■ AGRICULTURE
Typhoon toll nears NT$900m
Crop losses and damage to agricultural infrastructure because of Typhoon Fung-wong reached NT$892.05 million (US$29.24 million) as of 10am yesterday, the Council of Agriculture (COA) said. Damage to crops amounted to NT$818.32 million, with bananas, pomelos, bamboo, papayas, watermelons, guavas, taro, pears and custard apples being the hardest hit, the council said. A total of 15,415 hectares of farmland suffered crop damage from the storm, including 2,117 hectares of banana fields, with an average of 24 percent of crops being lost, the council’s tallies showed. Livestock losses amounted to NT$4.34 million and forestry losses totaled NT$7.49 million, while damage to agricultural facilities reached NT$41.11 million and damage to fishery facilities totaled NT$1.19 million, the COA said. By region, Hualien County was the hardest hit, suffering losses totaling NT$314.4 million, followed by Chiayi County at NT$187.7 million and Yunlin County (NT$89.92 million).
■ TOURISM
More English in Penghu
Penghu is trying to make itself more English-friendly. The Penghu County Government has been collaborating with the Department of Applied Foreign Languages at National Penghu University to teach English to a number of local tour guides. The county government said it hopes the guides will not only provide a better experience for English-speaking visitors but also become “seed” English teachers who can help Penghu’s residents and future tour guides learn language skills. The county government said it was also compiling an English-language handbook on Penghu that will be posted online, and that it hoped the guide would become the “English-language bible” for the island chain.
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