■ Politics
Chen calls for good behavior
President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) yesterday said he hoped politics would not get in the way of the passage of government budgets as two elections are drawing near. The legislative election is scheduled for December while the presidential poll is slated for March next year. Chen said he hopes all candidates will engage in gentlemen's games and act rationally and responsibly. "The most important thing is: don't let the elections get in the way of the reviews of government budgets and bills concerning people's livelihood," he said. Chen made the remarks while addressing the Lunar New Year greeting at the Presidential Office yesterday.
■ Education
Boys prefer electronics
The most popular course at college and university for male senior high school students last year was electrical engineering, while for girls it was business administration, Ministry of Education officials said yesterday. The officials made the remarks while releasing statistics concerning last year's top 50 college and university departments as ranked by graduating high school students in order to help this year's high school graduates make their college selections. For male students, in second place was mechanical engineering, followed by information management, computer science and information engineering, while for females, the second choice was information management, followed by finance, according to the officials.
■ Agriculture
Orchids win prizes
Two moth orchid hybrids, named Glory of Taiwan Sugar and Red Pearl, cultivated by Taiwan Sugar Co, won prizes at this year's Tokyo International Orchid Show, a spokesman for the company said yesterday. The spokesman said the Glory of Taiwan Sugar -- a yellow moth orchid that won the first prize in the "other colors" category -- was supposed to have fewer and smaller flowers, but the company's horticultural techniques made it bloom abundantly this season, bringing it a lot of attention at the show. Red Pearl -- a small red orchid which won the bronze prize -- was exported to Japan for the first time last year and has become popular, despite a market that traditionally favors white moth orchids. This marks the second time the company's orchids have won prizes at the show, which is a big event in the orchid industry and proves the company's prowess in orchid growing as well as improving the reputation of Taiwanese orchids in the Japanese market, the spokesman said.
■ Entertainment
Casual gamers increasing
Promotion of simple games by the online video game industry has expanded the market by bringing in many people who would otherwise not be interested and changed the composition of the virtual world, according to a recent Market Intelligence Center (MIC) study. The MIC, under the quasi-official Institute for Information Industry conducted research into online video game markets and found that casual players, who spend less than an hour per day playing games, make up 36 percent of online gamers and for the first time outnumbered medium and heavy players, the MIC officials said yesterday. Heavy players, who play games for more than four hours a day, constitute 27.5 percent of the market while medium players make up 35.9 percent, the study showed, adding that compared to last year's survey, casual players have shown an increase while both the other categories showed a relative decline.
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