■TRAVEL
Airport offers free massages
Travelers at Kaohsiung International Airport are entitled to a free massage if they spend NT$3,000 at the airport’s duty free shops, Kaohsiung City officials said on Friday. The city’s labor affairs bureau and the airport’s duty-free shops are offering 10-minute massages free of charge to shoppers who spend at least NT$3,000. The offer is being made to boost business for vision-impaired massagers, officials said, and will last until the end of next month.
■CULTURE
Matsu statue to visit Everest
A temple on Matsu Island has entrusted a miniature statue of Matsu, the goddess of the sea, to a mountain climber who intends to carry it to the peak of the world’s highest mountain. In a ceremony on Friday, temple administrator Tseng Lin-kuan (曾林官) handed the statue to Lee Hsiao-shih (李小石), who hopes to bring some publicity to the island by taking the goddess with him to Mount Everest next month. The 54-year-old Lee, a Matsu native, is a former military instructor and now works as a mountain tour guide and photographer. He has climbed 200 mountains over 3,000m high in Taiwan and hopes to become the fifth Taiwanese to make it to the peak of the 8,840m Mount Everest. “The temple will give Lee every support,” Tseng said, adding that it had commissioned a new wooden miniature statue for the trip and had donated NT$300,000 for the expedition.
■GOVERNMENT
Streamlining plan under way
Research, Development and Evaluation Commission Minister Jiang Yi-hua (江宜樺) said yesterday that the proposal to streamline the Executive Yuan would be finalized by the end of this month. Jiang said the proposal would cut the number of agencies under the Executive Yuan from 37 to 28, including 13 ministries, eight councils, four institutions and three independent entities. The plan would merge the Overseas Compatriot Affairs Commission with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The three independent entities would be the National Communications Commission, the Central Election Commission and the Fair Trade Commission, Jiang said. Independent entities are defined by the Organic Standard Act of Central Government Agencies (中央行政機關組織基準法) as bodies whose commissioners are appointed by the premier and require legislative approval.
■WEATHER
Cold front moves on
The cold air mass over Taiwan will start to leave today, the Central Weather Bureau said yesterday, but temperatures should be low in the morning and evening, dipping to 11ºC in northern and central Taiwan. Temperatures will rise steadily through the week, with temperatures next weekend between 20ºC and 29ºC in the north, 19ºC and 30ºC in central Taiwan, 21ºC and 31ºC in the south, and 20ºC and 28ºC in the east.
■HEALTH
Boy contracts enterovirus
A two-year-old boy in Kaohsiung County has contracted enterovirus and is suffering from severe complications. It is the county’s first serious case of enterovirus this year, the county’s Health Bureau said on Friday. The boy developed a fever and cold-like symptoms last week. When he developed mouth soars and showed signs of excessive nervousness, his parents took him to a hospital. The boy is being treated in an intensive care ward. Last year, the county confirmed 39 serious cases of enterovirus cases, with two deaths.
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