■ENVIRONMENT
Mild quake sways south
A magnitude 4.6 earthquake struck southern Taiwan at about 2am yesterday, the Central Weather Bureau’s Seismology Center reported. The quake was felt in most of southern Taiwan, but did not cause any damage or casualties, authorities said. It was centered 12.7km southwest of the Jiasian (甲仙) seismology observation station in Kaohsiung County at a depth of 19.2km, said Kuo Kai-wen (郭鎧紋), head of the center.
■CRIME
Hualien judge impeached
The Control Yuan yesterday impeached a Taiwan High Court Hualien Branch judge for visiting the home of a suspect in a corruption case in which he served as the judge. The Control Yuan referred Judge Lin Teh-sheng (林德盛) to the Commission on the Disciplinary Sanctions of Public Functionaries for disciplinary measures. Lin was accused of visiting the home of former Taitung County commissioner Wu Chun-li (吳俊立), who was charged with corruption while serving as a Taitung County councilor in 1999. Lin was suspected of accepting benefits from Wu in exchange for influencing the outcome of the judicial review in Wu’s favor.
■CRIME
Taiwan seeks extradition
The government is seeking the extradition from China of an airline passenger who claimed to have a bomb in his luggage during a flight bound for Shanghai, a Ministry of Justice official said yesterday. “We’ve already presented our request to [China] to bring back the man,” the official said. The request was based on an agreement forged by Taipei and Beijing on cooperation in the fight against crime, the official said, but declined to reveal the background of the man and the charges he may face. Local media said the passenger, identified as George Lin, holds both a US passport and a Taiwanese ID. He claimed there were explosives in his luggage on China Airlines Flight CI501 from Taipei on Saturday, leading pilots to divert the plane to Hangzhou, the Central News Agency (CNA) said. The plane with 293 passengers on board landed safely in Hangzhou and no one was injured in the incident. Lin was taken away by Chinese police for questioning, CNA said.
■CULTURE
Local belly dancer wins
Belly dancer Sun Yu-ting (孫于婷) has won first place in the solo category of the World Belly Dance Competition in Seoul, sharing the title with a South Korean dancer. Sun was presented with a championship trophy on Sunday, a day after the competition ended, amid some controversy over her final position in the contest. Sun tied with the South Korean competitor for the highest score, but was not named the top winner. After a protest by Tzeng Niou-lang (曾紐朗), leader of the Taiwanese team and head of the Taiwanese Dance and Sport Federation, the organizers of the competition agreed to present a winner’s trophy to Sun. However, they did not allow her to share the cash prize of US$3,000, saying the South Korean competitor had outshone Sun in the areas of dance skills and costume. The biennial competition in South Korea is one of the four major belly dance contests in the world, second only to an annual contest that is usually held in Cairo in June, Tzeng said. Twenty professional and amateur Taiwanese dancers, aged nine to 63, took part in this year’s competition. Several other members won various prizes.
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