SOCIETY
Message board launched
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) yesterday launched a message board on its Web site to help overseas Taiwanese travelers get in touch with their families when major disasters occur. The message board was established to enhance the existing reporting system, which is based on telephone communications, the ministry’s Bureau of Consular Affairs said. Minister of Foreign Affairs Timothy Yang (楊進添) said the system would be useful in emergencies because telephone communications are often disrupted in disaster zones, cutting off people’s connection with the outside world. The newly launched message board includes two subsystems, one for disaster victims to send messages back home and another for victims’ families in Taiwan to post missing person alerts.
AGRICULTURE
Litchi season to come late
The peak season for Kaohsiung’s “jade purse” litchis will be about two to three weeks late because of the irregular weather this year, forcing litchi farmers to come up with creative strategies to promote sales. Kaohsiung’s Dashu District (大樹) is the main cultivation area for the local litchi variety. Because of unseasonable weather in March and April, the peak harvest time for the fruit will be after the Dragon Boat Festival, which falls on June 6 this year, a 15 to 20-day delay compared with past seasons. Farmers are worried that this delay will cause sales and prices to slump since the fruit will not be ready for the festival. Jade purse litchi are usually a popular holiday gift. Kaohsiung’s Agricultural Bureau and the Dashu District Farmers’ Association are promoting litchi sales by cooperating with other industries. For instance, they are developing a new cake flavor that combines litchi with pineapples.
CRIME
Man sentenced for murder
The Taiwan High Court yesterday sentenced Wang Yu-hua (王裕華), 52, to life imprisonment for murdering a woman and mutilating her face, belly and sexual organs. In its ruling, the court said Wang and the victim, surnamed Kung (孔), 46, were colleagues in a company in Keelung. It said Kung had refused requests from Wang to date him on several occasions, but that at one point she borrowed money from him. In the middle of 2009, Wang became violent and followed her after he suspected she had begun dating another man. On Aug. 26, after a friend had visited the woman, Wang went to her home and insisted that Kung open the door. A heated argument ensued, whereupon Wang grabbed a kitchen knife and murdered the woman, the court said. Wang cleaned the scene and made it look like Kung had committed suicide. The court said Wang, who can still appeal, never admitted to the crime.
AGRICULTURE
New avian flu case found
Avian flu was detected on Friday at a duck farm in Chiayi County’s Dalin Township (大林) after the virus was discovered in another township in Chiayi in April. Huang Kuo-ching (黃國青), deputy director of the Council of Agriculture’s Bureau of Animal and Plant Health Inspection and Quarantine, yesterday said the two reported cases of the H7N3 virus might have spread to the farm animals from migratory birds. Huang predicted that the epidemic would taper off soon as there will be fewer migratory birds in the summer. Huang said the H7N3 virus is unlikely to be passed on to humans and that only poultry is susceptible to the viral infection. The cases will be reported to the World Organization for Animal Health.
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