■POLITICS
Ma denies Web site hacked
The Presidential Office yesterday denied its Web site had been hacked and replaced with a video clip mocking President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) and several other officials. The video clip, which could be seen on the Presidential Office Web page, showed Ma, Vice President Vincent Siew (蕭萬長), Premier Liu Chao-shiuan (劉兆玄), Executive Yuan Secretary-General Hsueh Hsiang-chuan (薛香川) and former minister of health Yeh Ching-chuan (葉金川) dancing to Sorry Sorry, a Korean pop song. The video clip mocked Ma and his Cabinet officials for their poor performance in handling the aftermath of Typhoon Morakot. The video can also be seen on YouTube. Presidential Office Spokesman Wang Yu-chi (王郁琦) said yesterday that the Presidential Office’s Web site was not hacked, and that no information was stolen. “It is only a prank. The Web site has not been hacked,” he said. Wang said the video clip was uploaded to the Web site by people using a home computer instruction code to change the Web page path.
■TYPHOON
COA denies responsibility
Officials from the Council of Agriculture’s (COA) Forestry Bureau said that most of the driftwood that has accumulated on the coast near Tainan County’s Jiangjyun (將軍) fishing port did not originate from state-owned forests overseen by the COA. An official from the Forestry Bureau division in Chiayi County said after a fact-finding tour of the port area that a majority of the driftwood, extending over 1.3 hectares, did not come from state-owned forests. The bureau officials said the central government would decide who should clear the driftwood. Fishermen complained that they have incurred huge losses because of the driftwood.
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