WEATHER
Bureau issues mudslide alert
Work, online classes and COVID-19 vaccination efforts were yesterday suspended in five mountainous districts in Kaohsiung due to heavy rain and fears of mudslides. The districts affected were Jiasian (甲仙), Liukuei (六龜), Taoyuan (桃源), Maolin (茂林) and Namasia (那瑪夏). “Yellow” mudslide alerts, which are announced when the rain forecast exceeds an area’s warning threshold for debris flow, were issued for 53 rivers in the municipality. The Central Weather Bureau also issued an extremely heavy rain advisory for Kaohsiung, the Tainan metropolitan area, and Chiayi and Pingtung counties, indicating downpours of more than 200mm in 24 hours or 100mm in a three-hour period. Heavy rain advisories, where rainfall of more than 80mm in 24 hours or more than 40mm in one hour is expected, were also issued for Keelung, New Taipei City, Taichung and Chiayi City, as well as Changhua, Nantou and Yunlin counties.
SOCIETY
Author Yang Pin-chun dies
Literary writer Yang Pin-chun (楊品純), better known by his pen name Mei Xun (梅遜), on Monday passed away at the age of 96. Born in 1925 in China’s Jiangsu Province, Yang moved to Taiwan in 1949 when the communists won the Chinese Civil War. He wrote more than 20 million words during his career, many of them after he became visually impaired due to retinopathy in the 1980s, Wenhsun Magazine said in a statement on Monday. Despite his inability to see, Yang continued to work by dictating to his son, Wenhsun Magazine editor-in-chief Feng Te-ping (封德屏) said. Yang was a highly versatile writer who was well-known for his novels, essays, commentaries and even dictionaries, the statement said.
CRIME
National park ban defied
The National Police Agency (NPA) yesterday reminded the public that entry to national parks is still prohibited under a nationwide level 3 COVID-19 alert, and that those found contravening the rule risk a fine of up to NT$15,000. Since the level 3 alert was issued in the middle of last month, many people have disregarded the ban, NPA official Lin Kuan-ting (林冠廷) said. From May 19 to Sunday, there were 22 such cases, the majority of which were at Taroko National Park in Hualien County, Lin said. Twelve of the people who entered the parks were found not wearing masks and were fined for contravening the Communicable Disease Control Act (傳染病防治法), he said. Over the past month, police have warned 456 people who were either not wearing a mask, were trying to enter national parks, aiming to hold public gatherings or attempting to park illegally at national park compounds, Lin said, adding that 227 drivers were fined for the latter.
AGRICULTURE
NZ bans Taiwan mangoes
The Council of Agriculture (COA) has asked New Zealand to lift its import ban on Taiwanese mangoes, an official said yesterday. The New Zealand Ministry for Primary Industries stopped a shipment of Taiwanese mangoes and lychees at its border on Friday last week due to a problem with live fruit fly larvae, Radio New Zealand reported. COA official Tsou Hui-chuan (鄒慧娟) said the larvae were only found on the lychees, even though the mangoes were part of the same shipment. The mangoes passed quarantine inspection, but Taiwan still received a notice yesterday that a ban on mangoes had been imposed, Tsou said. The COA sent correspondence to the New Zealand Commerce and Industry Office in Taipei to ask that the ban on mangoes be lifted, Tsou said.
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