■ Politics
Travel plans denied
Vice President Annette Lu (呂秀蓮) never had any
plans to visit Greece, the Presidential Office said yesterday, in response to a newspaper report that she had dropped the plans only after learning that it would be difficult for her to attend the opening ceremony of
the Athens Olympics next month. "Lu has never had any plans to attend the Athens Olympic Games opening ceremony nor has she had any contact with the Olympic Games organizing committee," the Presidential Office said in a press statement. The statement said it was regrettable that the newspaper failed to make any verification before publishing the report.
■ Society
Indigenous talent targeted
The Council of Indigenous Peoples will expand its program to give Aborigines skills that they can use when they return to their villages, council Chairman Chen Chien-nien (陳建年) said yesterday. The plan this year will include 720 people in
18 teams, compared with the 640 people in 16 teams last year, Chen said. This year's program will teach self-help skills, how to better organize and develop individual talent and learn things useful to fostering indigenous cultures. Wang Hung-en (王宏恩), voted best artist at the Golden Melody Awards in 2002 and a member of the Bunun tribe, will serve as the spokesman for the program's development team. Wang hopes to cultivate Aboriginal talent in music composition and production so that Aboriginal music can go beyond just singing. Chen said Aboriginal people have the responsibility to pass down their culture to the younger generation.
■ Crime
Illegal immigrants nabbed
Sixteen Chinese women were arrested on a beach near Tamsui in a pre-dawn
raid yesterday, coast guard officers said. Also nabbed in the raid were two Taiwanese fishermen who had allegedly transported the 16 to shore aboard the Fuhao speedboat. The youngest of the seized immigrants was only 16 years old, coast guard officers
said. Acting on a tip that
a smuggling ring would smuggle a batch of Chinese into the country soon, coast guard authorities kept a close watch on the Fuhao after it left Aoti fishing port in Taipei County at 3:30pm on Sunday. After picking up the women
in the Taiwan Strait from
a Chinese fishing boat,
the Fuhao headed back to Taiwan. It ran aground near Tamsui after a two-hour chase with coast guard cutters. The ship's two crew members and the 16 stowaways jumped overboard and tried to hide in shrubs but were found.
■ Flood Relief
Japanese team helps out
A medical team from Osaka is in Nantou County to help with medical services there in the wake of the storms earlier this month. The five-member team, headed by Yodogawa Christian Hospital superintendent Takeshi Ishida, along with a medical team from Puli Christian Hospital, traveled to Jenai township by helicopter. Because the roads to most
of the flood-ravaged areas in Nantou have been repaired and sufficient medical supplies are continuing to flow in, some medical teams have left; the medical teams from Puli and Yodogawa
are taking their place. Lin
Li-hsueh, an administrator
at Puli Christian Hospital, quoted Ishida as saying that when the Japanese team arrived at the scene, they were very impressed that the military and civilians were working well together. Tropical Storm Mindulle, which struck the country on July 2, brought torrential rain and severe mudslides.
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