This month, social groups are urging the public to turn off their televisions for six consecutive days to seek healthier leisure activities.
"We are starting this cultural movement, which will help people to reset their thinking processes by turning off their TVs," Miaoli Community University president Chiang Ming-hsiu (江明修) said at a press conference yesterday.
The institution is one of three groups sponsoring the event, along with the Campaign for Media Reform (媒體改造學社) and Media Watch (台灣媒體觀察基金會).
The event is slated to run between April 25 and 30 and will be held simultaneously with a similar event in the US.
The movement was started in 1994 in the US by a non-profit organization known as the TV-Turnoff Network to encourage children and adults to watch less television, to promote healthier lifestyles and communities.
In Taiwan, the event began last year in Miaoli, within local communities there. This year, the movement will spread to northern and central Taiwan, where many other community colleges have signed up.
The Campaign for Media Reform takes a more aggressive stance toward watching less television.
"We encourage the public to boycott TV stations until TV media has gone through a reform process," said Chiu Chia-yi (邱家宜), an executive member of the group.
The group calls for the establishment of more public television channels and television programs, and is the key advocate pushing for the establishment of a National Communications Commission. A bill to set up the commission failed to clear the Legislative Yuan last year.
Statistics provided by the event's sponsors show that, on average, a one-year-old child spends at least one hour per day in front of the TV, whereas an 18-year-old spends more time watching TV than attending school.
Event sponsors are urging those who wish to join the movement to make five statements: to refuse to be couch potatoes, to improve familial interactions, to agree to select quality TV programs, to pursue arts and cultural activities and to get outside on trips to enjoy nature.
The Taipei Department of Health yesterday said it has launched a probe into a restaurant at Far Eastern Sogo Xinyi A13 Department Store after a customer died of suspected food poisoning. A preliminary investigation on Sunday found missing employee health status reports and unsanitary kitchen utensils at Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) in the department store’s basement food court, the department said. No direct relationship between the food poisoning death and the restaurant was established, as no food from the day of the incident was available for testing and no other customers had reported health complaints, it said, adding that the investigation is ongoing. Later
REVENGE TRAVEL: A surge in ticket prices should ease this year, but inflation would likely keep tickets at a higher price than before the pandemic Scoot is to offer six additional flights between Singapore and Northeast Asia, with all routes transiting Taipei from April 1, as the budget airline continues to resume operations that were paused during the COVID-19 pandemic, a Scoot official said on Thursday. Vice president of sales Lee Yong Sin (李榮新) said at a gathering with reporters in Taipei that the number of flights from Singapore to Japan and South Korea with a stop in Taiwan would increase from 15 to 21 each week. That change means the number of the Singapore-Taiwan-Tokyo flights per week would increase from seven to 12, while Singapore-Taiwan-Seoul
POOR PREPARATION: Cultures can form on food that is out of refrigeration for too long and cooking does not reliably neutralize their toxins, an epidemiologist said Medical professionals yesterday said that suspected food poisoning deaths revolving around a restaurant at Far Eastern Department Store Xinyi A13 Store in Taipei could have been caused by one of several types of bacterium. Ho Mei-shang (何美鄉), an epidemiologist at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Biomedical Sciences, wrote on Facebook that the death of a 39-year-old customer of the restaurant suggests the toxin involved was either “highly potent or present in massive large quantities.” People who ate at the restaurant showed symptoms within hours of consuming the food, suggesting that the poisoning resulted from contamination by a toxin and not infection of the
BAD NEIGHBORS: China took fourth place among countries spreading disinformation, with Hong Kong being used as a hub to spread propaganda, a V-Dem study found Taiwan has been rated as the country most affected by disinformation for the 11th consecutive year in a study by the global research project Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem). The nation continues to be a target of disinformation originating from China, and Hong Kong is increasingly being used as a base from which to disseminate that disinformation, the report said. After Taiwan, Latvia and Palestine ranked second and third respectively, while Nicaragua, North Korea, Venezuela and China, in that order, were the countries that spread the most disinformation, the report said. Each country listed in the report was given a score,