WEATHER
Further instability in store
The weather is likely to be unstable over the next few days, with heavy rains expected across the nation until Tuesday, the Central Weather Bureau said yesterday. As a front approaches, the volume of rainfall could exceed 130mm a day, even higher than last week when heavy rain caused flooding and traffic disruptions in some areas, forecasters said. Southwestern winds accompanying the front could also create a Foehn effect, bringing warm, dry winds that blow down the sheltered side of mountains into the valleys in the east of the nation and could send temperatures soaring, the bureau added. Meanwhile, a magnitude 4.6 earthquake jolted the eastern regions at 1:44pm yesterday, the bureau said. The earthquake’s center was in the ocean about 34.5km north of Hualien County Hall at a depth of 15.8km, it added.
DIPLOMACY
Australia praises contestant
Australian Office Taipei Representative Kevin Magee yesterday congratulated a Taiwanese woman who has reached the final round of a competition to select short-term employees for Australia’s “Best Jobs in the World.” Australia announced on Wednesday that 26-year-old Hsieh Hsin-hsuan (謝昕璇) from Greater Kaohsiung, was among the final three contenders for the position of wildlife caretaker. “This is great news,” Magee said. “I congratulate Ms Hsieh on making it to the finals and hope she will charm the judges and showcase the natural beauty of Australia to people in Taiwan.” The job is one of the six positions on offer in the competition, which aims to showcase Australia to young travelers, said Tourism Australia, which organized the campaign. The winners, to be announced on June 21 in Sydney, will each receive a package worth A$100,000 dollars (US$97,410).
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