■ Religion
Buddha head returns
A Buddhist group yesterday sent back to China a 1,300-year-old sculpture of Buddha's head that looters cut off from a statue in a pagoda in eastern China about five years ago. During a brief ceremony at a temple in northern Taipei, Buddhist Master Sheng Yen (聖嚴) said returning the Buddha head to China could help enhance friendship between the rivals. Sheng said that earlier this year a group of lay disciples donated the head -- stolen in 1997 from the Four Gate Pagoda in the city of Jinan -- to his Dharma Drum Mountain, a Buddhist group involved in research and education. Sheng has only said that his disciples purchased the head abroad and has not identified who sold it to them.
■ Health
Students get food poisoning
About 40 elementary students were sent to a hospital yesterday complaining of nausea, dizziness and stomach pains after eating a school lunch. The suspected mass food poisoning was the second case in the Taipei area in less than a week. Last Thursday, about 200 students went to hospitals after drinking milk. In yesterday's incident, 41 children at Shih Chien Elementary school complained that they felt sick after eating lunch, hospital and school officials said. The meal included chicken, green vegetables, mushrooms and corn chowder, they said. TV reports showed health inspectors pouring bowls of corn chowder into plastic bags, which were sent to laboratories for testing. A physician at Wan Fang Hospital told reporters that he didn't think the sickness was caused by a virus in the food because the children did not have the common symptoms of diarrhea or fever.
■ Politics
President stresses quality
President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) yesterday stressed the importance of maintaining quality in public construction projects. Only by ceaselessly raising the level of quality control, which will in turn assure a high quality of public construction, can Taiwan maintain a level of competitiveness equal to that of industrially advanced countries, Chen said. Addressing an award presentation ceremony for individuals, companies and public offices that have made outstanding contributions in the field of public construction, Chen said quality is the best guarantee for a government or a nation to survive in today's highly competitive world. He said quality public construction as a whole is a precondition for laying a solid foundation for a country's sustainable development. Chen said, the government will see to it that "Taiwan comes first" as far as investment efforts are concerned.
■ Politics
Mayors get certificates
Central Election Commission Chairman Huang Shih-cheng (黃石城) presented certificates of election to the mayors of Taipei and Kaohsiung yesterday. Huang first presented a certificate to Taipei Mayor Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) and lauded the Dec. 7 mayoral campaign in the capital as "high class," saying that both Ma and his rival Lee Ying-yuan (李應元) engaged in a "gentlemanly competition." Ma, stressed that as mayor, it is important to set an example, saying that if a mayor indulges in name-calling, it sets a bad example for school students. Later, Huang awarded Kaohsiung Mayor Frank Hsieh (謝長廷) his certificate and praised him for putting so much effort into city construction.
Agencies
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