SOCIETY
EATC chair killed in crash
Executive Aviation Taiwan Corp (EATC) chairman Philip Yang (楊宿智) on Tuesday died in a helicopter crash in the US, the company said yesterday. Yang, 61, owned three original equipment manufacturers of electronic devices in China, EATC’s Web site says. He began learning to fly at the age of 40, then received seven aviation certificates in four years and flew his private airplane around the world four times. Established in 2010, EATC is the only aviation company in Asia that offers emergency air medical assistance with its own fleet. In 2017, EATC inked a contract with the Ministry of Health and Welfare to provide air ambulance services for Penghu, Kinmen and Lienchiang counties, a project that was launched in August last year.
EDUCATION
NTU ranked 69th in world
British education network Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) ranked National Taiwan University (NTU) 69th in the world, up three notches from last year, in its annual ranking released on Wednesday. Sixteen Taiwanese universities are in the QS World University Rankings 2020, with NTU the only one to rank in the top 100. National Cheng Kung University saw the biggest improvement, rising nine notches to 225th and replacing National Chiao Tung University (227th) as the third-best Taiwanese school. National Tsing Hua University (173rd) is listed as the second-best. The rankings evaluate six metrics: academic reputation, employer reputation, faculty/student ratio, citations per faculty, international faculty ratio and international student ratio. Forty percent of the overall score is assigned to academic reputation. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology retained the top spot for the eighth consecutive year, followed by Stanford University, Harvard University and the University of Oxford.
ENTERTAINMENT
Director wins monthly award
The Oniros Film Awards (OFA) has named Charles Yang (楊孟嘉) best director for last month, according to the organization’s Web site. Yang won the monthly prize for his work on the film Lethe about a fugitive murderer who encounters his daughter at a drug party working as a prostitute. Yang, who also wrote the screenplay, said that he interviewed several fugitives and prostitutes, and researched the life story of a young fashion model who was murdered at a drug party at an upscale hotel in Taiwan in 2016. The OFA is an IMDb qualifying competition based in Italy that awards filmmakers every month. All the winners automatically qualify for the OFA’s “Best of Year” competition and have a chance to win the Annual Finals, which are to be held in August at the Palais Theater in Saint-Vincent, Italy, the Web site says.
ENVIRONMENT
New rules on nitrogen oxide
Regulations aimed at reducing nitrogen oxide emissions to 4,000 tonnes per year in areas that do not meet air quality standards are to be introduced by July 31, the Environmental Protection Administration (EPA) said on Wednesday. Priority would be given to regulating entities that emit more than 40 tonnes of nitrogen oxide per year, including those in the power, cement, steel and waste incineration industries, it said. Factories would be given five years to comply. The public is invited to make comments and suggestions over the next two weeks, the agency said. The nation in 2015 emitted more than 430,000 tonnes of nitrogen oxide, government figures showed.
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