Monocle, an international magazine covering culture and design, listed Taichung Mayor Jason Hu (胡志強) among the world’s top urban leaders in its July-August issue.
Hu “thinks big,” the magazine said, under the headline “Ten Urban Leaders — Mayors Rethinking the Way Cities Expand, Move, Compete and Breathe.”
PLACE OF CULTURE
Hu’s large-scale infrastructure and economic developments have been applauded, Monocle said, but his key strength is in turning a city known for crime and prostitution into a place, where, as Hu says, “culture permeates all levels of society.”
Hu has brought Zaha Hadid, Chinese director Zhang Yimou (張藝謀) and cellist Yo-Yo Ma (馬友友) to Taichung.
He has also set out plans for a futuristic opera house designed by Japanese architect Toyo Ito, the report said.
CRIME
It said Hu’s most prominent success was seeing the crime rate drop 60 percent since 2001, the year he was elected mayor for his first term.
Hu said on Tuesday he was surprised and flattered to be cited by international magazine as one of the world’s 10 urban leaders.
“I’m glad that the Taichung City Government’s efforts to go global has caught the eyes of the world,” Hu said.
WORK NOT DONE
He said that despite the improvements in Taichung’s social order, such work is never done.
The mayors of the other nine cities listed in the magazine were those of Nagoya, Japan; Holon, Israel; Houston, Texas; Stockholm, Sweden; Oost, the Netherlands; Madrid, Spain; Phoenix, Arizona; Barranquilla, Colombia; and Perth, Australia.
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