A winter basketball league for teams of Filipino players was launched in Taoyuan yesterday, with hundreds of people gathering at a community center complex for the opening ceremony and to watch the first three games.
The opening ceremony of the Winter Basketball League 201 — organized by the Confederation of Ilocano Association Inc’s (CIASI) Neili Bade chapter — featured a uniform review, in which the teams, comprised of only Filipino migrant workers, marched past the stands of spectators and were judged for best uniform and best muse.
The ROC team, with a squad of workers from the Taoyuan-based auto parts maker ROC-Spicer, won the Best in Uniform trophy, with eye-catching red, white and black jerseys.
“The word ‘Pilipinas,’ which means the Philippines in Tagalog and is printed on the chest of our jerseys, symbolizes that our home country is close to our hearts,” said the team’s vice-captain and point guard, who identified himself as “Jhong.”
The ASE Ballers won the Best Muse trophy, because of their muses Maricar Catre and Jean Ortiz. In Philippine basketball culture, muses are women who whip up support for their teams at league openings.
The aim of the tournament is to create unity, sportsmanship and respect among Philippine migrant workers, CIASI Taiwan national chairman Rheden Delumen said.
“It also provides an opportunity for them to play sports as a means of fighting homesickness,” he said.
With the opening of the league, about 200 Filipino migrant workers on 13 teams have the opportunity to play a sport on their day off, CIASI Neili Bade chapter president Jossa Somera said.
“The main goal in organizing this league is to allow Filipino workers to play basketball in a safe environment where they can also make friends,” he added.
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:
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