■ WEATHER
Cooler weather ahead
Cooler nights are expected nationwide this week, with temperatures forecast to drop to 22ºC or 23ºC, the Central Weather Bureau said yesterday. The bureau said the second northeast monsoon this year was expected to arrive this afternoon. Heavy rain was likely in the north and northeastern regions, including the coastal areas — Wanli (萬里) and Rueifang (瑞芳) in Taipei County — as well as areas surrounding Yilan. The bureau said that the effect of the northeast monsoon would be more acutely felt tomorrow and on Thursday — particularly in the north, where the highs would be 28ºC or 29ºC during the day and dropping to 22ºC or 23ºC at night. Central and southern Taiwan would not be affected by the monsoon, the bureau said. Keelung and Yilan have already felt the effect of the monsoon, with torrential rains starting last week. Bureau statistics showed that more than 350mm of rain poured into these areas within 24 hours, causing floods and mudflows.
■ MEDIA
'Taiwan News' ends printing
Starting on Thursday, the English-language Taiwan News — one of three English daily publications in Taiwan — will cease being sold on newsstands and will only be available online. Founded in 1949, when it was known as the China News, the paper was acquired by food manufacturing group I-Mei in 1999, whereupon it acquired its current name. Under I-Mei’s ownership, Taiwan News adopted a pro-independence editorial line that tended to be supportive of the pan-green coalition. Faced with rapidly rising pulp prices, on Jan. 1, 2008, the paper abandoned the broadsheet style and switched to tabloid format.
■ EDUCATION
Nobel winner to talk on HIV
French Nobel laureate and pioneer AIDS researcher Francoise Barre-Sinoussi will visit the country early next month to speak about AIDS studies, Academia Sinica said yesterday. Barre-Sinoussi, co-discoverer of the HIV as the cause of AIDS, will give a speech titled “What can we learn from the diverse spectrum of HIV/SIV infections,” the institute said in a press statement. “The scientist will discuss two prominent models of interest, with respect to HIV resistance — human HIV controllers and African Green Monkeys,” it said. The virologist is the director of the Regulations of Retroviral Infections Unit at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, where her team focuses on regulation of HIV/SIV (simian immunodeficiency virus) infection. In 2008, she won the Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology, together with Luc Montagnier, for their identification of HIV as the cause of AIDS. Barre-Sinoussi will give speeches at National Tsing Hua University on Oct. 4, National Yang Ming University on Oct. 5 and Academia Sinica on Oct. 6.
■ MEDIA
CNA reopens Hanoi office
The Central News Agency (CNA) has reopened its bureau in Hanoi, the first Taiwanese media organization to return to Vietnam since the end of the Vietnam War in 1975. CNA's correspondent arrived in Hanoi on Saturday, after receiving approval from Hanoi for the bureau to start operations. The bureau will dispatch news about political and economic developments in Vietnam and its relations with Taiwan. The coverage is expected to include Taiwan's vast investment in Vietnam and the economic integration of the Southeast Asian region. Nguyen Bac Cu, director of the Vietnam Economic and Cultural Office in Taipei, welcomed CNA's decision to reestablish a presence in Vietnam.
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