When the FBI dismantled an encrypted messaging service based in Canada in 2018, agents noticed users moving to other networks. Instead of following their tracks to rivals, investigators decided on a new tactic: creating their own service. ANOM, a secure-messaging service built by the FBI and other law enforcement agencies, launched in October 2019 and solidified its following after authorities took down another rival. Popularity spread by word of mouth. When ANOM was taken down Monday, authorities had collected more than 27 million messages from about 12,000 devices in 45 languages — a vast body of evidence that fueled a global sting operation. Authorities on Tuesday revealed the operation known as Trojan Shield and announced that it had dealt an “unprecedented blow” to organized crime around the world. “Each and every device in this case was used to further criminal activity,” said Suzanne Turner, the agent in charge of the FBI in San Diego, where the investigation began in 2016. Users were “upper-echelon, command-and-control” figures in more than 300 criminal organizations. Unbeknown to criminals, authorities were copied on every message sent on the FBI devices, much like blind recipients of an e-mail. “The very devices that criminals use to hide their crimes were actually a beacon for law enforcement,” Randy Grossman, the acting US attorney in San Diego, said at a news conference. More than 800 suspects were arrested and more than 32 tons of drugs seized, including cocaine, cannabis, amphetamines and methamphetamines. Police also seized 250 guns, 55 luxury cars and more than US$148 million in cash and cryptocurrencies. An indictment unsealed Tuesday in San Diego named 17 foreign distributors charged with racketeering conspiracy. The seeds of the sting were sown when law enforcement agencies took down a company called Phantom Secure that provided customized end-to-end encrypted devices to criminals, according to court papers. Unlike typical cellphones,
An outage at a little-known firm that speeds up access to Web sites knocked a lot of top Internet destinations offline on Tuesday, disrupting business and leisure for untold millions globally. The problem was quickly resolved. The company, Fastly, blamed a configuration error in its technology. But the incident — Fastly’s traffic dropped 75 percent for about an hour just as the US East Coast was beginning to stir — raises questions about how vulnerable the global internet is to more serious disruption. WHAT’S A FASTLY? San Francisco-based Fastly isn’t a household name, but its “edge server” computing technology is used by many of the world’s most popular Web sites, such as The New York Times, Shopify, the Guardian, Ticketmaster, Pinterest, Etsy, Wayfair and Stripe. The British government is among its clients. The company provides what’s called a content delivery network — an arrangement that allows customer Web sites to store data such as images and videos on various mirror servers across 26 countries so that the data is closer to users, and thus shows up faster. Many of Fastly’s customers are news sites that use its technology to update their Web sites with breaking news. Buzzfeed, for example, used Fastly to cut the time its users took to reach the site by half. Fastly had US$290.9 million in revenues last year. WAS THERE ANY BACKUP? Customers rely on Fastly and its rivals to host and protect their Web site data from denial-of-service attacks and disruption from spikes in traffic. Had this outage been more serious, customers could have moved to competitors such as Cloudflare or Akamai. But that’s not simple; many businesses would have had to scramble and might have suffered losses. “You can’t switch quickly to another service unless you had it set up ahead of time,” said Doug Madory, an Internet infrastructure
Kaohsiung’s National Sun Yat-sen University (國立中山大學) has one of the most idyllic settings of any university in Taiwan. Away from the bustling city center on the far side of Monkey Mountain, also known as Chaishan (柴山) and Shoushan (壽山), the buildings in this tranquil setting are blessed with unobstructed views of Kaohsiung Harbor and the Taiwan Strait, not to mention glorious sunsets. In fact, this area was so beautiful that former president Chiang Kai-Shek (蔣介石) established a villa here for his personal use, preventing the average citizen from entering the area for decades. After his passing in 1975, the Kaohsiung City Government began developing the area for recreation, re-establishing the swimming beach from the Japanese days, and setting up a zoo nearby, among other improvements. With the establishment of the university in 1980, the zoo animals had to be moved up the mountain, but sports facilities were then added to the list of reasons for people to visit the area. Chiang’s Villa has even been opened as a tourist attraction. Behind the university campus, however, one narrow paved road continues to wind its way farther and farther away from the city center, parallel to but high above the shoreline. Eventually, the road dead-ends at a military checkpoint. Tucked away in this isolated corner of Kaohsiung just before the checkpoint is Chaishan Village (柴山部落), an eclectic mix of residences, farms, cafes and temples, first populated centuries ago by Aborigines and later Han immigrants. THE CHAISHAN COASTLINE The Chaishan Alangyi trail takes visitors from the edge of the university campus down to the far end of this settlement, all along the shoreline. Like its namesake in Pingtung County, the Alangyi Historic Trail (阿朗壹古道), this trail follows relatively unspoiled coastline from one trailhead to an exit elsewhere. Also like its namesake, it is very exposed and
The strong elderly Taiwanese woman who silently endures a life of suffering under the shackles of patriarchy is a story that’s often explored in local cinema. The theme takes center stage in Little Big Women, which tells the story of Shoying (Chen Shu-fang, 陳淑芳), the Chen family matriarch who turned her shrimp-roll stall into a successful restaurant after her philandering husband abandoned the family decades previously. The husband’s untimely death on her 70th birthday throws upends her life as she has to arrange the funeral with her three grown daughters. Chen, who won last year’s Golden Horse for best actress for this role, also won the best supporting actress award for Dear Tenant (親愛的房客), where she played an ill, but dignified, woman who mourns over the death of her son. Chen has a much more complex and nuanced role to work with in Little Big Women. Shoying is playful in private, first seen singing a karaoke love song in the back of a taxi, but is also extremely proud and bitter about the past. She is deeply caring but often domineering toward her three grown daughters, who don’t seem to have the best relationship with her even though she practically raised them alone to become successful adults. The daughters each have their own issues. The oldest, Ching (Hsieh Ying-hsuan, 陳宛青), is a dance choreographer with health issues. Yu (Vivian Hsu, 徐若瑄) is a plastic surgeon, while Jiajia (Sun Ke-fong, 孫可芳) constantly clashes with her mother while learning how to run the restaurant. Despite the father being virtually absent for most of their lives, the three often defend him and fight with their mother, which provides a somewhat hard-to-believe yet effectively heartbreaking setting and serves as the basis of the bulk of the conflicts. In one defining scene, Jiajia follows her father’s lover’s
The 20th Tribeca Festival is aiming to not just rebuild itself after its 2020 edition was largely scuttled by the pandemic, but to help revitalize its hometown. This year’s Tribeca, which opened Wednesday with Jon Chu’s adaption of the Lin-Manuel Miranda musical In the Heights, will be spread throughout all five boroughs of New York with a mix of in-person and virtual screenings, ultimately culminating in a full-capacity premiere at a newly reopened Radio City Music Hall. For a festival founded in the wake of 9/11, coaxing New York back to life is a familiar role. “Our founding mission felt more poignant, more important than ever,” Jane Rosenthal, who started the festival with Robert De Niro, said in a recent interview. “That original mission of the festival was to use the power of film and storytelling not just to entertain but to rebuild our city — emotionally more than anything else.” Tribeca, which this year is being held two months later than usual, will be one of the biggest film festivals yet this year to go forward with a mostly in-person event. But instead of the usual theaters that are home to the festival, its primary venues this year will be outdoor screenings dispersed around the city. There’s still a virtual component to the festival but the emphasis will be the energy generated by perhaps the largest cultural event held in New York in more than a year. “Eighteen months ago, we all had to isolate,” says Rosenthal. “Now that we’re coming out of it, I talk to so many people who are in some ways struggling to come out. It’s been interesting the emotional toll this has taken on so many of us, not to mention the families that lost loved ones and all the front-line workers.” Tribeca is part of a wider effort
Joseph Liu chose Norway for his legal studies because he wanted to learn more about human rights. But instead, he’s been fighting the Norwegian government for the past four years for the right to use his national identity. Following a diplomatic row with China in 2010, Norway changed the nationality of its Taiwanese residents to “Chinese.” Liu and others launched the My Name, My Right movement to raise funds and pressure the authorities to change the country designation back to Taiwan. They eventually took the case to the Norwegian supreme court, where they lost in November last year. While the outcome wasn’t surprising, “we didn’t even have a chance to represent ourselves in court,” Liu says. “The judge just rejected us on grounds that our allegations were unfounded. I’m quite disappointed in Norway’s legal system.” Liu and his team filed a lawsuit last month with the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in France, where they now have to wait up to a year to see if the case is accepted due to the court’s enormous caseload. As of the end of April, there were about 65,000 pending cases. If the ECHR rejects the lawsuit, Liu plans to either help Taiwanese in other countries who have similar issues, or bring the issue to the UN. “It doesn’t matter if we win or not, but we need to keep speaking out,” he says. “If we remain silent, then it will become difficult in the future for Taiwanese to exercise their right to self-determination. Not saying anything means that we’ve quietly accepted the fact of being designated as Chinese.” “If this lawsuit wins, it would be the first time for the European Court of Human Rights to make a decision related to national identity,” states a My Name, My Right press release. Since the ECHR is
As fitness-conscious New York emerges from the pandemic, many residents are hitting the gym to get back in shape, but without putting too much pressure on themselves after the psychological stresses of the past 15 months. Thirty-year-old Benny Maidenbaum comes from a family of sportsmen and said he’s always been “very active.” Basketball twice a week and pounding sidewalks as a real estate agent kept him fit. But in March 2020, all that stopped. “I had no activity, was sitting at home. I gained weight, like 15-20 pounds (seven to nine kilograms). They call it ‘corona weight,’” he says at TS fitness studio on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Health journals and articles have indeed talked about “Quarantine 15” — unwanted extra pounds gained from the upheaval of our daily routines, including lack of activities and emotional eating caused by the anxiety of the pandemic. About 42 percent of American adults said they had gained more weight than they intended — an average of 29 pounds — during the pandemic, according to a survey conducted by the Harris Poll for the American Psychological Association. Angela Thuman, a 42-year-old bank worker, lost 32 pounds over the winter before the pandemic struck. She put it back on during the COVID crisis. “It made me depressed and my anxiety was sky high. I had no motivation whatsoever,” said Thuman, who lives in Maryland. Maidendaum said he found himself stuck at home eating junk food, without any interest in healthy options. “It’s like you’re in a hole. There is no way out,” he said. Maidenbaum says TS Fitness has helped him “break the cycle” of unhealthy living. Founder Noam Tamir says the studio has seen attendance increase significantly in recent weeks. “With summer coming, being outside more, not fitting into the clothes they used to and obviously revealing more of their body, they want to get
With droves of Taiwanese Americans reportedly bolting stateside on “vaccine tours,” the issue of transnational healthcare opportunism is back in the public eye. If you’re wondering if that’s a real thing, well, while I believe I may have just coined the phrase, the phenomenon it describes has been controversial since Taiwan’s superb National Health Insurance (NHI) system was launched in 1995. “Editorials of major Taiwanese newspapers — such as Apple Daily, United Daily News, United Evening News and the Liberty Times (the sister paper of the Taipei Times) — have criticized overseas Taiwanese for manipulating public health insurance by paying minimal fees and shifting their medical cost to other local taxpayers,” writes Ken Chih-Yan Sun (孫志硯) in Time and Migration, a new work on aging Taiwanese migrants to the US. In 2006, the law was changed so that dual nationals had to have been in country for at least four months of the year to avail themselves of NHI; a 2010 amendment pushed the threshold to six months. Still, the perception remains that many Taiwanese Americans are taking advantage of both systems in an unscrupulous manner. As Sun observes, those who return to live out their dotage full-time in their homeland are not spared criticism: “Given that they had spent most of their working years contributing to the United States … many returnees faced negative critiques in Taiwan …” Although this is just one element of the book’s penultimate chapter, which focuses on migrant thinking on access to social rights, long-term Taiwan residents are likely to find it among the most engrossing. As with other sections of the book, the opinions offered on this issue are mixed. “For Mr Guo, immigrants using public benefits in Taiwan, whether visiting or settling there, were transgressing moral boundaries … ‘How can we dedicate the
For millennia, the plants that humans have eaten absorbed light energy from the sun, and water from the soil through their roots. Farmers hoped and prayed for just the right amount of rain, temperatures that would make their crops thrive and an absence of pests. Now, consumers in Taiwan and many other countries can buy vegetables that have never come into contact with soil, been exposed to sunlight or been made wet by falling rain. Indoor farms — often called vertical farms, because they occupy small pieces of land but feature multi-level growing areas — bypass the unpredictability of nature. In few places does indoor farming, also known as controlled-environment agriculture (CEA), make more sense than in Taiwan. Farmers here lack space (according to official statistics, household engaged in agriculture have on average less than one hectare of farmland each), endure floods and droughts and worry typhoons might destroy their crops. What’s more, Taiwan has scores of disused industrial sites that could be repurposed into vertical farms. GOING VERTICAL A vertical farm in Taoyuan City’s Lujhu District (蘆竹) is the most productive example of CEA in Taiwan, according to Jesper Hansen, chief commercial officer of YesHealth Group, the company that designed and operates it. The farm, inaugurated in 2017, yields 1.5 to 1.6 metric tonnes of lettuces, cruciferous vegetables and herbs every day of the year. Its growing chambers, which cover 3,000 square meters, are dominated by 10m-high, 14-level sets of shelves on which 50 farming staff nurture leafy greens. The various types of leafy greens grown by YesHealth take between 21 and 32 days to grow from a seed to a harvestable product. The company doesn’t currently grow tomatoes or cucumbers on a commercial basis, because they take a relatively long time to grow from seed, Hansen says. YesHealth Group founder and CEO Winston
This has been the year of a thousand faces. Every face is an inch or two high on my laptop screen, and trapped inside a rectangle. The rectangles form a wall of faces that builds up brick by brick. As each new face arrives, the wall shifts and rearranges itself. Outside, in the real world, other people’s faces have been frustratingly elusive, half-hidden by masks. Or they have averted their gaze, focused on completing their essential journeys and not wishing to exchange their spittle with mine. But here the faces keep coming, popping up magically from wherever they are in the world, happy to be seen. During lulls in meetings, my eyes scan the virtual room. You can look long and hard at people’s faces online in a way that would be rude in real life. I have never before paid this much attention to how a hairline runs along the top of a forehead, or an eye sits in its socket, or a jawline segues into a neck. I hadn’t noticed how vulnerable faces are — so soft, fleshy and bruisable — and how mercurially they move between moods. The faces look by turns dazed, dogged, sweetly attentive, full of faraway thoughts that no one could guess at, and as if they are trying hard to be bright-eyed and smiley but might suddenly dissolve into tears. It’s been that kind of year. Encountering faces like this feels oddly intimate, but also inadequate. All the intricate topography and chiaroscuro of their features is gone. Some faces are right in front of a window, which bathes them in impenetrable shadow. Others are too near the screen and blanched by its blue-light glow. Others move jumpily, out of sync with their speech, or freeze mid-flow, with eyes closed and mouth open, as if in
By the end of last year, over 150,000 migrant workers in Singapore had been infected with COVID-19, roughly 47 percent of its migrant worker population. Their lives, already under harsh control in situations worse than in Taiwan, came under even stricter rule. Whole dorms were quarantined and even healthy workers were allowed out only infrequently, to shop in designated shops and, of course, to work. To its credit, the government did force employers to pay workers, and gave them medical care and support. Yet, in the end, the Singapore worker outbreak underwrote even tighter controls on the migrant worker population. Many of us have been fearing that outcome here in Taiwan. Last week there were two outbreaks among migrant workers at different companies. These cases signal that we could be on the cusp of a Singapore-like disaster, with workers overwhelmed by the virus, threatening everything from human lives to Taiwan’s economy and place in the global supply chain. Government officials have repeatedly averred that keeping the economy ticking along is an important priority in getting the nation through this crisis. Prove it: vaccinate migrant workers. Now. It is long past time to move migrant workers to the top of the priority list, after health care workers and other at-risk populations, for vaccination. And it should be free — use the 1.2 million doses of vaccine that Japan is sending us. There is hardly a more threatened population in Taiwan. INVISIBLE, BUT PRESENT Migrant workers in many ways are a population known to exist, yet somehow invisible. Ghettoed in their own communities surrounding dorm areas near industrial districts, we hardly see them. They have their own eateries and shops, where they buy their own products from their home countries, right? Their own churches and community centers, no? They are isolated from us, right? Nope. Last
Vaccinations against COVID-19 began in the migrant camp on the Greek island of Lesbos on Thursday, with authorities hoping to overcome widespread vaccine hesitancy among the asylum seekers. “Some people are scared of getting vaccinated — they’re against it and have not put their names down,” Congolese asylum seeker Neihnman, 36, said. The temporary camp is currently hosting some 6,000 migrants, part of a huge wave of arrivals since 2015 of people fleeing war and poverty in the Middle East, South Asia and Africa. People were being welcomed into a large white vaccination tent in groups of five as the camp’s inoculation rollout got under way. “It only lasts 20 seconds. Don’t worry, complications are very rare,” a doctor could be heard saying in a bid to reassure the vaccine recipients. Medics checked the asylum seekers’ medical histories and informed them of possible side effects before administering doses of the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 shot. “We hope that the pace will increase in the coming days,” said camp director Nikos Babakos. Barely 50 people had signed up to receive the jab so far, warned health official Anastasios Chatzis. Greek asylum chief Manos Logothetis told the ANA news agency COVID Wednesday that across the refugee camps on the islands of Lesbos, Samos and Chios, “only 15 percent of asylum seekers have for the moment shown an interest in getting vaccinated.” ‘WE WILL SUCCEED’ But “if one estimates that 30 percent of this population are aged under 18 and another 30 percent have already been ill, the road towards immunity for the asylum seekers is a short one,” he said. “We will succeed.” The migration ministry said the rollout would be expanded across all Greek camps next week. Neihnman said he wanted to get vaccinated in the hope that it might eventually allow him to leave the Lesbos site
June 7 to June 13 If a typhoon was coming in 1898, you’d likely be notified by your friendly neighborhood chief banging on a gong and yelling outside your window. Today, people check their watches and smart gadgets for upcoming storms. But most people who grew up in Taiwan should remember watching longtime weathercasting legend Jen Li-yu (任立渝) in times of severe weather, his low-key calmness a contrast to the howling winds outside. The 76-year-old Jen made his final weather forecast for TVBS news last Monday, quietly drawing the curtain to a long career. “Nobody’s paying attention to the weather right now during this outbreak. I’ll take this chance to exit quietly,” he told the media. Jen, who headed the weather forecasting center at the Central Weather Bureau, made history in 1993 as the nation’s first professional meteorologist to present the weather on the news when he appeared on Taiwan Television (TTV). “Jen won over audiences with his professional image, and a bidding war broke out among the news channels for other former weather bureau experts,” The Journalist (新新聞) magazine reported in 2005. EARLY METEOROLOGY According to a Hsinchu City Archives Quarterly article, modern weather observation began in Taiwan near the end of the Qing Dynasty. With British guidance, the Qing began building custom houses and lighthouses with basic meteorological technology along its coast. The two it constructed in Taiwan in 1885 (one in Penghu and one in Pingtung’s Eluanbi) functioned for at least a decade. When the Japanese took over in 1895, they immediately launched weather stations in Taipei, Taichung, Tainan and Hengchun, adding Taitung station five years later. All the data was sent to Taipei to be analyzed, and the forecast was published in the newspaper. As Taiwan occupied a strategic position in the crossroads of East
I fear I’m in JB MacKinnon’s bad books. Halfway through our Zoom interview, I tilt my camera to adjust to the setting sun — but from this new angle, an e-commerce box can be spotted over my shoulder. Its barcode glows in the fading light, a totem of 21st-century materialism presiding over our call. MacKinnon is too polite to say anything, but he can’t be thrilled by my cardboard companion. After all, the Canadian bestselling author and journalist is on a mission to get us to buy a lot less stuff. The Day the World Stops Shopping, his new book, explores what might happen if the world transformed into a society that does not revolve around purchasing, one in which our primary role is not as consumers and our credit cards are not our most commonly deployed tools. His “thought experiment” plays out like a Ridley Scott sci-fi epic — or perhaps a scene from the pandemic. On the hypothetical day the world stops shopping, carbon emissions plummet; the skies turn a deeper blue; and with no ads polluting smartphone screens our minds become as clear as the bottle-free oceans in which whales swim merrily. There’s also chaos. Shops shut, production lines grind to a halt and millions of factory workers lose their jobs. The global economy nosedives so severely it makes the 2008 recession seem like a blip. “It would be a shock so great that it would seem to bend time itself,” MacKinnon writes. The only thing fantastical about his vision is the timeframe: rather than ceasing all shopping overnight he thinks we should, in reality, restructure society over several years to support a sustained reduction in the amount we consume. He sees this as an obvious, if difficult, fix to a big problem. Consumption — of fast fashion, flights, Black Friday-discounted
Despite suffocating population density and a history of reckless industrialization, Taiwan remains an island of globally significant biodiversity, as well as a country where finding wild creatures isn’t difficult. The northern part of the country has a subtropical climate, while the south falls into the tropical climate zone. Because of the complex and vertiginous topography, there are places that swelter for several months each year, while others experience snowfall and freezing nighttime temperatures. Crucially, Taiwan has been an island for something like 12,000 years, since the end of the Last Glacial Period resulted in rising sea levels. The lifeforms that established themselves here continued to evolve in ecological isolation, resulting in a huge number of species that are unique to the island. Of Taiwan’s 4,077 species of native vascular plants, 1,067 are endemic, meaning they’re seen nowhere else on Earth. Endemism is also common in Taiwan’s insect population. Among the country’s 161 kinds of damselfly and dragonfly, 19 are endemic species and 10 endemic subspecies. For its land area, the variety of butterflies in Taiwan is 10 times that of Japan. Bat species total 38, of which 11 are endemic. The official total of avian species recorded in Taiwan has climbed to 678, including 30 endemic species and 54 endemic subspecies — and birds are some of the easiest wildlife to see. BIRDS, BIRDS, EVERYWHERE An online global database of bird observations called eBird (ebird.org) collates data from more than 2,900 locations in Taiwan. It has some good news for birdwatchers who live in or around the capital: The first, second, sixth and seventh most specious places are in Greater Taipei. Yeliu (野柳) on the north coast tops the list with 344 species recorded. Tianliaoyang Wetland (田寮洋濕地) in the northeast, where 335 species have been seen, is second. Yeliu’s avian attractions include the Greater crested tern, the Blue
From this week a seven-meter-high installation entitled Gilded Cage, by the exiled Chinese artist and human rights campaigner Ai Weiwei (艾未未), will be on display at Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire. The piece, originally constructed for Central Park in New York in 2017, was made as a reflection on the worldwide refugee crisis. Ai, 64, is currently based in Lisbon. This conversation took place last week by phone. Tim Adams: Tell me a little bit about Gilded Cage. How did it come about? Ai Weiwei: I made it not long after I came out of China after four or five years of detention. I was researching migrants in Europe to make a film [Human Flow, 2017] and the Public Art Fund in New York City asked me to do a project. The golden cage was not far from Trump Tower, maybe three blocks away. It looks like a bird cage and it is double layered so that the audience can go into it and see how the world looks from there. TA: Why have you chosen to put it at Blenheim Palace? Ai: I had an exhibition there in 2014, [the inaugural annual contemporary exhibition]. At that time I couldn’t get out of China to see the show, but it was such an excitement for me. So this time when they asked to have the Gilded Cage, it recalled that show for me: it has the same kind of energy and the same humor and the same kind of commentary of the current political situation. TA: When you did the original show you made some references to Blenheim and its association with Winston Churchill. How interested were you in the specifics of that history? Ai: I knew Churchill as a political figure and I know many people think he was very heroic in terms of ending the
They have been tested, examined, judged and graded since childhood; told they must excel, compete and succeed. But thanks to COVID-19, across Europe a generation of school and college leavers face a bleak present and an uncertain future. When Europeans in their late teens and early 20s were asked how the pandemic has made them feel, you might have expected an outpouring of frustration: over jobs lost, friendships forcibly attenuated, dates canceled. What arrived was a critique of capitalism. BLEAK FUTURE Like their predecessors in the uprisings that followed the 2008 crisis, this generation of young people is ready to draw systemic conclusions from the way political elites have handled the pandemic. They know they will be paying higher taxes, carrying bigger personal debts and facing more uncertainty than any generation since the second world war. They understand that, on top of the aftermath of COVID-19, they will be dealing with a climate emergency for the foreseeable future. And they are equally certain they cannot influence the political present. This, as we are likely to see as summer arrives, is an explosive mixture. From Dublin to Cardiff, Barcelona to Berlin, young people are responding to the easing of lockdown restrictions with demonstrative partying: flashmob raves, sudden beach invasions, instant gatherings in the clubbing districts of various cities. Wherever there is political protest — such as the two pro-Palestine demonstrations in London last month — they have turned up in large, vocal and defiant groups. But as the testimonies show, behind the release there is deep frustration. Because while older people have mainly borne the physical health risks of COVID, the young have borne the mental health risks. “The past year was a wooden stage and I fell right through it,” one respondent writes. Another tells of experiencing something equivalent to a “midlife crisis” at the age
Elaine Wei (魏郁蓁) didn’t stop filming when villagers called the police on her or threatened her over the phone. Nor did she shut the project down after her production company ran out of funds to travel to the filming location in Pingtung. These challenges, and many others, seemed to end after she managed to get The Way Home: The Call of the Azangiljan (阿查依蘭的呼喚, a documentary that depicts the struggles of a Paiwan chief and single mother, into theaters through a crowdfunding campaign and government assistance. Then, 10 days before opening night, Taipei raised its COVID-19 alert to level 3 and shuttered all movie theaters. “It is what it is,” Wei says with a laugh during an online interview. “We’ll just have to face it.” Wei will have to wait until the outbreak is over to negotiate a new screening date for the film, the protagonist for which, Dremedreman Azangiljan, never wanted to be a chief and spent years avoiding it. This, and her lack of knowledge about the Paiwan language and culture caused some in the village to resent her and challenge her title, which became the biggest obstacle to finishing the film. “I always say that I’m just shooting Dremedreman’s personal story. The film isn’t out to explore who really should be the chief,” Wei says. “Her status is just the setting. What I want to tell is an encouraging story of a woman who is working hard to survive.” UNEXPECTED CAREER Wei, who worked most of her life in finance, never planned to be a director either. She was preparing to switch careers when her producer husband Hsu Kuo-yang (徐國揚) decided to launch a documentary studio and asked her to help out. “I was like, ‘That’s crazy,’” Wei says. “I have a nice job where I’m pretty well-respected.” But she eventually relented.
Jordan Janz knew his gamble on an experimental gene therapy for his rare disease might be paying off when he returned to work and a friend sniffed him. “He said, ‘you have a normal smell, you smell good,’” Janz recalled. “And I’m like, ‘that’s probably the nicest thing you’ve ever said.’” The 22-year-old Canadian man’s previous treatment required 40 to 60 pills a day and left him smelling like rotten eggs or stinky cheese. He was born with a flawed gene that left him unable to make a protein needed by virtually every organ in the body. Kids with this disease can throw up a dozen times a day, need eye drops every hour to prevent blindness and often kidney transplants before they’re adults. Now, Janz and a growing number of others with rare diseases have hope of not just better treatments, but perhaps a cure. Gene therapy increasingly is being used to attack the root cause of their problems by supplying the DNA they lack. Janz was the first person in one such study at the University of California, San Diego. He and two other participants no longer need the eye drops and pills that only delayed progression of their disease and left them smelling bad. The company that developed their therapy is testing it for several other diseases by simply adjusting what gene is supplied. Other companies are doing the same, and US health officials are working on guidance to encourage the trend. “I am very excited for the field because I feel like we’re beginning to get to a critical mass,” where a single method or product can be deemed safe and then adapted for many uses, said Peter Marks, head of the US Food and Drug Administration center that oversees gene therapies. “You’re essentially using the same rocket ship to put stuff
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