Star's Naked Photos Drive Hong Kong Wild

It all started when Edison Chen, a Hong Kong actor and hip-hop artist, took his laptop in for repairs. Turned out Chen had on his hard drive more than a thousand photos of himself, naked, with more than a dozen of the island's leading actresses and singers. Someone at the shop helped himself to the pictures, and the result was biggest sex scandal the puritanical city has ever seen, the LA Times reports.

As first a stream and then a river of salacious images cropped up online—more than 400—and in print. Newspaper circulations spiked by as much as 50%, as police in both Hong Kong and China went into high gear to track down the perpetrators. The possible involvement of organized crime was debated. Chen, who is Canadian, apologized and suspended his Hong Kong career “indefinitely,” but it's the careers of the women that will be hurt most, observers say. (More Hong Kong stories.)