■ EDUCATION
Ministry warns on drugs
The Ministry of Education expressed concern yesterday over what it said is a worrying trend of drug abuse among younger students, including some in elementary school. In the past, drug abuse had mainly been found among students with more pocket money, but the problem had now spread to those from disadvantaged families without pocket money, said Wang Fu-lin (王福林), head of the ministry’s Department of Military Training Education. The ministry’s findings revealed that poorer students were gaining access to the substances through unemployed parents with a drug habit, Wang said.
■ DIPLOMACY
Medics head for rural India
An 11-member medical team from Taiwan left New Delhi on Monday to provide free treatment to poor inhabitants of remote areas in the Indian states of West Bengal and Sikkim. The team is composed of medical doctors and staff from the International Cooperation and Development Fund — an organization affiliated with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs that oversees Taiwan’s overseas development programs — and five hospitals. The team, carrying more than US$10,000 in medicine, is on a 10-day trip to the tribes and villages in the mountainous region wedged between Nepal, Tibet, Bhutan and the North Bengal Plains of India.
■ ECONOMY
3C voucher show held
The Taipei Computer Association is organizing an exhibition at the Taipei World Trade Center from tomorrow until Monday to boost the sale of so-called 3C consumer electronics products through voucher spending. The association said the exhibition would offer good deals to consumers who purchase products with their government consumer vouchers.
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