Taiwan News Quick Take
MEDIA
PTS manager gets new term
The general manager of the government-funded Public Television Service (PTS) has received unanimous support to begin a new three-year term, PTS chairman Shaw Yu-ming (邵玉銘) said on Tuesday. Sunshine Kuang (曠湘霞) won the votes of all 15 board members — including two proxies — at a meeting held on Tuesday to select the next general manager, Shaw said. Two other board members did not participate. Prior to the vote, Kuang and two other candidates were interviewed by members of the board, Shaw said. He did not reveal the identity of the losing candidates, citing secrecy rules. Shaw said he favors Kuang because of her familiarity with the TV station. Kuang, 62, has held the job since February 2011 and has spent much of the past 25 years working in broadcasting.
TOURISM
Thailand wooing Taiwanese
A senior Thai tourism official said during a just-concluded travel fair in Taipei that his country is expecting about 400,000 Taiwanese tourists to visit by the end of this year amid increasing travel exchanges between the two countries. The goal seems reasonable, as nearly 350,000 Taiwanese visited Thailand between January and August this year, an 80 percent year-on-year increase, according to the Tourism Bureau. Annual visits to Thailand by Taiwanese could continue to grow to 510,000 by the end of next year, when the Southeast Asian country forecasts a total of 28 million overseas tourists will have visited, Tourism Authority of Thailand Governor Suraphon Svetasreni said. Svetasreni said his authority would especially focus on first-time visitors, particularly groups of young people and students, adding that businesspeople and golfers would also be major targets.
SOCIETY
Krispy Kreme coming soon
US-based Krispy Kreme Doughnuts will open its first local store in December, filling the vacuum left by the departure of another US chain, Dunkin’ Donuts, earlier this year. Krispy Kreme Taiwan declined to comment on the move, but wrote on its Facebook page on Tuesday: “Coming to Taipei in December.” According to information from the company on a local job site, the new store will open in Xinyi District (信義). Krispy Kreme is looking for both full-time and part-time employees as it plans warm-up promotional events starting in the middle of next month, the recruitment ad says. Founded in North Carolina in 1937, Krispy Kreme has outlets in the US, Canada, Japan, South Korea, Thailand, Colombia and several other countries.
BIRDWATCHING
Taipei team wins marathon
A team from Taipei won a birdwatching marathon in the southwest of the country over the weekend by recording 125 bird species in 30 hours, more than one-third of the total observed this year. Birdwatchers from the Wild Bird Society of Taipei beat 24 teams from Malaysia, South Korea, the US, Spain, Thailand, Canada and South Africa in the 2013 Taiwan Birdathon. The teams recorded a total of 305 species, 39 more than last year, from 8am on Saturday through 5pm on Sunday. Competitors from the US and Malaysia said they were thrilled to discover more than 20 birds they had never seen before and that they were encouraged by the diversity of birds in Taiwan to come back and compete again, the Southwest Coast National Scenic Area Administration said. Under the rules, teams of three or four race to record as many different birds as they can by identifying them in the mountains or by the seaside in Yunlin and Chiayi counties and Greater Tainan.
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