IMMIGRATION
Coast guard meets runaway
Coast Guard Administration officers in Kinmen County met with a runaway Vietnamese worker surnamed Vo in Miaoli County on Thursday after acting on a tip-off and arranged for him to surrender to the National Immigration Agency after Vo said he left his place of employment due to homesickness. Coast guard officers stationed in Kinmen said they received information about a Vietnamese worker in Miaoli who wanted to surrender to law enforcement officers and be repatriated to his home country after becoming homesick. Officers traveled to Miaoli on Thursday and met with Vo, who provided them with proof of identification and agreed to be handed over to immigration officials in Miaoli. The 34-year-old arrived in Taiwan in May 2011 and worked at a manufacturing plant in southern Taiwan. In March 2014, he ran away from his workplace, complaining about low pay and brokerage fees demanded by a labor broker, the Kinmen officers said.
SOCIETY
Rose festival begins
The Shilin Official Residence Rose Festival, one of the biggest flower festivals in Taipei, began on Thursday, showcasing more than 1,600 roses. The annual festival, which runs through April 6, features 90 types of roses, the Taipei City Parks and Street Lights Office said. The festival is at the Shilin site. Also on display are works by Nobuo Sugino, a Japanese master in the art of flower pressing, and local flower artists who use pressed roses in their work, the office said. The Shilin Official Residence was built by the Governor-General’s Office as the Shilin Horticultural Experimental Station during the Japanese colonial era from 1895 to 1945.
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