ENTERTAINMENT
Film headed to Sundance
The animated Taiwanese short The Present (禮物) has been nominated for the Sundance Film Festival’s animated short film award competition for next year. Directed by Joe Hsieh (謝文明), the film revolves around the conflict between strong desire and religious belief. It tells the story of a hotel manager’s daughter who falls in love with a married man who is on a business trip, but the love turns into deep hatred and sparks devastating revenge. The film, which has a voiceover in Hoklo (also known as Taiwanese) was inspired by the Japanese musical tragedy Dojoji, Hsieh said. The short film has won several titles, including Best Animation at the Taipei Film Festival, and was nominated for best short film at last year’s Golden Horse Awards. It has also been featured in the San Diego Asian Film Festival, the Milan International Film Festival and the Holland Animated Film Festival. This Sundance Film Festival runs from Jan. 16 to Jan. 26.
TAIPEI
Papering city with pandas
The city government will host an exhibition of papier-mache pandas next year to help raise awareness of wildlife protection. The city has signed a contract with French artist Paulo Grangeon to stage his 1,600 Pandas exhibition, but the dates are still under discussion, according to Left Brain, a marketing firm that is helping organize the event. Grangeon organized the first show with the French section of the WWF in July 2008 at Paris City Hall, and it has since traveled across the globe to remind the public that only 1,600 giant pandas remain in the wild. Department of Information and Tourism Commissioner Sun Ting-lung (孫廷龍) said the city hopes to stage the exhibition in late February or early March. The paper pandas for the show, which will be made by a factory in Thailand, will be auctioned off for charity after the show ends, officials said.
CROSS-STRAIT TIES
Avian flu warning stressed
People traveling to China should take health precautions as 10 more H7N9 avian flu cases have been reported there since October, the Central Epidemic Command Center said yesterday. Center spokesman Chou Jih-haw (周志浩) said the 10 cases included three in Guangdong Province, five in Zhejiang Province and two in Hong Kong. There have been 142 confirmed cases of the virus in China since the outbreak began at the end of March, he said. Of those, 47 patients have died. However, the cases have been sporadic and there are no signs that the H7N9 strain has been transmitted from person to person, he said.
SOCIETY
Campus condoms popular
Two hundred boxes of condoms have been sold since vending machines dispensing boxes of condoms were installed at five universities in Greater Taichung 10 days ago, the city’s Health Bureau said yesterday, showing that there is a demand for the contraceptives. Taichung Deputy Mayor Tsai Ping-kun (蔡炳坤) used the event to launch a safe-sex initiative and bid to prevent the spread of AIDS by making it easier to purchase condoms on college campuses. Vending machines have already been installed at Hungkuang University, China Medical University, National Chung Hsing University, Chaoyang University of Technology and National Taichung University of Education. Statistics from the Centers for Disease Control show there were more than 20,000 people with AIDS nationwide as of last month, 72.6 percent of whom contracted the virus through unprotected sex.
BUREAUCRACY
Passports get Web service
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs is to launch an online service that allows people who are applying for passports to fill in their personal information and make an application appointment, an official said yesterday. The online service, which will be launched on Tuesday next week, is aimed at providing a more convenient service, the ministry’s Bureau of Consular Affairs Director-General Kung Chung-chen (龔中誠) said. The service will allow applicants to use the Web site to fill in their information and make a reservation to visit the bureau’s headquarters in Taipei to finish the procedure to obtain a new passport or renew an expiring passport, the official said. Applicants will be able to choose a preferred time period to visit the bureau, the official said, adding that the visit should not take more than 20 minutes.
HEALTH
Dengue fever cases rise
The number of dengue fever cases continues to rise with the onset of winter, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said yesterday, adding that three cases of severe dengue fever, along with 49 locally acquired infections and four imported cases, were reported last week. Thirty-seven of the locally acquired infections were reported in Pingtung County, 10 in Greater Kaohsiung and two in Greater Tainan. Pingtung County has reported 404 locally acquired cases out of the nationwide total of 514 as of Monday. Pingtung also has the highest number of severe dengue fever cases so far, with eight of 13 cases reported in the county this year, according to the CDC. The center added that with the threat of severe dengue fever, also known as dengue hemorrhagic fever, people should step up their efforts to eliminate mosquito breeding sites, and keep their living spaces clean and free of containers with standing water.
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
FLU SEASON: Twenty-six severe cases were reported from Tuesday last week to Monday, including a seven-year-old girl diagnosed with influenza-associated encephalopathy Nearly 140,000 people sought medical assistance for diarrhea last week, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said on Tuesday. From April 7 to Saturday last week, 139,848 people sought medical help for diarrhea-related illness, a 15.7 percent increase from last week’s 120,868 reports, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said. The number of people who reported diarrhea-related illness last week was the fourth highest in the same time period over the past decade, Lee said. Over the past four weeks, 203 mass illness cases had been reported, nearly four times higher than the 54 cases documented in the same period
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
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: