■ Corruption
Police expand task force
More than 5,000 policemen have been mobilized to assist in a national campaign to prevent vote-buying in the run-up to the March 20 election, a spokesman for the National Police Administration said yesterday. An additional 5,904 policemen have been organized into 1,476 units to join the current force of 154 people in 38 groups which are normally in charge of probing fraud. Members of the force have been equipped with advanced digital video cameras since Jan. 10 to record evidence.
■ Sports
Council focuses on Olympics
The National Council on Physical Fitness and Sports has earmarked NT$80 million to upgrade the competitive edge of local athletes and boost their chances of medals in this year's Olympic Games. A total of 62 athletes have registered to compete in nine pre-event competitions held to test their qualifications for the Athens Olympics in August. The nine sports events include archery, shooting, boxing, weightlifting, taekwondo, table tennis, wresting, soft ball and cycling. The council has also earmarked NT$738 million to help local athletes win medals in the Asia Games and East Asia Games.
■ Economics
Klein joins KMT think tank
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) announced yesterday that Lawrence Klein, the winner of the 1980 Nobel Prize in economics, has agreed to serve as an adviser to the National Policy Research Foundation, a KMT-run think tank. KMT Chairman Lien Chan (連戰) made the announcement after Klein delivered a speech on strategies for Taiwan's economic development in Taipei.Klein, 84, is the think tank's first foreign adviser.
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