■NATURE
Earthquake rattles north
An earthquake measuring 6.0 on the Richter scale rattled northern Taiwan yesterday, but there were no immediate reports of casualties or damage, officials said. The epicenter of the quake, which struck at 1:21pm, was about 160km east of Suao (蘇澳) on the northeast coast, at a depth of 28km, the Central Weather Bureau said in a statement.
■SOCIETY
Eslite to hold vinyl show
Eslite bookstore will hold its annual “Vinyl Underground” exhibition and sale from March 5 to March 14 to encourage people to discover the beauty of vintage music albums, organizers said. The Dunhua branch of the bookstore will showcase more than 10,000 vinyl albums, with prices ranging from NT$99 to NT$30,000. The exhibits will include Michael Jackson’s Black or White and Remember the Time, Madonna’s colored vinyl records and the baseball music album Baseball and Me, which was released in the first year of the local Chinese Professional Baseball League. The exhibition is supported by nine companies, including London Vintage International, Goodiscs and Joy Audio, and some individuals have offered to add their personal collections, the organizers said. Vinyl records were the primary medium used for commercial music reproduction for most of the 20th century, but they are no longer in the mainstream. However, many fans and collectors still love the vintage sound they produce. The Eslite bookstore said the event has attracted many local and foreign fans in the last two years.
■TOURISM
Young tourists growing
The number of young travelers visiting Taiwan grew by 8.19 percent to 1,060,196 last year, National Youth Commission figures showed yesterday. “The increased number of foreign travelers in the 15-to-30 age bracket shows the potential of Taiwan’s tourism market,” the commission said in a press release. The statistics showed that more than half of the visitors came to Taiwan for the purpose of sightseeing. The tallies also show that tourists from Hong Kong and Macau comprised the biggest group, with a 15.44 percent increase from last year to 241,923. Tourists from Japan, however, decreased by 0.72 percent to 189,766, while the number from South Korea dropped by 25.85 percent to 36,715. Comparing tourist numbers from the West with those from Asia, the statistics show that the majority — more than 900,000 — were from Asia, with females accounting for 543,000. Visitors from Europe, the Americas and Africa, however, were mostly male.
■EDUCATION
Taipei to hire coaches
The Taipei City Government will recruit more full-time coaches this year to help upgrade the sports skills of students at the city’s elementary and secondary schools, a municipal official in charge of athletic affairs said on Sunday. The city Department of Education recruited 44 professional sports coaches last year to work full time on primary and middle school campuses. “As the program has proved effective in helping upgrade our students’ sports skills, we have decided to continue this program in 2010 by recruiting 30-plus additional full-time coaches,” the official said. Only those who have obtained professional sport coach licenses issued by the Sports Affairs Council are eligible to register for two phases of examinations scheduled to take place between May and June, the official said.
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