■ Society
Elderly demand better deal
The government should
help agencies dealing with welfare and senior citizens improve their efficiency so that policies can be carried out more smoothly, the fifth "silver hair summit" declared yesterday. Participants said the government ought to establish an assets and property trust for senior citizens to reduce tensions between offspring even before elderly people have died. The summit, attended by about 120 senior citizens, also resolved that the elderly should be treated equally and entitled to the same retirement benefits regardless of profession.
The summit was organized
by the League of Welfare Improvement for the Elderly in the Republic of China. League secretary-general Wu Yu-chin (吳玉琴) said that the recommendations drawn up during the summit will be forwarded to the Ministry of the Interior for reference.
■ Engineering
Taipei 101 sets new record
Taipei 101 -- the world's tallest building -- set another first yesterday as
the Guinness Book of World Records certified two of its elevators as the fastest in
the world. Vice President Annette Lu (呂秀蓮) attended the record-setting ceremony and took a short and quick ride up the 508m Taipei
101. The two Toshiba-made elevators will take tourists
to the observation deck on
the 89th floor in 37 seconds,
or 60kph. They beat a 1993 record of 45kph set by Mitsubishu-made elevators in the 70-storey Landmark Tower in Yokohama, Japan. Guinness representative Hein De Roux said Toshiba's achievement is impressive even by modern standards
as "it has exceeded the previous record by 33 per cent." Taipei 101 has 61 elevators -- including the two record-breaking lifts -- and 50 escalators. It already holds three world records: structural height (508m), rooftop height (448m) and habitable floor height (438m).
■ Health
Vaccines in test mode
David Ho (何大一), a leading figure in AIDS research and the inventor of a cocktail therapy that improves the lives of sufferers, yesterday discussed two potential HIV vaccines and one potential SARS vaccine at a seminar
in Taipei yesterday. For the past four years, Ho has been researching a DNA vaccine composed of two plasmids that can express five HIV genes. This kind of vaccine
is thought to be able
to enhance the immune system's ability to detect the rapidly changing HIV virus and trigger a cell-mediated immune response to protect the body. A clinical trial involving 45 people in New York conducted this month by Ho proved the vaccine was safe, he said. The second vaccine under research is the MVA vaccine, which has been found to be safe in preclinical in vitro studies. Clinical trials for this vaccine are expected to begin next month.
■ Academia
Ma to speak in HK
The University of Hong Kong said yesterday it will invite Taipei Mayor Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) to deliver a speech on urban cultural development next month. A spokesman said Ma will speak on urban cultural development and
the role of Chinese cities in global cultural development in the 21st century at the university on Jan. 11. According to the spokesman, Ma will make the lecture tour of Hong Kong after attending the closing ceremony for the 2005 Deaflympic Games in Melbourne, Australia. Taipei will be the host city of the next Deaflympics -- an Olympic-style sports event for the hearing-impaired --
to be held in 2009.
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