DIPLOMACY
US lawmakers to meet Ma
Two members of the US House of Representatives said they will meet with President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) during a transit stop in New York City on his way to Paraguay later this month. House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Ed Royce and the committee’s ranking member, Representative Eliot Engel, said they planned to go to New York for the meeting. Royce, a Republican who led a bipartisan delegation to Taiwan early this year, said he hopes to visit again next year to discuss trade and investment issues, while Engel, a Democrat, said he hopes to continue to improve bilateral relations. Ma is scheduled to visit Paraguay and four Caribbean allies from Aug. 11 to Aug. 22.
DIPLOMACY
New AIT official starts job
Joseph Bookbinder has assumed duties as the head of the American Institute in Taiwan’s (AIT) Public Diplomacy Section, the institute said in a statement yesterday. Bookbinder took up his new post on Thursday, following former section head Sheila Paskman’s return to the US for a new posting, it said. A Foreign Service officer for 21 years, Bookbinder’s most recent overseas assignment was head of the Public Diplomacy Section at the US consulate in Hong Kong from 2009 to last year, during which time he worked on various press, cultural and education programs, the statement said. He has also served in New Dehli, India, and Chengdu and Beijing in China. His most recent domestic posting was as an assessor with the Board of Examiners from last year to this year, it added. Bookbinder, a Long Island native, holds a bachelor’s degree in history from Harvard University, the AIT said.
EDUCATION
Center in India opens
A Taiwanese educational program at a state-funded university in India to help promote Chinese language-learning has opened. Speaking at the opening ceremony on Thursday, S.M. Sajid, president of Jamia Millia Islamia University in New Delhi, said he was grateful for Taiwan’s help in providing language teachers, because India does not have enough teachers who can teach Chinese. The education center, which teaches traditional Chinese characters, can better showcase the beauty and essence of Chinese culture, Representative to India James Tien (田中光) said. The Ministry of Education has designated National Tsing Hua University to promote higher education exchanges in India. Six other Taiwanese have been posted to two other centers in India to teach Chinese, at O.P. Jindal Global University Haryana state and at Amity University in Uttar Pradesh.
SOCIETY
Party planned for panda
The female panda born on July 6 at Taipei Zoo will be one month old on Tuesday, and to celebrate, the zoo yesterday said it will throw a two-hour party tomorrow. The zoo will also launch a contest to formally name the cub, which is now known as “Rice Meatball” (圓仔). The cub was the result of four years of artificial insemination attempts between Tuan Tuan (團團) and Yuan Yuan (圓圓), the pandas given to Taiwan by China in 2008. Zoo officials said the cub is thriving and now weighs 1.054kg. In Chinese culture, there is traditionally a celebration for a baby’s first month. Zoo officials said its other newborns will also be included in the party: a male white rhinoceros born on Feb. 2, five raccoons born on March 23 and a siamang born on July 3. The party will take place between 10am and noon, the zoo said.
HEALTH
Drinking habits revealed
As many as 95 percent of junior-high students consume at least one sugary drink a day and 55.2 percent have two a day, according to a government survey released yesterday. The survey, conducted by the Ministry of Health and Welfare’s Health Promotion Administration, asked 6,273 junior-high students how many carbonated or other sugary drinks they had during a 30-day period last year. A small number of those polled, 3.8 percent, said they had more than five sugary beverages each day. More boys had two or more sugary drinks a day than girls, the survey showed. Just 5.4 percent of respondents said they stay away from sugary beverages in favor of water. The agency highlighted the high calorie counts in popular beverages, pointing out that a 700ml cup of pearl milk tea can contain up to 550 calories — the equivalent of 28 cubes of sugar.
SOCIETY
Missing daughter found
Police in Taoyuan County said on Thursday that they had reunited a daughter with her parents thanks to clues left by invoice receipts in a lost wallet. Police said an officer in Jhongli City (中壢), Shen Yi-chang (沈怡昌), used the ID card left in a wallet to identify and contact the parents of the wallet’s owner. The parents, who live in New Taipei City (新北市), said their daughter had gone missing six months ago and they had created a Web site in an effort to find her, police said. Moved by their story, Shen opened an investigation into the daughter’s disappearance and discovered that many of the receipts in the wallet were issued by a convenience store in Jhongli. After reviewing surveillance footage and finding a receipt with a license plate number, Shen managed to locate the daughter, bringing the family together for the first time in six months.
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