TOURISM
Reservoir proving popular
The Wushantou Reservoir Scenic Area has seen increasing numbers of Japanese visitors, the Siraya National Scenic Administration said. As of last month, the number of Japanese visitors had reached 4,000, exceeding the total for all of last year, the administration said. It added that more than 120,000 people in Taiwan and from around the world had visited the area so far this year. Yoichi Hatta, the Japanese engineer who built the reservoir in 1930 and enjoyed widespread fame in Taiwan and Japan, could be a major pull for Japanese tourists, said Huang Ling-ying, a spokeswoman for the Chianan Irrigation Association. The fact that Wushantou is recognized as a civil engineering heritage site by the Japan Society of Civil Engineering might also help to increase the area’s popularity, Huang said.
TRANSPORTATION
Highway to get safety boost
More monitoring and communication devices will be installed along the Suhua Highway to make road condition information and rescue facilities more easily available to drivers, the Directorate General of Highways (DGH) said. A total of 21 emergency telephones will be set up along the highway where cell phone signals are weak, while 35 closed-circuit televisions and three content management systems will be installed to display real-time road conditions, the DGH said. The DGH will construct another five open tunnels at points along the 118km highway and will extend the tunnel at the 112.8km mark from 30m to 100m, the DGH said. The tunnels could serve as temporary shelters in case of sudden rock falls, said Liao Wu-chang (廖吳章), deputy director of the DGH’s fourth maintenance office. The emergency response system is expected to be completed by April next year, he said.
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