■ CULTURE
Filipino festival to be held
The 2008 Taipei Filipino Festival will be held tomorrow at Da-an Park in Taipei to celebrate Philippine Independence Day and the country’s culture. The festival, which will be held between 10am and 6pm, will feature 20 stalls selling Philippine snacks as well as dancing and singing performances. Rodulfo Sabulao, director of the Manila Economic and Cultural Office’s labor center, said during a press conference at Taipei City Hall yesterday that Philippine Independence Day fell on June 12 and holding the festival tomorrow would give Filipinos a chance to get together and celebrate their national holiday. Taipei City’s Labor Affairs Department said there are about 8,000 Filipinos working in Taiwan. The city government has cooperated with the Manila Economic and Cultural Office to hold the festival to allow “new immigrants” from the Philippines and local residents to experience Filipino culture and enjoy the holiday.
■DIPLOMACY
St. Lucia reaffirms ties
St. Lucian Prime Minister Stephenson King yesterday expressed his nation’s gratitude for Taiwan’s technical assistance and reaffirmed that ties between the two nations were firm and stable since the renewal of diplomatic relations in April last year. King made the remarks at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs as the two governments signed an agreement to boost bilateral agricultural cooperation and released a new book featuring wild birds of St. Lucia. St. Lucia was the only ally not represented at President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) inauguration ceremony last month. St. Lucian Agriculture Minister Ezechiel Joseph also thanked Taiwan’s agricultural mission and said many Caribbean nations were closely “observing and analyzing” how the re-establishment of diplomatic relations with Taipei had benefited his country.
■SOCIETY
Club holds rummage sale
The Taipei American School’s (TAS) Orphanage Club will hold its annual summer rummage sale tomorrow from 10am to 5pm in the school’s forecourt and lobby — come rain or shine. Club members have collected a huge variety of new and used clothing, shoes, sports equipment, games and toys, furniture, household appliances and other items. The money raised will provide funding for orphans and other children in need across the nation and abroad. TAS is located at 800 Zhongshan N Rd, Sec 6, in Tianmu (天母).
■HEALTH
Summer camps planned
Special summer camps to educate mothers on healthy food and encourage children to eat more vegetables and fruit will open next month, the Homemaker’s Union and Foundation (HUF) said yesterday. HUF executive secretary Chen Ju-wei (陳儒瑋) said many mothers were not aware that local markets were full of tainted foods and cooking materials and the HUF hoped that, through the event, mothers could gain a better understanding of how to select good quality foodstuffs. “We at the HUF would like to help participating mothers gain knowledge that enables them to purchase good and healthy food for their family,” Chen said. He said that the camp would include a variety of activities, such as teaching children to make gelatins containing fruit. Chen said mothers with a child aged between between nine and 12 could register directly with the HUF to attend one of the four half-day camps to be held on July 5, July 11, July 19 and July 29. The cost for each mother-child pairing would be NT$200, which covers the cost of registration and the materials used, Chen said.
■Health
Blood donors wanted
The Taiwan Blood Services Foundation voiced hope yesterday that 15,000 people under 30 years of age would donate blood on a regular basis to help more than 400 thalassemic patients. Foundation officials said it would begin a one-month blood donor drive today, World Blood Donation Day, to meet the goal. Officials said that thalassemic patients rely heavily on high-quality blood to survive. Chang Yu-cheng, a 30-year-old thalassemic sufferer, said she has been receiving blood transfusions since she was three months old. “We’re modern-day Draculas,” Chang said of herself and fellow sufferers. “I used to think that every child has to take Desferal injection before they go to bed,” she said, referring to the medicine taken to remove excess iron in the blood accumulated through repeated blood transfusions. Thalassemia is an inherited form of anemia found chiefly among people of Mediterranean descent. The patient must receive blood transfusions intermittently.
■CRIME
Heroin smugglers arrested
The Investigation Bureau announced yesterday it had seized 31kg of heroin at Taichung Harbor from a container which came from Thailand. Investigators said the seizure was the largest quantity of smuggled drugs they had confiscated this year, with an estimated street value of NT$100 million (US$3.28 million). Taichung customs officials said they suspected that several heroin bricks were hidden in two teak closets imported from Thailand, but did not take action until three suspects — Lin Chin-yi, 33; Shu Wei-chun, 30; and Kuo Hsiu-fang, 55 — came to pick up the furniture. The investigators arrested the three suspects when they tried to dismantle the furniture to get the heroin. Kuo is a vagrant who has a record of drug smuggling in the past. The investigators said that the drug trafficking ring from central Taiwan, which usually hires homeless people to transport heroin and uses pseudo companies to declare their imported goods at the customs office, had smuggled drugs into the country several times using the same method.
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