■ JUSTICE
‘White Roses’ to protest
After having collected more than 300,000 signatures, several organizations behind the “White Rose Movement” will stage a demonstration on Ketagalan Boulevard in front of the Presidential Office starting at 6pm tonight to voice their demands to the government. The White Rose Movement calls for the elimination of judges they consider unsuitable and for a revision to a law to provide better protection against sexual assault for children and people with disabilities. The move was first initiated by Internet users who were upset about a court verdict last month that gave a man accused of molesting a six-year-old girl a three-year prison sentence, based on the explanation that the girl did not explicitly express objection.
■SAFETY
BSMI identifies unsafe tires
The Bureau of Standards, Metrology and Inspection (BSMI) yesterday announced that certain types of automobile tires made by Goodyear and Neuton failed to pass safety inspections and have been ordered off the shelves until a full investigation has been concluded. Bureau inspectors recently tested 13 types of tires currently sold in the country for tire strength and checked the tires for damage or cracks after running at the maximum speed for which the tire is designed. While 11 types of tires passed all the safety testing, Goodyear’s Eagle CA Plus, manufactured in Taiwan, and Neuton’s NT5000, manufactured in Indonesia, failed high-speed testing, bureau deputy director-general Huang Lai-ho (黃來和) said. The bureau said the two brands may have slight cracks and other abnormal reactions when running at maximum speeds.
■ AVIATION
CAL to cut China-bound fares
China Airlines (CAL) yesterday said it would cut ticket fares on flights to four Chinese cities, effective Oct. 10. The price cuts range between 9 percent and 13.4 percent based on the ticket’s length of validity, and involve flights to Shanghai’s Pudong and Hongqiao airports, Nanjing, Ningbo and Hangzhou, CAL official Hamilton Liu (劉國芊) said. “With China destinations getting more and more popular, the price cuts are expected to benefit passengers,” he said. The load factor on the Taipei-Shanghai and Kaohsiung-Shanghai routes exceeds 90 percent and an empty seat on any of these flights is rare, Liu said. After the cuts, the fare for a 14-day validity ticket will fall to NT$9,500 from NT$10,580, the price on one-month tickets will drop to NT$10,300 from NT$11,550, three-month tickets will decline to NT$12,000 from NT$13,860 and one-year tickets NT$14,000 from NT$15,390.
■ EMPLOYMENT
Aviation office recruiting
The Taoyuan Aviation Office yesterday posted online job openings for the Taoyuan International Airport Co, which will become operational in November. The office said it was planning to hire 48 people in the first stage of the recruitment, adding that it would be handled by the Taiwan Academy of Banking and Finance. The employees the firm intends to hire include people with engineering, law, finance, media and public relations backgrounds, as well as basic-level clerks, it said. The company will offer higher monthly salaries than the private sector, the office said. Candidates with expertise in finance and law, for example, could be paid as much as NT$80,000 per month. The office said the recruitment drive is to fill vacancies created by employees who have quit before the new company becomes operational or who do so soon afterward.
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