■ POLITICS
Professor appointed to KMT
Lin Te-jui (林德瑞), a professor of economic law at National Chung Cheng University, will take over as a Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) vice deputy secretary-general to assist the party’s election campaign in southern Taiwan. Lin, who represented the party in the Chiayi legislator by-election last year, was recommended by KMT Secretary-General King Pu-tsung (金溥聰) to assist with handling party assets and November’s five special municipality elections. King has also asked Lin to establish mechanism to review the finance of local branches. King said Lin had a great reputation in Chiayi as a person with integrity despite his loss in the by-election. The party expects Lin to use his understanding of the political situation in the south to help the party gain more support during November’s election in Tainan and Kaohsiung, he said. The KMT currently has two deputy secretary-generals, Chang Jung-kung (張榮恭) and Juan Kang-meng (阮剛猛).
■ NATURE
Three quakes rattle east
Hualien County residents were startled by three earthquakes yesterday morning. Statistics from the Central Weather Bureau (CWB) showed that a magnitude 4.8 foreshock occurred at 1:17am, with the epicenter located 1km southeast of the CWB’s observatory in Hsiulin (秀林), Hualien County. The foreshock occurred at a depth of 19.5km. The main earthquake, of magnitude 5.6, occurred at 8:31am. The epicenter was also located in Hsiulin. The largest intensity was felt in Hualien, Yilan and Nantou counties, which were magnitude 4. A magnitude 4.1 aftershock occurred in Hsiulin again at 8:33am, at a depth of 17.3km. The largest intensity — magnitude 2 — was recorded in Hualien and Nantou. Kuo Kai-wen (郭鎧紋), director of the bureau’s seismology center, said the earthquakes were a normal release of energy and would not generate many aftershocks.
■ MILITARY
Navy searches for torpedo
The Taiwanese Navy is offering a cash reward to any fisherman who finds a torpedo its sailors lost during a drill last week, the military said yesterday. The offer follows four days of intense but futile searching in the area around the Tsoying base in Kaohsiung, the navy said in a statement. Any fisherman who snares the German-built SUT torpedo will scoop up NT$30,000, it said. This was the second time submariners aboard the Dutch-made Hai Lung, or Sea Dragon, had lost a torpedo. In 2003 the missing weapon washed ashore.
■ DIPLOMACY
Ma praises Burkina Faso
President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) praised Burkina Faso yesterday for its support for the “Lamp for Africa” lighting project that Taiwan is promoting there to benefit schoolchildren. Ma told visiting Burkina Faso Foreign Minister Bedouma Alain Yoda that he was moved by Burkina Faso’s participation in the program, which will distribute 1,000 LED lighting kits to schoolchildren. “The LED lighting kits will allow at least 1,000 schoolchildren to read at their home at night, instead of reading outdoors under street lights,” Ma said. Students there will be given an LED lighting kit equipped with a rechargeable battery that lasts four-and-a-half hours. The lighting kit was developed by the Central Taiwan Vocational Training Center. Ma told Yoda that he was also deeply moved by a Burkinabe student because of his fluency in Mandarin.
FLU SEASON: Twenty-six severe cases were reported from Tuesday last week to Monday, including a seven-year-old girl diagnosed with influenza-associated encephalopathy Nearly 140,000 people sought medical assistance for diarrhea last week, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said on Tuesday. From April 7 to Saturday last week, 139,848 people sought medical help for diarrhea-related illness, a 15.7 percent increase from last week’s 120,868 reports, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said. The number of people who reported diarrhea-related illness last week was the fourth highest in the same time period over the past decade, Lee said. Over the past four weeks, 203 mass illness cases had been reported, nearly four times higher than the 54 cases documented in the same period
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:
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
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