LA Dodgers slugger Manny Ramirez caused a stir in Taipei yesterday, with media and fans following the baseball star as he traveled around the city.
Ramirez arrived in Taiwan with the team on Thursday night and they are scheduled to play three friendly games over the weekend.
The Major League star took advantage of a short break before afternoon practice to go shopping for a digital camera at the Taipei 101 Mall. His visit drew the attention of both the media and baseball fans, who asked for autographs and photos.
PHOTO: LIN CHENG-KUNG, TAIPEI TIMES
Equally zealous fans were also waiting for Ramirez at a press conference yesterday, where he and Taipei Mayor Hau Lung-bin (郝龍斌) planted a tree together to celebrate Arbor Day. He volunteered to sign autographs for fans and gave out three autographed baseballs to attendants. Ramirez then invited fans to take group photos with him before leaving for practice at the Tienmu Baseball Stadium.
People in Taiwan became familiar with the Dominican-American left-fielder when he was with the Boston Red Sox.
As of the end of last season, Ramirez had a batting average of 0.313, hitting 546 home runs with runs batted in (RBI) topping 1,788.
Meanwhile, another Dodgers player, local boy Hu Ching-lung (胡金龍), met the press yesterday in an event hosted by a local PC maker.
Hu, an infielder, has been switching between 3A-level Minor League and the Major Leagues in recent years. Last year, Hu appeared in just five Major League games.
“I’ve changed my mentality for this season. I will just look at it with a normal attitude. The most important thing is to keep yourself fit,” Hu 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
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