■ Politics
Lu wants role spelled out
Vice President Annette Lu (呂秀蓮) yesterday called for the rewriting of the Constitution to definitively spell out definitely the role of vice president. In an interview with CNA, Lu said the Constitution's ambiguity on the government's organization has led to endless arguments about whether the president or the premier should be accountable to the legislature. In order to eliminate the controversy, Lu said a rewriting of the Constitution is necessary to clearly define the roles and functions of president and vice president.
■ Society
Ministry plans hot line
To provide more comprehensive assistance to foreign spouses, the Ministry of the Interior's Sexual Harassment Prevention Council is scheduled to provide a multi-lingual special telephone service for domestic abuse victims from April, the council announced yesterday. The service, which will operate in Tagalog, Bahasa Indonesian, Vietnamese, Thai and Cambodian, will be available as an option on the number already used by the Chinese-language domestic abuse line, 113, which was introduced in January last year. Council Secretary General Lin Tzu-ling (林慈玲) said that the service will provide information on preventing domestic abuse to foreign spouses, while also enabling them to report abuse with minimal communication problems. According to council statistics, some 543 foreign spouses sought assistance for domestic abuse through the Chinese-language line last year.
■ Justice
Chen to focus on discipline
Minister of Justice Chen Ding-nan (陳定南) said yesterday that maintaining prosecutors' moral discipline is one of his goals for the year and that he has asked the ministry's Inspection Department to come up with a plan for doing so within a month. "We need to come up with certain rules for prosecutors and write them down. We have nearly 3,000 discipline inspectors at the department. I have asked the department to raise the guidelines within a month and I am confident that they can make it," Chen said. He said that "one shall shave himself first before he shaves others," meaning that law-enforcement officers should hold themselves to a stricter standard of morality.
■ Society
Couple allowed to wed
About 20 years ago, a man surnamed Wu (吳) had an extramarital affair resulting in a daughter with a woman surnamed Lin (林). Because the child could not be entered in the household registration, the birth certificate was forged, listing a married couple surnamed Kuo (過), friends of Wu and Lin, as the girl's parents. Wu then adopted the child, who had her surname changed to Wu and currently lives with her biological mother. As a child, the girl often visited the Kuo family with her mother. Eventually the girl and the Kuo's son, listed as her brother in the household registration, fell in love. When the two attempted to marry, they were denied by the court due to their blood relation. To eliminate the obstacle to their happiness, DNA samples were taken at the Tri-service General Hospital to prove that they were not related. After results verified that the two were not related, and that Lin was the mother of the girl, the court allowed the couple to get married.
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