■ ENVIRONMENT
CDs offer 'green' fireworks
The Taipei City Government Department of Environmental Protection is offering free "firecracker sound" CDs to residents to make the Lunar New Year safer and more environmentally friendly. Department officials said the CDs were being offered to encourage people not to use firecrackers during the festive season to cut down on air and noise pollution and have a safe holiday. To provide an alternative, the department made audio recordings of firecracker sounds available on its Web site prior to last year's Lunar New Year holidays. Copies of the CD can be picked up for free at the department's main office in Xinyi District (信義), the officials said, adding that the audio file is also available on the department's Web site.
■ GOVERNMENT
Superstition leads to change
National ID card numbers will no longer have more than one number "4" in the future, Minister of the Interior Lee Yi-yang (李逸洋) said in a news release yesterday. "Because the number '4' is traditionally considered an unlucky number, [the ministry] stopped issuing national ID cards ending in '4' in 2000," the statement said. "But the number `4' can still appear on national IDs." The number "4" is considered an unlucky number because the Mandarin pronunciation, si, sounds similar to the word for "death." The statement said avoiding the number "4" completely would be too difficult because 45 percent of national ID numbers would have to be replaced. Instead, the ministry will allow no more than one "4" on new national ID cards. The ministry will also allow "anybody whose national ID number contains a number '4' to apply to change their national ID number," the statement said.
■ CRIME
China targets Web site
Police in China have shut down a Taiwan-based Web site that featured Chinese women in erotic footage and have arrested 33 people involved in the operation, China's state media reported on Wednesday. Viewers, mostly in Taiwan, paid to watch footage taken in Guangdong Province, Xinhua news agency said. The site had been in operation for more than one year and took in more than US$137,000 in three months, it said. Police told Xinhua that 23 of those arrested were performers for the site at 12 locations. The other 10 helped manage the operation. Two Taiwanese were among the 10 organizers, the report said without elaborating.
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