CULTURE
Jiaosi to hold beer festival
Jiaosi Township (礁溪) Administration Office in Yilan County will host a hot-spring beer festival from Aug. 26 to Aug. 28, inviting 1,000 members of the public to drink as much cold beer as they can. Limited-edition beer glasses will also be handed out as souvenirs, officials said. The event aims to help fashion Jiaosi into a Taiwanese Munich and hopes to attract tourists with its hot springs and beer, transforming the area into a summer tourist hotspot, officials said. During the carnival, a limited offer of 200 glasses per day will be available from 5pm to 7pm for those who arrive by public transportation. Visitors can exchange ticket stubs from Capital Bus, Kamalan Bus, Kuo-kuang Motor Transport or the Taiwan Railway Administration for free beer at the event’s information desk.
DIPLOMACY
Visa-waiver mulled in Chile
The lower house of Chile’s Congress passed a proposal on a visa-waiver agreement with Taiwan on Wednesday, which will be sent to the President Sebastian Pinera as a reference for policymaking. The plan was proposed by 10 lawmakers from both the ruling and opposition parties of the lower house. According to sources familiar with the matter, the Chilean government is mulling the possibility of initiating a visa-waiver program with Taiwan, because of the close bilateral relations between the two countries. Hundreds of Taiwanese are expected to travel to Chile when Taiwanese expatriates hold an annual conference for Taiwanese businesspeople in Central and South America next year. Another wave are likely to attend a golf tournament for the Southern Common Market in 2013. Republic of China passport holders now enjoy visa exemption or landing visas in 117
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