■MUSIC
Top folk choir to perform
The world’s No. 1 folklore choir, Kearsney College Choir of South Africa, is to perform in Taiwan this week on its “Absolutely African” concert tour, organizers Skybridge Folk Arts Troupe said yesterday. The group of 58 males will present a program comprising musical genres that range from contemporary, folklore and religious songs to popular music by The Killer, ABBA, and Queen. The repertoire will include traditional Zulu songs, an anti-apartheid protest song called Weeping, and a Taiwanese and Japanese song. The choir is currently in the 17th spot in the Musica Mundi World Rankings and is the leading folklore choir among more than 3,500 such groups around the world. The choir will perform in Taichung tomorrow and in Taipei on Friday. After its performances in Taiwan, the group is scheduled to go to Japan and then to China to compete in the sixth annual World Choir Games.
■CULTURE
Yingge hosts art exhibition
A biennial exhibition featuring 43 artists from 17 countries will open this year’s International Ceramics Festival in Taipei County’s Yingge Township (鶯歌) tomorrow, the county’s Cultural Affairs Bureau said yesterday. The Taipei County Yingge Ceramics Museum exhibition will feature a total of 105 works, said bureau director Ching Min-liang (卿敏良). The curator of the exhibition, entitled Korero is Moyra Elliott from New Zealand, who the museum selected from 64 candidates. She said that korero means “to speak” in Maori and that she hopes viewers will have lively “conversations” with the ceramic pieces on display. People are also invited to participate and learn to make ceramics along with other activities, Ching said. The exhibition will run through the end of October.
■CRIME
Female detention opens
The government will officially open the first detention center exclusively for women tomorrow to provide a better environment for female detainees. The women’s detention center is part of a Ministry of Justice plan to improve conditions for detained women that was announced by then-minister of justice Wang Ching-feng (王清峰) in March. The center will be set up by transforming the current Shihlin Detention Center and will house detainees from northern Taiwanese areas including Taipei, Keelung and Taoyuan.
■HEALTH
Girls offered vaccine
Teenage girls living in remote mountainous or in low-income households will be offered free cervical cancer vaccinations from the second half of this year, a Department of Health (DOH) official said yesterday. Bureau of Health Promotion Deputy Director Chao Kun-yu (趙坤郁) said the government will earmark NT$42.16 million (US$1.27 million) to purchase the human papilliomavirus vaccine (HPV vaccine) for cervical cancer prevention, of which NT$33.6 million will be used to subsidize vaccinations for teenage girls from remote areas, and NT$8.5 million will be spent on those from low-income families. Although Taiwan has been promoting cervical smear tests for years, few women from remote areas actually have the tests, Chou said, adding that the government therefore decided to take a suggestion from the WHO and carry out a vaccination program with priority given to those from disadvantaged groups.
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