A lot has happened to Edison Chen, the marginally talented Hong Kong-based actor/singer who rose to international prominence after nude pictures of him with a coterie of Asian starlets ended up on the Internet, since we last checked in! It is now being floated that Chen himself plotted to leak the photos in an attempt to facilitate his transition from Hong Kong cinema to Hollywood, where whoring yourself out for attention isn't a source of national shame but rather a holistic life approach.

Reports are also surfacing that Chen tried proposing to his mob-connected girlfriend (and featured star of many of the leaked photos) Vincy Yeung four times in an effort to avoid a hit from the Triads, the underground Chinese criminal organization you might recall from such fine films as Rush Hour, Rush Hour 2, and Lethal Weapon 4. Yeung's uncle, Albert Yeung, is a famous Hong Kong gangster who evidently didn't take kindly to seeing shower pics of his niece on the Web.

After Yeung spurned his advances, Chen, in a page ripped straight from the Lindsay Lohan School of Crisis Management, reportedly checked into a Utah rehab facility to treat himself for "sex addiction," only to leave after a few days after allegedly getting beaten up by several male residents for reasons that are not yet clear.

It's not all bad news, however. The Los Angeles Times noted yesterday that some papers in Hong Kong have experienced a 50 percent jump in circulation during the month-long scandal. Who said the newspaper industry is dead?