■ POLITICS
Flight plans approved
The government has given approval for aviation carriers to offer 101 flights in the first week of daily passenger services to and from China, the Civil Aeronautics Administration said yesterday. Five domestic carriers and nine Chinese airlines will offer the flights from tomorrow to next Sunday, the administration said on its Web site. Services will increase from four days a week to daily after last month’s agreements between the Straits Exchange Foundation and the Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Strait to boost the number of direct flights and establish direct shipping and postal links. Under the deal, airplanes will no longer need to travel through Hong Kong airspace.
■ EDUCATION
US military students visit
A delegation of US military school students from Delaware is visiting the Chung Cheng Armed Forces Preparatory School on educational exchanges, the school said yesterday. The seven foreign guests, led by Commandant Charles Baldwin, arrived on Dec. 4 and will depart on Wednesday. The visit is the result of a request Baldwin made to the Ministry of National Defense last year for the two schools to engage in education exchanges. In addition to learning about the school’s training system, the Delaware delegation will take classes in Chinese and calligraphy and lessons in playing the ocarina, a type of flute. The Delaware Military Academy cultivates personnel for the US naval forces and was founded in 2003. The Chung Cheng Armed Forces Preparatory School prepares students for professions in the military forces and has about 700 students. The two schools will sign an agreement on Tuesday to pave the way for an exchange visit to Delaware in April.
■ POLICE
Police throw dinnerware
The Taitung County Police Bureau has borrowed an idea from abroad to help overworked police officers relieve stress by encouraging them to smash dinnerware at a training camp. Some of the officers who took part in the stress-relief program said on Friday that they felt great when they heard the ceramic plates breaking against a wall. “I felt like the pressure on me was gone,” one of the officers said of the experience. The police bureau collected 400 unwanted plates from restaurants around the county for the program. Each police officer was allowed to smash three plates. Pent-up officers could write down their complaints or the names of the bosses they hated most on the plates before hurling the dinnerware as hard as they could against a stone wall.
■ DIPLOMACY
Abe may visit next year
Former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe will most likely visit Taiwan early next year, the Central News Agency quoted a foreign ministry official as saying. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office in Tokyo first extended the invitation to Abe in September last year, when he stepped down from office. The likelihood of the trip, the official said, would hinge largely upon Japan’s political climate at the time of his visit. If all goes well, Abe could come to Taiwan sometime during the first half of next year, making him the fourth former Japanese prime minister to visit Taiwan, he said.
STAFF WRITER, WITH AGENCIES
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