■ Earthquake
Strong temblor in Hualien
A strong earthquake hit the nation yesterday, shaking buildings and giving a New Year's Day jolt to residents of Taipei, but no damage or casualties were immediately reported. The 5.9-magnitude quake had its epicenter under the ocean off the east coast of Hualien and Taitung counties, the Central Weather Bureau said. The quake struck at
11:15am, and occurred at a depth of 18km under the ocean, the bureau said.
■ Politics
Su on the hustings in US
Taipei County Commissioner Su Tseng-chang (蘇貞昌) is scheduled to visit Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego, Dallas and New York from Jan. 17 to Jan. 22 at the invitation of President Chen Shui-bian's (陳水扁) support network in these cities, a source said in Dallas on Wednesday. A spokesman for the Chen Shui-bian Supporters' Association in Dallas said that during the visit, Su will attend fund-raising activities in support of Chen's election campaign. Su is also a top official at Chen's re-election campaign headquarters.
■ Crime
Web site protects gamers
The Ministry of Justice has designed a Web site to promote online game safety. Since it opened on Nov. 12, the site has received over 100,000 hits. It offers information on the different types of online games that could be subject to criminal activities such as hacking into the accounts of players to procure virtual game assets. It also lists helpful legal information to allow players to protect themselves from being led into criminal activity by illegal game sites. Free legal consultation is also available. The address is search.moj.gov.tw/game/index.asp.
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
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
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