■ DIPLOMACY
GIO minister to visit US
Government Information Office (GIO) Minister Johnny Chiang (江啟臣) will depart for the US on Saturday for a 10-day visit. The GIO said the main purpose of Chiang’s trip would be to visit Washington and New York, where he will call on various think tanks and mainstream media to publicize the government’s policies and inspect the GIO’s offices there. A GIO official said that the cross-strait Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement (ECFA), which was signed on Tuesday last week, could be of concern to the US. Chiang may also communicate with the US side on the trilateral Taiwan-China-US relationship, the official said.
■SPORT
Thousands swim in sea race
More than 3,000 people, including some in their 80s, took part in a 4km swim race in the sea off Keelung yesterday. The annual event took place at Waimushan Beach (外木山沙灘). After a warm-up on the beach, the participants, led by a swimmer with only one leg, began the race that finished at Dawulun Beach (大武崙沙灘), also in the city. They formed a long chain of people along the route, escorted by lifeguards in boats. The first swimmer completed the route in about one hour, and most of the participants finished, including an 83-year-old woman who was the eldest participant. A few participants, however, dropped out after being stung by jellyfish.
■MUSIC
Chinese composer dies
Veteran musician Huang You-di (黃友棣), long acclaimed the greatest composer and conductor in contemporary Chinese history, died in a hospital in Kaohsiung City yesterday at the age of 100. He had been hospitalized for nearly a year after breaking his hip in a fall at home. Among his 2,000-odd compositions, Azaleas (杜鵑花) — a piece he wrote during China’s Anti-Japanese War to give cheer to soldiers and their families — is probably the most sung song in the Chinese world. According to friends, Huang asked to be cremated and his ashes scattered on a mountain, in his will written nine years ago. He signed legal papers in which he gave up the intellectual property rights to his works, in the hope that more people would have access to his songs in generations to come.
■CRIME
Phone vendors selling porn
Taipei prosecutors yesterday said they were investigating allegations that some businesses had sold cellphones with pornographic movies installed on their memory chips. Prosecutors said complaints had been received about an increasing number of small shops in Wanhua District (萬華) selling cheap cellphones that contain adult movies. Prosecutors said police on Saturday arrested a man surnamed Lin (林) who was suspected of selling such cellphones. Lin told prosecutors that the cellphones, which carry an initial price tag of about NT$1,500, would sell for between NT$3,000 and NT$4,000 after uploading Japanese adult movies. The business owners would allegedly play adult movies on the cellphones when introducing their products to clients, prosecutors said. Police officers said the sale of such cellphones had become “rampant” in the past month, adding that they were also being sold in night markets in the area. Japanese adult video producers recently accused Taiwanese shops of selling pirated Japanese adult movies, adding that local cable TV stations also broadcast pirated content. However, prosecutors said that adult videos were not covered by the Copyright Act (著作權法).
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