EVENTS
Taipei 101 race nearing
Applications for a race up Taipei 101’s stairs are to be accepted from noon tomorrow, with 3,000 entrants expected in the individual race and 30 teams in the group event, organizers said. The Taipei 101 Run Up, now in its 13th year, is to take place on May 7, with nearly NT$1 million (US$33,020) in prize money on offer, organizers said. Participants must climb 2,046 stairs to the 91st floor of the building. Australian Paul Crake, who clocked 10 minutes, 29 seconds, and Austrian Andrea Mayr, who finished in 12 minutes, 38 seconds, in 2005 remain the male and female record holders respectively. As an added incentive, NT$200,000 in prize money is being offered to anyone who sets a new record, organizers said.
SOCIETY
Zhonghe polluters fined
A printing house and a dyeing company in New Taipei City’s Zhonghe District (中和) were fined NT$3 million each for illegally discharging alkaline wastewater into the sewage system, officials from the city’s Environmental Protection Department said on Monday. After receiving a tip-off on Thursday last week, inspectors said they traced the origin of pink wastewater in a ditch — which had a pH level of 12 — to printing business Hualin Co. The company was found to be releasing wastewater and other pollutants into the sewage system, officials said. As inspectors were checking on Hualin, Hung Yuan Printing and Dyeing Co, which is in the same building, suddenly stopped its operations, sparking inspectors’ suspicion, officials said. Inspectors determined that water used to clean Hung Yuan’s machines had the same pH level as that taken from the ditch and it had been illegally discharging it, officials said. The two companies were charged with violating the Water Pollution Control Act (水污染防治法).
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