Saturday September 29, 2012

Singer Shila Amzah hitting the high notes

Compiled by LEE YEN MUN, BEH YUEN HUI and A. RAMAN

SINGER Shila Amzah is on a winning streak. There is now a possibility of her collaborating with Mandopop heart-throb Wang Leehom after impressing him with her performance in Asian Wave, Guang Ming Daily reported.

Shila, whose real name is Nur Shahila Amir Amzah, performed Wang's Mandarin hit Forever Love in one of the preliminary rounds of the Asian regional competition held in China recently.

When judge Eric Moo a veteran Malaysian singer-songwriter showed her performance to Wang, he was said to be amazed with her performance and agreed to write her a song.

It was reported that Shila's manager was planning to include all the songs she had sang at the competition, including Adele's Set Fire to the Rain, in an album soon.

The manager is also in the midst of a discussion with Shanghai Entertainment Team Media Group on Shila's singing contract. The 22-year-old singer is also making arrangements to improve on her Chinese, a language she learned from pre-school until Year Three.

Following her skyrocketing popularity in China, Shila opened a Weibo (Chinese Tweeter) account to interact with her fans. On Tuesday, she tweeted: “I bought so many scarves in Shanghai ... around 36 scarves all together..:) so happy!”

> Nanyang Siang Pau reported about a 32-year-old monk who was executed after murdering the husband of his girlfriend in China.

Master Shi Shengyuan, whose real name was Teng Zhaowu, had an affair with a villager Zhang Youju, who was 20 years older than him, while he practising Buddhism at a temple in Hunan in early 2009.

In August of the same year, the lovers staged a plot to kill Zhang's husband after he came to know of the affair by poisoning him but failed. A few days later, they assaulted him to death with a hoe. Both were sentenced to death.

Other News & Views 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 a >, it denotes a separate news item.