HEALTH
No Chinese drugs coming
Department of Health Minister Yaung Chih-liang (楊志良) said on Monday Taiwan would not open its doors to generic drugs from China anytime soon even though the two sides last week concluded a medical and healthcare cooperation agreement. “Generic drugs developed and manufactured in Taiwan are of better quality than those from China,” Yaung said after attending an award ceremony for exceptional pharmaceutical and biotechnology products. In Taiwan, qualified pharmaceutical companies can produce and market generic products once the patent protection afforded to the original developer has expired. Yaung said the medical and healthcare pact was aimed mainly at establishing cross-strait mechanisms on pharmaceutical and medication management.
CULTURE
Prof tops at Music Nova
An electronic music composer from Taiwan has won one of the top prizes at an international competition with digitized variations of the timbre and tone of the pipa, a four-stringed traditional Chinese music instrument. Tseng Yu-chung (曾毓忠), a professor at National Chiao Tung University’s (NCTU) Institute of Music, won the top prize in the A-category of Music Nova, an electroacoustic music competition held in the Czech Republic, with a composition titled Points of Departure with 17 Variations. Tseng performed his composition, which he said was inspired by the sounds of the pipa, at a news conference held at an NCTU studio on Monday. Through a compositional technique similar to developing variations employed by Brahms and other composers, Tseng said he created 17 variations, with each one departing on its own sound journey with a punctuated percussive sound similar to that of the pipa’s plucked sound.
TRANSPORTATION
KMRT to run late Saturday
The Kaohsiung Mass Rapid Transit (KMRT) system will provide late night services through 3am on Saturday to accommodate the crowd attending New Year celebrations, the Greater Kao-hsiung City Government said yesterday. The KMRT will shorten train intervals to 2.5 minutes during peak hours as a total of 500,000 people are expected to participate in the overnight celebrations in front of Dream Mall. Flow controls will be implemented at Kaisyuan Station on the Red Line, the city said, adding that the Bus Service Administration would provide two free shuttle buses — one to and from the Singuang Parking Lot and Dream Mall between 6pm on Friday and 2:30am on Saturday, and the other between KMRT Cultural Center Station and the Southern Training Center during the same period. The city’s 24 KMRT shuttle bus lines will also extend services through 3:30am.
TOURISM
Arts park planned in Hualien
A planned theater featuring natural scenery will be built along the east coast to boost tourism in the area, Hualien County Commissioner Fu Kun-chi (傅崑萁) said on Monday. The proposed site for the arts and culture park is near the coast where the Liwu River (立霧溪) empties into the Pacific Ocean, Fu said, as he unveiled the project with playwright and director Stan Lai (賴聲川) and architect Kris Yao (姚仁喜). The proposed park will feature a theater whose rear wall can open for the audience sitting on 800 rotating seats, enabling them to enjoy the mountain and sea views surrounding the venue. Lai said the spectacular dual view inspired him to come up with the idea of adding rotating seats to the proposed design.
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