■ Foreign Aid
Nation to give Iraq aid
The government will donate US$400,000 to help Iraqi schools set up an Internet center so students can use their computers to learn about the outside world, officials said yesterday. Taiwan plans to help estab-lish an Internet center for 10 high schools in Khanaqin, to include training computer personnel and conducting computer courses for teachers and students. The Internet center is a contin-uation of Taiwan's partici-pation in Iraq's post-war reconstruction, as carried out through the nonprofit volunteer organization Mercy Corps. After the US-led war on Iraq broke out last year, Taiwan pledged US$4.3 million in aid to Iraq. Non-governmental organi-zations donated 13 con-tainers of relief material
and US$2 million to Iraq through Mercy Corps last year.
■ Society
Guide dog respect urged
Taipei Mayor Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) called on the public yesterday to treat guide
dogs for the blind in the proper manner. Ma made
the remark during a meeting with 10 blind citizens and
six guide dogs at Taipei
City Hall. The meeting was organized by the Taiwan Guide Dog Association as part of a campaign to allow guide dogs to enter public places. While guide dogs
are allowed to enter public places and shops in many countries, stores and bus drivers here consider them pets and refuse to allow them entry to their premises and vehicles. Chang Chiu-hsiung (張秋雄), chair-man of the Taiwan Guide Dog Association, urged
the public to be aware that guide dogs are not pets
but working animals. Ma also thanked the guide dogs by awarding them with certificates during the meeting.
■ Crime
Seller of fakes nabbed
Police arrested a man yesterday for selling fake brand-name products on
his Web site, according to the Criminal Investigation Bureau. Wang Kuo-chieh (王國杰) was apprehended after police raided his premises in Taipei and found many counterfeit brand-name goods. A bureau official said Wang, who
holds both Republic of China and Canadian passports
and is fluent in English, operated a Web site that
sold the products to overseas customers for as little as one-tenth of the price of the genuine articles.
The Web site was written entirely in English and registered under a Yahoo
US domain name. Wang
was arrested for violating
the Trademark Act (商標法).
■ Health
Children getting heavier
A survey released yesterday shows that the preva-lence of obesity among children has increased to
12 percent from 3 percent
or 4 percent some 20 years ago, a worrisome pheno-mena caused mainly by inadequate exercise and overeating. The report also indicates that the number
of women with a waist of more than 80cm has been
40 percent of the female population over the past 20 years, far higher than the 20 percent for males. Obesity among males aged over 19 has been growing in recent years, said Chu Nien-feng (祝年豐), a physician at the department of public health of the Tri-Service General Hospital, while announcing the survey results at the two-day Symposium on Nutrition Monitoring and Health Policy Development that opened yesterday in Taipei. Chu noted that weight-control measures popular among women might be the reason their obesity rate has not expanded.
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