DEFENSE
Mishap damages F-16
The landing gear of an F-16 jet on Thursday retracted during a routine preflight inspection, slightly damaging the aircraft, Air Force Command Headquarters said yesterday, adding that no one was injured. The mishap occurred in a hangar at Chiayi Air Base, where ground crew were checking the aircraft when the incident occurred. A preliminary investigation blamed the landing gear retraction on carelessness by crew members, the command headquarters said. The air force is in the process of implementing more security measures and stricter personnel training to prevent accidents, it said. A statement from the air force came after the Chinese-language Web site Apple Daily broke the news of the incident.
TRANSPORTATION
HSR on alert after threat
Security patrols have increased along the high-speed railway (HSR) after Taiwan High Speed Rail Corp received an e-mailed bomb threat, the Railway Police Bureau said on Friday. Taiwan High Speed Rail Corp on Friday evening confirmed that it had received the threat and said it reported it to the police and authorities, but did not elaborate on the details of the threat, such as time and location. The company said it is following its protocol for such incidents, with platform patrols increased to every 30 minutes and identification checks for people working in its stations.
TRANSPORTATION
Suhua to open to scooters
Motorcycles and scooters with yellow or red registration plates would soon be allowed to travel on the new Suhua Highway as part of a six-month trial to begin on Thursday next week, the Directorate-General of Highways (DGH) said. Scooters or motorcycles with engines larger than 250cc are issued yellow plates, while those with engines larger than 550cc are issued red plates. They are allowed on the old Suhua highway, but have not been permitted on the three new sections of the highway that officially opened to motorists in January last year. Data from the trial, to begin at noon, would be used to determine whether to permanently open the highway to heavy motorcycles, the DGH said. Riders must turn on their headlights when entering tunnels and maintain a safe driving distance of 50m from the vehicle in front of them, it added.
WEATHER
Temperatures rising: CWB
The average temperature in Taipei from Sept. 1 to Monday has been about 2°C higher than the average for September over the past 30 years, the Central Weather Bureau (CWB) said. Data compiled by the bureau showed that the average temperature recorded at its Taipei monitoring station over the 20-day period was 29.8°C, compared with an average of 27.65°C for September from 1991 to last year. Bureau forecaster Liu Pei-teng (劉沛滕) on Tuesday said that the warmer weather can be attributed to a relatively low volume of rainfall and the absence of a northeasterly wind system during the 20-day period. The average temperature in Taipei was the highest in Taiwan, ahead of 29.5°C degrees recorded at the bureau’s Hsinchu County monitoring station, and 29.4°C registered at its Tainan and Keelung stations, he said. It was unclear if the average would remain high for the rest of the month, he added. The average temperature in Taiwan last year was 24.62°C, the highest since the country began keeping climate records in 1947.
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