CULTURE
Canadian celebration set
The Canada Day celebration in Taipei on Saturday will allow visitors to experience Canadian fine arts, live music, food and sports, the Canadian Chamber of Commerce in Taiwan said. The event celebrating Canada’s 146th birthday is to be held at the Hakka Cultural Park. Visitors will have the opportunity to taste Canadian beef dishes and enjoy performances by Canadian bands such as The Ever So Friendlies, the chamber said. A children’s hockey game will also be held. The event, which will run from 1pm to 8pm, will end with fireworks, the chamber said.
DIPLOMACY
Friendship medals awarded
The German Institute Taipei presented medals to three Taiwanese yesterday in recognition of their efforts in strengthening friendship between Germany and Taiwan. This is the first year the German-Taiwanese Friendship Medal has been awarded. It was presented to Peter Wang, chairman of the Chinese-German Cultural Foundation; Eugene Chien (簡又新), chairman of the Taiwan Institute for Sustainable Energy and a former minister for foreign affairs; and Aline Siao Ma (馬蕭亞麟), a former German teacher at National Taiwan University and a board member of the Sino-German Cultural and Economic Association, the institute said.
SOCIETY
Female artists showcased
The Taipei Fine Arts Museum at the weekend kicked off an exhibition featuring Taiwanese female artists’ works from 1930 through 1983. The exhibition, titled Women Adventurers: Five Eras of Taiwanese Art 1930-1983, includes 150 paintings, photographs, sculptures and installations by 18 artists. It runs until Sept. 29 and includes lectures, forums and tours on the artists, the museum 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
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