EDUCATION
Austronesian program opens
National Taitung University (NTTU) on Monday last week became the nation’s first higher education institution to offer a doctoral program in Austronesian culture. The Graduate Institute of Austronesian Studies has recruited one international and three Taiwanese students for the program’s first year, NTTU Center of Austronesian Culture spokesperson Chen Ying-ju (陳盈儒) said, adding that the classes are taught in English. Taitung County is home to seven indigenous communities of Austronesian descent: Amis, Paiwan, Bunun, Rukai, Pinuyumayan (also known as Puyuma), Yami (also known as Tao) and Kavalan. It is the most diverse region in Taiwan in terms of Austronesian culture, offering students a chance to apply their research to real-world scenarios and engage in intimate observations of how indigenous groups grapple with the challenges of modernity, Chen said.
CRIME
Gold fraud attempt foiled
Employees at a Bank of Taiwan branch and police in Tainan on Thursday prevented a 70-year-old woman falling victim to fraud. The woman, surnamed Cheng (鄭), told a bank teller that she wanted to withdraw enough money to buy 1.25kg of gold — about NT$2.15 million (US$71,786) — due to rising tensions in the Taiwan Strait, police said. However, the teller, suspecting foul play, alerted police rather than going through with the transaction, they said. Police later questioned the woman and found that a suspected member of a fraud ring posing as a prosecutor had told her by telephone that her personal documents had been used illicitly and that she would have to buy gold at a local bank to pay a deposit to settle the issue.
AVIATION
Father, son die in crash
Police in Pingtung County are investigating the cause of a light aircraft crash that killed two people on Saturday. The deceased were identified as a father and son surnamed Chu (朱), who were 61 and 27 respectively, police said. The Pingtung Bureau of Fire and Emergency Services said it received a report at 5:48pm that a light aircraft had crashed near a gravel pit along the border of Yenpu (鹽埔) and Gaoshu (高樹) townships. First responders found the aircraft in flames, and the bureau dispatched 12 firetrucks, 22 firefighters and medical personnel to the scene, it said. The father and son were dead when found, it added.
HEALTH
Ice shops fail tests
Ten ice shops in Tainan and Kaohsiung failed to meet health standards following inspections last month, the Consumer Protection Committee said on Thursday. The committee inspected a total of 50 ice shops in the two cities, as well as Pingtung County. All 10 of the inspected shops in Pingtung met health standards, while five out of the 15 inspected shops in Tainan failed and five out of 25 shops failed in Kaohsiung, it said. Legislative amendments to sanitation laws added new categories of bacteria to be screened in edible ice products, such as shaved ice and ice cream, resulting in more rigorous testing, the committee said. Prior to the amendments, inspectors would send an entire serving of a product — ice and edible toppings — to a laboratory. This year, inspectors separated the edible parts for testing, as each is held to different standards, it said. One shop was found to serve ice that contained 3,800 times the amount of acceptable Escherichia coli, the committee said.
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