■ Courts
HIV lawsuit blasted
Bayer AG, Germany's second-biggest drugmaker, said it will defend itself against a lawsuit brought by seven Taiwanese hemophiliacs who claim the company's blood-clotting medicine may have been contaminated with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. The suit, reported yesterday in the Wall Street Journal, alleges Bayer's Cutter Biological unit, Aventis SA's Aventis Behring division and three other companies continued to sell Factor VIII blood-clotting injection outside the US in the mid-1980s after regulators approved a heat-treated version designed to kill the HIV virus. It wasn't known in the 1980s whether the blood supply contained HIV or whether heating blood products to kill HIV would weaken their effectiveness for hemophiliacs, Bayer spokesman Michael Diehl said. After heating was shown to deactivate the virus, Bayer had to wait for regulatory approval of heat-treated versions of its blood products in different countries before selling them, he said.
■ Transportation
War games disrupt flights
Hundreds of passengers yesterday found their flights to and from Hualien city's airport cancelled after the airport was closed for five hours because of a military live-fire exercise. Angry passengers complained to the airlines, but the carriers said they were also victims of the unexpected decision by the military, the cable television station TVBS said. Military officials insisted that they had informed the airlines of the closure a month ago. The military said the airport could be shut down again over the next few weeks, TVBS reported. The drills were part of the annual Han Kuang 19 wargames.
■ National Defense
Cargo to be inspected
The crew of a North Korean freighter detained in Kaohsiung agreed yesterday to unload chemicals that the US government suspects could be used for making weapons, officials said. Authorities have barred the Be Gae Bong from sailing to North Korea since it docked at Kaohsiung to refuel last Thursday, citing US intelligence that the ship had among its cargoes 156 barrels of phosphorus pentasulfide. After unloading the goods, the ship would be allowed to sail for Nampo, North Korea, customs officer Wong Yao-nan told reporters. The ship's Taiwanese agent said the North Korean owner of the chemicals said that the goods were to be used as fertilizers, not nuclear or other weapons, but eventually agreed to unload them for inspection. Officials said the government would confiscate the chemicals if they were confirmed to be phosphorus pentasulfide.
■ Aviation
Air show cancelled
The government has cancelled the 2003 Taipei Air Show because Ukraine has decided not to participate, the organizer said on yesterday. "Ukraine told us that it could not send its aircraft to the show. Since Ukraine is the main exhibitor, but it could not attend, we have to cancel," a spokeswoman for the Taiwan Helicopter Association told reporters. "We understand that Ukraine made the decision under pressure from China," she said. Media reports last month said that Ukraine hoped to sell warplanes to Taipei and that it would send three aircraft to the Taipei Air Show, including a Sukhoi-33, an AN-74 TK-200, and an AN-74 YK-140. The 2003 Taipei Aviation Technology Exhibition, however, will be held from Thursday to Sunday as scheduled at the Taipei World Trade Center.
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