■ Health
Vaccination program to start
Health workers in hospitals and clinics nationwide will be the first to receive free flu vaccinations, starting tomorrow, the Department of Health announced yesterday. Apart from the 1.83 million doses of vaccine for nurses and doctors, the department also allotted half a million doses for children aged between six months and two years old. Babies will be given vaccines on Sept. 22. On Oct. 5 people over 65 and those who work in the animal husbandry business will receive shots. The program aims to innoculate 2.5 million people by early next month as part of the effort to prevent a flu epidemic this fall.
■ Society
Ministry studies amendment
The Children's Bureau of the Ministry of the Interior is inviting specialists to meet this week to discuss if the Children and Juveniles Welfare Law (兒童及少年 福利法) should be amended to make sex-toy shops off-limits to those under the age of 18. Article 28 of the law states that children and youths are not allowed to enter places where sex, violence and gambling occur.
■ Cross-strait ties
Chinese boat nabbed
A Chinese fishing boat was seized off Kinmen early yesterday on suspicion of intending to smuggle Taiwanese-made auto parts into China. Five crew mem-bers aboard the vessel, including skipper Wu Sui, were detained for violating customs regulations and the Statute Governing the Relations between the People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area (台灣地區與大陸地區人民關係條例). Also seized in the raid were 41 cases of auto parts and shoemaking equipment, worth an esti-mated NT$1 million. Coast guard officials said the confiscated auto parts were believed to be wanted by Taiwanese-funded companies in China. "They had commissioned the boat to smuggle the products probably because they wanted to evade China's import tariffs and speed up the delivery," a coast guard officer said. The skipper said he was hired to transport the cargo from Kinmen waters to Weitou, a fishing port in Fujian Province, for NT$5,000 per shipment.
■ Education
Health programs planned
To improve students' phy-sical and mental health, the Ministry of Education and Department of Health (DOH) yesterday said it would launch health promotion programs in 50 schools nationwide. "The deter-minants of education and health are invisibly linked," DOH Director-General Chen Chien-jen (陳建仁) said. "We don't know how much of a budget has been allotted to schools and what kind of teaching the principals and teachers will have to come up with," said Hsiao Hui-ying (蕭慧英), chairwoman of National Alliance of Parents Association. Statistics show that student health is at unprecedented risk from smoking, drug abuse, AIDS and complications of pregnancy. One out of every 11 girls aged between 15 and 19 years old has become pregnant. One in five HIV-positive patients is aged between 15 and 24.
■ Crime
Trio face death in Thailand
A Thai court has sentenced three Taiwanese men to death and another three to life in prison on drug trafficking charges, an official said yesterday. The six, ranging in age from 24 to 50, were arrested on Sept. 13 last year when police stopped their van and seized 11.7kg of heroin.
■ Environment
Measures taken against ants
With South American red fire ants beginning to multiply in parts of the nation, the Environmental Protection Administration will host seminars around the country to help local environmental officials stop the spread of the pesky insect, officials said yesterday. The ants have been found in increasing numbers in Taoyuan and Chiayi Counties since September of last year. Farmers consider the insect a nuisance because of its painful sting. Red fire ants become aggressive if their hills are disturbed. Although the ants do not endanger crops, their bite is annoying -- and for a small number of people who are allergic to the ants, a single bite could be fatal. Administration officials will invite scholars and experts to speak at the seminars to help local environmental protection officials learn how to battle the ants.
■ Tourism
Futsal players to get tours
The Tourism Bureau will offer one-day free tour incentives to all teams taking part in the 2004 FIFA Futsal World Championship to be held in Taipei late this year, a government official said yesterday. Futsal is five-a-side indoor soccer. The Government Information Office will also launch a publicity drive to "sell" the nation, to coincide with the "2004 Taiwan Tourism Year" project aimed at enticing more foreigners to come to the country. The 2004 FIFA Futsal World Championship is scheduled to be held at National Taiwan University and the National College of Physical Education and Sports between Nov. 21 and Dec. 5. This will be the country's first time to host the indoor soccer championship, the official said, adding that altogether, 16 teams from around the world will participate in the tournament.
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