WEATHER
Rain forecast for festival
Anyone planning to enjoy outdoor activities during today’s Dragon Boat Festival might want to take along a raincoat, as unstable weather is expected due to a weather front that is affecting the nation, the Central Weather Bureau said yesterday. Western and northeastern parts of the country could see showers or thunderstorms, while constant rainfall is likely in northern areas, forecasters said. Daytime temperatures are expected to hover between 28°C and 30°C in northern parts, and between 31°C and 33°C in other areas of the nation, the bureau said. Meanwhile, Tropical Storm Yagi was centered 1,510km east-northeast of Taipei as of 8am yesterday, moving at 20kph in a northerly direction.
HEALTH
Infections mostly tame: CDC
Enterovirus infections in the country are at their highest level in years, but the most prevalent form of the virus is relatively tame, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said yesterday. A total of 2,233 enterovirus patients sought treatment in emergency rooms last week, accounting for 1.9 percent of Taiwan’s emergency room cases, the highest for a week in seven years, the CDC said, adding that another 33,000 people with the disease went to clinics during the seven-day period, the most since 2008. The nation has been fortunate so far this year because the most prevalent enterovirus infection has been from coxsackievirus A6, which has a lower likelihood of leading to serious complications, the CDC said.
HEALTH
Department issues alert
The Department of Health issued a level-one travel alert — the lowest level used by the agency — yesterday following the confirmation of a third case of rubella, or German measles, imported from Japan. The agency said the most recent case was that of a 42-year-old woman who visited relatives in Osaka in the middle of last month and began complaining of fever and rashes — symptoms of German measles — two weeks after returning to Taiwan. The patient made a full recovery, but to prevent the disease from spreading, the department said it has continued to monitor the health of 70 people known to have had contact with the woman. None of them have so far presented symptoms. The Centers for Disease Control said the German measles cases reported in Japan so far this year are now four times higher than the 2,392 for the whole of last year, and 13 times that of the average 751 cases reported per year between 2009 and last year.
CRIME
Couple arrested for arson
A 25-year-old man and his 17-year-old girlfriend were yesterday arrested on suspicion of setting fire to the girl’s home, seriously burning the girl’s parents. The two met each other on the Internet six months ago, New Taipei City (新北市) police said, adding that the man, surnamed Lu (呂), had quit his job and was renting an apartment near the home of the girl, who had dropped out of school. The girl’s father was upset that the two were unemployed and staying at home every day, and on Saturday last week the girl’s family met Lu and asked him to leave the girl, surnamed Huang (黃), police said. Two hours later, a surveillance camera showed Lu allegedly carrying two bottles of gasoline and starting a fire outside the family’s house in New Taipei City’s Jhonghe District (中和). The pair then allegedly went into hiding in southern Taiwan, before eventually handing themselves in to Chiayi police three days later, police said.
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