The death toll of an incident earlier this week involving an army tank has risen to four with the death of Lieutenant Wu Te-wei (吳得瑋), the tank’s commander, Kaohsiung Armed Forces General Hospital said early yesterday.
Wu died of multiple organ failure late on Thursday night, and he was pronounced dead in the presence of his family and girlfriend, the hospital said. He was 25.
The officer had been kept on life support since Tuesday, when he was pulled from his overturned CM-11 tank that crashed into a swollen river in rural Pingtung County.
Three other crew members died shortly after the vehicle overturned, which happened as the vehicle was moving down a slope. They were Sergeant Chen Shih-kun (陳世坤); Corporal Chen Ping-yi (陳秉逸), the gunner; and Private Chang Chih-wei (張志偉), the loader.
The tank’s driver, Private First Class Yang Yen-lin (楊炎霖), survived with only minor scratches.
He has been questioned by prosecutors and now faces possible charges for causing the deaths of others in the execution of his occupational duties, according to the Pingtung District Prosecutors’ Office.
If found guilty, the 25-year-old conscript could be sentenced to up to five years in prison.
Yang has told prosecutors that the brakes of the 45-tonne tank malfunctioned as the vehicle was approaching a bridge from the inclined country road on its way back to base after a live-fire exercise.
Citing Yang’s initial account of the incident, which occurred late on Tuesday morning, the army has said that the tank’s left track got stuck while the right track continued to operate, causing the vehicle to veer off the bridge and plunge into the river upside down.
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
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
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