As the nation celebrated the Double Ten National Day yesterday, President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) got a thunderous reminder that she will have to contend with the voice of youthful rebellion at the nine-in-one elections on Nov. 24.
Death metal band Chthonic, led by New Power Party (NPP) Legislator Freddy Lim (林昶佐), released its latest album.
Lim is one of the co-founders of the party born in 2015 out of the previous year’s Sunflower movement.
Contesting its first local elections this year, the party has 41 candidates running for council seats nationwide.
While the band’s album is called Battlefields of Asura in English, its title in Chinese is a little more pointed: Politics (政治).
The NPP is proving a draw for younger Taiwanese who want a more decisive break with China.
That is a problem for Tsai who — despite also supporting independence — has lost traction among younger voters frustrated with the slow pace of progress on issues such as marriage equality and political reform.
Tsai hosted the National Day celebrations at a time when ties with China are at their lowest ebb in years.
Lim’s album reflects the growing sense of unease. Featuring foreboding lyrics such as “Darkness surrounds, Endless seas as yet unseen, Death’s fugue abounds,” its songs explore themes such as resistance and freedom through a mix of Taiwanese mythology and history.
The track A Crimson Sky’s Command is about a god on the warpath.
“It represents the courage we need to face, confront and overcome our own weakness,” Lim said in a video statement on Tuesday.
“That’s what I’ve learned in my political career,” he said.
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