■ ENVIRONMENT
Kaohsiung turning off lights
Kaohsiung environmental protection officials are urging city residents to switch off their lights for one hour on Saturday evening in support of the global “Earth Hour” campaign. The lights should be turned off at 8:30pm, in tandem with major cities around the world, as part of an effort to cut greenhouse gas emissions and conserve energy, the officials said. Earth Hour is an international event initiated by the World Wide Fund for Nature/World Wildlife Fund and held on the last Saturday of March each year. It asks households and businesses to turn off their non-essential lights and electrical appliances for one hour to raise awareness of the need to take action on climate change. Officials said 370 cities worldwide would participate in this year’s campaign. People could use the one-hour lights-out period to take a walk with their families, ride a bicycle or enjoy Kaohsiung’s spectacular nighttime beauty,” they said.
■ ENVIRONMENT
Photo exhibition opens
A photo exhibition titled “Under the Sea” opened yesterday at the National Taiwan Museum and will run until the end of May. The exhibition, sponsored by the museum, the Taiwan Underwater Photography Association and the Taiwanese Coral Reef Society, has 116 photos showing marine life and ecology in the coral reefs around Taiwan. The photographs were taken by members of the Underwater Photography Association. Lin June-chung (林俊聰), assistant curator of the museum, said the exhibition aims to raise public awareness of the need to conserve marine ecosystems. “The photographs taken underwater record the cruel fact that our marine environments has become increasingly polluted,” he said. Amateur divers nationwide number more than 600,000, Lin said.
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