■ Academics
Nobel laureate to visit
Chinese Nobel laureate Yang Zhengning (楊振寧) is scheduled to visit Taiwan on Sunday to help promote academic exchanges between Taiwan and China, his host said yesterday. The 80-year-old Yang, who won the 1957 Nobel prize in physics, will hold seminars in celebration of his birthday, said officials of the Academia Sinica. Yang was invited by Academia Sinica President Lee Yuan-tseh (李遠哲) for a four-day visit, officials said.
■ Media
English TV program launched
Taichung yesterday launched Taiwan's first 24-hour English-teaching TV program to promote English as the second official language. Taichung Mayor Jason Hu (胡志強) presided over the ceremony launching the cable TV program, Hello Taichung. The program can be watched by all cable TV subscribers in Taichung City, central Taiwan. "The launch of Hello Taichung is very important because it can help us join the global village," he said. "I hope that Taiwan residents will spend more time learning English so that one day our English level can surpass that of others," he said.
■ Education
Principal fined for outburst
A principal at an elementary school has been ordered to pay a teacher NT$150,000 after implying he was a "communist" in a public row. During an angry exchange at a school meeting three years ago the defendant, surnamed Lin, asked a teacher at the school outside Taipei "you are not a communist, are you?" The teacher, identified on local cable television TVBS only as Chan, filed charges in a civil lawsuit. "Here in Taiwan `communist' is generally accepted as carrying a negative connotation," Judge Tu Hui-chin explained. He said the term "marred the reputation and dignity" of the teacher.
■ Technology
Nanotechnology gets boost
The Executive Yuan yesterday pledged to inject over NT$30 billion to help Taiwan become a leader of the world's nanotechnology industry and one of the world's design centers of integrated circuit chips within six years. Nanotechnology and chip design are two of the technology development programs included in the government's NT$2.6 trillion national development project. According to the press release made available by the Cabinet yesterday, the six-year nanotechnology project is two-phased and estimated to cost the government about NT$23 billion. Its major tasks will include cultivating nanotechnology talents and constructing nanotechnology research and development facilities. To develop Taiwan into a design center of silicon property, the Cabinet plans to invest about NT$7.6 billion between 2002 and 2005.
■ Government
Lawmakers suggest cuts
Eliminating legislators-at-large would be a good first step to reducing the number of seats in the Legislative Yuan and streamlining its operations, a group of independent lawmakers suggested yesterday. In a proposal crafted to reform the legislature, the newly formed non-partisan alliance said by getting rid of the legislator-at-large seats, which are named by political parties proportionally to ballots they garner in elections, the number of seats in the legislature would be cut to 184 from the current 225. Noting that legislators-at-large lack any mandate from voters nor have the expertise to supervise governmental affairs, the proposal said the seats have been used in the past by political parties as rewards to their financial donors.
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