INFRASTRUCTURE
Suhua repair progressing
Repair work on the Suhua Highway linking Yilan and Hualien counties is progressing well, with two-way traffic expected to resume from 6am to 6pm on weekends and holidays, officials from the Directorate-General of Highways’ Maintenance Division said on Monday. During weekdays, the road will be open with traffic controls and one-way traffic in place from 6am to 9am, 12pm to 1pm and 4pm to 6pm, the officials said. Heavy rain caused rock falls at the 112.6km mark on Suhua Highway (part of Highway No. 9) in Yilan County’s Jiugong (九宮) on May 28, the second day of the Dragon Boat Festival, causing severe traffic jams between northern Taiwan and Hualien.
TOURISM
More bilingual menus
The Tainan City Government is planning to make bilingual menus available at two more night markets this year in collaboration with the Southern Taiwan University of Science and Technology to make it easier for foreign visitors to order food. The city helped prepare English and Chinese menus for vendors in the Tainan Flowers Night Market last year to forge an English-friendly environment, and it is expanding the service this year to the Wusheng Night Market and Yansing Night Market, city official Liu Shih-chung (劉世忠) said. Participating vendors can submit their menus for translation into English by students majoring in applied English at the university. After foreign consultants hired by the city have edited the translation the government will print out the bilingual menus for the vendors for free. The city is also considering setting up a database of dish names in English and Chinese based on the bilingual menus of the three night markets, Liu 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