■ EDUCATION
Free education extended
Starting this academic year, children aged between five and six who are of Aborigine heritage or live on outlying islands will receive free education, the Ministry of Education said yesterday. The ministry intends to include children whose families have an annual income of less than NT$1.1 million (US$35,000) in the free early childhood education program next year, said Cheng Lai-chang (鄭來長), deputy head of the Department of Compulsory Education. The program will later be extended to all children in the five-to-six age group, Cheng said. The government plans to include all children aged between two and six in the nationwide compulsory education system once the legislature gives approval to the plan, Cheng said.
■ ENTERTAINMENT
Night owls get extra day
Starting next month, consumers who rent movies between 10pm to 12am will get an extra day before they have to return the movies, the Consumer Protection Commission said yesterday. It said many consumers had complained that they don’t have time to rent a movie until 10pm or 11pm, but they are still charged for the full day. The commission recently revised standard contracts for movie rentals, which now states that consumers who rent movies between 10pm to 12am will get an extra day before they must return the videos, legal division director Chiu Hui-mei (邱惠美) said. For example, when the new regulations take effect next month, a person who rents a movie for three days between 10pm to 12am on Wednesday needs to return the movie by the end of Saturday, the comission said.
■ SOCIETY
Samuel Yin honored
Ruentex Group president Samuel Yin (尹衍樑) has been named vice president of the Russian Academy of Engineering (RAE), becoming the first person not from a former Soviet Union country to receive the honor, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said yesterday. Yin also received the institute’s “Engineering Courage Award” on Sept. 15, said Lin Jinn-jong (林進忠), director general of the Department of West Asian Affairs. Yin, whose business interests include textiles, education, retailing, medical services and construction, became an RAE member in 2008 and received an Engineering Glory Award the same year. The 60-year-old Yin is best known for introducing prefabricated construction to Taiwan in the mid-1990s, which he used to help build Taipei 101.
■ SOCIETY
Meat Free Monday urged
Mankind’s chances of survival on Earth would increase if fewer people ate meat, Nobel Chemistry Prize Laureate Lee Yuan-tseh (李遠哲) said in a discussion yesterday. In a video presentation at a press conference in Taipei, Lee urged people to live a simpler and more thrifty life that would include eating less meat and more vegetables. “The fewer meat consumers there are, the better humans’ chances of survival on the planet,” said Lee, adding that if humans fail to take any action, floods and droughts would become more serious. He also said that the human race could become extinct in another 100 years if the level of greenhouse gases continues to rise at unprecedented rates. Writer Su Hsiao-huan (蘇小歡) and a group of environmentalists initiated Meat Free Monday in Taiwan last year with the aim of raising public awareness of the environmental impact of meat production and consumption. It promotes the idea of making a difference by eating vegetarian meals at least one day a week.
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