■ Cross-strait ties
Offer from China's Red Cross
China's Red Cross Society wants to step up cooperation with its Taiwanese counter-part on the repatriation of illegal Chinese immigrants, Xinhua news agency said yesterday. The Red Cross efforts follows the drown-ings of six Chinese women who were thrown overboard in the Taiwan Strait by smugglers trying to escape a coast guard patrol last week. In the first eight months of the year, 914 women were among the 1,231 illegal migrants repatriated to China, according to Xinhua.
■ Health
Thermometers on sale
In order to help prevent the outbreak of SARS in the autumn and winter, the Taipei City Government has made 1.1 million thermo-meters available at the city's more than 3,000 chain drug stores and convenience shops. An official of the Taipei City Bureau of Health said the thermometers will be sold at a discount price of NT$50 per piece.
■ Health
Anemia awareness urged
The Department of Health's Bureau of Health Promotion and the Taiwan Thalassemia Association marked Inter-national Thalassemia Day yesterday by holding an event to promote public awareness of the disorder. Parents of children with the disorder spoke about their experiences, while a slide show documenting the lives of victims was shown. Tha-lassemia, also known as Mediterranean anemia, is a genetic disorder that affects a person's ability to produce hemoglobin. According to an association press release, one out of 10 people in the country has the disorder.
■ Culture
CCA chief joins committee
Cultural Affairs Chairwoman Tchen Yu-chiou (陳郁秀) has been named to the Cabinet's National Assets Management Committee. The 20-member committee, headed by Premier Yu Shyi-kun, was launched in April last year to help manage national assets and help ease the govern-ment's financial difficulties. Statistics show that the government has national assets worth NT$6 trillion, but the National Property Bureau sells or leases only NT$36.4 billion of it. During a committee meeting yes-terday, Yu ruled against the proposal of the Chunghwa Telecom Co to return one-fourth, or 99 hectares, of its 409 hectares of land to the state because the privatized company has released most of its shares to individual shareholders.
■ Education
Yu to tackle housing uproar
Premier Yu Shyi-kun will meet with national university professors on Tuesday in response to complaints that the government is forcing senior professors out of
their university residences. National Property Bureau Director-General Richard Lee (李瑞倉) said that the schools and professors have misunderstood the plan. "We're asking national universities to scrutinize the use of their off-campus properties," Lee said. "They can continue to use the properties if they can pre-sent a reasonable explana-tion." Lee said the govern-ment will offer NT$2.2 million in compensation to professors who move out of their residences before the end of the year.
■ Weather
Typhoon near Guam eyed
The Central Weather Bureau said yesterday that a tropical depression near Guam has become a light typhoon named Dujuan. The typhoon was located about 1,600km east southeast of Hengchun at 8am yesterday. It is moving west at 9kph.
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
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
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