MORAKOT
New community inaugurated
A new residential community for some of the families affected by Typhoon Morakot was inaugurated yesterday in Pingtung County after eight months of construction. The new community, located in Sinpi Township (新埤) on land owned by the state-run Taiwan Sugar Corp, provides permanent housing for residents who originally lived in the county’s Laiyi (來義), Yilin (義林), Dahou (大後) and Danlin (丹林) villages, but were made homeless by the typhoon in 2009. The inauguration included an Aboriginal harvest festival, as Laiyi used to be an area inhabited by people from the Paiwan tribe. Premier Wu Den-yih (吳敦義) attended the inauguration and congratulated the families on their new community, which includes a produce center featuring locally grown taro root. The community of 232 housing units was funded by the Red Cross Society of the Republic of China.
AVIATION
CAA denies media reports
The Civil Aeronautics Administration (CAA) yesterday rebutted media reports that a private jet landed at Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport late the previous day and taxied toward a runway where a China Airlines (CAL) flight was preparing for takeoff. According to the media reports, the planes were only 700m apart and could have collided in seven seconds if the control tower had not handled the incident properly. The CAA said its air traffic control staff had the situation under control as soon as they noticed that the private jet, registered in South Africa, was not following the tower’s taxi instructions. CAA officials said the control tower ordered the CAL plane to abort takeoff immediately and directed the smaller jet to the correct taxiway. The officials said that the planes were never on the same runway, contrary to the reports, and that they were never closer than 1,300m.
SOCIETY
Birthrate edges up
Most cities and counties have recorded an increase in their birthrates this year, thanks to local government incentives to encourage people to have children, with Taipei reporting the largest increase, according to official statistics released yesterday. The statistics, compiled by the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics, showed that the number of babies born reached 107,545 in the first seven months of the year, for a year-on-year rise of 12.8 percent. In Taipei alone, 13,773 babies were born during the period, marking growth of 34 percent from the same period last year and representing the biggest rate increase in the country, the tallies showed. However, in terms of actual newborns, New Taipei City (新北市) took the lead, with 18,440 babies born during the January-to-July period.
SOCIETY
Men dominate civil service
New government figures on the gender makeup of the civil service show that the number of women grew very slightly from last year, indicating that there is still a long way to go to achieve gender balance. According to the Examination Yuan, the percentage of women went up by 0.15 percentage points in the first six months of this year. However, men, at 61.08 percent of the civil service, still vastly outnumber women. When counting high-ranking officials, the ratio gets worse. Only 26.37 percent of those promoted to high-ranking posts were women. The figures include government employees at various levels, workers at public-run hospitals and public school staff members.
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