The Association of Taiwan Journalists (ATJ), several civic groups and academics are urging the public to sign an online signature drive in support of employees of the Chinese-language China Times against the paper’s plan to lay off some 400 workers.
At a press conference in Taipei yesterday, Media Watch chairman Kuan Chung-hsiang (管中祥) urged the China Times to sign a pact guaranteeing employees’ rights and to publicize its financial condition. He said the online petition launched last Monday had attracted more than 400 people.
He criticized the paper’s plan to turn downsize itself and turn itself into a “newspaper for the elite,” adding: “The media, as a public tool, should not exist only for the elite but should reflect the voice of different groups of a society.”
ATJ secretary-general Liu Chia-jun (劉嘉韻) said the paper would become a tabloid for a short period before disappearing.
The China Times said on June 18 it would reduce its pages and downsize its work force by almost half because of a big drop in advertising revenues.
“Newspapers are more than a business. They are also an indispensable public sphere in a democracy,” Campaign for Media Reform representative Chiu Chia-yi (邱家宜) said, urging the paper to model itself on the Guardian in the UK and turn the newspaper over to a trust to be managed.
“I don’t think the China Times ever cared about its elite readers,” said Kuo Li-hsin (郭力昕), a lecturer at National Chengchi University’s department of radio and television and a contributor to the paper.
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