■ Crime
Drug mule arrested
A Malaysian Chinese youth was arrested at Taipei Taoyuan International Airport yesterday for allegedly attempting to transport 29,000 tablets of erimim, a new type of speedball, to Malaysia, aviation police said. Police said the erimim tablets, weighing 8.7kg, were concealed in seven packages of cookies and chocolates. Police found the drugs in the youth's luggage as he was boarding Malaysia Airline's MH095 flight to Malaysia. The juvenile confessed he was carrying drugs and asked police to let him off while his luggage was being checked, but he declined to disclose to source of the drugs. The adolescent was subse-quently referred to the Taoyuan District Public Prosecutors Office.
■ Health
Nutritional campaign opens
In a bid to promote better nutrition among school-children, the Agricultural Trade Office of the American Institute in Taiwan has developed a cooperative nutrition promotional program with the Formosa Cancer Foundation to educate children on the importance of eating five servings of fruit and vegetables daily. The campaign will tap into the promotional and financial resources of 12 US agricultural producer associations, with the US contributing US$60,000 this year. Funding is expected to carry on for several years. This year's program kicked off last Wednesday and will continue through the end of the year, with the in-school nutrition education program reaching an estimated 25,000 elementary school children.
■ Culture
Children's art on display
Forty-five disadvantaged children from 14 countries are in Taiwan to promote a world children's drawing exhibition featuring their paintings, while also meeting with their sponsors. The exhibition on the theme "World, Listen to Me" has collected paintings from children around the globe who have received assistance from Taiwanese sponsors and will travel around the country until the end of the month, said a spokesman for World Vision Taiwan, which organized the event. World Vision Taiwan launched the world children's drawing contest a few months ago to offer a platform for under-privileged children to show their creativity and selected some 100 paintings for entry into the exhibition, the spokesman said. Partici-pants come from Bosnia, Romania, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Honduras, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Swaziland, India, Mongolia, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Vietnam, among others.
■ Politics
KMT requests Chang firing
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers called on Premier Su Tseng-chang (蘇貞昌) to dismiss Council for Economic Planning and Development Vice Chairman Chang Ching-sen (張景森) over what they called a rash announcement on the opening of car racing and horse racing. Members of the KMT's legislative caucus issued the call in the Legislative Yuan after Chang told the local media last Thursday that the council was planning to open sports car racing and horse racing in the central or southern part of the country beginning in June, with the aim of reinvigorating local economies. KMT caucus whip Hsu Shao-ping (徐少萍) said the KMT had strong reservations about the "ridiculous" plan.
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