■ DIPLOMACY
Officials to meet on talks
A preparatory meeting for the upcoming high-level cross-strait talks will be held at the Grand Hyatt Taipei tomorrow, the Straits Exchange Foundation (SEF) said yesterday. The Chinese delegation will arrive in Taipei this afternoon, and SEF Secretary-General Kao Koong-lian (高孔廉) will host a dinner party at the hotel to welcome the guests tonight, the foundation said. The SEF and the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) did not reveal the information to reporters until last night amid concerns that pan-green supporters would protest against the meeting at the hotel. The preparatory meeting will be used to discuss the time, place and agenda for a meeting between SEF Chairman Chiang Pin-kung (江丙坤) and Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Strait (ARATS) Chairman Chen Yunlin (陳雲林). ARATS Deputy Chairman Zheng Lizhong (鄭立中) would lead a delegation of about 20 officials to attend the meeting, MAC Vice Chairman Liu Te-shun (劉德勳) said. Chiang will host a dinner party with the Chinese delegation following the meeting tomorrow. The delegation will leave on Sunday morning, he said.
■ POLITICS
Ma to talk about TRA
President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) has been invited to deliver a keynote speech by video conference from Taiwan at a seminar to be held in Washington on Wednesday on the role of the Taiwan Relations Act (TRA) in Taipei-Beijing-Washington ties 30 years after its enactment. Ma will be introduced by former US deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage, according to the host, the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies. Other China affairs experts such as Bonnie Glaser, Douglas Paal, Alan Romberg, Randy Schriver and Kerry Dumbaugh will take part in discussion panels at the seminar, titled “US-Taiwan Relations in a New Era: Looking Forward 30 Years After the Taiwan Relations Act.”
■ CULTURE
Blossom festival ends
The Alishan cherry blossom festival came to an end after a month during which it attracted 304,485 visitors to view the wide range of flower species in the Alishan Forest Recreation Area in Chiayi County, officials said yesterday. The single-day visitor total peaked at 27,186 on March 22 during the festival, which ran from March 15 until Wednesday, officials of the Council of Agriculture’s Forestry Bureau said. Although the festival has ended, a variety of flowers, including the Cerasus sieboldii cherry, Oshima cherry, Prunus lannesiana, camellias, azaleas and daisies, are still in full bloom, the officials said.
■ SHIPPING
Kaohsiung pumps up volume
The container handling volume at the port of Kaohsiung made a slight recovery last month, signifying that the global economy was slowly warming up, the Kaohsiung Harbor Bureau said yesterday. Officials at the bureau said the port handled 718,800 20-foot equivalent units (TEUs) last month, up from 551,000 in February and 619,100 in January. However, last month’s figure was still lower than the monthly average of 800,000 TEUs in recent years. In the January-March period, Kaohsiung handled a total of 1.89 million TEUs, lower than the 2.46 million TEUs recorded in the same period of last year. Kaohsiung’s container-handling volume saw a year-on-year decline for the fifth consecutive month in February, mainly because of the global economic downturn and partly because of the Lunar New Year holiday, officials said. They attributed the moderate increase last month to growing exports.
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