■Athletics
Ten golds at Karatedo meet
Athletes grabbed 10 gold medals at this year’s Gojukai Asia-Pacific Karatedo Championships in Singapore on Saturday. National Taiwan Sport University emerged as the biggest winner, taking six gold medals. Twenty-five players from seven cities and counties competed in the tournament and garnered a total of 10 gold medals, seven silvers and 11 bronzes. The Taiwanese delegation was headed by Taiwan Gojuryu Karatedo Association president Chang Ching-li (張靜麗) and Hsinchu City Sports Federation’s Karatedo Committee chief Huang Yu-mei (黃玉梅). Huang partially credited the strong showing of the athletes to the numerous donors who paid for the team’s travel costs.
■Crime
Mentally ill man not guilty
The Taiwan High Court’s Tainan branch on Friday found a man who murdered his neighbor in March last year not guilty, saying he suffered from mental illness and had claimed the Presidential Office ordered him to kill his victim. On March 4 last year, the 58-year-old defendant followed his neighbor, surnamed Lin, into his home and killed him with a knife. The defendant was arrested near the scene of the crime and was in a relaxed mood. The court said the defendant, who had hallucinations that Lin was blackmailing him for NT$3 million (US$94,300), told his victim: “If you don’t stop blackmailing me, I will kill you.” The defendant told the court that the Presidential Office had ordered him to kill his neighbor. Though he was found not guilty, the defendant will have to receive mental treatment for five years. Tainan prosecutors said yesterday they would appeal the case to the Supreme Court, arguing that while the defendant’s judgment was impaired, he should nevertheless receive a jail sentence.
■Animals
Beagles abandoned
With their hunting instinct and acute sense of smell, beagles may be the perfect sniffer dogs for the nation’s airports, but their nature also makes then more likely to become victims of abandonment, the Kaohsiung City Government’s Animal Protection Educational Shelter said yesterday. The shelter said more than half of the nine beagles it currently housed had been abandoned by their owners, who could not stand the animals’ body odor and barking. “It seems the owners forgot why they brought the dogs home in the first place,” the shelter said. The strong odor and barking are simply part of the dogs’ nature, since they are small hounds that are very active and like to chase small animals, the shelter said. However, this trait also makes beagles perfect home watchers, the shelter said, urging residents to consider bringing them home.
■Aquaculture
Hairy crabs to double
Hairy crab production was expected to more than double this year, to the delight of local gourmets, the Fisheries Agency Director-General James Sha (沙志一) said over the weekend. Sha said Taiwanese aquaculturists produced 400,000 hairy crabs — also known as dazha crabs — last year, and the number was expected to reach 1 million this year. However, because of warmer weather this year, the production time could be delayed and prices were not certain, Sha said, estimating that the high season for the delicacy could come around the Mid-Autumn Festival, which falls on Sept. 22 this year. Sha said that since Taiwan banned imports of mature crabs from China, Taiwanese aquaculturists have been increasing their imports of crab larvae from Hong Kong and China.
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