■ Culture
Beer festival in Tainan
A two-day beer festival will begin on Saturday at the Shanhua brewery in Tainan County, officials from the Taiwan Tobacco and Liquor Corp said yesterday. The festival will feature 10 dishes seasoned with beer, such as sticky rice, stewed "Tungpo" meat and seafood. In addition to beer tasting, a host of other activities, including singing contests and parent-child painting contests, will be staged during the festival.
■ Environment
Incinerator plans assailed
Taiwan Solidarity Union Legislator Chiu Teh-hong (邱德宏) said yesterday that the government should scrap plans to build six garbage incinerators. Chiu and representatives of environ-mental protection groups said at the Legislative Yuan that the projects were too costly and that expanding the "zero-garbage" campaign and ending the Environ-mental Protection Adminis-tration's "one county or city, one incinerator" policy would be a better solution to the problem of garbage disposal. He suggested the government concentrate on recycling programs. The incinerators the groups want to prevent from being built are planned for Hsinchu, Miaoli, Yunlin, Nantou, Penghu and Taitung.
■ Politics
Constituency reform urged
Taiwan Solidarity Union (TSU) lawmaker Chen Chien-ming (陳建銘) yester-day urged the administrative sector to properly handle the re-demarcation of electoral constituencies to cope with a new electoral system for legislators. Chen urged the administrative branch to demarcate the electoral constituencies by population to highlight fairness, and his idea was shared by several legislators among different political parties. According to the revisions to the Constitution, the seventh legislature beginning from 2008 will see the number of seats reduced from the current 225 to 113, while the electoral system will also be changed from the current multiple seats for each constituency to a single seat, two ballot system.
■ Diplomacy
PM's words called `hurtful'
Three Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) legislators urged new Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) yesterday to stop making remarks which they regard as hurtful to Taiwan. Legislators Tsai Chi-fang (蔡啟芳), Lin Chung-mo (林重謨) and Hou Shui-sheng (侯水盛) made the appeal after Lee said in a Singapore National Day speech Sunday that China has made it clear that it will react if Taiwan moves toward independence and that "if a war breaks out across the Strait, we will be forced to choose between the two sides ... but if the conflict is provoked by Taiwan, then Singapore cannot support Taiwan."
■ Crime
Kaohsiung drug lab raided
Investigation Bureau agents arrested two suspects during a raid on a large underground drug manufacturing factory in Kaohsiung Monday. The agents also seized 65kg of amphetamines and around 5kg of methedrine, the main ingredient in the manufacture of amphetamines, as well as manufacturing equipment with a market value of around NT$100 million (US$2.94 million). The agents were tipped off three months ago that a man, surnamed Pieh, who is skilled in the manufacturing of amphet-amines and who was jailed several times previously for making the illegal drug, was again collaborating with gangsters to manufacture the substance.
FLU SEASON: Twenty-six severe cases were reported from Tuesday last week to Monday, including a seven-year-old girl diagnosed with influenza-associated encephalopathy Nearly 140,000 people sought medical assistance for diarrhea last week, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said on Tuesday. From April 7 to Saturday last week, 139,848 people sought medical help for diarrhea-related illness, a 15.7 percent increase from last week’s 120,868 reports, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said. The number of people who reported diarrhea-related illness last week was the fourth highest in the same time period over the past decade, Lee said. Over the past four weeks, 203 mass illness cases had been reported, nearly four times higher than the 54 cases documented in the same period
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not