■ TRANSPORTATION
Train tracks to get boost
The Taiwan Railway Administration will elevate a 17.15km section of railway in the north to improve services as part of its strategy to compete with the Taiwan High Speed Rail, officials said. The project to elevate the section between Yingge Township (鶯歌) in Taipei County and Chungli City (中壢) in Taoyuan County will eliminate 17 crossings. Stations at Taoyuan, Neili and Chungli will be replaced with elevated stations. Five stations will be added between Yingge and Chungli. The decision was made in accordance with the administration’s strategy of operating the railway more like a metro system. The project will carry a price tag of NT$30.8 billion (US$1.02 billion) and is expected to take seven-and-a-half years to complete.
■ ENVIRONMENT
Lights-out campaign returns
The nation is expected to join a regional campaign to turn off unnecessary lights for one hour on June 21 in an effort to raise environmental awareness, an environmental group said yesterday. The Society of Wilderness, Taiwan said it agreed with its counterparts in Hong Kong and Guangdong on an energy conservation plan that would see Hong Kong, Taipei, Taichung, Kaohsiung and Guangdong turn out unnecessary household lights and exterior lights on public buildings for an hour on the night of June 21. “More than 1 million people are expected to join in on June 21, as other civic groups, from Beijing and Japan ... have also promised to participate,” the group said. It said that some 650,000 people around the nation joined in last year’s lights-out action, with more than 100 buildings of local governments, high-tech companies, railway stations, Taipei 101 and Kaohsiung’s Love River included in the drive. Last year’s campaign saved a total of 300,000kWh of electricity, roughly equivalent to a reduction of 187 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions, the group said.
■ TRANSPORTATION
Organ donations lacking: Hu
The rate of organ donations is not as good as it could be because of cultural taboos, Taichung Mayor Jason Hu (胡志強) said on Saturday at a ceremony to honor those who have become voluntary organ donors. Hu presided over the unveiling of a plaque that commemorated organ donors, while organ recipients presented bouquets of flowers to the families of donors at the ceremony at China Medical University in Taichung. Hu expressed gratitude to the families of organ donors. “Taiwan faces various obstacles to promoting organ donation,” Hu said, citing the cultural belief that the deceased must have a complete body to enter the spirit world. Government agencies and the private sector have a responsibility to help raise awareness of the importance of organ donation, Hu said.
■ CULTURE
Cloud Gate to cheer patients
The Cloud Gate Dance Theatre and its sister troupe, Cloud Gate 2, will take turns entertaining patients at hospitals, with 19 performances this year as part of Cloud Gate’s 35th anniversary celebrations. Dancers from the two troupes will stage some of Cloud Gate’s classic shows in the lobbies of 18 hospitals in Taipei, Hsinchu, Chiayi, Tainan and Kaohsiung through Oct. 24 during a tour called “Spring in Hospitals,” said Lin Hwai-min (林懷民), founder and artistic director. Lin said that although the two troupes were very busy with performance tours this year, they managed to find time to bring a little joy to hospital patients.
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