COMMERCE
Ryukyus to accept EasyCard
EasyCard Corp stored-value cards would be accepted as a means of payment at more than 2,000 locations in Japan’s Ryukyu Islands from Nov. 7, the company said yesterday. The new service, its first outside of Taiwan, would be available to people aged 20 or older with name-registered cards, the company said. Cardholders would be able to make purchases of up to NT$1,500 — or NT$10,000 in the case of SuperCard holders — and have the payment deducted based on real-time exchange rates and without a processing fee, it said. The businesses that would accept EasyCards would include the gift shop at Okinawa Churaumi Aquarium, Roadside Station Kyoda and the Tomari Iyumachi Fish Market, as well as taxi and coach services, EasyCard said. Okinawa, the largest of the Ryukyu Islands, is a popular destination for Taiwanese tourists.
COVID-19
CECC reports 65 deaths
The Central Epidemic Command Center (CECC) yesterday reported 35,365 new COVID-19 cases, including 43 imported cases, and 65 deaths from the disease. The daily caseload dropped 15 percent from a week earlier and remained below 40,000 for the fourth consecutive day, it said. The fatalities ranged in age from four months to their 90s, the center said. All but seven had underlying health issues and 30 had not been vaccinated against COVID-19, the CECC said. The youngest death was a four-month-old unvaccinated boy with no underlying health issues, it added. As of yesterday, the total COVID-19 deaths in Taiwan since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic was 12,323. The nation has recorded 7,450,158 cases since the start of the pandemic, including 36,051 classified as imported.
WEATHER
Drier weather forecast
While seasonal northeasterly winds brought cooler temperatures and rain to northern Taiwan yesterday, drier conditions are expected to prevail this week, the Central Weather Bureau said yesterday. The weather is expected to improve from today through Wednesday, with cloudy to sunny skies and no rain forecast for most areas nationwide, meteorologist Daniel Wu (吳德榮) said. Daily lows could drop to 17°C during the early morning hours over the three-day period, before rising slightly on Wednesday and Thursday, said Wu, a former bureau Weather Forecast Center director who is an adjunct associate professor of atmospheric sciences at National Central University.
POLITICS
Exec to become legislator
Shin Kong Life Insurance Co vice president Cynthia Wu (吳欣盈) is to assume former Taiwan People’s Party’s legislator Tsai Pi-ru’s (蔡壁如) at-large seat in the Legislative Yuan, the Central Election Commission said on Thursday. The commission said Wu would see out the remainder of Tsai’s term, which ends on Jan. 31, 2024. Tsai stood down as a legislator on Oct. 14, one day after Takming University of Science and Technology announced that it had revoked her master’s degree for improper citation of sources. Tsai is the latest politician caught in a spate of tit-for-tat political attacks linked to academic plagiarism. In August, former Hsinchu mayor Lin Chih-chien (林智堅) had two master’s degrees revoked after being accused of plagiarism and withdrew as the Democratic Progressive Party’s candidate for Taoyuan mayor.
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