■DIPLOMACY
Texas governor pays visit
Texas Governor Rick Perry arrived in Taipei yesterday for a three-day visit at the invitation of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Perry is expected to promote business cooperation between Texas and Taiwan, seek to establish more air links between the two sides and encourage local businessmen to invest in his state, the ministry said. It is Perry’s first trip to Taiwan since becoming Texas governor on Dec. 21, 2000. The ministry said it invited him to visit on his way back to the US from China, and that he is scheduled to pay a courtesy call on President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九). Taiwan maintains close economic ties with Texas, importing US$2.51 billion in goods from the US state last year, making the country Texas’s 12th largest export market that year.
■CROSS-STRAIT TIES
Air ticket prices to drop
The price of tickets on Chinese carriers plying the Taiwan Strait will be reduced by 10 percent to 15 percent as part of Beijing’s efforts to promote exchanges with Taiwan, Chinese aviation authorities announced yesterday. Li Jiaxiang (李家祥), director of China’s Civil Aviation Administration (CAA), made the announcement at a meeting of this year’s seven-day “cross-strait forum.” However, he did not say when the price cut would take effect. In the future, an additional 40 flights per week will operate on the route, in accordance with an agreement between Taiwan and China, he said. Currently, Taiwanese and Chinese air carriers operate a total of 380 cross-strait flights per week. However, even with an increase to 420 flights per week, Li said, the carriers would not be able to meet demand and more flights would have to be added in the future.
■SOCIETY
Mortality rate edges down
Last year, a total of 143,513 deaths were recorded out of a population of 23.0796 million, which was a 0.06 percent drop from 2008, according to statistics recently released by the Ministry of the Interior. The crude mortality rate also edged down 0.003 percent from 2008 to stand at 622 deaths per 100,000 people last year, the tallies showed. The crude mortality rate is defined as the ratio of deaths to residents in a country or area in a specified period. The tallies also revealed that the median age at death last year was about 68.1 years for men and about 73 years for women, with a national average of about 70. The median age at death in Taiwan has risen by 4.39 years over the last 10 years.
■AGRICULTURE
Tainted US cherries blocked
Nearly 1.5 tonnes of US cherries were blocked from entering the nation after they failed a pesticide test, the Department of Health (DOH) said on Saturday. It was the third batch of US cherries to fail the tests in two weeks. The shipment of 1,469kg of US cherries was found to contain 0.92 parts per million (ppm) of fenpropathrin, a pesticide that is often used on cherries and pears, which exceeds the allowable level of 0.5ppm. The importer can request a second test of the shipment in two weeks time, the Food and Drug Administration said. As this was the third such case in two weeks, the Food and Drug Administration said it had decided to increase the rate of its random checks on US cherries from 5 percent to 20 percent. The DOH said it had also written to US authorities to ask them to address the situation. Nearly 5.6 tonnes of cherries imported from the US earlier this month were found to contain excessive levels of the pesticide malathion, which is not allowed in trace amounts on fruit in Taiwan.
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