CROSS-STRAIT TIES
MAC appeals to China
The Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) on Wednesday urged China to refrain from doing anything that could increase the risk of conflict across the Taiwan Strait, two days after scrambling fighter jets to monitor Chinese aircraft intruding into its air defense identification zone. Maintaining peace across the Strait and in the region is a common duty of Taiwan and China, the council said. It also called on China not to take any steps that might escalate tension across the Strait and affect the hard-built mutual trust between the two sides.
HEALTH
Dengue fever spreading
This year’s outbreak of dengue fever in Greater Kaohsiung is worsening, accounting for the majority of new cases reported in the nation over the past week, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said yesterday. There were 226 indigenous dengue fever cases reported between Aug. 19 and Tuesday, including 220 in Kaohsiung, the agency said. The other six, reported in Pingtung County, Greater Tainan, New Taipei City and Penghu County, involved people who had visited Kaohsiung, it said. There have been 1,113 cases of dengue fever this year as of Monday, compared with 272 during the same period of last year, it said. Among the 1,113 cases were 13 hemorrhagic forms of the disease — two of which were fatal, the CDC said. Preventive measures such as draining water containers, cleaning up mosquito breeding sites near homes and taking precautions against mosquito bites should be taken, it said.
ECONOMY
National wealth increasing
Gross national wealth grew 5.6 percent annually over 2012 to end at NT$197.5 trillion (US$6.6 trillion), thanks largely to rising land values, the latest data from the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics showed. The figure represents the sum of physical assets, including land and reproducible assets, as well as net foreign assets at the replacement price. The net national wealth — gross wealth with depreciation factored in — stood at NT$155.1 trillion at the end of 2012, also a 5.6 percent year-on-year increase, the agency said. Given the population of 23.3 million at the end of 2012, gross national wealth per capita was NT$8.47 million, an increase of NT$420,000 from the previous year, while net national wealth per capita was NT$6.65 million, or NT$330,000 more than at the end of 2011. Land increased, more than any other category, by NT$6.1 trillion due to the increasing of the government-defined current land value, the agency said. Land accounted for 42.4 percent of gross national wealth, more than any other single category, it added.
ENTERTAINMENT
Film to debut at Venice fest
Taipei Factory II is to premiere at the 71st Venice Film Festival tomorrow. The three-part film coproduced by the Taipei Film Commission and Italy’s Rai Cinema is to be screened in the out of competition section of the festival, which opened on Wednesday and runs until Saturday next week. The film comprises three 30-minute shorts by Taiwanese directors: The Thrill is Gone by Hou Chi-jan (侯季然), Soap Opera by Cho Li (卓立) and Luca by Hsieh Chun-yi (謝駿毅), covering the genres of thriller, romantic comedy and drama. Three Italian actors are cast alongside Taiwanese actors in the films, which are all set in Taipei. The Taipei Factory project helps match Taiwanese filmmakers and actors with their foreign colleagues.
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