■ ENVIRONMENT
EPA to address spill
Following Monday’s oil spill, when Panama-registered cargo ship the Morning Sun ran aground 300m off of Taipei County’s Shimen Township (石門), the Environmental Protection Administration (EPA) said yesterday in a press release that a group of experts had inspected the stranded ship and would formulate a cleanup plan soon. About 120 people have been hired to help with the oil cleanup in the ocean, the EPA said, adding that the remaining fuel oil on the 14,000-tonne ship would be extracted as early as tomorrow. The accident happened on Monday night, when the crew of the Morning Sun, seeking shelter from the wind, pulled close to the Taiwan coast during its voyage from Singapore to South Korea. The EPA said the cleanup would take several weeks to complete and no ecologically sensitive regions were in the vicinity.
■ CULTURE
Chrysanthemums on display
The 2008 Shilin Presidential Residence Chrysanthemum Exhibition will begin tomorrow at the Shilin Presidential Residence. The exhibition, which will run through Nov. 31, will be free and open to the public between 8am and 7pm. Taipei City’s Parks and Street Lights Office said the exhibition this year showcases Ichimonji-giku, the chrysanthemum used in the imperial crest in Japan, and more than 100,000 pots of chrysanthemums will be featured in the exhibition. The exhibition will also feature chrysanthemum art pieces, using the flowers to form the shapes of dragons and characters from Chinese opera. The event will feature musical performances and other activities over the weekend. For more information, visit the Web site at www.2008chshow.com.tw or call (02) 2881-2512.
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