■ CROSS-STRAIT TIES
Hu’s son visited Taiwan
Chinese President Hu Jintao’s (胡錦濤) son made a top-secret visit to Taiwan earlier this month, Next Magazine said yesterday. Hu Haifeng (胡海峰), accompanied by unidentified senior Chinese officials, arrived on July 18 and met agricultural experts, the Chinese-language magazine quoted unnamed sources as saying. The weekly said Hu Haifeng’s trip was kept under wraps after he was forced to call off a planned visit to Taiwan in May to attend an academic conference after Taiwanese media got wind of it. The younger Hu, a top official at Tsinghua University’s Yangtze Delta Region Institute in Zhejiang Province, also discussed agricultural technology transfer with Tsay Tung-tsuan (蔡東纂), a researcher and head of the plant pathology department at National Chung Hsing University in Taichung, the report said. As the son of China’s leader, Hu would be one of the highest-profile visitors yet from China since President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) assumed power in 2008.
■ HEALTH
Marine bacteria kills man
A marine bacteria killed a man in Taichung County, a hospital official said on Tuesday, adding that a species of vibrio bacteria present in coastal and brackish waters also left another man in a critical condition. Chen Chih-min (陳志銘), head of the department of infectious diseases at Tungs’ Taichung MetroHarbor Hospital, said the two men already suffered from cirrhosis, which increased the risk of death when infected with vibrio vulnificus, known locally as the “summer marine killer.” The dead man was 42 years old and had been rushed to the hospital at the end of last month after his legs swelled with hemorrhagic blistering, Chen said. Laboratory results later confirmed the culprit to be vibrio vulnificus, he said. The other patient, a 32-year-old surnamed Wu (吳), was suffering from shock and a swollen right leg when he was taken to the hospital, also toward the end of last month.
■ CROSS-STRAIT TIES
Zoo to bring in tigers
The Shoushan Zoo in Kaohsiung City plans to bring in a pair of white tigers from the Xiangjiang Safari Park in Guangzhou Province before the next Lunar New Year, according to the city’s Tourism Bureau Director-General Lin Kun-shan (林崑山). The city government received an approval document on July 19 from the Ministry of Economic Affairs to import the tigers, Lin said. The city has also asked the Council of Agriculture to provide a list of quarantine requirements for importing the animals, which will then be referred to the Chinese safari park, he said. Lin said the safari park promised to give the tigers to the zoo during a visit to China by Kaohsiung City Council Speaker Chuang Chi-wang (莊啟旺) in July 2008.
■ CRIME
Man indicted for fraud
A Zimbabwean man was indicted on fraud and blackmail charges on Tuesday for swindling about NT$2 million (US$62,000) from eight Taiwanese women who he promised to marry. Prosecutors sought a five-year jail term for Litlbla de Seth, 47, who is accused of duping eight women in 2008 and last year and has previously served a jail sentence for similar offenses. He also threatened to kill several women who wanted to end their relationships with him, a spokesman for the prosecution said. Seth promised to marry the women to gain their trust and borrowed money from them on the grounds that he needed to buy a house, a car or arrange the wedding, the spokesman 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
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
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