■ ENERGY
Waste not wasted
The nation's 21 waste-to-energy plants collectively supply 120 million kilowatt-hours of electricity per year, equal to 44 percent of the amount generated by the Third Nuclear Power Plant, Environmental Protection Administration officials said yesterday. The plants, which produce electricity by means of garbage combustion, have also helped to raise the country's garbage disposal rate from 76.97 percent in 1997 to 99.98 percent last year, the officials said.
■ CULTURE
Bedrooms on display
An exhibition featuring 65 miniature bedrooms furnished in styles from around the world opens today at the Miniatures Museum of Taiwan. The exhibits in the "My Sweet Bedroom" show were selected from 95 entries in a contest held by the Taipei City museum and include Western, Asian and Taiwanese-style bedrooms. Chen Jung-hui (陳蓉慧), winner of the Golden Prize in the general category, thanked the exhibition organizers in sign language for showing their appreciation of her work. Chen's piece uses flowers, exquisite furniture, a colorful roof and picturesque garden to present a fairytale-like romantic room. Expressing special thanks to the museum and his friends, Tsai Jun-jie (蔡俊杰), the co-winner of the Golden Prize in the student category, said he found inspiration out of nowhere. "I made the miniature work in my dreams while sleeping before the contest," he said. "After several failures and stops and starts, I am really delighted that I could finish my prize-winning piece," he said. The exhibition will run through June 15. The museum is open everyday except Mondays, from 10am to 6pm.
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