POLITICS
Alliance to recall petition
The Constitution 133 Alliance said yesterday that it is set to submit 6,000 signatures, representing 2 percent of the electorate in New Taipei City’s (新北市) first district, that it has collected in requirement for the first phase of its recall campaign against Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Wu Yu-sheng (吳育昇), who represents the district, to the Central Election Commission today. The campaign, launched in August by award-winning writer Neil Peng (馮光遠) and film director Ko Yi-chen (柯一正), would need to collect another 40,000 signatures — 13 percent of the electorate — to pass the second phase for the recall proposal to pass. The recall campaign against Wu is the first in a series of campaigns to bring down lawmakers committed to partisan voting and who ignored public opinion in the legislature, the alliance said.
SOCIETY
POWs to be remembered
The Australian Office Taipei and the Taiwan POW Memorial Society are to co-host an event to remember Allied POWs who were once imprisoned in the nation by the Japanese military during World War II at the site of a former POW camp in Jinguashi (金瓜石) in New Taipei City’s (新北市) Ruifang District (瑞芳) at 11am on Sunday. The Australian Office said that as many as 16 POW camps were set up across Taiwan by the Japanese between August 1942 and September 1945, holding more than 4,350 Allied POWs. In the Jinguashi camp alone — known as the Kinkaseki camp at the time — more than 1,000 Allied POWs were held and forced to work as miners. Representatives from Australia, Taiwan’s Veteran Affairs Council, the US and Commonwealth nations will attend the event.
CULTURE
Huashan attracts 120,000
The annual Huashan Living Arts Festival in Taipei, which started on Oct. 10, attracted more than 120,000 visitors this year, which will be its last, the organizers said yesterday. The festival, which ran at the Huashan 1914 Creative Park until yesterday, featured more than 400 shows by more than 200 performing groups, said the Performing Arts Alliance, the joint organizer of the event, along with the Ministry of Culture. Now in its fourth year, the festival hosted 1,300 performances in its first three years, attracting at least 350,000 visitors, the alliance said. Despite its popularity, the festival will not continue next year as it has accomplished its mission, the Ministry of Culture said. The festival was originally conceived to attract crowds to the Huashan 1914 Creative Park, once an abandoned brewery, and turn it into an arts and recreational hub — goals that have been accomplished, Minister of Culture Lung Ying-tai (龍應台) said last month. She said her ministry hopes to utilize its budget next year to nurture a larger art audience in central and southern Taiwan.
CULTURE
Berlin Phil to broadcast live
Classical music lovers unable to attend the Berlin Philharmonic’s concerts in Taipei this month will have the opportunity to turn to the Internet for a live broadcast of the shows. The first of two concerts that the German orchestra will hold in Taipei will be shown live on its Digital Concert Hall for fans around the world, according to the Management of New Arts, which is organizing the events. Led by its chief conductor, Simon Rattle of Britain, the Berlin Philharmonic will give two concerts at the National Concert Hall in Taipei on Friday and Saturday.
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