SOCEITY
Taipei flower show opens
Christmas is set to come to the Taipei Expo Park when the Taipei Flower Show opens on Saturday, the city’s Park and Street Lights Office announced yesterday. This year’s outdoor flower display will feature more than 100,000 pots of about 200 different varieties of flowers organized around Christmas themes, including snowmen, sleds and Christmas trees. Poinsettias will be the highlight of the show with more than 12 different varieties featured, including rare mixed color and double-flowering varieties in addition to the more common scarlet, pink and yellow. The show will run until Jan. 11 with craft activities and street artist performances on weekends.
TOURISM
Kaohsiung officials in China
Greater Kaohsiung government officials led a delegation earlier this week to visit their counterparts in China in an effort to boost maritime tourism on both sides of the Taiwan Strait by pushing for various concessions, including 72-hour visa-free transit for cruise ship passengers. The delegation is being led by Marine Bureau Director Lai Jui-lung(賴瑞隆), who is accompanied by officials of the Taiwan Yacht Industry Association, the Kaohsiung Tourism Industry Association and the Kaohsiung International Cruise Association. Lai said that with 17 of Taiwan’s 33 yacht manufacturing companies located in Greater Kaohsiung, the city has boundless growth potential in the maritime tourism industry that could be further improved by cross-strait collaboration.
SOCEITY
‘Heaviest man’ has surgery
A Greater Kaohsiung man was discharged from the city’s E-Da Hospital yesterday after recovering from gastric bypass surgery aimed at helping him lose weight. Dubbed “the heaviest man in Asia,” Lee Chih-cheng (李志成) weighed 261kg when he was admitted to hospital on Nov. 11. E-DA Hospital surgeons performed the procedure, which reduces the functional volume of the stomach and reroutes the small intestines to allow food to bypass part of the digestive system. Within a month of the surgery, Lee had lost 50kg and his weight had dropped to 211kg. However, on his discharge it still took 10 strong orderlies to lift him into the van that was taking him home. Lee’s doctors said they expect him to regain mobility and be able to walk unassisted when his weight falls to 150kg.
NATIONAL DEFENSE
Aerobatics team to be on TV
The air force’s Thunder Tiger Aerobatics Team is to be featured in a special produced by the National Geographic Channel aimed at revealing the stories behind the team members, including one who died in a recent crash. The single-episode special titled Taiwan Elite Warriors: Thunder Tigers is to be broadcast on Jan. 1, the channel said. After an English version of the program is made available, it is to be aired in other Asian countries. In the program, viewers are to get a glimpse at the hardships the team members have to endure as they practice various aerobatic maneuvers, including rolls and spins. Members on the Thunder Tiger Aerobatics Team make an appearance in the program, including Lieutenant Colonel Chuang Pei-yuan (莊倍源), an AT-3 trainer pilot who died in a training accident in October. Chuang’s aircraft collided with another AT-3 trainer during a routine aerobatic training mission on Oct. 21 in Greater Kaohsiung. The other pilot, Lieutenant Colonel Yang Chih-ping (楊志平), survived.
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