WEATHER
Cold, rain forecast today
People hoping to celebrate Valentine’s Day or the Lantern Festival today should bundle up as the cold and wet weather seen earlier in the week is set to continue, the Central Weather Bureau said yesterday. A low temperature warning has been issued for northern and central Taiwan, where daytime lows could dip to about 10oC, the bureau said. The mercury could range between 10oC and 14oC in the north, 11oC to 18oC in the center and 14oC to 21oC in the south. Rain is likely nationwide, while chances are high for downpours in the Greater Taipei area, the bureau said. The cold and wet weather could last until Sunday, with minimum temperatures expected to increase by only 1oC to 3oC nationwide.
SOCIETY
Lotto outlets beat 7-Elevens
The nation, which is said to have one of the highest concentrations of 7-Eleven convenience stores in the world, now has more lottery outlets than 7-Elevens, Sinyi Realty researcher Tseng Chin-der (曾敬德) said yesterday. There are nearly 5,600 lottery stores around the nation, including 12 on one section of Taipei’s Nanjing E Road. By comparison, there are 4,920 7-Eleven stores nationwide, or a density of about one per 7.35km2, the fourth highest in the world after Macau, Hong Kong and Singapore. Tseng said high sales of lottery tickets have driven up demand for outlets. There is also a growing trend to rent small partitioned spaces for ticket outlets, with the monthly rent ranging from NT$30,000 to NT$50,000, depending on size and location.
NATIONAL DEFENSE
Life sentence cut sharply
The Taiwan High Court’s Kaohsiung Branch on Wednesday cut retired navy commander Chang Chih-hsin’s (張祉鑫) prison sentence to six years. Chang was convicted of “preparing to” conduct espionage activities for Beijing. The court’s ruling overturns the life sentence handed down by a military court. The High Court ruled that the former retired commander of the Naval Meteorological and Oceanographic Office’s political warfare department was guilty of taking money from Chinese agents who were trying to recruit him to collect military intelligence in 2010. Chang began working at the political warfare department in 2008 and retired in May 2012.
DIPLOMACY
Working holiday deal stalls
There has been not much progress on a potential working holiday agreement between Taiwan and France due to some technical problems, a French envoy said on Wednesday. Olivier Richard, director of the French Office in Taipei, which represents France’s interests in Taiwan, said Paris has to sort out some “technical problems” in the legal structure of the working holiday programs before it can sign new agreements with other countries. Richard did not elaborate on the technical problems, but said they are “not related to Taiwan or to any other countries.” He also said he could not predict how long it would take to solve the technical issues. In September last year, French Interior Minister Manuel Valls said in a letter to French Senator Richard Yung that a working holiday agreement between Taiwan and France could be signed soon. Taiwan has working holiday agreements with New Zealand, Australia, Japan, Canada, Germany, South Korea, Ireland, Belgium and the UK. Such programs have been popular with Taiwan’s young adults.
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