■TRAVEL
MOFA updates ‘yellow’ alert
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) yesterday added Sweden, Guatemala and Poland to the “yellow” travel alert category after they recently reported confirmed cases of H1N1, bringing to 26 the number of countries and areas that Taiwan has tagged with a yellow advisory since the global outbreak of swine flu. A yellow alert serves as a reminder for travelers to exercise caution, an orange travel alert advises travelers to postpone their trips and a red alert warns travelers not to enter the area in question under any circumstances. At present, Mexico is the only country for which MOFA has issued a red travel alert.
■SOCIETY
Mothers’ feet to be washed
An ethics group plans to mark Mother’s Day by inviting 1,000 children and students to wash their mothers’ feet, the group said yesterday. The event will be held on Sunday at the Ilan Sports Park by the Alliance of Filial Piety for Parents and Respect for Teachers. On that day, 1,000 mothers will sit in rows, each with a basin of warm water in front of them, so their children can wash their feet. “This event is to let children show filial piety for mothers. The physical contact can help improve child-parent relationships and enable children to care for their mothers, because their mothers cared for them when they were small,” the alliance said in a news release. This will be the second year the event will take place on Mother’s Day in Ilan. Last year, the alliance gathered 660 children and students to wash their mothers’ feet.
■SOCIETY
Neihu Line almost open
The first pre-operation inspection of the Taipei MRT’s Neihu Line is expected to be completed by the end of this week in preparation for the scheduled inauguration of the line late next month, the city’s metro authority said yesterday. After the system passes the first inspection, a second examination by the Ministry of Transportation and Communications will be required, the Department of Rapid Transit Systems (DORTS) said. The 14.8km Neihu Line, which is an extension of the 10.5km Muzha Line, will run along 12 stops from Songshan Airport Station to Taipei Nangang Exhibition Station. Initially, the service will run every 145 seconds during rush hours and every five minutes during off-peak periods, DORTS said. Later, the frequency of the service will be gradually increased to every 90 seconds during rush hours and every three minutes during off-peak periods.
■SOCIETY
Kaohsiung to hold rail bid
The Kaohsiung City Government is calling for another round of bidding to start on Monday for the construction of a light rail system to complement its mass rapid transit (MRT) system, a city official announced yesterday. The tender period was originally supposed to end this month. Sources familiar with the project said that the city’s MRT bureau, which is in charge of the project, decided to extend the tender period until July 11 because it has yet to find a private investor interested in the project because of the high cost and low potential return. The government’s plan calls for the system to be built by private investors on a build-operate-transfer (BOT) basis with a budget of NT$12.2 billion (US$370 million) — NT$2.5 billion of which will come from the city government, NT$4.4 billion from the central government, and the remaining NT$5.295 billion from private investors, the city official 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