■ENVIRONMENT
EPA: Don’t flush toilet paper
Toilet paper should go into trash bins instead of the toilet bowl, the Environmental Protection Administration (EPA) said yesterday, countering recent media reports calling on the public to flush used tissue paper to “reduce the amount of trash because tissues disintegrate in water.” “With an 18 percent connection rate of Taiwan’s buildings to the underground sewage pipes, more than 60 percent of homes still rely on septic tanks to process sewage,” said Chen Hsien-heng (陳咸亨), director-general of the EPA’s water quality protection department. “However, tissue paper in septic tanks increases the pollution density of the waste and in turn worsens the overall water quality of rivers [where waste in septic tanks end up],” Chen said. This is true even if products are labeled “biodegradable,” Chen said. To instill in people good habits and to avoid confusion, the EPA advises against throwing anything into toilet bowls.
■CRIME
KMT legislator charged
The Taichung Public Prosecutors Office indicted Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Justin Huang (黃健庭) on Friday on charges of taking bribes between 2004 and 2005 during his previous legislative term. Prosecutors said they were seeking a 10-year sentence for Huang, who was indicted for accepting more than NT$2 million (US$63,640) in bribes from two pharmaceutical companies to lobby on their behalf to obtain approval from the Bureau of National Health Insurance (BNHI) to change the brand-name of one of the company’s products. The BNHI also agreed to the price the company sought for prescriptions of the medicine. The KMT lawmaker later used dummy employee accounts to accept more than NT$1 million in “salaries” paid by the two companies.
■LEISURE
Boy finishes bicycling tour
Seven-year-old Chiu En-chia (邱恩加) from Tainan City recently completed a cycling tour that took him across Germany and the Netherlands and earned him the title of the youngest Taiwanese to complete a cycling trip of more than 1,000 km. Chiu and his parents were part of a special tour group that cycled along the Rhine River from Frankfurt in Germany to Amsterdam in the Netherlands in 29 days, starting June 29, local media reported yesterday. Chiu’s parents said they still could not believe that their son, who graduated from kindergarten this summer, completed the 1,000km journey. Chiu broke the record of Hsu Chan-jen (許湛然) of Taiwan, who cycled 1,022km in 30 days across Germany and Denmark at the age of nine with his parents last summer. After he returned home, Hsu published an account of his journey, entitled Family Travel by Bike — A Boy’s Cycling Diary.
■SOCIETY
Percentage of disabled rises
The number of citizens with physical or mental disabilities has continued to increase, having climbed to 4.47 percent of the country’s population at the end of June, a report by the Ministry of the Interior said on Friday. The figure rose from 4.37 percent at the end of June last year and 3.37 percent at the end of 2001, the report stated. At the end of June, the number of registered disabled individuals totaled 1.027 million, up 26,000, or 2.6 percent, over the year-earlier level. Of these disabled individuals, those with limb disorders formed the largest group, accounting for 38.9 percent of the total disabled population.
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
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:
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