■LABOR
Bureaucrats get 110 days off
Government employees will have a total of 110 days off next year, the Executive Yuan’s Central Personnel Administration said yesterday as it unveiled next year’s work schedule for civil servants. Holiday periods of three or more days will include the Lunar New Year break between Jan. 24 and Feb. 1 and the Dragon Boat Festival from May 28 and May 31. The work schedule only applies to government employees, the administration said. If a folk holiday falls on a Thursday or Tuesday, the Friday or Monday of that week will be given as a holiday so that employees can enjoy a long weekend. However, employees will be required to make up the extra day off by working the Saturday in the week before or following the holiday weekend, the administration said. The adjustments will not apply to memorial holidays such as the Founding Day of the Republic of China, 228 Peace Memorial Day and Double Ten National Day.
■SOCIETY
Red House invites ‘ghosts’
To celebrate ghost month, the arts market in front of the Red House Theater in Ximending is inviting the public to put on “ghostly” makeup and clothes and join various activities from today to Sunday. More than 20 booths will hand out free ghost masks and other creative products during the event starting at 2pm today. Visitors are encouraged to dress up “as ghostly as possible,” and could receive vouchers worth up to NT$2,000 for the best costumes, according to the Art and Lifestyle Association of Taiwan. The event will also feature an exhibition of gods often worshiped during ghost month, including Chiye (七爺, Seventh Lord) Baye (八爺, Eighth Lord) and Zhong Kui (鍾馗).
■POLITICS
Chiu sentenced for slander
The Taipei District Court yesterday sentenced Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Chiu Yi (邱毅) to 25 days in jail or a fine of NT$22,500 for calling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Kuan Bi-ling (管碧玲) “ugly.” Kuan and former DPP legislators had accused Chiu of fabricating allegations against other politicians at the Legislature on Nov. 18, 2005. In response, Chiu said to Kuan: “You are an ugly woman, even by the kindest standards.” Kuan responded by filing the slander suit against Chiu, who now has 10 days to appeal. While Chiu was in China yesterday and could not be reached for comment, Kuang said in a statement: “This is a victory for all my fellow women. It is also a warning to chauvinists.”
■CULTURE
Festival to end with samba
This year’s Luodong Fringe Festival, sponsored by Ilan County’s Luodong Township (羅東), will culminate tomorrow with a street parade of 20 floats and teams of samba dancers, along with 61 performance teams from Taiwan and abroad. Township chief Lin Tsung-hsien (林聰賢) told reporters on Thursday that the samba dancers and foreign performers from Brazil, Mexico, the US and Thailand would join teams from Taipei, Keelung, Nantou, Taitung and Ilan County in the two-hour parade starting at 4pm. The festival, now in its seventh year, is modeled on Scotland’s Edinburgh International Festival and France’s Avignon Dramatic Art Festival. The annual event features modern dance and music performances, a national street dance competition, performances by rock bands and elementary-school orchestras and children’s films from the US, the UK, France, Germany Italy, Spain, China, India, Thailand and Taiwan.
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
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
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