SOCIETY
Immigrants star in TV show
A new television show documenting the culture, lives and success stories of immigrants in Taiwan premiered yesterday. In the series, jointly produced by the National Immigration Agency and CtiTV, immigrants and their families talk about their everyday lives, love, friendships and successes in Taiwan, the agency said. One of the immigrant stories featured is that of a Vietnamese woman, who married a Taiwanese man and became the lead singer in a Taiwanese opera troupe. Another episode features a Vietnamese woman who worked her way up from domestic worker to radio host. National Immigration Agency Director-General Hsieh Li-kung (謝立功) said he hopes the programs will serve as source of information for new immigrants and give Taiwanese a chance to learn more about that segment of the population. The series consists of 52 one-hour-long episodes that will be broadcast every Sunday on CtiTV and China Television Co in several languages, including Vietnamese, Thai, English and Indonesian.
POLITICS
Mayor promotes summit
Greater Kaohsiung Mayor Chen Chu (陳菊) on Saturday left on a trip to Singapore and Malaysia to invite city mayors and business leaders there to attend the 2013 Asia Pacific Cities Summit, scheduled to take place on Sept. 9 for three days in Greater Kaohsiung. It was Chen’s second overseas visit this month, following a trip to Japan to promote tourism to her city and the upcoming regional meeting. The Greater Kaohsiung Government said Chen will also look at city development and public infrastructure construction while in Singapore and Malaysia. It did not detail Chen’s itinerary in the two Southeast Asian countries, nor state when the mayor will return. The summit is a biennial event that was initiated by Brisbane City Council of Australia in 1996. Past meetings have been held in Seattle, Washington; Chongqing, China; Incheon, South Korea; and other key cities in the Asia-Pacific region.
ENTERTAINMENT
Hsu Feng passes away
Veteran entertainer Hsu Feng (徐風) passed away yesterday at the Taipei Veterans General Hospital, aged 68. A star television show host in the 1980s, Hsu was in the most watched-programs of his time and was as famous as pop legend Feng Fei-fei (鳳飛飛). When Feng’s representative announced in February last year that the singer had died of lung cancer in Hong Kong, Hsu, devastated by the news, said that if anyone should die from cancer it should be him. Diagnosed with esophageal cancer in 2010, Hsu was subsequently diagnosed with other kinds of cancers, but never gave up on life and continued to be active. The media reported that Hsu felt unwell on Sunday last week and was sent to the Taipei Veterans General Hospital. The hospital on Tuesday announced that he was critically ill and yesterday said he had died at 5:30am.
SOCIETY
COA to change farmland use
Council of Agriculture Minister Chen Bao-ji (陳保基) said his council will work on raising the percentage of farmland that can be used for non-agricultural purposes to pave the way for the use of renewable energy on farms. Chen said the revisions would help the Ministry of Economic Affairs promote the use of wind power, solar power and other sources of renewable energy on prime farmland in the country’s coastal areas. Out of food safety considerations, the use of premium farmland is restricted to farming. Currently, there are about 330,000 hectares of prime farmland.
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