■CRIME
Fake DVD racket busted
Copyright police in Chiayi said yesterday they had raided a factory in Taoyuan County producing illegal copies of DVDs and seized approximately 100,000 pirated discs with an estimated value of NT$10 billion (US$310.95 million) in terms of losses to the legal copyright holders. Police said that about six months ago they discovered a Web site selling the pirated products. The goods offered included a wide variety of software systems, usually bundled on a single disc under the name “instant noodles,” as well as pirated movies including pornography. An investigation identified the head of the operation as a man surnamed Chen, who ran the Web site on a server in China, police said. Chen took orders in China through the Internet and referred them to two accomplices in Taiwan, who created the copies and sent them to customers at prices ranging from NT$100 to NT$300 per disc through regular delivery services, the police said.
■CULTURE
Chiayi holds celebration
Chiayi invites the public to attend the city’s Double Ten national day fireworks show, Legislative Speaker Wang Jin-pyng (王金平), chairman of the National Day Celebration Committee, said yesterday. It will be the first time the celebration is held in Chiayi City, which Wang called the “sacred land of Taiwan’s democracy.” Wang said the idea was proposed by Vice President Vincent Siew (蕭萬長), who is a Chiayi native. The 50-minute fireworks display is scheduled to begin at 7pm. A concert featuring pop singers including Wu Bai (伍佰) and Alan Luo (羅志祥) will follow. Organizers hope the celebration will attract between 200,000 and 250,000 visitors during the three-day holiday. The city will also hold a photography competition for the best photo of the pyrotechnics. The winner will take home NT$15,000 in cash, a trophy and other gifts.
■POLITICS
Ma visits Kaohsiung Harbor
President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) said on Saturday during a tour of Kaohsiung Harbor that the port’s competitiveness would improve once it opened to direct sea shipments across the Taiwan Strait. Once direct shipping links are established, international merchant ships will not need to sail via other ports, which will help enterprises cut transport costs, he said. Lu Feng-hai (盧峰海), chairman of Yang Ming Marine Transport Corp, suggested that the government take steps to alleviate road traffic around the harbor by building another cross-harbor tunnel to Cijin (旗津), a cross-harbor bridge and new access roads to the harbor. This would improve traffic flow to Cijin and enhance the efficiency of cargo deliveries, Lu said. Ma asked the harbor administration to consider Lu’s proposal.
■CHARITY
Quake kids visit Nantou
Twenty-nine young survivors of the deadly earthquake in Sichuan Province are on vacation in Taiwan to help them recover from the trauma of the May 12 catastrophe that left at least 70,000 people dead. The children, ranging in age from seven years to teenagers, are guests of the Chinatrust Charity Foundation. After visiting Taipei and the Taipei Zoo, the group arrived in Nantou County on Saturday to visit the site of the Sept. 21, 1999 quake that killed 2,321 and injured 8,000. The children also visited an amusement park in Nantou County and attended a “step over the fire” Aboriginal ceremony intended to ward off bad luck.
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
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
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