HOLIDAYS
Officials confirm 115 days
The number of holidays and weekends next year will total 115 days, including six long weekends lasting three days or longer, a calendar released yesterday by the Directorate-General of Personnel Administration showed. The six extended public holidays are the Lunar New Year holiday (Feb. 2 to Feb. 10) and the weekends following 228 Peace Memorial Day (Feb. 28 to March 3), Children’s Day and Tombsweeping Festival (April 4 to April 7), Dragon Boat Festival (June 7 to June 9), Mid-Autumn Festival (Sept. 13 to Sept. 15) and Double Ten National Day (Oct. 10 to Oct. 13), the calendar showed. Feb. 7 during the Lunar New Year holiday falls on a Thursday, so the following Friday would be included in the nine-day public holiday. The previous Saturday, Jan. 26, would normally be a makeup day, but as that coincides with the national General Scholastic Ability Test, the administration will use Jan. 19 as an official makeup day, an official said.
RAILWAYS
THSR to reach 500m riders
Taiwan High Speed Rail Corp (THSRC) expects to welcome its 500 millionth passenger near the end of this month, the company said yesterday, adding that a series of events would be held to celebrate the occasion. As of Sunday, about 496 million tickets had been sold since the high-speed rail started operations on Jan. 5, 2007, it said. To celebrate the milestone, THSRC said it would reward the 500 millionth passenger with a year of unlimited free rides. The two preceding passengers, as well as the following two would win high-speed rail vacation packages of their choice, including free hotels and business class round-trip train tickets, the company said. The railway transported an average of 173,000 passengers each day during the first six months of the year, up 5 percent from the same period last year, the company said.
EARTHQUAKES
Temblors strike together
Two earthquakes registering magnitude 4.6 and magnitude 4.5 struck simultaneously within several kilometers of each other off the coast of Chiayi at 3:26pm yesterday, the Central Weather Bureau said. The epicenter of the magnitude 4.6 earthquake was at sea about 19.8km east of Chiayi County Hall at a depth of 12.1km, while the other temblor was at sea about 20.2km east of the county hall at a depth of 8.9km, the bureau’s Seismology Center said. The intensity of the two earthquakes was highest in Chiayi City and Dapu Township (大埔) in Chiayi County, where they measured 4 on Taiwan’s 7-tier intensity scale. The temblors could be felt in other places in central and southern Taiwan, with the intensity ranging from 1 to 3.
CRIME
Suspected money mule held
A Malaysian national visiting Taiwan has been arrested on suspicion of working as money mules for a fraud ring, the Tainan City Police Department said on Saturday. Lin Yun-hao (林雲豪), head of the department’s fourth precinct, said that his team on Friday received a tipoff about a suspicious person withdrawing NT$105,800 from an ATM at a local convenience store. The suspect, surnamed Yen (顏), 25, was detained for questioning by police that day and confessed that he had been hired through a contact in Malaysia to smuggle money out of Taiwan, police said. Yen is a tour bus driver in Malaysia and wanted to make extra money on the side to supplement his unstable income, police quoted him as saying.
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