■ SOCIETY
Jackpot unclaimed
The sole winner of Monday night’s NT$1.12 billion (US$35.07 million) lottery jackpot had not claimed the prize as of yesterday afternoon, but the Taitung lottery shop that sold the winning ticket has been flooded with congratulatory telephone calls and ticketbuyers. Shopkeeper Ting Chang-min (丁昌明) said he had no idea who bought the winning ticket, but it was likely someone in the neighborhood because most of his customers were locals. The winner has three months to claim the jackpot. Ting said many people bought tickets and had their pictures taken in front of his shop yesterday, hoping for some good luck. Monday’s jackpot was so big because there hadn’t been a winner in 22 consecutive draws. The winner will receive NT$896 million after tax — a record for a single winner. The previous record was NT$1.9 billion, which was shared by two people in 2008.
■ HEALTH
Kaohsiung urges pet shots
The Kaohsiung City Government is offering a subsidy for rabies vaccinations of dogs and cats to mark World Rabies Day. Economic Development Bureau Director-General Liu Hsin-cheng (劉馨正) said pets could receive a rabies shot for NT$100 at 105 animal hospitals in the city through Oct. 31. Liu said the plan was expected to help raise vaccination rates. Chu Chia-te (朱家德), director of the city’s Institute for Animal Health, said there are about 70,000 dogs in the city and transmission of rabies cannot be completely prevented unless the vaccination rate reaches 70 percent. However, according to the Centers for Disease Control, Taiwan is one of only seven “rabies free” countries in the world. The last case of animal rabies was reported in 1961. No human case has been reported since 2002, when a Taiwanese contracted the disease in China. Before that, the last human case reported was in 1959, the Web site says.
■ HEALTH
Hearings on NHI reform set
Department of Health (DOH) Minister Yaung Chih-liang (楊志良) said yesterday that public hearings would be held on national health insurance (NHI) system reform proposals, including drug prices, financial expenditure and co-payments. The legislature will screen the bill in December. Yaung said he is worried the bill would be shelved again after it failed to clear the legislature during last month’s provisional session. Chu Tong-kuang (曲同光), deputy convener of the department’s task force on insurance premiums, said he hoped the meetings could resolve controversy over whether to include income generated from financial markets or real estate when calculating household income, which is used to determine premiums.
■ WEATHER
Storm alert issued
The Central Weather Bureau issued an alert yesterday for a tropical depression. As of 6pm yesterday, the center of the tropical depression was 220km southeast of Taitung, moving west at 10kph. Lin Hsiu-wen (林秀雯), deputy director of the Weather Forecast Center, said the depression did not have a good structure, but was very close to Taiwan and likely to turn into a tropical storm. The tropical depression would bring showers and thundershowers to southern, southeastern, eastern and central Taiwan today, it said. Chances of showers and thundershowers are also high in the north and northeast, the bureau said, adding that strong winds were likely to hit areas along the east coast.
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