■ CRIME
Teens arrested for murder
Two teenagers were arrested yesterday for allegedly burning their 45-year-old father to death in revenge for what they described as severe physical abuse, police said yesterday. The victim, Tseng Hung-yuan (曾洪元), was on Sunday allegedly drugged by his 17-year-old son, who is accused of taking him to a field with the help of his 18-year-old sister and her boyfriend, aged 26, police said. A witness reported seeing the trio watching a fire burn in the field where the charred body of the victim was discovered several hours later, Pingtung County police said. The police suspect the trio of drugging the victim with sleeping pills, knocking him unconscious with a baseball bat and dragging him to a betel nut farm in Kaoshu Township (高樹鄉), where he was set alight. Police said the siblings have admitted to plotting Tseng’s death, but defended their actions by saying they were victims of domestic violence. The sister’s boyfriend was also arrested.
■ SPORTS
Taipei to bid for Games
Taipei City has beaten Kaohsiung City and Taipei County for Taiwan’s bid to host the 2019 Asian Games, the Chinese Taipei Olympic Committee (CTOC) said on Monday. The decision was made less than two weeks before the March 31 deadline for applications to host the 2019 and 2023 Games. Fourteen committee members, officiated by CTOC honorary chairman Chang Feng-hsu (張豐緒), voted on Monday to decide which city should represent Taiwan. Taipei City received 221 points, ahead of Kaohsiung City’s 207 and Taipei County’s 171. The Olympic Council of Asia (OCA) is scheduled to vote next year on who will be awarded the right to host the 2019 Games. So far, Vietnam, Singapore, the Philippines, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, Hong Kong and Dubai have all expressed their intention to bid for the Games. Based on the normal four-year rotation, the Games should have been held in 2018, but last year the OCA decided to move future Games to a year before the Summer Olympics.
■ MEDIA
Magazine to help homeless
A local version of Britain’s The Big Issue magazine, which aims to help homeless people earn a living, will be launched next month. Eighty homeless people will stand outside Taipei MRT stations, hoping to sell 100,000 copies of the inaugural issue, which will be priced at NT$100, the United Daily News reported. The seller will earn NT$50 per copy sold. The new magazine is targeting young readers and will cover issues such as fashion and technology, the paper said. Publisher Li Chu-chung (李取中) was quoted as saying he hopes the magazine will provide employment and dignity for the homeless. The magazine was founded in Britain in 1991 to offer homeless people the opportunity to earn an income. Versions of the magazine are now published in Australia, Japan, South Africa, Kenya, Ethiopia, Malawi and Namibia.
■ MEDIA
Chinese reporters accredited
The Government Information Office (GIO) said yesterday that the government had granted media access to two more Chinese TV stations, bringing the number of Chinese reporters stationed in Taiwan to 26, with nine different Chinese media outlets as of next month. The GIO said the number is the highest since Taiwan began allowing Chinese media outlets into the country in 2002. The applications filed by Xiamen Star and Hunan TV to send reporters here to cover news were approved, the GIO 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