GOVERNMENT
President hit by foam board
President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) was yesterday hit by a falling board while addressing an event in Taoyuan, but was unharmed. The accident occurred at a ground-breaking ceremony to inaugurate work on a social housing project. As Tsai was speaking on the stage, the board, part of the backdrop, fell down and hit the president on the head. Security guards immediately straightened the board, which was reportedly made of lightweight polystyrene foam, as a surprised Tsai quickly resumed her speech. Presidential Office spokesman Alex Huang (黃重諺) said the incident was likely caused by organizers’ failure to properly fasten the board to its support. The president was not injured and the organizers have apologized, he said.
CRIME
Spain arrests 47 for fraud
Forty-seven Taiwanese have been arrested in Madrid for their alleged involvement in telecom fraud, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said on Sunday. A group of eight Taiwanese had already been arrested on suspicion of telecom fraud, and the ministry was notified by Spanish authorities on Wednesday last week that another 39 were arrested on similar charges. News reports said Spanish police raided more than 10 locations last week after months of investigation and arrested nearly 240 Chinese and Taiwanese fraud suspects. The ministry said Taiwanese were also involved in telephone fraud in the cities of Barcelona and Alicante, but Taiwan’s representative office in Spain was still working with Spanish authorities to determine the exact numbers involved. The ministry said it has instructed the representative office to form a task force to work with Spanish police and prosecutors, and help Taiwanese suspects and their families.
FLU SEASON: Twenty-six severe cases were reported from Tuesday last week to Monday, including a seven-year-old girl diagnosed with influenza-associated encephalopathy Nearly 140,000 people sought medical assistance for diarrhea last week, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said on Tuesday. From April 7 to Saturday last week, 139,848 people sought medical help for diarrhea-related illness, a 15.7 percent increase from last week’s 120,868 reports, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said. The number of people who reported diarrhea-related illness last week was the fourth highest in the same time period over the past decade, Lee said. Over the past four weeks, 203 mass illness cases had been reported, nearly four times higher than the 54 cases documented in the same period
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:
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
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