DIPLOMACY
Chinese delegation visits
China’s Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Straits Deputy Chairman Zheng Lizhong (鄭立中) began a trip to the nation’s center and south yesterday to study the agricultural and aquaculture sectors. Invited by the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) think tank the National Policy Foundation, Zheng arrived at Kaohsiung International Airport. The itinerary for Zheng and a delegation of five to eight members will be similar to when he visited last year, officials from the Taipei-based Straits Exchange Foundation (SEF), said, when Zheng traveled to Greater Taichung, Greater Kaohsiung and Greater Tainan and Changhua, Yunlin, Chiayi and Pingtung counties.
CULTURE
Documentary wins US award
A documentary produced by the Public Television Service (PTS) has received a prestigious award in the US, it was learned yesterday. A Year in the Clouds was one of 15 works honored in the “People & Places” section in the Professional Non-fiction Division of the Fall CINE Golden Eagle Awards. The documentary depicts a year in the life of a group of Atayal Aborigines who live in the high mountain village of Smangus. Two decades ago, the tribe was among the poorest in the nation, but its chief, Icyeh Sulung, had a vision of great trees that would ensure the tribe’s survival. The tribe found a forest of Cypress trees that changed their lives. Interest from tourists turned Smangus into a thriving ecotourism center, but sudden wealth and outside pressures played havoc with the tribe’s unity. This was the fourth time that PTS has won the prestigious award. The three previous works honored were Mme. Chiang Kai-shek (2005), The Secret in the Satchel (2008) and Taipei 24h (2010).
SOCIETY
Agency touts English sites
The Research, Development and Evaluation Commission on Friday launched a Facebook page to publicize government English-language Web sites and seek feedback. The commission said that after years of providing bilingual Web pages, the agency was seeking to make the service better known. It encouraged people to visit the government Web sites listed on its Facebook page and leave their comments. Those who do will be eligible for a lucky draw, with prizes ranging from brand name watches and an iPad2 to round-trip tickets to Los Angeles. The event will run through March 31. More information is available at www.i-taiwan.nat.gov.tw.
ARCHEOLOGY
NTU team finds rare jade
A team of National Taiwan University (NTU) students has unearthed a rare jade core at the Puyuma Archaeological Site in eastern Taiwan, according to officials from the Taitung-based National Museum of Prehistory. Wang Ying (王潁), an anthropology student at NTU and a member of the team, and 26 other students had been participating in an archeology field study at the site in Taitung County organized by NTU and the museum, the officials said, adding the students also discovered a number of more common jade tubes. About 6,000 items of jadeware have been unearthed from the site over the years — however, jade cores are considered to be very rare, the museum’s assistant researcher Lee Kun-hsiu (李坤修) said. Used in jadeware production, a jade core is usually discarded after an item has been made, Lee said. However, no jadeware factories have been discovered in the area, and the archeological site is 100km away from the source of the jade, the researcher 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