■ EDUCATION
No resolution for Chuang
National Chengchi University (NCCU) will soon convene an extraordinary meeting to discuss whether to renew former Ministry of Education (MOE) secretary-general Chuang Kuo-rong’s (莊國榮) teaching contract after the ministry returned the school’s resolution on Tuesday night. The university submitted the resolution not to renew Chuang’s contract for final verification by the ministry on June 27, citing Article 14 of the Teacher’s Act (教師法), which allows schools to reject a teacher for “misconduct.” A ministry official, Chen Kuo-hui (陳國輝), said the ministry returned the resolution because the article cited by the school in its decision was flawed as it would also bar Chuang from teaching in other universities. NCCU vice president Lin Bih-jaw (林碧炤) said yesterday that the school might have difficulty holding the meeting before the semester ends on July 31 as most teachers had left for their summer break. Chuang sparked a controversy during the presidential campaign in March, when he used a profanity to imply that the late father of then Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) candidate Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) had a salacious relationship with his goddaughter.
■SOCIETY
Many lay claim to money
A university student found NT$100,000 lying on the ground, prompting about 50 people to claim it belonged to them, the Chinese-language Liberty Times (the Taipei Times’ sister newspaper) reported yesterday. Hsieh Chia-yin (謝佳吟) found the bag of money on Monday in Taichung and waited for 10 minutes at the location, hoping the owner would turn up, the report said. When no one came, she took the money to a police station. After newspapers reported Hsieh had turned in the money, about 50 people phoned the police station, claiming they had lost the cash. But when police asked them from which bank they had withdrawn the new bills and asked them to show police their passbooks to prove they had withdrawn the amount, they all hung up, the newspaper said. Police said they would keep the money for six months. If its owner does not claim it, Hsieh can keep the money.
■TRANSPORTATION
Nearly 200 fines issued
Kaohsiung MRT police issued 199 fines for minor violations of the system’s regulations between April and last month, police statistics showed yesterday. Most of the 199 tickets issued to passengers were for drinking or eating on the train or platform or for lying down on MRT train seats, police said. The Kaohsiung MRT system’s Red Line was inaugurated on March 9, with passengers allowed to ride for free during its first month of service. Police recorded 401 violations during the free-ride period until April 7, but no fines were issued. After the free service ended, 17 fines were issued in April, 69 in May and 113 last month. The MRT has collected NT$298,500 in penalties since April.
■FISHING
Chinese fishermen nabbed
The Kinmen Coast Guard arrested 37 Chinese fishermen on suspicion of illegally fishing in the Jinlie waterway (金烈水道) between Dajinmen and Xiaojinmen islands, a coast guard official said on Tuesday. The Coast Guard dispatched three patrol boats on Tuesday morning to intercept the intruders after being tipped off about their activities. The fishermen, from Longhai City in China’s Fujian Province, were handed over to the Kinmen District Prosecutors’ Office for further questioning, said Chen Pao-chen (陳保成), deputy director of a Kinmen Coast Guard team.
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