POLITICS
Reminder on donations
Tax authorities warned that while political donations are tax deductible, there are legal limits on the total amount of contributions that can be made by individuals and households. The maximum contribution that can be made to one political candidate by an individual cannot exceed NT$100,000 (US$3,300) a year, the Taipei National Tax Administration said. The total amount of political contributions made by a household to any political parties and candidates cannot exceed NT$200,000 or 20 percent of the taxable income of the whole family for the year. Political parties and candidates are prohibited by law from accepting contributions from individuals who are not eligible to vote, such as Taiwanese under the age of 20, those who have been deprived of their civil rights as well as foreign nationals.
WEATHER
Banciao sees winter record
The temperature in Banciao District (板橋), New Taipei City (新北市), rose to 31.2°C yesterday, a record winter high for that area, the Central Weather Bureau said. Temperatures in northern Taiwan climbed rapidly before noon as a cloud system from the south, which brought rain to Yilan and the mountainous areas of Hualien on Tuesday, moved away from the nation, the bureau said. The previous record in Banciao was 29.4°C set on Dec. 5, 2002, the bureau said. Meanwhile, Taipei recorded its seventh-highest winter temperature ever — 30.4°C at 11:50am. The warmest winter day in Taipei’s recorded history was Dec. 22, 1934, when the temperature was 31.5°C. However, the warm weather was forecast to last only for half a day since a cold front was expected to arrive last night. Rain and temperatures of less than 20°C were forecast for last night and temperatures are expected to drop to about 10°C this weekend, the bureau said.
SOCIETY
Organ donor meets sister
The first death-row inmate in the nation to make a live organ donation met his sister yesterday, one week after the transplant procedure that gave the sister a new lease on life. Cheng Chin-wen (鄭金文) appeared agitated during a 40-minute meeting with his sister at Far Eastern Memorial Hospital, said Yeh Pi-jen (葉碧仁), deputy director of the Taipei Detention Center. “The sister encouraged her little brother to write down his life story so that people can learn from his mistakes,” he said. Cheng was discharged from the hospital and returned to prison after the meeting. Both Cheng and his sister are recovering well, said Chen Kuo-hsin (陳國鋅), the surgeon who supervised the transplant. The Supreme Court finalized Cheng’s death sentence in June for murdering two debt collectors and burying their bodies in the woods in Keelung in 2004. His sister had been undergoing daily dialysis treatment before the transplant.
CULTURE
Artists headed for France
A delegation of 20 Taiwanese comic artists will take part in an exhibition at the 39th Angouleme International Comics Festival scheduled for Jan. 26 to Jan. 29, the nation’s representative office in France said. The Taiwanese exhibition will include works dating back to the 1950s, and it will be showcased under the theme “Ocean of Comics,” it said. The festival, the largest of its kind in Europe, attracts more than 200,000 visitors each year. According to event organizers, comics fans in France have shown great interest in foreign comics. Of the 5,000 comics published in France each year, 2,000 are translated works.
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