ENVIRONMENT
Earthquake strikes northeast
An earthquake measuring 4.8 on the Richter scale struck northeastern areas of the country at 4:30pm yesterday. No casualties were immediately reported. The earthquake was centered beneath the seabed about 33km south of Yilan County Hall at a depth of 5.2km, the Central Weather Bureau said. The strongest tremor, with an intensity of 5, was felt in the county’s Nanao Township (南澳). The quake was felt at an intensity of 4 in Heping in Hualien County, 3 in Yilan City and 2 in Taipei.
CRIME
Thailand agreement inked
Taiwan signed a cross-border crime agreement with Thailand on Wednesday. The agreement is a new milestone in international police cooperation, National Police Agency director-general Wang Cho-chiun (王卓鈞) said. Since August 2009, Taiwan and Thailand have jointly investigated 32 cross-border fraud cases, leading to the arrest of 417 people, Wang said. Over the past two years, Taiwan has launched six operations against cross-border fraud in cooperation with China and Southeast Asian countries, with a total of 2,943 people arrested, the agency said.
Travel
Stomach woes most frequent
Stomach complaints are most commonly reported by Taiwanese who request medical assistance while overseas, especially during the Lunar New Year holiday, the Taiwan office of International SOS said yesterday. Over the past five years, the company has received an average of 4,700 requests per month from Taiwanese overseas that were linked to stomach ailments, and the average number is 5,300 for the month in which the Lunar New Year holiday falls, it said.
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