CRIME
Players jailed for fraud
Three former professional baseball players were sentenced to up to 10 months in prison for fraud in a 2008 match-fixing scandal, a Taipei District Court official said yesterday. It was the first time that players convicted of corruption had not been given suspended sentences or allowed to pay a fine in lieu of prison terms and reflected the fact that they had refused to cooperate with the authorities, the official said. The three, who played with dMedia T-Rex, a team disbanded after the scandal, were convicted of collaborating with a bookie to play to lose in several matches during the 2008 season, he said. The bookie was sentenced to eight months’ imprisonment. The team’s boss and his assistant were cleared of breach of trust charges, while two other players received suspended sentences after pleading guilty.
EARTHQUAKE
Yilan rattled by quake
An earthquake measuring 5.1 on the open-ended Richter scale struck Yilan yesterday with no immediate damage reported, the Central Weather Bureau said. The earthquake, which occurred at 3:56am, was centered 11.4km north of the Yilan seismic station at a depth of 102.1km, seismologists said. Earlier this week, Hualien was rattled by series of earthquakes over 15 hours beginning on Tuesday night. Statistics from the bureau showed that 12 mild earthquakes, including a magnitude 5.1 temblor, occurred between 9:10pm on Tuesday and 7:54pm Wednesday. No casualties were reported.
EDUCATION
Henry Lee honored
The University of New Haven will dedicate a newly completed US$14 million building at its campus in Connecticut to forensic scientist Henry Lee (李昌鈺), with university president Steven Kaplan officiating the inauguration ceremony on Oct. 15, a university press release said on Thursday. “Dr Lee has been a pioneer in the field of forensic science for more than 40 years,” Kaplan said in the release. “With the dedication of the new Henry C. Lee Institute of Forensic Science building, we will establish a benchmark by which technologically advanced forensics training facilities will be measured for decades to come.” Lee joined the university’s Department of Forensic Science as an assistant professor and program director in 1975. Lee arrived in the US from Taiwan in 1972 to pursue his education in forensic science and biochemistry in New York after working in the Taipei Police Department for several years.
POLITICS
Tang Fei leaves hospital
Former premier Tang Fei (唐飛) was discharged on Thursday from the Veterans General Hospital in Taipei, where he had been receiving treatment for cardio--pulmonary failure. The 78-year-old retired four-star general wore a surgical mask, but appeared to be in good spirits and was able to crack a joke. “The doctors told me to avoid crowded places,” he told reporters waiting to see him at the hospital. “That means no more fun trips for me.” Tang was flown back to Taiwan on an emergency flight on Aug. 12 for treatment after falling ill during a trip to China. He was later diagnosed with a lung infection causing acute respiratory distress syndrome, as well as Legionnaires’ disease. After six weeks of treatment from a team of specialists in chest medicine and infectious diseases, Tang no longer has an infection and his heart is functioning normally, said Li Shou-tung (李壽東), deputy superintendent of the hospital.
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