ENVIRONMENT
Five factories get fines
Five electroplating factories in Changhua County have been fined more than NT$52 million (US$1.7 million) for releasing industrial wastewater into irrigation channels, the county’s Environmental Protection Bureau said. The five companies polluted 278 hectares of farm land with the wastewater, bureau director Liu Yu-ping (劉玉平) said, based on evidence collected by prosecutors who dug up pipelines around the factories. While the county government launched a farmland treatment program in 2002 to combat high levels of pollution in the area, Liu said compensation can only be sought for a maximum period of five years. Fines of NT$49 million levied on the factories cover costs starting in 2009. Combined with additional fines for damaging crops, the fines amount to NT$52.79 million. The companies are also required to propose a plan to treat 44 hectares of last year’s pollution-damaged first rice crop. Failing that, the government will take care of the treatment and send the bill to the offending factories, Liu said.
GAMING
Cosplayers can win prizes
The Taipei Game Show, an annual videogame exhibition, is to feature a cosplay competition for the first time at this year’s event, offering prizes including popular tech gear for fans dressed up as their favorite fictional characters. Applications to enter the competition opened on Tuesday and will run through Wednesday next week, the Taipei Computer Association said. The best costume will be awarded a Sony Xperia Z Ultra smartphone, while the contestant who receives the most votes in an online poll will get NT$3,000 in department store gift certificates, the association said. Prizes will also be awarded in several other categories.
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