■ POLITCS
KMT seeks clarifications
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) presidential candidate Ma Ying-jeou's (馬英九) camp yesterday urged Presidential Office Secretary-General Yeh Chu-lan (葉菊蘭) to clarify within three days allegations that Ma had acted as a student spy for the KMT. Yeh, the campaign director for Democratic Progressive Party presidential candidate Frank Hsieh (謝長廷), said on Tuesday that Ma had been hired by KMT authorities to spy on independence activists in the US -- including Carnegie Mellon University associate professor Chen Wen-chen (陳文成) -- when the former was a student in the US. Chen was found dead on the grounds of National Taiwan University a day after being questioned by secret police in 1981. In an editorial written at the time, Ma said the cause of death was either accident or murder. Ma spokesman Luo Chih-chiang (羅智強) yesterday denied Yeh's accusation and said the Ma camp would file a defamation lawsuit against Yeh if she failed to substantiate the accusations within three days.
■ POLITICS
Scholarship budget frozen
Opposition lawmakers on the legislature's Education and Culture Committee froze some funding for foreign students during a budget review session yesterday. They told the Ministry of Education to present a more comprehensive proposal on foreign student scholarships before they would consider releasing the remaining budget. Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Lin Teh-fu (林德福) asked why the government spends millions to aid foreign students while Taiwanese struggle to pay tuition fees. Ministry officials said foreign students who receive scholarships are indispensable because they provide an international perspective for local students. They also said 70 percent of scholarship recipients end up working for Taiwanese companies after graduation. The committee urged ministry officials to be impartial when they are selecting scholarship recipients. Eligibility should be based on academic records, not on nationality because "shoring up Taiwan's diplomacy" was the Ministry of Foreign Affairs' job, not the education ministry's, KMT Legislator Hung Hsiu-chu (洪秀柱) said.
■ CULTURE
Aboriginal expo scheduled
The 2007 Taiwan Aboriginal Tribes Expo is scheduled to take place in Taipei from Nov. 17 to Nov. 24, the Council of Indigenous Peoples said yesterday. The expo will be held at the Xinyi Public Assembly Hall, a former military dependents' village that is now a civic space. The exhibition is intended to promote Aboriginal cultures and to market their products, the council said. Pavilions and stalls will feature crafts and other products, including Aboriginal delicacies. Anyone interested in setting up a stall should contact the council before Oct. 26.
■ ENERGY
Researchers find enzyme
A National Taiwan Ocean University research team has discovered an enzyme at undersea hydrothermal vents near Turtle Island (龜山島) in Ilan County, which could be used in the production of biomass energy, Tzou Wen-hsiung (鄒文雄), a professor of at the Institute of Bioscience and Biotechnology, said on Tuesday. The enzyme -- which is derived from Thermoanaerobacterium sp. NTOU2 -- can be used to decompose agricultural crops to produce biomass energy in the form of alcohol, Tzou said. He said the university was applying for patent rights for the application of their research to industrial processes involving the enzyme. He said it would take about one year before the enzyme could be marketed.
Staff writer, with CNA";
■ TRANSPORTATION
More bike decks on the way
The Taipei Rapid Transit Corp (TRTC) is to install additional two-deck bicycle parking racks outside the Yuanshan MRT Station to provide more parking space for Taipei City cyclists, a TRTC spokesman said yesterday. The TRTC already provides a total of more than 9,800 bike parking spaces outside several MRT stations, the spokesman said. The TRTC installed the first two-deck bike racks outside Beitou MRT station in 2004, then added racks at Jiantan, Fuzhong and Gongguang stations, providing nearly 1,100 parking spaces. The spokesman said the racks at Beitou station were made in Japan and cost more than NT$14,000 each, while the two-deck racks installed outside other stations were made in Taiwan and cost NT$8,000 each.
■ SOCIETY
Hualien area scoops prize
A community in Hualien County won the prestigious Presidential Cultural Award yesterday for its efforts in promoting sustainable community development. Starting with four couples and their families in 1996, the community in Fengtien Village (豐田) of Shoufeng Township (壽豐) in Hualien has made itself a role model in terms of community development over the past 11 years. Members of the community -- who call themselves the Ox Plough Working Group -- have made business development, welfare and medicare, public order, humanities and education, environmental protection and landscape building their six priorities. The group began to promote an in-depth tour of Fengtien in 1998, earning at least NT$1 million (US$30,700) per year for the community and introducing the area to people from the rest of the country.
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