CULTURE
Gao Xingjian showing film
Nobel literature laureate Gao Xingjian (高行健) will attend screenings of his new film Requiem For Beauty (美的葬禮) starting today, the National Taiwan Normal University said on Wednesday. The experimental film will have its Taiwan premiere at the National Palace Museum today and Gao will speak to the audience, the university’s Graduate Institute of Performing Arts said. He will also attend the screenings tomorrow and on Sunday at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum and the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts. On Wednesday, he will attend a screening and a forum at the university, the institute said. The two-hour film, written and directed by Gao, is based on his poem of the same title. According to Gao, the film is a “cinematic poem” that departs from traditional film narratives. It includes poetry, paintings, monologues in Chinese, French and English, and performances by dozens of actors. The Chinese-born Gao, who has been a French citizen since 1998, has served as a chair professor at the institute since 2012.
CROSS-STRAIT TIES
Culture sessions planned
Minister of Culture Lung Ying-tai (龍應台) on Wednesday said that the ministry is to hold a series of sessions for the arts and cultural sector, beginning at the end of this month, to explain the government’s policy on the service trade pact with China. Lung said she would attend two of the three sessions and forums. Topics related to independent bookstores and a single pricing scheme for publications will be addressed in the sessions, Lung said. Writers, artists, film directors and people from the publishing industry launched a petition drive on April 9 calling on the ministry to fully communicate with the cultural sector before signing any culture-related agreements with China.
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