■ Health
Group helps quake victims
The Taiwan International Health Action (Taiwan IHA) group has dispatched a medical mission to Indonesia to help those affected by a magnitude-6.3 earthquake that rocked the country's Batusangkar District on Tuesday, leaving up to 100 dead and hundreds injured, a spokesman for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said yesterday. The spokesman said that the group, an ad hoc interagency body established by the Executive Yuan's Department of Health and the ministry, has sent a four-member medical team to the earthquake-affected area in West Sumatra Province to assist in disaster relief. The spokesman said the Taiwan IHA began operations in March last year to provide international humanitarian medical aid and promote medical cooperation. The group has helped international relief and disease prevention efforts on many occasions, he added.
■ Earthquakes
Moderate quake strikes
A moderate earthquake struck off northeastern Taiwan on Thursday night, meteorologists said. No damage, injuries or tsunami warning was immediately reported. The magnitude 5.2 quake hit at around 11:30pm local time and was centered at sea about 6km southeast of the coastal city of Suao, the Central Weather Bureau said in a news release. Suao is about 150km southeast of Taipei. The earthquake was felt in northern and central parts of Taiwan, the bureau said.
■ Crime
Fraud ring busted
Police recently raided a criminal ring in Taichung, arresting nine people suspected of obtaining money by fraud, mostly from people living in China, the Criminal Investigation Bureau (CIB) said yesterday. The criminal organization, which specialized in fraud, was headed by a woman surnamed Hsieh (謝) who, together with her accomplices, employed a "phishing" scheme aimed at Chinese citizens living in inland regions, as well as major cities including Beijing and Tianjin, the CIB said. Based in Taichung, the suspects made a massive number of telephone calls through Internet phone systems to mobile phone users in China. Masquerading as bank staffers or police inspectors investigating credit card fraud, the suspects lured their victims into remitting money to a dummy bank account via ATMs. The fraud ring had made more than 1 million phone calls since last July and succeeded in defrauding their victims of about NT$100 million (US$3 million). The swindlers had also "laundered" the money by wiring it back to Taiwan via an underground remittance system, the CIB said. The suspects have been sent to the Taipei District Prosecutors' Office on charges of fraud.
■ Science
Stem-cell advances reported
A team of scientists working at the gynecology department of the National Taiwan University (NTU) has successfully produced ovarian follicles from human embryonic stem cells. The scientists said that this represented a major advancement in stem-cell research and could be a major breakthrough in the treatment of infertility. The research team added that it could also help advance future research in the field if functional egg cells could be successfully grown from the ovarian follicles. The NTU team's paper detailing its research made the cover story of last month's issue of the science journal Human Reproduction.
■ Trade
Chen lauds orchid show
President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) yesterday expressed hope that the annual Taiwan International Orchid Show (TIOS) would become a platform for sales of Taiwan-grown orchids to other countries around the world. Chen spoke of his expectations during a visit to the 2007 orchid exhibition held at the Taiwan Orchid Plantation, a biotech park in Tainan County as part of the local government's drive to promote technological research and development in orchid cultivation. Chen visited the TIOS hours before its formal opening. Speaking to reporters at the event, Chen said he was very excited to know that the number of foreign visitors to the exhibition had been doubling year on year since its debut in 2005. The boom is believed to be the best encouragement to local orchid growers and related businesses, Chen said.
■ Politics
No name-change date set
No timetable has been set for renaming the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall because certain administrative procedures have yet to be completed, an official with the Ministry of Education (MOE) said yesterday. Chu Nan-hsien (朱楠賢), director-general of the Department of Social Education, made the remarks after the MOE and several other government agencies adopted a resolution the day before to degrade the memorial hall from a third-level administrative unit to the fourth level. For any third-level administrative unit under the Executive Yuan, a set of "organic statutes" must be drafted and submitted to the Legislative Yuan for approval, while the establishment of a fourth-level unit is based upon "organizational rules," Chu explained.
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