■DIPLOMACY
Hau to visit New York City
Taipei Mayor Hau Lung-bin (郝龍斌) is scheduled to visit New York City later this month to learn more about the city’s crime-control program and urban planning. Heading an 11-person delegation, Hau will leave Taiwan for Boston on Aug. 23 before heading to New York on Aug. 26, where he will meet Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Hau, who once served as head of the Environmental Protection Administration, said he was particularly interested in the PlaNYC program and the Million TreesNYC initiative. The initiative is a citywide, public-private program with the goal of planting and caring for 1 million new trees across the city’s five boroughs over the next decade. The PlaNYC program aims to reduce citywide carbon emissions by 30 percent below 2005 levels. Hau is also scheduled to visit the city’s Real Time Crime Center and the 311 Call Center.
■POLITICS
Hsu back in the DPP
Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Chairwoman Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) said yesterday the party would issue former chairman Hsu Hsin-liang (�?}) a new party card today. Hsu will also be issued a certificate as party adviser, she said. The party’s Taipei branch approved Hsu’s return to the DPP yesterday, Tsai said. After failing to secure the DPP’s presidential nomination for the 2000 election, Hsu withdrew from the party in 1999 and ran unsuccessfully as an independent. Hsu has been closely associated with the pan-blue camp in the past few years, particularly during a campaign in August 2006 to unseat former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) launched by former DPP chairman Shih Ming-teh (施明德). Hsu’s endorsement of DPP candidate Frank Hsieh (謝長廷) in the run-up to March’s presidential election was as an apparent move away from the pan-blue camp.
■SOCIETY
Coincidence stops fight
Four men involved in a car accident quit arguing about who was to blame after they discovered a numerology twist in their birthdates, the Liberty Times (the Taipei Times’ sister newspaper) reported yesterday. The four-car collision occurred on Monday evening in a highway tunnel in Chiayi County. No one was injured, but when the four men went to a police station to file a report, they saw their birthdates were June 6, July 7, Aug. 8 and Sept. 9, the paper reported. The succession of 6/6, 7/7, 8/8 and 9/9 was so unusual that the men forgot about assigning blame for the accident and instead marveled at the coincidence. “When we showed police our ID cards, we were speechless because this is too unusual. ‘How could this happen?’ we kept asking,” Chen Kuang-chia (陳廣嘉) said.
■SOCIETY
Poor students get help
The Kaohsiung City Council passed a guideline yesterday to provide lunch subsidies to Aboriginal elementary and junior high school students from low-income families. The Guideline Governing Lunch Meal Subsidies for Financially Poor Students in Kaohsiung City’s Elementary and Junior High Schools stipulates that Aboriginal students from families with a total income less than 2.5 times the city government’s stipulated monthly living expenses for an individual, or NT$27,478, would qualify for the subsidy program. Ateng Ingay, head of the city government’s Commission of Indigenous Affairs, said that about 90 percent of the more than 1,820 Aboriginal elementary and junior high students in Kaohsiung would benefit from the program, which is set to be launched at the start of the new semester next month.
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