SOCIETY
Mosque seeks forbearance
Taipei’s Grand Mosque on Monday, the first day of the Islamic festival of Ramadan, expressed the hope that employers and company executives would make it easier for Muslim workers to observe the month of fasting and other rituals. Mosque chairman Feng Tung-yu (馮同瑜) quoted Imam Ibrahim Chao (趙錫麟) as saying that Ramadan began on Monday and runs through July 6 or July 7, when Muslims around the world celebrate the breaking of the fast, or Eid al-Fitr, for the Muslim year 1437. During Ramadan, Muslims refrain from food from dawn to dusk, or from about 3:30am to 6:30pm, until Eid al-Fitr. Feng called on families and companies that employ Muslim workers to help them observe the festival, focus on prayer and scripture reading, and attend Eid al-Fitr activities.
LABOR
Doctors’ hours mulled
The government is planning to include doctors in the Labor Standards Act (勞動基準法) within four years, Minister of Health and Welfare Lin Tzou-yien (林奏延) said. Lin made the statement on Monday at a meeting of the Legislative Yuan’s Social Welfare, Health and Environment Committee, in which all participants expressed support for the idea of including doctors under working hours regulations. Doctors do not have fixed work hours and work according to a responsibility system, in which they can only go off duty after completing their work, leading some to complain about long hours. Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Arthur Chen (陳宜民) said that if doctors cannot be included in the act immediately, the maximum work hours per week of resident doctors should be reduced from 88 hours to 80 hours and the maximum consecutive on-duty time cut from 36 hours to 24 hours.
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
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
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