UTILITIES
Water departments ink MOU
The Taipei and Tokyo water departments signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) yesterday in which the two sides agreed to expand cooperation and exchanges of personnel and technology. The agreement was signed by visiting Tokyo Metropolitan Waterworks Bureau Director-General Atsushi Masuko and Taipei Water Department Commissioner Wu Yang-lung (吳陽龍) at Taipei City Hall, the Taipei Water Department said in a statement. Under the agreement, the two sides will continue to exchange personnel and technology and extend their cooperation to training and technology development, the Taipei Water Department said. The department said that Japan is recognized for its technologically advanced earthquake-resistant pipes, something Taipei should adopt, because Taiwan is prone to earthquakes, and the capital is situated in a geologically soft basin, the statement said.
DIPLOMACY
Ma to deliver video lecture
President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) has been invited by US academics to deliver a speech via videoconferencing on the topics of cross-strait issues and Taiwan-US ties, the Presidential Office said. The meeting, which will bring together several top experts from the areas of politics, diplomacy and security, is scheduled to take place on Tuesday at 9am. Ma will talk about how Taiwan is working toward cross-strait peace and how it improved its relations with the US. He will also take questions from participants. The conference will be hosted by former US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice. It will be Ma’s fourth videoconference of this kind with US academics. He had similar ones with Harvard University in 2010 and with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank, in 2009 and 2011.
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