SOCIETY
Tang Prize to unveil winners
The winners of the first Tang Prize, an award established by Taiwanese tycoon Samuel Yin (尹衍樑), are to be announced over four days starting tomorrow. The Tang Prize aims to supplement the Nobel prizes by honoring top researchers in four fields that it deems critical in the 21st century. The first laureates in the category of “sustainable development” are to be announced tomorrow, followed by “biopharmaceutical science” winners on Thursday, “Sinology” winners on Friday and “rule of law” winners on Saturday. Up to three winners in each category are to share a cash prize of NT$50 million (US$1.66 million). The awards ceremony will be held on Sept. 18.
TRAVEL
Online passports successful
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs is planning to expand its online service allowing Taiwanese to make an appointment to apply for a passport, the Bureau of Consular Affairs said. Launched in December last year, the online service allows users to fill in their information on the bureau’s Web site and make an appointment to visit its Taipei office to complete the process of obtaining a new passport or renewing an expired one, the bureau said. Once the service is extended to other parts of the country in August, applicants can make appointments at the bureau’s offices in Greater Taichung, Chiayi, Greater Kaohsiung and Hualien, it said, adding that it should take no more than 20 minutes to finish the application procedure. Before the service was launched, applicants needed to visit the bureau’s headquarters or other offices, fill in application forms there, and line up for sometimes long periods, a bureau official said.
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