■ WEATHER
Cold air mass coming
Temperatures may drop to as low as 12ºC on Wednesday as a cold air mass from the north is expected to move south this week, the Central Weather Bureau said yesterday. The bureau said that temperatures started falling yesterday as seasonal winds from the northeast became stronger, with highs in the north and east dropping to 26ºC to 27ºC. It also rained in northern and eastern Taiwan, as well as on Matsu. For today, the bureau has forecast that highs in the north and the east may drop 3ºC more to between 23ºC to 24ºC. Lows will be around 20ºC, it said. Temperatures are expected to drop nationwide tomorrow, with the highs in the north down to 15ºC. Residents in the north and central Taiwan may see the temperature fall to 12ºC.
■ EVENTS
Hotel welcomes blind guests
The Grand Hotel hosted a party yesterday to welcome 35 visually-impaired Japanese tourists and their family members, as well as 30 guide dogs that came with them as special guests in their deluxe rooms. The tourists, who arrived over the weekend, learned about the tour through the All Japan Guide Dog User Association. The tour is part of the bureau’s marketing strategy to target Japanese tourists. It was inspired by the Japanese movie Quill (再見了,可魯), which was adapted from a true story of a Labrador that was trained to become a guide dog and changed many blind people’s lives in Japan. Last year, the Tourism Bureau invited the association’s representatives to come and inspect Taiwan on behalf of the blind tourists. The association then arranged the tour. Members of the group are from all over Japan and will return on Wednesday. They will be visiting tourist attractions in northern Taiwan that include Taipei Baoan Temple (保安宮), Yehliu Geo-Park (野柳地質公園) and Jiufen (九份).
■ CULTURE
Dancer to open Games
An 83-year-old Taiwanese dancer, cherished as a national treasure, has been invited to perform at the opening ceremony of the 2009 World Games next July in Kaohsiung City, officials said yesterday. Lee Tsai-er (李彩娥), a renowned dancer and dance instructor in southern Taiwan, and her students will be part of the program to entertain the 4,600 athletes from some 100 countries when the Games opens on July 16 for 11 days of competition in various athletic events. Born in 1926, Lee was Taiwan’s first dancer to pursue further training in the theory and skills of classical ballet and creative dance in Japan. She returned to Taiwan at 19 and began to combine ballet skills with Taiwanese folk dancing and modern dance. Although Lee is now a great-grandmother, she still views dance as her life and has never talked about retirement. She still spends at least two hours each day practicing various dance skills and training her dance class students.
■ ATHLETICS
Run sees record turnout
The annual Taichung running event was held yesterday in the city, with Taichung Mayor Jason Hu (胡志強) on hand to cheer on the record number of runners who participated. Taichung Deputy Mayor Hsiao Chia-chi (蕭家旗) led the 23,000 runners from a city park early yesterday morning in the 27th year of the run. Following the run, a wide range of activities were staged in the park where the run began. The city government, which organized the event, announced that next year’s run will be organized as a marathon.
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