HEALTH
Eid al-Fitr feast canceled
An Eid al-Fitr celebration scheduled to take place at 6am on Thursday near Taipei Railway Station has been canceled to avoid large gatherings amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the event organizers said yesterday. Eid al-Fitr marks the end of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, the ninth month on the Islamic calendar, the Global Workers’ Organization said. However, due to the pandemic, the organization and local Indonesian Muslim groups have jointly decided to cancel the gathering, it said, calling on Taiwan’s Muslims to break their month-long fast at home. The cancelation is in response to three people testing positive for the virus after visiting the Taipei Grand Mosque on April 16 for a gathering, it added.
SCIENCE
Supermoon eclipse nears
Local astronomy enthusiasts can look forward to a total lunar eclipse on May 26, which is to coincide with the year’s biggest full moon — when a full moon occurs when the moon is the closest it gets to the Earth on its orbit, the Central Weather Bureau said. The eclipse is to last from 6:31pm to 9:51pm, it said, adding that the moon would appear in a copper hue when completely obscured by the Earth’s shadow from 7:09pm to 7:28pm. The last time such an event took place was in 2018, the bureau said, adding that the next total lunar eclipse is to occur next year. This time, the moon is to appear about 13.6 percent larger than in this year’s smallest full moon on Dec. 19, it said. The bureau said it would broadcast a livestream of the lunar eclipse on its Web site.
WEATHER
Heat, clear skies forecast
The Central Weather Bureau forecast hot and sunny weather across most of Taiwan for this week, with sporadic rainfall likely only in the nation’s east and in mountainous regions. Temperature would rise to about 34°C in northern Taiwan, 30°C in eastern Taiwan and 35°C in the rest of the nation, the bureau said. Today, the temperatures in parts of Kaohsiung and Tainan would rise to 38°C, it said, adding that temperatures in Chiayi City, and Nantou and Pingtung counties would climb to 36°C, it added. The highest temperature in the nation yesterday was recorded in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), at 38.3°C.
TOURISM
JAL axes Kaohsiung flights
Japan Airlines (JAL) on Friday announced that it would from July discontinue flights between Kaohsiung International Airport and Tokyo’s Narita International Airport, due to sluggish demand amid the COVID-19 pandemic. The airline has been operating the route for nearly 40 years, offering one round trip per week. “The market outlook in Kaohsiung is not promising,” JAL representative Wang Fu-min (王富民) said. The company said it would from July to September also suspend flights between Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport and the Japanese destinations of Chubu Centrair International Airport, serving Nagoya, and Kansai International Airport, serving Osaka. Other routes from Taiwan’s largest airport, as well as those from Taipei International Airport (Songshan airport), to Japanese destinations would not be affected, it said, adding that if offers four weekly flights from Songshan airport to Tokyo International Airport and two flights from Taoyuan airport to Narita airport. Prior to the pandemic, Kaohsiung was a major destination for JAL, which operated seven round-trip flights per week on the Kaohsiung-Narita route and several flights to Osaka, as well as the Japanese islands of Hokkaido and Okinawa.
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