ENTERTAINMENT
Music awards set for fall
This year’s Golden Melody Awards ceremony is to be held on Oct. 3 at the soon-to-be inaugurated Taipei Music Center, the Ministry of Culture’s Bureau of Audiovisual and Music Industry Development said yesterday. The ceremony, which had been scheduled for this month, was postponed in April due to disease prevention measures to prevent the spread of COVID-19. The bureau said that it chose the newly constructed venue for the awards because it would provide for exciting ceremony content. The center, which would hold its official opening ceremony on Sept. 5, can hold up to 6,000 people, its Web site shows. The nominees for the 31st Golden Melody Awards are to be announced in the middle of next month, the bureau said.
TRAVEL
Taipei again best destination
Taipei has won the “best leisure destination in Asia” Leisure Lifestyle Award from the US-based Global Traveler magazine for the third consecutive year, the Tourism Bureau’s Los Angeles office said on Friday. Singapore and Seoul were second and third, followed by Tokyo, Phuket in Thailand, Hong Kong and Bangkok. The magazine also ranked Taiwan second in “best adventure destination, international,” and ranked Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport fourth in “best airport for layovers,” behind Miami International Airport, Singapore’s Changi Airport and Doha’s Hamad International Airport. Brad Shih (施照輝), director of the bureau’s Los Angeles office, said the best leisure award represents an important recognition for Taiwan’s tourism industry. The award was determined by a survey conducted from Oct. 1 last year to Jan. 31.
ENTERTAINMENT
Film festival begins
The Taipei Film Festival on Friday began screening a dozen full-length feature films from new and emerging international filmmakers. The annual festival this year accepted 12 films by filmmakers from Taiwan, Brazil, China, Denmark, Japan, Kosovo, Lesotho, Peru, Portugal, Saudi Arabia and Uruguay for its International New Talent Competition category. It is on Monday to announce the winner of its grand prize and special jury prize, worth NT$600,000 and NT$300,000 respectively. However, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the festival would not hold an award ceremony, as international filmmakers would be unable to attend, festival organizers said. This year’s festival, which opened on Thursday, runs until July 11. Screening times and ticket information are available on the Taipei Film Festival’s Web site, taipeiff.taipei.
SCIENCE
Researchers make discovery
A team of Academia Sinica scientists have discovered how phosphatidic acid (PA), a molecule that influences the growth of pollen tubes, is produced in plants, it said on Tuesday. The team, led by associate research fellow Yuki Nakamura, found that PA was produced by the enzymes DGK2 and DGK4, which convert diacylglycerol into PA in pollen grains. Scientists have long known that PA plays an important role in the growth of pollen tubes, which enable fertilization, but how PA forms in plants was not known, the team said. The study was conducted using thale cress, a small flowering plant commonly used in scientific studies. Because DGK2 and DGK4 are also found in rice, wheat and corn, the same mechanism could also exist in those crops, and could help improve scientists’ understanding of crop fertility, the team said. Their research paper on the discovery was published on May 29 in the journal The Plant Cell.
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