SOCIETY
Kinmen to vote on casinos
A referendum is to be held in Kinmen County on Oct. 28 to allow residents to decide whether to allow casinos to open there, the Kinmen Election Commission said. The referendum was initiated by Tsai Chun-sheng (蔡春生), a member of the Kinmen County Council. Tsai has collected 5,602 valid signatures to back his initiative, surpassing the threshold of 5,178, or 5 percent of the total number of eligible voters, the commission said. The commission is to make a formal announcement tomorrow on the planned referendum. Gambling is not allowed on Taiwan proper, but the legislature passed an amendment to the Offshore Islands Development Act (離島建設條例) in January 2009 allowing outlying islands to establish tourist casinos if residents agree via a referendum.
CRIME
Victim numbers fall
The number of people affected in criminal cases from January to last month was down slightly from the same period a year earlier, with the 18-23 age group the most likely to be victims, Ministry of the Interior statistics showed. Police handled 75,513 criminal cases in the first five months, down 2.6 percent year-on-year, or 320.7 per 100,000 people affected, down 9.4 people from a year earlier, the data showed. Major crimes accounted for 57.4 percent of the people affected, or 43,330 people, including burglary, robbery, fraud, assault, violent crimes or extortion, statistics showed. Of those crimes, there were 22,342 burglary and robbery victims, 14,247 fraud victims, 5,633 assault victims, 634 victims of violent crimes and 474 victims of extortion. There were 1,175 people affected in drunk driving incidents during the first five months, down 20.7 percent year-on-year.
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