SOCIETY
Yunlin runs music festival
Yunlin County is to hold its first music festival along its coastline today to celebrate summer and the area’s love of the ocean. The festival, which will feature a family running event, concerts, art performances and a lucky draw, is also aimed at raising environmental awareness, organizers said. Sharing the spotlight at the festival will be a new museum near the venue that opened early this year, Yunlin County Commissioner Su Chih-fen (蘇治芬) said yestereday. She touted the museum as the Taiwanese version of the remote moorland farmhouse named “Wuthering Heights” that serves as the backdrop of the novel of the same name by British writer Emily Bronte. As isolated as Wuthering Heights, the Taiwan Taisi Haikou Life Museum rises up on the seashore in a beautiful panoramic setting, Su said. The museum offers an authentic glimpse of the lifestyles of people living along the coastal area and introduces aquaculture, one of the economic backbones of Yunlin County, she said.
SOCIETY
New Party founder dies
Senior politician Chen Kwei-miew (陳癸淼), who helped found the pro-China New Party in 1993, has died at the age of 81. Chen was surrounded by his family at Cheng Hsin General Hospital when he died. The New Party has extended its condolences to his family members, with party Chairman Yok Mu-ming (郁慕明) commending Chen as a respectable politician. Chen had suffered from kidney and liver disease in his later years. A former lawmaker and acting mayor of what was then Tainan City in the 1990s, Chen helped found the New Party, which broke away from the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) in opposition to the leadership style of then-KMT chairman and then-president Lee Teng-hui (李登輝).
SOCIETY
Tang winner reveals plans
Chinese-American historian Yu Ying-shih (余英時), the first Tang Prize winner in Sinology, promised on Friday to visit Taiwan for the first time in six years in September and attend the Tang Prize award ceremony and related events in person. Yu, a Princeton University professor emeritus, is regarded by many of his peers as the greatest Chinese intellectual historian of his generation. The 84-year-old said he plans to arrive in Taipei on Sept. 13 and will attend the award ceremony on Sept. 18, deliver a speech the following day, and then participate in a forum on Sept. 20. In addition to his academic pursuits, Yu is an outspoken supporter of the democracy movement in China.
ENTERTAINMENT
Carey concert sought
The cancelation of Celine Dion’s Taipei concert in October could reopen the possibility of a performance in the city by Mariah Carey, who was vying for the same venue earlier this month. Amy Ko, a promoter at Yu Kuang Music, said they informed Carey’s team immediately once they found out that Taipei Arena was available again, adding that they have not had any response yet. “If we get a positive response from the pop diva, the most likely date for the concert would be Oct. 30,” Ko said. Carey and Dion had been competing to book Taipei Arena from Oct. 27 to Oct. 30, with the Canadian singer winning the time slot. After losing out in Taipei, Carey’s team planned a concert in Manila on Oct. 28. However, on Aug. 13, Dion announced that she had canceled her Asian tour to look after her 72-year-old husband Rene Angelil, who is battling throat cancer.
An essay competition jointly organized by a local writing society and a publisher affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) might have contravened the Act Governing Relations Between the People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area (臺灣地區與大陸地區人民關係條例), the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) said on Thursday. “In this case, the partner organization is clearly an agency under the CCP’s Fujian Provincial Committee,” MAC Deputy Minister and spokesperson Liang Wen-chieh (梁文傑) said at a news briefing in Taipei. “It also involves bringing Taiwanese students to China with all-expenses-paid arrangements to attend award ceremonies and camps,” Liang said. Those two “characteristics” are typically sufficient
A magnitude 5.9 earthquake that struck about 33km off the coast of Hualien City was the "main shock" in a series of quakes in the area, with aftershocks expected over the next three days, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said yesterday. Prior to the magnitude 5.9 quake shaking most of Taiwan at 6:53pm yesterday, six other earthquakes stronger than a magnitude of 4, starting with a magnitude 5.5 quake at 6:09pm, occurred in the area. CWA Seismological Center Director Wu Chien-fu (吳健富) confirmed that the quakes were all part of the same series and that the magnitude 5.5 temblor was
The brilliant blue waters, thick foliage and bucolic atmosphere on this seemingly idyllic archipelago deep in the Pacific Ocean belie the key role it now plays in a titanic geopolitical struggle. Palau is again on the front line as China, and the US and its allies prepare their forces in an intensifying contest for control over the Asia-Pacific region. The democratic nation of just 17,000 people hosts US-controlled airstrips and soon-to-be-completed radar installations that the US military describes as “critical” to monitoring vast swathes of water and airspace. It is also a key piece of the second island chain, a string of
The Central Weather Administration has issued a heat alert for southeastern Taiwan, warning of temperatures as high as 36°C today, while alerting some coastal areas of strong winds later in the day. Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門) and Pingtung County’s Neipu Township (內埔) are under an orange heat alert, which warns of temperatures as high as 36°C for three consecutive days, the CWA said, citing southwest winds. The heat would also extend to Tainan’s Nansi (楠西) and Yujing (玉井) districts, as well as Pingtung’s Gaoshu (高樹), Yanpu (鹽埔) and Majia (瑪家) townships, it said, forecasting highs of up to 36°C in those areas
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