The New Power Party (NPP) yesterday said its sole large-scale campaign rally ahead of the Jan. 16 legislative elections is to take place on Saturday, which is to feature a 10m-tall sculpture by artist Lee Liang-ren (李良仁) as the backdrop and a live performance by the Paper Windmill Theater Troupe, famous for its productions for children.
NPP legislator-at-large candidate Ko I-chen (柯一正), who is a renowned Paper Windmill Theater stage director and performer, yesterday told a news conference that the group’s performance at Saturday’s rally would be atypical, as it is a play about the NPP designed for an older audience.
The Dream Rangers, a group of octogenarian motorcyclists famous for touring Taiwan who were featured in the 2012 documentary Go Grandriders (不老騎士), are also to perform at the event, Ko said, adding that he hopes to help elect at least five NPP legislator-at-large candidates.
Lee’s sculpture is to be featured as the event’s stage backdrop, rather than the currently popular LED projections, Ko added.
When asked about his sculpture, Lee said: “As the main themes of the NPP’s evening rally are birth and hope, I designed my sculpture to resemble a young pregnant woman who symbolizes the extraordinary group of young people who carry a nascent hope, and the ushering in of a new vision that is to take place on Saturday.”
“We are passing the future on to them so that they can forge a new one,” Lee added.
Meanwhile, when asked by reporters about the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) latest TV campaign commercial — which accused anti-KMT campaigners of disrespecting contributions to society made by baby-boomers — NPP Chairman and legislative candidate Huang Kuo-chang (黃國昌) said that the ad had “no relevance” to the “injustice of [President] Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) administration,” which activists have been trying to address.
FLU SEASON: Twenty-six severe cases were reported from Tuesday last week to Monday, including a seven-year-old girl diagnosed with influenza-associated encephalopathy Nearly 140,000 people sought medical assistance for diarrhea last week, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said on Tuesday. From April 7 to Saturday last week, 139,848 people sought medical help for diarrhea-related illness, a 15.7 percent increase from last week’s 120,868 reports, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said. The number of people who reported diarrhea-related illness last week was the fourth highest in the same time period over the past decade, Lee said. Over the past four weeks, 203 mass illness cases had been reported, nearly four times higher than the 54 cases documented in the same period
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:
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
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