■ SOCIETY
Indians to hold vigil
The Indian community will hold a candlelit vigil in Taipei on Sunday in memory of the victims of the recent Mumbai terror attacks. The vigil will take place at Taipei Municipal Chung Cheng Senior High School, No. 77 Wenlin N Rd, beginning at 7pm. Everyone is welcome to pay their respects. For further details contact Mr. Amarnani at 0936-348184 or Mr. Rakesh at 0932-026425.
■ TOURISM
Taipei City to fund film
The Taipei City Government plans to spend NT$20 million (US$596,000) to finance a feature film showcasing the city’s “unique characteristics” to a global audience, Department of Information and Tourism Director Yang Hsiao-tung (羊曉東) said on Tuesday. Yang said shooting on the film will hopefully begin in March or April. The city will ask award-winning director Hou Hsiao-hsien (侯孝賢) to produce the film and Hsiao Ya-chuan (蕭雅全) to direct it. Yang said many cities or towns have left an imprint on people’s minds because they served as backdrops to movies, such as Rome in the 1953 movie Roman Holiday, London in the 2001 film Bridget Jones’s Diary, Jiufen (九份) in Hou’s 1989 film A City of Sadness or more recently, Hengchun (恆春) because of the box office hit Cape No. 7. The film should reflect Taipei’s beauty, vitality, color and other outstanding aspects to attract foreign tourists, he said.
■ SOCIETY
Poinsettia exhibition starts
Taipei Flower Auction Co is holding an exhibition on poinsettias and flower gift sets at Taipei Flower Market from 8am to 12pm today through Saturday. About 1.14 million poinsettias have been grown in Taipei this year, and the average price of a small plant is between NT$40 and NT$50. Large plants cost about NT$150 to NT$180. The company said the slow economy has hurt poinsettia sales in the run-up to Christmas. Meanwhile, the company said it would offer a 20 percent discount to customers who use the government’s consumer vouchers, which will be issued in January, to purchase flowers at the flower market and about 400 member stores around the country.
■ EDUCATION
‘American Shelf’ opened
The Public Affairs Section of the American Institute in Taiwan (AIT) and the Taoyuan County Government on Tuesday unveiled a new “American Shelf” in Chungli Village and Happy English Village. The “American Shelf” program provides students with direct access to resources on the US, including materials for understanding American culture and society, and the study and teaching of English. Under the partnership between AIT and the Taoyuan County Government, AIT will purchase new books, pamphlets and DVDs for the shelf’s collection on a range of topics, including US culture, history, English teaching, geography and democracy. AIT public affairs officer Thomas Hodges said the latest American Shelf was the perfect complement to AIT’s projects elsewhere in Taiwan.
■ ENVIRONMENT
Go green with lanterns: EPA
The Environmental Protection Administration (EPA) yesterday called on individuals and businesses to select products powered by recyclable batteries or those with a mercury content within EPA regulations. Mercury content should not exceed 5 parts per million, the EPA said. Mercury leaked into the environment could cause harm to the Earth as well as to human health, it said.
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
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