SOCIETY
City buses get Wi-Fi
Commuters in New Taipei City can now enjoy free Wi-Fi on the city’s 2,500 buses, New Taipei City Mayor Eric Chu (朱立倫) said on Tuesday. The city leads other cities and counties in terms of offering free access to wireless networks, Chu said, citing Taipei’s MRT and the high-speed railway as examples of public transport that have yet to fully install Wi-Fi services. According to the New Taipei City Department of Transportation, people will be able to connect to the Internet without creating an account or providing a password. Free Wi-Fi is available on city buses bearing the “New Taipei Free Wi-Fi” logo, the department said.
EMERGENCY AID
Hurricane relief donations
American Institute in Taiwan (AIT) Director Kin Moy (梅健華) posted on Facebook yesterday to thank Taiwanese for their generous donations to aid Hurricane Harvey victims. “I want to thank the people of Taiwan for their generous aid to the people of the United States to help them recover from Hurricane Harvey. Taiwan has a long record of helping friends in times of need, and this support will go a long way toward helping the victims of the storm,” he wrote. He finished his post with: “The people hit by Hurricane Harvey know that they are not alone as they begin the tough road of recovery.” Taiwan was in the forefront of donors and swiftly announced donations to the relief efforts totaling US$800,000. A ceremony for the donation handover was held on Tuesday at the American Red Cross headquarters in Washington with Stanley Kao (高碩泰), representative of the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office, presenting a US$500,000 check. Kao said the remaining US$300,000 would be donated directly to Houston’s disaster relief efforts.
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:
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
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