SOCIETY
Donald Tsang visits Taiwan
Former Hong Kong chief executive Donald Tsang (曾蔭權) arrived in Taiwan on Tuesday on a personal trip to visit relatives, the Mainland Affairs Council said. Tsang, who stepped down in June last year, is the first key political figure from Hong Kong to visit the nation. He became Hong Kong’s second chief executive after his predecessor, Tung Chee-hwa (董建華), resigned in 2005 for health reasons. Tsang was re-elected to a second term in March 2007. In 2008, then-Straits Exchange Foundation chairman Chiang Pin-kung (江丙坤) received a high-profile welcome when he visited Tsang, reflecting warming Hong Kong-Taiwan ties. After that, more Taiwanese political and financial heavyweights visited the territory, including Greater Taichung Mayor Jason Hu (胡志強).
SOCIETY
Toilets make life better
Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) Minister Shih Su-mei (石素梅) addressed the public’s doubts about why the level of private access to indoor flushing toilets was included in the country’s Gross National Happiness index, saying the index is an international measuring scale specified by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) “Better Life Index” for measuring people’s satisfaction with their homes, such as whether have basic sanitary facilities. Among the 36 countries in the OECD, all dwellings in the US, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden and Spain have private access to indoor flushing toilets, Shih said. The OECD’s “Better Life Index” measures well-being by asking people to rate their satisfaction with life on a scale from zero to 10. Australians ranked the highest last year, with a score of 8.01, while Turkish people were the least satisfied, with a score of 2.91.
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