CULTURE
CAL float wins trophy
China Airlines (CAL) on Monday won the International Trophy at the Rose Parade in California for the seventh straight year, with its entry of a fire-breathing dragon float. The float was designed in keeping with the parade’s theme of “Just Imagine” and in celebration of the Year of the Dragon on the lunar calendar. Titled “Spirit of Prosperity and Harmony,” the float was dedicated to wishing Taiwan and its people an auspicious, prosperous and harmonious year, said Chang Feng-ping (張鳳炳), director of the airline’s Los Angeles branch. The airline began participating in the parade in 1987. Taiwan was also featured on another float, called “Donate Life,” which displayed the photos of 72 organs.
WEATHER
Meteor shower to be hidden
The first meteor shower of the year is unlikely to be visible, thanks to poor weather expected across Taiwan, the Central Weather Bureau said yesterday. The Quadrantid meteor shower, one of the year’s most prolific, will likely be obscured by heavy clouds at its peak in the early hours of today, the bureau said. The meteor shower will reach its maximum at 7:20am, the bureau said. The Quadrantid meteor shower was discovered in 1825 by Italian astronomers. By 1938, it was confirmed to be one of the three strongest annual showers visible from Earth, along with the Perseids and Geminids.
TRANSPORT
UA flight turns around
A United Airlines (UA) plane carrying 270 passengers was forced to make an emergency landing at Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport yesterday due to a mechanical problem. The pilots of the Boeing 777 turned the aircraft around about an hour into the flight after the nose wheel door of the landing gear failed to close. The plane made an emergency landing close to midday. All passengers and crew were safe upon landing, the airline said. The flight took off from Taoyuan airport at about 10:30am, bound for San Francisco and Houston, Texas, with a stopover in Tokyo. The passengers were later transferred to other flights.
CULTURE
Jay Chou tops song list
Pop idol Jay Chou’s (周杰倫) new song, titled Sailors Afraid of Water (水手怕水) topped the list of the 100 most popular songs of last year in Taiwan, making Chou a four-time winner of the annual title, according to the results of an online survey released on Monday. South Korean boy band Super Junior’s Mr Simple took second place, while the The Boys by the nine-member all-female South Korean band Girls’ Generation ranked third among the 300 Taiwanese, Chinese, Japanese, South Korean and Western songs listed in the survey. In previous years, the survey included more Japanese songs than South Korean ones. This time around, 16 South Korean songs made the list compared with nine Japanese songs. The online survey was conducted by the radio station Hit FM from Dec. 1 to Dec. 18. Nearly 4 million votes were cast during the period.
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