SOCIETY
Air raid drill moves south
An annual air defense drill that requires people to stay indoors and imposes traffic controls for half an hour is to take place in three areas in southern Taiwan tomorrow. The Wanan drill is to be held in Tainan, Kaohsiung and Pingtung from 1:30pm to 2pm. During the 30-minute period, which is to be signaled by sirens at the beginning and the end, those who are at home should shut their doors and windows and shut off electricity and natural gas lines. People who work outdoors should follow instructions on entering public shelters, and vehicles should pull over and wait at the roadside. As for transportation, the high-speed rail service and ordinary trains are to operate normally, but passengers who disembark during the half-hour period should wait in stations until the all-clear signal is given.
ENTERTAINMENT
Cannes recognizes director
Arnie, a movie about a Philippine fisherman filmed by a Taiwanese director with a Filipino mother, has been picked for Cannes’ International Critics’ Week, in the “short and medium-length films” category. Rina Tsou (鄒隆娜), said she shot the film in Kaohsiung’s Cianjhen (前鎮) fishing port to record a day in the life of Arnie, whose fishing boat was docked at the port after weeks of battling waves on the high seas. Her film will be up against nine other entries in the category at Critics’ Week, a parallel competitive section of the Cannes Film Festival aimed at giving young directors exposure. Arnie will also be featured at this year’s Kaohsiung Film Festival along with 11 other “shot-in-Kaohsiung” films subsidized by the city government. The last time a Taiwanese director caught attention at International Critics’ Week in was in 2005, when Ho Wei-ting’s (何蔚庭) 15-minute film Respire won the Best Short Film award.
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