TRANSPORT
New bike rules to take effect
From July 17, cyclists in Taipei are to be fined NT$300 if they ride on sidewalks outside of established bike lanes, the Taipei City Government said on Friday. Riders would be required to stick to designated bike lanes and if such a lane does not exist, they would have to ride in the slow lanes of city streets, city officials said. The regulations are to first be enforced in areas that have well-defined bike lanes, such as on Xinyi, Renai, Roosevelt and Xinsheng South roads, officials said. The Taipei Department of Transportation had originally planned to put the regulations into practice yesterday. However, it decided to delay the launch by two weeks after Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) said he was unaware of the new rules and asked transportation officials to step up publicity of them.
SOCIETY
Conscript number dips
The government plans to conscript 138,975 military personnel this year, a decrease of 29,144 people from last year and the lowest annual number in the past decade, the Ministry of the Interior said yesterday. The low number is partly a result of superstition, as on the Chinese zodiac, 1998 — the birth year of the conscripts — was a Year of the Tiger, so the birth rate was low, the ministry said. It is believed that people born in the Year of the Tiger have bad luck. The number of conscripts per year over the past 10 years has often reached 165,000, with 2009 seeing a high of 174,000, the ministry said. Among those conscripted this year, 89.4 percent would not be able to fulfill their duty in the year, ministry data show. The ministry said 85.9 percent of that group remain in school and 9.8 percent have already served their terms — for example as military-school students.
WEATHER
Mercury soars in Taipei
The mercury hit 35.9°C in Taipei at 12:10pm yesterday, the highest temperature recorded in the capital this year, the Central Weather Bureau said. As of about 2pm yesterday, the highest temperature across the nation occurred in Chiayi, where the temperature climbed to 36°C at 1:16pm, the bureau said. The highest temperature in northern Taiwan was the 35.9°C recorded in New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋), although a high of 36.2°C was recorded there on Wednesday, it said. The bureau reminded the public to take precautions against sunburn and to stay hydrated to avert heat stroke.
SOCIETY
FDA flip-flops on fluopyram
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on Thursday revoked its decision to tolerate traces of fluopyram in tea, after its previous decision to permit residue of the fungicide stirred controversy. In line with the Council of Agriculture policy of allowing the use of a pesticide that is a mixture of fluopyram and trifloxystrobin on tea bushes, the FDA on March 15 announced that up to 6 parts per million of fluopyram residue would be permitted. The announcement immediately triggered a public outcry because fluopyram has been linked to thyroid and liver cancer in mice. According to FDA Food Safety Division director Pan Chih-kuan (潘志寬), the decision to revoke the tolerance was made to ease consumer concerns and avoid unnecessary misunderstanding. The FDA and council would reconsider the use of fluopyram and its residue limit and would improve communication with the public before a further decision is made, he said.
Staff writer, with CNA
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