NATIONAL DEFENSE
Navy retiring old vessel
The navy plans to retire a vessel that it originally saved from the scrap heap. The dock landing ship Chung Cheng (中正), which was named after former president Chiang Kai-shek’s (蔣介石) given name, will be decommissioned early next month and moved to the Kaohsiung naval base before a decision is made about its fate, military officials said. The ship will either be dismantled, as was the first naval vessel that bore the same name, or be used as a target in drills, they added. Chung Cheng was acquired by the navy from a local steel company, which had planned to dismantle it for scrap in 1985, officials said. Formerly the USS Comstock (LSD-19), the ship was built for the US Navy during World War II and first commissioned in 1945. It entered the Taiwanese navy’s service in 1987.
TRANSPORTATION
More ETC lanes on the way
More electronic toll collection (ETC) lanes are scheduled to be opened in August in an effort to cope with the increased average ETC usage rate, the National Freeway Bureau said. The new lanes are expected to be added at three toll stations — Sijhih (汐止) in New Taipei City (新北市) and Yangmei (楊梅) and Longtan (龍潭) in Tayouan County — where traffic volume has seen a large increase since a free ETC installation program was launched in the middle of last month, the bureau said. The ETC usage rate has reached 55 percent, the bureau said. According to bureau data, traffic on the northbound side of the Yangmei station has increased by 157 vehicles per hour, while on the southbound side it has increased by 216 vehicles per hour. The northbound side of Longtan station has seen an increase of 101 vehicles per hour, while the southbound side has more than 163 additional vehicles per hour, the data showed.
NATURE
Quakes hit Hualien County
Ten earthquakes with magnitudes of between 2.9 and 4.2 rattled Hualien County early yesterday. There were no reports of casualties or damage, according to the Central Weather Bureau. The bureau’s Seismology Center said the string of temblors were aftershocks of a magnitude 5.4 earthquake that struck the county at 12:15am on Friday. The quake was followed by more than 20 aftershocks later that day, 10-plus quakes on Sunday afternoon and 10 more aftershocks between 12:08am and 4:43am yesterday, the Seismology Center said. The aftershocks recorded early yesterday were all centered in the county’s Fongbin (豐濱) and Guangfu (光復) townships, at locations between 31.9km and 35.5km southwest of Hualien County Hall. All of yesterday’s quakes occurred at depths of less than 10km and the strongest one was felt at an intensity of five in Fongbin, the center said.
CULTURE
Choreographers shine
A dance by a Taiwanese choreographer won second place on Sunday in an international competition sponsored by Theatre de la Ville in Paris. Wu Chien-ying’s (吳建瑩) Dancing in Badminton earned him the second prize of 11,000 euros (US$14,000) out of a field of 300 entries from 41 countries. The Danse Elargie competition is now in its second year. The only rules are that each group must have at least three performers and the dance must be at least 10 minutes long. Wu’s piece was inspired by badminton. Wu, 29, studied at National Taiwan University of Arts in Banciao (板橋), New Taipei City (新北市), and at the Ecole Nationale Superieure de Beaux-arts in Paris and is now based in the French capital. Another Taiwanese entry, Chang Chien-hao’s (張堅豪) The Next Three, made it into the final 10.
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