■ INDUSTRY
Officials probe overwork
Taiwan will launch an investigation into how many hours people in the technology sector work after a 29-year-old engineer allegedly worked himself to death, an official said yesterday. The Council of Labor Affairs will probe technology companies across the country from next month, the official said without elaborating. The move comes amid a high-profile dispute that was sparked when the young engineer was reported to have collapsed and died as he tried to work his way through a mountain of paperwork at his desk in January. Authorities rejected a compensation claim brought by his family, who said he had worked up to 19 hours a day during the six months leading up to his death, some months clocking 80 overtime hours. Labor authorities had determined that the cause of death was heart disease and unrelated to work.
■ DIPLOMACY
Ma invites Swedish artist
President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) has invited Swedish singer, artist and author Lena Maria Klingvall to visit Taiwan on the country’s 100th National Day on Oct. 10 next year. The Government Information Office said in a press release on Sunday that the invitation was extended to Klingvall in a pre-recorded video message broadcast on Saturday on Sweden Public TV during a feature program about her. Klingvall was born without arms and her left leg is only half the length of her right leg. However, she excels at swimming, dancing, cooking and singing, and is an artist and author. She can drive a car using her feet. She visited Taipei in 2005 and became friends with Ma, who was mayor of the city at the time, and was granted honorary citizenship in Taipei City. The office quoted Klingvall as saying that she is more than willing to be the president’s guest.
■ MUSIC
Hoklo queen invites ‘Mr Phil’
Queen of Hoklo music Judy Chiang (江蕙) invited “Mr Phil” from New Zealand for an all-expenses-paid visit to Taiwan to attend her concert over the weekend, 10 years after Mr Phil’s son disappeared near Alishan. At that time, when Mr Phil came to Taiwan in search of his son, he did not know anyone, nor did he speak Mandarin, but he said that listening to Chiang’s Half Intoxicated, Half Conscious helped him face the tragedy. His son was never found. However, “I’m glad that my son’s last moments in life were spent in the mountains of Taiwan,” he told the Liberty Times (the Taipei Times’ sister paper). Chiang said that when she was arranging the concert program, she decided to include the song in the concert because she wanted to express her condolences to Mr Phil, who was both touched and surprised that Chiang still remembered him and extended the invitation.
■ SOCIETY
7-Eleven offers flights
The 7-Eleven convenience store chain on Monday began offering booking and payment services for domestic flights offered by Uni Air, a domestic and regional carrier. The innovative business strategy, the first of its kind in Taiwan implemented by an air carrier, means consumers can book any of Uni Air’s 16 domestic flights and purchase the tickets through the electronic ibon facility at more than 4,700 7-Eleven stores, the carrier said. Tickets will be valid for flights within an hour of booking and up to 60 days later, it said, adding that until the end of next March, no processing fees will be charged for the round-the-clock service. From next April on, the fee will be NT$10 per transaction, the company 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
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