■POLITICS
Chang tapped for defense
Mainland Affairs Council Vice Chairman Chang Lang-jen (張良任) has been tapped to be the vice minister of national defense, the council said yesterday. Vice Chairman Liu Teh-hsun (劉德勳) said yesterday was Chang’s last day at the council and he would start his new job today. However, Liu said the public should wait for the Ministry of National Defense to make the announcement official. There has been widespread speculation that Liu would also be moving on, but he said that he knew nothing about such plans and was trying to find out himself. Chang and President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) studied at Harvard together and Chang served at the council when it was established in 1991. He became Straits Exchange Foundation deputy secretary-general in 1996 before moving to Hong Kong in 2001 to head the Chung Hwa Travel Service, the nation’s representative office in the territory. Chang was appointed one of the council’s three vice chairmen when Ma took office in May.
■CULTURE
Indigenous market to open
Taipei City’s Indigenous People’s Commission said the Naruwan Indigenous People’s Market, the first market to specialize in Taiwanese indigenous products, would open tomorrow. The mall, located at the intersection of Guangzhou Street and Huanhe South Road, will open at 11am on Saturday. It will offer handicrafts, agricultural products and food and beverages, including tea from Thao farms on Alishan and dishes of the Atayal tribe such as Bamboo tube rice with betel nut flower. Indigenous artists and singers will also stage performances at the mall on Saturday and Sunday nights. The mall will be open Monday through Friday from 4pm to 10pm, and Saturday and Sunday from 11am to 10pm.
■DIPLOMACY
Wang headed back to Japan
Legislative Speaker Wang Jin-pyng (王金平), who only returned from a trip to Japan two weeks ago, said yesterday that he would leave for Japan again to meet former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe. “I’m going to deliver a speech at a conference on future relations between the US, Taiwan and Japan. Former prime minister Shinzo Abe will have lunch with me,” Wang told reporters at the legislature. But he said he didn’t know if he would meet again with Liberal Democratic Party Secretary-General Taro Aso, a possible successor to Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda. Wang’s last trip was to explain President Ma ‘s stance on Taipei-Tokyo ties.
■SOCIETY
Motorcyclists at higher risk
Nearly 60 percent of road fatalities in 2006 and last year were motorcyclists, statistics released on Wednesday by the Ministry of Transportation and Communications’ Road Safety Supervisory Committee show. In 2006, 3,140 people died in traffic accidents on public roads, with 58.92 percent (1,850) of them motorcyclists. Traffic accidents took 7,573 lives last year, including 1,536 motorcyclists who accounted for 59.7 percent of fatalities. In 2005 there were 2,894 traffic fatalities, with 1,566 of the victims being motorbike riders. The committee said it would review the durability and use of motorcycle helmets on the market because 62.2 percent of the motorcyclists who died in accidents in the last three years were wearing helmets. Of the 432,557 accidents involving motorcycles between 2005 and last year, the fatality rate for people wearing helmets was 0.65 percent, compared with a fatality rate of 5.13 percent for those not wearing helmets, the committee 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