■ AVIATION
Chopper pilot had no license
PHOTO: CNA
The pilot of a helicopter that was forced to land in Ilan County's Jiaosi Township (礁溪) on Sunday has no legal operating license and will be penalized in terms of the Civil Aviation Act (民用航空法), the Civil Aeronautics Administration (CAA) said yesterday. The helicopter, a Robinson R-22, was found in the parking lot of a hot spring hotel in Jiaosi. Unable to find the pilot, the local police tied the helicopter to a police motorcycle to prevent it being flown away. The police later found the owner, 45-year-old Wei Chin-lien (魏金連), and discovered that he had done the same thing nine years ago, when he was forced to land in Bade Township (八德), Taoyuan County. The CAA yesterday confirmed that Ilan County prosecutors had confiscated the helicopter's rotor blades. The body will be transported to Songshan Airport for storage. Wei could face up to five years in prison or a fine of NT$1 million (US$31,500).
■ HEALTH
Dialysis centers show losses
Fierce competition among dialysis centers mean that more than 30 percent of the nation's dialysis centers are operating at a loss, the Taiwan Society of Nephrology said yesterday. The society responded to recent media reports portraying the centers as hugely profitable and questioned the appropriateness of non-medical businesses such as farmer's associations investing in dialysis centers as moneyspinners. The society called on medical service providers to think carefully before making the substantial investment necessary to start a dialysis center.
■ SOCIETY
Foreign spouses get help
A handbook in six languages that provides foreign spouses in Kaohsiung City with information on living in Taiwan has been warmly received, officials at the city's Civil Affairs Bureau said yesterday. The Kaohsiung City Government Foreign Spouse Manual, printed in Chinese, English, Vietnamese, Indonesian, Cambodian and Thai, provides foreign spouses with a better understanding of local customs and easier access to important information, such as how to apply for citizenship, the officials said. The bureau said that 19,123 foreign spouses were living in Kaohsiung City. Among the 11 municipal districts, Siaogang, with a population of 151,932, counted 804 registered foreign spouses from Southeast Asia, 60 percent of whom were from Vietnam.
■ ARTS
Troupe laments exposure
The fire that burned down the rehearsal studio of the Cloud Gate dance troupe put the troupe on the front page of local newspapers for the first time in its 35-year history, the founder said on Sunday, lamenting that it took a disaster to raise the troupe's profile. The Cloud Gate Dance Theatre has staged more than 1,500 shows locally and globally, each attracting an average of 60,000 people. The troupe is generally regarded as having made a major contribution to raising Taiwan's global image. However, the theater's founder, Lin Hwai-min (林懷民), complained that Cloud Gate's performances had never been covered by local newspapers as a front-page story until the fire early last Monday, which he said reflected a general lack of understanding of the performing arts in Taiwan.
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