AVIATION
Taipei-Dubai flights planned
Emirates Airlines has announced that it will begin offering direct flights next year between Taipei and Dubai, United Arab Emirates. The move will make Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport the carrier’s 16th destination in the Far East, according to a press release from the Commercial Office of the Republic of China to Dubai. From Feb. 10 next year, Emirates will operate six Taipei-Dubai flights per week using 777-300ER passenger aircraft, the press release cited Barry Brown, an Emirates senior manager in charge of commercial operations, as saying. Brown said his company is confident that the new service will contribute to travel business, as well as bilateral economic and trade ties. With the opening of the new air route, Taiwanese travelers will be able to use Dubai as a transit stop on trips to the Middle East, Europe and Africa.
IMMIGRATION
Defector arrested again
A man from China’s Sichuan Province making his third attempt to sneak into the country was arrested on Wednesday on Kinmen. The 38-year-old was caught on Kinmen’s Dadan (大膽) islet by soldiers stationed there after he had swum to the islet from the nearby Chinese city of Xiamen. He was sent to the Kinmen District Prosecutors’ Office after being interrogated by Coast Guard Administration authorities. The man is the sixth Chinese to have been arrested this year for illegally entering Kinmen. He had previously illegally entered Kinmen in 2003 and 2009. He said he was sentenced to five years in prison the first time, before being repatriated to China. He received a seven-month jail term the second time. On Tuesday, he swam from Xiamen to Tuyu, a small islet northeast of Dadan, before swimming the short distance to Dadan the following day.
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