DIPLOMACY
US visa-waiver stalled
Minister of Foreign Affairs Timothy Yang (楊進添) yesterday said the ministry has been working to persuade the US to grant Taiwanese visa-free treatment, but so far, “there is no timetable for its implementation.” The US wants Taiwan to increase its percentage of in-person passport applications and to make applicants have their passport photographs taken when they apply, Yang said. Accordingly, the ministry has recently launched a trial drive to get more Taiwanese to apply for their passports in person, he said. From next month, at least one household registration office in each city and county will be opened to in-person passport applications on a trial basis, Yang said.
CULTURE
Swedish singer to visit
Disabled singer Lena Maria Klingvall from Sweden, who has been invited to visit Taiwan to attend the Republic of China centennial celebrations next year, presented a video to President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) in which she expressed her appreciation for the invitation, the Presidential Office said yesterday. The singer said in her 90-second clip that she was willing to accept the invitation and was looking forward to attending the celebration. Ma officially extended the invitation in a message broadcast in September on Swedish TV during a program about Klingvall. Although the singer and artist was born without arms and her left leg is only half the length of her right, she enjoys life just like other people.
CULTURE
Chefs to visit Belgium
Six award-winning Taiwanese chefs will visit Belgium to showcase some of the country’s delicacies this week, according to the Taipei Representative Office in the EU and Belgium. The six chefs, who won a team award at the Food and Hotel Asia Culinary Challenge in Singapore in April, will present cuisine that integrates Taiwanese and local ingredients at a Brussels hotel from Wednesday to Friday. The first dish on their scheduled menu is rice wine chicken soup, which is believed to warm the body and improve the circulation and energy flow. For appetizers and cold dishes, the chefs will prepare drunken chicken with goji berries, mussels in a five-flavor sauce, tomato slices in ginger thick soy sauce and celery salad with sesame sauce and wasabi. Soybean crumbs, an ingredient unique to Taiwan, will be spread on steamed cod from northern European waters for a combined taste of Taiwan and Europe.
CULTURE
Folk dances showcased
A two-day event showcasing Taiwanese and Japanese folk dancing, held in celebration of the friendship between the two countries and the growing bilateral tourism ties, concluded yesterday. In its eighth year, the dance festival held in Taipei’s Xinyi District (信義) was aimed at promoting cultural exchanges through performances of drumming, lion dancing and Japanese folk dance, a Tourism Bureau official said. According to statistics, the 10 Japanese dance troupes with a combined 120 performers also boosted foreign tourism in Taiwan by attracting more than 1,000 Japanese tourists to the annual extravaganza. According to the bureau, in the first 10 months of this year, about 885,000 Japanese visited Taiwan, a 6.5 percent rise compared with the same period last year. Meanwhile, around 1.11 million Taiwanese visited Japan in the same period, representing a 25.3 percent year-on-year increase.
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