, C. ARUNO and R. ARAVINTHAN
SINGER Avril Lavigne (pic) has dispelled talk that she will be taking part in a Chinese reality TV show, reported China Press.
The award-winning Canadian artiste became a trending topic on Chinese social media recently after speculation emerged that she had signed on to appear on season four of Sister Who Make Waves in a bid to generate hype for her upcoming tour in China.
“Uhhh. It’s not true, that’s what I can tell you about that! Yeah, I haven’t heard any of that, not true. That’s funny,” Lavigne, 38, told the American radio show PopCrush Nights.
This led Internet users in China to speculate that the rumour might have been started by Mango TV, the broadcaster for Sister Who Make Waves, to create a buzz for the show’s new season.
The show was previously credited for reviving the careers of singers such as Cyndi Wang, Rainie Yang and even the group Twins.
In 2018, British singer Jessie J auditioned for the popular singing competition Singer and became the first international artiste to have won.
> Human traffickers now capitalise on romance to lure unsuspecting victims from Malaysia, reported China Press.
A Malaysian warehouse manager, known only as Li, purportedly fell in love with “two women” he met on Facebook, only to end up being trafficked to Myanmar.
The women, who were actually male scammers, told Li that they were being held captive by a scam call syndicate there.
They pleaded to Li to send them money so that their captors would not harm them.
“I wanted to save them, so I would occasionally send them between RM500 and RM1,000,” said Li, 26.
Li, who admitted that he was blinded by love then, even agreed to go to Thailand to meet a cousin of one of the women to take up a job as a translator there.
However, he ended up being trafficked to KK Park in southeastern Myanmar, known for being a hot-bed of job scam syndicates.
Li spent seven months being forced to work for a scam call centre before being rescued.
He berated himself for falling for a typical romance scam.
“In the end, I lost most of the money I had earned from working in Singapore previously,” he said.
● The above article is compiled from the vernacular newspapers (Bahasa Malaysia, Chinese and Tamil dailies). As such, stories are grouped according to the respective language/medium. Where a paragraph begins with this ' >'sign, it denotes a separate news item.
