TRANSPORTATION
Traffic greets holiday-goers
Heavy traffic greeted motorists yesterday morning — the start of the three-day New Year holiday, according to real-time data from the Taiwan Area National Freeway Bureau. As of 8:30am, cars were moving slower than 30kph on the southbound lane on the Sun Yat-sen Freeway (Freeway No. 1), between Hsinchu County’s Hukou Township (湖口) and Jhubei City (竹北), the data showed. Meanwhile, travel speed was just over 30kph on the southbound section between New Taipei City’s Tucheng (土城) and Yingge (鶯歌) districts, and between Taoyuan’s Dasi (大溪) and Longtan (龍潭) districts on the Formosa Freeway (Freeway No. 3). Travel time is likely to triple from eight minutes to 24 minutes on the Hukou-Hsinchu section on Freeway No. 1, and quadruple from eight to 32 minutes on the Changhua-Puyan (埔鹽) section on Freeway No. 1, the bureau said. It is also expected to triple from 14 to 42 minutes on the Yingge-Guansi (關西) section on Freeway No. 3, more than double from 15 to 41 minutes on the Kuaiguan (快官)-Nantou section on Freeway No. 3, and increase from 11 to 55 minutes on the Nangang (南港)-Pinglin (坪林) section on Freeway No. 3, the bureau said.
CRIME
Court denies attack threats
Online posts about a planned attack against the Taichung District Court are nothing but unsubstantiated rumors, court officials said on Friday. A person posted on the comment section of the district court’s Web site that the court had received information about a plan to attack court personnel using dangerous liquids or explosives, hence its request to bolster bailiff patrols. Li Chin-i (李慶義), head of the court building’s management committee, said that during last month’s building maintenance, access controls were stepped up as many construction workers were entering and exiting the building. However, it has not received any information about a planned attack, he said.
POLITICS
Tsai lauds MOS over pay
President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday had breakfast with her aides at a MOS Burger restaurant in Taipei to show her support for the fast-food chain’s decision to give its employees a raise. The president wrote on Facebook that she wanted to treat her aides to breakfast after her year-end press conference on Friday, and when no one could decide where to go, she suggested MOS Burger to support the chain’s move to raise wages. MOS on Tuesday announced that it would give its employees an average pay hike of 4.2 percent, including a 5.3 percent increase for part-time workers to NT$140 per hour, starting tomorrow. The pay raise coincides with new minimum wage standards that are to take effect tomorrow, with the hourly rate rising to NT$140 and the monthly minimum increasing to NT$22,000.
TRADE
Southbound center opens
A New Southbound Policy service center is to open on Tuesday, the Executive Yuan’s Office of Trade Negotiations said. The center is to provide New Southbound Policy planning and implementation, financial support, cultivation of talent, foreign cooperation, small and medium enterprises services and other information on related issues, the office said. The center’s main objective is to to help individuals or groups solve problems relating to the New Southbound Policy, Minister Without Portfolio John Deng (鄧振中) said. The center will bring together resources and views from all sectors to promote broader civic participation in the policy, the office said in a press release.
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