ENTERTAINMENT
Ang Lee wins US award
Oscar-winning Taiwanese director Ang Lee (李安) received the 2012 best director award from the North Carolina Film Critics Association (NCFCA) on Tuesday for Life of Pi (少年PI的奇幻漂流), his third such honor for the year. Lee defeated several other hopefuls, including Kathryn Bigelow, who directed Zero Dark Thirty, David O. Russell for Silver Linings Playbook, Paul Thomas Anderson for The Master, Wes Anderson for Moonrise Kingdom and Rian Johnson for Looper. The award was Lee’s third best director award for the film, following a Kansas City Film Critics Circle award announced in December and another from the Las Vegas Film Critics Society that same month. Lee’s 3D fantasy was also nominated by the NCFCA for best adapted screenplay, but did not win.
TRAVEL
Travel program expanded
A program that allows Chinese tourists to travel independently to Taiwan will be expanded, a tourism official said yesterday. Chang Shi-chung (張時中), deputy director-general of the Tourism Bureau and vice president of the Taiwan Strait Tourism Association (TSTA), said the association and its Chinese counterpart, the Cross-Strait Tourism Association, have reached an agreement to extend the free independent travel program to an additional number of Chinese cities. Currently, residents of 13 cities — Jinan, Xian, Fuzhou, Shenzhen, Beijing, Shanghai, Xiamen, Tianjin, Chongqing, Nanjing, Guangzhou, Hangzhou and Chengdu — are permitted to travel as independent visitors and not just in tour groups. Arrivals from China last year totaled 2.58 million, an annual increase of 44.96 percent, according to the TSTA’s Beijing office. Of that number, 190,676 were independent travelers, which represented an annual increase of 529.69 percent, the office said.
WEATHER
Cold weather expected
The weather could be at its coldest between today and tomorrow, with northern and eastern parts of the country likely to see rainfall, the Central Weather Bureau said yesterday. The bureau also warned of strong winds between today and Saturday in southern areas, as well as in Penghu, Kinmen and Matsu. The chill could start to ease up on Saturday, when clear skies are expected countrywide, it said. Tamsui recorded the lowest temperature this winter on Dec. 30, reaching a low of 7.3°C.
ENTERTAINMENT
Taipei-based film to open
The romantic comedy film Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow? (明天記得愛上我), directed by Arvin Chen (陳駿霖) and set in Taipei, has been included in the Panorama program of the 2013 Berlin International Film Festival. The film will have its world premiere at the 63rd annual film festival, which runs from Feb. 7 to Feb. 17. It is part of a lineup of 31 fictional features from 23 countries that have been selected for Panorama’s main program to provide insight into the world of contemporary cinema production. Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow? is the second Mandarin feature film from Chen, a 34-year-old American of Taiwanese descent, following Au Revoir Taipei (一頁台北), also a romantic comedy set in Taipei, which won the Best Asian Film Award from the Network for the Promotion of Asian Cinema at the 60th Berlin Film Festival. Chen’s first short film, MEI (美), won a Silver Berlin Bear at the festival in 2007.
Foreign tourists who purchase a seven-day Taiwan Pass are to get a second one free of charge as part of a government bid to boost tourism, the Tourism Administration said yesterday. A pair of Taiwan Passes is priced at NT$5,000 (US$156.44), an agency staff member said, adding that the passes can be used separately. The pass can be used in many of Taiwan’s major cities and to travel to several tourist resorts. It expires seven days after it is first used. The pass is a three-in-one package covering the high-speed rail system, mass rapid transport (MRT) services and the Taiwan Tourist Shuttle services,
Drinking a lot of water or milk would not help a person who has ingested terbufos, a toxic chemical that has been identified as the likely cause of three deaths, a health expert said yesterday. An 83-year-old woman surnamed Tseng (曾) and two others died this week after eating millet dumplings with snails that Tseng had made. Tseng died on Tuesday and others ate the leftovers when they went to her home to mourn her death that evening. Twelve people became ill after eating the dumplings following Tseng’s death. Their symptoms included vomiting and convulsions. Six were hospitalized, with two of them
DIVA-READY: The city’s deadline for the repairs is one day before pop star Jody Chiang is to perform at the Taipei Dome for the city’s Double Ten National Day celebrations The Taipei City Government has asked Farglory Group (遠雄集團) to repair serious water leaks in the Taipei Dome before Friday next week, Taipei Mayor Chiang Wan-an (蔣萬安) said yesterday, following complaints that many areas at the stadium were leaking during two baseball games over the weekend. The dome on Saturday and Sunday hosted two games in tribute to CTBC Brothers’ star Chou Szu-chi (周思齊) ahead of his retirement from the CPBL. The games each attracted about 40,000 people, filling the stadium to capacity. However, amid heavy rain, many people reported water leaking on some seats, at the entrance and exit areas, and the
BIG collection: The herbarium holds more than 560,000 specimens, from the Japanese colonial period to the present, including the Wulai azalea, which is now extinct in the wild The largest collection of plant specimens in Taiwan, the Taipei Botanical Garden’s herbarium, is celebrating its 100th anniversary with an exhibition that opened on Friday. The herbarium provides critical historical documents for botanists and is the first of its kind in Taiwan, Taiwan Forestry Research Institute director Tseng Yen-hsueh (曾彥學) said. It is housed in a two-story red brick building, which opened during 1924. At the time, it stored 30,000 plant specimens from almost 6,000 species, including Taiwanese plant samples collected by Tomitaro Makino, the “father of Japanese botany,” Tseng said. The herbarium collection has grown in the century since its