■ Diplomacy
Japanese lawmakers to visit
Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) will send a 100-person delegation to Taiwan for a visit on Aug. 25. The delegation, made up of legislators and prefectural councilors, will call on President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) and former president Lee Teng-hui (李登輝) during the visit. All the delegation members are under 45 years of age. The main purpose of the visit is to promote exchanges among younger lawmakers of the two counties, sources said.
■ Society
Youth events planned
A series of cultural events has been organized by the Presidential Office as part of an effort to promote culture among the nation's young populations. With "Youth Power" as the theme, each event will consist of a live performance and on-site teaching demonstration. The first event, featuring modern dance, is slated to take place Saturday in Taipei. Events featuring a traditional Taiwanese puppet show, Beijing opera and comic dialogue are scheduled for upcoming weekends. For registration or more information on these events, visit the Web site at ww.ncatw.org.tw/yp20004.htm
■ Society
`Johnny Sakura' gets award
An 83-year-old resident of Wushe in Nantou County, central Taiwan, received a special award from the Ministry of Transportation and Communications yesterday after having planted cherry trees along the highway between Puli and Wushe for 25 years at his own expense. Wang Hai-chin (王海清), winner of the Golden Road's special contribution award, has planted more than 3,000 of the cherry trees, also known as sakura, on both sides of the highway. Thanks to Wang's work, the highway in mountainous Nantou County now attracts numerous tourists from around the country every winter, when the sakura blossoms paint a colorful and scenic picture.
Wang said he has been interested in trees since his childhood. He served at a forest industry research institute during the period of Japanese colonization that ended in 1945,then opened his own business selling seeds and seedlings in Wushe, a town dubbed the ?kura capital?uring the Japanese occupation. Wushe is situated 25km from Puli, a major town in Nantou. The Puli-Wushe highway had been a single-lane road decorated with many sakura trees until construction work to widen the road destroyed them.
■ Weather
Megi turns north
Typhoon Megi has continued to move in a northwesterly direction toward Okinawa, greatly reducing the chances that it will hit Taiwan directly, the Central Weather Bureau (CWB) reported yesterday. Megi, the 15th typhoon reported in the Pacific area this year, was centered about 580km south-southeast of Okinawa as of 8am yesterday, moving northwest at a speed of 25kph, CWB meteorologists said. As the typhoon was expected to turn more towards the north yesterday, the chances of Taiwan coming under its direct influence have been greatly reduced, they said. Nevertheless, the weathermen continued, the outer rim of the depression was to affect Taiwan yesterday and today, bringing rain to the northern and northeastern parts of the country. The meteorologists also warned of high temperatures in Taiwan over the next few days, with highs of 34?C forecast for around the nation.
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