STANDING HEAD
Termite eats savings
An Investigation Bureau official advised the public yesterday to keep their savings in financial institutions following media reports yesterday that a college graduate in April found that the NT$1 million (US$33,380) in savings she had amassed over eight years had been reduced to shreds by termites inside a safe in her home. The woman sent the damaged bills to the Investigation Bureau, but efforts to salvage the money yielded poor results, said Liu Hui-fang (劉蕙芳), an expert in the forensics branch of the bureau who spent a week trying to piece together the bills. The Bank of Taiwan allowed the woman to exchange the damaged bills for only a little more than NT$26,000, saying that the rest were beyond redemption.
ENVIRONMENT
Aboriginal weather service
A new weather forecast service aimed at the 55 major Aboriginal communities will be launched next month, the Central Weather Bureau said yesterday. The new service will provide weather information in several indigenous languages via local television and radio broadcasts and will include forecasts for small tribal areas that are often not mentioned in the regular forecasts, the bureau said. The initiative takes into consideration the now higher chances of extreme weather brought about by global climate change, said Cheng Ming-dean (鄭明典), director of the bureau’s forecast center. Early warnings are particularly crucial for Aboriginal groups because most of them live in mountainous or coastal areas that are prone to natural disasters, Cheng said. In the future, the project could be extended to the whole nation so people could have more localized weather information, he added.
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