■ Weather
CWB issues sea warning
The Central Weather Bureau (CWB) issued a sea warning for typhoon Damrey yesterday, anticipating rough seas in the Bashih Channel and torrential rain for southern and southeastern Taiwan for the next several days. The tropical storm, with a radius of 200km, was centered 340km south-southeast of Taiwan's southernmost tip of Oluanpi (鵝鑾鼻) at 5pm yesterday, moving in a west-northwest direction toward Taiwan at a speed of 12kph, CWB meteorologists reported. Damrey, the 18th typhoon reported in the Pacific this year, is forecast to continue moving toward the South China Sea over the following two days and to directly affect the Bashih Channel area. The eastern part of Taiwan as well as the Hengchun Peninsula (恆春半島) at the southernmost tip of Taiwan were expected to begin experiencing heavy rain by nightfall yesterday when these areas came under the influence of the typhoon, while the northern and northeastern parts of the country are forecast to see rain starting today.
■ Society
Women upset with figures
Nearly 75 percent of Taiwan's career women are unsatisfied with their figure, but only 12 percent regularly exercise to improve their figure and health, a poll showed yesterday. According to the poll of 1,782 career women by the E-Woman Weekly, 74.6 percent are unsatisfied with their figure. Of those, 55 percent are unhappy about their thighs, and the rest don't like their abdomen or their behind. However, only 12 percent of Taiwan's career women regularly exercise, 31 percent occasionally exercise and 57 percent never exercise. Reasons for not doing exercise were laziness (65 percent) as well as being too busy and lacking an exercise partner. When asked what kind of exercise they do, 42 percent said window shopping, 21 percent mentioned using Hula Hoops and 10 percent said walking and hiking.
■ Religion
Religious terms suggested
A civic group yesterday resurrected its call for the government and media to support a campaign to change what they say are discriminatory Chinese translations for terms related to Islam and Judaism. The Peacetime Foundation of Taiwan yesterday requested the government and media replace the commonly-used Chinese translation for the religion of Islam, hui chiao (回教), with yisilan chiao (伊斯蘭教) and Muslim, hui chiao tu (回教徒), with muslin (穆斯林) because hui has a connotation of paganism. The foundation also called for substituting the Chinese characters 尤太 (you tai) for the currently used characters for "Jew", 猶太 (also you tai). The foundation said that you (猶) with the "dog" radical refers to a type of monkey and has the connotation of stinginess.
■ Education
More students study abroad
More than 30,000 Taiwanese students went abroad to study last year, nearly 80 percent of whom opted to go to English-speaking countries, according to tallies made public yesterday by the government. A total of 32,525 Taiwanese students applied for visas for academic purposes with foreign representative offices in Taiwan last year, up 23.6 percent over the 2003 figure, but down by 3.7 percent from the peak number posted in 2002, statistics compiled by the Directorate General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) show. The US attracted the largest number of students -- 14,054 -- while the UK and Australia came second and third, luring 9,207 and 2,246 students from Taiwan, respectively.
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
FLU SEASON: Twenty-six severe cases were reported from Tuesday last week to Monday, including a seven-year-old girl diagnosed with influenza-associated encephalopathy Nearly 140,000 people sought medical assistance for diarrhea last week, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said on Tuesday. From April 7 to Saturday last week, 139,848 people sought medical help for diarrhea-related illness, a 15.7 percent increase from last week’s 120,868 reports, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said. The number of people who reported diarrhea-related illness last week was the fourth highest in the same time period over the past decade, Lee said. Over the past four weeks, 203 mass illness cases had been reported, nearly four times higher than the 54 cases documented in the same period
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
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: