POLITICS
DPP election set for May 27
The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) said yesterday it would hold an election for chairperson on May 27. DPP Deputy Secretary-General Hung Yao-fu (洪耀福) said party members who are interested in the post can expect to register starting late next month or early April, and that about 150,000 members will vote on May 27. The party will hold at least one televised presentation for the candidates, Hung said. Outgoing Chairperson Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) won 57.14 percent of votes in the 2008 chairperson election. In 2010 she was re-elected with 90.29 percent of the votes. Tsai resigned the chairpersonship after she lost the presidential election to President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) on Jan. 14. Tsai is scheduled to leave office at the end of this month. The party will choose an acting chairperson to stand in until a new chairperson is elected.
SOCIETY
Guide says thanks with java
A tour guide from Changhua County purchased 500 cups of coffee from a convenience store in the east of the country on Thursday to thank the store clerks for returning the purse she left behind. The woman, identified by her surname Yeh (葉), took a group of tourists to Hualien on Jan. 20. She accidentally left her purse behind — which contained a wallet with more than NT$10,000 in cash, her ID and credit cards — while waiting for a tourist who was using the restroom. The clerks handed the purse to a local police officer surnamed Hsieh (謝), who managed to track Yeh down. Hsieh originally intended to deliver the purse to Yeh when he returned home to Greater Taichung for the Lunar New Year, but Yeh asked a friend to retrieve the purse on her behalf to avoid troubling Hsieh. Yeh decided to celebrate her birthday on Thursday by buying 500 cups of coffee, worth about NT$20,000, for those who helped her find the purse and residents in the neighborhood.
FILM
Director wins award
A Taiwanese director has won the top prize at the Kuala Lumpur International Short Film Festival, pocketing about US$5,000 in prize money. Hsieh Chun-yi (謝駿毅), a graduate film student at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts Asia in Singapore, won with his film Braid (辮子) on Thursday. The film, which depicts the hardships of a single father trying to raise his young daughter, also won the Student Project Award at the festival, said the organizer of the event.
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