■ POLITICS
Legislators to vet nominees
The legislature is set to begin the confirmation process of President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) nominees for Examination Yuan president, Control Yuan vice president and other members next Wednesday. The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), however, has threatened to boycott the process. The legislature’s Procedural Committee agreed yesterday to place the confirmation bill on the agenda of the plenary session on Friday. The committee, dominated by Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers, also voted in favor of a KMT motion proposing legislators examine the qualifications of nominees on Oct. 22 and Oct. 23 and conduct the confirmation vote on Oct. 24.
■ SOCIETY
Sex-change recognized
Under pressure from gender-equality groups, the government plans to recognize the sex-change of a woman who underwent surgery to become a man. The Department of Health announced the decision yesterday. Activists opposed a Ministry of the Interior decision not to register a female-to-male sex change on a person’s national ID card unless the woman undergoes surgery to reconstruct male genitalia. The decision was based on a 2005 law that said a woman must be evaluated by two psychiatrists, have her breasts and ovaries removed and have her urinary tract and genitalia reconstructed for the government to recognize the change. Gender-equality groups said some women undergo sex-change surgery without genital reconstruction, which is very expensive.
■ EDUCATION
Official pans skirt rule
Schools should not penalize students for not conforming to discriminatory school uniform regulations, an education official said yesterday. Chen Chiao-mei (陳皎眉), a member of the Committee for Gender Equality Education under the Ministry of Education, said schools must respect students’ right to choose what they wear. Chen was referring to a controversy that arose when students at Taipei First Girls’ High School sent a letter to a media outlet complaining about rules prohibiting them from entering or exiting the school wearing shorts. The school’s uniform is a green shirt and black skirt. Although the Teacher’s Act (教師法) authorizes schools to implement rules to guide students, Chen said students had the right to initiate rules regarding the school uniform through a democratic process. In response to the students’ letter, the ministry said the schools’ rigid rules were in violation of the Gender Equality Education Law.
■ POLITICS
TSU still plans to expel Lai
The Taiwan Solidarity Union (TSU) plans to expel Mainland Affairs Council Chairwoman Lai Shin-yuan (賴幸媛) despite her withdrawal from the party. TSU Chairman Huang Kun-huei (黃昆輝) said yesterday the party would carry out its Central Executive Committee decision to strip Lai of her membership. Lai said on Monday night she was withdrawing from the TSU shortly after the Central Executive Committee said it would expel her if she did not quit her job within the next three days. The committee said the decision was made after five months of pro-China policies by the government. Lai said she had accepted the job with the blessing of former president Lee Teng-hui (李登輝), the party’s spiritual leader, and that it has been her goal to open trade policies and minimize their impact on Taiwanese.
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