■ Transportation
THSRC issues ticket warning
The Taiwan High Speed Rail Corp (THSRC) warned travelers against using modified high speed rail tickets, saying that doing so is illegal and that violators will face up to a year in jail. The THSRC issued the warning in a news release on Friday after discovering online trading of modified tickets originally sold as half-price tickets for children. The THSRC release said that some tickets bought from the ticket machines and then altered with forged ticket prices and classes were marketed on the Internet. The company has asked police to launch an investigation into the case while demanding that Internet service providers stop allowing advertising for the illegal tickets, the release said.
■ Transportation
Taipei to promote bike rules
The Taipei City Government will hand out pamphlets and free bicycle LED lights today at Machangting Riverside Park to promote a new transportation policy that will clamp down on serious violations of traffic regulations by cyclists that will start on Sept. 1. The policy promotion event will be held at 2pm at the park by the Taipei City Police Department and is aimed at educating cyclists about traffic regulations they should follow. After the promotion period scheduled for this month and a persuasion period from July to August, cyclists who violate traffic regulations -- including riding through red lights and riding on a road's inner lanes -- will be fined from NT$300 to NT$600, according to the department.
■ Medicine
Drug license withdrawn
The Department of Health's Bureau of Pharmaceutical Affairs is withdrawing the license for the anti-constipation drug tegasorod maleate, following in the footsteps of the US Food and Drug Administration. A risk assessment analysis from 29 clinical studies links the drug with potentially deadly cardiovascular side-effects. The US drug administration told drug company Novartis Pharmaceuticals to stop selling the drug, which is marketed as Zelnorm in the US and locally as Zelmac. Novartis has agreed to recall the stock already in stores, including stores in Taiwan. Tegasorod maleate was approved here in 2003 for the treatment of irritable bowel syndrome in women. "The number affected by the withdrawal should be small since the drug is not paid for by the national health insurance" said bureau director general Liao Chi-chou (廖繼州). "But for those who are taking it, there are many alternatives on the market, Liao said.
■ Technology
Sex use closes chatroom
The country's largest Web portal said yesterday it will shut down its chatroom service next week, after a lawmaker said it has been used extensively to offer sexual services. Yahoo Kimo, a joint venture between a Taiwanese portal and the US Yahoo Group, said its instant messaging chatroom program will shut down on Wednesday. The shutdown will help "provide [a] safer, healthier Internet environment and avoid its use by unscrupulous users," the portal said on its Web site. Democratic Progressive Party lawmaker Lee Chen-nan (李鎮楠) on Friday said the portal had become a haven for the sex trade, with many users offering sex in exchange for cash or gifts. After he signed up for the chatroom service, Lee said he received unsolicited messages from users he believed were underage high school girls offering sex in exchange for help in resolving their financial difficulties.
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