CHARITY
Happy Run held in Jakarta
The Taiwan Excellence Happy Run, a charity event that features food and beverages, as well as games and performances, was yesterday held in Jakarta, Indonesia, for the fourth straight year. The annual run attracted nearly 3,500 runners to 5km and 10km events that began in the city’s Gelora Bung Karno Stadium. Participants were encouraged to donate books to charity. The books would be donated to a local charity organization, the Obor Berkat Indonesi, to be distributed to children from underprivileged backgrounds, the event’s organizers said.
TOURISM
Visa-free entry postponed
A plan to grant visa-free entry to visitors from the Philippines as of June 1 has been postponed, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said on Friday. The ministry said the plan’s implementation has been pushed back indefinitely to complete administrative procedures and negotiations. “The exact date for the measure will be announced in September,” it said, adding that e-visa privileges remain in place for Philippine visitors. An inter-agency meeting last month decided to expand visa privileges to visitors from Thailand, Brunei and the Philippines and streamline the visa application process for visitors from other Southeast Asian and South Asian nations. The plan is part of the government’s efforts to promote exchanges with the Philippines under its “new southbound policy.”
TRANSPORTATION
Train enters wrong way
Taiwan High Speed Rail Corp on Saturday said that human negligence was responsible for an incident that led to a high-speed train traveling in the wrong direction. The incident, which occurred on Wednesday, was the first of its kind since the inauguration of the high-speed train in 2007. Local media reported that an empty passenger train entered Zuoying Station at 3pm after tests and was supposed to travel to Yanchao Main Workshop in Kaohsiung, but the track controller at Tainan Station failed switch tracks, sending the train in the wrong direction. The train headed north to Tainan and stopped after traveling 1km past the railroad switch. It was rerouted to Tainan after about one minute and entered the workshop. The company said the incident did not affect operational safety. All high-speed trains are protected by an automatic train control system to ensure they brake automatically at a set distance from any train in front of them, eliminating the possibility of a collision.
CRIME
Taiwanese held in Thailand
Two Taiwanese have been arrested in Thailand over alleged connections with a telecoms fraud ring targeting people in China, police said on Friday. The suspects, surnamed Cheng (鄭) and surnamed Chou (周), are expected to be deported to Taiwan, police added. Six Chinese and a Thai were also arrested in a raid conducted jointly by Taiwanese and Thai police in Bangkok on Tuesday, according to the Criminal Investigation Bureau. A probe had found that the ring, allegedly led by a Taiwanese surnamed Liang (梁), had bases in various Southeast Asian nations and launched its operations in Thailand in March, the bureau said. The operations in Thailand were allegedly run by Cheng and Chou, who hired Chinese and Thai nationals to pose as police officers and prosecutors to defraud people, the bureau said. The ring made illicit gains of more than 1 million yuan (US$144,925), it said. Liang was arrested in Taiwan on Wednesday, it added.
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