■ EVENTS
Da-an flower show opens
The annual Taipei Flower Show at Da-an Forest Park kicked off yesterday, featuring various performances and activities. Called "Discover Paradise," the exhibition runs through Jan. 20. It showcases more than 270,000 flowers, with 13 different exhibition zones featuring creative flower displays from coffee cups to alligators. DIY and other family activities, magic shows, flower tea drinking games, and music and dance performances are also featured, the Taipei City Government said. Taipei Mayor Hau Lung-bin (郝龍斌) said the city government would continue to promote floriculture by hosting more flower shows and an international flower exposition in 2010. Visitors can also win prizes while spending quality time with the family. The show is open from 9am to 5pm.
■ TRANSPORT
Kids receive free trips
A group of children benefitted yesterday from free trips provided by three major transportation companies. China Airlines, Mandarin Airlines and Taiwan High Speed Rail Corp jointly sponsored 110 socially disadvantaged children to travel between Taipei City and Kaohsiung City by airplane and high speed rail. The children visited several tourist attractions including Taipei 101, Taipei Zoo and the Maokong Gondola, as well as Kaohsiung Harbor and the Dream-Mall shopping mall.
■ TRANSPORT
Violation tallies released
Riders of motorcycles over 550cc have committed 76 traffic violations while traveling legally on expressways in Taipei City over the past 50 days, according to tallies released on Thursday by the city's traffic police. The tallies, which looked at the expressways since they were opened to heavy motorcycles on Nov. 1, show that speeding accounted for 65 of the violations. In one of the most extreme cases, a rider was caught riding at 121kph while traveling near Huachung Bridge on the Huanhe Expressway, where the speed limit is 60kph, traffic police said. During the same period, the number of traffic violations by heavy motorcycles on ordinary roads amounted to 357, including 288 speeding violations, the data showed.
■ ENVIRONMENT
Wetland turned into habitat
A wetland that has been developed into a natural wastewater treatment area through ecological engineering in Taipei County has also been turned into a natural habitat for wildlife. The 13-hectare wetland, known as the Da Niao Pi Wetland (打鳥埤溼地), was the recipient of the 2007 Ford Motor Co Conservation and Environmental Grant for Excellence. Built between November 2005 and December last year, the wetland can treat some 11,000 tonnes of wastewater discharged into the Tamshui River by communities in Taipei County per day, with a cleansing rate of 60 percent. Kuo Hua-jen (郭華仁), a professor at National Taiwan University, provided the Taipei County Environmental Protection Bureau with the technological know-how to grow endemic wild rice on the wetland, efforts that have already borne fruit over the past year, said Hsiao Tien-kun (蕭天焜), a bureau inspector. Hsiao said the wetland has become a wildlife conservation habitat for wetland and migrant birds such as the common moorhen, a water bird that inhabits paddy fields, mangroves and wetland areas, the little grebe, the common teal and the rarely seen jacana, among others.
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
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:
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
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