■ SOCIETY
ew food rules for cinemas
Outside food is to be allowed in movie theaters, except foods with a strong odor such as fermented bean curd and fried chicken, an official with the Government Information Office said. Many movie theaters prohibit outside food and drinks from being consumed on the premises, so that moviegoers wishing to eat snacks while watching a movie must buy from the theater’s concession stands. The official said the office would make a formal announcement today that, effective immediately, movie theaters must lift bans on outside food and drinks. The office, however, will suggest that moviegoers refrain from bringing in foods with strong odor or snacks that are noisy to eat, such as melon seeds, the official said. The authorities will make random inspections at theaters to ensure they are not maintaining an outside food ban, the official said.
■ CRIME
Telephone fraud tackled
About 10,000 fraud telephone calls are made in Taiwan daily, a major telecommunications operator said on Saturday. Taiwan Mobile said it had spent more than NT$10 million (US$312,000) on developing interception measures to protect subscribers and cut harassment by fraudsters to a minimum. Just one month after adopting measures to intercept scam calls, Taiwan Mobile reported it had blocked 77,000 such calls. The company found that most scam calls were made between 9am and 9pm. The number of calls blocked was the highest at 9am, showing that the scammers use a time when people are going to work or to school and when public offices are opening to confuse the receiver into thinking the call is real.
■ CULTURE
Tibetan exhibition opens
An exhibition of Tibetan culture and religion in exile organized by the Tibet Religious Foundation of His Holiness the Dalai Lama — the de facto representative office of the Tibetan government in exile in Taiwan — was officially inaugurated at the Yuanlin Performance Hall in Yuanlin Township (員林), Changhua County, on Saturday and will run until the end of the month from 9am to 5pm, Tuesday through Sunday. Admission is free. Yuanlin is the fourth stop since the exhibition was first unveiled in Taipei in July and aims to show the developments of Tibetan culture and Tibetan Buddhism within and outside Tibet after China invaded in 1959. It also offers stories of resistance against Chinese rule, foundation secretary-general Sonam Dorjee said.
■ SOCIETY
Bureau can’t pay informants
Kaohsiung City’s Environmental Protection Bureau is having difficulty issuing payments to people reporting violations of environmental rules as the number of the reports skyrocketed in the past three years, the bureau said yesterday. Tung Wen-chieh (董文傑), a section chief at the bureau, told reporters that the bureau had requested budgets of NT$90,000 every year since 1997 to compensate people who informed the bureau of violations against the Waste Disposal Act (廢棄物清理法), but no one applied for the grant in 2007. However, the number of reported violations rose to 10,100 the next year and reached 166,608 last year, possibly because of the global financial crisis, Tung said. The payments the bureau needed to make in 2008 and last year added up to NT$2 million, making issuance of the money a headache for the bureau, Tung said.
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