CHARITY
Book sale set for TAS
The Taipei American School’s (TAS) Orphanage Club will hold its annual book sale on Saturday from 10am to 5pm in the lobby and courtyard of the school. The club has collected thousands of books, as well as magazines, comic books, games, DVDs and other items. The books include best sellers, biographies, children’s books and -English-teaching books as well as titles dealing with Taiwan, China and Asia. There are lots of books in Chinese, both fiction and non-fiction. Money raised from the book sale will provide funding for orphans and other needy children in Taiwan and its outlying islands as well as other countries. In case of rain, the sale will be postponed one week to March 19. The Orphanage Club is one of the oldest and largest student organizations at the school, with members ranging in age from junior-high to high-school students. TAS is located at No. 800, Zhongshan N Rd Sec 6 in Tianmu.
POLITICS
Councilors sorry for display
Local Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) councilors apologized over Tuesday’s attempted fire display at the New Taipei council, after it received widespread criticism. The councilors had dressed up as cooks and brought six lit torches into the council building two days after a fire at a Greater Taichung pub killed nine and injured a dozen. The group had said that they were trying to highlight to New Taipei Mayor Eric Chu (朱立倫) the importance of fire safety in the city. “We understand … that it was extremely dangerous,” councilor Peng Cheng-lung (彭成龍) said yesterday. “We also know that it was a bad example.”
TRANSPORTATION
Airport taxi fare to drop
The surcharge for taxi fares at Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport is set to drop from 50 percent to 15 percent from March 15, airport authorities said yesterday. The announcement came in the midst of increasing passenger complaints that the 50 percent surcharge on taxis from the airport is too high, airport officials said. However, the officials also said that because other aspects of airport taxi tariffs will actually be increased, the final adjustment will see taxi fares from the airport to Taipei drop just NT$64 from before.
HEALTH
Kidney, heart disease linked
People with chronic kidney problems have an increased risk of developing heart disease, a recent national survey found. Released yesterday ahead of World Kidney Day today, the survey found that high blood pressure, high cholesterol, diabetes and heart disease were more prevalent among patients with kidney diseases than among those without renal illnesses, the Bureau of Health Promotion said. It was found that 36.6 percent of people with kidney dysfunction have high blood pressure, compared with 15 percent among those without kidney disease, said Horng Shiow-shiun (洪秀勳), a section chief in the bureau’s division of adult and elderly health. In addition, 32.3 percent of kidney disease patients have high cholesterol levels, 17.3 percent have diabetes and 12.9 percent suffer from heart disease, the study showed. Bureau -Director-General Chiou Shu-ti (邱淑媞) said Taiwanese kidney patients often overlook their condition, as indicated in the survey, which found that about 60 percent of people with kidney problems do not monitor the risk factors regularly. The survey was conducted nationwide between 2009 and last year among 200,000 respondents over the age of 15.
COLLABORATION: As TSMC is building an advanced wafer fab in Dresden, Germany, it needs to build a comprehensive supply chain in Europe, Joseph Wu said Taiwan is planning to team up with the Czech Republic to build a semiconductor cluster in the European country, National Security Council Secretary-General Joseph Wu (吳釗燮) said on Friday. Wu, who led a Taiwanese delegation at the annual GLOBSEC Forum held in Prague from Friday to today, said in a news conference that Taiwan seeks to foster cooperation between Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) and its counterparts in Czechia. Such cooperation is expected to transform the country into one of the most important semiconductor clusters in Europe over the next three to five years, he added. As TSMC is building an advanced
A joint declaration by Pacific leaders was reissued yesterday morning with mentions of Taiwan removed after China slammed an earlier version as a “mistake” that “must be corrected.” After five days of talks in Tonga, a “cleared” communique was released on Friday that reaffirmed a 30-year-old agreement allowing Taiwan to take part in the Pacific Islands Forum (PIF). However, the wording immediately raised the ire of Chinese diplomats, who piled pressure on Pacific leaders to amend the document. The forum reissued the communique without explanation yesterday morning, conspicuously deleting the paragraph concerning the bloc’s “relations with Taiwan.” “It must be a
A tropical depression in waters east of the Philippines could develop into a tropical storm as soon as today and bring rainfall as it approaches, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said yesterday, while issuing heat warnings for 14 cities and counties. Weather model simulations show that there are still considerable differences in the path that the tropical depression is projected to take. It might pass through the Bashi Channel to the South China Sea or turn northeast and move toward the sea south of Japan, CWA forecaster Yeh Chih-chun (葉致均) said, adding that the uncertainty of its movement is still high,
TAIWANESE INNOVATION: The ‘Seawool’ fabric generates about NT$200m a year, with the bulk of it sourced by clothing brands operating in Europe and the US Growing up on Taiwan’s west coast where mollusk farming is popular, Eddie Wang saw discarded oyster shells transformed from waste to function — a memory that inspired him to create a unique and environmentally friendly fabric called “Seawool.” Wang remembered that residents of his seaside hometown of Yunlin County used discarded oyster shells that littered the streets during the harvest as insulation for their homes. “They burned the shells and painted the residue on the walls. The houses then became warm in the winter and cool in the summer,” the 42-year-old said at his factory in Tainan. “So I was
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