■ Society
Gay parade today
Some 60 social groups representing politics, academia, culture, the arts and entertainment are expected to join in an alternative lifestyle parade in downtown Taipei today, an organizer of the event said yesterday. The Taiwan Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Pride Parade's organizing committee executive secretary, Wu Hsu-niang (巫緒樑), noted that the planned march has also won the support of many popular singers and TV celebrities, including Sandee Chen (陳珊妮), who will participate in a musical rally at the Red Theater in Hsimenting at the end of the parade. Although the annual march no longer enjoys the financial support it received last year from the city government, when it drew a great deal of attention from local and foreign media, Wu said, they will still put on a colorful activity filled with music to project the "happy image of the homosexual street party."
■ Legislature
Proposed peace law fails
The draft cross-strait peace promotion law proposed by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the People First Party (PFP) failed to get its first reading in the legislative sitting yesterday after the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) caucus showed objection to the bill. The bill proposes to have the Legislative Yuan establish a special ad hoc committee to push and participate in the cross-strait negotiation. The bill passed through the Procedure Committee on Tuesday with the pan-blue camp in majority. But now the DPP caucus had rejected the bill to get a first reading, the bill has to go through the Procedure Committee session again to get a first reading. The DPP caucus said the bill was impractical and might violate the administrative power.
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:
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
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
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