■WEATHER
EPA warns of poor air
The nation can expect poor air quality today because of a dust storm in northern China, the Environmental Protection Administration (EPA) said yesterday. The EPA said the sandstorm had affected weather in the southern part of Xinjiang Province and several provinces in northern China since Saturday last week and that it was moving toward eastern China. The EPA added that a cold air mass arriving today, as forecast by the Central Weather Bureau, could bring some of the dust with it. However, based on weather simulations, the density of the dust in the air mass may not be as high as in China, it said, adding that it could further be diluted by rain.
■FILM
‘Au Revoir Taipei’ wins again
A Taiwanese romantic comedy, Au Revoir Taipei (一頁台北), won the Jury Award on Sunday at the Deauville Asian Film Festival in France. It was director Arvin Chen’s (陳駿霖) second award for the film, which won the Best Asian Film Award at the 60th Berlin International Film Festival last month. The film’s success in Berlin has attracted European attention to the film, which was nominated in the feature film category at the Deauville festival. Au Revoir Taipei shared the award with the South Korean film Paju, directed by Park Chan-ok. The Best Film Award went to Judge, directed by Liu Jie (劉傑) of China. Malaysian director Charlotte Lim’s My Daughter won the International Critic’s Award. A total of nine films produced in Japan, South Korea, Malaysia and India were nominated for awards at the festival.
■SPORTS
Taekwondo team wins
A Taiwanese taekwondo team scored impressive wins on Sunday at the German Open in Hamburg, taking two gold, three silver and three bronze medals. The two gold medals went to Chao Yu-chin (趙宇擎) and Tsai Hsiao-ju (蔡曉茹), both from Taipei County’s Shulin Senior High School — the alma mater of two Olympic taekwondo athletes — Chen Shih-hsin (陳詩欣) and Sung Yu-lin (宋玉麟). Students from Shulin High School also won three silver and two bronze medals in the competition. A student from Yulin Junior High School, also in Taipei County, took the third bronze medal. The Taiwanese team was composed of students from the two schools. Shulin Mayor Chen Shi-rong (陳世榮), who has taken taekwondo teams from his city to competitions in the Netherlands, Germany and Austria over the past few years, attributed the team’s performance this year to Shulin’s efforts to nurture taekwondo athletes.
■CRIME
Taichung buys lie detector
The nation now has its first high-tech polygraph chair after the Taichung District Prosecutors Office bought the chair from a US company to boost the accuracy of polygraph tests, local reports said. The office recently purchased the chair from Indiana-based Lafayette Instrument Co, the reports said. “The equipment is designed to be highly sensitive and it can detect very small physical reactions,” said Lee Chin-ming (李錦明), an investigator at the prosecutor’s office and one of the nation’s few polygraph experts. Lee said the Criminal Investigation Bureau and the Ministry of Justice have polygraph chairs, but the sensor is either in the seat or the footpad, and suspects often move their bodies when sitting on the chair to affect the test results. The new polygraph chair has three sensors — in the seat, arms and the footpad — which can minimize the impact of these deliberate moves, Lee said.
FLU SEASON: Twenty-six severe cases were reported from Tuesday last week to Monday, including a seven-year-old girl diagnosed with influenza-associated encephalopathy Nearly 140,000 people sought medical assistance for diarrhea last week, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said on Tuesday. From April 7 to Saturday last week, 139,848 people sought medical help for diarrhea-related illness, a 15.7 percent increase from last week’s 120,868 reports, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said. The number of people who reported diarrhea-related illness last week was the fourth highest in the same time period over the past decade, Lee said. Over the past four weeks, 203 mass illness cases had been reported, nearly four times higher than the 54 cases documented in the same period
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:
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
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