■ SOCIETY
Nurse commits suicide
A nurse at Chang Gung Memorial Hospital in Keelung succumbed to the pressure of mounting credit card debts and committed suicide on Friday, police said yesterday. Tsai Yu-ting (蔡玉婷) died by draining her own blood, they said. Her younger sister found her body in bed with a blood transfusion pipe and a bucket full of blood at her side. Tsai said in a suicide note that when her father, a fishing boat owner, ran up heavy debts several years ago, she borrowed large sums of money from a bank to help him, but did not tell him where the money came from. After years of struggling to pay the debts with her limited salary at the hospital, she ended her life to settle the debts once and for all, the note said. Police said statistics show that on average, 40 people committed suicide every month because of heavy credit card debts between 2006 and last year.
■POLITICS
DPP pans Ma over index dip
The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) caucus said yesterday the stock market’s 5 percent, or 460.67 points, drop last week was a reflection of the public’s lack of confidence in President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) policies and capabilities. “The TAIEX dropped approximately 5 percent within the past five business days. An estimated NT$1.17 trillion [US$39 billion] vaporized just like that. Although economics was a major issue in Ma’s campaign [for office], it is obvious that he has failed to convince the public in that regard,” a press release by the DPP caucus read. As the central government plans to raise gas and utilities prices, the caucus warned that the situation could go from bad to worse and the TAIEX could continue to decline, reflecting investors’ disappointment with and lack of confidence in the new government.
■CULTURE
Confucius camp in August
Local and foreign youths, aged 15 to 17, are invited to participate in the annual Confucius rite of passage camp hosted by Tainan City Government, the Taiwan Economic and Cultural Representative Office (TECRO) said yesterday. The camp aims to help young people learn more about the values of gratitude, responsibility and independence, TECRO said. All participants will receive a certificate of completion at the end of the camp, which will run from Aug. 2 to Aug. 7. The entire camp will be conducted in Mandarin and participants would be responsible for their own transportation. Registration ends on July 15. Application forms can be downloaded from the TECRO cultural division Web site at www.moetwdc.org/English/index.html.
■ARTS
Sculptors in German show
Two award-winning Taiwanese woodcarving artists have been invited to demonstrate their creative skills at a workshop held alongside the 2008 International Woodsculptor Symposium in Annaberg-Buchholz, a town in the Free State of Saxony in Germany, from June 14 to June 21. Chen De-Lung (陳德隆) and Tseng An-kuo (曾安國), who both have their own studios in Sanyi (三義) — a small town in Miaoli County renowned for its woodcarving industry — will compete with 23 other wood sculptors from Germany and six other countries in the creative camp called “Wood Sculptors Create Great Works.” Chen’s specialty is carving historical figures, animals and insects, while Tseng is an expert in carving Buddha statues, orchid flowers and female figures. Both of them have won numerous awards in domestic competitions since 1992.
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:
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
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