■ CULTURE
Taipei Guest House open
The Baroque-style Taipei Guest House, a century-old national historic landmark, will be open to the public from 8am to 4pm today to coincide with the upcoming Lantern Festival, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) announced yesterday. Foreign Minister Francisco Ou (歐鴻鍊) will also send out New Year’s greetings on behalf of the ministry by distributing small lanterns to visitors there at 2:30pm, the MOFA statement said. Visitors are required to present identification documents and submit to security checks to enter, and are advised to show up before 3:30pm.
■ CRIME
Incest scam leads to jail
The Pingtung District Court on Friday sentenced three people to prison terms ranging from eight to 18 years for posing as religious masters and convincing a man to have sex with his own three daughters. The court said the two men, Chang Yao-ming (張耀明) and Chen Ming-tsun (陳明村), and one woman, Hsu Su-chun (?K), set up a sect several years ago in Pingtung County, claiming they had the power to cure illnesses. In 2005, a local man sought help for his sick wife at the temple run by the trio. The fake religious masters told the 48-year-old man that his wife was dying and the only way to save her was for him to have sex with his three teenage daughters. The daughters were told that they must have sex with Chang, too. The defendants then allegedly intimidated the three daughters into submitting to the sex act to save their mother’s life. From 2005 to last year, the three daughters had sex with their father and Chang many times, with Chen and Hsu watching and fondling the girls, the court said.
■ CRIME
Tongue-tied man sentenced
A man whose tongue was bitten off by the women he tried to rape was sentenced by the Chiayi District Court on Friday to six years in prison for attempted rape, the Apple Daily reported yesterday. On Oct. 17 last year, Lee Tang-hsiang (李堂祥), 35, was riding his motorbike at 4am in Chiayi when he saw the woman on a motorbike. Lee, whose criminal record includes previous sex crimes and drug use, rode alongside the victim, pulled on her blouse and skirt and eventually caused her to fall off her motorbike. Lee jumped on top of the woman, held her down and forced his tongue into her mouth. She bit off his tongue, spat it out and ran to the nearest police station. Lee jumped on his motorbike and raced home. Police found about 2.5cm of Lee’s severed tongue and alerted hospitals in Chiayi. A few hours later, one hospital reported a man seeking treatment for a severed tongue. Police arrested Lee six hours after the incident, but it was too late to reattach the severed appendage. His wound was treated, but he cannot speak clearly and has lost most of the ability to taste, the paper said.
■ HEALTH
DOH quells salmonella fears
The Department of Health (DOH) assured the public that the US-produced nutritional bars contaminated with the Salmonella typhimurium bacteria and recalled by Natural Organics are not being sold in Taiwan. Since the US salmonella outbreak last month, more than 500 people have been sickened and at least eight have died. The US Food and Drug Administration has since ordered recalls of a long list of products, including nutritional bars produced by Natural Organics. The DOH confirmed on Friday that the tainted products are not being sold in Taiwan.
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