CHARITY
Book sale set for TAS
The Taipei American School’s (TAS) Orphanage Club will hold its annual book sale on Saturday from 10am to 5pm in the lobby and courtyard of the school. The club has collected thousands of books, as well as magazines, comic books, games, DVDs and other items. The books include best sellers, biographies, children’s books and -English-teaching books as well as titles dealing with Taiwan, China and Asia. There are lots of books in Chinese, both fiction and non-fiction. Money raised from the book sale will provide funding for orphans and other needy children in Taiwan and its outlying islands as well as other countries. In case of rain, the sale will be postponed one week to March 19. The Orphanage Club is one of the oldest and largest student organizations at the school, with members ranging in age from junior-high to high-school students. TAS is located at No. 800, Zhongshan N Rd Sec 6 in Tianmu.
POLITICS
Councilors sorry for display
Local Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) councilors apologized over Tuesday’s attempted fire display at the New Taipei council, after it received widespread criticism. The councilors had dressed up as cooks and brought six lit torches into the council building two days after a fire at a Greater Taichung pub killed nine and injured a dozen. The group had said that they were trying to highlight to New Taipei Mayor Eric Chu (朱立倫) the importance of fire safety in the city. “We understand … that it was extremely dangerous,” councilor Peng Cheng-lung (彭成龍) said yesterday. “We also know that it was a bad example.”
TRANSPORTATION
Airport taxi fare to drop
The surcharge for taxi fares at Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport is set to drop from 50 percent to 15 percent from March 15, airport authorities said yesterday. The announcement came in the midst of increasing passenger complaints that the 50 percent surcharge on taxis from the airport is too high, airport officials said. However, the officials also said that because other aspects of airport taxi tariffs will actually be increased, the final adjustment will see taxi fares from the airport to Taipei drop just NT$64 from before.
HEALTH
Kidney, heart disease linked
People with chronic kidney problems have an increased risk of developing heart disease, a recent national survey found. Released yesterday ahead of World Kidney Day today, the survey found that high blood pressure, high cholesterol, diabetes and heart disease were more prevalent among patients with kidney diseases than among those without renal illnesses, the Bureau of Health Promotion said. It was found that 36.6 percent of people with kidney dysfunction have high blood pressure, compared with 15 percent among those without kidney disease, said Horng Shiow-shiun (洪秀勳), a section chief in the bureau’s division of adult and elderly health. In addition, 32.3 percent of kidney disease patients have high cholesterol levels, 17.3 percent have diabetes and 12.9 percent suffer from heart disease, the study showed. Bureau -Director-General Chiou Shu-ti (邱淑媞) said Taiwanese kidney patients often overlook their condition, as indicated in the survey, which found that about 60 percent of people with kidney problems do not monitor the risk factors regularly. The survey was conducted nationwide between 2009 and last year among 200,000 respondents over the age of 15.
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
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
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