TOURISM
Yangmingshan bus starts
Taipei City will operate special shuttle buses to transport people to and from the annual Yangmingshan Flower Festival, which begins on Friday next week, the city’s Public Transportation Office said yesterday. The office said seven shuttle buses would be provided to take visitors from downtown Taipei to Yangmingshan (陽明山), where cherry trees usually blossom between late February and the middle of March. The buses include the No. 126 series that was launched last year, the office said, adding that the buses would run between Taipei Railway Station and the Yangmingshan Flower Clock. The buses will depart from North Gate No. 2 of the railway station every hour from 7am to 4pm, the office said. The festival runs through March 18 at various locations in Yangmingshan National Park.
SOCIETY
Workers slacking off: poll
Nearly a quarter of office workers are having difficulty adjusting to work after the nine-day Lunar New Year holiday, a survey said yesterday. About 22 percent of office employees admitted they were procrastinating on the job after the holiday, a poll of 1,582 workers by 360d HR Consultancy Co found. The other 78 percent said they had no procrastination issues. On the question of why they were putting off their tasks, 32 percent said they simply did not feel like working, while 37 percent said they were taking it slowly because they did not want to make mistakes by doing things in a hurry. About 25 percent said they were being slowed down by inadequate knowledge of their assignment, while 24 percent said they did not know the order of priority of their tasks. Another 18 percent admitted they were spending too much time online on social networking and instant messaging services.
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