■ TOURISM
Tourists injured in Taroko
Two Chinese tourists got hit by falling rocks during a tour of the Taroko National Park yesterday afternoon, the Tourism Bureau said yesterday. Bureau Deputy Director-General Steven Kuo Su (郭蘇燦洋) said the two injured tourists were 56-year-old Shi Jinhong (施金訇) and 57-year-old Si Yuying (蘇玉英). Si suffered a slight injury to the face, but Shi was heavily wounded and was being operated on at press time. Both were being treated at Tzu Chi Hospital in Hualien. The accident happened when the tour group from Fujian Province was on their way to Jiuqiu Dong (九曲洞), one of the scenic sights at Taroko.
■ HORTICULTURE
Taiwan orchids win at expo
Taiwan-grown butterfly and Oncidium orchids presented by the Taipei City Government took first place in the Judges' Prize at an international flower exhibition in South Korea, a city official said yesterday. Taipei City is one of 121 exhibitors from 21 countries in Asia, Europe and the Americas, which competed for the prize in the Korea Floritopia 2009, said Chen Hsiung-wen (陳雄文), head of the Department of Economic Development. The city has a 36m² booth displaying a wide array of flower species endemic to Taiwan, including the butterfly orchid, Oncidium orchid, flamingo flower, peace lily and pleomele. The city said the exhibition in South Chungcheong Province could serve as a warm-up to its 2010 Taipei International Gardening and Horticulture Exposition, Chen said.
■ POLITICS
Tsai Chi-fang summoned
Former Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) legislator Tsai Chi-fang (蔡啟芳) yesterday said he had been summoned by the Chiayi Prosecutors' Office for questioning over allegations he had incited others to commit crime and threaten the public last month by calling on people to break into the Tucheng Detention Center on April 4 “to liberate” former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁). Tsai said he did not understand why prosecutors would accuse him of “threatening the public” as his remarks would at most be billed as “threatening the administration of President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九). DPP Secretary-general Gao Jyh-peng (高志鵬), a trained lawyer, argued yesterday that since nothing happened on April 4, the charges against Tsai could not be established, adding that judges should not be wasting their time.
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