EDUCATION
Pacts signed with Shizuoka
Three cities and counties signed an accord yesterday with Japan’s Shizuoka Prefecture to expand exchanges between teenagers from Taiwan and Japan. Toru Abe, superintendent of the Shizuoka Board of Education, inked the agreement in Taipei with representatives of Greater Taichung, and Changhua and Taitung counties. The accord provides opportunities for interaction between young Taiwanese and Japanese people, Abe said. He expressed the hope that the platform would pave the way for exchanges in other fields. Lin Che-hung (林哲宏), a senior specialist at the Ministry of Education’s Department of Physical Education, said he hoped that through the medium of baseball friendlies, visits to historical sites and mutual experience of local cultures, education and cultural ties with Japan could be strengthened.
AUTOMAKERS
Car market booming
The car market boomed last year, with 77,000 cars imported at a cost of NT$69.04 billion (US$2.3 billion), according to information released by the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS). The number and value of imported cars increased by 39.4 percent and 49.5 percent respectively, compared with 2009, DGBAS said in a statement. Taiwan produced 301,000 vehicles last year, an increase of 33.5 percent compared with 2009. Of those, about 35,000 were sold abroad, bringing in NT$14.4 billion — more than double the year-earlier level, it said. Meanwhile, the production value of locally-made cars reached NT$164.92 billion, up 39.2 percent from the previous year, DGBAS said, adding that 254,000 cars were sold domestically for NT$144.9 billion last year, up 11.3 percent.
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