■Health
Alcohol ban for Aborigines
In order to battle the counterfeit rice wine problem, the Council of Indigenous Peoples yesterday morning announced to a ban on Aborigines drinking on the streets or in stores in the daytime, Chinese-language media reported yesterday. The council has informed offices of Aboriginal townships and villages about the new regulation. It has also demanded that all township and village chiefs set good examples by no longer using rice wine as a liquor. Almost 30 people nationwide have been poisoned by bootleg rice wines over the past week, many of them Aborigines.
■ Transportation
Lin backs higher speed limit
The Ministry of Transportation and Communications is considering raising the speed limit on some sections of the Sun Yat-sen Freeway from 100kph to 120kph. At a meeting on traffic safety yesterday, Minister of Transportation and Communications Lin Ling-san (林陵三) said many sections of the freeway have been expanded to three lanes and can handle the higher speeds. The speed limits, which had been 70kph, 90kph and 100kph, depending on the section of freeway, were raised to 100kph in all sections last December.
■ Labor dispute
Vietnamese workers beaten
Hundreds of Vietnamese workers clashed with Taiwanese bosses at a furniture factory in the southern province of Binh Duong, officials said yesterday. Police were mobilized to break up the violence, which flared when 30 bosses attacked workers who tried to join striking colleagues outside the factory, union official Nguyen Van Khuong said. Chen Chung Hoan, general director of Doanh Duc factory, made an official apology on Wednesday for the behavior of his officials and pledged to deal firmly with wrongdoers.
■ Elections
TSU supports clean vote
The TSU yesterday threw its support behind a "clean election promotion campaign." TSU Chairman Huang Chu-wen (黃主文) expressed his party's support for the campaign launched by a non-government organization headed by Chai Sung-lin (柴松林), a noted sociologist and promoter of clean politics. Huang said vote-buying and violence eroded Taiwan's young democracy. "Therefore, all political parties and individual politicians should support the clean election campaign," he noted. All seven of the TSU's candidates for the Taipei city council elections also signed up to support the campaign.
■ Haiti
Taiwan-funded road opens
A highway linking the Haitian capital's international airport to the city's downtown district has been completed with funds donated by Taiwan. Taiwan's government has donated more than US$8 million for construction of the 7.26km highway linking Port-au-Prince's downtown to its international airport, which is Haiti's main gateway. The first two sections of the highway were built by a Haitian contractor and the remaining five sections were all constructed by Overseas Construction Co, which is partly owned by Taiwan business groups. Overseas Construction hosted a party on Wednesday to mark the completion of the project. More than 200 people attended the ceremony.
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:
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
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