■TRANSPORTATION
Flights to resume: official
The nation’s second-largest international air carrier, EVA Airways, is scheduled to resume Taipei-Paris passenger flights from January in view of lower oil prices, a corporate source said yesterday. From Jan. 21, EVA will offer three weekly passenger flights, on Monday, Friday and Sunday, departing from Taipei for Paris, while the returning flights will depart from Paris for Taipei every Monday, Thursday and Saturday, the EVA official said. EVA suspended its passenger flight operations on the Taipei-Paris route last November after deficits caused by soaring oil prices. In addition to higher fuel prices, expensive costs for flying over Russian airspace also led the carrier to call a halt to the Taipei-Paris route, the official said. EVA will be using new Boeing 777-300ERs on the route, which will save up to 20 percent of the fuel consumed by the Boeing 747-400s that were used on the route prior to last November, the official said.
■ CRIME
Police take pity on thief
Police served a lonely man cake and sang happy birthday after arresting him for stealing a goose to celebrate on his own, an officer in charge said yesterday. Police in Pingtung’s Neipu Township (內埔) treated the 49-year-old suspect, surnamed Lee, on Thursday after they caught him making off with the bird from a betel nut plantation, said Hsiao Chi-liang (蕭吉良), second in command at the local police station. “It was his birthday and he stole it to celebrate, so we bought him a cake,” Hsiao said. “He was very surprised.” Officers took pity on Lee because he was poor, single and living in a shabby home, Hsiao said. Nevertheless, police have sent Lee’s case to the prosecutor’s office.
■ ENVIRONMENT
Protest targets expressway
Environmentalists yesterday protested in front of the Environmental Protection Administration (EPA), urging the government to take measures to halt the construction of the proposed Tanbei Expressway (淡北快速道路) in Taipei County. The expressway has generated considerable controversy for its potential damage to mangrove habitats near Tamsui Township (淡水) since it was proposed by the county government. Yesterday environmentalists said that not only had the county intentionally designed the blueprint of the expressway to take advantage of a loophole in environmental impact assessment regulations, it had also used a survey polling only 1,121 people about the road to say that the project had a 60 percent support rate. The groups said they had more than 13,000 signatures that opposed the expressway.
■ CRIME
Cops nab coin counterfeiter
A makeshift factory that specialized in counterfeiting NT$50 coins over the past 10 years has been discovered in Kaohsiung County, and its owner arrested, police announced on Thursday. The 61-year-old man, identified only by his family name Lin, told police he had been producing the fake NT$50 coins for a decade, injecting more that 500,000 fake coins, with a total face value of over NT$20 million, into the local market. Acting on a tip-off, a law enforcement team raided the factory in Luchu Township (路竹) on Wednesday and seized its owner and a large number of finished and unfinished fake coins and equipment. A Criminal Investigation Bureau spokesman said Lin sold the fake coins to accomplices who then laundered the money through retail market channels, night markets, convenience stores and automatic vending machines.
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