■ TRANSPORTATION
Muzha line off this weekend
The MRT Muzha Line will temporarily suspend service on Saturday and Sunday to allow system tests for the soon-to-open MRT Neihu Line, the Taipei Rapid Transit Corporation (TRTC) said. Free shuttle services will be available along the Muzha Line between 6am and midnight during the two days, the company said. The two transit bus routes will be the Xinhai Line and the Jungong Line, the TRTC said. Services will be every two minutes during peak hours and every five minutes during off-peak hours. The company suspended the MRT Muzha Line’s weekend service for seven weeks in November for system integration.
■ AVIATION
Cross-strait talks bear fruit
Civil Aeronautics Administration director general Lee Lung-wen (李龍文) said yesterday that Taiwan and China had reached a consensus during a preparatory meeting on Saturday on some key aviation issues that will come into play when regular direct flight services become available. Both agreed that passenger flights should be allowed to carry cargo and that pilots and flight attendants at both Taiwanese and Chinese airlines should be able to pass through airline staff-only counters at customs as per the rules governing international airlines, Lee said. Lee, however, said the two sides did not reach an agreement on the possibility of increasing weekly charter flights before moving on to the regular direct flights. “They [China] said this would increase the burden on air traffic control, which could compromise cross-strait aviation safety,” Lee said.
■ CRIME
Taitung prosecutor arrested
Prosecutors at the Taitung District Court’s Public Prosecutors’ Office arrested one of their own early yesterday on bribery charges. Prosecutor Lin Sheng-lin (林聖霖) was taken into custody for questioning after an internal investigation found that he may have accepted bribes in at least two cases. Armed with a search warrant from the court, members of the Taitung Public Prosecutors’ Office anti-corruption division and agents from the Investigation Bureau raided Lin’s residence and arrested him. Lin had been reassigned from the Shilin Public Prosecutors’ Office in Taipei to the Taitung Public Prosecutors’ Office in August because he had left too many criminal cases unresolved, the Taitung prosecutors’ office said. Ethics officers at the Taitung prosecutors’ office placed Lin under surveillance after noticing that he continued to allow cases to accumulate and that he had dismissed many cases that, in their opinion, he should have prosecuted. Further investigation led to the admission by suspects in two criminal cases that Lin had offered not to indict them if they paid him bribes.
■ HEALTH
Enterovirus to peak
The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said yesterday that the number of enterovirus infections would start increase within the next two weeks, urging parents to pay close attention to their young children. “When the symptoms begin to appear, please take your children to the emergency room at major hospitals rather than to local clinics,” CDC spokesman Shih Wen-yi (施文儀) said. Statistics from the CDC showed that 13 severe enterovirus infections have been recorded in Taiwan so far this year. A two-year-old boy in Yunlin County died after being infected with enterovirus earlier this month. CDC specialists later determined that the boy was a victim of enterovirus type 71(EV71). Enterovirus is the most common cause of aseptic meningitis and can be deadly, especially in young children.
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