Two prominent business executives — Uni-President Enterprises Corp General Manager Alex Lo (羅智先) and Yahoo Asia Managing Director Rose Tsou (鄒開蓮) — have been invited to co-host a flag-raising ceremony at the Presidential Office plaza on New Year’s Day.
Council for Cultural Affairs Minister Emile Sheng (盛治仁) said the surprise arrangement underscores the government’s determination to celebrate the Republic of China’s (ROC) 100th anniversary next year with creativity.
In addition, famous Aboriginal composer Lee Tai-hsiang (李泰祥) has been invited to provide a special arrangement of the National Anthem to further highlight the uniqueness of the flag-raising ceremony on the first day of the ROC’s centennial, said Sheng, who concurrently heads the ROC (Taiwan) Centenary Foundation.
In an effort to inspire all ROC citizens to commemorate the country’s 100th anniversary with joy, Sheng said both the Presidential Office and the foundation have “racked their brains” to design interesting and meaningful programs.
Lee, who suffers from Parkinson’s disease, presented his newly completed musical score to Vice President Vincent Siew (蕭萬長) at the Presidential Office on Wednesday.
Lee told Siew that he endured great physical pain while trying to inject new life into the National Anthem.
“I worked my heart out. Every note required great effort,” he said.
Lee said the new arrangement makes the National Anthem sound more lively and theatrical.
More than 200 musicians selected from private and public music ensembles and orchestras will play the piece at the New Year’s Day flag-raising ceremony, Sheng 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