INFRASTRUCTURE
Songshan airport expanding
Work on expanding Taipei International Airport’s (Songshan Airport) runway is to begin on June 20 and is expected to take a full year, airport director Hsu Nei-shin (徐乃新) said. During this period, the airport’s 11pm to 6.30am curfew is to be extended by half an hour on both ends, Hsu said. Most flights operate during regular hours and would not be affected, he said. In case of delay, flights would be redirected to Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport, he said. The 2,605m runway is to be widened to 60m, from 45m, and repaved at a cost of NT$900 million (US$30.5 million), an airport official said.
COMPUTER SCIENCE
Taiwanese wins recognition
Taiwanese scientist Ed Chi (紀懷新) on Sunday received a CHI Academy Award in Montreal, Canada, from the Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (CHI), an international society of professionals in the field of “computer-human interaction.” Upon graduating from high school in New Taipei City’s Tamsui District (淡水), Chi moved to the US and earned a doctorate in computer science from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. Now a principal scientist at Google, Chi is to participate in an artificial intelligence boot camp organized by the firm in Taipei this summer as part of its “Google for Taiwan” project to coach young local talent and academics from top universities.
CULTURE
Fulong sand festival opens
The Fulong International Sand Sculpture Arts Festival in New Taipei City opened on Saturday. The annual event, featuring temporary works by local and foreign artists, runs until July 16. Twenty teams are to take part in a sculpting competition on May 26.
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
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