■ CULTURE
Kaohsiung to hold art fest
An iron and steel sculpture festival will start later this month in Kaohsiung City, with artists exhibiting a variety of interactive projects, the city’s Bureau of Cultural Affairs announced yesterday. The 2008 Kaohsiung Steel and Iron Sculpture Festival, which will take place in the Chungtu Tangjung Brick Kiln Factory starting next Saturday, will use the factory area and nearby communities as a platform for artistic dialogue between artists, residents and visitors alike, the bureau said calling upon community residents to take part in the creative process to highlight the interactivity of the projects and to boost their creative strength. The “Domino Game,” for instance, calls upon participants to experience metal production by welding their own domino figures, which will be lined up next to one another before being toppled.
■ DEMOGRAPHICS
Population still growing
The nation’s overall population stood at 23,016,257 as of the end of last month, the Ministry of the Interior announced yesterday. The ministry said that household registry statistics showed the number of households in Taiwan reached 7,637,756 at the end of last month, up 1.87 percent from the figure for the same time last year. Taipei County topped the list with more than 1.33 million registered households, followed by Taipei City at more than 958,000, the ministry said. There were a total of 18,740 births in Taiwan last month, tallies showed.
■ DIPLOMACY
MOFA extends condolences
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs yesterday instructed the nation’s US representative Jason Yuan (袁健生) to express condolences to the family of the late Charles Cross, who served as the first American Institute in Taiwan (AIT) director from 1979 to 1981. Cross had a long and distinguished career, including service in the US Marines in World War II and many years with the US Department of State, serving as ambassador to Singapore and US consul general in Hong Kong.
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