■SPORTS
Ma to chair baseball talks
President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) will chair a national baseball conference tomorrow after 800 fans of professional baseball took to the streets around the Presidential Office on Sunday. Presidential Office Spokesman Wang Yu-chi (王郁琦) said that Ma attached great importance to development of the national sport. Aside from Ma, Vice President Vincent Siew (蕭萬長) and Premier Wu Den-yih (吳敦義) will attend the cross-ministerial meeting to discuss how to revitalize the ailing sport. They have also invited representatives from the professional leagues, baseball fans, experts and academics, as well as Sunday’s protesters, Wang said. Demonstrators appealed to the government to hold a national baseball conference following the recent game-fixing scandals. The organizer hosted a similar rally on Nov. 1 attended mostly by fans of the scandal-ridden Brother Elephants.
■AGRICULTURE
Center donates seeds
More than 1,800 packets of vegetable seeds were donated to World Vision Taiwan by the Taiwan-based World Vegetable Center yesterday to help in the reconstruction of areas devastated by Typhoon Morakot in early August. Officials at the non-profit World Vegetable Center said that the seeds, a majority of which could be used immediately during the winter months, could help 600 farming families. The organization, which is a center for research and development, is headquartered in Taiwan, but has regional centers throughout Southeast Asia.
■EDUCATION
Foreign courses increase
The number of students who took a second foreign language course in the nation’s high schools increased slightly over the past semester, Ministry of Education statistics showed yesterday. The ministry’s Department of Secondary Education said in a press release that a total of 199 high schools offered 887 classes in different foreign languages to 30,272 students this semester. Compared with the previous academic year, the number of schools providing a second foreign language course rose 1 percent, while the number of classes increased 2 percent. The number of students taking the classes also rose 5 percent over the past semester, the department said. Second foreign language classes have been included in the nation’s high school curriculum guidelines since 2004 to give students more opportunities to learn the languages and culture of non-English-speaking countries, it said. The ministry statistics showed that the majority of the students, or 23,837, chose to take Japanese as a second foreign language course, followed by French with 3,836 students, Spanish with 1,333 and German with 827.
■HEALTH
Toilet gives health feedback
Researchers at Kun Shan University and Southern Taiwan University recently unveiled a new type of toilet that can check a user’s body fat, weight and pulse rate. Cheng Kuo-sheng (鄭國順), dean of the College of Information Technology at Kun Shan, said the researchers installed four sensors on the seat of the toilet to give health readings. The device is expected to benefit the elderly, the physically challenged and those who need to keep a record of their health condition, Cheng said, adding that the data could also be transmitted to medical personnel in hospitals to help them monitor their patients’ health. “[Users of the toilet] can keep track of their health condition and observe the weekly or monthly changes in data,” said Huang Chi-cher (黃基哲), one of the researchers.
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