■ Legislature
Some NCC candidates named
The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) caucus named five of its nine nominees for the soon-to-be-established National Communications Commission (NCC) yesterday. The caucus is scheduled to officially announce all of its nominees today, as will the other caucuses. The five people named yesterday are Weng Hsiu-chi (翁秀琪), chairman of the Public Television Service; Chang Tien-chin (張天欽), director of the NCC preparation office; Shih Jun-ji (施俊吉), a research fellow at Academia Sinica's Institute of Social Science; Hsu Song-ken (許松根), a professor of economics at Tamkang University; and (呂忠津), a professor of electrical engineering at National Tsing Hua University. DPP Legislator Ker Chien-ming (柯建銘) said that none of the nominees are DPP members and all of them have professional expertise. The Organic Law of the National Communications Commission (國家通訊傳播委員會組織法), stipulates that political parties must nominate 15 candidates for the committee and the final selections will be based upon each party's proportion of seats in the legislature.
■ Health
Young men risk STDs
A report released by the Taipei City Hospital system yesterday showed that men between 20 and 29 are at the greatest risk of acquiring sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), and heterosexuals are much more likely to acquire an STD than homosexuals. According to an STD report conducted by the Taipei City STD Lab between May and last month, of the 186 people who acquired an STD, more than 75 percent were male, while about 24 percent were women. Heterosexuals made up 85 percent of all STD patients, with about 8 percent homosexual. More than 66 percent of the STD patients had urethritis or cervicitis, and among the 66 percent, 23 percent of patients had gonorrhea. The hospital said the questionnaire found that about 62 percent of the patients did not use condoms when having sex.
■ Society
AIDS inmates separated
Prisons have begun to segregate prisoners infected with HIV or suffering from AIDS to curb the spread of AIDS in jails, an official said. "We are building separate wards for HIV-AIDS convicts in six prisons, and have begun moving these prisoners to those wards," an official from the Correction Department said. "With HIV/AIDS prisoners living in special wards, it is easier for us to take care of them and prevent the spread of AIDS," he said. Among the 60,000 prisoners in the 47 jails, there are 1,539 prisoners infected with the HIV virus or suffering from full-blown AIDS. The Ministry of Justice began to build wards for HIV/AIDS convicts earlier this year due to the sharp rise in infections among drug using inmates.
■ Politics
Soong story `incorrect'
The Presidential Office yesterday rebutted a report in a Chinese-language daily that claimed the office's Personnel Department had confirmed People First Party (PFP) Chairman James Soong (宋楚瑜) was not paid during the period he served as a secretary of the office while holding posts in the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT). According to the Department of Public Affairs, a letter from the Personnel Department replying to PFP Legislator Chang Hsien-yao (張顯耀) was to clarify that the office's materials regarding salary records had been destroyed. "What the president actually said was that serving as an official at the Presidential Office and in an important party position at the same time violates the law," the office said.
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