TRADE
Cross-strait cargo up 22.4%
The accumulated volume of container cargo shipped between Taiwan and China via direct cross-strait sea shipping routes increased to 1.91 million TEUs last year, according to the latest tallies from the Ministry of Transportation and Communications. TEU is the abbreviation for twenty-foot equivalent unit, a measure used for capacity in container transportation. The new figure marks a 22.4 percent increase over the previous year, the tallies showed. Officials attributed the growth to the economic recovery from the global financial crisis. Air cargo shipments via direct cross-strait links also rose last year, with growth nearly doubling to 240,000 tonnes compared with the previous year. In December, 25,000 tonnes of cargo was transported directly across the Strait by air, representing a 48.3 percent growth compared with December of 2009.
CULTURE
U Theatre ready for NZ
Renowned dance troupe U Theatre was ready for its first performance in New Zealand as first lady Chow Mei-ching (周美青) arrived yesterday as the troupe’s honorary leader showed her support. U Theatre is scheduled to deliver four shows, titled Sound of the Ocean, as one of the featured groups at the biennial Auckland Arts Festival from tomorrow until Friday during the event’s final week. The troupe was invited to the festival by David Malacari, the event’s artistic director, four years ago in Hong Kong after Malacari saw U Theatre, the troupe’s founder and artistic director Liu Ruo-yu (劉若瑀) said. About a dozen dancers and technical staff arrived in Auckland on Thursday to prepare for the show, Liu said. Chow is scheduled to appear at U Theatre’s rehearsal and performances as well as visiting local schools for charity purposes during her stay until Friday.
ENTERTAINMENT
Super Junior draws fans
Thousands of fans of South Korean boy band Super Junior thronged Taipei Arena yesterday for the group’s final concert on its second tour in Taiwan. Lined up outside three hours before the afternoon show, many fans, mostly girls and young women, were carrying hand-made posters with Korean characters, glowsticks and other props for the concert. Some held a red rose folded in paper — distributed for free by one of the band members’ fan clubs — while waiting to watch their idols. The 11,000 seats available for each of the three concerts on the tour were sold out long before this weekend, in part because the pop band’s concerts are said to be like parties, with lots of interaction with fans.
TRANSPORTATION
Airlines seek dialects
Airline companies have been expressing interest in hiring flight attendants who can speak Chinese dialects to prepare for the opening of Taiwan’s borders to independent Chinese tourists. In a flight attendant recruitment session held by TransAsia Airways earlier this week, more candidates showed up to exhibit their ability to speak Chinese dialects rather than the more traditionally popular foreign languages of English and Japanese, according to the company. At present, Chinese tourists are only permitted to enter Taiwan as members of tour groups, with a cap of 4,000 tourists per day. While preferred dialects come mostly from prosperous cities along China’s coast, such as Cantonese and Shanghainese, the ability to speak dialects from inland regions could offer job candidates an extra advantage, because those areas have greater potential for tourist growth, the company 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
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