■ SOCIETY
UDN seeks word of the year
The Chinese-language United Daily News (UDN) launched a search for this year’s “Word of the Year,” offering 48 Chinese characters for the public to choose from. The search was launched by the UDN and a private foundation in the hope that one Chinese character could summarize the situation of Taiwan this year, or reflect the feeling of Taiwanese about the year. The Chinese character that gets the most votes from the public would become the Word of the Year. To encourage the public to participate, UDN and the foundation are offering rewards that include a car priced at NT$500,000 (US$15,100). Several countries conduct selections for the Word of the Year, with the Society of the German Language starting the process in Germany in 1971.
■ EVENTS
Poetry festival opens
The ninth Taipei Poetry Festival opened yesterday, hoping to infuse the spirit of poetry into the daily lives of residents in the busy capital city. Sponsored by the Taipei City Government, the theme of this year’s festival is “Roving Desk, Walking Poetry.” The festival will experiment with many art forms poetry interdisciplinary exhibitions, music, stage performances, conversations with poets, poetry recitals and screenings, the event sponsor said. Many foreign poets have been invited to participate in a conference, including South Korean poet Kim Hye-soon, Chinese poet Yu Jian (于堅), Singaporean Madeleine Lee (李夙芯), Hong Kong’s Yau Ching (游靜), the Czech Republic’s Katerina Rudcenkova and France’s Emmanuelle Pireyre. The festival ends next Sunday.
■ EVENTS
Panda pen almost ready
Preparations for the arrival of a pair of giant pandas from China are entering the final stage as construction of a panda house and other facilities at the Taipei City Zoo are nearly completed, said the zoo, which will host the animals. Zoo director Jason Yeh (葉傑生) told reporters yesterday that the zoo had made a few changes to the panda hall and that work was almost completed. Animal caretakers have also recently ensured there would be no problems when they raise and take care of the two pandas, he said, adding that facilities designed to hold educational material and guidebooks had been installed in the main lobby of the hall. The construction of the exhibition areas, which includes a pool, bamboo shrubs and driftwood racks, would be finalized soon, he said, adding that the zoo would seek police assistance to shorten the transport time from the airport to the zoo.
■ MANUFACTURING
High-tech firm in Kinmen
A Taipei-based solar power kit maker inaugurated a manufacturing plant on Kinmen on Friday, becoming the first high-tech Taiwanese company to set up a factory on one of the country’s outlying islands. SolarGate Technology Corp (茂鑫能源科技公司) chairman Chuang Chin-pei (莊欽培) said the company would use Kinmen as a springboard to the Chinese market. SolarGate hopes to develop Kinmen into Taiwan’s first “solar-power model island,” he said. SolarGate provides international trading services for solar power products and systems, including solar cells and solar glass. The Kinmen factory would handle manufacturing and development, with raw material to be supplied by Taiwan proper. The products made at the Kinmen factory would be shipped to Xiamen, Fujian Province, whence they would be transported to other Chinese markets as well as to the US and Europe, SolarGate said.
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
FLU SEASON: Twenty-six severe cases were reported from Tuesday last week to Monday, including a seven-year-old girl diagnosed with influenza-associated encephalopathy Nearly 140,000 people sought medical assistance for diarrhea last week, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said on Tuesday. From April 7 to Saturday last week, 139,848 people sought medical help for diarrhea-related illness, a 15.7 percent increase from last week’s 120,868 reports, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said. The number of people who reported diarrhea-related illness last week was the fourth highest in the same time period over the past decade, Lee said. Over the past four weeks, 203 mass illness cases had been reported, nearly four times higher than the 54 cases documented in the same period
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
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: