Compiled by RAZAK AHMAD, C. ARUNO and R. ARAVINTHAN

       FANS of Malaysian singer Jess Lee Kar Wei in China were left disappointed after she failed to make it onto the popular singing reality show Sing! China due to visa issues, China Press reported.

       The 33-year-old from Negri Sembilan, who was slated to be one of the participants in this year’s competition, was not the first singer who ran into a brick wall while attempting to obtain a visa to China.

       Earlier, local singer-songwriter Firdhaus Farmizi (pic), 22, who wrote the popular Mandarin hit The Gulf of Alaska, had to also give up his opportunity to appear on the same reality show following visa woes.

       “Originally, I had the chance to bring this song (The Gulf of Alaska) to that programme in China. I was originally supposed to fly there this month and start shooting next month but due to the pandemic, we couldn’t get a visa,” he wrote on Instagram.

       Lee also has to temporarily put aside her music career due to the impact of the pandemic on the entertainment industry.

       She started selling houses and made more than T$200,000 (RM28,563) in commissions in about a year.

       Lee first made a name for herself after winning the seventh iteration of talent show One Million Star in Taiwan, making her the first Malaysian to have won in the show.

       She subsequently signed with Warner Music Taiwan in 2011 and has since released four albums.

       > A video of a wild boar in action started trending on TikTok recently, and were viewed more than 2.1 million times, China Press reported.

       The video, which was believed to have been taken in Penang, showed the animal sprinting along a padi field.

       The man who uploaded the video managed to capture the rare footage as he rode alongside the animal on a motorcycle.

       Many Internet users commented that they had never seen a wild boar running so fast, with some joking that it must have broken the speed limit in the village.

       Others commented that the wild boar resembled Inosuke, one of the main characters in the popular anime series Demon Slayer, who fights while wearing a wild boar hide.

       The above articles are 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.