■SPORTS
Parade starts countdown
The Kaohsiung City Government will hold a grand parade today to mark the beginning of the one-year countdown to the 2009 World Games. Bureau of Cultural Affairs Director-General Wang Zhi-cheng (王志誠) said the sports carnival parade will set off at 5pm from Singuang Road and move along Jhongshan Road to the Central Park, where the event will continue through 7pm. Sixty-nine performance troupes and some 4,000 people are expected to join city officials at the event, he said. The World Games’ Kaohsiung Organizing Committee said people who want to participate in or watch the parade should take public transportation because traffic controls will be imposed at 4pm in the parade route area.
■CRIME
Vietnam sentences pair
A Vietnamese court has sentenced to death two Taiwanese men for trafficking more than 2.5kg of heroin, a court clerk at the An Giang Province people’s court said yesterday. Lee Chin-wen, 35, and Wei Chun-lung, 23, were arrested in May, together with three Vietnamese women and another Taiwanese, the clerk said. The three accomplices received jail sentences of up to 20 years imprisonment, the clerk said after a two-day trial. State media earlier reported that the ring had used Vietnam as a transit point to transport heroin from Cambodia to another Asian country and Australia.
■EARTHQUAKES
Undersea quake jolts north
A 5.1-magnitude undersea earthquake jolted northern Taiwan yesterday, the Central Weather Bureau said, but there were no reports of damage or casualties. The tremor struck at 11:07am and was centered 55km east of Keelung at a depth of 24.1km, the bureau said.
■HEALTH
Cold noodles fail tests
The Consumers’ Foundation claimed yesterday that 85 percent of sampled cold noodles failed to pass safety tests, including those from well-known shops or convenience stores. Foundation officials said 20 samples were collected last month from convenience chain stores, hypermarkets and cold noodle vendors in the greater Taipei area. Only three out of 20 samples passed a series of tests on hydrogen peroxide, boric acid and borate content, as well as e-coli and aerobic bacteria counts, the officials said. Sixteen samples — mostly from cold noodle vendors — had too much coliform bacteria, while 16 samples had high aerobic bacteria colony-forming units. Foundation director Lee Cherh-yu (李哲瑜) said consumers should buy only noodles sold chilled and should watch for location, staff and preparation process to ensure food safety.
■TRANSPORTATION
Road repairs given priority
The government will make a greater effort to improve the quality of road surfaces throughout the nation, and hopes to achieve this goal within six months to a year, the Public Construction Commission said yesterday. The poor quality of roads is clearly evident, a commission official said. The government will ask road management agencies to repair the potholed surfaces to ensure better road quality, the official said. The government paid out more than NT$64 million (US$2.09 million) in compensation for 211 road accident cases between 2005 and last year — including 16 deaths and 125 injuries — that accounted for 38 percent of national compensation cases, the official said. A hot line for road quality complaints received 3,221 complaints last year, the official said.
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