DEFENSE
‘Stealth’ warship planned
A new “stealth” warship armed with guided missiles is to be built next year in response to China’s naval buildup, a top military officer and a lawmaker said yesterday. Construction of the prototype of the 500-tonne corvette is due to start next year for completion in 2014, Vice Minister of National Defense Lin Yu-pao (林於豹) said in answer to a question from Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Lin Yu-fang (林郁方) in the legislature. The warship, which the navy says would be harder to detect on radar, is expected to emerge after China puts its first battle carrier group into service, Lin said. The twin-hulled boat will be armed with up to eight locally built Hsiung-Feng II ship-to-ship missiles and eight other more lethal Hsiung-Feng III anti-ship supersonic missiles. China has been restoring the Varyag, an old Soviet aircraft carrier bought in 1998. Calls have been mounting for the military to come up with countermeasures against the perceived threat.
ENERGY
Wind farm subsidy planned
The government hopes to encourage private investors to build the nation’s first offshore wind farms by 2015 and is preparing to offer subsidies to help the projects get off the ground, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. The ministry plans to offer subsidies ranging from NT$950 million (US$32.7 million) to NT$1.6 billion, depending on the amount of installed capacity, to help local companies build up to two model offshore wind power projects with a total of four wind turbine generator systems. Possible locations include the waters off the Changhua Coastal Industrial Park, the coastal areas of Yunlin and Chiayi counties and the outlying island of Penghu. The ministry will announce further subsidy details in the first half of this year and it hopes to consider applications for the incentives beginning in the second half of the year.
SOCIETY
Publicity fears deter suicide
A woman in Rueifang Township (瑞芳), New Taipei City (新北市), changed her mind about committing suicide on Sunday morning when she realized she could end up on the TV news. Officials at the township’s police station said several pedestrians contacted police after seeing a woman in her 30s sitting on the railing of a nearby bridge. A police officer, surnamed Chen (陳), tried to talk to her out of taking “rash” action. The woman told him she just wanted to sit there and cry, and she did not want her family to know. He then told her: “If you don’t come down now, when the satellite TV news vans come to report on this story the whole world will know you wanted to commit suicide.” Fearing her suicide would be shown on national TV the woman climbed down from the railing and was escorted home by Chen.
EDUCATION
Taoyuan schools violate act
The Ministry of Education recently discovered that some schools in Taoyuan County were sharing one principal, a violation of the National Education Act (國民教育法). Wu Hsiao-hsia (武曉霞), a section chief at Taoyuan County Government’s department of elementary education, said the county was in violation of Article 9 of the act, which states “elementary schools should have one full-time principal to manage school affairs.” The county allegedly decided in 2002 not to appoint principals to schools with less than 100 students. Taoyuan County Teachers’ Association vice president Peng Ju-yu (彭如玉) criticized the county for trying to save money through the “shared principal” scheme.
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