■ Diplomacy
Ma heads to US, Canada
Taipei Mayor Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) left for Toronto yesterday afternoon to begin his 11-day visit to six major cities in Canada and the US, an official with Taipei City Government said. After visiting Toronto, he will proceed to Boston, Washington, Atlanta, Phoenix, and San Francisco. While in these cities, he will visit hospitals and disease-control organizations to study their measures to control SARS. He will also meet with business leaders in these cities.
■ Travel
Aircraft stranded over Strait
Seven passenger aircraft were forced to hover over Makung Airport for nearly an hour while one of the airport's radars underwent maintenance work, officials said yesterday. The disruption began at about 8:00am when seven domestic flights flew to Penghu. "For a while up to seven aircraft had to circle around the airport waiting for landing approval from the control tower there," a Civil Aeronautics Administration official said. "It was eventually relieved an hour later with the help of manual flight control and radars from nearby airports," the official said.
■ Infrastructure
Taichung mayor to meet Yu
Taichung Mayor Jason Hu (胡志強) is scheduled to visit Premier Yu Shyi-kun today to discuss local infrastructure projects and the possibility of the city's integration with Taichung County and upgrade to a single municipality. According to Cabinet Secretary-General Liu Shih-fang (劉世芳), Hu's requests would be added to the Cabinet's three-year, NT$300 billion public construction project. One of the projects Hu has planned is the establishment of a NT$6-billion branch of the Guggenheim Museum.
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