WEATHER
Heavy rains expected in west
Significant rainfall can be expected across Taiwan during the next seven days due to a weather front and southwesterly currents, the Central Weather Bureau said yesterday. Especially residents in the western parts of the nation should prepare for heavy or extremely heavy rain from Wednesday, with 80mm to 200mm of accumulation in 24 hours, bureau forecaster Lin Po-tung (林伯東) said. The front and southwesterly winds are to affect Taiwan until the Dragon Boat Festival on Monday, he said.
TRANSPORTATION
YouBike coming to Miaoli
The popular YouBike bicycle sharing service is soon to be available in Miaoli County, with the first 10 automated rental stations to be installed by the end of this month, the county’s Public Works Department said on Monday. The stations are to be at Miaoli Railway Station, Miaoli County Public Library, the Miaoli City Office, National Miaoli Senior High School and National Miaoli Agricultural and Industrial Vocational High School, among other locations. Bikes can be rented for NT$10 (US$0.33) per 30 minutes.
CRIME
Taipei nabs 180 for fraud
Taipei police from Monday to Friday last week launched a massive crackdown on telecom fraud, arresting 180 suspects in 89 cases, the Taipei Police Department said on Monday. Police also seized 34 cellphones and NT$2.04 million in cash, police told a news conference. The department estimates that there were 422 victims, with monetary losses totaling NT$149.76 million. The suspects and seized evidence have been turned over to prosecutors for further investigation on charges of telecom fraud.
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
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
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
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: