ENTERTAINMENT
Patty Wu claims award
Taiwanese actress Patty Wu (吳可熙) yesterday received the Asia International Competition Best Actress Award at the SSFF & ASIA Film Festival in Osaka, Japan. Wu, who starred in two shorts at the festival, won the award for her role in The Place on the Sea (海上皇宮), an otherworldly short set in Kaohsiung, about a ghost who visits a palace in the sea with her lover for one final dance. Calling the award a big surprise and thanking the judges for choosing her, Wu said she was thrilled and touched that her performance had been so popular with the audience, adding that she hoped to learn more about acting and share her experiences with the public.
ANIMAL WELFARE
Rights education urged
The authorities are asking employers of foreign workers and recruitment agencies to step up animal rights education to help prevent incidents of cat or dog consumption, the Ministry of Labor’s Workforce Development Agency said. A majority of foreign workers come from Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam, where it is legal to eat cats and dogs. Some of the workers are reported to have made meals using cat meat or dog meat. According to Taiwan’s Animal Protection Act (動物保護法), anyone found to have caused the death of an animal banned from slaughter is subject to a maximum prison sentence of one year, in conjunction with a fine of between NT$100,000 and NT$1,000,000 (US$3,219 and US$32,194). The Workforce Development Agency said that many foreign workers are not aware of legislation regarding the protection of animals so it is asking local employers and recruitment agencies to help raise awareness.
ENTERTAINMENT
A-mei to sing at ceremony
Pop diva A-mei (阿妹) is to join a list of performers at this year’s Golden Melody Awards ceremony, organizers of the event said yesterday. In her performance, the singer is to collaborate with Filipino dance group A-Team, which won gold at the World Hip-Hop Dance Championship last year, Taiwan Television Enterprise said in a statement. The 42-year-old singer and her album Faces of Paranoia were nominated for three Golden Melody awards this year — Best Mandarin Female Singer, Best Song of the Year and Best Album Packaging. She is to compete against Taiwan’s Lala Xu (徐佳瑩), Waa Wei (魏如萱) and A-lin (黃麗玲) and Hong Kong’s Karen Mok (莫文蔚) for the Best Mandarin Female Singer award. Among the other singers set to perform at the ceremony are Taiwan’s Show Luo (羅志祥) and Harlem Yu (庾澄慶), and Hong Kong’s Eason Chan (陳奕迅) and Sandy Lam (林憶蓮). The 26th Golden Melody Awards is to be held at Taipei Arena on June 27.
WEATHER
Heavy rain batters nation
Some areas in Hsinchu County and New Taipei City were battered by heavy rain yesterday, with Hsinchu’s Jianshi Township (尖石) and Sansia District (三峽) in New Taipei City seeing 87mm of rain between noon and 6pm, the Central Weather Bureau said. Monitoring stations in Taipei recorded 55mm of rain during the same period, and heavy rain was recorded in mountainous areas of Nantou and Chiayi counties, Tainan and Kaohsiung. Rising waters caused by the heavy rain trapped 12 adults and eight children on a sandbar in New Taipei City’s Wulai District (烏來) until firefighters were able to haul them to safety with a rope. No one was injured in the incident.
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