WEATHER
Typhoon approaches
The outer rim of Typhoon Soudelor could start affecting Taiwan on Friday, bringing showers across the country, the Central Weather Bureau said yesterday. At 2am yesterday, Soudelor was centered 2,650km east-southeast of the nation’s southernmost tip, moving at 22kph in a west-northwesterly direction. It was packing maximum sustained winds of 144kph, with gusts reaching 180kph, the bureau said. The storm could bring rain to northern and eastern regions on Friday, with the southern and mountainous regions in central Taiwan also expected to see showers from later that day, forecasters said. The future trajectory of Soudelor will depend on the strength of a Pacific high-pressure system in the coming few days, the bureau said. According to the current forecast, the typhoon could reach eastern Taiwan over the weekend.
LAW
E-cigarette sales up: group
The John Tung Foundation called for tighter control of e-cigarette sales after recording a dramatic increase in the number of tip-offs of illegal sales. According to the charity, it received 4,436 reports of illegal sales of e-cigarettes from January to June, more than six times the total number of reports it received last year. The group said the jump in the number of tip-offs show that the government’s attempt to regulate e-cigarettes under the Pharmaceutical Affairs Act (藥事法) has not worked. Although the Ministry of Health and Welfare does not allow e-cigarettes to be manufactured, imported or sold in the nation, they are widely available online and through street vendors, the foundation said. If e-cigarettes were regulated under the Tobacco Hazards Prevention Act (菸害防制法), there could be tighter control of the user end, and online sales would be banned as a result, the group 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