■ Education
Retirement policy changed
The Ministry of Education announced it will cancel a policy that allows teachers over the age of 55 or who have worked for 25 years or more to retire because of budget constraints. The 18 percent preferential interest rate given to retired teachers' bank deposits will also be dropped. Central Personnel Administration Director-General Lee Yi-yang (李逸洋) said the administration reached consensus with the education ministry that a new regulation covering the pensions of the nation's 300,000 teachers will be implemented in January. The National Teacher's Association said the move is unacceptable because the government failed to discuss the new rules with association representatives. The association's public relations head Peng Ju-yu (彭如玉) said teachers nationwide will demonstrate against the education ministry's policy on Sept. 28, teacher's day.
■ Politics
Ma joins California joggers
Taipei Mayor Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) took part in a charity jogging activity held on Sunday near the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, California. The fund-raising activity for children with special needs was cosponsored by the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in San Francisco and the Chinese-language daily World Journal. Hundreds of people took part in the activity, with T-shirts featuring Ma's signature being one of the most popular items available. Ma will also take part in a marathon to be held by the University of California, Berkeley, next week.
■ Crime
Vietnamese arrest trio
Three people were arrested in Ho Chi Minh City and charged with trafficking women to Taiwan to work as prostitutes there, Vietnamese police said yesterday. Ringleader Ho Nguyen Ngoc Thanh, 23, and his two female accomplices, Nguyen Thi Kieu, 25, and Ly Linh, 21, were detained on Friday after police received a tip-off from the family of one of six women sent to Taiwan last month. The six women, who came from poor families in Mekong Delta provinces around Ho Chi Minh City, were sent there on tourist visas, a police officer said. The women went willingly to Taiwan knowing they would work in the sex industry, he said. The trafficking of women and children from Vietnam, often to work in the sex trade in China and Cambodia, is a significant problem, with police estimating that 50,000 have been sold into prostitution over the past decade.
■ Politics
TSU head off to New Zealand
TSU Chairman Huang Chu-wen (黃主文) will leave for New Zealand today for a visit aimed at promoting party-to-party diplomacy, a party spokesman said yesterday. TSU Deputy Secretary-General Chen Hung-chi (陳鴻基) said Huang will head a five-member delegation. During the visit, Chen said, Huang's group will meet with lawmakers from various New Zealand political parties for wide-ranging talks, including ways to boost TSU ties with them as well as to promote Taiwan-New Zealand cooperation. The group will attend a ceremony marking the inauguration of an association of TSU supporters in New Zealand, he said. Chen said the TSU will continue forging ties with major foreign political parties. "We hope to enlist more support from foreign governments and their peoples for Taiwan's cause through increased party-to-party interchanges," he 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