CULTURE
85,000 visit 24-hour library
The new headquarters of the New Taipei City Library has attracted more than 85,000 visitors during the first week of its trial run, the library said yesterday. The new 10-story building in the city’s Banciao District (板橋) is the first library in Taiwan to provide 24-hour service, with round-the-clock access to its first and fourth floors. It is also the first with a smart self-service book collection machine. The library was opened to the public on May 10 for a trial run until June 29. As of Sunday, more than 85,000 people had visited, library officials said. Its five most popular facilities include its “windows of the world” reading corners and its graffiti wall, they said.
SOCIETY
Universiade helpers sought
The Taipei City Government is recruiting 30,000 volunteers to serve at the 2017 Summer Universiade, it said. The sports event will need the support of many volunteers because it is likely to draw at least 10,000 athletes from different nations, the city government said, adding that the volunteers must be at least 18 years of age and some will be expected to have foreign-language skills. They are to be assigned to various competition venues and some will be required to help maintain traffic arrangements. Held every two years, the Universiade, or World University Games, is organized for university athletes by the Lausanne-based International University Sports Federation. The Universiade in Taipei is to include 14 compulsory sports, such as swimming, diving, artistic gymnastics, fencing, tennis, volleyball, judo, table tennis and taekwondo.
SOCIETY
Degrees do not lift salaries
Higher education does not guarantee a higher salary, and employees with master’s degrees sometimes earn less than those with undergraduate degrees, statistics from the Ministry of Labor showed. The figures showed that last year, entry-level workers with bachelor’s degrees or higher earned an average of NT$27,152 per month. Employees with undergraduate degrees in science, engineering or medicine earned slightly higher pay, but the average was still less than NT$30,000 per month on average, ministry data showed. The average monthly starting salary of entry-level workers with bachelor’s degrees last year was less than the 1998 average of NT$29,887, the data showed. Statistics also showed that the starting salary of employees with graduate degrees had dropped from an average NT$32,321 per month in 2011 to NT$32,189 last year.
CULTURE
French critics praise director
French film critics expressed their admiration for Taiwanese film director Hou Hsiao-hsien (侯孝賢), whose latest work, The Assassin (聶隱娘), is one of the 19 movies in the main competition at the Cannes Film Festival. The Cahiers du Cinema French-language film magazine introduced the films this month, with Stephane Delorme identifying two favorites — the long-awaited work by Ho, and US director Gus Van Sant’s The Sea of Trees. The US director won the festival’s top prize, the Golden Palm award, for Elephant in 2003. Film critic Vincent Malausa wrote in Cahiers du Cinema that the most anticipated event this year is Hou’s return to Cannes with his new work. In 1993, Hou’s The Puppetmaster (戲夢人生) won the Jury Prize. Le Figaro Magazine also selected The Assassin as one of the top 15 movies at this year’s festival, which started on last Tuesday and runs until Sunday.
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