■ Politics
Lien tour starts today
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairman Lien
Chan (連戰) will start a nationwide post-election "thanksgiving" journey today, with Keelung as the first stop. Lien will be accompanied by KMT Vice Chairman Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) and party Secretary-General Lin Fong-cheng (林豐正) on his visit to Keelung, where they will meet with grassroots
KMT cadres and elected representatives in the city, KMT spokesman Alex Tsai (蔡正元) said. Tsai added that Ma will brief KMT cadres on a plan to merge with the People First Party (PFP) and that Lin will deliver a report on the findings of the judicial recount of the 13 million ballots cast in the March 20 president election and scrutiny by pro-KMT attorneys of voter rosters.
■ Crime
More betel nuts seized
Customs officials yesterday seized a large batch of betel nuts that had been smuggled from Thailand, the third such batch uncovered by airport authorities in the past two weeks. The seized betel nuts, weighing a total of 3,584kg and packed in 128 cases, had been shipped to CKS International Airport a day earlier. Customs officials said the labels on the cases had been changed after their arrival at the airport warehouse, indicating that local accomplices had probably been involved in the operation. Since this is the off-season for betel-nut harvesting in this country and the Council of Agriculture has banned imports of the product, there has been a sharp increase in the retail prices of betel nuts recently. Customs officials said they suspect that local smuggling rings have colluded with airport staff to change the labels of Thai betel nuts to facilitate the smuggling of the nuts.
■ Weather
New typhoon forms
The Central Weather Bureau said yesterday that it is closely watching a newly-formed typhoon located in the South China Sea near the Spratly Islands. Typhoon Chanthu is not likely to hit Taiwan judging from its current course, meteorologists said. Chanthu -- the fifth typhoon reported in the Asia-Pacific area this year -- was centered about 1,200km south-southwest of Hengchun at 8am yesterday, moving in a northwesterly direction at a speed of 19kph. The typhoon, which has a radius of 100km and is packing winds of up to 65kph near its center, is forecast to move toward the Indochina Peninsula over the following 48 hours if its current course remains unchanged, meteorologists watching the storm's development predicted.
■ Sports
Paragliding event set
The World Paragliding Championship will begin on July 17 in Taitung in conjunction with a series of other aerial activities, Taitung County Government officials said yesterday. The paragliding competition, which will be held in the heights of Luyeh village and in mountainous areas of Yungkang village, is expected to attract paragliders from the US, Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Australia, the Middle East, Germany and France. As some translators will
be needed during the competition, the county government's tourism office said it would welcome applications from people aged over 20 who can communicate effectively in German, French, Spanish, Japanese and Korean.
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