■WEATHER
Rain on the way
A low pressure system that has been strengthening over the past few days has developed into a typhoon in the West Pacific, the Central Weather Bureau (CWB) reported yesterday. The typhoon, which is located some 700km west southwest of Eluanbi (鵝鑾鼻), Pingtung County, is moving toward China’s Hainan Island, the weather bureau said. Although the typhoon will not approach Taiwan, it will bring torrential rain to mountainous areas in the northern and northeastern regions of the nation over the next two to three days, the CWB said. Central and southern Taiwan can expect afternoon showers, it said. Temperatures in the northern, eastern and northeastern areas of Taiwan are likely to be cooler, while in the central and southern regions they will remain as high as 34ºC, the bureau said. The typhoon, the 13th this year, has been named Mujigae, which means “rainbow” in Korean.
■TRANSPORTATION
Free bus rides available
Kaohsiung City Government will offer free bus rides to passengers between Sept. 20 and Sept. 22 to mark International Car Free Day, an official with the city’s Transportation Bureau said yesterday. Wang Kuo-tsai (王國材), director-general of the bureau, told reporters at a press conference that the free rides were meant to encourage the residents of Kaohsiung city to take advantage of mass transportation instead of driving cars or riding scooters. Wang said that the bureau had also planned a 6km bike route connecting scenes where a popular local TV series was filmed and invited residents of Kaohsiung to travel along the route between 7am and 12pm on Sept. 20.
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