■ Crime
Tourist' sentenced to death
A 31-year-old Taiwanese man has been sentenced to death in Vietnam after being convicted of trying to mail 1.3kg of heroin from Vietnam to Taiwan, a court official said yesterday. The man, surnamed Chang, was given the death penalty in Ho Chi Minh City after a half-day trial on Thursday, said Nguyen Van Mai, a court official. "The man was arrested in January at Ho Chi Minh City's Central Post Office after customs officers found the heroin in his mail package, hidden in packs of coffee," the court official said. Chang came into Vietnam on a tourist visa last November and had been paid US$2,000 to try to send the drugs to Taiwan, state-run media reported. The man will have the right to appeal the conviction within two weeks. If the appeal is unsuccessful he may still be eligible for a presidential pardon. If he is not given a pardon, he will be executed by a five-man firing squad.
■ Arts and culture
Cooperate, heartthrob says
South Korean actor Bae Yong-joon told reporters in Taiwan yesterday that he would like to work with the nation's most famous director, Ang Lee (李安) of the Oscar-winning martial arts saga Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Bae, 32, who rose to heartthrob status in East Asia after starring in the South Korean soap opera Winter Sonata, said he wanted to see better cooperation between film makers from different Asian cultures. "I hope to work with Chinese directors, because it's a positive form of cultural exchange," Bae said through an interpreter. Bae arrived in Taipei early yesterday. Bae was on a three-day visit to promote his new movie April Snow, the story of a man and a woman who grow close after a traffic accident reveals their spouses had an affair.
■ Education
Local students don't exercise
Taiwan's elementary and junior-high-school students exercise less than their foreign counterparts, according to the results of a survey released recently by the Ministry of Education (MOE). In US grade schools and high schools, students have physical education class every day, according to the MOE report. In comparison, the weekly physical education time is only 90 minutes in Taiwan's junior high schools and 80 minutes in elementary schools, far less than the 250 minutes in French high schools and 200 minutes in French elementary schools. Taiwan also lags behind China and Japan in terms of the weekly physical education hours in high schools and elementary schools, the report said. According to the MOE survey, local people aged over 15 spend two hours and 20 minutes watching television per day, about 50 minutes reading newspapers or resting, and only 19 minutes exercising.
■ Politics
DPP tops donations list
The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) topped the other political parties with respect to the balance of political donations, with more than NT$97.31 million (US$3.04 million) as of the end of last year, the nation's highest watchdog body said yesterday. The Control Yuan said that the DPP was followed by its ally, the Taiwan Solidarity Union (TSU), with more than NT$7.18 million, and the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) with more than NT$7.05 million. The People First Party (PFP) had NT$2.42 million, the Non-Partisan Solidarity Union had NT$550,000 and the New Party had NT$9,000 in donations. This was the first time that the balance of political donations had been announced.
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