The Tang Prize, Taiwan’s highest private award for global achievement, has gained increasing global publicity following a report in German news weekly Die Zeit earlier this month that compared the prize to its global counterparts, such as the Nobel Prize, the Tang Prize Foundation said.
Die Zeit in its Oct. 8 edition compared the Tang Prize to other awards, including the Nobel Prize, the Kyoto Prize in Japan and the Shaw Prize in Hong Kong.
The Tang Prize was described as “a biennial prize based in Taiwan that is given in four categories: Sinology, biopharmaceutical science, rule of law and sustainable development,” which the foundation said suggests the prize’s growing influence.
The foundation also cited Guenter Wermekes, the German finalist in the Tang Prize Medal Design Competition in 2013, as saying that the prize “seems to have become much more popular and important in the world, and among the German public.”
The foundation also said that the number of nominations for this year’s Tang Prize has seen a 25 to 50 percent increase from the previous year, suggesting that it is gaining both awareness and participation in the international community.
The diversity of the nominees has also increased, meaning that the prize has garnered approval from the professional world, it said.
The foundation said that Tang Prize laureate in rule of law Albie Sachs is to deliver a lecture at this year’s meeting of The World Academy of Sciences in Vienna Nov. 18.
In December, the foundation is to be represented in Paris at the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change Conference, which is to be attended by former Norwegian prime minister Gro Harlem Brundtland, last year’s Tang Prize laureate in sustainable development.
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