SOCIETY
Mother resumes hunger strike
The mother of former air force staff sergeant Tsai Hsueh-liang (蔡學良), who died in 2008, was rushed to a hospital yesterday morning after she began a hunger strike on Sunday last week outside the headquarters of the Ministry of National Defense. Yu Jui-ming (尤瑞敏) was sent to a hospital yesterday for a short treatment before she was back outside the ministry to continue her fast. Military investigators decided that Tsai had committed suicide by shooting himself with a T65 rifle during target practice, but his family says the fatal wounds were caused by a bullet from a pistol, not a rifle. Yu has said she will end her fast once the ministry conducts a ballistics test as part of her son’s case.
ENTERTAINMENT
Golden Melody envoys named
The Golden Melody Awards have unveiled an ensemble of celebrity spokespeople with three of the biggest and most established pop singers in Taiwan: Jay Chou (周杰倫), Jody Chiang (江蕙) and Chang Hui-mei (張惠妹), better known as A-mei (阿妹). The ambassadors for the June 28 event shot a promotional video directed by award-winning music video director Bill Chia, event host Taiwan Television Enterprise (TTV) said. Together, A-mei, Chou — dubbed the king of Mandarin pop — and Chiang, called the diva of Taiwanese-language music, have won a total of 29 Golden Melody awards and been nominated a total of 132 times. The 25th Golden Melody Awards ceremony is to be held at the Taipei Arena on June 28. TTV is to broadcast the red-carpet event and awards ceremony live from 5pm. This year’s ceremony is to be hosted by singer-songwriter Harlem Yu (庾澄慶). The nominees list scheduled to be released this month, but exact dates have yet to be announced.
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