■ POLITICS
King to visit two countries
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Secretary-General King Pu-tsung (金溥聰) will embark on a one-week visit to Japan and Singapore today to promote party diplomacy. The KMT's candidate for Greater Tainan mayor, Kuo Tien-tsai (郭添財), will join King on the Japan segment of the trip from today through Sunday, and the party's mayoral candidate in Greater Kaohsiung, Huang Chao-shun (黃昭順), will accompany King on the Singapore leg from Sunday through Tuesday next week. In Tokyo, King said he would meet and deliver an invitation from President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) to Liberal Democratic Party President Sadakazu Tanigaki to visit Taiwan. King is also scheduled to meet members of the Democratic Party of Japan, the Japan-ROC Dietmen's Council and the deputy governor of Tokyo. King declined to give any details of his Singapore itinerary, saying that it was part of an understanding the KMT reached with the city-state.
■ INDUSTRY
US experts inspect complex
Six industrial safety experts from the US arrived in the country on Monday to help probe the causes of two fires that broke out at Formosa Plastics Group's naphtha cracker complex in July. The group from the Mary Kay O'Connor Process Safety Center, headed by M. Sam Mannan, came at the invitation of the group's management. During their five-day stay, Mannan and his group will also offer suggestions on how to improve safety and efficiency at the petrochemical complex — home to more than 60 petrochemical factories — in Mailiao, Yunlin County. The second fire that broke out at the complex on July 25 triggered major protests by local residents, who demanded compensation for losses on their farms and fish farms caused by the blaze's smoke and pollution. The group offered to pay NT$500 million (US$15.75 million) in compensation, which the protesters eventually accepted.
■ MEDIA
ICRT upgrades signal
International Community Radio Taipei (ICRT), the nation's only all-English radio station, came through loud and clear in the Chiayi region on Monday for the first time in 31 years of broadcasting. ICRT solved the previous problem of weak signals and disruption from unlicensed “underground” stations by installing a new relay station in the area, resulting in clear broadcasts for audiences in the Chiayi area and some parts of Yunlin and Tainan counties. Chiayi Mayor Huang Ming-hui (黃敏惠) and Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Chiang Yi-hsiung (江義雄) had lobbied the Government Information Office and other agencies for years to make the improvement.
■ POLITICS
Hsu stripped of membership
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) yesterday stripped Legislator-at-Large Hsu Shu-po (許舒博) of his party membership after he was found guilty of corruption by the Taiwan High Court on Wednesday last week. Hsu was sentenced to seven years and six months in prison for taking bribes from the National Chinese Herbal Apothecary Association in 1998. He was acquitted by the Taipei District Court in the first trial in January last year. Seven other former and incumbent lawmakers have also been sentenced by the high court. They can still file an appeal with the Supreme Court. The KMT said party regulations stipulate that members who are found guilty in a second trial should be stripped of membership and expelled. The expulsion would cost Hsu the seat he took over from former legislator Lee Chia-chin (李嘉進) in October last year.
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