Hundreds of thousands of people lined up at post offices nationwide yesterday morning to purchase the commemorative stamps issued for President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) inauguration.
Each set contains four stamps featuring the president and Vice President Vincent Siew (蕭萬長) and the first day cover, an envelope issued specifically for the occasion.
Taiwan Post estimated it sold 1 million sets yesterday.
At the main Taipei Post Office, 68-year-old Lin Rey-yao (林瑞曜) was busy pasting the commemorative stamps on the first day cover as he spoke with the Taipei Times. He purchased 10 sets, which he sent only to himself.
“I do this for fun,” he said, adding that he had also bought the commemorative stamps for the inauguration of former president Lee Teng-hui (李登輝) and former vice president Lien Chan (連戰) in 1996.
Forty-year-old Mr Chen waited for two hours before he could put his hands on the sets he had ordered. He said he had purchased the stamps not only because Ma was president, but also because the Chinese characters for “Republic of China” were once again on the stamps.
Last year, the stamps issued by Taiwan Post Co only bore the name Taiwan.
Meanwhile, to welcome Japanese guests, the Office of the President ordered 90 lunch boxes made by the Taiwan Railway Administration (TRA).
Ma said the TRA lunch boxes were to reflect the fact that the railway infrastructure was mostly built during the Japanese colonial era, while the High Speed Rail was inspired by Japan’s Shinkansen line.
Each TRA lunch box contained a deep-fried cutlet, fried rice, Taiwanese sauerkraut, potherb mustard, as well as an iron-made container carved with “the 120th anniversary of the TRA” in Chinese characters and an image of a TRA train. The lunch box cost NT$300 and is only available at the Taipei Main Station.
The public can also buy the same meal, packed in a wooden container with a plastic lid, at a cost of NT$100.
Lee Yu-hsia (李玉霞), the TRA’s kitchen manager at Taipei Main Station, said the lunch box was popular among Japanese tourists.
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